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Acoustic Treatment and Design for Recording Studios and Listening Rooms

Acoustic Treatment and Design for Recording Studios and Listening Rooms
Acoustic Treatment and Design for Recording Studios and Listening Rooms by Ethan Winer Ethan Winer is co-owner of RealTraps, a leading manufacturer of acoustic treatment products. Ethan has at various times earned a living as a professional musician, computer programmer, circuit designer, recording engineer, composer/arranger, technical writer, acoustician, and college instructor. Ethan has more than 150 feature articles published in various computer and audio magazines. He’s produced dozens of educational and music videos, and composed three pieces for full orchestra, all of which have been performed. If you have questions about anything in this article, or anything else related to audio, you're welcome to ask in my Audio Expert Forum. This page was last updated on May 9, 2016. French readers, see THIS version that is being translated by Christian Parent.Hungarian readers, see THIS version that was kindly translated by Tamás Bánfi. This text will surely expand as I learn more. Top

Real traps - test methods Performance below 100 Hz is what separates the men from the boys with acoustic treatment products. It's easy to build an absorber that works well at mid and high frequencies, and rigid fiberglass or acoustic foam one or two inches thick are common materials that do a fine job above 500 Hz. However, it's much more difficult to design an absorber that is highly effective below 100 Hz, yet these very low frequencies are usually the main problem in small or poorly proportioned rooms. With bass traps, performance below 100 Hz is what matters most! This reveals another limitation with the standard tests. Most US labs are not certified to measure below 100 Hz because they're not large enough to develop the reverberant field on which these tests rely. As a designer and manufacturer of bass traps and other acoustic treatment, I needed a more reliable way to assess low frequency absorbers and compare proposed trap designs.

Reverb Comparison: Convolution vs. Algorithmic Reverberation (or reverb) is one of the most important effects in the ‘toolbelt’ of a recording or mixing engineer. It ‘s conventionally used to make a signal sound like it was produced in a sonically pleasing acoustic environment. When sound is produced in an acoustic environment, the surroundings reflect echoes (or delayed versions) of the sound. Reverb, as an effect, attempts to create these echos “artificially” for a signal. There are many different ways that reverb can be created and added to a signal. Reverb can also be created without actually creating any acoustic vibrations and echoes. With the adoption of the computer based Digital Audio Workstation, reverb could be created through software and implement as a plug-in. Convolution reverb uses an Impulse Response (IR) to create reverb. Software reverb that does not use convolution creates echoes using mathematical algorithms to simulate the delays that occur in reverb. For more on setting up and mixing reverb:

The Tanning Effect: How Dr. Dre And Snoop Dogg Broke Down Barriers Last week HuffPost Black Voices premiered the second episode of its ongoing video series, "The Tanning Effect," which featured hip-hop mogul Jay-Z discussing his performance as the first major hip-hop act to headline British festival Glastonbury (in 2008) and the effect of his 2003 hit single, "Change Clothes," on the stock of sports apparel. In the latest installment of the series, legendary music producer Jimmy Iovine opens up on breaking down barriers with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's 1993 single "Nuthin But A 'G' Thang" [Watch the clip above in part two of the interview]. The Interscope Records chairman revealed the trick that influenced radio programmers to play the classic hit on Pop radio stations. "There's no reason in the world why this is not being played everywhere in the world, all times, everyday. "I brought it during drive time [rush hour] because I wanted the [radio] programmers to hear it while they were driving home. Also, check out an excerpt from Stoute's book below.

Quadratic Residue Diffusor The goal became to find a surface geometry which would permit designers the predictability of diffusion from MLS diffusers with a wider bandwidth. The new system was again introduced by Schroeder in 1975 in a paper describing the implementation of the quadratic residue diffuser or Schroeder diffuser ? a device which has since been widely accepted as one of the de facto standards for easily creating diffusive surfaces. Rather than relying on alternating reflecting coefficient patterns, this method considers the wall to be a flat surface with varying impedance according to location. sn = n2 mod(p) where sn is the sequence of relative depths of the wells, n is a number in the sequence of non-negative consecutive integers {0, 1, 2, 3 ...} denoting the well number, and p is a non-negative odd prime number. The actual depths of the wells are dependent on the design wavelength of the diffuser. dn = sn * (DF / 2 p) where dn is the depth of well n and DF is the design wavelength.

Industry standards Technics SL-1200 There's some gear DJs expect to see in every club they walk into. Our new series Industry Standards will look at the history, technology and personalities behind these classics of the craft. Once a month for the next six months, we'll grab one item out of the booth, scratch through the front panel and see what we find. What we'd tackle in our first edition was a no-brainer. In 1979, the Japanese electronics giant Matsushita introduced an updated version of its Technics SL-1200 turntable. The Technics SL-1200 MK2 is unquestionably not the best turntable ever made. But the decks known simply as 1200s—or 1210s, if you hail from a part of the world where the black model was more ubiquitous—went on to become something much more than turntables. Most critically, the 1200 was direct-drive, one of the hallmarks of the Technics brand for years prior. Mister Saturday Night's Justin Carter & Eamon Harkin. The MK2s, with their quartz-enhanced timing, proved especially good at this.

Welcome to Snip.it | Share your thoughts on anything from the web We are excited to share some big news: Snip.it has been acquired by Yahoo!. For the past year and a half, we've worked tirelessly as a team to build the best social news platform on the web. We've been absolutely blown away by the breadth, depth and quality of the content you guys share on Snip.it every day. You helped make it a treasure trove of unique content, and we cannot thank you enough for your contributions to the platform, as well as your valuable feedback on the product. We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Snip.it's vision to a larger scale at Yahoo!. As of today, we will no longer support snipping. We've also created a Snip.it Hall of Fame, where we’re honoring some of the top contributors to the Snip.it community. We are so grateful for all of your support. Here's to new adventures in 2013! Sincerely, The Snip.it Team Jouhan Allende, Will Dalton, Jen Pollock, Francesco Carli, Marc Nijdam, Ramy Adeeb, Mark Percival, Alaina Percival, Cedric Han, and Sarah Caplener.

Flush mounting to wall Flush Mounting to Wall flush-mounting minimizes diffractionseliminates back wall reflectionboosts speaker outputremoves the front baffle effectlow frequency room resonances need to be attenuated Implementing half space An enclosed dynamic loudspeaker drive unit has theoretically ideal working conditions only if its radiation space is either a full space (spherical radiation) or a half space (hemi-spherical radiation). To achieve ideal full space conditions the drive unit and the enclosure must be small compared to the radiated wavelength. In practice the radiation angle will decrease at higher frequencies because of the finite front baffle size of the speaker cabinet and finally because of finite size of the drive unit itself. The half space loading generated by the front baffle is far from ideal. Frequency response dip caused by a reflection Considering the practical control rooms, a free standing speaker is always surrounded by walls that will generate reflections. Figure 1. Figure 2.

Five milestones in music technology Last week an audio clip emerged that is apparently the oldest recording of the human voice in existence. It's a ten-second clip of a woman singing a French folk song, and was recorded in 1860 on a device called a phonautograph. You can hear it here. The last two hundred years have seen huge advances in music technology, such as electronic music and even home recording software. 1. His device was called the Musical Telegraph and was based on a self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit. Pickups are the devices mounted on the bodies of electric guitars, under the strings. The first pickup is generally credited to George Beauchamp, a vaudeville musician who experimented with several techniques for making louder guitars. 3. You might immediately think of Kraftwerk and other icons of 1980s synth-pop, but the first drum machine actually dates from 1930 and was invented by Leon Theremin, who also came up with the theremin and many other unusual instruments. 4. 5. Labels: history, music

Buffalo Chicken Dip This Chicken Buffalo Dip will please any crowd! Ingredients: 3 Chicken Breast, cooked and cut into bite sized piecesMoore’s Buffalo Wing Sauce (1 jar)2 (8 oz) packages cream cheese, softenedMarie’s Ranch or Blue Cheese Dressing (located in the refrigerated section)1 1/2 C shredded Mozzarella Cheese1 Bag of your favorite chips or Celery Sticks I took three chicken breast and boiled them. Then I cut them into bite-sized pieces! While that is coming to a boil take the 2 packages of cream cheese and spread them on the bottom of a 9 x 13 pan. Now the sauce will be nice and warm….pour it over the cream cheese. Next you are going to take your dressing (I go back and forth between blue cheese and ranch depending on my mood) and spoon it onto the chicken and sauce. Now top it with the shredded mozzarella cheese and it’s ready to go into the oven! It’s that easy….and delicious! a rel=”attachment wp-att-3989″ href=” Directions:

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