OT sound quality improvement by disabling filters?

Somewhere in the vast online resources of people complaining about the OT’s sound quality (namely that it sounds) I came across a post where someone mentioned hearing a significant improvement in sound quality when disabling all track filters (which by default are enabled). I tried this and noticed a slight improvement but not sure it’s worth the trouble to disable for playing live. I may need the filter on a few tracks for live improv. Has anyone here performed live with filters disabled (or most of them disabled) and did you notice a significant improvement in sound quality?

In a live situation. No. No real difference. Sound systems are always different depending on where you are anyway, so tiny tiny things like the ever so slight change that having no fx om your sample makes… yeah, you cant tell. I dont worry about it. Having a good clean mix is way more important and makes much more impact on your live sound than disabling a filter.

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I can hear the difference. For many sounds, it’s inconsequential, but if a track has delicate high frequency content I’ll remove the filter. 90% of the time I don’t think it’s noticeable in a practical sense.

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If you want to be sure to be neutral, it’s better to set Fx to NONE, for sure !
In a default template, would I set them to NONE? Maybe. Would I use both Fx after? Highly probable!

I noticed it when I used Recorders + Flex for overdub, resampling the recordings. After 20 passes or less, the sound was getting very muddy. Disabling Fx1 Filter changed that.

Really depends on audio material, harmonic contents, levels…I like to make tests with normalized sines or white noise, and with some fx on/off switching it’s really noticeable.
@defenestration made an interesting video about it.

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any digital fir filter will introduce phase shifting and could cause some kind of sound degradation
but imo the chances that you will notice it in a live situation a very slim since it will hardly be the weakest link in the audio chain so if you ask me, dont sweat it

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just discovered that the click/DC offset I encountered during re-sampling silence in this video is related to the default filter on FX1; seems changing the filter to any of the other FX (have not exhaustively tested) makes this DC offset go away, you can then change back to the filter and the DC offset is still gone, but power cycle the OT and the DC offset from the filter returns :thinking:

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There’s a difference but not big enough that it bothers me. The ones that really have a big impact even in their “unity” settings are the EQs and lo-fi.

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Well this was a help for me to have the topic brought up anyway, since I by habit keep the obvious choice of filter on 1 due to it’s wide applications…
to keep it in the back of my mind sortof deal… like inverting a waveform… if there is something I am trying to work out sonically that I can’t quite put my finger on.
We may need actual null tests tho, given the placebo effect…

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