Golden Ears

[CDB Studios]

Does anyone own these CD's? And does it help?

http://www.moultonlabs.com/gold.htm

-Zach

[Piotr]

A friend let me borrow some in Seattle long ago. I had a fun time with them and did learn quite a bit.

It is very useful to be able to look at an EQ and have a more intuitive sense of what it will do before tweaking with it...

[Auxillary]

Wouldnt variances in playback systems negate the usefullness of the cds a bit?

[jerrymac]

I used those CDs when I taught production classes at a college that I worked at as a facility tech. (As adjunct faculty...i only have a bachelor's degree). Dave Moulton taught there as well, that's how we got started with the CDs. He's a really nice guy, as well as a really good teacher. The CDs great for training your ear. They come with a book that explains a lot. Dave is teaching short (once a week for a month) classes at Parson's Audio in Wellsley, Massachusetts right now. Their website is www.paudio.com

To answer your question, Aux, the CDs are relative. I can't explain this very well typing it out...One of the first tests is 10db boosts of one octave frequency bands: Imagine a song playing, then a frequency band is boosted 10db for a few seconds, then it goes back to normal. You write down what band you think it was, then listen again after reading the answers. It's not just music, some of them are white noise tests. Then, later, they change to smaller frequncy bands, or cuts instead of boosts, etc...
So the main thing is that during the test you hear the example, the boost/cut, then the regular example again, therefore it is relative. So you should be able to hear it on any pair of regular speakers. This is hard to explain on a written forum, I wish I could just play a test, it would make a lot more sense.

jerry

[Piotr]

All I can say is that you should listen to it in the environment you intend to work.

[hiddendriveways]

I just want to second that Dave Moulton is a great guy and a really great audio teacher. I hung on to all of my notes from his classes and I still use them as references sometimes. I bought the CDs a long time ago when I took his audio classes at Emerson. Come to think of it, it's about time I fished them out and did a little ear training.

Go Dave!

[stillafool]

I bought them when I was first getting started -- frankly, I thought they were very disappointing for the money. I'll give you a real good deal on mine if your interested. He may be a real nice guy and all that, but for the price he's asking for those cds, he really doesn't give you anything you can't learn on your own. For instance, there are a couple of c.d.s on learning eq frequencies where he uses pink noise and an eq filter. You can do this yourself, and it's alot more fun, if you've got wavelab/soundforge and an eq like waves Q10 (which is what he uses on his demonstrations). Other than that he just takes a bunch of generic cds and puts them through the q10, boosting and cutting certain frequencies -- which is something you should do on your own. The section on fx was downright disappointing -- I got the feeling he spent very little time and effort on some of these tracks -- you're better off just putting various cds through an fx box and experimenting with delay/times, compression, and other parameters. Don't mean to knock Dave Moulton, and his being a nice guy and all that bulshit, but I felt kind of ripped off when I bought these, even though I did get a little bit out of them.