Stereo Tool

it "sounds" good

_________________
by GAP
"Less is More" (Bob Katz)

I was wondering about the hole punching as well. As an example, on the processing freakday MIX2 file, there is a SUN FM jingle at 3:30. ST 6.21 has some obvious hole punching (trying B Town 4 and FM Transmitter Soft Europe presets) during this jingle, especially towards the end of it. The effect seems far worse them some of the other processors results on that site, Orbans etc Running it through BBP with The Heavy Reference or Plutonium presets, the hole punching is also far less severe. I can get ST sounding generally great on air (it is awesome!), then along comes some source material that just seems to cause this pump/hole punching effect that I can't seem to tweak out without impacting substantially on the overall sound of the preset. It's the weakest point I find with ST on air. If this is what you guys are talking about, I'd welcome suggestions to tweak it out, or ST improvements in this area as well! I suspect (But an not sure) its primarily driven by high end/ peaky material, as toning down the top end seems to reduce the effect, at least on the tracks I've noticed it on. Cheers. AJ

Storm: You're talking about hole punching caused by high frequencies, the others were talking about low frequencies.

To get rid of (or at least greatly reduce) holes caused by loud high frequencies, have you looked at the "Advanced Extreme Highs Protection" settings? Especially "Do not allow other sounds to be dropped below" should help a lot here. (Also make sure that "Never reduce highs below" is set low enough).

Some other processors limit the amount of highs a lot by default - ST does not, but indeed esp. in the jingle you mention you really need to do some work to get it to sound good.

Thank you Hans, that makes sense. I was just using the AEHP defaults for both presets on the assumption assuming these would likely be the best for most requirements, so I'll experiment with those settings. Cheers.

It seems I can reduce that hole punching by adjusting AEHP, but even with fairly extreme settings, I still not get it down to the levels of omnia/orban/BBP demonstrated in the processing freakday files. They are really useful files for A-B comparisons in MPXTool. I created an additional recording using the source test files through BBP with BBP set to more aggressive limiting/clipping, as ST is so much louder in those tests. And pushing BBP harder shows how good the clipper in ST is now.

However, all the ST presets I've tried so far seem to exhibit the hole punching to varying degrees, even when adjusting AEHP, so I assume its not just highs then that are producing that hole punching? Cheers.

It can be fixed a bit. However it sound decent. In O.11 demo there is even small distortion. So what's best to allow small distortion or small hole. (?)

Given a choice between those two evils, in an ideal world a variable slider between the two would be good! With less aggressive loudness settings in ST, of course distortion/artifacts reduce but the hole punching is still clearly evident. So perhaps at lower loudness levels such a slider would enable us the choice of minimal distortion and minimal hole punching. Personally, and I know this is subjective, I find the distortion you mentioned on the O.11 less noticeable than hole punching/pumping, particularly when listening at lower/background listening levels. Pumping tends to stands out at any listening level.

The 0.9 /BBP and 8600 seem to have established a fair trade off.

Version with better sudden spike handling in the AGC:

Winamp DSP plugin: http://www.stereotool.com/download/dsp_ ... 22-002.exe
Stand alone version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... 22-002.exe
VST version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/vst_ ... 22-002.dll
VST version (No SSE2): http://www.stereotool.com/download/vst_ ... 22-002.dll
Command line version: http://www.stereotool.com/download/ster ... 22-002.exe

I've added 2 new sliders on the right. (Also added an extra singleband compressor, but I'll probably remove that one again).

Default values are threshold 1.75, steepness 0.75.
This means that if the AGC target level _should_ suddenly be divided by 1.75 if the response speed were infinite, it will be dropped faster. Steepness defines how fast it must drop if the level difference is bigger; at 1.75+0.75 = 2.50 the volume will IMMEDIATELY drop to the new calculated target level.

Hope that this is at least a bit clear...


Warning: This version also contains the - not yet finished! - BS412 limiter. So be careful when using this version, it could behave strangely.

Hans one indicator of gain reduction in the new Compressor Singleband would help to see when and how does the compressor, to make a finer adjustment. If possible it would be good, later going to try the new version.

Something that occurred to me as an idea and throw it to work:

- From the AGC information is available the change of level, at least for the time of lookahead.

- If you have this information, my idea is that you can handle the threshold and compression ratio Singleband Compressor (not sure if both or one of the two) automatically.

- At times it is not necessary to use the Singleband compressor, automatically adjust the threshold to a high level and compression ratio to 1:1, so that would not affect the signal.

- In the case is detected from the AGC a significant level jump (you could set this), the AGC threshold and automatically adjust compression ratio that makes the peak will not be able to handle the AGC, is controlled or absorbed by the compressor while accommodating AGC gain levels.

- I think the condition of automatic adjustment of the threshold and the compression ratio should be, first lower the threshold to the lowest level to maintain the compression ratio as low as possible. This to make it less noticeable as possible.

- From this last show that you could pass the threshold to a fixed value and only needed to calculate the peak absorb excendente, for simplicity.

I hope you get the idea, and I hear opinions?

_________________
by GAP
"Less is More" (Bob Katz)

New Hans mechanism in AGC wokrs surprisingly well without using (new) singleband from AGC.
There is something like a bug and i already reported that to Hans and *i hope* should be fixed.
Advantage of this over singleband compressor is simple. much less compressed_like_sound.
However, compressor might be usefull too, but first new AGC should be fixed.

note @all: test using slower "Down Speed" (3.000- 5.000), you'll better notice new mechanism, and also should bring better consistency, but just a bit more compress_like_sound.