Paul White:  Hello and welcome to this Sound On Sound podcast. I'm Paul White and with me is Hugh Robjohns.

Hugh Robjohns: Hello there.

Paul: And we're going to answer a few of your questions this time around. The first one out of the bag says, I've got a very basic home studio, what should I upgrade first if I want to get better quality? This is over to you Hugh.

Hugh: Probably the first thing that's gonna make the biggest difference is the acoustics. Whether you're recording acoustic instruments or whether you're recording electronic instruments, having decent room acoustics makes a big difference, both when you're recording and when you're monitoring and trying to decide what to do with the sound, whether to EQ it or compress it or whatever. The better the acoustics of the room, the easier and the faster it is to get a good sound in the first place and to hear what you're doing with it subsequently. So I'd say the room acoustics.

Paul: So assuming you've got a fairly small home studio, what kind of acoustic treatment would you recommend for that?

Hugh: You can make a really, really big difference by just treating the mirror points and the mirror points are where, if you imagine you were holding a, or a friend was holding a mirror on the wall, if you move that mirror up and down the side walls, there will be a point where from where you're sitting to where the speakers are, you can see the reflection to the mirror. That's the mirror point. So roughly it's gonna be on the side wall halfway between where you're sitting and the level of the speakers. You can do the same on the ceiling, you can do the same on the back walls, you can do the same on the front walls, but it's those mirror points that really make the biggest difference.

Paul: Yeah, I'd agree with that and I guess you can't put serious bass trapping in a small home studio, so we are looking at things like foam or mineral panels.

Hugh: Yeah. If you're gonna do it yourself, the mineral wool is probably very cost effective. Alternatively you go to one of the suppliers, there's plenty of them around and pick their pre-built panels, which are generally foam and mineral wool in various compositions. Most of the manufacturers now offer a kind of room design service which is typically free if you buy their products and they're very helpful and useful, so try those.

Paul: And for the benefit of students living in rented accommodation, the trick we came by many years ago was to buy some of the foam panels and instead of gluing to the wall, you glue an old CD, you remember those, onto the back somewhere near the top and then just hang it on a map pin.

Hugh: Yeah, it works really well actually, yeah. As long as the glue's good. You gotta be careful with glue on foam because some glues will actually dissolve the foam, so make sure it's a glue that's designed for use on foam.

Paul: Yes, one of those contact adhesives like Evostick works pretty well.

Hugh: Yes, absolutely.

Paul: Yeah, the other aspect of accurate monitoring of course, is reasonably accurate monitors. I mean, some of the budget speakers are pretty good, but you can always improve on them if you can get a bit more money together and also in an imperfectly treated room, there's also the option of headphones and they don't have to be hugely expensive, do they Hugh.

Hugh: No, not at all. In fact I mean, you can get really good headphones for just a hundred quid or two hunderd quid these days. Really good indeed and way better than monitors that are gonna cost you a thousand or fifteen hundred pounds. The only real difference is the deep low end because the loudspeakers, you've got that physical air moving around you, you kind of feel the low end. On headphones you don't have that, so it's a different experience, but you can get used to it very quickly and when you do, it's a good way of working if the room is not ideal, either acoustically or because you've got noise coming in or you don't wanna have your noise going out to upset other people. So yeah, decent monitors, sure absolutely but good headphones are a real saviour, I think.

Paul: And it's important to make sure that your mix sounds good on both because consumers, as they call them in the trade, listen to audio either on speakers or on headphones and the listening experience is rather different just because of the way we process the stereo information.

Hugh: Yeah absolutely, of course. I mean in the sixties, seventies, people didn't really listen on that, on headphones very much. Through the eighties they certainly did with the introduction of the Sony Walkman and that kind of thing. And now of course it's, you know, it is ubiquitous. Everybody listens on EarPods all the time. So yeah, make sure it works on headphones because the way your brain interprets music on headphones, it's different to the way your brain interprets music over loud speakers, you sense the mix in a different way. With loud speakers, both ears hear both speakers, with headphones, each ear only hears the earphone on that side. So it's a different experience. It's not better or worse, it's just different.

Paul: Of course, the other piece of equipment that can make a huge difference to the quality of acoustic recordings is the humble duvet, as we've experienced many times in the past, not just for the drummer to sleep under.

Hugh: Yeah, absolutely. Yes, the SOS standard duvet, saviour of acoustics everywhere. Yeah I mean it comes back to the point I just made about acoustics doesn't it, but the thing about a duvet is that it's very easy just to, you know, pull it out from the cupboard or off the bed and hang it on a frame, any kind of frame, whether you build something out of bits of timber or you hang it over a tall clothes horse or...

Paul: Two mic stands.

Hugh: ...or just a couple of mic stands or a lighting T-stand, anything like that. It's very cheap, it's incredibly effective and it really does make a big difference.

Paul: I certainly use that principle a lot when recording vocals In untreated rooms, if you just create a sort of semi-circular shape behind the singer, it stops those reflections coming from over their shoulder and back into the microphone and if you're using a cardioid baton microphone, that's gonna be most sensitive at the front and the sides, so the semicircular shape takes care of that pretty well.

Hugh: Yeah, I think that's the thing that people often get a bit confused about, particularly when they think of things like reflection filters which go behind the microphone. Actually, as you say, microphones, cardioid microphones are sensitive at the front and the sides, the sides are only very slightly less sensitive than the front. So what you're trying to do is stop unwanted sound getting into the front of the microphone and by putting the duvets behind the singer any sound that's rattling around in the room that would normally bounce off the back wall and straight into the front of the mic gets absorbed by the duvet and that's the problem solved.

Paul: And the bigger the tog rating, the better the low frequency response of the duvet.

Hugh: Quite right.

Paul: And the warmer the drummer.

Hugh: So the next thing to think about once the acoustics are sorted as well as you can, is the speakers themselves. What kind of speakers should we upgrade to, is there anything we can do to improve the performance of the speakers you've got. What would you say to that?

Paul: Well, speaker platforms are good, especially the IsoAcoustics ones that we've tried have been very, very good. If you're gonna put your speakers on a shelf on a mixing desk for example, then there are vibrations from the speaker into the desk and vice versa. These isolation stands really tighten up the bass end of the speakers, so it's worth doing, especially if the speakers are a reasonable size, you know. Maybe not quite so vital with a five inch speaker, you can stand up on a piece of foam and get away with it. But if it's a seven inch speaker or above, I would say a speaker platform is a really good thing.

Hugh: Yeah I'd agree. The only thing to be careful of is to make sure that the isolation device, whatever that might be, is suitably rated for the mass of the speaker, the weight of the speaker because you don't want a very heavy speaker on a platform that's not designed to take that kind of weight because it'll affect its performance.

Paul: Now of course people are often regaled with advertising for better microphones and better preamplifiers. How much difference do they really make in your experience?

Hugh: Very little, very little indeed. I think modern interfaces, the preamps in modern interfaces are way better than anything we used to work with in the seventies and people made a lot of really good albums in the seventies, nobody complained about the quality of the preamps then and modern interfaces are definitely better than those. So yeah, I mean it's nice to have tweaky preamps and things that. You know, you can reminisce about as being what they used in the seventies but quality-wise, probably not gonna make that much difference. There are better things to spend your money on, acoustics being one of them.

Paul: And when it comes to microphones I mean, we've done tests in the past where we've checked a lot of cheaper microphones and more expensive microphones and it usually comes down to finding one that best suits the vocalist.

Hugh: Yeah, or the source. Yeah, whatever the source is but particularly with voices. Voices are so unique that finding a match of microphone and voice really does make a big difference to the quality. You know, the well-known microphones, the AKG C414's and the Neumann UU87's, you can always guarantee that you're gonna get something very usable out of it, but it might not be the best you can get and we've done trade shows before with microphone shootout and we found that with a particular voice, a microphone as modest as the Audio-Technica 2020 easily sounded better than a U87 or even more expensive microphones.

Paul: But just on that one particular vocalist.

Hugh: But just on that one particular vocalist, it just happened to work, it was a really nice combination and you find that very strongly with voices and microphones. With guitars and guitar amps and other instruments, probably the differences aren't quite so dramatic, but with voices it really does make a difference.

Paul: Okay but if you are still using the SM57 or 58 out of your gig bag, it probably would be worth spending two or three hundred pounds on a capacitor microphone, I think.

Hugh: Yeah absolutely, although you know, lots of recordings are made with 57's and 58's very happily, so if the combination works, don't be put off by it. But going to capacitor mic, you get a nicer top end usually, you get a bit more resolution and detail, just a bit more fidelity shall we say, about the sound, which usually is what you want.

Paul: Of course all of this stuff's joined together by bits of wire. What can you do in that department Hugh, without getting silly and buying something really esoteric.

Hugh: Yeah, I don't think you need anything esoteric. I mean, there are lots of well-known brand names but to be honest, ordinary sort of bog standard cheapo cables get the job done. There's only so many things you can do to make a cable work. Where you can have problems is with the connectors and I've had several situations myself and when I've visited other people where cheap far Eastern XLR connectors just seem to have slightly incorrect dimensions and they don't fit properly or they don't make contact properly, so I've had a few problems there. I mean personally I like Neutrik connectors but, Cannon connectors and there are others that are just as good but try, be a little bit careful when it comes to the really cheapest of connectors.

Paul: Yeah that's fair enough and in terms of mains cabling, again nothing esoteric but it does pay to fan all the mains out from a single point rather than to plug into sockets all the way round the room as that's less likely to give you ground loop problems.

Hugh: Yeah absolutely. Again I'm not a big fan, in the UK, I mean this may vary in other parts of the world depending on the quality of the mains supply but in the UK it's generally very clean and we don't need to worry about things like, you know, these optional mains filter units. I know a lot of people think that if they have mains filters, they'll get a better sound overall, but it generally doesn't work like that. Equipment has its own filters anyway, the mains coming in is generally clean. I've never used one, I've never found a need for one. But yeah, the problem you generally get is these ground loop problems where you've got mains coming from different parts of the room on different lengths of mains cable and that can cause problems with different voltages on the ground references for different bits of equipment and that's where your grand loops come from. So if you start with one socket in the wall and fan out from there, so you put a plug board into that socket and then you plug other things into that plug board and you have a kind of star arrangement, everything fans out from that one point. You can run an entire home studio on one wall socket without any trouble at all because it doesn't draw that much current.

Paul: Well I suppose we can't really leave that subject without mentioning our old standby, Deoxit D-5.

Hugh: Yeah, absolutely, cleaning things up and naturally in the UK environment with the weather as it is, we tend to get a lot of humidity and we get a lot of corrosion and tarnishing of connectors. So, you know, once a year or so it's a good idea just to give everything a bit of a wipe over with something like Deoxit, which will remove that tarnish and give you better quality contacts.

Paul: Another question that comes up quite often is asking us about the difference between a plug-in emulation of something like a compressor and an EQ or the actual analogue real thing. How much difference does it make and does it depend on where it is in the signal chain? For example, if you want to go in through a compressor before you hit your audio interface, is that going to give you any kind of advantage?

Hugh: Yeah, good questions. I think plug-ins these days are so sophisticated and so accurate that you can use them without worrying about quality issues at all. I think most of them these days are fantastically good and I use them all the time. Using a hardware processor before you go into the DAW? Well yes you can and historically of course, it's what we used to do because that's the only option we had. The only downside with that is that once you've done it, you can't easily undo it. So if you compress your vocals for example going into the computer, then you've got compressed vocals to work with thereafter, whereas if you record them straight and then compress in the computer, you can always change your mind and fiddle with settings later. If you're confident at what you're doing and you know the sound you want then yeah sure, go for it, use compressors as hardware inputs, no problem with that. You just need to be sure of what you're doing.

Paul: Yeah, the one place that hardware actually can come in useful is when you're using modelled guitar amplifiers and just sometimes using your old analogue overdrive pedal on the input will sound a little bit more natural than the digital emulation of the analogue overdrive.

Hugh: I'm not a guitarist so I'll take your word for it.

Paul: You're a bass player.

Hugh: Yeah...

Paul: Yeah, so those people with golden ears sometimes say that they can tell a tiny difference. Maybe they can but as an engineering friend of mine once said, will it affect the sales of the record and I think the answer is definitively no.

Hugh: Yeah absolutely, I agree. I mean yes, I think if you compare things precisely then you, yeah, of course you can hear differences but then if you get two hardware compressors, you're going to hear differences anyway because of their age and the way that the tolerances vary and all the rest of it. But the important thing is, is it doing the effect that you want it to do, is it having the right effect and if you need to turn a knob slightly more or less, then who cares. It's about the finished result isn't it really and as you say, if it sounds right at the end of the mix, then it is right.

Paul: Yeah and that's very true when it comes to all these emulations of vintage things that we are offered and most of us have never heard the vintage original anyway.

Hugh: Well exactly. I mean yeah, I've heard quite a few over the years but nothing recently. Does it matter? No, not at all. What I'm looking for is, am I getting the compression effect I want, is it doing the right EQ that I want and if it's not, I'll try something else. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't need to be exactly the same as something from 70 years ago.

Paul: Okay, thanks for that Hugh. Another popular question relates to patch bays which, back in the analogue days, we all had banks and banks of the things and loads of cable sticking out the back but with a digital studio, do we still need a patch bay?

Hugh: In most cases probably not, but I think a lot of it depends on what number of sources you have, how much you want to change them around and how big your interface. I mean, if you've got an interface with a lot of inputs, you can probably just have everything connected all the time and just select it on the, you know, input routing for the interface. If you've only got a small interface with maybe, you know, two mic inputs and two line inputs, maybe a patch bay would just help you route things around a little bit more easily than having to physically go to the interface and unplug and replug. So I think a lot of it depends on your personal situation. I like a patch bay because I was brought up with patch bays, but they can be more trouble than they're worth often.

Paul: Yeah, that's true enough, dodgy contacts and dodgy cables. The probability of that multiplies as you start to add more patch bays, but sometimes it can be useful if you've got one of these audio interfaces like the one I've got where two of the inputs are on the front panel and the other six inputs and all eight outputs are on the rear panel. Sometimes it's useful to bring those out to a place where you can actually get at them and it's also very useful if you've got the one piece of hardware that you want to plug into an insert point within your DAW, you can do that if you've got a patch bay. But I probably think that one strip of Patch Bay should be enough for just about any job these days.

Hugh: Yeah I think so. The only thing I'd caution is putting microphones on patch bays, at least on TRS jack fields.

Paul: Absolutely, I'd bring those out to an input panel which has just got dedicated XLRs on the front and just wire those straight into the connections that are on the back of the interface.

Hugh: Yeah, I mean the reason is that because of the way jack sockets work, plugging in and out when you've got phantom on can create some really nasty splats and it has been known to damage both preamps and microphones so if you're gonna route microphones around, if you want the ability to patch microphones from different locations into different preamp inputs, then do it on an XLR patch panel rather than a TRS one.

Paul: That's good advice, from someone who has obviously blown up lots of things in the past.

Hugh: Not many, but I have blown some up, yeah.

Paul: There comes a time when you want to put your music online, what do you need to do to prepare it to get it into a state where the streaming companies will accept it and it will sound good. I mean, some people are using remote mastering where you send your track off and it gets mangled up on a cloud and sent back to you. Others are using the one built into their DAW, like the mastering in Logic Pro. What do you think of all these things Hugh?

Hugh: As always with mastering, it's a combination of two main aspects. There's the technical aspect and with, you mentioned streaming which is the way most people are gonna release their music these days, most of the streaming companies have quite specific requirements about the average sound level, the integrated sound level and the peak levels. So there's a technical aspect to make sure you get those pretty much right and there's plenty of stuff online these days that tell you what different streaming companies want and allow you to compare your material with how it's going to sound online and then you can sort of fine tune the settings. So there's that, and then there's the artistic aspect of what a mastering person would do to your mix and one of the most important things usually with a real mastering person is that they're gonna listen to your mix on full range loud speakers, which means they go all the way down to 20Hz and all the way up to 20kHz, in a good room acoustic. They're gonna hear things that you may not have heard at home and possibly need to fix those, so that's one benefit. The other is that it's a fresh pair of ears on your mix and they might be able to tweak things in a way that brings a bit of extra life and quality and character to it. You don't get all of those things when you master with one of these automated processes, but a lot of them do add the shine, shall we say, in a kind of automated way.

Paul: Yeah, I think providing you've got a decent mix, they will give you a bit of a polish and get the levels right for streaming. I use the one in Logic myself quite often and sometimes I argue with it, but not very often. Yeah, it's important to get your music right for streaming, but back in the old days, mastering was also used to make sure that all the tracks on an album sounded like they're being recorded on the same planet. You know, you might have done them in different studios, different months or even different years and it made the more sound kind of homogenous these days. The way that we listen to music is not quite so album-based usually, so that aspect of it isn't as important as once it was perhaps.

Hugh: Yeah, I still like albums. I like music that tells a story as it goes along but you're right, people tend to listen to individual tracks in their own playlists these days rather than having to have tracks in an album that all work together sonically. So it is a different approach, isn't it?

Paul: Yep, but by and large, if your mix doesn't need a lot doing to it then one of the automated systems will do a good job. But if you've got a big budget, you're going for a commercial release, then definitely get a human to do the job.

Hugh: Good plan. Just coming back to that selection of speakers, upgrading speakers thing, I know you've got quite strong views about size of bass drivers in small rooms and that kind of thing, so what would you advise people to look for Paul?

Paul: It depends on the size of your room. There's no point in putting a huge amount of bass into a little space that's maybe, you know, two meters by three. It's just going to give you lots of low frequency problems and I have a studio B setup in my office upstairs at home and it's a very small bedroom space and so I've got a couple of speakers in there actually with 4" bass drivers. A 5" bass driver would be fine, but a seven, eight or larger, I think would cause problems because I'd be putting too much low end into a room that couldn't accurately reproduce it. So I think it's all down to picking something that works with your room size. If you have a garage studio for example, then an 8" driver might work fine. If you've got a warehouse, then you can go up to a 12" driver. But in a small home studio, I still recommend around the 5" base driver.

Hugh: Yeah I think I'd agree and I'm laboring the point again, but it comes back to the whole room acoustics. In a small room, you tend to have all the standing waves in the room, all tend to pile up on one or two frequencies, so you get very big peaks and dips in the frequency response at low frequencies. So putting more bass into the room tends to give you a very sort of one note-y character to the sound, it makes it really hard to hear what you're doing at the low end. So restricting the bass performance of the speaker by choosing a small speaker actually helps. It seems counterintuitive, but actually you'll get a clearer mix and you'll know more accurately what you're doing with a smaller speaker than you would with a big one.

Paul: And you can still check your low end with your headphones.

Hugh: Exactly that, yeah and the same thing, you can extend the same argument for subwoofers. I mean, a lot of people have small satellite speakers and then they add a subwoofer and while in theory that gives you a full range system, again you've got this whole problem of lots of low end being generated by the subwoofer going into a room that can't really handle it. So you've gotta be careful about how much low end you put into the room. It's nice to have your trousers flapping with the sub bass and all the rest of it but it's often gonna actually interfere with your ability to hear the sort of lower mid frequencies and the rest of the mix.

Paul: Yeah, so the one argument in favor of subwoofers, providing you've got space to accommodate it and you don't go overboard and buy one that goes down to ridiculously low frequencies, is that you can position them away from the main monitors in a position that's gonna give you the most even bass response, whereas if all your bass is coming out of your main speakers, you have to put them where you have to put them and then you have to deal with the consequences.

Hugh: Yeah, that's true. It does give you more flexibility and that's a very valid point. It comes down to how well the room can handle those lower frequencies.

Paul: Very true. Well, that's all we've got time for this month, but do check out further podcasts on soundonsound.com. So today it's goodbye from me, Paul White and goodbye from Hugh.

Hugh: Goodbye. 

Sam Inglis: Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information, along with web links and details of all the other episodes. Oh, and just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.