Why no head/human selection in the cabs block? This is how cabs should have worked by default...

[grdGo33]

I was just thinking, a great feature to have in the cab section would be a head or human instead of a mic.  Let me explain; in the cab block; you mainly select a cab, a mic and a distance.  But why not also have the ability to select a person?   Meaning; say you had a 4x12 in a room, and you were 8 meters away from the cab; how would it sound if you were in the room?  (aka; if it was recorded with a perfect mic?)

 

I think that actually this should have been the default setting for all cabs.  How would the amp sound if you were in the room?  When you have to select a mic, you're basically removing cab simulation from unit; and you're basically saying, this is how it would sound if it was recorded.  I mean it's fine/great to have as a feature, getting the recorded mic+cab tone from albums is great.  But, the Go lacks the most basic ability to emulate a guitar cab.  It cannot emulate the sound of a cab; of how a plain cab would sound to a human in a room.  It can only emulate the sound of a cab if it were recorded with a microphone...  And that is to me quite an artificial way to treat cabs. 

 

The most basic way to use an amp and a cab is playing them directly, and hearing the sound.  The Go lacks this most basic feature.  This would simplify tremendously the cab block, and I think might help get some great tones also...  Of course room becomes a parameter; are you playing in a garage, bedroom, church, etc., (reverb characteristics) but many reverbs aren't super expensive DSP wise, and if my my old 1994 Digitech RP5 could do such reverbs; don't think the PGO couldn't...

 

Thoughts?  Any idea why there isn't such implementation?

[silverhead]

Not sure whether this would be a real hurdle, but it occurs to me that this raises an immediate technical issue: how (without using a mic) do you capture and emulate/model the sound of the ‘real’ cab?

 

I could be totally oversimplifying and completely misunderstanding the modeling technology Line 6 uses but it seems to me that the heart of the technology is some sort of comparison: you capture a waveform of the sound of the ‘real thing’ and then your DSP software is designed to reproduce that waveform as closely as possible. Where does the waveform of the ‘real cab’ come from for comparison purposes if you don’t use a mic to capture it?

 

Again, maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee yet.....

[silverhead]

In other words...... what sound does a tree make when it falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it? Using a microphone to capture the sound is artificial!! I want the ‘real’ sound as if I were standing there at the time. How can you ever know what that sounds like without recording it? And then, of course, what you get is the sound coloured by the actual mic used to record it.

[grdGo33]

Quote

how (without using a mic) do you capture and emulate/model the sound of the ‘real’ cab?

It would be fairly simple; 'perfect mic'.  Well maybe it's not that simple...!  lol   But yeah, you do need a mic at one point I'm guessing, maybe there is a multi-million dollar experimental/scientific near-perfect mic that could be used, if you want to go kind of the IR way?  Maybe using mic blends & source signal to get from the original signal to what you would hear in a room?

 

https://moneyinc.com/most-expensive-microphones-in-the-world/

https://mynewmicrophone.com/top-20-most-expensive-microphones-on-the-market-today/

 

But we have a source signal before going in cab.  The cab (with an IR or other) will have an effect on the signal; that likely already built in Helix; the helix does appear to have 'cab' emulation, and 'mic' emulation...  Unless the Helix basically uses an IR of every possible cab + mic + distance?  (I don't think so, think it's mic emulation + cab emulation?)

 

But anyway, likely, it could be similar to what Helix uses; just using the 'cab' algorithm, plus some room reverb, and yeah 'distance' probably isn't even really relevant, just having cab + room without variable distance parameter would be great!

[silverhead]

A ‘perfect’ mic?    Hmmmm..... interesting. Perfect according to whom or to what standard? We can get really metaphysical here. Do your ears perceive sound exactly the same way mine do, and generate exactly the same neural responses in the brain? Are there hearing blind people in the same way there are colour blind people? Do you see the same shade of red that I do? Do we both hear 440 hz at exactly the same pitch?

 

Aristotle would be proud! I did major in philosophy......

[grdGo33]

30 minutes ago, silverhead said:

A ‘perfect’ mic?    Hmmmm..... interesting. Perfect according to whom or to what standard? We can get really metaphysical here.

Absolutely zero metaphysical!  Just meaning; captures the sound waves perfectly.  IF we had a perfect transducer and a perfect mic, we could simply compare the original signal and the recorded signal; what is commonly called a null test.  So; it would be 'what comes closest'. 

 

Now there's no perfect transducer (which is what we want to capture with 'cabs' emulation; distortion of the signal).  With microphones, there are correction curves to alleviate the mic's FR aberrations, so already that ?should? give us fairly close representation of the sound of the cab?

 

Quick search results in results such as these, but I'm not entirely sure how it would end up sounding say if we put a cab in a room or anechoic chamber and recorded them using one of these, then using as IR or emulation reference...

 

https://www.bksv.com/en/transducers/acoustic/microphones

https://earthworksaudio.com/measurement-microphones/

http://www.josephson.com/pdf/srs5.pdf

http://www.josephson.com/pdf/c617setds05.pdf

Going on a tangent; for headphone use, it would be, I think, fairly simple to generate a binaural IR, and that would put us in the room with the cab.  That would be cool.  But that wouldn't work for speakers; for speakers, you'd be better off with a pair of the most accurate mics & creating an IR...   And yeah... IR...

 

Actually, that entire topic could in fact be summed up as an in-room IR; taken with a very accurate (realistic sounding) microphone...

 

[grdGo33]

 

Quote

what sound does a tree make when it falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it? Using a microphone to capture the sound is artificial!! I want the ‘real’ sound as if I were standing there at the time. How can you ever know what that sounds like without recording it? And then, of course, what you get is the sound coloured by the actual mic used to record it.

 

The sound (sound waves) is exactly the same whether someone is there to hear it.  

 

And that is exactly the premise of the entire music and recording industry;  an event occurs which causes sound vibrations, those vibration are captured and stored on a device (ex; mic & CD), then, the data is read, and converted back to sound waves (tranducers; speakers).   That's how you can hear someone playing example violin in your room via speakers even if there is nobody in your room playing violin.

 

What is artificial in my original comment is that you can ONLY hear a cab via a microphone, and the actual sound you would hear from say a 4x12 Marshall in a living room does not exist in Helix/Go.  Nobody listens to a 4x12 two or five inches away ...  And I'm pretty sure that a well recorded 4x12 in a room (using mic blends or whatever; just recording the cab so that it sounds as close as possible as to what you would hear in room) would not sound like with the Helix/Go set at 12 feet or whatever...

 

But yeah, maybe it's just a bad idea... I mean; setting up a pair of speakers to get optimal sound in a room is a PITA, and then you need to be seated at a precise location in the room; as if you move around, the sound goes to hell.   But yeah, if you had a room and a cab, and walked around in the room to the best spot to listen to the cab, that could well be a good capture point for an in-room IR.

 

But maybe also the sound you get via the current cab+mic Go/Helix system is just way better than my 'in room' concept... It might very well end up sounding poorly vs any other 'standard' Helix mic+cab setting, as there is no 'accurate' in room 'sound', it would be the sound at one spot in a particular room; and given the FR effects of the room, reverberation, etc., might just sound 'poor' vs a cleanly recorded cab...  Still, my old Digitech RP5 had reverbs like stadium, hall, church, bathroom, garage, etc., which made it sound like you were playing in one of those environments, it was pretty cool.

 

But yeah the entire microphone thing seems to be a big can of worms also...  Although the maybe the 'new' laser microphones could do the job!  :D

 

https://germanmasterworks.com/publish/articles/Advice/The-Myth-of-the-Accurate-Microphone.html

 

https://www.engadget.com/2009-09-21-laser-accurate-microphone-proves-once-and-for-all-that-everythin.html

[silverhead]

I’m not saying it’s a bad or unworkable idea. Just that it’s hard to define exactly what is meant by the sound of ‘a 4x12 Marshall in a living room’ because, as you note, there are lots of factors involved. I know that the sound waves are there whether someone is listening or not, but not everyone in the room will hear the same thing. That’s why I have trouble with the ‘perfect mic’ concept.

 

Thanks for the interesting (to me, at least) discussion.

[phil_m]

There’s a couple longish threads over on The Gear Page Digital and Modeling forum talking about reflection-free, far-field IRs, which are kind of getting at this same thing. I still don’t think those are going to be a panacea, as the playback system is still going to matter a lot. Perhaps they can make an FRFR monitor sound something more like a guitar cab, but I’m doubtful they’re going to successfully recreate the experience of playing through a particular guitar cab in a particular room at a particular distance away from the cabinet.

 

But them shorter answer to the question is that modelers have always been about recreating close-miced guitar sounds. The main reason for that is that the vast majority of guitar sounds we hear in recording or even live are from close-miced guitar cab. Recreating the experience of playing through a particular cab is probably something that’s not necessary physically possible, just like watching a movie on an iPad is never going to be the same sort of experience as seeing the movie on an IMAX screen.