HMX & IRON Part 1: The Triangle of Tone
as you may have seen, we’ve just launched our new 8-channel mic preamp, the ASP800.
We’re really proud of the quality and feature set we’ve delivered on this unit, and it makes a great partner to your existing audio interface, our iD14 / iD22 offerings or in partnership with big brother the ASP880.
In particular, we’re proud of our tonal shaping options and the new HMX & IRON saturator combination.
I’ve written a piece on HMX before and also the Triangle of Tone concept - but here I wanted to uncover a little more about the technology behind the saturators & why they do what they do.
In this multi-part series I will cover how these concepts relate and why our new IRON saturator was the missing piece to this puzzle - a colour I felt we really needed alongside HMX to balance the ying/yang of the tonal centre on the mic pre.
You may have seen us mention the concept of the Triangle of Tone before with regards to variable impedance but it can be applied to anything.
It is a simple way to assist training your ears to recognise transformations in the source sound to a desired sonic target. By learning to map your equipment and it’s “personality” to what you hear, you can eventually break the rules, ignore the “theories” and technological choices and go with 100% feel and vibe - with more appropriate musical directivity.
Consider mapping the characteristics of the piece of equipment in a graphical way, a visual reminder. Would you categorise a piece of gear as slow, soft, hard, clean, coloured, trashy and if so by how much, in which frequency ranges, how does it relate to the source? How do those changes make you “feel”? These characteristics can be placed on the graph above in a scale of strength from 0 (centre) to 10 (outer perimeter). You could also make a Triangle of Feel if you prefer!
Take a source, such as a soft singer with a darker tone on the mic and add an airy, forwards lift with your sound shaping tools to achieve the “appropriate” tonal centre, or take a sound with an uneven midrange and “smooth it out” with something that softens details to slot it into a mix.
Good tracking engineers know how to do this on the way in, leaving less guesswork for the mix engineers. Great mixers now how to shape these choices and blend within thousands of subtle changes to make sense of the puzzle and ensure the pieces fit together perfectly, thus increasing the emotional impact of the song. A great mastering engineer should understand the relationships of these choices and know when to tread lightly to preserve them but also when to apply more heavy handed tonal shaping to ensure the message of the material really hits home on with the listener across various playback systems.
“I got 99 plug-ins but it’s a b*tch choosing one...”
Keep it simple, make easy choices and try not to confuse yourself with too many options. Restrictions often enhance creativity.
How many of you truly feel that you understand the sonic impact of each of the plug-ins you have in your DAW? Are you aware that some change the sound by just turning them on, even set “flat” and I’m not talking about fashionable channel saturators but seemingly transparent digital EQs etc? Do you really need 6 different mic preamps to make a decent recording?
You should be making sure you have a few reliable tools that get the job done - and don’t fall foul of having a gazillion different options available that confuse your creative process.
If you spend your time recording or mixing, you may find that the subtle tonal shaping available in ASP800 with HMX & IRON allows you to do less processing in the box later downstream and it may allow you to reduce the number of mic pres you need to use when recording. If you produce electronic music, running elements through the saturators can replace the need to stack hundreds of “tape emulation” & “console saturation” plugins in the DAW which can tend to cheapen the sound or at the very least, compromise 3D depth to some degree in my experience if over used.
The Classic Audient Sound Modified:
HMX & IRON are our new tonal shaping tools that allow you to take the fundamentally clean Audient mic pre sound and add sharper edges, smooth complex midrange dirt all the way to full-on-fuzz and growl.
I would categorise our ASP Class-A mic amp as pretty fast and clean sounding with a tonal centre that is neutral - neither too hard or too soft (the green triangle).
HMX - our MOSFET saturator is pretty soft, slow and very colourful with low frequency emphasis and a gentle compression style. It can take the tonal centre towards the purple triangle.
IRON - our new TRANSFORMER saturator is shimmery, hard, offers a slightly distorted midrange, with lots of low frequency harmonic distortion and it can shape transients and add some attack / punch to very transient material. IRON takes the ASP mic amp and moves it towards the blue triangle.
By combining these two in varying amounts - ASP800 allows you to take the source tone on a trip around the map - providing more separation and personality with very simple choices at unbeatable price/performance value.
Once learnt, you can forget about the “concepts behind the tool” but remember why & when you would choose a certain sound when you are making records - it is our job as engineers to fully understand these choices.
Tune in for Part II - where I’ll cover the circuits behind HMX & IRON. However if you want to skip ahead and take a listen - head over to https://soundcloud.com/audientworld and check out our HMX & IRON playlists.