Hi everybody, last ultimate test 
What organ did I use?
As I admitted myself, there is a question as to if a human can hear attack differences (slight ramp up) in the first two or three milliseconds of otherwise similar sounds. Ray said there is no way anyone could hear that difference. He also pointed out that a real B3 has a very slight ramp up in the attack, which Blue3 is calibrated to match.
An interesting quote from his reply:
“…in Settings, there’s a slider labeled Contact Timing. Pull out a few drawbars and play a single key VERY SLOWLY and you’ll hear each drawbar turn on, just like the real thing. You can shorten the duration of that by lowering the Contact Timing which is also affected by key velocity. This is all part of the key click as well”
Without A/B comparison, I am not nearly expert enough to tell. You could tell me it was “real Hammond”, and I would believe you.
Do you like that sound?
Certainly sounds good enough to me!
I was trying to compare to original Booker T, but not easy because demo has Chorus turned on, and Booker does not.
Interesting. I would not “kick her out of bed”.
BTW… Unless I am missing something, Arturia seems to have nowhere near the editable parameters of other VST Hammonds.
You are right, but B3-V2 is much better than the 1st version.
What I wanted to show: With proper tweaking in the plugin or channel nearly every plugin can sound good.
There are some plugins (like Omnisphere) which sounds very well without tweaking for a band context and others sound super (when you hear it alone), but when you play with the band you cannot hear them.
In earlier days I tested plugins only alone and was impressed or not.
But now I decide which plugins are good when I played them with a band.
This is the only way to check if the plugin is worth.
And very important: I am checking with speakers and not only with headphones.
Unless you mean testing in a recording (as opposed to live)… I still do not see how a double blind test could be done to eliminate all other variables, and really prove that “one organ only sounds better than others when played alone (but not with a band), while another organ only sounds better than others when played with a band (but not when played alone)”.
At least I would want to know what “acoustical physics” can reliably account for that. If it is just EQ (prominent frequencies), then any organ can be EQ’d to cut through more.
A double-blind test eliminates your ability to make a choice based on information other than just what you’re hearing,
Well, I knew that.
I was trying to say "I do not see how a proper double blind test could be conducted in a live situation (that proves that “your favorite played solo” is no longer “your favorite” when played with the band).
How can you eliminate all other variables to properly conduct the double-blind test?
And is the difference really just a slight EQ difference that accounts for how it “cuts”.?
Then I don’t understand your question. The only purpose of a double-blind test is to eliminate bias.
Setting up the conditions themselves so that a double-blind study can be done is a totally separate issue.
So you might compare different plugins in a live situation to see which you like better and then you might compare those same plugins in a standalone (studio?) situation to see which you like better.
As for EQ, one thing that seems to not be well understood is the importance of EQ to reduce different instruments from stepping on each other, a major cause of muddiness in a sound. So, for example, an acoustic guitar will be EQ’d very differently if it is being played solo vs if it is being played along with a bass guitar and other instruments whose frequencies overlap.
If you EQ the acoustic guitar to be played with other instruments and then listen to it without the other instruments playing, it might sound quite horrible.
Maybe this is getting into the weeds too much, but
I presume the test must also be able to control for all other potential differences being introduced by accident, i.e make sure no differences are inadvertently introduced, or unintentionally involved.
So that test control is certainly achievable easily when comparing solo instruments in a studio, or in context in of a studio recording. But I am wondering, in a live situation (as opposed to recording), how could you control for all other variables that could be affecting your impression? I suppose in a sound check situation the band could repeat the same 2 bars with different organs while “test listener” is standing/sitting still in same location?
Exactly, I would want to know to what extent a “double-blind preference” is rendered moot by simply adjusting EQ.
Sure – but that has nothing to do with the “double-blind” issue, which if you remember was my concern at the beginning when you were testing by clicking with your mouse (and I would note that you have now in fact changed your opinion 
)
You set up whatever parameters you want to do your test and choosing those parameters properly can be very difficult (consider for example, how do you test to see if a drug will cure cancer vs will kill you!)
Maybe — but the only concern from a “double-blind” condition is that neither you nor the person playing the organ would know which organ plugin was currently being played.
Except there is no such real playing environment that makes a double-blind test relevant here.
People choose gear, plugins etc for a number of reasons that live outside of the sound–nice GUI, better colors, how it looks on stage, how it feels playing it etc. All of these factors go into how the performer feels playing said equipment, thereby changing how it sounds to them. The side by side organ tests above are all good and fine–except the person judging the sound isn’t actually playing it. In a bubble, we can make all sorts of different choices than we would when our particular biases are added in. Try telling any renown blues guitarist that your guitar is technically a better instrument and would sound better if they played it instead of their current one, and they’ll laugh at you. Our biases make us more than the sum of our parts,
I happened to agree with @dougalex, insomuch as I was also (suprisingly) not blown away by Blue3 when I first got it and felt the B4 II was much sharper and felt more realistic while playing it. I’ve found reasons why that is so, it is measurable the EQ differences in the harmonics with identical drawbar and key click setups. It is true that Blue3 has many more parameters to adjust, making it a superior virtual instrument in that regard. Sometimes, however, that can be a disadvantage, as a wider number of possibilities makes finding the limited number of sounds one is looking for much harder.
The initial point here was that the B4 II has a ‘sharper’ sound out of the box, and I agree with that point. Nothing I’ve read or heard in this entire thread changes that particular observation for me.
My concern was:
One could do a “double-blind” test and possibly not realize that a contaminating factor was involved, which actually affected the “blind choice”.
Obviously we are generally in agreement (so far) on the Blue3 v. B4II discussion.
I am just curious: Did you notice (and did it annoy you, like it did me 
) that the B4II had a high “drawbar bleed” that could not be turned off (as far as I know).
@dougalex
Definitely notice that same drawbar bleed, but its less noticeable in a full band environment vs. played by itself.
Whenever I really needed just pure low drawbars, I would have to switch to VB3.
And, LOL, 
I am well on my way to owning all the major Hammond VSTs out there so… hey, I will not give up on any of them! 