Have Patience, Don't Keep Clickin'
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Glossary of the letter "a"
All words also link to dictionary.com definitions for further information.
a/d convertor - A device that converts analog signal to digital data.
absorption - Quality of a surface or substance to take in, not reflect, a sound wave.
acoustics - The science dealing with sound and it's physical properties. See also, psychoacoustics.
aes/ebu professional interface - Standard for sending and receiving digital audio adopted by the Audio Engineering Society and the European Broadcast Union.
aftertouch - The amount of pressure applied to a key at any given point while the key is being held down. Pressure sensitive keyboard can have varying presure levels WHILE beingheld down.
ambience - Portion of sound that comes from the surrounding environment rather than directly from the sound source
ambient field/reverberant field - The area away from the sound source where the reverberation is louder than the direct sound
ambient micing - Placing a microphone in the reverberant field where the reverberation is louder than the direct sound so as to do a separate recording of the ambience or to allow the recording engineer to change the mix of direct to reverberant sound in recording
amp emulator - See amp modeler.
amp modeler - A piece of hardware (or sometimes software) that attempts to recreate the sound of an amplifier/speaker setup and generally allows the convenience of direct recording while still getting the sound of a huge stack, small combo, or whatever your simulating.
amp simulator - See amp modeler
amplitude - The depth, or excursion of a vibration or wave. In audio waves, it translates to loudness.
analog - Continuous electrical method of transmitting, modifying, and recording sound. e.g. the output of a guitar pickup or a microphone. An example of an analog recording would be tape or record. As apposed to digital, being a series of samples.
asio - A standard for sound card drivers that offer very high performance and very low latency in a supporting application.
attack - The speed at which the unit reacts to the signal.
attenuation - Reduction of electrical or acoustic signal strength
audio - All vibration that falls between the frequency range of 20 to 20K Hz, and therefore detectable to the human ear. Often used in recording to mean the desired sound of the recording as apposed to undesired noise.
automation - A feature that lets an engineer program control changes (such as fader level) so that upon playback of the multitrack recording these changes happen automatically
aux loop - A signal loop available in many mixers to send a channel (or more than one) out of the mixer to a signal processor (effects unit or the like) and loop back into the board to be sent out of the main outs.
aux return/send - These are paths out of and back into a mixer, preamp or whatever device you find them in. They are usually user as a way to get your signal out of the device and run through effects or other signal processing devices such as an EQ, then back into the mix.