Stereo Tool

I really haven't heard much true "improvement" in audio fidelity, to be totally honest, for some time now. I don't have bad hearing, as I picked out that the vocalist has vibrato.

The largest thing holding your product back is multiband. Plain and simple. The reason is because you need to compress bass, but not vocals. You might need to compress highs, but it's going to vary on a case-by-case basis. That's why I'm stopping all preset development now, as there's nothing more I can do. I need a change to where you can compress or limit on a per-band basis. That's what will allow vocals to be less subdued. That's going to help everyone, while these minor tweaks to loudness may be totally imperceptible to many people.
LOL. I typed that out and then saw you said this...

I guess I need to read ahead more...

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4056

I'm going to post a final here in a bit. Spent far too much time on it...

Yeah thanks, I already found it after I asked and saw you were talking about preset development. Will try them out immediately! And I agree with you, it's very difficult to make sense of what everything does without documentation.

Well, to be clear, I'm not happy with certain aspects of the vocals. To address that, the way multiband works now, I'd have to cut the bass. When I cut the bass, certain hiphop / rap / r'n'b / dance / club tracks take a hit.

Also, something seems to have made the vocals more muffled. Maybe it's where I've been listening to stuff too loud. I don't know...

I don`t know if you already have tried that preset:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4093

it's private" version, then it must be good

Well, it sounds pretty good, maybe a bit too much bass to my taste. At least now I got something to work from. Thanks again.

Thanks, will give that a try too.

Comparing that with many other presets you will get the impression that is more muffled.
But that only proves that it is not that simple to compare presets.
I doubt that most people seriously adjust settings to compensate loudness differences.
IMO less than 1 dB RMS difference would be ideal - but sometimes very difficult or even impossible (AGC processing !) to adjust you have to re-adjust all the time for different sources.
And as long as you do not use extreme volume (when it starts to hurt your ears) most people always tend to prefer the louder preset (independent of the resulting true processing characteristics).
That is the (stupid) way the human hearing system (the combination of ears and the brain processing that cannot be bypassed) works.
And that is the reason why the loudness race exists:
Because it works aiming at a world market of ordinary listeners (without the knowlegde most experts in this forum have - everyone except me ).

That is so great about Stereo Tool:
I can use even very strange settings (others disagree and some even laugh about what I do), but I am happy with my presets.

That's what I was talking about. I like thumping bass, but to really do it right, it ends up eating into the vocals. They aren't vibrating, it's just they get drowned out. Kind of like where the vocals being talked about over the past day are not really vibrating any more than they naturally do, but it's the bass that's buzzing / distorting.

Both my issue and Bojcha's could be addressed by a more versatile multiband.