I know for a fact that automobiles have a mind of their own. When you are nice to them and keep them clean, they run better. If you stroke the steering wheel just so, you can coax it to start so you don’t have to walk home.

I am also a firm believer that audio equipment can turn on you in a heartbeat if you don’t treat it nicely. When my digital delay is acting up, I can get it to work fine by plugging it into an outlet of its own on the other side of the room. My Harmonizer came back to life after I installed a CPU cooling fan over the digital converter chips.

On the other hand, my G3 laptop computer likes to be slapped around. The LCD screen keeps turning white so I can’t see anything. It has never done it when I have taken it in for service, but it happens about 10 times per day when the service tech is not watching. I had to take videos of the screen before the tech would even believe that it was happening. (The guys in the studio thought I was nuts when I would run across the control room, grab my video camera and start video taping the screen on my laptop.) So, every time my screen turns white, I have to give it a backhand to the upper left corner o the screen. It then works fine for half an hour or so, then I have to give it another smack.

Then there is the Neve console that I have to whack on the side with my shoe. Kicking it doesn’t work, I have to take my shoe off and smack it on the side by module one and the crackling noise goes away.

How about Pro Tools? How many of you have a love-hate relationship with your Pro Tools system? Right now I bet there are at least a dozen people begging their Pro Tools system to please SAVE one more time before crashing.

My computer mouse has fun with me all of the time. I click the button to pull down a menu, drag down to the selection I want, and then just as I am letting go of the mouse button, the mouse pointer moves to the menu selection just above or below the one I really wanted. I know the neighbors can hear me when I yell "NOOOOOOOO," and all of my animals scatter to the far corners of the house. (They have learned to split up so I can’t find all of them at once. When I lived in Nashville I learned to take frustrations out on my dog.)

Feedback is a way that equipment has of communicating its anger with you. After a mic preamp has to endure out of tune vocals for a while, a nice little feedback squeal always works to stop the session for a few minutes. New digital equipment has come up with its own way of slowing down sessions. Some nice subtle digital hair on the tail off of a piano chord, or that crunchy distortion in the DAT copy because the DAT machine didn’t like the wire you were using. Hey, all of this new digital equipment is connected. Digital audio contains user bits. Do you use them? I don’t think so! This is how digital audio equipment exchanges information. "Uh oh, here comes that same demo this guy’s been working on for a year," says the digital console to the CD recorder. "Maybe if I make a bad CD this guy will take me back to the store where he got me!" The CD recorder answers, "Hey, everything will be ok. You’re lucky, you could’ve been bought by Jeff Baxter." That was a cheap shot. I guess I should apologize to my CD recorder.

Finally, I noticed that all of my equipment is much happier since I started feeding them balanced power. Nothing hums anymore. I guess it’s because they finally know all the words.

Reader Questions

I don’t have room to answer all of my e-mail, but sometimes I get a lot of versions of the same question. Here are a couple of them.

From: Chris

I have a Fostex dmt8 digital recorder. In the manual it says that I need a DAT machine to archive the data from the hard disk. I have a PC with a CD-R. Is it possible to archive to the PC? What type of interface board would I need?

Answer: Yes it is possible to archive to your PC. You need an audio interface board that has a digital audio input. There are some inexpensive SoundBlaster compatible boards that have digital audio inputs, or you could go with one of the I/O boards that are specifically designed for digital audio recording. There are tons of them advertised right here in EQ. Your local dealer probably has a few also. Make sure you start recording before you start dumping data from the Fostex. Although it sounds like noise at the beginning of the data dump, it is actually file data that is needed by the Foxtex in order to load the sound files back in correctly. After you get the data into your PC, I would make an audio CD. Make sure you leave the noise on the front of each selection. The data must be sent back to the Fostex as an audio file through the digital input. If you have the data on an audio CD you can use a CD player with digital out to get the data back into the Fostex.

From Ola Lagarhus, Norway

I have questions about using 20 bit and 24 bit converters with 16 bit machines such as my Tascam DAT machine or my Pioneer audio CD recorder. How will a 24 bit converter perform with a 16 bit recorder?

Answer. I get this question very often. There is a specification for digital converters called linearity. This is the accuracy of the absolute value of each of the bits. Let’s say that it took a 10 volt signal to give us a full level digital signal. A 16 bit converter has ±32768 digital steps between zero signal and the full level ten volt signal. This means that the smallest bit would be .00030517578 volts, and each of the other bits should be exactly twice the value of the bit below it. The more error in the bit value, the lower the linearity. The resistors that determine the values of the bits are trimmed by a laser. The more accurate the trimming the better the linearity. 1 bit converters, or Delta Modulation type converters have only 1-4 bits that actually do the measuring, and the all of the bit values are mathematically derived inside the chip. This means that each bit will be exactly double the bit value below it, resulting in high linearity.

20 bit converters have four more bits, which means that the smallest bit is 16 times smaller than the smallest bit of a 16 bit converter. The smallest bit of a 24 bit converter is 256 times smaller than the smallest bit of a 16 bit converter. Because of the higher accuracy required to produce the higher bit converters, the top 16 bits of one of these converters will usually be much better than all but the very best 16 bit converters.

Remember that only 16 bits of the signal will be recorded on a 16 bit machine. Feeding the machine with a 20 bit or 24 bit converter will not give you any more dynamic range. The dynamic range is based on the number of bits available for storage.

Dithering or noise shaping helps the dynamic range equal to about one or two bits. If I was going to buy a 24 bit converter to use with a 16 bit recorder, I would get something like the Apogee 24/96 box with built-in noise shaping, and the ability to do track splitting for storing 24 bit /96kHz data on an 8 track recorder. You could use it for your 16 bit recording now, and you won’t have to change if you upgrade your recorder.

And Finally

From: Don Barry

What about doing live, no retake, two track and lets go stuff. I do portable recording for kid schools and local church choirs who want CDs of their music. I go out with a small Mackie board, some Shure KSM32s or SM81s, a Tascam portable DAT and just turn the machine on and go. I bring it home and S/PDIF into my PC and SOUNDFORGE to clean up, edit. EQ, compress, normalize, and then burn CD-Rs on a 2x-HP drive. I hear a really great sound for less than $2000 in gear. What am I missing?

Answer: You are making good recordings without remixing and without buying $100,000 worth of equipment to impress everybody? Don’t ever e-mail me again.