A.3. Sound studio accessories
The following accessories
are essential to good recording and
production in the studio. Since these accessories are not the
big-ticket items, they are often overlooked. Do not make the mistake
of spending a few thousand dollars on mixers and microphones and then
get cheap cables or headphones.
A.3.1. Headphones
Good studio reference
headphones let
you hear
subtle
details and noises that are difficult to detect with studio monitors.
Several sets of high-quality headphones that completely cover the
ears are necessary for voice-over recording sessions and critical
sound-editing applications. Headphones also serve as a monitoring
system during recording sessions where a live microphone is in the
same vicinity as your studio reference monitors. Do not use cheap
headphones. For under $100, buy the industry favorite, Sony MDR-7506
or AKG headphones.
Six ways to get the best deals every time
Getting the best deals and service is an art form. Everyone knows that music
retailers never sell for list price, but how far they will come down
is anyone's guess. All audio equipment manufacturers offer
retailers different wholesale percentage discounts. High-end
specialty companies such as Mesa-Boogie generally sell their gear to
retailers at only 30% off list, while other companies such as Alesis
sell their low-end items to retailers at 40% to 50% off list. There
is no formula to wholesale pricing in the music retail business. Do
not expect to get the same percentage discount for every brand.
Generally, retailers are making less of a profit than you think. The
average markup on products is 20% to 27%. In many cases, their sale
price might be only 5% to 10% above cost. That 10% to 27% margin is
what keeps the music store alive.
-
Research prices before you buy. Do your homework. Before you buy
equipment, look at a few mail-order catalogs and make a few phone
calls to get an idea what the going rate is for the particular item
you are looking to purchase.
-
Look for overstocked blow-out items.Music retailers give greater discounts on items in stock.
Watch for blow-out sales when retailers have too many items in stock
and need to move inventory.
-
Look for old demo models. Music
retailers as a rule do not always give
discounts on demo models. But on occasion, if you think the model has
been on the floor for a long time and it has a few nicks or dings, it
is worth asking for a small discount. Also look for last year's
models. Most manufacturers update their models periodically. Often
retailers are forced to discount previous models if newer versions
have arrived.
-
Shop at the end of the month.If you
are shopping at a large retail chain, go at the end of the month when
salespeople have to meet their sales quota, or better yet, shop at a
store where salespeople don't have quotas.
-
Mention the competition.Before you
discuss specific prices with the salesperson, let him or her know in
a tactful manner that you are aware of the competition. In passing
conversation, drop a name or two of the other retail stores in town.
Where appropriate, be direct. If another store gives you a good
price, ask the salesperson to beat or match it.
-
Buy all your gear at one time. If you are buying several items at
once, retailers will give you a few extra percentage points off as a
package deal, as well as discounts on accessories such as cables.
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A.3.2. High-quality cables
Cables are
the last item anyone wants to spend money on, but considering that
they transmit all the electrical signals in the studio, it is worth
the extra money to buy high-quality cables with reinforced connectors
and proper shielding. Cheap, poor quality cables produce noise and
interference, and they break frequently.
Do not buy cheap cables. One bad cable can ruin an entire recording
session and render all your high-quality gear useless. If you are
adept at electronics and soldering, the best option is to buy long
runs of specialized audio cables for all your studio components and
attach the appropriate XLR or 1/4 connector yourself for each length
of cable. This is generally the technique for large professional
studios where hundreds of audio cables are needed. Look for Mogami
audio cables -- they have a reputation for manufacturing the best
cables in the industry.
If you are configuring a large-scale studio, you will have to
special-order audio cables direct from the manufacturer or from a
distributor such as Markertek at http://www.markertek.com. For small studios,
it is easier to buy premade high-quality cables. For premade cables,
you should expect to pay anywhere from $20 to $30 each.
A.3.3. Sound libraries
A set of sound effects CDs is an indispensable tool for any
sound designer under tight deadline
or budget constraints. We cannot tell you the number of times that a
soundtrack called for a particular, hard-to-capture sound that would
have been nearly impossible to get ourselves if it were not for sound
libraries. It may be a bus traveling down the street, or a bird
singing on cue for exactly 11 seconds, or even a particular door slam
or footstep sound. For each of these noises, we could go right to our
sound libraries, import the desired sound into our editor, and be
done.
You can purchase high-quality, royalty-free professional sound
effects CDs for $50 to $100 for approximately 90 minutes of sounds or
upwards of $1,000 for an entire collection. The
Hollywood
Edge offers some of the best production sound libraries in the
industry. In fact, we use The Hollywood Edge "Premiere
Edition" sound effects for all our sound design projects at
Raspberry
Media. A sampling of 80 royalty-free sounds can be found at
http://www.designingwebaudio.com.
For a low-cost alternative, you can download audio clips from a
variety of web sites that provide free or low-cost sound effects. A
few are listed in Section A.4, "Web resources" in
this appendix. Beware: cheap sound effects packages generally contain
poorer-quality audio files with more noise and glitches than high-end
packages.
A.3.4. Disk repair and optimization utilities
If you do any
hard-disk recording, you will need to optimize your hard drive at
least once a month, if not every week. It is always a good idea to
optimize your hard disk before an important
recording session. Due to the speed that hard drives read and write
digital audio files, it is highly critical that there is enough
contiguous hard disk space for each recording session. Fragmented
disks are the leading cause of audio system crashes and error
warnings. Norton Utilities is the industry standard for hard drive
repairs and optimization.
A.3.5. Audio plug-ins and utilities
With the
steady rise of hard-disk-based
recording and editing, more and more effects processing is being done
internally with software. An ever-increasing number of outboard
analog equipment manufactories, such as Lexicon, Focusrite, and dbx,
and traditional audio software companies, such as Waves and
Audio Ease, have introduced
digital software plug-ins for Pro Tools
and other hard-disk recording applications. Internal software
plug-ins allow you to keep the audio signal entirely in the digital
domain from recording to editing to final mix-down.
The most useful plug-in or utility you will want to purchase is a
batch conversion and processing application such as Waves' Wave
Convert Pro or Audio Ease's
BarbaBatch. Both
batch processors convert Macintosh and PC audio files between sample
rates, word lengths, channels (stereo/mono) and file types (AIFF,
SDII, .wav, .ra,
.swa, QuickTime) while retaining optimal sound
quality. As well as converting sound files to alternate file formats,
they perform dynamics effects such as normalization, equalization,
and peak limiting.
Wave
Convert Pro from Waves runs native on Macintosh and is available for
Windows 98 (http://www.waves.com). BarbaBatch runs on
Macintosh (http://www.audioease.com).
A.3.6. Pop screens
Pop screens are
essential for reducing wind and
explosive P's and S's in voice-over recording sessions. A
pop-screen is a circular hoop with a thin nylon material that rests
directly between the speaker's mouth and the microphone. Pop
screens may be found in most music stores. In a pinch, you can get
away with using a homemade method that many engineers have used in
the past before pop screens were manufactured. Take a nylon stocking
and stretch it over a framing device, such as a bent metal clothes
hanger or embroidery hoop, and then tape it to the mic stand
with
duct tape.
 |  |  | | A.2. Designing a studio with proper acoustics |  | A.4. Web resources |
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