advertisement


One sub or two

If you've got an acoustician then what's the point of asking the opinion of rank amateurs, aside from which you then go on to say that you're going to leave it all up to her. :confused:
 
fox said:
Tony sadly I cannot forget it as I have to start of an opera (I shit you not) in 4 channel for my first year phd. The plan is to stay here in the old schoolhouse and Uvi will do the best she can with the room as a temp measure for at the very least until the summer while I decide where I will live if I ever want to be a grown up.

The opera is by far the most ambitious thing I have ever undertaken and I'm terrified I am overreaching which means I have a little cash to spend on not needing to fight for studio time.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, though I'd still argue that the number of operas that will have been written, scored and produced on better kit than 4 x ATC 100s is little more than a rounding error! I just can't see how a sub solution would be a deal-breaker in such a scenario - you already have a genuinely world-class monitoring rig. The most important thing is to really get to know and trust it, and that's a time, not an expense thing IMO.
 
Good question to be honest I think it's because I hope to find a certainty in the noise. As an acoustician she works with what customers have and has a pragmatic view that both will give me what I am after. Both are the same cost so hoping something will emerge from other viewpoints. Merlin Markus Tony Purite all helping.
 
Tony L said:
Fair enough, though I'd still argue that the number of operas that will have been written, scored and produced on better kit than 4 x ATC 100s is little more than a rounding error! I just can't see how a sub system would be a deal-breaker in such a scenario - you already have a genuinely world-class monitoring rig.
Click to expand...

Well this is no ordinary opera as it involves a whale and Noah's ark embedded in a melting polar icecap and has some serioulsly deep freqs planned. the libretto is animal human morphs. But it's also for future work. I'm no longer working in stereo. I'll make stereo mixes but primary is surround for 3-4 years.
 
I'm intrigued as to how you are defining opera here? I'm imagining you are creating surround soundscapes? Forgive me if I'm wrong.

This is very different to the classical norm of creating a score for others to perform. How will the piece be performed? Opera is essentially a staged musical drama. Could yours ever be that with morphed animal sounds?
 
fox said:
Good question to be honest I think it's because I hope to find a certainty in the noise. As an acoustician she works with what customers have and has a pragmatic view that both will give me what I am after.
Click to expand...

At considerable risk of attempting to teach you to suck eggs I think it may be wise to take a small step back and ask the basic question 'what is a studio monitoring rig for?'. To my mind it's actually more a relationship between engineer and tool than an absolute 'thing' and can be viewed in several key ways. Ok, the first priority is that it must be sufficiently robust that you don't break it with mistakes (e.g. I've taken tweeters out with old analogue synths, forgetting a channel strip was live etc etc). Secondly it must be revealing enough that you can hear your mistakes, e.g. mic clipping, bad mic position, nasty EQ etc. Thirdly you have to understand very clearly how that particular rig translates to the outside world, and there are no short-cuts here.

It is this final point that is the most important IMO. In many ways you are ahead of the game here as you have used ATC 100s for many years so should know them very well indeed - you will have a good mental picture of how stuff recorded through them translates to other hi-fi, iPods, cars, TV, radio or whatever, in other respects it's not so good as you are in an entirely new (and worse, temporary) environment. My response to this would be to keep the familiar (the ATC 100s) as familiar as possible (i.e. don't add to them), get your acustician to iron out the worst room kinks, and then just try and relax and really learn the kit in this context. Play stuff you know, record lots of stuff, take those recordings to friends with systems you know, play them in the car etc etc, just get to understand how the ATCs in that space translate to the outside world.
 
Thank you. This is what I am looking for

It's a place to both create and assemble and assess sound. Some real world some not so real-world. So, it's not really a composers space. it is not a recording studio either, nor is It really an engineering or mastering suite. It's becoming a very personal extension of a thing to enable these and future sounds and ideas to take shape and then take them out. The last work took place in it and hinted at where to go next. Mics are sorted, Soundfield SPS200 and 8 x Oktavias, A few Condensers and some ribbons. Desk is sorted. SSL. DSP is TC 6000. Its clean small, agile and very very easy to operate. Logic I know well, the whole thing is ITB, so no nannying hardware and no synths, anywhere.

What an opera is is a very big question. Too big to reply on an iPhone. I expect i'll finalise how it takes form (in the context of Opera as an extension of some of the ideas of Trevor Wishart's Red Bird) after 8 months approaching this question... and finish throughly nailing it in a personal and historical context perhaps in 4 years time, perhaps. Between now and then I spend day after day exploring the tools, going out, recording in A format and then B format conversion and learnign it all... its all so new and none of it DIY.

This is hard typing on an iPhone. I'm going to sit and decide but surround is my epiphany. I am pretty certain my elements have to be spaced in surround with the orchestra similarly diffused. Stereo is important for mass distro, but I can express things in an immersive way I cannot work out how to do in stereo (lack of knowledge, I am new to this), but the way the 100s cannot quite reproduce the low ebb: the formants that underpin the sound of ice crushing wood or the heart beats of a pregnant horse (in eos) or the subterranean mic in something I am woking on, or the contact expansion of trees in the wind is bugging me. Subs are one answer, recording better is another, refining the room (now I am stuck here) also It's a process of refinement in the space so I can concentrate on the actual job in hand, starting in feb.

This is putting all the pieces in place before I stop and use it. Frankly I take no pleasure in this part. Once upon a time it would have been "WHOOOAAHHH SUBS" now its kinda, "feck, more money to spend."
 
lordsummit said:
I'm intrigued as to how you are defining opera here? I'm imagining you are creating surround soundscapes? Forgive me if I'm wrong.

This is very different to the classical norm of creating a score for others to perform. How will the piece be performed? Opera is essentially a staged musical drama. Could yours ever be that with morphed animal sounds?
Click to expand...

Perhaps different to classical idioms but not as different in the wider context as you may think. There is the classical Idiom but the term Opera (perhaps operetta will be my starting point) is greater than that. The serialsts (all those 2nd Viennese School composers, Berg, etc) and especially Stockhausen (himself a force of nature) did a lot of work to help drag the form out of the hands of what are essentially musical necrophiliacs into the 21st C.

So yes yes I am planning on live human to animal sound morphings in definitely a performance setting, staged? No, we can do without that. I want people to walk it... about perhaps as multimedia setting with performers/projections maybe even in a forest or dare I say it a floating melting ice rink (hellish images of Wakemanesque prog hell in my mind here) basically extending ideas from R Muray Shafer’s Fifth String Quartet (1989) from his Patria Cycle, itself part of a 30 year old ongoing “musical ritual” known as The Wolf Project.

My idea is based around the Whale and the flood and Noah's Ark as metaphors for Global Warming, Ecogeddon and our stewardship to the planet and the animal kingdom (some of this is being sung from Sufu and Gnostic singing, I have some ideas for Tibertan songs of the dead too), its following the same line of inquiry started since malfunction://ouroboros and up to this year's é-õs but this is now tackling my deepest fears and concerns using biblical imagery in a largely atheist modern world and the notion of a man-made flood. i.e. **** god, **** religion -- we were given the planet to look after and we flooded it for ourselves...

I'm trying to be moving outwards always. And there I are with fears of overreaching.

Anyway this is OT but I guess useful context whats brewing in my little skull...
 
spacey said:
Replaced with?
Click to expand...

Well I built some TAD 4003 based mids and treble to match to those bass cabs with a Pass Labs active crossover, tried some SCM50 Anniversary when i wanted my living space back, then sold the lot and bought a large motor home to travel Europe in.

Now selling the motor home and looking for speakers...
 
Here's a different perspective:

A pair of SCM100's have two 31.4cm Bass units.

That's a total radiating area of ~ 1550 cm^2

Or the equivalent of a single Bass unit of 44.4cm or 17.5 inch.

Given that lower bass needs ever increasing radiating area to maintain SPLs then you're going to need a single sub of at least 18" probably more (though god knows where you'd get one) or two subs of 15" ,(equivalent to a 21" driver) or more.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top