MultiBand devices are especially handy when dealing with the dynamics of a full range mix. In a symphonic orchestra as well as in a Rock n Roll band different instruments dominate different frequency ranges. Many times the low range dominates the whole dynamic response while the higher frequencies are riding on top. While it is the mixer’s or composer’s job to reach a desired balance, mastering engineers often find they need to do something about the dynamics of the mixed source. It may be to complement it further or indeed improve its quality, or possibly just make it as loud as possible for competitive level, with as little degradation as possible.
LINEAR PHASE XOVERS
When the LinMB is active but is idle, it presents only a fixed amount of delay. The output is 24bit clean and true to the source.
When we use Xovers to split a signal we like to think that they are splitting the input signal to bands leaving everything else untouched. The truth is that any normal analog or digital Xover introduces different amount of phase shift or delay to different frequencies. Further dynamic gain changes will cause further modulation of the Phase shift introduced by the Xovers. This phenomenon was treated in C4’s phase compensated Xovers but the initial phase shift caused by the Xovers is still apparent in C4 and in its output all frequencies are equal to the source in Amplitude but not in Phase.
When its important to achieve as much source integrity as possible the LinMB goes a long way and splits the signal to 5 bands maintaining a 24bit clean starting point for applying different dynamics processing to each of the bands.
Transients are the main sonic events that benefit from Linear Phase. Transients contain a wide range of frequencies, and are highly “Localized” in time. A
ADAPTIVE THRESHOLDS AND
When a soft sound and a loud sound happen at the same time, the loud sound has some masking effect over the softer sound. The research of Masking, articulated the Upward spread Masking, where loud low frequency sounds mask higher frequency sounds. The Linear MultiBand provides a way for each band to be sensitive to the energy in its “Masker” band. When the energy in the Masker band is high the band’s threshold will rise to introduce less attenuation and compensate for the masking, letting the sound in each band come out as loud and as clear as possible. The Linear MultiBand is the first processor to introduce this
