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BBE Sonic Maximizer

I got their newest model, called Alpha 80 Evo. It is close to the absolute bottom of the Focal product line. Focals for po' folk, you might say. Definitely not comparable to the S3s. However, if I did have S3-level money to spend I'd probably favor the high-end Focals over the high-end ADAMs. But it's like imagining Lamborghini vs. Ferrari if I won the lottery.

Hi, Jerry. Wonderful stuff, as always. Today my new Focals arrived, so I spent the first couple hours listening to my favorite Deutsche Gramophone recordings to get a feel for the new speakers. As expected, they sounded great. Next step, pull up one of Jerry's pieces. Guess what? This one stacks up with the best references I have on hand. On top of being a fine composer, you are also a bona fide Audio Engineer. You probably keep your lawn manicured as well, and squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom like a civilized person.

Thanks, I enjoyed that. But does anybody else hear Chris Farley when Joe speaks?

wtf, who studies that sh*t, lmao? I'm guessing it's the same grant-scammers who studied why snow-shovel usage declines in July. btw, it's pronounced "SDuh".

It's most likely the reverb insert. I see you're a FabFilter guy; any chance you have Pro-R? It has a mono version. If not, look through your reverb collection and try different ones, freezing each until you find one that preserves the interleave.

Oh, now I'm truly triggered. Drew Carey's glasses are FAKE.

The speakers arrive on Saturday. I won't be able to set them up until Sunday, but that's OK because whenever the band isn't rehearsing, Sunday is My Music Day! And we won't be rehearsing Sunday because Saturday's gig is a 2-hour drive and nobody will be up for practicing the next day after getting home at 3:00 AM. I, however, will be up early as always and will likely faceplant into my keyboard by afternoon. Geez, I hope these speakers live up to their reputation. If they do, I'll be singing their praises loudly because they were way cheaper than any I've had.

Technically, the majority of modern synths are computers. My Korg Kronos takes two full minutes to boot up, which is inconvenient when somebody steps on your power cable in the middle of a song. And yet, replacing a synth with a laptop and a MIDI controller is frustratingly impractical, e.g. when Microsoft decides it's time to reboot just as the band launches into its opening number. (Both examples based on actual events, btw.) Imagine being on stage ready to entertain an audience, and when you load up Omnisphere you get this:

A pet peeve of mine. When a programmer could have clocked out 5 minutes later and made his product better. Example #1: when you open the door of a microwave it should stop beeping automatically. You've clearly heard the alert and you're actively responding to it by taking your leftovers out. You've done everything the microwave demanded of you, but it keeps on beeping. That's lazy coding. Example #2: Now, I'm a big fan of Spitfire, but somebody in the office spends too much time playing video games. btw, the "something" that went wrong was I replaced my motherboard and CPU, and had to re-authorize several products. Not just the Spitfire ones. But every other one, e.g. Kontakt, came right out and explained the problem. "ERROR #1"? Seriously? If you click on "LET'S FIX IT" you are taken to a YouTube video, and even it doesn't come right out and tell you what you need to know.

Well, *I* am offended because he has long hair and wears glasses. Plus he looks too young to know what he's talking about. But - when he touts a product he backs it up with examples. I never get the impression that he's a shill. I give him high marks for credibility and objectivity. And how do we know what Dan Worrall's fingernails look like? Never seen them. What's he hiding?

I just added Epic Strings and Epic Brass and Woodwinds to my Originals collection for $39. I didn't really need any more strings, brass or woodwinds, but these sound pretty darn good for the price of a nice lunch.

That's encouraging. I've seen side-by-side comparisons of the Alpha 65s and the EVOs, and the consensus seems to be that the EVOs are an improvement. And cheaper to boot. I wouldn't mind getting the dual-woofer version, but at 21" wide I just don't have space for them. So you've never felt the need for a sub? Or maybe would like one but just couldn't justify the expense (the Focal sub is a grand)? Or maybe your room isn't big enough to support a subwoofer? For the past 7 years I've enjoyed the luxury of really good bass extension on my current monitors (Emotiva Stealth8), that reach down to a window-rattling 30 Hz at -3dB. Consequently, I never replaced my stolen subwoofer because I didn't need it anymore. Prior to that, I used ADAM P11-A, predecessor to the A7 but with a slightly larger woofer. I liked them a lot, their only real downside being the narrow sweet spot from those laser-like folded ribbon tweeters. These Focals are famous for having a wide sweet spot, and they go down to 38 Hz so no sub needed. I'm also concerned that the EVO might not be loud enough. For everyday mixing, sure, you don't need 104 dB. I mix at around 70 dB. But my band also rehearses in this space and we often learn songs from YouTube videos so there are times when I do need them loud enough for a roomful of people to hear. The Stealths featured 200W of amplification. My other candidate is the Presonus Sceptre 8, at 180W. The EVOs are a wimpy 115W. It sounds like that's never been a problem for you. As I was typing this out I got a call from my guy at Sweetwater, whom I'd asked for advice on this purchase. He didn't waffle for a second, saying he's a total Focal fanboy. Of course, the ones he's running are the $8k model - he must get a helluva employee discount - but he's convinced me to place the order for the Focals.

Hard to find nowadays in the original Wintergreen livery.

That's how they're advertised. They're even on sale at the moment, $494 ea vs $550. But that could just mean they're not selling well. And that could mean they're not very good. And that could mean I'll lose my motivation to make music. And that could mean an early death, because if I can't make music, then what's the point? Why not just become a heroin addict? How do I know it's not some devious trick by those sneaky French buggars? I'll have to consult with Zo, the only Frenchman I know. Then again, he could be in on it. Then again, I could just be overthinking it.

I'm really tempted to get the new Focal Alpha 80 Evo. On paper it specs out great, and its older 6.5" sibling has great reviews. But I haven't actually heard the 8" version yet, as it's only been out for a few months. I just have a hard time believing that a pair of great monitors can be had for $1000. That's way cheaper than previous speakers I've owned.

Yeh, but those people can't tell the difference between a FLAC, an MP3, a WAV and an 8-bit Donkey Kong soundtrack.

The reason your MP3s sound different online is that they are re-encoding and streaming them at a lower bitrate than the original files. In truth, an MP3 at 256 kb/s or higher should be indistinguishable from an uncompressed file, assuming no other processing has been applied (which happens a lot). That said, I deal exclusively with FLAC files nowadays, whether uploading to a hosting service or sharing parts for an online collaboration. For a long time, SoundClick had a file size limit that kept me from uploading FLAC, but they've done away with that. SoundCloud, I think, has always accepted wav and FLAC. Of course, such services won't actually stream you music at that rate to conserve bandwidth, but if you download the files they should not be degraded. For as long as somebody has to pay for the bandwidth. Jeff Bezos needs another yacht, and his servers host the vast majority of, well, everything. MP3 will also remain the standard for as long as people continue to get away with charging big premiums for lossless formats.

And it's not like us geezers don't have enough to deal with already, what with routine failures of random body parts. At least my gall bladder worked for 70 years before clogging up with stones. It should be reasonable to expect comparable longevity from solid-state electronics.

Stuff breaking down. First, a floor monitor died. It was still under warranty, so I took it to an authorized repair shop - 2 months ago. No word on its status. Some online posts suggest that it may be - no kidding - a software problem. In a frickin' speaker. Might require a firmware upgrade. Then my computer burned up. New motherboard, RAM and CPU, $675. At least it's a slight upgrade. After firing up the new and improved computilator, I noticed some distortion in one of my speakers. After an hour of use, it began crackling loudly. A bad capacitor, probably. Wrote to the manufacturer, who replied saying that model was no longer supported and I was on my own. At least they were nice enough to attach a PDF of the amp schematics. But it's unusable at the moment, so I have a computer again but all nearly-completed projects are on hold because I don't want to do a final mix and mastering with just headphones. So now I'm unexpectedly in the market for some new speakers. These things never happen when I have spare cash on hand, so I'm probably looking at a significant downgrade. Anything I can afford will have less power, less bass extension, lower mass, less volume than what I've enjoyed for the past 7 years. Here's a model that seems to be universally well-liked (Presonus Sceptre S8). But I can't get over the fact that it looks like a Minion. If I get this I will have to name it Kevin. Maybe get some kid's size overalls and hang them from the speaker stand.

I reviewed the SWAM instruments a couple years ago for SoundBytes. That was the angle I went with - small size and fast load times. I've since become very fond of the sax and the other reed instruments, but prefer samples for most string instruments, often layering sampled strings with the SWAM violin to bring out a melody. Convincing physical modeling for guitars is still a ways off, being a far more complex challenge than piano.

Yes, it is. They take up less disk space, use less memory, load waaay faster, and sometimes are capable of things their sampled equivalents are not. The problem is that modelled instruments just haven't achieved the same level of realism yet. While lots of users say they can't distinguish between Pianoteq and a sampled piano, anyone who plays piano as their primary instrument can easily tell the difference - but only when soloed or way up front in a mix. So for most people and most applications, the modelled alternative is workable. Personally, I'll stick with Keyscape and endure its excruciating load times because it sounds incredible. It's slow because they didn't use any of the usual tricks for minimizing memory usage, e.g. every note is sampled, so no stretching. I have the full suite of modelled instruments from Audio Modeling. They load in the blink of an eye, take up a tiny fraction of the memory and disk space that a Kontakt library would, are expressive and can sound quite good in the right context. But naked, they often sound a bit "synthy". I still like them because they can do things a sampled instrument cannot, such as programmable glissando and vibrato speeds. But as Jim notes above, the speed of the drive itself is consistent, regardless of the library. Perceived slowness is a function of how much data is being loaded into memory on startup. That's why I suggested that phrase libraries might be inherently slower to load because the size of their individual samples is larger, or maybe it always loads the complete sample set. I cannot test this hypothesis myself, as I have no phrase libraries here to look at.

Have you done a Windows restart? Check Task Manager and see if there is an instance of cakewalk.exe running. If so, use End Task to kill it.

Just guessing, but it could be that phrase libraries load bigger chunks into memory than single-note samples. By default, Kontakt preloads only the start of each sample so it's ready to go when called upon. If the note played is short, no further disk access will be required. If you have lots of RAM, you can increase the preload cache, resulting in better performance during playback at the cost of longer load times. With phrase libraries, you're less likely to only play the first 100 milliseconds of a sample and more likely to play the whole phrase. [AFTERTHOUGHT] Take a look at the preload buffer size for those phrase libraries and compare them to conventional libraries. The library author sets the default preload cache size, which can then be overridden by the user. I'd be curious to know if the default cache is larger for phrase libraries (I don't have any here to look at).