I just finished a long project that started with material from Protools. There was some bad sounds in that, I thought it was human error but maybe there's something in this.
But seriously, of all the things that are likely to affect the 'sound' surely Vegas or Protools would be the last thing to pick on?
I can understand arguments over mics, studio design, plugins, and monitors but both Vegas and Protools are just sophisticated number crunchers.

If I'm not mistaken, Pro Tools has a fixed bit deoth in it's mixing path depending on whether you have PT, PT|24 or PT|HD. (Some verification from the experts here is greatly appreciated). Vegas, on the other hand does all it's internal mixing in floating point which provides essentially 32-bits of resolution.
If my original Pro Tools assumption is correct, which an intensive mix, you may be able to hear the difference between a 24-bit mixer and a 32-bit mixer and this could contribute to the "sound".

Check lynn fustons DAWSumm daw comparison CD

I used to bring this up all the time, but I realized my testing was flawed, the DAWSumm CD spells it out pretty good. It would be interesting to know the exact gain staging areas in Vegas but I havent run into a situation where obvious funny math is going on, no matter how I try to crank faders.

Im probably nearing my 200th album summed in Vegas, and if there were any real issue, you can bet I'd be doing something else

And yeah, like was asked, let us know the name of the forum so we can have a good go at em. You up for it Rednroll?

I've heard that it's using the Digi pre amps that makes the difference. Some guy told me once at the music store that the digi pre's where the best on the market and that buying or owning any other pre amp would be uneeded if you owned a digi unit. He said it was "THE Industry sound" Watcha think?

I think that guy sniffs glue. The very best of the digi preamps, are comparable to the focusrite platinum series, which while good, are nothing compared to any of their higher up lines.

Don't let the digi guy fool you, they will claim that Neve designed the focusrite preamps

True in a way but not THOSE particular ones! Neve had a company named Focusrite which folded and then were bought by someone else, who made his own designs. GOOD designs but not Neve's. There is a GREAT Rupert Neve video free for download on the web that explains that part of it, Ill see if I can dig it up.

The normal digi pre's might or might not be better than the pre's on a Behringer

And only a tard would suggest that any one preamp is the best pre to use on everything. There are pre's that DO sound good on everything, but for any specific use there is always a better pre.

He may be right about them being the industry sound tho. Modern records sound like squashed garbage crap for the most part, and claiming responsibility for that sound would probably steer me away from any of those products

>>Some guy told me once at the music store that the digi pre's where the best on the market and that buying or owning any other pre amp would be uneeded if you owned a digi unit. He said it was "THE Industry sound" Watcha think? <<

First of all, don't buy anything from that guy unless you've done your homework elsewhere. I think he probably worked at Circuit City at some point as its basically the same kind of pitch by someone who doesn't know what the F he's talking about! And I agree with Pipe, unfortunately the "industry sound" has more to do with overuse of compression than any mic pres. ;-O

drbam

The Digi pres would definitely contribute to the "sound" but not in a particularly good way. There are so many preamps out there, many of them arguably better than the Digi ones.
B.

Here's the video

even if you are on dialup, grab this thing!

http://www.imusicast.com/html/rupertneve.html

www.sweetwater.com/forums



lets get em boys

more specifically........


http://www.sweetwater.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6453&perpage=20&pagenumber=1

Forum wars....too funny. Go get 'em. I'd be surprised to see users as smart as the users in this forum...

You know, I understand the whole importance of good pre's and all, but I truly believe there is a perceived quality limitation. To me, when I listen to a pre, I listen for transparency and a low noise floor. If I don't hear anything drastically wrong, and no perceived additional noise is being added, I say use it. I listen to a lot of music and consider myself to be a critical and educated listener. Not once have I focused in close enough, to say "that recording sounds like it used a Neve preamp". Or that recording sounds like crap, "they must have used a behringer pre-amp". Now, if I hear a bunch of hiss and the sound is rather thin to me, then I would probably say, they didn't use a transparent and low noise pre-amp during their recording. This also holds true for the whole high resolution 24bit/192Khz sampling rates. I know and understand that higher is better, no argument there. I have yet to sit down and say, "that recording was recorded using 16bit technology, that sounds like garbage." I'll tell you guys something, the song that Cosmo posted here for me awhile back, was originally tracked on 16bit/44.1 Khz Tascam DA-38's. All the Vocals, where recorded through a Joe Meak pre-amp, with an Audio Technica 4050 mic. The pre-amps output got inserted into a channel on a mackie 32x8 mixer, where the channel fader was routed to a bus, that fed the inputs to the Tascam DA-38's.. All the instruments went through, the Mackie's 32x8's Line IN pre-amps, and then routed out the consoles buses that fed an input on a DA-38. After the tracking was done, all the tracks where transfered from the DA-38's to Vegas. The transfer was a digital transfer at the original recorded 16/44.1 recording bit rate/sample rate. The mix was done through my Gina 20 bit sound cards at a Vegas project setting of 16/44.1. The analog outputs of the Gina 20, where again fed to the pre's of the mackie mixing board, and the mix was put on a 16bit/44.1khz DAT tape. The Dat was later mastered through 16/44.1 processing through a TC Finalizer and recorded into Sound Forge at 16/44.1, where additional processing was done at 16/44.1 settings. The final song was recorded onto 16/44.1 CDR. I extracted the song off of CDR, and saved it as a 192 Kbs .MP3 file for everyone's critique. The results, everyone commented that it definately sounded professional. I got a few emails asking me what type of compression I used to make the drums so slammin. I got other emails asking me what type of FX's and other processing, I used on the vocals. No one seemed to notice, that everything was done at 16/44.1 or that the majority of the instruments where recorded through the Mackie's 32x8's pre-amps.

My viewpoint is that it's the engineer that makes a good sounding recording, not a mic pre. Expessive/prestine mic pre's and high definition audio is for bad engineers, that are short on brains and long on cash and they need the highend gear to cover up for the rest of their bad engineering skills.

Whilst I agree that the majority of the professionalism is derived from the song, the way it is put together, the production and the engineering - but the preamps make a hell of a difference.

I worked for a long time using only the Behringer MX8000 preamps.... horrible, but I got used to them. I did a lot of recordings and got a professional sound. It is possible.

However, recently I got the opportunity to do a unique comparison.

I recorded a band almost exactly a year ago, using the Behringer mic pres, not as many nice mics, and a different sound card.

Then recently I got to record the same band, the same song using expensive mic pres (and admittedly some better engineering)

I can post a direct comparison if you would all like? I found it facsinating.

Everything sounded incredibly better - but most notably the vocals.

the Behringer vocals sounded like they had a sock over the mic, and yet it was the same microphone in the same vocal booth. With the Behringer pre I remember distinctly having to to work hard with the EQ to get the sound, and even then I was never happy. Nasal and boxy.

Vocal wise - this time I had almost no EQ, just a little bass rolloff and compression. It sounds fantastic and airy (RODE NTK mic through Manley Dual mono mic pre)

Now, this is a below average band, and far far from my best production sound consequently. However, the gear did make a massive massive difference.

While I know it is possible to get close with the cheap stuff, but there definitely are limits, and with the cheap stuff, the engineer definitely has to work harder.

Perhaps we should hold a Vegas mix-off competition. Someone provide us with a raw project to mix and it'd be interesting to see what everyone came up with!

Jason

True as rain. I always hear stuff and say "now that was tracked at 32bits"....all the time. Not.

As for that song I posted that RednRoll referred to - Red may have done a whole lotta re-routing of stuff but the tune was tracked much simpler. Yes - 16bit, 44.1kHz; one AT-3035 for all instruments and vox through the preamp of a Carvin SM16 board to an M-Audio Delta 410.

That should actually work to prove RednRoll's point even more...

I'd laugh at anyone who said they can hear the difference between a sound recorded with PT vs Vegas vs Cubase vs Sonar or any of them, all other things being equal. No one has an ear that good except maybe RednRoll or PipelineAudio and they're calling bullsh*t.

stakeout - I agree about the preamp making a difference on vocals. Losing my behringer board was the best move I ever made.

I'll always stand up for human creativity over bit depth and gear delusion.
HOWEVER! I won't back down from the importance of pre-amps in the recording process. I've used "good" preamps (low noise, decent dynamic range... the Mackie boards come to mind) and I've used high end preamps and I can really hear a difference
.
That said, are recordings made using Mackie preamps crap? No way, no how. I'll take Daniel Lanois with a Mackie board and a couple of old ADAT black face units over Jimmy Knobtwirler with a rack of Neve's and a ProTools|HD system. :)

I'm still wondering if anyone has insight to the ProTools internal mixing bit-depth resolution and how it compares to Vegas and it's 32-bit floating point internal mixing.

B.

I tell you Rednroll, I take the opposite approach. Like for me, I will use alot of different pre's and things, I will do almost ANYTHING to make it easier to mix.

I know it sounds weird at first but for me the hardest thing in Vegas, is keeping space. For some reason its VERY hard for me to do. Maybe because of the muddy product I record now, I dont know. But I will try and use mic pre's for focus. For instance I have some ADI pres that will distort the hi's a tiny bit and sacrifice lows in the process. I find this works really well for cymbals and angry snares. Later in the mix I dont have to worry about the bottom. Things like that.

Now that I think about it its really weird. We go for "fat" sounding mics and pres and comps and all that, yet I find the most important thing to do in tracking is to make things "thin" lately, and I try to tailor my mic pre collection for that. Someone said before that the solo button is the most dangerous thing on a console, and I guess lately I agree. We have the technology now to make the HUGEST sounding individual tracks one could ever dream of, but put 4 of those in a mix and you get mud, nothing but mud.

I guess I think things like mic pre, mic selection ,and all is for focus lately. I dont always get blessed with the kind of "talent" that can focus itself. I get guys with guitars dropped down to B tuning, with mesa boogie whatevers with the mids all scooped out, or worse. I get flim flam tom tom drummers. And that weird lame tool vibrato all over the beginnings of vocal notes.

I pick my pre's carefully because I need all the help I can get!

"I pick my pre's carefully because I need all the help I can get!"

As I said, "Exspensive/prestine mic pre's and high definition audio is for bad engineers, that are short on brains and long on cash and they need the highend gear to cover up for the rest of their bad engineering skills.' :-) Or maybe more appropriately in your case, to help bad performances sound better.

I wasn't really saying the Behringer's where good mic pre's. I was just referring to them. I actually think they suck, because they're too noisy and sound a bit thin to me. So that has to do with my "Transparency" and "sound coloration", when listening to a mic pre. I personally use DBX mic pre's in a combination of DBX 376's and DBX 286a's. 376 is a tube pre, and the 286a is a lesser expensive transistor pre. I think these sound good to me. Does an Avalon,Manly, high end focusrite, Neve, or Presoneus mic pre, sound better than my DBX pre's. Well, I hope they would for the extra 2-3 grand, I would have to spend on one. All's I know is the DBX's fit my budget and my needs, so I don't have a real desire to go spend an extra $3000 on an Avalon, that will give me the same thing I have now, with a tinge more bottom end....that's what EQ'a are for. Also, if I find I need more pre's than I currently have in my rack for a certain record session, I have no delima's of pluging into one of the Mic pre's on my Yamaha mixing board...they're pretty quiet and transparent too, just sound a little thin to me....but again, nothing that can't be overcome in the mix.The noise floor is the most important factor of a mic pre to me. If it's noisy, there's not much you can do to fix that, unless you like to use the noise reduction plugin on every track of your recording.

I challange anyone to go pick up a new recording CD, and listen to the vocals and be able to tell me what Mic Pre was used. I've been able to do that with certain Lexicon reverbs used in mixes, but never a Mic pre.

Check out the seventh circle audio MP knock offs;

Seventh Circle Audio

Very affordable and as good as it gets.

NICE, I love stuff like that!.I had a heathkit power amp once for some NS-10's and I thought it was great....nothing like the love of a piece you make yourself

****...nothing like the love of a piece you make yourself****

even if he assembles it for you, it is a bargain. There are a bunch of guys down here that are using them.

They are very nice MPs...

We make our own LA2As.... ....there isn't any good kits out there, so you might end up with one in an old yamaha amp chassis and another in a Ampeg supply rack frame..... but all in all, they're right in the pocket... about $500 in parts.

We get the same sort of rubbish on the video side. I hear comments about you can't make a proffesional video if you don't use XYZ to edit!
I've always believed that what happens in front of the mic/camera has more impact on the final outcome than anything else.
What happens after that has more to do with the skills of the operator than the tools being used. And finally how the audience hears / sees the finished product has a huge bearing as well.
I'm not saying that better mics or cameras don't make a difference but the mark of a pro is knowing the limits of what he has to work with.
I suspect this is coming from the Apple 'camp', trying to convince its user base that without their overpriced hardware their production is going to suffer. It's simply an attempt to stem the flow of users to the dark side by creating FUD.

My thoughts are that Vegas doesn't sound, it's the hardware you use with Vegas that sounds.
Vegas just handles digital information.