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Stereo Tool Question (Breakaway as well)

As far as I can see, the two differences between the Trace Alpha and Trace Pro are:
- Pro has AES/EBU, Alpha only S/PDIF
- Pro has a resampler for the digital input.

You may wonder why a resampler is good, basically this means you can connect to any digital signal without worrying what sample rate the source is. And with ASIO that's very important, because the output samplerate needs to be identical to the input sample rate - so if you want 176.4 or 192 kHz output, you need it at the input as well, and the chance that the signal you get from the studio is in such a high sample rate is near-0.

By the way: If you get *2* cards, you can connect them together and use them as a single card in the software. So you can also use a secondary Marian card for low latency output. Warning: IT HAS TO BE EXACTLY THE SAME CARD TYPE!

As far as I understood it:
If you want to monitor, and only use analog signals, a Trace 8 would be good.
If you want to monitor AND use digital, you need 2 Trace Pro cards. (if you can use the digital output for monitoring, it might work with one).
If you don't need to monitor at all, the Trace Alpha is good for analog, or a Trace Pro for digital.
If your digital signal is S/PDIF, and you don't need low latency output at all (including for the FM signal), you could also go for a Trace Alpha.


NAB
By the way, is anyone going to the NAB next week? If so and you want to meet, send me a message :) I'll be walking around there Monday-Wednesday.
 
Wish there was a Trace alpha pro with XLR's, but i can live with the TRS.The Marian product has super clean audio,about the best i've heard.Have one in the prod machine,too.
 
BobOnTheJob said:
I'm finding it to be in the same league as the Omnia 9.
Click to expand...

oldiesstation said:
ST is hands down the clear winner over BBP.
Click to expand...

BobOnTheJob said:
BBP is Good...ST is Better
Click to expand...

Sgeirk said:
With ST i have more control than I can conceive and it sounds amazing on dry voice. Hans is onto something.
Click to expand...

Wow! All the glowing reviews on this thread and the other one sure did catch my attention. I spent a few hours yesterday and today doing some extended listening with ST, and going back and forth between ST and BBP.

Hmmm... am I the only one against the tide here? To my ears, ST doesn't have the same major-market sound and the sonic stability that I'm used to with BBP. I was ready to be impressed, considering the outpouring of kudos here. But somehow with ST I didn't hear the power & consistency that I was expecting.

FYI the two presets I used most extensively were "Bojcha Addiction V11" and "Bob Hawkins Loud 'n Clear FM".

Any thoughts or guidance from the ST fans? Would still love to give it a try, if I don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time "rolling my own" preset.
 
@cedar: First a quick check: Is your input level high enough? In the left waveform display (the input), peaks should get close to the top and bottom of the display. If you're feeding the input at a much lower level, for example -24 dB as some stations use, presets that were made assuming higher input levels will have problems (noise gate and AGC gating will fail, to name a few). If this is the case, and you're using the stand alone version, use the input gain slider in the input sound card settings to adjust the level. Pre Amp will NOT fix this! (It doesn't matter if an occasional peak ends up above the maximum, no clipping will occur here).

Bojcha's Addiction is an older preset - it uses the old (bad) multiband compressor. The presets on top of the list are the newest ones - you can recognize them because they use the new multiband (upto 9 bands), older presets have 10 bands ("Classic Multiband).

A problem with presets is that the sound needs to be different in every market, most of the ones that are currently built into it were made for European markets. Since in the US there's 75 us pre-emphasis instead of 50, that might have a big effect on how stations sound.
 
celar: are you in tweaker mode or basic ST interface? big difference.

Are you more of a digital omnia or optimod fan?

To me, the difference between bbp and st on dry voice is night and day. ST wins effortlessly.

ST is less of a one size fits all solution...breakaway is elegant in its simplicity.

In all fairness...most processors have their own texture. ST, to me, allows
more of the original 'feel' of the source and... sounds less 'rushed'
at high loudness levels. The bass/mid/hf tradeoff settings in the advanced clipper are
among the most powerful (clarity/loudness) to the final sound.

....and its all sujective. :)
 
Not an engineer but am a processing geek so forgive what may be a dumb question...

I use Breakaway Audio Enance on my computer while listening to music.
Will ST work in the same way and process everything hitting the sound card?
I'd like to see how it sounds and mess around with it.
Also knowing Bob on the Job, his setting will most likely be impressive and I'd like to hear it.

Thanks for the info..
 
@ Smiths
You will need VAC, since you cannot use pipelines you already have, same adjusted, as default system soundcard.
Also, standalone version.

br
 
Let me be clear about something regarding the version of Breakaway I am using. I use Breakaway Live for my net-only station. BL doesn't have some of the features BBP has. For example, BL doesn't have clipping or pre-emphasis. Those features aren't needed for net-only use. I've heard others say that dry voices on Breakaway are distorted. I don't hear that on the preset I am using.

I tried to give ST a chance but it choked badly on the PC I installed it on. Breakaway Live works flawlessly on the same computer. I even tried older versions of ST and had the same stuttering issues. The fact remains that ST requires far more CPU than I can afford to give it at this time.

I invite all of you to hear BL in action on my station. Visit www.live365.com/stations/robertbass to listen. No login is required to listen.

R
 
I just recently put Breakaway Live on my internet radio station http://www.positiverockradio.com/ I am quite impressed with it... I tried Stereo tool but I don't have a high end Core2Duo CPU and it kept choking unless I turned a lot of stuff off.. Prior to Breakaway Live I was using SAM Cast's built in Sound Processing which is not great at all (disabled all that and I am feeding Breakaway to SAMCast to encode the HE-AAC and the MP3 streams coming out of my console).
 
krush99 said:
What's the upgrading policy for Stereo Tool once I buy it? Free? Half-price?
Click to expand...
Licenses are independent of versions, so someone who registered version 3.00 in 2008 can still use the same license on the latest version. But in some cases, new features require an upgrade. Until now that happened once, when I added the declipper. It will also be the case when I add a composite clipper. In these cases, upgrades will be available at a price close to the price difference between the license types.

Disclaimer: Although I have no plans to change this, I cannot promise that this will never change.
 
Good time for me to clarify as well that the dry voice distortion I hear on Breakaway is indeed on BBP. Breakaway Live is a cleaner product where dry voice is concerned IMHO.
 
The composite clipper has landed. Check the news section on the stereo tool website.

Gentlemen, start your Intel I7's.
 
Sgeirk said:
what sort of cpu load?
Click to expand...
On my OCed E8400 with XP32 CPU is on very edge, but it works.
Today i checked some i5's and it works very nice. Also still some optimizations need to be done for clipper.
 
When I'm back from the NAB I'll first add SSB (I might even do it on the flight home). Because SSB might interfere with my optimization ideas I want to have it in place first (to avoid discovering after optimizing that I cannot add SSB to it anymore). SSB will actually increase the CPU load slightly more - probably not much though. I also have an idea for a new clipper method that - maybe combined with SSB - could have a big impact on multipath distortions. It will have an effect on stereo separation though. After some talks with someone from Belar today and Googling a bit afterwards I think I finally really understand how multipath issues affect the behavior of a receiver - I just need to think about it a bit more to make sure that my new idea is the optimal solution - and Las Vegas isn't the best environment to sit down and think ;D
 
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