terms

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thebrontosaurus

New member
alright. ive figured out a lot of terms since i started posting here but i am still at a loss for some of them. help me out if you want.

aliasing and anti-aliasing
imaging
DSD technology
mixing 'in and out of the box' ( i feel like i should know this one)
MOA
Alsihad
MARSH (that wet thing out in the woods near my house? i dont know how thats tied in with recording.)
SSL
VCA
and last but not least DAW, i think i should know this too. digital audio...(w)interface?

forgive me, im still working with the tascam 488
 
Alsihad - Mixerman's word for ProTools, which he hates

imaging - used when talking about the stereo field

Mixing in the box means you do all you processing in the computer. Mixing out of the box means you send your audio to a mixer and do it the old-fashioned way

MARSH is a forum over at prosoundweb. http://marsh.prosoundweb.com/

SSL is short for Solid State Logic, maker of some seriously fine mixing consoles

DAW - digital audio workstation
 
thebrontosaurus said:
aliasing and anti-aliasing
imaging

Are digital filtering techniques used by converters to prevent ultrasonic frequencies from messing with your audio.


Voltage controlled amplifier, a component or type of a compressor.
 
corban said:
Still up: DSD and MOA

DSD is direct stream digital, a competing digital audio format to PCM, or pulse code modulation. DSD is used in the SACD format, whereas PCM is used for CDs and DVDs.
 
DSD means Direct Stream Digital - it's a format that some guy in Australia thought of. Sony bought it from him and developed it with Phillips. It was developed as a non-commercial format that Sony uses for archiving. They've released it to the consumer market in the form of SACD, and they've licensed companies to build DSD standalone recorders.

DSD is supposed to sound very nice, but there's no way to do processing with it yet - any EQ, compression, reverb or any kind of signal processing can only happen with PCM digital. DSD recorders do exist, but all they do is record.

MOA is the MARSHian term for the manufacturer of Alsihad.



sl
 
mshilarious said:
Are digital filtering techniques used by converters to prevent ultrasonic frequencies from messing with your audio.

I think a slightly more thorough explanation might be helpful there. Anti-aliasing is a filter technique. Aliasing is what it is trying to prevent.

Have you ever watched a movie and noticed that as a car sped up, the tires appear to slow down, stop, and then start moving backwards after a certain speed? That's aliasing. The sample rate (in this case, the frame rate of video/film) is slower than the spokes per second rate. When the spoke rate is half the frame rate, that's the most that can be accurately expressed, and results in the spokes alternating between two positions in sort of a shimmer. This is called the Nyquist limit.

When the spoke rate goes beyond half the frame rate, you end up with the next spoke moving more than half the distance to the previous spoke's position. This is visually almost indistinguishable from the spoke moving backwards. When it reaches the frame rate, the next spoke ends up in the same position as the previous spoke, and motion appears to stop.

The same phenomenon happens in audio as waves are sampled, for precisely the same reason. Above half the sampling rate, you end up with low frequency "fake" signals, or aliasing, being introduced. Thus, anti-aliasing filters are added, generally in the form of an analog filter bank prior to the analog to digital converter (ADC) that's doing the sampling. By rolling off frequencies that are beyond half the sampling rate, this aliasing effect is avoided. (A similar effect in film would pretty much be a blur, but... that's where the comparison starts to break down a bit.)
 
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