AD/DA Conversions with Multiple H9 Pedals

[bohan]

cljfford wrote:

I'm running two H9s, one in front of a guitar amp and one in the fx loop. I see that some musicians are running four. Aside from adjusting the Input and Output Gain and the MIDI controllable Input and Output converter gain, is there anything else I should consider to do to factor in these Analog to Digital, Digital to Analog conversions? Maybe it's academic because the tone sounds great to me, when I can set the gain stages properly, but I wonder, at what point would cumulative conversions degrade the sound?

Digital audio has been developed for decades. Almost all the music we are listening to is in digital format. Nowadays most albums are recorded & produced digitally. How many A/D D/A conversions are involved? I think we should trust their quality. 

[cljfford]

bohan wrote:

Digital audio has been developed for decades. Almost all the music we are listening to is in digital format. Nowadays most albums are recorded & produced digitally. How many A/D D/A conversions are involved? I think we should trust their quality. 

Thank you for that response, bohan. I will stop worrying and leave my cassette and VHS tape dubbing mindset in the past. 

[cljfford]

I’m running two H9s, one in front of a guitar amp and one in the fx loop. I see that some musicians are running four. Aside from adjusting the Input and Output Gain and the MIDI controllable Input and Output converter gain, is there anything else I should consider to do to factor in these Analog to Digital, Digital to Analog conversions? Maybe it’s academic because the tone sounds great to me, when I can set the gain stages properly, but I wonder, at what point would cumulative conversions degrade the sound?

 

[Given To Fly]

cljfford wrote:

I’m running two H9s, one in front of a guitar amp and one in the fx loop. I see that some musicians are running four. Aside from adjusting the Input and Output Gain and the MIDI controllable Input and Output converter gain, is there anything else I should consider to do to factor in these Analog to Digital, Digital to Analog conversions? Maybe it’s academic because the tone sounds great to me, when I can set the gain stages properly, but I wonder, at what point would cumulative conversions degrade the sound?

If you put 4 Factor/H9 pedals in front of a clean amp, the guitar signal will sound “degraded.” The only time I have heard this was in an Eventide demo. Outside of this demonstration, I have never seen or heard someone use 4 FX processors in front of their amp without additional buffers/boosts/etc so I would say the answer to your question is 4 conversions in a row will degrade the sound enough to be noticeable. This is not a criticism of Eventide either. Quite the opposite. When I was 14, I returned a product from another company which will remain nameless because I could hear aliasing artifacts in some presets. I did not know what I was hearing but I knew it sounded bad. Sometimes there is nothing cumulative about signal degradation. 😉

An H9 in front of your amp and an H9 in the amp’s FX loop will do less to your signal than the collection of pedals required to achieve the same result…by a good margin.   

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