dave

A speaker designer speaks out

Speaker designers are fascinating people, and each one has his or her own unique perspective and priorities. Some are "pure" engineers, and spend most of their working life in front of a computer; others test and measure their designs, but invest countless hours listening to prototypes.

I recently interviewed Dave Wilson, founder and chief engineer for Wilson Audio Specialties for The Absolute Audiophile magazine. Wilson Audio is the high-end audio equivalent of Ferrari; the Provo, Utah,-based company makes ultra-high-performance speakers for the most demanding audiophiles and music industry professionals. Warner Brothers, Pixar, Disney, and CBS/Sony are all Wilson customers.

Q: The greatest challenge is making highly accurate speakers that still sound good with less-than-stellar recordings. Accuracy can't be the only design goal. Wilson: Right, it's like designing a car for sports car enthusiasts, and developing it entirely on a smooth racetrack. You find that if you take out all of the suspension compliance, the car performs better and lap times go way down, so it's great on the track, but it will be hell to drive on a real road. [In audio] a lot of people use "accuracy" as a pejorative, meaning the sound is bright, forward, or lean in the lower midrange; so it emphasizes high-frequency detail at the expense of the music's body and soul.

So the art of speaker design is all about preserving accuracy without losing musicality. Wilson: The speaker needs enough resilience and latitude to sound great with all types of music. As our designs have improved over the years they have become more tolerant of imperfect recordings. It should just sound right.

That's exactly what I thought when I heard your new speaker, the Sasha. It's highly resolved and it's still very easy to listen to. Your designs of the last few years have more curves and fewer hard edges than before; do I see a Ferrari influence in the Wilson aesthetic?… Read more

Mastering engineer muses on sound of music

Dave McNair has been playing, recording, mixing, producing, and mastering music for more than 30 years and has worked with a wide range of artists including Los Lobos, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Patti Smith, Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, Angelique Kidjo, and John Mayall. He now works for New York City's top mastering house, Sterling Sound.

I interviewed McNair for Tone Audio magazine, this is just a small part of it.

Q: How has the mastering engineer's work changed from the days when analog audio ruled the roost?

When they were cutting records from analog masters, mastering engineers were caretakers of rather fragile analog signals. It wasn't an easy thing, trying to get it from Point A to Point B without losing the music. Back then the mastering engineer didn't compress or limit the signal all that much, you wanted the end user to hear all of the punch and leading edge dynamics. But now that things are so clean on the recording end mastering is a bridge from mixing to the duplication process. You might be adding the color that might have once been added by analog processors or mixing consoles.

Q: 'Color,' is that the same thing as sweetening?

Right, I'm chasing this idea, I want to make CDs sound like LPs.

Q: By adding complementary distortions?

Not always, but sometimes. I want to get more of the effortless sound of vinyl on CDs.

Q: It's pretty complex, but I agree, analog distortions can sound more musical than digital, even high-resolution digital.

Right, they add flavor, texture, and harmonics, but I'm not speaking for all mastering engineers; many still use a very simple path and stay away from enhancements.

Q: Like compression, you guys love compression. But the music was already compressed during tracking and mixing, why compress it again?

 Not always, maybe 20 percent of the time I get stuff that's not compressed enough. That's only because there's so many more new-to-the-game, semiamateur engineers making records these days. They're recording some really great, artistically valid bands, but it winds up sounding like a documentary style of recording. They leave it to the mastering guy to make it work, so I need to make the sound more dense, gluing the elements together. … Read more

Game trailers that work: Daredevil Dave (iPhone)

Think about some of the best movie trailers you've ever seen; the ones that made you sit up and say, "I gotta see that!" (For my money, they don't get any better than the trailer for Cloverfield.)

A good game trailer can have the same impact. For example, I just got my first look at Daredevil Dave: Motorcycle Stuntman! Immediate reaction? I gotta play that! Watch the trailer for yourself (the whole thing) and see if you don't agree:

Funny, right? I mean, the developer had me from the get-go: the opening lines immediately made … Read more

Google: Don't upgrade Office, add Docs

On the eve of the business launch of Office 2010, Google is arguing that there is a better way for businesses to upgrade their productivity suite.

Instead of paying Redmond for the new version, Google argues businesses would be better off using the version of Office they have and mixing in Google Docs to get their dose of collaboration and Web-based tools.

"Most people find, and they maybe perhaps don't expect it at first, that Google Docs works quite well with Office and in fact it makes Office better," Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said in an … Read more

Facebook's Dave Morin announces departure

Longtime Facebook employee Dave Morin announced on his personal blog Friday that he's leaving the company and will be starting up a new endeavor with original Napster creator Shawn Fanning.

At Facebook, which Morin joined late in 2006 following a marketing gig at Apple, he served as "senior platform manager." He became one of the company's most high-profile representatives when it launched its developer platform in 2007 and then Facebook Connect in 2008.

His departure is not surprising. While Morin, now 29 and recently engaged to a Googler, had been extremely prominent at Facebook for quite … Read more

Dave Taylor on CES and the most common tech questions

Dave Taylor is a tech author, journalist, blogger, and question answerer. His Web site, AskDaveTaylor.com, is a place where anyone can submit a question or learn from his many previous answers. Larry Magid asked Taylor about his most common questions, which turn out to be password recovery for people who's social-networking sites were commandeered and iPod issues.

Magid and Taylor also talked about what impressed them at CES. Taylor's response was "smart energy monitoring for the home."

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So long, and thanks for all the hits

With this post, I begin my new career and bring this blog to a close.

As of Monday, I'm a senior systems architect at Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. I'm working for David R. Ditzel, vice president, Hybrid Parallel Computing. Ditzel is perhaps best known as a founder and CEO of Transmeta. He was also a CTO at Sun Microsystems and, while at Bell Labs in 1980, co-author of a seminal paper on Reduced Instruction-Set Computing (RISC).

I can't say any more about what we're working on. Please don't ask. :-)

Suffice it to say … Read more

Top recording engineers explain why music sounds awful

I attended a fascinating panel discussion, "Behind The Glass: Audio Production in the 21st Century" at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York City on Sunday.

The panelists were all prominent record producers and engineers: Tony Brown (Elvis Presley, Emmy Lou Harris); Jimmy Douglass (Jay-Z, the Rolling Stones); Dave Hewitt (Simon and Garfunkel, U2); Ryan Hewitt (Avett Brothers, Red Hot Chili Peppers); George Massenburg (Linda Ronstadt, Lyle Lovett); Ann Mincieli (Alicia Keys, Whitney Houston); and Russ Titelman (Stevie Winwood, Eric Clapton). These people know from where they speak!

Moderator Howard Massey led the panel through a discussion of the problems facing the record industry, with a primary focus on sound quality. Massey co-authored (with Geoff Emerick) my favorite Beatles book of all time, "Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles." He also has a new book coming out, "Behind the Glass, Volume II: Top Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits" a collection of interviews with top record producers and audio engineers.

It seems like the main problem comes from record company pressure to make perfect recordings. Vocalists' off-pitch and out-of-time singing is tweaked with Auto-Tune; music-making is largely technology-based. That is, technology has replaced musical talent, and singers like Britney Spears were cited many times as to where it's all headed. Not so musically talented, her music has to be patched together in the studio. There's not a lot of there there.

Jimmy Douglass talked about the overuse of dynamic range compression, admitting that since most music is listened to over crappy computer speakers or cheap earbuds, compression is required to make it sound acceptable. Sad, but true. … Read more

The 404 430: Where we Microsoft Courier your enthusiasm

We couldn't record today's Podcast without spending a little time on Gizmodo's big unveiling of Microsoft's secret tablet PC. The blog is reporting that even though our first inclination is to call it a tablet, it's really more of a booklet, with two 7-inch(ish) screens with multitouch, a 3MP camera on the back, and a fancy stylus for clicking, writing, dragging, and drawing. In typical 404 fashion, we have to poke fun at the fact that while a long plastic pen is very innovative, we wish it had fully functioning voice recognition, but as we've seen from the Google iPhone app, that technology will likely never be perfected. In the meantime, it looks like the Microsoft booklet will materialize before the fabled Apple tablet.

Speaking of Apple, Wilson and I are very psyched for Google to finally release push e-mail support on Google Sync for the iPhone. This means there will always be a connection to Google's servers to keep your mailbox up to date. There's no additional application necessary, just head to m.google.com/sync from your computer and follow these instructions.

If you're a long-time 404 listener, you'll remember a few months back when my iPhone camera stopped working and the Apple Genius at the store told me that my phone had somehow been submerged in water, judging by the indication on the external water sensor. Well as it turns out, that liquid sensor is a filthy liar. There are actually two liquid sensors on the phone, an internal and an external, which more often than not, tell contradicting stories. If a Genius sees the external one is triggered, the official Apple protocol tells them to report that the warranty is now void and Apple is no longer responsible for fixing the damaged phone. More importantly, the protocol says not to open iPhones and check the internal sensor. If you've had a similar experience, we want to hear about it, but you should also head back to the Apple store and ask them to open up the phone and double-check it. Who knows, you might leave with a brand-new iPhone.

EPISODE 430 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video Image Credit: Gizmodo… Read more