A Nice Read - Real vs Virtual Amp Simulation Test

[atalwar]

There you go.

http://emusician.com/tutorials/showdown-clubhouse-amp-software/index.html

[ShredRex]

I have suspected that for years......lol

[mickeymix]

I'm enjoying this Amit thanks for the read.

[EvanBerard]

That's for the link man! That was a great article!

[blue4u]

Did you guys take the blind listening test? Have a go at it: http://emusician.com/web_clips/listening_test/

[blue4u]

Surprisingly, I was able to pick out the live amp in all of them except the first one. Once I heard which one was the live recording I had a reference to go off of. The rest were pretty easy to spot. Here's how you can tell...

1. If you listen close you will always hear the room in the "live" recording. It's subtle sometimes but there's usually at least a little bit of room sound in there. It makes the tone slightly darker (more bottom-mids) and a bit more irregular (not as consistent in volume).

2. Digital modelers sound plastic in the high end past 7Khz. That is because guitar speakers don't produce many frequencies above 7k and that's usually the giveaway. You can really hear it in some of these though it's more subtle in others. It's a shrill sound that's pretty easy to spot. Very bright and brittle. You'll know it when you hear it!

3. As the article states, modelers usually compress the sound to make it louder and more consistent. Amplitube does a lot of that. The live recording has a bit more jump to it where there are slight volume changes.

Now, here's the thing....I've taken another test like this before and got them ALL wrong so maybe I just got lucky here! Or maybe...I'm waaaaaay too obsessed with guitar tone :rolleyes:

I've spent embarrassing amounts of time listening to nearly every modeler on the market for hours and hours. I don't have Pro Tools so this is the first time I'm hearing "Eleven". Must say I am VERY impressed

FWIW I thought the "Amp Farm 3" sounds were the best with "Eleven" coming in 2nd and the actual "live" recorded sounds in 3rd. There were many times I thought the modeled sounds were actually better than the live ones.

Btw, I listened with headphones and had to review the parts a few times before I could pick out the live take....

[Timejunkie]

Average listener would never tell the difference.

[atalwar]

apart from the twins(eleven) i got all rest dead on.
There are some subtle non linearities in real amps and they change over the decay/freq. (not easy to model as in realtime recording plugins the modeling has to be latency free too)

and unless you know what you are looking for, it's very hard to tell, other than that there were some that were way too off due to some artifacts (or they tried to simulate some artifacts (speaker and mic distortion) but got too linear).

Since i use a tube preamp before pod, it was a bit easier for me to pick a certain signature that tubes impart.

The second closest was surely amp farm for me.

In Their own right and might all sound decent and in a full mix it would be really hard to tell.

[blue4u]

Average listener would never tell the difference.

and they probably wouldn't care if they COULD hear a difference

that said...whatever inspires you to create that killer lick or song is what matters most and if you need a real amp to get that then that's what you use. luckily for me, I like amp modeling and find it even MORE inspiring to be able to get virtually any sound on the planet

[Timejunkie]

Agreed blue4u....the new digital world is so inspiring. No more sitting in a studio at $1,000.00 an hour trying to get a decent sound out of a Marshall Combo...LOL