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.
Antares launches Auto-Tune Advanced, built around a new DVA engine that detects and preserves a singer’s natural vibrato, even under hard correction. Auto-Mode is rebuilt, Live Mode drops to 0.84 ms latency, and the plug-in ships at $450 perpetual.
PreSonus refreshes its compact digital console line with the StudioLive Series III SE, in SE 16, SE 24 and SE 32 sizes. Highlights: 32-bit float processing, Milan-certified AVB networking and a 64×64 USB interface, starting at $1,799.99.
On radio and TV, ‘live’ is almost never quite live: a broadcast delay of a few seconds sits between the studio and the transmitter. Here’s what it’s for, how it’s built, how you ‘dump’ it, and why it remains an essential safety net.
A line array isn’t rigged at random: its height, overall tilt and above all the splay angles between boxes decide the coverage from the front row to the back. Here’s how to think about the hang for an even sound, with no gaps and no punishing level in the front row.
Before EQ, before the compressor, there’s mic placement: it decides about 80% of your recorded sound. Distance, axis, proximity effect, room reflections, the 3:1 rule for stereo… here are the concrete pointers to capture clean, source by source.
Music Thing Modular has rebuilt the Radio Music, one of its best-loved modules, as a Mk2 that keeps the spirit and changes almost everything else. Still 4 HP and still hackable, but with a new processor, a far lower noise floor and much cleaner playback. Pre-orders are open, with shipping due in October 2026.
Sennheiser adds a ZMAN version of its Spectera wireless base station, carrying a Merging network module for AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110. It plugs wideband wireless straight into an all-IP broadcast plant.
Stage wireless is turning a corner: on-board 32-bit float, wideband transmission and digital that’s finally affordable. Seven systems that matter in 2026, from entry-level to the broadcast flagship, sorted into honest tiers.
Black Lion Audio launches the MIDI Eight, an 8-in / 8-out rack MIDI interface. Class-compliant, with a powered USB hub and three standalone routing modes, it links a whole synth rack with or without a computer. Price: $349.
XLR, jack, Speakon, powerCON, multicore: on a stage, half the trouble comes from connectors. Here is what each one is for, why you never run a speaker on a jack, and the habits that keep you off the failure list mid-show.