Week 2 Audio Arts - Startup/Shutdown procedures for Studio 2

I booked a couple of sessions this week to practice the art of safely powering up and down all the equipment. By following the instructions on the EMU website I managed to turn on the necessary equipment and achieve signal flow from a microphone and a guitar into protools without any dangerous clicks through the monitors.

The startup order makes sense because it essentially works through the signal chain towards the monitors. A pop emitted by a piece of gear being turned on is only ever transmitted down the chain to a unit that is turned off and can't be damaged.

When I began trying to patch in outboard equipment I initially had issues when I accidentally mixed up the input and output jacks on the patch bay. This should become easy to avoid as output is always a top row and input the bottom row. I monitored through the Genelec speakers, however headphone monitoring should be easy to patch by feeding the headphone amp with the mixer outputs, or creating cue mixes using aux sends. One issue in live monitoring is that a signal may be fed to the monitors through it's mixer channel and protools simultaneously. In order to avoid hearing both signals mixed (they will probably sound phasey) then either protools or analog mixer monitoring should be disabled.

Here is my test recording

References: 

• Studio 2 Guide - EMU website - http accessed 15/3/08 - http://emu.adelaide.edu.au/resources/guides/spaces/pdfs/studio2.guide.pdf
  
• Lokan, David - Lecture given on 11/3/08