Tag: DVD

New scientific high-technology recording devices are used to bring the Word of God to people who might not otherwise have any way of hearing God’s Word. The result of this scientific technology on the Word of God is the audio Bible. There are various formats in which you will find the audio Bible available, including the audio Bible on CD and audio Bible mp3 formats, as well as Internet distribution by podcast. This technology also brings another benefit: it is highly portable, requiring only a small digital sound system connected to a computer. This means that recording of the Bible can occur anywhere in the world. The result of this ease of mobility is that there can be recording centers where the audio Bible is recorded in hundreds of different indigenous languages. People worldwide, who might not have any other means for reading and understanding the Bible, can now be exposed to the power of God’s Word in an audio version, which they can hear.

Digital recording provides clear, crisp audio, and is a preferred method for capturing sound. The basics of how it works is that a speaker reads the Bible into a microphone, which produces an analog signal. Then this signal is sent from the microphone to an analog to digital converter. This component’s job is to convert the analog signal into a binary code. This code is then sent through a bundle of transmitters, usually wires connected to the computer in the form of cables, and eventually ends in storage on the computer, often on a hard drive or a CD burner.

The beauty of digital recording is that any mistakes can be taken out by simply removing the exact part of the code stored on the computer, which makes for much more precise editing and cleaner sound as a result. During the editing process, music and sound effects can also be added, and are, in order to produce a final audio Bible version that is dramatized, and more compelling to listen to. You can have speakers from anywhere in the world recording their part of the final version, then sending it via the Internet to the mixing center, where all of the parts are combined together and edited to result in the final version of the audio Bible. Speakers who come from oral cultures can relate to drama very well, and this is an important aspect of the recordings that make the audio Bible so influential.

Lasers are used in the recording and playback of CDs. The laser burns tiny holes onto the CD’s surface. This allows a CD or DVD player to distinguish between parts of the disc that allow reflected weak laser light to permeate through holes and parts of the CD surface that do not, resulting in a reading of the digital data and playback through a speaker so that you can hear it. These are some methods used for audio Bible production, to share God’s Word worldwide.

Susan Slobac has worked professionally with audio recording technologies focused on audio Bible translations. In particular, she has been involved with a number of groups in recording audio Bible podcasts and believes strongly in making the audio Bible online a tool for ministry work. Due to the ease use Susan recommends the audio Bible mp3 and the Bible on audio CD for a variety of uses including audio Bible study sharing Bible stories with children.

Technology is taking us to new places with audio. During lectures, conferences, speeches, press gatherings and other types of speaking engagements, the speaker commonly uses complex audio equipment and teams for direct audio enhancement. Meaning the equipment that is setup at the event provides the cleanest audio both for presentation and for recording.

This extra effort on the front end minimizes the work that audio experts and professionals have to do when packaging recorded audio to other media format for distribution or syndication among news studios, DVD products, etc.

It wasnt long ago that speakers did not have the benefit of the high quality audio enhancement techniques we use now during presentations and recordings. Before amplification of audio and recording devices was mainstream, public speakers and those giving lectures had to rely on careful annunciation and voice projection to ensure that everyone in attendance could hear them clearly.

Even with careful annunciation and training in giving speeches, the resulting recordings were limited by the low quality audio technology of the time. Even with improvement in microphones and recording technology, the audio was still recorded to magnetic tape.

Changing the Way We Hear

Beyond the professional sphere, personal recordings such as audio letters and diaries recorded to analog media can suffer the effect of time. Important events in family histories can be lost without audio enhancement. Unfortunately, things like atmosphere, sun exposure, gases, dust and humidity can have a toll on tape media that make it virtually impossible to recover even with audio enhancement.

It is important to note here that audio enhancement is not a magic button, or instant fix for damaged and/or aging audio recordings. Audio engineers can tackle minor artifact, poor volume in audio and segregation of some noises but it cannot repair badly damaged tape.

To counter this issue, some companies rely on oral history transcription and other forms of professional transcription once enhancement is complete. These transcripts can provide a written account of the recorded dialogue. For important audio, this is an effective way to review the audio on older tape without submitting that older tape to continued replays that could severe the media and cause additional damage.

Common Problems Requiring Audio Enhancement

Older media such as reel-to-reels once allowed for recording at different speeds. It wasnt uncommon to get an important recording that wound up being recorded at the wrong speed due to mechanical issues and tape deck malfunctions at the time of the recording. Audio engineering makes it easy to adjust the playback speed of media when moving it to a digital recording. This keeps the master intact while providing you with a modern format for playback and review.

Beyond playback speeds, audio enhancement can tone down or remove things like buzzing, hissing, humming, electrical interference, ambient sounds (car horns, motor noise, traffic, nature sounds) and variable tones that interfere with hearing and understanding the spoken dialogue of a recording.

Dont give up on old reel to reel recordings, especially if the data is something important to you. Audio enhancement and oral history transcription can breathe new life into your old audio formats.

When it comes to digital audio, you have two options when it comes to choosing cables: optical digital audio cables, or digital coaxial cables. Either of these cables will let you set up your home audio or theater system in digital high quality that will transmit audio signals in digital, rather than analog form. The quality that they provide will invariably be much better than RCA audio cables.

What Are Digital Coaxial Cables and How Do They Work?

Like other coaxial cables (for example, the cable TV cable that is connected to your TV), these cables employ the same basic principle. They have an inner conducting layer that is usually made of copper. This layer is surrounded by an external conductor along with rubber insulation that wraps around the outside of the cable. The digital audio signal travels through the inner conductor, while the outer conductor (usually an aluminium foil) prevents interference and loss.

Unlike RF coaxial cables which transmit both audio as well as video, digital coaxial cable has just one purpose only: to transmit digital audio between two components. Obviously, this single function delivers much higher quality over RF coaxial cables, while minimizing signal loss and interference.

What Are the Benefits of Digital Coaxial Cables?

Besides the much higher quality that digital coaxial cable delivers, it has several other benefits too. In the typical scenario, a digital signal from a component such as a DVD player is first sent to a Digital-To-Analog converter (DAC) that, as the name suggests, converts the digital signal to analog. This analog signal travels through the medium (i.e., the cable) to the other component (say, a TV or speakers) which has an Analog-to-Digital converter (ADC) which turns this signal back to analog. Needless to say, this double conversion of the signal from digital to analog and back results in significant quality loss.

With a digital audio cable (i.e., both digital coaxial cable as well as optical digital audio cable), the audio signal can travel through a digital medium, thereby saving the use of the DAC and the ADC. Thus, the signal can bypass the receiver and deliver a clear, high quality digital signal.

You can find such cables on virtually every modern entertainment appliance, from home theater systems to DVD players to HDTVs.

When Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto turned “The Girl from Ipanema” into a classic LP, they probably never realized that the work they were doing would be the standard by which many turntables would later be judged and that’s why a turntable such as the Audio Technica AT-PL60 Fully Automatic Belt Driven Turntable is still a hit after all these years.

It is true the digital audio crowd has proclaimed the end of the LP and pressed recordings many times over, yet, if you are a real audiophile, the only way — only way — one can listen to good music is with a standard turntable. Fortunately, the audio industry does know that it takes all kinds of source material to keep audiophiles happy, so they provide as many ways as possible to get source material to the speaker cones. They may use simple binding posts or screw-on binding posts or the clip-style (push the button and insert the wire into a set of teeth). Even the good, old-fashioned RCA-style plug has its place in an audiophile’s speaker domain, which is why true purists can get the richness that LPs and 45s still bring to music.

It is true that digital audio is great and when you jam those iPod earbuds down tightly into your earlobes you hear many bright highs and lows, but there is still a lot to be said for putting on a classic pressing of an LP — Chicago’s “White Album” comes to mind — and listening through a good set of speakers (that’s one good thing about speakers, as long as the input source material can go from digital to analog or analog to digital, the speaker cones don’t care what is driving them, they just reproduce the sound).

There’s a certain richness that you only get from a good pressing of an LP that digital audio, for all of its ability to repeat sound exactly, just can’t match. We’ve tried listening both ways and still do prefer the output from a turntable like the Audio Technica because of the richness we’ve talked about.

Yet, even Audio Technica, which still uses belt drive, has been overtaken by the digital audio world in that it the AT-PL60 includes a switchable phone preamp and inputs so that you can hook your turntable directly to your home PC.

One of the features we like about the turntable is its dual magnet phone cartridge which not only helps audio input but, since it is a cartridge, is replaceable when the stylus wears out (digital audiophiles will point out that one doesn’t have to replace a CD or DVD unit after a given number of plays and that the digital units will deliver clean precise audio until they fail, but remember when they fail, you do have to replace the whole CD or DVD and not just the stylus).

The Audio Technica is a two-speed turntable 33 1/3 and 45 and the platter itself is aluminum-based so it will remain straight and balanced. It also has some fine Wow and Flutter specs. Wow and Flutter is less than 0.25 percent (WTD) at 3 kHz. The S/N ratio (signal-to-noise) is better than 50 dB (DIN-B).

On the output side, the phono preamp has is 2.5 mV at 1 kHz, at 50 cm per second. The line-in preamp has great specs of 150 mV at 1kHz, at 5 cm per second. Phono pre-amp gain is a nominal 36 dB.

A compact turntable, the Audio Technica weighs only 6.6 pounds and is 14 by 4 by 14 so it won’t take up much space in any home entertainment center. Accessories included with it include dual RCA-style female to standard 3.5 mm stereo male adapter; and a RCA-style female to female adapter cable, as well as the 45 mm center spindle for 45 rpm pressings.

With countless career opportunities, audio engineering is one of the most diverse career paths to follow. Taking advantage of the many opportunities available to you begins at a sound engineering school.

Here are a few of the career opportunities available for audio engineers:

Music recording

Singers might use their melodious voices to sing the words of a song, but it is the audio engineering team that turns those lyrics into music.

Music producers, mixing engineers, recording engineers, studio managers, studio maintenance engineers and an endless list of other professionals contribute to the production of each and every music track that you hear.

These professions require very specific skills; that is why there are audio engineering courses geared specifically towards learning skills that allow you to do these jobs.

Movie and video production

Every modern moviegoer has experienced the awesomeness of digitally enhanced surround sound while enjoying a good movie. Whether you are watching an action movie or a romantic drama, the great audio quality pulls you in and makes you feel as though you are a part of the story. A team of audio engineers is what makes this possible.

The audio production of a movie is even more complex than that of a music track. In addition to all of the post production engineers that making music requires, movie production requires a team of skilled audio workers managing sound quality throughout the production. This includes operators of equipment so large that it makes the audio engineers look as if they are construction workers.

In order to operate equipment like this, many complement their audio courses with skills learned at film schools in Canada.

DVD and CD development

Once a movie or music track is produced, the work is not done. Professional audio engineers have to format the data to ensure that the personal CD and DVD disks that they are copied to plays the sound at the same quality that it was produced at.

Live performance management

Ever hear that loud squealing sound ring out in the middle of a music performance or public speech? That means that at least one audio engineer messed up.

Don’t be too upset with him or her, though, because maintaining sound quality at a live performance is a complex endeavor. Even those who have gone through extensive audio courses at an audio engineering college have to maintain intense focus on the intricate details of their part of the sound management process for the performance to go on without a hitch.

Video game production

Computer software engineers aren’t the only ones involved with the development of video games. As the realism of video games continues to increase, so does the need for audio engineers who can help produce video games with Hollywood movie-like sound quality.

Executive and management positions

To make it in any industry, you have to understand something about it. That is why music companies prefer to hire executives and talent management professionals who have taken audio courses at an audio engineering college in the past.