Audio Engineering

To begin: While skimming through posts on Twitter the other day, I found one that really excited me from Dave Rat of Rat Sound. Dave’s work was brought to my attention when I did a two day trip to Hartford, CT and Columbia, Maryland to see Blink 182’s summer 2009 reunion tour. At both shows I was in complete awe over the band’s sound. Travis Barker, being the technical drummer he is, had a kick drum that sounded more like a doomsday cannon and the clarity of the entire performance was evident even through the lower end of the audio spectrum. Fortunately, through my ability to follow people on Twitter, I tracked down the man responsible for exposing my ears to a live sound I have never witnessed before. To my luck, Dave documents his work well online. After discovering his blog following Blink’s summer tour, I spent almost an entire day reading through his technical details. While the majority of it is out of my league, Dave has become a great influence towards my aspirations.

And now to the next: While researching room acoustics, I was introduce to the company RealTraps based right here in New Milford, Connecticut. I first heard of RealTraps while reading through Mastering Audio by Bob Katz (Big thanks to Tom MacLean for providing me with a copy of this book). RealTraps came to my attention again several weeks ago as I began a more in depth look at the art of treating rooms for better acoustic accuracy. The owner of RealTraps, Ethan Winer, has proved himself to be a seemingly endless amount of knowledge to any level of recording engineer or audiophile. Ethan Winer tops my list of the ‘most helpful’ and I look forward to meeting him one day (fingers crossed).

Onto the connection: As I stated, I was stumbling through Twitter posts and came across Dave Rat’s latest. It was a YouTube link to a ‘must watch’ video for anyone in the industry. I fixed myself a delicious bowl of mac n cheese and prepared myself for what would most likely be some great new insight. To my surprise, the owner of the video was none other than Ethan Winer. I gave myself a pat on the back for looking up to both of these greats and dove right into the video.

To get to the point: Ethan’s video is from an Audio Myths workshop lead by himself, James Johnston and Poppy Crum that took place at AES 2009. Like many before me said, this video is a ‘must watch’ and I couldn’t agree more. Here it is: