THD Hot Plate - Line Out - Can it be improved?

[Steve Conner]

Oh, I thought those were brands of solid-state guitar amp. I didn't realise that there are now companies that make a living selling cabinet impulse files. I feel old

[J M Fahey]

@ Steve Conner.
Funny thing is that many of those "cabinet impulses" may not be real at all !!!
Instead of spending a Million Dollars buying a Ton of cabinets, the most desirable ones being made of pure "Unobtainium", I can easily imagine a guy (with gifted ears of course), working in his basement, listening to old records , and creating all kinds of interesting response curves with shrewd use of a couple equalizers.
Nice cottage industry.
Which, by the way, would work smoothly because people who buy impulses usually has *not* listened to the "real" cabinets, except the few widely available such as 1960 with G12T75 and such.
And the people who have, such as Eric Clapton playing/recording through some old Marshall cabinet he bought new 40 years ago, couldn't care less about impulses ... they have the real thing !!!
Just sayin'.

[Steve Conner]

Hmmm... I expect the impulse responses are being made by studios who already have an acoustically treated room and a bunch of nice speaker cabinets and mics. It's just a new way to make money out of their gear investment.

But you have a good point, there's no need for the impulse responses to be based on real gear at all. Maybe I should get to work and make some.

[led-hendrix]

I partly agree that impulse responses aren't always needed. Jimmy Page's Black Dog guitar parts come to mind, he sent the guitar signal through a couple of modified compressors and EQ'd the output, but very often you don't want your guitar parts to be so upfront and raw in the mix. Impulses capture the resonances and reverberation of the cab and room which gives you depth. I know that you're thinking you could just EQ the attenuated amp signal then add reverb for depth, but I've tried it and 1. It takes too long to obtain a reasonable tone, and 2. With reverb slapped on top of a very dry distorted guitar signal it's incredibly difficult to get a natural sounding result which blends with other tracks.

In an attempt to defend some of the people who sell impulses, here are some images to show how complex they can be. It's very difficult to get these results with EQ and reverb: