Dynamic range and headroom
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...
View ArticleBouncing to audio
‘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...
View ArticleMore things you can’t hear
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...
View ArticlePhase vs polarity
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....
View ArticleAudio perception and ABX testing
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...
View ArticleThe most powerful tool
Gain (volume) is the most important and powerful tool available to the mix engineer. Each audio track is processed through a mixer channel and there are generally two points at the mixer channel where...
View ArticleHeadroom (and the difference between what we hear and what the equipment hears)
Headroom is not a property of sound – it is a property of the equipment that processes sound. Headroom is a measurement of how loud the peaks of a sound can go above the 0dB reference point before the...
View ArticleHow loudness is measured
The meters on your DAW channels or your mic preamps aren’t telling you the whole story. When sounds are recorded, the microphone captures the continuous vibrations in the air and creates a continuously...
View ArticleWhy I don’t worry about bleed
It’s a fact of recording studio life – bleed happens. ‘Bleed’ is the residual sound picked up by microphones placed around the studio to capture multiple instruments. For example, it happens when a...
View ArticleClick tracks
The debate about click tracks has always raised passionate responses. Are they killing music? Do only really overproduced artists use them? Or are they just like vegetables – really useful, healthy and...
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