Lavry Black AD10 mode demonstrations

https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/lavry-black-ad10-modes

https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/lavry-black-ad10-equal-peaks

This is for my reference, anybody else who's interested in using the Lavry AD10, and kind of a shout-out. The Lavry has four modes you can capture with: Clear, Tube, Transformer, and Complex. I needed to check out what they did, so this is several sections of modular synth music into each mode in turn.

First bit is Spacey, reverb, sort of open-sounding, and you can hear the reverb space very clearly (accentuated with a Crate SRS). Second bit is Funky, which is a lot busier but still captured cleanly. Third bit is Loud, where I clipped the converter mostly with snare. The first bits are all normalized to -24db, and Loud is normalized to -18 db, which means their peaks are all different: if you're going for loudness Transformer will always be the one to select for slamming the converter.

Each mode is announced with a little voice clip in the following order: Clear, Tube, Transformer, Complex (for each bit). They're not identical clips, they're discrete captures from the modular system each time, only the mode is changed.

Clear is the 'correct' mode, no processing. The others are each kinds of sound effect.

Tube seems to smush the negative side and accentuate the positive peaks a tiny bit, so it is the OPPOSITE of 'distorting for level'. It seems to give a nice 'magical' extra space to things, check it out on the reverb spaces. That said, if you slam it, you get a LITTLE extra oomph out of it, but if you don't clip your clean RMS will actually be lower. It seems to lift mid-level transients in an interesting way. Consider it a 'magic tube tone maker' and not an RMS level booster unless you intend to clip positive transients a lot.

Transformer is the smashy smashy. It'll give you WAY more apparent loudness, nearly 6db, pretty cleanly (the idea is that it's aliasing-free: processing is presumably done before decimating the sample rate to whatever the output should be). So basically it's a softclip, the example I show is normalized, and if you capture using this you get extremely hot peaks both positive and negative and your whole gain staging will be pumped up (the meters should show what you get). The sound is thick and forward and maybe a little darker. Very useable if you mean to have consistently loud digital captures.

Complex is like a hybrid thing: very much like Lavry took the Transformer behavior, and then stuck the Tube behavior on after it. So it's got pumped-up levels, but then it does the 'asymmetrical processing' in Tube that actually increases positive transients, to get sort of halfway: less denseness than Transformer but more 'slam' than just plain Clear.

I'm going to experiment a little further and I enjoy what Tube is doing: the processing which evens out the hottest transients is interesting to me, as there's a peculiarly useful effect to bringing out MORE transients more evenly, against RMS, and Tube does that relative to Clear. If I was determined to make the hottest possible beats it's Transformer all the way. For accuracy you want Clear: I'm not sure Complex is that great as it seems to be Transformer and Tube in series, and in my opinion you'll want one or the other or Clear. If you needed to get full slam I'd just go to Transformer and use that.

For patrons (and readers of this post): in the Equal Peaks capture where I had all peaks at the same non-clipping level and then normalized the peaks to -0.1dbFS, Clear gives me -20 LUFS overall. Tube gives me -21.5 LUFS and is noticeably quieter. Transformer gives me -17 LUFS and is, natively, pretty much in the ballpark for 'optimal streaming service loudness levels', and sounds MUCH bassier… and Complex gives me -18.7 LUFS, but doesn't sound any bigger than Clear. Functionally, in the absence of other processing, Transformer gives me the correct Peak/RMS balance for the audio I'm streaming, though Tube continues to do amazing things with its somewhat 'emptier' sound.