Shane_B.

They were actually shot in better than 4K. They were shot in analog. And therein lies the problem. The transfer to digital and how to get that to people's viewing devices with minimal compression artifacts. You can't think of DVD (720), or HD (1080), or 4K (2160) as recording methods but rather delivery methods physical or stream. You have to think of them in terms of compression like MP3, FLACC, WAV. And that's where the problem lies. You can have a 96k MP3 or a 320k MP3. There's a huge different. All DVD's and Blu Ray's are compressed. UHD discs are too but the technology is getting better and the discs are getting larger so you can fit larger (less compressed) files on to a disc or stream them within the limitations of the streaming capabilities of most people. Uncompressed movies in 1080 won't fit on a single disc. You could watch an uncompressed HD movie on Netflix but the file size they would have to get to you real time while you are watching the movie would be enormous. You would need a very fast internet connection and very few people have that. Some people don't mind watching old DVD's. I do. It actually gives me a really bad headache to watch an old DVD on a flatscreen. They weren't developed for that type of resolution, they were developed for tube TV's. On those with the scan lines and limited resolution they actually look really really good. Scanning film is like scanning a picture on a flatbed scanner. You scan it at the highest resolution you can and reduce the size to fit on the screen to make it look good. It's the same with 4K. As for gaming, it's the exact same. It's all about compression and how fast your system can deal with higher resolution in real time before the framerate drops so bad you get sick looking at it. And the higher resolution isn't necessary for them. That's a choice the developers are making always striving to be the biggest and best and newest. They could just as easily have made Fallout 4 with the same engine as Fallout 3 but they used a newer engine that takes more horsepower and the visuals suffer for it on all but todays highest end current hardware ... and that game is 7 years old. Fallout 3 on todays modest hardware looks better than Fallout 4. Thankfully audio resolution isn't a big deal and nobody ever argues about that.🙄

I just skimmed through this thread and have nothing to say IRT the actual topic because I'm one of the 'home studio' type guys. So I'll bow out of that part of it. But, I was a master service technician and supervisor for a fortune 500 company for 10 years that got bought out by and dissolved in to Ricoh. They are a massive copier and printer manufacturer. I knew I wanted nothing to do with Mac's when I ran in to having to install an $800 dollar circuit board containing a proprietary ROM chip in multifunction machines (Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax machines) that activated Adobe True Type fonts for use with Mac. IOW, on top of the optional NIC, you had to install another TTF board. I can't tell you how many times salesmen would almost lose deals because they didn't know this and ended up giving that $800 ripoff, I mean, add-on, to customers and gave up their commission so the company wouldn't lose the sale. There's an old saying that goes, "The bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away.". That is oh so true in the Mac world.

I stopped reading when I got to the part where he mentioned the requirements to view Netflix in UHD. I've been down that rabbit hole and it's a lot more complicated than what he says. That tells me he hasn't researched this or it's an AI bot written article. That's a thing now sadly. Probably has been for a while but it's now available to everyone. I get ads for it all the time. You also have to have a newer Gen CPU. My i7 6700K is not supported by Netflix so they won't allow me to stream in UHD on my PC even though I pay extra for it. Which is total bull because I can stream up to 4K and 8K UHD on YouTube and 4K UHD with Prime Video. It took me forever to find that information and it was buried in a tech pub they put out. It doesn't come up in any of the troubleshooting they offer on their website. At least the last time I looked. He also says you need 25M or faster. Uh ... you need faster. Unless you have an incredibly reliable provider that will guarantee you full bandwidth 24/7, you aren't going to stream Netflix in UHD on a 25M connection. I have a 30M connection with my provider but they allow higher burst speeds when streaming from all the approved services like Netflix, Hulu, Prime etc. etc.. My ISP is down right now because of a storm last night so I'm using the hotspot on my cell. It's 25M. I can stream all day long at 1080p, but it completely dies when I try to force 4K on Youtube. Netflix won't even try 4K, it scans it and locks me at 1080p. My PC is far FAR FAR better spec wise than any smart TV, laptop, cell phone or pad type device, and almost all stream Netflix in UHD ... but nope, not on a PC that's 1,000 times more powerful that supports UHD on every other app. And they wonder why they are losing billions right now.

We got the single version exactly a year ago almost to the day and we both got a boosters 2 weeks ago. Fo sar hhere tas ween no probrums. eYt! And the wife thinks the vestigial tail I've developed is kinda cute so there's that. I'm excited because I'm going home in a few weeks. It's ramping up out there though so I figured it would be a good idea to get a booster. I recently read that Philly reinstated mask mandates. But, the current data, which changes as often as you change bass strings (Which is a lot I'm assuming 😁.), suggests the single version with 2 boosters has the best protection so far. *FiNgErS cRoSsEd* But that data changes daily and I don't think the powers that be really know. In my opinion.

Any i7 regardless of what Gen it is, especially with 32GB RAM, should be able to handle a lot in regard to home audio recording. You may run in to trouble when you start adding in VST's on multiple tracks and you keep recording tracks, but if you are using CbB just Freeze those tracks and that frees up your resources. Then raise your buffers back up when you are done recording and unfreeze the tracks and everything will be ok. I'm still running an old i7. See my sig.. I have absolutely no latency problems whatsoever. I was running a very old i5 650 with 4GB of RAM before this and had no problems. I just had to freeze tracks temporarily if I wanted to record new tracks when I had larger projects. There are settings you should change in your Mobo's BIOS and in Windows. There are guides out there but for some odd reason the big ones like the one at Sweetwater took the BIOS tweak information out of the guides. They aren't the only ones who did that and I don't know why. Maybe BIOS tweaks aren't needed on newer PC's anymore? I don't know. Basically, In BIOS you have to lock/set your CPU clock speed by turning off Intel Turbo Boost and set your RAM speed by turning off XMP if your Mobo has it. Also turn off all the C States. They allow your CPU to go in to power saving modes of various forms. You want your CPU to always be on and available, never sleeping. You need as fast and steady stream of data as possible. On most motherboards you can have multiple BIOS profiles so you can have one for DAW usage with all that stuff turned off and another with it all turned on for everything else. Check out Sweetwater's guide for the Windows 10 related stuff. If you are running Windows 7 or something else there are guides out there for them too. If you have inexpensive HDD's and they are 5400 RPM that may be a problem if you are recording a lot of tracks at once, but I can't imagine it would be a problem recording one track at a time or a few even. If the drivers for your audio card suck then nothing else you do will help but you need to start by making sure your BIOS and Windows are tuned properly. You should be able to squeeze a lot of life out of any i7 so you may just have a few setup problems. Good luck!

I've noticed that too. The only thing I can think of is they do that with the thought in mind that you might layer it with something else in a different octave? I don't know. I'm not a keyboard player by any stretch of the imagination but I've noticed that too about bass patches on various VSTi's I've tried. Yeah it's a 1st world problem but when you pay for those 1WP's you kinda expect a little more.

I have the X5 version. If you ever turn it on and it cycles through all the languages and never boots, that means the backup battery is dead. It happened on mine. I soldered in a quick change socket so if it happens again I can just pop in a new one that I can get at any local store rather than special order one with solder tabs. I also had to reset it to factory settings after I changed the battery so anything custom will be lost. I think the main difference is the X5D had a dedicated easily accessible midi bank and more poly notes but I can't remember for sure. I did the backing tracks for an entire nights music for my band with the X5 back in the 90's track by track on a Tascam 8 track cassette tape machine. No midi involved. It was an incredibly stressful hard core, fast paced, learning session on recording mixing and mastering. I remember having to start a good ways in to the tape because the beginning would stretch and the tempo and pitch would change. Then I had to transfer it all to DAT so it would stay the same speed and pitch. We rearrange and call up any song via the DAT if we wanted to change the set around. Now days you'd just do it on a laptop with MP3's or WAV's and the click of a mouse. I used it for the backing tracks and an Alesis SR16 for the drums. I still have the SR16 and astonishingly you can still buy them brand new. They are excellent units. I trust laptops for live applications. If you dig in to them you can remove all the bloatware and get them to run very lean and stable. Heck, even a rack mount midi module like the X5Dr and a modest midi trigger would be great. The drums on the X5's are excellent but the SR16 was easier because of the built in ready made patterns.

My wife and I have done the home tests because she travels for work a lot and some of the government facilities show goes to require it. They all came back negative when we were feeling ill and she verified it with lab tests too. The instructions aren't exactly clear on the ones we took so I can see how it's easy to do them wrong. It's been a long time since we did them so I can't remember specific details, but I do remember thinking it could be done wrong if you weren't one to follow directions well. The other thing is, they can't be stored below a certain temperature so if you got tests that shipped during the winter by mail from the government then they won't be accurate. Some brands were messed up and inaccurate but that was a while ago and I can't imagine that hasn't been fixed. ------- But the big thing that I seem to recall about the home tests is you have to be showing symptoms before the home tests show accurate positives. They are meant as verification for those who are showing definite symptoms. So if you have no symptoms you could test negative and still have it with a home test. The earliest signs of it are fever and blood oxygen levels. You can get those little finger clip O2 level meter things cheap at Walgreens and Amazon too I'm sure. My neighbor's wife had it at the height of the whole thing and one of the things they had him and the others in their house do is constantly check their temps and O2 levels. ------ I'm very sorry to hear this. I hope she gets well soon and please take every precaution. With your heart and age and all that it would more than likely not turn out well for you. It's a horrible way to go. A friend of mine died from it a few weeks ago. He was in the hospital for months. When they send you from the hospital to rehab, then it's over. I've heard that story a dozen times and that's exactly what happened to him. Up then down several times. The final up they shipped him off to rehab and he was dead in 3 days. The nurse at my one doctors office is in her early 30's. Healthy as could be and vaccinated and she got it. She told me she wished she was dead it was that bad. My dad who is 84 got the first version of it that killed so many people and he just had the sniffles and he was not vaccinated at all at the time. It's a messed up situation so please take it serious as a heart attack. Edit: BTW ... my wife and I have never officially had it, but I believe we did. We travelled all over the KC metro in a lot of crowded not so nice places back when I was doing my furniture flipping thing before the pandemic killed that too. We both got really really sick and then 2 weeks later they shut down everything due to "the first case" in the U.S.. I call B.S. on that 'first case'. I think it was here long before. In fact, the guy I told you about that died, his wife died of something months before there was any serious talk of it with the exact same symptoms as him and it wasn't the flu. I think it has been going around a lot longer than will ever be admitted to.

Yeah. I agree. 😁 That's how I would do it if I ever got back in a band and was forced to play keys again. 99% of people there will not care about how 'real weighted' your keys are. In fact I'd probably think most people would see a laptop/controller combo as the norm and think you're some old geezer not letting go of the past if you did haul a bunch of large gear up there. And there's nothing wrong with that either, unless you are in fact an old geezer and your back is starting to go out from hauling all that heavy equipment by yourself . . . 😁😘😜 But I'm not really a keyboard player so it's hard for me to suggest how to do it because I don't know the real world difference it can make between how the keys feel and the options and all that. I'm not sure how 'dynamic' you can or should be on the keys in a live band situation, but I don't know. I can fake it but that's it. It's hard to find good keyboard players. I used to get stuck doing some keyboard parts until I put my foot down and said no more. It was too stressful playing lead guitar and singing lead and backups and then throwing that in the mix for a few songs per set. Imagine playing 2/3 of your first set then next up is Desperado and you haven't had a chance to dial in your volume, get warmed up, you still have your guitar around your neck and you're rushing in to it before everyone leaves the dance floor. That was the only time I ever said this thing goes or I go.

Bapu. It's always Bapu.

Happy belated birthday!

That's lie number one that we've all fallen for. I had a huge reply written to you yesterday but decided to delete it so here's the abridged version. The DAW and VST developers want you to believe it's possible to make a professional studio quality recording in your home on a laptop and headphones. It's a lie. It can't be done. You must have a decent sounding room. There is only so much you can do with software. You have to look at software like a fancy tape machine and go from there. In my opinion the room is probably the single most important thing when recording, if you are doing vocals and micing cabinets. You can achieve that in a small room with room treatment but it's tricky. If you are fortunate enough to have a house, even a small one, you can dedicate an area and treat it just for recording. That said .... you can still make great sounding recordings at home that rival "pro studio's" with or without a great room. Especially anything that has come out of these so called "pro studio's" in the last 25 + years. Almost all the studio's that recorded the great sounding albums are closed now and you are shooting for something that sadly doesn't exist anymore. Def Leppard may have written some of their own stuff but they didn't record themselves. They did it in a pro studio with pro help. What you and the rest of us here are doing is trying to accomplish a monumental task of writing to mastering. Normally there are a LOT of people in between that start and end point. That 'sound' you are hearing on those recordings is more the room and how the mics are placed on the cabinets. You cannot duplicate those sounds with just an amp. There's more to what you are hearing than just the amp (or amp VST) is what it boils down to. The other thing is, while the chord possibilities and lyrics are endless in how you can put them together, there is actually a very narrow path of what people actually like if that makes sense. It's extremely hard to write something new that's unique that hasn't been done before in one way or another. I'll give you an example. My father in law loves Joe Bonamassa. We sat down and watched a couple of his live shows on DVD one time. Apparently Joe hasn't heard of Bluray and HD yet. W T F Joe? Anyway, throughout both entire shows I kept saying, Oh wow, he's playing a riff from this Led Zepplin song in his song, or a riff from this group, oh wow that's Heart!. By the end when I pointed out that he was basically ripping off a lot of peoples riffs and recycling them my father in law got pissed off at me and never mentioned him again. One of the biggest if not thee biggest ripoffs of all time was the intro to Stairway To Heaven. Anyway, what I'm saying is it's extremely hard to be unique. Maybe take some songs you know and like and change them a little to get ideas? Have you thought about Band In A Box? It's great for just pumping in chords to see how they work together. It's a great writing tool. It seems you have two major issues plaguing you. The writing aspect and the recording aspect. It just takes time, and the fewer people in the process makes it take even longer. It's just the way it is. The fact that you are so torn about it says to me you are not really ready to give it up. It is a hobby, but it's an emotional one. Music triggers chems in our brains. It can absolutely become an addiction and it is really hard to completely walk away from.

Ditto. I joked about about Weird Al but the man is an incredible musician. So was Frank Yankovic. Funny they have the same last name, play the same main instrument, but aren't related. Jimmy Sturr, Big Joe Polka, and many others. I'm actually a big fan of a Polka fan. One of my favorite songs to do back in my band days was a Polka Medley we arranged. I used the accordion and tuba banks on my Korg X5 heavily and did backing tracks. It was very convincing. That old ancient Korg has some great sounds in it. Being in a Wedding band and playing at all the legion type places and banquet halls in the PA/NJ area it was a requirement to know polka's or you didn't get hired for a lot of gigs. Going from memory here and I know I'm forgetting some, we put together Beer Barrel Polka, The Pennsylvania Polka, and parts of My Melody Of Love by the Polish Prince himself (Bobby Vinton). I have a recording of it somewhere but the vocal tracks were just markers we did while recording the backing track and they are messed up. We took the hooks from them and strung them together and I think it was about 4.5 ~ 5 minutes long IIRC. My Melody Of Love is such a great song on it's own. Utoob vid of it here.

I loved this show. Still do actually although I haven't seen it in a *****'s age. Edit: You've got to be kidding me right? Seriously? IRT the *'s. Whatever.

Lloyd, "So, what happened Harry, some little filly break your heart?" Harry, "No, it was a girl." Lloyd, "Ooooh!"

Hell, I can't even remember what the question was. So my advice now, after 4 pages, yeah. Whatever it was, screw it man. It ain't worth the hassle. Unless it's music related. Then by all means, do what makes you happy and don't listen to anyone else. You know the old saying regarding what opinions are like. Edit: Make that 5 pages. I really think this thread has the potential for 6 ... maybe more.

Sorry to hear that Steve. Who knows, you could have been the next Weird Al Yankovic.

Alcohol helps quiet that subconscious. 👍🏻 Start saving now. To give you a rough idea of how this works ... Fallout 4 is almost 7 years old. I have a modern card that is nowhere near the 'low end'. F4 can't even detect it and automatically set itself to max resolution because the card is too new. It's about in the middle of what's available now. I have a 12GB EVGA RTX 3060. It runs the older Fallout's that are 10 + years old smooth as glass maxed out in 4K but I have to kick the resolution down and lower the graphics details for Fallout 4. Pretty amazing considering the recommended 'high spec' cards for this can't even hold a candle to the 3060. The top card you can get now is a 3090 Ti. They are going for around $2.1K and I'd be willing to bet it still wouldn't run this with all settings set to max. That said, it runs great if you lower your expectations and settings of the eye candy. F3 and FNV look much better than F4 IMO. And another odd thing, it actually looks better on console than PC and loads faster on console. This is why I got out of PC gaming originally. It's an endless money pit. On console you are locked, no options, you know what you're getting in to, and you accept it going in.

It sure is. Once I level up enough and don't have to sneak around I find it very relaxing to just wander around the desert in FNV and take in the eye candy. Between the ambient sounds and modding it with hi-res graphics then add in that Nevada Skies Weather Effects mod and wow. Just wow. Here's a vid that shows the options for Nevada Skies. It also allows you to adjust gamma, brightness, what the night sky looks like, among many other things all real-time in the menu screen without having to shut down and restart. It's pretty incredible and a little scary how these kids are able to write these mods.

I think they are small enough to where I can back up the vanilla game installation folders for each one on to a single 25GB disc. Then I can back up the mods to their own disc and just do a quick copy/paste then use the Vortex Mod Manager to install the mods if I ever want to revisit those. You can get official DLC sized and larger quest mod's for FNV that are massive. There's a couple out now and there are a couple in the works. One based in Mexico iirc. Then you can even get a mod called TTW (Tale Of Two Wastelands) that combine F3 and FNV and use FNV's newer game engine to drive both. You play both as one long huge game and travel to both maps seamlessly if I'm understanding the mod right. I skipped all those mods and went on to F4 but I should download them and back them up to disc. The modding rules are changing and in retaliation a lot of modders are deleting their content. Probably a good idea to download and backup what's still available. I managed to scrounge enough space after I used that Glary App Craig suggested. It took all night for F4 to download but it was waiting for me this morning. I love the building aspect of F4, but New Vegas set a pretty high bar. I got Skyrim and F4 in a bundle on Steam. I'm not even going to download Skyrim until fall. Too tempting to just sit here and waste the hours away. I don't mind in the fall and winter so much when I can't get outside to do anything, but as soon as it stops raining here I need to get back outside. Plus I'm putting heat in my shop so I can work outside all year round now so I'm not sure how much time I'll for this now anyway. These games consume your life. It's not playing COD or shooter. The whole series is VERY addicting.

It's really good on bass. That's what I initially bought for iirc. It wasn't until a few years later that I got the MPA II to pair with it. That's how I discovered the tube was bad on my originally one. Electric guitar was fine but bass sounded like the VLA II had a built in fuzz unit. Good luck with whatever you choose.

I didn't want to hijack the other thread where you mentioned this so I figured I'd post it here ... I got goose bumps when I saw this ... 😁

I've never used any other hardware extensively like I have the VLA II and MPA II gear so I can't compare how they sound and react to anything else. I looked up the WA76 and it says it's a Limiting Compressor so it's going to react different than the VLA II. ART's description of the VLA II on their website is 100% accurate. "natural sounding and sonically transparent compression ..." and "Mastering Quality Audio Signal Path.". That's how I would describe it too. Very natural and transparent and absolutely no line noise at all when using balanced cables. I use balanced cables through my entire signal path including the monitor cables. I only recently started using the VLA II for mastering and I'm sorry I never took the time to set it all up and do it years ago. I run my bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar (DI) and vocals all through the chain. Less is more with this though. You can easily overdo it without realizing it because it's so transparent and then things start to sound a little squished when you mix. I'll take more time and really kick in the VLA's compression when I do vocals but I'm a lot more conservative with the instruments and in some cases I just have them turned on for a cabinet emulator effect without compression kicking in hardly at all if at all. It all depends on the song, feel, and sound I'm shooting for. Just running everything through their analog path makes everything sound so much better to me. They remove the digital harshness like you are using a really good cabinet emulator. I think you'd be happiest if you paired it with an MPA II. It's an excellent mic pre/instrument input device. It feels like they designed them to work together and both are dual channel. The MPA II has an adjustable impedance knob to really hone in your mic's impedance. It makes a night and day difference on some of the mics I have compared to just going DI in to my audio cards pre's. I'm surprised I don't see the adjustable impedance control on more gear because it makes a huge difference, at least on the handful of mics I have. The other thing that is nice about these is all the knobs are segmented so you could take notes and put them back exactly how they were to recreate a sound. I've taken them both apart and they are very well made. The tubes are very easy to replace if you want to, but I never have. Before I plug in any tube based gear that is shipped to me I open it up and make sure everything is seated and hasn't been broken during shipping. As for modding or upgrading them, in spite of what you see on the net I don't believe changing the tubes on low powered gear in this price range will make a difference. In the very expensive gear with large power tubes maybe but not in low power driven tube gear like this. You'll more than likely get more of a change by swapping out the caps, diodes, and resistors for different values and I don't like modding stuff to that degree so I've never attempted it. Can you find other hardware that's the same price or more expensive that has a different sound? Yep. Is it better? That's up to the person using it. Will it have a cleaner signal path and be more silent like these units ... 100% no. I've detected zero background noise at ear destroying levels with both of these units activated and chained using balanced cables. When I got my very first VLA II it came from the factory with a bad tube. I asked Sweetwater or G.C. (can't remember which one I got it from now) to just ship me a new tube and they said they had to ship me a whole new unit and send mine back to the factory. They overnighted me a brand new unit and I've had it ever since. Well over 10 years. Probably close to 14 or 15 now. Still no crackle when I turn the knobs and it sits out in my portable rack unit uncovered 24/7. Still no problems with the jack inputs or the tubes, the VU lights still work. Hope this helps in some way. If you can, get it from some place you can return it just in case there's something about it you don't like.