Cool Plug-ins ...How do you know?
 |
| Don't boil in microwave! |
There
is a lot of really cool looking plug-ins available. They're lacking in tactile
response and smell nothing like an old Universal Audio LA-2A, the meter glass tarnished with years of cigarette smoke, spattering’s from an exploding egg
cooked in the lounge microwave oven dotting its faceplate and has been baking in a rack for 10 plus years.
If you were lucky enough to have multiple LA-2A’s
you understood each one’s sonic character. You knew each one's personality
because it was housed in a room devoted exclusively to the capture and release
of audio signals.
 |
| LA-2A |
These are places where you can denote the smallest change
in the signal path between a captured component and its playback medium ... which was generally big ass loudspeakers sucking gallons of energy to move mass quantities
of air.
Big and heavy takes a fair amount of
concentrated energy to move …rapidly (approximately 2400 feet of 1.5 mil tape in 60
seconds). Rapidly concentrating anything makes it hot. Lots of hot takes big
fans to cool; big fans make lots of noise, so you combat them with Big Ass Monitors.
 |
| Ampex MM-1000 |
Big
standing waves and reflections come from running BAM’s at monster loud levels.
Huge Monuments of Steel create bright reflective spaces in control rooms which makes reverb levels, for one thing, hard to
judge. How did you know when the reverb level was right …you
added it until it sounded good. A lot of emulation attempts have been made
to recreate great old recordings produced in poorly tuned acoustic spaces full of uneven reflections and standing waves.
Back when recording engineers (recordist) wore lab coats and ties their real-world experience had a simple name, one more agreeable to mistake, it was
called trial and error.
What was being judged by the audio engineer was:
…the character of the controlled
acoustic space (control room) as it presented itself (how the mixes sounded) in a multitude of uncontrolled acoustic
spaces (the audience's personal playback systems).
Once the finer points of the critical listening space’s acoustic anomalies
had been addressed (the space voiced) the finer details regarding the colorization (sound) and the range of adjustment
for any given piece of equipment used in that space became more than apparent.
 |
| RLS Seattle …A critical listening environment |
Judge your critical listening environment before you criticize or complement your plug-ins. In most cases, as you improve your listening space’s acoustic character your fondness for your plug-ins and their ability will increase.
Professional recording studios and their operators, as well as a lot of psychoacoustic science i.e., math, are how you answer the question of:
How do you know you can trust what you hear here ... will be heard everywhere?
Next is levels
and plug-in’s which is freakin huge!
Comments
Post a Comment