Been reading about the BBE Sonic Maximiser.
According to one guy, it made an outstanding improvement to his clean sound. So I was wondering, if anyone that has one here, can tell me if they make such a big difference?
I've been playing a lot on clean lately and even though it sounds pretty good to me, like everyone else, I'm always looking for anything that adds to the sound quality. Thanks.
Cheers.

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A Sonic Maximizer does a little phase alignment trick between lows and highs that makes the whole signal sound "brighter" and "livelier."

The only good use I ever found for mine was making cassette dubs sound hotter. When it became obvious that I was never going to be asked for a cassette dub again, I fooled around with it in my guitar rig and finally sold it. YMMV.

Ok SlapChop, thanks for that, I don't think I'll bother with one of these.
Cheers.

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When you take any signal and feed it to a normal signal chain--a preamp, EQ, Amp, etc.--and out through a speaker, it's going to lose quality. It's one of the great negatives of amplified music : any signal fed to a speaker will lose quality due to problems that all speakers have with phase and accurate amplitude reproduction.

This causes fundamentals and harmonics to be out of order or even reversed, making the sound muddy. Certain frequencies may be overemphasized because of phase problems making the sound inaccurate and just plain bad.

This BBE unit's circuitry puts the clarity back in your signal by correcting those problems. The circuitry gives the speaker a signal that it likes, one that it can re-produce more efficiently and with clarity and loudness. It makes the waveform that the speaker reproduces closer to the natural, unamplified musical signal.

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Being able to play and enjoy music is a gift that's often taken for granted.

Don't leave home without it!

Yeah, thanks Miami Mike, that's just about the same as what I was reading, however I've never actually tried one of these, to see whether or not they make a substancial difference in practical use with a guitar.
That's why I was asking, if anyone in the forum had used one and what they thought of it?
The obvious answer is to go and sound one out for myself isn't it?
Thanks for your input.
Rhumba

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Is the noise it generates part of the "natural, unamplified signal?"

It depends what type of amp you have, like someone said YMMV. I have one and put it to my little Marshall Valvestate 15W. The sound was night and day. It sounded like the blanket was removed. I put it inline with my Cyber Twin, and though it did clean it up, it wasn't that noticeable to me. I think the better your amp the less you need it. But I will keep it and use it on both amps.

BB SM's came out originally as an alternative process to the Aphex Aural Exciter. The Aphex takes a high pass signal, creates even order harmonics (distortion) and mixes that signal back with the original signal. The process doesn't sound like distortion, but extends the high end.

For all the mumbo-jumbo about phase this, annomalities that, I believe (and I could be wrong) that BBE designed a process that produced a similar sonic result as Aphex with a different process. Upon examination of the circuit, the stages do create phase changes, but I'm not sure the phase changes were intentional, but a result of the circuits.

There is a known phenomena. If you hear three signals, and if they hit your ear at different times...even milliseconds apart, your brain will perceive the sound that reaches your ears first as the louder signal.

So you take the audio spectrum, split it into 3 bands, and delay the middle band a few milliseconds and delay the low band a few more. Your ears will hear the high end first, the midrange second and the bass last. The milliseconds are too short to hear or perceive those delayed signals as delayed, but the brain perceives the high end as louder, even though it may not be.

In this delay process, phase shifts do occur. So are the phase shifts intentional, or simply a result of the delay process, and BB is just describing the phase shifts as intentional?

BB stepped ahead of Aphex by including a bass control which can balance the increased high end. Aphex eventually added a low end control and a good one at that, which increases the low end without requiring larger speakers or power amps.

Aphex products were incredibly expensive in the beginning, so much so that only top shelf recording studios had them.

Prices of both processes have come way down over the years.

It is common for people to overuse this effect. It's best in small doses. The suggested setup for Aphex Aural Exciters when they first appeared was to turn up the process until you can just hear it, and then back it off a hair.

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Being able to play and enjoy music is a gift that's often taken for granted.

Don't leave home without it!

If you do any recording via computer, you can also use the BBE SM plug-ins :

http://www.nomadfactory.com/products/bb ... index.html

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Being able to play and enjoy music is a gift that's often taken for granted.

Don't leave home without it!

I use a BBE on my PA system out and there is a huge difference in sound when the process button is pushed, as for individually using it for a guitar, meh. I highly recommend it for the finished product though.

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Thanks for your input guys, some very useful stuff here.

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