Before writing our very popular article 5 Common Audio Myths Debunked I wrote a list of contenders. There were more than 5 myths on it and considering how well received the first five were, here are five more commonly held truisms about audio which we don’t think stand up to scrutiny.
Fix It In The Mix
This myth suggests that it’s no longer necessary to fix deficiencies in the performance or the capture of audio at the recording stage. Issues can be addressed later using your DAW or plugins.
Looking at the solutions available it’s understandable how this idea that issues with the take can be addressed using the dizzyingly powerful tools available to us. The first hint that this proposition doesn’t stand up is that while Playlist Comping, Beat Detective, Melodyne and the like present potential fixes for most performance issues, people have been saying this since people were ‘fixing it in the mix’ with razorblades, AMS delays and the pitch wheel of a sampler. The phrase and its associated lazy thinking isn’t a result of the powerful tools we have available today, its been around much longer than that.
So why can’t we ‘fix it in the mix’? Well many individual things we can fix. So to some extent we can fix individual issues in post. If someone delivers a killer vocal but bumps the mic stand on the big note, we can fix that. And many other issues like it.
The myth of Fix it In The Mix is that we no longer have to focus on quality at the capture stage and that a poor performance can be elevated to a good one using studio techniques. A great performance with an issue can be salvaged but an indifferent one will always be indifferent. This phrase can be used with integrity, but if its used to defer a problem or to transfer responsibility to someone else, its a myth!
You Need Professional Plugins To Create Professional Mixes
With the tools used by professionals being accessible to anyone with a few hundred pounds to spend, it can be tempting to think that the fact that a professional uses a particular plugin, or any other tool, is what makes them great at what they do.
The direct access we have into the workflow of the pros also feeds this idea that, because Mixer X uses premium plugins that somehow using the stock plugin which came with my DAW is somehow inferior. This is something which is prevalent in music mixing but just look at the world of post production where, because of a different set of priorities, fantastic sounding mixes are made using that stock Pro Tools EQ we didn’t think was ‘pro’ enough!
I think we all know this is nonsense. Great mixers are great because of their decisions, not their tools. Roger Federer is a great tennis player and he uses an expensive racquet. But he’d still be great using something from lost property…
We addressed this myth some time ago in an article in which Grammy winning mix engineer Mike Exeter mixed the same song twice. Once using premium plugins and once using stock Pro Tools plugins. The only difference which was noted was that the stock reverb didn’t sound quite as good as the premium offering. Apart from that the differences were insignificant.
You Can’t Put Phantom Power Across A Ribbon Mic
The ribbon mic, famed for its smooth vintage tone, has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since digital media replaced analogue tape. With its ability to capture brightness without sounding harsh it has found a natural home on anything which is bright and loud - Drums, electric guitars and horns are all great candidates, or sounds which can get harsh or shrill, for example they are fantastic on strings.
However the thing most of us learn first about ribbon mics is that they are fragile. In the UK there are so many old Reslos and the like circulating which have suffered the dreaded torn ribbon. Old ribbons have a deserved reputation for fragility, with advice about not storing them lying down to avoid ribbon sag and horror stories about people putting them on kick drums. Modern ribbons are tougher than they used to be and as someone who has had a pair of 4038s for years I can say they are tougher than people think, though they still need treating with care. However there is one myth surrounding ribbon mics which persists. The myth that you can’t put phantom power across a ribbon mic.
We investigated this some years ago in this article in which we assembled a panel of qualified experts to examine this subject. Check it out and you’ll see but the brief takeaway is that you should be careful with vintage mics and damaged cables can cause issues, but a modern ribbon mic is fine with phantom power. However you shouldn’t hot-plug mics and definitely don’t hot-plug patchbay connections.
Different DAWs Sound Different
While you might make different decisions when using a different DAW, which would of course result in a different sounding mix, and the stock plugins which come with different DAWs are not the same and might well sound different, that’s not the same thing as the suggestion, which is still repeated online, that the audio engines of different DAWs sound different, that different DAWs have an inherent and unique tonal character.
The good thing about this myth is that is it so easily tested. If you want to definitively establish whether two pieces of audio are the same you can settle this using a null test: Invert the polarity of one of them and if they are identical then when combined, with levels precisely matched, they cancel to silence. This is what happens between different DAWs.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind here though. Any processing which introduces randomness won’t cancel, but that’s down to the processing, not the DAW. Modulation in reverb is a common culprit here. The pan law of different DAW mixers can differ and this will affect the results too. Though if you set the pan laws to match between the DAWs these differences will cease. And there are a couple of examples of DAWs which do sound different. One technical, the other by design.
Pro Tools TDM systems, the predecessors of modern HDX systems, had a different mixer architecture than native Pro Tools systems which resulted in differences between the two systems. This difference is long gone. Harrison’s Mixbus DAW is designed to impart its sonic fingerprint on audio in a similar way to the way analogue consoles do. As a result it isn’t sonically neutral like other DAWs. This is a feature rather than a flaw. But if you’re being told that different DAWs all sound different, they don’t and it’s something that is easy to test.
Analogue Summing Sounds Better Than Summing In The Box
This myth is kind of related to the previous one but somehow is more contentious. Some people feel strongly about this. Summing is the process of adding signals together and it’s the most fundamental action of an audio mixer, whether physical or virtual - they ‘mix’ or ‘combine’ or ‘sum’ audio signals together. Many people notice a difference between mixing in the box compared to mixing through an analogue mixing console and many people attribute this to the summing taking place in the analogue domain rather than digitally in software.
There is no doubt that mixing through an analogue console sounds different to working in the box. What is in question though is whether this is down to the way the summing is achieved or whether it is because of non-linearities introduced by the analogue signal path, which would remain if the summing were to happen in the box after passing through equivalent analogue signal paths. It might sound like there is little difference between those two explanations but, for example, if it’s actually the transformers in the signal path which are making the difference then running the audio through some transformers and summing in the box would achieve the same result. The non-linearities could be caused by all sorts of things in the analogue domain but if the summing isn’t one of them then the various analogue summing boxes which are available aren’t necessary.
We’ve looked at this in the past and our test failed to show a significant preference one way or the other. This wasn’t unexpected. In our test one of the comparisons was between summing in Pro Tools vs summing through the vintage Neve 8068 at Capitol Studios and Steve Genewick, who conducted the test for us, said:
What sounds better is so subjective. We have done test like this at Capitol where another engineer does the switching, so truly a double blind test and there is nothing to call between the two versions of a mix. Most of the time you are just guessing.
We get many people who bring their tracks to Capitol just to run them through our consoles and they think it’s going to make a world of difference. They get very frustrated when it really doesn’t. That is until they start to grab faders and finesse their mix. Once you start to reach out for an EQ or start pushing faders it’s not an argument about summing any more, it’s all about the difference between an in-the-box workflow and mixing on a console.
Check out the test here and for a fantastically clear explanation of the issues watch the video below by Dan Worral.
What commonly held beliefs about audio would you categorise as myths?