Proper acoustic treatment

Ethan from www.realtraps.com presents his new video about how to set up and treat a listing room even at home. Or lets say: how to turn a "nice" living room into a hall of traps.

This video is a greatly expanded version of our text article How to Set Up a Room, and explains the basics of room layout and acoustic treatment. The focus is on home theaters with 5.1 surround systems, but most of the information applies equally to professional recording studios and mastering rooms. You also get to meet my wife and have a guided tour of my living room.

Movie: Problems in the studio ...

Funny movie: This guy "freaks" out because the drummer can't play in timing. ;-)



Maybe he should work with this wonder boy next time.

Focusrite Liquidmix preview - [video]

Dancetech made a nice exclusive preview video of the liquidmix from Focusrite. You can/must download the avi movie file on the Dancetech side. Wouldn't it be more easy to upload it to i.e. youtube? Anyway, it's still very interesting to watch and worth the download.

32 channels of classic vintage & modern compressors & eq's emulated with impulse response sampling, all in a dedicated DSP firewire unit with the option to load more emulations as they are released. Could this be the next buzz product for home studio tech?.... You can see & hear the Liquidmix unit explained while in action in this video preview exclusive... This is going to fly off the shelves at such a low price point!... It's a full-on video rendered in high quality Divx with stereo 64k soundtrack, so it's 180mb to download, but you get a full 1/2 hour preview video 'diary' in high quality web video so all details of the unit's LCD screen etc are fully visible while in use. Check it out!... This units is going to be a monster product for budget studio's worldwide!

Hollywood veteran John Ross shows his 5-MC Film System

Wouldn't it be fun to have one of these babys? ;-)

Euphonix System 5-MC + 1 super DAW

Euphonix System 5-MC Integrated DAW Controller as used by John Ross for Film Audio Mixing. The two-operator System 5-MC is controlling Pro Tools and Nuendo DAWs. The Studio is located in Hollywood Californina. Click the PLAY button to watch the video.

This really is a hyper powerfull super DAW!!

AES SHOW: UAD-1e PCI Express DSP Card from Universal Audio

Great news from the AES Show 2006 in Paris:
UAD-1e PCI Express DSP Card from Universal Audio.

Some official words:

"The UAD-1e Express PAK and Expert PAK offer DAW users with new PCIe-based Mac/PC computers access to UA's DSP-powered and sonically superior mixing and mastering plug-ins." said Mike Barnes, VP of Marketing for Universal Audio. "This is the first big milestone in our UAD strategy to offer a wider range of UAD solutions, help our customers cross-grade to new systems and give them total flexibility to choose precisely which plugs they actually want at the UA online store - my.uaudio.com."

"The PCI Express (PCIe) bus offers exceptional performance, lower system overhead, and higher reliability for low-latency audio signal processing while allowing us to maintain software compatibility with legacy PCI and PCI-X systems." stated Joe Bryan, VP of Technology. "This approach allows users to mix and match UAD-1 and UAD-1e cards in any combination for maximum flexibility. The PCIe bus and ExpressCard system interfaces are vastly superior to other high-speed interconnects, and allow us to run many more channels (up to 254 channels per card), operate reliably at higher sample rates, and offer much more powerful DSP expansion than alternatives using FireWire or EtherNet. Put simply, PCIe is the professional solution."

The Project Studio Network Weekly Podcast

The PSN Podcast is dedicated to both the amateur and professional recording musician. It features news, talk and reviews on all topics related to the performing and recording of audio and video.

I very much liked the great interviews with Charles Dye.

Stuff i missed: Tube Motherboard

This thread pointed me to a product i totally missed since 2002: The AOpen AX4B-533 Tube Motherboard!

The AX4B-533 is intended primarily for audiophiles, music lovers, and "serious gamers" who want the best possible sound, according to AOpen product manager Al Peng, a self-described "audiophile for more than ten years." Some company engineers derided the concept, but Peng said that their "laughter turned into raves a few months later when we did our first lab demo . . . The reproduced sound was absolutely amazing. It left everyone stunned. What we realized at that moment was how the limitations of typical audio output from a PC as we knew it had come to an end—and what we were pioneering was a way to literally combine the best of two audio worlds, old and new."

Here is the original Aopen press release, a nice articel about the AOpen AX4B-533 Tube Motherboard and a review from neoseeker.

Since this product is not available anymore, i wonder what happened?

FAKE 1954: Take a look into the year 2004!

Back in 1954: Scientists from the RAND Corporation (think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces) have created the above model (pic) to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. ;-) I'am just happy they where sooo wrong - just think about how your studio would look like today!

EDIT:
Uups ... just learned that this story is a fake "Urban Legend"!
The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo). My fault ... ;-(

Index of beatmaking videos

Here is a nice and big collection of beatmaking videos. some of them load slow, but it's still worth checking them out ... much hip-hop and mpc stuff, but also some great tricks about FLstudio (Fruity Loops), Propellerheads Reason, NI Battery, Cubase and Logic. Artists & producers: Jesper Jenson, Jay-Z, DR Period, J-Traxx, Just Blaze, DJ Premier, Jai Freedom, Kev Brown, Pete Rock, Scott Storch and Jason Walton... (via Peter)

NI Kore: NO Kore without Kore

This is really bad: i just learned that you will have to connect NI Kore allways to your DAW in order to playback a song that used Kore. That means: NI Kore hardware is somekind of a dongle. so, if you travel with your laptop you have to take your Kore Dongle with you. No Kore, no playback of songs. Gee ... that sucks.

Sidechaining in Cubase SX

Here is a nice tutorial video about how to do sidechaining in Cubase SX. As you will see it's a pain to set it up, but after doing it a couple of times it's ok. Well, except you use something like the old TC Electronic Native Bundle or dB-D dynamics processor (watch latency of compression when using these!). I wish Cubase SX had a better sidechain concept.

3D Walhalla Modular

Alian Projects presents a very nice Quicktime 3D Panorama shot of a big "Walhalla" Modular.

The Project Studio Handbook

This link takes you to the The Project Studio Handbook - the web's largest directory of recording-related articles and links... Very nice site to check out.

WTF €199: F*ck U Korg

This is what pisses me of when buying software: INSANE PRICE DROPS for no reason!

Here is the story: i bought the Korg Legacy Collection (the one with the funny USB MS-20 controler) about 6 month ago for exactly € 599. Just some 4 weeks later the price went down to € 199!! i called my dealer and told them that i am pretty pissed - € 400 down the drain! Of course my dealer told me to relax: first this offer would be just for a very very short time - only to clear the stocks. And second i would get a very nice discount of the new Digital Collection. Fine i thought! But now: the original Legacy Collection is AGAIN on sale for only € 199 all over europe. So this would be the first lie! And: the discount i would get is only € 20!! Well, F*CK U KORG!!!

Don't get me wrong: i do like the Legacy Collection. And if you don't have it by now, you should get it for € 199 fast.

But for all the people who spend (at least) € 599 ... this is very close to a rip off!!

I can not think of another piece of gear i ever bought that lost value so fast!!
(By the way: the Korg EULA says that you are NOT allowed to sell your software, just think about it!!)

One thing is clear:
I just can not trust Korg on there price policy anymore. I will never ever buy anything in the first month again. I hate beeing a early bird that get's f*cked!!

Anyone else had the luck to spend 599 instead of 199??

Ebay: Three Dog Night signed guitar

Strange auction text:

This guitar was brought in by a consignor, He really does not what to sell it, but his father is sick and he needs to help him out.

The guitar is a white Squier Strat by Fender. It is signed by Three dog Night. There are five signatures on the guitar. They are Pat Bautz, Cory Wells, Michael Allsup, Danny Hutton, Jimmy Greenspoon, and Paul Kingery. The guy told us that there are very few of these signed by the group.

He is also sending with the guitar a case, Signed t-shirt. The t-shirt was not signed by every member just some of them.

There is a news paper artical about the band just a couple of days before the concert.

There is even a card that goes in the middle of a reserved table with some of there signatures on the inside of it.

Our confirmation of authenticity is a picture of the young man holding the signed guitar with all the members of Three Dog Night standing around him.

Somehow i don't believe it ... this pic is not really a "confirmation of authenticity" to me in any way ;-)