DIGITAL AUDIO

Digital Audio Technologies



Digital Audio Technologies

Abstract

The digital technologies have been advanced tremendously over past few decades. The audio control surfaces and digital audio technologies have been used for controlling a variety of music production aspects, such as virtual instruments, samplers, signal processors and console automation. This paper focuses on the audio control surfaces, HUI's, digital mixing desks, associated market and technologies. The future implications of these technologies on analogue mixing console are also discussed.

Market and Technology of Digital Audio Devices

The audio recording and mixing used to be a tedious task before a period of few decades. There used to be a large studio filled with music equipments such as instruments, wires, compressors, mixing desks, and speakers. However, nowadays, advancements in digital audio technologies have made the life of sound engineers and musicians easier. All they need is a computer, music processing software, mouse and a small set of speakers (. This section discusses the vital elements required for the music industry in today's digital world.

The audio control surface is the device, which facilitates the human interaction for controlling a digital audio workstation. The control surfaces consist of one or more controls that enable a person to have tactile control of the digital audio software. As the control surfaces can serve for a wide range of controlling applications, their size and shape may vary.

The conventional control surface that is intended for providing the mixing functions consists of faders, knobs and buttons. Some audio controllers include transport controls, so that the musician can control the sequencer during recording.

Most of the control surface use MIDI Machine Control (MMC) transport keys and eight motorized faders. Control surfaces rely on the use of MIDI for communicating with the program that they control. The MIDI commands are not standardized for different types of mixers. Mackie Control, which is priced at $1,299 uses to, sends doubled-up pitch-bend commands, while a profile is required as mandatory for mapping the control surface's commands. These commands are written to DAW or digital audio sequencer.

The mixing desk has been always considered as the main equipment of the producer's studio. The producers use these mixers for routing their music in and out; adjusting the volume levels and arrange their mixes. The concept of digital music desks have improves the quality and efficiency of all these processes, while reducing the chances of errors and quality degradations.

The digital mixing desk efficiently introduces the human interface to the sound system (Harada, K., 2001). The essential functionality of a mixing desk can be split into the blocks of input, processing and output. The desk takes the inputs via series of input channels, performs adjustments for the tonal inputs, and provides back the outputs via series of output channels.

Digital mixing desks provide the solutions to many of the common problems, such as lack of experience of a musician, or non suitable solution of the music equipment. The integration of digital technology in music equipment allows the audio equipment to play almost automatically, without relying on a person ...