Kind of a general question about VST’s, but it DOES involve Renoise (I am now a full blown registered user - )!
I have heard it said that the same VSTI played back on Cubase will sound better than if played back on other software (like Fruity, or even possibly Renoise).
As I am not a techy buff, I can only guess as to whether it is true. I HAVE noticed that VSTI’s in general are harder on the ears and harder to mix than hardware sources, but does the host sequencer REALLY play that much a part in the resulting sound of the VSTI?
I have given up on Fruity Loops (after 2 years) pretty much for the reason that if I mix more than a few sources together, the sound loses any clarity and an almost ‘compressed’ sound becomes apparent over the mix(?)!
Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a problem with all hosts (including Renoise)? Is one hosts output quality technically better than another?
I would like to hear anyones views on this (particularly from a technical point of view), as it is becoming a real reason to dig out my old hardware (ah… the old Cheetah MS6) again!
as far as i know the sound quality should not change at all
from the threads ive read on here about this subject , there are virtually nothing in between the vstis output to the buffer of the soundcard
this might change if you use sends but to tell you the truth, ive run renoise on a maudio24/96 and an echo io and both sound very very good.
on the other hand since they actually developed vsti & vst then there might be better handing inside cubase. ive never used cubase,
and remember this, if the vsti or vst has_any_bugs_in_it
they will almost indefinetly show up while using renoise.
welcome to the renoise forum!!
good to have you here
im the resident troll
There was one old thread comparing sound quality between different apps, where aliasing was compared, if I’m not wrong. But I couldn’t seem to find it now…
actually, the maudio audiophile 24/96 is about 99USD at the moment and it does pretty nice for an amateur card. it works very well in renoise too.
-just dont lock the sample rate- but imo its the best sound to cash ratio.
as far as rendering your friends pieces, it is my understanding that a soundcards hardware is not used when doing this. but i could be wrong about this.
Resampling/Aliasing is a factor that can make one VST-host sound better than the other, especially in the mixing stage. Renoise uses 32bit “cubic-spline” for soundplayback and “sinc” (which is the “perfekt” algorithm, although slow) for .wav render. Its the best sound you get anywhere. Top samplerate is 96khz for Renoise, but that should be ok, unless youre some kind of bat.
Thanks for all your ideas guyz - seems like a very helpful place here
MIKE: If I were to make a pattern with 8 vst tracks and put seven of the tracks volume very low, so that they were barely audiable, would this be a fair test of aliasing? ie - I could hear track 1 and get an idea of what the other tracks were doing to the original signal. I would then listen to track 1 with the other tracks deleted and compare.
Does the rendering go through the sound card?
VVOOIS: Thanks for the link - bloody good read! Is there anywhere I can get hold of older versions of Renoise so I can perform my own tests? I have a bazillion plug-ins, but have decided to limit myself to Quadrasid in an attempt to simplify my tracks! I will be performing tests with some basic waveforms as soon as I get a chance.
CHOICE: I think I’m gonna go for the audiophile. Just read an online review @ Computer Music, and they seem to hold it in high regard. I have never been completely happy with the Audigy (in fact, I felt that my old SB Live had a much crisper sound)!
ya know ive heard quite a bit about certain producers saying that isa cards sound alot better than pci and after hearing their music i could agree with them.
Hella amusing
I know you probably don’t believe it anyway, but that’s like saying midi sequencers sound better than trackers, or vice versa.
ISA is just an interface for the card to the processor via the motherboard.
PCI- just another interface.
In reality both have nothing to what kind of AD/DA converter chips are on the card, or what kind of dsp it has, or the shielding it has from the rest of the components, the quality of it’s drivers, or pretty much anything else.
It’s nice to romanticise though. Whatever excites your superstition
don’t fall into that samplerate trap, really… or would you say that cds sound terrible mushy? good clean mixes still mostly grow from good clean mixing skills.
going to 24bit on the other hand seems to be much more beneficial for mixing.
and soundcards generally… sure there’s a difference, but i doubt you will hear such a big difference as you seem to expect. why not listen to a well-produced cd or wavefile through your current soundcard, i bet it will sound clean and good.
again, don’t be fooled that a better dac makes your mixes sound cleaner, it’s the engineer’s job. Plus, even if it was that way, wouldn’t that mean that only on your super-dooper-expensive soundcard your music sounds good?
i doubt it. it’s just adding numbers. every now and then someone comes out with a story that host x sound better than host y but i think so far nobody could actually prove it.
sorry that’s nonsense
resampling is job of the instrument. the host only deals with audio-streams that have all a fixed samplerate, the one that you set in the audio config.
the interpolation settings of renoise only apply to it’s builed-in sampler.
As a stoned friend of mine said:
Perhaps its best to look at the sound as a painting, where you should stay within the boundaries of your selected object when colouring, accidental or not, painting the colours outside will only make it look out of place. And throwing in more colour to fix the original will only make it more “mushy”.
Where some VST effects could support 96khz but not 192khz, and sometimes only 48khz, so I jumped to the conclusion that somehow the VST would have to be “enabled” at a certain samplerate. And that would call for the necessity of host-resampling in certain cases.
I see now that the cubic-spline interpolation only applies to the sampler. But how about the “dither” setting in the “master”-settings, is this applied to the final mix? Could this increase definition of “analog” sounds from 16bit output VST on a 24 bit soundcard, for example?
Hi Marc - thanks for your opinion, but I think you are missing my initial point slightly.
I am saying that the sound quality deteriorates when I add extra tracks. Listening to a track from CD, it is already mixed down to 2 track (left & right) and so is not really stretching the soundcards capabilities in any way…
I think that where soundcards/hosts stuggle and get ‘mushy’ is when multiple tracks are layered.
Whilst a novice at Renoise, I do have years of experience with mixing hardware sources, and it is not the same sort of ‘mushy’ you get from poor mixing. It’s… umm… kinda ‘gritty and compressed’…
I do have to disagree with the statement that there is not a big difference between soundcards, too. It just doesn’t make sense that a pro card has the same or similar quality to a built in card on a motherboard?!
Thanks again for your opinion - you seem to know your stuff & I would be interersted to know which card you use!
The difference between pro soundcard and motherboard’s you’ll hear only with good studio monitors or hi-Q headphones.
So as i understand - you was on FL but it’s mixing quality is 2 bad (i’ve hear it before from many ppl), and now you’re on Renoise.
So did you hear the difference of Renoise realtime mixing and some other host (seqencer 4 example) ? Or it’s just a curiosity ?
I doubt this very much. At least I hear a difference between my motherboard and good card on my normal hifi system. Not saying that you’ll notice it even more with monitors or headphones…
)!
