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joekool wrote: its not analog voodoo secret black magic. it just is what it is.
i have ZERO clue what the actual difference is..
A sine wave is a sine wave. Other than frequency, phase, amplitude and noise I guess, and how these change over time, there are no differences between two sines. These are all easily replicated, as well.
Depends whether the 808 'sine' is a pure sine or whether it's actually a bit distorted. Obv this would actually make it less bassy than a pure sine, but with more 'presence' or 'punch' - which would make it feel like it was hitting harder.
Would be very easy to put this to the test if anyone has the sampler patch set up and can be arsed... just a single-cycle-of-808 based patch, get the same sampler patch with the 808 replaced by a pure sine from soundforge or a synth, play half a dozen notes from one interspersed with half a dozen from the other, and see who can tell the difference consistantly.
Would be kind of interesting to know, cos I always find 808 based sounds hit harder than I can manage with a synth, but I'm also kind of aware of the placebo effect and that there might be a load of other factors influencing it.
So curiosity got the better of me and I loaded up a few 808 samples into Ableton and checked them out with a spectrum analyzer. There is indeed a bit of distortion -- it's very slight, just a little bump at around the second harmonic and an even tinier amount at higher harmonics. I guess there's probably some very slight asymmetric saturation going on. The second harmonic is about -24dB down; there's a little bit of third around -27dB and some fourth at -31dB and so on.
It'd definitely be possible to synthesize, but if the 808 ain't broke....
Tried 808 vs Sine last night - really interesting looking at the spectrum. You can get good sub sounds out of both - especially with compression. If I'm looking to accentuate the kick sound with the sub - then the 808 really adds the Boom. If I'm looking to add to the Bass sound with the sub - then I'm liking the slightly softer sine I created in Massive.
nowaysj wrote:Do really wish I understood why all these sines sound different. I don't understand it, but I know that sines do sound different.
Sines don't sound different. If they do sound different, they aren't both sines.
But the output of an analogue sine wave generator fed through some circuits that might not be completely transparent might not be a pure sine wave - as damagedgoods showed by actually analyzing the waveform.
nowaysj wrote:As between all the softsynths, all the sine waves should sound the same but they don't. Not really addressing the 808 aspect of this issue.
Not trying to be an arse here, but have you tried objectively measuring them (null test, spectrum analyzer) or doing a blind test, or is this just your subjective perception?
If you have, possibilities are that there's some sort of processing in the synth (I dunno, it might apply some saturation somewhere in the signal path even with everything turned off) or they're using different wavetables to get a slightly distorted sine wave because the designer thought it sounded better, or they've fucked up their anti-aliasing or something.
I can never get any good results from 808's but I think I need to tune them and start cutting tails and multiplying. Thanks for this thread! DSF is teh leet
