Soundhound,

I'm confused by the comparison you described as: "My Logic 7 comparisons were 'this is the uncompressed master unaltered' and 'this is the uncompressed master with Logic 7 processing' I liked the unaltered presentation."

How were you able to make such a comparison? Logic 7 (in its 5.1 variety) is designed to operate on a Dolby Digital or DTS source, both of which are compressed formats, and lossy ones at that. Are you saying that you played a source in one of these formats through Logic 7 and compared the result with an uncompressed master? In that case, you're also comparing the uncompressed master with a significantly compressed source before the Logic 7 processing was even applied to it. Since for 5.1 sources Logic 7 actually performs very little alteration (none to the front L-C-R), it’s more likely that the artifacts and degraded signal you report are due to the format compression.

But if you were somehow able to get an "uncompressed master" into the Lexicon for comparison purposes, would you please explain how you did that?

You also said something puzzling earlier: "I simply prefer the sound of the film the way it was mixed. I can hear the artifacts of signal processing like Logic 7 (and I'm not singling out this process - it applies to all of them) and this creates a disconnect for me with the mains." The thing that confuses me is that the vast majority of the sound you hear in a film is not natural recording, it's heavily post-processed even on the master tape, using all kinds of professional tools to manipulate the perceived ambient space and steer content between channels. Engineers don't create each soundwave by hand, they use equipment--most of it by Lexicon, in fact--to manipulate the entire soundfield. So if such manipulation is "bad" when applied afterwards to the master tape, why is it any less bad when applied before it?

It's perfectly fine to have personal attachments to a way of doing something, and I can quite understand how given your professional involvement you would come to begrudge any processing after the recording had left the engineer's board. But when Logic 7 post-processing involves ambience extraction of information cues that were placed there by the engineer (using Lexicon Pro gear), it’s hard to see that as the violation you make it out to be. Your personal preference and respect for the sanctity of the recording engineer’s role is understandable. However, I question the lengths you go in defending it, by claiming there are problems with a surround processing mode that do not at all match the experience of anyone familiar with it--including respected members of your industry like Mi Casa’s Brant Biles, who has been using matrix-encoded Logic 7 to create the Dolby Surround mixes of some spectacular soundtracks. When played back through a Lexicon home pre/pro, Mi Casa’s L7-encoded tracks recreate the original 5.1 mix with often jaw-dropping fidelity (anyone with a Lexicon who catches a Dolby Surround broadcast of The Lord of the Rings is in for a happy surprise). Far from being “distracting” and “less desirable,” well-designed surround processing can honor and extend the sound engineer’s intent by extending it beyond the limitations of the delivery medium, as in extending the contents of one pair of surround channels into two, in a natural and believable way. For anyone who can get past the theoretical mindset of “well, it’s not what’s on the original master tape,” they may be surprised to find that it sounds better.

Cheers,
Philip Brandes