CENTRAL PROCESSING
“When ‘cutting edge’ means multiple streams of uncompressed 8k video, audio starts to look like a solved problem.” One of the core skills of the audio engineer is overcoming limitations. In the days of tape, that might have meant squeezing additional overdubs into the gaps where the bass wasn’t playing, or giving everyone in the band their own fader to move at mixdown. These and a hundred other familiar compromises went out of the window when computers replaced consoles. Practically overnight, we could stop worrying about noise, frequency response, track count, alignment, maintenance and so on. And to compensate, computer-based recording introduced some new and confusing limitations of its own. Some of these are inherent to the technology. For example, a degree of monitoring latency is inevitable in any digital system. But…
