Key Of Grey

January 23, 2011 - A new year, a brand new product review! Audio-Technica was kind enough to send me a set of their DJ headphones, the ATH-PRO700. I've been itching to try out a good set of headphones since the ones I've used to mix and listen with for the past 10 years, have begun disintegrating. Because I check my mixes with a couple sets of in ear monitors, one of them being the Ultimate Ears Triple-Fi I reviewed last month, I haven't ... Read More

December 19th, 2010 - With the amount of cool apps coming out for iOS, there hasn't been a whole lot of good hardware solutions for getting great sound in and out of the iPhone/iPod Touch. Sure there are some for plugging in a guitar, but they aren't exactly the highest quality. New Signal Process, a boutique shop out of Portland Oregon, has released the NSP BreakOut to remedy that situation. The BreakOut has an input to get your audio into whatever music apps ... Read More

December 13, 2010 - I recently received a set of Ultimate Ears TripleFi 10 IEM's (in ear monitors) and I've had a few days to put them through their paces. The TripleFi 10s, as the name suggests, contain 3 drivers, each corresponding to the low, medium, and high frequency ranges. Many earphones claim to go down to super low frequencies, lower than the normal range of human hearing in fact; in the TripleFi 10s Ultimate Ears says the can get down to ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Dylan Menzies November 22nd, 2010 - Lately, I've seen a lot of crazy instruments being created, and especially a lot leveraging MIDI in interesting ways. Some of it is interesting in an eccentric and fun way, and then there are some that have the potential to be straight up game changing. The most exciting I've seen in a long is Dylan Menzies' O-Bow. In a nutshell, an optical sensor tracks an object, in this case a "bow" made of wooden dowel, ... Read More

October 10th, 2010 - Over the past few weeks, I've been working on music on my freshly installed Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive so I thought I'd share a few thoughts on it from a music production perspective. First off, the computer boots much faster than on a standard hard drive. I didn't do any instrumented testing, however when started side by side by my friend's identically spec'd Macbook Pro, but with an Intel 256gb SSD, it more than held its own. ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Sebastien Chorney September 18th, 2010 - The NS10, NS10, NS10; to a beginner it must seem that audio engineers have an infatuation with it. Indeed, the signature white cone on black cabinet is so recognizable, people who aren't audio geeks might think all studio speakers look like that. Earlier this week, I linked a Gizmodo article on the Yammies through Twitter (btw, add me here!). Later I figured that I might go a step further and provide a succinct review of ... Read More

September 6th, 2010 - I've had my M-Audio Firewire 410 for a long time. I picked it up in 2004 when I needed a mobile recording solution and I still use it. Lately though, I've been having audio drop outs. The software mixer will register audio output, and the card itself will light up its LEDs, but no audio will play. I can unplug and replug the interface back in, and it still won't register. What's especially weird, is that it will be ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Make Magazine September 2nd, 2010 - Have you ever seen those sweet custom-molded earphones and actually looked up how much it costs to have them molded, on top of the price of earphones themselves? I don't doubt that they're worth the price, but I certainly can't afford them. I do, however, have a pair of old Shure generic in ear monitors (IEM) that are in need of new sleeves. Make Magazine has a tutorial on how to roll your own out ... Read More

Photo courtesy of iamaruntimeerror August 24th, 2010 - Gizmodo has a pretty damning article on the state of cheap earbuds. In the article, it outlines how all the companies making fashion earbuds likely use the same manufacturer and don't even have inhouse designers or engineers. Companies in China offer a-la-carte choices, and all you have to do is order a few thousand to sell, and you can have whatever you want made. I'm sure you all know that this kind of stuff happens with ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Native Instruments August 16th, 2010 - I'm a big fan of Native Instruments. I like their FM8 and Absynth instruments, and I have a fairly large Kontakt library. One of my next purchases will be Maschine, and I like Traktor Pro quite a bit. Well, today brings exciting news because they've finally released their own standalone controller, the Traktor S4 system. It's a hardware controller with a built in audio card (no doubt using their line of very well regarded audio ... Read More