Recent content by Duncan Hutchins

many thanks for that. Yes, an acrylic booth would give a useful reduction, and in fact if I get the chance I'll always colonise any likely looking structure that happens to be around, be it a brick garden wall or a shed, just so long as I can see. Most of the time a dedicated booth as you...

I am a retired sound engineer with UK City & Guilds qualifications. I work part time for live bands providing sound engineering, audio and video recording and DMX-controlled lighting. I frequently need to use headphones at the mixing desk, not only to monitor the main stereo mix going to the PA...

Please don't do this! You'd create an extreme room-size explosion hazard within 15 minutes, far more dangerous even than the alcohol in liquid form, because you've mixed it with the oxygen in the air. Basically the same as the inside of a cylinder in a petrol engine, just before the spark plug...

that and mechanical failure in analogue gear. For example, lubrication sometimes dries up in the bearings of the motors in reel to reel tape machines. The merest speck of sewing machine oil left to soak overnight in usually puts things right.

Make of it what you will, but the advice I was given on a sound engineering course was that the one thing to avoid on older electronics was leaving it unused. Apparently that promotes degradation of some components, particularly capacitors, electrolytics being the most vulnerable. Perhaps it's...

there's no such thing as silence, and believe me I've tried! I have a substantially built workshop with thick stone walls and a thick wooden composite doorway to the outside in the basement of my home, which is already quite well screened from noise. I also use it for recording-related work. On...

Or beg / borrow / hire / steal machine and use your ears perhaps? If it sounds good, it is good, and vice-versa. In any case, you'll never really know what it sounded like 'way back when'. If it was a good many years ago, your hearing will probably have changed more than you might like to think...

You are confusing 'volume' with 'headroom'. Volume is a subjective effect of human hearing, and is produced in audio equipment by selecting higher or lower voltage levels, typically through (mostly) passive resistive channel 'faders'. Just to confuse matters still further 'volume' is not 'gain'...

To judge from your first sample of a piano piece the unwanted noise is not the 'self noise' I'd expect from any microphone, which would approximate to 'white noise', and is the wideband natural background electromagnetic radiation of our environment (think the rushing sound of a waterfall). The...

I very much agree with the use of BBC Radio as a good yardstick for good vocal recording. I would add that the BBC uses professional quality dynamic compression. This 'smoothes out' some of the natural rise and fall in the volume of the human voice (or other sound source). The result is much...

IMO you will get an markedly different result when you work entirely on headphones, rather than monitor loudspeakers. The psychoacoustic is different: headphones will give you damn near perfect stereo separation; but that's not the experience of real world 'hearing' in the normal sense...

You mention 'overlapping channels to get quality'. I may be mistaken, but if you mean what I think you mean, overlapping tape channels will not give you 'better quality'. It will merely double the output voltage, along with doubling the unwanted noise. It just comes to what you had before, just...

My advice to anyone building a studio, particularly without a great deal of experience, is to spend a modest £30 sterling on the latest edition of F Alton-Everest's book 'The Master Handbook of Acoustics'. It's the standard widely respected practical work on everything to do with sound, and how...

I don't know if this will support your opinion, but anyone who loves listening to music, or better still, spends hours on end mixing and mastering day after day for hours on end day will know all about the phenomenom of 'listener fatigue'. Before very long, the sheer 'sonic detail' found in...

I expect you already know this, but the obvious is often worth repeating. In analogue recording generally it's important to have the programme material at the highest possible level, i.e. as far above the noise floor as possible. That's much less of a problem with digital. And on top of that...