SOS Technical Glossary

[Forum Admin]

Envelope follower

Isn't that a trainee Post-person?

[wireman]

Been a while since I looked for new suggestions:

• Public Address System (PA)
• Audio Feedback / ringing
• Feedback Suppressor/Controller
• Alignment (tape)
• Front of House (as pertains to division of tasks for sound engineering).
• Live Sound Mixing
• missing/phantom fundamental

[forumuser840717]

Suggestion - explanation of the 3:1 "Rule"?

Mainly because it creates more confusion than it solves and probably 95+% of the time it's irrelevant to the circumstances in which it's being raised!

[Hugh Robjohns]

Thanks. I'll add it to the list.

[wireman]

Perhaps my suggestions a few posts up were not worthy?...

[Hugh Robjohns]

Sorry, yes, I'll add them to the list too!

[Drew Stephenson]

Rompler. Saw it in the mag this month and I'm really not sure what it is.
But I might have one in the garage.

[Wonks]

Rompler. Saw it in the mag this month and I'm really not sure what it is.
But I might have one in the garage.

Didn't you ever wear a rompler suit when you were young?

Replace 'sam' in sampler with 'ROM', and you get a ROMpler. A synth that basically plays back samples stored in ROM, though often allowing you to mix different samples in layers and to change the filters and envelopes plus add effects etc. A pure ROMpler has no other means of sound creation onboard (e.g. no oscillators). The Roland JV1080 would be a classic example of a ROMpler.

[Eddy Deegan]

Yep. Wonks summed it up nicely but it's a term close to my heart so I'll add my supplementary definition.

"A device that uses samples instead of oscillators but cannot sample and within which the waveforms are stored in ROM as opposed to RAM or equivalent".

One advantage of a rompler is that you don't have the hassle of keymapping and such. It 'just works' due to the effort put in by the engineers who created the product. They are generally better at sampling than users are.

Of course the downside is you can't play samples you created.

There is a grey area between sampler and rompler which is a synth that has no sampling hardware but which has memory into which user-samples can be loaded (the Yamaha SY85 being an old example and the Kurzweil K2700 being a new one) but that feature comes with various caveats, overheads and limitations and technically that's not completely romplerific* by definition.

* I may have coined a new term there. I'll own it

[Hugh Robjohns]

Thanks chaps, I'll add those definitions ASAP.

[Drew Stephenson]

Thank you all.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Sorry... took me a while, but I've added it to the Glossary

[RichardT]

Sone thoughts on potential entries:

Granular synthesis
Grain
EQ (some people may not know this means equaliser)
Automation
Fade in / out
Masking (psychoacoustic)
Pre-master
Clip gain
Normalise (as in adjust level of audio)
De-click
Quantisation noise
Array (microphone)
Source-destination edit
Three point edit
Four point edit
Rectifier
Comping
Null
Streaming
Destructive (editing)
Edit list
Mixdown
Floating point
Disk image
Distributor (as in cd-baby etc)
Royalty (streaming)

[Hugh Robjohns]

Tiz a never-ending challenge!

All good ideas. Thanks Richard. I'll try and work through them.

[Drew Stephenson]

There goes Hugh's weekend!

[Wonks]

A couple of weekends at least. He’ll have to look all those terms up first so he knows what they mean.

[zenguitar]

Bonfire - collective noun for banjos and/or bagpipes.

Andy

[RichardT]

Bonfire - collective noun for banjos and/or bagpipes.

Andy

Apparently, it's a poverty of pipers

[Martin Walker]

Surely the destruction of banjos should be banjaxed?

[forumuser840717]

Plate Reverb
Spring Reverb
(Or do some kind of grouping under 'Reverb')
Multitap Delay
Head Block
Tension Arm
Capstan
Pinch Roller
De-Gauss
Magic Eye Valve/Tube
Main types/configurations of valves
Acoustic Camera (aka Sound Camera though for me that refers to a movie film camera that records sound onto film, either with picture or separately)
Infrasonic
Ultrasonic
Cycle(s) per second
Matrix/Mat Number (as found on vinyl)
Pre-echo/Post-echo (maybe link to Print-through)
DSD
DXD
SACD
Ravenna
AES67
Cans
Cassette / Compact Cassette / Musicassette
Elcaset
R128
Elliptic/Elliptical EQ/Filter
Phased-array (Clarification that it has bog all to do with mic techniques!)
Phase aligned (in speaker marketing!)

It rained a lot today!

[Hugh Robjohns]

Well, that's November taken care of, then!

Thanks

[Kwackman]

Maybe of more relevence to broadcasting than recording, but "Nicam"?

[Hugh Robjohns]

Good idea.

Although there are several variations of NICAM used in several different contexts.

And there's still a number of other items on my 'to add' list.

[Drew Stephenson]

I didn't know that was still a thing. I kind of assumed it had died out with video tapes. I didn't realise it was still used in broadcast and video codecs.
What a marvellous modern world we live in.