mainly cpu issues for me @ jon (esp now i’ve commited to TP2) .. also most of the time i use a 3% diff between tracks max. this means with trance i can use a bpm range of 133 - 138 and run at 136 with no keylock and still sounding minty fresh.
As an owner of an Audiofire I can testify to better audio output (purely subjective). No DVS though means I sacrifice this for a more pleasurable performance experience through the Audio 8.
My tests found that if you start straining the computer and are using tracks with large differences in BPM (and trying to match them) keylock will degrade the sound of the track. The actual sound coming from the speakers might be fine, but the track will lose its polish.
This is what I found anyways.
so, progressive trance is ~90bpm? 
Funktion One is damn good…no doubt!
But I prefer TurboSound and Opus.
@ Sarasin & Jes - thanks guys - I’m realising more & more how having a dedicated machine with massive specs (500G HD, 8G RAM, i5 variable speed processor, stripped W7, iTunes & Traktor ONLY) spoils me. CPU usage is never a consideration for me - maybe it should be. Going to revisit all my settings. I was astounded as to how ‘crisp’ my sound was with keylock.
I only ever use Funktion One. This is because the company I rig for uses Funktion One and we get 50% off hire.
I was using it on saturday night and play 320 mp3’s and it sounded perfectly fine. We were using 2 x 118’s and 2 x res4’s, and it sounded sweet.
We set up a nightclub in our town (The Vue) and used 4 x 218’s and 6 x Res 4’s on each side, and some smart arse decided to play some 128 Mp3’s. He thought the speakers we to quiet and had the mixer bouncing off the red.
As you can imagine, he was kicked off within 10minutes and the next lad went on and played an extra 90minutes with no complaints.
But as for the difference between .WAV and .Mp3, on a Funktion One set up like we use for standard 18th’s 21st’s etc, 320 Mp3s are perfectly fine. But as soon as you get on the big set ups (i.e. 4 218’s etc) you start to notice a slight difference.
I still use 320’s though
(Btw using a Audio-2…I don’t believe the hype over the Audiofire)
It’s amazing how much bullshit you get out of people who are really good at audio. It’s like they don’t know they’ve been being sold snake oil all their lives and actually believe what they say.
There’s a very, very highly respected Mastering Engineer out there who had a word clock custom built based off Cesium decay because vibrating crystals weren’t precise enough and he thought he could still hear jitter. Since most people don’t know what that is…click here. Yeah.
He also prefers for people to mail him the original hard drive things were recorded onto because different brands of CDs sound different and copying digital files degrades their quality the same way copying analog tape does.
The guy from Function One–if he really said that about space–takes the cake.
They’re speakers. They use magnets to move something that’s vaguely like a drum head. They’re not magic.
There’s also one at Set, and I think Mansion. They’re all over the place. They did sound really good, but nothing to write home about. Frankly, I think clubs aren’t the place for an impecable sound system…people are talking and drinking and running into each other and dancing and making shit-tons of noise and moving around and climbing on things………you can’t tune to that. And they’re all so damn loud that pristine audio quality really doesn’t matter.
I’d rather clubs spend that money on other things…but that’s just me.
It’s subjective all-right. Not criticizing that. I’m just wondering what you’ve compared it to. I’ve used some pretty nice sound cards and monitors at least in passing…and I think the differences are tiny.
Oh yeah…and about the actual topic….
Key Lock doesn’t really bother me, but I might be lucky…it doesn’t seem to smear over transients in my stuff as much as other people’s…though IHNFC why that would be the case. Maybe it’s just a (Wav + Key Lock) > (mp3 + Key Lock) situation. I can hear it if i look for it…it never jumps out at me on the systems I normally play on…at least, not as much as the transients being faster/slower anyway and the track sounding screwed up.
I use the Xone EQ model because the only EQ I really want is the xone hi-mid, which I’ve said before. I’d prefer for them to not add noise for no reason (subtly color the sound even when the EQs are all at unity, I believe it says in the manual) and I don’t actually like what xone mixers sound like any better than anything else that doesn’t suck…I just like that one EQ frequency + bandwidth. I do think that the Classic EQ sounds audibly better on my systems. Not just different…I think it sounds better. But it’s not enough better to sacrifice that hi-mid EQ knob.
Traktor’s limiter sounds like you took a cheese grater to everything in your signal path. I don’t know what they did to make it sound so bad.
And I play really quiet coming out of Traktor. I can’t figure out exactly how Traktor’s gain structure works…but it seems to sound the same set to just barely not clip my sound card outputs as it does outputting at like -10dB (assuming you have a gain stage right after the SC output). I think it works better that way.
And I can’t really hear a difference between my Audio 2 and my FS Open, which was supposed to be a re-branded focusrite or something. I also can’t hear a difference between those and my MBP’s internal sound card on any system/headphones I’ve used the internal output with…which pretty much means KRKs, headphones, and personal HiFi systems that I think are really overrated. Nor the SL1. Or really anything else I’ve used until you get into the $5,000+ recording interfaces.
Other than not doing the same stupid things that people have been telling DJs not to do since DJing was invented (like using a Mixer’s master as a volume control) and using things that aren’t broken…I think a lot of the argument is just selling snake oil.
Also…I only buy wav files now. Mostly, that’s because I realized they weren’t functionally more expensive than mp3s and sometimes I like editing tracks. I don’t do that with mp3s because it’s dumb to re-compress it when you’re done or have a huge wav-sized file sitting around with mp3-quality data in it.
Tested Audio 8 and Echofire in a converted and dead garage, both sides of room covered by two long shelves of vinyl (approx 10000).
Cards plugged straight into power amp and directly to monitors.
Subjectively the sound from the Echofire was better to my ears.
Will post some vinyl rip comparisons when i get time in a different thread. Slightly off track, sorry guys.
this is what i love to hear, loving all the awesome responses in this thread keep it up guys!
How can Audiofire be the best? What about Apogee Duet 2 or many others in that price range?
So what is the difference between wav’s and 320’s on a big system? Did you try comparing vinyl too? Mates tell me vinyl sounds better on big sound systems but I’ve never been able to test the difference.
3 main notable differences about mp3 vs WAV, or any other lossless, 320 mp3 looses about 1.3% volume, aswell as adding small amounts of artifacts (very bad unwanted noises but usually unhearable unless listening at 120+db), other then that all wavs have vs properly encoded mp3’s is an extra 2khz of dynamic range, meaning on speakers that go passed 20khz and upto 22 or more will be able to utilize the wav, where the mp3 will be more ideal on the average speaker that can’t pass 20khz, here is the differences in 2 beatport releases, 1 320 MP3, 1 AIFF
so if the track itself doesn’t use 20khz to 22khz range then there won’t be any difference right? sorry i know almost nothing about production…
You know you can hear very little above 16- 17KHz if you are not:
A: a dog
B: a 2 year old
sad but true.
test yourself…
There is a huge difference however, your loudspeakers need to be large enough and posses good quality to hear the difference.
Bear in mind even an mp3 @ 320 kilobytes per second uses compression to consolidate the size of the file. Compression will always hamper the dynamics of an audio track. This is the reason many prefer .wav (no compression added) files to mp3s.
the human hearing curve changes drastically passed 100db, we accually are able to pick them up but our ears have there own frequency curve, the volume needs to be really loud and on speakers that also can play those frequencies in relative loudness to the rest of the sounds (completelty flat eq is always best for a properly mastered track to be enjoyed how it was suppost to be), its unfortunate so many cheap speakers have to glamorize certain frequencies just to sound decent because they are so cheaply made.
but i know that any lossless that reaches 22khz instead of 20 with a properly encoded mp3, when using my synheiser hd25, wich accually have a range to 22, everything sounds noticeably better and the highs are alot more clear, dynamic music is always better if you have the speakers to properly hear it, but as i said earlier, this is only noticeable at really high volume’s, for headphones 1/4 jack is almost nessesarry unless you have a really loud amp on your soundcard like me
Im pretty sure he was joking, at least i hope he was… I highly doubt thats actually a claim tony andrews made.
and the rest