Monthly Archives: August 2010

Had a fun experience tonight “debugging” something that turned out to be a simpler problem… I mounted the mic wrong!  Cardioid microphones, as most folks know, pick up sound from most angles except directly behind them. Thus, if you mount your mic 180 degrees away from where your noise source is, most of what you are hearing then is the room reflections. I figured something was wrong when I found myself cranking up the preamplifier to get a decent line level. So, next time your mic seems “boxy” or too quiet for the preamplifier settings… Check the positioning first!

SeguinSound is thrilled to announce the arrival of Mojave Audio’s MA-200 tube condenser microphone!  This fantastic mic has proven very well on some initial tests, delivering amazing warmth and size.  I will be sure to point out the mic in use on the next demo recording.

This link was sent to me by a friend in the video game business. It’s a super cool concept, but one that I think is quite the ways off from practicality. For one, there are usually very few cycles reserved for audio work in a real-time video game. I have no way of knowing what this would “cost”, but I’m guessing it would be resource intensive. And, of course, these simple demos are trivial compared to all of the physics going on.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, these demos and research if foscussed on making the most life-like models possible. In entertainment, “reality” is often put in second compared to a “hyper-reality” — what we believe it SHOULD sound like.

The irony, of course, is this hyper-reality has been programmed into us because of years of watching films and listening to things that were done with very rudimentary sfx setups where “every gun” has to sound like a powerful shotgun, etc.

Nonetheless, a cool new future awaits! Enjoy the demos on the site!

Dr. Andy Gill at the University of Kansas consulted SeguinSound on sound quality issues related to his research and was recently cited in his paper for our contribution.