réactions à la news Le son Harrison Consoles arrive en digital avec 32C Channel

@bachstudies: those videos have been discussed a lot in other forums, and I've responded there.

The videos are not 'wrong' but neither do they tell the whole story. Life is not that simple Smile

I'll ask Gary to make a comment in our forum and then we can discuss further if you like.

-Ben

Ben asked me to chime with a new thread in the General Discussion area where we can continue the conversation.

From the 32C Channel press releases and our website.

"Predating the modern parametric EQ, the 32Series equalizer had to serve many purposes and remain easy to use. The middle 2 bands use a proportional-Q design: small gain changes provide for gentle classical-style tone controls; but cut a little harder and the filters become sharper, allowing you to hunt down and then notch-out troublesome frequencies. The high and low bands are a shelving design with a huge gain range, allowing you to add dramatic punch and shimmer to any source. If you needed more surgical work, however, you could switch the high and low bands to operate as additional proportional-Q 'bell' filters. The effort put into voicing this EQ was unmatched at the time, and its signature remains on some of the biggest records ever made.

The 32C Channel Plugin provides a complex emulation of the original Harrison 32C EQ. Every resistor, capacitor, and transistor
is included in the model. When combined with the 32C Filter section, a huge range of tonal possibilities are available with just few knob turns."

Now as we have said publicly in various places...

We do not add distortion or noise to the EQ.

Instead of being focused on artifacts found in old gear, we focused on the original work that went into voicing the EQ at the time. As mentioned above the 32C EQ predated "parametric EQs" and it was very difficult to make that EQ do a lot of work with just the two knobs per band. The feel of the knobs, the depth of the proportional -Q action, the speed of the filters relative to the knobs etc. etc. etc. was a serious trial by error. Those refined circuit designs (yes resistors, capacitors, transistors etc.) are what we included in the mathematical model.

Also note, that the distortion and noise measurements of those original consoles (WHEN THEY WERE NEW) were extremely low and virtually unaffected even with the EQ in circuit. The entire point back when there were ONLY analog consoles was to make them as clean, with the lowest possible noise and distortion, lowest possible cross-talk, and as phase coherent as possible. Harrison was not alone. Every analog console manufacturer was after the same thing/s. Distortion, noise, cross-talk, phase issues etc. etc. were all the enemy. We spent many man years tweaking those console circuit designs for optimum performance.

All of that... is what we built into the mathematical model of the Mixbus32C EQ and now the 32C Channel EQ. As with the original console EQ design, this was no easy task. It caused a lot of headaches and issues here because the mathematical model was built on the knob resistor values to get the tapers and behaviors correct rather than using off-the-shelf Bi-quad math.

In our collective opinions, there is nothing wrong with our marketing and we stand behind what we make and offer just as we have done for the last 45+ years.

We think the 32C Channel is a excellent plugin and it stands on it's own as a great mixing channel strip, and a good value as well.


Thanks,
Gary

Hi Stikkers,

I greatly appreciate your input on this thread. It is good to know how our marketing is perceived. We are aggressive with our statements but I think we are one of the few companies who can support our claims since we make both analog and digital hardware.

We've used the 'every resistor, capacitor and transistor' line for several years now because it is a way to tell a very complicated story in just a few words, and that is the point of marketing text!

The EQ circuit is fairly simple (circuit diagrams were included in the 1975 console manual, and you can probably find it by googling). There were no 'tube' or 'drive' stages in the EQ circuit so there was no desirable distortion generated, and the point was to minimize those distortions anyway. The distortion level was lower than a typical 'analog plugin' which imho greatly exaggerate the effect for their own marketing purposes....possibly because they don't know what made vintage hardware sound good, and they've decided it was the distortion (we never thought so)

There's been a lot of debate about 'cramping' and this is directly related to our 'every resistor, capacitor ...' model: When you recreate the circuit in digital, the response warps (or 'cramps') around the nyquist frequency, which is expected. You can fix it by adding more stages (to fix magnitude response) or using allpass filters (to fix the phase response) or oversampling (at the expense of incurring latency). But at that point, you've deviated from the original circuit, so we couldn't make the 'every resistor' claim!

The hard work in this EQ was the 'voicing' of it. That required a lot of trial and error to find the exact right combination of resistor (knob taper), to get the desired shapes for vocal, sax, drums and piano, with just a few knobs and as little twiddling as possible. The resulting steady-state EQ curve is 'just an EQ' like any other. But 'how you get there' takes a very specific path!

Apparently it resonated with a lot of people because we later moved to fully-parametric EQs in our analog consoles, but the 32C remained highly desirable and spawned several recreations, like the licensed UAD 32c version and also several unlicensed copycats.

I hope this helps explain more about our company and why we use that sentence in our 32C products.

-Ben at Harrison