IR for Apple Space Designer, AGAIN!

Da crew!

Ok, let's go outside the Molen Lab for a while, guys!

Due to the success gained yesterday with the Vermona experiment, today my Conservatory mates, the producer Fabrizio Barale and me decided to play with our school's rooms and environments in order to record other impulse responses and create other custom Space Designer presets.
Our classrooms have the great disadvantage of being huge, quite empty and located in an attic with concrete walls and floor tiles, then extremely reverberant. Terrible when you work and record, but great for the reverberations! The results were astonishing.

Gear: Apple iMac, KRK VXT8, RME Fireface800, a pair of Schoeps condenser microphones (Colette series with cardioid and omni capsules). We used a mono source (one VXT8) to play the sweep and the stereo pair of Schoeps to record it.

We ended with the 6 different presets I'll describe here below.

CAVE CLOSE. AB miking with microphones about 3 meters far from the source and 5 meters far from each other. 1 meter high from the ground.

CAVE FAR. Source and microphones at opposite ends of the room along its longest side, mikes quite higher from the ground than in the previous set (about 2 meters). Distance between mikes: unchanged.

CAVE FURTHER BOTTOM. As the previous one but with the mikes pointing to the ground and really close to it (low frequencies boost).

Metal Furniture.

METAL FURNITURE APOCALYPSE. We took an empty metal wardrobe, put it in front of the speaker (4 meters far from it) and put the mikes into it, one in the upper left and the other in the lower right.

METAL FURNITURE APOCALYPSE EXTREME. The same as the previous one but with glass doors closed. (Surprising result!)

THE ROOF IS ON FIRE - WIDE VERB. We recorded this one in the corridor with speaker in the middle and microphpones at opposite ends, about 15 meters far from the source. This time we used omni capsules. Great wide reverb this one, but unfortunately louder on the right side.

YOU WANNA STUFF? I GIVE YOU STUFF!

You can download all the presets from this link, for free:
www.sergiobertani.com/molen/conservatorio_cuneo_SDIR.zip

Hope you like it! Remember: if you use these reverbs in your productions, please don't forget to put our name in the credits list!

Yes, but ProTools sounds better...

Hi guys, just done a little test... for personal curiosity, not polemics.

I wanted to compare a bunch of playback engines of the main DAW's and audio players. The software programs I chose to make this comparison are Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, OSX Preview Player, iTunes and Cog (awesome and recommended free audio player - link to download).

Aligned Files with max zoom ratio

To do that, I wired the built-in output of my MacBook Pro with the MOTU 828 MK3 connected to my iMac. In the MacBook Pro I played the same audio file (mono, 24/44.1) with all the software I mentioned above and recorded the analog output of the laptop with my iMac. The quality of the connections and converters should be insignificant, since I used the same configuration throughout the duration of the test.

Once I got all the recordings I aligned all the files using the maximum zoom ratio and compared them all, each time inverting the phase of one of the two I was comparing.

The result is surprising in some way.

They're all different from each other, but still quite similar (no abyss at all), except for the file played by Ableton Live, which really has nothing to do with all the others (this, in a way, makes me suspect something wrong).

The two couples of files which are more similar to each other are: ProTools/iTunes (!!!) and Cog/OSX_Preview.

I want to clarify that I absolutely didn't want to make a comparison between the algorithms the DAW's use to process or bounce the audio files, but only between the sound engines during simple playback.

If you like to try the comparison by yourself, here you can DOWNLOAD the files. Just make sure they're well aligned when you upload them in your DAW.

G'nite, mates.