Editors:
Mary (ISDN queen) Mazurek
and
Kathy (Splice Girl) Dunaj

Volume 16 Number 4
April, 2001

EARS Meets At Audio Recording Unlimited

400 North Michigan Avenue st. 1900
(312) 527-7000
Tuesday April 24, 7:30 pm

We return to Chicaga's Mag.(netic?) Mile for a tour of this long successful operation. Head honcho, Don"Trib-man" (show up & you'll get it) Arbuckle will update us on doing biz today in this very different market once shared with the likes of Universal, Zenith/DB, Paragon (at their original Huron location) and Streeterville.

On a "LARC", (Star Trek?) Next Generation Marketing's Tom Parnell will bring us a detailed look at Lexicon's latest flagship 960 in Full Surround!
- Gary Khan-

EARS on T.V. (sorta)

In the last 3 weeks, WTTW aired TWO of our cadre' in separate segments! Coolest was Paul Serrano - esteemed past EARS roastee and owner of the legendary P.S. "the mess"in a short piece on the still crankin' Delmark Records and Studio. Lookin' good, Paul ! Also,yer's truly was briefly on a "Chicago Stories" episode recalling my geeky grammerskool projectionist daze showin' those nationally distributed, locally produced (by Coronet & Britannica) "educational films" which dominated that industry thru the 50's and 60's. With exteriors usually shot in Evanston, they portrayed a "whitebred"America that made the Cleavers look third world! They were often finished at the original Zenith Audio Services (see appreciation file) on Foster Ave. in a nondescript area of Chicago's north side and a stone's throw from our departed colleague George Minol's Continental Sound.
- GK-

Outreach Update

A.J. Bautista and I carried the EARS banner at our AES compadre's 4/9 meeting which focused on studio and control room acoustic issues with an informative presentation by Jeff Szymansky of Auralex. I've initiated a mutual meeting invitation and info sharing between our fader-bangers and these way cool eggheads with whom we share MANY interests! More details later.
- G.K-

EARS Appreciation File/Recaps

Many thanx to Brett Johnson, our guest speaker and Doug Jones, local acoustical guru and Head Cheese at the legendary music room of the former Sonart/Zenith/DB (now Columbia's A.T.C.). I'll send more details of our essential Chicago Studio history when EARDRUM space permits. Special tip of the hat to our local Student Chapter of the Audio Engineering Society, Columbia and Music Industry Workshop's kik-butt sound engineering student attendees who will soon be snippin' at our heels (or gettin' coffee ?). 'nuff said for now.
- G.K.-

Balanced or Unbalanced?
(Audio Signals, Not A Sanity Assessment)
By: Bruce Breckenfeld

Balanced is better, right? After all, expensive, high end professional gear always has balanced inputs and outputs, right? Not always and not always.

First, a little background. Audio signals usually travel on cable that is either balanced or unbalanced. What's the difference between the two? An unbalanced cable has a single conductor that is covered by some sort of metallic outer wrapping called the shield that is intended to block unwanted noise from impressing itself onto the inner wire. This noise can be hum from nearby power cables, radio signals from nearby transmitting towers, static from sunspots, or anything of an electromagnetic nature that we don't want contaminating our audio signal. This type of cable is called coaxial, (or coax for short) and we see it used between guitars and amps, and [also] throughout home stereo systems. One potential drawback with this design arises from the fact that in order to carry a signal from one point to another, we need a minimum of two conductors so that a return path for the flowing current is provided. In our coax cable, the second conductor is by default the shield. This means that our poor signal is being carried on a conductor that is exposed to the aforementioned electromagnetic smegma.

A balanced cable solves this problem by using two inner conductors to carry the signal and protects them both with an overall shield. In order to best implement this approach, the equipment driving this type of cable should send the normal signal on one of the inner signal wires (the hi) and send an inverted (opposite polarity) version of this signal on the other (the lo). An output transformer will naturally do this, or it can be accomplished electronically by using an additional output amplifier configured to both invert the signal and drive the second conductor.

Now here's the beauty: at the receiving end, the signal carried on the lo conductor is inverted back to it's original polarity and added to the signal coming in on the hi. This means any noise that makes it through the shield and gets into our signal wires will be impressed upon both wires equally and will be canceled out when it gets summed with its inverse. For you math freaks, (x) + (-x) = 0. In fact, this approach is so effective that our beloved telephone company has used it since early in the past century to transmit audio for thousands of miles without the benefit of any shielding on the cables whatsoever!

So balanced is better, right? Not always. Certainly, a balanced signal is very desirable for long cable runs, but for short distances it may not be necessary. The signals cruising about inside your console or for that matter, within the chassis of any piece of audio gear are almost always unbalanced. Just because a signal is unbalanced does not mean that it is somehow deficient in quality. Because we associate unbalanced signals with so-called "consumer" gear and RCA cables, we tend to give unbalanced a bad rap.

But expensive high end professional gear is always balanced, right? Not always. The famous GML e.q. and Manley tube compressors are two very respected pro units that have unbalanced outputs, even though these signals appear on XLR connectors. There is a school of thought that it is desirable for the sake of sonic purity to eliminate the extra hardware (transformers, additional output amplifiers) required to implement a balanced output. Fans of vintage Neve gear will disagree here since they love what transformers do to a signal, but that's a subject for another article...

Balanced equipment does have one huge advantage over unbalanced and that is the number of available options for grounding schemes in your studio, but that's also a subject for another time.

As for the inherent difference in quality between the two ...well, there isn't always one.

Bruce Breckenfeld is a technician at Chicago Recording Company and also runs an independent tech service called Sound Advice, Inc.

EARS Dues

Kathy and Mary,

I would like to pay my dues for EARS!
Realizing my worst of fears,
I've been in arrears-
for a couple of years!
Please send me a form
to sign in reply-
possibly red so it catches my eye.

I'd also like to save a tree
every time you contact me.
I like the Eardrum in hardcopy,
but I'll print from email, though it's kinda sloppy.
When sending future Eardrums to me,
Full Scope Sound is where I'll be.

From audio limbo & sonic suspension
to slow death by vise and digital detention -
Thanks, Kathy and Mary, for your time and attention.

Carl Miller
Full Scope Sound

To make a dues payment for 1 year's membership, send a check for $15 (payable to EARS) with your name, contact info, desired destination for EARDRUM newsletter/meeting notice (preferably e-mail), phone number, and career status/specialty/occupation/goals to: Pegasus Recording P.O.Box 578903, Chicago, Il 60657. If you move or change your email address, you must contact Mary or Kathy or you will not receive the EARDRUM. Thanks!

Tech Tip
Classic SonicStudio
by Bob Katz

I have the source material edited in the top panels, and for earlier purposes have track marks also in those panels. Now I want to capture all effects and processing 24 bit into the next pair of panels. But I want to use the marks from the top panels without much work and without losing the marks from the top panels, in case I want to go back and produce a CD ref from the original source.

1. Lock all marks (quickkey sequence), so they won't disappear after an edit.
2. Synchronize the captured audio in the 3, 4 panel with the 1, 2 panel.
3. Mount edit list. That is, mount the same edit list into itself! It works.

This gives me two sets of panels that are identical of the source. I put one of those at the top, cut all the audio, leaving the (locked marks), and the 24 bit capture back into panels 3, 4. Cut and paste or insert that audio into the top panels and you're done.

Bob Katz, Chief Mastering Engineer, Digital Domain, Inc., Orlando, FL.

Who have you been working with lately? We want to know! If you have any ideas for stories, wish to contribute an article, want to include any upcoming events, or have a tech tip, please contact:

Mary at pegasusrecording@ameritech.net. Or write to:
Peagasus Recording P.O Box 578903, Chicago, IL 60657.

Kathy can be reached at SVI, or
kathy@soundvideoimpressions.com.