The DSP Project

Last year we had our 2010 studio headphone shoot out consisting of 5 of the most popular brands of closed back circumaural studio headphones. To our surprise Shure won taking out brands that have been in the headphone game a lot longer and costing more (I ended up buying a pair for myself). So I was excited to find out they have released a new flagship model the SRH940 I decided to see how it stacked up against last years winner.

The Sonnox SuprEsser is a fully featured de-Esser and Dynamic EQ. Part of what makes it so attractive besides its transparent sound is the vast amount of visual feedback allowing you to quickly lock in on the exact offending frequencies. I took it for a test drive.

Dont forget to enter our competition to win a TC Electronic Impact Twin!

I have very few “rules” that I follow on every track in fact I can only think of two: Dont clip (but even I will break this on occasion for certain creative purposes) and the tip that I am going to share with you this week. It is easy to do but can have a HUGE impact on the power and clarity of your mixes.

You can find Prism Sound converters in most of the big name professional mastering and recording studios here in London so its fair to say I was pretty excited when the courier delivered to me Prim’s premium quality firewire audio interface the Orpheus. Not wanting to make life too easy for it I put it up against Bryston’s DBA-1 to see if the Digital to Analog conversion was as good as everybody says.

Sonnox’s Inflator is an interesting mix of perceived loudness enhancement without compression via what I suspect is tricky harmonic excitement mixed with emulated valve over drive. The ability to increase perceived loudness with out damaging transients is an exciting prospect for any mastering engineer so I was keen to try it out. This week we explore what its capable of as a creative tool in production on a single channel and in mastering over a complete mix.

This week we take time to listen to some of the entries from our fellow DSP viewers and find the new intro for The DSP Project, it was cool to see entries come in from all over the globe. Congratulations to the winner who will be taking home a brand new Launchpad to mashup Ableton Live until his heart is content. And a BIG thank you to the dudes at Novation for putting up the prize.

The original Jupiter 8 was an 8 voice polyphonic analog subtractive synthesizer released by Roland in 1981 responsible many classic 80′s tracks. Arturia have had a crack at recreating this iconic synth in plugin format. I was going to playing some samples but wanted to get you a bit closer so we are going to quickly walk through the original interface and the extras goodies Arturia have added. Sorry there aren’t more audio examples but this episode was already way too long!

Disclaimer: This is no way a complete walk through, please dont get upset because I missed out X function. I know I missed out X function.

Interested to hear what you guys prefer in a review a detailed walk through like this, or more audio examples & over view approach?

The BMC-2 is a monitor controller and DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) with a headphone output rolled up into one neat desktop unit. I decided to test it out against the standard DAC in an edirol UA-101 interface and the considerably more expensive DAC in the Prism Orpheus to see what it could do.

The Finger is an effects plugin that is specifically designed for live performance by Tim Exile himself. Built on Native Instruments Reaktor I was keen to get stuck in to it.

This week I release the details on an exciting new comp, giving you a chance to win a brand new Novation Launchpad.