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Infinite Series (Aaron Venture) thread

I noticed that IB instruments don't always sound very good in mono and have a lot of phase cancelation issues, and I couldn't figure out why. I thought maybe it was the instrument's impulse reverbs doing it, but even after disabling them in kontakt, I was still having mono phasing issues with the raw instruments.

So I looked at the raw waveforms themselves in the sample directory. Oddly enough, a lot of these waveforms, even though technically they're properly stereo correlated for the most part, seem to lose a lot of upper frequency information when they're converted to mono, and thus are not very mono friendly. Rather than play the waveforms in here and destroy everyone's ears, I'll just show a raw IB Trumpet 1 playing an F scale as an example.

Here it is normally in the Bersa hall:
And Bersa mono:

You can already hear the phasing going on in mono, so here is the raw trumpet with no impulses on, in stereo (!!! VOLUME WARNING!!!!!):
and mono:

As you can hear, this trumpet sounds nice and full in stereo, but in mono it loses a lot of the high end, and what's left is kind of smeared and odd sounding, kind of like the player is waving their hand around in front of the bell or something. It gets a very pronounced dip in mono around 7k, especially when played loudly, and on certain notes.

True, some of this is inevitable when summing to mono, but this is usually minimized by careful recording and mixing. This explains why IB instruments don't always "sit well" in mono. Hopefully this can be fixed, because otherwise I absolutely love these samples. Just a bit of a monkey's paw right now.
 
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I noticed that IB instruments don't always sound very good in mono and have a lot of phase cancelation issues, and I couldn't figure out why. I thought maybe it was the instrument's impulse reverbs doing it, but even after disabling them in kontakt, I was still having mono phasing issues with the raw instruments.

So I looked at the raw waveforms themselves in the sample directory. Oddly enough, a lot of these waveforms, even though technically they're properly stereo correlated for the most part, seem to lose a lot of upper frequency information when they're converted to mono, and thus are not very mono friendly. Rather than play the waveforms in here and destroy everyone's ears, I'll just show a raw IB Trumpet 1 playing an F scale as an example.

Here it is normally in the Bersa hall:
And Bersa mono:

You can already hear the phasing going on in mono, so here is the raw trumpet with no impulses on, in stereo (!!! VOLUME WARNING!!!!!):
and mono:

As you can hear, this trumpet sounds nice and full in stereo, but in mono it loses a lot of the high end, and what's left is kind of smeared and odd sounding, kind of like the player is waving their hand around in front of the bell or something. It gets a very pronounced dip in mono around 7k, especially when played loudly, and on certain notes.

True, some of this is inevitable when summing to mono, but this is usually minimized by careful recording and mixing. This explains why IB instruments don't always "sit well" in mono. Hopefully this can be fixed, because otherwise I absolutely love these samples. Just a bit of a monkey's paw right now.
Whats your usecase for them 100% dry and in mono?
 
Whats your usecase for them 100% dry and in mono?
Well, I'm a composer and I work on a lot of mobile games and other media where people won't necessarily be listening with headphones or high end monitors, so I need my stuff to sound as good in mono (or a reduced stereo field) as it does in full stereo, as much as possible. Even with the instrument's impulse reverbs on, it still gets the upper frequency smearing in mono to a certain degree. Sometimes it's masked by the impulses, other times it isn't. Bottom line is, that smeary mono signal is being fed through the reverbs and can be very noticeable on louder, brassier stuff. This is something I don't have to worry about with other samples nearly as much, but with IB/IW stuff I have to check it constantly.

Second, sometimes it's nice to have a tight, focused mono signal that I can put through my own reverbs, such as VirtualSoundStage or whatever else. Infinite Brass and Winds are very wide sounding, which is nice if I want a wide signal, but if it doesn't sum down to mono well enough then yeah there's gonna be issues.
 
Well, I'm a composer and I work on a lot of mobile games and other media where people won't necessarily be listening with headphones or high end monitors, so I need my stuff to sound as good in mono (or a reduced stereo field) as it does in full stereo, as much as possible. Even with the instrument's impulse reverbs on, it still gets the upper frequency smearing in mono to a certain degree. Sometimes it's masked by the impulses, other times it isn't. Bottom line is, that smeary mono signal is being fed through the reverbs and can be very noticeable on louder, brassier stuff. This is something I don't have to worry about with other samples nearly as much, but with IB/IW stuff I have to check it constantly.

Second, sometimes it's nice to have a tight, focused mono signal that I can put through my own reverbs, such as VirtualSoundStage or whatever else. Infinite Brass and Winds are very wide sounding, which is nice if I want a wide signal, but if it doesn't sum down to mono well enough then yeah there's gonna be issues.
Could you not feed either the right or left signal as a mono input to a spatialisation plugin?
 
Could you not feed either the right or left signal as a mono input to a spatialisation plugin?
You can, and I've done that already with a pretty good result. But the thing is you can only do that with the raw, dry signal. Once the impulses are engaged that won't help.

I'm actually considering doing a batch mono channel conversion somehow with the raw wav samples signals on an instrument, just to test it out and see if it works.
 
You can, and I've done that already with a pretty good result. But the thing is you can only do that with the raw, dry signal. Once the impulses are engaged that won't help.

I'm actually considering doing a batch mono channel conversion somehow with the raw wav samples signals on an instrument, just to test it out and see if it works.
If you batch mono convert the samples, won't you just imprint exactly the effect you are trying to avoid?
 
If you batch mono convert the samples, won't you just imprint exactly the effect you are trying to avoid?
Oh definitely, and to clarify I mean I would have to do a L or R signal to mono, not a stereo to mono sum. Which is why I'm wondering if I could even do a batch conversion like that.

Also (to everyone), I hope I'm not giving the impression that I don't like the Infinite series, because I absolutely adore these samples. They're like a dream come true for me, even with the mono issues.
 
Oh definitely, and to clarify I mean I would have to do a L or R signal to mono, not a stereo to mono sum. Which is why I'm wondering if I could even do a batch conversion like that.

Also to reiterate, I hope I'm not giving the impression that I don't like the Infinite series, because I absolutely adore these samples. They're like a dream come true for me, even with the mono issues.
If you have access to Linux, this is pretty easy to do in the command line, with the sox tool. To select the left channel:
sox input.wav output.wav remix 1

You would just run a loop to convert all the files.

Still, I think you should talk to Aaron about this, before taking such drastic measures.
 
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Doing them that way was my way of attempting to tackle the static factor of impulse responses since Kontakt's IR doesn't offer any type of modulation. I sacrificed a bit of mono quality for a better stereo sound.

That being said, please send me an email via the website as I have an idea for an implementation which would be painless and could allow the user to enable mono compatibility with a click. 1.6 is done and in testing, but if I could test this thing out with you, I can still squeeze it into the update.
 
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