Page 36 - Zone Magazine Issue 020

STUDIO TIPS 007
A 2 Z OF ENGENEERING
W hen working in the audio world, you can often come across terms you might never have heard before. I am going to explain
some of these terms very briefly so that in the future you will not be confused if you happen to come across them.
AC
Aliasing: Aliasing is a form of distortion that can occur during the conversion of an audio signal. When the input signal is more than half of that of the sample rate, aliasing will occur resulting in unwanted frequencies being added to the signal.
Automation: This allows a producer or engineer, to program automatic changes for various parameter such as signal level or panning. These changes can be programmed on a mixing desk or within a digital audio workstation.
CV: CV is short for Control Voltage, which is a variable voltage used to control parameters on an analogue synthesizer such as pitch or filter frequency. Most synthesizers will follow a 1V/Oct (One Volt Per Octave) system.
Clock: This sends out a timed signal used to synchronize several devices. Clocks use a specific frequency, but when syncing several devices at once a master clock is usually used to make sure each device stays in time with each other.
BD
Bitrate: The number of “bits” processed in a period of time usually over one second, is known as the Bitrate. It is commonly represented using units called Kbps or kilobits per second. Higher bitrates produce better quality however this also means a bigger file size.
Bus: This is a collection of audio signals or channels, grouped together into one signal. Commonly used to group similar sounds to be processed as one signal to make it easier when mixing.
Dither: This is the process of adding low level noise to a signal, when converting between different sample rate and/or bit depths, to minimize quantizing errors. You will often see this option when exporting from your DAW.
Downsample: Downsampling simply means converting from a higher sample rate to a lower one. This could be converting a 96kHz 24bit file to the CD standard format of 44.1kHz 16 bit.