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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 90882, member: 2178"] Measured across four popular handsets, phone speakers start rolling off from 1 kHz downward, which is nowhere near the 41 Hz your 808 is actually playing. That number surprises people who assume a phone reaches down to 100 or 150 Hz and simply stops. It does not stop. It fades for two and a half octaves before it stops. So the sub content in your mix is not being reproduced quietly on those devices. It is not being reproduced at all, and whatever the listener hears as bass is arriving through something else entirely. [HEADING=2]Phone speakers give up long before the sub does[/HEADING] What they hear is the harmonic series. The ear reconstructs a pitch from evenly spaced overtones even when the fundamental is physically missing from the signal, which is why a male voice with a fundamental near 150 Hz still sounds like itself on a telephone that reproduces nothing below 300 Hz. Your 808 gets the same treatment, but only if the overtones exist. Take that E1 again at 41.20 Hz. Its harmonics land at 82.4, 123.6, 164.8, 206, 247.2, 288.4, and 329.6 Hz. Now apply the phone. Everything below roughly 300 Hz is already deep into the roll-off, so the eighth harmonic is the first one with a real chance of being reproduced at a useful level. That changes what saturation is for. You are not adding warmth, you are manufacturing [B]harmonics high enough to reach a phone[/B], and a saturator that only generates a second harmonic at 82 Hz has not helped that listener at all. It also explains why the grit belongs above the crossover. Feed the upper band and the distortion products stack upward from content that already sits in the reproducible range, which is the entire argument for [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/rockheyday-introduced-the-krum-b-bass-compressor.76233/']a grit control that only touches the upper band[/URL][/B] rather than the whole signal. [HEADING=2]Asymmetric saturation is not the polite option[/HEADING] Plugin descriptions lean hard on the idea that asymmetric circuits produce even-order harmonics, and that even harmonics are the musical ones. The first half is true. The second half gets oversold. Asymmetric clipping generates even harmonics and odd harmonics together. You do not get one without the other. Measured side by side against a symmetric stage at matched settings, the asymmetric version produced roughly 2.5 dB more total distortion product, not less. The character is different. The quantity is higher. So treat a grit control that runs from 0 to 100 percent as a distortion amount, because that is what it is. Small values on a bass part do real work, and the temptation to push it because the label says tube is worth resisting. Watch the analyzer while you turn the control up. The new content appears as a stack of peaks above the split, and once those peaks push past 300 Hz you have bought yourself some translation. [HEADING=2]Full-band saturation invents frequencies nobody played[/HEADING] Harmonic distortion never arrives alone. Any process generating harmonics also generates intermodulation, where every pair of input frequencies produces sum and difference products that were nowhere in the recording. Two tones at 1 kHz and 1.1 kHz come out with 100 Hz and 2.1 kHz added. The arithmetic runs the same way down low. Layer an 808 at 41.20 Hz under a synth bass at 55 Hz and push both through one saturator. You get a difference product at 13.8 Hz and a sum at 96.2 Hz. Neither belongs to your song. The 13.8 Hz component is below hearing but not below your speaker cones or your limiter, so it eats headroom and moves woofers while contributing nothing audible. That is the case for keeping saturation off the low band entirely. Split first, distort only what sits above the crossover, and the sub layer arrives at your master bus with the same spectrum it left with. The trade-off is real and worth naming. Band-limited saturation cannot thicken the fundamental itself, so if your 808 sounds weak on a full-range system, grit is the wrong control and you need level, tuning, or a different sample. There is also a monitoring problem hiding in all of this. Studio monitors reproduce the fundamental perfectly well, so the harmonics you added for phone listeners are the part you can hear least clearly on the speakers you trust most. Check the upper band on its own for a moment, then check the whole thing on the worst speaker you own. If the note keeps its pitch on the bad speaker and its weight on the good one, the split is doing its job. [/QUOTE]

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