Audio Engineering: Adjectives of Audio

This course consists of the explanations of popular adjectives used to describe audio. Dark - this means the signal sounds vintage, to understand what vintage sounds like listen to some old recording and study the tone. Dark sounding also falls under colored.

Bright - this means the signal has more high frequencies. If you want to make something sound brighter add some high frequency to it. Bright being the opposite of dark can be great on some vocals.

Clean - clean means your signal is pure and accurate. This is a modern sound, the opposite of vintage. For example a clean mic pre means it doesn't change (or color) your sound.

So what you put in is what you get back. Solid-state or transformerless is generally clean. Colored - this is the opposite of clean.