User Manual

AUDIO BASICS
69
Manual audio routing
In most cases, you will want to have the Main Mixer Master Section device connected to outputs 1 and 2 of the Hard-
ware Interface. This connection is made automatically as soon as you create a new Song document. However, there
might be situations where you want to manually route audio to other outputs of the Hardware Interface. For example
if you want to use the Control Room Outputs of the Main Mixer (see “Control Room output section”).
To send the sound of a device in the Rack to a specific output, you route the device output to the corresponding Out-
put jack on the Hardware Interface. This is done by using the patch cables on the back of the rack, as described in
“Manual routing”. If we flip the rack around, by pressing the [Tab] key, the Hardware Interface looks like this:
On the rear of the Hardware Interface, Inputs 1 and 2 are available but not connected,
Outputs 1 and 2 are available and connected, whereas Output 3 is connected but unavailable.
! You never have to connect any cables to the Audio In jacks of the Hardware Interface to be able to record au-
dio on sequencer tracks. This routing is made internally “in the background”, which means you just have to se-
lect audio interface inputs from the Audio Input drop-down list in the sequencer Track List - see “Selecting
audio input(s) and defining mono or stereo”.
Audio quality
The audio quality in a computer based recording system depends on two things:
• The quality of the software calculating the audio.
In our case, this is the Record DSP (Digital Signal Processing) code.
• The quality of the hardware audio interface used for recording and playing back the sound.
Software
• Record uses 32-bit floating point arithmetic for all internal audio operations, with 64-bit summing in the mix
bus in the Main Mixer Master Section.
This ensures the highest possible audio quality throughout the entire signal chain.
• Record supports 16, 20, and 24 bit resolution for input and output audio.
• Record supports all standard sample rates between 44.1 kHz and 192 kHz.
Record also supports lower sampling frequencies, but using a sample rate of less than 44.1 kHz is not recom-
mended since it might affect the audio quality negatively.
• A number of digital audio techniques that reduce the risk of “aliasing”, background noise, unwanted distortion
and “zipper noise” are implemented in Record.
Audio hardware
How good a hardware audio interface actually sounds depends on a number of things; its frequency range and fre-
quency response curve, the resolution (bit depth), the signal to noise ratio, the distortion under various circumstances,
etc. Furthermore, some designs are more prone to disturbance from the other electronics in the computer than oth-
ers. Such disturbance might add hum or high pitched noise to the signal.
The only advice we can give is that if you are serious about sound, choose your audio hardware carefully!