Sommaire pour Issue 129 de AudioTechnology

We go through cycles of technology, and it’s easy to be critical of something before it hits its stride — to sit back, popcorn in hand, and label the newest trend a fad; to lampoon manufacturers who’ve bet the organisation’s entire R&D budget and direction on the next big thing. It’s easy to criticise when you don’t have any skin in the game; when you only have to move if you’re forced too. In the visual world it happens all the time. 3D was the laughing stock of the consumer world, but that stereoscopic technology underpins the pursuit of virtual reality. Likewise, many would argue recording video in high-resolution 4K is pointless when YouTube is dominated by ‘standard’ HD content consumption. So why are the top YouTubers buying $100,000 cinema…

My first impression of the Rode VideoMic Me-L for iOS was, ‘Geez, that’s a bit quieter.’ Of course, I simply hadn’t adjusted for the fact that reducing the background noise to that degree would feel so drastically different. All that rowdy sonic junk that had been clouding the sound of what I was actually trying to capture had largely disappeared. The noise reduction was courtesy of the VideoMic Me-L’s mini-shotgun microphone, which does a good job of focusing on the sounds in front of it, rather than around it like the iPhone’s onboard omni-directional mics. It’s not the longest shotgun mic, but has more than enough ‘reach’ when holding a phone in selfie-mode at arm’s length. This little phone mic appendage isn’t completely new. The VideoMic Me has been around…

The collision of real estate developers and recording studios usually spells bad news. That somewhere, out there, a studio is making way for yet another apartment block. Even Australia’s largest studios aren’t immune. Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne had to pack all its gear into the smaller ‘South’ studio when it couldn’t afford the asking price; Studios 301 also relocated to a completely new-built studio to escape development. Up in Byron Bay, the script has been flipped. When Taryn McGregor and her husband Rob bought the 70-acre property with Taryn’s father two years ago, they never expected to end up running a studio. Their family-owned real estate business specialises in regenerating land into the perfect plots for someone else’s dream home. Other than Rob’s profession as a tiler, they don’t…

Thanks to L-Acoustics’ L-ISA and d&b’s Soundscape making headlines, it really feels like immersive audio’s time has come. Immersive (or ‘spatial’) audio has been around for a while. Ambisonics’ bubble of 3D sound was first in development in the ’70s, for example. But now the conditions are right for immersive audio to take a leap forward into mainstream concert touring, AV events, audio installation, musical theatre, museum and exhibitions, and more. Such is the flurry of activity it’s hard to separate what ‘immersive’ is and isn’t. Let’s break it down. IMMERSIVE: 1 WORD, 2 PURPOSES When we talk about immersive audio systems we’re talking about systems designed to potentially do two distinct jobs (and occasionally, they’ll do both). The first is room enhancement. The most famous of these systems is…

L-ISA only debuted in 2016, and Guillame Le Nost, L-Acoustics’ Director of R&D on L-ISA, is already referring to stereo PA deployments as “the way it used to be”, “traditional”, and “stuck in a 50-year old configuration.” I guess everything looks nostalgic when you’ve poured the last few years of your life into developing the ‘next step’ in live sound technology. As Le Nost tells it, it all started when L-Acoustics’ founder Christian Heil had his lightbulb moment five years ago. Heil was sitting up in the side bleachers at a concert and hearing the vocals out of a PA hang situated 10m to the left of where the singer was physically standing. His frustration with this lack of continuity between sight and sound was only compounded by looking at…

Martin Peralta has quickly become the ‘go-to’ audio guy for podcasts from the ABC, Gimlet Media, BBC, SBS, The Guardian and The Wheeler Centre. It’s been a busy two years for the Sydney-based producer, as one podcast project has rolled quickly into the next. “The first podcast that really kicked it off was working with Andrew Denton on Better off Dead for The Wheeler Centre,” said Peralta. “From there I went to Gimlet and did the Science Vs project. After that, I was lucky to work on the American Apparel season of Startup, as well as do some work on Crimetown. I helped out with other shows for Gimlet, but those were the main three when I was there.” Now working with the ABC, his list of credits has grown…

KRK monitors aren’t something I’ve had great experience with. Even so, I’m well aware of the impact KRK’s nearfield designs had on the Australian recording industry back in the early ’90s. At the time, it seemed like every second mix engineer was jumping on the KRK bandwagon. Admittedly, there wasn’t a lot of choice back then. Still, KRKs were a clear breath of air amongst the NS-10, Tannoy, and JBL monitors found in many studios at the time. Delineating KRK from the stalwarts of the day was the use of woven Kevlar drivers, something not seen in the recording sphere until then. When KRK monitors first hit the meter bridges they rapidly gained fans who would extol KRK’s punchy bottom-end and precise yet unfatiguing high-end. Following my time with the…

Mickey currently lives in the Victorian countryside, freelance designing venue tech systems and acoustics. Prior to that he accidentally co-founded a bedrock of Sydney’s indie rock scene, Troy Horse. It grew from a rehearsal studio into a studio complex, manufacturing plant and multi-city major events company. I studied music at Sydney Conservatorium as a guitar and bass player. In the ’80s, I played in punk and jazz bands as a teenager. Anything I could do to make a living. I never really saw myself as an entrepreneur, I always pictured myself as a musician. We didn’t start Troy Horse with the idea of building a big business. It was very hard to find a place to live. My partner and I rented a space from 418-420 King Street in Newtown.…

DAMIEN GERARD’S 1 The crew at Damien Gerard’s recently ripped the roof out of the studio’s main live room. They’d always used the stairwell for ambience — using the door to change the ‘size’ of the space — but dreamed of ripping out the false ceiling and opening up the live space. When the new fire regulations meant they had to expose the sprinklers up in the ‘real’ ceiling… it didn’t take long to break out the tools. It was an old ’70s false ceiling with a network of panels, insulation batts, fabric, plastic wrap and a stud grid. They ripped out all the panels to increase the height of the space, but kept the industrial bits and pieces, and saved the grid to mount the baffles and string up…

“My biggest concern was the gain before feedback figures, but I had more gain before feedback than I’ve ever had before” In mid-July, The Classic BRIT Awards was due to descend on the Royal Albert Hall in the UK. It would be a televised event, with crossover artists like Tokyo Myers layering virtuoso pianoscapes and epic drum sequences over orchestral backing. It was the perfect gig to showcase L-Acoustics’ immersive sound system L-ISA, and beam the audience’s response into living rooms across the nation. Of course, an event like that doesn’t go to air untested. There had to be a guinea pig, and Adam Rhodes was it. Brit Row called up Rhodes to ask him if he wanted to demo L-ISA when Angus & Julia Stone were playing the hall…

“I FEEL HAPPIER RUNNING AROUND CHECKING IF A MICROPHONE IS IN PHASE. IT KEEPS ME MORE INVOLVED IN THE PROCESS” Two weeks before Run the Jewels’ producers were due to fly out from New York to work on The Ruben’s latest record, the right hand channel of Will Zeglis’s console master bus stopped working. Talk about stressful. He’d already been anxious about what the New York producers would think of his space, now he had to find a tech to work on his Soundtracs IL3632 console, quick smart. “I ended up getting sick from the stress thinking the whole hub of the studio has gone down,” said Will. “At first I had problems even getting a tech to come look at the console. Then he couldn’t fix it. Eventually, at…

Like many other musicians, I’m often asked for comments about in-progress mixes, and recently I’ve noticed a couple of common issues relating to software reverb. The first one thankfully seems to be getting rarer, and that’s the habit of slapping in a different reverb for each and every instrument, which generally results in mixes that may sound complete but very ‘muddled’. Once you point out the advantages of relying on one or perhaps two global reverbs, each instrument feeding into them via an aux send, you end up with all sounds playing back through the same acoustic space, resulting in much clearer and cohesive mixes that more closely reflect real life. FLATLINING Unfortunately, once ‘fixed’, a second related problem often appears which I’ve nicknamed the ‘flat line’ mix. By using…

FILTER THE CREAM Price: $139 To the recording engineer, EQ filters are a way of carving out space in a mix. To the FOH engineer, high pass filters buy headroom in the sub sends. But to the electronic music producer, filters are practically instruments. Arturia’s new trio of filter plug-ins are derived from classic analogue synths. In typical Arturia style, every ounce of possible musicality and manipulation is squeezed from each one. No matter what kind of music you produce, these filters are creative tools you need to have in your arsenal. SEM FILTER 1 Oberheim’s SEM (Synthesizer Expander Module) was always meant as a modular synth add-on, so a filter spin-off is right in the SEM wheelhouse. It’s impossible to make this filter sound bad, the first spin of…

Audient’s history is steeped in large-format consoles and time-tested circuit designs; the founders both worked at Soundcraft, before starting DDA consoles. While consoles are still a big part of the Audient catalogue, the company has done especially well for itself by pouring its ‘world class’ DNA into attainable interfaces designed to appeal to home studio enthusiasts. The iD interface series is the vehicle that put Audient designs within reach of the commoner. Starting with a cute two-input box, the iD4, the family has grown steadily into what we have today — the new iD44. It’s a 20-input/24-output USB-C interface with four of Audient’s staple Class A preamps designed by founder David Dearden. The iD44 is the first in the series to have dual-ADAT inputs lending it an extra 16 digital…

NI KICK & BASS www.native-instruments.com Native Instruments has released a new kick and bass instrument for Reaktor called TRK-01. The instrument is a combination of mixing techniques and sound design features that address common issues encountered when mixing kicks and bass while adding synthesis, modulation and sequencing capabilities. TRK-01 is broken down into two modules; the Kick module which combines synth and sample-based layers, and the Bass module which provides the choice of five synth engines from wave-shaping, FM, analogue synth models and more. Both modules feature insert, send, master effects and modulation, with ‘smart’ and ‘simple’ routing. While two independent step-sequencers house features such as eight hot-swappable pattern slots per sequencer and triggerable sound settings, allowing instant switching between up to eight completely different Kick and Bass module settings.…

Paul Pilsneniks has been in Byron since 2000, but he’s done a lot of travelling production work over the last few years and is excited to have a place to call home in The Workshop. He’s always felt a call to engineering, splicing cassettes as a kid, and recording on his four-track around the house. After school, he went searching for a job and was lucky enough to land a position at Studios 301, when it was at Castlereagh Street. He’d been looking for the opportunity to travel, so when owner Tom Misner offered him a job at the new Studios 301 in Byron, he jumped at it. Over the years he’s engineered acts like & Julia Stone, Van Halen, Alanis Morisette, Grinspoon, Powderfinger, and the Mars Volta. He and…

Ralf Zuleeg is d&b’s head of Sales Services & Application Engineering. If Soundscape is anyone’s ‘baby’, it’s Ralf’s. For d&b, it was a case of ‘what would be the next loudspeaker?’ With GSL, we have an amazing new loudspeaker with great properties — great directivity, SPL; everything is outstanding. Yet, still, we’re stuck in a left/right speaker world. For me, the most important thing was my belief that for 30 years we’ve been doing it wrong. Then some years ago we worked with Kraftwerk on an immersive concert system. That tour got a lot of press coverage; people heard about it; and more people began jumping on board. This is the normal way that an idea develops: you persevere, you can never make it all on your own, you need…

The UAE celebrates its National Day (when a bunch of Gulf States unified to create the UAE) with a variety of cultural events, military parades, and unimaginable quantities of fireworks. A formal VIP presentation at the most recent 46th National Day last December switched things up a bit. 1800 dignitaries were treated to a no-expense-spared rich-media manifesto of UAE as a leader in the world of hi-tech and an ambitious vision-cast of the future. An enormous (40m wide by 14m high) stage was replete with LED and projections and the listening area was surrounded by an L-Acoustics L-ISA-controlled PA. It was a fully immersive experience for those present, both visually and aurally, and masterminded by UK event producers, Done+Dusted. Auditoria director, Scott Willsallen, got the call to take care of…

It was Christmas, 2015, and I got a call asking if I could cut a vocal with singer Elliphant for an upcoming Peking Duk song. As I have no actual life and never take holidays, I was there with jingle bells on. This wasn’t just an in-and-out engineering session. It was a writing session where the lyrics and melody (or topline) were being written over a pre-existing track. 12 hours later we had a completed, multi-layered punchy dance/pop song with close to 100 vocal tracks. Over the course of the day and a bottle of rum, the four of us — Adam and Reuben (the Duks), Elli and myself — formed a great working relationship. A few months later they sent me some more vocals to edit and mix. That…

Even if you haven’t heard Australian producer/engineer Anna Laverty’s name, you most certainly know a good fistful of the records she has worked on. Originally from Western Australia and a graduate of WAAPA’s sound engineering course, Anna took her love of music production with her to London and put in the hard yards as an assistant engineer at Miloco Studios for 10 long and fruitful years. During this time she learnt her craft from producers Paul Epworth and Ben Hillier and played a big part in breakthrough albums for Florence and the Machine, Bloc Party and Depeche Mode, to name just a few. Returning to Australia Anna brought a massive skillset and a wonderful breadth of experience to bear in producing and engineering for a wide range of Aussie talent,…

If you’re an OS X or macOS user with half a clue you’ll know that jumping into the application Disk Utility and hitting the ‘Repair Permissions’ button can drag your operating system drive back towards peak performance. But what exactly do file permissions pertain to? OK, here’s the deal. If you select a file or folder in macOS and choose ‘Get Info’ from the control-click menu, you’ll see a section at the bottom of the window entitled ‘Sharing & Permissions’. This section sets up how the particular file or folder is available to read, write, or read and write, and which processes have access to those abilities. Those processes can be the system itself, the admin user, or any users with access via sharing. As you’d imagine, should any files…

Sennheiser Ambeo Smart Headset AU$469.95 | www.sennheiser.com.au PROS Can record at any resolution Mics well protected Low noise recording CONS iOS only Bulky cable lump SUMMARY Sennheiser’s Ambeo Smart Headset takes a different tack to the Verse; it’s wired and iOS-only. While you have to plug it in, it does mean you can choose your recording resolution and it plays nicely with all your apps. Hooke Audio Verse US$189.99 | www.hookeaudio.com PROS Easy Bluetooth operation Realtime wireless recording Lots of earplug sizes CONS Cable operation a bit noisy WAV only a wrapped MP3 SUMMARY Hooke has not only managed to reinvigorate binaural recording, it’s also made wireless recording absolutely seamless. Simply hook up via Bluetooth for realtime 4K video and immersive audio in a jiffy. All at a very reasonable…