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A friend/customer of mine recently sent me this article re-published from Stereophile's archives and originally from 1991: https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.stereophile.com_content_humidity-2Dconcert-2Dhall-2Dsound-2Dspectral-2Dtilt&d=DwQFaQ&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=fIjp4PqByLla5KkLpLt3xfztydNaNIS7GhxiYSiM7Ko&m=EZW7l50-mQQEri3zfapZAKsGByqyWijoM3q87jiPF-Y&s=58i5fGf6dNJK1YYjK3umaAFfkawTT_LZUkl8WLc0488&e= It basically advocates the use of a "Tilt control". Do you have any recordings, that sound too bright, cool or thin? Or recordings that are too dark, muddy, warm? A 'Tilt control" can correct these by allowing you to pivot, the frequency balance around a central frequency axis (e.g. 1000hz). Other than warming up or cooling down a recording to "correct" the spectral frequency balance, the "Tilt control" has no effect on the sound. As explained in the article, a 'Tilt control" is not the same as tone controls, such as Bass and Treble controls that used to be common on audio gear. The "Tilt Control" is both subtle and powerful at the same time. Subtle in terms of how it effects the frequency balance; but powerful in the sense that just a small change can transform recordings that have problems in these areas. The bad news is that 'Tilt controls" were introduced by Quad and can only be found on their vintage 34 and 44 pre-amps and their newest pre-amp. Audiophiles and High-End manufacturers avoided them like the plague, probably confusing them with "tone" controls, which were banished from any respectful high-end gear from about the same time that Quad introduced this innovation. I went searching to find out if such a thing exists in software form today that could benefit any modern computer based audio system and I found this… https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.tb-2Dsoftware.com_TBProAudio_stilt.html&d=DwQFaQ&c=euGZstcaTDllvimEN8b7jXrwqOf-v5A_CdpgnVfiiMM&r=fIjp4PqByLla5KkLpLt3xfztydNaNIS7GhxiYSiM7Ko&m=EZW7l50-mQQEri3zfapZAKsGByqyWijoM3q87jiPF-Y&s=ZizfNZ2k09NmoeagVK5BO_vEGykJ0BRR3uMhv4E60Ds&e= In this page the company acknowledge Quad's innovation. They also include a health warning that it does increase latency. A dirty word in digital audio on a par with jitter in its undesirability. The latency they say will be mitigated by the DAW (digital audio workstation). That's because, of course, it's aimed at audio professionals working in the studio, to produce the recordings we listen to. Not really intended to be used by audiophiles as a post-processing DSP fix, after the fact. The good news though, is that it works, and it's free! You will need a software player that allows hosting of VST or Audio Unit plug-ins. Audirvana J River … are two that I've tried. sTilt consists of one main dial control. Pictured as a clock-face 12:00 O'clock would be applying no effect, five past twelve would be cooling the recording down a little, creating greater transparency in a recording that started off too warm and where the lower frequencies might have been obscuring details further up the frequency range. 11:55 does the opposite; warms up an overly cool/bright recording. In both cases I've found the recording in question becomes more "transparent" in the true sense. A recording that needed to be cooled down, will now have cleaner and seemingly more powerful bass, that might even seem to go deeper. A recording that needed warming up will now have instruments and voices that now sound more natural, more like themselves. What about that latency issue? sTilt comes with several quality settings. The degree of latency will increase as you go further up the quality scale. The Max quality button appears in red, supposedly to warn you of this. Max, is the quality setting I used though, after trying "Medium" and being disappointed with the quality of the result. Latency will also increase depending on the amount of tilt you apply. I found five past the hour or five before the hour sufficient to correct most recordings I've tried it on. Some call for a more extreme correction at approaching 11:50 or 12:10, which will lead to greater latency. With J River on Windows I couldn't detect latency at the 11:55 and 12:05 settings; but I definitely heard it at 11:50 or 12:10. Once heard I believe I could also detect at the 5 minute settings, although it bothered me less. Audirvana on Windows fared worse, with the latency becoming unbearable for me. Audirvana on Mac on the other hand fared best of all. I detect no obvious audible latency, even at the more extreme settings. Could this be because Mac has inherently less latency in its Core Audio stack and drivers, and is favored by audio pros for this reason? I don't know. A couple of Google searches threw up articles that suggest this. Microsoft have recognized this problem and have worked to reduce it, apparently, on the latest versions of Win 10. Still I detected it easily and that was when talking to an ASIO driver. Incidentally, if you use Audirvana as a UPnP server, the benefits of any AU processing, such as sTilt you may apply, will also be sent to the audio renderer, which could of course, be running on a different machine with a different OS. I've no idea how Linux fares on the latency issue. Thoughts anyone?
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