… and its marketing is deceptieve (ie. all the “but I thought I had 2gigs of ram” threads).
Yes, this is off-topic, feel free to flag.
2 Likes
Thats interesting. I had no idea about that.
I don’t run out of RAM on my MPC luckily, or that would be super annoying.
Jam on top?! You absolute heathen!
1 Like
I did, with multi-sampled instruments with multiple layers. There’s still plenty of it so it’s ok, but a streaming-based approach would be better (like in Octatrack or Blackbox)
1 Like
A lot of electronic music was made with 16 bit and it still sounds freaking great. Just saying.
Another thing i want to add without downplaying the OT sound quality at all:
If you record one sample and play it back you might hear no degration. But if you put 10 or more sounds into it and make a track out of it it could be that the “unhearable” minimal coloration of the device can now be heard.
So when you would make a beat on an MPC 2000 or something and then make the same beat on let’s say a SP-404 you might hear the difference even though you wouldn’t notice it on only one sample.
My experience with samplers is that i only get a feeling for how they really sound after i used them for a year or something. For example i noticed that the SP-404 had more low end than the MPC 500 i used. But only years later when i listened to my old beats and after i already had sold both.
I hope you didn’t regret to sell some great sounding gear years after! 
Apples and oranges :
OT AB test : comparison between source / capture
1 Like
i wish i hadn’t sold the 404. but that’s why i’m interested in the mk2 a bit.
1 Like
ye I noticed, but that one is special!! You gotta love how OP posted such a comically bad example to then disappear completely, leaving a never-ending cat-fight behind himself 
5 Likes
I think that IF you are bothered with your OT when it comes to the sound quality, clearly the OT’s USPs aren’t really grabbing you in the way they should, and moving on from it would be my recommendation.
1 Like
Well this escalated quickly. Again.
Funny how many Black Friday VST deals are for plugins to degrade sound.
I guess if somebody made an Octatrack sound VST, people would complain it made no real difference.
5 Likes
Of course it wouldn’t (you need to tick the “add timestretch” box from the drop down)
4 Likes
OT is definitely second, the open hi hat/cymbal sounds quite a bit different. I like both.
EDIT: I haven’t read anything in the thread past the clip yet, so I don’t know if you’ve revealed which is which already.
EDIT 2: I guess it was the opposite, I’m actually pretty surprised because the hi hat sounds slightly distorted in the second one, and is a tiny bit quieter relative to the rest of the instruments, so I assumed it was the Octatrack and it was some truncation in the internal signal path that was dirtying up the hats. So the difference was pretty obvious to me but in this case the Octatrack actually sounded more hi-fi than the direct signal. Weird.
4 Likes
My theory is that it’s a combination of phase distortion from the antialias filters on the converters, and truncation distiortion (and possilby sometimes some aliasing) internally, since I would be shocked if the OT signal path is using floating point math, and even more shocked if it includes dither after every stage of processing in the signal path, and it would have to do one or the other to avoid truncation.
It’s all very, very subtle and when I can hear it at all I usually like it. What I’m hearing is very similar (but more obvious) than what happens if I accidentally render a mix without dither (I dither my monitor chain, so I never hear undithered audio while I’m mixing, but even at 24 bit I can tell something’s wrong if I accidentally left dithering off). But a lot of really great sounding albums were mixed and mastered without any dither (at 16 bit, no less) back in the 90s before engineers understood dithering, and also Pro Tools didn’t use floating point math OR dither between stages in the mix buss until like 2012, so anything mixed on Pro Tools before then had a bunch of stages of truncation on every track. So does it really matter? Yes and no, but mostly no.
The OT automatically pads recordings -12db, which is two bits of resolution. That alone is going to change the sound a little, but not much (effectively nothing at 24 bit, because 22 bit is still plenty; at 16 bit you’re getting 14 bit audio and that’s still really enough - most high quality 16 bit converters only have an effective number of bits of about 14 bits anyway, maybe 15 if you’re at the level where a pair of channels of conversion costs as much as the entire Octatrack - but it means getting your inputs hot enough is pretty important at 16 bit.
I’ve definitely spent quite a bit of time and effort in some mixes using plugins, hardware or both to get similar coloration to the way the OT “degrades” sound.
1 Like
Everytime I open this thread I imagine what Mark Broom, a well known professional who regularly uploads octatrack videos that then usually become his finished tracks, would have to say on this matter? I wonder if he hears the sound drop, or even cares at all if he does? 
1 Like
I’m not speaking on the OT here, but more this notion in general - I’m really puzzled by the idea, that what I care about, or find important, should, in any way, be informed by, what people with a higher level of succes might think.
The subject always comes up, in discussions like this, along the lines of ‘if it’s good enough for x, then it’s good enough for me’.
I don’t care what anybody thinks about a piece of gear - if I don’t like it, it’s not good enough for me. And I don’t automatically assume, that a given level of succes, makes you an expert on my taste.
3 Likes
It‘s interesting because he is someone who makes a living using the tool being discussed here so his input would be at least as relevant as all of this back and forth on this thread, if not more so since in a sense his paycheck is somewhat dependent on him using this tool. And I am definitely using the word dependent lightly here but I hope my point comes across.
I genuinely don’t understand your position. But I’ll die defending your right to it 
2 Likes
I just think his take on all this would be interesting is all 
1 Like
He probably does not care, he DJ’s and releases music on vinyl, which has nowhere near the dynamic range and channel separation of the OT.
2 Likes