Quote:
Originally Posted by scott petito  I was experimenting today with plugins for parallel compression and eq for ITB...
what started out as a way to verify delay compensation turned into an interesting study of phase shift
I sent my 10 tracks of drums to 2 stereo auxes bus1-2 and bus 3-4
I made sure all levels were Identical to the sends by sending automation data to sends
then I put a trim plug on both aux tracks , I flipped the phase one aux bus trim bus1-2
I then paned both aux to center (mono)
the audio then cancelled 100% as it should.... I then decided to test delay compensation for Compression
as i inserted various compression plugs on aux 2 feed by 3-4 I noticed they all produced various phase shifts...remember the trims are still out of phase
even at unity gain with no compression some compressors "leaked audio" more than others
I tried tdm and rtas versions of the plugs some like most of the waves plugs sounded identical
the BF actually sounded quite different in RTAS and TDM
A UAD Fairchild was especially "leaky" at what I believed was unity settings...
remember I'm still only listening to the sum of the 2 out of phase buses
here's where it got interesting I tried to get a compression setting engaged and adjust it to produce as little leakage as possible( which obviously is phase shift caused by the change in level and attack release times) basically I was using attack and release times and some level compensation to get as close to phase cancelation as I could...
I then flipped the phase on the first bus... thus bringing all the drums back in to the mix including the parallel buss compression
it sounded really good....
here s the rub when I tried to increase the parallel buss fader to get more compression I became immediately aware of the phase shift ... it was subtle but obvious...
I tried this with various compressors at similar attack and release times and some compressors produced much more pleasant but still obvious phase shift
I started to wonder if this was due in part to the coloration of various compressors
the UAD Fairchild seemed to be the most forgiving and the dyn 3 was pretty good
others were hit and miss... strangely enough the linear multibands i used were the least forgiving
I did this with various eq's as well very interesting results there as well
well to end a long winded story .. I will be checking my parallel compression in mono and out of phase....
anyone else try this? ... I'm going to give it go with outboard but I already have convertor delay to cope with...
cheers
SP |
I think this is a very cool test.
One thing that people do model is the phase shift of a device. Clearly you're aware that any alteration of sound, such as the attack an release time, will stop the null.
If you put an EQ on and started making changes, you'd cancel the null too. A very colored sounding plug in should cancel the null as well because it's changing the tone.
I'd be curious to know how it sounded if you did the same thing without delay compensation, but an identical plugin path, with one side muted. In theory, that should cancel the null too, but it might cancel it differently .