When I was an engineer I was lucky enough to record my band's demos at the studio I worked at(Maison Rouge in London). We had 48 track Dolby SR recordings. One weekend we came in to mix a track to find our studio has rented out all the Dolby racks to another studio! Rather than waste the weekend, we mixed the un -decoded tape, using some heavy gating on the SSL to tame some of the 'tails' of the un-decoded signal. It sounded amazing and gave an excitement to the track we were never able to reproduce when mixing with the NR on . A happy accident!
u-He Satin tape plugin has a Dolby A-mod setting, plus you can control the compander mix level and mix-match encoders and decoders in the compander section. For example, you can have a modded Dolby A encoder with no active decoder.
I used to work for Dolby in the '90s. Ray was the most brilliant (and unassuming) man I've ever met. And an absolute literal genius. I'd bet his IQ was over 200. 700 component schematics were like children's books to him. He also didn't allow trim pots on any of the products to try and prevent people from messing with them. Every thing was "calibrated" with selected components. I think I'd heard about this "mod" and how it offended people in the company. I also agree with the comments below that the molested Dolby unit sounds smoother and silkier than the plug in. Ray, Ken Gundry, David Robinson and others at the company completely understood marginal non-linearities of certain devices that weren't on the data sheets, and how to use them to get the best sound. I don't know if the world will ever see a concentration of brilliance like that place again. Ray kept things lean compared to the tech giant I work for now. People really worked together and ran as hard as they could out of respect for Ray's leadership.
I find it interesting that people at Dolby would be offended by this method, at the same time Dolby produced the CAT 43a nd B which enabled the manipulation of the different bands of a Cat-22. You are right though Ray Dolby was quite a genius.
By the way, the company AudioThing released a plugin emulation of this unit a while back, it would be interesting to see a comparison with the real thing
Idk if it’s just me but the plug-in sounded harsher and less inviting, than the Dolby sounded. It’s hard to explain but it’s just got that digital eq boost sound
Very interesting, Brad. I seem to hear the compression on the multiband effected track, or else the level is just higher. But, either way, it's a great tool! Also because no one will be A/B-ing the final track like you're doing here! MJ
Very cool! Didn't know that's how Dolby did it's thing. Very ahead of it's time indeed! I had already frozen the screen and taken pics before you put the settings up at the end lol. Very glad I clicked on this. Now let's see how the stock plugin from Cubase 11 pro does at this... Love the "air" that it gave the track! Very clean! Subbed, liked. I'll be back! lol Cheers!
Absolutely brilliant stuff, thank you so much for digging in and providing this information. interesting thing happened a little while back where I had some old 2 track cassette‘s that were on a tascam 103 and I remember I used to play them back with the Dolby c turned off and it really did add a dimension to it; I didn’t care about the noise it would be interesting to see how this would apply using the ‘Dolby c’ trick...hehe...even domestic sounded good...just so full and rich...except the bottom end sucks. Be great to have both ;)
Very good, thanks for this video! Can anyone help me to understand what kind of effect(s) Mark Linkous /sparklehorse used on his vocal in his cover of "wish you were here" ? Thanks if somebody will be able to help me, ciao
for moments multiband and dolby sounds really close to each other, but sometimes the dolby has more character (I like that) and the multiband sounds more clear.. the singer it's great btw
Awesome video, breaking down the effect helped me understand how to better apply it my mixes. Granted I'm using it as more of a creative effect in the production stage to help spruce up samples I've cut. Do you think the various software emulations are faithful to the original unit?
Having the real thing I have not yet tested the plugins. I was hoping others would post comments. On my FB page many have said they have gotten good results with the Dolby emulator plug ins.
Not sure I fully understand it, from the sounds of the explanation the Dolby turns up the higher frequencies of a signal when it decreases in volume, which is upward compression, yet the technique on the plugin seems to turn down these frequencies as downward compression, unless I'm getting something wrong here? Wouldn't it make more sense to change the Range control from minus to plus in the plugin and not boost the EQ?
@@aviatedviewssound4798 music was my first love and it'll be my last. Whenever I try out things or reach boundaries orI want to expand my knowledge during a practical process, I search the net for it. Hi bro btw :)
@@nichttuntun3364 good to see you man it's jams3223 at gearslutz we talk about a lot of stuffs specially plugin alliace stuff so when do you use the dolby technique ?
@@aviatedviewssound4798hey, nice to meet you. I-net is small. I just experimented with it and tried to make things more cut through our change the sound. I use Satin a lot and I just wanted to understand the technology behind it better. There also are great plugins from AudioThing which emulate that technology. It's great for vocals but technically you can use it on every source. Cheers
@@nichttuntun3364 i know about audiothing but other than on vocals what do you use it for ? or does it get used less by you (just wanna get some feedback from peoples about it).
Could you do the same thing with a normal compressor if you have a mixer? Wouldn’t it be very similar to send your vocal through an AUX or the effects loop output into a compressor then bring that back into a separate channel and cut out all of the lows and low mids to blend in with the unaffected vocal? I record to tape before dumping into the computer, and I don’t have Dolby A but would like to kind of do this trick before hitting the tape (atleast ballpark) because I’ve found that boosting any of the hi’s digitally from a tape source after-the-fact just essentially creates tape hiss. Also, incredible video! Nice to see some actual audio engineering going on
If you had a hardware multiband compressor it would work, but hardware multiband compressors are rare and expensive. A standard compressor would not have the same effect.
Well if you are disabling from multitrack you would by pass those channels which is a option on pro noise reduction units. If you were using a stand alone unit during mixing you would connect through the encode connectors.
5 лет назад
Thanks for the demonstration of the unit. Your EQ settings were close for sure. A little 'edgier' than the Dolby Unit. I assumed they were using a DBX unit not Dolby :)
Agreed, I would say this requires adjustment to taste. I overdid it a tad. I also think I would back off the Q on the 3k eq I cranked to match the curve.
@@biasedaudio Thanks! But you're loosing a chance for an awesome giveaway... you can GIVE it AWAY to me, in case you are out of ideas (; But seriously, I'm loving your content so far, specially stuff about tape. Keep it going!
I'm a big fan of Voxengo plugins. I use their Span plugin often. I expect you could create something similar but I would expect the way the bands are split would make it difficult to match closely. Other plugins can do the same setup as the F6. I just liked the F6 because I could set two shelf overlapping shelf bands in the high freq that was similar to the Dolby.
You know all that is good what we are seeing, but priceless would be if you put one sample in DFF file somewhere in description for those who have for example Astell&Kern SP1000 with some good quality headphones like Final Audio D8000 to compare to themselves. RU-vid is not good neither for video or sound comparison, there is big difference between unprocessed vocal and processed one, but very light difference between those you try to make and with JL mode. Great video by the way ;)
