Our Story To Date

Faithful readers will recall that I'm trying to build a really nice "dream" studio. Particularly alert readers may even remember that a big part of my dream is to have excellent acoustical qualities in my room, so that I can really hear what's going on in my recordings.

Well, reality has intruded, and we've gotta talk about it.

Part of my plan was to "go digital," which means I bought a computer, a hard drive, etc., etc., and set up a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). Now there is a certain amount of culture shock inherent in such a move. Even though I am computer literate, with 9 years of experience with mice, icons and system errors, I still feel like an analog guy, a newcomer to all this digital stuff. So, when I took delivery of my new bag o' digital toys, I wasn't too surprised that I couldn't make them work at first, and that the DAW seemed RBD, UU, EF & OUFPAU (Really Brain-Dead, User-Unfriendly, Extremely Fragile and Otherwise Unsuitable For Pro Audio Use).

However, a worse problem has cropped up. The problem is sufficiently bad that when I first encountered it I almost lost my temper and threw a piece of equipment through a window. It is a fundamental problem that lies at the junction of the relationship between Cold Hard Reality and Virtual Reality, a fork in the road where the cyberjocks, ice-cowboys and infobahnistas have really made a wrong turn. As a result, the digital equipment being manufactured for us to use is seriously deficient to the point of fraud, which is to say that not only does it not meet spec, it annihilates spec. It has the same relationship to spec that Godzilla has to Bambi. The problem is noise - acoustical noise injected into the signal path by the digital equipment as a function of its proper and normal operation.