Never in my entire life have I enjoyed the sound of silence more than today. Trying to think of a proper name for this blog has forced me to compile a list of things this blog will NOT be.
I could go into a convoluted diatribe about how tinnitus destroys my ability to hear perfect silence, but I won't. I will not get into the intricacies of analog versus digital, warmth versus clear unadulterated signal, that's a whole other blog entry.
Todays article is a great big duh for me.
For years... I am talking years, I've created music using computers. MACs and PCs living peacefully together in a long revered silicone utopia melding together to create the perfect fifth of harmony, interoperability, boundless creative potential, audio superiority and redundancy. However, like any marriage, marrying two technologies has its ups and downs. But today.. today was an up day.
The short of it, there was a eureka that should have occurred a long time ago but didn't. In any digital audio chain, there is the inevitable introduction of noise due to analog source and conversion. The world.. it's noisy. Recording drums is really noisy if you ask anyone who has a headache. Tracking vocals is noisy, the mike is inevitably going to have self noise and transmit noise to an analog to digital converter, which introduces more noise and distortion until it reaches the pristine land of digital. And yet, this still is not the topic of this entry.
When you use a separate computer to playback samples of orchestral instruments as most composers do, the invariable question surfaces, how do I mix that with my main computer sound? Until today, I have been taking the analog outs of a audio interface from the PC and mixing it into my digital mixer via the analog input.
Noise you say? Yes I say. Noisy.
A computer's internal organs, in fact the entire interior of a CPU is a radio frequency play land. Putting a digital to analog converter in a place like this is truly asking for trouble. Most cards have breakout boxes attached to PCI cards which put the A/D and D/A as far from that noisy scenario and thus achieving a balance between noise and the need to have analog inputs. Most current audio interfaces use USB2.0 or Firewire to communicate with it's host computer, which takes the PCI out of the equation entirely.
But there are those composers who rarely if ever require analog inputs and outputs at all. We write music in our digital audio workstations, we trigger samples which have been expertly recorded in beautiful halls, chambers, churches, etc. (Yes they still have noise :) We mix these pieces down through our digital mixers or even right in the computer, no external processing. And we are happy, and enjoy our noiseless creations.
Not me though. My PC had an audio card. It was noisy. I didn't think to interface it to my main computer digitally. All it required was a S/PDIF digital audio cable, and the insertion of that noisy computer into a digitally clean world through it's S/PDIF connection. It was so simple yet so elegant. My solution was in front of me for years, and only now do I realize I've been making noisy mixes. Goodbye BNR plug in. I powered up Protools, turned on the digital mixers, activated Gigastudio on my PC and loaded my Steinway B sample. Absolutly clear, beautiful signal through my HD headphones. I nearly wept.
If a $14.95 cable brought me so much joy, I wonder what $30 will do to me.
j
