This is the dual head-mounted listening device. What it lacks in portability it makes up for in attention-getting appeal. My friends and I do not advise doing sound mixes with these cans since the frequency response is rather flat and the outcome is a little muddy.
As a hearing aid, this device may have had some benefits. It looks pretty cool, but then I’m a big Pixar fan.
With the debut of the final film in the Harry Potter series, I reminisced recently about the great narration by Jim Dale, the 1980 Tony-award winning actor of Barnum, co-starring Glenn Close. Jim Dale’s great character voices brought all the wizards and muggles and the magical world of Harry Potter to life so beautifully. His numerous character voices were distinct, perfect in emotion and tempo, as was his compelling “narrator” voice.
I genuinely love audiobooks. By the end of the day, my eyes are tired and having a story read to me is one of the few harmless indulgences I enjoy. Unfortunately, as a voiceover, I’m a little picky about my narrators. I don’t like overacting, not in audiobooks or on the screen. The stage is different, but audio and screen acting are more intimate. In the Potter series, Jim Dale keeps a story that could easily lend itself to exaggeration intimate and real.
Watch Jim Dale in action for yourself in this short video as he narrates Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, the 2009 Winnie-the-Pooh novel by David Benedictus. Dale is truly amazing:
The wait is finally over for Mac users who wanted an audio editing program that is more robust than Soundbooth, but less complicated and expensive than ProTools. Adobe Audition CS5.5 has gone native! Audition now runs on both Mac OS and Windows PC platforms. Also new to this version is 64-bit support for presumably faster processing, high-performance audio engine which allows background processing in multiple sessions; native 5.1 multichannel support, and improvements on the already outstanding noise reduction capabilities available in Adobe Audition 3.0.
Check out this Adobe Audition CS5.5 noise reduction video. Although it’s in Spanish, you’ll still be able to appreciate what Audition CS5.5′s noise reduction can do.
Sadly, these improvements come at an unusual cost. I don’t mean the price which is reasonable IMHO at $349. For some reason, Adobe decided not to implement some key features previously available in Audition including: MIDI support, tone and noise generation, video thumbnails and export, pitch shifter, my beloved vocoder effect, and CD burn (which makes the least amount of sense). Although other programs or plugins might replace some of these lost features, their lack in this Audition upgrade diminishes what I think was previously great all-purpose audio software. Adobe Audition 3.0, the older version, could handle audio recording, editing, mixing, mastering and MIDI sequencing all in one easy to use program.
