About the SHQ mode in my compressors

i sent out emails for updates for my Rayphlex compressor yesterday, completing all of my comps. now they all have instructions and skins included, to allow the program switching buttons to work on skins with N4.

i want to make one thing clear because i’ve had a few emails about this, but after you install these skins you are not supposed to ever open the compressor programs with the ‘finder’ button inside N4. you open them as their own plug-in (a custom copy of n4), and then you use the buttons/switches on the skin to select the various versions of the comp (hard/soft knee, lite/full/shq quality levels). the program switching happens without losing your settings on the controls (nebula normally resets all controls to default upon switching programs). the only thing you still use the finder for is to load the pass-through/tone programs.

about SHQ and why i offer it- yes it can take a long time to render using SHQ. it’s optional and the difference can be pretty subtle. the reason i’ve been providing SHQ programs for something like 6-7 years now, with my comps, is because nebula comp programs are pretty much always using really shortened kern/impulse lengths. this has always been required because they need faster progrates to allow for the necessary faster response to input levels. but you can’t get that with longer kern lengths, so very short lengths have always been the norm. they got shortened even more once using TIMED mode became the norm, which allows even faster progrates, and removes the artifacts that used to plague nebula comps. the problem with timed mode is it uses lots of CPU, so to get those benefits you need even shorter kern lengths (which use less CPU) than was used before when FREQD mode was the norm (and there were artifacts).

the shortened kerns don’t allow for as accurate a reproduction of frequencies under 1khz though. and this is going to be true with any compressor program using them, not just mine. it’s just a law of nebula/convolution in general. so my SHQ programs have always used more full, longer kern lengths, usually around 80ms, which allow a better reproduction of lower freqs. this can still be a subtle difference as the most obvious stuff is below 100hz. but the most obvious case is with the natural high pass filtering type of effect you normally see with just about any hardware. it simply can’t be reproduced with the kinds of short kern/impulse length settings typically used in nebula comps.

so i think this round of n4 skin updates is important to anyone who was interested in trying to use my SHQ programs for rendering but was always annoyed by the controls resetting in nebula when switching programs. now that doesn’t happen and all you have to do is click one button. again, shq difference can still be pretty subtle, but these skins also allow you to mix with lite mode and just switch to full mode for rendering if you choose to do that instead (which adds the subtle harmonics back in). really, rendering with any option is fine and it could even make sense to use lite mode in some cases if you want the cleanest/most transparent result with no harmonics.

anyway, here’s a couple of graphs showing the kind of difference SHQ mode makes-

C254-E, lite mode:

C254-E SHQ mode:

Posted by Tim in Uncategorized