2

One Word To Confuse Them All

In the world of audio, nothing seems to trigger more reflexes of fear than “phase issues”. The reason is probably that it describes a rather scientific concept which is sometimes hard to relate to the reality of music signals. Also, there are three very different phenomena that are often confused by using the same word for all of them.

Continue reading

Analog Summing Demystified – Part 1: An Introduction

Today, we are entering the dangerous territory of one of the most reliable causes for flame wars on audio forums: analog summing boxes!

It is essentially a recreation of the part of an analog mixing console that actually mixes all the channels together. The promise is to provide a bit of “console sound” while otherwise still working “in the box“. In this two-part series, we’ll analyze analog summing circuits thoroughly and try to find out what there is to it. Today’s article is about introducing you to the basics of analog summing circuits and the first of two typical types of these circuits – the passive summing network. Next week we’ll look at the active summing network and think about how we can apply what we learned to think outside the summing box.

Continue reading

Hearing: The Blessings and Curses

For working with audio, we have two tools at hand to assess what is going on: hearing and measurement. I already posted an article about the blessings and curses of audio measurement, to increase awareness about what we can and cannot achieve with it, and about the several traps installed along the way. And necessarily there must be a complementary post that deals with the even more important tool we use: our hearing. Continue reading

2

Quantization Noise and Bit Depth

In this early stage in the life of The Science of Sound, I’d like to cover some of the basics especially of digital audio, as these are a recurring source of confusion in many discussions. Today we’ll start with covering the „vertical“ dimension of digital audio: quantization noise and bit depth.

Continue reading