Theory / Technical

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.

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

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

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.

We explain why aliasing in plug‑ins isn’t always a problem — and why oversampling isn’t always the solution.

Mixing gets so much easier when your processing chains are configured to deliver the same results in response to the same levels!

Turn the ratio up, and a compressor becomes a limiter. Go even further and you enter the world of reverse dynamics — and unique sonic effects.

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.

In print for almost half a century, the eighth edition of Vance Dickason’s loudspeaker bible is as relevant as ever.

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.

We look at the processes that can add harmonic content to a sound, for subtle warmth or radical transformation.

As electret condenser mics have internal preamps, do non‑electret condensers also have built‑in preamps?

What’s the best technique, or combination of methods, for refreshing the high end when pitching-down samples?

Standard test signals can be incredibly useful when configuring and aligning audio equipment — and we’ve created a set of properly calibrated test files just for you! Read on to find out how to use them and where to find them.