production is about using your ears, not your computer skills.
Simulation Technology
Here follows three geeky sections, so you might want to skip directly to the next chapter on page 9.
Once upon a time, when Softube was not yet born, three guys (the hacker, the guitar player and the professor) were involved in a research project at Linköping Institute of Technology in Sweden, aimed at finding a model that could simulate nonlinearities in audio equipment. Nonlinear systems were one of the expertise research areas at the university, although the audible effects of the models hadn't been carefully investigated yet. When they, in 2003, found a suitable model for audio nonlinearities, it was evident that the ear can discriminate between certain details that are very hard to discover through purely mathematical methods, and also that the human ear couldn't care less about other properties that the mathematical methods focused on.
The birth of this technology also led to the birth of Softube, and since then, about a dozen of different research projects have been completed by Softube and Linköping Institute of Technology, with focus ranging from loudspeaker nonlinearities and spring reverb simulations to novel poweramp designs and next generation compilers.
In short, the Amp Room plugin consists of three core technologies:
1)A true physical circuit modeling, where every capacitor, resistor and component is described in detail. In order to simulate these circuits on a DSP platform, we developed a, now patented, simulation method.
2)A patented model for nonlinearities that leads to a very dynamic and accurate valve modeling.
3)A model of the cabinet, room and microphone using resonance modeled IIR filters (yep, also patented), with extra care taken to assure numerical stability.
Supernormalize
The “supernormalize” feature (from the beginning the internal name of a slightly magic component of our model building toolbox), makes sure that the output signal from Amp Room always has a reasonable volume. From a user perspective, this means that the Amp Room never clips the signal (unwanted digital distortion). Also, the output volume is normalized, so even with low settings on the Volume knob in Amp Room, the output volume will be within a reasonable level and ready for digital recordings. Compare this to
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