SOUND ON SOUND
To find the exact phrase, put the words in quotes or join them together with a plus sign e.g. live+recording or "live recording".
To find, say, all live recording articles that mention Avid, enter: live+recording +avid - and use sidebar filters to narrow down searches further.
Yamaha look to reclaim their stage keyboard crown with two world-class live instruments.
Looperator takes any audio source and slices it into 16 steps, applying a series of effects to any step that include filters, stutters, slices, distortion, tape stops, volume modulation and looping.
Whether you are setting up a bedroom studio or the next Abbey Road, choosing the right audio interface for your needs can be brain-meltingly difficult. Editor In Chief Sam Inglis breaks down everything you need to know into 26 bite-sized chunks!
Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer Dom Morley chats with Sam Inglis about the art and craft of recording and mixing vocals.
Distortion can be a surprisingly useful mix effect, if you know what you're doing. Mike Senior reveals several common applications, and explains how to get the best results in practice.
Dr Manny Fernandez has been heavily involved in development and programming for Yamaha and is best known for his FM and Physical Modelling work through their glory years of new synthesis technologies in the DX7II, SY77/99, VL1, VP1, EX5, AN1x and FS1R. More recently he has been working with the Reface DX, Montage and MODX.
Several employees at Universal Audio have lost their homes and all of their belongings in the California wildfires. Help them get back on their feet...
Grunge pioneer teams up with Native Instruments to produce hard-hitting drum instrument.
Big Reds house twin 10-inch woofers and offer low-frequency extension down to 28Hz.
The Haas Effect is a psychoacoustical effect named after Helmut Haas who first described it in 1949 and clarified his findings in 1951, although it was actually discovered by Lothar Cremer the previous year and called 'the law of the first wavefront'. It is also known as the Precedence Effect which is a far more descriptive term.
If one sound wave arrives at the ear shortly after another, the two are heard as a single sound, with the first arrival being used to determine the perceived sound location for the merged sound, even if the later sound is louder. For simple transient sounds, the time window for the two sounds to merge is below 5ms, but for more complex sounds like speech it can be as much as 40ms. A longer gap between the two sounds is usually perceived as an echo.
It is this precedence effect that allows accurate sound localisation in reverberant locations, since only the direct sound determines the perceived source location, and the later reverberant reflections are merged into the first sound.
However, if the second sound is significantly louder than the first it can become dominant in the perception of source location. It was determined that for time differences of up to 30ms, the first arrival determined the perceived source location even if the second arrival was as much as 10dB louder. Only when the second arrival was around 15dB louder did it become dominant in determining the source location.
“Most portable EWI to date" features built-in speaker, battery operation and 200 onboard sounds.
To help SOS readers, other musicians and studio personnel during the COVID-19 lockdown, we've launched a FREE Replica Digital Magazine.
The legendary London studios have acquired long-running mastering house Alchemy, with the latter facility being rebranded Alchemy Mastering At AIR.
Your chance to win this truly superb orchestral sample library from Spitfire Audio, worth £1697$2200.
The updated portable sample player adds a USB port for sample and project management, assignable MIDI channels, expanded memory and more.
New consoles combine advanced analogue features, such as illuminated buttons and mute groups, with powerful digital signal processing and effects.
DC Coupling (sometimes also known as AC-Blocking) is an electronic engineering arrangement that allows both AC (eg. audio) and DC (eg. control voltages) to pass into or out of an amplifier or other circuit.
AC-coupled equipment effectively has high-pass filters at each connection, and these affect the phase response slightly, so some designers prefer to omit those and provide DC-coupled connections instead. The danger, though, is that any DC present on the connections can potentially cause damage and incorrect operation of connected equipment, as well as loud clicks or pops when making or breaking connections. An increasing mumber of audio interfaces now provide DC-coupled inputs and outputs to enable them to be used with synthesizer control voltages, which are effectively DC signals.
AC Coupling (sometimes also known as DC-Blocking) is an electronic engineering arrangement that allows an audio (or any other alternating) signal to be passed through a connection while simultaneously preventing any DC bias or offset voltage on the source signal from getting through. In other words, AC coupling rejects any DC components within a signal, passing only the AC elements. The simplest form of AC coupling is a series capacitor in the signal line and, in effect, it forms a high-pass filter with a very low turnover frequency (<1Hz).
AC coupling is employed widely in audio circuitry to isolate the DC operating condition of one stage of circuitry from affecting the next, and to protect parts of an audio chain from the potentially damaging effects of DC voltages.
Tonaderspeisung Power — more commonly called Tonader, T-power or A-B power — is a largely obsolete microphone powering system which was widely used on portable battery-powered audio equipment in the 1960s and '70s before the technically superior phantom powering system became more popular. T-Power operates with 9-12V DC with the positive rail connected to the hot side (pin 2) of a balanced audio connection, and the negative rail on the cold side (pin 3).
One of the potential weaknesses of T-Powering is that any power supply noise is inherently added directly to the wanted audio signal. T-Power is broadly similar in concept to the Plug-in or Bias Power arangement used on unbalanced consumer electret microphones, but with a higher supply voltage.