VtáàÄx cé Çà BEAT. Letter From the Editor. So...Who Is David Moulton? THE

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1 SPECIAL POINTS OF INTEREST: Get to know what music industry star David Moulton has done throughout his career and what he s working on today. Get ready for your introduction to the new BeoLab 5 loudspeakers that bring the high-tech to hi-fi. INSIDE THIS ISSUE: Letter From 1 the Editor So...Who Is 1 David Moulton? THE VtáàÄx cé Çà BEAT V O L U M E 1, I S S U E 1 Letter From the Editor Dear Readers, Season s greetings and happy holidays! This is the December issue of Castle Point Beat. I m pleased to announce that for this month s issue we are featuring a series of articles on industry star David Moulton. It s a producer! It s a composer! It s an author! No, wait! It s David Moulton! In addition to these things, David Moulton is an educator and an audio engineer renowned for his work with acoustics. If you were fortunate enough, you may have been able to attend Moulton s seminar given recently right here at our very own Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Stevens Institute of Technology campus in Hoboken, New Jersey where Moulton gave a recent seminar. The focus of Moulton s talk was on the new Beo- Lab 5 speakers and sound D E C E M B E R system which utilizes Acoustic Lens Technology originally developed in part by Moulton. The BeoLab 5 project and other technical aspects of Moulton s career will be further discussed inside this issue. Don t miss your chance to find out what this vanguard of the music and technology industry is up to. See you next year! Enjoy! -Selena Townsend Chief Editor Contact via stownsen@stevens.edu Moulton s Quick Tips On Mastering 3 So...Who Is David Moulton? Meet & Greet the New BeoLab 5 4 David Moulton, as was briefly mentioned before, plays a multitude of roles in the audio industry including: audio engineer, producer, composer, author, educator, and active acoustician. All of these titles describe the present man of today, but you can be sure he didn t get there overnight. So how did he do it? You re about to find out. During the 60 s Moulton started working in the audio industry and founded Dondisound Studios in Red Hook, New York. In 1963 he received his Bachelors of the Arts from Bard College and two years later his Masters from the prestigious Juilliard School of Music. While at Juilliard he completed major studies under the direction of John Becker, Jacob Druckman, Emil Hauser, and Vincent Persichetti. In 1980, David Moulton became a tenured

2 PAGE 2 The man of the issue: David Moulton. Moulton s Quick Tips on Mastering 1) Have someone else master your work. They will be emotionally unattached to the piece so they should be able to pass a rational judgment on it. They also may pick up on things that you don t because the piece is new to them. 2) Manage audio levels analytically. Using combinations of different types of meters can help you manage audio levels effectively. 3) Understand the spectrum of the recording. Make adjustments that bring out the best qualities of the mix, but be careful not to highlight spectral problems. Also try to anticipate the spectrum s sound based on a broad range of end-users. 4) When hyper-compressing a recording louder is not necessarily better! Compromise between loudness and quality. 5) Work on a piece until it sounds good on all of your speakers. Don t limit a piece to sounding good only in certain places. It is not mixed well until it sounds good in as many environments as you can test it in. In 1999, David Moulton was jointly nominated along with project partner Curt Wittig for a Grammy Award.. David Moulton s collegiate recording and acoustics text book. Assistant Professor and took on the title of Chair of the Sound Recording Technology Program at the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Fredonia. Shortly afterwards he became interested in loudspeaker dispersion problems, which has lead to a lifelong commitment to the development of widedispersion acoustic lenses and loudspeakers saw Moulton welcomed as the Chair of Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Moulton built up quite an academic history, additionally teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the Parsons Center for Audio Studies in Wellesley, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and Emerson College both located in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1992, David Moulton began regularly writing for Recording Magazine and became a monthly columnist for TV Technology Magazine. Since then, he has continued writing and has published more than one hundred articles. In 1993, he resigned from his position at Berklee to focus on recording, composing, researching, and writing. Within that same year Moulton authored and produced Golden Ears. Golden Ears is an audio eartraining course based on traditional music school ear-training techniques as well as new materials Moulton developed over the course of his music career. (It is interesting to note that the first Golden Ears drill was conducted in 1969, although Golden Ears was not published until the early nineties.) He later authored Total Recording, a general text book about recording and acoustics for collegiate audio students, as well as Ten Essential Audio Lectures a series of audio education CD s. In 1999, David Moulton was jointly nominated along with project partner Curt Wittig for a Grammy Award. He was nominated by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences in the category of Best Engineered Album, Classical for his engineering work on a CD of music in Circle Surround by George Crumb entitled Ancient Voices of Children. CASTLE POINT BEAT

3 VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 David Moulton s audio eartraining course Golden Ears. Moulton has provided his services as a recording engineer to: soprano Kyoko Saito, folk singer Jonathan Edwards, and the Handel & Haydn Society just to name a few. He has also worked as a consultant about noise pollution and abatement in rural areas. David Moulton owned and operated his own commercial recording studio for ten years and currently maintains his 32-track digital postproduction studio, Digital Media Services, as well as Moulton Laboratories in Groton, Massachusetts. Moulton Laboratories specializes in multichannel surround production. Moulton has worked in the laboratories with psychometrician and son, Dr. Mark Moulton, measuring audio and acoustics related phenomena including the subjective effects of microphones, loudspeakers, codecs, cables, and other audio devices and systems for companies like Lucent Technologies. Recently, David became an active studio designer and formulated a simple, low-cost, playback room topology dubbed The Moulton Room. David Moulton is also the Vice President of Sausalito Audio Works, a firm that specializes in wide dispersion loudspeaker designs for the audio industry. Sausalito Audio Works is currently developing lenses for applications in audio systems, automobiles, and the commercial sound industry. David Moulton collaborated with famed company Bang & Olufsen (which subsequently licenses patents from Sausalito Audio Works) to design the BeoLab 5 loudspeaker, the BeoLab 3, and the audio system for the new Audi A8. As if all this wasn t enough, David currently teaches privately and specializes in multichannel surround recording production. He is also now working on a long-term surround music composition project involving a series of large electronic works of music specifically composed for surround playback. PAGE 3 David Moulton collaborated with famed company Bang & Olufsen to design the BeoLab 5 loudspeaker, the BeoLab 3, and the audio system for the new Audi A8. Moulton s Quick Tips on Mastering Continued... 6) Do not give undue importance to someone else s opinion. Carefully weigh factors about a listening session to determine how much weight to give to someone's opinion. 7) Get monitoring and levels under control. Get your monitoring under control. Also, make sure your levels at the mix bus, meters, and in the room are under control. 8) Get to know as much as possible about the media you will be mastering. Become intimate with the best recordings in the genre of the media you will be mastering. 9) Become more than just proficient with the signal processing devices you want to use. Article published in 1999 by David Moulton in Recording Magazine. 10) Practice! Practice! Practice! Practice!

4 PAGE 4 Meet & Greet the Meet the BeoLab 5. B&O rolled more goodies than just aesthetics into their portion of the project Adaptive Bass Control (ABC), a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Platform, and of course their ever popular ICEpower. A pair of BeoLab 5 s make any room look good. Since its recent public debut, it seems there has been a growing chatter surrounding the BeoLab 5. From what we can tell, this chatter should soon be an uproar. It s time for the readers to meet this high-tech aural party tower and get ready to start the commotion. The BeoLab 5 is the baby of proud parents Sausalito Audio Works and Bang & Olufsen, the renowned Danish audio and video company. What makes BeoLab 5 quite revolutionary is the fact that it is the first commercialized product to utilize Acoustic Lens Technology (ALT). This technology was invented by Manny LaCarrubba and David Moulton, the President and Vice President respectively of Sausalito Audio Works, from whom B&O licenses various technologies including ALT. So what exactly does ALT do you ask? ALT is a technology that allows the even distribution of acoustic power from a conventional dome radiator. In the BeoLab 5, the acoustic power is dispersed with a very uniform frequency response over a 180 degree horizontal coverage angle. The goal of ALT is to counter tonal imbalance and control the dispersion of a given frequency. ALT is able to control the dispersion patterns by implementing multiple elliptical design elements with the lower foci placed at the acoustic center of the driver. This results in a 3-dimensional lens which uses the sound convergence at the upper focal points of the ellipses to deliver a uniform distribution of sound in the horizontal plane with 180 degrees of dispersion. Because of the BeoLab 5 s controlled 180 degree dispersion, the listener experiences uniform sound in the area in front of the loudspeaker. ALT solves the problem of a differing quality of listening for a user that is either stationary or moving about. Wherever you are the BeoLab 5 is sure to sound the same and is sure to sound good. The new Audi A8 with a pai Acoustic Lens Technology is not the only thing BeoLab 5 has got going for it. B&O rolled more goodies than just aesthetics into their portion of the project by providing BeoLab 5 with their patented Adaptive Bass Control (ABC), a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Platform, and of course their ever popular Intelligent, Compact and Efficient audio power or ICEpower. CASTLE POINT BEAT

5 VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 PAGE 5 New BeoLab 5 r of BeoLab 5 loudspaekers Adaptive Bass Control optimizes the BeoLab 5 s performance by calculating correction filtering based on the loudspeaker s environment. The BeoLab 5 has a microphone and software built into it that allow for digital calibration based off of the acoustical radiation resistance. The BeoLab 5 produces numerous calibration sounds with varying frequencies. The built in microphone then collects data and compares it to a control data set stored in the Beo- Lab 5. Speech and noises not generated by the BeoLab 5 are discounted in this analysis with the use of digital error correction. The BeoLab 5 uses a Digital Signal Processing platform that is entirely digital. All components in the BeoLab 5 are specially optimized to match each other. When BeoLab 5 speakers are initially calibrated there is a tolerance of only 0.25 db. The BeoLab 5 s DSP plays its most crucial role during use by providing Thermal Compression Compensation. Usually when loudspeakers are used at high volume for extended periods of time increasing temperatures in the electronic components cause increased electrical resistance and decreasing performance. In the BeoLab 5 this problem is avoided by employing software temperature monitors. The BeoLab 5 is able to detect increase in temperate and apply corrective filtering to maintain performance. The DSP also provides a Thermal Protection System so that in the case that the maximum tolerable temperature is reached, signal levels are automatically reduced to prevent damage to the BeoLab 5....the BeoLab 5 The BeoLab 5 also uses B&O s patented IC- Epower technology. Each BeoLab 5 has two 1000 can safely reach watt built-in ICEpower amplifiers and two 250 watt built-in ICEpower amplifiers. These revolutionary amplifiers are 90% efficient as compared to sound pressure the 10% efficiency of other conventional amplifiers. levels of 115- Whereas conventional amplifiers waste most of their energy as heat, ICEpower amplifiers are able to 120dB. achieve high power output while maintaining a cool operational temperature. Because of this temperature control, the BeoLab 5 can safely reach sound pressure levels of dB. All of these features of the BeoLab 5 make it one of - if not the - hottest loudspeaker on the consumer market, but it gets even better for all you new aficionados. Audi has incorporated the B&O BeoLab 5 technology into the new 2007 A8 s specially designed fourteen point audio system. The audio system has been designed according to the specific acoustical properties of the A8 s interior and utilizes ALT. This audio system won first place at the seventh annual Interior of the Year Awards held by Ward s AutoWorld Magazine in the United States. BeoLab 5 loudspeakers are the first commercialized consumer loudspeaker using ALT.

6 Visit for access to artist info, songs, merchandise, and more! Castle Point Records presents its 1st compilation CD: Delusions of Grandeur Featuring artists like Cori Yarckin Myopia The WMD s Never the Nines Last Perfect Thing John Connor THE VtáàÄx cé Çà BEAT DECEMBER 2006 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1