Sommaire pour Issue 128 de AudioTechnology

It’s difficult to know how to frame Milan; the latest AV-over-IP networking protocol. On the one hand, it’s technically ‘open source’. Taking on the entrenched, proprietary Dante protocol — owned and operated by a single entity, Audinate — by layering a thin veneer over the ‘open’ AVB standard. On the other hand, this isn’t a people’s revolution. It’s under the umbrella of the AVB standards alliance, AVNU — which counts giants like Harman, Intel and Cisco among its number — and was defined by the likes of Avid, d&b, L-Acoustics and Meyer Sound. This ain’t no simple David and Goliath storyline. So, why do we need another protocol? We’ve all been dragged through this umpteen times, and Dante seems like it’s doing a stand-up job of whizzing audio around over…

ABLETON EXTENDS LIVE 10 www.ableton.com Ableton only just released Live 10 earlier in the year, and it’s already adding value with eight new ‘Creative Extensions’ available gratis to all Live 10 Suite owners. Created in collaboration with Amazing Noises, the eight tools include new ways of pitch shifting and sequencing melodies and delays, creative processing, a device that creates reverb-like spaces, and two revamped Max for Live synths. Melodic Steps – a fast and intuitive MIDI sequencer for playfully evolving melodies. Bass – a monophonic virtual analogue synth with four individually tuneable oscillators. Poli – a virtual analogue synth designed for classic polyphonic chords and phrases with de-tuneable oscillators and a built-in chorus. Pitch Hack – a single delay line with transposition control, reverse, randomisation and delay folding. Gated Delay…

“Eight of nine,” Shane Crawford reminds me, when I short change how many tips he and fellow podcast host, James Hird, got right in the first round of the 2018 AFL season. It’s been a ripping start for the pair on both the tipping and podcast charts. They’re barely into the first couple of weeks of shows and the Crawf & Hirdy podcast is kicking goals. Like many podcasts, there’s no financial backing behind this venture other than a couple of bucks from the local panel shop. It’s purely independent; no Channel Nine, no Triple M. While podcasts have long matured to being more than just a cheap outlet for opinionated people, there’s still room for a couple of guys to get together around some mics and chinwag about a…

A river cuts through rock, as they say, because of its persistence. And Flood is persistent. “Flood looked me in the eyes and said, ‘You should move to London.’” recalled Australian producer Dax Liniere, who at the time was tossing around the idea of moving overseas when he mentioned it to the famous UK producer. “I was saying how expensive it was. He looked me in the eyes again, pointed at me and said, ‘You should move to London.’ A few months later, it clicked. It was like a cheesy movie, I could hear his voice and see him pointing.” Up until a few years ago, Dax Liniere was comfortably living the self-employed studio owner life in Canberra. That all changed when Dax managed to snag a Churchill Fellowship which…

The diagram on the left shows old-school LED metering. At the input, audio has already been rectified to DC and had ballistics applied, perhaps like the VU meter in Diagram 1. Its DC voltage level is fanned out identically to the Signal reference pins on a stack of op-amps configured as comparators, whose output can only be one of two states: high or low. The voltage divider presents different fractions of a fixed reference voltage to each Ref pin. When the signal voltage is lower than VDC #1, all LEDs are off. When it exceeds VDC #1, the first comparator will change its output from low to high, turning on LED 1. If it goes higher than VDC #2, both LED 1 and LED 2 will be turned on, and…

The first audio interfaces were plug and play ‘soundcards’ that you installed inside your PC, firstly in ISA format, then PCI, and most recently PCIe. Early models were primarily intended to accompany games playing, and didn’t really offer audio quality good enough for commercial recordings. I can still remember the first soundcards I reviewed that tipped the balance for me over to ‘professional’ audio quality; the 20-bit Echo Gina, Darla and Layla models, released in 1997 for Windows 95/98. As the available options mushroomed, I/O began to expand into rack-mounting cases, and nowadays the format choices can seem rather more complicated. I still see a lot of people asking for advice on upgrading PC audio interfaces, and they seem to fall into two main categories. The first comprises musicians reluctantly…

How big is the wireless mic market? Have a guess. I found a report from Grand View Research (released in October last year) that valued the global wireless market in 2016 at US$2b, with the handheld segment accounting for about 65%. The market is set to hit US$3.5b by 2025, according to the report. So we can all agree: it’s a significant market. Sennheiser and Shure are like the Coles and Woolies of the wireless market. Yes, there are other competent players and there are niche competitors but Sennheiser and Shure rule the roost. 10 YEARS SINCE G3 10 years ago, Sennheiser launched the third generation of its Evolution wireless. It hit a real sweetspot — the price was right and the systems were rich in features. The market has…

The struggle is real. You’re trying to lay down electric guitar tracks through a vintage tube amp and quad — in your living room. The guitarist insists the ‘true tone’ of the amp exists beyond the halfway Volume knob mark, but it feels like the beastly 100W head explodes with the slightest twist above two. Mattresses go up and curtains are draped to counteract the tsunami of SPL but with little effect on your neighbour’s nerves. You resort to an amp simulator plug-in. The UA Ox is designed to solve this age-old problem for guitarists. The Ox can be used in two ways. First, you can hook up a cabinet direct so it acts as an in-between load box to allow your amp to enter its favourable range while maintaining…

Way back in 2009 Presonus’ Studio One DAW software was introduced to the industry as a ‘bloat free’ application. It offered plenty of features, it just promised to deliver them without any of the baggage its competitors had accumulated by maintaining compatibility with previous versions. A crime you can hardly blame them for. After all, one studio engineer’s absolutely must-have, Grammy Award-winning workflow function is often another musician’s, “Why the hell would I ever use that?” defunct menu item. It’s tough to trim functions that seem largely obsolete without prompting someone’s outrage, just as it’s difficult to decide which improvements are truly worth introducing. Developers can’t react to every Feature Request thread on the forums. Almost 10 years later, Studio One hasn’t bloated, but it’s put on a bit of…

LUSH STUDIOS 1 The past couple of weeks up in Brisbane at Lush Studios have been a busy period. Producer Kevin (The Caveman) Shirley dropped in to produce Jimmy Barnes and his band, with guest drummer Jason Bonham (son of the late John Bonham of Led Zeppelin). Bonham paid the studio drum room a special compliment, saying it had great bottom end and how it reminded him of the drum sound on Led Zeppelin 1 and 2! Meanwhile Grammy-winning producer John Hudson (ex-Mayfair studios, London) has been back in the studio producing and mixing some new tracks for the talented Barbadian singer/songwriter, Alexander Mills. On the mixes, John used a pair of Pultec EQP 1A3 EQs and a Neve 33609C across the stereo bus and found a lot of love…

I’ve gotta say, Bluetooth speakers are getting pretty incredible. I just got a Sony Bluetooth speaker, and I’m loving it. It’s IP67-rated, lights up like a Christmas tree, and has a ‘Party Booster’ mode where you can play it like a set of bongos, or a cowbell. Perfect for my beach party lifestyle… if only it wasn’t Winter in Melbourne. Aside from all Sony’s kitschy features; it’s plenty loud, sounds pretty good, and pairs up in a jiff. You can even daisy-chain 100 of them! Super handy for blaring out tunes down at the local rec centre, when you’re having a barbie, or building a studio. When the Korg Konnect portable PA rolled in for review, I was pretty keen to see what a big version of my little Sony…

I make no secret of the fact that I dislike ‘intelligent’ plug-ins which make mix decisions on my behalf. Same goes with algorithmic mastering. No thanks, I have ears for a reason. Still, here I am reviewing a plug-in that sits squarely in that ‘intelligent’ camp. Perhaps I’m just more resigned to the fact that AI is going to be a larger part of my life — whether it’s predicting my email responses or my EQ curves. Gullfoss by Soundtheory is a plug-in that — as much as I hate to admit it — does the latter extremely well. Pitched mainly as a corrective tool that identifies and fixes frequency issues in a mix or instrument, it’s the plug-in’s ability to breathe life and definition into virtually anything that impressed…

When the main Sing Sing studio in Cremorne shut down and Kaj and Jude squeezed the biggest and best pieces of its inventory into the smaller Sing Sing South, there wasn’t a whole lot of space left for engineer/producer Tristan Hoogland. He and Aaron Dobos had been sharing a makeshift production/mixing space there, and they figured it was the right time to look for a new place to work. “We were looking for months, and it was really hard to find anything around that was decent,” said Hoogland. Eventually they happened on to their dream scenario, Fall Back Studios, an up-and-coming spot in Ascot Vale owned by Daniel Neidermeyer and built by he and his musician brother Stefan. Fall Back is a new co-share studio facility with custom-built studio pods…

AC audio is converted to a DC level by the full-wave rectifier, which then charges the capacitor at a rate governed by capacitor size and circuit resistance. In effect, it is the charge on this capacitor that the needle ends up following. When the incoming voltage decreases, the capacitor empties through the meter windings at about the same rate. With the 3600Ω resistor illustrated, a steady 1kHz sine wave at +4dBu (1.228V RMS) should produce deflection to 0vu in 0.3 seconds. By using different resistors the sensitivity may be changed to correlate higher levels to 0vu. In the original devices, and expensive ones today, the resistor is external and everything else is built into the meter housing. Galvanometers are also used for PPM and gain reduction meters, employing different input…

Kamasi Washington doesn’t want to save jazz. He just wants you to give it a chance. In the same way that the perception of country music is saddled with layers of exaggerated twang, jazz has been pigeon-holed into the living rooms of audiophiles with squillion-dollar hi-fis, and quiet dinner-date background music. “Musicians in the past suffered from the word jazz having this bad reputation,” figured the saxophonist, who draws a lineage of jazz from early big band, through James Brown — “not the name, but the music, absolutely,” — to hip hop. “People putting words on jazz music and call it hip-hop. That’s been doing well,” he said. “Ask most R ’n’ B musicians and producers what they like, and they all love Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder. It’s jazz,…

It was that time of year again. World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose, California ran from the 4th to the 6th of June and, as always, focused on software developments for, well, developers — those folk who create software for the macOS and iOS ecosystems, which are steadily converging. That convergence is promising to make cross-platform apps a reality, with Apple showcasing its own ports of iOS apps to macOS. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much mention of apps going the other way; the likelihood of porting your favourite DAW to iOS still a distant proposition. Disappointingly, there was no news regarding anything audio or Logic Pro X. However, there’s a lot to like about the soon to be released iOS 12, which is compatible with iPhones as far back as…

Three versions in and I can’t help but feel the SPL Crimson still looks like it belongs in a different era. It’s decidedly unfashionable. While a cockpit-like dashboard of lights and knobs was once the norm, modern interface design has thrown away much of the hands on controls and tucked it all away in the box. The Crimson stands alone in that regard. It’s big, has tons of buttons and knobs, and there’s no PC-control malarkey here. Let me introduce you to the most analogue-y digital desktop interface you’re likely to encounter. Founded in Germany in 1983, SPL (Sound Performance Lab) is renown for high-end analogue audio processing gear — names like Transient Designer, Vitalizer, Passeq, and Phonitor may ring a bell. So when SPL makes an interface, you can…

WALDORF SUPER SYNTH www.waldorfmusic.com Waldorf is heading in a completely opposite direction to most synth manufacturers. While many are trying to figure out how to repackage vintage designs or build new version of analogue synths, Waldorf is doubling down on digital. They’ve revealed the specs for a new FPGApowered synth called Kyra. With the same sort of chips that tend to power digital live consoles, etc, the new super-powered synth will feature 128 voices, each with 10 oscillators per voice, and eight-part multi-timbrality. It’s an incredibly powerful virtual analogue synth that outperforms anything out there for sheer voice count. The 32x oversampled hardware with dual wavetables provides over 4000 waveshapes, and Kyra’s resonant filters are accurate oversampled emulations of classic analogue ladder filters with 2-and 4-pole configurations. There are three…

DIGICO DELIVERS AUTO MIXING www.digico.biz Previously the preserve of Dugan-equipped hardware, these days Auto Mic Mixing is popping up in all number of consoles, making the work life of broadcast and corporate event mixers immeasurably easier. Digico has just released a DMI-AMM card for its more affordable S-series consoles. It allows up to 48 channels of automatic mixing for complex vocal mic setups. Insertable on any input channel, be it local or rack I/O, the DMIAMM is seamlessly incorporated into the console’s user interface, so engineers don’t have to jump out of their typical console workflow. The AMM uses the ‘Shared Unity Gain’ principle to automatically adjust levels. The Weighting control allows engineers to emphasise one or more channels, or balance it to give every channel equal opportunity to ‘take…

A part of being a producer is battling that deadly vice… lust. The condition has a name: Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Have you got G.A.S.? Do you convince yourself that a new preamp, microphone, compressor, plug-in, etc., will be the elixir that transforms your next production into a hit? I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. Hey, I’ve bought plenty of gear over the years that has changed my workflow — and the way I think about audio — but none of it has made a song better. Gear may have made a song easier to record, it may have even made the sound a little sweeter, but it was never that magic bullet. When you don’t have a Neve console in the shed or a cupboard full of Neumanns, it’s…

I’ve been toying with an Arduino board lately. Not building anything, mind you, just picking it up occasionally and turning it over in my hands, pondering what analogue interfaces I can digitally wrangle with the tweeny-priced processor. These days, digitally controlling analogue is a common combination that makes a lot of sense; you get precise, repeatable control without introducing conversion into your signal flow. It’s everywhere, from audio interface and console makers implementing digitally-controlled head amp gain, to boutique guitar pedal manufacturers like Chase Bliss Audio layering digital control over analogue circuits to draw all manner of sound combinations out of a tiny die cast box. Sounds that would barely be achievable in the analogue domain alone, even with a console’sworth of knobs and switches. Elektron has taken a similar…

We recently reviewed Korg’s Grandstage flagship digital piano, which puts the finest Korg tones under an impeccably authentic keybed to make for a thoroughly satisfying piano experience — and you’d expect no less for nearly $4k. The new sub-$1k Korg D1 digital piano represents an affordable way of getting a similar experience — specifically, the same progressively-weighted RH-3 keybed — with a smattering of voices that sound anything but entry-level. Though it’s small and narrow, the Korg D1 feels like it’s stuffed full of shot-put balls — typical of all Korg digital pianos. The plus side is it takes a very heavy-handed player to make it budge. Thankfully, the D1 doesn’t have the multi-colour light-up logo from the Grandstage. Pitch and mod wheels are also nowhere to be found, though…

JBL, or more succinctly, Mr James B. Lansing, has been trotting out sound reinforcement drivers for the motion picture industry since the 1920s; the musical instrument field with Fender’s use of the D130F speaker for its instrument amplifiers since the late 1950s; and for the professional studio sphere since 1973 with the 4300 series studio monitors. The company’s been around several blocks multiple times, and these days, JBL has pretty much become a household name. But JBL didn’t start out as JBL. The company’s founder, James B. Lansing, kicked it all off in 1927 with the Lansing Manufacturing Company. In 1941, the Lansing Manufacturing Company was acquired by Altec Service Company, hence Altec Lansing. It wasn’t until James Lansing left Altec Lansing to form a company using his initials that…

We haven’t been able to project sound forward, like a sound hologram. It’s starting to happen in video using lasers, but we haven’t got the equivalent with audio. Everyone’s hoping we’ll figure out 3D sound… we’re hoping, too. It’s like the Greeks hoping to fly. I asked my mechanical engineer friends, “Could you build a hang glider out of materials that existed during Greek times or do you need high-tech materials to make a hang glider?” They never figured out how to get a kite that wasn’t tethered to fly. They pulled people up with a string, so did the Tibetans, but no-one ever got a glider to work. Hang gliders seem fairly simple now. Why couldn’t they do it? It’s how I feel about 3D sound; we know what…