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Articles by Liam McShane
Genelec speakers: Leading the charge in immersive audio
Our world by its very nature is immersive. We’re constantly stimulated by the sounds around us whether it’s simply strolling down the street or walking through the bush. It’s habitual for us to hear everything in front, behind, side to side or from above us, it’s epic, it’s enthralling, it’s human. This “norm” is rapidly making its way into how we experience film, television, gaming and music through immersive audio technology and it’s pretty wild to say the least.
Review: Focusrite ISA One
Words by Liam McShane Focusrite Australia | Enquire for pricing With VST synths and sample replacements for drums becoming commonplace in many projects, bedroom ambition or Billboard mainstay, interfaces with large numbers of preamp inputs are becoming increasingly unnecessary.
Review: Perreaux 300iX - Mixdown Magazine
Words by Liam McShane Sound and Music | Enquire for pricing The Hawke’s Bay wine region in New Zealand’s picturesque North Island is known for its exquisite expressions of the Syrah grape, rivalling the best that the northern hemisphere has to offer. In much the same fashion, the Hi-Fi company Perreaux, originating from Napier, Hawke’s Bay, is known for its exquisite amplifiers, rivalling the best that the northern hemisphere has to offer.
Review: Tone Projects Unisum Mastering Compressor
Words by Liam McShane Tone Projects | Enquire for pricing Every once in a while, a plugin producer releases a plugin that eclipses its competition so unanimously that a new benchmark is set, one to which any subsequent rival offerings are tirelessly held to on audio gear forums and YouTube channels dedicated to plugin reviews.
Review: Baby Audio Crystalline Algorithmic Reverb
Words by Liam McShane Baby Audio | Enquire for pricing Do you have plugin fatigue yet? Is there even such a thing?
Review: Novation Launchkey 49 MK3
Words by Liam McShane Focusrite Australia | Enquire for pricing Perfect for young buzzing minds who don’t like to play by the rules that sheet music expects you to follow. In 1975, Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term ‘flow’ to refer to the feeling of total immersion when performing an activity. Unlike Mihaly’s surname, this ‘flow’ state is a pretty simple concept; you might already know it as ‘being in the zone’.
Review: Master Tones Stage Package Plugin Suite
Words by Liam McShane Master Tones | Enquire for pricing The art of spatial placement is one of the hardest skills to master for the budding mix engineer, and is one of the marks of a true professional. As important as compression and equalisation are to the playback quality of your track, the ability to manipulate the stereo field is a crucial tool in solving the 3-dimensional audio puzzle that is a well mixed song. Catch up on all the latest music gear reviews here.
Review: Positive Grid Special Edition Spark Pearl
Words by Liam McShane Positive Grid | See website for pricing The recent string of COVID-related closures have had a lasting impact on many guitar players who for the first time since their instrument’s inception have had their playing environment reduced to the home, and only the home, with the nasty pandemic temporarily putting the kibosh on rehearsal studios and live venues. This presented the guitar-playing fraternity with a particularly unique predicament from which to navigate.
Gear Icons: Solid State Logic
Words by Liam McShane Content Creator Month: A look at the iconic British company's history and success with consoles and their latest innovations SSL’s decades-long dominance of the professional audio world is evident in a multitude of ways, the first, and most immediate, being the sheer volume of successful records recorded and mixed on SSL consoles.
Review: Nembrini Audio Acoustic Voice
Words By Liam Mcshane Nembrini Audio | US$99 The recent surge in interest in home recording has been liberating, albeit mostly to those primarily concerned with recording instruments direct or in the box. For the electronically inclined, achieving professional(ish) sounding recordings in ramshackle DIY environments, are for the most part entirely achievable to the layperson with a basic laptop/interface setup and a fundamental understanding of audio.
Review: Warm Audio Premier Series Cables
Words By Liam McShane Studio Connections | Enquire for Pricing The most overlooked and most certainly the most neglected member of the audio signal chain, it is the humble cable that connects all our gear, and without which, we would sit in silence. Some audio engineers thumb their nose at the concept of premium cables, quoting experiments read about on internet forums and claiming snake-oil.
Review: Apogee Symphony Desktop
Words By Liam McShane Link Audio | Enquire for Pricing As the home recording boom continues its ascent into the stratosphere, the propensity for small, single or dual channel interfaces has reached critical mass, which is great for anybody working track by track, or relying on samples and drum machines for their groove requirements.
Review: Schoeps V4U Condenser Microphone
There exists a home truth amongst the professional studio fraternity, that when it comes to recording peripherals like mics and monitors (products that are on the first and last line in regards to overall sonic quality): you really do get what you pay for. Explore all the latest microphone, monitor and headphone reviews here.
Review: Acustica Audio Sienna
Words by Liam McShane Acustica Audio | Enquire for pricing The parable of the blind men and the elephant describes a situation where a group of blind people come across an elephant for the first time.
Review: Instant Audio QuickBass Plugin
Words by Liam McShane Distributed by: United Plugins | Expect to pay: Intro Price €29 (€99 after April 11) A particularly grizzled recording engineer once mused that ‘the bass guitar is, at its core, a fundamentally flawed instrument-an example of marketing and portability winning out over common sense’.
Review: JZ Microphones Signature BB29
Words by Liam McShane JZ Microphones | intshop.jzmic.com | Expect to pay: $999 Latvia is a favourite country of mine for a variety of reasons. For starters, it is the birthplace of fan favourite 7-foot-3 NBA centre Kristaps ‘The Unicorn’ Porzingis (a man capable of draining 3-pt shots from the concession stands). Another reason to love Latvia is it’s recent emergence as something of a technological hub for another major passion: forward thinking studio solutions.
Review: Aston Element
Pro audio very rarely caters to the everyman. For those new to the world of recording, whether aspiring recording engineers, hobbyists, or musicians trying to record a demo to attract the attention of a label, quality microphones appear to be both exclusive and expensive. The other side of the coin is that affordable ‘studio’ microphones tend to be anything but flattering, with harshness, hissiness and all round unpleasantness the norm.
Avid ProTools | Carbon
Words by Liam McShane Distributed by: Innovative Music | Expect to pay: A$6,070 There was a time when Avid sat upon the summit of the consumer audio interface market with their beloved early gen Mbox, Mbox 2, and later the Mbox 3/Mbox Pro, before quietly retiring the beloved product line in 2015. The reasons for this were as numerous as they were complex.
Reviewed: Kawai VPC1 Virtual Piano Controller
Most of these differences are environmental and educational. For example, a composer can easily do their thing on the fly with a little 25 key MIDI keyboard, but for the most part often such gear is completely alien to them.
Reviewed: Casio Privia PX Series
We unzipped the diminutive little gig bags and sure enough there lay two full scale 88 key pianos, but there was something indeed different about them. They just looked so…..so…manageable!?! Compared to the traditional, hulking units we were used to, these looked and felt like something completely new. Piano players have had a historically rough trot when it comes to portability.
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