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Old 11th November 2005   #3
Fletcher
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Joined: Jun 2002
Location: Durham, NC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TapeOp

(1) What's IC?
Integrated Circuit... also known as a "chip". These are generally "operational amplifiers" that are found through out a design on a repeated basis. They're the little black rectangular things that have little silver legs coming off the sides and numbers on the top like "5534" and "TLO 72"


Quote:
(2) What's Class A?
Class A is an amplifier design that amplifies the waveform as a whole. A Class B amplifier will split the top and bottom halves of the wave and amplify them separately [one amp for the top half of the wave, another amp for the bottom half of the wave] You get a bit of distortion when you split the wave, but the amplifier is more efficient. Sometimes in design you have to trade expense and power consumption over audio... and it's really not that egregious if it's a well designed amp... often these come in "IC" form which makes the design even more cost effective

Quote:
(3) What's Discrete?
Individual components that make up the amplifier instead of using a "plug and play" IC based amp. It means that you have individual transistors, tubes, etc. instead of an IC socket and an IC amp. "Discrete" generally nets better headroom from the amplifier which leads to a deeper/clearer sound.

Quote:
(4) What's an In-Line console?
This is when you have the potential for two signals on the same channel strip to coexist in a desk. In the early days of large format consoles you had the "input strip" and the "monitor section". The "monitor section" [a.k.a "jukebox"] was used for the returns from the multi-track deck.

Your microphones would come into the channel strip, be assigned to their respective tracks, then the output of the tape machine was monitored on the jukebox. As consoles began to get larger this became kinda impractical... so as a space saving measure console designers came up with the "inline" format. This is where you have the [input] mic signal and the [monitor] tape signal co-existing on the same channel strip.

You have an input gain [mic-pre] that can be assigned to a tape track through the routing section with it's own level and pan controls... and a return path which also has it's own level and pan controls... when you see two faders on a channel strip, this is generally an "inline" configuration... usually the "small fader" is feeding the track assignment section and the "big fader" is your monitor return fader that is feeding the 2 Mix buss.

Quote:
(5) Is there any book I could get to learn about this stuff?
The only one I can think of at the moment is "Modern Recording Techniques" http://www.modrec.com and I'm not sure if it covers this kind of stuff or not.

BTW, my explanations here are exceptionally basic [as in sub-rudimentary], so finding a book or something like that is definitely advised.
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mwagener wrote on Sat, 11 September 2004 14:33
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