I was an analog snob. Having fallen foul of a few ADATs back in the day, I badmouthed the sonics of digital: the crispiness, the sterility, the lack of depth, etc. In the last couple of years,...
When the Royer R-121 ribbon mic (Tape Op #19) came out in 1998, word on the street from working engineers was overwhelmingly positive. I borrowed one from Jeff Stuart Saltzman and soon bought my own....
ck when they were first introduced, I was skeptical of the Primacoustic Recoil Stabilizers monitor pads (Tape Op #62) that have since become something of an industry standard. Having little or no...
Next on the 500-series hit parade is Shadow Hills Industries' gorgeous Dual Vandergraph! It's a stereo compressor with roots in Shadow Hills' own Mastering Compressor, a behemoth that has found its...
When contemporary music intersects with the world of classical music, certain things can be lost in translation. How many times have you heard a guitar player mention that he doesn't really know...
If you've mastered the skills necessary to build something like a Seventh Circle Audio preamp (Tape Op #35, #54), you might want to move to something a little more challenging. Eisen Audio has just...
This past March, I had my first experience recording to tape with CLASP (Closed Loop Analog Signal Processor). CLASP inventor Chris Estes was at Yellow Dog Studios in Austin to help us get started...
How many good vocal mics are there out there today? Probably way too many, but how many are truly great vocal mics? Now we can narrow the field, with the choice mics being mostly of the vintage or...
I can't think of a recording studio that doesn't require acoustic treatment. Like many Tape Op readers, we've done our fair share of DIY blended with commercial off-the-shelf solutions. If you run a...
Focusrite's compact, 16 in, 8 out, 24-bit, 96 kHz FireWire audio interface includes 4 analog inputs (2 mic/line/instrument, 2 line/instrument), 6 analog outputs, S/PDIF I/O, and ADAT in. Under the...
The DrMS plug-in is based on Mid/Side processing, a powerful way of manipulating stereo signals that grew out of a recording technique patented by Alan Blumlein in the 1930s. There's really no way to...
If you've heard of Steven Slate and his sample libraries, you're aware of one thing; Steven Slate loves drums. All kinds of drums - big ones, small ones, drums up close, drums far away...... drums,...
This standalone, cross-platform application allows mastering engineers to provide complete evaluation masters to artists. If you're wondering why this matters, it means that artists can review masters...
