Wow! It’s been a while since I last updated the ol’ Stereo Bus. But I haven’t forgotten about it. I’m settling into San Francisco nicely, keeping myself very busy. Unfortunately, space is too expensive for me to open up the studio that I planned to open here, but the good news is I’ve started playing bass guitar for the band Cuban Cigar Crisis. CCC is gearing up for recording an album Summer 2010 and I’m already doing research into the production process. I have decided that we should go with a high sample-rate recording this time around. I’ve been working pretty much exclusively at 24-bit/44.1khz but now DAWs are fast enough and hard drives are cheap enough that there’s no good reason not to step it up. 192khz is simply overkill. Most DACs simply upsample to achieve that rate and response can actually be poorer as a result. This leaves the choice between 96khz and 88.2khz.
by Dan Connor
This post is about the mastering process for my latest EP. The session was booked at Minneapolis’ Rare Form Mastering. Greg Reierson took the helm and did a really solid job overall.
First of all, I’m not the sort of producer who does mastering the same way for each album. For my own material, I prefer a light touch and lower overall volume. This is the sort of thing mastering engineers tend to prefer, so it works out well. Obviously, a metal album would be a different story altogether (and my next self-produced release will be more along those lines.)
This post focuses on an experiment with my new Focusrite Liquid Mix, with which I mixed and mastered a song of mine that was in need of polishing.
First of all, I will be out of town until the 19th… meaning that I won’t be making any posts here at TSB until then. But, I thought I’d offer you something to make up for it: free music!
Read the rest of this entry »
by Dan Connor
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.
This post is part 2 of 2 on audio data compression. The first part focused on lossy compression whereby audio quality is decreased and quite a bit of size is reduced. This post will focus on lossless compression whereby quality is retained and some size is reduced.
As I mentioned in the previous post, there are folks out there who are paranoid about their audio. They feel that anything that touches their audio will degrade the quality. These fears are unjustified in the case of lossless audio compression. Whatever goes into lossless compression is exactly what comes out of lossless compression. In fact, with most modern lossless formats, if you were to compress a raw audio file into a lossless format and then uncompress it back, the two files would be exactly the same, bit-for-bit. As a result of this integrity, lossless compression is perfect for applications where quality is more important than space or bandwidth like archiving or transfering masters. Many folks, myself included, keep lossless backups of their CDs so that they can recreate the audio from the source discs should anything happen to the originals. There also is an added benefit of being able convert these lossless files into any lossy format without having to re-rip the source media. It’s very convenient. But, I digress. For pro audio there are two main applications for lossless compression: archiving and the transfer of masters.
