PARIS� SMACK (Son of a bit) ::

By Max Mobley - Technical Support Representative

When it comes to computer based DAWs, we've all been conditioned to be conservative in our tracking, mixing and outputting levels for fear of introducing the all too familiar digital hard clip. So rather than engineers going for the "vibe" of the mix, they are focused on balancing bit depth with full scale saturation, that optimum point just before a digital clip. Too conservative and your audio sounds wimpy and lifeless, or even worse, grainy and artifact laden as you use only a portion of the 16 or 24 bits available. Not conservative enough and you're stuck with a plateaued waveform clip that sounds like an elephant seal in heat. Imagine that, the whole reason our industry jumped from 16 to 24 bits for the sake of audio integrity is negated as you pull the punches on your mix and pull down the bit depth with it.

Fortunately, PARIS breaks this convention as the only DAW that begs you to smack the meters just as you would an analog console. Obviously, you can make PARIS (or nearly any device) hard clip, but PARIS has a wide sweet spot before that point where you can actually hear the saturation as an analog like warmth envelopes your tracks. So the point here is clear: Get the red (clip) lights flashing and enjoy a warmth unheard of in an all digital system.

Try this: Take a bass guitar track in PARIS and set all 4 bands of EQ to "off," but turn the ALL EQ switch to "on." Have the ALL EQ knob visible as well. Now grab that ALL EQ knob and bring it up. Watch your meters bounce into the red while the bass guitar warms up in tonality. Now keep increasing the ALL EQ and eventually you'll begin to introduce distortion. Not the ugly digital distortion we loathe but a warm analog hardware (dare I say tube?) distortion that people pay big bucks for trying to emulate with a VST or TDM plug-in. Remind anyone of a classic tube bass amp? Depending on the material and how hot it was recorded, the headroom in this range and amount of warmth and analog-esque saturation can be pretty broad. It's a great trick for breathing life into the low end and bringing back the rock-n roll mix ethics of all those tapeheads out there.

PARIS's 56 bit accumulator algorithim maintained through the signal path coupled with excellent hardware in DA/AD conversion and summing amps allows PARIS to be a much more accessible mixing environment compared to its digital brethren.

So smack those meters so they bounce into the red and get your money's worth out of each and every bit available to you.


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