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The Creative Music Recording Magazine
Allen Sides
Ocean Way & Beyond
David J
Love and Rockets & Bauhaus
Tony Green
Garage Jazz & David J
Greg Wilkinson
Oakland Metal Maven
Robin Ashley
of Phoenix Audio in Behind the Gear
Music Reviews
w/ Jon Regen
Gear Reviews
Issue No. 106
measurement
Mar/Apr 2015
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I also passed the unit over to my studio cohort Martin
Feveyear for a test drive. Martin works almost exclusively on an
SSL, so I valued the opinion of someone that has logged many
hours with the Quad Compressor. His impression was that the
BC1-S is “extremely close to the SSL,” with heavier compression
through it sounding a little more musical than through the SSL.
He also noted that the BC1-S is very clean, with a touch more
upper-midrange presence. He thought his SSL desk compressor
may have the BC1-S beat by a hair in smoothness and depth.
I personally used the BC1-S primarily on the mix bus,
typically A/B’ing and printing mixes with it and my Manley
Variable Mu. I produce and mix in a variety of styles, so having
the BC1-S on hand as one of several options was a huge
benefit. On a couple occasions, I used the BC1-S for
compression duties while following it with the Variable Mu for
limiting. This was really the best of both worlds for me —
marrying the punch of the BC1-S to the warmth of the Manley.
For other compression duties, the BC1-S performed
admirably. It was nicely aggressive on bass, as well as solid and
transparent reining in vocal peaks and sticking a guitar solo in
place. It was hard to find anything on which I felt this
compressor was an absolute-no.
We all have our favorite pieces of gear, and this quickly
became one of mine. It can operate invisibly as a utility, or it
can add character when I want to dig in a bit. Once you know
that this particular flavor is available, you will want to return
to it frequently. There are times when this sound is exactly
what an individual element or a whole mix needs to bring it
home. Anyone looking for a fantastic and reasonably affordable
version of the classic SSL VCA compressor cannot go wrong
with the TK Audio BC1-S. ($1349 street; www.tkaudio.se)
–Geoff Stanfield <geoffstanfield.com>
Audio Kitchen
The Big Trees tube amp
& processor
Is it an amp or a pedal... or a DI... or outboard gear?!? The
Big Trees really is all things to all people. Having used the
Audio Kitchen Little Chopper guitar amp [Tape Op #82 online]
a lot in the studio, I know Audio Kitchen’s sound and attention
to detail well. When I heard about The Big Trees, I had to get
a hold of one. Principally, it’s a 2.5 W guitar amplifier in a pedal
form factor. It has two outputs: one speaker level and one
instrument/line level. The speaker output is specified as
“8 ohms(ish),” but Steve Crow at Audio Kitchen assured me
that you can connect it to any impedance cabinet: “It will get
a little hotter at 2 ohms, but it should be fine.”
Using the instrument output, The Big Trees functions
similarly to other guitar pedals — the footswitch selecting
between overdrive and clean channels. The Dirt channel
features gain, Root (bass), Branch (treble), Dirt, and output
controls. The Dirt control operates as a power-amp attenuator
or “headroom” control, and you can then balance the output
level with the output control. The sound of this channel ranges
from cleanish, through bluesy breakup, into classic rock
crunch. It’s a very defined and dynamic sound, and if you dig
in hard, you get more saturation and sustain — great for big
power chords and leads — but a softer pick attack or rolling
the guitar volume back cleans things up, and then it’ll only
crunch when you want it to. Even at its highest gain, there is
great note definition, and even complex chords come out very
clear; there is no way to get a bad sound out of The Big Trees.
The Root and Branch controls work in such a way that there is
always a general Audio Kitchen character happening, and
you’re really just nudging it one way or another.
Not to say that this is a one trick pony. If you cut the Root
and boost the Branch, you get a great sharp funk tone that’s
never harsh or scratchy; and if you do the opposite, it doesn’t
sound muddy or “under a blanket” — it’s just warm and gooey.
Audio Kitchen has a very good idea about which areas their
EQ needs to work in and where it doesn’t — so the tone stack
always feels right. The clean channel has only a level control,
and in this mode, the signal ends up with a “discrete all-valve
clean tone.” In use as a pedal, this is the ultimate buffered
bypass, but it also makes an excellent studio DI. The valve
stage adds a sparkly gloss to anything that passes through it,
and there’s enough output to go straight into a line input. I
wouldn’t record a DI’ed bass without it.
As a guitar amp, its features and output may be basic, but
its sound is detailed and huge, I have been running it into
4×12, 2×12, 1×12, and even 1×18 cabinets with great success.
At 2.5 W of output, more conservative settings will yield good
clean tones, and you can push it up through touch-sensitive
crunch, up to a solid crunchy rhythm or rock lead tone. It’s also
a superb bass amp through my Selmer Goliath 1×18 — the
combination providing a great round bottom without having to
crank the Root knob unnaturally.
I (and more famous users like Gil Norton and Alan Moulder)
have also had great success using it as an outboard processor. It’s
perfect for warming up plug-in synths or as a parallel distortion
box for drums. I used it on the lead vocal for a doom metal album
I mixed, after I’d already done some songs using the Thermionic
Culture Vulture [Tape Op #45]. With the Vulture, I’d been running
an EQ before and after it so I could push certain frequencies into
distortion and pull out others that were getting harsh, then
following that with an Empirical Labs FATSO Jr. [#24] to tame the
crispy top end. The first song I used The Big Trees on — The Big
Trees was all I needed. No pre and post–EQ, and no FATSO
required. The Big Trees has the fuzz with none of the fuss!
For a guitar pedal, the price is on the high side, but I think
in each of its alternate guises alone, it’s more than worth the
money. It’s as good a recording amp as you could hope to find
in terms of tone, if not features, and it offers the same clarity
and refinement of its bigger brother the Little Chopper, which
is twice the price. It’s also cheaper than one channel of
Thermionic Culture Vulture. And yet, you get all of these things
in one compact box, plus that sweet DI. It’s like a Swiss Army
knife. I think once you work out everything it does, you could
find yourself using it, as I do, almost every single day.
(£600 GBP; www.audiokitchen.co.uk)
–Al Lawson <al@tapeop.com>
MUTEC
MC-3+ Smart Clock
Master clocks are a near necessity if you own multiple digital
audio devices that are interconnected. Sure, you can forgo a
master clock and just chain one digital device to the next, each
synchronized to the device before it, but doing so raises the
possibility of introducing jitter — instability in the timing of the
digital signal or clock — at each link of the chain. Also, if you
repatch your chain in a different order, you’ll need to change sync
settings on at least two of the devices in the chain. A master
clock makes life so much easier by feeding a common timing
reference to all of your digital devices, and it also adds
consistency to the sound of your digital studio because your
converters won’t be affected by changes in the sync reference.
With that said, let’s be clear that there’s plenty of talk —
both marketing and research driven — on whether external
clocks can actually improve the sound of converters,
or if converters sound better when they’re running on their
56/Tape Op#106/Gear Reviews/(continued on page 58)
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internal clocks. So far, the best discussions I’ve seen on the topic are in
several whitepapers that are downloadable from the publications page
of Grimm Audio’s [Ta pe Op #75] website <grimmaudio.com>. These
papers mirror the conversations I’ve had with several leading ADC and
DAC designers. Here’s my greatly simplified paraphrase:
To sy nchron ize t o an ex ter nal re ferenc e sig nal, a co nverter typ ical ly
utilizes a PLL circuit controlling an internal oscillator. Compromises exist
in choosing a PLL design that favors the internal oscillator or the
external reference. A converter with a “slow” narrowband PLL mated to
a low-jitter internal oscillator won’t change much in sound between
running off its internal clock or a high-quality external one. A converter
with a “fast” wideband PLL, which is often employed to reduce the jitter
of the paired internal oscillator, can sound better with a high-quality
external clock. On the other hand, a converter with a “fast” PLL mated
to a low-jitter oscillator might actually sound worse when running off
an external reference that exhibits more jitter than the internal
oscillator. And a converter with a “slow” PLL driving a suboptimal
internal oscillator will always sound bad, no matter the reference.
Conclusion: A “slow” PLL converter, good or bad, won’t sound any
better with an external clock. But a high-quality external clock can
improve the performance of a “fast” PLL converter. Moreover, an external
clock with lower close-in phase noise (narrowband jitter at frequencies
close to the carrier frequency) has a better chance of improving the
sound of a “fast” PLL converter.
All that is a long-winded way of saying that the MC-3+ Smart Clock is
a great choice for a master clock because it exhibits exemplary ultralow-jitter performance — especially in regards to close-in phase
noise — due to MUTEC’s 1G-Clock Technology, a variation on the Direct
Digital Synthesizer (DDS) method of generating clock signals from a
fixed-frequency reference clock. For the past year, I’ve been relying on
an MC-3+ to generate and distribute sync to my Sony DMX-R100 console
[Tape Op #25], RME HDSPe MADI FX interface [#91], and Apogee
AD/DA-16X [#59] and Antelope Audio Orion32 converters [#99].
The MC-3+ has six individually buffered BNC outputs for word clock,
as well as XLR I/O for AES3/11, and RCA and Toslink I/O for S/PDIF. It
can generate clock at all the standard audio frequencies and then
some — from 32 kHz to 768 kHz, plus Avid’s 256× “Superclock”
multiples. In addition to operating as a master clock, the unit can
resynthesize and distribute an incoming clock, and it can also re-clock
a digital audio stream. It even has a “10.0M” input for synchronizing to
an atomic reference. Two buttons on the front panel and arrays of welllabeled LEDs make setup easy enough. I had no problems configuring
the device for my studio after a quick scan of the comprehensive manual.
Sound-wise, I wanted other sets of ears to confirm the kinds of
improvements I was hearing after patching in my MC-3+, so I asked
other engineers to contribute to this review. Mastering engineer Alex
DeTurk (whose credits include David Bowie, Sugar, and Willie Nelson)
offers his experiences below, followed by senior Tape Op contributor
Allen Farmelo, who worked closely with mastering engineer Matthew
Agoglia (Emmylou Harris, James Taylor, Henry Butler) to test the reclocking abilities of the MC-3+. –AH
When plugging in the MUTEC MC-3+ for the first time, the results were
immediate. I didn’t have to convince myself that what was coming out
of the speakers was tighter, more detailed, and expansive. My tests with
the MUTEC were all done with the unit used as the master word clock,
feeding into three different mastering-grade ADCs. I was most interested
in how a word clock could tighten up an already good converter. I did
not get into the MUTEC’s interesting re-clock mode, so I’ll let Allen and
Matthew talk about their findings on that function.
What the MUTEC rendered to my ear was increased precision and
detail in the sound stage. Where once was a ride cymbal sizzling along
somewhere to the right, now became a mix element that I could point
my finger at and say, “There!” In addition to the spatial detail, in more
general terms, it was like a layer of gauze was removed from the
speakers, and I was hearing everything a little bit more crisply. Perhaps
call this better high-frequency coherence.
58/Tape Op#106/Gear Reviews/(continued on page 60)
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Gear Geeking w/ Andy…
Allen Farmelo has been writing Tape Op gear reviews for a decade.
His reviews are always engaging, educational, and importantly,
inspirational. Allen always seems to find an arc up to a concept,
convention, or belief that goes beyond the specific product being
reviewed. He has a way of placing the gear into a more meaningful
context — how it fits into the broader spectrum of what we do as
recordists. I spoke to him about his new online venture, Pink Noise
<pinknoisemag.com>. “Engineers default to gear conversations
because it’s comfortable turf. It’s not always easy to talk about
ideas, creativity, vulnerable topics, and ineffable things. With Pink
Noise, I’m often trying to take us — as an industry and a group of
people making music — out of that comfort zone. I want to pull
focus from the tools and get closer to why we make records.”
Catherine Vericolli is the co-founder of Pink Noise. She owns 513
Analog Recording <www.513analog.com>, a studio in Tempe, AZ
with a collection of enviable gear. Allen explains, “Catherine loves
gear, but often complains that conversations about gear get in the
way of talking about what people are trying to accomplish. If
artists ask you if you have this mic or that preamp, they rarely get
to ask, ‘What’s the goal?’ The answer to this question can
eventually lead to gear choices and even to the direction you turn
a knob, but collaboration should really start with the artist’s vision,
not the gear.” The inspiration for Pink Noise came from a rant Allen
wrote on Facebook about sexism in pro audio. “That rant flew out
of me one morning while I was having coffee. I think it was
building in me for a decade or more. We are anachronistically maledominated, and in my opinion, there’s a lot of unchecked
chauvinism in our field. When I checked back on that Facebook
post, it had been shared all over the world. I had lots of private
messages from people, especially women, thanking me for saying
something. Catherine was one of those people. Our conversation
started with, ‘What can we do to help the situation? How can we
counter that trend?’ Pink Noise is not just an attempt to talk about
diversity. We’re trying to open a channel for more intelligent
thinking about our art form, and that should help build a more
inclusive conversation.” ••• Joel Hamilton has also been writing
Tap e Op gear reviews for a decade, and like Allen, his reviews are
instructional and enlightening. Joel tends to move quickly into the
realm of emotion, mentioning very few acronym-laced specs. He
talks instead about how a product inspires him — and his
artists — to capture a magical performance in a way that’s far
above the electrical or mechanical capabilities of whatever whizbang mic, preamp, or processor he’s discussing. His reviews throw
around phrases like “larger than life” and “romance and intrigue,”
while still managing to give invaluable insight into workflow and
technique. Moreover, he has a way of mixing metaphors that
speaks to his music-mixing prowess — with clear intentions, he
wrangles together unexpected combinations to form engaging
narratives that actually make a lot of sense. That’s why I loved
watching Joel in Art of Sound <boseartofsound.com>, an eightpart video series presented by Bose that covers sound and music
from personal and historical perspectives. Topics include low and
high frequencies; signal processing and pitch-correction; the
creative process; reverb, delay, and distortion; looping with tape;
and the emotional experience of sound. Each episode is paired
with a Spotify playlist containing songs relevant to the subject of
the video. Joel ends the series by explaining, “Perfection reads in
the gesture, in the sense that that person is handing me
something across time and space and through the speakers, and
I’m then feeling it. When that gesture reads loud and clear, the rest
of the choices are sort of the framing, or the lighting, or
whatever.... That’s where the perfect experience in music lives for
me personally.” –AH
Also noted was a more snappy dynamic response,
especially from the drum set. The kick drum consistently
across different mixes spoke more clearly in its transient
attack. Again a tight coherent sound, even when the
mastering got a little more pushed in level. Very defined,
direct, and exciting.
I wondered while listening if this clock seemed to
produce a signature sound all its own. It almost felt like
an additional piece of hardware getting inserted into the
chain. What I’m getting at is that I was hearing a
different interpretation of the material — and I was
thinking if and when this increased clarity, better-defined
detail, and sharper dynamics would be unwanted. It’s
great for clean electronic tracks where punch, rhythm,
and clarity are paramount. But what about some lo-fi,
washed out, textural shoe-gaze? Would the MUTEC
produce a more discrete vision than the artist intended?
That of course is getting pretty subjective, but is
interesting food for thought.
Bottom line is that I loved what it did for what it was
trying to do, and it made each of the three converters I was
auditioning sound a little better than without it. Whether
it is the perfect choice for all types of music may remain to
be seen — but at a street price of $799, the MC-3+ is
definitely worth checking out.
–Alex DeTurk <alexanderdeturk@yahoo.com>
When Andy reached out to me about the MUTEC MC-3+
Smart Clock and told me that some audiophiles were daisy-
chaining two of them in re-clock mode for extreme jitter
reduction, my ears perked up. Two clocks in series? Those
nutty audiophiles! Of course, I told Andy to make sure
MUTEC sent two clocks.
Re-clocking is different than using an external clock.
Let me try to explain. In the case of using an external
clock, a device accepts a clock input from an external
device’s clock and uses that as its timing reference. In reclocking, the entire digital audio stream (including the
clock signal of the “transmitter”) is sent to a second unit
downstream that strips the transmitter’s clock signal and
sends the data stream back out with a new clock signal
— thus the term “re-clock.”
It’s important to realize that one cannot “strip away” any
artifacts (due to jitter or other digital errors) that are
encoded into a digital file during the A/D conversion that
created it. What one is improving (or degrading, or
replicating — or let’s say “changing”) when one re-clocks
a data stream is the timing of that data stream’s
transmission. Jitter can be introduced in any number of
places along the path to final D/A conversion, and
“transmitter jitter” is just one of them. In some cases, in
fact, improving the clock signal of the data stream can
actually reveal artifacts that are embedded in the original
data file but have been masked by distortion induced by
jitter introduced in the transmission chain.
So when is re-clocking a useful tool? Whenever you
must use a device that is introducing unacceptable
jitter during the transmission. In my listening tests
with Matthew Agoglia at his studio The Ranch
<www.theranchmastering.com>, it was predictable that
the MC-3+ in re-clock mode improved the sound of a
10+ year old Sony CDP-M12 CD player, as it contains older
technology (10 years is a whole era in digital tech), and
it wasn’t a particularly high-end piece in the first place.
Also predictably, the MC-3+ did not improve the sound of
the data stream coming off of a Forssell MADA-2 converter,
as that piece is very recent and of the highest quality.
60/Tape Op#106/Gear Reviews/(continued on page 64)
(Both were monitored through the reliable DAC of a
Dangerous Music Monitor [Tape Op #34] feeding Matthew’s
ATC SCM 100 spea ker s.)
What was interesting when using the MC-3+ in re-clock
mode on the not-so-great CD-player, however, was daisychaining two of the clocks together. I’m about to step into
audiophile-speak here, but we were able to hear increased
detail in the recording, improved sound staging, and more
sense of space around the instruments. We didn’t conduct
jitter measurements, so we can’t confirm that this is
because double re-clocking was more stable (we assume
that’s the case). Regardless, Matthew and I were rather
pleased with the sound of the re-clocked CD data stream,
and we were more impressed when there were two of the
MUTEC units in series.
Yes, double re-clocking can se em li ke a huge s ales
gimmick — rinse and repeat! However, audiophiles are a
fascinating group who are interested in tiny, incremental
improvements in their playback systems. I don’t believe
that any single small improvement is really a big deal, but
I do believe that enough of those improvements (or the
removal of them) can add up to something significant. For
example, about 10 years ago, I bought an Equitec balanced
power unit, started clocking my digital rig off of my Crane
Song HEDD [Tape Op #26] (a great clock source all these
years later), and started running sessions at 96 kHz. I got
a marked improvement in my system. I’m not sure any one
of those things was going to win an A/B/X shoot out, or
even if it did, whether it would justify the expense. But
taken together, those three millimeters start to get me a
little closer to an ideal digital system. This is the game
audiophiles play. Re-clocking might be one of those
millimeters, and dual re-clocking might get you two
millimeters closer to whatever-it-is-you’re-seeking.
But more importantly, one has to weigh the expense of
purchasing a re-clocking device against the expense of just
getting a better transmitting unit in the first place. Perhaps
the money could buy you a new CD player, or DAC, or
whatever the source might be.
At only $799, the MC-3+ is quite a find, though, because
it’s also a high-performance master clock. For what it did
to the sound of Matthew’s system, the MUTEC stood up to
the internal clock in the Forssell MADA-2, and it stood up
to the $1295 Antelope Audio Isochrone OCX [Tape Op #68]
that Matthew uses to clock his Pro Tools rig. Given its price
point, MUTEC may be on to something.
I dislike, even despise, the sound of so many digital
tracks I inherit on projects, and more often than not, I
learn that the digital conversion was the weak link. People
seem to love spending money on instruments, mics, and
preamps, but they chintz-out on converters and clocks —
such a shame, given how much they’ve spent on their front
end. It’s like buying a $10,000 camera lens and attaching
it to a cheap tourist camera body. Decades of crap-sumer
crap-verters have given us literally countless digital audio
files that contain undesirable distortion caused by jitter
and phase noise from less-than-stellar clocking, etc. We
modern record-makers swim in a sea of subpar audio files,
and it’s time to put that trend to an end. If you think your
studio could generate better sounding digital recordings
with an MC-3+, it might be a better purchase than the next
500-series module or whatever obviously fun toy you might
have on your wish-list. ($799 street; www.mutec-net.com)
–Allen Farmelo <www.farmelorecording.com> & Matthew
Agoglia <www.theranchmastering.com>
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