Micro BR-80 review

[Oldrottenhead]

daw mix
                     https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=7269.0;msg=94624

mbr mix

                          https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=7269.0;msg=94416

[Oldrottenhead]

sober as a fudge

[64Guitars]

i think i might start a new religion.

first collection buys 64 an mbr so he can experience da magic.

Cool!

I can understand someone wanting to do their mastering on the BR in order to use its mastering effects.

bouncing in mbr is crystal clear compared to a daw despite not being able to see the wav. it is so hard to explain, but to my ears daw doesnt compare.

Maybe there's something wrong with your cubase setup, or you're doing something wrong when you mix with it. Have you tried mixing in Audacity or some DAW other than cubase to see if cubase is the problem?

I'm not finding any difference in sound quality when mixing in Audacity versus mixing on my BR-864, and I can think of no reason why there should be any difference. But I don't use mastering effects. I think the difference you're hearing is in the mastering effects rather than the mixing. That's why I think you should do all of your mixing in cubase and just do the mastering on the BR.

[64Guitars]

daw mix
                     https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=7269.0;msg=94624

mbr mix

                         https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=7269.0;msg=94416

I loaded them both into Audacity so I could A/B compare them more conveniently. The first thing I saw is that the MBR mix is louder and has lots of clipping.



That makes it hard to do a meaningful comparison. I did notice that the guitar seemed a bit brighter in the MBR version. I assume that's because you applied mastering effects to the MBR version but not to the DAW version. One of the things mastering effects will do is apply EQ. So that would explain why the guitar sounds brighter (assuming you didn't master the DAW version in the Micro BR with the same mastering effects).

[Oldrottenhead]

ears

[AndyR]

I'm with orh - I really do not want to mix on the PCs I have access to because the Boss things have a "magic" in them that I can't get out of the PCs. If the PC way did it for me, I wouldn't be bothering with Boss kit at all

Btw (caveat: this is from "experts" elsewhere on the internet ), the DAW - be it Audacity, Cubase, Sonar, etc - is using your soundcard or whatever to do the conversions/etc. The DAW itself doesn't have much control over the sound quality, it's just a front-end/user-interface that gives you control over what gets fed into the soundcard. It's feeding the individual tracks (digital) into the soundcard, this converts them to the audio that you listen to when mixing. It's also the soundcard that the DAW uses for converting the audio into digital... So your soundcard is the limiter on how cute your recordings/mixes sound. Choose a DAW for the bells and whistles of user functionality, choose a soundcard for sound quality.

So, for me "mix on the PC" completely and utterly defeats the object of using an external recorder in the first place! (I don't need the portability aspect.) If my soundcard did the job I wanted, I'd be feeding everything straight into the PC and the MBR and BR1600 would be gathering dust.

As it is I try to avoid doing anything to my audio files on my PC other than copy them from one place to another. (I even use the MBR for WAV to MP3 conversion because I like the sound of what it does compared to other methods at my disposal - I wish the BR1600 had this same ability, it would cut out a bunch of file transferring )

[Greeny (No longer active)]

the wee silver box has magic in it.

It sure does. It has Abbey Road inside that plastic casing. Or so I like to imagine. Everything I need and want, and somehow always sounds 'just right'.

[Hook]

Surprise, I'm gonna add my 2 cents.

1st -great review Geir, thorough & insightful! As some of you might know I tend to be a little impulsive in my decision making and would certainly benefit from more reviews like this. I wish I had found 64's review of the 004 before I bought it, I really thought virtual tracks were common place in the modern age & his was the only one that i found that actually stated no virtual tracks! I do want to know if they fix that mixing while bouncing issue on the 80.

2nd- Mixing/Mastering- Since I got the ps-02 & 004 everything I've recorded with them has been mixed on audacity, prior to that I had done my mixing on my br900. I have to say that I'm in the br camp. I like to pull a fader down when I'm too loud and push it up when I need more. I like being able to add reverb and chorus to individual tracks easily, which I can't figure out on audacity yet. I like the mastering effect choices, don't always find one I like but more often than not I do. I don't mind using audacity, and for the "guerrilla recording"  It's the easiest option, but I think my results are better on the br so far! I did finally use all 3 machines(along with bruno's, so that makes 4 recorders) to make "Sweet Britney" & I did feel like I had more control and was able to work much faster on the 900. I'm sure that has something to do with my familiarity with the br or my lack of with audacity. Years ago I had a little exposure to Garage Band and I have never seen a DAW more user friendly but right now switching to mac isn't an option.
I know nothing about the MBR or the BR-80 but I agree that boss has installed magic into their products!

[Hilary]

64guitars - that was really useful thanks - I've got a BR80 and am having trouble getting the mix I want with the Sonar Cakewalk in MTR (but this isn't exactly my area of expertise!). Will try Audacity.

Where I think the BR80 wins hands down for a vocalist over other recordings I've done is that you can hear exactly what you are singing in real time - usually you have the backing track on in the cans and can't really hear what you're singing until its played back.

[64Guitars]

Btw (caveat: this is from "experts" elsewhere on the internet ), the DAW - be it Audacity, Cubase, Sonar, etc - is using your soundcard or whatever to do the conversions/etc. The DAW itself doesn't have much control over the sound quality, it's just a front-end/user-interface that gives you control over what gets fed into the soundcard. It's feeding the individual tracks (digital) into the soundcard, this converts them to the audio that you listen to when mixing. It's also the soundcard that the DAW uses for converting the audio into digital... So your soundcard is the limiter on how cute your recordings/mixes sound. Choose a DAW for the bells and whistles of user functionality, choose a soundcard for sound quality.

Hmm... now you've got me wondering. It could be that the soundcard is more important than I thought. However, I always thought that mixing in DAWs was done by mathematically combining samples from each track, which wouldn't require the soundcard. I could be wrong but, if I am, why is it that Audacity can Mix & Render a song that's several minutes long in just seconds? Same with exporting the current mix. If it was using the soundcard, I'd expect it to be realtime, so the time required would be the length of the song (like the BR's Bounce Mode).

I'm quite happy with the sound quality of the songs I've mixed in Audacity. And my computer only has a cheap soundcard. In fact, it doesn't have a sound card at all; it's just a chip on the motherboard. The whole computer was only $300 brand new, so it's not exactly state-of-the-art hardware. Yet, my mixes sound just fine to my old ears. If the soundcard was a factor in mixing, I wouldn't expect the results to be that good with such a cheap soundcard/chip. I've mixed on the BR-864 too and never heard any difference in sound quality.

So, for me "mix on the PC" completely and utterly defeats the object of using an external recorder in the first place! (I don't need the portability aspect.) If my soundcard did the job I wanted, I'd be feeding everything straight into the PC and the MBR and BR1600 would be gathering dust.

If I had a BR-1600, I might mix on it instead of using Audacity. It has enough playback tracks that I could mix most of my songs without bouncing. But for those of us who have less-expensive BRs with a limited number of playback tracks, mixing in a DAW is a great convenience and allows better control over the final mix. It doesn't defeat the purpose of having a BR and I certainly wouldn't want to be without mine. It's great for recording the individual tracks. I'd never want to do that in a DAW. But my BR-864 only has 8 playback tracks which share four faders. This makes mixing on the BR a real pain. So I very much prefer to export my individual tracks from the BR and mix them in Audacity where I can see all of them at once and make level and panning adjustments quite easily.