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dawhead · 20th March 2010

i'm going to pick up on a small detail of what ben said in his last post, and explain my POV on this in a different way.

if i was looking at two (analog) reverb stomp boxes, and was evaluating them to decide which one to buy (or just use), there are a number of things that would affect my decision. One of them would be how well they handled settings designed to provide a massive factory-style reverb effect, since I like to drench all kinds of things in such an effect. So to test that, I'd play with the knobs, buttons etc, and I'd feed various kinds of signals into it to see how the results compared. I might not be able to tell the difference, or it might be really obvious ... depends on the stompboxes. I might really really like one of them, and not like other - these are my feelings, for example, about the large hall settings in two plugins i use - one of them is great, the other is pretty weak for this kind of effect.

But that's not the only test I'd want to run. I'd also want to make sure that when I have the wet/dry mix turned all the way to 100% dry, that neither of them mess with the signal at all.

OK, now lets make two changes to this testing scenario, one at a time.

First, lets make the stompboxes digital. This means that my 100% dry test can be done with great accuracy by doing a null test between the input and output signals of the boxes. Great. I can now establish definitively whether or not they leave the signal unaffected, and if not, roughly what the magnitude of the changes they introduce are. It might be small enough for me to not care, or big enough that it helps me make a decision. Chances that are than any decent digital stompbox is going to leave the signal totally unaffected when on 100% dry.

The second change is more subtle: lets get rid of the wet/dry mix control. Instead, its the values of all the other controls combined that determine whether or not the box should leave its output signal identical to its input. Now I run my tests again. I'm not totally sure what the settings are that should give me a null test between the ins and outs, but I have a fairly good idea. I set things up. I test both boxes. Lo and behold - they both null!

So, at this point, do I assume that both boxes are equivalent in terms of what I actually want to do with them? Well, no. Because my other testing - of how the reverb actually sounds, of how it behaves when I change the parameters while playing, of how well it can do a large super wet factory effect - have already demonstrated that I prefer one to the other.

My position is that your testing of MixBus is really effectively just the null part of what I've described above. The reason people say that they like MixBus, and indeed the reason it was created, has a lot more to do with the other part of the testing I've described above. Perhaps its more clear to you now why some of us don't view your testing as particularly interesting, even though we don't claim that its "wrong". We expect the results that you got (or at least, we expect that you could get them), but they are not the interesting part of the gear at all.

20th March 2010	#1744
dawhead Gear nut Joined: Mar 2007 Posts: 143	i'm going to pick up on a small detail of what ben said in his last post, and explain my POV on this in a different way. if i was looking at two (analog) reverb stomp boxes, and was evaluating them to decide which one to buy (or just use), there are a number of things that would affect my decision. One of them would be how well they handled settings designed to provide a massive factory-style reverb effect, since I like to drench all kinds of things in such an effect. So to test that, I'd play with the knobs, buttons etc, and I'd feed various kinds of signals into it to see how the results compared. I might not be able to tell the difference, or it might be really obvious ... depends on the stompboxes. I might really really like one of them, and not like other - these are my feelings, for example, about the large hall settings in two plugins i use - one of them is great, the other is pretty weak for this kind of effect. But that's not the only test I'd want to run. I'd also want to make sure that when I have the wet/dry mix turned all the way to 100% dry, that neither of them mess with the signal at all. OK, now lets make two changes to this testing scenario, one at a time. First, lets make the stompboxes digital. This means that my 100% dry test can be done with great accuracy by doing a null test between the input and output signals of the boxes. Great. I can now establish definitively whether or not they leave the signal unaffected, and if not, roughly what the magnitude of the changes they introduce are. It might be small enough for me to not care, or big enough that it helps me make a decision. Chances that are than any decent digital stompbox is going to leave the signal totally unaffected when on 100% dry. The second change is more subtle: lets get rid of the wet/dry mix control. Instead, its the values of all the other controls combined that determine whether or not the box should leave its output signal identical to its input. Now I run my tests again. I'm not totally sure what the settings are that should give me a null test between the ins and outs, but I have a fairly good idea. I set things up. I test both boxes. Lo and behold - they both null! So, at this point, do I assume that both boxes are equivalent in terms of what I actually want to do with them? Well, no. Because my other testing - of how the reverb actually sounds, of how it behaves when I change the parameters while playing, of how well it can do a large super wet factory effect - have already demonstrated that I prefer one to the other. My position is that your testing of MixBus is really effectively just the null part of what I've described above. The reason people say that they like MixBus, and indeed the reason it was created, has a lot more to do with the other part of the testing I've described above. Perhaps its more clear to you now why some of us don't view your testing as particularly interesting, even though we don't claim that its "wrong". We expect the results that you got (or at least, we expect that you could get them), but they are not the interesting part of the gear at all.