It can be less musically transparent. Muddling the musical message.
No, it cannot "be less musically transparent". It can be less audibly transparent and if that's the case, then it might affect the perception of "the musical message" but equally it would affect the perception of speech, noises and any sound/s that are not music. If you can show me some audiophile bit of gear with some sort of distortion (a lack of transparency) that only affects the music/"musical message" but doesn't affect any other sort of noise or sound, then you could make an argument for "musical transparency". Otherwise "musical transparency" is a nonsense term and you're just talking about transparency!
I have been talking about equipment's musical transparency, not playing its own tune. But if you must know that if you turned the pedantry down. Or you're just not listening, as usual.
Again, there's no such thing as "musical transparency" and I didn't mention anything about equipment playing it's own tune. However, that is effectively possible with harmonic distortion, although of course the DAC/Amp/whatever has no idea it's creating something that might be perceived as music and will produce that same distortion regardless of whether the signal it's fed represents music or some other sort of sound. And also of course, any DAC/Amp/whatever which actually did that, would be highly undesirable.
This isn't pedantry! It would be pedantry if it wasn't for the fact that this use of musical/musicality is so commonly used incorrectly in audiophile marketing to mislead consumers.
And yet it is called a "Musical saw". I think you should tell them off, like everyone else.
Why? A "musical saw" describes a saw used by musicians to create music, why should I "tell them off" for an accurate description?
I knew nothing about Lexicon 224 because I am a moron, but thanks to you I learn something.
How does not knowing about the Lexicon 224 make you stupid or a moron? It was a game changer in it's day but apart from old sound engineers around at the time or those well educated in the history of music/sound production, hardly anyone knows about it, including most geniuses (in other fields).
My post was not about EXACT facts of music history, but rather MY personal subjective impression of 80's music in all its ignorance and my impression has been that it was an era of analog synths. I should have stated that clearly, but I DID NOT.
Not knowing that the '80's was the decade which defined the move to digital synths from analogue synths is not stupid or moronic but if you don't know, then making the assertion (or even impression) that it was the era of analogue synths is slightly stupid. No need to beat yourself up over it though, we're all slightly stupid like this on occasion. I was slightly stupid to state that "musical saws" are identical to ordinary hand saws because although this is sometimes true, I now know that some musical saws are specifically designed to be musical saws. It would have been better to frame my statement as a question or to have looked up musical saws first.
Why was it impossible to use only one unit of Lexicon 224 and process the track individually one by one? What was the technical reason this was not possible?
The workflow I have in mind goes like this: Sent track one to Lexicon 224 with the proper adjustment and overdub track one reverb added. Then do the same for every other track. Sure, this takes time, but then again money is saved by having only one $8k unit.
Two reasons:
1. The 224 was a stereo reverb. So if we feed say the lead vox into the 224, we start with one recorded track (vox) but we have to bounce down two tracks (vox + stereo reverb). If we do the same with the lead guitar, bass guitar, snare and everything else, we would nearly double the number of recorded tracks required (except for original stereo recorded tracks). Bare in mind that pro audio recorders (digital or analogue) in the 1980's had a maximum of 24 tracks, all or most of which have already been recorded on, so there simply isn't the number of tracks available to do what you suggest. You could in theory buy another 24 track recorder but syncing them together was not very accurate or reliable and it's ten times cheaper to buy 2 x $8k Lexicon 224s than to buy 2 x $80k 24 track recorders.
2. Using the previous example of say the vox fed into the 224 and recording it down, what happens later in the mix process if we decide we need to EQ the vox slightly differently? We're screwed, the vox track has been overdubbed and no longer exists and we can't do anything to the vox without also affecting the reverb recorded with it. Likewise, we can't change anything about the reverb on this stereo track.
Put these two facts together and it's a no brainier. It's a vastly more flexible, superior workflow and far cheaper to have two 224's used with "sends" and "returns" and never bounce down the reverb until the final stereo mix.
G
