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"Loud Music" setting

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A440

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Well, from that thread it appears we do not have the comparison we want. There is one person's experience (bad) with the loud setting. And there is another person's experience with the standard setting (good). [and one experience with neither - manual]. But who knows what went else wrong in the first case (maybe nothing). What we need is the same person, with the same mike and MD at the same concert using the two settings.

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I did a test, and I hear little or no difference.

Went to see Oneida at the Knitting Factory last night--a great band, by the way, relentless loud minimalist Brooklyn update of Kraut-rock. Anyone in NYC should go hear them.

MZ-NHF800, little SoundPro omnis, Hi-SP, Low Sensitivity and switched a few times in mid-song between Standard and LoudMusic on Mic AGC.

Listening back through good headphones---Grado SR 125--the change is almost imperceptible. Level stays exactly the same. There may be a tiny bit more high-frequency airiness on the Loud Music setting, but that may be wishful thinking.

I'd be curious about other people's results.

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I've used CoolEdit Pro to look at the waveforms in three different songs where I switched between Standard and LoudMusic. There's no difference.

That doesn't mean that Loud Music doesn't somehow provide extra headroom, but it was a mighty loud concert to start with and Standard didn't distort either.

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My findings would suggest that you're right, A440..

I made a test file consisting of burst tones of varying lengths from 1ms to 500ms in sequence with increasing gaps between them. It should be possible to see the ADSR envelope of the AGc's compression this way.

I then repeated the sequence in incremental drops of 1dB each.

I recorded this via line-in.

The results were surprising - ADSR and average levels were -identical- for both the "normal' and "loud music" settings.

I did not try this using the mic input but by my experience with older MDs this should not make a difference.

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It did on the ones I've used.

And AFAIK the difference between normal and loud music settings should be that loud music uses a different attack and release [hard knee with limiting vs. soft knee with limiting] and more gain with a lower threshold [meaning there isn't more headroom, just much harder compression, which is why noise in the quiet parts becomes more apparent].

I'll do it with the mic in if I can get it to calibrate somewhere near right.

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Okay..

Rather unscientific when it comes down to it, but I had deleted the test file I created before and didn't have the patience to do it all over again.

The new test is simpler but still gives some idea of at least the attack and limiting levels. I didn't measure for release.

Test consisted of a series of 1kHz tones of .1sec followed by .1sec silence repeating for 5 sec, followed by 5 secs silence, then repeating 1dB quieter all the way down to -32dB.

My loose calibration was off by approximately +2dB so the first burst is clipped at its beginning.

full view of the original file:

user posted image

Click here to zoom in some

full view of the Normal AGC'd file:

user posted image

Click here to zoom in some

full view of the Loud Music AGC'd file:

user posted image

Click here to zoom in some

The spike on the 10th burst is Trillian, which I forgot to close, alerting me to someone sending me an IM.

the first 3 bursts on Normal:

user posted image

Click here to zoom in some

the first 3 bursts on Loud Music:

user posted image

Click here to zoom in some

first burst on Normal:

user posted image

Click here to zoom in some

first burst on Loud Music:

user posted image

Click here to zoom in some

This is what I see, which I openly admit might not be correct:

Loud Music appears to have a longer attack.

It looks like the there's fast attack, *very* slow release [longer than the 5 seconds between each burst!] compression going on here, followed by limiting applied to approx. -6dB. The compressor's settings change between normal and loud music, the limiter's don't appear to.

Anything below that is left alone, though gain might be being applied below -30dB which is where I stopped testing.

Like I said, not entirely scientific, but it gives some idea. The difference is really very small though. I'd expected it to have been more obvious.

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