Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 136 i AudioTechnology

AudioFuse was an outstanding maiden interface for Arturia. Wrapped in a futuristic design and several thoughtful features were squeezed into the desktop package. Arturia has expanded the AudioFuse’s appeal by developing a rackmount version with more I/O. Meet the AudioFuse 8Pre. Carrying over the innards from its predecessor, the most obvious difference of the new rack-able version is six extra preamps; eight in total, as opposed to two in the first and four in AudioFuse Studio. Metering has a similar look with the bright LED strip sitting next to each channel’s gain pot. Although the AudioFuse 8Pre only has one set of headphone outputs, we still get both 6.5mm and 3.5mm options — no stress if you can’t find that elusive adapter. IN ACTION Firing up the AudioFuse 8Pre couldn’t…

PRICE $1699 CONTACT CMI Music & Audio: (03) 9315 2244 or www.cmi.com.au PROS Excellent sounding interface with expandability Generous free bundle of DSPaccelerated plug-ins Desktop design great for home studios CONS None SUMMARY If you can’t work out of a million dollar studio, the UAD Apollo Twin X ‘studio in a box’ concept is the next best thing. With onboard DSP driving pristine plug-in emulations, this desktop interface features two Unison-enabled mic pres, monitoring control, and ADAT expandability. As a bonus, Apollo users get the UAD Luna recording system (Mac only) for free when released later this year.…

PRICE $179 RRP CONTACT Sennheiser: (02) 9910 6700 or sales@sennheiser.com.au PROS Impressive tone with gutsy lows Lightweight CONS Headband feels a little delicate SUMMARY Sennheiser’s HD25 Light won’t disappoint as a trusty ‘desert island’ monitoring tool for audio engineers or recording musicians. Professional enough for critical listening yet portable enough for field recording or live performance, the HD 25 Light is an affordable all-rounder that sounds bigger than its size.…

To illustrate their mix approach for I,I, Hanson and Messina chose ‘Jelmore’ as the most indicative. The first six tracks are sends to outboard gear – an Eventide H3000 side chain and a Thermionic Culture Vulture side chain. Below that are nine drum tracks, four keyboard tracks, two sax tracks, a bass track, four Messina and H3000 tracks (returns of the top six tracks), then vocals. At the bottom are a number of group/stem tracks that are prints of signals coming back from the desk. Messina: “The six tracks at the top are duplicates of other tracks in the session. These were edited to taste and then used as the key input sources for various gates and side-chaining. They each triggered the key in a different way and at different…

The current tour saw Michael Bublé move from Sennheiser’s 5000 Series to the 6000 Series. The system is interesting for the fact it converts the signal to digital in the transmitter. I spoke to Monitor Engineer Marc Depratto about his experiences: “It’s been very stable. It’s given us more flexibility, in the sense that we can stick the transmitters very close to each other and you don’t run the same risk of intermodulation. Which is especially true of a show like ours where you’re in 20-plus countries in year. We could be in Dallas one week — which is an RF hell-storm — and then in another city with a highly regulated RF landscape and not have any problems. It makes it much easier. “The 6000 series also sounds great.…

Meyer Sound Laboratories’ popular UPA speakers are retiring after a long and distinguished career as leaders of the professional mid-sized point-source class. The full-range passive UPA-1 was released in 1980 and was the first live speaker to use a trapezoidal cabinet – a shape that allowed for curved arrays. Output quality was maintained by a dedicated electronic controller containing active crossovers, frequency and phase correction circuits, and feedback circuits to provide driver protection. In the mid-1990s Meyer Sound embraced powered loudspeakers by putting the processing and an amplifier inside the speaker cabinet. The active UPA-1P has been delivering Meyer’s trademark high-fidelity-at-high-volume sound to appreciative audiences ever since. Mention them around sound types and you’ll likely hear an anecdote along the lines of “I heard this big sound and it was…

I recently reviewed Zoom’s F8n [see AT132] and both it and their new F6 demonstrate that Zoom is continuing a strong evolution of design in its products. There will never be a single device that is perfect for all needs, but the F6 is an interesting development that is, in many ways, a real game-changer for location recording. I take a pragmatic approach to the equipment I use; the best tool for a job is the tool that lets me get that job done. That means I judge microphones and recording equipment with my ears, not by some arbitrary value of reputation. The ultimate test of any equipment is if you trust it enough to use it for paying gigs. This review is based on my experience using the F6…

Dynaudio’s Core series of studio monitors has that feeling of getting back to basics. It was as if Dynaudio went a little too ‘mad scientist’ with the previous flagship studio speakers, the Air series, and Core is the natural course correction. The Air series was a bit of a marvel, no doubt. It promised to be a seamless intersection of hardware components and software DSP right from the beginning. Drivers would come off the manufacturing line with a perfectly-matched DSP correction to accompany them. But perhaps the more DSP you add and the more obvious you make it, the less it feels like you can trust the physical hardware. What’s to stop Dynaudio hooking up a hand-folded piece of paper to a DSP chip and calling it a professional listening…

Jonathan Burnside talks with Rick Perrotta of Royer Labs about passive microphones, impedance and how the dBooster does what it does... Jonathan Burnside: There are a lot of boosters on the market. What inspired you to add yet another to the fray? Rick Perrotta: Most of the signal boosters are nearly-identical circuits using four transistors in cascade mode; they’re very simple circuits with few components. They provide a certain amount of gain under certain conditions, but that gain isn’t stable. The input impedance of the preamp, the quality of the phantom power (meaning the amount of current available), and the output impedance of the microphone all affect performance. They’re very dependent on conditions and the preamp they’re plugged into. They can lack fidelity and can be noisy when driven hard.…

PRICE $1199 CONTACT CMI Music & Audio: (03) 9315 2244 or www.cmi.com.au PROS Quality preamps with heaps of gain Routing software is intuitive and comprehensive CONS Two headphone outs would be nice Software allows only one cue mix SUMMARY Life is too short to use troublesome interfaces. Be of good cheer – Arturia’s AudioFuse 8Pre is about as reliable as they come. The first rackable rendition of the AudioFuse concept, 8Pre functions on its own or as a standalone ADAT expander with clean pres and fantastic control software. Bundled with instrument and emulation plug-ins you’ll actually use, AudioFuse 8Pre is a workhorse interface that’ll just work.…

Walking into the Forum Melbourne on a cold Spring afternoon I’m looking for Naomune Anzai (Nao to his friends), production manager and FOH mix engineer for the Teskey Brothers. Recently renovated and restored to its original beauty, the Forum’s inside is resplendent in gothic glory with Greco-Roman spires and turrets looming against a starry dark blue ‘sky’ – reminding me yet again of what a special venue it is. Underneath the proscenium arch this evening something equally special is taking place: the Teskey Brothers are playing a fourth sold-out show, and behind the scenes there are no less than three recording rigs capturing every note – one of them recording to analogue tape. If there’s any band that can take on this challenge successfully, it’s the Teskey Brothers with their…

Mark Woods talks with Pablo Espinosa, Meyer Sound’s Vice President & Chief Loudspeaker Designer, about the Ultra-X40. Mark Woods: How do the Ultra-X40s maintain their dispersion pattern below the horn’s crossover frequency? Is there some kind of array behaviour with the eight-inch speakers? Or is it the wave guide they’re mounted on? Pablo Espinosa: All of the above, and more. When using a single driver, the polar pattern of the driver is dominated by the size of the driver and the frequency being reproduced – this is just physics. One of the huge advantages of using two drivers in this configuration is that the combined polar pattern of the two drivers can be controlled and optimised to well below their crossover frequency. In addition, the polar pattern can also be…

PRICE $1399 RRP, expect to pay $1099. CONTACT Dynamic Music: (02) 9939 1299 or info@dynamicmusic.com.au PROS Rugged, small & light weight. No need to adjust input gain. Numerous powering options. CONS Cannot adjust recording levels of 32-bit files. SUMMARY A small, lightweight and good sounding field recorder with numerous operating modes. Its 32-bit recording capabilities remove the need to adjust input gain before recording, and allow it to capture peaks that would distort 24-bit files.…

Recording an album for the Melvins some decades ago, I put an RCA 74B a few feet back from King Buzzo’s Sunn amp and had my first listen to a ribbon mic. A friend had gifted it as a joke; he’d grabbed it at a garage sale, found it to be noisy and dismissed it as an unusable relic from a bygone day. As usual, I had an SM57 crammed up on one of Buzzo’s 12-inch speakers. When I listened to the RCA ribbon, it didn’t have the ugly 6kHz sizzle inherent to SM57s. The signal was indeed noisy, but noise was never an issue on Melvins’ albums so I rolled tape and never looked back. I quickly learned that dynamic and condenser mics have a high resonant frequency that…

There’s an air of efficiency around Roswell’s Mini K47; no-nonsense, straight to the heart of it, says what it does on the tin. And at the heart of these mics is the capsule; a K47-style one, the sort you’ll find in Neumann tube mics like the U47 and M49. The mini part? Well these ain’t no U47-sized mics. A pair of Mini K47s turned up in the office after I met Roswell’s owner Matt McGlynn at NAMM earlier in the year. Unfortunately, I got caught up moving around a bit, and they’d only found their way onto a number of guitar recordings. Recently, things have settled down and I found the time and projects to try them on some other sources. Even if you’ve not heard of Matt, you’ve probably…

A studio in a box. That’s the basic premise of a Universal Audio interface. With the DSP-enabled line of Apollo interfaces, UA has done a fantastic job recreating the signal chain workflow of an outboard-laden analogue studio within a digital microcosm. The UA Apollo Twin X is built on this idea, yet takes on a new outer shell. Of the many members in the Apollo family, the Twin X is the most compact. The sturdy desktop unit is less than a handspan across, totally backpack-able and rugged enough for an itinerant life. It’s also Thunderbolt 3 so latency reaches new lows when tracking through UA’s emulations of prestigious outboard models. UAD-2 Duo processing is the brains of the DSP, letting you load up the plugs without stressing your PC (Quad…

Justin Vernon, leader of the alt-folk band Bon Iver, called their 2016 album 22, A Million, “a new way of telling a story.” It was an understatement. 22, A Million was as experimental as it’s possible to get (short of going atonal), with tons of distortion, drop-outs, and weird sonic artefacts. The combination of disorientating sonic weirdness, gorgeous melodies and crazy song titles proved enormously successful, both critically and commercially. 22, A Million was a major achievement, but, as is often the case with artistic high points, where could they go from there? Getting even weirder risked severing their connection with popular culture, while a more straight-up album might be considered a retreat. The follow-up album, I,I, released in August, provides the answer. In many ways it is a return…

‘A mix is a mix is a mix.’ This is the sage advice given to FOH engineer Craig Doubet by a recording engineer mentor David Leonard (who won a Grammy in 1983 for co-engineering the Toto IV album). By which he meant: a good mix will translate across any monitoring system. Craig carried that lesson into his live sound career. In a live context, the lesson is: make sure your well-balanced mix sounds good in the room by getting your PA right — right design; right tuning. Which is why Craig Doubet personally oversees the intricate Michael Bublé PA design. He knows most of the arenas in the world pretty intimately and armed with Meyer Sound’s MAPP acoustic prediction program, will make sure his crew chief knows exactly what the…

PRICE RRP: $362 CONTACT Mixmasters Pro Audio: (08) 8278 8506 or www.mixmastersproaudio.com.ausales@mixmasters.com.au PROS Allows passive ribbons and low-output dynamics to be used with any preamp. Maintains original sound of the microphone. High ‘bang for buck’. SUMMARY A sophisticated in-line booster with a high input impedance to prevent degrading the original sound of the microphone, and a stable output impedance to ensure the sound is not degraded by the preamp it is plugged in to. CONS Requires an extra mic lead.…