Sounds better? Transformer question

[pucho812]

I hate when I am told it made things sound better. Better in comparison to what?

At last nights brain trust meeting had a gentleman, a mastering engineer no less, laying claim that he built a box that houses 2 x transformers. They are wired with connections in and out. When a mix is run through them it sounded better and also gave a 2.5dB boost.  Now we all saw the box but did not have time to give a listen, perhaps next month
Best was the tag that several Grammy award winning engineers listen and agreed it made things better.

the transformer in question is a repeating coil  by w.e.  Being a repeating cool I would expect a 1:1 ratio so driving it would not be too difficult but I do not get how a 1:1 would give a 2.5 dB boost.
I suspect the harmonic content from transformer saturation is what is happen here.

Dubious as usual.

 

[JohnRoberts]

The customer is always right, even when ridiculous (assuming his money is good).

JR

 

[Winston OBoogie]

Can't say I've tried them myself but Google shows them to be quite popular. 
Dual coils on pri. & sec. and, depending on the type,  you can strap for about 0.6dB, 6.0dB, or 6.6dB voltage gain if you ignore insertion losses.
If the guy's getting 2.5dB then there's maybe some loading loss as well...  ?

Again, no personal idea what 'magic' they may, or may not, have!  And no doubt they probably cost $500 each so I will never know...

 

[bruno2000]

I probably have 20 of these around if anyone is interested.........
Best,
Bruno2000

 

[Winston OBoogie]

I probably have 20 of these around if anyone is interested.........
Best,
Bruno2000

No winkey face so I'm guessing you're serious 
How are they?  Looking at the specs online they look quite beefy little buggers, you may be sitting on a wee fortune Bruno.
I have to ask, how much for a pair sent to the UK?

 

[bruno2000]

I probably have 20 of these around if anyone is interested.........
Best,
Bruno2000

No winkey face so I'm guessing you're serious 
How are they?  Looking at the specs online they look quite beefy little buggers, you may be sitting on a wee fortune Bruno.
I have to ask, how much for a pair sent to the UK?

No winkey face.  Just have to find the box they are in.
Used back in the 70's for Class AAA telephone transmissions.
Yep, they are pretty large (and heavy)  When I find them, I'll PM you.
Best,
Bruno2000

 

[Winston OBoogie]

I'd better clear my inbox then   FYI, looks like you can get about £130 each ($200) on the bay though so might be too rich for my blood but let us know when you find 'em...
Cheers Bruno.

 

[CJ]

WE  111C ?

bass boost

big toroid core

 

[DerEber]

On the plugins I use, I mostly find myself turning the transformer off is there is an option.  ;D
But my Desk is full of transformers. It's awesome.
When inserting 1:1 on the patchbay I never heard anything happen at all.

Sorry I can't contribute more on this toppic.
Wait...... big irons look great and make me happy.  ;D

Anyway I would think that in mastering you'd really need an 1:1 and no 2,5dB step up.
Or at least get some compensation afterwards.
But I just doubt that the 1:1,3 transformer from same transformer-maker will have a different flavor than the 1:1.
It's plain stupid.

 

[zebra50]

Louder is always better.  In this case 2.5db better. 

 

[emrr]

11C are super flat when measured.  They take high level.  They are big as a brick.  They sound good, add some low mid thickness.  We've talked about this a lot here over many years.  More recently they were back down to around $50-70/ea.  CJ hacked one apart and gave data long ago.  Accept no substitutes.  Those are strapped funny if they are getting gain out of them, could be 119C (I think) that does 500:600 matching.  Yes, there was once a need. 

 

[pucho812]

Got sent sample files. One with magic box and one without.
I had to line them up in a daw. First thing I notice is file without and file with box are out of polarity with one another. Where the no box has a peak  in the wave form the same audio point in the one with the box  has a valley. I was told that the transformer flips the polarity.    sounds like a wiring issue to me. 

 

[emrr]

Uh, yes, they do that, and we correct for it. 

 

[Winston OBoogie]

Where the no box has a peak  in the wave form the same audio point in the one with the box  has a valley. I was told that the transformer flips the polarity...

Haha   What a fantastic feature to include on a box that you shove your masters through. 

 

[CJ]

you can get a bass boost if you feed the xfmr signal into a cap,

to see this plug a 20 hz xfmr signal into  a scope  set to AC input,

 

[bluebird]

What is the program material that sounds better? A Jazz band recorded with ADAT's? I don't know, all the songs I get these days have so much "warming" on them I would kill for an anti-transformer box. I never thought it would get to this but I've been experimenting with expanders lately, just trying to eek out a bit of dynamics. Thank God for transparent plug in EQ.
I'll slap a digi rack EQ on that guy's stuff with a 1db medium Q bump at 200hz...along with the 2.5db boost. No transformer needed.

Ahh but it's all subjective...Could be wrong!

Ian

 

[joaquins]

What is the program material that sounds better? A Jazz band recorded with ADAT's? I don't know, all the songs I get these days have so much "warming" on them I would kill for an anti-transformer box. I never thought it would get to this but I've been experimenting with expanders lately, just trying to eek out a bit of dynamics. Thank God for transparent plug in EQ.
I'll slap a digi rack EQ on that guy's stuff with a 1db medium Q bump at 200hz...along with the 2.5db boost. No transformer needed.

Ahh but it's all subjective...Could be wrong!

Ian

There are a few softwares out there for declining signal and reducing THD, I've used some of this tools in Rx lately to recover a really really bad speech to make possible to transcribe it and it did help a lot, I don't have experience with music related signals dough.

JS

 

[bluebird]

Yes I have used those tools also. Waves has some less CPU intensive plugs that work well for some things. The Rx spectrum tool is really powerful but it takes a lot of time to clean things up. Its good for the occasional vocal distortion or guitars that put the song over the edge for a just a moment.

I master a lot of pop music and don't mind distorted synths and clipped kicks, it goes with the territory. But when every single element is distorted with some kind of tape simulator or decapitator or vintage pedal modeler...including the vocal, it gets on my nerves. Then of course the mix is put through an SSL buss compressor plugin, a Fairchild plugin, an ATR tape simulator plugin...Then an L2!!!!!!!

Then I'm supposed to make it sound good again. Now the mixer is mixing loud because the "producer" or the artist who gave the mixer the tracks to mix had their own reference mix that was loud to begin with. Now I have to make it sound louder than the mixer did because no matter how much better I make it sound, if it's not LOUDER the client will think something's wrong.
I know all the mastering guys feel me on this. It's just part of the job now. Actually has been for quite a while.  And to tell you the truth, I kind of enjoy trying to turn a sh*tty loud mix into a decent sounding LOUDER mix. If you do it right, the client goes nuts. And that just feels good ;D

So to get back on topic, putting modern stuff through another set of transformers no matter how awesome they are, seems silly to me. Now maybe you get that country music client or singer songwriter guitar girl or some folky stuff that was recorded on an digi003 with some MXL mics and you just want to get a little vibe on there then MAYBE running it through those transformers might help.

BUT if you're a full time mastering engineer 90% of the stuff you get will be pretty vibed out already no matter what genre you work with.

I don't know why I'm going on and on about this, if the guy likes his WE transformer box and it makes HIM feel good than, cool.

Ian

 

[CJ]

note that those old 111C coils are wound with bare copper wire that is wrapped in cloth, over time the cloth gets funky, combine that with the sharp edges of the tape wound core,  jus sayin...