Rick's Articles

Sound Australasia - Volume 1 : Issue 5 (1997)

Romancing the Tone It's my birthday, and I'm feeling a little dull, a little olden and none the wiser I think I'll go out and get drunk, or perhaps all I need is a little romance... Everybody knows that I think and talk too much. Sometimes an idea just seems to mess with me until I deal with it, and I wonder where the hell it came from. I wonder if I thought of it, if I stole it, or whether (as usual) I'm actually the last one to find out about it...

What I'm going on about is one of my favourite terms for a simple piece of audio magic. Something I discovered by myself, something I named and thought was quite clever - until I realised it was no real secret and that lots of other people use it everyday with the same results. But I figured it was really something worth sharing. So what is this secret, this phenomena? Well, it's romance... The romantic frequencies, to be precise.

The romantic frequencies exist between 18kHz and 30kHz. They're the stuff you're not supposed to hear and like romance, they're the stuff you read about in books. So what do you do with these romantic frequencies? The answer is quite simple -you boost them.

Get hold of a really good analogue equaliser I mean really good, like the expensive analogue outboard equalisers made by Focusrite, GML, Sontec, Avalon, etc. Tune the HF shelving EQ somewhere around 18kHz to 25kHz, set your sights on the sun, and boost at will. If you're using a really good equaliser things will start sounding pretty silky, pretty quick. When you turn the knob, the sound will just go expensive!

Vocals will suddenly get very real sounding without being sibilant, bright without being harsh. A bass guitar will slot into its hole much better, acoustic guitars will say 'thanks very much', stereo imaging will become more precise, and your master mixes will instantly have more depth and dimension. This is where those high quality analogue equalisers really shine, up in the romantic frequencies. And in this cold harsh digital world, I think everybody needs a little romance. Now the problem with romance, and believe me it is always a problem, is that this stuff only works if you're using an excellent analogue equaliser. By 'excellent' I mean something with fantastic linear frequency response, flat to around 250kHz, with its phase relationship not changing much within its useable range - well, at least up to 30kHz, anyway.

If you try boosting the romantic frequencies with an average analogue EQ, what you'll get is bad stuff- hiss, noise, distortion, and a really phasey sound. You know, the kind of stuff you get on most analogue consoles when you try to boost frequencies this high. It's not good, not helpful, and not romantic at all.

If you try this romance thing on a digital EQ, then you're really wasting your time. With sampling rates of 44.1kHz and 48kHz, those clever digital designers have to roll-off (read: cut off) the frequency response at around 20kHz, just like some kind of chastity belt. Their rationale is that you can't hear this stuff, so therefore it makes no difference, and going into those frequency ranges is just trouble waiting to happen. (With digital, trouble is not something you go looking for - it seems to find you all by itself.)

The thing about boosting the romantic frequencies is that it doesn't affect the fundamental frequencies that most sounds start from, because they're really fairly low (usually lower than 10kHz). What it does affect, however, are the upper harmonics of these sounds, and this has a very real effect on the 20Hz to 20kHz world we supposedly live in. These harmonic frequencies make up the sound as we know it, and generally hang around in a decay type mode until the sound is inaudible. By boosting them after you've recorded a sound, you quite often get the picture of what was actually there, the real sound - the sound that existed before you shoved it through thousands of electronic components and got it confused and lost. The romantic frequencies glue the sound's pieces back together again, and help it find its way.

One of the more elegant aspects of the romantic frequencies is that some days they are totally obvious to me, and on other days (if I'm tired, for instance) they're a lot harder to realise. Doesn't that sound like romance to you?

The clever designers in the audio world are starting to appreciate the impact of boosting the romantic frequencies. The cool thing about this magic area is that if you boost them on the way into an analogue-to-digital converter lots of the benefits (the definition and localised imaging) remain with us into the digital domain. It's like some kind of secret pre-emphasis, and is a trick that mastering engineers have been using for years to give us CDs that sound silky smooth, rather than harsh and digital (yes, good 16-bit CD’s do exist). Give me more romance, give it to me now.

In the not-too-distant future, I'm willing to predict a wave of new products bragging about their extended frequency range, with a picture of some dweeb saying "I'm just boosting the romantic frequencies". By my logic, romance is something we all need. It's perfect advertising.

I was recently talking to a guy in America about building me a very classy tube mastering compressor. Now this guy advertises his products as being comparable to the classic old Fairchild compressors. I asked him if it would be possible to include some kind of switch to boost the romantic frequencies after the compression stage, something that puts back the 'air' that most compressors take out.

The guy told me I was mad, that no human being can hear over 20kHz, and that the stuff in that range was not a reality and not even useful. About a month later I got a excited phone call from him, explaining that he had just tried it and "...it really worked!" He wanted to incorporate a 'romance' button into his designs, and asked me if I had a trademark on the name.

Yeah right, me have a monopoly on romance? Now that would really be a good birthday present. Send it on over..

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