51m0n

[url="http://www.voxengo.com/product/pha979/"]Voxengo PHA-979[/url] is available as a Mac AU but I dont think its free....

Not sure theres much to be gained with a LMIII, they were going to sort out the limiter to the power amp section, but apparently didnt in the end. I'd go with the LMII (assuming both a new)

Just a thought, and feel free to shoot me down in flames but how about an Auralex Gramma Pad? Just shorten your spike a wee bit and put it on top of that. Being the height it is I would imagine it would be a better barrier against direct transfer through the floor boards/joists than that thinner high mass flooring, it would probably be a cheaper outlay to try too.

Ha ha, that puts the compressor talk to shame, and I am no expert on acoustics, I've just read a fair bit about it, and tried some variations on the theme. I'll attempt a brief synopsis though:- Sound reflects off a surface much like light does off a mirror, different surfaces reflect different wavelengths of sound, and absorb others ( a bit like colours then). IN very very simple terms hard surfaces reflect high frequencies (and low frequencies), soft surfaces absorb high frequencies (but not low frequencies). The brain takes this reflected sound information and turns it into a very accurate model of the space in which the initial sound occured, where the sound is relative to us, the size of the space, the material bounding the space the number of boundaries to the space, the distaince of the source from the boundaires of the space etc etc. Standing waves in a room occur where the wavelength of a frequency matches the length of one of the rooms dimensions. The result is large peaks and nulls at that frequency as you move around in the room as the reflections from walls add or cancel each other - not good. The very worst type of room is a cube, but parallel walls are generally not good as they tend to create strong nodes (peaks & nulls). A parallel ceiling and floor is a source for standing waves too, unfortunately. Any kind of eqing for a room is doomed to fail as the room is the issue, it cant actually work anywhere but in the tiniest area of the room and should be disguarded as a solution to a difficult room, especially a room in which you intend to do any tracking at all. Absorption is where you try and turn acoustic energy into something else, heat usually, by impeding the acoustic wave in some way. Diffusion is where you take a reflection and scatter it so as to make the resultant reflections no longer appear to be from a single point. Bass trapping is absorption aimed at the lowest (and most difficult to control) frequencies and uses some ver special tools. So what does all this mean? You need to fool the brain into thinking the space you have is bigger than it is. To do this you need to create some broadband absorption to deal with that nasty slap back delay (the metallic ring you get if you stand in an empoty room and clap your hands). There are hundreds of examples of making a simple absorber on the web, you need some Rockwool RW45 or RW60, a good 4" to 6" thick and as big as you can (say 4' by 2' minimum), enough 2"x2" to make a frame, some cheap material you can blow through, and some nice material you can blow through. Make you frame and staple the cheap material to it. Put you nice material on the deck, put the RW on top, put the frame on top of that, cheap material against the RW. Pull the nice material up and staple it to the back of the frame all the way round, with a little compression of the RW and some careful folding you can get a nice looking result with no creases. Note the frame attaches to the wall and the RW is held off the wall by the thickness of the frame you made, this is important as absorbers like this work by slowing the movement of the air molecules, and if they are hard against the wall then they dotn work as well. Ideally they should be 4" to 6" off the wall. A simple rule of thumb, a third of your wall area can be covered in absorption like this. Staggering the absorption works well (so absorption mirrors wall. Then hang some off the ceiling (again maybe a third of the ceiling area covered) especially if your ceiling is less than 15ft tall. As a rule of thumb in a small room (ceiling less than 10ft, length less than 20ft, widht less than 15ft) you simply cannot have too much bass trapping. Bass is really hard to deal with, the deeper the bass the more difficult it is. The nature of acoustics mean that the corners where walls meet give you double the bass trapping effectiveness, and where the floor and walls meet you get another doubling. So corners are where you want your basstraos to be, a very simple and effective way to bass trap is to make a superchunk, whereby you cut triangles of RW45 and fill (literally) the corner of the room from floor to ceiling with RW, then put a frame up and stretch nice material over it to hide the truth. This works and is simple but requires a large amount of RW. ANother approach os to build two absorbers like the ones above, one 6" deep and one 4" deep and put them in the corner as follows:- [url="http://forum.studiotips.com/download/file.php?id=5184"]http://forum.studiot...ile.php?id=5184[/url] The trick here is to use less dense material for the filler (so nothing more than RW45, something equivalent to an RW30 would be fine). These are really effective for less material. Even thenther are cases wher you cant really get to grips with the lowest of the low, and at this point you need to investigate membrane absorption if you want to get really good results. Check out the BBC R&D pages there is a whitepaper in there that detials the building of a modular membrane absorber that takes out frequencies around 50 to 100Hz, and its basically a box made of ply, with a front of very thin ply filled with pink fluffy roof insulation. The dimensions of the box are super important as is its airtightness, but basically the low frequencies are spent trying to flex that ply membrane, and the result is a very thin (~6" deep) extremely effective bass trap. More time consuming than the other methods, but taking up less space in the room. Finally with all this absorption going on you are in danger of making the room lose a lot of top end, diffusion is one way to help move the top and around the room more evenly. It is a big topic though, there are various mathematically derived systems (2d, 1d, slats, etc etc) for diffusing the sound, its seriosly complex but putting a diffuser up imbetween each absorber can really help stopping a room get too dark sounding. Have a search oin gearslutz in [url="http://www.gearslutz.com/board/bass-traps-acoustic-panels-foam-etc/"]the acoustic forum[/url] some more detailed info. A good point to note is all this stuff needn't be guess work, for a small outlay you can get a measurement mic (£30 for a perfectly reasonable Behringer one) and using some free software you can measure what is happening in your room with regard to early reflections a frequency/decay time waterfall plots and really scientifically improve the space. In the meantime get some bass traps in there and some absorption on the walls!

You can hear plenty of room in that Jake, lovely bass, very strong "Puhh" at the attack of every note (esp in the lowest octave), then a nice warm round tone. I always find that buzz db's have really distracting, although it is a legitimate part of the sound and disappears in a mix. Treating that room a little with some basstrapping, broadband absorption and diffusion would make it sound great for tracking though. Not that its awful right now, just 'there' quite a bit.

Look for a Markbass sa450 second hand. Seriously light, but fills 2u nicely, perfect swap out, if anything it amy be a smidge louder than the LH500, but its vfery very close either way.

Possibly. As mentioned above there are a lot of factors in play here that we cant make absolute judgements without. Its worth a go though...

[quote name='Mykesbass' timestamp='1322650652' post='1453866'] Loved the look on the presenter's face when Brian May started playing Bohemian Rhapsody - genuine fan moment! [/quote] +1 that was just wicked wasn't it!

[quote name='jakesbass' timestamp='1322558034' post='1452432'] I have good ears which makes me happy and sad in equal measure, if there is a pick up in a recorded sound I can hear it, and HATE IT!!! I have a (3 actually) GT67 large diaphragm condenser, into a presonus firewire mic pre/interface into logic... (soon to be pro tools) I'll sort a soundcloud thingy later and give you some examples of my home recordings. I've done a couple of online sessions with it so I guess I'm doing something right. I'd be most interested to hear expert views on my setup and how to maximise it's usability I also have a couple of sm58s and a 57... and a gorgeous Alembic Pre for electric stuff. When I've played upright in studios, I encounter a variety of techniques, at AIR and strongroom the engineer uses a really lovely old Neumann, at Parr st in Liverpool the guy used a Neumann in front, a big ol ribbon mic in the distance and a thing that looked like a tapered pencil pointing at my fingerboard. At the Church in Crouch end it was one of these [url="http://www.korbyaudio.com/products.html"]http://www.korbyaudi...m/products.html[/url], at Angel in Islington a large Neumann condensor, and at Sleeper Studios he used a Neumann m149. I often think about selling my bass to get something louder... then I go into the studio and it just records so well... I've also done sessions in little jingle studios where I've been in a large vocal booth with a U87 and it sounded great despite the size of room restriction. [i]Bilbo, you know what your bass sounds like, and you know how you want it to sound coming back at you from monitors, as a novice engineer I would say experiment with positioning, if you can get someone else to play your bass and get on your hands and knees in front of it and with your ears find the place that it sounds most pleasing to you... mark the spot, and put the mic there, also mark the position of your bass. Keep trying mate.[/i] [/quote] I 100% agree that mic position is at least as important as everything else, a few inches, or a few degrees of rotation can really change the timbre of the sound you pick up. There are a million ways to skin this cat, as Jake points outy every studio he works in has a different plan to do exactly the same thing. Did that weird looking mic look like this Jake? If so its an Earthworks, and really rather spiffy! And Korby stuff makes me go "Ding, dong...."

That would be "Plux The Duck" also refferred to as Plux, or my son

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1322485048' post='1451277'] Tim! [/quote] Exactly!

You describe time alignment rather than phase alignment. Time alignment is bringing the two tracks in time, which means moving one in the tim domain, phase alignment is changing the phase but leaving the timing where it is. The difference is subtle but important. Phase aligning retains the sense of the space in which things are recorded far better. Using a delay to sort out phase is very ver tricky, not many delays work in sub-millisecond time gaps, phsing is down to sub ms levels of detail. You are better off using summed output to get the phase right (and your ears), moving the second source as little as an inch can fix phase. Phase is good when the summed output of two sources is at is maximum, although you need to use your ears to check as well. There are hardware devices for fixing phase at source in much the same way without moving, they are not cheap (and dotn rely on delays). In software the easiest, cheapest solution is a free vst called phasebug.

That needs the Benny Hill music so much Was a brilliant afternoon, thanks to Nik for sorting it out, and everyone who came along with so much great gear for us to all enjoy, I had a superb time as did the "Demo Biatch"! Cheers all!

Alex is a star, he will definitely see you right.

About a million quid if you are insisting on using it for jazz apparently.... Something to do with the crystalline structure of the head or something? Just use a decent lead - Neutrik XLRs, decent cable, properly soldered - and you are golden (maybe £25 for 5m)

Gain structure is vital for dealing with noise. Its not so difficult to get a decent level, but if the preamp that is bringing that level rise is noisy you are f****d. If you have various places where you can add that level (true in some signal chains) my usual starting point is to get the level up as close to the mic as you can, anything later in the chain is only going to bring up the noise of the earlier devices as well. I would include the mic lead here, a crap lead can add all sorts of weird noise, and its not until you swapped everything else out that you try swapping that bloody lead, and then the noise is gone, and the signal is twice the volume.... Nothing wrong with guerrilla recording, its brought many great pieces of music to us all - Joe Meek was probably the original mad scientist of guerrilla recording!

Yeah, do yourself a favour and at least give [url="http://www.reaper.fm/"]Reaper[/url] a try, I've done some seriously complex mixes on it and never had a problem, its rock solid, uses very little CPU given what it can do and includes everything you need in a DAW to record, mix and even master complex full fat tracks. Oh and it runs on Mac and PC (32 & 64 bit)

[quote name='aldude' timestamp='1322221156' post='1448080'] I'd suggest one of the larger cabs. You're thinking about the Compact so you should have that covered. Edit: I'm also struggling to see why some people think 340W into two Barefaced cabs won't be enough! Sounds like it will shake down buildings! Of course the OP could always get more than two cabs [/quote] I didnt say 340w into two BF cabs wouldnt be enough, I said it would be enough just about. Assuming that Hartke actually delivers 340s at *ohm (big assumption IMO).

Of course if your figure out a way to bridge those two amp outputs into an 8Ohm load you would be delivering 340w into a siongle Compact or Midget at 8Ohms and that would go a lot further.... Still not a patch on the LH500 though....

These cabs are using drivers designed to be able to cope with far more power than other drivers before they fart out. They have very large Xmax capability. In order to get as loud as they can you supply more power to the driver than for a 'normal' cab with similar drivers, so the drivers are slightly less sensitive (less loud for the same amount of power) but happily handle a great deal more power than a normal cab. The upshot is a very very loud cab that needs plenty of power to get there, but will absolutely out perform a 'normal' cab. The one cab that is mentioned here that belies that a bit more is the Super Twelve T, that is just staggering, it is more sensitive IME than the Compact or Midget alone, and can cope with massive amounts of clean power. The thing is that amp is going to make life difficult for you running 8Ohm cabs, you would be developing as you say a max of 170w a side into each 8ohm cab, and IME 340w is going to cut it, but only just. I've never really got on with Hartke gear from that era, IMO you would do better to trade it in and get an LH500, because with either a Compact/Midget stack or a SUperTwelveT it will knock down walls.

Being mucked about some more then