Tech Talk

The latest microphone to come knocking on my door down here at The Mill has been AEA’s new N8 phantom powered, bi-directional ribbon; a mid-sized side-address mic that sounds superb on a wide variety of sources. From the moment it arrived here it’s been hard at work recording everything from loud drums and percussion to screeching…

Something in the air The product video on the Martin website claims AirFX provides “versatile efficiency”, and after spending some time with the unit I can certainly substantiate this. It’s definitely not the ‘one trick pony’ the name could lead you to believe it might be, with solid performance on both aerial effect and wash…

Christmas Eve, 1974, is a date etched in the national Australian consciousness. When Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin, it destroyed 80 percent of its buildings, took the lives of 66 people and sparked the largest civil evacuation in the country’s history. The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory is tasked with keeping the stories of…

All too often it’s the top-end that people reach out for consoles and in mix windows when a sound lacks clarity in a mix. it’s their go-to solution – a knee jerk reaction to a problem that’s often best solved by vastly different means. When this unthinking, reactive approach to mixing is deployed too often, the…

Quad channel power amp AUDAC makes a range of power amplifiers under the Wave Dynamics name, including both the SMA dual channel models and SMQ quad channel units. Each of these ranges is available in three different power output levels – 350, 500 or 750W into 4 ohms. The basic feature set is common across…

There’s a disease gripping the world of singer songwriters that’s gone undiagnosed for ages now. It’s brought on by a combination of things: the natural desire to be the best, a determination to sound amazing, insufficient funds and a lack of free time to finish a project without distraction. I call it ‘B-Side Blues’ or ‘Killing…

What’s in a name? The odd thing about the Ui is that while Soundcraft is an English company, the Ui was actually conceived in Melbourne, Australia by SM Pro Audio. The firm was acquired by Soundcraft earlier this year, and now the Ui12 and Ui16 have landed on shelves. The Ui series has a feature…

Brisbane City Hall has stood imposingly over King George Square since 1930. In Italian Renaissance style, it’s grand and opulent, with an auditorium to match. However, its architects sadly never foresaw the electroacoustic issues that would be caused by basing the auditorium’s shape on The Pantheon in Rome. “It’s extremely difficult,” said Damian Juhasz, Audio Systems…

Digital wireless with more D1 is the next evolution of wireless systems from Sennheiser. It’s a 24 bit 48kHz digital platform operating in the globally license-free 2.4GHz band. The marketing info tells me D1 is “designed for people who make music as a part of their lives, not for people who make a living making music”. I reckon…

Smarter than your average column speaker    Something I really like about Meyer Sound is that their solutions to challenging audio problems are founded firmly in science, not marketing. Every functional design decision is made for a reason based on actual physics. CAL, or the Column Array Loudspeaker from Meyer was designed with the specific…

Proof that everything’s bigger in Texas The VL4000 is a mawkish brute of a thing, weighing over 40kg and requiring a minimum of 52 DMX channels to control. The VL4000 uses a 1200W Philips MSR Gold lamp to achieve an output of 33,000 lumens in standard mode. ‘Standard’ mode sees the 1200W lamp run at…

Portable audio testing convenience Some people get oddly enthused by test equipment – typically they’re the kind of people who rely on such equipment to make their working days easier.  dBbox 2 from CTP Systems is a test device and it’s clearly been designed with audio professionals in mind. The dBbox 2 is a fairly…