Audio Engineering: Know It All

Chapter 27. Recording Consoles

27.1. Introduction

This chapter is about recording consoles, the very heart of a recording studio. Like our own heart, whose action is felt everywhere in our own bodies, consideration of a recording console involves wide-ranging considerations of other elements within the studio system. These, too, are covered in this chapter.

In pop and rock music, as well as in most jazz recordings, each instrument is almost always recorded onto one track of multitrack tape and the result of the “mix” of all the instruments combined together electrically inside the audio mixer and recorded onto a two-track (stereo) master tape for production and archiving purposes. Similarly, in the case of sound reinforcement for rock and pop ...