Ever had a call from a friend like this one?
“Hi Ken, I’ve just set up my new DAW, and the sound is tinny, feeble, hollow. Sounds like it’s been recorded in a metal tube somewhere a long way away.
This isn’t what I paid for…Am I doing something wrong, or should I send the gear back?”
So why is it that their new digital recording gear doesn’t sound anything close to what they expected?…
Well, I recognized the symptoms – it’s often caused by some kind of delay which produces a “comb filter” effect.(Note: if the delay time varied continuously, the result may well be the popular effect called “flanging”)!
Recently, another friend called to complain that his multi-effects unit sounded cheap and tinny. Now, this chap had done his research thoroughly before buying the unit, so it was rather a disappointment. He’d been super-impressed by the rave user reviews he’d read previously.
After a quick look, and here’s what we found:
- both the dry and the effects signals were being output in equal amounts
That’s fine. It’s the right kind of configuration for in-line effects units – as you’d have feeding a guitar input into your stompbox and on to the amp).
- In this case, an auxiliary bus on his home studio sound mixer was feeding to the effects unit.
That’s what was causing the problem.
In this set up, the effects unit digitized the dry signal before passing it through to the output. This meant that the signal was delayed by a few milliseconds.
Then mixing that delayed signal with the original signal was what was producing the metal, robo-sounding audio track.
So how did we solve the problem?
We edited the effects unit’s Mix parameter to remove the dry signal from the output. As a result, the metallic effect disappeared.
Finally we heard the sound my client was expecting!
MIDI Sequencers can throw up similar problems…
Does your DAW have a MIDI echo (or pass-through) option?
Then you could too easily feed the output of your keyboard back to its own input!
With a round-trip time delay of several milliseconds to make X, the same comb-filtering effect described above takes place. And guess what? The results are an equally thin sound.
Solution?
Just disable the MIDI echo option! Then your sound will be as fully-rounded as a cup of Colombian coffee!