I like his music a lot actually and I think he is a really great live performer. When I saw him play this summer he used Octatrack, Blackbox, Microfreak and a couple of Pedals. Quite an effective small setup for a sort of semi improvised set. He used the Octatrack as a mixer, for sequencing MF and to send clock. So it’s really used in a very simple way but he still use it cause there isn’t really anything else out there capable of doing what it does.
I understand some find his comments rude but I don’t think he is saying anything that controversial if you consider his use of the machine. Sure the OT sounds great but there are obviously mixers out there with a more Hi-Fi kind of vibe and more bells and whistles when it comes to effects. He is just a performer sharing his personal perspective. Even if he is a bit of gear geek, he is still a musician first and foremost.
I think the sound character of an instrument is a strength rather than a problem. I didn’t buy OT because I thought it was the most transparent sounding DJ mixer on the market. Considering how good pretty much everything sounds these days (including OT) I’m not sure if it’s really that important.
Same, but I also love super precise digital minimalism (and sometimes actually want it to be sterile and boring), and I hate this audiophile bullshit.
Yep, funny how nobody has actually done any analysis to test these theories…?
Don’t let it fool you though, Jamie’s podcast is great. The vocal processing he does on his voice during the intro takes a bit of getting used to, but the interviews are generally pretty good.
This may be true, but ever since this video, there has been at least one post per week on the Elektron facebook groups asking “I’m thinking about getting an Octatrack but I’ve heard the sound is trash”. I think it’s just bad form to use a public platform to trash something like that, when most people aren’t going to notice any sound quality issues. It just makes people confused.
That might be so but I think that’s a sign of the times that is bigger than this review. People are just so scared of getting something that could maybe somehow be inferior to something else in some way, that they can’t really hear because they haven’t trained their ears in any way but still know exist because they heard someone say it🥺
I remember seeing the Stimming review but didn’t really think he trashed the OT. He did say he thought the converters were bad and was perhaps a little rude about it. I think he was trying to be a little funny by exaggerating… but didn’t he say a lot of positive stuff as well?
I would have never heard of Stimming if I hadn’t seen his reviews of gear. I am guessing he is a regular at European festivals and clubs, which I haven’t been to in years. But, I do enjoy his personality videos. He plays a German in real life well.
I don’t take any so called expert’s words as gospel . Nobody should. The internet is easy to search for opinions. If someone can’t google “Octatrack sound quality” and find the whole endless unfolding drama, then so be it. If someone gives up trying to learn the OT after 6 months, then so be it. If someone just uses the OT for a mixer, that’s fine too. If someone starts a new thread wondering about the sound quality of the OT, it should be the job of the Admin to sort them out. Who cares what some guy on the interweb says. If you’ve gotten to know the OT intimately, you know whats up.
He‘s trying to be entertaining and funny. Since there is so much positive feedback to his videos I think he got quite comfortable in his role.
I also think he was using strong words for the sake of being entertaining.
I enjoy his reviews and think his music is quite nice.
But I don’t agree with everything he says.
And I fortunately own a OT long enough to know he is wrong with his sound quality statements i
since a wrong bitrate setting in the OT (only 16 bit) seems to be the knockout argument to every OT sound quality discussion, i want to honestly know if somebody can explain why 16 bit vs 24 bit on the OT should have better sound fidelity?
In my understanding it raises headroom (allowing more dynamic range, though people have enjoyed brick-limited loudness-war-sausage music on 16bit audio CDs for the last four decades ) and lowers noise floor which can have an advantage if the source is very quiet and noisy. but on the other hand the sampling rate of a recording and the quality of the AD-converters should be a much bigger factor when it comes to accurately reproducing a sound or do I miss something?
Every 6 decibels below clipping represents loss of one bit (which cuts the dynamic resolution in half). The usable wordlength of a niminally 16 bit converter is more like 13-14 bits, maybe 15 if it’s a really nice one. When 16 bit was the recording standard, optimizing levels and dynamic range during recording was really important, because it’s very easy to end up with audio where transents are nearly clipping but most of the time you’re actually down in the 11-12 bit zone (or worse). 24 bit pretty much solved this by giving so much more dynamic resolution than 16 bit that optimizing levels isn’t really that big a deal. If your recording levels are peaking at -50dBFS you’re still capturing 16 bits, which is BETTER than the real world performance of 16 bit converters. If you record at 24 bit with anything like reasonable levels (eaking somewhere between -18dBFS and -6dBFS depending on who you ask) the quantization noise is going to be so far below the threshold of hearing that it’s hardly relevant. With 16 bit, a really well optimized signal has a quantization noise floor just below the threshold of hearing, so for a final master it should sound pretty comparable to 24 bit audio, but at the recording stage, where you’re probably going to be increasing levels you’re probably going to bring some of that quantization nosie up above the threshold of hearing (not to mention using who knows what effects, where noise below the threshold of hearing could easily cause audible artifacts).
All of that becomes way more relevant in the Octatrack, where
-it’s pretty hard to carefully optimize your recording levels
-there’s a built in -12dBFS pad and boost on everything you record, so that alone is already going to bring the noise floor up above the threshold of hearing with 16 bit audio
-there’s probably no dithering happening, or if there is it’s probably only happenning at the very end of the signal path, but any quantization noise that was introduced earlier in the signal path is going to be baked in - dither won’t do anything about it. Quantization noise is more noticeable and unnatural sounding than dither at the same level.
At 24 bit the nosie floor is so low that if the quantization noise is ever anywhere near the threshold of hearing you’re doing something very, very weird with your gainstaging, and even then the noise floor of the analog section of the inputs would probably be pretty loud long before the quantization was theoretically audible, so you still wouldn’t hear it.
Basically, 16 bit audio is just barely enough that it can sound very good (in the specs sense, so more like “technicaly correct”) if you’re careful at every stage of the recording and mixing process. With 24 bit you would have to put in some effort to make it sound “wrong.” In the context of the Octatrack, 16 bit really doesn’t have enough dynamic range to accomodate the kind of processing you’re going to be doing to the recorded audio without bringing quantization noise up into the audible range (although whether it’s audible in a particular context and whether it sounds subjectively bad is a whole other issue).
The short version is that at 16 bit the Octatrack is going to have more of a “sound” than at 24 bit, and which one is better is a matter of taste.
this was the most elaborate explanation why the OT sounds like shit – wow! Hope OT mk3 will be 32 bit from recording to playback so I will
never have to deal with quantization noise or dithering or that damn gainstaging / clipping😀 Also I’m now switching to 24 bit on my OT … riiiight now!
Obviously it depends on the source being sampled but I almost always use 16bit along with decent level hitting the inputs, and I think for most electronic sources 16bit is more than adequate, TBT I’d quite like a 12bit option with a bit more memory
Great post. I’ve found 16bit adequate for most situations.
But it reinforces my opinion, which has strengthened over time, that inadequate metering might be my single biggest beef with the OT.
That’s impressively compact. I’ve never seen that small mixer-looking-thing (below the bluebox), does anyone know what that is? This is almost damn near an advertisement for 1010-music!
Interesting stuff about the 16 vs 24 bit in the OT, for my uses I’m definitely sticking to 24 for live sampling. Regarding the sound quality stuff I thought I’d share this here:
I recently borrowed an old Akai CD3000XL sampler with the intention of finding out what kind of sonic character it had and what it would do to samples compared with using a standard high quality DAW plugin. I put a sample from some old film into Reaper’s RS5K and used the highest quality resample mode, and recorded the same sound into the Akai.
Playing around with both using a MIDI keyboard I noticed that the Akai sounded quite noticably more compressed/saturated and a bit brighter than the DAW equivalent. I like the sound of it a lot, would be great in a mix where a bit of saturation helps a sound to stand out. I also noticed the stereo field seemed to be lessened or altered somehow, not sure why exactly.
The DAW sampler had a much cleaner and more accurate sound, and could be played at much lower pitches and with less artefacting. And being all modern and digitally perfect it doesn’t impart any particular character on the sound, I would definitely choose the old Akai for the sound if practicality wasn’t an issue (which it definitely is, old rackmount samplers are silly big and awkward to work with).
I then thought to try the same sample through the OT to see how that compared. I won’t tell you which is which but see if you can tell the difference…
The sample is slowed down three octaves on both machines (the lowest the Akai can go) which I found brought out the artefacts most clearly, plus I use this particular technique a lot to create useful sounds so I’m interested in the character of different gear. Here’s the same thing but using Reaper’s resampling for comparison -
i
) and lowers noise floor which can have an advantage if the source is very quiet and noisy. but on the other hand the sampling rate of a recording and the quality of the AD-converters should be a much bigger factor when it comes to accurately reproducing a sound or do I miss something? 
