Engineering Systems

The equipment in a studio often looks complex and daunting. Each individual piece of equipment can seem difficult if not impossible to understand at first glance. However, studio equipment is in reality just another form of engineering, hence the "studio engineer".

In any engineering system, be it a studio, software package or heavy engineering, the complete system is broken down into smaller more manageable units. Consider a ship. In any ship there may be millions of individual parts which all have to fit and work together. Trying to understand the whole thing at once would be impossible. For that reason the designers (i.e. engineers) break the problem down into progressively smaller parts. For example, the ship's engine can be thought of as an individual unit. It has:

• an input - in this case fuel
• a process - turning the fuel, somehow, into rotational motion
• an output - a propeller is turned

Notice that we don't need to know exactly how the fuel is turned into rotational motion in the process section - it is enough to know that is does this without understanding it. We can think of the ship's engine as a "black box" that has an input, a process and an output.

We can think of a recording studio and its equipment in exactly the same way. The studio has:

• an input - sound (usually music)
• a process - the sound or music is recorded
• an output - the recorded sound or music on some sort of medium such as tape.

We can also think of any individual piece of studio equipment in the same way. For example, consider a digital echo chamber. It has:

• an input - the original sound
• a process - echo is added to the sound
• an output - the sound with an echo effect

Again, we don't need to know how the process is achieved. It is enough to know that the process works and what it does.

An input to a sound system is often called a signal.

Every piece of equipment, even sub-sections of the equipment, should always be thought of in the following manner:

The Studio System

As we have seen, at its most very basic a typical recording studio system consists of:

• an input - sound or music
• a process - the sound or music is recorded
• an output - the recorded sound or music on some sort of medium such as tape.

We can illustrate this as:

As we will see in the following sections, each of these pieces of equipment can be further broken down and understood in the same way, that is by remembering: