I love ST - and the 7 Wonders preset in general (with a few tweaks - but isn't that the point!)
A few questions:
1. SSB FM - from what I can hear this makes no real difference to the sound (and I remain a bit doubtful about the multipath benefits) but I understand that the idea is to avoid clipping harmonics cancelling each other (e.g. a tone at 9500 Hz would have a third harmonic at 28500 Hz, but that would also be the frequency caused in the stereo MPX e.g. 38000-9500). So why not use the upper side-band only instead of the LSB? There are no third harmonic relationships between the mono signal and the USB part of the SSB signal?
2. Where in the chain is the pre-emphasis applied? Could this be made adjustable (e.g. to put it between MB1 and MB2) so that MB2 could be used to capture the horrid HF transients caused by the pre-emphasis but MB1 could be left more free to play with the sound?
3. Could a pink noise generator be added to the input to see the resulting output spectrum, to help tune the MBs?
4. In the same way there are 'difference' buttons for some functions, would it be possible to have a button to listen to the output of the 'sidechain' on the SB compressors?
5. How does the de-esser in the clipper work? It wasn't clear from the description in the help section. Is it a sliding frequency de-esser that applies an LPF of and ever lower frequency until the peaks are sufficiently reduced; does it reduce the pre-emphasis; or does it act on all frequencies above a certain point equally?
6. The default settings for MB2 have incredibly short attack and release times - what is the intention of these? Is it for MB2 to act more like a clipper than a compressor, or does it perform some other function. From what I can hear it adds density but also quite a lot of distortion (if driven too hard).
One other question/thought - having played around with multiband analogue processors since the 90s, one thing I found really useful was to split the cross-over band filtering before and after the compressor (usually 12/18 dB/oct before and a simple 6 dB/oct after, because in the analogue domain you can't get 15dB/oct
). This has two notable benefits, one is that the resulting sum of the outputs can be made to have a flat frequency response including at the cross-over frequencies where the output of the compressor will tend to rise as the input is falling and this is corrected by the post-compression cross-over. Also, it's possible to add some clipping after the compressor (bass and HF in particular) and have the out-of-band artefacts filtered out.Bob
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