Knobs that don't do anything.

[rasputin1963]

 

Paul McCartney has remarked that the digital audio revolution has brought us knobs that don't do anything.   In the 60's,  he said,   if you turned a knob on a console,   you can bet you were going to get an undeniable change in the sound.   In digital worlds,   you can turn a knob and get....   very little change indeed in the sound. 

 

Have you found this to be the case:   dials or potentiomenters or sliders or buttons whose effect is so subtle,  that you start questioning your own ear:   "Was I supposed to hear something different from this adjustment?"

 

??

[Anderton]

I can't say I've had the same experience...maybe the issue is that digital can expose so many parameters because you're not limited by having to tie parameters to hardware. Because of that, you can have parameters that make a very subtle difference, like the "sag" parameter in amp sims. But also, some parameter changes are more obvious with some sounds than with others.

[blue2blue]

Analog potentiometers... a BIG can of worms.

At their best, like a fine turntable or tape machine, they are a thing of precision engineered beauty. 

Unfortunatley, these days, hardware engineering is gonna cost, big.

I saw a BB estimate that hardware costs of dedicated, high precision stereo pot circuits to control output volume on the MAIN outs of given digital devices would probably add as much as $100 to $150 to the cost of such devices. (Bare, precision double-ganged autio pots can cost more than $50 a pop, as I recall.) But if you use cheaper double-ganged pots, you get anomalies in the gain taper from side to side as the pots go through their range -- you know, that unpleasant thing where you turn the volume down and the center image shifts to one side or the other.

(And that last is the reason that most prosumer converter boxes don't have that quite desirable feature. Most less experienced folks can't even figure out why you'd want analog output controls rather than controlling output volume from the digital domain. That said, 24 bit conversion greatly eases these considerations. Still, if you have very loud powered speakers hooked up to the main outs of your converters [like my 200w/ch Event 20/20bas] you may well need to reduce the output level as much as 60 or even 70 dB, even with the input trims on the speakers all the way to the bottom of their level reduction range. And ~140 dB (aprx 24 bit SNR) minus 70 dB = uh oh -- suddenly we're talking mid-60s fi. Which is why I use my nearing 25 year old original Mackie 1204 as an overgrown volume control. And, yes, of course, it also reduces SNR. Pardoxical, ain't it.   )

You can design dedicated throw digital knobs and sliders -- but you need some way to 'update' their value to match changes from the digital side -- and that pretty much means motorization and that pretty much throws a whole new set of engineering and cost considerations at the device.

Me, I've never been crazy about free spin knobs -- but there is one, pretty sweet advantage that CAN be implemented...

The output knob on my MOTU 828mkII is the typical (and tiny) free-spin knob -- but it has the rather convenient feature that -- if you turn it slow -- you get high precision/resolution -- by just nudging things, you can dial in the desired value with fair precision. But when you need to, you can give it a quick twist and shoot down from 0 dB FS to the - inf volume in a flick. And that can be very handy.

 

But, there is no question, using analog devices is VERY different from using digital devices. 

A lot of people jump through all sorts of (sometimes quite silly) hoops trying to accomodate their sense of dislocation and unfamiliarity, everything from onscreen visual representations with overly-detailed, cornball,  3D skeumorphic graphics (the glint of chrome -- oh pleez!) to outboard motorized control surfaces and everything in beween.

Me, maybe it's because I went digital in the early 90s, after fighting it for a while (it's different, it responds to signal ballistics very differently), I decided to learn how to work with it and not try to make it back into some sort of faux analog. 

I wasn't so much concerned with the visual as the signal handling, however. I've been using computers almost every day since 1985, so no stranger to working  with the abstract.

For me, accomodating the tectonic shift to digital was primarily about how to deal with signal dynamics that had the 'taming' benefits of analog tape transcription without the netagives of noise and (unwanted) distortions. Once I began to get a grip on how I wanted to approach things from the sound side, I was already pretty well adjusted to UI considerations. Learning new UIs is, in a sense, a big part of what I do. Because when the ground under you as a developer keeps shifting -- and it does -- then you find yourself basically running on a collapsing suspension bridge. You have to keep learning faster than the bridge of your knowledge is collapsing... or... something like that.

 

And, no, I shouldn't write a song about it.   

[Lee Knight]

It is what the knob is controlling that matters anyway, right? So if you have one knob that controls the output of an 1176, well, you're gonna hear that. Then there's that knob that controls the Q of the mid band set at unity gain on a parametric EQ. And you swing it left then right all the way and say what the hell this thing doesn't do anything!

[daklander]

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blue2blue wrote:

snip

 

And, no, I 

shouldn't

write a song about it.  

 

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You've already written the book...... 

[dboomer]

I basically disagree with what I believe your point is. It is my experience that when you adjust a parameter and don't "hear" the result you expect it's more likely because the parameter wasn't set to be in the position to give you that result.

 

Let me start with an overly extreme example. If you move a bass control on a simple mixer it won't brighten the high end of a flute. It's the wrong knob for the job. Ok now something a bit closer to reality ... If you adjust that same bass control to boost the low end in your vocal. Well if it is the Bass control on say your typical Mackie/Peavey/Yamaha mixer it is centered way too low for a human vocal. So you'll probably have to twist it quite a way to get it to be effective. In the meanwhile you will have boosted a bunch of low-end gak that you didn't intend to and will now have to deal with.

 

Of course your position would be better understood with a specific example.

[MikeRivers]

 

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dboomer wrote:

 

If you move a bass control on a simple mixer it won't brighten the high end of a flute. It's the wrong knob for the job. Ok now something a bit closer to reality ... If you adjust that same bass control to boost the low end in your vocal. Well if it is the Bass control on say your typical Mackie/Peavey/Yamaha mixer it is centered way too low for a human vocal. So you'll probably have to twist it quite a way to get it to be effective. In the meanwhile you will have boosted a bunch of low-end gak that you didn't intend to and will now have to deal with.

---

 

That's exactly the point. You turn the knob far enough to hear what it's doing. If you can't hear a change, then you don't know what the knob is doing. If you're trying to make a vocal sound fuller and, when you turn a knob, you hear the bass get all mucky, then you should be able to figure out that you aren't adjusting the right thing. If you don't turn it far enough to hear (or recognize) what you've done to the sound, but just leave it there because you read somewhere that it's what you're supposed to do, you may have made more trouble for yourself.

Of course there's the assumption that you have some idea of what the knobs do. It's pretty easy to hear when you're changing tonal balance with the EQ knobs. It may be more difficult for a novice to hear what a compressor is doing when he engages it and starts turning knobs. So in essence, turning a knob far enough so that you can hear it do something is an "learn while you earn" experience. 

 

[Beck]

First thing I thought of was when and where did McCartney say this and in what context.

Without knowing what he meant I can only guess based on my own bias.  With that I can say, yes, there are lots of "knobs" that don't do anything because there are so many false claims about what knobs are supposed to do in relation to the hardware devices they're supposed to emulate.   But... I don't know if he's thinking along those lines because this thread in HC is the only place I can find a reference to Paul McCartney, digital and knobs.

 

 

[Jaime Vargas]

He said something similar in the introductory interview in Mark Lewison's "The Beatles Recording Sessions". He was comparing the consoles at Abbey Road in the 60's with modern equipment. "Now you add treble on and it's nothing".

I think the issue is that the old console had less eq bands and of course any fader affected a lot of things. Basically he misses the ability to instantly hear big changes by seeing Norman Smith or Geoff Emerick just pushing a fader. Of course, Emerick or Smith would reply that with so few EQ bands every adjustment had to be coarse and crude anyway.

It's in the same spirit of Jimmy Page's quote that now you have so many tracks it's hard to do any positioning of instruments. Of course if you have 96 tracks, 60 of which are guitars, you're not forced to use different pannings for every one of them so everything sounds like a widescreen sludge. I bet Jimmy found four tracks much more easy to "position"