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Javier Melendez
This week at Audio Mix House, I went over a chapter review of digital audio with Luis. This chapter was actually a bit more challenging than the past two. The two things I found most challenging from this chapter was Non-PCM DSD (direct stream digital) and DBFS (dB relative to full scale). Luis explained the answers to my questions and made me realize I did have a good grasp on the material. I guess I just over thought or over analyzed the Non-PCM DSD audio format. It's not as complex as I thought of it when I first read about it, and there's a slim chance I'll see that format very often. It was a similar situation with DBFS. I over analyzed what it was and confused myself. It comes down to being a good visual tool for keeping track of audio levels and preventing clipping. Another important thing to keep in mind with DBFS is keeping the calibration level the same on the ADC and DAC to avoiding having to change levels when sending the signals in and out of the system.
Another interesting thing we talked about was the difference in file size and sound fidelity between lossy compressed audio format and lossless compressed audio. For day to day listening on portable music players or small speakers, smaller file size and slightly lower sound quality are fine. However, when working with an audio file that needs to be mixed and equalized, you need the higher quality audio, and thus larger file size. It just makes it hard to hear the full depth and range of a song and difficult to manipulate parts of the file when so much of it would be missing with lossy audio compression.
The next time I went to the studio there wasn't any project I could sit in on, but I did get a chance to briefly talk with Luis about the current chapter on connectivity while we did some general studio clean up. I wrapped up microphone cables and folded and stored a couple microphone stands in one room. Once clean up in the microphone room was done we collected the wrapped up cables and took them to the storage room. While hanging the cables up in their designated spot, Luis mentioned names of some of the cables and their uses. There wasn't much clutter and clean up was not very in depth, but it definitely gave the studio a clean and "fresh" feel. It was like a clean canvas ready for the next artistic production.
Jam of the Week: Major Lazer & DJ Snake - Lean On (feat. MØ)
