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Unmatched sonic purity
The Yardstick 249x series of room simulators are high-quality, digital sound processing devices based on the original 1982 QRS Room Simulation algorithm.
Due to its unobtrusive, natural character and its superb room simulation, the original QRS has become a lot more than just a well-know production tool for pop music. In the fields of classical music production, chamber music, as well as in movie post-production, the QRS is considered to be the Yardstick for all competing products. In other words, whenever a natural sounding ambience is desired, and any kind of artificial reverberation is not, the QRS algorithm has been repeatedly praised by countless sound professionals.
Due to the sophisticated characteristics of the QRS algorithm, any QUANTEC Room Simulator stands out favorably among the competition. But there are quite a few situations where its sonic qualities really shine: - In the final mix, where it is unobtrusively transparent with virtually no tendency to blur – even with a full dose over the entire set of tracks
- In a multitude of productions in classical music, where any room impression with an artificial smack is undesirable – for stylistic reasons alone
- In the production of movies and radio dramas, where its virtually tangible room illusions simulate real rooms, which – in cramped environments – may actually create a physically unpleasant feeling of pressure
- In movie productions, using its outstanding ambience in spacious effects
- In sound reinforcement and P.A., where those pronounced resonance lines and gaps in the acoustic spectrum of a hall not suited for musical performances can be averaged and smoothed out. As a result, the sound of a general-purpose municipal hall becomes more suitable for music, and the risk of feedback is reduced
- During the musical-improvisatory play with the reverberation onset – or the effervescence of the room
Since the sound characteristic of the QRS algorithm – and thus that of Yardstick as well – is quite a bit different when compared to the competition, it inevitably will have a significant influence on the number and types of the available parameters.
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Why are there no analog inputs and outputs anymore? – The world is analog, and many recording studios still swear on analog audio technology.
AD/DA converters age at a much higher rate than outboard signal processors. This means that separate AD/DA converters typically are a more economical approach.
Digital audio inputs and outputs are an almost perfect interface: full 24 bits in and out – no noise, no distortion, and, if required, double or quadruple sample rates.
Our units are designed for an operating life of 15 to 20 years. Analog inputs and outputs, especially A/D and D/A converter chips, are changing from year to year. What today means the spearhead of technology has to be paid for with astronomical prizes – but may turn out to be outdated in just a few years. Here is an example: our 2493 builds on (currently still) high-performance and thus expensive converters. But what if a new trend will further manifest, which favors IIR instead of FIR anti-alias filters (because of the IIR's non-existent pre-echoes)? What about the 2493 with its time-tested linear-phase FIR filters – will these filters turn out to become a problem in a year or two? From our point of view, it doesn't make a lot of sense to burden an outboard unit with possibly doubtful converters, until its end of life.
Digital audio ports are much easier to keep up with converter advances. So we recommend: use your digital I/O Yardstick with external AD/DA converters, and replace them every few years with a then state-of-the-art model. Then the cost/performance ratio will be your decision, not ours...
Aug 2008
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Why do QUANTEC Room Simulations sound more impressive and more realistic than real rooms?
First a formal objection on the part of the Reverberation Czar! - It goes without saying that natural rooms still sound better than our simulation models, first and foremost because of their outstanding spatiality. However, this only holds true as long as the listener is physically positioned inside the room, and thus gets flooded by the omnidirectional sound waves.
As soon as one tries to capture the room impression with microphones, all 3D magic will vanish.
Every sound transducer the acoustic event has to come about on its way to our ears is a bottleneck, which strips off a certain amount of the original room response's spatiality and liveliness. This is by no means a devaluation of our state-of-the-art microphones. But fact is that the microphone bundles all the omnidirectionally-arriving signals on its diaphragm, and then tunnels the precious payload through an electrical mono channel. Even if you would totally shut-off one ear while at the church, that does, on no account, sound monaural.
As the omnidirectional output of our room acoustic models is fed straight into the audio signal path, instead of being tunneled through a microphone's diaphragm, our models clearly sound more live than a natural room captured with microphones. What is still unavoidable, even for us, is the bundling through the diaphragm of the playback transducer, currently the final acoustic difference remaining between a QUANTEC Room Simulation model and a person's physical presence inside a real room.
From the number of sound transducers involved, three quality classes may be derived: - Class 0 – no sound transducer:
The listener is physically positioned inside a real room; flooded by the omnidirectional sound waves. - Class 1 – one sound transducer:
The listener harks attentively to the QUANTEC Room Simulation model through loudspeakers or headphones. - Class 2 – two sound transducers:
The listener follows a recording where room acoustics have been captured by microphones. Only those components of the natural room acoustics not yet stripped-off by the multiplication of recording and playback transducers will remain. While QUANTEC Room Simulation with its parameterized models belongs to class 1, the nowadays extremely popular convolution-type reverberation is clearly at class 2 candidate. Reason is that the convolution chain still comprises of two sound transducers: first the microphones to capture the room's “fingerprint”, then later the playback transducers to monitor the convolution result.
Strange: if the room fingerprints would be deducted (i.e. “stolen”) from our Room Simulation models, a convolution-type reverberator would ascend to class 1. Still unachievable for any size of fingerprint library would be our parameterized models' unrivaled ease of ad-hoc characterization.
Nov 2008
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Competitive products always provide plenty of different algorithms: Room, Hall, Plate, Space - exactly what I need in daily routine. As far as I understand, a Yardstick has a single algorithm only, which seems a bit narrow-gauged to me, isn't it?
No way. You're right that a Yardstick does not provide more than that single QRS algorithm, but that's a powerful, all-inclusive solution. Its universalism is hidden within its parameters. Just by well-directed tuning of the various parameters, you can end up inside a bread bin, or a giant cathedral with multiple side naves and transepts. Other than competitive devices, which recommend an optimized reverb for a specific type of sound (e.g. Voice, Guitar, Drums), the QRS algorithm is being defined by the room the musicians are playing in, independent of the construction of their instruments.
If I'd squeeze the entire mix through reverb, or a room for your sake, I'd totally loose transparency and comprehensibility.
That's true for reverb, but not for QUANTEC Room Simulation. The QRS algorithm applies diffuse components individually for each instrument, according to its momentary style of playing - fully automatically, without any intervention. Just the same as with a real room that never needs to be tailored to a specific instrument. The trick lies simply in an exact simulation of the physical laws effective inside a room. In particular it's the attack behavior, i.e. the gradual effervescence of the room. The longer a tone will be maintained, the further it will climb up the attack slope, and the louder it will tilt over into the reverb tail. With this "launch pad" trick, long tones lead to strong, short tones to gentle reverberation - all of its own volition. All-important: each one individually, i.e. without any interdependency of the envelopes. (»Hallelujah diagrams« - see links below).
Let's construct an extreme example: if we concurrently feed a room with a flute and a spoken voice, the low-bandwidth, sostenuto flute tones will play around the room much louder, haunting and longer observable, while the short, wide-bandwidth transients of the spoken consonants just tip the room. To clarify the consequence of this approach even further, let's simply exchange the roles for a moment. Sixteenth-note sequences from the flute just tip the room, while a sustained "Aum" will considerably pump up the room response. This is one of the secrets why transparency will be so strikingly maintained with the QUANTEC approach.
To get back to your question: it's the QRS algorithm's ability to do all things right with just a single parameter setting. With multiple dedicated algorithms, you'd need multiple reverb units, one for each instrument class. More than once it will take you hours of fiddling about with the various units, until all the individual components will end up coordinated in an acceptable manner.
Another QUANTEC premium: all the instruments are always playing together within the same room, and don't live their parallel lives in different rooms.
Dec 2009
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Competitive products always provide dozens of adjustable Initial Reflections; but only two with the Yardstick. Is QUANTEC running out of reflections?
Less is often more, especially in this situation. QUANTEC has recognized very early, that, within a real room, each initial reflection is being emitted from the same structure that also generates the reverberation tail. In its simplest case, a room consists of six boundaries; left, right, front, rear, top, and bottom. If we'd allow a sound engineer to add arbitrary early reflections, which, because of the freedom of choice, can no longer be consistently co-created by the late-reflection structures, would do more harm than good to a coherent sonic image. Physics simply do not allow separately created echo patterns to seamlessly merge with the subsequent room response - disruptions and side actions are inevitable. In this context, we were told of a singer who once put this phenomenon into words. »With this device, I had the impression for the first time that there was no more annoyances between my voice and the room.«
What exactly, from the QUANTEC viewpoint, does the established competition do wrong?
To preserve complexity, i.e. to minimize DSP power, most competitors split room response into two partial algorithms - A multi-tap delay line with a fistful of taps, which, independent of the contents it is fed with, repetitively reiterates the same distinctive early reflection pattern. This approach follows the idea of a raytracing model, where a few initial echoes (»early reflections«) are derived from the geometric circumstances of that room. The temporal and panoramic distribution of the delay line echoes is told to characterize the desired room.
- Separated from the direct signal by suitable Predelay, follows a continuum with as much density as possible. Allegedly, any room behavior according to size, individual reflections, and room resonances can be completely ignored. What irritates us most: the one and only design target for this continuum is to increase its density beyond limits. This does mean nothing else than, as far as DSP resources can deliver, to end in musically dead "White Noise" - for any type and any size of room.
QUANTEC's conclusion: an evermore reiterated pattern is an annoyance, sooner or later. A similar effect is known from cheap loudspeakers, which continuously repeat their impulse response with each and every transient coming in. Second: an "acoustic harassing fire" in contradiction to the room would completely destroy the interaction between tone duration and reverberation level, which is so stunning with the QRS algorithm. Net result: the QRS algorithm would still supply clean reverberation; but its legendary transparency will be lost and gone.
But why are there still two adjustable initial reflections, after all?
What has been outlined above is basically required for musically inspiring rooms. Movie and radio drama dialogs are a different story. What's needed there over and over again are standard acoustics, painted with a pretty wide brush. Most situations are "nonmusical" rooms with pronounced boundary surfaces in the near field, e.g. a hallway, a car, or a staircase. For such near field simulations, the reverberation tail is generally second-rank, and the emphasis of a simulation is shifting towards early reflections, indeed. There, and only there, one single, representative early reflection for left and right each does make sense.
Dec 2009
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Compared to the competition, QUANTEC is showing off with a highly idiosyncratic approach for yonks. Such an esoterically prancing idea looks pretty untrustworthy to me, as it suggests that QUANTEC follows other physical laws than the rest of the universe. Seems like pure marketing wishy-washy, isn't it?
It goes without saying that QUANTEC is bound to operate within the limits of physical laws, as anybody else. Major difference and unique selling proposition is our way to approach common room-acoustic phenomena via mechanisms and models defined by the air fill of the room. In other words: we focus on the transportation medium of the sonic energy, and include those frequency-selective resonators within a room. This is contrary to the competition, which follows delay line patterns deducted by a raytracing perspective. Translated to a wind instrument, the competition concentrates on the wooden or brass instrument body, while we turn our attention to the vibrating air column within the instrument.
Still frivolous. As resonance behavior in the frequency domain may be represented by impulse response in the time domain, and vice versa, simply by Fourier transforming one into the other. Plain-talking: both approaches lead to absolutely identical results; they are two faces of the same coin.
Your statement is valid for unlimited resources only, which means abundant DSP power. Whenever one is bound to economize DSP power, because one has a meager 1% compared to that of a real room, one should thoroughly evaluate the important details to devote the scarce resources to, and what uncalled-for knick-knack would go unheard anyway. Point is rather: what can be omitted without harm, and which one of the contrary approaches may lead to music-esthetically pleasing results faster and easier.
Well, based on a resonance approach, QUANTEC claim that they're in a position to extract more useful results from limited resources than the competition. Which means they fish out those better 1%, simulate only that, then spoof the auditory system music-esthetically more pleasing than the competition.
Exactly. Approaching room acoustics from the frequency domain, instead of geometry, shifts the importance of various physical phenomena essential for the simulation of a certain target room acoustic behavior. Main target for QUANTEC are musically ambitious room acoustics. More than 30 years ago, QUANTEC was the first to recognize that the silver bullet for simulation of musical rooms lies in modeling the engaging and subsiding of resonators. Those who index a room's boundary surfaces, then raytrace geometry, then deduct tapped delay lines from that data, will inevitably dissipate their energies and DSP power on musically meaningless sidelines.
Dec 2009
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My reverb unit offers 4 algorithms - a Yardstick just one. How come?
My Chinese guitar from the DIY store has 4 pickups - an Ovation just one. How come?
Dec 2009
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With regard to price: why are those Yardsticks considerably more expensive than the competition?
Just have a quick listen - and you'll put this question aside.
Dec 2009
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Rating: 4.0 of 5. 1 vote(s).
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Most competitive units feature a Modulation parameter. Has QUANTEC diligently missed the need for modulation?
Yes, as modulation is of no significance for Room Simulation.
Without random modulation, all reverberation tails would be equal.
True for reverberation, but totally ineffectual for Room Simulation. Here's our competitors' problem: in front of the actual reverberation tail is a cluster of so called initial reflections, which are told to characterize a room according to a raytracing concept. Such a cluster has one major problem - with each and every transient fed into the system, the cluster reiterates the same response over and over again. This kind of "fricative", which sticks out of any plosive like p, t, k, will be fatiguing, and will turn out to become boaring or annoying before long. Quite similar to a cheap loudspeaker, which cannot cope with fast transients, and thus will replay over and over again its critical onset pattern: kprwt, kprwt, kprwt.
Our competitors circumvent that problem by randomly moving the initial reflection delay line taps slightly. The goal is that the fricative will mutate quickly, thus prevent the hearing from associating subsequent fricatives with preceding fricatives. Basically, the problem seems to be solved, but unluckily this trick has serious adverse effects due to the inevitable Doppler effect. Moving the taps would result in frequency fluctuations, which detune the incoming signal. The reverb commemorates Chorus effect - it whines, and is no longer "piano proof".
But such a chorus reverb may sound ridiculously beautiful, e.g. with a guitar solo.
As a creative means of design, chorus reverb certainly has its value. But in a real room, frequency modulation won't happen, so there is no such parameter in the context of Room Simulation.
Just a minute! - There's a paper by David Griesinger (»Lexicon«) where he demonstrates that, due to airflow in large rooms, slight frequency deviations can definitely be detected.
Extremely thrilling reading for HVAC engineers. But where's the music-esthetical benefit? - Show me one conductor or choirmaster, who pilgrimages to the caretaker to ask him to crank up heating or ventilation - in order to make the room sound more pleasing.
It's sort of weird, isn't it?
And what's QUANTEC's trick to suppress the undesired regularities within the algorithm?
No trick at all. With Room Simulation, this problem simply doesn't occur, as we don't add separate initial reflections. As documented elsewhere, loudness and character of each reverberation tail depends tone by tone on the duration of the stimulus. This will be mixed with the previous history, i.e. longer tones played recently, whose tails remain louder in the mix. Based on individual tone durations, it's quite possible that originally staggered tones will decay with synchronous tails (»Hallelujah diagrams« - see links below).
The individual composition of each reverb tail according to tone duration and previous history leads to continuously changing interferences between one another. Such interference results in frequency-dependent accentuation and cancelation, which is beyond association for human hearing, thus sounds very lifelike and musically pleasing. But without the cumbersome Doppler effect now, which, if noticed too late, could lead to aggravating surprise during subsequent processing steps.
Dec 2009
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In web forums one can routinely read that 'the QUANTEC' is an outstanding primary reverb. Actually, what's a primary reverb?
Many music productions deploy different reverb units and reverb plug-ins, tweaked to specific instrument classes in an optimum way. This requirement for optimum tweaking is the result from a limited range of artifact-free operation of low to medium-cost reverb algorithms, which may be useful for vocals only, or solo instruments only, or percussion only, etc. Argumentum e contrario, one has to be prepared for inacceptable side effects for every wrong instrument class. Because of this persistent "requirement for chasing the instruments", automation is indispensable here.
With this strategy, the musicians are playing in separate rooms. It's the job of the primary reverb, a device with outstanding quality, to re-collect them and put them back into a single room. Problem is that a primary reverb generally compromises transparency of the cumulative sound image, and thus will often be used reluctantly.
A QUANTEC Room Simulator meets highest standards at this critical position. Most of its Music Library presets flawlessly process all instrument classes simultaneously, i.e. the entire mix. Side effects such as coloration, clatter, intransparency, or mushy sound are almost nonexistent with a QUANTEC-based primary "reverb".
Another peculiarity of primary reverberation is that it is an always-on effect, which means that its settings are modified infrequently. To put it into perspective: automation is seldom required; similar to monitoring speakers. This may explain why, despite unavailable automation, even the very first 1982 Room Simulator generation is still in daily operation worldwide.
Jan 2010
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All Yardstick I/Os are AES/EBU. Does that mean that I cannot operate a Yardstick in my S/PDIF studio?
Not at all.
S/PDIF Channel Status bits are being recognized properly. As most sound cards deliver wrong sampling frequency indication beyond x1, there's an optional fallback mode based on an internal sampling frequency counter.
For adapter cables and plugs, there's an S/PDIF section in the manual with exact schematics.
Jan 2010
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Contrary to a much hyped competitive unit, my choir stands amidst the room here, not in front of it. Why does QUANTEC perform better than the other guys?
Business secret!
Buy our no-hype product and enjoy it.
Jan 2010
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What's the stunning transparency of QUANTEC Room Simulation based upon?
Psychoacoustics - the cocktail party effect in this case.
Whom?
The cocktail party effect, discovered in 1953, describes the ability of the human auditory system to focus its listening attention on a single talker, among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations.
How is this related to the acoustic transparency of a room?
Within such selective perception, the hearing reaches noise suppression from 9 to 15 dB, i.e., the acoustic source, on which humans concentrate, subjectively seems to be many times louder than ambient noise of the same level. This even holds, if the ambient noise is louder than the information by a similar amount (»negative S/N«). On the other hand, a microphone recording would capture mainly background noise, as any selective perception does not apply.
Within a room, a side effect of the cocktail party effect would result in a greatly reduced perception of spatiality: the information sounds dry and with minimum reverberation. A microphone positioned at the same place would capture blurred, slushy, and over-reverberating information instead.
Once again, QUANTEC seems to be ahead of the pack...
That's by no means our merit! - It was surprise to us, too, that even within the scope of the cocktail party effect, perfect Room Simulation behaves just like a real room, and provides the human hearing with the necessary clues. If those clues are unavailable, as it's the case with our competitors' reverberation devices, the human auditory system reacts just like the microphone: the sound is unintelligible, slushy, and with far too much reverberation.
Feb 2010
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Whenever I'm recording the impulse response of any QUANTEC Room Simulation, for putting it through my convolution plug-in, its spatiality collapses altogether. To name a number, the 60 to 150 feet depth of a sacred building has completely vanished into thin air. No idea of what's going wrong. Maybe some copy protection QUANTEC has hidden intelligently?
It's neither you doing something wrong, nor there's a copy protection. It simply doesn't work.
QUANTEC really cannot make a claim for themselves, that proven mathematical and physical methods like convolution and Fourier transforms ironically fail, as soon as they're applied to their Room Simulation algorithm.
Nobody did insist on that. It goes without saying that convolution works; you do hear flawless reverberation, don't you? It's just it's spacial depth that you're missing; which has gone flat somewhere in the course of your manipulation.
Flawless indeed. But, where exactly, the spatiality has fallen by the wayside?
Right from the start - when feeding the unit.
In plain language: first I feed the left input with a click, and record the impulse response on both outputs. Then click on the right, and again record both outputs. What's wrong with it?
For now, you've recorded no more than two, let's call them "labyrinths": one for 100% left, and one for 100% right. Now hurry to proceed with sampling center, slight left, slight right, and all the rest of it.
Just wait! - I've two labyrinths - one for left, and one for right. If I'd feed the unit with a center signal, i.e. mono into both labyrinths at once, the output always delivers the sum of both labyrinths. Generally, this should hold for any panpot settings, right?
In the context of Room Simulation, we don't deal with two delayline-based labyrinths, but with hundreds of thousands of resonators distributed throughout the room. From the perfect coordination of all those resonators - and only from there - results that stunning transparency.
Feeding the unit with a sine wave test signal and very fine frequency steps (<<1Hz) would stimulate a non-specified subset of those resonators, to a more or less extent. Depending on the phase and amplitude conditions at the two inputs, quite a few resonators may not even respond at all. Moreover, one cannot estimate if a specific resonator will respond to the left, right, or only to a specific phase or amplitude relationship between the two input channels. In other words, as jagged and bumpy as the amplitude and phase behavior of a single labyrinth, is crosstalk between the two labyrinths. The operative point here is that those hundreds of thousands resonators jump wildly with even the slightest frequency drift, while your two labyrinths stubbornly deliver their vector sum, regardless of the frequency - definitely a bit of a yawn.
I must admit that my approach would indeed force a majority of those resonators into lockstep. This may paralyze time-of-arrival stereophony, but what puzzles me is that intensity stereophony does collapse likewise. Did I overlook another important detail?
Due to the complex crosstalks within a room, one may realistically imagine one resonator at one specific room position, which would respond to either left or right channel, but not both. With mono, genuine Room Simulation may deliver a resonance gap here, while your convolution clone may still deliver the sum, e.g. a peak - as it does with any other resonator. Be aware that you haven't captured those singularities while taking the fingerprints. Moreover, just 1 Hz higher, both approaches might match again, and 2 Hz higher, some completely unexpected behavior could occur.
In short: while having sampled the two room fingerprints, you've completely disregarded the "crosstalk domain".
Finally, it looks to me that there's no feasible way to counterfeit the QUANTEC Room Simulation algorithm by means of a convolution plug-in?
Sure enough, there is one dedicated configuration where a convolution clone would be 100% identical.
Would you mind to tell me?
The idea is to just lever out the uncapturable "Crosstalk Domain". Take care of feeding your Yardstick always with a mono signal. Just feed both left and right input with the click, record both outputs' IRs, and then off to convolution!
With this trick, both the Yardstick and its convoluted IR clone do really sound exactly the same?
Absolutely - both are as flat as pancakes now.
Feb 2010
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Rating: 3.7 of 5. 3 vote(s).
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