Christopher Woods

488 reputation

bio	website	chriswoods.co.uk
	location	Birmingham, United Kingdom
	age	27
visits	member for	2 years, 3 months
	seen	Mar 11 at 5:38
stats	profile views	6

Boo. :P

	488 reputation	bio	website	chriswoods.co.uk	visits	member for	2 years, 3 months
26 badges		location	Birmingham, United Kingdom		seen	Mar 11 at 5:38

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Mar 11	comment	VST plugin that hosts VST plugins If not all VSTs work because they require API calls the primary VST host doesn't support, you'll still encounter incompatibility further down the chain. And, instead of a graceful fail, fb will probably just crash. FWIW, I use George Yohng's VST Wrapper for Foobar player v1.2 with my fb2k installs, and it works great for just about everything. With LOADS of VSTs Foobar can take longer to start as the wrapper parses all of your plugins, but I hardly ever close foobar ;)
Feb 22	awarded	Yearling
Feb 22	awarded	Yearling
Feb 21	comment	How is it possible to hear something at 44.1Khz? Speaking from experience, recording at 44.1 kHz / 48 kHz is somewhat of a moot point. 48 kHz is used for film and TV due to its (now much) easier synchronisation with video framerates, whole numbers ftw. Professional studios equipped with sufficient quality gear will now opt for a higher bitdepth - 24 bit recording either at 44.1 kHz or 88.2 kHz (if they can capture those frequencies, and it's worth it). They'd only usually opt for 48 kHz / 96 kHz if they knew they were going to be providing an eventual mixdown primarily for film or video.
Feb 21	comment	How is it possible to hear something at 44.1Khz? The standardisation on 44.1 kHz is not purely related to the average ear's range of detection, it's also to do with sync with audiovisual equipment. See the Audio CD's Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc#44.1_kHz_sample_rate. As has been said already, provided the equipment used to record and play back is of sufficient high fidelity, frequencies above 20 kHz will allow for more harmonics and ultrasonics which can improve the imaging and realism of instruments. You 'feel' the sound.
Feb 14	revised	Voiceover drowns in music. How do I make it more dominant? adding tips about mic placement
Feb 14	answered	Voiceover drowns in music. How do I make it more dominant?
Dec 5	comment	Reducing breath noise I'd start by taking down breath noises by about 3 dB. Try to make sure it's not a simple shelf cut, attempt to get a bit of bezier curve into the automation - you can do this by applying automation in Touch mode whilst playing the track back -- if you're not linear with your gain adjustment it'll sound really awful. If you can get the adjustments on target, it will sound even more realistic as you'll be able to hear your singer breathing away from the mic then moving back towards it to sing the next phrase. I find it far more pleasing than completely cutting all breath sounds.
Dec 5	comment	When should I trust my ears over the phase/vector/lissajous scope? Also, if a track's being mastered for vinyl -- and it's always going to be (re)mastered for vinyl, usually from the original bounce -- the requirements, and the treatment it's given, varies drastically from a 'standard' CD- or digital-oriented master. Multiband processing and selective narrowing of stereo image across frequency bands is easily achievable so out of phase components can be nipped in the bud before a track ever makes it to the lathe.
Dec 5	answered	Record Skype conversation with Audacity
Nov 26	comment	How do I maximize the audio quality of a recorder? Need to correct my previous comment - I did some more testing to idiot check my own issued-as-fact statement and there's in fact two stages for possible gain adjustment: the Low/Medium/High switch on the outside is pre-A/D and the "Recording Level" (0-128) is post-A/D. I leave my Recording Level at 100 (discerned to be equivalent to 0 dB); 128 is +arbitrary dB (6 or 12). The H2N apparently has proper analogue gain control but I've not had the opportunity to compare. I was 50% correct in my last assertion; if you adjust the Recording Level technically you are cutting or boosting digital. ;-)
Nov 23	revised	Getting rid of a lisp Missed finishing a paragraph! (cutting the EQ once you've found the sibilant frequency band)
Nov 22	comment	Imitating a phone call? As well as bandlimiting and sharply filtering above and below the aforementioned frequencies, applying some judicious parallel compression and distortion will also help you achieve a more realistic result. Old handsets used carbon mics with notoriously lo-fi reproduction characteristics; whilst most phones now use tiny electrets the circuitry's designed to rapidly and severely compress (in terms of dynamic range) incoming sound with a long release. That's why if your conversational partner blows down the mic, everything goes silent momentarily then ramps back up. Compress the hell out of it!
Nov 22	answered	Getting rid of a lisp
Oct 13	comment	What exactly does “Ethernet-capable HDMI cable” mean? I've noted that the crop of current-gen TVs have an increasing amount of multimedia functionality. Taking this one step into the future, if (in theory) you had a display, NAS (or other storage medium) and an amp / switcher all supporting HDMI ethernet you could likely forego the requirement to have a separate network cable to connect them all together. Single cable streaming! I like the logical step of removing another cable, the final thing we we need is Power over Ethernet over HDMI (PoEoH... 'poweoh'? Sounds like Schwarzenegger trying to pronounce 'power' ;-) - THEN we're cooking with gas.
Oct 13	comment	How do I maximize the audio quality of a recorder? @leftaroundabout I meant exactly what I said -- the gain adjustment was placed in the circuit flow post-ADC from the inbuilt mics. External audio sources plugged into the Mic/Line In socket likely pass through a similarly designed signal path so will experience the same problem. I simply said "post-digitisation" to describe how it's the already-digitised signal that's being gain adjusted (and therefore simply scaled, including any distortion) as opposed to an analogue, limiter-style adjustment pre-ADC which could perhaps cope with a little overmodulation going in.
Sep 19	comment	How do I record songs straight from a vinyl record to a cassette tape? Does your tape deck have its own recording level pot? My dad's old deck had the ability to adjust the recorded signal independently of the line level signal being fed to it from the amp stage. Fortunately the tape deck also had VU meters to avoid under- or over-gaining the recording stage.
Sep 19	comment	How do I maximize the audio quality of a recorder? Some recorders won't even have a decent signal path as the incoming audio's digitised - my own handy recorder, the Zoom H2, is a great little thing, but even if you set to record at 24 bit the SNR and quality of the captured audio (as qualitatively measured by users) is no different from 44.1 kHz, 16 bit capture. Also, the gain switch on it adjusts the gain POST-digitisation... Meaning any clip just gets reduced (or boosted) by 10 dB. I tend to leave that switch at zero! Bear it in mind when shopping around for players - do extensive research on potential devices to identify any shortcomings.
Sep 15	comment	Noise removal vs. adding bed noise In contrast, I would vote in favour of keeping the background sound and then mixing in appropriately. it's very important to have natural, consistent audio -- it will help viewers effectively ignore flaws in the video (amazing what poor quality of video you can tolerate when the sound is good). I HATE the aliased, digital sound of excessively noise-reduced vocals; it sounds unnatural and blends syllables together when not applied well. I always prefer a bit of location sound with all of the speech sounds audible, just blend any scene transitions. (I am an audio engineer & sound recordist)
Sep 15	comment	How do you handle performers that want to “fix it in the mix”? Or an adaptation of the original English saying, "you can't polish a turd" -- in our case, "I can polish this turd to a shine... But it's still shit"