If you go OVER the sweet spot, the response is also non-linear, and what comes out of the component isn’t the same as what went in. If the level of power you feed in is BELOW the sweet spot area, the response is NON-LINEAR, if the device even worked and passed signal. In simplest term, shit sounds the same going in as it does coming out. Now, if it’s an amplifier, the signal coming out might be more powerful (louder), but if the amp is linear, the frequency response of the output closely matches the frequency response of the input. Basically, when a circuit is linear, the signal that comes out of it is the same as the signal that feeds into it. LINEARITY AND NON-LINEARITYįor many amplifiers, the “sweet spot” is when the response of it is LINEAR. The sweet spot of the pan is the right temperature, such that the egg cooks just fast enough that you have control, and you get the egg that you want.ĭifferent ways to bias transistors. If you have the frying pan crazy hot, when you drop in the egg, the oil will come splattering out, making a mess, burning the egg and your face off (if you decided to lean over the pan like an idiot). If you set the frying pan’s temperature too low, your eggs are going to be sitting in oil getting all disgusting without getting cooked. Weird shit happens outside of the sweet spot. If you feed in too much power, you’ll be above the sweet spot and while the component will work, it might be distorted or otherwise bizarre sounding. If you feed in too little power, you’ll be below the sweet spot, and for a lot of components, they simply won't work, or if they do work they're very quiet, or really noisy. And unless power is handled just right, a component might not work, or work like ass, or work inefficiently and burn out quickly. They are very particular about the amount of input fed into them, and they can be very particular about power in general. In some cases they don't want to work at all. AUDIO CIRCUITS HAVE A SWEET SPOTĪmplifier circuits of any type - tube or solid state - actually don't want to work properly. Obviously, if you've got a bunch of amplifiers in a device they're going to contribute a lot to the sound and character of the device, which is why tube EQs and compressors sound "tubey" and Neve EQ's sound "Nevey." The amplifiers inside the gear impart a particular sound. A recording console has literally thousands of amplifiers in it.Īmplifiers in equipment can be based on tubes, or on solid state component like transistors or OP amps, or some sort of combination. So, for the rest of this article, when I write amplifier or component, I am NOT referring to a guitar amp, or a mic preamp or a stereo power amp I'm referring to a little circuit thing stuffed down in all the analog gear you will ever run into. Generally, in a piece of analog gear, no matter if it is an EQ or a compressor or a mic preamp, the heart of it, the thing that makes it work, is some sort of amplifier. And digital plug-ins are all simulating the characteristics of those analog components. LOTS OF AMPLIFIERSĪnalog recording equipment is made up of a bunch of components, things like tubes and transistors and transformers, etc. And if you understand bias, our plug-ins will make more sense to you, especially since almost all of them have a tweakable bias control on them. If you understand bias, you’ll understand a lot of other concepts, and things like dynamic range and harmonic distortion will actually make more sense when we get to them. There are reasons I want to start here, rather than something more elementary like dynamic range or “what is a dB” or some such. The technical stuff is important to know and apply - it’s the reason we call ourselves Audio Engineers, because it’s engineering. There will be some details I'll gloss over, and a few things I’ll simplify, but conceptually, everything I’ll write will be useful and applicable. So, for the next few weeks, I’m going to address some of the these technical concepts in an easy to understand way. And our plug-ins have more possibilities and performance if you understand things going on under the hood, or in the case of our plug-ins, around on the other side. I try to write things such that they are “self-explained,” and you don’t need to google terms, but there are some concepts that require going deeper. We’ve gotten really good feedback on our blogs, and we're glad a lot of you have been finding them helpful.īut in much of the feedback, people ask questions, usually about technical terms or issues.
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