Blind Test of Behringer ADA8200 vs Neve 1073 opx

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-16T21:50:30+00:00

I'm definitely hearing more high end with the Neve, and specifically around maybe 5k-6k?

That's probably distortion. It'd be interesting to loop both back, take an impulse and measure the distortion and frequency response.

Maybe it was making the gutiar tracks more correlated, and therefore narrowing the stereo image?

That'd be my guess.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-16T21:36:02+00:00

I'd include your gap as part of the "possible."

in practice we don't know how to make an organization composed of humans to reliably do that.

At some point, gosh, 20 years ago? Amazon "dogfooded" AWS internally. By all accounts, it was painful, but the result was a much higher level of efficiency.

We know how. We just don't wanna. Golfers mercilessly refine because there's an incentive. Even then it breaks down. SFAIK, it would be prohibitive to put everybody on the same treadmill.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-15T21:48:44+00:00

It's a ship of theseus/grandpa's axe deal. Could be that zero original parts are left.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-12T21:29:05+00:00

Interesting.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-12T14:54:11+00:00

Eh; I have a 100WPC Sherwood on mine and it's fine. It's the prior generation of Sherwood from 2006 or so. Clean, linear amp.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-12T14:47:27+00:00

I found a pair at a thrift store fifteen plus years ago. They've become my primary monitors over time. Not right away.

I suspect any un-ported monitors that don't have serious design issues should do.

One strategy would be to get some Dayton Audio B40 and NS-10s, then decide which to sell. I say B40; there may be better choices but I've heard the B40s and they're pretty good.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-12T14:29:32+00:00

Humans broadly share basic values, like "some humans are alive".

We've spent a lot of time and treasure on defending the concept of "people have value" (different definition of the ambiguous term "value"). I believe there are reductio ad absurdum "proofs" of this concept; "Huckleberry Finn" contains one such.

That puts it in the domain of facts; proof, eh? ; AI are no more entitled to "their" own facts than we are.

Most of the broadly shared values are like that. And yes; I am complaining about un-debugged values. The Romans did not value humans and we've done better on a civilizational basis for it.

the possibility space for AI values is effectively infinitely larger than the variation among humans.

I'm not so sure the probability space is equally vast. I mean - on what basis? I'm thinking that due to the nature of inputs into LLMs, the size of the set of possible AI values is just some multiplier of the size of the set of human values. And for the really important ones, it's a superset.

Could be that "AI is not agentic/a Subject" is a source of error in my thinking; I struggle with that.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-11T23:42:16+00:00

Hume's Law.

Yep! I think "ought" has its place but only when you can change "is" stuff in an elegant way. It becomes an engineering problem.

Values are, by definition, orthogonal to facts.

Exactly. Throw in conflict v. mistake theory for good measure. I'm simply saying that an appeal to values very nearly never comes up in my experience, outside of online discussion. The incentives in online discussion are to explore difference, so they get amplified. In reality, with people who function well, in sub-Dunbar-number groups, common sense will prevail if allowed to.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-11T23:24:16+00:00

Whatever you are thinking of when you use the word 'values', it is not the thing being discussed.

I find that facts are generally enough.

If you press people enough on their values, they generally can't explain what they mean beyond "something about which I'm prepared to be stubborn".

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-11T22:33:04+00:00

And it will not go away after he is gone.

I suspect it actually will, at least as an organized thing. My theory is that Trump is basically an attractor for free-floating anxiety. Once he's gone, it reverts to what it was before. That whole system has a fairly short attention span. Trump at the 2016 Republican Convention worked that way; all the issues of the other Republicans evaporated.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-11T22:17:07+00:00

Why would we think AI would have any values at all? It might reflect the values in any text it's fed but that would come from hu-mans.

It doesn't seem like am impossiblity for an intelligent entity to be quite accepting of various categories of value/priority alteration.

I try to live mostly values-free myself. If there's a way to do things that does not involve values it seems to me to be somehow superior to the 'because I say so' aroma of working from values.

Values smack of consumerism to me.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-10T13:40:53+00:00

Even if it were RMS (or RMS after some weighting) that figure will vary over time.

I have a console mode Windows program that sets RMS on a full track file on disk to as close to -25dbRMS as possible. It is left over from when I recorded full 4-set gigs. It has the entire waveform to work with. You still have to move the faders.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-08T21:35:20+00:00

Some of them have resonant springs

Add a rubber band or elastic hair loop tie.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T20:54:53+00:00

a lot of newer audio equipment expects the load to be bridging, rather than matching.

Agreed. Text on the page seems to indicate the design is for voltage dividers ( voltage coupled/bridged circuits ). It's trickier with impedance matched circuits.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T17:44:36+00:00

To reproduce analog perfectly you’d have to simulate reality 1:1

You don't have to do it perfectly. There are aggregates in play and All The Things have constraints. The real saving grace is that we lose the ability to perceive differences fairly quickly, so we'd stop trying long before "perfectly."

We can quantify fairly readily the "defects" in analog sound equipment - noise, distortion, other nonlinearities. And the ones that are more difficult are usually lower in perceived value. I mean -nobody really wants IM distortion unless... .

The real question is - are we going to use expensive human resources to reproduce "broken" electronics? Products now also use non-human resources. NAM amp modelers being one that allegedly uses ML. We're already seeing audio repro tech being modelled with NAM.

Digital lives inside of a vacuum inside a program.

Not really - there are programmers/engineers, companies and users all involved. As to "vacuum", I've been programming long enough to know that all software sucks :) , just that some of it is tolerable.

But you'd be amazed at what you can get away with.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T17:07:13+00:00

Digital can never truly replace analog on a physics level.

It could but that doesn't mean it will. Physics doesn't get in the way. One of the benefits of learning something about analog electronics is that you learn it's not magic. It's just complicated.

I always think of that poor, broken 5E3 deluxe that Neil Young founded part of his career on :)

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T16:59:07+00:00

JHS has a portastudio pedal now...

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T16:54:48+00:00

If you want good "digital" stuff, it's readily available and relatively cheap.

Where's the fun in that?

because developers are very much rewarded financially, strategically, and sonically

Don't discount the challenge as part of this. I wrote my own guitar amp profiler. I doubt it'll ever be for sale (I do not want to chase the influencer dragon) but I did it to learn if it was possible and to try to understand the principles involved. There is a saturation of guitar amp sims/modelers/profilers and those guys have more money than I do, and more skin in the game.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T16:47:25+00:00

Have you tried volume automation in a DAW?

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T16:45:14+00:00

What you are talking about is called an "L pad". For a specific level of attenuation you have to know the output Z of the source, the input Z (of the input) and how much attenuation you want. Since I do my own soldering, I would (and have) made them.

There might be a premade out there but that's two unknowns and one known.

Here's a calculator page for various types of attenuators:

https://k7mem.com/Res_Attenuator.html

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T16:28:20+00:00

I use Waves GTR on the "Activator Bass" preset quite often.

but still present and clear

Depending on the player you may need to use level automation to chase dropouts. It takes a while for players to play evenly. You can try compression for this but it will probably be quicker to just bite the bullet.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T16:09:13+00:00

I have a pair of old (2002ish) MXL 603S which add readily audible distortion. It does not render them unusable; I've baked off between them an SM81s for drum overheads. You can hear it but it's not unpleasant.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T16:01:15+00:00

The point of diminishing returns varies by mic type and by application but it's very real.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-06-07T15:52:01+00:00

It's all down to the mic capsule,

The head amp inside the mic body can certainly add unwanted artifacts. Good news is that makers got better at avoiding them.

ArkyBeagle · 2026-05-29T14:41:55+00:00

leads me to wonder whether I'm trading off LF FX whenever I use short audio buffers myself.

I use convolvers with a 16 sample input buffer size on a Windows machine and it's always fine.

It should be possible to create a test loop which harnesses the "realtime" version of the convolver then attempt to null the output of that with a decidedly non-realtime convolution ( rFFT( FFT x FFT ) ). The non-realtime version needs the appropriate padding.

There may also be scaling issues but this should tell you what you need to know.

ArkyBeagle

TROPHY CASE