Homebrewed Music

I was already in Hawai`i on my vacation – can you take a vacation from being retired? – when I learned of the new Kodak Zi8. Now I already have a collection of video cameras that gets me teased by my wife, but this new shooter was too good to pass up. I’ve had it here in beautiful Kailua, O`ahu for a couple of weeks now and posted two videos.

I’m pretty pleased with this new camcorder. Let’s look at the pros and cons: (more…)

I’m enjoying some time in Hawai`i and part of the fun is getting back together with my Epiphone Masterbilt EF-500M. This is the first Epi EF-500 I bought, it’s a “second” that I bought used (second squared, I guess). For that last few years I’ve left this guitar in Hawai`i so I don’t have to carry an instrument on the plane.

I’ve tweaked and fiddled with this guitar for a while, especially since I brought it to O`ahu. The humidity is pretty tough on instruments. The tuning machines have always been stiff and they’ve gotten worse lately, so I decided to swap them out for the new Grover Vintage Sta-Tite 18:1 machines. (more…)

I posted a link to yesterday’s blog post at a couple of recording forums and one guitar site. I started threads at the Reaper Forum, on Gearslutz, and at the Acoustic Guitar Forum. It’s been interesting reading people’s reactions.

As I expected, some folks reject the validity of these controlled tests, stating that different mics respond to different positioning in different ways, and their performance in their optimal position is the important issue. I can only suggest that they try some controlled testing in those different positions. After all, if the difference really exists, it should be apparent when levels and positions are matched, right?

And as I expected, some people pointed out that mics with different patterns and mics with very different transducer technology, like ribbon mics, sound different from the cardioid condensers I used. I absolutely agree.

Also as I expected, some people suggested that my use of a single source, the acoustic guitar, is preventing me from hearing the differences, which show themselves on cymbals and vocals. As Dirty Harry was wont to say, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” I don’t record those sources so I don’t use them for testing .

One comment that has come up a couple of times is that the mics I chose were too similar, all large diaphragm mics from the low end of the spectrum. So I pulled out my highest priced mic, a Schoeps CMC64 small diaphragm condenser, and stuck it in the array. (more…)

Mics are fun. They are a great gear fetish item, because they’re collectible, a bit esoteric but still familiar, come in a wide range of types and sizes, and most of them have a bit of a phallic quality (grin). Even better, when I read about microphones on the internet or in recording magazines it seems that each mic has a dramatically distinct personality, and a big part of the job of a recordist is choosing the optimal mic for any given source and style.

Sometimes when I’ve listened to mic samples I thought I heard these dramatic differences, but after a bit I realized that I was listening to different performances, not different mics. Sure the mics had been changed, but the player was hitting the strings differently and playing different riffs at a different volume – so how could I tell what part of the difference was the mic, and what part the player?

Since then I’ve tried to do some mic tests of my own, and I’ve tried to educate myself on audio testing. At this point I’m beginning to think that the differences in microphones are a lot more subtle than I had been led to believe, which makes a careful test even more important. As I’ve mentioned before, very small differences in volume are registered by our ear/brain combination as differences in quality rather than loudness. I’d like to demonstrate the steps I now take to try to make my mic comparisons, and preamp and a/d comparisons, meaningful. (more…)

In my last blog entry I described the process for merging audio and video recorded on two different devices, for instance, replacing the audio in a Flip Mino HD video with audio recorded on a Zoom H2. This is a very handy technique, and can give great audio quality in the final video, but sometimes we only have camera sound available. So this post will describe the steps involved in separating the audio from the video, processing the audio, and merging the improved audio stream back to the video. (more…)

I have a lot of fun with Flip Mino HD camcorder. I’ve already done a few music videos with it and in my opinion the audio is far behind the quality of the video. Of course, even with expensive video equipment, having the mic on the camera keeps it some distance from the subject. Having a separate mic, much closer to the subject, gives a much better result. (more…)

This post will reveal the identity of the comparison clips in the post comparing the M-Audio Profire and the Lynx and John Hardy recording chain. But before providing the answers, I’d like to pose a question.

I (naively) expected that people would embrace an opportunity to do some controlled testing, using an easy but very effective comparison technique. I have found that careful ABX testing, using Foobar2000 and the ABX utility included in the program, has made me a better, more careful listener. I learned that the perceived differences between clips became much less when I no longer knew the source of the clip. As a result, I learned to search out subtle differences in tone color and texture. I also learned that I can’t hear any difference between systems that I have been told should show night and day differences.

I’d hoped that a number of other folks would try careful ABX testing of these clips with a statistically significant number of trials, so I could compare my results to theirs. At this point, I don’t know if my inability to hear the differences is normal or unusual.

The Question

If you visited here, listened to the clips, maybe even downloaded and installed Foobar2000, why did you not go the next step and run a test of 20 comparisons? Foobar2000 makes it easy to save your results and share them with the world, or not. Wouldn’t you like to have a personal evaluation of the difference between a high end preamp and a commodity unit, or between 44.1 and 192 sampling rates? Wouldn’t you like to contribute to the knowledge of the recording community?

After all, if the huge differences we read about in magazines and online are true, it will be easy to pick out the different samples, and we can get busy saving up for high end equipment. But if those differences are actually imaginary, driven by normal human traits like confirmation bias, we can save a bunch of money and time and trouble by ignoring gear lust and concentrating on mic placement and room acoustics.

So the question is, what do you have to lose by conducting a thorough series of ABX comparisons and reporting the results?

The Answers

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This is probably about as close to a political post as I am likely to write. I think that listening “tests” that are not conducted as double blind side-by-side comparisons are just wishful thinking. We wish that human hearing were not so totally dominated by the vagaries of our brain/mind, but it is. We wish that we could retain accurate mental images for more than a few seconds, but we can’t. We think we can discount the impact of small volume differences, but we can’t, and the smaller the difference the more likely we are to describe it as anything but a volume difference. We think we can trust our ears but all the evidence gathered from controlled experiments tells us plainly that we should not.

Since my interest in recording began only a few years ago, I’ve always had the internet as a resource for learning about the subject, I researched in every forum and magazine site I could find. And I now firmly believe that most of what I learned there was incorrect. (more…)