After 20+ years in professional audio: live sound engineering, studio technical direction (Deep Forest, Pierre Jacquot), head of digital marketing at Playback.fr. A first-hand witness to the analog-to-digital shift, I track the whole audio landscape and break it down here — no fluff.
Behind the robot voice of Kraftwerk or Daft Punk sits a simple idea: stamp the spectrum of a voice onto a synth. Here is what a vocoder really is, how carrier and modulator work, and how to get an intelligible sound out of one.
A lone subwoofer radiates in every direction, including back at the stage. Cardioid arrays flip the logic: they aim the energy at the audience and cancel it behind. Here is how they work and how to set them up.
In digital audio every sample has to land at exactly the right instant, or your gear drops out and the sound suffers. Here is what word clock, jitter and master clocks really mean — and when an external clock actually changes anything.
Cleanup, subtractive EQ, two-stage compression, de-essing and LUFS calibration: the complete method for treating a voice in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, with YouTube, podcast and broadcast targets.
The Mini Pops 7 revives the analog rhythm box, but it is a preset machine. Here are 7 analog and hybrid drum machines to program, from a $149 clone to a $1,600 boutique box.
The RØDECaster Pro II does more than record a stereo mix: it captures every source on its own track, handles mix-minus for remote guests automatically, and works as a multichannel audio interface. Here is how to actually use those features in podcast and radio production.
Dillon Bastan releases Iota II, a plugin that turns the spectrogram into a playing surface. You draw playback paths through the sound, blending sampling, spectral and granular synthesis. It fills the gap left by iZotope Iris 2, for $60.
Neumann updates a mixing-room staple and adds a bigger sibling. The KH 310 II keeps the sealed cabinet that made the KH 310 a reference while gaining headroom; the all-new KH 350 goes bass-reflex down to 27 Hz. Both move to Class-D amplification.
Yamaha fills the gap between the DM3 and the DM7 with two new compact digital consoles, the DM5 and DM5 Compact, aimed at small-to-mid live, corporate, house of worship and broadcast work.
The DI box is one of the quietest, most useful tools on a stage. It turns an unbalanced instrument signal into a clean balanced one that survives long cable runs. Here’s what it does, the difference between active and passive models, and the settings that matter in the field.