This book is for everybody interested in getting high-quality audio, regardless of their audio engineering expertise. There is as little technobabble as possible, which makes the book easy to read and understand. While it is primarily for audio beginners and practitioners (and this explains its sparkling style), it does not neglect experts. Chapter 5, for instance, deals with the problem of configuring the system by describing three different hypothetical audio systems, one each for users at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels.
The book is divided into four sections, covering tools and technologies, techniques, product reviews, and future directions. The first section provides background information. It presents some basic concepts in digital audio sampling, an introductory look at the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), and some practical hints for creating audio “depending on whether your budget and goals are modest or extravagant” (p. xxiv). The second section introduces hands-on tips for audio production. Section 3 reviews the main audio tools available today, including editors and mixers (chapter 9), processors (chapter 10), and MIDI sequences that integrate digital audio (chapter 11). The final section looks at possible future directions in audio technologies. The author’s expectations are either supported or contrasted by the opinions of leading creative artists, including Laurie Anderson and Herbie Hancock; interviews with them constitute a prominent part of the book’s second half.
The book is exhaustive. It tries to be an effective guidebook for otherwise puzzled users. The author’s hints answer almost any possible question: how much a microphone costs (p. 24); how to gain staging (p. 33); how to connect multiple synthesizers to a basic interface that supports 16 MIDI channels (p. 56); some good rules of thumb (for example, operate each device at about 70 percent of its maximum range, p. 34); detailed considerations of practical questions (such as why you need a fast CPU or why you need plenty of backup, pp. 40 ff.); explanations of some common misconceptions (for example, that of MIDI data being performance data rather than digitized sound data, p. 48); and common metaphors for sound editing (p. 71).
The book fills a gap, not only because of its content, but because it finally recognizes the importance of sound. Multimedia involves compromises. In the name of such compromises, graphics are displayed in 8-bit colors instead of 24-bit colors, and video is played at reduced frame rates and at small frame sizes. Sound has always been discriminated against in this respect, perhaps because people normally approach multimedia from a visual perspective. It is believed that users are more willing to suffer from low-resolution audio than from low-resolution video, but some empirical findings demonstrate that while people are tolerant of low-quality video as long as it is accompanied by high-quality audio, the reverse is not true. Furthermore, the higher the audio quality, the better the overall perception of the picture quality: graphics are enhanced by audio. Even if producing audio is much cheaper and faster than producing video, audio is still sacrificed to save disk storage, reduce RAM requirements, or boost performance.
The CD-ROM accompanying the book helps the reader appreciate the newly discovered tool.
