Update Monitors, Acoustics and Har-Bal - Ready to go !
Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 3:44 pm
Hi Har-Bal folks,
I have been down for a while as we were moving cross-country and I had to put my studio to sleep for a bit. Now that our plans have changed I am re-assembling my studio and doing some final acoustics tweaking. The good news is it is better than ever as I have replaced the Yamaha RX-V1200 Home theater amp and Alesis active M1's and over-damped acoustic treatments with: Benchmark DAC-1, Event ASP8, bass traps (homemade) and Auralex 3" for mids and high treatment. This time I won't kill all the good 'reflections' and will use ETF software to help me with RT60 and reflections preventing an overly dead room (bad news).
Why am I mentioning monitoring on the Har-Bal forum? Well, I'm a big fan of using visual audio spectrum RTA's as well as any software that gives visual feed back that I can compare to a reference point. But sometimes you just gotta turn all that stuff off and listen - let the 'force be with you' and twist knobs using you ears not your eyes. So that's the piece I was missing - good enough monitoring that worked well in the room and let me accurately hear the changes I was making with Har-Bal.
I am ferociously bad with an EQ so that is what initially attracted me to Har-Bal and other 'curve-matching' EQs. I live for the day when I can walk up to any audio and tweak it to match the reference in my head. Until then I'm having to use Har-Bal to help me out, once I get the EQ art 'mastered' then I imagine I'll keep using Har-Bal like any other tool when appropriate to cobble together songs for a CD or DVD project.
Currently I'm just trying to re-master some older analog tape recordings from a few years ago. All recorded, mixed, and 'mastered' in analog at a home studio with terrible monitoring. I'll be using Har-Bal to rebalance the EQ and Loudness prior to making any dynamics adjustments (upward expansion, compression and limiting) - hopefully with a well balanced EQ curve I'll need to use less dynamics to 'repair' this stuff.
Now that Har-Bal 1.5 has been out for a while and I have my monitoring setup sounding pretty good I'm gonna get started...I'm sure I might have a question or 3...
I have been down for a while as we were moving cross-country and I had to put my studio to sleep for a bit. Now that our plans have changed I am re-assembling my studio and doing some final acoustics tweaking. The good news is it is better than ever as I have replaced the Yamaha RX-V1200 Home theater amp and Alesis active M1's and over-damped acoustic treatments with: Benchmark DAC-1, Event ASP8, bass traps (homemade) and Auralex 3" for mids and high treatment. This time I won't kill all the good 'reflections' and will use ETF software to help me with RT60 and reflections preventing an overly dead room (bad news).
Why am I mentioning monitoring on the Har-Bal forum? Well, I'm a big fan of using visual audio spectrum RTA's as well as any software that gives visual feed back that I can compare to a reference point. But sometimes you just gotta turn all that stuff off and listen - let the 'force be with you' and twist knobs using you ears not your eyes. So that's the piece I was missing - good enough monitoring that worked well in the room and let me accurately hear the changes I was making with Har-Bal.
I am ferociously bad with an EQ so that is what initially attracted me to Har-Bal and other 'curve-matching' EQs. I live for the day when I can walk up to any audio and tweak it to match the reference in my head. Until then I'm having to use Har-Bal to help me out, once I get the EQ art 'mastered' then I imagine I'll keep using Har-Bal like any other tool when appropriate to cobble together songs for a CD or DVD project.
Currently I'm just trying to re-master some older analog tape recordings from a few years ago. All recorded, mixed, and 'mastered' in analog at a home studio with terrible monitoring. I'll be using Har-Bal to rebalance the EQ and Loudness prior to making any dynamics adjustments (upward expansion, compression and limiting) - hopefully with a well balanced EQ curve I'll need to use less dynamics to 'repair' this stuff.
Now that Har-Bal 1.5 has been out for a while and I have my monitoring setup sounding pretty good I'm gonna get started...I'm sure I might have a question or 3...