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Q: Why does Logic 10 sound different to Logic 9 ? Logic 9 seems to be better....!?

hello

 

Im not sure if anyone else has noticed this but i feel that Logic 10 does not sound as good as Logic 9.

 

I got some new tracks back which we made in Logic 10 and they sound flat and very "HiFi".

 

Has anyone else noticed this ?

Logic Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Dec 10, 2013 12:08 AM

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Q: Why does Logic 10 sound different to Logic 9 ? Logic 9 seems to be better....!?

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  • by Jazzmaniac,

    Jazzmaniac Jazzmaniac Sep 12, 2016 4:03 AM in response to Eriksimon
    Level 2 (489 points)
    Sep 12, 2016 4:03 AM in response to Eriksimon

    Ok, I think I know what you saw. There is a website that compares the quality of the built-in resamplers of different OSes (and some application specific resamplers). In days where different applications can talk to the audio hardware with their own sampling rate, the OS is responsible for converting the sample rate on the fly with low latency. That's where you can make a number of different trade-offs. Those usually involve latency, phase response, aliasing and high frequency roll-off. I would not call this part of the audio engine of logic. Any serious DAW (including Logic) demands that the audio interface runs at the same sample rate as the DAW and bypasses the resampling stage entirely.

     

    The website you refer to is probably either this one or referring to it:

    http://src.infinitewave.ca/

     

    Please note that the graphical presentation is somewhat misleading. They use a very large dynamic range of 180dB. The stimulation is at 0dB. Any noise below -100 dB is absolutely inaudible, even in the most unfortunate situations. It is generally agree that aliasing rejecting to -80dB is sufficient for high quality audio. The website does not allow to change the dynamic range to reflect that. Also, aliasing over 20kHz is generally also inaudible. The "Acon Digital" converter therefore performs like a well designed sample rate converter and likely has a lower latency than others that seemingly perform better from the time-frequency charts shown.

     

    This quickly gets very esoteric, and some companies are really over-engineering this. There's nothing to say against a little extra safety margin, but creating a sample rate converter that rejects aliasing to below -170dB is ridiculous and helps nobody, even if you factor in accumulation of aliasing noise when multi-tracking. The converter of Ableton Live 9.11 uses a significant amount of CPU cycles to achieve that result and also adds nearly one millisecond of latency as you can see from the impulse response graph. If you look at the response of Live 7, you see how it should not be done. That one is terrible in every aspect. However, the 7, 8.02 and 9.03 converter was absolutely sufficient and it had a much lower additional latency as a result of its minimum phase design, even though the phase response was slightly off above 1kHz (where it doesn't matter that much and every reproduction system messes with the phase response much worse anyway!).

     

    So please, don't fall for this voodoo. There's so much esoteric nonsense going on when it comes to audio quality that I'm surprised nobody has advertised a DAW yet that was only coded during full moons.

  • by Eriksimon,

    Eriksimon Eriksimon Sep 12, 2016 5:11 AM in response to Jazzmaniac
    Level 6 (12,469 points)
    Sep 12, 2016 5:11 AM in response to Jazzmaniac

    OK, ok, this goes over my head. I just know that I can null any audioplayers' output with Logics' output, which makes me think that either all their individual audio engines are very similar, or that it is indeed the OS that handles the basics. The question is: do you agree that Logic 9 sounds "15 % better" than LP X?

  • by Jazzmaniac,

    Jazzmaniac Jazzmaniac Sep 12, 2016 5:29 AM in response to Eriksimon
    Level 2 (489 points)
    Sep 12, 2016 5:29 AM in response to Eriksimon

    Eriksimon wrote:

     

    The question is: do you agree that Logic 9 sounds "15 % better" than LP X?

    Logic does (or at least used to) rely on the OS for offline audio conversion jobs. That's how the resampling diagrams depend on the OS version.

     

    Whether Logic 9 sounds "better" is surely a very subjective question, unless Logic X was massively flawed. I did not notice that. I have not done a null test on the mixer engine, but I'm fairly certain that this has not degraded from logic 9. If it has changed, it surely has towards higher precision when summing lots of tracks by either reordering before summing or using higher precision intermediate representations. In any case, the mixer does its job well and more reliably and accurate than any analog mixer. There are a few internal plugins that have changed that I'm aware of. Those will clearly affect the result of a mix that employs them. I know about the nature of some of these changes, and none of them is a degradation. In fact, some of the old algorithms were quite bad and have been replaced by something much better.

     

    Of course, there may be bugs in the more recent version that compromise audio quality. But without good evidence or at least a first indication and a reproducible scenario I don't bother much. To me, Logic X sounds great. I have not encountered a single situation that made me believe that they have messed up. And we regularly measure our own products inside the supported hosts, and never was there anything unusual.

  • by Eriksimon,

    Eriksimon Eriksimon Sep 12, 2016 5:49 AM in response to Jazzmaniac
    Level 6 (12,469 points)
    Sep 12, 2016 5:49 AM in response to Jazzmaniac

    Well, it is good to get this well informed support (and criticism) from you for my now long running attempts at debunking this particularly stubborn myth.

  • by octopi,

    octopi octopi Sep 12, 2016 5:43 PM in response to Eriksimon
    Level 4 (1,357 points)
    Audio
    Sep 12, 2016 5:43 PM in response to Eriksimon

    Since this thread started I have turned into a Zombie. Now I can't stop drinking blood. Typical.

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