Today's Top Stories:
 Sennheiser e903 & Glyph GT Key 80GBStudio In A Box Month At Sweetwater!
Sennheiser e903
Sennheiser's new e903 cardioid snare drum mic is engineered to deliver outstanding frequency response while tolerating maximum sound pressure levels. It delivers a punchy transient response while accentuating the true character of the snare. It also features a tapered black handle and a "gunmetal" blue grille. Check it out today!
Glyph GT Key 80GB
Glyph has been the leading provider for pro audio storage solutions for years due to their ability to offer high-quality hard drive solutions that simply perform under nearly any circumstance! The all-new GT line of hot swap, FireWire storage solutions are simple to use, ultra quiet and amazingly affordable. The hot swappable GT Key 80GB is now shipping. It works in combination with Glyph's GT051, GT103, and Trip2 FireWire hard drive chassis'! Tons of audio storage that will perform day after day, that's the Glyph way.September - Studio In A Box Month At Sweetwater!
Whether you want to record a few tracks on the fly, or need a fully functional personal digital studio, Sweetwater is proud to showcase today's crop of Digital Recorder Workstations so you can find EXACTLY what you need! We're showing off our very finest 4-track pocket recorders through our behemoth 32-track giants. The benefits of having your own personal studio are endless: record full CD projects, make sure you never miss out when inspiration hits, track your rehearsals, pull off amazing demos, collaborate with other musicians, record your own songs anywhere, anytime...! Check out our showcase today.
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| Delay |
| In audio production, a delay is an electronic device designed to store a signal for a specified period of time and then release it, thereby delaying the signal relative to other parts of an audio program. Delays are often used to create echo effects, where a particular signal may repeat several times, with each repeat being lower in level than the prior one. This application goes back many years to a time when delays were only able to be accomplished with tape recorders (see WFTD Tape Delay). Later, analog circuitry was developed that could store signals long enough to be useful as a delay. This often involved a complex process of dumping the signal from one circuit with a finite amount of storage into another, and so on. Some of these early designs were thus known as "bucket brigade" circuits because they pretty much worked like an old time fireman's bucket brigade where water would be passed in buckets from person to person in a long line between the source and the fire. The big downside of these units was that it cost a lot to build one with enough bucket brigades to amount to any length of time, and the sound quality sometimes degraded as the signal was passed along, which was exacerbated when regeneration was applied to achieve multiple repeats. Ultimately delays became most flexible and useful when digital technology became practical. In a digital delay the signal is simply stored in memory chips until it is needed. The longer a signal needs to be stored, and the higher the sample rate and bit depth, the more memory is required, so early digital delays tended to suffer from some of the same problems as their analog counterparts. It wasn't long, however, before digital delays could capture a nearly perfect recording of a signal and store it for minutes if necessary. Delay technology is at the core of most time based effects such as flangers, chorus units etc. They have also been widely used in broadcast applications over the years to provide a few seconds of delay to "live" broadcasts. These few seconds can be used by an attentive engineer to "bleep" out things like curse words, etc. |
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| Phase Shifter explained. |
Q: "I have a question about your Word for the Day 'phase shifter.' You say it is in the family of time-based effects, however, I recently read in another on-line article that it's not considered a time-based effect. The article said it was an EQ effect. Just wondering why the discrepancy?"
A: The other article is wrong.
...okay, that's a little strong. There is confusion about this, and it is understandable. First we have to settle on the semantics of what constitutes a time-based effect. My/our definition is that it's any effect that uses the manipulation of time (i.e. delay) to achieve its results. Anything that messes with the relative phase of signals is, by definition, changing where it falls in time. If you take two identical signals, and then delay one of them by a microsecond, they are now partially out of phase with each other. Depending upon the signal's content and the amount of delay applied, the effect is quite audible. This would seem to clearly point to a phase shifter being a time-based effect. Funny thing is, however, virtually every analog EQ circuit also has a time component to it. When EQ is applied to signals, some elements can become delayed very slightly (see WFTD Group Delay), effectively phase shifting them. Phase shifting is often achieved with EQ circuits. Nevertheless, the actual effect on the signal is the same: it, or certain frequency ranges of it, are delayed by small (and often varying) amounts. This has caused a lot of confusion about this process over the years.
Ultimately the argument is a purely semantic one. Regardless of how the effect happens to be created - whether you want to call the circuit an EQ circuit or a delay circuit - the effect is a time-based effect and should be treated as one. The net result on the signal, including where and how you'd apply it in your signal chain, has everything in common with other time-based effects (reverb, delay, flanger, chorus, etc.) and very little in common with things that aren't considered time-based, such as compression, distortion, equalization, even though each of these potentially has a time or phase component to its process as well. |
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