Daddy’s Blog

I wanted to get back to the studio project that I’ve been working on with Dr. Franks for the last couple weeks and discuss another very important aspect of building a quality recording environment. Now, most of us don’t have the luxury of being able to build a room from the ground up, but if you do, treating the room can be as important as buying the right equipment. The sound control will play a big roll in everything from tracking to mixing. Not all of the techniques discussed below will apply to everyone, but it will be quite obvious after reading about the different treatments, which would work for your environment and which would not. There are a few basic terms that are important to know that will help you identify the problem that you have and how to correct it. There may not be an actual “problem”, instead this may just be a way to improve the sound of your room. They most important things for you to know and consider are:

Diffusion: Diffusion is the act of sending audio waves in different directions. Elaborate diffusers will actually send the audio waves in different directions depending on frequency. A diffuser is used to keep sound waves from grouping, so there are no hot or dead spots in a room. Sound diffusion can widen the “sweet spot” and sense of openness to a room, making it easier to hear all the individual parts of your mix.  Sound diffusion can make a small space seem large and a large space seem even larger. For example, proper diffusion of audio waves could make your drum recording sound “bigger” than if you did not employ diffusion techniques. Sound diffusion can eliminate some of the reflections of the sound waves in a control room. This prevents these reflections from interfering with the sound you are hearing directly from your monitors, and therefore allows you to create a more accurate mix.

Absorption: Absorption is a little easier to understand due to the fact that everyone is familiar with the term absorb. Absorption works by absorbing excessive audio frequencies into the sound controlling material. There are several materials that will actually absorb audio waves, but the most common type of material used currently is studio foam. Just for the sake of conversation, the egg crate looking mattress foam doesn’t work. You need specially made high density acoustic foam to actually make a difference in a recording or live sound environment. Absorption is useful to help eliminate or cut down on the excessive frequencies in the room.

Isolation: Isolation is another easy one to understand because we are all familiar with the term. One way you would use isolation in a recording environment would be in a vocal booth or live room. In a vocal booth you create a sound proof and acoustically controlled environment that is isolated from the rest of the studio. This enables you to get the most accurate recording of vocals because you can control the other aspects of sound control in the room. You can employ tactics of diffusion and absorption in a vocal booth to create the most accurate sounding reproduction of a vocal possible.

Another type of isolation would be employed if you want to isolate a specific piece of equipment such as your studio monitors. By placing a piece of high density foam underneath your recording monitors you get a more accurate reproduction of your recording. The reason you would do this is to decouple the speaker from your work desk or mixing console. When you have a speaker that is resting on that surface, the surface effectively acts as an amplifier. There is a major difference in the bass response of a speaker that is isolated or decoupled from your desktop. There are a couple simple ways you can experiment with this to see what I’m talking about. If you’re a guitar player, take your electric guitar and don’t plug it in. Rest the headstock up against a wall or on your dresser (the larger the better) or something similar. Play a few chords, then take it away from the surface while playing. It will be louder when the headstock is pressed up against the wall. If your studio monitors are not isolated from your desk surface, then you will get a false representation of the bass frequencies that are in your mix. The end result would be that you perceive there to be more bass than there is and you would then adjust the mix accordingly. More often times than not, this would cause you to mix the bass too light because you are hearing things that aren’t really in the recording. If you have a sub woofer in your studio it would be imperative that you isolate that as well. Get a bit of high density foam that’s used for absorption, and lay that down on the floor. Then put piece of ply or something down on top of it and put the sub on that. This will decouple it from the floor and not only eliminate the false bass frequencies, but in addition, it will help to prevent transmission of those frequencies to other areas of the room where it could rattle a picture on the wall, or your acoustic guitar strings etc.

In my home studio I even put some high density foam under my Mac tower to help eliminate the amount it amplifies the fan in the computer when it kicks on. You’d be surprised how much these little tricks will help to improve your sound quality in the room and the mixes you create. As always, if you have any questions, give me a call at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com.

   For those of you whom I haven’t cornered yet, or aren’t sick at home with the Swine Flu, this is just a reminder. This Friday we are having our 3rd Annual( wow, time sure does fly) Sabian Day in the Boston Store. It’s happenin’ from 11am ’till 6pm. There will be LOTS of prototype cymbals from all Sabian line’s, mostly with with lots of hammering on them. There will, as usual, be  balloons and special ONE DAY ONLY pricing. While I can’t go into great detail, I can tell you that pricing will be at it’s all time low this year. There will also be a cool giveaway for multiple cymbal purchase. Anyhow, stop in to hit some new, one of a kind things, and remember we’ll take your trades as well. See you Friday

Michael Tocker-drums

So in the last post I talked about Ohms and Wattage rating as it relates to PA speakers and amplifiers. In this part of the post I want to address another common Ohms question. What is the difference between series and parallel wiring inside of a guitar cabinet? Well first off, here’s what that looks like. Then I’ll explain.

Parallel wiring is exactly the same as described in the first post with the examples I provided about PA cabinets. Two matching impedance speakers on the same channel lowers the resistance by half.

Series wiring is two matching impedance speakers wired together to increase resistance. This would be useful if you had a couple of speakers that you wanted to run, but your amplifier was not stable at a lower ohm rating.

Series parallel wiring is very common in guitar cabinets because it allows the cabinet to retain the same resistance as its individual speakers. This makes it easier to match up cabinets and amplifiers without doing a ton of guesswork.

Here is a real world example: Marshall 1960 series cabinets typically are wired 16 ohms internally. This means that when you hook up one 16 ohm Marshall 1960 cab to a Marshall head you use the 16 ohm output. Remember the discussion from the last post where by doubling the number of speakers hooked up to a single channel of a power amp you lower the resistance by half? That’s why the Marshall cabinets are wired 16 ohms. If you want to run a stereo pair of Marshall cabinets (a full stack) there’s two 8 ohm outputs on the back of the head that you run one line into each of the cabs. This allows the amplifier to deliver more power to the two cabinets without risking damage to any component. Not everyone wants to run a full stack, but those who do can utilize the same equipment just by simply adding to their existing setup.

Now, if you ignore everything else that I’ve said up to this point and only remember one thing. This is what I want you to remember. No matter what the wattage rating, ohm rating blah blah blah is on any amp or speaker combination that you’re using, one rule trumps every other.

IF IT SOUNDS BAD IT IS BAD!

Regardless of speaker wattage and amplifier output, one thing remains the same. If it sounds like crap, then you’ve got two potential problems. Either bad matching equipment, or you are expecting too much from equipment that does not work properly together.

For example: You have a 100 watt amplifier and a 100 watt speaker. You may think that because the speakers handling capacity is not exceeded by the power amp then it must be o.k. to crank the crap out of your amp because hey, it can only make 100 watts and that’s what the speaker can handle. That should work fine, right? Completely wrong. Although matching these components mathematically makes sense, the resulting output would be terrible sounding because you are forcing the amplifier to operate at it’s utmost extreme. Therefore, you are overtaxing the amp by turning it up all the way and thus sending a distorted and dirty output signal to the speaker. So no matter how good the speaker is, or how high the wattage handling, this would still sound bad. You could hook a 1,000 watt speaker up to a 100 watt amp and crank it to the max and it will still sound like crap. This a common occurrence that you could call under powering a speaker. It’s also a common misconception that you blow speakers because you push too much power when in fact it’s just the opposite. By under powering a speaker you send the speaker a dirty, distorted, output that will ultimately produce a poor quality sound no matter what you do. By overpowering a speaker (even drastically) you get a much better result. The amplifier does not need to work nearly as hard to deliver the speakers maximum wattage capacity. Therefore, the amplifier is not being overworked and producing a perfect clean, undistorted signal at the current output level. Sure, you could blow the speaker if you cranked it up all the way, but hopefully your ears would stop you from doing that. That’s where I was going with the whole, if it sounds bad, it is bad thing.

Let me leave you with a quick analogy. Two cars, one is a 4 cylinder, one is an 8. Both cars are capable of going at least 100 mph. If you want to go 100 mph in the 4 cylinder, you need to mash the throttle right to the floor. The car eventually will get up to speed, but it will be putting way too much strain and wear on the motor to achieve that speed. In the 8 cylinder, you can achieve 100 mph by only pressing the throttle down half way. You’ve got plenty of throttle left, and could go faster than 100 mph, but you don’t need to. You only wanted to see if the car could hit 100. Thus the 8 cylinder motor is relaxed and efficient at that speed, where the 4 cylinder is about to blow up. Make sense? So the moral of the story is, listen listen listen. If you are playing and stuff sounds distorted and bad, then you are potentially risking doing permanent damage to your speakers. So if you aren’t sure when things start to sound bad, give me a call at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com so I can sell you a pair of top of the line ears that will make it much easier for you to hear the difference.

I’m going to skip talking about home studio stuff for today’s post to address a topic that I think is very important. This will hopefully provide everyone with some good information. I’ve had multiple conversations this week with our Daddy’s Junky Music customers about ohms and wattage ratings and it got me thinking that it would be good to post about this so I can present everyone with some helpful information. That and the next time someone asks me this question I can save myself an explanation and just send them to the blog page to read up on it. Of course I’m kidding! I’m always happy and willing to take time to explain anything I can to our customers in the hopes of providing them with the information they need to make educated buying decisions.

So here’s the simplest way I can give you a run down on ohm’s and wattage rating. As a basic rule of thumb, lower ohm’s means more power. Let’s not get into all the technical aspects of how this is achieved and why, but for the purpose of this discussion think of it this way. 2 ohms is louder than 8 ohms. Lower ohms rating means a lower resistance which allows the power amp to deliver more power to the speakers. This applies to all power amp and speaker combination’s regardless of type. So this works with a PA system as well as it does with a guitar or bass amp. The lower the ohm rating on the speaker, the more power the amplifier can deliver.

It’s easiest to think of this in terms of a PA system, so we’ll use that for the example. Most manufacturers include the different wattage ratings of the amp at different ohm’s on the spec sheet. If they don’t include this information then it is likely that they are trying to make something sound more impressive than it is. If the manufacturer says the amp is 10,000 watts, just be sure that you check the wattage rating at 8 ohms, because this is the standard that a large percentage of PA speakers adhere to. If you want to know what the real world output of an amplifier is, then use the 8 ohm rating as your reference point. So, if the amplifier delivers 500 watts at 8 ohms, then it would deliver significantly more at a lower resistance. 8 and 4 ohm’s are the most common ratings for general purpose PA cabinets while the most common ratings for a professional grade PA amplifier would be 8, 4, and 2. I know, I know, it’s wordy and long winded. I’m sorry, but I’m trying to cram a novel worth of information into a 500 word blog. Here are a few real world examples.

If a 2 channel amplifier has a power rating of 500 watts per channel at 8 ohms and you hook up two 8 ohm speakers to the amplifier, one on each channel, then you would have a output of 8 ohms and each speaker would be getting 500 watts.

If that same amplifer has a power rating of 750 watts per channel at 4 ohms and you hook up two 4 ohm speakers to the amplifier, one on each channel, then you would have a output of 4 ohms and each speaker would be getting 750 watts.

Here’s where it gets a little more complicated.

If that same 2 channel amplifier has a power rating of 750 watts per channel at 4 ohms, you can hook up four 8 ohm speakers to the amplifier, two on each channel. Then you will have an output of 4 ohms and each speaker would be getting 375 watts. Adding a pair of speakers lowers the resistance in half provided the speakers are all the same ohm rating.

If that same amplifier has a power rating of 1000 watts per channel at 2 ohms, you can hook up six 8 ohm speakers to the amplifier, three on each channel. Then you will have an output of 2 ohms and each speaker would be getting roughly 333 watts.

Every time you add a pair of speakers, you lower the resistance by half. So one pair of 8 ohm speakers is an 8 ohm draw on the amp, two pairs of 8 ohm speakers is a 4 ohm draw, three pairs of 8 ohm speakers is a 2 ohm draw.

It’s very important to remember not to exceed the lowest ohm rating of your amp. So if you have an amplifier that is only stable at 8 ohms and not less, then do not hook up more than one pair of 8 ohm speakers to it. You could blow it up.

Confused? So am I. I think exceeded the amount of information that I wanted to put out there for the day so I’m going to go now. Stay tuned for the next post and I’ll cover some other aspects of ohm’s law and wattage ratings for you. If you have any specific questions about this or any other gear related topic, please don’t hesitate to contact me at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com

For those of you out there who follow the blog, you’ve noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. First off I want to apologize for the absence, but allow me to explain briefly what’s been going on. I have recently been promoted to oversee all of the online departments for the entire company. It’s been a ton of work getting organized, and it’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be well worth the effort. In addition to offering my help for our customers with their sales needs and product questions, I now handle all of the emails and customer service calls for our online support department. I will also be handling our eBay department as well. This includes our online eBay store and all of the auctions that we run weekly. I’m very excited about this new opportunity to have a positive effect on our business. I will work hard to provide only the highest level of customer service, support, and attention to detail for our customers. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, on to the good stuff. MORE GEAR!

The studio live is a 16 channel digital mixer. This mixer has 16 XLR inputs, 4 sub groups and is fully compatible via the fire-wire output with the majority of the DAW software that is currently on the market. One of the other really cool features of this mixer too, is that it has a host of digital effects built in. Remember a few posts ago where I was talking about how less cabling means less signal loss? This is one major advantage of having built in effects. This mixer has compression, limiting, gating, reverb, delay, and dual 31 band EQ’s. These are just a few samples of the features that you get with this mixer. To see it and all the gory details, Click Here.

Another nice feature of this mixer is that you can daisy chain, or add, an additional 8 mic pre’s by hooking up something like a Presonus Firestudio Tube to the other fire-wire input. You can also daisy chain a second Studio Live mixer so you can run a simultaneous 32 channels. This is the perfect product if you need a mixer that will double as a live or recording mixer with built in effects. I’ve got a customer of mine who lives on the west coast who is probably going to be picking one of these mixers up soon. He’s currently in the process of building a studio, and we’ve been talking a lot about a lot of different things. So starting with this post I’m going to be going over some of the other aspects of building a home recording studio to give you guys some insight on other things you might want to consider. We’ll be talking about sound-proofing, snakes and cabling, software, computers and a few other related topics. I’ll basically cover the majority of the items that myself and Dr. Franks are going to be putting to work in his newly built home recording studio. We’ve already talked about studio monitors and interfaces so we’ll skip those topics, but there will be plenty to talk about over the course of the next several posts. As always, give me a call or email if you have any questions, or if there’s anything you’d like to see me talk about here on the gear blog. 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com

So my most favorite funnyman , Kevin James, is filming another movie in Boston right now.( King of Queens..best comedy series ever. If you disagree, you probably haven’t seen it.Yeah, I own all 9 season’s on DVD.so..) After the huge success of Mall Cop, they’re hoping for a two-peat w/The Zookeeper. Well, you may ask, what does this have to do with drums or any musical gear for that matter. Well, I’ll tell ya right now. The movie folks rented a bass amp, a guitar and a drum set to use in a scene from in the movie. I’ve been sworn to silence as to which scene the gear is used in , but have been told that it’s an important seen, one which won’t end up on the cutting room floor. The drums “featured” are a GMS CL Maple kit( USA shells) w/a 20″ kick, 10″, 12″, and 14″ toms and a 14″ snare. There is also a full set of hardware. The drums are now sitting back in the Boston store  ,complete w/dust added by the crew for special effect, and are available for sale. Things to say to your friends after this blockbuster movie to be is released in the theaters. ” Hey , see those drums up there? They’re mine now” or “Do those drums look familiar to you?” I can’t promise you any residuals or fame and fortune, just a cool drum set with a story. If you are interested in the drums, give me a call and maybe we can work something out.( item # GMS07069)

Michael Tocker-drums

PS.We love trades.