Gear Days: Audio

First actual Gear Days post.  What could be more fitting than going over what audio actually is and an overview of what gear is out there?

Scientifically, the sounds we hear as humans are the interpretations of pressure waves by our brains.  More specifically, our eardrums vibrate due to pressure waves in air and our brains interpret those vibrations by our eardrums.  Now that's all well and good, but let's talk about gear and their functions at a high level.

Obviously we have output devices.  These include headphones and speakers and their use obviously is to interpret audio signal and reproduce it for us to listen to.  There are a bunch of different ways that these are made and different ways to recreate sound from a non-analog signal.  A good distinction to make is that these output devices represent a digital signal and output an analog signal which is what we hear.

The second class of devices are inputs.  These include MIDI devices like MIDI keyboards or synths as well as microphones.  The point of these is to either take an analog signal, like microphones do, and interpret that and spit out a digital signal that computers can understand.  MIDI devices are a bit different in that they do not start out as an analog signal but are instead send values down the line to represent sound in a numerical manner, but I'll get into that later, when I actually get a MIDI device.

The last class of devices are audio interfaces.  These bridge the gap between outputs and inputs and computers or other devices.  This class includes Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) and Digital-to-Analog Converters (DAC) examples of which include what are called audio interfaces as well as sound cards and media players like cd players.  This is an interesting class of devices because when you're beginning to get into headphones or speakers, you'll completely ignore this class of devices.  However, if you ever get to serious recording or listening, this is sometimes seen as the most important class of devices of the three.  But I'll get into these in a bit.

As of this post I own 7 pairs of headphones, 1 pair of speakers, 1 audio interface, and 1 microphone with plans to get another pair of headphones.  More specifically, I have 3 pairs of closed circumaural headphones, 1 pair of closed supra-aural headphones, 1 pair of in ear monitors, 1 pair of earbuds, and 1 pair of closed circumaural noise cancelling headphones.  The speakers are a pair of studio monitors, the microphone is a condenser microphone with a cardioid polar pattern, and the audio interface supports two inputs and two outputs.  I'll go into what all of that means in future Gear Days posts, namely later this month.  I hope you're as stoked about this as I am and until next time.

--CsMiREK