Theory / Technical

Lots of useful boxes now allow you to send analogue audio signals over Ethernet‑style Cat cables. But sadly there’s little progress towards wiring standards...

Why are almost all audio interfaces still USB 2 devices? And does it matter?

I have a tower PC that I had built specially for music production a few years ago. It used to work fine, but now I have to boot it twice before I can get Windows running.

Paul White and Hugh Robjohns address some of the most frequently-asked questions about home studio recording and production. 

A Cat5/Cat6 stagebox is a much cheaper option than a Dante stagebox — but does this really work, at least for fairly short runs, at mic level?

Why is it that for the first few minutes of listening to an AM radio station after switching from an FM station, it sounds very different?

Paul White and Hugh Robjohns discuss the best practices for avoiding and eliminating electrical noise interference in your home studio.

I have two different mics, made by the same legacy German manufacturer, that I’m ‘shooting out’ to compare them as vocal mics, and generally to make sure they’re working properly...

After 85 years of active service, the humble VU meter remains as useful as ever in today’s digital studios — despite BBC engineers nicknaming it ‘virtually useless’!

We conclude our four-part series with a look at how specifications can accommodate the foibles of human hearing.

Low distortion is often a marker of quality in audio equipment. We explain how to make sense of standard distortion specifications.

USB is at the heart of most PC‑based studios. But what do you do when it goes wrong?

In the first of this two-part series, David Mellor gives us an introduction to mic polar patterns.

A valuable test for recording engineers, David Mellor gives examples of different mic types to emphasise the importance of knowing your mic collection in detail.

Noise performance is important, but to fairly compare different products, you need to understand how noise specs are calculated.

Specifications can be a useful guide when choosing equipment. Our new series, in association with Audio Precision, explains how to understand and compare the specs of competing products.

If you want to identify studio equipment that’s susceptible to grounding problems, a simple DIY project based on a wall‑wart PSU can help.

I am trying out an ART Voice Channel, which has some interesting features, one of which is a dial to vary the microphone impedance continuously from 3kΩ down to 120Ω. So I have been testing this with a bunch of dynamic and capacitor mics...

Understanding the science behind musical taste and listening preferences can help you make more effective production decisions.

Suffering from mysterious hums and buzzes in your studio? This down‑to‑earth explanation will help you identify and solve the problems — or hopefully avoid them in the first place!

When our job involves a lot of sitting down, it’s up to us to inject some movement into our lives.