Recording Questions at the West L.A. Music Recording Expo
Recording Questions was in attendance at West L.A. Music’s Annual Recording Expo this past Saturday and Sunday. I had a chance to talk with representatives from a ton a companies including Steinberg, Apple, Roland, Blue Microphones, Presonus, Mackie, SE Electonics, Universal Audio, and many more. To top it all off we also had the privalege of hearing a great, if not long-winded, keynote address by noneother than Rupert Neve himself. I gathered two very popular trends from all of this: affordable ribbon microphones, and better integration between analog and digital hardware.
Every microphone manufacturer said they had at least one new ribbon microphone on the way, and most had several. This seems to address a serious hole in the typical low-budget studio microphone space as most studios, up until now, have been unable to really afford an kind of ribbon microphone for theie cabinet. I must say I really love ribbon mics, they have the ability to really stay pretty neutral across most of the frequency spectrum without all the high-end hype of most condenor microphones. And with mony of these companies also releasing ribbons at price points of around $199, it’s quite possible to pick up a pair for some truly spectacular stereo results.
On the other side is the new level of integration manufactures are bringing to analog and digital hardware. In particular I enjoyd talking with Woody from Mackie about the new Onyx firewire mixer range that allows you to buss each channel, aux send, and master output to and from any DAW including Pro Tools M-powered. I see all kinds of possibilies for this, from having an external analog EQ available to your DAW to making it super-easy to integrate external hardware via the aux bus system. It think it’s all pretty exciting.
Again, I’d like to say thanks to all the people over at West L.A. Music for putting on such a great event!