Inside Audio: Dave Moulton

Dave Moulton is hard at work on loudspeakers and composing. You can complain to him about anything at his Web site, moultonlabs.com.

How Do You Get From Producer to Viewer?
Alert readers may recall that I started to open a new can of audio worms last month.

Another Can of Audio Worms
We tend to gloss over some of the production difficulties we face as a consequence of our current broadcast distribution system.

TV Levels: A Canadian's View, Part 2
You may recall that last month I wrote about audio guru Neil Muncy's observations regarding television audio level problems he encountered in Canada.

TV Levels at Home: A Canadian View
History buffs and reasonably alert readers may recall that back in the day (2003-04), I wrote several articles dealing with the disarray of audio levels at our beloved end-users' sofas, couches and recliners.

Surround Sound Suffers From Poor Presentation
As I pondered it all on the way home and began to prepare for a largish public surround-sound presentation, I realized I had some serious concerns about what I had seen and heard. I'd like to share them with you, as they may have some impact on the effectiveness and salability of our surround production efforts.

More About the LFE Channel & Subwoofer
Some of the more alert readers among you may recall that in my August column I wrote about the low-frequency effects channel in multichannel video and music production, and made some observations about how it fits into the end-user environment.

The Center Channel: Unique and Difficult
As you may recall, I've been reviewing the function of the various channel groups in surround sound, including a consideration of how they came to be, how they can be approached in various types of production, and how they end up being used by our beloved viewers in their homes. This month, I'll discuss the most challenging channel: the center channel.

The Care and Feeding of Surround Channels
Last month, as part of my current work involving surround sound, I wrote about the use of subwoofers, from the viewpoints of both audio professionals and consumers. This month, I'll tackle the surround channels.

LFEs and Subwoofers In Perspective
I've gotten involved in surround sound as a music producer, mixer, and user consultant, all at once. This month, I'd like to share what I've been finding about how we are using the subwoofer and the LFE (low frequency effects) channel.

Suddenly Inundated With Surround Work
Over the past couple of months, professional things for me have been happening on a lot of fronts. It's worth sharing because it bodes well for all of us in the 'biz.

Audio for Home Theater Presents New Challenges
I was interested and pleased to receive a Tweeter catalog in the mail that described a fairly comprehensive installation offer. The Tweeter program includes the sort of installation, setup and follow-up service needed to make these systems work reliably in peoples' homes.

What is HD Home Theater Like for Consumers?
While I expected HD to be better, I didn't expect it to be quite so freakin' much better, if you know what I mean.

AV 107: The Basics of Audio Interconnections
This is for those among us who don't know a lot about audio and are not quite sure we should ask.

Where Exactly Is Audio in 2005?
Back at the turn of the millennium (remember that?), I did one of those smarmy Fugawi columns where we took stock of where we were and made some brave, brash and perhaps foolish predictions about where we were gonna be. Well, five years have gone by, and it's time for a fresh look.

A/V 106: Surround Sound For Broadcast TV
This column will be devoted to the basics of surround sound for video, as part of my series for non-audio folks.

The Truth About Stereo for TV
This column will be devoted to the basics of stereo for video, as part of my series on "the basics."

A/V 104: Time-Domain FX and Reverb
This column will be devoted to the basics of time-domain signalprocessing effects, most notably reverb.

A/V 103: The Basics of Audio Compression
This column is devoted to the basics of audio compression, a powerful signal-processing technique that is poorly understood by almost all of us.

Audio 102 for Video Folks: A Primer on EQ
This article will be devoted to the basics of equalization, or "EQ," for those of us who aren't really all that familiar or comfortable with audio (which is most of us in the biz, I've found).

Audio 101 for Video Folks: Levels
I'm going to devote a couple of columns to audio basics for video folks.

Revenge of the Couch Potato
Our Story To Date. Alert readers may recall my recent concern with the variance in audio levels as experienced by us home viewers.

A Trip Down Memory Lane: Some Good Audio
About a month ago, I got a package in the mail containing a bunch of CDs, a long letter and some magazine articles from a guy named Ron Estes. Naturally, if you don't know, you're gonna ask. Who Is Ron Estes?

Metadata in the Home: A Case History
Alert readers will recall that I've been struggling to understand the use of metadata, particularly dailnorm, in TV broadcasting. This month I thought I'd share with you my adventures with it to date.

The Mystery of the Set-top Box
The various audio outputs have a variety of applications and each of them have different capabilities as well. These behaviors are based on differing assumptions about the intended performance and capability of the system, based on which output is selected. This is a serious potential booby trap.

DialNorm 101
Dialnorm makes it possible for us to fairly easily achieve consistent dialogue levels at the outputs of decoders. All we've got to do, collectively speaking, is understand the process, make the correct moves, and it's done. Voila!

Surround Sound Field of Dreams
I recently attended the Audio Engineering Society's Technical Conference on Multichannel Audio, held in late June in Banff, Canada.

Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments
Recently, I attended the Acoustical Society of America's annual convention in Nashville and presented a paper on "The Loudspeaker As A Musical Instrument." Writing the paper was a lot of fun, and it gave me an excuse to formalize a lot of the thoughts I've been having about loudspeakers.

The 'Aesthetics' of Audio Compression
I recently received a letter from Tom Lento, a broadcast technology marketing consultant, commenting on my March 5 column about the variance of audio levels in TV programming.

More Thoughts About Copy Protection
Since I wrote my column on copyright, I've received some e-mails about it and I've noticed that the issue is alive and kicking in other industries as well. These merit further discussion, I think, so I'll continue my brief digression from pure audio for another month or so.

Musings About 9/11, Our World and Our Industry
What a year! It's been 12 months now since the terrorist attacks on our country. What's happened? Where are we?

Some Thoughts About Copyright
Copyright issues in media have been in the mainstream news and in TV Technology recently. A number of important problems have been rattling around over the past couple of years, and it's beginning to look like a bumpy ride.

Dolby C: How Dolby Sees It
Alert readers will recall that I've been ranting about "bad audio" for a number of months, and that in my last outing I took on some of the unintended consequences arising from the long-term use of Beta SP and Dolby C in combination. Specifically, I looked pretty hard at Dolby C, as a number of readers have written in to suggest that it is a major contributor to the "bad audio" problems that plague broadcast TV.

Bad Audio and Some Unintended Consequences
These "bad audio" pieces I've been writing seem to have pinched a collective nerve among our readership. I am getting a steady stream of letters sharing numerous kind and, ah, not-so-kind thoughts about the whole range of issues this sad topic engenders.

The Media’s Role on Sept. 11
By the time you read this, it’ll be early November and you’ll be sick of reading about the sad events of Sept. 11. But as I write this, it’s only been a week and I’m still stuck in those events – I’m sorry, but I can’t write about anything else quite yet.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY,The Brave New World
A couple of years back, I got an irate e-mail from a guy in northern California who calls himself Bro Duke. He took me to task for worrying about Surround Sound, saying, "As far as I'm concerned, the TV medium hasn't even begun to manage mono properly.

The Brave New World: Loudspeakers All Around!
As I noted last month, audio authority John Woram has said, "Audio is a hallucination where the sufferer believes that he or she hears music coming from a small wooden box."

The Brave New World:Control Room Design
I promised last month I’d talk a little more about the design of control rooms, as part of our inquiry into the care and feeding of loudspeakers.

The Brave New World: Part 2
Last month I ranted about the state of loudspeaker design and performance, and promised you that I’d devote several columns to this worthy topic.

The Brave New World: Loudspeakers
As I noted a couple months back, we tend to devalue the more familiar and prosaic items in our technology toolkit. It seems to me that we’re particularly indifferent to loudspeakers.

New Microphones at NAB
An exciting array of new microphones and related technology will be introduced at NAB this year.

How Microphones Have Changed
After the end of World War II, the best microphones were the ones used for live broadcasting. These were tube-amplified condenser microphone designs intended for generic recording of medium-to-large ensembles in reverberant spaces (recorded in mono – often just a single microphone).

The Brave Old New World
In all our gear-slut madness – that sick, demented, trembling need for the latest, coolest, bestest stuff on the market – which we all suffer from, especially around Christmas, we tend to ignore the old, the traditional, the known stuff.

High Resolution Audio and Standards:
Uh-oh! Some Production Professionals Have Their Say
I know, I know! I promised you that I was done with resolution issues. But as I wrapped up my rant, a couple of industry pros really got on my case about some of the things I was saying.

Blind Testing in the Audio Realm
Alert readers will recall that last month I began a discussion of how we try to determine what it is that we humans can really hear.

The Difference Between What You Hear and What You 'Hear'
Alert readers may recall that over the past several months I've been plumbing the mysteries of audibility, with a particular eye to the troubling confusions about how much resolution we can really perceive in an audio signal. Very alert readers may have noted that the issue is far from simple.

We Want Really Accurate Recordings, Right? Or Do We?
We've been ranting about high-resolution recording for lo, these many months. Nobody has questioned the desirability of high resolution. We all agree that we need such resolution in order to make accurate recordings. All I've been quibbling about is just how much resolution we really need.

What Is It That We’re Hearing, Anyway?
For the last 2 months I’ve been trying to offend everybody by suggesting some things about the audibility of high-resolution audio, and I’ve taken the position that hi-res isn’t very audible, compared to 16-bit or even analog audio.