And somehow never encountered M-Audio or MOTU devices. Interesting.
What kind of mixing board is he using? And what I really want to know is what kind of mic or pickup is he using for his sax, and what kind of preamp with that mic? The mic+preamp combination is something of a gestalt, especially when you consider the source. Woodwinds have some specific challenges, and different challenges when recording solo vs. ensemble.
A jazzer's "dream rig" had better have at least 8 or 12 discrete inputs. You need half of them just to mic a drum kit properly. If you want to place your winds and horns in a stereo field, you're going to want individual close tracks *and* Mid/Side tracks to work with. You probably need an XY pair inside the piano lid. You're out of inputs, and you haven't even got a mic in front of the singer.
On the other hand, if he's simply recording a single track of his sax, he can do much worse than a SB card, especially if he uses a good mic+preamp. But this isn't really the scenario that a sax player wants to record, since we're almost universally talking about jazz ensembles.
With that in mind, I'd also consider a location rig, something with good XY mics that can get good imaging of a group. For 2-channel XY, give me a Zoom H4 any day.
Often just using a proper mic+preamp on the line-in of a consumer sound card is good enough. On cards where you can also work out the latency issues (e.g. for mix dubbing and for softsynths and so on), a lot of people have gotten results good enough results to be "production quality" on shoestring budgets. On the other hand, a nice M-Audio card, a Behringer mixer (they do get the job done), and a Chinese condenser mic or an SM58 clone or whatever fits your style, probably also qualifies as "shoestring budget" for this purpose. For some, it's all about working with what you have, or can scrounge up.
There's a psychoacoustic model that is *very* convincing. Thanks to our evolution as hunters and/or prey animals we have evolved a sensitivity to variations in the time, frequency, and dynamic domains that we interpret as "location." The effect is really pretty amazing, especially when it is combined with visual cues to reinforce the illusion.
It's surprising how much aesthetic value lives in the dynamic headroom. People focus too much on frequency characteristics that are already at or beyond the threshold of human perception, but dynamic range turns out to be far more important. And music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s was originally mixed to maximize dynamics. The same music has had its dynamic domain significantly altered to exploit the limits of digital media, because doing anything else causes quiet parts to be lost, relatively speaking. Mostly, the loudness wars have been an accident.
Some people enjoy the *experience* of vinyl, if not making judgments on the *sound*. There are some arguments to be made with respect to the EQ curve of vinyl mastering. If you can get your hands on the source material and make your own mix, you can impart the same qualities of sound into the digital domain.
But that's not always the issue, anyway.
There's the aesthetics of having a wall of phono albums. And then there's the process of selecting one. It even has a *smell*. Then there's the ritual of preparing the tonearm, cleaning and de-ionizing the record, and playing it while your girlfriend rolls a joint on the album cover, which is a nice, big work of art (the cover is, also).
>This. My last 3 systems all have had integrated audio and a SB Live! and no matter how I tried to record speech with a Microphone, there was always a significant level of noise (and not just white noise.. >low frequency hum as well)
The preamp was definitely the weak link. It's extremely hard to put a decent preamp into the same circuit as the mobo.
Some of those USB headsets turn out to be pretty amazing. To get any kind of results with a mic and a SBLive (mobo or not) you need a dedicated preamp and a decent mic. This is mostly true for any consumer sound card. The preamps just aren't that good, and there really aren't any electret mics that are worth using to begin with. But even at the bottom of the barrel, say the preamp on a Behringer mixer or one of the one- or two-channel M-Audio preamps, and a cheap Chinese condenser mic or an SM58 (or clone), depends on your style what kind of mic you use, these will give good enough results for production work, in all seriousness.
If your source material, the rest of your signal chain, and your listening environment don't make for a reasonable test case, you shouldn't be making value judgments about sound quality in the first place.
To make a car analogy, it's like looking at the moderate-to-high end performance tires, dismissing their value for the vehicles for which they are relevant or necessary, because you drive a 1975 VW Rabbit.
The guts of your Audigy include a circuit that compares very favorably with many professional devices on both input and output. The preamp for mic input isn't very good, but the line input is, and if you use an external preamp with a good mic (which is the only serious option anyway) you can get very, very good results. By "very, very good" I mean that this device introduces coloration below the threshold of human perception. As for output, it has a digital output circuit that will produce results that are precisely equivalent to the SP/DIF output on any professional audio device. (The only difference is that a pro device will have an option for an external clock to eliminate jitter, but sync is not an issue with one single device.)
It's also no small consideration that your Audigy works under ALSA because the EMU corporation was progressive enough to provide the team with very good specs and even participated in the process. Those pros with their Lynxes and their Unicorns can't even play in this world. (And when they [we] do, it's often with SB and M-Audio cards, which work perfectly fine, thanks to those manufacturers.)
Yes, extremely good. In fact, this chip pretty much defines the moment when the output quality of the consumer sound card reached the point of "at or beyond the threshold of human perception." As long as the rest of the circuit (e.g., preamp) is good, these cards are, in a very real and measurable sense, equivalent to professional devices at the same sample rate and dynamic range capability.
It's unfortunate that the original SBLive didn't come in a package with balanced 1/4" I/O, or in a 4-channel ADC or greater configuration. The SBLive with aftermarket drivers (either ALSA or kX) was wonderful for the time, and at least in the 16 bit dynamic range world, holds up well to this day. It's nice for use as a musical instrument, because you can get these things for $5/each, they can work at well under 10ms latency, and they are pretty damn good for both input and output.
With all due respect, if you aren't pushing the $100 headphone bracket or the studio monitor bracket more like $400 each, you're not in a category that can reasonably make the kind of value judgment regarding audio quality that's under discussion here. Basically you're below a threshold where the transducers and probably the room itself are far more important factors in sound quality than the sound output device (and we're ONLY considering INPUT here, correct?)
Consumer audio devices above the threshold where they have bad noise problems (and many of them DO have really serious noise problems), have fidelity beyond the threshold of human perception. That makes relative value judgments among them pretty much meaningless. Which means, in context, TFA is absolutely correct. Consumer cards on the digital 2-channel output have exactly the same fidelity as any professional device on an internally-clocked digital output. Exactly the same, meaning there is provably no room for improvement.
DACs are not all equal though, not by a long shot, and the average person can easily discriminate them in an A/B/X test, as long as the source material, the output device, and the listening environment permit this kind of judgment in the first place.
Do not underestimate the importance of the room itself in this scenario. In a good enough room (and I don't mean it has to be the fscking mastering control room at Sterling Sound!), a mundane system can sound *excellent*. With just a little bit of treatment (bass traps in the most reflective spots) the average living room can be seriously improved. Or you can put a breathtakingly expensive, pro studio rig in a bad environment and end up with unimpressive results.
If you're recording at all (and I don't just mean with professional recording expectations), the situation with consumer sound cards changes dramatically, and the low end of the products targeted at the pro market start to look (well, sound) very, very good.
>Actually, the built in sound cards are pretty decent, for virtually everything
Line recording? Mutli-channel recording? Surround encoding? How are the preamps for mic recording? Do they have sample-accurate digital transfer? In both directions? How does the 1/8" jack work out over a few months of location gigs? How clean is the output when connecting to a club or theatrical sound system?
For some users, "virtually everything" also means "almost nothing."
For casual listening? For critical listening before delivering A/V work? For production A/V work? As part of a musical instrument?
There are some mid-priced consumer audio devices that are good enough for most work (e.g., they have output fidelity that is already far beyond the limits of human perception.)
But how is their input fidelity? If the concept of "input" doesn't occur to you, I'm sure it matters very little how good your sound card is. Once you get to a -27dB noise floor, you're probably fine.
A sound card and monitoring environment good enough to stake your reputation as any sort of professional in anything audio related is a completely different scenario. And once you're recording, you can easily draw a bright line between consumer products that are good enough and those that are not.
And yes, there are plenty of applications for consumer-grade devices in what amounts to professional levels of work. Personally I'm satisfied with my Delta 1010 and my pair of Genelecs. I have spent more on room treatment than on these items, but then I'm a semi-professional musician and I consider my sound card and monitors to be an very important part of my musical instrument. I have a friend who spent more on her cello *case* than my current computer cost. *shrug*.
Uhhh.... a 3 is just barely into the category of quakes that people feel... The "cows giving curdled milk" thing is urban legend or you're just making a joke, right?
>My company (a giant company that purveys giant software to giant customers) and my customers have a never-ending thirst for technical >candidates who can speak and write good English, in a way that someone who barely passed TOEFL would not be able to handle.
You didn't give the location and the address to forward one's resume.
No, that's not what makes it a felony. It's the fact that it was a *contract* that made the subject of TFA a crime. Once it's a contract, the notion of fraud becomes possible. The GMail TOS isn't a contract.
Scalping is illegal because it abridges the rights of the operator of the venue, who has given an exclusive license for ticket distribution. Read the fine print on your ticket sometime, and notice that the venue would be perfectly within their rights to void your ticket at any time and for any reason.
>The article repeatedly uses the word "fraud" but does not explain how solving a CAPTCHA is fraudulent if they paid the >asking price.
That's not the crime, it's just one means to the end. The crime was fraud, specifically, entering into a contract while falsifying the identity of the party. The consideration for the contract was delivered electronically, which made it wire fraud.
If you use a false identity to enter into a contract, you commit fraud. If you do this with an electronic system, you commit wire fraud. This is precisely what they were accused of doing, and they pleaded guilty.
Language like "hacking" and "scalping" tend to hide the actual crime here.
The ticket purchase/sale is a contract, unlike some of the online transactions that people assume are contracts but are not. (There is a mutual agreement to terms, and consideration is exchanged for something of value.) The people who bought the tickets represented a fictitious identity while entering into a contract. This is a crime of fraud (not "hacking") and because of the electronic nature of the transaction and the intent, it constitute wire fraud.
What I'm wondering is what the threat was that persuaded them to plead guilty.
Slashdot Mirror
Mix engine is nothing. Rendering time-value effects and software synths in a "realtime" mix environment is another story.
>(did a Sound Audio Engineering course).
And somehow never encountered M-Audio or MOTU devices. Interesting.
What kind of mixing board is he using? And what I really want to know is what kind of mic or pickup is he using for his sax, and what kind of preamp with that mic? The mic+preamp combination is something of a gestalt, especially when you consider the source. Woodwinds have some specific challenges, and different challenges when recording solo vs. ensemble.
A jazzer's "dream rig" had better have at least 8 or 12 discrete inputs. You need half of them just to mic a drum kit properly. If you want to place your winds and horns in a stereo field, you're going to want individual close tracks *and* Mid/Side tracks to work with. You probably need an XY pair inside the piano lid. You're out of inputs, and you haven't even got a mic in front of the singer.
On the other hand, if he's simply recording a single track of his sax, he can do much worse than a SB card, especially if he uses a good mic+preamp. But this isn't really the scenario that a sax player wants to record, since we're almost universally talking about jazz ensembles.
With that in mind, I'd also consider a location rig, something with good XY mics that can get good imaging of a group. For 2-channel XY, give me a Zoom H4 any day.
Often just using a proper mic+preamp on the line-in of a consumer sound card is good enough. On cards where you can also work out the latency issues (e.g. for mix dubbing and for softsynths and so on), a lot of people have gotten results good enough results to be "production quality" on shoestring budgets. On the other hand, a nice M-Audio card, a Behringer mixer (they do get the job done), and a Chinese condenser mic or an SM58 clone or whatever fits your style, probably also qualifies as "shoestring budget" for this purpose. For some, it's all about working with what you have, or can scrounge up.
There's a psychoacoustic model that is *very* convincing. Thanks to our evolution as hunters and/or prey animals we have evolved a sensitivity to variations in the time, frequency, and dynamic domains that we interpret as "location." The effect is really pretty amazing, especially when it is combined with visual cues to reinforce the illusion.
I can hear past 16kHz, not sure about the limits of my current environment though.
But the online pregnancy test on that page told me I may be pregnant, which I think might be incredibly dangerous for a man my age!
It's surprising how much aesthetic value lives in the dynamic headroom. People focus too much on frequency characteristics that are already at or beyond the threshold of human perception, but dynamic range turns out to be far more important. And music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s was originally mixed to maximize dynamics. The same music has had its dynamic domain significantly altered to exploit the limits of digital media, because doing anything else causes quiet parts to be lost, relatively speaking. Mostly, the loudness wars have been an accident.
Some people enjoy the *experience* of vinyl, if not making judgments on the *sound*. There are some arguments to be made with respect to the EQ curve of vinyl mastering. If you can get your hands on the source material and make your own mix, you can impart the same qualities of sound into the digital domain.
But that's not always the issue, anyway.
There's the aesthetics of having a wall of phono albums. And then there's the process of selecting one. It even has a *smell*. Then there's the ritual of preparing the tonearm, cleaning and de-ionizing the record, and playing it while your girlfriend rolls a joint on the album cover, which is a nice, big work of art (the cover is, also).
>This. My last 3 systems all have had integrated audio and a SB Live! and no matter how I tried to record speech with a Microphone, there was always a significant level of noise (and not just white noise..
>low frequency hum as well)
The preamp was definitely the weak link. It's extremely hard to put a decent preamp into the same circuit as the mobo.
Some of those USB headsets turn out to be pretty amazing. To get any kind of results with a mic and a SBLive (mobo or not) you need a dedicated preamp and a decent mic. This is mostly true for any consumer sound card. The preamps just aren't that good, and there really aren't any electret mics that are worth using to begin with. But even at the bottom of the barrel, say the preamp on a Behringer mixer or one of the one- or two-channel M-Audio preamps, and a cheap Chinese condenser mic or an SM58 (or clone), depends on your style what kind of mic you use, these will give good enough results for production work, in all seriousness.
If your source material, the rest of your signal chain, and your listening environment don't make for a reasonable test case, you shouldn't be making value judgments about sound quality in the first place.
To make a car analogy, it's like looking at the moderate-to-high end performance tires, dismissing their value for the vehicles for which they are relevant or necessary, because you drive a 1975 VW Rabbit.
>I'm still using an Audigy 2 ZS
The guts of your Audigy include a circuit that compares very favorably with many professional devices on both input and output. The preamp for mic input isn't very good, but the line input is, and if you use an external preamp with a good mic (which is the only serious option anyway) you can get very, very good results. By "very, very good" I mean that this device introduces coloration below the threshold of human perception. As for output, it has a digital output circuit that will produce results that are precisely equivalent to the SP/DIF output on any professional audio device. (The only difference is that a pro device will have an option for an external clock to eliminate jitter, but sync is not an issue with one single device.)
It's also no small consideration that your Audigy works under ALSA because the EMU corporation was progressive enough to provide the team with very good specs and even participated in the process. Those pros with their Lynxes and their Unicorns can't even play in this world. (And when they [we] do, it's often with SB and M-Audio cards, which work perfectly fine, thanks to those manufacturers.)
>The Emu10k1 chipset
Yes, extremely good. In fact, this chip pretty much defines the moment when the output quality of the consumer sound card reached the point of "at or beyond the threshold of human perception." As long as the rest of the circuit (e.g., preamp) is good, these cards are, in a very real and measurable sense, equivalent to professional devices at the same sample rate and dynamic range capability.
It's unfortunate that the original SBLive didn't come in a package with balanced 1/4" I/O, or in a 4-channel ADC or greater configuration. The SBLive with aftermarket drivers (either ALSA or kX) was wonderful for the time, and at least in the 16 bit dynamic range world, holds up well to this day. It's nice for use as a musical instrument, because you can get these things for $5/each, they can work at well under 10ms latency, and they are pretty damn good for both input and output.
With all due respect, if you aren't pushing the $100 headphone bracket or the studio monitor bracket more like $400 each, you're not in a category that can reasonably make the kind of value judgment regarding audio quality that's under discussion here. Basically you're below a threshold where the transducers and probably the room itself are far more important factors in sound quality than the sound output device (and we're ONLY considering INPUT here, correct?)
Consumer audio devices above the threshold where they have bad noise problems (and many of them DO have really serious noise problems), have fidelity beyond the threshold of human perception. That makes relative value judgments among them pretty much meaningless. Which means, in context, TFA is absolutely correct. Consumer cards on the digital 2-channel output have exactly the same fidelity as any professional device on an internally-clocked digital output. Exactly the same, meaning there is provably no room for improvement.
DACs are not all equal though, not by a long shot, and the average person can easily discriminate them in an A/B/X test, as long as the source material, the output device, and the listening environment permit this kind of judgment in the first place.
Do not underestimate the importance of the room itself in this scenario. In a good enough room (and I don't mean it has to be the fscking mastering control room at Sterling Sound!), a mundane system can sound *excellent*. With just a little bit of treatment (bass traps in the most reflective spots) the average living room can be seriously improved. Or you can put a breathtakingly expensive, pro studio rig in a bad environment and end up with unimpressive results.
If you're recording at all (and I don't just mean with professional recording expectations), the situation with consumer sound cards changes dramatically, and the low end of the products targeted at the pro market start to look (well, sound) very, very good.
>Actually, the built in sound cards are pretty decent, for virtually everything
Line recording? Mutli-channel recording? Surround encoding? How are the preamps for mic recording?
Do they have sample-accurate digital transfer? In both directions? How does the 1/8" jack work out over a few months of location gigs? How clean is the output when connecting to a club or theatrical sound system?
For some users, "virtually everything" also means "almost nothing."
There's not much in the way of UK law that stops his dad from spending some of it on booze and gambling the rest away.
For casual listening? For critical listening before delivering A/V work? For production A/V work? As part of a musical instrument?
There are some mid-priced consumer audio devices that are good enough for most work (e.g., they have output fidelity that is already far beyond the limits of human perception.)
But how is their input fidelity? If the concept of "input" doesn't occur to you, I'm sure it matters very little how good your sound card is. Once you get to a -27dB noise floor, you're probably fine.
A sound card and monitoring environment good enough to stake your reputation as any sort of professional in anything audio related is a completely different scenario. And once you're recording, you can easily draw a bright line between consumer products that are good enough and those that are not.
And yes, there are plenty of applications for consumer-grade devices in what amounts to professional levels of work. Personally I'm satisfied with my Delta 1010 and my pair of Genelecs. I have spent more on room treatment than on these items, but then I'm a semi-professional musician and I consider my sound card and monitors to be an very important part of my musical instrument. I have a friend who spent more on her cello *case* than my current computer cost. *shrug*.
Uhhh.... a 3 is just barely into the category of quakes that people feel... The "cows giving curdled milk" thing is urban legend or you're just making a joke, right?
>My company (a giant company that purveys giant software to giant customers) and my customers have a never-ending thirst for technical
>candidates who can speak and write good English, in a way that someone who barely passed TOEFL would not be able to handle.
You didn't give the location and the address to forward one's resume.
No, that's not what makes it a felony. It's the fact that it was a *contract* that made the subject of TFA a crime. Once it's a contract, the notion of fraud becomes possible. The GMail TOS isn't a contract.
You aren't entering into a contract (there is no consideration.) That makes it a completely different situation in the legal sense.
Scalping is illegal because it abridges the rights of the operator of the venue, who has given an exclusive license for ticket distribution. Read the fine print on your ticket sometime, and notice that the venue would be perfectly within their rights to void your ticket at any time and for any reason.
>The article repeatedly uses the word "fraud" but does not explain how solving a CAPTCHA is fraudulent if they paid the
>asking price.
That's not the crime, it's just one means to the end. The crime was fraud, specifically, entering into a contract while falsifying the identity of the party. The consideration for the contract was delivered electronically, which made it wire fraud.
If you use a false identity to enter into a contract, you commit fraud. If you do this with an electronic system, you commit wire fraud. This is precisely what they were accused of doing, and they pleaded guilty.
>They rented a botnet to buy the tickets with.
That was probably legal. What they did that was illegal (fraud) was using fabricated identities to make the purchases.
>Tickets are for sale, they bought them and offered them at a market price.
They falsely identified themselves while entering into a contract. This would be wire fraud in your line of business as well.
Language like "hacking" and "scalping" tend to hide the actual crime here.
The ticket purchase/sale is a contract, unlike some of the online transactions that people assume are contracts but are not. (There is a mutual agreement to terms, and consideration is exchanged for something of value.) The people who bought the tickets represented a fictitious identity while entering into a contract. This is a crime of fraud (not "hacking") and because of the electronic nature of the transaction and the intent, it constitute wire fraud.
What I'm wondering is what the threat was that persuaded them to plead guilty.