Theory / Technical

After 85 years of active service, the humble VU meter remains as useful as ever in today’s digital studios — despite BBC engineers nicknaming it ‘virtually useless’!

We conclude our four-part series with a look at how specifications can accommodate the foibles of human hearing.

USB is at the heart of most PC‑based studios. But what do you do when it goes wrong?

Low distortion is often a marker of quality in audio equipment. We explain how to make sense of standard distortion specifications.

In the first of this two-part series, David Mellor gives us an introduction to mic polar patterns.

A valuable test for recording engineers, David Mellor gives examples of different mic types to emphasise the importance of knowing your mic collection in detail.

Noise performance is important, but to fairly compare different products, you need to understand how noise specs are calculated.

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!

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

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

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...