High Frequency Whammy!

[concretecowboy71]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cowboy71/5638158301/
Here is a screen shot of a track that was driving my lathe rack crazy. While setting this track up I noticed my limiter going wild (set on ZERO). It was registering 12db of reduction. If I turned the knob up at all, it would quickly go off the scale at the end.

Luckily, my head was off and up during all of this. I lowered the volume of the track, 10db below what I consider "normal" for an album cut and watched as the current through my head shot up to 1.8 amps. I shut the rack down and don't want to touch this until I have some more info about what is going on.

Am I being paranoid or safe?

[Bonati]

What are you hearing in the program? Is this harsh noise/atonal music? Are you suggesting you think some sort of "invisible" out-of-band noise is causing the freak out?

[cymbalism]

Holy 5:00 clipping batman!

[concretecowboy71]

This is not terribly harsh stuff. It sounds somewhat like a bubble machine. If that makes any sense. From the frequency graph, it looks like there is indeed information here that is above what I can hear for sure.

And yes, the clipping is also there. This is the section driving the lathe crazy.

[jjgolden]

Concrete,

Tough not being able to hear or check it on our own systems but I suspect it's that stuff in the 21k and up range as displayed on the sound forge graph.
It's not just that it's 22k, it's 22k that has more level than the rest of the frequency spectrum.
Wipe that out and check what the AL is doing.
Do you have a realtime Spectrum Analyzer?
This can be super helpful in detecting high and low frequency's that we can't hear and may not want to cut.

JJG

[mossboss]

Yep Have seen this before MJ423 output transistor Killer
The head survived 20 odd dead trannies
15-16 K chop on this mate
Not paranoid at all
Deliberate static like sound?
Cheers

[maniman]

The first I think is that response graph high end seems dithering / shaping noise , the track is totally acoustic or use samples ? one bad processed sample in that concrete moment maybe or something llike that?

I guess the first thing I would do is talk to the mix guy.

Cheers

[concretecowboy71]

Thanks guys. I have talked to the client and they are going to fix the issue.

I know it is hard to give advice without hearing the music, but I just didn't think it would be professional to post someone's music without permission.

In terms of a Real Time Analyzer, that is a good idea and I bet there are a ton of computer based software solutions that make that pretty affordable these days.

[markrob]

Hi,

I like the one from True Audio. Very affordable. I'd go for the 1/24 octave version.

http://www.trueaudio.com/

Mark

[opcode66]

You can also use this old app called CoolEdit Pro. It shows you realtime frequency analysis, stereo separation and vu meters. If you want spectrum analysis you can hit record in the software and see pretty colors...