The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on ways to use visual audio scopes to gain more understanding about what’s going on in your audio.

It’s important to state right off the bat that working with audio should primarily be an auditory experience.  In general people won’t be looking at visual representations of audio as much as they will be listening to the audio.  And ears are more accurate than eyes.  There are lots of situations where audio looks awful on a scope but sounds incredible.  Scopes can, however, be very useful for gaining a different perspective on your material.  Sometimes the speakers available don’t reveal as much of the lows or highs as is needed for the material, for instance.  Using scopes to dissect phasing, frequency response, and peak levels can further inform the impressions your ears are giving you.
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This post focuses on the basics of equalization.

Equalization is something that most people are probably pretty familiar with on a basic level, having some EQ capacity in their car stereos and portable players.  Essentially, EQ is cutting or boosting of frequencies or frequency ranges.

There are fundamentally two kinds of equalization: graphic and parametric.  Graphic EQ usually has set frequency points with sliders to boost or cut at those points.  Parametric usually has a set of moveable frequency ‘centers’ with a width control, combined with a cut and boost knob.

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This post focuses on the basics of digital audio: sample rate, bitrate, and how analog signals are represented digitally.

We use digital audio all the time, but I am surprised on a fairly regular basis how many people are unclear about how digital audio works. Digital audio has two primary qualities that compose the way the audio is described. These two qualities correlate to the qualities of real world sounds more like metaphors than anything else. Real sounds have frequencies and volumes. In order to measure real world sounds and represent them digitally, we have created sample rate and bitrate as digital’s audio qualities. Sample rate determines how analog frequencies are described digitally whereas bitrate determines how analog volume is described digitally. The two qualities need each other in order to describe a sound. You can’t have volume without frequency or frequency without volume.

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