Apple Soundtrack Pro 2 - Manual (Page 26)

26 Chapter 1 Setting Up Your System
Setting Up a Proper Audio Monitoring Environment
Room shape and material are just as important as the quality of the speakers
themselves. Every surface in a room potentially reflects sound, and these reflections
mix together with the sound originating from the speakers. Rooms with parallel walls
can create standing waves, which are mostly low-frequency sound waves that reinforce
and cancel each other as they bounce back and forth.
Standing waves cause some frequencies to be emphasized or attenuated more than
others, depending on your listening position. When you mix in a room that creates
standing waves, you may adjust certain frequencies more than necessary. However, you
may not notice until you play back your audio in a different listening environment, in
which those frequencies may sound overbearing or nonexistent.
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Tip: A much cheaper alternative to building new walls is to mount angled pieces of
material to the existing walls to eliminate parallel surfaces.
If the material in a room is very reflective, the room sounds “brighter” because high
frequencies are easily reflected. Mounting absorbing material (such as acoustic foam)
on the walls can reduce the brightness of a room. A “dead room” is one that has very
little reflection (or reverberation). Try to cover any reflective surfaces in your
monitoring environment.
Amplifiers
If you are recording audio from microphones and are not running the microphone’s
signal through a mixer with a microphone pre-amplifier, you need to connect an
amplifier to boost the microphone’s signal before sending it to the computer. If you are
connecting monitors or speakers that are not self-powered, you also need to connect
them through an amplifier.
Mixers
Connecting a mixer to your system allows you to record audio from multiple
microphones or instruments simultaneously, to play back the output from your computer
through connected monitors or speakers, and to control the volume levels of both the
audio input and output. Professional-quality mixers have a number of additional features,
including equalization (EQ) controls, auxiliary sends and returns for adding external
effects, and separate monitor and mix level controls. Mixers may also include inboard
pre-amplification for microphones, making the use of a separate amplifier unnecessary.
Control Surfaces
Soundtrack Pro supports control surfaces that use the Mackie Control and Logic
Control protocols. For information on connecting and using control surfaces, see
Chapter 15, “
Using Control Surfaces with Soundtrack Pro ,” on page 391.