Audio Engineering Session 2

I got lost again! Well, not really but still don't know my way around the school. I ended up being one of the first to arrive. I got there in time to see some band members loading up our isolation booth with instruments!! Band dudes! Get out of our room. I didn't say it but I sure was thinking it.

The instructor arrived right on time and after a bit of chit chat he talked about one of his students that brought in his SAW system. Built with a Asus MB, SATA drives, Lightpipe and a Frontier interface. We didn't get a chance to see it or discuss it much more. Sounded interesting and I'd like to learn more about it.

We checked out a ProTools system. It was an older 001 running with PT 5.01. Quickly went over the interface. 2 mic pres, and 6 analogue ins. We opened up a project and did a basic mixing
overview.

Into the control room we go. We spend a bit more time on the board this time. First off we learnt a bit about the board itself. This is a 32x16x32 board meaning, 32 input channels, 16 sub channels and 32 monitor channels.

We then went on to reading the meters. The meters read voltage with 1.23 volts = 0 on the meters. This is considered pro standard. 0 being optimum. In comparison, VU meters on a consumer cassette deck only require 0.316 volts to be at optimum. Because of this variation, it is important to watch that you don't overdrive consumer level products with the board. He went on to say that broadcast standard requires 1.96 volts = 0.

We also found out that 0 on the board is equal to -20 on the Tascams. Another way to look at it is, 0 = full scale on a digital syatem which equals +20 on the board.

Next up... the Roland V-Studio 2480. This is a DAW unit with 8 preamps and 16 inputs. It will record up to 96k - 24 bit. It can be connected to a pc through the use of Roland R-bus PCI cards (up to 2). It has a built in CD burner and a 80 gig drive partitioned into 6 drives. It uses native compression (MTP) to save space on the drive.

AT this point there would be way too much to describe in this blog as we dove into the DAW quite a bit. If you want to learn more about the Roland you are going to have to RTFM. Basically it was pointed out that we are going to be using this piece of equipment at lot in this semester.

I guess that is about it for this week. Bye for now.