L’édition 2012 des Audio Days a été un grand succès.

Ce sont plus de 400 visiteurs qui sont venus au Studio de la Grande Armée pour assister aux conférences et rencontrer les concepteurs des différentes marques présentes.

Nous remercions particulièrement tous ceux qui sont venus rencontrer nos fabricants : Brad Avenson (Avenson Audio) Dave Hill (Dave Hill Designs), Kelly Kay (Josephson Engineering), Jonathan Little (Little Labs), John Petersen et Jesper Bo Nielsen (Tube-Tech).

Rendez-vous l’année prochaine, 15 et 16 avril 2013.

La lecture de la fiche technique d’un micro peut laisser augurer de beaucoup de choses.

La comparaison des spécifications techniques de plusieurs microphones peut laisser penser à la supériorité de l’un sur le(s) autre(s).
Mais avant de tirer des conclusions, encore faudrait-il savoir… de quoi on parle !

En effet, depuis de nombreuses années, toutes les tentatives d’adoption d’un standard unique et commun à tous les fabricants concernant la mesure des performances de leurs micro ont échoué.
Chacun adoptant le standard le plus flatteur pour son micro ou bien utilisant des mesures « hors normes » pour lisser les courbes et rendre les chiffres flatteurs.

David Josephson explique dans cette conférence donnée lors des Audio Days comment lire et interpréter les fiches techniques ; mais aussi ce qui peut se cacher derrière toutes ces informations.

Cliquer ici pour télécharger la présentation visuelle de David Josephson (support de la conférence).

Après de nombreux mois passé à Hollywood pour la musique du film Tron : Legacy avec son camarade de Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter, de retour en France nous a contacté pour équiper le studio parisien du groupe.

Pour ce qui est de la conversion, ce sont les Lavry Gold AD122-96MKIII et DA924 qui ont été choisis pour leur qualité de conversion et leur musicalité inégalées.

Enfin, ce sont le compresseur VSC-2 de Vertigo Sound et le modélisateur de magnétophones à bandes ATS-1 d’AnaMod qui sont venus rejoindre les racks du nouveau studio du duo.

Jesper Bo Nielsen assurera les démonstrations des produits Tube-Tech et donnera deux conférences :
- Compression, can you hear it ?
- Mixing with EQ
Ces conférences (comme toutes les autres) seront enregistrées par nos amis d’Audio People et vous pourrez les retrouver dans les semaines suivant les Audio Days sur le site d’Audio People.

A l’affiche de cette édition d’automne : AMS Neve, Flux::, Two Notes, Klinger Favre pour ne citer qu’eux.
La liste complète des participants est disponible sur le site des Audio Days.

L’inscription aux Audio Days est gratuite mais obligatoire pour permettre à l’organisation d’accueillir le public dans les meilleures conditions possibles de sécurité et de confort.

Rendez-vous donc les 5 et 6 décembre aux studios +30.

Ships in a bottle. Pointillist paintings. Josephson Microphones. When an obsessive personality finds a labor of love, the results can be both impressive and a little geeky.

The designers at Josephson use their zest for minutiae, anechoic chambers and a battery of precision instruments to build microphones to tolerances measured in nanometers. They pick dust off components one particle at a time.

Craftsmanship like that does not come cheap. Some Josephson mics cost as much as $7,000, but their owners say they are worth every cent.

Josephson’s facilities are located across from a boutique bakery and hair salon in a refurbished industrial area of Santa Cruz, California. The offices resemble a college physics lab and the employees older versions of the students you would find there. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how some of the world’s finest microphones are made.

The Chamber of Sonic Secrets

Stick your head inside Josephson’s anechoic chamber, a big box that blocks out exterior sound and suppresses echoes, and you will discover that pure silence is the opposite of peaceful.

Like being in pitch darkness, the nearly complete quiet is disorienting, a novel sensation that initiates a kind of instinctual threat assessment. Once you’ve heard nothing, you realize that in normal life you are always hearing something, even if it is an almost imperceptible hum.

From Sound to Heat

The wedges on the chamber’s walls look like a crazy quilt. As the name “anechoic” suggests, they are carefully arranged to eliminate any echoes within the chamber. When struck by sound waves, the individual fibers of the wedges rub together, which converts the sound that would otherwise bounce off the walls into heat.

Technicians use the speaker at the back of the chamber to hit the microphone with sounds from specific angles and determine its response in the absence of any reflected sound or reverberation.

The Ears Know Best

Kelly Kay, a partner in the company, looks at a computer that displays signals from a microphone in the anechoic chamber.

True to the appearance of Josephson’s facility, with its bevy of readouts and gizmos, its design process is largely a matter of math and measurements — like calculating the acoustic properties of different shapes and materials. But making a good mic also requires a lot of listening and tweaking.

“For some of the aspects of a sound of a microphone there is no measurement for it. It’s easy to make a mic that sounds terrible that has a perfectly flat, textbook performance,” says Kay.

Like Dust in the Vacuum-Hood Wind

Marguerite Power assembles the capsule of a Josephson 700A while seated underneath a dust-removing hood. According to Kay, the company’s 700A and 700S microphones are the hardest ones to build.

« There’s a lot going into them, » he says. Kay estimates that each individual 700A takes four to five days’ worth of work.

There’s a surprising amount of concern over industrial espionage from the otherwise laid-back team at Josephson. One mysterious back room of the facility is off-limits to tours, as Kay claims certain trade secrets may be revealed by a simple photo or description of certain techniques. Despite the fact that other companies can simply buy Josephson mics and disassemble them, Kay says that no amount of reverse engineering can explain how certain components are put together.

Lonely at the Top

The price of the final product reflects the painstaking labor: The 700A retails for $4,600. The stereo 700S, which includes a second microphone capsule, goes for around $7,000.

“If you sort by price, it’s in the top 1 or 2 percent in terms of cost,” says Kay.

While hesitant to name names, Kay says that the bigger companies that used to occupy the high end of the market are trending towards a growing pro-sumer customer base, leaving some room for Josephson to step in with mics like the 700S.

“It’s targeted at the really honest-to-god professional moneymaking engineers who need a tool,” says Kay.

John Vanderslice, owner of the Tiny Telephone recording studio in San Francisco, whose clients include Death Cab for Cutie and Mike Watt, is one such professional. He describes the 700A as an “incredibly hi-fi, beautiful-sounding microphone.”

No Name-Dropping

Scott Solter, a recording engineer whose credits include indie-rock giants such as Spoon and the Mountain Goats, has recorded some of his sessions using Josephson mics almost exclusively.

“I’d use all the A-words: They are awesome, amazing, ass-kicking,” he says. As for the e22S and C617 models: “There is something about the openness of those mics, I could use them without any thought or concern.”

Though many music professionals are eager to discuss Josephson’s products, Kelly Kay is cagey about who exactly buys his mics.

“Sadly, once you get in our niche you don’t want to drop names of the customers, » says Kay. « In our echelon of making stuff you have a choice of dropping the names of people, and then they right away expect to have endorsement type things and get deals on stuff. We try and make a top-notch product, with the best value, that somebody who really is on the highest echelon is happy paying full price for.”

The plan appears to be working. Producers and studio owners rave about the company’s products. Vanderslice is emphatic in his praise: “I own 10 Josephson mics now…. Those are not discounted. I don’t have an endorsement from them.”

This willingness to pay full price even extends to Steve Albini, the legendary engineer and producer whose studio, Electrical Audio, is a trendsetter in recording technology. Albini not only purchases from Josephson, he actually commissioned the company to design a mic, the e22S, and helped test and refine it. Says Kay, « The mic didn’t actually exist, and he talked to Dave Josephson about ‘could you make this?’ »

Despite his contribution to bringing the e22S into existence, and his advocacy of Josephson products in general, even Albini isn’t asking for a discount.

“He’s used these mics, which he’s paid for, pretty much every session,” Kay reports proudly.

Double Standards

David Josephson, the eponymous founder of Josephson Engineering, is a professorial type who enunciates his words with Oxonian exactitude. His diction seems appropriate — and probably not coincidental — to his chosen career as a designer of precision recording instruments.

According to Josephson, the quality of microphones at the lower end of the price spectrum can vary widely, even within the same brand and model. So if one buys two of the same brand new microphone, they could sound noticeably different. It’s the luck of the draw. Even more so with two similarly spec’d microphones from different brands.

That’s why exacting standards are Josephson’s thing. And he is not only a practitioner but an evangelist.

“There is an international standard for measuring the performance of microphones,” he says. “There isn’t a single microphone company in the world that is completely compliant with that standard.”

As chairman of the Audio Engineering Society’s Standards Committee Working Group on Microphones, he has spent years trying to get convergence on a global standard for testing and comparison. « We might get there,” he says.

The goal of creating a battery of tests that is truly representative of a mic’s performance would allow end users to make an informed comparison of the products on the market. However, Josephson and Kay add that they do not publish the technical specifications for their most expensive mics, and report that customers almost never ask for that information.

People who buy the top-end mics “just want the mic in their hands; they want to use it,” says Kay. Josephson adds, “Our lowest-cost microphone has a frequency response on the data sheet, our more expensive mics don’t.” John Vanderslice, owner of studio Tiny Telephone, echoes that sentiment, saying that he pays almost no attention to the data sheets that come with many of the microphones he owns.

Josephson’s engineers embrace two competing design philosophies. Any element of a microphone that can be measured, they measure, preferably at nano-scale. Yet they say it is easy to build a mic that has excellent specs and terrible performance. Good sound is ineffable, they argue, and no readouts or equations will get you there.

Though Kay and Josephson stress that scientific testing ensures all their mics meet a consistent standard, it is clearly about more than quality control. To an outsider, they seem torn between two muses, math and music, and there is a whiff of fetishism in their obsession with technical details.

But perhaps they see no dichotomy, finding mysticism in numbers and precision in listening.

Le jitter est une erreur d’ordre temporel.
Le jitter est la variation infime dans le temps d’un événement – tel qu’un signal d’horloge régulier. Par exemple, le jitter est la variation dans le temps d’un événement périodique – tel que les transitions d’un signal – par rapport à une référence idéale que l’événement suivrait s’il était parfaitement régulier. Une des définitions généralement admise est la suivante : «déviation dans le temps de transitions quand celle-ci sont mesurées avec respect par rapport à une horloge idéale».
Contrairement à cette référence d’horloge idéale, le point de retour à zéro de la plupart des impulsions dans un flux de données varie dans le temps. On peut donc dire que le jitter est une modulation de phase du signal audionumérique.

C’est tout bête mais il fallait y penser.
Et c’est sur la tournée de Sting que ce procédé a été mis au point.

Résultat(s) :
- le chanteur est plus confortable et chante plus juste ;
- un LMNOPre a été acheté afin de l’utiliser sur la voix de l’artiste et d’avoir une solution « tout en un » (le LMNO étant un préampli qui intègre le module IBP de remise en phase). ;)

La grue à micro est née de besoins simples :
- ne pas gêner le public avec des pieds de micros lors de l’enregistrement de concert
- avoir un outils (facilement) transportable (en bus ou en train)

Florilège de photos des différentes versions de grues, modèles d’ingéniosité.

PS : je vous invite également à visiter le site de Benoit, l’inventeur de la grue, promenez-vous sans user vos chaussures.

Une forme d’onde échantillonnée contient TOUTES les informations sans aucune distorsion, quand la fréquence d’échantillonnage est supérieure au double de la fréquence maximale contenu dans la forme d’onde à échantillonner.

C’est lors de la MusikMesse de Francfort, et à l’initiative du distributeur allemand de Tube-Tech, que l’anniversaire de la marque danoise a été célébré.
A cette occasion un gâteau très particulier avait été commandé : un rack RM8 ! Pour la plus grande surprise de John G. Petersen (fondateur de Tube-Tech) et Jesper Bo Nielsen (directeur marketing et commercial)…

Après la séance photo, les invités ne se seront pas fait prier pour dévorer la machine à laquelle le patissier avait pourtant apporté le plus grand soin, représentant les boutons en « face avant » mais également les connecteurs (XLR et SubD s’il vous plait !) en face arrière.

Le champagne a coulé à flots et nous souhaitons encore de longues et belles années à toutes l’équipe (et aux machines) de Tube-Tech.

* certains l’aiment chaud !