Copper Wire vs Midas M32 vs Behringer X32 (Public)

all right i'm dave rat and i am continuing the videos on the midas m32 versus the x32 looking at the differences um all kinds of great comments have come through you know a lot of people out there say they're exactly the same with different shells some people say they're vastly different i've seen extremes on both sides today we're going to have some fun looking at the oscilloscope um i'm going to run some signals in and we'll take a look at what comes out now one thing i said in a previous video and i'd like to repeat is the perfect digital dream is to be a piece of copper wire digital attempts to emulate what happens with a signal traveling through a copper wire in its purest form now digital offers all these features and assets that you can do crossovers and filters and delays and eq and mass amounts of manipulation with zero degradation beyond the degradation that you get by converting the digital and back to analog those end stops are fixed or they're you know they push the limits of them whether or not it's relevant to extend to a very high frequencies or not for a certain application that is for you to determine we're going to take a look at the two consoles with various signals so if we look over here i've got a signal generator where i can control uh the type of wave form going in and a scope but right now we're looking at a piece of wire it's coming out of the signal generator going into a four-way split one uh whey is going into the midas m32 one way is going to the x32 one way is going into the behringer xynx and one way is going straight into the scope also i've seen comments where someone's like you're testing these consoles you're going into the xynx you're degrading the sound by going into this cheap analog board coming from these also not super expensive various price range digital ports think about that it's very easy to make an analog piece of gear that passes a very wide frequency response and it's very challenging a lot more expensive to do that in the digital domain although well let's go ahead and check it out so in any case i'll bring this up and we can see this is a 1000 no a 100 hertz sine wave coming directly out of the signal generator into the scope if i fire up trace number two there's a green trace and i can spread it out a little bit and you can see that's the trace coming out of the analog console and you can see that it's a very slightly offset probably a phase shift of some sort if i change the base on that it'll alter it there's a slight offset it's not necessarily a time offset as much as a phase offset but we'll just leave it at that so there is the um direct piece of wire and the analog board with 1 000 cycle 10. oh on this screen if you look right here 100 hertz tone you'll see it's the frequency of the tone is written there and then the frequency is here this is a sine wave and hopefully all this comes out and you'll be able to see it let's go ahead and fire we'll take out the analog trays and we'll fire up the m32 i believe that here if i mute this channel nope i'm sorry that is the x32 so the pinkish purple pinkish color is the x32 and here we can see that it's offset that would be the latency of the console and if we look at the sweep it's a one millisecond sweep rate a square is about one millisecond so we can not a very long latency it appears to be about a millisecond um yeah but it's not a lot of time not a lot of time very quick but still milliseconds about a foot now i'm going to fire up the third one which is the green one and here we can see that piled right on top of the pink one and now if i fire up all four we have the four waveforms at 100 hertz let's go ahead and take a look at a square wave so i'm going to turn off the various bits here and there we have a 100 hertz sine wave and if i go to the waveform here i should be able to go square wave and there it is there's a square wave at 100 hertz in the direct piece of wire beautiful it's this is what's coming out of the signal generator it's nice and square it's crisp all the way through let's go ahead and look at the xynx and see the quality of its ability to reproduce a square wave and here i turn off the initial signal we can see that the square wave has kind of a ramp down um it's unable to reproduce the dc component that is the flat at the top so it goes up and drops down spread that out a little bit now square wave is very difficult to reproduce the high frequencies required to make that corner sharp can be significant let's go ahead and fire up the x32 and here we can see that it overshoots and it rings a bit as it drops down and let's try the m32 which shows up almost exactly on top of the m32 and i can take that out so we can those are the two digital boards there's the analog board i will just use the m32 for this and there we got it there we have it so now if i spread these out we can kind of take a look at the difference between these waves so what i'll do is i'm going to go up in frequency and i'll line them up on top of each other and here we can kind of see really what's happening with these square waves now they're out of time so they kind of shifted but you can see that the analog board here is nice crisp and square and if i go to the original signal it's nice and square and the digital board overshoots rings and drops down and then over shoots again the inability to reproduce the square wave probably is not that big of a deal i mean it doesn't really need to reproduce a square wave um don't know but it does show that it does not have the frequency response let's go ahead and go back to the cheap analog board does a heck of a lot better job at reproducing a square wave than either of the digital consoles um let's go further into this now here's something interesting if i turn off the original this is just the two digital consoles and if i bring them out we can see that we can see that they're not right on top they're slightly offset and that is because there is a different latency in the x32 than the m32 the m32 has a slightly shorter latency very very slight the latency shift at 25 microseconds per division is about four of the five division so it's about 20 microseconds less latency in the minus m32 how does that affect this um probably doesn't who cares you know it's uh 25 microseconds is a very small amount we can actually look and see what frequency this would mess with so if i go over to like back to sine wave and if we go here we can actually raise the frequency of the generator until we see what frequency we get 180 degree phase shift on it um i'm raising it up and i'm at 20k so somewhere above 20k and there we're up um look at that fun that's what's happening at um 24k on the two digital consoles uh how we get up to that i believe the nyquist frequency um there we are at um 23k and we're almost 180 degrees out of phase so that point uh that 20 microsecond phase shift if you were to run a signal into this board a single on this board and mechanically sum them through hard wires you could get some problems but who cares about it doesn't make a difference um let's see so we saw that oh we saw what happened at 24k with these two consoles um it's interesting there that different frequencies different um uh effects there let's see how the analog console deals with that same frequency and look at that it is rock solid at 24k it um has no problem with that frequency now let's go farther let's go up to 25. now at 27k both cons both the digitals are gone they're not gonna have anything to do with that they're not even interested in trying uh whereas this inexpensive little behringer console um all three consoles of behringer has no problem doing it and we're going up to 35 38 40k 50. we're going way up there we're up to 100k and we still got some signal coming out of this thing wow um good stuff so um it goes up very high well that should manifest itself the fact that it's able to go very high should manifest itself in the ability to reproduce a square wave so let's go take a look at that and square boom and we can go down in frequency to let's get our frequencies here this is a thousand hertz and let's go up to 20k and there's our various waveforms at 20k fun uh let's get that right yellow one in there it looks like a mess so let's do them one at a time there's what we're sending to the three consoles the uh piece of wire and the analog board is reproducing the piece of wire with that um we're seeing a slight amount of phase shift or delay there and it's rounding off the front there a bit let's see how the digital console there's the x32 has decided that the square wave is not what it wants to do it will do a sine wave instead and the m32 will also do a sine wave and it will do it um a little earlier it's at a 10 microsecond delay here so we're seeing 10 about 20 microseconds actually about 18 microseconds i'm looking at um again digital consoles are not a piece of wire and the analog console does a much better job at it which is why during these tests i'm kind of nonchalantly using an inexpensive analog concert because i know it can easily perform or match the performance of what these digital consoles are trying to do at least for the tests that we're doing and anything that you'll be able to hear on youtube which even further degrades the performance if you haven't seen it i did a couple videos or two or three videos on youtube that actually test the frequency response of youtube in mono and stereo test the high frequency limit and the low frequency limits some might be worth checking out if you're interested in the limitations for the videos that i play sound on um what else do we got to do here so we showed some latency between the two uh the couple you know not very much but um i am looking at differences uh we looked at the difference between the analog console and the digital consoles we looked at how they deal with square waves and really the focus of this was for all the power of digital consoles not just these but any digital format for all the power flexibility and versatility that we gain it's important to remember that the perfect piece of digital gear still to this day cannot perform as well as a piece of wire not even close and an inexpensive analog board can get a heck of a lot closer to that the question is how do these performance differences impact what we hear and what is the relevance of that um should we discount it hey it's up there who cares or are there ramifications that show up as airiness or show that we can perceive and we can definitely measure but are they perceivable um did another video where i showed that 40k tone can be perceived with my daughter sammy and if you haven't done it next time you're in a swimming pool or in a bathtub or scuba diving plug your ears and have someone clap some rocks together if you're scuba diving listen to the fish biting the coral if you're out there um or just listen to splashing around and with your ears plugged you'll notice you do hear ultra high frequency sounds radiate through your skull not coming into ear drums other tests can show that you can hear ultra high frequency sounds not using your eardrums directly into your skull you can hear it if you rub your hand back there so it's a good probability that we are able to not a good probability we're never able to perceive things in multiple ways we can perceive vibration of the ground to an earthquake or vibration or the rocking of a boat at one hertz which is way below what we can hear we can perceive heat light which are frequencies way above what we can hear and this sonic related frequencies either vibrational or otherwise available to us that our bodies do perceive so don't put hard stops on what people can and can't do but definitely important to look at relevance and application sonic realism is only important for a very small sliver of things that we do so don't get too hung up on that either does it really need to be perfect or does it just need to be fun intense or memorable all right cool cool thanks for joining [Music] [Music] um

Channel: Dave Rat

Views: 1,577

Keywords: Dave Rat, Pro Audio, Rat Sound., Mixing Tips, Pro Audio Mixing, Pro Sound, Live Sound, SoundTools, Rat Sound Systems, Audio Engineer, Sound Engineer

Id: YYsWJhUtwlk

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021