Hi Dave,
I am a first semester student at SAE Institute-Atlanta. Your Golden Ears and Playback Platinum are a part of the foundational requirements here at my school. I must say that you have opened up a whole new world to me in regards to critical listening. Mixing and what not is a ways up the road for me in this training, but I feel that your products have already 'pulled my collar' to the deep intricacies involved in mixing a quality piece of work. I look forward to going into that area of my training and am confident that your expertise has help me be better prepared for what is ahead.
Thanks and many Blessings, multiplied sir!!!
Gerel

Dave,
It was an absolute pleasure meeting you in our internship & portfolio class yesterday. I learned so much from your presentation and admire all of the incredible accomplishments you have made. I can only hope that one day I will be equally as successful. I hope to continue to follow my dreams and pursue my interests, as you have done. I hope you are doing well, and I will be in contact soon. I would love to talk more about your work in acoustics and the audio field in general. Thank you for all of your inspiration. Best wishes! (And I hope you enjoyed the coffee!)

Matt Almquist

Dave,
I've been meaning to hunt you down for the past couple of months and finally found a slow Friday afternoon in the office to do so. I think of you every day these days, as I am the proud owner of an Audi A7 with the B&O system. I could never have imagined owning those tweeters back at Dondisound in '78! I often find myself sitting in the driveway waiting until the next track is done before heading in the house, the B&O system is that good.
Anyway, life is also good, Dan Ferraro says "hello!" and drop me a line if you have a moment to spare.
Very best regards,
Mark Valenti

Dave:
I'm Tim Woycik, and if you are the Dave Moulton that taught music at Saugerties High School circa 1972, then I was one of your students. I was out east to visit family recently, saw a couple of classmates, and started strolling down memory lane. Tonight we dug out the old yearbook and started thinking about teachers who had made an impact in my life. A little computer research brings me to this site. Hopefully, you are who I think you are. Would love to hear from you. Thanks for the musical memories, synthesizers, and a trip to NYC to see Jesus Christ Superstar!
It's exciting to see where your journey has led! Congrats!
Tim Woycik

Hi Dave,

Great to see your website - Looks great. I know i'm late to the party
I find myself surround by young audio students making the transition into pro-audio and i still find your Golden Ears collection to be the best way to judge their current skill level and help them improve on their critical listening. I'm always impressed when they come in already having your process down cold.

I remember - all those years ago - you creating those early listening tests for us at Suny Fredonia Tonemeister Studios. Funny thing was, even if you weren't taking it seriously, you simply got better by accident.

I hope you are enjoying your sports car - sure beats working !

All the Best, Dave

THANK YOU !

Scott Hull
Owner
Masterdisk Mastering Studios

DAVE MOULTON!!!!!!!! I miss those Dondisound days! You are the best! I hope all is well with you! Pat

Hi Rob!

It's great to hear from you – glad you're still having fun with audio. Of all the people who probably don't need the CALM Act, you'd be right up there. Good luck with LKFS, though.

Keep smiling, and If you ever get up to Boston, let me know.

Best regards,

Dave

So the chief comes into my room after ten days off (love the freelance schedule) and tells me there are some acronyms I need to familiarize myself with. LKFS, CALM. What?
We discussed some potential gear and decided I needed to google CALM and get some more info. The first article I find is written by none other than my audio guru from SUNY Fredonia, Dave Moulton! What a nice surprise. And, of course, the article was very helpful.
Since graduating in 1981 I have managed to stay in the business, first in music, then a little teaching then since the mid eighties in television.
I mix the Maury, Jerry Springer, Steve Wilkos and Trish Goddard shows here in Stamford CT for NBCUniversal.
I can imagine that maybe opera is the only thing more dynamic than daytime whispering/screaming talk.
CALM is of great interest to me.
Glad to find you Dave! You teached me real good!

Hi Dave-

Just writing to say thanks for the recording enlightenment, both in your articles in Recording and dating back to the '70s when you spent a January term at Gettysburg College with your 4-track, ElectroComp synth and analog sequencer. That brief exposure has cost me an unseemly amount of money over the years, but that's my weakness, no fault of yours.

The 4-track "planetarium piece" improv that I played while you imbibed and engineered is still on my iPod; though the original quad planetarium experience is only a distant memory, it might have inspired my continuing obsession with surround mixes, so on second thought I'm going to tell my wife that both my synth and surround habits are your fault.

So consider that a heads up, and thanks again.

Warren

Hi Dave.

I've enjoyed your recent "CALM Act" measurement article in TV Technology just now, and I think there may be a few issues to clarify.

As I tell operators around the world, the single most important thing they need to do is measure their signal off air, since you don't know where you need to go until you know where you are.

In your article, you relay a portion of a letter from Mr. Kohn in Montgomery, AL, who I believe unnecessarily complicates the subject a bit. For DTV in the US, the only thing that a broadcaster needs to do is to ensure that the dialnorm value within the AC3 data stream matches the measured level of speech (or the average level of the program as a whole) within the program. If that dialnorm value matches the measured value of the program, all Dolby processing within the home system will be performed properly, irrespecfive of the presentation settings (i.e. 2/0, 3/2L, PL decode, etc.). In most cases, MSOs (like DirecTV) are simply turning around local stations' signals, so the burden of making sure the dialnorm value matches the content is still on the local broadcaster.

Of course, legacy analog tiers in cable may have some issues due to mis-settings in the edge device, but these instances are relatively contained in my experience.

One last point: ITU BS.1770-1 has been replaced by BS.1770-2, which adds a relative gate, a silence gate and a 75% block overlap. A-85 supports the "most current version" of the ITU standard, so broadcasters should be looking to migrate their measurment approach to the ITU-2 method.

Best regards,
Mike

Finding your website made my day!

I'm a fledling in digital recording for voice science research.

One question... when I look at a frequency response graph, does it describe the way the mic renders the fundamental frequency of a vocalization at a certain pitch or does it describe the way the mic renders the individual harmonics of the vocalized pitch? I'm inclined to guess the later - thinking that recording devices treat all component of an envelope as if they were the only component. I'll put this another way. You probably have already guessed that I use spectrographic analysis and I am wondering whether a frequency response graph tells me that a fundamental frequency in a certain range is rendered differently than some partial of the produced sound several thousand Hz higher.

Dave, great seeing you in cyberspace! I'm so happy all that ear training I went through at Fredonia is finally coming to use in my humble and lovable studio here in Niskayuna. I went back to the alma mater recently and touched base with the SRT facilities, and current instructor buddy John Caruso. Just one question(complaint, if you will) though- isn't my super-mentor and mastering engineer Bob Ludwig known as the "man with the golden ears"? Warmly, John Norton

Dave,
I'm really enjoying your site and your writing - fell into it last night [welcome a few more visitors thanks to some pages shared via facelurk] and I'm still studying.

I have one complaint, though:
You have such a great archive! It's a shame that your articles that may have originally run in a series often don't link to each other. It's frustrating reaching the bottom of the page and seeing "more on this next time" without a link to the next time in question.

Search is functional, but this is the web - please consider putting some links between your works for continuity's sake, not to mention to save your readers the time it takes to find the next piece [which isn't always obvious and may not even be found with a search].

Otherwise - really enjoying the site.

Kudos,
Derek G in Canada

Dave,

You frequently invite your readers to complain to you about anything here on your website, so I've come to voice a complaint - you're far too awesome and generous with your knowledge.

But seriously, I deeply appreciate your insight. I've been self-studying audio for a few years now, and yours is the clearest and most helpful information I've come across. It's beautifully written and rigorously thought out. In particular, I've come to admire the way you cut to the quick of an issue - there's no fluff and no tired repetition of things I've heard a million times before. In fact, there's info here (e.g., your discussion of phase shift and polarity reversal) that I haven't heard even intimated anywhere else online.

Thank you much,

Thomas

PS - I'm really glad you mention Total Recording on here; now that I know you've written a whole book on this stuff, it's on my short list of things to order.

Hi Tom!

Thanks for your email and kind thoughts. Yes, you are on to something, which is to say, you've broken the code.

Now that you've encouraged mr, I'll devote a piece to some of the cool things you can do with a shuffler. Stay tuned.

Best regards,

Dave Moulton

Hi Dave. Your article on "Envelopment" in the latest TVTechnology was fascinating to those of us who tinker with such things. A colleague at Zenith in the '70s (they were pushing quad stereo at the time) showed me the poor man's surround method of connecting both positives of a secondary speaker output from a stereo system to the + and - terminals of a 3rd speaker and I was hooked for life on all things surround.

In about 2002 when I first bought a AVR with bass management I was looking forward to deploying that feature; it made a lot of sense regarding power handling for bookshelf speakers and for the amps themselves.

But I was completely surprised to find it unsatisfying and flat compared to leaving bass management off. Now that I read your article, I am starting to understand possibly why; it seems that maybe this can defeat Griesinger's enhancement effect by effectively "mono-ing" lower frequencies to the LFE and a single point-source (the subwoofer), even if the bass management crossover is set for a lower frequency. Am I on to something here?

Hi Brad!

Great to hear from you! You're very welcome, of course, but I clearly remember you thanking me at the time. Believe me, I have not spent the last 36 years in a snit!

Any adventures in the meantime that you'd like to share?

Best regards, and happy holidays!

Dave Moulton

Hi Dave, Thanks for your hospitality when I came to visit in Red Hook with Brucie. Granted it was 36 years ago, but is it really ever too late to say Thanks?

Hi Dave,
I bought the Golden Ears 8 CD pack many years ago... and still use it sometimes!

Hey Dave-
I've loved reading your articles! They really get me thinking differently about how I approach mixing. The Tom Bates way of EQ'ing has been very helpful and worth the extra bit of time it takes. I was wondering if you could maybe help me out with my understanding of the article below:

http://www.moultonlabs.com/more/principles_of_multitrack_mixing_the_phantom_image/P0/

I understand the concept but can't seem to use it effectively because it basically guarantees comb filtering will occur when my mix is summed to mono. Am I missing something?

Again, thank you for sharing your wealth of knowledge and your time!

Chris J.