Multiple conundrums, any sleuths? Captors, IRs, etc.

spawnofthesith

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TGF Recording Artist
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So conundrum A is pretty straightforward. I think the sonicake IR loader might just suck. I’ve been going crazy thinking there’s a difference in tone between going direct from captor and sonicake IR vs captor into reaper with the wall of sound loader. Just did a proper A/B and turns out there’s a HUGE difference with the exact same IRs. No EQ or anything in the WoS just straight up. Sonicake sounds like muffled shit in comparison. I don’t know much about IRs but the space on the sonicake is extremely limited and there’s a “converter” on their site that truncates IRs to fit on there. Would that really cause that much of a difference on the whole tone? Thinking I should’ve gone with the TC electronics IR loader now. Any other reasons this thing might just suck ass?

Now conundrum B is where things get weird. On a completely random from day to day basis I’m getting HORRIBLE shrill feed back and squealing. This is not consistent all the time though, but often. Thing is, I can’t just totally blame the IR loader. If I skip the IR loader into my in ear pack I still get the horrifying feedback, both from the line out and the XLr out with the captors baked in crappy cab sim. There is ZERO feedback when running either of those outputs into interface/DAW. For a minute I thought it was just my semihollow guitars that were doing this because at least that would vaguely make sense (except not, because again, 0 noise in the daw) because I switched to my silver sky and for whatever reason the squealing is slightly less bad with that guitar. But I tried all my other solid bodies tonight and same problem.

Feel like I should at least get a different hardware loader for the sound quality alone. But if I’m randomly having nightmare squealing that’s probably already damaged my hearing what’s the point

Any ideas? I’m stumped
 
almost definitely from your IR’s being truncated. TC should be fine, but worth checking the max length of whichever units you’re looking at.

With the squeal, it’s quite common when using load boxes. If things are physically placed near each other there’s a lot of transformers and magnetic fields interacting and it can happen. Moving stuff around physically as well as a line isolator will help tons. I recommend the Lehle P-Split or P-ISO, it’s very clean and doesn’t change the level. Incredibly useful to have around the studio too.
 
almost definitely from your IR’s being truncated. TC should be fine, but worth checking the max length of whichever units you’re looking at.

With the squeal, it’s quite common when using load boxes. If things are physically placed near each other there’s a lot of transformers and magnetic fields interacting and it can happen. Moving stuff around physically as well as a line isolator will help tons. I recommend the Lehle P-Split or P-ISO, it’s very clean and doesn’t change the level. Incredibly useful to have around the studio too.

Makes sense, where in the chain would I want to place one of those boxes? In between the captor and the IR loader?

Is my interface providing some sort of isolation? Not using anything fancy at all.... a cheap ass behringer u phoria I bought for $20 :LOL: still seems strange that the noise goes away introducing even more hardware/software to the signal chain

You know better than that SonicCake turd :hmm :rofl

Season 5 Nbc GIF by The Office
 
almost definitely from your IR’s being truncated. TC should be fine, but worth checking the max length of whichever units you’re looking at.

Looks like the TC max length is 200ms, is that reasonable? I'm really really dumb when it comes to this sort of stuff
 
Looks like the TC max length is 200ms, is that reasonable? I'm really really dumb when it comes to this sort of stuff
200 is plenty. IIRC Boss and one or two others offer 500ms but it’s really diminishing returns after 200ms.

Line isolator kind of depends, I’d try it before the amp first and move it to different places in the signal chain (don’t put it between amp+load box though) until it’s better.
 
Looks like the TC max length is 200ms, is that reasonable?

Fwiw, pretty much all typical modelers are offering an IR length of 1024 samples at (usually) 48kHz, which equals around 21ms.
Plenty of cab IRs even are are a lot shorter (or rather not spreading any information over the full length).
Yes, there's some companies delivering longer IRs from capturing room mics/reflections, but usually you don't want any of that, even less so in a live rig (and in a recording situation you could always use an IR loading plugin). 200ms (and even 500ms) are too short for reverbs, too, so the additional length usually goes wasted.
 
Gotta love reverb, I can save a whopping $9.45 vs. new on the cheapest used TC IR loader listed with the hackiest velcro job I've ever seen

Spin Dreams GIF by NBC
 
You may as well consider a 2nd hand AMT Pangaea (the small version, CP-100). Can deal with speaker level, too, so you can insert it between amp and cab and send an IR feed the FOH way. Did that for quite a while, FOH folks were happy.
 
I’d like to formally apologize to sonicake for my disparaging remarks in this thread


I legitimately think I’m going crazy

I’ve been back at this for the last couple hours like a lunatic. So then I Recorded a loop on my looper and recorded twice once with captor straight into daw with WoS and then again captor into sonicake with same IR

I don’t think there’s a difference. They sound identical to me

I’m either losing it, an idiot, or some combination

I guess I’m glad I didn’t buy anything else yet, I almost did earlier today


All this modern digital tech robbing me of valuable practice time… :cop
 
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