Recording on a ridiculously small budget

  • Thread starter Thread starter ellieken
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cool! sounds about like what we could do on our deck at work.
 
dgatwood said:
My gosh, you're absolutely right. And all these years, I never realized that when those guys from New York Audio Labs ran a power drill on the output of an amplifier, it was magic, not electricity.

(No, I'm not kidding. They actually did that as a gag.)
haha :D



The reso head on a kickdrum is on the front of the kick not the back. I'm not saying its the other head, i'm talking about the same head its just called the front. ;)

Just some random info for you. :)
 
dgatwood said:
My gosh, you're absolutely right. And all these years, I never realized that when those guys from New York Audio Labs ran a power drill on the output of an amplifier, it was magic, not electricity.

(No, I'm not kidding. They actually did that as a gag.)

http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/409/

Now repeat after me: "A microphone converts sound into electrical impulses, which travel along a wire a the rate of signal propagation in copper, which is approximately 130,000 miles per second."

I understand about the whole microphone theory.

I need you to explain this hypothetical example to me......pretty please :D

Take a power amp and run two speakers, the left one with a six foot speaker cable, the right with a hunderd footer. Both are the same guage, make, model, etc. Stand in the middle. When you play the sound source, there will be a stereo effect panning from left to right. Why would this happen? There's no way a persons ear could pick that up if the signal was traveling at the speed of light.
 
jamking said:
I understand about the whole microphone theory.

I need you to explain this hypothetical example to me......pretty please :D

Take a power amp and run two speakers, the left one with a six foot speaker cable, the right with a hunderd footer. Both are the same guage, make, model, etc. Stand in the middle. When you play the sound source, there will be a stereo effect panning from left to right. Why would this happen? There's no way a persons ear could pick that up if the signal was traveling at the speed of light.

You are barking up the wrong tree and are not thinking about the only reaction difference between the 2 objects in your above scenario.
Ideally, these cables of yours would have no (or precisely equal) internal resistance, whereas in reality, they do not.

A cable of length l will always have some internal resistance, which is a function of its resistivity and its length. This internal resistance is caused by imperfections in the transmission media which inhibit ideal electron flow. The only 'effect' you are hearing is the skewing of the electrical signal due to the increased resistance of the longer cable versus the shorter.

In short, layman's terms: If your cables had the same internal resistance, you would not hear any perceivable delay, unless the cable was extraordinarily long and imperfect.
 
jamking said:
I understand about the whole microphone theory.

I need you to explain this hypothetical example to me......pretty please :D

Take a power amp and run two speakers, the left one with a six foot speaker cable, the right with a hunderd footer. Both are the same guage, make, model, etc. Stand in the middle. When you play the sound source, there will be a stereo effect panning from left to right. Why would this happen? There's no way a persons ear could pick that up if the signal was traveling at the speed of light.

JazzMang's suggestion that the increased resistance of the longer cable may be partially to blame, but I don't think it's the whole story.

My best guess is that the delayed sound you're hearing is caused by the room, not by the speakers. Odds are good that it is the result of an early reflection.

The longer cable has a higher resistance. For this reason, the direct sound from that speaker will be less. (How much less is largely a factor of the gauge of the wire.) The diminished direct sound from the long-cabled speaker will cause the reflected sound to be more prominent, thus reflected sound off of walls, the floor, the ceiling, etc. will be more likely to confuse your ear into believing that you are hearing the direct sound with a delay.

In particular, the early reflection (reflection off the side walls) is likely to confuse the senses because it is the earliest reflection, and thus the closest in sound quality and time to the original signal (as opposed to a later echo that is blended with eighteen other echoes with varying delays).

That said, to a large extent, this will still occur even if both cables are the same length, since the majority of this effect is a property of the room, not the relative sound levels. The greater the distance between you and the speakers, the more difficult it will be for you to accurately distinguish between direct and reflected sound.

At some point, the distance becomes so great that the sound quality becomes almost unintelligible, as the perceived loudness of the reflected sound gets progressively closer to the perceived loudness of the direct sound. It is for this reason that large halls frequently have a large number of speakers down the sides to reinforce the direct sound.

Somebody with a psychoacoustics background could probably explain it better, but this should give you at least a rough idea of what's happening.
 
Wrong latency?

It sounds to me like all of this cable stuff pales into insignificance beside the latency in your computer (and mine) so you may be wasting your time with the sums. You can set up your software to compensate (ish) but all I do is to cut off the front of the new track and slide it up until it's back in sync. I'm using Krystal (which is shareware) so I'm sure that expensive software will have the same capability. That way you won't have to try and get it all in one take.
 
Tomayo1 said:
It sounds to me like all of this cable stuff pales into insignificance beside the latency in your computer (and mine) so you may be wasting your time with the sums. You can set up your software to compensate (ish) but all I do is to cut off the front of the new track and slide it up until it's back in sync. I'm using Krystal (which is shareware) so I'm sure that expensive software will have the same capability. That way you won't have to try and get it all in one take.
Thank's, guys. Sorry for being so argumentitive. Some of it is still confusing as hell but I'll get it.
 
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