Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 113 i AudioTechnology

Column: Christopher Holder There’s no adequate way to explain how or why, so I’ll just jump in. It was a perfect November afternoon on the Murray river and I was at the helm of a luxury houseboat. This thing was enormous: 12 berths over three decks; spa bath, swimming nets… it must have been six metres wide and 15 metres long. I was thrown the keys, given some vague directions (a pub about 10 clicks upstream) and was under strict instructions to have fun. So there I was, chugging up Australia’s biggest inland arterial without the first idea of what I was doing. I’d never skippered a tinny before, let alone Big Bertha. My enduring memory of the trip was just how little control I had. A bend in the…

Mitch Kenny: “I get a lot of mixes supplied where every track is a stereo file, which means you need to do something to manipulate the image. I tend to pan things in the centre or hard left and right, then I’ll stereo expand beyond the edges to get things out of the way or make a highlight of them. It’s why I’m so adamant about having a strongly centred kick; it helps balance that super wide stuff. “I’ll very rarely tuck something in. It has to be doing a specific function. The reverb and stereo synths take care of that anyway by being all over the place in terms of the image. “I find the trick is not about how wide you can make a track, it’s more about…

Mitch Kenny: “I’m a stickler for automating delays rather than leaving them in, because they take up so much space. I’m a big believer that the ear picks up changes in tone more than changes in level. I love using Waves’ H-Delay for its control, but hate the ‘analogue circuit’ part of it; it just adds noise. When you compress it, it just keeps bringing up the noise. “I automate my delay throws with a physical fader to catch the nuances in a more musical way. For instance, on Young Tapz’s vocal for The Buzz, I didn’t want the ‘z’ sound at the end of his hook to repeat in the delay. So as well as band-passing the delay signal, I quickly faded the send in and out to catch…

I make no apologies for returning to the subject of Microsoft's new Windows 10 operating system for a third time in this column. Simply because the vast majority of us (apart from those few diehards still hanging on with the now aged Windows XP) will have been offered a free upgrade to W10 from their current operating system by Microsoft, and thus either already taken the plunge, or at least been sorely tempted to do so. A huge number of musicians have already succumbed and installed Windows 10, and are either very happy with its performance in conjunction with their personal range of software applications, or have tried it and subsequently rolled back to Windows 7 or 8 for a variety of reasons. Some musicians are stoically resisting the upgrade…

Price: Expect to pay $5599 Contact: CMI Music & Audio: (03) 9315 2244 or info@cmi.com.au This is now the third time we’ve reviewed a UAD Apollo unit, and the second time for me. My last outing was with the Apollo Twin, a handy introduction to the Apollo range, but I’ve been eager to try the system again with a few more inputs. The Apollo 8p is the middle child of the second-generation ‘blackface’ Apollos — there’s also the standard four-preamp, eight analogue-in Apollo 8, and the preamp-less, 16-channel Apollo 16 converter. The 8p has eight channels of conversion, and eight Unison preamps to go along with them. If you’re unfamiliar with Unison technology, UAD has basically taken a vanilla IC preamp and used its own modelling technology to juice up…

The internal talkback mic can be replaced by an outboard mic connected via any of the mic preamps. Four backlit buttons address 48V power to each preamp input, along with talkback, mono monitoring, and output dimming/muting. Two headphone amplifiers with independent outputs and level controls. PreSonus’ remote controllable XMax solid-state preamps (60dB gain, 118dB dynamic range) with an added separate digital volume-control circuit for digital recall without affecting the sound quality. Input levels are represented via eight-segment LED meters, as are the main left and right output levels, and blue LEDs atop the mic level input meters signify 48V power activation. NEED TO KNOW PRICE Expect to pay $1399 CONTACT Link Audio: (03) 8373 4817 or info@linkaudio.com PROS Sounds great Complete monitoring system Very expandable Terrific preamps USB connectivity On…

NEED TO KNOW PRICE Handheld Set: $1499 Lavalier Set: $1499 Lavalier Pro Set: $1749 CONTACT Sennheiser Australia: (02) 9910 6700 or sales@sennheiser.com.au PROS Quick auto setup & pairing Tiny, but well-made & designed Auto gain-riding works well Good sound quality CONS Headphone output on receiver would be nice SUMMARY The Sennheiser AVX wireless system is easy to use, built extremely well, performs reliably and doesn’t get in the way of your creative flow. Sound quality is impressive, especially from the handheld AVX-835 microphone. It’s not the cheapest camera audio accessory, but if you want to evade audio distractions while filming, the AVX should rate high on your list. There’s an endless number of ways to bring a cinema shot alive and the tools to do it — sliders, stabilisers, jibs,…

After we’d successfully introduced Flashlight in 1989, by 1992 John Newsham and I had, sadly, allowed ourselves to be out-manoeuvred business-wise. Turbosound was sold, via AKG, to [audio giant] Harman. I’m always keen to tell people that John and I were out-voted; our ownership was too diluted to stop that move. It was a great shame; a pretty sad moment. We went on to form a new company: Funktion-One… and, I’ve got to say, what we’ve been able to do with better drivers and waveguide innovations, I could only have dreamed of back then. I don’t think the live sound industry has progressed that far. People’s memories are short. In fact, I’d go as far to say that we’ve been living through a time of complete audio nonsense littered with…

CRYSTAL MASTERING It was a big month for Unkut Recordings, with two major releases mastered at Crystal Mastering; Kings Konekted, as well as vinyl mastering for Trem One. Chief engineer Joe Carra also mastered releases for Illy, Emcee Kerser, Angus Younga, Diamonds of Neptune, Colour Dazed, Free Time, Von Voddy, Holy Moses, Ben Middleton, Davey Duzit, Jack Stirling, Myles Mayo and Little Georgia. DAMIEN GERARD STUDIOS With its 30th anniversary year almost complete, the team at Damien Gerard Studios has been compiling some history. The current studio setup has changed a bit since this photo was taken in 1985 at the old Ultimo facility 1. Starting in the pre-internet world of the ’80s with a telephone and a hard copy ‘Booking Book’, DGS began as a rehearsal room in Wattle…

This year’s AES show in New York saw Arturia announce its first ever interface, the AudioFuse. It’s caused a stir, and rightly so, with the company’s reputation primarily in synth, controller and software creation. Challenging as it is to crack into the crowded audio interface market, Arturia resolutely pushed ahead with AudioFuse’s development, insisting its unique features and design will find a place in the market. Talking with Arturia Area Sales Manager Antoine Barry, the word ‘better’ cropped up in conversation too many times to ignore; better audio quality, better user experience, better workflow, better connectivity, better compatibility. Apparently these are all focal points of the AudioFuse’s function. At face value, the desktop interface would appear to deliver on most of these fronts. Two built-in mic preamps provide 60dB gain…

There’s something empowering about having a mic set up on your work desk. As if it lends everything you say a little extra authority. I’ve had Audio-Technica’s AT2020USBi sitting on mine the last few weeks, and people have been taking me much more seriously around the AT office. Truthfully, I haven’t taken the time to ask, I’ve just had far too many important things to tell them. The mic is a familiar one, it’s an iOS-compatible version of the USB version of the AT2020, itself a popular mic choice for many home studio enthusiasts. The cardioid condenser supports 24-bit/96k sampling and comes with a folding table-top tripod stand, USB cable, and — to suit its new iOS capabilities — a Lightning cable. As you’d hope, getting sound from the USB…

Mitch Kenny: “The three most important things on a record are the kick drum, the kick drum and the kick drum. I knew it before I went to The States, but making a lot of dance and hip-hop records really reinforced that idea. Even with that big L.A. rock sound, the kick drums are just so big and important. I’ll layer kicks till the cows come home. “I’ve got a few kick drums that all do a certain thing. I use a live kick drum sample, and a 9th Wonder kick together quite often. Some of them might not be overly loud but it’s about making it work in different formats. Hermitude’s record, in particular, has to work in a club, on radio and on a phone. The very low…

Kenny’s setup is relatively simple. He’s a big exponent of mixing in-the-box. He holds nothing against consoles, having developed his craft on them, but he’s fully aware that the ability to recall is hugely important to his clients. Mitch Kenny: “Tal Herzberg, who unfortunately died so early, was my walking reality check. When I got to The States I was all console. He shook his head in his stern way and said, ‘When the A&R man rings you at 11 o’clock for a change and you’ve done the change while he’s still on the phone justifying his decision; and you’re sending it to him as he’s still arguing and telling you what the change is; you’ll never mix on a console ever again’ He’s right. The reality is the amount…

Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk was a very well orchestrated pastiche of ’80s funk. All the key elements were there — keytars, horns, low fisheye lenses and square-shouldered pastel sports blazers. But there was still a collected, serious side to the parody. Whether it was yammering on the phone while getting a perm or reading the paper while their shoes were shined, Mars and Ronson were getting down to the business of being funky. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis don’t have to parody jack. Their songs and videos are too oddball to attract direct comparisons. Especially so on their latest hit, Downtown, which, on the face of it, could be read as a direct response to Uptown Funk, but is so much more bizarre. Downtown’s chorus — top-lined by…

AT: Why do you only restore MCI machines? Chris Mara: In Nashville in ’95, you made records on tape machines. As an assistant and then as an engineer I got familiar with how they sounded. Also, they break and it seemed like the MCIs, even before I knew how to restore them, were very approachable from a technical standpoint. They were made to be fixed and sounded the best to me. Studer and Otari’s definition of sonic quality is to be neutral, which is valid and hard to do, like a Grace Design mic preamp. But that’s not what I want out of a tape machine and certainly not what people want now. You don’t buy a tube microphone for its frequency response — you want curves, valleys and high-end…

About six months ago I updated my DAW computer, and as a result was forced to take the plunge into Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite. Despite my reluctance, it has been a pretty smooth ride. As is the case with updating operating systems, I was also strong-armed into upgrading to Pro Tools 12 and chase some up-to-date installers for other software, but apart from that, the system has run well and is very stable. On top of that, some of the features introduced with Yosemite have been quite useful, particularly the batch renaming of files feature. Now that El Capitan is available, I’ve made cautious steps to install it on a separate partition on that same Mac, while I review the new OS — both for the mag and myself. I…

Supplied alongside the Studio 192 is a software control panel and mixer. Dubbed ‘UC Surface’, the software is also available as a free iPad application or as a touch responsive app for Windows 8 touchscreen computers. Aesthetically the software follows the current penchant for ‘you can have any colour so long as it’s grey’. Like most audio interface mixer control panels, UC Surface is primarily designed for configuring multiple mixes via the Studio 192’s additional outputs. Up to eight separate stereo mixes can be configured, and these can emanate from the onboard eight analogue outputs and the first eight ADAT outputs – likely more monitor mixes than you’ll need but the potential’s there if needs arise. Outboard sends? Backup recorder? There’s enough outs to do it. These features I’d consider…

The Channel 9 station in Adelaide was recently relocated from north of the city to the CBD. Upping and moving a TV station is a hefty undertaking, as you’d expect, and quite a bit more complicated than rewiring the patchbay of a recording studio. Steve Delmenico, Broadcast Operations Manager at Channel 9 Melbourne, headed up the build of the new Adelaide studio, with Soundcorp doing the heavy lifting. It involved the integration of a Dante audio network to connect a number of rooms and input sources throughout the facility. While other networking options like MADI were on the cards, Delmenico says Dante best suited the station’s needs because of its larger network capacity and redundancy system. The nerve centre of the system is the Yamaha CL5 console, chosen partly for…

It’s a hot summer day. You’ve got mates over, cooking up snags on the barbecue. Ol’ mate Baz gets a hankering for some music, and Jim puts in his request for Summer of ’69. You’re happy to oblige, but you’d rather sing it to them yourself than move the PMCs out to the backyard. Enter, the Mackie FreePlay; the modern boombox for the discerning soundie. Dubbed a ‘personal PA’, the FreePlay is a batterypowerable portable speaker system. With XLR and line inputs on the back, this is more than a mobile iPod dock. It’s a mobile iPod dock on steroids… without an actual iPod dock. But we’ll get to that. The speaker setup is not your average. A single eight-inch driver sits in the centre like the green iris of…

This connection method can be used at both the system tuning and optimisation stage of the process as well as while the show is actually running! Using this connection setup, the reference source (Channel 2 of the audio interface) for any FFT measurement is now derived from the mixing console instead of directly from the audio interface. All FFT measurements will therefore be comparing whatever is coming out of the mixing console — including the audio interface’s internally generated Pink Noise — to what the measurement mic is hearing coming into the FFT measurement input (Channel 1 of the audio interface).…

Mitch Kenny: “I ended up sidechaining the percussion break in Through the Roof with Waves’ C6 multiband compressor to lose all the bottom end in the drum loop and make space for the kick drums. When the kicks weren’t hitting I wanted to have the rest of it popping through, so a normal sidechain would have just taken away too much information. “I used the same trick for the snare. It was hitting at the same time as the kick drum, so I sidechained the multiband’s top end to compress when the kick drum hits. It means they work together rather than getting in the way of each other, and gives me more space”…

Mitch Kenny: “I didn’t record the vocals on this album but I did learn a lot about how to record them from working with Kuk Harell, who produces vocals for Beyonce, J-Lo, Bieber and the like. The biggest lie anyone tells a vocalist is, ‘one more’ He will track through until he’s absolutely convinced he has enough to comp, then he will say, ‘four more.’ That way the artist knows you’ve got everything you need to make a vocal, and the ‘four more’ is because we might stumble upon a happy mistake or a little bit of magic. Because they know you’ve got it, they relax and might find a bit of brilliance. Then after four, move on. I can make a barking dog sound like Pavarotti with Melodyne, but…

Originally from New York, Castelli studied saxophone at the Hartt School of Music on Long Island, and started and ran a studio together with his father in the same area, where he cut his engineering and production teeth. In 2013 he signed to Mirrorball Entertainment in Los Angeles as mix engineer and producer, where co-founder and star mixer Tony Maserati took Castelli under his wing. Castelli: “The first thing we mixed together was a Lady Gaga song, then he invited me to move in across the hall from him, where I still have my studio. It’s all in-the-box, my only outboard being a Rascal Audio Two-V preamp and a Kush Audio UBK Fatso compressor, both of which I use over the master bus. I also have two of Tony’s Neve…

Game audio people are still talking about Limbo, and may be for some time yet. Playdead’s debut release rocked the games industry, heralded as a poster child for ‘videogames as art’ thanks to its mysterious and compelling monochromatic visuals. The visuals are only one half of the story though. They’re perfectly accompanied by Limbo’s bleak yet enigmatic, multi-award winning soundscape. It’s a strikingly original take on game audio, especially for a 2D side-scrolling platformer; a style of game that’s more synonymous with Super Mario’s 8-bit bleeps and light-hearted theme music. (You can sing it now can’t ?) Martin Stig Andersen’s background in acousmatic music, sound installations, electro-acoustic performance and video art informed his brave holistic audio vision for Limbo. Andersen decreed that there was to be no ‘spooky’ stylised interactive…

AT caught up with JPJ’s Dean Mizzi to get the lowdown on the Def Leppard PA. Don't let the L-Acoustics T-shirt fool you, it's a d&b love-in. “It’s d&b J Series: 14 deep on the main hangs and 12 on the side hangs. We have flown J subs and stacked J subs on the ground and d&b Q7 infill. We time align the PA back to where the backline and drum fill are on stage. We’ve supplied the Digico SD5 using a Dolby Lake Processor as the mesa system EQ” JPJ Audio: www.jpjaudio.com.au…

It’s MCI through and through at Welcome to 1979. Mara used around 24 channels on his late ’70s MCI 428 console for the session. Here’s what he used to mic up the instruments. Mara: “I used a couple of mics on the kick drum, an AKG D112 and a Neumann U87. I usually use a sub-kick, but I don’t on direct-to-disc because it’s too risky having that much low end. I put a Shure SM57 on snare, and put up a couple of tom mics. I used an RCA 44 ribbon for a mono overhead. Stereo imaging just for the sake of it causes you to waste space on a record because the needle has to go down, which means the grooves have to go wider. Tighter drums means the…

Even though it’s one of the most widely used DAWs on the planet, some people still have a weird aversion to FL Studio. I get it, a little. I mean, it’s called Fruity Loops and it’s also got that reputation that everyone cracks it and makes their first beats on it. Nevertheless, when you dive in, it’s really good. I’ve used every DAW and I’m just fastest on this one, which is why I’ve persevered. I use Logic to quantise some live instruments, but I bring all the audio back into FL Studio. It’s also really efficient. The MIDI mapping is simple and with ASIO driver support FL has really low latency — I’m running my whole project with only 5ms of latency. Even though the developer, Image Line, is…