Theory / Technical

Specifications can be a useful guide when choosing equipment. Our new series, in association with Audio Precision, explains how to understand and compare the specs of competing products.

If you want to identify studio equipment that’s susceptible to grounding problems, a simple DIY project based on a wall‑wart PSU can help.

I am trying out an ART Voice Channel, which has some interesting features, one of which is a dial to vary the microphone impedance continuously from 3kΩ down to 120Ω. So I have been testing this with a bunch of dynamic and capacitor mics...

Understanding the science behind musical taste and listening preferences can help you make more effective production decisions.

Suffering from mysterious hums and buzzes in your studio? This down‑to‑earth explanation will help you identify and solve the problems — or hopefully avoid them in the first place!

As electret condenser mics have internal preamps, do non‑electret condensers also have built‑in preamps?

When our job involves a lot of sitting down, it’s up to us to inject some movement into our lives.

What’s the best technique, or combination of methods, for refreshing the high end when pitching-down samples?

What benefits have the latest crop of CPUs brought for audio users — and what might the coming year have in store for us?

I’d like a clearer understanding of what a fully floating balanced output is and how I can take advantage of it....

MIDI is the universal language of the studio — and if you use hardware instruments, you need to understand it!

I recently rewired my studio and patched a compressor and an effects unit into my mixer’s master inserts. Both processors were set to work with +4dB signals but the levels from the processors seemed low, so I switched them to their ‑10dB positions and the levels seem healthier. Have I done the right thing?

Mix engineers used to prefer hardware to software because it sounded better. Is that still true? And if not, is there still a reason to use it?

The waveform of an audio file looks bizarre when I load it in Adobe Audition, with a curious displacement of the audio...

I keep reading about the use of ‘negative feedback’ to reduce distortion in audio gear. How does this work and how effective is it?

Could you please explain why audio gear uses balanced signals and how they work?

Intel’s latest CPUs promise big performance gains. But can they topple AMD in our audio benchmarks?

I’m a long‑running technical electronics repair and design engineer working in music for film...

I’m about to be given an old mixer to play with in my studio and am planning to check each input and output, check the EQ does...

I got a separate 1TB drive to use with NI Komplete and told NI’s Native Access installer app to put the plug‑ins/apps on the system drive and the sample data on the external drive, and left it overnight...

The next evolution of Bluetooth contains a number of innovations that should appeal to consumers and professionals alike. And it’s coming to a device near you.