Dave,

You've got a great website that's full of very very informative and entertaining. A great contribution to musicians...

Rick Landers
Modern Guitars Magazine

Hi Dave!
I was looking up some info on grounding issues, which of course brought up Neil Muncy's name (how could it not?), and then your site. I'm a long way from Fredonia right now - teaching in Kosovo. I had fun reading through your site - keep up the good work. Reminiscent of a coversation we had so long ago - of all the web sites I have looked at, I can honestly say yours is the most recent.

Mr. Moulton,

I am currently reading your book Total Recording (page 117 and going) and i am learning a lot ! I've started a list of questions (so far two) and when i'm finished with the book i would like to e-mail them to you. Is there an e-mail address i can send it to?

I was doing an early saturday morning web crawl and found the following quotation- "Why is American beer served cold? So you can distinguish it from urine."
--David Moulton
I followed by googling the name and found myself here at the lab and was happy to find the plethora of interesting information here, as I do a bit of video production. I think we met breifly at SUNY Fredonia. Anyhow Thanks for having this site and provideing the keen resources to helping the world to be a better sounding place.
Randy Crawford- suny fredonia '81

As a long time BBN and independent acoustical consultant I appreciate your talent for making acoustic concepts understandable to a wide audience. But your recent article on managing SPL in TV Technology has left me a bit uneasy.

You state that in setting up a listening configuration one should set the individual speaker levels for pink noise at 0 VU or -14 dB FS signals to be 85 dBC. Should one turn on all the speakers at one time the SPL could go up anywhere from 8 to 16 dBC, depending on the phase coherence of the speaker signals. That would make it mighty loud.

Listening to music or home theater at these levels could be unpleasant. To be a sound editor or mixer at these levels might lead to hearing damage. SMPTE recommends movie theaters be set up for 85 dBA and Jay Rose recommends mixing at 91 dBC levels (85 dBC @ -20 dBFS).

What do you feel is the proper SPL for mixing and for listening.

Amen to your thoughts and beliefs on the "loudness race". I record, produce, mix and master mainly hip-hop but other genres as well and the squashed, limited dynamic range recordings are simply becoming tragic. Hopefully with enough persistence and individuals like yourself and Bob Katz enough people will be educated to scale it back a bit. Thanks for the great articles.

1 Independent Canadian Label in your corner to help try and end the loudness race.

Hi Dave,
I have a 17-year-old nephew who plays keyboards, "written" music, arranges the pieces he's written, then records and mixes his own CDs. He's talented, and has great passion for all this having started producing his pieces at age eight. He's decided he would like to be an audio engineer (I'm also suggesting he think along the lines of performer and producer too).

I was wondering what products of yours I might buy for him for Christmas, which also is his 18th birthday. Does Golden Ears sound right for him? (pun intended.)

Also, he's considering going to the New England Art Institute to pursue an associate's in audio engineering. I want him to learn more than toggles and switches though . . . I want him to get new ideas about arrangements and how to present them . . . your sculpture approach to sound. I don't know why, but I suspect the NEAI teaches the tech end of audio engineering, but perhaps not the art. My nephew is beyond that. He's got a lot of the tech down . . . it's using engineering tools judiciously, with a more mature vision and sensibilities that he needs. Are there programs in the Boston area that you'd recommend over the New England Art Institute? The only thing that might keep him back is that his ability to read music is limited. He does most everything my ear and memory, which in his case seems to be pretty remarkable.

Please advise me regarding what products of yours might benefit my nephew Tom. Thank you David for your time and consideration regarding my query. P.S. Your website really looks wonderful. I will definitely pass your website address on to Tom and suggest he read your articles. Thanks so much for helping people really appreciate and take full pleasure in our wonderful sense of hearing. Best always, Barbara Benham

Hi Dave -

I am just writing to suggest that you post the table of contents of the Total Recording book somewhere. I am interested in the book but would like to see the contents. Amazon has got me quite used to this and it really makes buying online much easier!

Done! Thanks for the suggestion. -webguy

Dear Dave,

I was so pleasantly surprised to run across your website when I was searching for some lost memories of my youth and I googled dondisound studios.

It is wonderful to see that you're still invoved in spreading your audio technology knowledge around. You were a tremendous influence in my life. I am no longer involved in audio as I followed a more mundane path to making a living.

I (quite joyously) attended the Center for Audio Studies Certificate Program in DondiSound Studios before you left to teach at the actual SUNY Fredonia campus.

I still talk about ear training to my co-workers every time I hear a Steely Dan song on the radio. I still remember driving around with your sound level meter measuring the db (SPL) level in a moving car. Both with windows open and windows closed. And, most of all, the concept of signal flow helps me in every area of my life. You were truly a great influence, even though my journey strayed off the recording engineer path.

Thanks for everything. Best wishes to you and your family.

Ken Harrison (Certified Audio Technician)
Center for Audio Studies Class of '79 -

Hi Dave , firstly I'd just like to thank you for producing the Golden Ears set of cd's , they're really helping my mixing and overall audio appreciation! I've just got one specific question that's driving me mad. In volume 4 drill set 6 (Pentimento) , the answers seem strange - I'm doing pretty well , but then come to this one and it all seems out.. I don't want you to think that I'm a bad workman blaming his tools (or you) , but I'd just like to clarify it.. Many thanks.

Unfortunately, Signs of Life is no longer with us! I've had quite a few requests for the CD, but so far as I know it is completely sold out, and nobody from the band seems to be around any more.

Sorry about that.

Best,

Dave

Hello,

I am a student at the sae institute in Leipzig. In the course of "golden ears" I came across the album "signs of life" of the homonymous band. As I really do love their music, I am know trying to find out where I can buy the cd. Do you have any idea where I can get the album??

Best regards

Florian

Hi my name is Scott and I am a sound tech at my high school. I just got through the first 2 disks of golden ears and found them very helpful as a starting point to finally add some depth to my mixing for live events.
The reason I am writing this is because I am doing a 10 minute presentation on noise-induced hearing loss and wanted to do a demonstration to show people if they might have lost hearing in either frequencies or in loudness(like different frequency tones I don't think that they would be very interested in pink noise). Also I want to show them what it could sound like if they have lost hearing at a older age. The whole point of my presentation is to persuade my class to turn down the volume of their iPods.
So I was wondering if there were any audio files out there that I could do this with sort of like what is on the multimedia section of this website. If there is anything that someone can do to help me out with this presentation I would be eternally grateful (If Dave could help me out it would make my day ) But I am open to anyones help. Thanks for reading this! If you want to contact me please write at

In response to Henry Ruhweidel's post, below:

Henry is referring to an article I just wrote for TV Technology, wherein I suggested that a reasonable standard for the magnitude of resolution in ALL dimensions for HDTV/Surround Sound might be 60 dB, and I characterized that as equivalent to the pressure ratio of 1,000:1, not 1,000,000:1, as Henry asserts (correctly, if incompletely).

Henry correctly notes that the equation for voltage ratio (which is a pressure ratio) is 20xlog(pressure ratio), which is the square root of the power ratio, which is, for 60 dB, 1,000:1, which is the square root of 1,000,000:1.

I decided to skip this explanation in the article because I only have 1,000 words to play with for any given column. Hence the confusion.

Henry has gone far more deeply into the visual resolution issues than I had any inention of doing. So far as I can tell (I don't know much about video), his assertions all seem to be correct.

I stand by my position that the ratio of line resolution is reasonably equivalent to a pressure ratio. Furher, the article was REALLY making the point that in order to have a high resolution experience, we need to be able to SUSTAIN that experience for the 'high-resolution" period of time, or 99.9% of the time.

WHEN we have HD running, we manage to maintain 60 dB in both visual and audio realms pretty consistently. The problem is that we can't do it for very long. I suspect our time errors in video production, as perceived by the end-viewer, reduce the resolution to somewhere between 1 and 3% (30-40 dB), which isn't very good, and in many respects wrecks the HD experience we've been promised.

Thanks, Henry, for your thoughts!

Best regards,

Dave Moulton

Uh pardon me, but 60 dB is not 1000, its 1 MILLION. 1 folllowed by 6 zeros. That number in video has been achieved since days of hte Quad high band VTR. Actually the AVR 1 would hit 63-64 dB becuase of the square wave zero crossing mod/demod system. Now if you are talking voltage, its 20 log, not 10 log which is power. Digital stuff today is easily inthe 70 + dB range of V/N ratio.

Now if we are talking MPEG errors, that has little to do with dB except in RF land is BER rate that kills it, or concantination errors, or conversion dither error, etc. Yeah, the compression engines stink.

The viewing public also equates contrast ratio with "high detal" and this is limited to the display device, CRT, LCD, Plasma, whatever. I guarantee you can walk up to any solid state display (non CRT) and count the dots. On RT you may be able to count the lines if the spot diameter is less than the scan line spacing but you can dither that so force overlap between fields. (fuzzy logic has nothing over a little V jitter from a HV yoke circuit!)

While the screen may be 103" diagionally, at 16:9, its hardly more than 1/2 height to width which goes back to the square pixel vs the other geometric shapes pixel. All of which is limited by the consumers 20/20 or not vision and viewing distance, amient light, etc.

Dave,
Thanks for posting the information about hearing loss and prevention, and OSHA safety levels. I have recently had a small incident at "The Bunker" at Bose, and have sustained some hearing damage (not sure if it is permanent just yet). The dB SPL was slightly over 137 dB SPL, and I used over ear protection and Earplugs. It's been over a week and my ears are still ringing. I now know that even with 2 levels of hearing protection that transmission through the skull, and other orifices such as nostrils can cause hearing loss on some people. Even outside this room with 1 level of hearing protection on was still not sufficient when the doors opened. (How I got injured). You may have just saved my career by posting this article, and my hearing. Thanks so much!!
Andy Despres

Hi Dave,

Well, moved my studio from Los Angeles to Kingston, Jamaica 4 years ago. We dont do too much fancy stereo M/S techniques here, but i'm having a ball living in the Caribbean and running a Reggae label.

Love the site, came up in a search, so hats off to the "webguy" he's got your site's search engine hacks looking good!

How many more ex-patriot engineers are out there??

Were producing a series of concerts here in the Caribbean, 3 more this year and 6 in 2008, lotsa fun, kinda branched out from sitting behing the console, into broadcast and digital distribution....

Thanks for the knowledge in those precious Fredonia years....

-rick o'neil

Hi Dave,
Once again, a totally killer site with unlimited information! I'm still looking for two engineers who went missing in action in the early eighties: Mr. Dave McNair outta Texas and Mr. Claude Hachile from NY, NY. C'mon guys, time to phone home! Thanks again for for truly maintaining the bar of excellence!
Very respectfully,
J. D Eisenberg

Great site! With it I can return to school!

Hi Dave,

I am so happy I found your website.
I am doing a lot of studio work lately , and I find all this information priceles.

Thank you for sharing.

Geni