too much or not enough
2001-07-20 by Ben
I'm at the point where I'm starting to actually read the manual and look at the MD a little less as a new toy and a little bit more objectively and it's inspired a couple of thoughts from me (in under a week!). First, the issue of the noise floor and the distortion being "too much". To quote the email from Daniel in response to me: " > Also, I guess Joeri mentioned to you that this has a relatively high > noise floor, at least through headphones. That is a misunderstanding really - the noise floor is low, but the signals are defaulted as low, to leave headroom for excessive resonance and EQ-ing. " Now, ignoring me referring to Joeri in such a casual manner, this email plus the distortion volume issue (and other things I've noticed) leave me to think that perhaps they allow too much room for effects and not enough for the standard sounds (and less-volume increasing effects). I use the MachineDrum through my headphones with the main volume turned between 3/4 to full level and the instruments' volumes in that same range, which is relative to most synths and drum machines I have, high settings for the headphones. Then I use distortion, or try a few other things and it becomes painfully loud. It's nice to have room to do weird crap but I'd rather that the weird crap be attenuated a bit than have the sounds at most settings essentially attenuated for the purpose of huge headroom. I mean, I like the fact I can use the repeat trigger function to go so fast that the bass drum sounds like a synth but it doesn't have to be so much louder than the bass drum itself. Second, as you may know by now I am a sample rate/bit reduction fiend. I find the implementation on the MachineDrum to be less than desireable. I guess (but am not certain) that it is bit reduction and for things like the bass and snare I tried it seems to just add a tinkly sound in high frequency range [but it's always the same general frequency range for a certain rate setting which makes me wonder if it is indeed rate reduction not bit reduction and that's aliasing]. For cymbals, yeah, it gets nasty in a good way. What I'm saying is that whichever of the two it's missing - bit or rate reduction, I really want to see that added. I ws so desperate I was looking and 6 rack tall HP analog to digital convertors on eBay today. They're cheap but they're big, ugly, probably drain lots of power and would mean I'd have to buy a d/a convertor too, unless I could just stick it into my 2408. I decided to leave my last (and larger) topic for a bit later when I've got more perspect