RecordingJunkie

Recording Junkie is a user driven audio engineering library that contains manuals, spec sheets, repair manuals and more. While you are here register for the Audio Pro Map, GET FOUND and GET HIRED!

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7 April 2008 - We're Moving! - Update 16 April

We are moved. The old store is down while we work on a new one. Not a big deal. If anyone wants to order our DAW1, you can call the number at the bottom of every page, or the number on the DAW1 sales flyer. The map is working, but the forums are buggy, we are working on that now. The resources database works and we have A LOT more storage space so now we can get some more resources up here without worrying about storage or bandwidth.

S!
Jason

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4 April 2008 - Recording Junkie DAWs

We have spent some time designing and testing several DAWs in recent weeks. I have put together a new article on building your very own DAW, as well as put together a tested and powerful DAW, that is not only economical, but easily expandable to fit anything you might want to throw at it.

I you are a do it your self kind of engineer, you can read through the Build your own DAW article posted in our forums. The article covers the basics to think about when developing an idea of what kind of DAW to build, sourcing the parts, and putting it all together. Feel free to comment in the thread if you have suggestions or questions, we will update it to cover anything that comes up. Call us at (615)809-4574 and we can help source the parts for you.

Alternatively, we have for sale one of the DAWs that we designed and tested. It features the new Intel E8400 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB DDR2 800MHz RAM, 250GB SATA 3.0Gbps HD, XP Pro OS, 512MB Nvidia video card, Asus Motherboard with RAID 0/1/0+1/5 capability, a wireless KB/mouse combo, 19" widescreen monitor, 2.1 stereo speaker setup. All of this will be optimized for audio work. We also offer free setup of an audio interface, for those customers that are here locally in middle TN.

S!
Jason

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1 January 2008 - New Year is Tracking

Happy New Year!! 2008 is here and Recording Junkie has some cool tools planned for the Audio Engineering and Studio community. Whether we get to all of it will depend on how busy we are with other things, but rest assured the items will remain on the tracklist until they are reality.

You will notice we have added a translator to the site, if not it is in the right hand column. We were getting quite a few hits from places like Germany, and Denmark and while we would love to make this site absolutely accessible to everyone, we have too many other projects to keep this site in too many languages. Hopefully the translator will be helpful to some users however.

The audio pro map seems to be performing well. If you would like your studio or services listed, you can send your information through the contact us link, or register on your own (read the instructions though, there is one spot that most miss). More features will be added to the map in the future. We will likely also require a once per year login to verify your studio is still open for business. This will keep the search results relevant and keep your studio from having to compete with closed businesses for customer attention. This is a problem on most of the studio listings we have seen.

Good luck in the New Year!
Jason

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1 December 2007 - Audio Pro Map Upgrades

The Audio Pro Map is a tool designed to help find studios, audio engineers, producers, gear manufacturers, mastering services, and other audio engineering related services. The new map adds a colored marker based on the type of service the Pro offers.  = Studio   = Manufacturer   = Producer   = Engineer   = Other. We will add other types as needed. Also added is the website links for all Pros that have a site and an email link to contact them.

Recording Junkie hopes you find these improvements helpful. Now, try it out... Find a studio or other audio pro service today!

S!
Jason

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30 November 2007 - Forums Changes

The forums we use got an update and in the meantime broke the nice looking forum style we worked so hard on. We will be using the default forum with a few cosmetic changes until a more concrete version of the forum code is released. It is only cosmetic :).

S!
Jason

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29 November 2007 - Forums down for an hour or two for updates

We are currently performing some maintenance and updates to the forums. They should be backup by the end of the night. Meanwhile take a look around at the resources section, or find something in your own stash to share and send it on over via the contact form.

S!
Jason

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1 November 2007 - Solid State Hard Drives in Audio

What has been the biggest bottle-neck in digital recording for as long as you can remember? The answer is Read and Write access to your hard disk drive. Computers have attained faster clock speeds on the CPU, so they can process information quicker, they have multiple cores, so they can process more items simultaneously, and faster bus speeds, the volatile memory (RAM) has become faster and larger, allowing for quicker access to application files, but the hard drives have lagged miserably behind for years. SCSI has been the consistent favorite for speed for over a decade. The speeds of SCSI drives are somewhat misleading however. SCSI is the interface technology from the computer the drive, but the speed of the SCSI comes from the platters spinning at higher speeds than the IDE interfaced drives are typically capable of. SCSI disks are 10K and 15K RPM respectively. IDE and SATA drives are 5400, 7200, and a few 10K RPM. The drives depend on a mechanical arm and a magnetic platter and record and read the data to/from the disk. All of this data and the limitations of the mechanical device add up to time to "seek"(find) the data, time to "read" the data, and time to "write" the data. These times have been the bottleneck for pro audio recording for some time now.

Time delays anywhere in the signal chain add up to "latency"(time delays) in the recording of audio, and can add up to some interesting problems within your DAW. Ultimately this costs the recording engineer time, and possibly money, by requiring the engineer to nudge tracks around to get them to line back up in time properly, as well as making overdubs a challenge at times. Hard drives have long been the cause of much of the latency in digital recording. The human ear can begin to hear latency above 10-12ms. With a typical disk drive having inherent read/write/seek times of 9ms/11ms/8ms approximately. 15K RPM SCSI drives jump to almost twice as fast, but none the less, the time does add up to an audible amount. Audio recording software has had to account for these by allowing us to adjust latency, which has worked, but still been limiting in recording.

Are Solid State Drives the answer? SSDs have been coming to puberty in the market. The price is, as of yet, still too high for most of us to invest, but does the performance justify the cost for a select few recordists?

SSDs come in two flavors, the SDRAM type, considered volatile memory, because the computer must be powered for the data to remain intact, and NAND type. SDRAM type are approximately 250 times faster than their mechanical counterparts, but are not the type in which manufacturers are focusing on as HD replacements because of their volatile memory. NAND type drives are similar to the flash drives we have all become so fond of. They are fast to read/seek in comparison to mechanical HDs and they have non-volatile memory.

NAND drives are better at read and seek times by several orders of magnitude than your standard mechanical drives. There are several well written documents on implementations of these drives in enterprise level applications here. NAND drives are lacking in write speed however when compared to mechanical drives with smaller file handling. The quote below details the performance write speeds of SSD drives.

"Because Flash SSDs have write performance that is so much worse than their read performance, the overall performance mix with reads and writes can be confusing. If you are doing pure reads, a Flash SSD will typically be 20x faster than a hard disk for small random reads. If you are doing pure random writes, the same drive might be 15x slower than a hard disk. But what about a 50-50 mix. You might think that the performance would balance out, but you would be wrong."^article

Write speeds of these NAND drives can and does outperform the mechanical disks when working with larger file sizes however. A general rule of thumb is the larger the file the better the write performance because the NAND drive does not have to do what it is bad at as often, that is random writes. Therefore, the SSDs seems to be an improvement over the mechanical drives, though this is dependant upon the file size you write. Typically an audio file from a protools session is easily large enough to see a performance boost. Your own personal testing will be required to determine if there is actual benefit. I would think a 10 second pre-roll, like in the days of tape, would be time enough for the NAND drive to ramp up to speed, though I have not tested this.

SSD technology has come a long way. It is getting better at a rapid rate. In this tech's opinion it is not a significant enough change to warrant the cost. The drives are wildly successful in server applications, where data is being "served" rather than written, such as database applications or even in serving up sound libraries. As many of you that have research SSDs have found, the cost is not cheap. One reason for this is that the market is still very new, the main one I believe is the fact that these are essentially enterprise targeted products, so you will be paying the price for enterprise technology. NAND drives will be cheaper soon, so hold off.

If you are still set on buying an SSD drive however, I can get them through one of my distributors. Please let me know, I will be happy to get you a quote, and would appreciate the sale.

S!
Jason

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25 October 2007 - History Lesson 1

I thought I would highlight the manufacturers that we all love with "history lessons" that I would like to continue into the future. To be diplomatic and fair, I am simply going to start with the As. So here goes. History Lesson 1.

Ampeg Company was started in 1946 by pianist and bassist, Everette Hull, and Stanley Michaels. The company was originally called Michaels-Hull Electronic Labs. Hull designed a new microphone pickup for the bass guitar that was placed in the end of the bass. The pickup was called the "Amplified Peg" and the name was shortened to, you guessed it, Ampeg. The pickup needed an amplifier that would not distort when the stronger transient attacks were played.¹

Ampeg built small bass amps called, creatively, "The BassAmps", until 1960 when they introduced the Portaflex series of amplifiers. Portaflex amplifiers are a mainstay in many recording studios and are easily recognized by their "flip-tops". The amplifier is stored inside the enclosure for transport, and flips out while being used.

In 1969 Ampeg marketed new bass amps with SVT, Super Valve Technology, which were 2-3 times the power output of other amplifiers that ampeg had on the market. This power advantage made them popular with large venues. Dumb luck happened to Ampeg in 1969. The Rolling Stones came to the states with their Fender Amps, the guy plugging in the amps failed to realize that voltages are different across the pond and blew the amps. The Stones were given the use of the prototype SVTs to use for the remainder of the tour. Rich Mandella, Ampeg's Hollywood liaison, stayed on with the Stone's as their Ampeg tech. Despite the ability to handle more power than the original Fender's the Stones had brought, they were still pushing them to the limit and Mandella had to switch between heads when they were nearing the breaking point.²

Ampeg has ventured into other music equipment making as well with their "Baby Bass", Ampeg guitars and Basses, "scroll"-basses, horizontal basses, as well as effects pedals and stand alone reverb units.

Check out our resources section for more info on Ampeg bass amps, and Ampeg guitar amps.

S!
Jason

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5 October 2007 - Studio Database Beta version LIVE!!

Recording Junkie is proud to release the Beta version of our Studio Database and mapping application. The purpose of the database is to help individuals and companies to find audio recording services, as well as to help studios find clients. The Beta version has no restrictions on range of search, so all of the studios will be displayed that are in the database, this is not optimal, but will work in the short term. Range limitations will be implemented as soon as the resources can be devoted to development. If you would like to register your studio visit the map and complete the registration process.

Recording Junkie is very proud of the work completed on the mapping app. If you would like to leave us some feedback, please send us an email. And as always, if you have any resources to submit to the database, you can submit those in the submissions forum, or can send them via the email form.

S!
Jason

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27 September 2007 - Propellerheads Reason 4 Released

New sequencer, groove tool, arpeggiator and synth. Check out the news and download the demo over at Propellerheads.

Keep an eye out for a write up on solid state hard drives. I've had word that some of the DAW softwares are already tested and working with them. HD write speed is getting ready to drop dramatically! This will improve that constant headache "latency".

S!
Jason

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23 August 2007 - dbx products added to Resources

I have added a bunch of dbx products to the resources database. I hope to have more soon if/when I get approval from dbx. They are good enough to put many of their resources on their site anyhow, so hopefully they will be equally good in getting us any we are missing.

Products added include 160/161/162, 160s, 162SL compressors, 504X digital output card, 223/234 crossovers, 933 distribution amp, 1086, 286A pre-amp and dynamics processor, 166, 166A, 168A, 172, 1BX series III dynamic processors, 263A, 902 de-essers, 274 quad expander/gate, 463X OverEasy gate/expander, 904 gate, DDP, 296 spectral enhancer, 120X, 120XP subharmonic synthesizers, 1531X stereo/mono graphic eq, 242, 905 parametric eqs, 30 series eq, F900A and FS900 chassis, 140X type II noise reduction, 150, 150X, 180 type I noise reduction, 563X, 929 single-ended noise reduction, 911, 941A noise reduction.

Hope you all find them useful :)

S!
Jason

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