Have you ever stopped to consider that all your audio theories could be wrong?

OK, I’ll let you into a little secret, the title is intentionally provocative, it might have got your back up, but there’s a reason and it’s not click bait… read on and you’ll see.

We live in strange times where experts are dismissed out of hand and the complex world of audio is reduced into pithy memes. In this article I want to explore how the democratisation and over-simplification of advice may be making us all dumber.

It seems the knowledge is under threat, smart people are being dismissed in forums and on social media by keyboard warriors who spent most of their school lessons picking glue off their hands. It doesn’t take long to find someone who can just about string a sentence together arguing with the smartest brains on the planet.

This article was inspired when I saw a post by Bob Katz about the anti-intellectual movement. It didn’t take long before those in defence of it emerged, social media is the comment equivalent of kicking a bucket of rats, there’s going to be a response of some kind and it’s usually not good. The comment, “since experts are always right and never manipulate people for their own or others' benefit.” Was the starter for ten. I know a lot of experts and I’m yet to meet one who thinks they are always right.

Take some of the common pearls of wisdom shared like bass has no directional frequency. Cut narrow, boost wide. Never pan the kick, always pan the overheads. The list is endless.

Let’s take the classic quote “bass has no directional frequency.” If you’ve never heard this gem then count yourself lucky. Really? Are You Sure? What does that even mean?

I take my dog along a beach on the end of Belfast Lough (pronounced Loch) as it opens out into the Irish Sea. At the other end of the Lough is Belfast City Airport, it’s not the main airport but it’s still big enough for the smaller jets such as 737s to take off and land. This morning I was out with the dog and in the direction of Belfast to South I heard a rumble, I knew immediately what it was, it was a 737 taking off some 12 miles down the other end of the Lough. To be sure I opened up an app on my phone called Flightracker (yes I’m sad) to see it coming up the Lough before turning and heading off to Heathrow in London.

Let’s get that story straight again. I heard the rumbling sound of a jet engine some 12 miles to my south? Furthermore at the point I’m hearing the sound, most of the higher frequency is missing from the jet sound, it’s mainly rumble around 10-30Hz. How is that possible that I can hear it coming from my south if low frequency has no directional frequency?

Had I been wrong all these years, had I believed a fact that was untrue? Well, yes and no, the quote ‘bass has no directional frequency’ is at best a half truth and the worst kind of truth is a half truth.

To really understand what’s going on we need someone smarter than me to explain it, so I emailed my super-smart friend Micheal Carnes, ex Lexicon, Exponential Audio and iZotope and asked him to explain. Here’s his reply to my ‘explain to a dumb guy like me what’s going on with bass’ email;

“I think you’re asking me about my take on directionality of low frequencies. I think I’d put it like this: It’s not that physics says that there’s less direction as frequency goes down. It’s more like our ability to perceive direction decreases as wavelength increases. A big clue to directionality is the difference in intra aural pressure (difference between left/right ears). When wavelength is short that difference is significant (unless the signal is face-on). But as the wavelength increases, that difference gets less and less so it becomes harder and harder to perceive enough difference to discern direction. Another way to look at it is that you may notice several degrees of phase shift between your ears for a HF signal. For LF, you might only hear a fraction of a degree. If our ears were a lot farther apart, it would be much easier to pull out LF direction—in a free field. This gets to be very hard to do in a room, where standing waves become a problem. Out by the seashore where you were, standing waves were likely not a problem. So even though intra-aural difference was small, you were still able to pull out enough difference to make an educated guess.”

He went on;

“The big problem with rules of thumb is that many people don’t understand the reasoning behind those rules: they just spout the rules as holy writ. Using rules of thumb can be hugely time-saving. But not knowing the reasoning behind those rules is what gets some “authorities” out over their skis.”

This article is less about the nature of how sound behaves at lower frequencies and the more troubling development in the world of audio and recording - teaching by one line memes. Social media is great for pictures of cute dogs, food or funny videos but not for explaining complex things like acoustics in any detail.

We asked the Expert contributors and many of them have their pet hates of what is essentially dogmatic bollocks designed for social media. All well meaning, but when written as an absolute, they are at best dumb and at worst untrue.

One line audio tips are the recording world equivalent of telling people to paint by numbers. They often exist without any context, and do little to equip those who are genuinely trying to understand difficult concepts improve their skills.

It’s time we saw and end to the proliferation of one-line memes that fill our Facebook and Instagram feeds with pithy half truths dressed in snappy graphics. As you can read in Micheal’s response to the question about the directionality of low frequency audio, the answer isn’t going to fit into a meme.

We all love a tip or a shortcut but creativity is not about dogma, it’s about exploration, play, painting outside the lines. Learning is the same, it’s tempting to try and condense complex facts into snappy memes, I urge you to ask more questions.

Remember the title of this article? Of course it’s a dumb title, as dumb as trying to condense the art and science of recording into one liners. Life is far more nuanced and interesting than that.

With that in mind, what’s your most hated dogmatic audio tip?