Rob Schlette: [I]t’s not uncommon for people to be asking the question, “can you really hear the difference?” This is very good news for music and music lovers. Rob then goes on to describe a particularly thorough method for conducting audio tests. But it doesn’t matter. If you have to squint to hear the difference, [...]
Phase vs polarity
by Kim Lajoie on April 29, 2012
Randy Coppinger: You’ll see a button on some mic preamps and other audio gear labeled Phase, Phase Reverse, Phase Invert, etc. This is really Polarity. I can’t believe how often people get this wrong. Mix engineers without an *actual engineering* background I can excuse – they simply don’t know any better. What surprises and disappoints [...]
More things you can’t hear
by Kim Lajoie on March 7, 2012
Justin Colletti: Compared to the much of the animal kingdom, human beings have pretty terrible hearing. We have poor powers of echolocation, especially for sounds that come from behind us, we can only hear a relatively narrow bandwith of 20Hz-20kHz, and we’re easily fooled by illusions. [...] As the votes came in, the crowd was [...]
Bouncing to audio
by Kim Lajoie on July 26, 2010
‘Bouncing’ to audio is a process of rendering realtime generated audio to audio files. Typically, ‘realtime generated audio’ is software synthesisers, samplers, hardware sound generators, or even audio files being processed by plugins or hardware effects processors. After bouncing, these audio sources are turned into audio files on your hard drive. The audio files are [...]
Dynamic range and headroom
by Kim Lajoie on September 3, 2009
Noise floor The noise floor of a system is the level at which the background noise occurs. In analogue systems, this will be the hiss and/or hum. In digital systems, this will be the point at which audio has less than one bit to represent it (audio at this level sounds like a crunchy mess). [...]
Masking
by Kim Lajoie on August 17, 2009
Masking is a little-understood concept that is important to composers and mix engineers. Essentially, masking is what happens when one sound makes it difficult to hear another sound. An obvious example of this is two instruments playing the same note, with one instrument sounding much louder than the other. This can happen with notes or [...]
Normalising
by Kim Lajoie on July 20, 2009
Normalisation is a process that changes the volume of a piece of audio. It does this by first analysing the audio, looking for the highest peak. Then an amount of gain is applied to the entire section of audio, so that the highest peak is at 0dBfs. Because of the need to analyse the audio [...]
Gain Staging
by Kim Lajoie on July 8, 2009
A “gain stage” is any point in the signal path where gain is applied – where volume can be changed. Gain can be positive (makes the sound louder), negative (makes the sound quieter), or unity (doesn’t change the volume – but it’s still a gain stage!). “Gain staging” is the awareness that there are all [...]
Sample Rate
by Kim Lajoie on July 1, 2009
As with bit depths, there are several different samplerates used for digital audio. While bit depth determines the accuracy of low level details, samplerate determines the accuracy of high frequency details. Samplerate is actually the rate at which the digital audio is being processed, and where there are multiple files or audio streams being processed [...]
Bit Depth
by Kim Lajoie on June 29, 2009
Occasionally there’s a bit of confusion about bit depth, and about what the best bit depth to use in different situations is. In the digital world, there are three bit depths that we might have to deal with – 16 bit, 24 bit and 32 bit. 16 bit Digital audio at 16 bit is most [...]