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#41
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"Harvey Gerst" wrote in message
... "Preben Friis" wrote: This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Preben, For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": Ya got me curious. I looked up the Feb 1992 charter. Under reference entry, the official listing for the newsgroup is "rec.audio.pro Professional audio gear, production and studio engineering". The intended audience was... - Broadcast and studio engineers - Those with interests in production and engineering - Musicians and recording hobbyists Feels a little like quoting scripture. dt king |
#42
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I fall into the recordin hobbyist group. So what is the issue. I am the
person being recorded. Bob "dt king" wrote in message news:BPv_c.38037$_g7.18561@attbi_s52... "Harvey Gerst" wrote in message ... "Preben Friis" wrote: This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Preben, For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": Ya got me curious. I looked up the Feb 1992 charter. Under reference entry, the official listing for the newsgroup is "rec.audio.pro Professional audio gear, production and studio engineering". The intended audience was... - Broadcast and studio engineers - Those with interests in production and engineering - Musicians and recording hobbyists Feels a little like quoting scripture. dt king |
#43
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I fall into the recordin hobbyist group. So what is the issue. I am the
person being recorded. Bob "dt king" wrote in message news:BPv_c.38037$_g7.18561@attbi_s52... "Harvey Gerst" wrote in message ... "Preben Friis" wrote: This is rec.audio.pro as in "recreational.audio.production" ... You don't have to be payed to be here.. Preben, For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": Ya got me curious. I looked up the Feb 1992 charter. Under reference entry, the official listing for the newsgroup is "rec.audio.pro Professional audio gear, production and studio engineering". The intended audience was... - Broadcast and studio engineers - Those with interests in production and engineering - Musicians and recording hobbyists Feels a little like quoting scripture. dt king |
#44
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"Ted Lachance" wrote in message news:Nhn_c.290329$eM2.10508@attbi_s51...
Excellent post, and one question: What are the special problems of digital you are referring to? First and most obviously, the problem of setting levels without clipping or, at the other extreme, wasting bits and getting a grainy result. Learning to judge according to source how much compression is the right amount to offset those difficulties without creating further problems. Then, maintaining a proper gain structure within the digital domain. It's all more critical than analogue; even brief peak overloads are ruinous. Second, the rather audible degradation that results when you first go berserk with plugins and other digital processing in the naive belief that "there's no quality loss with digital". The rounding/truncation errors, I suppose they are, become troublesome surprisingly quickly, especially with dodgy software. I sprung for the Waves plugins and moved to 24-bit recording a couple of years ago and this problem has largely gone away, even with fairly heavy processing. But I've been meaning to run some 16-bit/24-bit tests to see whether the 24-bit part of the solution is just superstition. Then there's the famous "brittleness" problem, which is at least partly just the lack of warmth produced by a recording medium lacking the pleasant distortions of tape. Finally, and related, the lack of flattery of the source produced by grimly accurate recordings. Microphone choice becomes more important, I think. Another poster has mentioned that one shortcoming of cheap gear is an additive brightness/brittleness. This is true, to a degree, but it depends on your choices of gear. Which is one reason I rather like my cheap Chinese dbx compressor: it has the opposite effect. Raglan |
#45
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"Ted Lachance" wrote in message news:Nhn_c.290329$eM2.10508@attbi_s51...
Excellent post, and one question: What are the special problems of digital you are referring to? First and most obviously, the problem of setting levels without clipping or, at the other extreme, wasting bits and getting a grainy result. Learning to judge according to source how much compression is the right amount to offset those difficulties without creating further problems. Then, maintaining a proper gain structure within the digital domain. It's all more critical than analogue; even brief peak overloads are ruinous. Second, the rather audible degradation that results when you first go berserk with plugins and other digital processing in the naive belief that "there's no quality loss with digital". The rounding/truncation errors, I suppose they are, become troublesome surprisingly quickly, especially with dodgy software. I sprung for the Waves plugins and moved to 24-bit recording a couple of years ago and this problem has largely gone away, even with fairly heavy processing. But I've been meaning to run some 16-bit/24-bit tests to see whether the 24-bit part of the solution is just superstition. Then there's the famous "brittleness" problem, which is at least partly just the lack of warmth produced by a recording medium lacking the pleasant distortions of tape. Finally, and related, the lack of flattery of the source produced by grimly accurate recordings. Microphone choice becomes more important, I think. Another poster has mentioned that one shortcoming of cheap gear is an additive brightness/brittleness. This is true, to a degree, but it depends on your choices of gear. Which is one reason I rather like my cheap Chinese dbx compressor: it has the opposite effect. Raglan |
#46
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"J&L" wrote in message news:0Cm_c.144652$Lj.74165@fed1read03...
This thread is horse ****. [snip] The review compareing a MXL gibson mic to a u87.. Nuff said.. Now for some U87 heresy. I've never had a chance to tinker with such a mic, but I suspect the situation is similar to the reverence that many electric guitarists have for the holy Gibson PAF pickup. There's nothing intrinsically great about a PAF. It's just that the sound of the PAF has become a familiar defining characteristic of a certain style of music, a certain guitar tone. But you don't actually need a vintage PAF to get that tone, or so close that it doesn't matter. A cheap copy, like a Duncan whatever-it-is or an Ibanez Super-58, will do the trick. There are more variances in guitars, amplifiers etc than there are between those two pickups. Raglan |
#47
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"J&L" wrote in message news:0Cm_c.144652$Lj.74165@fed1read03...
This thread is horse ****. [snip] The review compareing a MXL gibson mic to a u87.. Nuff said.. Now for some U87 heresy. I've never had a chance to tinker with such a mic, but I suspect the situation is similar to the reverence that many electric guitarists have for the holy Gibson PAF pickup. There's nothing intrinsically great about a PAF. It's just that the sound of the PAF has become a familiar defining characteristic of a certain style of music, a certain guitar tone. But you don't actually need a vintage PAF to get that tone, or so close that it doesn't matter. A cheap copy, like a Duncan whatever-it-is or an Ibanez Super-58, will do the trick. There are more variances in guitars, amplifiers etc than there are between those two pickups. Raglan |
#48
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I've been home recording for about 20 years. (whatever than
means) Cheap gear is pretty good these days and is a lot better and cheaper than it used to be. One can make some good sounding recordings with it. A few years ago i bought some higher quality gear i.e mic amps, mics, monitors and converters. There is no question that the higher end stuff is both easier to use and sounds far better. If you have the money, the skills and a decent room, good gear can be a very positive benifit. Gregg ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Visit my website: http://www.greggjonesmusic.com |
#49
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I've been home recording for about 20 years. (whatever than
means) Cheap gear is pretty good these days and is a lot better and cheaper than it used to be. One can make some good sounding recordings with it. A few years ago i bought some higher quality gear i.e mic amps, mics, monitors and converters. There is no question that the higher end stuff is both easier to use and sounds far better. If you have the money, the skills and a decent room, good gear can be a very positive benifit. Gregg ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Visit my website: http://www.greggjonesmusic.com |
#50
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"sycochkn" wrote in message
k.net... A parametric equalizer on each mic before conversion would probably be a good idea. It'd help out the peakiness of the microphone, but not the high-frequency distortion, which is where some of the harshness comes from, and which stimulates more misbehavior down the line. Peace, Paul |
#51
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"sycochkn" wrote in message
k.net... A parametric equalizer on each mic before conversion would probably be a good idea. It'd help out the peakiness of the microphone, but not the high-frequency distortion, which is where some of the harshness comes from, and which stimulates more misbehavior down the line. Peace, Paul |
#52
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Paul Stamler wrote: "sycochkn" wrote in message k.net... A parametric equalizer on each mic before conversion would probably be a good idea. It'd help out the peakiness of the microphone, but not the high-frequency distortion, which is where some of the harshness comes from, and which stimulates more misbehavior down the line. How do you define high frequency distortion? Technically, I mean, not how it sounds. Bob -- "Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler." A. Einstein |
#53
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Paul Stamler wrote: "sycochkn" wrote in message k.net... A parametric equalizer on each mic before conversion would probably be a good idea. It'd help out the peakiness of the microphone, but not the high-frequency distortion, which is where some of the harshness comes from, and which stimulates more misbehavior down the line. How do you define high frequency distortion? Technically, I mean, not how it sounds. Bob -- "Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler." A. Einstein |
#54
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"Raglan" wrote in message
m The way I see the state of prosumer audio at the moment is a bit like the state of desktop publishing around 1990. (My job is in publishing, so I was there.) The analogy isn't perfect, but it's instructive. Before the advent of DTP, "professional-looking" documents could only be produced on specialised equipment by skilled operators at vast expense. When DTP came along, the skilled operators pooh-poohed it. At first, they were right. But any fool could see that the potential was there. As DTP advanced, they resorted to special-case arguments, such as saying it would never be possible to produce a multi-edition broadsheet newspaper using the new technology. But of course it was, soon enough. Nowadays, any fool with a small amount of capital can set up DTP workstations and an imagesetter and produce the best possible quality of output for printing. Technically speaking, that is. The fact remains that without a solid grounding in design principles, lithographic printing techniques, colour theory and so on, all this cheap but nevertheless state-of-the-art equipment will only produce garbage. Which is why specialised repro houses are still in business. And so it is with audio. Instead of dissing the cheap gear to maintain their competitive advantage, I suggest the pros should consider embracing it, while emphasising what is their real selling point -- the skill and experience they bring to operating it. At the present time, the audio pros seem to be where the print compositors were in 1990 -- arguing endlessly about how many angels could dance on a 1200dpi imagesetter. There very much might be something to this thing that you are saying here, Raglan. |
#55
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"Raglan" wrote in message
m The way I see the state of prosumer audio at the moment is a bit like the state of desktop publishing around 1990. (My job is in publishing, so I was there.) The analogy isn't perfect, but it's instructive. Before the advent of DTP, "professional-looking" documents could only be produced on specialised equipment by skilled operators at vast expense. When DTP came along, the skilled operators pooh-poohed it. At first, they were right. But any fool could see that the potential was there. As DTP advanced, they resorted to special-case arguments, such as saying it would never be possible to produce a multi-edition broadsheet newspaper using the new technology. But of course it was, soon enough. Nowadays, any fool with a small amount of capital can set up DTP workstations and an imagesetter and produce the best possible quality of output for printing. Technically speaking, that is. The fact remains that without a solid grounding in design principles, lithographic printing techniques, colour theory and so on, all this cheap but nevertheless state-of-the-art equipment will only produce garbage. Which is why specialised repro houses are still in business. And so it is with audio. Instead of dissing the cheap gear to maintain their competitive advantage, I suggest the pros should consider embracing it, while emphasising what is their real selling point -- the skill and experience they bring to operating it. At the present time, the audio pros seem to be where the print compositors were in 1990 -- arguing endlessly about how many angels could dance on a 1200dpi imagesetter. There very much might be something to this thing that you are saying here, Raglan. |
#57
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On 4 Sep 2004 14:50:27 -0400, (Mike Rivers) wrote:
I'm not sure what the point of that would be other than as an experiment. High end gear is used for high end projects involving high end musicians, high end engineers, and high end producers. While some of the High End Engineers or Producers use an M-box on their laptop at home or on an airplane to edit and do some rough mixes, that's not the final product, ever, unless it's one of those "the music is just so good we had to release it for the publicity" stunts. Low end gear is usually used by people without a lot of experience, recording people who don't have a lot of experience. You never get past the "it sounds fine, but I sure wish they played better" stage. It's mostly people who have low end gear and little experience who think that it's the gear that's keeping their project from sounding like a commercial recording. Then they get more expensive gear and ask if they need better cables, or a master word clock, or new monitors. The only point I can unravel from the above is that owners of low end gear tend to record poor musicians. I guess this could be true, if you're coming from the direction of wannabee recording engineers looking for "work". What about professional musicians looking for an affordable way of recording their experimental projects? That's the direction some of us came from. Our primary consideration is the musical product. We'll buy as many boxes with knobs and switches as are necessary, but we're not gear-heads. CubaseFAQ www.laurencepayne.co.uk/CubaseFAQ.htm "Possibly the world's least impressive web site": George Perfect |
#58
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On Sun, 05 Sep 2004 00:57:57 GMT, "sycochkn"
wrote: The setup is almost good enough for that purpose. Now I need to convert my spare room to a little studio suitable for a very small group of musicians. Suggestion. Don't beat yourself up trying to make a small room sound adequate. You probably have a space in your house that sounds better - a bigger space with carpets, soft furnishings, curtains etc. Buy some long cables and use this space for recording. It's only for one afternoon, now and again. Your family won't play power games over that, will they? CubaseFAQ www.laurencepayne.co.uk/CubaseFAQ.htm "Possibly the world's least impressive web site": George Perfect |
#59
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On Sun, 05 Sep 2004 00:57:57 GMT, "sycochkn"
wrote: The setup is almost good enough for that purpose. Now I need to convert my spare room to a little studio suitable for a very small group of musicians. Suggestion. Don't beat yourself up trying to make a small room sound adequate. You probably have a space in your house that sounds better - a bigger space with carpets, soft furnishings, curtains etc. Buy some long cables and use this space for recording. It's only for one afternoon, now and again. Your family won't play power games over that, will they? CubaseFAQ www.laurencepayne.co.uk/CubaseFAQ.htm "Possibly the world's least impressive web site": George Perfect |
#60
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"Laurence Payne" wrote in
message The only point I can unravel from the above is that owners of low end gear tend to record poor musicians. IME the effects of somehow breaking that mold and getting some really good musicans to record is like totally incredible. Every once in a while my church lucks out and gets someone really good playing, or one of the usual suspects has a good day. The effect on my recordings is generally stunning. It seems like the cheap CAD, Shure and Marshall mics become expensive German mics in Shanghi cases, the Mackie mic preamps transform themselves into Great Rivers in a Mackie console shell, the Delta 1010 box is suddenly infested by two stealthy Lynx Studio 2As that burrow inside when nobody is looking, and Adobe Audition suddenly becomes one of the high end versions of Nuendo. |
#61
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"Laurence Payne" wrote in
message The only point I can unravel from the above is that owners of low end gear tend to record poor musicians. IME the effects of somehow breaking that mold and getting some really good musicans to record is like totally incredible. Every once in a while my church lucks out and gets someone really good playing, or one of the usual suspects has a good day. The effect on my recordings is generally stunning. It seems like the cheap CAD, Shure and Marshall mics become expensive German mics in Shanghi cases, the Mackie mic preamps transform themselves into Great Rivers in a Mackie console shell, the Delta 1010 box is suddenly infested by two stealthy Lynx Studio 2As that burrow inside when nobody is looking, and Adobe Audition suddenly becomes one of the high end versions of Nuendo. |
#62
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#63
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#64
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#66
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"Harvey Gerst" wrote in message ... For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": According to Google you are far from a million yet... - but I stand corrected. *bows to the pope* /Preben Friis |
#67
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"Harvey Gerst" wrote in message ... For the millionth time, here is the start of the FAQ for this group. Please note the absence of the word "production": According to Google you are far from a million yet... - but I stand corrected. *bows to the pope* /Preben Friis |
#68
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Mike,
The problem was that people who had no experience with graphic design or layout started making flyers with every font in the list on them. Yes. I agree with Raglan's analogy, but you really nailed it. An amateur trying to produce a professional looking brochure or magazine ad and an amateur trying to produce a great recording is an exact parallel. Which further proves the notion that it's not the tools but the operator's talent. I have a friend who's a music copyist for a living. I fully expected that story to end "so now she's using Sibelius and making even more money because she's more productive." But your ending is good too. Even with Finale's fancy fonts, it's not the same as what a good copyist does. Or a good draftsman or any other good artist. The key word being "art." --Ethan |
#69
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Mike,
The problem was that people who had no experience with graphic design or layout started making flyers with every font in the list on them. Yes. I agree with Raglan's analogy, but you really nailed it. An amateur trying to produce a professional looking brochure or magazine ad and an amateur trying to produce a great recording is an exact parallel. Which further proves the notion that it's not the tools but the operator's talent. I have a friend who's a music copyist for a living. I fully expected that story to end "so now she's using Sibelius and making even more money because she's more productive." But your ending is good too. Even with Finale's fancy fonts, it's not the same as what a good copyist does. Or a good draftsman or any other good artist. The key word being "art." --Ethan |
#70
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Raglan,
the problem of setting levels without clipping or, at the other extreme, wasting bits and getting a grainy result. ... The rounding/truncation errors .... Then there's the famous "brittleness" problem I have to disagree with this. Modern digital does not have to be dirty or grainy on soft passages, and it's no big deal to set levels properly at the other extreme. I never felt that digital was "brittle" with the sound card I use (Delta 66). Yes, digital is unforgiving if you go over hard zero. So you learn to work the tools. Analog is not so forgiving either. Yes, it doesn't hard clip right at zero, but the distortion rises a lot. And it's the IM distortion that kills you after just one or two generations of slamming the tape - much more so than THD which is the spec more often quoted. If you want to experiment on your own, take the best sounding CD you own and record it via analog from your CD player to your sound card. Now run Arny's ABX test on a Wave file extracted from the original CD versus your recording. Is one more brittle than the other? Can you even hear any difference? --Ethan |
#71
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Raglan,
the problem of setting levels without clipping or, at the other extreme, wasting bits and getting a grainy result. ... The rounding/truncation errors .... Then there's the famous "brittleness" problem I have to disagree with this. Modern digital does not have to be dirty or grainy on soft passages, and it's no big deal to set levels properly at the other extreme. I never felt that digital was "brittle" with the sound card I use (Delta 66). Yes, digital is unforgiving if you go over hard zero. So you learn to work the tools. Analog is not so forgiving either. Yes, it doesn't hard clip right at zero, but the distortion rises a lot. And it's the IM distortion that kills you after just one or two generations of slamming the tape - much more so than THD which is the spec more often quoted. If you want to experiment on your own, take the best sounding CD you own and record it via analog from your CD player to your sound card. Now run Arny's ABX test on a Wave file extracted from the original CD versus your recording. Is one more brittle than the other? Can you even hear any difference? --Ethan |
#72
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#73
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#74
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#76
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"Raglan" wrote in message
m... "Ted Lachance" wrote in message news:Nhn_c.290329$eM2.10508@attbi_s51... ...Then there's the famous "brittleness" problem, which is at least partly just the lack of warmth produced by a recording medium lacking the pleasant distortions of tape. This is bullcrap. Cheezey analog tape recorders had the same problem, wimpy power supplies that crap out when hit with high powered low frequency signals such as kick drums. There's also a problem with cheezy digital converters that create artifacts that sound like a buzzsaw when you apply any high frequency eq. Adding "warmth" only adds to the mud. -- Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery, Nashville TN Mastering, Audio for Picture, Mix Evaluation and Quality Control Over 40 years making people sound better than they ever imagined! 615.385.8051 http://www.hyperback.com |
#77
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"Raglan" wrote in message
m... "Ted Lachance" wrote in message news:Nhn_c.290329$eM2.10508@attbi_s51... ...Then there's the famous "brittleness" problem, which is at least partly just the lack of warmth produced by a recording medium lacking the pleasant distortions of tape. This is bullcrap. Cheezey analog tape recorders had the same problem, wimpy power supplies that crap out when hit with high powered low frequency signals such as kick drums. There's also a problem with cheezy digital converters that create artifacts that sound like a buzzsaw when you apply any high frequency eq. Adding "warmth" only adds to the mud. -- Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery, Nashville TN Mastering, Audio for Picture, Mix Evaluation and Quality Control Over 40 years making people sound better than they ever imagined! 615.385.8051 http://www.hyperback.com |
#78
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On Sat, 04 Sep 2004 05:04:02 -0700, Raglan wrote:
If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. Yes, this is meant to be provocative. No, it's not meant as a troll. It seems to me that the gear obsession that drives much of the discussion in rec.audio.pro is misplaced. Many overenthusiastic amateurs like me are being stampeded by "pro" advice into buying stuff that they don't need and won't do them any good. Even the best gear in the world won't make up for the acoustic shortcomings of typical home studios. And even low-end gear won't usually make them audibly worse. Two theoretical exceptions may seem to be microphones and monitors, which are highly coloured compared with solid-state electronics. But you can get decent enough mics cheaply -- look no further than the SM57 or condensers like the Oktavas, Rodes and MXLs. And cheap-and-nasty monitors can do a good enough job. You've just got to learn them. Look at the ubiquitous NS10. Hell, some hi-fi speakers will do just fine. (Oh yes they will.) No one pair of monitors will tell you everything, anyway. Cheap modern solid-state audio gear, even some of the worst of it, is actually not bad. Signal-to-noise and distortion figures are fantastic by the standards of a few decades ago. Never before has it been possible to buy so much transparency for so little money. On top of that, most home studio work these days is done in the digital domain. How much seriously audible damage can be done to a signal that is subjected to no more than preamplification, mild compression and A/D conversion before it enters -- and stays in -- the digital domain? Before you flame me, take note that I'm saying "good enough", not "stellar". So how good is good enough? I reckon the judgment lies with the lay listener. If my girlfriend can't tell the difference, then there is no difference -- for all practical purposes. And if my hi-fi crazed friend (whose listening gear costs a lot more than the entire contents of my home studio) reckons that some of my output compares sonically with less exacting commercial releases, then I consider my hobby well worth carrying on with. I think you should do the same. Of course, both my friend and my girlfriend are wrong, in the sense that I can tell the difference and the little flaws leap out at me. Pro engineers might spot the difference on a boom box. But that's not the point. We make music for ourselves and for the listener, not the anal perfectionists in the industry. I've been doing this home-reccing thing for nearly 20 years, mostly as an aid to songwriting and arrangement for various bands. My sound sucked for the first 15 years, when I was using four-track cassette, but I learnt a lot of techniques and workarounds. Then I got a DAW, and my sound still sucked because I didn't understand the special problems of digital. The past five years have been a period of learning and slow improvement and I'm now confident of being able to make recordings -- musical content aside -- that the average listener cannot tell from a commercial release on an average playback system. And I use equipment that would be panned in this forum. Having said all this, I have to add that gear quality is not *entirely* irrelevant. Some stuff will do obvious harm to your recordings -- those starved-plate preamps spring to mind. Horrible microphones are not a good idea. And decent sources -- good-sounding instruments and amplifiers, and guitars with newish strings -- make a big difference. Certainly a home-reccer should avoid the very worst gear, but there is hardly any point in aspiring to the best. You're just wasting your money. Raglan PS. What inspired this posting was a bout of gear-insecurity that I recently suffered, specifically about my audio card, a Delta 44. How much fidelity did the converters lose, I worried. Well, I took a fine recording with lots of detail (track 2 on Bela Bela La Habana by Chucho Valdes) and ran it through the sound card six times. After that amount of generation loss, flaws should be strikingly apparent. And they are. But guess what? Not so bad, actually..... and my girlfriend mistakes the seventh-generation copy for the original if I trick her with an extra couple of dB on the copy. This whole thread has been very interesting for me, as I, (after working for most of my life in other peoples studios, PA, as a recording artist, and my own modest studio), am about to open a 'real' studio. It's still going to be fairly low end to begin with, but provide 'pro' enough equipment and experience to take on most projects. Rather than thinking of home studios as competition though, I have been thinking about how to integrate what I can offer with the way people work at home. Namely, doing what is impractical for them. These are - recording drum kits, recording live bands playing all together, providing instruments like real piano, hammond, rhodes, different snares etc for kit, having a good sounding live room and a flattish control room. The cost of the studio has mainly been in constructing this space so far. The way I see recording going is that production is going to be split between the 'studio' and the 'home'. More and more I get work where a lot of the production is already done. The loops, sounds etc are already chosen and there is no point in trying to recreate them again as the sound is as much part of the track as the notes. What generally does not cut it are recordings of real instruments/vocals etc and the final mix. As long as the parts are played well and the sound is right for the track, there is zero difference between them plugging a keyboard into my DAW and A/Ds and doing it at home. If it's not the right sound, then the midi is already there.. It's rare for me nowadays to come across a keyboard player that does not have a computer and know how to use it. There is no point for a band to pay for studio time while they hunt for sounds or picks samples, write parts, edit and mess around. If they want to do that to begin with, the chances are they are pretty good at it, and it's an integral part of their sound that has got them this far. Like it or not, a lot of pop music is getting written by messing about trying things out, whether on a computer or not. Quite of lot of keyboard musicians simply cannot play their instruments properly, so without a sequencer they are totally lost. The computer has become an instrument that is played by the artists, and they use it to create their music, and they don't want to pay to do that in a studio..... But they do want their mix sorted, analsyed by someone who knows what they are doing, and world class drum/guitar/vocal sounds. Most of the bigger studios where I live are closing down, but yet there is more music being made and recorded than ever before, and the most successful bands+artists are all computer savvy and do much of the production themselves. It's sink or swim for a studio, and I think the mistake the larger ones have made is not recognising and adapting to to the way music production is changing. Not everyone works like this of course, I reackon about 40% of bands at the moment would benefit from combining what a 'real' studio offers to what they already do at home, there is a big market for those who wish to tap it. I don't want to spend all my time working on half finished demos, but the standard of what people are doing in 'home' studios is getting so high that I don't find that the case. I also prefer to work an album from the very first note to the final mix, so there is consistency and quality throughout. It's just that not every band wants to work like that nowadays. |
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On Sat, 04 Sep 2004 05:04:02 -0700, Raglan wrote:
If you're a home recordist, I have a suggestion -- stop stressing out about your gear. It's probably fine. The signal path is more than likely capable of getting fairly close to megastudio quality even if all your equipment is just prosumer-level stuff. If your recordings sound crap, the reason is probably your technique, not the shortcomings of the gear. Yes, this is meant to be provocative. No, it's not meant as a troll. It seems to me that the gear obsession that drives much of the discussion in rec.audio.pro is misplaced. Many overenthusiastic amateurs like me are being stampeded by "pro" advice into buying stuff that they don't need and won't do them any good. Even the best gear in the world won't make up for the acoustic shortcomings of typical home studios. And even low-end gear won't usually make them audibly worse. Two theoretical exceptions may seem to be microphones and monitors, which are highly coloured compared with solid-state electronics. But you can get decent enough mics cheaply -- look no further than the SM57 or condensers like the Oktavas, Rodes and MXLs. And cheap-and-nasty monitors can do a good enough job. You've just got to learn them. Look at the ubiquitous NS10. Hell, some hi-fi speakers will do just fine. (Oh yes they will.) No one pair of monitors will tell you everything, anyway. Cheap modern solid-state audio gear, even some of the worst of it, is actually not bad. Signal-to-noise and distortion figures are fantastic by the standards of a few decades ago. Never before has it been possible to buy so much transparency for so little money. On top of that, most home studio work these days is done in the digital domain. How much seriously audible damage can be done to a signal that is subjected to no more than preamplification, mild compression and A/D conversion before it enters -- and stays in -- the digital domain? Before you flame me, take note that I'm saying "good enough", not "stellar". So how good is good enough? I reckon the judgment lies with the lay listener. If my girlfriend can't tell the difference, then there is no difference -- for all practical purposes. And if my hi-fi crazed friend (whose listening gear costs a lot more than the entire contents of my home studio) reckons that some of my output compares sonically with less exacting commercial releases, then I consider my hobby well worth carrying on with. I think you should do the same. Of course, both my friend and my girlfriend are wrong, in the sense that I can tell the difference and the little flaws leap out at me. Pro engineers might spot the difference on a boom box. But that's not the point. We make music for ourselves and for the listener, not the anal perfectionists in the industry. I've been doing this home-reccing thing for nearly 20 years, mostly as an aid to songwriting and arrangement for various bands. My sound sucked for the first 15 years, when I was using four-track cassette, but I learnt a lot of techniques and workarounds. Then I got a DAW, and my sound still sucked because I didn't understand the special problems of digital. The past five years have been a period of learning and slow improvement and I'm now confident of being able to make recordings -- musical content aside -- that the average listener cannot tell from a commercial release on an average playback system. And I use equipment that would be panned in this forum. Having said all this, I have to add that gear quality is not *entirely* irrelevant. Some stuff will do obvious harm to your recordings -- those starved-plate preamps spring to mind. Horrible microphones are not a good idea. And decent sources -- good-sounding instruments and amplifiers, and guitars with newish strings -- make a big difference. Certainly a home-reccer should avoid the very worst gear, but there is hardly any point in aspiring to the best. You're just wasting your money. Raglan PS. What inspired this posting was a bout of gear-insecurity that I recently suffered, specifically about my audio card, a Delta 44. How much fidelity did the converters lose, I worried. Well, I took a fine recording with lots of detail (track 2 on Bela Bela La Habana by Chucho Valdes) and ran it through the sound card six times. After that amount of generation loss, flaws should be strikingly apparent. And they are. But guess what? Not so bad, actually..... and my girlfriend mistakes the seventh-generation copy for the original if I trick her with an extra couple of dB on the copy. This whole thread has been very interesting for me, as I, (after working for most of my life in other peoples studios, PA, as a recording artist, and my own modest studio), am about to open a 'real' studio. It's still going to be fairly low end to begin with, but provide 'pro' enough equipment and experience to take on most projects. Rather than thinking of home studios as competition though, I have been thinking about how to integrate what I can offer with the way people work at home. Namely, doing what is impractical for them. These are - recording drum kits, recording live bands playing all together, providing instruments like real piano, hammond, rhodes, different snares etc for kit, having a good sounding live room and a flattish control room. The cost of the studio has mainly been in constructing this space so far. The way I see recording going is that production is going to be split between the 'studio' and the 'home'. More and more I get work where a lot of the production is already done. The loops, sounds etc are already chosen and there is no point in trying to recreate them again as the sound is as much part of the track as the notes. What generally does not cut it are recordings of real instruments/vocals etc and the final mix. As long as the parts are played well and the sound is right for the track, there is zero difference between them plugging a keyboard into my DAW and A/Ds and doing it at home. If it's not the right sound, then the midi is already there.. It's rare for me nowadays to come across a keyboard player that does not have a computer and know how to use it. There is no point for a band to pay for studio time while they hunt for sounds or picks samples, write parts, edit and mess around. If they want to do that to begin with, the chances are they are pretty good at it, and it's an integral part of their sound that has got them this far. Like it or not, a lot of pop music is getting written by messing about trying things out, whether on a computer or not. Quite of lot of keyboard musicians simply cannot play their instruments properly, so without a sequencer they are totally lost. The computer has become an instrument that is played by the artists, and they use it to create their music, and they don't want to pay to do that in a studio..... But they do want their mix sorted, analsyed by someone who knows what they are doing, and world class drum/guitar/vocal sounds. Most of the bigger studios where I live are closing down, but yet there is more music being made and recorded than ever before, and the most successful bands+artists are all computer savvy and do much of the production themselves. It's sink or swim for a studio, and I think the mistake the larger ones have made is not recognising and adapting to to the way music production is changing. Not everyone works like this of course, I reackon about 40% of bands at the moment would benefit from combining what a 'real' studio offers to what they already do at home, there is a big market for those who wish to tap it. I don't want to spend all my time working on half finished demos, but the standard of what people are doing in 'home' studios is getting so high that I don't find that the case. I also prefer to work an album from the very first note to the final mix, so there is consistency and quality throughout. It's just that not every band wants to work like that nowadays. |
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"philicorda" wrote in message
news Rather than thinking of home studios as competition though, I have been thinking about how to integrate what I can offer with the way people work at home. Namely, doing what is impractical for them. IMO that's a brilliant idea... you've probably heard the expression "there's riches in niches", and if you can create that niche for yourself in your area, you should do well. -- Neil Henderson Saqqara Records http://www.saqqararecords.com .. |
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