Quote:
Originally Posted by Skye  [...]
He's very clear that he doesn't understand the technical knowledge behind many things. He could go crazy over figures and specifications and not learn a thing, but his ears tell him how something works and how to use it. When his ears tell him something, he doesn't bother to see if the technical data backs it up. [...] |
In the past, I've often said that your ears are the most
important piece of gear you'll ever own.
But I'm tempted to now add that the
brain is
equally important.
At any rate, if the signal
is degraded on a given board at the short end of the throw, that
will be something that will show up in measurement.
The ears and brain are
amazing tools that can do incredible things -- but they are
not very good at objective, standardized measurement.
We're all familiar (or certainly should be) with the Fletcher-Munson Curve, which describes the radically varying perception of loudness at different frequencies of the human auditory system. It's the most obvious -- but only one of
many "non-linearities" in human perception of sound. One's hearing changes from day to day, even from hour to hour. Changes in health and body chemistry affect hearing. And, of course, hearing is idiosyncratic to each organism; each pair of ears and each nervous system is a little different. (And we won't even go into the highly irregular resonance responses of most less than ideal listening environments, the huge changes in perceived sound that can come from relatively small changes in listening postition or angle.)
Audio analytical tools, by contrast, are
extremely accurate in very narrow ways. They can be calibrated and standardized, allowing for meaningful communication of performance details. And they are
far more sensitive than human ears --
at the very narrow point of measurement.
A
smart person uses
both tools for what they do best, and balances what each tells him against what he knows about the performance characteristics of the other.
Maybe your teacher formed his approach on very poorly designed or performing mixing boards. Maybe he's simply fooled by his ear's alinear response as he pulls down the fader. Who is to say?
But I can tell you one thing, if mixing boards were designed to leave the faders in one spot and mix with the trim pots -- they would
not be designed with wee, tiny little knob pots way at the top of the strip for trim and big, luxurious, smooth-gliding slider pots handily at the near edge of the board for channel output faders.
Really.