Is it me, or do the newer Mpc's soud "too clean"?

B-Wise wrote:

dryad-66 wrote:The 1000 is known to be a bit nasty

Ok buddy. I sample something in the 1k/2500 & there no nastiness added what are you talking about. Do you mean after you sample something & add the LPF or the Bit Grunger?

Monotremata wrote:Sometimes I wonder how much of that 'grit' and 'nasty' came from people who had no idea what they were doing with their gain staging when sampling too.

Let take it back to the basics:

Gonna run with my live 2 again tonight.Hope it don’t sound too clean and sterile one thing is for sure tho,people making some shite on YT…..we’ve really hit the mainstream head on with these consumables……. another thing is I really wish we could just delete some of those atrocious plugins.really off putting…right,time for a jam.will report back l8er

Ok,that was pretty good,it is clean and not particularly interesting soundwise on its own.but as others have said that leaves you too impart your own character on the samples/audio yourself.so effecting a tad on the way in and tasteful use of gainstaging bringing the levels down rather than up to decrease potential horrible digital distortion.then i added a combo of limiter,air flavour and Hp shelving filter (for that sizzle) to taste…….pretty happy with results recording in stems and old recordings in tbh.think my old battered OG SP404 will do the rest !!!!

Monotremata wrote:
Sometimes I wonder how much of that 'grit' and 'nasty' came from people who had no idea what they were doing with their gain staging when sampling too.

I think that’s one of the attributes of the older MPCs is that some raw gainstaging can impart some character on sounds.obvious it helps if you know what your doing and what sounds good tho.but you learn a lot by making mistakes…..

hyena wrote:

BeatWilson wrote:When sampling people would run the signal in hot so that they would get a bit of the distortion from the machines converters. its like using the drive on the old moogs. its a pretty unique sound in the end. Dont trust any A/B videos on mpcs unless you can see or if they state they used the 8 outs. If they didnt use the 8 outs... Its basically a useless comparison. Since I started most of my bros been preaching about it to me. Once again though... This conversation has been had so many times.. We goin in circles. Just pair up the new mpc with a AkaiS950 and you should be fine for sound.

yes.
quoting comparisons on youtube is totally pointless, only very few comparisons are made with a scientific approach and even then there's too many variables you cannot put in a yt video...
what really upsets me is when people try to deny one's own direct experience... if the O.P. now has both his 1000 and a current line mpc and can compare them now ,not based on memory, how on hell anyone feels ok to tell him "no, you are wrong it's all nonsense". this is very close to gaslighting...
anyway, you may think what you want, but direct experience is key to knowledge. the OP will make up his mind making his own real life comparisons and then will decide which unit is better in which areas.

this 100% ... you cats might wanna lay off the whole gospel bias in your head talk.. as its worse on the flip side .. telling somone its in his head when hes monitoring the units in real life ... wtf

The only few times I have played with the new kais it was just messing around with a kit ... sounded fine, actually very good .. had a round musical sound to it ... yet ..

IMO the diffrence becomes noticable when layering sounds and stacking tracks ... as in summing ..
playing a single sample in vs battle does not reveiw this ..
Its like everything has a sound ... ipads have a sound ... its in the way the board and OS system codes audio ...


Just record the same pattern running a bunch of tracks with some drums in program layered ... and then do a phase reversial in an audio editor ans see if there is silence ... my guess is the audio that plays through will display where the frequencies differ the most ...

glide wrote:this 100% ... you cats might wanna lay off the whole gospel bias in your head talk.. as its worse on the flip side .. telling somone its in his head when hes monitoring the units in real life ... wtf

While I agree with that statement in general...
I‘ve had 2 units (2 versions of the same amp sim) in front of me, monitoring with precise equal settings, and one of them was „superior“ without question.
Until I found out the older one used 1.5 dB more default gain (hidden) in the preamp section.
After adjustment both units sounded exactly the same.

glide wrote:IMO the diffrence becomes noticable when layering sounds and stacking tracks ... as in summing ..
playing a single sample in vs battle does not reveiw this ..
Its like everything has a sound ... ipads have a sound ... its in the way the board and OS system codes audio ...

this is one of the areas where differences are noticeable, and it is VERY important. of course if you use the separate outputs and mix on a decent analog desk you can shape your sound , both on current line mpc's and older ones. but the internal summing and overall "glue" is an important area. others are: how samples play back when transposed, how the unit reacts when hitting the headroom ceiling. how do samples sound when sampled directly in the machine, both with clean headroom and saturating...
___________
TLDR - what follows are mostly personal opinions based on personal experience and i'm a bit logorrhoic...

but there are also much more subtle ones, that i can tell just by empirical, personal experience. one of them is how they "sound" live on stage on a proper p.a. ... i started using mpc's in the mid 2000's just for that, because they were among the few hardware machines that allowed you some detailed , intricate and complex sequencing compared to the usual step sequencers found on grooveboxes. so i initially used them mainly for their sequencer features, the sampling part was something i kinda overlooked at that time, also because my main samples (drums) were assigned to the old trusty s950 using separate outputs... then i started experimenting with the sampler part, and that's when i swapped the 2000xl for the 4000, doing a lot of synth-style sampling (single cycle waveform layers etc...). then i had some financial issues and had to sell the 4k, after one or two years i was able to buy an mpc1000, upgraded the pads and most of all installed jj. that was liveset heaven for me, the next seq features, the keygroups, the midi cc implementation, but also how good it sounded. it was inferior to the 4k, but not in an ugly way and, i know it will be blasphemy to some, i found it better sounding than the 2000xl. but the thing that always put a smile on my face was that everytime i played a live set on a big p.a. usually the other artists were using laptops with decent soundcards.... the comments were always the same... "when you played your set the sound system kinda opened up, it was more full-spectrum and more dynamic". not my opinion, other people's. and it wasn't about my music, if they liked it or not, just the sound coming out of the speakers. i think, i may be wrong but it is my firm opinion, that this doesn't happen with current line of mpc's. they sound VERY good, very similar to how a laptop with a decent sound card sounds.
i know this is not scientific in ANY possible way, it's just aural experience. but it's my experience. so i'm finally buying back an mpc1000 and will couple it with the live mk1 and the other samplers i have now. but center role will be back to the 1000.

Good timing,it’s the 20th anniversary of the MPC 1000….

Summing isn't magics. In the Digital Domain, Summing is simply an addition. It's done the exact same way internally in a MPC2000, a MPC1000 and a MPC Live. Obviously a bigger bit depth allows more headroom thus less possibility of clipping, but unwanted digital clipping hardly sounds "good" or "better". You can easily simulate a 16 bit depth with the bit reducer/crusher effect on the master.

We're moving the goalpost here, constantly inventing new fictions to try to find arguments for a flawed premise.

I have no doubt there is some sort of marginal sound difference between 16bit and 24 bit DAC but it has nothing to do with "summing".

Addition and multiplication performed in some order, with a potential of clipping and losing accuracy to rounding errors in many places along the way. How did you verify that the operations are the "exact" same in MPC 2000, MPC 1000 and MPC Live? Do you have all the source code or what? What kind of tests have you done?

I'm not saying that differences in the summing are significant, just that you probably haven't really checked.

I'm not saying that differences in the summing are significant, just that you probably haven't really checked.

Conversely Neither did you. The premise that "the sound difference is in the summing" is a preposterous assertion.

mpc_fan_2022 wrote:
Conversely Neither did you.

You just proved his point.

B-Wise wrote:You just proved his point.

No I didn't prove his point. I'm not the one who claim that summing is what makes a difference at first place, an addition is an addition no matter on which device it is done, that's what digital summing is, it's the same algorithm everywhere. it's DSP 101. Enough with the bullshit. What next? "pixies inside the MPC dirty the sound! No proof needed"

mpc_fan_2022 wrote:
No I didn't prove his point. I'm not the one who claim that summing is what makes a difference at first place, an addition is an addition no matter on which device it is done, that's what digital summing is, it's the same algorithm everywhere. it's DSP 101. Enough with the bullshit. What next? "pixies inside the MPC dirty the sound! No proof needed"

I see you edited the post, it make more sense now.

again, you can say whatever you want but i have experience with multiple samplers\digital sound environments and, at the same bit depth and sample rate, they sound similar playing back a single sound, they sound different when multiple sounds are mixed (summed). but hey, if you say so.. i'm probably crazy, having visions, hearing voices...plain hallucinating...
is it the summing stage? well, i supposed so, can it be something else i'm not thinking? yes, of course... i'm surely not an electronic engineer...but it seems to me you take many things for granted...