AA1 - Week 4 - I/O and Monitoring

In this session we learnt about the process sound goes through whilst recording. This included how it gets from the recording space, to the mixer and then to the computer. The following flow chart shows how the sound gets where.

As you can see from here, after the sound leaves wall bay (junction box) it goes to the patch bay. A patch bay is basically one of those things the old telephone operators used, and simply patches the sound to a different place, or in a different order. This can include patching in effects or EQ/compression. There are three ways a patch bay can be configured. Normalised, half normalised and not normalised. This has got to do with how the patch bay is wired up, for example normalised means the signal goes straight from the in to the out through the hardware, even if you connect one patch lead into either in or out, although if you plug a lead into both in and out (i.e. out to EQ back in to bay) the new signal will flow through. Half normalised is similar to normalised, but you can interrupt the signal, say just taking it out to another place, and the signal will no longer flow through the patch bay but out to where you patched it. If a patch bay is not normalised you physically have to patch it in yourself.

I am still not 100% if this process is correct though, so I shall review the session again soon.