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Posted by Tiesto on Mar-23-2003 12:09:

Sound quality in Reason 2

If I have quite a lot of tracks running at the same time in Reason, it sounds very... bad in the higher and lower frequencies and there are some distortions. Anyone knows how to improve the sound quality?
Thanks.

Posted by Vortex_SA on Mar-23-2003 12:45:

export each track to wav, and mix it in some mixing prog, such as n-track...

Posted by Mr.Mystery on Mar-23-2003 15:39:

Possible reasons:
1) Your sound levels are too high which causes distortion
2) Your PC can't handle that many events at the same time - try incresing the latency.

Posted by Trancevision on Mar-23-2003 16:09:

Reason and sound quality problems

First thing I suggest is eqing the individual tracks and bring every instrument to its desiderated place in the mix.

Second If it's distorting try to reduce the volume level and use pan knobs to adjust the sounds.

You can export every track and use it in another sound programm or use Rewire to link directly to Cubase, Logic, Sonar...whatever.

Trancevision

Posted by Tiesto on Mar-23-2003 20:32:

Thanks for your help.
I'm afraid exporting any single track ( or even a few ) would take too much space on the hard drive, which is scarce. At least I'm using 30-40 tracks per production...

quote:

1) Your sound levels are too high which causes distortion

Oki, I'll reduce the sound level later on and hear the results

quote:

2) Your PC can't handle that many events at the same time - try incresing the latency.

If the song is exported, the latency doesn't play a role, does it?
If so, this is definitely not the reason. I'm referring to the sound in the compiled version.

quote:

Second If it's distorting try to reduce the volume level and use pan knobs to adjust the sounds.

Uhh, actually... what exactly do you mean by 'pan knobs'?

Posted by Mr.Mystery on Mar-23-2003 21:08:

quote:
Originally posted by Tiesto
If the song is exported, the latency doesn't play a role, does it?
If so, this is definitely not the reason. I'm referring to the sound in the compiled version.

Ahh, right. Then it's most likely the sound levels

Posted by Michael Russo on Mar-23-2003 21:44:

quote:
Originally posted by Tiesto
Uhh, actually... what exactly do you mean by 'pan knobs'?

On the mixer, there should be some way to 'pan' the sound left or right... it's one way to adjust the position of a track in the stereo field. Other methods have been mentioned as well (ie. eq'ing, and changing the levels).

It sounds to me like there's some clipping go on. I remember reading some criticisms of reason somewhere.... someone claimed that tracks would be clipping, but there would be no indication of this. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's something to think about at least.

Posted by Mr.Mystery on Mar-23-2003 21:47:

quote:
Originally posted by Michael Russo

It sounds to me like there's some clipping go on. I remember reading some criticisms of reason somewhere.... someone claimed that tracks would be clipping, but there would be no indication of this. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's something to think about at least.

There's a little red light in the bottom left of the Reason control panel that goes on if there's any clipping.

Posted by Michael Russo on Mar-23-2003 21:59:

quote:
Originally posted by Mr.Mystery
There's a little red light in the bottom left of the Reason control panel that goes on if there's any clipping.

I know, but I think the guy was trying to say that that light didn't go on when it should have... I'll try and find the article.

Posted by DJ Chrono on Mar-24-2003 03:43:

I dont think its possible for the sound quality in reason to actually decrease when you add more tracks.

it sounds to me that your computer/sound card has trouble playing that many tracks. this could be due to a low processor speed, not enough ram, or a sound card that just cant handle multitracking that well.

If you try exporting the song, my guess is that it will sound fine. It is merely the processing of all the sounds and devices in reason while you are working on it that makes it sound like the audio quality is decreasing.

Posted by Mr.Mystery on Mar-24-2003 08:27:

quote:
Originally posted by Michael Russo
I know, but I think the guy was trying to say that that light didn't go on when it should have... I'll try and find the article.

Weird - I feel it's the other way around as it sometimes seems to be going off at the weirdest places...

Posted by Anheuser on Mar-28-2003 07:50:

I'm under the impression that the clipping light only illuminates when the master out clips. So you could still overdrive an individual track and not cause clipping on the master. Even if I'm wrong on this point, I made the mistake in the past of having one or more channels red-lining on the mixer. The overall mix sounded fine, but when it came to compressing the overall mix, the sound from the track that was red-lining distorted horribly. To fix this distortion, I reduced the volume on the channel(s) that were red-lining (you will probably have to drop the volume on everything else too) and exported the track again (you can probably boost the master mixer volume now). This time I was able to compress the whole track without the distortion.