2016 - MRH Audio Official Blog - Audio News, Review, Tutorial

Monkey Stories - Starting Your Home Studio Like A Pro - The Room

2:28 am

1. What is Home Recording?

According to Wiki, home recording is the Practice of Sound Recording in A Private Home, rather than in a professional recording studio. Yes, that's right! Instead of going to a professional recording studio, you are setting up your recording task in your own room at home.

2. Are You Serious? What Are The Common Places To Start A Home Studio?

1. Your Bedroom

2. Your Living Room

3. Why Bedroom or Living Room? How About Other Spot In My Room?

Some of you may be curious and want to know why is your bedroom or living room would be the best place to start your home studio. Let's not deep into the technical part and see the reason below:

Your bedroom/living room may fill with some sort of absorption, reflective, and refractive materials that would actually help you to achieve minimum acoustic requirement to start your home studio. We will talk more about the Acoustic Treatment on next few episodes.

*Note: Room with a lot of dead end corner may not be the best choice and require some effort on the acoustic treatment.

4. My voice sound awesome in my toilet/washroom! Can I use my toilet as a room to record my voice or instrument?

Please Don't Try Unless You Are Trying To Get Any Other Effect Which You Can't Achieve In Your Acoustically Treated Bedroom! Your toilet is definitely not the best place to do any sort of recording. This is because our toilet is usually designed and built with reflective flat wall tiles that create a lot of flutter echoes and high humidity.

We always want our recording as clean as possible for audio post processing(Mixing) job..

5. Does It Cost A Lot To Start Home Recording Studio?

A home studio can be as expensive and beautiful or as inexpensive and funky as you want it to be. Always remember the First Rule, get a room which sounds the best and appropriate as a start. Most importantly, it makes you feel good working on it, and that it makes you want to come back.

We hope the tutorial is simple, informative, and straight forward for those of you who just about to start your home recording studio. If you have any question, leave us some comment below or in our Facebook page. We will try out best to answer every question. Do stay tuned with us regularly to receive more updates on the next topics too.

Happy Home Recording! Peace!

ESI U22XT 24 Bit Professional Audio Interface - The New German Engineered Audio Interface Review

1:45 am

About ESI Audio

Perhaps the name ESI may sound unfamiliar to some of you but one thing you definitely have to know that ESI is one of the leading German vendors for professional and semi-professional audio equipment worldwide.

Similar to other company such as Steinberg, Focusrite, M-Audio, ESI has been making top quality professional audio products such as audio and midi interfaces, keyboard controllers, studio monitors, and mobile accessories for over a decade now.

The NAMM 2016 Highlight - ESI U22XT Professional 24 Bit USB Audio Interface

On January, ESI has announced their latest audio interface which is also known as the ESI U22XT at NAMM 2016. If you are still looking for an affordable yet high quality audio interface to start your music production journey, the ESI U22XT is one of the choice that you shouldn't miss out! As far we all know, a decent piece of audio interface would cost you around RM650 - RM1000 at current market price in Malaysia. However, the new ESI U22XT would only cost you RM580 here.

What ESI Say?

U22 XT offers a maximum of flexibility as fully bus powered USB device with pristine professional 24-bit audio quality.

The interface features 2 analog input and 2 analog output channels with RCA connection, a microphone preamplifier with XLR input and support for +48V phantom power, a Hi-Z instrument input for guitars, a high quality headphone output and TRS line outputs. Master and headphone volume as well as monitoring are controlled on the front panel.

On the software side, U22 XT provides low latency drivers with support for WDM, ASIO 2.0 and CoreAudio based on our EWDM and DirectWIRE technology.

Included with U22 XT is the Bitwig 8-Track software, the trim and effective digital audio workstation to start producing, performing, and designing audio like a pro. With Bitwig 8-Track, you can start working right out of the box without other additional software. Record and arrange, improvise and perform, or do it all at once, with this professional solution developed by musicians, for musicians.

If you're looking for a really powerful USB audio solution for your PC or Mac to start working out of the box, then U22 XT is for you!

What We Say?

We do not want to go through a long story to explain all the technical specs here. However, we will highlight a few points why you should get this audio interface.

1. 24 Bit Dept / 96 kHz Audio Resolution

No more worry on exporting high resolution digital audio files such as FLAC or Wave format. With the sufficient support of bit dept and sampling rate, you will be able capture high level detail out of your recording up to 96000Hz every seconds.

2. Healthy Mic Preamp

What do we mean by the term "healthy" here? Mic level is one of the core factor that remind us to pick an interface which can produce healthy level signal during our recording session. Below is the characteristics that we think ESI U22XT could deliver:

Powerful - to drive the level of input to the maximum performance
Clean - out of distortion/noise

3. Monitoring Your Track Without Fear

The most common issue that happening to a USB Microphone with direct monitoring is having huge delay in monitoring their own track. Thus, the low latency drivers provided by ESI allow you to monitor your track in real time under the latency of 10 ms (0.01s) to 20 ms (0.02) which is also considered as acceptable level of latency. In addition, the Mix Control will give you a flexibility of

listening to more input signal in real time or the computer playback signal or both. This is one of the features where we can hardly see on other cheap recording interfaces.

4. Windows 8 & 10 Support

This is a long discussed issue on audio interface since Windows 10 has been released on last year. Since not many interface release a driver particularly for Windows 10 user, somehow the new ESI U22XT is currently supporting the new operating system Windows 10 (32 bit/ 64 bit)! For Windows 10 recording enthusiast, you know what to do now.

5. Direct Wiring Technology

Last but not the least, the most dazzling extra feature here is the DirectWIRE technology. According to them, DirectWIRE is a driver technology, developed by ESI, which can be used for routing audio streams internally within applications using EWDM Audio MIDI Drivers exclusively developed by ESI.

Wow! It may be sound complicated. However, it is not as hard as you think. Lets look at an example here. You are using a broadcasting application with WDM driver to do a live online broadcasting. Then, you would like to record the output of your broadcasting session into your DAW in real time which using an ASIO driver. Therefore, Direct Wiring Technology wired two applications with different audio driver together so you are able to record the contents of your broadcasting to your DAW simultaneously without losing any data.

Highly Recommended To:

1. Solo musicians who just about to start music production in their home studio

2. Travelling musicians who always need a compact recording interface on hand

3. Live Streaming/Podcasting users

We are planning to make a full video review of ESI U22XT, please let us know if you are looking forward of our video review.

More information at: www.mrhaudio.com/esi-u22xt-24-bit-professional-audio-interface

Audio-Technica Introduces New 2016 Limited Edition Color For Their Best Selling ATH-M50X Headphone!

4:56 am

Audio-Technica, a leading innovator in transducer technology for over 50 years, unveils the ATH-M50xMG Professional Monitor Headphones, a limited-edition matte gray version of A-T’s popular ATH-M50x and part of A-T’s M-Series line of headphones in the NAMM Show 2016. The included cables and storage pouch are gray to match the headphones.

From the 45 mm large-aperture drivers to its sound-isolating earcups and robust construction, the ATH-M50xMG provides an unmatched experience for the most critical audio applications, including recording, live sound, broadcast, DJ and personal listening. The headphones incorporate technology drawn from Audio-Technica’s long history in the field of high-performance professional audio, providing exceptional power handling, very high SPL capability, and natural, accurate sound with impactful bass and high-frequency extension. With professional-grade earpad and headband material and a collapsible design, the ATH-M50xMG headphones remain comfortable throughout long monitoring sessions and transport easily.

ATH-M50xMG Features:
• Proprietary 45 mm large-aperture drivers with rare earth magnets and copper-clad aluminum wire voice coils
• Exceptional clarity throughout an extended frequency range, with deep, accurate bass response
• Circumaural design contours around the ears for excellent sound isolation in loud environments
• 90-degree swiveling earcups for easy, one-ear monitoring
• Professional-grade earpad and headband material delivers more durability and comfort for extended wear
• Collapsible for space-saving portability and convenient storage
• Top choice for studio tracking and mixing, as well as live sound, DJ monitoring and personal listening
• Detachable cables (includes a 1.2m-3m coiled cable, 3m straight cable and 1.2m straight cable)
• The ATH-M50xMG Professional Monitor Headphones are a limited-edition matte gray version of A-T’s popular ATH-M50x Professional Monitor Headphone

Audio-Technica’s new limited-edition ATH-M50xMG will be available in February 2016 at RSP: RM900.

Celebrating over 50 years of audio excellence worldwide, Audio-Technica is a leading innovator in transducer technology, renowned for the design and manufacture of microphones, wireless microphones, headphones, mixers, and electronics for the audio industry.