interview series (5) – Dave Hill

Dave, some of your Cranesong devices are already legend – how did that affair once started?

Before I started Crane Song I had been designing the Summit Audio Gear through and including the DCL-200, plus some gear that did not get finished. I was teaching electronics at a 2 year technology school at the start of the Summit thing and also was part owner of a small studio that had a 1” 8 track, and Ampex MM1000. The studio grew into what is Inland Sea Recording owned by me, which is a for commercial room with a lot of nice microphones and other gear.  It now serves as a design environment and has a number of customers that help keep it going.  Developing in a real studio environment helps make sure that what you are working on works correctly and sounds good.  When doing a session if one needs to mess with the gear it questions the design, but if you can turn a knob and it makes some thing sound good, it tells you something about the design.

compressor gain control principles

A short compendium on digital audio compression techniques.

Basic compressor configurations

Compression vs. limiting

Technically speaking the same principles are used in audio signal limiting and compression processors but just the transfer curves and envelope follower settings are different. Ultra fast attack rates and high ratio amounts are used for limiting purposes which causes just very few peaks to pass on a certain threshold.

In digital implementations limiting processors can be more strict due to look-ahead and clever gain prediction functions which guarantees that no peak information passes the threshold. That is called brickwall limiting then.