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View Full Version : Bob, can you tell us about the EQ?



AudioAstronomer
06-13-2004, 10:57 AM
I really, really like the channel EQ. In fact I love it! Sounds awesome.

Can you give us some background on it, ideas that lead to the design, possible design features of it, specific designed uses etc...

Anything you can tell us about it at all. Im very curious as to how, why, when it works so incredibly well. I am very much prepared for a nice long read if you're ready to write it :) And Im sure others are too :)

Oz Nimbus
06-13-2004, 11:43 AM
I'll second that request. BTW, Here's another related question: Is Saw Studio's mixer a modern recreation of that large-format analog console you built??

-0z-

Pedro Itriago
06-13-2004, 12:50 PM
Take a look here http://www.rmllabs.com/SAC.htm and here http://www.rmllabs.com/Biography_40.htm & tell me if you see something familiar.

Also this will hint you as to what on Bob's head http://www.rmllabs.com/OnTheDrawingBoard.htm

AudioAstronomer
06-13-2004, 01:02 PM
Take a look here http://www.rmllabs.com/SAC.htm and here http://www.rmllabs.com/Biography_40.htm & tell me if you see something familiar.

Also this will hint you as to what on Bob's head http://www.rmllabs.com/OnTheDrawingBoard.htm

I had seen these too, but you never know. Sometimes people, rather than mimic past ideas, try to ideas based on the antithesis of prior experiences.

TotalSonic
06-13-2004, 03:11 PM
I'll second that request. BTW, Here's another related question: Is Saw Studio's mixer a modern recreation of that large-format analog console you built??

-0z-

Actually - afaik it has more similarities to the Gamble DCX - which is a completely analog console designed for foh controlled remotely through a software mixer which I believe Bob & other original IQS staffers such as Hristo Doichev & Francis Styck had a large hand in designing.

http://www.gambleboards.com
http://www.corteksoft.com/dcxsoftware.asp

It's been used by several very high profile artists for major tours. Cool stuff.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

Bob L
06-14-2004, 01:10 AM
Steve is correct... the SAC was my first design concept beta of the idea of virtual mixing... I met Gamble at the 92 AES show in San Fransisco and the DCX was born over the next few years.

The original SAC idea was a virtual controller for a hardware based mixer.

What's interesting... is that now, the SAWStudio console does it all without the hardware... save the soundcard and converters. :)

It sure is fun to see how that evolved.

The EQ... a very interesting routine... founded over years of experimentation... the original EQ from the old SAW line had some weaknesses in the low end... some noise and DC offset problems that I never could quite put my finger on a solution for.

Just about the same time that Jon Marshall Smith released his hi-res eq, I stumbled upon some documents on the web (possibly the same ones or similar that he may have used) detailing some more hints and algorithms about FIR filter designs.

I started fooling around with modifying the EQ routines I had and found some hints as to where the DC offset problems were coming from.

I redesigned the eq routines, using some of the info in the documents and then moved the code into floating point... to my horror :) ... the low end problems dissapeared... the performance was horrible, but the sound was pretty impressive.

Some time spent with a high end Spectrum analysis program and some serious work on moving all the floating point routines into straight assembly language and the results are what ended up in SAWStudio. So my complete integer math design was now a hybrid... oh well... whatever works.

The noise floor is an honest -118 db... I believe Jon's is also very similar...

I also used a modified version of those filters to build the Frequency Analyzer... instead of using FFT routines... the analyzer gives some unique options for tweaking and zeroing in on frequencies... a very interesting tool once you dive in and get a feel for the interface possibilities.

Bob L

mghtx
06-14-2004, 01:17 AM
Thanks Pedro and Steve for the links. I had not seen them before and it was great reading about Bob's past. I had no idea.

mghtx
06-14-2004, 01:31 AM
You know, now that I have a little history on Bob and SAW, it's a wonder nobody else used assembly language to code their apps. Or am I wrong about this? It's becoming more and more apparent to me, IMHO, that many aspects of Bob's software were "borrowed" by the other companies.

matt
06-14-2004, 01:46 AM
Bang on. SAW was a 4-track recording program when Slow-tools was still choking on two. I remember telling my school about it at the time and they didn't believe me. I guess people don't listen unitl they are ready to understand. Stein&*^& coppied SAW and called it VST. Thus is the nature of the beast. As far as I know, no other recording apps use Assembly. It is more than just the language though. I think it helps that Bob is a talented engineer. I would question the likes of other programmers.

mghtx
06-14-2004, 02:16 AM
Absolutely. As I stated somewhere else......he's one of us. Meaning he's a true music lover.

Bob L
06-14-2004, 08:17 AM
I fail to see much about VST that looks anything like SAW... Looks like Steinberg came up with that one on their own. :confused:

No matter though... SAWStudio is the evolution of 12 years of my focus in digital audio, and hopefully it will just continue to evolve for many more.

Bob L

TotalSonic
06-14-2004, 09:10 AM
Bang on. SAW was a 4-track recording program when Slow-tools was still choking on two. I remember telling my school about it at the time and they didn't believe me. I guess people don't listen unitl they are ready to understand. Stein&*^& coppied SAW and called it VST. Thus is the nature of the beast. As far as I know, no other recording apps use Assembly. It is more than just the language though. I think it helps that Bob is a talented engineer. I would question the likes of other programmers.

Just to be historically accurate - Digidesign's Session 8 running on a Mac & Audiomedia II card could do 8 mono tracks each with a 2 band eq in 1993 - which is the year SAW came out doing 4 stereo tracks. I know this because I was deciding between both systems when I bought SAW in 94. SAW was a heckuva lot cheaper and seemed to do everything Session 8 could (except for wav form display in the multitrack). I certainly have never regretted that decision.

I also agree with Bob that I don't think that Steinberg's VST was really influenced by SAW very much - it was simply an extension of Cubase 3.x - which was more of audio capabilities tacked onto a well developed midi program.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

Bob L
06-14-2004, 09:13 AM
Steve,

Was the session 8 card actually 8 channels of hardware?

If that is the case, then it was still not capable of virtual mixing of more channels through one channel of physical hardware, which SAW, I thought, was the first to demonstrate at the 92 AES show in San Fransisco on a CardD.

Bob L

TotalSonic
06-14-2004, 01:37 PM
Steve,

Was the session 8 card actually 8 channels of hardware?

If that is the case, then it was still not capable of virtual mixing of more channels through one channel of physical hardware, which SAW, I thought, was the first to demonstrate at the 92 AES show in San Fransisco on a CardD.

Bob L

It's obviously been a long while - but if I recall correctly Session 8 did indeed do virtual mixing of 8 mono tracks with 2 in and up to 4 out. I'm pretty sure it wasn't out in 1992 in time for AES though - and it did depend on the extra DSP on the cards in order to do what it did - so it certainly wasn't a native system like the original SAW was - so I believe your claim of being the first in this regard is correct. It won one of Mix Mag's TEC Award's in 1993 though (even back then Digi was pretty well off in the marketing dept.). afaik The Session 8-XL was Digi's only pre-recent-LE support for Windows - it had it's Motorola DSP chips on ISA cards and worked with Win3.1 on a minimum 486-60. Support for this didn't last very long though - they pretty much abandoned it in 95 when they came out with PTIII - which was strictly Mac.

As a side note - my 1st job at a studio started in 1991 at Multimedia Productions in Baltimore. It's claim to fame was that we were the first in the area to have Digi's Sound Designer II and for some reason I was immediately attracted to digital editing. One of my jobs there would be to occasionally work night shifts for this - because it would take so long to for example normalize an entire album that there would be sometimes even a few hours between button pushes to initialize the next command! Since it was a 2 track editor though my dream was to find a system that could actually do digital multitracking. By luck at another studio I was working at in 94 I saw a flyer for SAW and it seemed to describe exactly what I had been looking for at a price I could actually afford for my home studio. I still remember distinctly how amazed I was at it's speed and power back then when I first installed it - funny how much our expectations and capabilities have grown in only 10 years!! My 2nd solo album that I released in 95 (and now out of print) was for the most part tracked just doing internal bouncedowns in the 4 track SAW - and there's still a few tracks that I'm in fact really proud of done this way - although I've been wanting to try and reload some of my old .ark files off of floppy & DAT and give some of it a proper remix in SAWStudio. Just need a few more hours in the day!

Anyway - I think it'd be great if someone came out with a site detailing the history of early DAW design - there's a lot of interesting stories, such as your own (and of plenty of others that unlike SAW are no longer around - like OSC, Dr. T's, Spectral, etc.) - that would be a really cool thing to have.

Best regards,
Steve Berson

Carlos Mills
06-18-2004, 07:04 AM
[QUOTE=TotalSonic]It's obviously been a long while - but if I recall correctly Session 8 did indeed do virtual mixing of 8 mono tracks with 2 in and up to 4 out. I'm pretty sure it wasn't out in 1992 in time for AES though - and it did depend on the extra DSP on the cards in order to do what it did - so it certainly wasn't a native system like the original SAW was - so I believe your claim of being the first in this regard is correct. It won one of Mix Mag's TEC Award's in 1993 though (even back then Digi was pretty well off in the marketing dept.). afaik The Session 8-XL was Digi's only pre-recent-LE support for Windows - it had it's Motorola DSP chips on ISA cards and worked with Win3.1 on a minimum 486-60. Support for this didn't last very long though - they pretty much abandoned it in 95 when they came out with PTIII - which was strictly Mac.

Steve, we also have to know how did the 8 summed mono tracks sounded... ;)


As a side note - my 1st job at a studio started in 1991 at Multimedia Productions in Baltimore. It's claim to fame was that we were the first in the area to have Digi's Sound Designer II and for some reason I was immediately attracted to digital editing. One of my jobs there would be to occasionally work night shifts for this - because it would take so long to for example normalize an entire album that there would be sometimes even a few hours between button pushes to initialize the next command! Since it was a 2 track editor though my dream was to find a system that could actually do digital multitracking. By luck at another studio I was working at in 94 I saw a flyer for SAW and it seemed to describe exactly what I had been looking for at a price I could actually afford for my home studio. I still remember distinctly how amazed I was at it's speed and power back then when I first installed it - funny how much our expectations and capabilities have grown in only 10 years!! My 2nd solo album that I released in 95 (and now out of print) was for the most part tracked just doing internal bouncedowns in the 4 track SAW - and there's still a few tracks that I'm in fact really proud of done this way - although I've been wanting to try and reload some of my old .ark files off of floppy & DAT and give some of it a proper remix in SAWStudio. Just need a few more hours in the day!

Interesting story Steve. Back in January, 1996, I was at Manny's Music Store (48th st, NYC) looking for ADATS ans Mackie Consoles :rolleyes: , when this salesman, Richie Greenberg (if my memory doesn't fail), told me about this software, SAW plus 32, which was "much better" than ADATs. I remember seeing it in use in the second floor of the store, but I thought it was too expensive... Anyway, my brother insisted in buying it and we took it along with a Card D plus; which, Richie told us, sounded much better than ADATs (on that time, salesman knew about what they were talking about... :) By July I had read all SAW plus 32 manual and was completely in love with it... :p Since then, all my productions are entirely recorded, mixed and mastered in the SAW domain. I also managed to write about 6 or 7 articles about SAWPro, SS, and SS light in the two biggest Brazilian audio magazines: Backstage and Audio, Música e Tecnologia.