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APPS: Measuring Sound Quality?
I would like to find quantifiable numbers showing the quality iOS apps compared to one another.
For instance, Cubasis, Auria, AUM, BM3, or Audiobus. Everyone says "blank" has best sound quality. But does it?
Secondly, what kind of documented variations of the sound quality of apps is present when run independently or in a host such as AUM or Audiobus.
Developers, do you test such things?
If so, what do you measure?
Decibels, fidelity, frequencies, noise ratios?
I think this would be interesting to see. I have many apps that seem to have better sound then others. I wonder how much is potential ear fatigue, personal bias, or maybe some really do suck compared to others.
Please do not get into naming apps, I really am not here to criticize or beat up on any developers or companies.
I feel we have progressed to a point with iOS music the inside stuff should start to be more available.
What say you?
Comments
I say...just trust your own ears!
Is there really anything like quality in any given creative process or is it just about making the best out of the tools? What is the difference between character and quality?
Considering how none of this is available for desktop DAWs either, I don't know why it's relevant or how you'd even measure it. I for one have never once thought an iOS app was 'lacking in sound quality', though certainly some have their own unique flavors that may or may not suit individual people. From a technical perspective though, they all are capable of more than enough fidelity for professional applications.
Just my $0.02
that's about it, and there's personal taste... and experience
sound quality isn't a de facto thing and depends on application or what you have in mind
I think what sounds good is a very subjective experience that varies among people so as others have already commented, I don't know how you could measures such a thing to even be able to design an app for it.
For those from the, "I know it when I see it" school of thought who don't know it when they hear it, perhaps they should spend more time figuring out what they like listening to than urging developers to create an app to do that for them?
They are certainly many theories about how we experience sound that could be presented in an app form to assist us in exploring our options but this is quite different from an app that would be able to sample a sound and provide a meaningful objective measure of the sound's quality. As with color in the visual arts, the context within which a particular sound occurs will also strongly influence our response to sounds as well.
https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/can-sound-quality-be-measured/
I think I know where the OP is coming from, though.
I sometimes wonder if iOS apps across the board have a “sound”, and if that can be mitigated with a good audio interface, stuff like that.
“Trust your ears and use what works” is great advice, and I don’t disagree. But at the same time, I might think something sounds great, put a ton of time into it, transfer it to Ableton and studio monitors, and realize that my headphones were tricking me and it sounds shite next to other sources. So wanting to get an objective take on what sounds “best” to the majority of users with good ears is a valid question, artistic and subjective concerns aside.
You could conceivably create an app which randomly plays samples from various sources and the users then rate the quality of the sound on a scale. An analysis of the data collected from such an app might be interesting in terms of identifying patterns among its users though without more information and about the users themselves and the context in which they're listening to each sample, it might be difficult to draw conclusions from this. Pandora was certainly a case of using this approach to sort music into different groupings based upon listener responses.
That is an impossible question. You can't define sound "quality". The whole sound of rock and roll was born from amps being pushed into distortion - "bad" sound quality. Every subtractive synth is based on removing frequencies - "bad" sound quality. Saturation, overdrive, lo-fi, resonance .... on and on are mangling of sound quality. Everything you say about what sounds good to you is based on the alteration of the "quality" of the sound in such ways that it sounds good to you.
There is no criteria by which you could measure what you're referring to.
I guess you could try and determine quality in one context......the ability of a recording app to reproduce the sound that went in without adding any noise, distortion or colour.....
BM3 near enough nulls with Maschine in our tests over here, any slight discrepencies we put down to pan laws, nobody complains about Maschines quality, normally quite the opposite.
Thank you, an excellent article which addresses these issues.
But there are differences in bit depth, sample rate, anti-alialsing of oscillators, audio rendering algorithms, etc.
Different devs could use different methods. Would these not effect sound quality in a measurable way?
I don't know, maybe it is just sound fidelity that can be measured, leaving sound quality in the abstract, "personal taste" zone.
Many processors are praised and sought for the coloration they give. The whole "analog vs digital" thing is about source degradation
Of course you can measure sound quality, most know you do it with a piece of string, but really most people don't even listen to the end product in the best fidelity. All we can hope for is something that works, to an approximation, of our desire.
Of course there can be huge differences when it comes to aliasing f.e. especially in the higher frequencies.
I like my reverbs aliasing free as possible f.e. too because if i cascade several reverberations it will otherwise add up fast into a noisy muddy hell.
But sometimes you want that "effect" maybe even and it will give you a nice character.
If i f.e. compare the build in FX from some iOS DAW´s, they are not quite good for my taste.
But some i really love, even if they are also more on the low fidelity side , like NanoStudio´s Waveshaper.
When KQ synth went to anti-aliased oscillators, it went from a chiptune sound to a more traditional synth sound.
In my opinion, that is an increase in sound quality.
Why does a DX7 sound good to my ears? Why does old analog sound good to many people’s ears? Why do many of us like the sound of the early emulators? Could we even get these original sounds now that we are mixing and recording via digital instead of analog gear?
Too many variables for the average Joe. Far too many variables to try and quantify quality even just within apps. Too little time when as many have said, just listen and us what sounds good to you.
I too was thinking about this recently. I think in the case of a synth app, we’d need a set of ‘reference patches’ that are fairly portable from one synth to another and provide what would effectively be the same if not identical patch that could be applied to several synths. On one hand, the more complex the patch, the less likely it is to be portable, and hence there might not even be such a patch (but I doubt this case - I suspect there are many such reference patches, that apply to a good many synths). On the other hand, the scaling of the controls need to be taken into account and probably limited to a ‘common’ range, such that when the reference patch specifies 20% vcf cf mod from LFO sinewave, that 20% isn’t 20% of the knob or slider travel, it’s a “normalised 20%” quantity, as different synths have different knob or slider scaling and offset.
It’d be nice to have a small handful of about five or so portable patches that could apply to almost any decent synth. It’d also be nice if there were some songs made with them.
I just paint...and leave the clever calculations to those who can't
I would be curious to hear from devs the sort of corners they need to cut to pack things onto iOS as opposed to VSTs, particularly the old school iOS apps. It does seem like things are improving in terms of oversampling n such... I mean I get anti-aliasing and mip mapping / texture filtering with 3D images but would be fascinated to know more about the various layers of processing that go on with synths and FX.
I would love to hear more modern versions of Animoog or Nave with over sampling/anti-aliasing/voodoo etc. (insert waving hands etc). How about Animoog Pro? Same easy interface and methodology but more CPU sucking bits 'n math magic to smooth things out.
Judging by Diva on the desktop, these apps can gobble as much processing power as you throw at them. I have an older core i7/24Gb and even in multicore mode it cannot handle 50% of the Diva presets available.
For an app like Zeeon to sound as good as it does without glitching on an Air 1 is quite the achievement I think.
Indeed! This is why I am really geeking out with BM3 sampling VSTs, best of both worlds. My ipad never sounded so good.
There are so many great apps out there, the same app can sound different depending on what you’re listening to it thru, ie, Model 15 sounds great when I use headphones just plugged into my IPad or thru my Avid fastrack duo, but sounds even better, and I mean lot better thru my Apogee Duet.
I get the intent of your curiosity @rustik It crossed my mind at one point when I decided to “compare” a certain Mini Moog iOS app with the desktop equivalent from the same manufacturer. Impossible to quantify what “better” means, I get that. So let’s just say the difference between the two with the same settings was vast. They both sound great though, so I abandoned my “test” and jammed out with the both of them!
@AudioGus Nave is already oversampling internally - you cannot get that smooth filter response with high resonance at 44.1 khz. Oversampling is quite common with (better) IOS audio apps.
The 'asshole test' is to set resonance full up and sweep the filter frequency.
Do that on VST and a large part will fail, as will Turnado and Flux-FX on IOS.
But oversampling isn't allways the clue: there's a tape emulation by UHE which doesn't really sound like tape at all (imh ears).