OT - sound quality

[GovernorSilver]

The OP last posted in Dec. 2018 and created the OP in Sep. 2018. I doubt he will ever come back to change the topic of this thread.

The recurring debate over OT sound quality is one of the reasons I don’t really push the OT on potential buyers in various forums. 90% of the time, the person does not really know what they want anyway, and is just too proud to admit he really doesn’t know the difference between the OT and more popular drum samplers in the mold of MPC and Electribe. I personally don’t consider the OT to be a drum sampler but those guys always talk about it like it is.

[NoiseLab]

I must agree that the sound quality of the OT is not that great, no kidding! Even the sound quality on the sampling part of the AR mk2 could be better.

Saying this many times before by comparison with my ‘old samplers’ Akai S1100, SSC Kyma but also new like the Waldorf Quantum.

[darenager]

Also I don’t think well known recording artists like Tejada, Surgeon etc would be using OT if it did not sound good enough.

Or to put it bluntly:

Octatrack, good enough for Tejada, but not good enough for random guy on internet.

[NoiseLab]

@darenager

Tejada, Surgeon

Don’t shoot me, but I never heard about these artists

[darenager]

Quite well respected Techno artists with long careers.

[darenager]

Also Octa Chainer forum super hero @Abhoth did this test, worth checking out:

Do the Elektron Octatrack AD/DA converters colour the sound?

[NoiseLab]

Oki, I just have little affinity with Techno in general.

[darenager]

No worries, I am hardly up to speed on tons of artists myself.

[NoiseLab]

Anyway, I had fun with the OT and used it like 3 years on jam sessions. Need also different ways to work with sampling and got my eye on the Pecussa SSP because of it’s 16 inputs and 8 outputs.

About sound quality I could add that the Akai S1100 got something special maybe because of the discrete way of AD/DA. SSC Kyma is just paramount in sound quality and Waldorf Quantum more towards hifi in a controlled matter. For the rest it’s Sound Devices 32 bit float for field/foley recording. Even before with 24 bit the content it sounded less detailed with ambiance and pinpointing sound sources on the OT. Maybe the OT it’s not perfectly phase coherent?

[Blasted_pingin]

@darenager

The problem when people make sweeping statements like this is that it could put potential purchasers off

Is that a problem? Are you working for Elektron sales dept?

@darenager

Quite well respected Techno artists with long careers.

In rethoric it is called a peripherical argument. Quality of sound has some subjectivity and many people have long careers with what i consider being a shit sound.

[1ticio]

Digitakt:

Octatrack MKI:

Octatrack MKII:

[Fin25]

@Blasted_pingin

Is that a problem? Are you working for Elektron sales dept?

It’s not about sales, it’s about having a constant supply of new OT users asking questions and making us all feel super smart and cool.

[ViolentMeals]

[thoughtstarZ]

@NoiseLab

Saying this many times before by comparison with my ‘old samplers’ Akai S1100, SSC Kyma but also new like the Waldorf Quantum.

Okay. Got it. So, what exactly does “is not that great” mean? Can you describe what freq is missing, or boosted, or… I’m just wondering. Would love to hear some examples. Maybe record the same samples with each sampler type of thing. Put it through a spectrum analyzer? Maybe we can learn something. Most likely, I would guess, you are having a gain staging problem. But, hey, maybe you are right. This thread is interesting to me when people have examples for me to listen to.

[1ticio]

Is there any ‘data compression’ or other conversion occuring once the audio is inside, for the OT to do all of its tricks on 8 stereo streams of audio?

• ie - old samplers used their own audio data format, not WAV.
• ie - the modern Akais convert all imported audio to 32 bit; also everything recorded through its audio inputs is recorded at 32 bit. Don’t know about any conversion happening inside, is it still in its native WAV format when the Akai is processing the audio?

Don’t want to ruffle any feathers here, just curious.

[thoughtstarZ]

@darenager

Tic Tic – 31 Jan 21

Do the Elektron Octatrack AD/DA converters colour the sound?

I keep coming across forum posts or facebook questions from people worrying about the quality of the converters in the Octatrack. What usually follows tends to be quite heated discussions about whe…

This is a good example. I can’t tell. I do have soundboy ears, but, yeah. Great link. Octatrack1_Beat.wav - Google Drive

[Supercolor_T-120]

Since I already had everything powered up but got interrupted and don’t have time to actually do any recording tonight, and this thread made me curious, I just ran a quick test.

Started a default project. Changed to 24 bit. Set DIR A/B and master volume to 127, all other settings left default. Looped a 440Hz tone and then white noise through both the OT (via DIR, so the audio wasn’t touching any of the track level processing and I was getting the most neutral signal path possible through it) and a direct loopback connection. I didn’t go through the trouble of actually repatching and using the same input and output on my interface or anything, they’re all matched well enough that using two different inputs and outputs is more than good enough. The audio sources were Reaper’s built in tone and noise generators, set to their default settings of -12dBFS. Here are the results:

440Hz tone through Octatrack:

440Hz tone direct loopback:

White noise through Octatrack:

White noise direct loopback:

It’s a little hard to see (I should have set Span to smooth more) but there was a very, very slight rolloff above about 17.5kHz through the Octatrack, just shy of 1db by the time it hit 20kHz. Otherwise it was identical to the loopback for all intents and purposes.

Also worth mentioning that the OT’s input LED was pinned fully in the red for these tests but as you can see from the 440Hz tone there wasn’t any distortion or clipping at all, which just reinforces my experience that the OT’s input LEDs go red when there’s still plenty of headroom, and it sounds best when they’re in the yellow to orange range.

I didn’t check phase response or anything and don’t care enough to bother with that but if someone else did it I’d be interested to see the results - from what I’ve read our hearing is WAY more sensitive to phase than to frequency, so that could still be relevant I guess. I think the OT sounds pretty neutral and this just confirms it more IMO.

EDIT: it also looks like in the 440 tone measurements there’s maybe a .1db volume drop through the Octatrack, but that signal path also has more than twice as much cable (a 10’ balanced cable to the OT’s input and a 15’ back from its output, vs. a single 10’ for the direct loopback measurement) and that could easily be what’s causing the tiny volume drop AND the tiny rolloff in the air band.

EDIT 2: This was a late MKI bought about a month before the MKII announcement.

[thoughtstarZ]

Nice. Thanks for the effort.

[square_wave]

I wonder if some of the arguments here are missing a major factor: compression

I don’t have an OT, so I have no opinion on which is “better,” but I do have a DT, and the master compressor is on by default. Converters nowadays are all pretty good, and if they create any perceptible difference it’s a subtle one. Compressors, on the other hand, can easily make a very obvious difference in sound. I would suspect that if people are noticing a difference between these machines it has to do with compression. Even if they had identical compressors if they had different default setting that could create a pretty big perceived difference in sound.

As I said, I don’t have an OT, but I love the sound of the DT. I feel like anything I put in there sounds amazing. Maybe that’s because of some fairly heavy-handed default compressor settings, and maybe the OT is not set up this way?

[Supercolor_T-120]

Good point! I’ve never used a Digitakt so I don’t have any real frame of reference but that sounds pretty plausible.