Table of contents for AudioTechnology Issue 115 in AudioTechnology

Price: $999/pair Electric Factory: (03) 9474 1000 or www.elfa.com.au I’m sure we can agree that a studio monitor doesn’t have to be enormous to be accurate. But let’s face it — you can’t get much smaller than a three-inch speaker before the term ‘pro audio’ starts to lose weight. The Eve Audio SC203 is the baby of the company’s well-regarded offspring of studio monitors. It’s a master/slave speaker system, meaning the unpowered left speaker is chained to the right, which receives power and input signal via USB, optical, or analogue RCA connections. You can hook up a subwoofer through the RCA output, though its quoted frequency response of 62Hz-21kHz actually puts it in the full-range category. The provided FlexiPads are like the toy in a HappyMeal — not really a…

NEW TRIO FROM BRAINWORX www.plugin-alliance.com Audio plug-in developer Brainworx has announced three new plugs at MusikMesse 2016. The first is the Brainworx Panoramic EQ, with three parametric bell-curve filters and all the usual equalisation controls. The twist is its ability to boost or cut EQ at discrete pan positions in the stereo field. That means you can select what part of the stereo field you want to affect — allowing for some pretty full-on flexibility in both mixing and mastering applications. The new SPL EQ Ranger Plus differs from the original EQ Rangers Vol. 1 by including 181 EQ modules, with a heap of genre-specific settings by Craig Bauer and Brainworx founder Dirk Ulrich. Third is the new Acme Opticom XLA-3 compressor, designed as a flavourful compressor that imparts a…

It’s a rare event to find Production Sound Mixer, Chris Duesterdiek, in the more controlled conditions of a studio. In the case of The Revenant, impossible. Every day was shot on location in the Canadian wilderness, between the months of September and April, which included the dead of Winter. Most of the film was shot well away from the production trucks, sometimes many miles down goat trails and across rivers where ATVs and snowmobiles couldn’t reach. “We had to go mobile and fit a cart-based location package into bags” said Duesterdiek. “Whether it was sleds or backpacks, our team of three had to figure out how to be sound sherpas” The film was entirely shot in available light, which meant a lot of filming in Magic Hour (shortly after sunrise…

“That’s the rule of mixing. Every action has a reaction, but it’s tenfold when you mix two genres that are foreign to each other” An entire class of Silicon Valley ‘unicorns’ exist to try and solve the Hilltop Hoods’ problem. Namely, cutting down the mountain of progress-tracking emails that plagues every project team’s inbox. Somehow I don’t think taking on the task of personally answering every email concern is high on their list of solutions, yet it’s effectively the role DJ Debris chose to occupy on their latest album Drinking from the Sun/Walking Under Stars: Restrung. This is the second time the hip hop group has ‘restrung’ existing material with an infusion of orchestral arrangements. Their virgin effort was mixed by Chris Thompson, their own live engineer and ABC live…

TRAVELLING LIGHT Everything you see here jams into a 12-tonne truck (well, okay, maybe not everything… the musos might object). Space saving measures include the exclusive use of in-ears, using projectors instead of LED walls, and maybe leaving half a dozen guitars at home. SWART BE WITH YOU Anatole likes his tagteam mic combos. Here he has a Sennheiser e903 and an e906 on the Swart Space Tone combo. Anatole will blend the tone to taste. JUST FOR KICKS The drums are kitted out with 900 Series Sennheiser mics — 12 channels in all. There are a couple of exceptions: an e602 sits out of the kick drum shell complementing the e901 inside the drum, and a pair of MK4 large diaphragm condensers take care of ‘underhead’ duties. KEYS OF…

LIGHT WORK — They’re slightly bigger and heavier than your average prosumer speaker, but they’re definitely lighter than they look. 24kg for the RL15 won’t present any problem for the professional road crew you’d expect to see delivering these speakers. When you add the 18-inch RL18s sub-woofer, again a fairly big box, at a comparatively modest 37kg, it adds up to a very high output-to-weight ratio. ROAD READY — The cabinets are made of wood and finished in EAW’s tough Roadcoat surface. The perforated steel grill feels strong, and the stylish recessed handles work well. They look much better than your average powered speaker. “My initial impression with Courtney’s regular Shure SM58 vocal mic was the big clear volume; quite a smooth, thick sound, and not too bright” POWER TRIP…

1 Newmarket Studios — Milwaukee Banks, recorded and engineered by Callum Barter, put on a great live show for their album launch party in the studio space. The new album was played in full and the subs were given a solid workout. Mikelangelo & St Claire brought a refreshing vibe into Newmarket for some Croatian and Spanish lullabies. The Neumann U47 and U48 were the mics of choice for some smooth vocals, and a pair of AKG C12Bs for gentle guitar. Barter also tracked some Greek folk songs consisting of Lyra, traditional drum and impressive Greek vocals. The tasty valve mics did a sweet job capturing it. 2 Heliport Studios — Sunshine Coast’s Heliport Studios had a busy month installing a new SSL Sigma summing mixer in Studio B which…

BEHRINGER’S X AIR GETS IN TOUCH www.behringer.com Behringer’s latest V1.12 firmware for the X Air Series mixers lets you add hands-on, tactile control of your mix using the X-Touch control surfaces. You can hook up an X Air mixer to the X-Touch via MIDI or the built-in Ethernet port. X Air is already compatible with iPad and Android tablets for wireless remote control, but there’s nothing quite like real faders. The controller provides nine moving faders with LED scribble strips, eight rotary encoders, FX send/return with parameter controls, assignment and adjustment of Mute Group/DCAs and AutoMix channels. You also get Gate/EQ/Dynamics and transport controls for the two-track USB player/recorder on XR16 and XR12 models. X-Touch can also act as a DAW control surface via Mackie Control and HUI protocols. Australis:…

Price: US$99 Sound & Music: (03) 9555 8081 or www.sound-music.com Mixing with headphones can be a risky ordeal. I remember when I first tried producing a song entirely in cans — the track was bangin’, everything felt big and wide, the vocals cut through like a knife. Then I chucked it on some speakers and, to my dismay, the levels were all out of whack, effects were overblown, and anything panned centre was way too loud. Waves’ new Nx plug-in is designed to marry the paradigms of headphone and speaker monitoring by maintaining the convenience and privacy of headphones while rectifying the deceptive auditory world they put you in. Namely, a dramatically wide stereo image, unconventional amount of detail, lack of ‘crosstalk’ between left and right channels, and the absence…

Neville Clark, mastering engineer/location recorder and general jack of all audio trades, from Disk Edits in Adelaide, assisted the Hilltop Hoods by recording the orchestra for the album. Typically Clark would rely on his Decca Tree to capture the orchestra blend, with only a handful of spot mics. This time, the Hilltop Hoods wanted more control over the final balance, so Clark individually miked all 30-odd instrument as well as putting up his tree. “In the end, I think it made their mix job easier” said Clark. “Last time round we had mics on sections, so if somebody was out in that group it was very hard to massage or hide that” A standard Decca Tree usually comprises three omnis (Oktava MC012), but Clark likes to augment that arrangement by…

It never ceases to amaze me just how many really useful and high quality freeware audio plug-ins are out there for PC owners. It’s about time I honed in on some of the best around. Most of these are fairly new releases that rapidly caught my eye, but I’ve also thrown in a few oldies but goodies. If you’ve missed them thus far then you need to explore their excellence for yourself. 1 IGNITE AMPS www.igniteamps.com Ignite Amps builds custom guitar amps and effects to order, but also provides an accurate real time virtual simulation of them before building the real hardware! With this core business in mind, it also offers a range of freeware virtual guitar amp plug-ins, which have a great reputation with guitarists. However, what recently drew…

METERING — The meters can be flipped between input, output, gain reduction and mix masters. The actual labelling refers to the Fat Channel parameters, which is probably for the best. For a hint on what the channel meters are telling you when in input or output mode: they’re a dBFS peak meter and are the same as the ‘Selected Channel Level’ meter to the right. Presonus set itself a complex task when designing the Studiolive CS18AI hardware control surface. No bones about it, it’s much easier to design console hardware and software at the same time. That way you can trade off software features to meet hardware limitations, or design the software around them. Presonus didn’t have that luxury, it was retroactively fitting a control surface to pre-built software. To…

I spent 25 years at Lexicon. I was hired in as a senior engineer. It was the early days of workstations, and we made a monster called Opus. We were in competition with companies like New England Digital, Waveframe and AMS Audiofile. All these hardware based, hard disk-operating, editing and mixing systems. It was bleeding edge. We were out front of the market and would beat each other bloody. Opus, for its day — talking the late ’80s — was really amazing. For the low, low price of US$200,000 you could get a 12x8 mixing console and a 12x8 editing system. Anybody’s laptop will do better than that now. I worked on Opus’ operating system and automation system, eventually managing the project for a couple of years. I begged to…

UAD OPENS WINDOWS TO USB $1499 | www.uaudio.com UAD has started to bolster its line of Windows-compatible Apollo products. Previously, the only recourse for PC users was to use Firewire devices like the original Apollo and Firewire UAD-2 DSP accelerators. Alternately, if serious speeds were required, a PCIe card — with portability taking a knock. Mac laptop users have been treated to high end Thunderbolt Apollo interfaces of all persuasions for a while now, and Windows users can start to join them via USB 3. It’s not the whole line yet, but so far UAD has released a USB 3 Apollo Twin, which is available now, and announced a couple of Satellite USB 3 DSP Accelerators (QUAD and OCTO) due later in the year. You get all the same power…

BUCHLA — Byron: “Buchla synths are quasi-scientific and almost mystical. The oscillator knobs are deliberately wonky so you can wiggle them for a little tremolo. The idea with a Buchla is you almost can’t make ‘traditional’ music with it. If you try to, you’ll send yourself insane” Robin: “The thing that modular synthesists seem to be really interested in is this slightly generative, slightly random, not-quite-surewhat’s-gonna-happen, chaotic aspect” TRIADEX MUSE — Robin: “This was touted as one of the first artificial intelligence sequencers ever built. If you read the manual to the Triadex Muse, they start off by saying you can’t make current music with this; you can only make the music of the future. At that time, there was this really utopian, almost science-fiction relationship to the sound of…

Taylor and Montano primarily work on a large Harrison MPC4-D console. They also have an integration of Avid Artist Mix work surfaces and some JL Cooper panners. The main reverbs used on the film were Altiverb, Phoenix Reverb, and a Lexicon 480L on the dialogue. Taylor: “One day Alejandro said, ‘Mr. Taylor you’ve had this box for every movie we’ve done.’ And for all the next ones too’ I replied” Another tool the pair find useful are subharmonic simulators. The biggest tool in their arsenal though is the second identical stage — matched in gear, not in size. “If Frankie is hung up on a scene, or vice versa” explained Taylor. “I can go on the other stage and pre-mix on the same console. Get all the automation correct and…

“The connection to the original music, and the way it coexisted with the new recordings was absolutely crucial. It became a very emotional project, and an enormous technically forensic project” 1 The (blue) original tracks are arranged at the top of the session, along with the Abbey Road Studio 2 monitor mix and an old original mix. The original tracks are also scattered through the rest of the session where they are being used as part of the main mix. The blue tracks here are not part of the mix but monitored as a separate external source. 2 The original backing vocals, new backing vocals, backing vocals combined, and original drums in green/yellow. You can see the new drum comps with tons of edits. 3 All the new heavily-edited drum…

Three years is a long time in technology. It’s at about the three-year mark where you’d seriously look at replacing any workstation computer — either sell it on or relegate it to lesser tasks — and ship in a more powerful unit that can keep up with the endless progress of software. With this in mind, it seems odd we are yet to see a new Mac Pro from Apple. The ‘Late 2013’ Mac Pro has possibly reached its replacement date. It’s not that the currently available Mac Pro isn’t capable of keeping up with the workload and applications it was assigned nearly three years ago — it most certainly is. The question remains; what’s next? Will Apple release a better Mac Pro? Or, will Apple coerce it’s customers into…

LEVERAGING PERFORMANCE — Eschewing the traditional Pitch and Modulation wheels, the primary (and only) performance control is a diagonally oriented performance lever. While it provides a unique look in use it has substantial mechanical noise, a fair degree of lateral play and feels a touch too heavily spring loaded, being particularly resistant toward the extremes. NOTABLE KNOBS — The slightly-rubberised finish on the knobs feels fantastic, and any wobble is avoided by their chassis mounting. There’s also plenty of space for chubby-fingered tweakers. Many controls have a precise 1024 steps of resolution, which is substantially higher than many legendary vintage synths. The resolution is essential for accurate recall of patch memories and to avoid stepping when swept. The largest knob controls VCF Cutoff, and will last the distance even in…