09-22-2022, 11:52 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-29-2022, 11:47 AM by Ben@Harrison.)
Harrison sometimes takes criticism for our use of the term "True Analog", which originated with the launch of Mixbus in 2009.
Clearly, you can't run an analog console in a computer, so what does "True Analog" mean?
Before I answer that question, it deserves a short anecdote from the original launch of Mixbus.
Where did the term True Analog come from?
Before the current ownership (consisting only of long-tenured engineers), Harrison was operated by Bill Owen. Bill was a successful lawyer and was part of the ownership group of the original Harrison Systems. He took over sole ownership of the company for a time, and traveled the world with our current president Gary to convince people of the need for computer-automated consoles.
But ... Bill was not a technical person. When I approached him to pitch the idea of Mixbus, I explained how we should make a DAW using our best-practices that we had learned while porting our analog consoles into the digital realm. I talked about how a better mixing engine should be dithered, how the parameters should be ramped, how it should have a knob-per-feature layout and how the knobs should be scaled exactly like our esteemed analog consoles, down to the type of pots used in the filter frequency knobs.
When I finished my description, Bill awoke from his slumber and said "I didn't understand any of that. Why would you waste your time with that?" to which I responded "Well, we are trying to avoid digititis, the digital artifacts that make a lot of current DAWs sound bad. After two previous large format digital console engine designs, we have some techniques that help us avoid digital artifacts, and those tricks aren't being done in the popular DAWs".
Bill replied "You're going to have to simplify your pitch, Ben, because you're approaching this from an engineering standpoint, but nobody knows those terms. You need to call it something simple like Analogue Emulation" Well, the other engineers and I had some concerns about that, because emulation is a loaded term and it can mean something really good, really bad, or nothing at all. We weren't emulating tube guitar amps and all their idiosyncrasies, but rather we wanted to fix digital so that it sounded more true to the intent of our super-high end consoles. Bill didn't like our timidity but he couldn't talk us into Analog Emulation, either.
Bill asked "is it good?" to which I replied "Yes, of course it's good, it's done by the same guys that make our million-dollar analog and digital consoles!" So Bill responded, "in that case, be bold. Call it something big. Call it True Analog". For us engineers, that was crazy talk. But on the other hand ... maybe he had something there.
What is "True Analog"?
"True Analog" is the marketing term which sums up the hundreds of subtle design choices that go into Harrison's DAW and plugin products. We arrived at those choices by trial and error when reproducing our analog sound in a digital world. They often include engineering models of resistor, capacitor and transistor circuitry found in Harrison's original analog console designs. By definition these circuit designs were linear and were designed to - even under harsh operating conditions - minimize distortion and noise down to theoretical limits. In other words, they are true to the signal. There are pitfalls in digital audio that can make it un-true to the signal, and we wanted to avoid those. We use dithering, parameter ramping, and a hundred other small design details of our choosing to avoid some digital mistakes and therefore retain more of the true analog sound.
It's hard to remember the days before digital, but Harrison is one of the few audio companies who continuously made products before, during, and after the digital revolution. We were making cutting-edge analog products for film production at that time. We had some very smart ex-military guys with experience with sonar and radar systems. With the support of early digital audio pioneers (anecdotally, the guys who later founded Waves) and a few false-start collaborations with companies like AT&T, Harrison eventually developed our own digital mixing engine to replace the analog mixing engines in our top-tier customer facilities.
Because it replaced an existing analog mix engine (separate from the mixer control surface) it was critical that the digital version should operate and sound like the analog one. This meant we had to address some negative aspects of digital audio by closely scrutinizing how the knob scaling affected the eq sounds, avoiding digital artifacts when turning knobs, and introducing dither to hide digital quantization noise (a technique that many DAWs still don’t use, even decades after it was found to be desirable). These were early days of digital and we were pioneering many of these methods.
Since then, we've continued to refine our approach, and we've made 5 major digital mixing platforms, learning a little more with each step. This hard-won experience has created a unique set of priorities that was informed by each prior iteration. Most digital products, as good as they may be, are stuck with their first-and-only implementation and haven't had the chance to evolve. Harrison's products span from million-dollar consoles to $9 plugins, and we have a depth of know-how that other companies ... even big companies like Apple or Avid ... simply lack.
Whew, that's a long story. Bill was smart enough to realize that this story needs to be encapsulated in a short phrase, because we can't explain all this, all the time. Hence "True Analog"
What isn't "Tue Analog"?
When you make a series of products covering such a wide range, one of the most important things to learn is what not to do. For that reason, True Analog is defined by what we don't do, just as much as it defines what we do do (heh).
Unless it is explicitly stated in the product manual, Harrison does not add distortion or noise to our digital signal processing products. We don't add hidden eq or level changes. There is no arbitrary "color" or other non-linear artifacts added to the digital signal processing models.
Many people are looking for pedals and plugins that add "color" by way of distortion, tonal shifts, or crosstalk. This is perfectly acceptable and good, but for a variety of reasons it is something Harrison has chosen not to do. Consoles are meant to be the heart of the music making process and are there to tie together all the other pieces of the puzzle. Having a clean signal path is critical to this purpose. In our experience, if you make a product that 'futzes' with your sound, then you get relegated to the category that is sometimes useful, but often not. We want our products to be in the 'always useful' category.
Some plugin developers de-cramp their equalizers to correct for naturally-occurring behaviors at lower sample rates. Harrison generally does not de-cramp our equalizers. We'll likely cover this topic in a future post, but the short answer is: if you do anything to de-cramp the EQ at low sample-rates, you're either deviating from the original circuit elements, or you are adding processing that will make a more 'digital' sounding EQ. This is a hotly-debated topic, but we’ve tried it several ways and we like our solution.
Some plugin developers upsample and then downsample (i.e. “oversample” or “re-sample”) their operations so their individual response looks better when inspected on a graph, or to slightly lessen aliasing artifacts for ‘modeled’ analog distortion; but this introduces digital distortions, so we only re-sample in cases we deem it is necessary for our desired operations.
We've got your back!
Our list of successes is long: Records made on Harrison consoles, in the last 50 years, have sold many hundreds of millions of copies. We've had an astounding number of movies made on our digital film consoles. We've sent consoles on the biggest tours ever (heard of a little group called U2 ?) and were part of worldwide events like Live Aid. The local Ryman auditorium broadcasts American country music to the world from Nashville ... using Harrison mic preamps.
Our products are made by people in Nashville with extensive experience in our field. But at the end of the day we are only human! We have a company history of fixing errors when we are alerted to them, and we stand behind our products. That's why Harrison is still standing when many companies have not stood the test of time.
We are here for you! I look forward to your comments.
-Ben at Harrison
Clearly, you can't run an analog console in a computer, so what does "True Analog" mean?
Before I answer that question, it deserves a short anecdote from the original launch of Mixbus.
Where did the term True Analog come from?
Before the current ownership (consisting only of long-tenured engineers), Harrison was operated by Bill Owen. Bill was a successful lawyer and was part of the ownership group of the original Harrison Systems. He took over sole ownership of the company for a time, and traveled the world with our current president Gary to convince people of the need for computer-automated consoles.
But ... Bill was not a technical person. When I approached him to pitch the idea of Mixbus, I explained how we should make a DAW using our best-practices that we had learned while porting our analog consoles into the digital realm. I talked about how a better mixing engine should be dithered, how the parameters should be ramped, how it should have a knob-per-feature layout and how the knobs should be scaled exactly like our esteemed analog consoles, down to the type of pots used in the filter frequency knobs.
When I finished my description, Bill awoke from his slumber and said "I didn't understand any of that. Why would you waste your time with that?" to which I responded "Well, we are trying to avoid digititis, the digital artifacts that make a lot of current DAWs sound bad. After two previous large format digital console engine designs, we have some techniques that help us avoid digital artifacts, and those tricks aren't being done in the popular DAWs".
Bill replied "You're going to have to simplify your pitch, Ben, because you're approaching this from an engineering standpoint, but nobody knows those terms. You need to call it something simple like Analogue Emulation" Well, the other engineers and I had some concerns about that, because emulation is a loaded term and it can mean something really good, really bad, or nothing at all. We weren't emulating tube guitar amps and all their idiosyncrasies, but rather we wanted to fix digital so that it sounded more true to the intent of our super-high end consoles. Bill didn't like our timidity but he couldn't talk us into Analog Emulation, either.
Bill asked "is it good?" to which I replied "Yes, of course it's good, it's done by the same guys that make our million-dollar analog and digital consoles!" So Bill responded, "in that case, be bold. Call it something big. Call it True Analog". For us engineers, that was crazy talk. But on the other hand ... maybe he had something there.
What is "True Analog"?
"True Analog" is the marketing term which sums up the hundreds of subtle design choices that go into Harrison's DAW and plugin products. We arrived at those choices by trial and error when reproducing our analog sound in a digital world. They often include engineering models of resistor, capacitor and transistor circuitry found in Harrison's original analog console designs. By definition these circuit designs were linear and were designed to - even under harsh operating conditions - minimize distortion and noise down to theoretical limits. In other words, they are true to the signal. There are pitfalls in digital audio that can make it un-true to the signal, and we wanted to avoid those. We use dithering, parameter ramping, and a hundred other small design details of our choosing to avoid some digital mistakes and therefore retain more of the true analog sound.
It's hard to remember the days before digital, but Harrison is one of the few audio companies who continuously made products before, during, and after the digital revolution. We were making cutting-edge analog products for film production at that time. We had some very smart ex-military guys with experience with sonar and radar systems. With the support of early digital audio pioneers (anecdotally, the guys who later founded Waves) and a few false-start collaborations with companies like AT&T, Harrison eventually developed our own digital mixing engine to replace the analog mixing engines in our top-tier customer facilities.
Because it replaced an existing analog mix engine (separate from the mixer control surface) it was critical that the digital version should operate and sound like the analog one. This meant we had to address some negative aspects of digital audio by closely scrutinizing how the knob scaling affected the eq sounds, avoiding digital artifacts when turning knobs, and introducing dither to hide digital quantization noise (a technique that many DAWs still don’t use, even decades after it was found to be desirable). These were early days of digital and we were pioneering many of these methods.
Since then, we've continued to refine our approach, and we've made 5 major digital mixing platforms, learning a little more with each step. This hard-won experience has created a unique set of priorities that was informed by each prior iteration. Most digital products, as good as they may be, are stuck with their first-and-only implementation and haven't had the chance to evolve. Harrison's products span from million-dollar consoles to $9 plugins, and we have a depth of know-how that other companies ... even big companies like Apple or Avid ... simply lack.
Whew, that's a long story. Bill was smart enough to realize that this story needs to be encapsulated in a short phrase, because we can't explain all this, all the time. Hence "True Analog"
What isn't "Tue Analog"?
When you make a series of products covering such a wide range, one of the most important things to learn is what not to do. For that reason, True Analog is defined by what we don't do, just as much as it defines what we do do (heh).
Unless it is explicitly stated in the product manual, Harrison does not add distortion or noise to our digital signal processing products. We don't add hidden eq or level changes. There is no arbitrary "color" or other non-linear artifacts added to the digital signal processing models.
Many people are looking for pedals and plugins that add "color" by way of distortion, tonal shifts, or crosstalk. This is perfectly acceptable and good, but for a variety of reasons it is something Harrison has chosen not to do. Consoles are meant to be the heart of the music making process and are there to tie together all the other pieces of the puzzle. Having a clean signal path is critical to this purpose. In our experience, if you make a product that 'futzes' with your sound, then you get relegated to the category that is sometimes useful, but often not. We want our products to be in the 'always useful' category.
Some plugin developers de-cramp their equalizers to correct for naturally-occurring behaviors at lower sample rates. Harrison generally does not de-cramp our equalizers. We'll likely cover this topic in a future post, but the short answer is: if you do anything to de-cramp the EQ at low sample-rates, you're either deviating from the original circuit elements, or you are adding processing that will make a more 'digital' sounding EQ. This is a hotly-debated topic, but we’ve tried it several ways and we like our solution.
Some plugin developers upsample and then downsample (i.e. “oversample” or “re-sample”) their operations so their individual response looks better when inspected on a graph, or to slightly lessen aliasing artifacts for ‘modeled’ analog distortion; but this introduces digital distortions, so we only re-sample in cases we deem it is necessary for our desired operations.
We've got your back!
Our list of successes is long: Records made on Harrison consoles, in the last 50 years, have sold many hundreds of millions of copies. We've had an astounding number of movies made on our digital film consoles. We've sent consoles on the biggest tours ever (heard of a little group called U2 ?) and were part of worldwide events like Live Aid. The local Ryman auditorium broadcasts American country music to the world from Nashville ... using Harrison mic preamps.
Our products are made by people in Nashville with extensive experience in our field. But at the end of the day we are only human! We have a company history of fixing errors when we are alerted to them, and we stand behind our products. That's why Harrison is still standing when many companies have not stood the test of time.
We are here for you! I look forward to your comments.
-Ben at Harrison