Fizzy Tones

[Memory Lane Jr]

I have noticed how awesome the sound is with Robert's videos using the Line6 HD 500 my question is I have a Line6 Guitar port using Gearbox but I can't seem to get rid of the fizzy tones, what gives, does the HD 500 overcome this problem? I realize the HD 500 is more expensive so is it a case of get what you pay for or am I doing something wrong.   

[reb]

i am not an electronics engineer, but i'll show my complete ignorance anyway...

fizzy could be dirty contact somwhere, loose track on the pc board, loose solder joint on the pc board, failing ic or resistor, cable not shielded, something somewhere in the sound chain not shielded...

it could be a damaged speaker in the playback chain...i mean???

could you maybe borrow some other input device to run into and see if the fizzy stops? the first step in this kind of stuff-i bet you know this, from your background-is to isolate the offending unit. it's just like finding a short in wiring....it's a p.i.t.a., but it's sometimes necessary.

i had a regular signal chain; at one point, i bought a cheap wireless system...there were so dang many cords on the stage, you could fall, and disappear. i plugged the new wireless in, and played through it at home. when i got to the rehearsal, i plugged it in and wailed away. until i went around to the front of my amp and got 'on axis' with the treble, i could not hear the fizz...but when i heard it i went 'man, that's ugly!'.

back home, i tried it again...it's not as bad (stage stuff was all old electrics, except for a few instruments in use), but it's still there. the digital conversion to analog is the culprit, i think. i went back to cords.

[DetroitBlues]

Robert may also have a noise supressor he uses on the recordings...

[Memory Lane Jr]

Yeh my tone through my amp setup is great ,I just don't seem to be able to find what I am looking for through the Guitar port & computer it has the same nasty fizzy digital tone my first amp ( a line6 Spider3 ) had.

[DetroitBlues]

Now you know why people love to mic tube amps instead of using digital effects processors.... Hopefully, Robert will chime in and help you out...

[reb]

aww, man...i will chime in on this digital thing....i grew up with 'analog' tv. when they went to digital, what they stuck us for was...we used to be able to watch ghost stations...you could get them 'a little', but they were fuzzy. now, you either get the station, or you don't. if the signal is '99%', you get digital artifacts on the screen, which are far more irritating than the old ghost stations were, imo.

how does this translate to digital items for guitar?  when you 'apply distortion', if you have an analog signal chain, and there is some breakdown of the signal, you get a 'slightly less powerful signal', i think. i cannot prove this, as i do not have an oscilloscope or test equipment to do so, so i'm just using my logic here.

if you have a digital item, and the signal is mucked up somewhere along, the artifacts are not 'weaker versions of the input', but 'changed versions of the input'.

i have a couple digital non-tube amps. a friend is having a garage sale sometime, and i'm going to play these things for the garage sale in an attempt to sell them. the only one i'm keeping is a roland cube 30. i use it to run my looper. it sounds pretty good until you really crank the gain on it, and then it does the 'artifact' thing. somewhere i posted about my digital wireless system i tried...the artifacts in it gave me fizz at stage volume, too.

is there a difference between low end digital equipment and high end? i don't know. really, i don't guess i care. any playing i might decide to do, i can do with my epi valve jr. head or my fender champ 600. i have extra tubes for both of them...and they are single tube units, so there aint  a lot of mess with them. if i were to buy some two tube amp, it would be a cathode biased one, so i dint have to find a tech to change tubes.

i don't think i have any other digital stuff in the signal chain except for the zoom h1 i use to record. driving this stuff with a strong signal is what leads to the problems, i think, or maybe it's just...digital is never going to completely replicate analog.

for a discussion of this kind of stuff, you might want to search 'mp3' and then 'wav' files. the difference is the mathematical algorithms that are used to make mp3 'drop out' certain things that are not 'critical'. this is what happens to a vinyl record over time as the needle wears away nuances in the vinyl.  so...one can draw conclusions from this or not, i think, MLJ.

i think you are using this guitarport to input (match) signal to your daw or computer? i have a behringer direct box (i think it is the ultra di 60, but i found 100s all over the web just now). about $35 u.s.. i interviewed about a dozen direct boxes before i kept this one...it sounded best to my ears. a lot of folks swear by radials, but i didn't want to spend that much. i have a little mackie 4 line board and a really cheap behringer that i use to manipulate levels into the computer when i had that set up. one of them has an effects send and return, so i can drop in reverb or whatever....

that would be an alternative to direct with the guitar port. i dunno...i'm not a sound engineer, nor am i an electronics engineer, and i might be full of stinkum (i don't know what they call bs in oz, but 'stinkum' may be close enough to translate)

something you might wantto read if you can find a copy is 'live sound', a thick book i bought that explains how sound engineers set up live performances. it goes through a host of things and concepts.

[VikingBlues]

As I've found the more digital my recording chain is the less convinced I am in the sound of my recordings I'm interested that the thread has brought up the analogue / digital issue. I've found it incredibly difficult to match my PC recordings sound with the usual tube amp sound I get. Unfortunately it is usually not practical just to mic up the amp due to living in a flat and needing to consider neighbours - so I have to consider and try and use the direct recording route to as good effect as I can. 

So far the more old fashioned the equipment I have used for direct recording the better the match seems to get. The Vox Tonelab LE has been by far the best to date for sound / tone. Though it lacks USB connectivity, and all the alleged benefits of changing parameters on a computer screen instead of on the unit itself. So it needs plugged into the line in on a USB Alesis interface.

Apparently while most units of this type rely completely on digital modelling, the Tonelab LE does the initial tone shaping and amp modelling in the digital domain before the signal passes into a valve power-amp circuit. Then a single low-wattage 12AX7 valve does all the work, but this I understand is combined with a virtual output transformer and a dummy speaker circuit, meaning that the final stages of the signal chain are all in the analogue domain. Mind - I think the Tonelab ST does the same but see my comment below about the ST.

Now I don't know if this extra use of the analogue side of things has helped but it just seems such a better tone than the previous units I used, the more recent Vox Tonelab ST, and a Line 6 Toneport UX1. I wrestled with the UX1 for a long time before giving up on trying to find a tone that didn't sound artificial or even that I liked. The Tonelab ST I got next was better, and I could capture much more closely the sort of sound I got on the tube amp but the lack of control over the parameters of the various settings was a pest. Now I've used the Toneport LE I can also see that the sounds I was getting from the ST were far more coloured and were letting much less of the guitars sound through. I can't help wondering if an upgrade to the even older Tonelab SE wouldn't bring a further improvement.

I will admit though I do like the digital aspect of the flexibility of A DAW. I also shudder to think of the cost of an analogue rrecorder to do as high a quality of multitrack recordings. I'm not totally pro-analogue - I spent quite enough time with a four track cassette multitrack recorder - not an ideal medium for studio quality sound. 

[reb]

i agree, VB. there is a 'cost/performance' ratio. it seems to me...and this is just in my experience, which is not far reaching...from mind to guitar to amplifier to mic, the more analogue, the better. the digital conversion takes place 'going into the daw' or the computer. this seems to result in the most natural sounding recordings. i have not had my computer up for recording for over a year when i started this move (putting up shelves in the music room this weekend...so, maybe??? this millenium???).

if you had even a 1 watt amp-tube, of course (i have a blackheart 1 watt head-it starts distortion about 9 o'clock) you might be able to try it in your flat.

i think an analogy is...when one makes a copy of a document, the more copies one runs in sequence, i.e. original, copy 1, copy 2 from copy  1, copy 3 from copy 2, the more fuzzy the copies get.  the first digital to analogue conversion is 'a copy', not a 'real' likeness of the sound wave/electrical field. the digits 'map' the soundwave or electrical impulse...but, of course, a map is not 'the ground'. a map may very much RESEMBLE the ground, but it is 'not it'. the 24 bit simulations are probably logarithmic to the 48 bit, e.g., 48 is some power of 24 bit, not just double. i don't know this for fact, but it's my thinking on it.

nothing wrong with digital if it is mapped by a high powered source converter to begin with. it goes wrong i think when i insert a digital conversion in my signal chain; then it is mapped again by the computer. i dunno if this is the case, but if one were to search 'digital artifacts in music recording' (i just did) one would get more of a head banger load of info than one might want...

in simplest terms, there is some great digital stuff...but some of it is high priced. stress the low price stuff, and sometimes ou get artifacts.  i stress the heck out of the instrument and 5 watt amps...any digital in there has proven to me to give problems. then there are some players hwo use digital amplifiers, and get great sounds...i dunno. conjecture on my part. buying digital stuff and messing with it gets expensive and tries my patience at some point. i want to play, not test equipment constantly for some company to use me as the road tester.