#LinuxAudio #AudioEngineering thoughts

Yesterday there was a thread on making stereo signals from a mono signal. In doing some basic research I found that I wanted to know more about Mid-Side (M/S) sources of audio.

It would appear that this is ideally suited for live recordings and this may explain a portion of my ignorance as I am “all in the box”. One aspect of M/S recording is that it uses different microphones (cardioid and figure-8) which are carefully positioned to record, and with some simple signal processing one has access to a clean mono, or stereo signals.

This does not really address how to widen a mono source into stereo. It looks like some combination of sending a dry signal to one channel and full-wet filtering (neutral, no resonance) or subtle delay, into the other will do this.

I think that @ahihi had a brilliant suggestion of spectral splitting even and odd components into either channel has some great merit and should be explored further.

Your samples never exceed 0 dBFS, your meters read clean and yet the audio distorts on playback. Intersample peaks are the reason and understanding how they form changes how you think about headroom.

https://tonalux.org/blog/intersample-peaks-true-peak-limiting

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #MusicTech #ProAudio #DSP #Mastering

This week's standout releases include Universal Audio's first D-style amp emulation modeling the circuit that sells for six figures on the used market, a dual spectral-plus-granular glitch tool with a morphing XY pad, a free...

https://tonalux.org/blog/weekly-plugin-roundup-may-4-2026

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #VSTPlugin #SynthPlugin #MusicTech

A track panned to center is quieter in some DAWs than in others, by up to 3 dB, even with identical fader values. The reason isn't a bug.

https://tonalux.org/blog/equal-power-pan-laws-explained

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #Mixing #MusicTech #StudioLife

The lush shimmer of analog chorus and the jet-plane sweep of flanger both trace to a 1969 circuit from Philips Research Labs.

https://tonalux.org/blog/bucket-brigade-delay-bbd-chorus-flanger

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #ElectronicMusic #Synthesizer

A Leslie cabinet doesn't produce one effect, it produces three and the upper horn and lower drum spin at different speeds on purpose. Here's the physics, the math and how plugins reproduce it.

https://tonalux.org/blog/leslie-speaker-doppler-rotary-simulation

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #ElectronicMusic #Synthesizer #DSP #MusicTech

Okay, I know that this is probably obvious to anyone who does sound engineering, but I just realized that for contra dances I can add a compressor to whatever bus the band is on, then sidechain the callers microphone in as the input. The band will be slightly quieter whenever someone is calling, making the calls more clear over the music but without having to turn them up so loud that it blows out everyone's ears during the walk throughs when there is no music. This sounds so much better, why have I never thought of this before? Just doing it in recordings right now, gotta figure out if we have something low-latency enough to do this live.

#Contra #AudioEngineering

The channel vocoder was designed to compress and encrypt military speech during World War II, not make music.

https://tonalux.org/blog/channel-vocoder-architecture-explained

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #ElectronicMusic #Synthesizer #DSP

In 1983, Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong published a plucked-string synthesis algorithm that fits in fifteen lines of C. The reason it sounds like a guitar took four more years to fully explain.

https://tonalux.org/blog/karplus-strong-string-synthesis

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #ElectronicMusic #Synthesizer #DSP

A naive sawtooth oscillator written in five lines of code aliases like a broken modem the moment you tune it above 200 Hz. The trick that fixes it costs almost nothing and almost every modern soft synth uses it.

https://tonalux.org/blog/blep-minblep-polyblep-antialiased-oscillators

#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #AudioDev #PluginDev #CreativeCoding #OpenSource #DSP #Synthesizer