Best Sound Book?

[Renée Dunaway]

There are many great one's out there, but which sound book on your shelf has the most creases in the binding?

[jayrose]

I have broken the binding on the Daniels "Audio Technical Data", but it's not being published any more.

Ballou is hard-bound, so it doesn't crease.

When I was writing my two books about sound*, Moulton and the ARRL Handbook were constant companions.

*Both are category best-sellers at Amazon,and have been adopted by a number of film schools. Critical and reader comments, useful downloadable samples, and discount sales at www.dplay.com/book.

[Renée Dunaway]

Mr. Rose, thanks for your reply! I am so excited, especially because I've had your _Producing Great Sound for Digital Video_ in my bag for the past month. I have it on loan from the library, and dive right into it whenever I get spare time on set or inbetween classes. Coincidentally, I just put it on my amazon.com wishlist.

Don't get bashful, because I'm going to hand the book its due praise. It provides a perfect balance of personal advise/accounts and technical information, thus keeping it consice, fun to read, and informative. The illustrations help gumshoes like me understand some of the concepts, and it covers a full gamma of situations.

It came in especially handy the other day on a student film shoot, when I had two actors speaking in a car, then one continues to speak as he exits the car. I dashed to the book and did some index searching, and found a very helpful combination of guidelines for the situation.

For my Post-Sound class, we used the Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound, which was a bit too story-specific for me. Of course, my favorite theory book would be AudioVision. I just became proficient enough in French to read the original version.

Thanks again, Mr. Rose!

[jayrose]

Call me Jay.

You've really got to check out my audio post book published about a year ago.

It's written in the same style as Great Sound, but goes into a lot more depth. It actually gets 'under the hood', in conceptual terms, to explain how most of the processors work so you can use them better. There are separate chapters on noise reduction, pitch changers, and even things like stereo simulation. There are also cookbook recipes for using most of the processors.

The chapter on conceiving and executing a mix - not including effects, which are covered elsewhere - runs about 30 pages.

And there's a one-hour audio CD of diagnostics, tutorials, and examples.

That book's website, www.dplay.com/book/app, includes some downloadable samples as well as toc, critical comments (Millimeter magazine loved it), and discount purchase.

See? I'm not necessarily bashful.