By Bill Park on Wednesday, September 20, 2000 2:00 AM

Last week I had occasion to attend one of the NARAS "Ask A Pro" Series events. This one was Called "Radio Today" and the panel contained radio execs, program directors, DJs, and label representatives.

It was an interesting, if somewhat disheartening event.

The Spirit of Radio

Since the late 1920s, it has been all about radio. In the 40's the first rock and roll records were played on the radio and a synergy was created that exists to this day. Rock and roll radio rules the airwaves, and impacts the lives of most Americans at one point or another as they follow their daily routine.

The really cool thing about radio was that it seemed to be a place for rebels. Small owners ran stations the way that they wanted to, playing the music that they wanted to, supporting the causes that they believed in, and catering to their own particular if not peculiar audiences. The parallels ... Read More »

By Rip Rowan on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

When recording rock rhythm tracks, I prefer to have the band all play together. That way the drummer and bass player are hearing all the cues they need to make performance decisions. For example, when a drummer doesn't hear the loud guitars he's used to hearing, he'll back off and won't play hard enough. Then you add in the guitars and wonder what happened to the energy in the drum track. I also like to attempt to get a keeper rhythm guitar track whenever possible. The guitar that's cut together with the bass and drums will have the raw energy of live performance.

For this record we wanted to get a natural, versatile drum sound. The goal was to capture a "studio" drum sound - tough and slightly larger than life, but not overly gated or processed, and with a nice dose of real room sound.

Drum Setup

The drum kit was set up in my main tracking room, which is L-shaped and connected to a hallway. The L-shape and the attached hallway provide some variance in the reflections - ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

Many things will affect the performance of digital audio software in general, and multi-track production software in particular. The performance of the disk drive being used to store the audio data is only the beginning. Naturally, this component must be of optimum efficiency in order to allow real time streaming at a high track count.    However, this isn't necessarily always going to be the limiting factor in a DAW's performance. There are other places to look as well.

Modems: Having a modem plugged into a DAW's PCI bus can lead to conflicts, particularly if the modem is a voice modem. Some production software will attempt to configure the modem as a sound card. While more "aware" programs such as Cakewalk will report a modem upon finding it and allow you to ignore it as part of the sound system setup, other programs may not, and could default to a lower bit depth or sample rate as a result. Many DAW users agree that an external modem connected to one of the computer's serial ports ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

The SCSI interface is an old timer. Before there was IDE, there was SCSI. It was used not only for disk drives, but scanners, printers and even to interface the PC with synthesizers and automated sound and light boards. For a long time, SCSI was the only really high performance disk interface, and in early versions, high performance was a whopping 5 MBytes/sec. WOW! Remember, that was in the time before the PC-based DAW, before Windows and before a person could buy a PC with more than 1 meg or RAM. Here's a quick rundown on SCSI.

The History of SCSI

In 1980, SCSI amounted to a proposed interface whose specifications occupied little more than 20 pages. Compare that with the more than 600 pages used to describe the interface standard today. In 1985, a group of manufacturers got together and started pressing for ANSI to define SCSI. This came to pass in 1986 with the publishing of the first SCSI standard, now referred to as SCSI-1. This new interface standard consisted of a controller card, ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

IDE, or more formally, IDE/ATA, is the most common system for connecting a hard drive to a PC.

In modern systems (to which this discussion is limited), they plug directly into the motherboard through a 40 pin cable. Most motherboards offer 2 separate IDE channels and thus 2 connectors on the board. Each connector can support 2 IDE devices, be they disk drives, CD drives, tape drives, removable drives and so on. If a channel has 2 devices on it, one must be designated a master and the other a slave. This is done simply by moving or removing a jumper on the drive itself.

As a result of this configuration, any system can have 4 IDE devices connected to it. Using an external controller board connected to the PCI bus supporting 2 additional channels, up to 8 devices and be supported on a PC. This is the limit, and attempting to add 4 more devices with an extra controller will consume more interrupts and other system resources. This contrasts with modern SCSI which can have up to 15 devices ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

By default, IDE disk drives transfer data to and from the system using a protocol called "Programmed Input/Output" or PIO. This technique requires the CPU to get into the middle of things by executing commands that shuffle the data to or from RAM and the drive. Thus, the CPU is tied up doing the work of fetching and stuffing. Also, the time overhead involved in putting data in the cache, reading each byte into the CPU, sending it out to the cache again and then routing it to its destination puts a top end to the speed of the transfers.

In typical desktop systems this isn't much of a problem. The system doesn't have much to do during these transfers anyway, so who cares? Even if a user has several applications open at once, seldom is more than one actually doing anything, and during disk I/O, the application will likely be idle anyhow.

Now suppose you have an activity known as "streaming" going on which is pulling lots of data from the drive in real time while the application doing the ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

What is the difference between regular DMA and bus mastering?

Plenty!

Bus Mastering Logistics

First, let's look at bus mastering again but from a DMA point of view. A bus is a data transport. Bus mastering is a very advanced means of transporting data to and from devices and/or memory using the PCI bus as a conduit.

A device that issues read and write operations to memory and/or I/O slave devices is considered the master, although a master device can have slave memory and/or I/O ports available to be accessed by other masters. For example, an Ethernet controller must convey data it receives from over the LAN and must also access data to send over the LAN as a bus master, but acts as a slave when the CPU, acting as a master, programs it to initialize and to specify where it must get and put data.

Only one bus master can own, or "drive" the bus at a given instant, and the bus is responsible for arbitrating bus master requests from the various bus master dev ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

So how do you get this so-called Bus Mastering to work anyhow?

First, let's make sure your ducks are in a row. You must have the following squared away:

1)

A motherboard with the proper chip set for bus mastering. The 430 FX, HX, VX, TX and 440 FX, LX, EX, BX, GX chipsets from Intel will support UDMA bus mastering as well as the VIA chip set and some other competing chip sets.

2)

A disk drive that is Ultra DMA compliant. Most new drives are.

3)

Windows 98, Windows 95 OSR2 or above, or Windows NT with service pack 3 (at least!) installed.

How can you tell if you have this condition met? If you have Windows 98 installed, you're ready to rock. If you are running Windows NT and don't know if you have service pack 3 installed, then you aren't the one to be messing with NT and you need to call in whoever it is that normally administers your system. If that's you and you still don't know what I'm talking about, sell your system and buy ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

When it comes to picking a drive for a DAW, you have a bit of a job ahead of you.

We looked at the two contending controller formats in the last sections, but that's just an overview. What about the specifications? What do you need to know about a drive's performance in order to make an intelligent choice regardless of which format you're interested in?

As it turns out, the specifications of both the drives and the controllers can lead you quite clearly to the best choice so long as you don't lose track of what you're after. You want a disk for a DAW - not a file server - so many of the drive specs and controller advantages don't apply and others will count more heavily. On the other hand, you're not just going to be typing email or surfing the net on this system either, so not "just any old drive" will do.

Decision Criteria

To an extent, the drive format you have already committed to will be a big factor. If you don't want to support a large number of drives and CD ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

In comparing IDE and SCSI it is important to understand that both types of drive are, from a "between the shells" point of view, the same.

Inside the Drive

Hard disks have a sealed case with one or more platters of magnetically coated media, a small synchronous motor designed to rotate the platters at a precise speed, and an actuator with one or more arms attached, each with a read/write head at the tip. The platters hold the data in the form of concentric tracks, each split like a pie into many sectors. Each sector will hold 512 bytes of user data as well as error correction information and other alignment information.

The actuator is designed like a speaker voice coil, extending or retracting along its throw path depending on the strength of an electrical signal in the coil which will force it very precisely to any location. The arms attached to the actuator are thereby positioned to various places above the spinning platters where the heads can pick up or lay down streams of ... Read More »

By D. Glen Cardenas on Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM

Introduction

Look in any newsgroup devoted to DAW discussion and sooner or later there will be some sort of mention regarding favorite hard disks or preferred disk formatting techniques or optimum parameter settings or SOMETHING about the impact of specific hard drives on the performance of audio streaming.

Often, the argument starts with the personal preference between SCSI and IDE disk drives. Why "personal preference"? We think that after going over the data in this article, you will see that there's a lot of room for subjective opinion in this discussion. Far from proving that there is one clear winner between the two, research has proven just the opposite.

There is a lot to be said for SCSI. On the other hand, many readers are about to say "A-HA! I knew SCSI was better!" and are about to be disappointed. This will come as a shock to many hard core SCSI advocates - perhaps even an insult! However, before proponents on either side start sending us an HTML flame-thrower, look ... Read More »

By Bill Park on Monday, July 31, 2000 6:00 PM

Show day. The grind begins.

This years NAMM show seemed to be about percussion. Lots and lots of percussion. All sorts of drums, cymbals, and other hitty-things filled booths and displays on all floors. There were also a goodly number of folk instruments...dobros, fiddles, digeridos, mandolins, etc. This was kind of fun.... it didn't have much to do with computers or pro recording, but as a performer I found the resurgance of 'acoustic' instruments to be refreshing.

On our trip through the booths we met Lucinda Ellison, of Lucinda Ellison Musical Instruments, who makes mbiras (thumb pianos) and other interesting acoustic instruments, and Bob McNally, the designer of Martin's Backpacker guitar and creator of his own line of stringed instruments, including the Strumstick. Thier booths were side by side, and right next to the Heartwoode booth. Heartwoode makes a neat guitar strap, constructed from small pieces of various hardwoods. You might have noticed the interesting strap that Car ... Read More »

By Bill Park on Friday, June 30, 2000 6:00 PM

Roger Norman

Roger W. Norman has spent the majority of the past 20 years working in the Personal Computer industry. He has designed networks for the Internal Revenue Service, the US Navy, the FAA, the US Army, and built major programs within the Social Security Administration. Six years ago he left the corporate grind to run his basement facility, SirMusic Studio, as a full-time endeavor. Roger has not looked back since.

Seems like my first real memory is waking up singing ‘Davy Crockett' and everything goes from there. I've always had a guitar, even if the first one was plastic with plastic strings. I learned to play piano by banging away and seeing what happened. I've played in tons of bands, I've always liked recording, and now I've got the best of both worlds. I can do music, capture it and I'm able to reproduce it so that others might enjoy it.

About 1988 I started becoming a little disenfranchised about my high priority / high stress position and star ... Read More »

By Bill Park on Friday, June 30, 2000 6:00 PM

Greg Reierson

Greg Reierson has worked in radio, audio and video duplication as a tech and a mastering engineer, location recording, studio tracking and mixing. Greg has been exclusively mastering for the past eleven years. He has been an officer of the AES for four years and is very active in his local music scene as a performer and service provider.

I suggest that the desire of any individual to learn is more important than the educational facility itself.

I attended a state university where I studied mass communications and broadcasting. The neighboring school offered a recording program so I juggle two schools. I spent most of my waking hours working at the local NPR affiliate as the production manager, recording jazz and classical gigs on location, and experimenting in the studio.

We didn't have much gear to speak of, but we learned tons about what could be done with next to nothing. That experience has made me a much better engineer tha ... Read More »

By Rip Rowan on Friday, June 30, 2000 6:00 PM

The Waves L1 Ultramaximizer plug-in has earned respect from virtually everyone who has ever used it. It is a very transparent limiter that doesn't overshoot, allowing it to be safely used as proof against digital clipping. Now, Waves has released a hardware version of the L1, the L2 Ultramaximizer.

The L2 Ultramaximizer is a stereo digital peak limiter that boasts high-quality 24/96 conversion, digital I/O, and a 48-bit digital signal path. The L2 is housed in an attractive 2-space rack unit. Although it is a purely digital processor, care has been taken to provide it with a user interface that makes it "feel" like a piece of analog gear. I for one will no longer subject myself to dinky 2-line LCD displays and 4-button navigators, and I'm glad the L2 provides a useful user interface.

A Pretty Face. And More.

The left side of the unit provides options fo ... Read More »

By Garry Simmons on Friday, June 30, 2000 6:00 PM

Although the Swissonic name is relatively new (they were formerly known as MusicNet), the AD24 and DA24 are no strangers to the US pro audio market. These highly regarded converters have been available from Sonorus as the AudI/O AD/24 and DA/24. Sonorus was simply re-badging the Swissonic units (i.e. same box, different paint).

Now, Swissonic is bringing their products directly to you. These converters, as well as the entire Swissonic product line, are now being distributed by Swissonic America. Sonorus is also offering the entire product line, although they will have the Swissonic name on them (see

http://www.sonorus.com/press24.html

for more info). The rapidly expanding Swissonic product line also includes a USB audio interface (the USB Studio D) as well as other converter options (see ProRec review of the AD96 and DA96). More info is available from Swissonic A ... Read More »