soundcraft ghost console modification

[angelothewolf]

I knew that Creation Audio Labs was involved somehow.

What you mean?

[J M Fahey]

Looks that they are famous for this Mod?

Which, unless I understood wrong, you are doing by yourself?

Just curious: do they offer a CD, PDF or video explaining it in detail or you are , say, "recreating" it from their Ad /page descriptions?

Do they offer a step by step guide?

[km6xz]

I am concerned that the client is not aware of the compromises required if he read about it on the internet. That could put you into a difficult position of being responsible for every change in performance, reliability and his perception of what he expects in contrast to what he has.

Boards are tools, and great recordings have been done on all consoles ever made. They have no....absolutely no... impact on the quality of a record as judged by the end user, the customer of the recording. A better course of action would have been to ask what he was having problems with in his recordings....not getting signed, too much noise, distortion, limited DR, etc and not assume any of his real problems are related to the board. Reliability, routing flexibility and repeatability are more important characteristics for a pro use of a board than specs. This mod only reduces its function in those the first and third of those areas. I assume the customer is a beginner in music production if he is getting his ideas from the internet chatter. Maybe he believes his problem with his clients or his project not wowing labels or promoters is his gear. It is not but a beginner always assumes it is his equipment and not his lack of song writing skill or talent. Same with guitar players, the lower in skill and talent, the more they assume their lack of audience acceptance because of not having the magic transformers or special sound of some 50 year old NOS tube is the reason.
That board before it was hacked was a better mixing tool than recorded some of the most important and beloved records of all time. The only thing changed so far is it is less reliable.

You say it sounded better with IC swaps. How did those better sounds measure, in what quantified measurements? If you can't measure it, you have no reasonable way of judging changes and whether better or worse. In what way did it sound better without basing it on the very significantly variable original signal source. Maybe it is much worse but in a way that hides defects in the original source.
I think you have gotten yourself into a no-win situation where his perceptions alone determine whether it was successful.

My advice to beginners who think their amp or outboard gear needs to be modified for the true goodness of their creations to get out, is to sell it and buy what think think sounds like their work will sound in its full glory. The reality of course is that his work, if it is not well received by an audience, is due to an absence of things audiences care about....songs that mean something to them.
Find out what his real problem is and address that. Assuming the board is his problem is not addressing the real problem.

[J M Fahey]

Agree with Stan, of course, but in this case I would take a more pragmatic approach.

As in:

the Customer already believes this is a killer Mod, so he will hear improvements, be they real or not
but to believe he'll check that you did it "by the book" , he'll "listen with his eyes" , so in this case I'd basically follow the Creation Audio Labs blueprint as accurately as possible (by the way they mention that power supply beefing is a necessity) and show him what you did, as in:
"here's the specified machined Op Amp sockets, here's the OPA2604 and LME49860, look at the beefed up supply", before any listening tests.
I'm sure you'll pass with flying colours.

And if you have any small stability problem somewhere, judicious application of some 100pF ceramic cap here and there will solve it.

Don't do it halfway because he'll later blame you for that.

[angelothewolf]

Juan Manuel you are right, im not folowing any Creation Audio mod, and i couldnt find any detail of their mod. i end up replacing the preamp stage opamps and all the 5532 for the LME and caps with very good results. for the PSU i replace rectifiers and reservoir caps for bigger/better ones and thats it, the console is now drawing less than 500mA more than before, and is sounding better for my ears and for my client.

I do not agree at all with km6xz " If you can't measure it, you have no reasonable way of judging changes and whether better or worse" ...i can measure S/N ratio and THD, but sometimes "better" specs does not means better sounding to my ears, wich in this case and many others, is my preferred tool.

listening and comparing the console before and after i think that the fast slew rate of the new opamps has a lot to do with the improving, seems like i can hear the difference in transient response, what you think??

Now the console is back in the studio ready to work, thanks everybody for the help!

cheers!

[Enzo]

Better specs don't always mean better sounding, but I think the point is that if something sounds better, you OUGHT to be able to measure why.

[S2udio]

i think that the fast slew rate of the new opamps has a lot to do with the improving, seems like i can hear the difference in transient response, what you think??

As always with this op amp modding lark , I guarantee you are deluding yourself.
A good recap is usually sufficient .

[km6xz]

Another guarantee is that those who are certain minor circuit changes will mean better music as observed by the audience does not have anything an audience would want in the first place. It is hi-fi model hoo-doo nonsense. But if someone thinks it is better without defining how it is better, it is dubious at best whether it actually is.
There has never been a great song that has sold one less copy based on technical sound quality, but many, most, songs not worth listening to where sound quality was stressed over more than song quality.
I get that all the time from amateur recordists, they are certain that some esoteric cap or wire change will make their recording better. No, it doesn't, never does and it is an excuse for song not being well received, when the reason is always the same, it is not a good song.

The hardest part of music is writing good songs, it is rare even for the best song writers. Yet beginners always assume they are one magic cable or one more $1000 put into monitors away from having a good recording.
Guitar players are the same, until they master the instrument, if ever, they insist their gear is holding them back or why people avoid listening to them.
When confronted with such a home recordist pining for the proper mod to turn their song into a masterpiece, I ask them for examples of their work that was successful. Crickets....Maybe they don't know what to look for if they are so certain they know the missing link, yet never had an example to prove that only the gear was the fault.
They would be amazed how little difference gear makes if they knew the vast variety of gear that has been used on recordings that struck a cord with audiences. A Behringer 8 bus is just as capable of generating a great song and be touted as sounding great as a Neve or API.

They would also be surprised the real reason producers often used external preamp modules. But every amateur believes it is needed just because it is often present. No one can identify what sort of gear was used when hearing a recording even if many people claim they can....and fail in actual testing of their certainty. I did a project that started with a classic Neve but mid way the project was switched to another board because the Neve was not versatile enough for monitoring. Since many knew what the project started on, but did not know it was switched when it was nominated for a Grammy, there was lots of talk of how important that Neve sound was into Stevens analog decks. ALL the tracks that ended up on the record, unknown to them, were from 3 DA-88's and a Mackie 32x8 plus 24 channel side car. And those trusting their ears to identify the gear on the record were pros. So audiences would have no chance of identifying the gear in a finished recording, and more importantly, would never bother or care about the gear. Why is the most recorded mic, on well regarded recordings, the lowly SM-57 if magic tube mics are required? Why are the most used near(close) field monitors crappy NS-10s if magic high end speakers are required? And why did they become standard? The answer has nothing to do with sound quality.

The song is everything. If it sounds bad it is not competent use of whatever gear is being used, if it is not appealing it is not a good song or its a good song masked by a bad performance. In both cases it is human fault and nothing to do with gear. Gear does not enter into it.

[Jazz P Bass]

Nice post Stan.

Water Cooler Talk: "Have you heard that new recording from 'XXX Band'?

I don't know which mixer they used but I can certainly discern that the slew rate of the opamps is insufficient."

[Leo_Gnardo]

<Jazz P Bass:I can certainly discern that the slew rate of the opamps is insufficient.>

Sounds Fizzy.

[Jazz P Bass]

"Come to think of it, maybe it was the CMRR that was lacking".

[J M Fahey]

Well, basically agree with gear importance but let's not turn this into Op Amp improvement bashing.

Good specs don't hurt

That said, I can understand that a mixer based on LM741 (yes, long ago there were such beasts ) can be audibly improved by switching to better ones, from 4558 class or TL072/LF353/etc.

Going from clearly slew limited highs well within the Audio band into , say, 24kHz or above is something anybody will hear (I'm talking about a microphone plugged into the mixer, which then directly drives a power amp and good speakers, not the final sound on record which involves many more steps) ; but going from , say, 24kHz to 100kHz bandwidth won't be as apparent, if any.

That said, I think that if a sound change is heard, (better or worse, the concept is the same), then a measurable change must be found.

Not necessarily the other way round, since by now instrumentation is far more sensitive, acurate and above all, reproducible, than plain hearing.

FWIW I grew (think late 60's ; early 70's) in the era of subjective Hi Fi qualification , those famous reports similar to: "these speakers project forward Ella Fitzgerald's voice on "Jazz Voices" Chicago Sessions #3266, are muddy sounding playing Mahler's 5th , Deutsche Grammophon Classic Series CS0038 and show perfect distance and space in Takanaka Jazz Trio "Jazz from Tokio" Nikato Records pp827" BUT later I noticed that they were verbal descriptions trying to describe horribly spiky speaker response, in very poor rooms, we were talking about 10dB peaks and dips.

And yes, such gross deviations are quite audible, and impact on different voice/instrument ranges.
Were those subjective reviews useful?

Frankly ... not ... quite useless.
They applied to that particular speaker in that particular room, in a particular position.

Now we have much better speakers, are free from "mechanicals" (such as cartridge or needle problems) and Electronics are out of the question, even the humblest $2 chipamp way surpasses classic Hi Fi requirements .

Which if I don't remember wrong, were something like "flat frequency response between 30Hz and 15kHz, at no more than 1% distortion" .

[km6xz]

But your room, even the best, has nulls and peaks spanning 40-60 db. Luckily, our brains filter out almost all the garbage...and good stuff to give an impression of the sound that has very little to do with reproduction or production characteristics. If the message seeming compelling, the brain can do wonders in making us aware of good stuff even if it is not even on the source material. Many times people have stated a recording I was involved with had great imaging and placement of sound sources "on the sound stage". Surem whatever you say buddy....there was no sound stage, all the instruments, recorded sequentially, sitting in the same spot, or in an iso booth or tie lined from another room in the complex or even over ISDN from across the world. It is all an illusion but the best illusions are those we imagine our selves....we are the easiest people to fool. One thing that all this cork sniffing ignores is that we have incredibly short memories for sound, and after 1/2 a second or two rely on memory of the impression of the sound rather than remembering the sound itself. Maybe recordists should study more psychoacoustics and less spec sheets to understand how to create those impressions that last. A/B tests with dynamic material is notoriously inaccurate and the idea of making a listening test, then swapping some ICs or a capacitor, reinstalling the board and claiming "it sounds better" is nuts. After all the great systems for repro and production I have dealt with, one speaker stood out as sounding out of this world....a pair of McIntosh bookshelf speakers. They have a rep of being terrible, worthless but none sounded better to me at that moment in time. How much influence the mushrooms I had consumed played in that evaluation is beside the point. We can talk ourselves into hearing things that is not in the material at all, like instrument placement on the sound stage.

Solve all the problems with gear by just writing good songs and performing them in an interesting appealing way and no more problems with poor sounding wires or pesky oxygen infused connectors or those dreaded non-phase aligned power cords.
The best sound system in the world can't fool a 5 year old as to whether it is real so whatever people are listening to or listening for, is not such a good impersonation of real.

[S2udio]

Solve all the problems with gear by just writing good songs and performing them in an interesting appealing way and no more problems with poor sounding wires or pesky oxygen infused connectors or those dreaded non-phase aligned power cords.
The best sound system in the world can't fool a 5 year old as to whether it is real so whatever people are listening to or listening for, is not such a good impersonation of real.

Absolutely Agree there..