Gear Review: Sennheiser HD 26 Pro Heaphones

     Once again I return to my search for the perfect set of headphones for everything I do. Something that can have me covered for location sound recording, studio recording & mixing, general music listening, gaming and travel headphones. It's a tale fraught with many obstacles, but represents a real challenge for any set of headphones.
     Today I'm taking a look into the Sennheiser HD 26 Pro on ear headphones. It promises to be a different sort of beast to anything I might have used before and has a price tag to suggest I could be on to a winner.

Game Profile: Beyond Eyes

     In the run up to games biggest gaming show in the world, E3, I went up to Wakefield with the guys from Explosive Alan Productions to meet the people at Team 17 who are helping to fulfill the potential in a really cool looking indie video game designed by Sherida Halatoe. The game is called Beyond Eyes.

     The profile for this really mesmerizing looking indie game can be watched at the 56min mark on this Twitch video after the break:

Location Recording: Power to the Bag!!!

     Petrol Bags, a company known for it's innovation in the audio bag sector has been bought by a bigger fish in the film accessories game and have been re-branded to suit. Petrol bags are now Sachtler branded and built. They now have a classy black and red colour scheme and what feels like a better price point. So I bought one for my new revised location recording rig (rather than trying to shoehorn everything in to an old Portabrace, which was built for my SQN and not much else!).

     I spent most of a morning fitting out my new Sachtler SN601 "Eargonizer" audio bag. For a fairly modest sized bag I was pleasantly surprised to squeeze in so much kit. I've paired the bag with the SN605 Heavy Duty Harness to reduce the strain of 8.5kg (!!) across my back.

Gear Review: Sound Devices 744T location sound recorder

     I'm a little late to the party here as, now, the 744T has been around for quite a number of years now and has effectively been superseded by newer and more feature rich recorder/mixers like Sound Devices own 664 and 633 and Zaxcom's Nomad. However, as I was in the market for an improved recording experience over my Roland R26, the 744T presented itself, through the 2nd hand market, as a very affordable upgrade path to reaching a professional grade recorder with Timecode syncing capabilities. That combined with my collection of Sennheiser MKH mics, fulfills my goal of attaining the most transparent audio recordings I've yet been able to make.

Review: SSL Duende Native Essentials

     Solid State Logic (SSL) have been at the top of the studio audio market for what seems like forever. Their success has been built on products that are both consistently incredible sounding and reliable. Studio tools that never fail and hardware that stands the test of time.

     Their Duende plugins are no exception. When these plugins were first realised it was required that any users also had a powerful DSP card to go with them; such were the processing requirements that would have strained computers of that time to breaking point without ever hitting useful numbers of instances of the plugins. With the power of modern computers SSL have completely revamped their plugin offering over the last few years so that they can all be run "Native", which means without additional DSP cards or boxes.