I'm playing mine at church this Sunday and will let you know.
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Origin Effects BassRig Ampeg B15 Fliptop recreation
- Thread starter Quatschmacher
- Start date
I've noticed the same thing as you: some phasing issues when blending a clean signal with one going through the Bassrig's analogue cabinet simulation. Either the low end was gone, or the mids were hollowed out when flipping polarity on one of the signals.
So, I did a small experiment in my DAW: recorded a simple open E string pluck onto two tracks in parallel, and looked at the waveforms:
- top is clean DI, before the BR pedal.
- bottom is the BR pedal with the cab sim only turned to "on" (the amp sim is off, just the cab sim), being fed by the DI's passive thru output.
As you can see, the two signals are flipped, which would explain the low end loss on the blended sound.
However, even when flipping the signal, it still sounded like there was some cancellation going on. When zooming in, I noticed the two were slightly out of phase and that I could shift one of the tracks a tiny bit to get them more aligned (eyeballed it looking at the waveform):
(note that the waveforms on this image are sitll flipped, because I was doing the flipping of the signal later on in the chain of the DAW, this screenshot is just to show the shifting I did to make the signal peaks aligned, even though the signals are flipped on the waveform)
Then, the blended sound sounded fine to me!!
So .. it seems like the cabsim is not only flipping the polarity on the signal but also adding a tiny bit of delay, which causes the cabsim signal to not play well with a clean DI signal without a bit of correction: for people expecting the analogue cabsim to be able to be blended with a clean DI signal real time, this would be a problem.
This is just a very amateurish experiment mind you, and maybe there can be different outcomes depending on where in the frequency spectrum the signal is at (ie, depending on the notes being played), this was just a simple one note comparison. I'm not an audio engineer, so that's as far as I can/will go since this particular issue doesn't affect me that much
I do recall someone complaining about phase cancellation issues on the Bassrig SV thread, when blending a direct DI signal with the cabsim signal, so maybe it's just a result of the design of the cabsim for this entire line of products; ie, it seems like it's not a malfunction, just part of the design of the cabsim.
If this is all there is to it, on a recording environment, it can be corrected by flipping the polarity and adding a small delay to the clean DI signal to get them aligned. To do that on a live signal however, may not prove to be very practical. It would seem that the pedal is simply not designed for that application, and I guess that may be one of the reasons the Bassrig's clean blend control is before the cabsim and not after as would be the more "standard" setup, even though it is also an interesting option to have when using highly driven thin settings on the amp sim .. however I am not the designer so this is just pure speculation on my part and I may be totally off the mark, both in my observations and with my little experiment in general.
Maybe @Origin_Effects can clarify if my observations are correct in regards to this use case (blending the Bassrig's cabsim with a clean signal)?
Isn’t that what happens in real life, mic’ng a cabinet and mixing it with a DI signal?
Well kind of, the extend of that would depend on the mic placement I guess .. but the point here is that there is a certain expectation (whether fair or unfair) that when using an analogue cab sim pedal designed for bass, you would not have a delay or such issues when blending with clean DI: the most common such analogue amp sim pedal (and baseline for all others) is the Tech 21 Sansamp bass driver, and it has a clean blend after the cab sim and works just fine "out of the box" for this use case. Of course digital modeler pedals always have a small delay due to analogue-digital conversion, but that is not what we are talking about.Isn’t that what happens in real life, mic’ng a cabinet and mixing it with a DI signal?
However, I think it's also fair to say that the analogue cab sim on the Origin Effects pedals sound incredibly good, rivaling a digital IR cab sim (in my view and many others I would guess), and so there is probably a lot more going on in terms of filtering.
I get what you are saying. I guess because I don’t use the tools talked about here and I am an old guy, I am used to lining up mic’d signals with DI’s in my DAW for timing and flipping one to be in phase with the other.
Your thing is, this is something that is done internally in most or all pedals like this, both signal are in line in time and phase at the output?
Fixes can be done in a recording environment. But live I want no issues that I can control and no menu diving so this is my bassrig use case. Therefore I always combine any split signal before the bassrig or I split after. I’ll either split the DI or the amp out to send places but I don’t use both at the same time on the SV. Maybe with the fifteen it will work now that I can switch off the cabsim, however the amp eq will likely also add some phase difference.
It would be a huge bummer if the DI and 1/4 inch out have baked in phase issues when played together like above. Hopefully @Origin_Effects will weigh in on that.
This is working out nicely with the cali76 on the slowest attack. The Fifteen cab sim negates all the harsh clipping in the DCX but it lets you add some higher frequency harmonics to it in either a subtle or obvious way or thanks to the defeatable cab sim I can switch to direct tone with DCX on its own.
This is working out nicely with the cali76 on the slowest attack. The Fifteen cab sim negates all the harsh clipping in the DCX but it lets you add some higher frequency harmonics to it in either a subtle or obvious way or thanks to the defeatable cab sim I can switch to direct tone with DCX on its own.
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The above test was with a DI taken before the Fifteen (not from the 1/4" out), mixed with the DI from the Fifteen with both the amp-sim and cab-sim in circuit. So it tells us nothing about what in the Fifteen is causing phase-incoherencies- the amp-sim or cab-sim or a combination of those (my take is that there are likely phase things happening all throughout, which can be said of most gear that incorporates EQ and filtering). That said, there is no reason to expect a pedal to blend perfectly with a clean DI like that- that's not really what this pedal is designed or advertised to do.
A small correction: In the test, the amp sim was indeed disabled, so the only difference between the two signals was the cab sim. So, unless I did some mistake wiring things up (which can certainly have happened) what the experiment indicates is that the cab sim indeed did not play well with a direct signal, without a few tweaks done in post.
I cannot notice any phase issues using the amp sim blended with a direct signal, in fact that's what the blend knob on the pedal does and it works just fine.
As I said in my original post, I don't think it's an issue, the pedal just doesn't seem designed to work in that scenario and that's all, to expect otherwise may be unfair.. but blending an amp signal with a clean signal is a super common scenario, and on of the reasons people choose analog over digital for realtime effects is exactly to avoid phasing issues that happen with digital/analog conversion, so it wouldn't hurt if Origin Effects clearly stated somewhere in the product literature that the cab sim signal may need work in order to be blended with a clean DI signal.
If it weren't a very common scenario, I agree that this would be over the top.
In any case, I'm very happy with the BR Fifteen, I think it's an amazing product and the addition of the "off" option on the XLR out is awesome. I just did the experiment because someone complained of phasing issues and was curious to see if I could replicate it.
I've had a few hours with the bassrig 15, and I do very much enjoy the tone. I have previously always used a compressor to get a bit more impact to my tone, but I find with the bassrig that although it sounds great, it is a bit too mushy to let the attack heavy tone through, and I find the compressor (empress bass) is better off disabled. Does anyone know if the origin comps play better with the bassrig 15? I don't mind spending the money, but I have loved the empress with every other preamp I have had on my board.
For the "just leave the comp off" suggestions, I like the comp for how it improves the sustain for when I click on the synth pedal (another issue is making that sound good through the bassrig 15...), I don't want to put an LS2 back on the board and I would need to turn the comp and synth off and on simultaneously if I can't keep the comp on all the time.
For the "just leave the comp off" suggestions, I like the comp for how it improves the sustain for when I click on the synth pedal (another issue is making that sound good through the bassrig 15...), I don't want to put an LS2 back on the board and I would need to turn the comp and synth off and on simultaneously if I can't keep the comp on all the time.
I assume you have the Attack control in the Empress turned up to slow down the attack? Honestly I've found when I play through a tube rig I've never needed a comp, but that depends on the tube amp for sure- some amps emphasize attack while some squash it. I haven't messed with the Fifteen enough yet to see how I feel on that front.
Yes, for clarity I have the empress adjusted so that the gain reduction is delayed to allow an emphasized note attack.
I a/b'd the bassrig with a bddi v2 (my standard) and found the bassrig 15 could be dialed in to sound similar to the setting I use on the bddi, but the bddi is significantly more versatile. Comparing the two set to my preferred tone, the bassrig 15 has a much more pleasant grit to it, and to be honest as long as the drive isn't set too high, the bassrig 15 can't really be made to sound bad or unusable like the bddi.
I am finding the DCX/Fifteen combo to be quite handy. For songs that benefit from the portaflex sound, I can use just the 15. For songs that need deeper console tones, switch to the DCX. Gain stage the DCX into the 15 for a very nice second level drive from the 15. Thats the config I am setting for this Sunday. Since we run through the set twice and then have three services, that will give me 5 shots at evaluating the 15 on the same 4 songs. Of course, I'm in IEMs and have no idea what the room is hearing. I plan to talk to the tech team and let them know my plans and see if they have any observations.
Yeah I agree, I don't use the effects at all when I use an amp, I only use traynor tube amps. I only use the pedalboard when going direct.
Thanks for the correction. Personally I still feel it isn't a real issue as I've always had to mess with phase in the box when mixing different signals. I suspect Origin's goal with the cab-sim was to achieve the most accurate representation they could of the measured cab using analog filtering- doing so in the analog realm would be impossible without phase shifting parts of the signal (and even linear-phase EQs that exist to try to get around this byproduct have their own consequences). Here's a great demonstration of what filtering does to the phase of a signal, done totally in the box so not involving any addition of latency based on DAC and you can recreate this test for yourself easily in a DAW (go to 5:10):
That's how filtering/EQ works, and will always have an effect when mixing two signals with different processing- even with the Blend control on the Bassrig Fifteen or any other device with divergent EQ/processing in the signal paths- plenty of times that blending sounds fine or even good, but pretty much will always have phase-incoherencies happening that are weakening portions of the signal. There's no way around it.
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The fifteen does compress realistically so I haven’t found a god way to use compression ahead of it that doesn’t limit the responsiveness. If you need sustain you could put it after (complications with cabsim xlr notwithstanding).
As for the synth they generally need full frequency range to sound right and the 15 reduces that range, so there may not be a solution with the 15 on.
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