Audio Engineering Session 1

I left home early so that I would have plenty of time to check things out at the college (never been there before). Parking wasn't a problem at all. (due to the fact that this is an evening course I'm sure). So off I go into the school. Wow, its big. I see that there is a large lobby with 3 wings. Cool cause I know that it is in the 3rd wing. Signs are everywhere to guide me. Room 3825 is just over there through the doors on the right, I say to myself. Found the room pretty quickly but it started to feel kinda strange. There is no studio here and why are there a bunch of people talking about physics. Hmmm... Back to the front lobby I go. Quickly spotted the general information area and found out the guy gave me the WRONG ROOM NUMBER! It was actually 3285. Now it is getting close to the time the class starts and I still don't know where the room is. Well, eventually I found the room with about 5 minutes to spare. Two students were already there. Four more arrived to make a total of 7 in our class.

We grab some chairs and start our session in the live room.

The teacher introduced himself and asked a couple of basic questions like, how did you hear about us etc. He moved onto the session pretty much right away. He showed us some cable types and began talking about what it takes to make a good recording. "Good musician+good room+good instrument+good engineer=proffessional product". "But how do you define a good instrument", he says. He then used drums as an example. How do you know a good drum kit? By the way it sounds, and general reputation. He went on to say that a good drummer can make a crappy kit sound good.

On to learning about SPL and decibels. Here is the basic breakdown;
-To increase the volume units (VU) by 3 dB, 10x the energy is required. To increase by another 3 dB, 20x required. To increase yet another 3 dB to make a total of a 9 dB increase requires 40x the energy etc. It is an exponential scale.

Here are some quick info bits on dB.
74 dB is conversation level. This is based on the phone system. It was a comfortable volume to speak to someone on the other end of a phone.
118 dB is the threshold of feeling.
130-140 dB is the threshold of pain
Ambient noise is around 25-35 dB.

After a quick break we went into the control room. He introduced us to the equipment which included a Peavey 1600 32 channel console, Avalon pres, Focusrite, Tascam and some really nice vintage Tannoy monitors and a set of Genelecs. A Roland DAW was hooked up to a set or Roland monitors as well. Too much stuff to list so I will try and get some pictures next week.

EDIT: These pictures were taken during the second session but I thought it would be appropriate to update this post rather than start a new one.