This is a document that was to be used as a supplemental marketing resource at our Utopia II Recording Studio at Urban Productions - Minneapolis The information in this document is probably not exactly the pure truth, but you may find some useful information here. Larry "Wingnut" Wendlandt Welcome Aboard the Utopia III Soundcraft! ----------------------------------------- Copyright (c) 1995 Larry J. Wendlandt UTOPIA III... our pride and joy soundcraft, is designed to carry up to 4 adults on a journey inside the grooves of a compact disk (CD). Actually, we fly over the surface of a Digital Audio Tape (DAT). DAT is basically just a compact disk that has been unrolled into a straight line. DAT has one MAJOR advantage over CD... DAT is erasable! RECORDING BASICS! Let's start with your most basic need for recording... a microphone. Most microphones have a DIAPHRAGM inside them. What's a diaphragm, you ask? Let's see if I can answer that for you. I'm sure you have had the pleasure of blowing soap bubbles. You dip that plastic "ring tool" into the soapy water, and then blow through the ring. And you eventually learned... that if you didn't have a thin soap film stretched across the ring after dipping, you might as well dip it again. You HAD to have a soap DIAPHRAGM... or you weren't going to get any bubbles. Soap bubbles, speakers, pumps, aircraft speedometers, tire valves, banjos, drums, ears, and microphones... have diaphragms. Diaphragms have the great ability to be pushed and pulled on by a FORCE, and still bounce back to their original shape. With a microphone, the "force" is ANY sound waves in the vicinity. Sound waves can be thought of as air molecule vibrations, or in effect, tiny little puffs of wind. Louder sounds produce more forceful tiny puffs of wind. And since diaphragms bend when they are hit by force (wind puffs)... ...THE LOUDER YOU YELL INTO THE MICROPHONE, THE MORE THE DIAPHRAGM BENDS! But what makes a microphone REALLY do its job well... are the VERY TINY movements of the diaphragm... just like our eardrums. These are the movements that determine whether you said the word "shuffler" or "buffalo". The diaphragm doesn't JUST go inward at the start of the sound and outward at the end. It quivers and jiggles in tiny movements during the entire sound. It is hard to imagine just how many air molecule "quivers and jiggles" happen during even the shortest or simplest of sounds. A sound as simple as a water buffalo snort can contain THOUSANDS of them... and it is our brain that attempts to recognize previously-learned quiver and jiggle PATTERNS... to try to determine what the sound is. For example, we recognize a car horn blowing ONLY because we've listened to car horns enough to recognize their general sound pattern. (quivers & jiggles) Let's talk a little bit about a VERY unusual piece of flesh that most of us have growing on the sides of our heads... the EAR! The ear is a highly complex device that is VERY sensitive to movements of air molecules against it. When you hear someone playing guitar in another room, believe it or not, your ear is being bombarded with tiny puffs of air that were sent flying at you by the vibrating guitar strings. Sounds strange, doesn't it? (I guess that depends on the guitar player.) When the puffs reach our ears, it is "funneled" into the inside of our ear, where it smacks head-on into a diaphragm! That diaphragm is called the tympanic membrane, or, the eardrum. A healthy eardrum will not let any air molecules sneak past it. It works like a trampoline. When an air molecule crashes into the eardrum, the eardrum bends inward a certain amount. The amount of bend depends on how fast (velocity) the molecule was traveling when it hit. In a tiny, air-filled room BEHIND the eardrum, a 3-bone mechanical contraption hangs from the ceiling. Those three bones work together to bend a SECOND diaphragm which is deeper in the ear. And behind the SECOND eardrum thing... is a fluid-filled, snail-looking thing that turns tiny fluid movements into electrical signals. Those signals are sent to our brain. The ear is very interesting and very complex, so you may want to learn more about it at your leisure. When an air molecule strikes the eardrum, the eardrum begins moving inward at approximately the same velocity as the molecule was traveling when it hit. But because of the "tension" and "springiness" of the rubbery eardrum, the eardrum quickly reduces its inward movement until HOPEFULLY, it comes to a stop. Then, the eardrum "recoils", slinging itself and that darn air molecule back toward the outer ear. I used the term "recoil" because... as the eardrum springs back outward, it goes BEYOND the "NOT BENT AT ALL" position and actually bends OUTWARD a certain amount. That amount is LESS bend than the inward bend amount was... again because of tension. Then the outward bend "recoils" back inward a certain amount, which is LESS than the outward bend, etc, etc. Its like a bowl of Jello. (tm) If you let go of the bowl after jiggling it, it keeps jiggling for a moment or two before it stops. Just for fun, lets make up some terms. When a diaphragm is bent INWARD, we will call that POSITIVE bend or +bend. When its bent outward, we will call that NEGATIVE bend or -bend. When there is NO +bend and no -bend, we will call that IDLE. So when you put a plastic bag over your head, and blow outward, that would be +bend. And if you inhaled... -bend. If you didn't breathe at all... idle. Kids... DON'T try this! Chew bubblegum! So... if we ever want to ACCURATELY re-create the sound that went INTO the microphone, we will want to TRY to make an EXACT copy of that sounds' quiver and jiggle pattern. In order to do this, we want to shove the sound against a diaphragm, and "memorize" the exact movements of the diaphragm during the entire length of the sound. This "memorization" or MEASUREMENT has TWO considerations to deal with. 1. We must be able to ACCURATELY measure the diaphragms LOCATION or BEND AMOUNT... so we get an exact force-power. 2. We must do the measurement AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE during the length of the sound. This is because there are often VERY VERY VERY VERY tiny quivers and jiggles that happen VERY VERY VERY VERY quickly and often within a given sound. We want to memorize EVERY ONE of those, whenever possible. So, we will want to mearsure the microphone's diaphragm POSITION (how much it is bent) AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE while the sound is happening. How do we do this, you ask? Well, let me tell you a little story here... Have you ever played with two magnets? You turn them one way, and they attract each other. Flip one of them over, and they repel. Did you know that if you put a piece of wire between the two magnets, that wire gets a voltage on it? If you wiggle the wire or the magnets around, the voltage on the wire wiggles around too. So... what if we super-glued the wire to a diaphragm, and then put the other end of the wire between two magnets? Well, if you would have been the FIRST to do it, you would have invented the microphone. The actual inventors fiddled around with the magnets and the diaphragm and the wire until it was nearly perfect. They got it adjusted to where... when the diaphragm was PUSHED (+bend), it would make POSITIVE voltage on the wire. And when the diaphragm was PULLED (-bend), the wire had NEGATIVE voltage on it. And when the diaphragm was not bent at all (idle), there was NO voltage on the wire. It was AMAZING! And I HOPE you didn't forget that we need -bend because of RECOIL! Each time a sound hits a diaphragm, its gets push toward +bend. But as it springs back outward, it will go BEYOND idle and into -bend! RIGHT? Just like the Jello wiggle. Way back when standard magnetic tape was used to record sounds, the tape recorder would simply blast varying amounts of negative and positive voltage onto the metal particles of the tape. The hope was that it would "influence" the non-magnetic particles into becoming magnets... some negative, some positive. It worked pretty well. To play back a tape, a wire was placed VERY close to the "metal-turned-magnets" as they went rolling by, and the wire got voltage on it. Someone hooked an amplifier and a speaker to the wire, and they heard a pretty good copy of the sound that was blasted onto the tape. Unfortunately, negative-charged magnets and positive-charged magnets don't like being next to each other. But they are glued onto the tape right next to each other! So they push against each other constantly. And if ever a big, powerful, POSITIVE magnet is "made" right next to a hundred or so smaller NEGATIVE magnets, the positive magnet will, in time, become LESS positive... MORE negative. And the hundred or so negative magnets will become LESS negative... MORE positive. Slowly but surely, the quality of the sound gets reduced... because the positive magnets aren't quite so positive anymore, and the negative magnets aren't quite so negative anymore. But then someone noticed that LOW-powered positive magnets and LOW-powered negative magnets could live next to each other fairly easily, because the LOW power of either magnet wasn't enough to cause "influencing" on the other. "But what can we do with low-powered magnets? We CAN'T make them MORE powerful, or they'll influence their neighbor. All we can really do with a low-powered magnet, is to go find out if its a negative magnet or a positive magnet. What good would THAT do for sound recording?" Many hours passed. Years turned into months! Then suddenly... ...somebody (probably a janitor) re-discovered the light switch! Yup, just a normal ON/OFF light switch on the wall next to the door. Just ON or off... UP or down... POSITIVE or negative. An ON/off switch is BInary. Just TWO positions, ON or off. Well then somebody asked somebody... "How MANY low-powered magnets (on/off switches) can we get to live next to each other on a magnetic tape?" The answer was BUNCHES! Somebody came up with a more usable answer... "We can magnetize 16 metal particles every fifty-thousandth of a second!" (see the section on "heads" which is just below) NOTE: The numbers used in these examples are subject to technological advancement without notice! The engineers asked "Ok, so, what do we do with THAT?" Then the janitor asked "What do we do with DAT?" And the engineers said "Shut the hell up, janitor man!" DAT uses the BINARY number system to store numbers onto magnetic tape. It can best be described by visualizing 16 light switches... lined-up across a wall. Each switch is either on or off, there's no in- between. With 16 ON/OFF switches, there are 65536 possible combinations. Mathematicians would say... "Each switch has 2 positions (ON/OFF), and there's 16 switches... so... the formula is... 2 to the 16th power, which, amazedly, is 65536. In the computer-wise world, each switch is called a BIT, and all 16 switches as a group... is often called a BYTE. Therefore, a BYTE has 16 BITS in it. A BIT is 1 switch. A BYTE is 16 switches. Got it? Now, back to diaphragm position measuring... which we NOW know MUST include measuring the AMOUNT of +bend... or the AMOUNT of -bend! We MUST have BOTH, or else we won't be able to copy our diaphragm's Jello bowl wiggle! Understand that "BOTH" does NOT imply that we will get a negative and a positive number at every measurement. Each measurement is either a +bend or a -bend, and never both at the same time. We now know that a microphone, with its diaphragm, magnets and wire, produces a POSITIVE voltage when the diaphragm is +bent, and a NEGATIVE voltage when the diaphragm is -bent... and NO voltage when the diaphragm is idle. By the way... someone hooked a cable to the wire inside the microphone... and wrapped the magnets, diaphragm, and wire in a protective case. This REALLY "looks" like a microphone! Let's plug it into the DAT recorder! Ok, now... yell at the diaphragm. Wait... something's wrong here!!! We just have a wiggly positive and negative voltage on the wire. If we sent THAT directly to the tape, it would cause lots of differently-powered magnets, and influencing. We can't do that! Ok, lets see if you can think like the DAT inventors did. They knew that they could magnetize (record) 16 magnets (a byte) every fifty-thousandth of a second. (See the section on "heads" just below.) They knew that they could positively charge (switch ON) or negatively charge (switch OFF) ANY of those 16 magnets (16 bits), low-powered of course. They discovered something else while they were messing around! They found out that... when it comes to "reading" magnets, they didn't need to negatively charge a magnet EVER AGAIN! They determined that, when it comes to binary storage, they could ASSUME that if a magnet was NOT positively charged (switch ON) than it MUST be a SWITCH OFF magnet. THEREFORE, we don't need to charge negative magnets, we just need to make sure all "switch off" bits have NO POSITIVE CHARGE. This was a trully WONDERFUL discovery, and much extended the useful life of magnetic tapes. Be careful not to confuse the POSITIVE/NO POSITIVE method used to write to a magnetic tape, with the POSITIVE/NEGATIVE method used to determine a microphone diaphragm position. Although negative magnets were no longer needed on the tape... negative diaphragm position (-bend) is DEFINITELY something that needs to be measured at the mic. Now, our friendly engineers KNEW they could remember or STORE any number from 0 to 65536 every fifty-thousandth of a second. But how do we convert the POSITIVE and NEGATIVE voltage wiggles on the wire... (+bends and -bends) to a number? The engineers invented an integrated circuit (IC) to do the job. This IC "chip" is called an "analog-to-digital converter". You will learn more about analog-to-digital converters in a moment. For now, its job is to QUICKLY look at a wire, and turn the AMOUNT of voltage on the wire into a number. It is essentially, a voltmeter. It gave our engineers a number whose size was determined by the AMOUNT of voltage on the wire. And guess what... they decided that the chip should give them a number that could be stored in 16 bits! Now comes the wierd part! They knew that they had -bend numbers and +bend numbers to remember... so they needed to make ONE of the sixteen magnets keep track of whether it was a -bend amount number or a +bend amount number. Magnet (bit) #16 was now designated as "the bend direction magnet"... which ended up being called "the SIGN bit". They called it the SIGN bit because, mathematically speaking, it contained the SIGN of the number, negative (-) or positive (+). Oh... but now... the A to D chip (Analog to Digital converter) needed to be re-designed. By using one of the light switches (1 bit) for a SPECIAL purpose, it could no longer be used to help store the actual number. So now there was 15 light switches. And with 15 switches, there is 32768 different combinations. So the engineers designed the A to D chip with this in mind. The new chip now produced a number between -32768 and +32768, depending on the voltage on the wire. The new chip had the ability to measure the wire's voltage every fifty-thousandth of a second, which was perfectly matched to the magnetic tapes abilites to "write" 16 bits every fifty-thousandth of a second... and DAT was born. ANALOG TO DIGITAL CONVERTERS: Also known as "A to D converters" or A2D's. This is an electronic circuit (often inside of an IC chip) that converts a wiggly, varying, positive or negative voltage level... into a number. The chip requires "calibration" in order to be accurate. Calibration requires that the MAXIMUM POSITIVE voltage on the microphone wire, which is also the maximum +bend of the microphone diaphragm, be set to equal the number +32768. The plus (+) meaning positive bend, and the number being the highest number than can be held in 15 bits (switches). Remember... we used the 16th bit as the bend direction indicator (+/-). Conversely, the MAXIMUM NEGATIVE voltage possible on the microphone wire must be set to equal -32768. And last but not least, the A2D converter needs to know where the IDLE or NO VOLTAGE/NO BEND position is, and set IT to zero. Once the A2D chip has these three settings, it can automatically divide the "distance" between IDLE (no bend) and maximum bend, into 32768 steps. It does that for both the negative bends and positive bends. So now, our trusty A2D has the distance between max -bend and max +bend divided- up into 65536 steps, 32768 of them negative, and 32768 of them positive. The act of a circuit dividing a given distance into equal parts is sometimes called INTERPOLATION. CONVERTING TO BINARY: For ease of learning, let's try something here. Let's say that you are in charge of a trucking company that owns 15 different sizes of trucks. The trucks are the following sizes... Truck #1 - holds 1 ton Truck #2 - holds 2 tons Truck #3 - holds 4 tons Truck #4 - holds 8 tons Truck #5 - holds 16 tons Truck #6 - holds 32 tons Truck #7 - holds 64 tons Truck #8 - holds 128 tons Truck #9 - holds 256 tons Truck #10 - holds 512 tons Truck #11 - holds 1024 tons Truck #12 - holds 2048 tons Truck #13 - holds 4096 tons Truck #14 - holds 8192 tons Truck #15 - holds 16384 tons Now, lets say that the boss has 27459 tons of sand to send somewhere, and he says DO NOT send out ANY trucks that are NOT FULL. Then he repeats himself... NO PARTIALLY-FILLED TRUCKS!!! So, you, being just as inventive as those engineering guys and gals, decide that if you ALWAYS use a truck size that is ONE size smaller than the amount of sand remaining, then the truck will ALWAYS be full. And in this case, there is 27459 tons of sand, and since the LARGEST truck holds 16384 tons of sand, we can easily fill the largest truck. So we do... and away it goes... FULL. Now, how much sand still remains? 27459 - 16384 = 11075. So... the SECOND largest truck, truck #14, holds 8192 tons, so we can fill-up THAT one too. We do and its gone. Now how much sand remains? 11075 - 8192 = 2883. Now, truck #13 can hold 4096 tons, but there isn't that much sand remaining, so we'll leave truck #13 in the garage. But truck #12 looks ok, eh? So we fill truck #12 and away it goes. Sand remaining... 835 tons. Truck #11 stays in the garage... not enough sand to fill it. Truck #10 looks ok at 512 tons, so we fill it and its gone. Sand remaining... 323 tons. Truck #9 looks ok with its 256 ton capacity. Filled and gone. Sand remaining... 67 tons. Truck #8 stays in the garage, can't fill it. Truck #7 looks fine at 64 tons... filled and gone. Sand remaining... 3 tons. Truck #6, #5, #4, and #3 all stay in the garage, because 3 tons of sand won't fill any of those. Truck #2 gets filled with 2 tons and truck #1 is filled with 1 ton, and you are successful. You have used the 15 different sized trucks in the most efficient manner possible. This is the SAME principle that the DAT uses to convert the -32768 to +32768 number received from the A2D into the binary system it uses to store that number on the magnetic tape. (THE BELOW SECTION IS A SIMPLIFIED EXAMPLE ONLY!) HEADS: A "head", as used by the tape recording world, is the part of a recorder/player that rubs against the tape. It is able to "read" previously charged magnets, as well as "write" (magnetize) magnets. In many recorders/players, the head itself has 16 or more separate "magnetizers" per TRACK. With an 8 track DAT, the head has 16 x 8 separate magnetizers on it, or 128 magnetizers in one head. Since DAT/VCR tapes are about 1/2 inch wide, that means each BIT (one switch) is about 1/256th of an inch wide. Each track is 1/16th of an inch wide, which is the width of a byte (16 bits). DAT recorders/players put some control signals (extra bits and bytes) on the tape as well, so, most likely, there are about 130-135 usable strips of magnets on a 1/2 inch tape. You will need to do research on current standards for digital audio tape recording if you want a more accurate number. Let's see if I can illustrate the way a head works. Shown below is ONE track of record/playback (16 bits). I will use a "1" to indicate that a bit is POSITIVELY charged | | | | |<-------(one track width or 1 byte width or 16 bits width)------>| | | | Below is one byte (16 bits or switches). The tape is moving | | upward in this diagram, so one of these 16 bit bytes is written | | approx. every 50000th of a second. In the case of our trucking | | problem, the number was 27459. Here, we signify which trucks | | were used to haul the sand. A "1" indicates that THAT tonage | | truck WAS used to help move the sand. A "0" means it was left | | in the garage. In the sign bit (bit 16), the "1" means that | | THIS number is NEGATIVE. A "0" means POSITIVE. Although the | | sign bit doesn't apply to the sand, I suppose one could say | | it was positive sand, because negative sand would be a hole. | | | truck# | 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 | | ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ | | | used? | 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 | | ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ | | S 1 8 4 2 1 5 2 1 6 3 1 8 4 2 1 | | I 6 1 0 0 0 1 5 2 4 2 6 | tons? | G 3 9 9 4 2 2 6 8 | (worth) | N 8 2 6 8 4 | | 4 | | | The DAT, and almost all computers, have these truck sizes memorized. The tape head simply makes a positive magnet on the tape WHEREVER a "1" is found in the byte. It also de-positives (removes positive magnetism) from every place where a "0" is in the byte. I guess you could try to imagine a read/write head as a VERY fine-toothed comb. There are AT LEAST 130 "teeth" in a width of 1/2 inch. The tip of each tooth floats just barely above the surface of the tape. In RECORD MODE, each tooth has the ability to MAKE a positive magnet or neutralize (kill) a positive magnet. This is called "writing". In PLAY MODE, each tooth has the ability to "feel" a positive magnet or "feel" a neutralized (dead) magnet. This is called "reading". We will talk more about reading the tape in the PLAYBACK section below. So all that needs to be done to this 0110101101000011 code is to KNOW what each digit's POSITION "means". For example, the DAT knows the leftmost "0" means it is a positive number. The next leftmost signifies whether or not the 16384 ton truck was used. The third "slot" from the left tells whether or not the 8192 ton truck was used... etc, etc. If you ADD all the tons of sand that were hauled in whichever trucks, it will total up to 27459. Cool, eh? Remember that a "1" means the truck was used, and since each used truck was DEFINITELY full, the DAT can figure out EXACTLY how many tons of sand were hauled. ############################################################################ Ok, we have now followed a single measurement (1/50000th of a second) from the microphone diaphragm (movement), down the wire (voltage), through the analog to digital converter (binary code of ones & zeros), through the tape head (makes positive magnets wherever there's a "1" and neutralizes positive magnets wherever there's a "0") and onto the tape (long thin geometric strips of LOTS of VERY TINY BYTES). Try to perceive how very small each "1" is on the tape. A good approximation might be to imagine each switch (or bit) being about 1/2 the size of a single granule of salt. Now, take 5, go get a sandwich, and get ready for us to continue our adventure with PLAYBACK... (getting the audio back). ########################################################################### PLAYBACK: From tape to eardrum... binary to audio... digital to analog. Ah, you're back. Good! Now, we'll put the DAT's head into PLAY mode. In THIS mode, the head doesn't do any magnetizing whatsoever. It has NO voltage on it at all, in any of its 16 switch-checking/bit-reading areas. But when a positive magnet comes by, the head "sees" the switch is ON, and tells the world about it. How, you ask? Well, strangely enough, it uses a circuit called a... DIGITAL to ANALOG converter! DIGITAL TO ANALOG CONVERTERS: Often called a D to A converter, or D2A... it converts a binary code into a standard number. It was most likely invented to reverse the effects of a A2D converter. THIS AREA IS STILL UNDER CONTRUCTION! Approximately once every fifty-thousandth of a second (a tick), a DAT stores a binary number (a byte) on a magnetic tape. This number is a value from -32768 to +32768. This number is a measurement of Volume Units (amount of diaphragm bend) that is made at the microphone at the EXACT SAME fifty-thousandth of a second. In other words, it all happens instantly, with no delays. I bet you want to ask THIS question... "How can you record the sounds of a 50 piece orchestra in a BYTE?" (Remember... a BYTE is SIXTEEN (16) ON/OFF switches!) As strange as this may sound (no pun intended), your ear can only hear ONE SOUND AT A TIME. Yes, yes, I know you're shocked, but it is a fact! Do take notice that the word "TIME" is in that statement. And just for fun, let's say that "TIME" means "ONE fiftythousandth of a second!" Yessiree, thats .00002/sec for you decimators. Now lets take a look at two related sounds... a chalkboard screech... and a shotgun blast. If you listened to ONE fiftythousandth of a second of chalkboard screech, you would hear... TICK. And if you listened to ONE fiftythousandth of a second of shotgun blast, you would hear... TICK! If you listened to one fiftythousandth of a second of ANY sound... you would hear... TICK!!! You hear TICK because your brain doesn't have enough TIME to figure out what the sound is. Your ear listens constantly, but your brain needs a certain LENGTH of TIME to determine what sound the ear is hearing. But... if we give our ear 2 SECONDS of chalkboard screech, which would be 100,000 ticks worth... our brain could determine that we are hearing a chalkboard screech. Through learning, our brain has come to recognize PATTERNS of these power changes (diaphragm bend/eardrum movements). Go screech a chalkboard, then screech it again. The two sounds are nearly alike, but RARELY exactly the same. Yet our brain knows that both sounds were indeed chalkboard screechs... from something learned through repetition. Our brain recognizes that when our eardrum moves in THIS pattern, we are hearing a chalkboard screech. It is PATTERNS of diaphragm bend that eventually become recognizable sounds. This is how we can determine whether we are hearing a guitar or a saxophone. Patterns of eardrum movements, or, patterns of power changes. Your eardrum is like rug hanging from a clothes line. If you gently throw a rock at it, it makes a soft tick, and the rug moves very little. If you throw it harder, the impact makes a louder tick, and the rug moves much more. You can throw a grain of salt or a Sherman tank at the rug, they'll both make ticks, although the POWER of the ticks are very different. Remember GRAPHS from your school days. Often, graphs are used to allow a human to see a picture of measurements. If we were to make a graph of the chalkboard screech, we could put the TOTAL sound time across the bottom of the graph... which is 2 seconds. Then, to be like a DAT, we would divide that 2 seconds into TICKS. And since there's 50,000 ticks in one second, then there's 100,000 ticks in two seconds... so we would need 100,000 little markers across the bottom of the graph. The other scale, which is the one going up the left side of the graph, would be divided into 65,536 little markers... 32768 upward and 32768 downward. The graph is much too large for my word processor... so I will show the bottom left corner. Remember that a 16-bit byte (a number from -32768 to +32768) is measured and stored EVERY tick. This graph shows the sound of a mosquito belch. +32768 -| (lots more numbers) +12 -| +11 -| +10 -| O +9 -| O | O O +POSITIVE +8 -| O | | | O | O diaphragm +7 -| | | | | | O | | bend +6 -| | | | | | | | | amount +5 -| O | | | | | | | | O +4 -| | | | | | | | O O O | | | +3 -| | | | | | | | | O | | | | | O +2 -| O | | | | | | | | | | O | | O | | +1 -| O | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | O ----------- 0 --------idle-line---------no-voltage----------no-bend-------- -1 -| | | | | | | | | | | | -2 -| | | | | | O | | | | O -3 -| | | | | | O | O | -4 -| O | | | | | | -5 -| | | | O | O -NEGATIVE -6 -| O | | O diaphragm -7 -| | | bend -8 -| | O amount -9 -| O -10 -| -11 -| -12 -| (lots more numbers) -32768 -| |-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 --> 100,000 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 (2 sec) TICKS (each is 1/50000 of a second) Because of the non-graphical abilities of my writing software, this graph is quite tiny! We are actually viewing 1/1725th of a second worth of sound time, and 1/5041th of maximum diaphragm bend. From this, you can maybe get an idea of just how fast and how accurately a DAT makes its measurements. Study this graph thoroughly. This is digital recording in action. The extremely fast repeated measurings, and the accuracy and sensitivity of each measurement, makes a very high quality "portrait" of the sound that our microphone hears. We can store these values just as fast as we can measure them... on a magnetic tape... which is almost EXACTLY like a VCR tape. DAT machines turn these tapes at a much higher speed than your VCR does. The graph above shows ONE sound being "digitized". The recording industry has decided to call this "sampling"... since we are repeatedly sampling the diaphragm bend amount (negative and positive) as time and sound goes on. Naturally, our DAT machine "samples" ALL the time, whether it hears a sound or not. It has no 2 second limits or anything like that. It has about 40 minutes of sampling per tape... which is around 3 million samples per minute or 120 million samples per tape. BUT... our DAT machine has EIGHT sampling/recording mechanisms built into it! It can record from ALL EIGHT samplers at once, ALL ON ONE TAPE (using multiple "tracks"). So... that means we can record 8 measurements every fifty-thousandth of a second, or 24 million or "mega" BYTES per minute, or 9.6 BILLION bytes or ticks per tape! WOW! Oh, by the way, Utopia II has TWO of these recording machines. So that means... we can record 16 samples every 50,000th of a second, on two separate tapes (which lock together to look like ONE tape), for a grand total of 16 digital tracks of 40 minutes each OR... 19.2 BILLION BYTES in 40 minutes!!! Does it work? Well, let's listen to the play-back and see! And guess what... Anytime you are listening to a CD player... your eardrum is being shot at by a machine gun! Yup... the CD player is reading number after number from the CD, and firing them out the speakers of your stereo system at a rate of about one shot every 50,000th of a second. Tick, tick, tick, tick, etc. Isn't it amazing how high-speed tick shooting can sound like music to our ears? Actually, there is a "tick-smoothing", analog-to-digital converter circuit just before the ticks get to the audio output jacks on the cd player. From there, its on to audio amplification (amplifier) and audio projection (speakers) and audio detection (ears). The designers of the DAT and the CD... predicted you'd be amazed. S.A.M... the Sample Artistic Manipulator Any sound that can be heard, including a tree falling in the woods, can be digitally recorded, or, in other words, SAMPLED! From a toilet flushing to a concerto, if its a sound, we can digitize it. After we have digitally recorded the sound, we can view and change the sound in picture- form, using our sample editor software, better known as SAM. SAM lets you listen to, bend, spindle, or mutilate any sound through mouse and keyboard commands, and is just a whole lot of fun. SAM is also TIME-LOCKED to MEL, so MEL can tell SAM when to play the sound... more about MEL later. SAM can zoom-in its view on a sound... to the point where you can view a single tick measurement, or can zoom-out its view to see about 4 minutes worth of sample... which is, of course, about 12 million bytes or ticks. SAM is great for making multiple sounds happen on top of each other or right next to each other. Once a sample is manipulated to happiness, it can be saved to disk, recorded on tape, or just listened to. SAM is a non-destructive editor, so even if you plaster 25 sounds on top of one another to make a different (and probably ugly) sound, the original 25 sounds will always be safe and reusable. The Synthesizer - Musicians in a Can! All 16 tracks of Utopia's DAT recorders can record all at the same time... IF you had audio input (microphones or pick-ups) to all the tracks at the same time. But the Utopia soundcraft would be a bit overloaded with 16 musicians on-board all at once. In the case where 16 musicians wanted to play or sing all at once, we would ask them to enter Utopia in groups of 4 or less, and make multiple flights to record multiple tracks. Let's say you wanted a saxophone track, AND a didjeridu track on your song. Although a saxophone player could be auditioned and then hired to come to Utopia and play the sax track, a good didjeridu player might have to come from Australia, making it too costly. Utopia II has somewhat solved this problem with "musicians in a can" technology. Utopia II has a built-in music "synthesizer" that is quite good at playing large numbers of instruments, including drums, bass, sax, didjeridus, glockenspiels, seagulls, space noises, human oohs and ahs, flugal horns, car horns, fog horns, etc, etc, etc! Utopia II also has a CD collection of over 20,000 sound effects from cartoons and movies. If you can imagine the sound, chances are, we can make it happen. The ONLY thing our synthesizer doesn't do well, is play guitar. We have guitars and on-staff guitar players to solve that little hassle. Our synth is very complex, and its instruments can be shaped and bent in numerous ways... too many ways to list here. But the synth, for some strange reason, doesn't have the abilities to know how your song goes. It doesn't know WHEN you want it to play the trombone part, and it doesn't know what melody to play or how fast to play it. Those things we leave to MEL. More about MEL soon! M.I.D.I. - Opening the Communication Lines of the Band First, M.I.D.I. stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. MIDI is a system of cables that can connect many sound playing devices together, to make them act as one BIG sound player with many voices. MIDI has tried to become standardized in the way it talks through these cables. Therefore, MIDI is not an electronic box or anything like that. Most drum machines, keyboards, computers, and synthesizers have all come to an "understanding" as to HOW to talk to one another, and the electronics involved with talking down the MIDI data cable are built-in to each MIDI-equipped device. To simplify learning, just pretend there are 32 wires in a MIDI cable, 16 for sending data and 16 for receiving data. There are really just two TYPES of information to be found on a MIDI cable... NOTES and COMMANDS. MIDI uses "input" devices and "output" devices. Let's look at a home computer system for examples of input and output devices. The typewriter- style keyboard, a mouse or trackball, are input devices. A disk drive is also an input device when it is LOADING a program or file into your computer. Input devices are things that SEND data INTO a machine. Output devices on a computer would include the monitor (screen) and the printer, and a disk drive when it is SAVING a program or file. Output devices are things that RECEIVE data OUT of a machine. The main thing you should know about MIDI, is that actions taken by one INPUT device, can be "watched" or "copied" by one or many OUTPUT devices. Utopia II has 4 sound-making MIDI output devices. They include the Alesis S4 general-purpose synthesizer, the Roland GR-1 guitar synthesizer, the SoundBlaster 16 synthesizer on our 486 computer, and the Alesis HR-16 drum machine. Utopia II has 3 MIDI input devices... also sometimes called "controllers". They include a Fatar 60-key piano-style keyboard, the GR-1 guitar-to-midi controller, and MEL. MEL is a software package that resides in Utopia's 486 DX2-66 computer, and can be thought of as a build-it-yourself piano roll for automated music playing. We also have 2 "passive" devices that "listen" to the MIDI cables, and can automatically "turn their knobs" if they are commanded to do so. These are the Roland GSP-21 guitar signal processor...an effects unit, and the Lexicon LXP-15 voice signal processor, also an effects unit. Effects units don't produce any sound on their own, they simply modify a sound that is sent to them via their audio (non-midi) input connector. Any musical note data sent to an effects unit would be ignored. Only commands are noticed by passive devices. Just in case you are not confused enough, remember that we asked you to pretend there are 32 wires in a MIDI cable... 16 to send data, 16 to receive? We did that to help illustrate how output devices listen to a MIDI cable. If everything is hooked to each other, and you wanted the synth to play a middle C note, ALL the output devices would try to play a middle C, including the drum machine. That wouldn't work very well at all. So, we tell the synth to ONLY listen to SEND WIRE #1, and we tell the guitar synthesizer to listen to SEND WIRE #2, and the drum machine listens to SEND WIRE #3, etc. This way, only the output device we WANT to play... actually plays. Let it be known though, that if you DID want all of our output devices to play middle C at once, they easily could, by telling ALL of our MIDI output devices to listen to all 16 SEND WIRES. MIDI send wires are called CHANNELS, and, because of special encoding and magical data manipulation techniques, there are really only 5 wires in a MIDI cable. And for the same reason, there are really only 16 channels in the MIDI cable, and they SHARE the tasks of sending and receiving. MEL - The M.i.d.i. Event List - The Digital Conductor's Magic Wand! MEL is a list of things to make happen in Utopia... based on TIME. MEL can tell DAT machines to start recording, then tell the SoundBlaster synth to play a pig grunt, then tell the synth to play a series of sax notes, then tell the drum machine to play a snare drum roll, and on and on. It is a fairly slow process to "program" this "SEQUENCE OF EVENTS" into MEL... but once programmed in, MEL can play it back faster than you can imagine. MEL is ALWAYS on the mark, and plays notes and sends commands EXACTLY when you want him to... because he does his stuff according to a master clock. This clock information is called TIME CODE. Our DAT machines also follow time code. So does our computer. So nearly EVERY- THING in Utopia II follows a master clock, and EVERYTHING knows where, in time, everything else is. This is called "time locking". MEL is time-locked to the computer, and to the MIDI cables, and to the DAT recorders, as well as to the computer. And because of this, MEL rarely makes a timing mistake. Most times, MEL's programmer makes the timing mistake. MEL can be programmed using ANY of our MIDI INPUT devices, also called controllers. You can play our MIDI piano, or our MIDI guitar, and MEL will "remember" everything you play. You can type-in input to MEL using our computer's typewriter-style keyboard, or you can "paint" music into MEL using a mouse or trackball. MEL can tell ANY output device to play a note or turn a knob, and MEL's data can be saved to disk or printed out on paper. MEL is the conductor of the orchestra, and will control the SEQUENCE of EVENTS that happen in Utopia. Therefore, MEL is often referred to as a SEQUENCER. Pre-Flight Considerations for the Utopia II Soundcraft Piloting the Utopia II can be as complex or as simple as you wish. Utopia II can be flown by one of our expert recording engineers, with you alone, or with your band. If you've mastered the controls of the Utopia soundcraft, and have shown proper respect to its owners, then you can fly the Utopia II all by yourself... or with just you and your band. Here are some of the most important pre-flight considerations... - Do I know how to play the sounds which are to be recorded? Musicians have been known to waste precious time and money by not being ready to perform the music or sound in a quick and efficient manner. Arguments and tension increase as studio hours tick away. Musical and technical consultants are always nearby in Utopia, ready to help. - Do I need outside studio musicians? This question may be best answered by spending an hour by yourself in Utopia, listening to the pre-programmed musicians-in-a-can available from our synthesizers. You can test piano, drum, or horn sounds, as well as any other sound, including sound effects... to see if they sound "real" enough for your needs. - If I don't use other musicians, how long will it take to input the data for my song into MEL? This is an EXTREMELY difficult question to answer. Depending on the numbers of instruments to be used, and how complex their parts are, one song has been known to take up to a week to input the sequence into MEL. - If I need lots of hours to input into MEL, can I be trained on MEL without cost? Yes! MEL training and other assorted familiarization training can be cost free, under certain circumstances. We are highly flexible and we go FAR out of our way to make sure our customers get what they need at a reason- able cost, and in a comfortable and friendly way. - If I DO use musicians instead of MEL, will I get done faster? Maybe so, maybe not. It all depends on how much time you will need to teach the musicians what you want them to play, and how accurately you can schedule them to come to Utopia. It also depends on how ready and fast you are with MEL. - What's the FASTEST way to get a song into and out of Utopia? The fastest, and least original way to record a song is with the use of Karaoke (tm) compact disks. Urban Productions, owners of the Utopia II Soundcraft, do not have any Karaoke CD's on hand... or have any plans to purchase such. So, if you want to do standard or modified Karaoke songs, you should borrow or purchase the CD that contains the music you want to record... prior to renting time in the Utopia II. - What if I need MORE than 16 tracks of digital recording? It CAN be done! Although the music will take a VERY SLIGHT loss of quality, Utopia II has the ability to record 256 tracks of digital data. And if you can stand TWO SLIGHT losses of quality, we can do 65,536 tracks. This has never been attempted by our soundcraft. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :: Email @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@@@ :: wingnut@winternet.com :: :: for me? @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ @@ :: http://www.winternet.com/~wingnut :: :: So ONLY I @@@@@ @@ @@@@@ :: pgpfp: 7b 93 d0 66 3d fb 1f 7d :: :: see... you @@ @@ @@@ @@ :: (1024) ba 33 93 86 09 82 36 61 :: :: can use ==> @@ @@@@@ @@ :: "Shields up, plastics down" :: :: fore it's thanks to Phil FREE! :: Bottom line: Cut the bullshit!! :: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::