http://www.qsound.com/products/qmax.asp

Link to the absolute best 3D enhancer.

It would be great to have a 3D enchanced mode of some kind.

I've always found Qsound (at least the directX plugin for soundforge) to be a poor 3d sound encoder. Has it gotten any better as of late?

I have used IQ by qsound as well as a directx plugin for programs like wavelab, and have absolutely loved the results. Anyways, something similar to what it does would be pretty nice...

Not exactly something that's needed when you have decent equipment to begin with, IMO.

Bruno

I went to that web site you linked, and it contained an audio demo sound bite which plays automatically when the page is loaded.

If their sound processor does to every sound file what it was doing to that demo piece, I would want to stay as far away from it as possible.

Their demo piece was a dry-recorded classical acoustic guitar. Not particularly well EQ'd, but a reasonable recording, if dry.

Then the demo added their "magic processing" to the music, which seemed to consist of piling on about six metric tons of reverb, an overt slapback echo, some chorus, EQ'ing the shit out of it, dynamically compressing it, and doubling the volume. I assume that, buried in all that processing, was also their patented q-sound 3D spatial processing as well, but I couldn't hear it.

I agree that all of those things are good for a piece of music, when done carefully. However, the proper place to add all of that stuff is in the original mixdown suite, with the artist and the producer making those decisions. Not at playback time.

I mean, it's proper to EQ the playback equipment, and I'm a big fan of dynamic compression as a tool to make different albums sound more similar in volume. But if you need all of that other stuff to make the music sound good, then the piece of music wasn't produced properly in the first place.

If you try and add all of that reverb and echo to a piece of music which already has reverb and echo, you'll just turn it into a muddy mess.

Interestingly, I know of a piece of music similar to their demo track which is already produced with that kind of processing. The song "Modoc" on the Steve Morse album "High Tension Wires" sounds very much like their demonstration piece. It's a classical acoustic guitar with a lot of processing. But Steve's version is much more tasteful in the way the processing is used. Steve used a hexaphonic pickup on the guitar, which gave it six separate outputs into the mixing board. This allowed him to mix and process each string individually. He was able to make the notes appear to dance around you, coming from all different directions, despite the fact that it was a single performance from a single guitar. Absolutely mesmerizing, no Q-max needed.

Tony,

Nice and valid points. One bit of information to add about qsound. Madonna, Sting, and I believe Roger Waters has used qsound in the mixing process on an album. Still...I would like to see something similar to it on the empeg.

One bit of information to add about qsound. Madonna, Sting, and I believe Roger Waters has used qsound in the mixing process on an album

Right. I'm quite familiar with those examples and with the Qsound 3D spatial processing, which is a different thing than what was being demonstrated at the front page of the web site you linked.

I remember getting Sting's "The Soul Cages" and seeing the note on the sleeve about how it had been processed with Qsound. I also remember, around that time, seeing an interview with Michael Penn about how he liked using Qsound in his production. In listening to the Sting album, I do notice a certain presence and sparkle to the production that wasn't there on the prior albums, so it certainly was doing something good.

One thing to keep in mind is that Qsound is supposed to allow the artist to give each instrument a more easily-detectable "location" in the stereo soundstage. For instance, you are supposed to be able to hear the guitar coming from "over there" and the bass coming from "over there" instead of it being just a vague stereo pan. Also, it's supposed to be able to widen the soundstage so that it appears to be wider than the physical distance between the speakers.

But for all of those things to be possible, the work has to be done ahead of time, in the mixing studio. You can't apply Qsound after the fact and have it extract the instrument locations from nothing. Hence, my statement that this processing should not be applied at playback time. The fact that Sting and Madonna (heck, lots of artists) use their technology in the recording studio only reinforces my statement.

What you linked at that web page was something different, though. It wasn't just 3D spatial processing. It was also a combination of playback-time EQ and echo effects.

Something else I didn't mention in my last post, and I just thought of it. I wouldn't be surprised if they were also applying some per-frequency phase correction, in the same way that the BBE devices do. Now, I've heard the BBE stuff in action, and I can understand how something like that can be useful at playback time. But again, it seemed that the demo soundbite at the page you linked was doing much more than this, and it was adding a lot of uneccesary echo to the recording.

On Roger Water's most excellent CD "Amused To Death", the processing works incredibly well. The dog barking is even noted in the liner notes to be one of the best examples of how good qsound can be. With a good stereo, the effect is pretty amazing...

- Jon