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.
The Producely Dialr is the first hardware controller that maps your plugins automatically, with no assigning and no templates. Twelve knobs, a 7-inch touchscreen and an AI cloud that recognises your VST3 the moment you open it.
Sony’s fourth-generation DWX brings the DWT-B40 bodypack transmitter and the DWR-R40Q rack receiver: 32-bit float backup recording inside the transmitter, a four-channel 1U receiver with Dante, and setup that is finally simple.
Roland’s TR-1000 Rhythm Creator is its most ambitious drum machine in decades: sixteen analog circuits descended from the TR-808 and TR-909, a sprawling digital engine and a full stereo sampler, all in a road-ready aluminium chassis. Here are the specs, the price and where it sits.
Tascam refreshes its solid-state recorder/player for install and broadcast. The SS-R300N adds secure network file transfer, OSC control and an optional Dante card.
d&b adds real-time auralization to its ArrayCalc software. You can now listen, on headphones, to what a system design will sound like before a single box goes up.
With the LW6, LEWITT releases its first-ever headphones and goes wireless for the studio. Uncompressed UWB transmission, sub-6ms latency and onboard DSP: the Austrian brand wants to normalise an idea long dismissed as heresy.
Soundpaint hits version 5.0 and finally grows up. 8Dio’s free engine gets a built-in sample editor, an eight-layer engine and a monster arpeggiator, and it is still free to download.
Between the console and the transmitter, a radio station’s sound runs through an audio processor that sets its sonic signature and protects the modulation. AGC, multiband compression, limiter, clipper, stereo generator: here is what each stage does, and why setting it is an art as much as a science.
Attack, decay, sustain, release: these four controls decide whether a sound snaps, settles or fades. The ADSR envelope is the tool that shapes a note’s contour over time. Understand it once, and half of sound design falls into place.
Also called New York compression, parallel compression blends a heavily compressed copy of a signal with the untouched original. You gain density and energy without giving up natural dynamics. Here is how it works, how to set it and where it truly earns its place.