I never imagined that the bass and treble controls as seen on home and car stereos for decades would follow me into my professional life. That ubiquitous EQ circuit, designed by Peter Baxandall, was reimagined in 2010 for professional audio applications by Chris Muth [Tape Op#45] and the team at...
I have a pair of Lauten Audio LA-220 V2s above my drum kit, and I’ve previously reviewed the Lauten Snare Mic [Tape Op#159], Tom Mic [#163], and Rim Mount [#164], so of course I was eager to check out their Kick Mic too! If you haven’t been following along, these Lauten drum mics are all condenser...
The DC-2 is a plug-in-controlled analog compressor that works in conjunction with the McDSP APB ("analog processing box") units (APB-8, APB-16) [Tape Op#134]. As I've noted before in APB-based reviews, the APB is a one-space rackmount box that attaches to your computer via...
I’ve been a big fan of Soyuz equipment since a rep came down to Chase Park Transduction here in Athens, Georgia, and let us demo several of their microphones a few years ago. After the demo session, studio owner David Barbe [Tape Op#14] decided to buy their Bomblet condenser mic [#140], and the rep...
Tone Projects is known for their popular mastering plug-ins. With UNI-L, Tone Projects’ Rune Lund-Hermansen and mastering engineer Bob Macc have created a truly special modern single-band limiter, one that uses multiband detection. This drives an adaptive lookahead time, a crucial innovation that...
ART’s Pro VLA [Tape Op#37] has always occupied a funny little corner of the compressor world. It isn’t boutique, it has never been especially expensive, and it is not the sort of box that sends engineers down rabbit holes over its sonic lineage. And yet, in one form or another, the Pro VLA has...
Opusonix is a new online platform designed for project management, sharing mixes, and gathering feedback. There are many of these sorts of apps and subscription services these days, all with a variety of features that go far beyond where we started with services like Dropbox or Google Drive. I have...
I’ve reviewed a ton of JZ microphones, and I have yet to come across one that was not a well-built and useful tool in the recording studio. Amethyst was first released in 2006 by the Violet brand (a venture of JZ founder Juris Zarins after his time as an original team member at Blue Microphones)....
Gus Berry reviewed oeksound’s "sonic-fixing" Soothe2 plug-in in Tape Op#138 and noted how handy it could be for suppressing bass resonances. I’ve been using it for years since that review, but exclusively for taming upper midrange harshness and rarely digging into the lower frequencies…...
I’ve never seen the value in spending exorbitant amounts of money on recording interfaces. I started recording in the early 2000s, so I’ve been at this long enough to remember digital in its earlier days when you really did “get what you paid for” as far as an interface was concerned. Anyone who...
Over 20 years ago, all the mixing I was doing was off analog 2-inch, 24-track tape and onto 1/4-inch stereo tape. I'd started with recording to DAT (digital audio tape) stereo decks for mixdowns, but I was concerned that their built-in digital converters were not of the highest quality (I was...
Radial Engineering has made built-to-last solutions that meet everyday studio and live needs for decades, and their new SGI Stereo instrument line driver – designed primarily for guitar and bass – is another excellent example. The SGI Stereo lets you drive two unbalanced, low-level instrument...
It’s funny, but I’ve always thought of Bitwig as a somewhat younger cousin to Ableton Live – both companies were born in Berlin and share a clip-based, non-linear workflow for audio and MIDI. They serve well as writing, recording, or live performance tools. But with Bitwig Studio 6, I can see...
I must confess, I never really used PreSonus Studio One [Tape Op#154]. While many of my friends are among its enthusiastic users, I was never able to find a place for it amongst my already crowded selection of DAWs. My workflow tends to look like this: Steinberg Cubase for film scoring (or Apple...
Purchasing headphones and headphone mixing systems is not among the funnest parts of building and running a studio, but it is one of the most essential. If the artists recording can’t hear themselves, it’s not likely you’re going to get a good take, no matter what vintage mic and esoteric mic...
These speakers would be remarkable if they were several times their size. But given that they're relatively tiny, with a single 5.5-inch ceramic-matrix mid-woofer and a 2-inch Air Motion Transformer (AMT) tweeter, they're unbelievable. They have the extension and dynamics of a big...
We live in a portable world. With entire studios in our laptops and backpacks, every room – even the back seat of an Uber – has become a workspace. The main problem point now is monitoring. Headphones provide accurate monitoring on the go, but speakers in a well-tuned room remain the gold standard...
For years, the Sony MDR-7506 headphones were in studios everywhere. I found them to be incredibly bright, but many of my friends used them regularly and loved them. I will say that I still own a pair, and even though the ear pads are a crumbly mess, they are operational and sound the same as they...