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Dolby Looking To Monopolize Consumer Audio By Restricting Its Codec (audioholics.com)
Audiofan writes from a report via Audioholics, written by Gene DellaSala: Variety is said to be the spice of life. Why only eat cherry Starbursts when you can sample orange, watermelon, lemon, etc? The same applies to multi-channel surround sound upmixers. But the folks at Dolby apparently want you to eat only one flavor. Their flavor. Dolby recently issued a mandate to all of their Atmos licensee partners to restrict usage of third-party upmixers with any Dolby signals including 5.1/7.1 DD, DD+, TrueHD and Atmos. That means if you're running a DTS Soundbar, it won't process a Dolby signal, or no dice if you want to use the Auro-Matic Upmixer for a native Dolby signal. Is Dolby doing this to protect their IP or to monopolize consumer audio like they tried to do with their patented Atmos-enabled speaker? The copy of the mandate that was sent to all of Dolby's licensee partners has the following guidelines: Native Dolby Atmos content shall NOT be up-mixed, surround or height virtualized by any 3rd party competitor upmixer (ie. DTS or Auro-3D); Channel-Based DD/DD+, Dolby TrueHD 5.1 and 7.1 codecs shall not be height virtualized by any 3rd party upmixer (ie. DTS). (This implies height virtualization without height speakers. DTS has this capability but Auro-3D does not).
Audioholics notes the company will however "permit third party upmixing and/or surround virtualization of channel-based codecs that support Dolby Atmos rendering as long as the third party doesn't license their own upmixing technologies to third parties."
As for why Dolby is issuing this mandate to its licensees, it may come down to two reasons: control quality of content so that their upmixer is only used with their software; put an end to Auro-3D and strike a blow to DTS.
Audioholics notes the company will however "permit third party upmixing and/or surround virtualization of channel-based codecs that support Dolby Atmos rendering as long as the third party doesn't license their own upmixing technologies to third parties."
As for why Dolby is issuing this mandate to its licensees, it may come down to two reasons: control quality of content so that their upmixer is only used with their software; put an end to Auro-3D and strike a blow to DTS.
Why is this a big deal? Are people really affected by this or us it just on principle?
It's gotten to the point that I don't really care what mode my receiver is in when I'm watching something as long as it sounds decent.
Hell, in the other room I have a projector setup and the sound comes out of a single speaker off to the side. It sounds good enough.
It's a total contrast to back in the 90s and early 00s when I was obsessed with surround and having a ton of speakers and a subwoofer. I think over the years I realized that it wasn't adding that much enjoyment to my experience. What mattered most in the end is clear, crisp audio and capable bass, not how many speakers are delivering it.
Yup. I'll be avoiding Dolby products from now on.
I don't need a company taxing my audio with anti competitive tactics.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's never about quality. It's always about hindering competition.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Atmos is a system, not a codec.
Traditionally, you had a pre-mixed channel bed like 5.1 (AC-3, E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4), and 7.1 (supported by E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4). With the introduction of audio objects in 3D space, E-AC-3, MLP and AC-4 are extended - and that is what Atmos basically is.
The problem is how to manage loudness when you have a channel bed and/or objects. E-AC-3, for example, had a substream type originally reserved for future use - in this case, implementing Atmos. Since E-AC-3-based Atmos is backwards compatible with legacy E-AC-3 decoders, Dolby has had to do some tricks to the metadata to insert the objects and keep loudness managed. This can only be accomplished at the renderer, and it requires tight control of the metadata to manage loudness consistently.
When you get into third-party upmixers, they do all sorts of awful things (*cough*Neural*cough*). Two things they can do due to "artistic" interpretation are to improperly locate the audio in 3D space, and mix in the incorrect level the audio that goes into the speakers. Because of differences in perception in loudness depending on location around your head, and because you aren't mixing the right level of audio at/across a given speaker, the original renderer's interpretation of loudness metadata and location metadata is incorrect. This leads to potentially disturbing variations in loudness and confusion in location of content that is the fundamental basis for Dolby providing an entire Atmos system from authoring to rendering, end-to-end.
The only place upmixers typically exist in devices anyway is in AV receivers and soundbars. Yes, they can exist in the broadcast chain somewhere before encoding and transmission, but broadcasters should know to manage that experience any time object-based audio is in play. As for the rest, Dolby already offers its own upmixer that works with the Atmos renderer. There really is no good reason to go outside of this, and licensees of Dolby technologies are only degrading the end user experience by doing this.
Again, Dolby doesn't care per se whether someone else is using another system, be it DTS or Barco or Fraunhofer. All they care about is that the content owners and distributors don't have complaints because of this. Certain folks who provide premium content, such as HBO, are huge sticklers for audio quality and have been pioneers since the beginning. If they're investing in Atmos, they don't want the downstream experience affected and so Dolby is really doing their bidding ultimately.
So no, there's no conspiracy and Dolby isn't doing this to screw anyone else over. "Blame" the content owners if you want to blame anyone, but Dolby is just trying to provide a consistent experience that has eluded folks for decades now. If you want proof of that, go watch 100 different videos from any large free streaming site and tell me that you won't touch the volume control.
You mean other than the government granted monopoly, right?
Is there even any 5.1 music available??
When they're done blinding you with science, they want to make sure you know which direction it came from.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I really fucking doubt you use SACD.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You don't speak for all of us, biatch.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Wait.
There's more than one Dolby?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I was into my 5.1 speaker system for my PC back in the day. When it came time to replace it, I ditched the extra speakers for a 2.1 speaker system. It got silly that you could get a 7.1 or 8.1 speaker system. These days I wear headphones while playing FortNite and Overwatch.
Dammit Dolby, I should be free to virtualize and upmix Dolby tracks however I want. Iâ(TM)m a big believer in virtualized 3D sound with a mimimum of drivers and speakers ever since Aureal A3D 3D sound blew my mind back in the day (15 or more years ago) with just two speakers. Ainâ(TM)t nobody got type to to buy all those speakers and move em around all crazy like. Dolby, just let me take my 5.1 setup and expand my experience with DSP, jeez.
Dolby-A was the savior of studio recording decades ago. They were making too much money, so along came dbx. Fraunhofer likely has enough money left from its MP3 licenses to do something better really soon. Technology moves fast, but so does the competition.
Since there's no -1, You're a Self-Important Ass moderation...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The thing is that unless you are in a room with no other sounds, headphones quickly become the superior experience. If someone else in the room is playing a game, or your dog is trying to get at an itch on its back, or kids are playing with Legos on the floor, or ... then the ambient noise will drown out a lot of the sound from your speakers, while the headphones by design send the sound straight into your ears.
I'd say for games like Fallout 4 or stealth-based games with proper use of the stereo channel, having headphones improves the experience because you can hear where the enemies are.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The game Hellblade even used binaural audio, so when you are wearing headphones you could hear sounds all around you.
It was very creepy to hear all those voices around you, and noises behind your back. Very well done!
As a side remark. The developers of Steinberg's Cubase has announced that they are working on a special binaural audio plugin (or output channel - I am not sure what it will be) that allows you to mix surround sound for headphone use. Very neat...
It's gotten to the point that I don't really care what mode my receiver is in
I'm not a huge fan of red velvet cake. But here's the thing, when I got onto the baking forums I don't jump into every post where they are debating the benefits of various red food colourings just to tell them about my lack of interest in red-velvet cake.
You don't like nice sound, fine. But leave the people who do and spend money on good multi-channel audio to debate the affects this change will have on them.
No, Dolby is the little "D" on ths goodcasette taps.
The musician you're thinking of is Alton Brown.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
People with ear buds or beats headphones seem typical these days. This ain't hurting them.
Those people are indeed most likely to listen to music from their smartphone.
Appart from the oddballs (Apple own patents on AAC and thus pretty much does whatever they want with it),
nearly all the smartphone/app/internet/webapp ecosystem has been taken over by OPUS an openstandars and open source high qality codec (beats nearly everything else, the only exception being the extreme low bandwidth which doesn't fit the internet use-cases).
Close to all modern apps (be it for voice calls or for music) have shifthed to this (with the high visible exception of Spotify, they started with Vorbis, OPUS' predecessor open source web standart).
Because most of the internet and app devs got fed up with the licensing shenanigans formerly around MP3 and then around AAC.
So most of these people won't give a damn about Dolby, and multi channel speaker upmixing (they only have 2 channels to begin with anyway). That technology got excised out of the mobile scene.
The problem is the home theater, home cinema, TV, etc.
These are the people having multi-speaker setup, and the TV world seems much more entrenched into older standard (e.g.: MPEG's video and audio codecs, Dolby's and DTS' codecs for sound, etc.)
These are the people affected by the licensing shenanigans of Dolby.
Of course Dolby *has* an excuse : they don't want their logo stuck on a piece of shitty hardware that does catastrophic multi-channel sound generation, and then only use Dolby to stream the badly distorted noise to the speaker system : that will ruin Dolby's reputation due to factors that have nothing to do with their technology.
The problem is that in practice, Dolby will most likely abuse the duopoly they have (together with DTS) in the movie audio market to mostly try to make sure to get some money out of every bit of sound played together with any movie.
But Dolby should be paying attention to what happened with OPUS on the internet/smartphone market.
If they start pissing way to many people with their licensing practice, they might be next.
Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, etc. : nowadays the various streaming platforms represent together a bigger market share than the classical TV channels and satellite cable networks together.
They come from a more internet oriented background. They got fed up with MPEG's licensing bullshit, and they banded together with all the other members behind AOMedia, and sent a giant collective "fuck you" to MPEG in the form of AV-1 codec.
Nowadays, there's no technical reason why Dolby should be important in the TV market.
There used to be a technical restriction in the past making it mandatory to use DTS or Dolby to transmit the audio to the speaker system : there's only so much data that you can cram within the fixed ~1.0-1.5Mbps bandwidth of SPDIF and TOSLink. You need to compress it to transmit it, and Dolby and DTS managed to get into the home theater market due to their presence in the commercial movie theaters. This made possible to have Video Laser Discs (on their digital track), then DVDs and now current media and streams that contain a standard format that can be streamed straight to the audio receiver.
But nowadays with standards like HDMI, that can pipe multiple uncompressed streams to the audio receiver, the Dolby or DTS compressions make a lot less sense.
A movie streaming app running on the smartTV/HDMI stick/set top box could fetch audio in any format it want (including the above mentioned OPUS), decompress it, optionally up-mixes it if the user has more speakers in their home cinema than what is streamed, and send it as raw uncompressed audio the speaker system, without Dolby ever being involved at any sstep.
Dolby should watch out to not piss off the market because some player (mostly the modern movie streaming platform) could pretty well do exactly that.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A set of high-quality stereo speakers and a sub or two to fill out the frequency range at the bottom end and done.
I don't need wizz-bang bullshit going on behind me or above me or whatever. If the move isn't immersive enough without surround sound, it's not a good movie, and hence not worth watching.
Eat the rich.
Companies are always trying to grab market share. But even if Dolby were to succeed at this as much as they like, they'd simply temporarily dominate the market, not monopolize it. You can bet that soon thereafter, if the feature mattered, some big company or an industry consortium would come out with some better, open source alternative.
Advanced Audio Coding
FairPlay was done so the record labels would let Apple sell music, maybe you're thinking about that?
Apple didn't really want to use it, see Thoughts on Music, and was eventually able to convince the labels to drop the DRM requirement.
Yeah for headphones on the PC I like the surround, you really can tell where stuff is sometimes in FPS/RPG games. For movies it is actually distracting to me to have stuff sound behind me anymore, possibly since it isn't interactive. It'd be like an audiobook using surround.
I have done so log ago. This is artificial scarcity, nothing else.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
At least in the US/North American markets Dolby is mandated (i.e. has a monopoly) as the broadcast standard for ATSC audio. While cable companies could do something different re-encoding feeds/content, that is a step they would want to avoid. Cell phones is are a bit different, there you only need the Dolby decoder because some of the content stands a reasonable chance of having the audio in a Dolby format. But the manufacturers are sort of forced to include it because customers expect to be able to watch anything they want. Many streaming systems also use Dolby encoding for some of their content.
This is independent of what your playback system is, i.e. 5.1 or simple earbuds - you still need to decode the audio. By blocking post processing options from other suppliers Dolby is locking everyone in to "their way" only. I am not knocking Dolby's work, they have some very smart audio people and do significant R&D. It's the heavy handed attempt to monetize that work that is the problem. When used for something like ATSC (use of a publicly owned commons - airwaves) companies that have their technology selected are supposed to license it under "Fair and reasonable terms". Blocking new and innovative methods of post decode sound field processing is neither fair nor reasonable. The companies that work in this area are typically small and can't afford the lawyers to take on a giant like Dolby, so they will (and have) given up.
Are those third party efforts better than Dolby's? Perhaps sometimes yes, sometimes no. The concern with this new position from Dolby is that you and I will never get the chance to know if someone has a better product.
Dolby is also a patent machine and ties up their technology for long periods of time by playing the system. It's a pretty clear case that at least for technology standards that use a public resource (airwaves) should use "open source/non-patented" technology to avoid exactly they type of issue being created by Dolby in telling audio system designers what they can and can not do, and limiting the options for customers.
In some other parts of the world Fruanhofer's MPEG-H is being used for broadcast of audio (for TV), I do not know what restrictions they might place on customers as it's fairly new.
An Anonymous Coward sneered:
Audio snobs are the worst neckbeards. Warhammer 40k people chuckle while competitive Magic players draw poor caricatures of audio snobs holding gold-plated cables and artisan vacuum tubes.
Nice conflation there, troll boy.
Overpriced, overhyped, gold-plated connectors and high-quality (NOT "artisan") vacuum tubes are two entirely different things.
While anyone who's actually A-B tested Monster cables knows they're crap, quality tubes (or "valves" in Brit-speak) are a whole different matter. Most of the tubes that modern manufacturers employ in audio amplifiers are made In China, and suffer from the same lack of concern for quality control and focus on quantity over quality for which everything else made in the PRC is infamous. That systematic disregard for quality results in audio that sounds harsh and peaky, and that lacks both warmth and detail. (Western companies, like Apple, who install their own quality-control supervisors at Chinese factories to oversee production can and do establish and maintain excellent, consistent quality standards - but only at the cost of paying Western salaries for those supervisors - a cost which, naturally enough, gets passed along to their customers.)
(I own five all-tube guitar amps and four hybrid ones. I've been recording multitrack audio for almost 50 years now, and my ears are therefore pretty well-trained. I say this to establish that I'm not appealing to false authority here, because I actually am a real-world, no-shit authority in this regard.)
And I'm telling you that quality vacuum tubes make a significant, and easily audible, difference in sound quality, for both production and reproduction. Every guitarist who uses tube-based amplifiers will tell you exactly the same thing, as will every audio engineer who employs tube-based microphone preamplifiers or signal processing gear.
Every flinkin' one of us.
Monster cables are a waste of money, but stick a set of JJ Electronics matched tubes in a new guitar amp - even a very expensive guitar amp - and the quality of the sound immediately improves. Sometimes incredibly so (which, again, is directly related to the particular manufacturer's focus on quality control).
Guitarists, producers, and audio engineers will argue about which manufacturer produces the best replacement tubes, of course. Electro-harmonix, Grove Tubes, JJ, and Sovtek all have their partisans - but everyone agrees that ANY of those manufacturer's products is a vast improvement over the garbage with which tube ampmakers ship their products by default.
So, why do high-end manufacturers choose to use such shitty tubes in the first place?
MBAs, of course. They run every company of any appreciable size nowadays. None of them gives a flying fuck about anything except "maximizing shareholder return" - and they consider quality control a cost center, rather than a competitive advantage ...
Check out my novel.
An Anonymous Coward insisted:
I'm fed up with expensive and mostly shitty sounding surround sound systems. I replaced my TV speakers with studio monitors with ribbon tweeters and I couldn't be happier. I don't know of any surround sound system that can compete with the accuracy and detail of a proper studio monitors. The previous Yamaha surround speaker package I was using which costed me over 1k was so bad there's no way in hell I could hear the detail at low volume.
I agree that the vast majority of off-the-shelf 7.1 speaker systems suck donkey balls.
That's why, when I built my own system, I used bookshelf speakers from Polk Audio and Boston Acoustics for the rear and surround speakers, kept the genuine Noname tower speakers (with 15-inch woofers) I've been using since the Stoned Age as my mains, and added a Klipsch center-channel speaker and a 12" Acoustic Research powered subwoofer. They're all fed by a Yamaha RX-765 amplifier, which does a superb job of upmixing stereo, when required, and brings out stunning detail in the 5.1 and 7.1 mixes it was designed to reproduce, even at quite low volumes.
I've heard plenty of shitty-quality 5.1 and 7.1 systems, all of which feature ridiculously-tiny satellite speakers that are simply incapable of reproducing full-range sound. And adding a subwoofer doesn't change or improve that fundamental design flaw. In the real world, bass sounds don't just emanate from a central location. Instead, they come from all directions. Tiny speakers produces tinny audio. There's just no getting around that.
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. By the same token, you can't produce convincing - or even pleasant - 7.1 audio with a system based on 3" speakers ...
Check out my novel.
This is why I'm leaving slashdot...
Pointless political commentary in every thread.
Take an already poor and inconsistent audio experience... for literally any consumer paying the slightest attention, and make it even more poor and inconsistent!
This is way more libertarian than its comic imagery suggests.
To begin with, it implies millimeter large-muscle control, situated in the cerebral cortex, over an ape-link domination reflex arc which traditionally originates in the Brown Shirt–craving amygdala.
It also implies passive boundary management on the behalf of the indolent beak. Perhaps an alternate version would read: Your right to shove your shit down my throat ends when I close my mouth, purse my lips, and bar my teeth.
The difference explains why so many people show up with a shit sandwich to find out whether you've got the wits (or not) to suppress your aggressive ape arm-swing swallow reflex.
Standard libertarian error: I did nothing, because I presumed the asshole was aiming at my nose, instead. In libertarian theory—if you believe this aphorism—that's quite all right, no need for alarm. Just so long as the fist stops, on a dime, in cross-eyed, neutral air space.
These weirder-than-normal typos happen when I've got mental shoes pointed at the exit (you know that old "toe direction" magic decoder ring to home in on damp sex-kitten hotness).
This, in keeping with my theme, that maintenance of full autonomy does ultimately become wearing.
Eventually, another part of my brain orients me toward another task, entirely unlike girding my alimentary intake against the daily shit-sandwich shit storm.
Generally, when I'm not writing, I think the world is a grand place (mostly). This partly because I do exercise my immune function so vigorously, in my ritualistic (and personally important) daily yelling into the wind—without which I would soon lapse into mouth-breathing, like so many others, who've pragmatically adapted themselves to inhaling the taint tax.
Just tell them it's part of an alien invasion conspiracy.
Monster Cable's original product actually made sense. But that was a long time ago, and the company has gone down a bunch of rabbit holes since then.
Back in the day, people mostly connected speakers with zip cord (the thin flexible wire that is used for lamps and other small electrical devices) or something similar, and it was usually 18 gauge wire so it would be small and flexible. That worked fine with tube amplifiers, which were high voltage and low current devices and usually operated with speakers designed for relatively high impedance levels like 16 ohms.
But then solid state amplifiers came along. Suddenly it was possible and not prohibitively expensive to make amps that produced hundreds of watts of audio. Transistors are also low voltage and high current devices by nature (even more so back then) and the designs were usually done without audio transformers, both to reduce costs and to eliminate signal degradation from the transformers. At the same time, speakers were being designed to operate at lower impedances, meaning less voltage and more current.
What did that mean for speaker cables? That the resistance loss in the cable was no longer negligible; it meant lost power. And because the impedance of most speakers is not a constant (it's higher at some frequencies and lower at others) the resistance loss was not constant with frequency, meaning that the resistance of the cable would alter the sound of the speaker. Along came Monster Cable with a much heavier gauge speaker cable to address the issue. (If memory serves their original product was 12 gauge.) They also made it with many small strands: not to minimize skin effect as later advertising for fancy cables claimed (that's an issue at RF but negligible at audio frequencies), but simply to let them make a larger cable that was still flexible and easy to connect. Because it used more copper and more strands, that Monster Cable was more expensive to make than zip cord, but by modern cable standards it was inexpensive.
The fly in the ointment is that there was nothing particularly novel or patentable there. Once Monster Cable caught on, other manufacturers started to make thick flexible speaker cable. So the company had to make increasingly esoteric designs and make grandiose claims about them to retain its market.
Similarly, their original low-level cables made sense. Their Interlink cables focused on two things: better build quality (the cheap available cables mostly weren't very well made and were easy to damage) and improved shielding. The latter helps to keep electrical noise out of the components that are being connected and thus improves sound. Again those things were easy to copy, so they moved into more and more elaborate designs, with fanciful descriptions to justify them.
Monster Cable is the best known of the high end cable companies and is often used as a symbol for the excesses of that type of product, but they are far from the worst offender in the snake oil business. And they still make more ordinary (and reasonably priced) cables for the car audio and professional home installer businesses.
An Anonymous Coward insisted:
Dude, I am an EE. Vacuum tubes are vacuum tubes. That "warmth" you guys always go on about is noise, usually 60Hz noise. You are actually saying "I like all my cars to come with cracked windows. It really makes for optimal clarity." This is exactly what the AC OP was talkin bout, Willis.
You're wrong. Let me explain why.
You are thinking like an engineer who knows nothing at all about tube applications in music. Which is to say you're thinking of tubes as signal processing components where the goal is to amplify an input signal as accurately as possible, without adding distortion or coloration in any way.
But that's not how guitar players use them. We WANT them to distort. We drive the preamp stage(s) hard, to purposefully over-amplify the signal. Some of us use floor effects to increase the distortion of our instrument's signal: overdrives, fuzz boxes, distortion units, and signal boosters (among many other kinds of signal processing units - far too many to list here). Some of us, by contrast (me, for instance), like to use an amp's natural distortion. That's why guitar amps come with overdrive channels. Some of them even have multiple, cascaded preamp sections to overdrive an already-overdriven signal, before it hits the power amp stage (I'm looking at YOU, Peavey 5150).
And, if you have a great amp, and a great guitar to play through it (and assuming you know what you're doing, of course), you can produce lovely, fat, singing tone that can make your guitar sound like it's crying, or screaming, or snarling like a cornered tiger. Or other effects that can only be produced by overdriven tubes feeding power tubes.
Even trad jazz guitarists - the kind of folks who worship at the shrine of Charlie Christian - like to push their signal hard enough to fatten the tone up just that much, as they strive to fill every 64th note with a different chord (none of them actually playing the melody, mind you, because that's just Not Done In Jazz).
I'm here to tell you, based on (mumble) years of experience playing many different makes and models of electric guitar through a wide variety of tube, hybrid, solid-state, and digital modeling amps that tube amps RULE - and the tubes in them make a huge difference in the way that overdriven guitar signals sound.
Most Chinese tubes suck donkey balls at making guitar amps sound good. When you overdrive them, they make your signal sound harsh, rather than creamy, spiky, rather than smooth, and shrieky, rather than singing. It's a fact of life for those of us who care about such things, and it means that we have to spend the money to buy matched sets of JJ's (which I favor), or Groove Tubes, or Sovteks, or Electro Harmonix tubes to replace the ones that come in new-from-the-factory amps, because, to reduce manufacturing costs (and thereby increase manufacturers' profits), even multi-thousand-dollar guitar amps come with those ugly-sounding Chinese tubes.
That, in turn, is because (to repurpose an Oscar Wilde quote about cynics) MBAs know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And they're the people who run every corporation of meaningful size on the planet - including all the major musical instrument and amplifier manufacturers.
In the same vein, it may surprise you to learn that recording engineers and producers also favor high-end tubes in things like microphone preamps for the same reason guitar players do: because a subtly-overdriven mic preamp creates a warmth and fatness of tone that a solid-state preamp just can't match. The same is true of tube-driven compressors, and other signal-processing units.
Go ahead and call it noise, if you like. And it may, indeed, look like noise on an oscilloscope - but it's not noise to your ears. It's tone. Glorious, lovely tone that makes rock (and I mean everything from Elvis to indie), blues, progressive jazz, and modern country sound the way they
Check out my novel.
I felt a lot better about it after reading your childish drivel.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.