What's is Scale Magic™?!?
It's our proprietary miniature sound design and imaging, and our way of distinguishing our sound from that of ALL others. You can hear the difference in Scale Magic™ Sound.

Scale Magic™ Sound is 'quietly huge'!
Scale Magic™ Imaging is different from all traditional stereo imaging, AND it is applied in a layout differently! Once you know the secret to how it works, installation is easy. Unlike 'normal stereo' playback, speakers must be located quite CLOSE TOGETHER, and to make it sound big you have to turn it DOWN... that's different! From a practical standpoint, that's the whole secret to the Scale Magic™ illusion.

If you simply do these two things (speakers close and quiet volume) you can stop right here, Scale Magic™ Sound will just work! Or, you can read on and we'll break The Magician's Code and spill all the beans:)...

The Prototype:
The more you understand about your prototype, and how it works, the more faithful your completed scale model!

This is fundamental in all scale modeling... and Scale Magic™ Sound is a scale model.

Building from Scratch:
We collect, or design from scratch, every individual sound for a scene (there may be hundreds!). Much like cleaning flash from castings, we clean up each individual little sound and prepare it to leap out of small speakers at soft (scale:) volume levels... these are the various direct sounds ('point sources') in the scene. We then position them into a traditional stereo image in and in between the speakers, and compose them along a time line of an hour or more... but this is NOT a Scale Magic™ Scene, not yet!

Sound doesn't happen in a vacuum!
That's not how the prototype works. Every sound happens 'somewhere'! We rarely pay attention to it, but the 'sense of place' plays a very important part in our experience... the ears never blink, they are always hearing 'somewhere'!

Every audible sound not only travels directly from it's point source to our ears, but also in every direction reflecting and bouncing off surrounding surfaces, traveling farther to arrive at our ears slightly after the direct sound arrives... that's the nature of (somewhere)! Every scene has a distinct way of reacting to all sounds within it, this is a scene's 'sense of place', or ambient image. Although most often much quieter than the direct sounds, the ambient image is in many ways more important to our experience than the direct sounds! The scene ambient image tells us a great deal about the nature and composition of the scene itself, and about our physical relation to that scene! That's how prototype works.

The Magician's goal: 'Suspension of Disbelief'
Let's say you scratch built a railway station complete with interior, lighting, and a bunch of little super details. And let's say you built it faithfully to the prototype in every dimension. And then, let's say you sit it on a piece of plywood... it might be difficult to imagine it is real, after all, most stations are located 'somewhere' else:). So you go about adding earth, weeds, bushes, shrubbery, trees, rocks, mountains, and maybe a sky backdrop with clouds. Same model, but now that model exists 'somewhere', and as a result it might be easier to believe it's REAL...or at least forget for a moment that it's isn't! This is called 'suspension of disbelief'... it's the reason no one calls 911 when the magician saws the lady in half! It's human nature to accept the illusion is fake... and enjoy the show. And a well built and presented model encourages that! Works in any scale.

Scale Magic™ Imaging & How it Works
So once we have built all the scene's direct sounds along a time line, we go about adding earth, weeds, bushes, etc., etc... this is the Scale Magic™ Scene Image! We want all our disparate little point sources to sound like they actually exist in the same place, we want to suspend disbelief.

We go about scratch building an appropriate ambient image. This is a sequence of adaptations from our direct sounds (early reflections, reverb decays, and subtle but discreet little echoes), but not the direct sounds themselves!. It is the sound of a 'place built entirely form scratch'. By definition a 'place' is normally bigger than the sounds within it, so we use 'phase canceling' to expand the ambient image OUTSIDE of the two speakers! This is accomplished by taking one half of the image 180 degrees out of phase with the other half. The sound of the image in between the speakers tends to cancel out (mostly). But the sound that escapes out to the left and right (outside of the speakers) will still propagate in air! This is the basic 'mechanics' of creating a Scale Magic™ Image! With the speaker pair close together and if the volume is not too loud (causing the image to destroy itself entirely in mid air!), this works a treat. The illusion is that the sounds are inside the scene, the scene's reaction to them is somewhere outside! Acoustically, Scale Magic™ Sound honestly is a complete and very real miniature somewhere!

A Scale Magic™ Image isn't stereo with a single sweet spot in the middle. A Scale Magic™ Image surrounds the sounds inside it and appears real from ANY vantage point. We quite literally turn the image 'inside out', that's how it works:). Our scale model works just like the prototype works. We say, "It's just like being somewhere, only smaller" because it is!

We work hard to build sound that sounds naturally believable, that suspends disbelief... that never reminds the listener that it's fake:)!

Download the Scale Magic™ Sound Owner's Manual in .pdf form, and get started dreaming immediately!