So I’ve been carried away by all this “The Octatrack sounds flat” and “It does something to the sound” and “The converters, dear lord, the converters”, but then I just fired it up, played with if for a couple of hours, and I thought:
Really?
As in I really think it sounds great.
Sometimes, I wonder if we imagine things to justify the pursuit and purchase of new gear.
If it can’t be picked up in blind tests, it is psychological.
People have posted clips of various samplers, and it doesn’t seem to be better, worse, or even able to be recognized.
I don’t have much sampler experience to be honest but I find the OT to be clean. What you put in is what you get out. Where you get an OT “sound” tends to be through user interaction. It’s all to easy to do the same thing to a sample which generally will chuck out the same sort of sound. Maybe people get themselves confused with the actual sampling side of things and the results of the sample mangling? I dunno.
Yeah it’s a load of bollocks!
Compared to my RME UFX there’s a slight (1dB or so), attenuation above 8kHz.
I’d expect similar variations between any preamps, desk channels, converters or what have you.
Doesn’t make it bad, just different.
Gain structure is important & can result in clipping but thats true for any piece of kit.
Incidentally I have 2 snapshots on my UFX.
1 feeds everything in the studio into independent channels.
2 busses everything into the OT. Drums into A/B, everything else into C/D
Switching between the 2 snapshots there really is very little difference between the 2!
Maybe “Flat” was their intention? The sound may come off a little lackluster at times?? It’s still the mighty Octatrack!!
I know, right? There’s just something with this instrument, whenever I get back to it, it just reminds me why I love music so much.
as a sound engineer, you hear shit like this all the time - and you learn to ignore it
clients who are like “it needs to sound more green.” or “make it more birdlike and less lizardlike” or whatever…
the main problem is that everyone thinks their own personal subjective world is the same as everyone elses… or even more common, they confuse subjectivity with objectivity
objectively, sound is the resulting information derived from perturbations of the tympanic membrane caused by vibration of air molecules at a certain amplitude and frequency
subjectively, its “flat” or “phat” or whatever… thats not an objective quality
get out your spectrometers and oscilloscopes, then we can talk about what the sound actually IS
I don’t think it sounds flat; I just don’t think it adds color.
When I first bought mine I didn’t like the workflow, but I liked the sound.
I thought it might be my imagination so I wound up making a loop in Ableton and writing it out to a Wav and sending it to the OT.
I also did it with a sample I had on my computer and the OT’s CF card.
A/B’ing the loops I couldn’t tell a real difference whatsoever and neither could Ableton’s spectrum analyzer.
Once I got used to the workflow I loved it, but I don’t think it honestly makes it flat or better/different, by any means.
I think it sounds like what the source sounds like, which is preferred.
I’ve got a few hardware compressors and use them to warm things up if need be, but no more than I have to do in Ableton’s sterile sounding audio engine, so no harm no foul.
as a sound engineer, you hear shit like this all the time - and you learn to ignore it
clients who are like “it needs to sound more green.” or “make it more birdlike and less lizardlike” or whatever…
the main problem is that everyone thinks their own personal subjective world is the same as everyone elses… or even more common, they confuse subjectivity with objectivity
objectively, sound is the resulting information derived from perturbations of the tympanic membrane caused by vibration of air molecules at a certain amplitude and frequency
subjectively, its “flat” or “phat” or whatever… thats not an objective quality
get out your spectrometers and oscilloscopes, then we can talk about what the sound actually IS
^^^ THIS
Once I got over my “It makes it sound better” notion, I put some objective science to it and wound up realizing the truth; I be trippin’.
I know, right? There’s just something with this instrument, whenever I get back to it, it just reminds me why I love music so much.[/quote]
Totally agree. Its a joy to explore, very unique approach.
I just got my OT yesterday. And I was curious about the “sound”.
All I know is the couple hours I spent with it sounded fantastic via my headphones.
Wait, so Live is “sterile”? Compared to what? Is Cubase “spicy”?
This isn’t true.
On this forum, on multiple occasions, people have spotted differences between OT signals and other samplers or sample playback machines.
In fact, a new thread about this was written just this week, with uploaded sound examples.
For most Elektron users, the sound “quality” of an OT won’t be an issue. For others, it will.
Wait, so Live is “sterile”? Compared to what? Is Cubase “spicy”?
Sterile simply meaning not colored.
It’s not meant to be an insult to Ableton.
Calm down, son. 
What leads to a lot this is people playing back at 16 bit with the default time stretch algorithm engaged.
Turning that algorithm off gives a real difference to the quality of the sound.
You’re right about color, it’s largely transparent and has no “mojo” in the sense of sample conversion like other, older samplers have.
I also find differences in the dynamic range of samples from the OT - has anyone else found this?
This isn’t true.
On this forum, on multiple occasions, people have spotted differences between OT signals and other samplers or sample playback machines.
In fact, a new thread about this was written just this week, with uploaded sound examples.
For most Elektron users, the sound “quality” of an OT won’t be an issue. For others, it will.[/quote]
What I mostly remember is threads where a certain someone insists how poor the converters are, and everyone else disagrees with you, errmm I mean with that someone.
Thats an interesting story.
But once again, it’s not entirely accurate, mainly because there are many, many examples of people raising this point on multiple forums.
But hey, don’t let the facts get in your way etc…
I could spend the time and post old threads, and you could too, but whatevs…
…bottom line, I doubt anyone using the OT is cursing the audio quality they get out of it, so it’s all good…
I think that’s a mature answer.
I agree, the OT as a whole is great. Quite transparent too when you switch the time stretch off. The time stretch algorithm has a massive negative effect on the sound quality, no doubt. Playback at 24k is also a great option.
Understand, I come from a lineage of sample heads. For us, it’s also about the mojo of the conversion and playback. That’s color, and for a lot of people that is the primary expectation in a sampler.
The OT doesn’t have the mojo in this regard. But great territory can be discovered within the synthesis engines inside the box, no doubt.
lot’s of samplers have a sound. to me the OT is a what goes in is what comes out kind of sampler. i like it. sounds rad to me. nothing lost imo.
it has a hifi kind of presence.
perhaps some people can identify that in a test… that doesn’t make it bad. people can pick out a 303 in tests too.
shrug.
edit:
OT sounds great. has so much power for processing/mangling/sequencing.