Audio Recording

This is a tutorial on how to use and understand the Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 from a user perspective. Take note that this tutorial can be applied to other Focusrite audio interfaces because they have similar mix control layouts and features.

How to get the mix control?

By default, mix control is available after complete installation of the Focusrite drivers. The drivers are usually installed before you will be hooking Saffire Pro40 to your computer firewire port. This is a standard procedure to prevent malfunction, damage or abnormal operation of your audio interface.

Read here for the details on how to install Focusrite Saffire Pro audio interface. Then after computer reboot, you can access the mix control in Windows by going to Start — > All Programs — > Focusrite — > Saffire MixControl, then click the Mix Control launcher.

It should exactly look like the one below:

Learning the most important features

The mixcontrol is the heart of your Saffire Pro 40 operations. It commands the hardware inputs and outputs of your audio interface. Read the rest of this entry »

In a digital audio workstation, all of your recordings would be stored in a digital storage medium with hard drives as the most common storage. The stored digital audio is the digitized version of the analog musical performance. These are converted to digital audio by pulse code modulation(analog to digital conversion) at your audio interface hardware.

This tutorial will cover data storage implementations in digital audio workstation in detail. If you are completely new to setting up your recording studio, you might read this tutorial on the 13 important factors in computer audio recording.

Data Storage Technologies for DAW and their performance

First thing you need to know is to be familiar with common data storage technologies. There are essentially two common data storage medium available to computer. These are:

a.) HDD (Hard disk drive)
b.) SSD (Solid State Drives)

The main difference between the two is that a hard disk drive is a mechanical storage device consisting of circular storage media known as the platters (see the white disc on the above screenshot). It rotates or spins to store and access data. The spindle handling the rotation is driven by a motor.

Due to the physical nature of the hard disk drives, it does play a role in limiting the read and write speed of the data. The access time (the shorter the better) of the hard drive is commonly around 5ms to 10ms. This is defined as the time it takes for the hard drive to actually start transferring data (since it will still need to rotate before it can actually transfer bits).

Another performance factor of a hard disk drive is the seek time. This is the time it takes for the drive to read and write data (search/write data on the drive and transfer bits). Typical (average) seek time for desktop hard drives would be around 9ms.
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If you are a beginner in home recording, one of the most important topics that you should understand is balanced and unbalanced audio. This will have a profound impact on the recording quality of your projects.

In fact, below are some recording problems associated with improper implementation of balanced and unbalanced audio:

1.) Noisy recordings (presence of hiss, hum or distortion).
2.) Weak sounding recording (poor signal to noise ratio).
3.) Poor capture sound quality of recorded musical instrument (guitars, bass, or even vocals).

Therefore if you are looking forward to learn some techniques on how to make quality recordings; it is imperative you have good understanding of balanced and unbalanced audio. These two can have a strong impact on the quality of your recording signal chain.

Balanced Audio and its connectors

Let’s start with the most important…

Balanced audio came from the fact that an audio signal travels in two different wires in addition to the ground. Why it’s called balanced is because these two wires actually carry the “same” audio signal except that the signal on the other wire is inverted(illustration below). The primary purpose of signal inversion is to get the benefit of noise cancellation at the receiving end. These “balancing” actions make it harder for the balanced transmission to pick up noise.

Let’s illustrate further, see below:

It shows a balanced audio transmission of a 3 volt signal. What happens is that this signal is present in the two conductors/wires of a balance cable. But the signal on the other conductor (“cold”) is inverted so the polarity is changed (-3volt). At the receiving end, it is re-inverted resulting in a doubled signal (+6volt signal) based on the above illustration.
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