Table of contents for AudioTechnology Issue 116 in AudioTechnology

I watched Warcraft last night. Not my choosing, believe me. One of my friends is an ex-WOW player and wanted an hour or two of mindless distraction… that wasn’t a game. It was no Spotlight, but it got me thinking about the marriage of live action and CG, and the analogous pairing of recording and programming. The great thing about Warcraft is the plot is so thin that it gives you ample time to study the visuals in detail without feeling like you’re missing any of the storyline. I would say the weighting between live action and CG is somewhere around 1:9. Anytime a human appears, they’re accompanied by a synthetic mise en scene, and all the orcs, elves and dwarves are informed by motion-tracked ‘performances’. Here’s the surprising thing;…

“VR could be the next 3D” warned Simon Beesley, Sennheiser’s Manager Global Business Development for Broadcast & Media. If you haven’t kept up with screen tech in the last decade, that’s not a good thing. 3D died under a mountain of CGI action movies and 3D-‘enhanced’ detritus controlled by an unholy alliance between Hollywood and screen manufacturers looking to cash in quickly on ‘the next big thing’. While Hollywood keeps its factory line of Avengers 3D movies trickling along, the tech industry, and many screen manufacturers have moved on to the next glittery toy: virtual reality. VR had basically been rubbish since Ivan Sutherland’s Sword of Damocles — the first head-mounted display (HMD) system that was so bulky it had to be suspended from the roof — right up to…

UPDATES FOR A&H QU www.allen-heath.com Allen & Heath’s Qu Series has received a host of enhancements accompanying firmware V1.9, including a thorough update for the Qu-Pad app. Alongside control of live mixing functions, processing, routing and effects, Qu-Pad now gives you complete access to scene management, control of the 15 mixer SoftKeys across the Qu range, I/O patching, and Qu-Drive stereo and multitrack recording/playback facilities. Password protected user profiles are also introduced. A&H has teamed up with Shure and Sennheiser to provide channel Library presets for a number of popular mics, with the presets designed to offer an improved starting point to get the best possible sound out of the respective mic/mixer combination. The new Qu-Control is a customisable iOS app offering five screens with up to 15 control ‘widgets’…

Towards the end of 2013, Toby and Russell Fawcus, who engineered Conditions, had been searching London for their own production space with modest expectations; a control room possibly with an attached iso booth. It happened to coincide with The Temper Trap beginning their third record, which inflated the size requirements and made the search harder. Soon after, they got the tipoff about Tileyard studios, a boutique design-your-own studio complex in a big industrial estate just north of Kings Cross. At Tileyard, artists, producers and engineers sign a long term lease on a studio space, with the cost of the custom design and build worked into the rent. Acoustician Chris Walls of Level Acoustics designs each studio and a full-time team of builders executes that vision. “The first time we went…

The pursuit of music that is, as he says, “profoundly, creatively interesting” has informed de Vries’ entire career. From South-African descent he was born in London, and received his first musical education at the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir. He later became a keyboard player and programmer and then a co-writer and producer, eventually working with well-known artists, including Massive Attack, Madonna, Björk, Robbie Robertson, U2, PJ Harvey, and others. It’s fair to say that de Vries was one of the main architects of the wave in ’90s music that took its inspiration from the latest developments in music technology. From 2000 de Vries’ work became increasingly diverse, abandoning obvious signs of being in the music tech vanguard, and collaborating with the likes of Josh Groban, Elbow, Marc Almond, and Rufus…

Standing front and centre on the floor of Adelaide Arena, Rüfüs FOH engineer Cam Trewin was torn between where his muscle memory was telling him to go and where his ears were beckoning him. For Rüfüs’s Australian run of shows, Trewin had opted to try out Avid’s new flagship live console, the S6L. They’d just stepped off the plane from a North American tour during which he’d meticulously dialled in his Profile show in the lead up to Coachella. The jet lag was giving him the jitters and he was questioning the cogency of jumping on a new console on the eve of an arena tour. After one day in Novatech’s Adelaide factory getting the rundown, he had just two days of preproduction in Adelaide Arena to get the set…

The Hills campus auditorium is cavernous and notoriously tricky in the low end. The 45–52Hz area can lose definition and get away from you pretty quickly. The Adamson E119s single-19 subs are flown in a position that ensures perfect coupling with both the main hang and the side hang. 1 The theory goes that if you arrayed the E119s alongside the main hangs you would have perfect coupling to the front but once you move to side the path lengths change, and you won’t get proper coupling with the side hangs. By positioning the subs in a way that the distance between the subs and the two hangs is the same overcomes this issue. One of the three E119s is rear facing to allow for a cardioid mode. In standard…

The Festival Centre in Adelaide has been one of the first real pitstops for the PM10 in Australia, we wanted to get the scoop on how it sounds and feels from monitor engineer, Craig McCowat. McCowat regularly mixes monitors at Festival Centre and got to use the console on two shows; when the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra played screen classics for the Movie Masterpieces show, and a concert featuring Marussia, the soprano who sings for Andre Rieu. Being a monitor engineer, McCowat is a frequent Yamaha user — an M7CL is the regular workhorse at the Festival Centre, and he often uses CL5s and PM5Ds too. He’s also a self-confessed Avid fanboy and enjoyed his time on an Allen & Heath D-Live at another show. His first impression was that it…

One of the not-so-secret pieces of outboard that has helped define Garbage’s sound is the Roger Mayer RM58 compressor. Butch and Billy swear by it for drums. Butch: “If you listen to the drums on the end of Amends, they’re hammered through the Roger Mayer, which blows them out in a cool way. Whenever the drums get really loud, like on Empty, it’s probably mixed in 50% on one of the buses. “I found it when I was producing Sonic Youth’s album Dirty in New York City. The engineer, John Siket, knew this gear broker who had a bunch of weird gear out in Brooklyn. I went out to his pad and he said, ‘You should try out this compressor, man.’ It was a $500 solid state compressor. I took…

“When I first started using a measurement system, I would hide the phase response… These days I wouldn’t consider measuring a sound system without it” When I first started using a measurement system, I would hide the phase response because I had no idea what it meant. It wasn’t until someone actually spent the time to show me how the phase trace worked that I realised how useful a tool it is. These days I wouldn’t consider measuring a sound system without it. We understand the concept of frequency response long before we become sound engineers. Every music listener can hear the effect of turning the treble or bass dials. On the other hand, it’s virtually impossible to determine the phase response of a signal just by listening to it.…

Execute; review; improve; repeat. I normally do my best to ensure the first sentence of an AT story is interesting enough to encourage you, the reader, to proceed to the second. But I thought I’d buck the trend and make a point about Hillsong: it does things better than just about any one else because of a happy coming together of big-organisation processes with small-organisation passion. Put another way: all the tech guys I met for this story really, really care, and they’re happily part of a big structure that allows them to excel. That’s the story. It’s not sexy or sensational. Yes, there’s a mind boggling amount of great gear to play with. For example, my visit coincided with the commissioning of a new Adamson E12-based PA in the…

A reader recently emailed me to ask which free utilities I recommended to manage or control Windows Services and Processes, since the CPU overheads on his audio PC were hovering around 52%, even before he launched any applications. I replied fairly quickly to the effect that I wouldn't advise him to attempt to disable any Windows Services, since in my experience this rarely results in any measurable improvements in performance, yet can seriously impinge on the reliability of your machine. For example, I once spent an entire afternoon disabling a total of some 46 Windows Services on my resolutely audio-only PC partition, carefully following the advice of a well-known commercial builder of Audio PCs. After a reboot I re-measured its performance, only to find that while the system RAM consumption…

Just over a year ago I wrote a review of Ozone 6 Advanced. I found it to be a proud successor in the fairly lengthy lineage of iZotope’s ‘all in one’ mastering packages. In Game of Thrones terminology it would be called something like ‘House Ozone’s sixth heir’. At the time of that writeup, whilst I thought it was better than the previous Ozone 5 in many respects, there were causes for concern — for example, the missing reverb algorithm. I felt as though an old friend had been beheaded. In the intervening period of time — despite having had access to both versions of the program — have a guess how many times I have ‘gone back’ and used Ozone 5 on a job? None. The fifth heir lies…

Arturia’s V Collection is a virtual candy store for vintage synth enthusiasts. They’ve been used on countless records as stand-ins for the often unattainable ‘real deal’, and the collection keeps growing. The fifth instalment has five new keyboards added to the mix, had its main menu system overhauled, and, would you believe it, now features resizable windows from 60-200% — no need to squint any longer! Before we get into the new bits of gear, let’s recap and see what else Arturia has been fiddling with. Three of the newer additions — Matrix 12V, Solina V and Vox Continental V — remain unchanged other than the zoom factor. Others have had cosmetic changes, like the ARP 2600V, which has shed its Blue Marvin skin for the 2601 orange and black…

SONAR FOR MAC & LIFETIME UPDATES www.cakewalk.com Mac users, here’s some good news. A free Alpha version of Sonar OS X will soon become available, as Cakewalk gauges the interest in doing a full Mac port. The version will include a set of Cakewalk plug-ins and ProChannel modules, work with any Core Audio interface, and include features like the Skylight User Interface. A dedicated forum will accompany the free download to gather feedback on the program. From June 1st until August 31st, purchasing or upgrading to Sonar Platinum will get you free, lifetime updates of any future core features, enhancements, and fixes. That means if you purchase Sonar Platinum with Lifetime Updates, you’ll never again need to pay for another renewal of the Rolling Updates plan. What’s more, Cakewalk’s development…

Vocals Nicholai Baxter: “In this section you can see the lead vocals at the top, entering throughout the song, and the stacks of backing vocals below. Almost all tracks in every session have the Slate Virtual Console inserted, which I use to give every track some character to start out with. Insert ‘7’ is a UAD 1176, which is the best-sounding 1176 modelling plug-in I’ve heard. Insert ‘P’ is a Fabfilter Pro-Q2, which is a great and versatile EQ. “I had trouble using a de-esser on Rufus’ vocal and ended up using clip gain automation to take out the esses. It sounded more natural, so I did the same thing on the other vocals. Insert ‘M’ is the Massey de-esser, which I tried and then turned down. ‘D’ is for…

When did your audio engineering career begin? I have been engineering and producing for 30 plus years! Bill Armstrong (AAV/Armstrong Studios Melbourne) hired myself, Quintin Rosario and Demo Karabatakis to work in his ethnic radio stations 3EA and 2EA. It was a great learning process but I found myself constantly sneaking around to the music studios every spare moment I had. I eventually begged Roger Savage (Bill’s partner and my mentor) to let me transfer to the music studios. He told me it would be hard work, long hours and no social life, but he did say yes. It quickly became everything he said it would be, but I was surrounded by amazing teachers; Roger, Ernie Rose, Ian Mackenzie, Ross Cockle and a host of incredible musicians, writers, producers and…

The S10 is a more recent addition to the Adamson lineup and a response to the market for: something smaller (it’s a two-way), more flexible and more cost effective, that could happily be driven from a minimal number of amp channels (as many as eight cabinets per amp), but still be a true line source. Like the E12, the S10 provides a 110° horizontal coverage and has the same sonic signature as the E12 above 2kHz (with its four-inch titanium compression driver). The S10 doesn’t have the nifty colinear drive module of the E12 but has the same waveguide (to ensure phase alignment of the mids and highs). Unconventionally, the 10-inch drivers splay outwards to provide the symmetrical horizontal dispersion. Prior to the Hills campus shootout, Hillsong pulled the trigger…

Back in the dark ages of synthesis, many a musician longed for the ability to layer the sound from one synth, with the sound of another. Imagine the phantasmagorical pad from your Yamaha CS80 combined with a cutting stab patch on your Korg MS20, or, if I’m being honest, a string patch combined with a piano! This was the stuff of dreams. Then 1982 brought with it the saviour of synth performance in the guise of MIDI. Suddenly ivory tinkling musicians could layer over a dozen keyboards and synthesisers to build super hybrid multi-convoluting soundscapes. The late 1980s, and a large section of the early ’90s, were the halcyon days of all-and-sundry synthesis. MIDI sequencing, computer-based patch editors, and an arms-race for as many synths you could run with a…

You could hear it coming, bubbling up like a slow rising tide, but there was not much I could do. I’d just handed control of an entire stage’s worth of monitoring to a haphazard bunch of musicians, and they were already fighting each other for onstage level. This was the first time I’d pressed Digital Audio Labs’ Livemix system into service, and it had been going swimmingly until this point. Livemix is a personal monitor mixing system; think Aviomstyle personal mixers on the end of an ethernet distribution network. It had been dead easy to set up, only taking me just over an hour to integrate the system into a setup that had previously required mixing monitor sends from FOH. That included: wiring the system between the stage rack and…

The issue with convolution reverb is when you take an impulse response of a hall, you’re typically only projecting the impulse from a few places on the stage captured by microphones in only a handful of places. You will get a perfect impulse response from that point source to that microphone at that instant in time. Of course, things change — people move around, humidity changes. Just say you had a perfect impulse response, I defy you to find an orchestra or band you can fit into two or three points. They occupy space, a thousand points of radiation would be understating it. If you moved around a few seats from the microphone’s position, it would sound pretty much the same, whereas the impulse response would be different. What’s happening?…