Resolution V5.3 April 2006

AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V5.3 APRIL 2006

Florian Camerer — Broadcast’s multichannel evangelist Ray Staff on mastering multichannel, vinyl and MP3 Genelec’s take on integrating DSP in monitoring Ten commonly used words with interesting origins Meet your maker: Christopher Hicks — CEDAR Audio On the cusp of tapeless in broadcast REVIEWS: DW Fearn VT-7 • Sadie LRX • DPA 4090/4091 • Wavelab 6 KTSquare One Dynamics • Avastor HDX-800 • Celemony Melodyne V3

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April 2006 V5.3

ISSN 1477-4216 THE PRO END-USER AUDIO PRODUCTION MAGAZINE

News & Analysis 4

Leader

16

Products

4

News

66

Headroom

Mixing Rooms

48

Meet your maker

50

In the picture

Sales, contracts, appointments, biz bites and the bigger picture

New introductions and announcements.

Dual Concentric puzzler; Colombian not Chilean; Audio Lookilikies.

Craft 14

40

42

46

It’s a showcase venue for musicians, an SSL-equipped recording studio, a miniMotown and it’s in Scotland.

Ray Staff

A mastering engineer who spans multichannel and vinyl discusses on-line mastering, MP3 and the ‘hot’ CD issue.

Florian Camerer

Broadcast’s evangelist for multichannel sound follows acquisition on location right through to postproduction, mixing and mastering in his workflow.

59

Sweet Spot

60

Genelec’s take on the integration of DSP into its new range of monitoring products.

Business 52

On the cusp of tapeless

Tapeless production is the buzzword for broadcasters, we look over the edge at what can be expected from taking the leap.

64

Technology 4

56

Christopher Hicks — CEDAR Audio’s senior engineer talks about the algorithm refinement process, processing power hikes, and tea without sugar.

HD editing — defining formats and the precise nature of your work is vital to the decision process.

Ten

Commonly used words with interesting origins.

Katz’s column

Bob Katz looks at the founding principles of how to optimise levels in your analogue processing chain.

Your business

Erosion of the generation gap principle and big business interests have led to the most unlikely of bed fellows. So who’s driving the bus?

innovative solution to the requirement for ‘universally consistent’ audio.

Taming three-dimensional audio4 Advances in research have resulted in an

62

Slaying Dragons

Watkinson rises to the challenge and asks

Reviews 22

Sadie LRX

29

Avastor HDX-800

24

Steinberg Wavelab 6

30

DW Fearn VT-7

26

Fatman 2Fat and Fat Funker

32

Celemony Melodyne V3

28

Klark Teknik Square One Dynamics

34

Waves SSL 4000 Collection

36

DPA 4090 and 4091

EDITORIAL Editorial Director: Zenon Schoepe Tel: +44 1444 410675 Email: zen@resolutionmag.com Editorial office: PO Box 531, Haywards Heath RH16 4WD, UK Contributors: Rob James, George Shilling, Keith Spencer-Allen, Terry Nelson, Jon Thornton, Neil Hillman, Nigel Jopson, Andy Day, Kevin Hilton, Dan Daley, John Watkinson

ADVERTISEMENT SALES European Sales Clare Sturzaker Tel: +44 1342 717459 Email: clare@resolutionmag.com US Sales Jeff Turner Tel: +1 415 455 8301 Email: jeff@resolutionmag.com

PRODUCTION AND LAYOUT Dean Cook Dean Cook Productions Tel: +44 1273 236681 Email: dean@resolutionmag.com

news Appointments K ATA R I I N A H O N K I O has been appointed marketing manager at Genelec in Finland. She was previously product manager at the Mint of Finland and at Nokia Networks.

DIGIDESIGN HAS appointed Gerard ‘ Te x ’ S c h e n k k a n as chief operating officer. Reporting to Avid VP and Digidesign general manager Dave Lebolt, Schenkkan will focus on day-today management of sales, marketing, R&D, operations, human resources and finance. Schenkkan previously held positions at Maxtor Corporation, Quantum Corporation and HewlettPackard.

E N E R G Y P R O H A S launched its loudspeaker brand in Europe and appointed Analogue Audio/ Pro Audio Services as its distributor in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

EnergyPro is the professional division of Audio Products International Corp, manufacturer of consumer brands Energy, Mirage and Athena Technologies and one of the ten largest speaker manufacturers in the world.

AUDIO-TECHNICA has appointed Harvey Roberts as senior marketing manager in the UK. He has a background in hi-tech and IT consumer markets with Psion and Fuji Photo Film’s camera division.

HHB’s Ian Jones and Vijay Modi.

HHB Communications has appointed Modi Digital as distributor of its products in India. An associate company of Audio Vision, Modi Digital has headquarters in Chennai and branch offices in Mumbai and Hyderabad.

©2006 S2 Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publishers. Great care is taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this publication, but neither

4

Leader

The dissolution of traditional institutional employers has spread havoc among a generation of audio hopefuls who would make a career in our illustrious industry. This doesn’t just pertain to changes in job function and description among bulk employers like broadcasters, but also to the economic and sometimes technological pinch (often they are very closely related) that has altered hiring habits in post, film and picture-referenced disciplines. They drew many recruits in on the lower rungs of the ladder and watched only the most enthusiastic and the most resilient to sleep deprivation progressing up to a desk job. The demise in sheer numbers of music studios has deprived many of the early unpaid work experience that could have served as a leg-up to more permanent employment. Music recording has become a largely solitary occupation for many.

A chat to a recruiter at the CabSat show in Dubai revealed that while there are certainly job opportunities in the booming Middle Eastern broadcast market, the last recession and its impact on the trainee recruitment policies of European broadcasters means that there is apparently a dire shortage of the experienced 30-somethings that the broadcasters are now crying out for to help run their stations. Manufacturers now have to be leaner and meaner and don’t employ anywhere near the number of people they did 20 years ago.

As an industry we have got out of the habit of creating a way into our business for the young — either because they have not made themselves known to us or because economic realities have forced a ‘make do with what you’ve got’ mentality. It was less of a problem ten years ago simply because we were all younger then, but take a look around your organisation and do a swift average age calculation. If you are a high-ish ranking operative and find yourself in the thick of that bell curve then the chances are your outfit probably doesn’t have enough diluting effect afforded by young blood. Now add ten years to everyone’s age and ask yourself how your business model works in that scenario and what needs to be done to ensure its survival.

There are more courses and colleges churning out better qualified and more switched-on individuals now than there has ever been. Yet at your average professional trade exhibition it is alarming at just how youthful the young can seem against an industry of individuals that on average have seen a fair few winters. Planning for recruitment is key to every business’s survival.

Zenon Schoepe

Calrec announces console processing ‘breakthrough’ Calrec Audio has unveiled its Bluefin technology, which it describes as a revolutionary High Density Signal Processing system that provides 200% more processing power in 92% less physical space and at no extra cost.

The technology is entirely native to Calrec and is the manufacturer’s response to broadcasters’ requirement for live 5.1 content as it gives the Alpha console the capability to provide 78 full 5.1 surround channels or 480 equivalent mono signal paths on just one card. Bluefin technology is also retrofitable to existing Alpha consoles.

‘Quite simply Bluefin doubles the processing power of the largest Calrec Alpha console at no extra cost, and more than doubles the power of smaller versions,’ said Calrec sales director John Gluck. ‘The Bluefin technology project has been in development for a number of years and elements of the technology have been used in the Alpha console since its launch in 1999. It

S2 Publications Ltd or the editor can be held responsible for its contents.

The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the Publishers.

is a proprietary architecture which has been conceived and developed entirely within Calrec and as such has been a major undertaking.’

Bluefin processing provides full EQ and dynamics to all channels and the system also allows for 8 x 5.1 groups with full EQ and Dynamics, 4 x main outputs, 48 multitrack outputs and 20 auxes. The system is said to generate less heat and use less power then the existing design. System resilience is provided by 100% redundancy of all processing elements through the provision of a second card — it is the equivalent of having another console as a hot spare.

‘The reality of HD programming is that it will continue to create more demand for 5.1 content,’ said Gluck. ‘We already see our customers needing more and more signal paths to create 5.1 channels yet HD programming with 5.1 audio is only just taking off. This technology meets production needs for HD production and live-to-air delivery far into the future.’

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Company number: 4375084.

Registered office: Equity House, 128-136 High Street, Edgware, Middlesex HA8 7TT.

resolution

CabSat shows international appeal

The CabSat2006 cable, satellite, broadcast and communication exhibition in Dubai in March hosted more than 8,000 trade visitors from more than 77 countries, according to organiser Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC).

‘Considering the international stature of the show, we are delighted with such a positive increase in visitor attendance,’ said DWTC director general, Helal Saeed Al Marri. ‘It only reiterates the event’s global appeal and the potential the regional markets offer to multinationals looking for new areas of revenue generation.’

A total of 439 exhibiting companies participated from more than 45 countries with six country pavilions at this year’s event.

Regatta fundraiser The 2006 Audio Industry Regatta (AIR) will take place on the Solent during the weekend of 23-24 September with the aim of raising money for The Elizabeth Foundation, which offers UK nationwide support for deaf children from 0-5 years and their families.

So far 11 major audio companies have already signed up to sponsor a racing yacht and there is still a chance for your company to do the same. You don’t need any experience, just a crew of 6 or 7 — SunSail will supply everything including the boat, expert instruction, the skipper and all the kit you’ll need.

If sailing isn’t your thing then you can sponsor a table for the Saturday evening fundraising event held at the Portsmouth Harbour Yacht Club with its views over the marina. AIR has raised a total of £65,000 for the Elizabeth Foundation since its creation. www.air-online.co.uk

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April 2006

news ATD2 takes on FAR ATD2 has taken over the active monitoring business of Belgian manufacturer FAR. ‘It is the logical follow-up of the first generation of digital monitors,’ explained ATD2 chief technology officer Xavier Lambrecht. ‘My electronic skills combined with Pierre Thomas’ know-how in acoustics are our commitment to deliver the highest level of quality.’

Lambrecht said that ATD2 would continue to develop the range and incorporate software tools for automatic room equalisation and level setting together with network control.

The commercial side of the business has been boosted by the appointment of Laurence Matriche to head up export sales.

TAS opens in-house studio

Bromsgrove, UK-based Total Audio Solutions has opened an audio post/mixdown studio within its new 8000sqft headquarters. Equipped with a Euphonix System 5MC linked to a Merging Technologies Pyramix V5 and Hi Def VCube, the studio features PMC MB2A stereo monitors and PMC DB 1A 5.1 monitoring. The studio is available for music, radio and TV postproduction hire and augments the company’s location Pyramixs in the Tardis Music Truck and derig systems.

‘In addition to filling a niche requirement for the Birmingham area, the studio allows us to work with some of the higher-end equipment we distribute,’ explained TAS MD Peter Knowles. ‘The workflow solution and sonic quality is of the highest order. Because we are a company that not only sells the equipment but uses it as well, our customers benefit from the additional expertise we gain through providing real-world solutions.’

A&H’s new MBO partnership (l-r) Dr Klaus Scholz, executive director Stage Tec; designers Arno Schünemann and Harald Klaus; Stefan Salzbrenner executive director.

The Golden iF Statuette for outstanding design achievement was awarded to Salzbrenner Stagetec Mediagroup for its Aurus digital console at the CeBIT exhibition. Other award winners include Apple’s iPod Nano and Sony’s DSCT7 digital camera. Decisive aspects in the judging include the design quality, workmanship, choice of materials, degree of innovation, environmental friendliness, functionality, ergonomics, visualisation of use, safety, and brand value/branding.

Tokai Television Broadcasting in Nagoya City, Japan, has installed a Studer Vista 8 in an all-new live broadcast studio that is equipped for HDTV and 5.1 surround production.

Appointments

(l-r): Colin Hill, sales director, Røde; Chris Hawkins Røde sales manager, HHB; Peter Freedman, MD, Røde; David Green, international sales manager, Røde.

UK RØDE distributor HHB Communications has appointed Chris Hawkins as sales manager for the microphone brand.

Ben Littlewood, Audio Pro; Matthew Fletcher, HHB. H H B C O M M U N I C AT I O N S h a s appointed Amsterdam-based Audio Pro Nederland as exclusive distributor of its products in Holland.

T E A C E U R O P E GmbH’s Tascam division has taken on distribution of Blue Sky International products for Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Tascam in the US has promoted Jim Bailey and Jeff Laity to product development manager and pro audio product manager.

(back l-r) Simon Hewes, Bond Pearce; Adams; Rogers; Blake. (front l-r) Karen du Plessis, Ernst & Young; Goleniowski; Jones; Williams.

UK mixer manufacturer, Allen & Heath Ltd, has signed a UK£9m secondary management buyout (MBO) with Close Brothers Growth Capital Ltd (CBGC), a provider of combined equity and debt funding. The move marks the successful exit of 3i, who backed the original MBO in 2001, and an increase in the management’s stake in the company, giving them majority control.

The MBO team is led by Allen & Heath’s MD Glenn Rogers along with board members finance director Dave Jones, sales director Bob Goleniowski, and operations

director Tony Williams. Peter Adams continues as non-executive chairman, while James Blake, who led the transaction for CBGC, will also join the board.

‘After five years and a period of substantial growth, we mutually decided it was time to move on — 3i are very happy with the results, and Allen & Heath’s management team has been able to more than double our stake in the business,’ said Rogers. ‘We were immediately attracted by CBGC’s financing package, which will enable us to continue our intended growth strategy, particularly in the digital arena.’

ANGEL STUDIOS in London has appointed Natalie Williams as assistant to studio manager Lucy Jones. She joins from PRS where she worked as a research assistant and has also worked for EMI.

MTR LTD has been appointed UK and Ireland distributor for A-Designs Audio products from the USA. The range consists of the Pacifica solid state mic pre, MP-1A and MP-2A valve mic pres, and the P-1 and EM Series mic pres.

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April 2006

resolution

5

news Appointments SOUND TECHNOLOGY has been appointed distributor for TL Audio and Fatman products in the UK and Ireland.

DISTRIBUTION OF KRK Systems products in the UK is now being handled

by Focusrite Audio Engineering.

DOLPHIN MUSIC is distributing Violet microphones in the UK. MI7 IS distributing the EMI TG12413 Limiter plug-in throughout Europe (with the exception of the UK).

(l-r): Dave Bearman (operations director, Peavey Europe); Courtland Gray (executive VP, Peavey); Mark Kocks (MD, TM Audio); Clive Roberts (MD, Peavey Europe); Eric Lund (sales manager, Peavey Europe).

AMPCO BELGIUM and TM Audio, both divisions of the Ampco/Flashlight Group, have agreed with Peavey Electronics to create a partnership covering all Peavey MI and pro audio products for the Benelux countries of Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.

A&H’s Bob Goleniowski with Perstinger.

ALLEN & HEATH has appointed Austrian-based Norbert Perstinger as European sales manager. He has previously worked with Alesis, AKG and dB Technologies.

GROUP ONE has appointed Michael Colon as national sales manager for p ro f e s s i o n a l a u d i o products. He previously worked at Crest Audio.

6

NEP Visions OBs driving 5.1

HHB Communications has supplied NEP Visions, the UK’s largest independent OB facilities company, with all the Dolby hardware required to supply BSkyB’s feeds with Dolby E audio stems in preparation for its transfer to high-definition video this year.

Operating 18 production units (12 OB, 5 VTR, one GX unit), eight of which are HD Units, NEP Visions is responsible for the majority of Sky’s live content from The English Premier League, Champions League, Scottish and English FA. With around 35km of cable in each vehicle, adding multichannel audio proved to be a complex logistical task. ‘Video is simple; I have one BNC cable carrying SDI from A to B,’ said Paul Fournier, head of sound at NEP Visions, although he did admit that ensuring HD video arrives at B is a more complicated achievement than with its SD counterpart. ‘Digital audio used to be the same, but with the arrival of 5.1 I have three AES pairs to contend with where I used to have one. Not only that, but they all need to be in sync — with each other and the picture.

‘The Dolby E encoders wrap-up eight channels of audio into a single AES pair, while the Dolby Surround encoders mix the 5.1 channel stem to LCRS and then matrix encode to a PCM Lt/Rt mix,’ he explained. ‘The ProLogic matrix is then sent to channels 7 and 8 of the Dolby E encoder as well as to the SDI embedder, together with that Dolby E bitstream. At least two of these groups are derived: one full programme and the other an international version, clean of all commentary. So we need at least two Dolby E encoders and two Dolby Surround encoders per truck.’

NEP Visions has four OB units kitted out with Dolby E and hopes to have another two by the end of the year. The company has also purchased Dolby DP570 multichannel tools and Dolby DM100 bitstream analysers.

‘Although the connection with Sky has been the driving force behind our acquisition of this equipment, I have no doubt that Dolby E encoding will be a prerequisite for much of our future business,’ he concluded.

Indonesian ArtSound installs Audient

Owned by a famous Indonesian art critic, ArtSound Studio has been refurbished and now features an Audient ASP8024 console.

Studio director Aryo Seto designed the facility in Jakarta and despite not having heard a demo of the console, had no qualms about buying it on its reputation alone. ‘The sound quality is very good, exactly to our taste,’ he said. ‘We have

definitely got great value for money.

‘The standard required of a recording studio in Indonesia is getting higher and higher, with clients expecting an extremely accurate studio and control room with world-class equipment, such as Digidesign Pro Tools HD3, Audient and Neumann microphones, all of which we can now provide — and at a reasonable price,’ he said.

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McGill thrilled with Pyramix

McGill University in Montreal, Canada has upgraded its existing Pyramix system, added two more and taken 14 copies of the Pyramix Native/Media Bundle. ‘Pyramix’s editing capabilities, file management and work flow far exceed any other audio platform that we have ever known,’ said Martha DeFrancisco, professor at McGill Schulich School of Music. ‘It allows DSD and PCM recording and postproduction on the highest level. The most accurate and precise music editing can be performed in an amazingly easy way. The fact that many of the world’s most advanced editing projects for classical music are performed exclusively on the Pyramix system is an indication that this is the most advanced editing tool at present.’

Loud on NASDAQ

Loud Technologies has announced that its common stock has begun trading on the NASDAQ Capital Market under the symbol LTEC. ‘This NASDAQ Capital Market listing is an important step in our program to enhance Loud’s visibility in the financial community,’ said chairman and CEO Jamie Engen. ‘As a leader in the rapidly growing professional audio industry, we believe that Loud is on the right track as we continue to implement our strategy to increase revenue, improve margins, and build value for our shareholders.’

Ten-time Grammy Award winning producer/engineer Rafa Sardina has been recording using the Enhanced Audio M600 universal mic mount. ‘I have just tracked drums with Vinnie Colaiuta using two M600s with AKG C12s on the overheads,’ said Rafa. ‘I purposely removed the M600s for one of the songs and I can really hear the difference. I have used them repeatedly now and they do work.’

April 2006

news

BEYERDYNAMIC UK has appointed Matthew Buck as consumer market sales manager. He joins from Swansea University and has a degree in business management.

JASON KING has joined Pharos Communications as product manager for the Mediator broadcast process control system.

He has previously worked a t P ro - B e l , S y m b o l Technologies, Quantel, and Omneon Video Networks.

B R I A N W H E AT has been appointed director of marketing at Auralex Acoustics and will be responsible for the development of an overall integrated marketing strategy at the company.

l-r: Karl Christmas (marketing manager), Gianni Abruzzese (technical sales), Nick Cook (general manager), Scott Fraser (installation manager), Wayne Powell (engineer), Nick Pemberton (technical sales).

YAMAHA COMMERCIAL Audio has named Scott Fraser as installation manager and Nick Pemberton as technical sales manager for the south of England.

EAW HAS appointed Bob Muniz as senior electrical engineer to its engineering team.

He previously worked at QSC. D AV I D G O U L D has joined Digidesign as UK product specialist.

He is a graduate of the University of Surrey Tonmeister course.

CHARLOTTE DAWSON, also a Surrey graduate, joins as UK marketing and PR executive. She was previously assistant studio manager at Angel studios, London.

8

8816s touch down at Mothership

MKH800s star on DG sessions Credit: Mel Lambert/content-creators.com

Appointments

(l-r) Recording producer Sid McLauchlan from DG, recording engineer Fred Vogler and Rainer Maillard.

A recent Deutsche Grammophon recording project at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA achieved two industry firsts. The dates in mid-January marked the first Deutsche Grammophon tracking sessions with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the new venue, which serves as the orchestra’s winter home. It was also the first time the label had used a pair of specially modified Sennheiser MKH800 mics, which had been converted for the sessions to output signals from their pair of forward- and rear-facing condenser capsules.

‘By blending outputs from the two capsules in postproduction, and adding phase inversion,’ said Rainer Maillard, tonmeister/head of recording services with Emil Berliner Studios, a division of Deutsche Grammophon, ‘we can continuously adjust the pick-up patterns of our central pair from omnidirectional through fig-8 to cardioid and hypercardioid. And to help match the sound of the performances in the Walt Disney Concert Hall during live concerts with an audience, and then with an empty hall during subsequent patch sessions, we can favour the front or rear capsules and control ambience pickup.’

Emil Berliner Studios and Deutsche Grammophon have worked closely with Sennheiser to develop enhanced-quality mics for classical recording sessions for some time. ‘Several years ago, we asked Sennheiser to develop a version of the MKH80 model that would offer extended frequency response,’ Rainer recalled.

‘The result was the MKH800 with outstanding clarity and minimum colouration — just what we need for classical sessions.’ The MKH800 has five switchable pickup patterns and a 30Hz to 50kHz response.

In addition to the pair of ‘twin’ MKH800 left and right mics spaced about six feet apart over the lip of the stage as the primary pickups, a pair of MKH30 fig8 outrigger mics were flown above stage left and right, spaced 35-feet apart.

The stage-edge array was augmented by an MKH30 and MKH50 hypercardioid arranged one above the other as an M/S pair, and suspended above the up-stage edge of the conductor’s podium.

DPA 4090s go Dutch Dutch consultancy for room and theatre acoustics Prinssen en Bus Raadgevende Ingenieurs has bought eight DPA 4090s for carrying out acoustic measurements.

‘We often perform measurements in auditoria, theatres, classrooms and so on, and according to ISO 3382 –- the International Organisation for Standardisation requirements for the measurement of room reverberation time — we are required to carry out measurements at multiple positions,’ said the company’s room acoustics consultant

Bjorn van Munster.

Van Munster also works for SIAP Acoustic Systems, a m a n u f a c t u re r of a state-ofthe-art acoustic architecture processor that can change the reverberation time of a venue. To create presets, at least 10 different measurements have to be made for each preset.

Another Dutch 4090 client is Bloomline Studio, which bought four of the mics for the recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion for Universal Music in a Dutch translation by Jan Rot (pictured).

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Mixer Ray Hedges has been using his three newly-acquired AMS-Neve 8816 summing mixers alongside his 32-fader Digidesign Icon at his Mothership Studios in Surrey, UK. ‘This is the best way to have a totally recallable Neve desk alongside the flexibility of Pro Tools,’ explained Ray. ‘I avoid sub mixing in Pro Tools, everything comes out individually to the three 8816s. Analogue summing definitely blends everything together in a way digital doesn’t. I’m thrilled that Neve has finally made a summing mixer.’

A long time user of 1081 preamps alongside his Tools and Logic, he relies on the analogue elements to complete his sound. ‘Neves on the way in, Neves on the way out, you can’t go wrong!’ he said.

His credits include Bryan Adams, Daniel Beddingfield and Towers of London.

• Televisió de Catalunya is installing its fifth Libra Live console. The console will be the third in its Production section, complementing those in the news section.

The station is the official Catalán language broadcaster serving the Barcelona region.

Shure/TC alliance formed Shure Incorporated and TC Group A/S have formed a strategic alliance focused on technology sharing. The companies intend to work together to develop networking solutions to enhance system performance, yet simplify system setup and use, for the professional audio market.

‘In a world that is becoming more integrated and connected each day, we think it is more important than ever for the component parts of an audio system to be able to communicate with each other,’ said Anders Fauerskov, CEO of TC Group.

Irhoj Studios in Haslev, Denmark has bought a pair of Genelec 8040 for its main monitoring. Owner Jan Irhøj first used the speakers on location for the recording of a big Christmas musical in the old beer halls of the former Tuborg brewery in Copenhagen.

April 2006

Main Features

 Record uncompressed Standard and High-definition video  HD/SD SDI interface with Dual link option for RGBA 4:4:4:4 and CGI applications  Real-time HD1080 format conversion for multi-streaming  Directly open OMF multi-layer video compositions  Multi-layer video and audio time-line  Real-time basic editing with fades/dissolves with cut, copy, paste functionality.  Three user level interfaces - VTR Emulation, Director and Advanced modes.  Instant access and transferability of SD and HD media across network/servers  Convert any SD/HD video format to any other format e.g. to AVI, QuickTimeTM SD to HD.  Notation capability for version referencing and film dubbing  Security embedded Water-marking  Picture-in-picture facility

Applications

 Up to 6.4TB media storage  Alternative replacement for SD/HD video tape machines  Playback/screening system at 24fps Film, PAL, NTSC and HDTV frame rates  Create clips, loops and play-lists within the system.  Ideal for audio post production SD and HD video and film dubbing referencing  HD Video Recorder for CGI and model animation frame store/playback  Digitizing station for Media Servers  Uncompressed RGB 4:4:4 recorder  Multi-format cache for telecine transfer

HD VIDEO SYSTEM

HD1080 VIDEO SYSTEM

HD-2K

news The Big Picture

mc 66 in Frankfurt double 2

BIZ BITES — Bertelsmann is preparing to sell off its music companies, writes Nigel Jopson. The Mohn family controls 75% of this private corporation, which

Studio control rooms in the Large Concert Hall and Old Opera House (Alte Oper) of German public broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk (HR) in Frankfurt are to be re-equipped by Lawo with two mc266 consoles for live and broadcast applications.

Control Room 1 handles all live broadcasts and production mixes of concerts in HR’s Large Concert Hall (pictured), which is also the production studio and rehearsal hall for the HR Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The core of the new console will offer a 3000 crosspoint matrix, 96 DSP channels and numerous MADI ports, four of them with redundancy. The control surface, with 24+8+16 faders, has an integrated user talkback panel and extension of the console by a further eight faders is possible.

An identical mc266 is to be installed in Frankfurt’s Old Opera House, which is considered to be acoustically one of the best concert halls in the German-speaking countries.

owns broadcaster RTL, book publisher Random House, magazine publisher Gruner & Jahr and half of SonyBMG. The crisis has been triggered by investment company Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, which holds the remaining 25% stake in Bertelsmann and is exercising an option to take the company public (an exit strategy designed to realise the value of its investment). The Mohn family would rather sell off troublesome music assets than go for an IPO. Sony has the option to buy Bertelsmann’s share, but this seems unlikely as Sony originally devised the joint venture as a means of spreading its own exposure to risk.

Analysts have mooted a figure of US$2.4b for Bertelsmann’s share of SonyBMG, investment bank Goldman Sachs suggested buying back GBL’s 25% stake would cost US$4.25b. Universal Music would almost certainly be interested in BMG’s publishing division, but this development can only add to the cultureclash drama at the combined music group, which has already cost Andrew Lack the top job.

Continued

Seven of the UK’s leading rental companies have joined forces to create a new rental company: M7 Audio Ltd. The company has been formed to facilitate UK rentals of the new Midas XL8 live performance system and has committed to taking an initial eight 96-channel

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systems and associated components worth in excess of UK£1,000,000. M7 company shareholders are Britannia Row Productions, Canegreen, Capital S o u n d , C o n c e r t S o u n d , S k a n PA Hire, SSE Audio Group and Wigwam Acoustics.

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Studer makes Paris stage debut

The first Studer Vista 8 to be used for FOH in Paris’s theatreland has been installed in the 1000-capacity Theatre de la Ville as part of a refurbishment programme that will take place over two years.

‘There are many reasons for choosing the Vista 8,’ explained the theatre’s Pierre Tamisier, ‘but the most powerful one is the Extension remote panel, which we now use most of the time. With the main console in the sound control room, the remote can be taken down into the auditorium, to set up the show or to mix it. It has a very small footprint and it is easy to move, providing up to 60 fader capability in a 60cm-wide unit that one person can lift.’

The sound control booth at the Theatre de la Ville is located high above the last rows of audience seating, with compromised sightlines to the stage. ‘When we bring in external productions, visiting sound engineers often prefer to work at seat level, and the Studer remote is ideal for this,’ he said. ‘Our team sets it up, and the ergonomics make it very simple for the visitor to understand and use — we can provide him with back-up because we can monitor his actions on the main Vista 8 in the control room.’

The Theatre has a longer-term plan to build a new control studio, close to seat level, which will also enable them to record productions. With this in mind it has installed the stagebox and optical fibre infrastructure for this next phase of the upgrade programme.

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Many musicians and recording professionals already consider the DPA 4006 to be the world’s most precise, natural-sounding microphone.

Now the new 4006-TL builds on that legendary platform, adding an ultra-low distortion transformerless preamplifier for increased sensitivity and tighter bass response.

The result is an even more remarkable microphone.

The DPA 4006-TL. One step closer to perfection.

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Upgrade your 4006 to 4006-TL specification 4006 microphones can be upgraded to 4006-TL specification. Undertaken at the DPA factory, the upgrade consists of a new preamplifier, a Close-miking grid, a calibration chart and a new mic case. Visit the DPA website for full details.

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news The Big Picture The UK government and Ofcom, the UK telecommunications watchdog, have both endorsed a plan to allow parts of unwanted or unused broadcast spectrum to be auctioned.

The US government hopes to raise billions of dollars when it auctions off spectrum freed by the transition to digital television broadcasting, scheduled for 17 February 2009.

It wasn’t the love of music that changed: it was the business model.

Physical sales down (by 7% in the US as reported by Soundscan) a big boost for digital downloading (sales tripling to $1.1b in 2005 according to the IFPI), and a preference for online CD shopping.

There are rumours the UK’s largest high street music retailer will merge its music and book outlets, and new statistics only reinforce what eyes already tell us: there are half as many independent record stores as there were a decade ago.

‘America goes ape for the Monkeys’ trumpeted the Telegraph newspaper in the UK, while ‘ ... the hooks weren’t strong enough to catch a goldfish’ scoffed the Oakland Tribune, and the Miami Herald criticised: ‘The teen rockers revealed a lack of seasoning.’ (Teens ... seasoning?) The disparity in reaction to the Arctic Monkeys, responsible for the fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history, proves the Atlantic Ocean is as wide a barrier to rockers as it ever was. James Blunt becoming the first UK artist since 1997 to top the US singles charts no doubt proves something else about US taste, but the real question is: when will UK-based labels recognise this gulf exists, and manage their artists accordingly in the world’s largest national music market?

SHOWTIME NAB, Las Vegas ................................22-27 April AES, Paris ..........................................20-23 May Broadcast Asia, Singapore................20-23 June IBC, Amsterdam .......................8-12 September PLASA, London ......................10-13 September AES, San Francisco ......................... 6-9 October SATIS, Paris ..................................... 7-9 October SBES, Birmingham .................. 15-16 November Interbee, Tokyo....................... 15-17 November

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Digico D5 mobile live recording

DB Videoproductions in Belgium has updated its services to multitrack recording and after-the-event CD and DVD production. To work with its video trucks it has built a new Unit4 audio truck with a Digico D5 console, Sadie 64 and Pro Tools HD3 system for 64-track recording.

‘The choice for the Digico D5 was made because of the quick set up in a live situation, this saves time and money, and the easy coupling with the main PA systems of the major PA companies in Belgium who also have D5s or D1s,’ said unit audio manger, Ivan Mangelschots. ‘This means no microsplits just one fibre between stage and the Unit4 truck and we are ready for multitracking or live programme mixing.

‘The big advantage of the D5 is the MADI coupling with multitrack machines — no messing around with multicore snakes. The D5 is also very quick to learn and handles very well in a live situation, and last but not least it sounds great,’ he said.

Tickle works AWS in Hawaii

English music producer and engineer/mixer David Tickle recently took delivery of an SSL AWS 900 for his private production studio in Hawaii.

‘We’re running Pro Tools|HD3 Accel here, but mixing-wise, the analogue world is still the best,’ said Tickle. ‘The bottom line is that my records sound significantly better if I can mix them in the analogue domain. The AWS 900 interacts with Pro Tools perfectly, allows me to use my vintage gear, and my plug-in window allows me to access everything right here at the console.

It’s great to be making records without a mouse again.

‘I’ve been working with Pro Tools for over

eight years here in Hawaii,’ he added, ‘but there are major maintenance concerns here in the tropics and it just wasn’t realistic to have a large traditional or vintage console.

When SSL came along with this compact design, it was all my dreams come true in one box.’

Tickle employs a large arsenal of vintage outboard equipment, including the Eventide Orville. ‘It’s got over 1,000 presets and is a quadraphonic device,’ he said, ‘so I can use it for surround mixing through the AWS 900.’ Tickle has remixed nearly 20 albums in surround for such artists as John Hiatt, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow, Joe Cocker, Yes, and Sting.

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PMC on air in Rome

PMC’s Miles Roberts and La Rosa.

I t a l i a n P M C re p re s e n t a t i v e s F e e l Communications is to supply PMC monitoring to RDS (Radio Dimensione Suono) — one of Italy’s largest national independent radio networks. The contract is the first of three to supply the Italian broadcast sector and also includes the RTL network in Milan.

The initial contract includes ten pairs of AML1 and four pairs of DB1S-A for a newly-converted monastery in Rome that will serve as RDS’s latest complex with one main on-air control room, four edit rooms, an extensive surround music production area and large live performance auditorium with control room. The first transmission is due in the autumn of this year.

‘After extensive technical and subjective listening tests, which involved the cream of current monitoring designs, we were pleased they specified the AML1 for the majority of the installations,’ said Feel Communications technical manager Luca La Rosa. ‘RDS is the first of the Italian broadcasters who have gone against the grain and have placed a greater importance on the quality of their monitoring; something we will see filter down to other networks.’

Japanese broadcaster MMT installed a C100 in its U-Sub control room in time for its switchover to terrestrial digital broadcasting in December. The console is being used for HD productions including J2 League football, which was among the first HD picture and 5.1 surround sound broadcasts in North East Japan by a private broadcaster.

April 2006

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facility

Mixing Rooms It’s a showcase venue for musicians, it’s an SSL-equipped recording studio, it’s a miniMotown and it’s in Scotland. NIGEL JOPSON goes north of the border to find out what the fuss is all about.

I

F THERE’S ANYWHERE in the world where it should be legitimate to enter a recording studio by walking through a bar, it must be Scotland. And in case the thought of a Glasgow bar conjures up the wrong mental image, we can assure you this is a watering-hole of the go-to-destination, glass-fronted, city-regeneration, bistro variety ... and it’s right opposite the police station! The facility is the brainchild of Stuart McCredie who has run (and still owns) Eldon Street Studios in Glasgow, and Westlife, Liberty X and Blue songwriter John McLaughlin. ‘I think the days are gone where a studio could just sit back and wait for the phone to ring from a major record company saying: we are going to send our band in, here’s 50 grand,’ explains John, ‘it’s the Motown/Factory Records/Rough Trade model that works today. While you are helping the artist, creating songwriters,

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creating new producers, you are also creating work for your studio.’ Hence the well appointed bar, which hosts acoustic showcases for new acts and ‘open stage’ sessions for local talent. ‘We’ve already signed an 18-year-old singer-songwriter called Maeve O’Boyle who has won the Celtic Connections festival Danny awards,’ McLaughlin reveals, ‘and we’ve found two artists we are considering for development.’

The Mixing Rooms represent the culmination of several years of searching by Stuart for suitable premises in Glasgow. When he eventually found the site, a modern building in West Regent Street adjacent to the Ibis Hotel, he rushed to put a deposit on it. A significant part of the plan mandated actual ownership of the studio premises, to avoid running foul of the lease-renewal trap that has nailed the coffin shut on so many famous recording spaces. ‘Finding a bank that would buy the whole idea, and having it underpinned with value in property, was key,’ explains McCredie. ‘I’ve run studios commercially for 10 years, if they are run correctly they can make money. We went to five banks with the project, got four really good responses and went with the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose support has been fantastic, they really see the value in it.’

Fronted by the bar and bistro area, the ground floor accommodates control rooms A and B, their recording areas, and a small office. Upstairs are the management company offices and preproduction rooms. Control room A houses a magnificent SSL G+ 48-channel console — a few test presses of the routing buttons confirm that this particular model must have inhabited a Tardis-like time-machine for much of its resolution

career. ‘We were very lucky to find such a low-use 4000 series in such great condition,’ confirmed Stuart, ‘I originally had the genius idea of buying a 144 moving-fader, winged Amek 9098i from a private studio in Oregon, Ohio, but logic prevailed and I got the SSL! We’re selling ourselves to major labels, so it was an important decision.’

The pleasantly large control room has a vocal/ instrument overdub booth to the left, and a live space to the right, with windows giving line-of-sight contact through the control room for band recordings.

The outboard racks are equipped with a compact but A-list selection of outboard including Neve 33609 compressors, GML and Amek 9098 mic amps, Urei 1176s and a Lexicon 960. As Resolution visited, a classic Fairchild 670 valve compressor had recently arrived and was immediately pressed into service by producer Calum Malcolm. ‘Stuart has done it really simply but highly professionally,’ he comments. ‘I was at great pains to warn him not to buy too much equipment! All the best studios I’ve been in don’t have that much outboard equipment, but what they do have are classics, which is just what you want.’

The studio opened in November with a full-on acoustic recording session by Scottish legends The Whistle Binkies, since then The Dykeenies, Antony Costa, Belle and Sebastian, The Dirty Pretty Things and Kelly Clarkson have been in to record and mix tracks. ‘In Scotland I’ve felt we always lacked the finishing aspect of making records. We’ve been able to find new artists and write material, but we’ve had to then go that extra step further and take projects to London for mixing,’ explains John McLaughlin. ‘We did Busted, Mark Owen and Blue at Stuart’s previous studio, but then we could never finish the record here in Scotland.’ Main monitors are the superlatively neutral-sounding Linn Professional 328As, using Linn’s revolutionary new servo-bass driver system.

Acoustic design for Mixing Rooms was by former Recording Architecture partner Nick Whitaker: ‘The interesting approach with the monitors is that they have to be completely free standing, they have a very wide and even dispersion and you have to be quite sure that there’s also a very even reverberation time and frequency response throughout the room, otherwise you won’t be able to exploit the good aspects of the Linn design.’

There is a noticeably larger sweet spot behind the console than in many more conventionally-equipped rooms, with a very smooth top end. ‘It was an interesting range of spaces that was asked for,’ adds Nick, ‘I’m very pleased with the way the live room and booth have worked out. Stuart wanted to have quite a lot of variability, so I’ve left as much of the height of the room as I could.’

Recording duties in both rooms are handled by Pro Tools HD systems with all the trimmings, driven from dual-processor G5 Macs housed in some very neatlooking cooling and isolation racks from Kell Systems.

Drives are shared using an Ardis Technologies Dynamic Drive Pool, an Ethernet-based storage area network (IP-SAN) using iSCSI protocol. Stuart has had a four-user system installed, which offers expansion possibilities for the future of two further Digidesign studios running virtual disks on the shared highperformance SATA storage system. A journey to Studio B passes the office of studio manager Helen Clark — a key member of the team — and a very well known figure on the Scottish music scene, after many years managing Ca Va studios. Throughout the facility, there’s a noticeably superior finish to the fabric of the building than might be expected in a regular recording studio, it transpires this is thanks to a builder friend of Stuart, more normally occupied with April 2006

facility the construction of upmarket night clubs and dining establishments.

When we visited, mixing duties in Control B were handled by an SSL AWS 900, which was highly praised for its flexibility and capabilities as a worksurface controller for Pro Tools. However, in the short period of time the Rooms have been open, there have been so many projects running concurrently at the facility that Stuart admitted an instant-reset board would be of huge advantage. By the time Resolution readers are perusing these pages, a brand new C300 console will have been installed and commissioned in the B room by Bill Ward, who took care of the installation at the facility. This mixer has the DAW control features and surround monitoring admired on the AWS, but also includes full digital mixing, up to 64 4-band EQ/dynamics per DSP card, instant reset from session to session, and SSL’s TimeFreeze automation — which has no requirement for external timecode. Monitoring in Control B is also handled by Linn 328As and, unusually for a smallish rectangular room, the console and monitors are arranged on the long side. ‘The Linns do have excellent horizontal dispersion and the lateral early reflections are very low level with this layout,’ explains Nick Whitaker, ‘so we have a reasonably wide listening field for a small room.’

Mixing Rooms is a great example of a modern facility, but the business model backing it up is not dissimilar from that which Leonard and Phil Chess mapped out in 1957, when they converted a former automobile parts factory into the Chess Records' office and recording studio in Chicago. ‘I think you need it all, there’s no use just having a studio,’ McLaughlin observes. ‘Just having a studio is the kiss of death.

Very rarely have I walked into a record company with an artist and they’ve given me a big giant cheque

— and when it has happened it usually messes up!

I’ve learned from that: what we like to do now is take the record as far as we can, then if a label comes in the ball is already rolling. As long as you bring a great group of people together, and you can be honest with yourself and make great records, there’s no reason why you cannot compete.’

Stuart points out that, in contrast to the situation a decade ago, the record industry is now much more accepting of productions from regional non-traditional music centres — whether from Malmö, Munich, or Glasgow. ‘We’ve got a good skills overlap — John

GRUNT

is very astute on the writing and publishing and management side — I concentrate on the facility and we obviously still write together. I think the only model these days for a studio is as a production house, the mini-Motown set-up still works if you can be successful with your product.’ ■

Contact THE MIXING ROOMS, UK Website: www.mixingrooms.co.uk Tel: +44 141 221 7795

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review gear

Products Equipment introductions and announcements.

AMS-Neve valve, EQ and fader outboard

AMS-Neve’s first valve based product, the 9001, is a dualchannel unit with mic pres and transformer coupled signal paths. Each channel is switchable between mic, instrument and line input and there is also a Series mode in which the Channel A output is connected to Channel B line in for extra gain. Each channel has 3-band passive EQ with Low, Mid and High broad bands with push-action switched potentiometers to give two frequencies per band. The EQ can be switched in and out of circuit and an optional A-DC can be fitted.

The 8803 is a dual-channel EQ and filter in a 1U with EQ circuits based on the Neve 8108 design but with enhancements to the flexibility of frequency ranges and Q ranges.

Balanced inputs and +/-20dB Trim is followed by two 12dB/octave filters. The High Pass Filter has a variable corner frequency from 25-300Hz and the Low Pass Filter has a range of 3-15kHz. The four bands of EQ have selectable shelving and switchable Q on the high and low bands and continuously variable Q on the mids. Frequency selection is continuously variable on all bands with ranges of 33-440Hz, 120Hz-2kHz, 0.8-9kHz and 1.5-18kHz. All the 88 range have recallable settings, a USB port connects the unit to a PC or Mac and a utility program can be used to store and recall settings.

Platform news: Steinberg An update to the EuCon adapter module in Nuendo 3.2 further extends the Nuendo functionality that can be directly controlled by Euphonix’s MC and System 5-MC products. It is available at no cost to registered owners of the Nuendo EuCon adapter.

The Nuendo EuCon adapter interfaces between Nuendo, MC and System 5-MC, and now offers integrated hardware control of the Control Room feature set in Nuendo 3.2. This provides control over an array of flexible monitoring functions within the Nuendo software.

Version 3.2 also offers support for the optionally available Euphonix dual motorised automated panner joysticks hardware module. Other enhancements include faster plug-in handling, improved speed and convenience in automation control and optimised display of Nuendo internal metering on the channel meters of the Euphonix hardware.

Virtual Guitarist 2 software offers 6.8Gb of authentic, editable riffs, parts and licks in 88 musical styles, and is a complete computer-based instrument that creates realistic electric and acoustic rhythm guitar parts from scratch.

GrooveMatch technology allows parts to be moulded to any drum loop or file, including Steinberg’s Groove Agent 2 virtual drummer product. Virtual Guitarist 2 ships with a range of virtual stomp box effects and a new amp modelling section recreates the sound of guitar amps and microphone type and positioning. www.steinberg.net

Tannoy Precision iDP Ta n n o y ’s i D P ( I n t e r a c t i v e D i g i t a l Programming) technology has been incorporated within two new Precision monitors — Precision 6iDP and 8iDP. The monitoring systems bring together Tannoy Dual Concentric and WideBand technology with digital processing from TC Electronic.

The built-in EQ capability of Precision iDP allows room optimisation with the user being able to compensate for acoustic anomalies in the room.

The technology also allows real-time control of bass management, global level, recall of different preset settings, and solo/mute functions. www.tannoy.com

TESI compact routers

Designed to be used with the 8816 Summing Mixer, the 8804 features 16 long- throw channel faders with associated mute switches and two long-throw output faders. The 8804 adds fader control over audio levels in the 8816 and as the channel level pot is no longer required for level setting, it becomes a dedicated auxiliary send. Each of the 16 input channels now has a direct output from the 8804 that can be set pre or post fader. www.ams-neve.com

UA Neve plugs Universal Audio is developing plug-in software emulations of Neve signal processors for its UAD-1 DSP card and Powered Plug-Ins system. The first product to be launched will be the Neve 1073 EQ. www.uaudio.com

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TESI has launched two ultra-compact, software controlled analogue audio routers, the Legato A48M and Legato A48. Each unit is 2U and the Legato 48M features a built-in mixer for increased flexibility. Both units are controllable

by W indows software. Software features include the naming of I-Os, saving and restoring complex routing configurations, and macro definition/execution facilities.

The basic configuration of both units is 16 I-O. The matrix of the A48 can be enlarged by adding 16 I-O expansion cards to 48 I-Os. The A48M can be expanded to 32 inputs/16 outputs or 16 inputs/32 outputs. The routers feature high input noise rejection and use D-Sub25 connectors. www.tesi.es

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Networked sub Expanding the JBL LSR4300 family, the LSR4312SP linear spatial reference powered subwoofer features JBL RMC Room Mode Correction and employs Harman HiQnet protocol to network with LSR4300 Series studio monitors and computer-based recording systems. The LSR4312SP will be offered in single and complete 5.1 surround-sound packages with the LSR4326P and LSR4328P studio monitors.

The box is based on a 12-inch transducer powered by a 450W amp. www.jblpro.com

Centro master control A u d i e n t ’s C e n t r o i s a standalone master section for DAW-centred studios, which brings together monitoring and routing of analogue and digital sources, cue mixing and talkback in a flexible, ergonomic package.

Key features include six stereo digital sources and four analogue sources, two Cue mixes for performers and builtin talkback. Centro is capable of controlling three pairs of speakers and a sub.

Centro completes Audient’s workstation peripherals range joining the ASP008 mic pre and Sumo summing amp. www.audient.co.uk

Stax headsets Sommer Cable is offering the complete range of Stax products, which include condenser headsets. Two headset-amplifier versions are available for the SR-303 Classic Headset: the SRM-310 with FET-input and driver level and the SRM-006t Class A amplifier with noise-free dual-FETs on the input and two channels on the output. www.sommercable.com

April 2006

review gear Soundcraft large-format digital

Soundcraft’s first large-format digital live desk, the Vi6, draws on Studer’s Vista and On-Air 3000 series consoles and employs a derivation of the Vistonics user interface (Vistonics II). Vistonics II uses the same type of touchscreen colour TFT monitor with integral rotary controls and switches mounted on the glass.

The Vi6 console has an input-to-mix capacity of 64 channels, mapped out on two layers under the control of 32 motorised faders. These can be assigned to 32 outputs (plus a stereo and mono mix), which can be any combination of group and aux buses. Up to 16 Matrix Outputs can be configured from the pool of 32 buses.

Adjustment of EQ, aux levels, routing or dynamics all takes place in-line with the channel, and colour-coded sections are enhanced by the Soundcraft FaderGlow system, which uses a multicolour LED with a unique diffuser alongside the fader track to indicate which function is currently active on the fader.

The input channel has 4-band parametric EQ, gain and routing, aux send level controls, and integral dynamics on the Vistonics II screen. www.soundcraftdigital.com

Genelec DSP monitors Genelec’s 8200 and 7200 DSP Series monitors are based on the 8000 MDE and 7000 LSE Series products and are designed for end-users who want a network speaker system that can be set up, measured, analysed and calibrated quickly.

The DSP monitors employ GLM (Genelec Loudspeaker Manager) software and AutoCal (Automated Calibration) software technologies that are said to maximise ease of integration into user studios (see p46). www.genelec.com

Sound Devices Flash recorders

Sound Devices has two additions to its 7-series line of portable digital recorders — the 702 and 702T (with timecode) are Compact Flash-only recorders. The twochannel recorders share the quality and chassis design of the 722 and 744T digital recorders. The 702 and 702T are available now and have suggested retail prices of US$2,175 and $2,650 respectively. www.sounddevices.com

Midas digital desk

The Midas XL8 live performance system is described as ‘the first of a new generation of open-architecture, cross-platform, integrated audio control and distribution systems’ that brings control of audio and all aspects of a live performance to a single control centre.

XL8 represents a networked system and requires only mics, amps and speakers to provide a complete audio system. Its open architecture ensures that third-party devices can be integrated into the system.

The desk features three Midas mic preamps per mic input, analogue and digital gain controls, Midas EQ sound quality and ‘control feel’, and Midas dynamics.

It employs open-architecture AES50 digital audio distribution, fully duplicated network for redundancy, up to 100m of dual-redundant connectivity between hardware elements, automatic integral delay management (audio outputs are time and phase coherent) and a flexible and expandable hardware system with Ethernet TCP-IP and USB tunnelling for third parties. www.midasconsoles.com

April 2006

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review gear Liquid multichannel FireWire processor Liquid Mix uses the same patented Dynamic Convolution process as Focusrite’s Liquid Channel and all processing is done using onboard DSP. Liquid Mix’s DSP connects to the computer via FireWire, which also provides bus-powering.

The control panel has metering, screen, rotary controls and buttons and you can choose to

control each channel from the desktop control unit or from within the sequencer, using a GUI that functions exactly like a plug-in.

Liquid Mix’s onboard DSP hosts 32 classic EQs and 32 vintage compressors simultaneously in the mix.

Each of Liquid Mix’s 32 channels provides compressor and EQ emulations selected from a pool 40 compressors and 20 EQs with an expanding library online. A hybrid 7-band ‘super EQ’ can be built out of separate classic EQ sections in every one of the 32 channels. Each channel appears as a separate VST/AU/RTAS effect within the sequencer and will work within all major applications, including Pro Tools.

An optional expansion card is available for Liquid Mix, allowing users to increase the number of available channels at higher sample rates (sold separately). The card is quick and easy to install and fits into the underside of the unit. www.focusrite.com

Beyer multipattern Beyerdynamic’s MC 840 is a large diaphragm studio mic built around the MC 740 capsule. Similar in size to the MC834, the MC840 features an improved transformerless low-noise preamplifier and 5-way polar pattern switch for omni, cardioid, wide cardioid, hypercardioid and fig-8. It also has two roll-off filters (80 and 160Hz) and pads at -10 and -20dB. www.beyerdynamic.co.uk

Performance Gear Wireless Offering 10 selectable frequencies and up to four compatible systems per b a n d , S h u r e ’s Performance Gear Wireless Systems have receivers in single and dual versions that use microprocessor-controlled Predictive Diversity to improve reception and minimise dropouts.

They also feature internal antennae to simplify operation and storage.

Handheld and bodypack transmitters feature a channel select button, a combined power/mute button as well as a gain switch. The selected channel is displayed in a 7-segment LED with an additional multicoloured LED indicating power, mute and low battery.

Performance Gear W ireless is offered in eight preconfigured systems designed expressly for vocals, instruments, and presentation use — four featuring a single, four a dual receiver. With the PG30 headset for active users and PG185 lavalier microphone for spoken word applications, Performance Gear Wireless systems also feature two new condenser mics. www.shure.com

Portico dynamics

Rupert Neve Designs’ Portico 5043 Limiter-Compressor Duo delivers two channels of dynamics and a brickwall limiter in a half-rack. It features fully controllable dual mono or stereo operation plus feedforward/feedback detection switching.

Each channel has individually controllable threshold, makeup gain from -6dB to +20dB, ratio and VCA detection mode (feedforward/feedback). The channels may be used independently or connected in sequence to provide two separate control slopes on a single source. The DC control circuits may be linked via a front panel pushbutton so the level of each channel may be held in a constant relationship for stereo operation. With the compressor inactive, the 5043 may be used as a transformer-coupled, high-performance line amplifier. www.rupertneve.com

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April 2006

review gear Marantz PMD560

Following on from the PMD570 solid state recorder, Marantz has launched the PMD560. It can record in MP3 or PCM formats with RS232 control and enables automatic recording (with Auto Track and Time and Date Stamp), and simple transfer of files to PC via Compact Flash card or USB interface.

It features stereo or mono recording and playback with phono I-Os. The PMD560 can be set to stop recording when there is silence and automatically start when sound resumes. www.d-mpro.eu.com

Milab DC-196

FireWire transmission over 100m

M i l a b ’s m u l t i p u r p o s e D C - 1 9 6 m i c employs the company’s rectangular large dual membrane capsule, which is mounted in a shock-absorbing rubber fitting. The DC-196 has three patterns adjusted on a knob to omni, cardioid and fig-8. It is also equipped with a -12dB pad. Based on the classic DC-96B, the DC-196 has a newly designed capsule, which gives considerably lower self noise.

To prevent popping, the capsule is surrounded by an additional very fine metal mesh. www.milabmic.com

The LongFire-Hub from DFM permits the transmission of FireWire at full bandwidth to distances over 100m. With LongFire-Hub FireW ire mic preamps can be used as a stage box remote controlled from a desk and computers can be placed in a machine room while a convertor with its user interface remains in the studio. The device can be bus-powered or used with an external power supply. The physical media is Cat6. www.dfm-audio.com

Enhanced Holophone Holophone’s H2-PRO mic is capable of recording up to 7.1 channels of discrete surround sound and is now offered with enhanced low frequency effects (LFE). Enhanced LFE permits a higher output level of deep bass information without imposing on the performance or levels of the rest of the system.

The enhanced H2-PRO features eight XLR microphone connectors and is compatible with all surround-sound encoding/playback formats. An upgrade programme is available for current H2-PRO owners. www.holophone.com

AWS 900+ The SSL AWS 900+ offers new control protocols for a wide range of DAWs including N u e n d o , Sonar, Digital Performer and Logic. Using the new control protocols, plug-ins and virtual instruments can now be controlled from the D-Pots and the faders. An enhanced display allows up to 6 character labels for track/channel names and the console also now features workstation Master Fader support.

Other enhancements have been made to the displays and meters and the desk has been restyled. www.solid-state-logic.com

Touch-it monitor The Touch-it series from Wohler offers a simple way to monitor multichannel video, provide routing, as well as multiscreen output in a compact and versatile 3U. The touchscreen video monitor is suited for multi-camera live shoots, machine rooms, and OBs. It has dual high resolution 7-inch LCD panels offering video confidence monitoring for up to 12 channels of composite video. The Dual 7-inch wide screen high resolution touchscreen monitors 12, 1.8-inch thumbnail images on the left with touchscreen selection of the image appearing on the right screen at full size. www.wohler.com

April 2006

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review gear Freestanding One Ewe with rackmounting option The One Ewe nonrackmounting unit comes complete with head-end mounted, stereo, flared horns giving near perfect balance. The body is securely mounted on four shock-absorbing legs that work in conjunction with an internal feedback loop to ‘self level’ the unit. The One Ewe will remain stable at deployment angles of

up to 42 degrees from horizontal.

Legs are fitted with calcium-based, water resistant feet.

B r u s h e d aluminium rack mounting ears are available as an option (sold as pairs), and are attached by means of heavy duty straps and do not require drilling. A +RAM upgrade permits the production of ‘mini Ewe’ units. www.canford.co.uk

Fostex CD-R

The Fostex CR500 CD recorder aims to offer advanced features as a master recorder and as a playback machine.

On the recorder side, CR500 offers the world-first of direct BWF recording onto UDF formatted CD at up to 24-bit/96kHz resolution. The file is fully compatible with PC workstations with data transfer performed by a simple copy and paste procedure instead of real-time audio ripping. The CR500 is said to be ideal for DAT archiving in the standard 16-bit/48kHz format.

On the playback side, it offers Instant Play, Fader Start, built-in memory for cue point and programme play per disc (up to 100 discs).

The MC10M is a multicapsule microphone set including a cardioid electret condenser mic (MC10) with a replaceable supercardioid capsule, shockmount adaptor, and windscreen. www.fostexinternational.com

H7600 and Anthology II

Eventide describes its H7600 Ultra-Harmonizer as its most powerful stereo effects processor yet. It has AESEBU, SPDIF, and Word clock digital I-O, two channels of analogue I-O via XLR and two channels of high impedance input. The H7600 also includes PC and OSX graphic preset development tools.

The Anthology II plug-in bundle for TDM offers 15 plugins with six new plug-ins. The E-Channel strip includes a gate, compressor/limiter with sidechain, and five bands of 48-bit double precision parametric equalisation. UltraChannel offers a more comprehensive channel strip and

has a gate, de-esser, Omnipressor compressor/limiter with sidechain, five bands of parametric EQ, stereo delays, and the Harmonizer micropitch shifter.

The EQ65 Filter Set recreates the sound and function of a vintage analogue filter set while equalising capabilities are expanded with the EQ45 parametric, which includes high and low cut 12dB/octave filters and four bands.

Mic phase alignment is made easier with the new Precision Time Align plug-in while Quadravox features four voices of diatonic Harmonizer pitch shifting.

The other plug-ins in the bundle are H910, H949, Instant Phaser, Instant Flanger, Omnipressor, Eventide Reverb, Octavox, H3000 Band Delays and H3000 Factory. www.eventide.com

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April 2006

review gear TC interfaces and outboard TC’s Konnekt 24D is a 14 in, 14 out audio interface with built-in DSP effects. It features two front-panel inputs that combine mic preamps with true instrument input circuits optimised for guitar. A non-DSP effects version, Konnekt 8, shares the same basic architecture and feature set with less I-O. Both Konnekt 8 and Konnekt 24D are optimised for use with active monitors, and come with Cubase LE software.

The Fabrik C channel strip and Fabrik R reverb are built into Konnekt 24D.

Streaming sessions in real-time Source-Live enables users to stream the output of their Pro Tools mix to multiple listeners simultaneously. Pro Tools users email listeners a Live-link and the listeners, using common media player software such as Quicktime, immediately connect to the stream in real-time from anywhere in the world.

Real-time ‘listener management’ and password protection within the plug-in allows users to control who is listening in on the session. Source-Live’s ‘Live-to-File’ feature makes generating mp4 files and podcasting simple and SourceLive can also be used to stream live events to a streaming server for Internet radio capabilities. www.source-live.com

The M350 dual engine rack processor offers 15 reverbs with 15 multipurpose effects. An AU/VST compatible software editor is included and enables the user to automate all parameters and presets or to control them in real-time.

The M350 has 256 factory presets plus 99 user presets and employs 24-bit processing and A-D/D-A conversion. It provides five direct access parameters and other features include MIDI I-O, MIDI clock tempo sync, pedal tap tempo, and global bypass.

The C300 compressor/limiter/gate/expander is a dualengine processor with analogue and digital I-O and both engines are able to operate in compression/limiter or gate/ expander mode. The 16 compression/limiter presets and 16 gate/expander source-based presets give the user realworld starting points for dynamic control. Routing provides combinations of parallel and serial link modes, and the stereo serial mode allows the user to process a composite signal on both engines simultaneously.

The BM 14S active subwoofer from Dynaudio is equipped with an LFE output for daisy-chaining several subwoofers, and a high-pass filter that provides bass management in a 2.1 system. BM 14S is designed to complement Dynaudio BM and M Series monitors, but will work well with any stereo or multichannel set-up.

The PowerCore range has been expanded with a PCI Express (PCIe) version. TC will continue to offer the existing PowerCore PCI mkII and PowerCore Unplugged versions. www.tcelectronic.com

Smallest wireless mic The Lectrosonics XSDT or ‘eXtra-Super-DamnTiny’ is claimed to be the world’s smallest wireless microphone. The wireless mic is completely self-contained, including a near-microscopic condenser microphone element, AA battery and a 250mW RF transmitter using the company’s Digital Hybrid Wireless technology.

The mic element, with a 1mm x 1mm capsule area, provides a claimed frequency response of 5Hz-120kHz and a transient response that is said to be far better than any other mic on the market.

Dynamic range is said to be 120dB, with selfnoise of 48dB (A-weighted) and a maximum SPL of 168dB. www.lectrosonics.com

SoundField Portable ST350 Microphone System

the front end...

Now Shipping!

The new ST350 Portable offers SoundField’s unique technology in a miniaturised package.

Powered by battery or mains the ST350 offers a ‘pocket-size’ solution in 5.1 recording for HD broadcast or location recording for film and DVD productions.

The system consists of a lightweight multi-capsule microphone and fully featured compact micpre/control unit that generates surround and stereo simultaneously at balanced line levels.

Digital wireless records with timecode Zaxcom’s TRX900 and TRX990 digital wireless microphone transceivers are the first wireless microphones to provide integrated audio recording, IFB receivers, and timecode transmission. This patent-pending feature set allows the recording of six hours’ of audio directly to Flash card that can then be transferred as .WAV file to PC or Mac. Timecode transmission allows the user to transmit two channels of audio and timecode to just one receiver on the camera. This eliminates the bulk and weight of having two separate receivers and a sync box for timecode and video sync. Because this system does not require manual jamming of the timecode into the camera, the TRX900 and TRX990 help reduce production time as well. www.zaxcom.com

April 2006

post-production...

The ST350 combined with the SoundField Surround Zone software represents the most comprehensive surround and stereo recording/post-production package available. now available for:

Surround Zone 5.1 page

Surround Zone Stereo page

SoundField • T: +44 (0) 1924 201089 • E: info@soundfield.com • W: www.soundfield.com

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Sadie LRX Location recording can fall into a number of categories and involve a variety of formats and media. However, it’s the total package and the satisfaction that surrounds the experience that wins the hearts of the hard core location recordist. ROB JAMES feels an acronym coming as he lays down the LAW.

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OW MUCH RISK are you prepared to tolerate? The ‘Nanny State’ is ever more pervasive and people are becoming more risk averse. Despite this, we all take risks with recording media every day. With analogue recordings, tape and film, the dangers are easy to see and quantify and it is relatively straightforward to design workflows to minimise risk. In any event, unless you actually lose the tape or roll of film, most problems only affect a small part of the recording, a hair in the gate for one

shot, a graunched section of tape, etc.

Hard disks and CD-R/DVD-R suffer from the big disadvantage that damage to the medium generally results in catastrophic failure. Recovery, even when possible, is expensive and time-consuming. However, if properly assessed and reduced to an acceptable level, the benefits can outweigh the risks. Recording audio on a film set or in a concert hall is a very different matter to recording an Everest expedition. Confidence

Top and tail Each of the eight channel strips has a touch-sensitive motorised fader with three level/status indicator LEDS, a two character alphanumeric display, Record Enable and Pre-fade listen illuminated buttons.

Three LEDs indicate when the LRX is locked to external Timecode, Ext Clock or Video. A Bank Select key and Mode key determines which logical channels are controlled and which of four functions the fader affects. ALT can be programmed to a variety of parameters in software; Pan puts the faders on the centre, orange marked position, up becomes right-pan and down becomes left. Input and Output gains complete the set.

Input gain is only active when a mic/line card is installed and affects the pre-A-D analogue gain. Play, Stop and Record are three, chunky, internally illuminated keys. Above these, the Jog/shuttle wheel has round, internally illuminated, concentric control buttons with the same default mapping as the BB2-J. The big bar is Preview and clockwise from this come Select, XFade, EDL/SRC and scrub. Anticlockwise, Razor, In, Out and Zoom. At the top, six more keys give direct access to Set, Previous and Next locators, Cut and Paste edit keys and a Mode key that will be used to switch the operation of the other keys to context-sensitive alternative functions. On the far right, the assignable master fader has a talkback key at the top. A 3.5mm jack socket on the side of the LRX is the powered mic input. The vertical front panel has a headphone socket and volume control.

At the rear we find a 25-pin D-sub male for GPIO, three Slither Slots, 4-pin XLR for 12V power, LR monitor phonos, XLR AES ref in, BNC video ref in, XLR LTC I-O and a 4-pin USB-2 socket.

The AES interface is single wire up to 96kHz and dual-wire for 192kHz, the maximum sampling rate. The analogue cards are all 96kHz capable. Sadie routinely supplies 2m breakout looms from D-sub to XLR. Alternatives include phonos, jacks or D-sub to D-sub.

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also plays a part. For example, the laptop has become an important part of the recordist’s armoury and experience had shown that reliability is adequate for location use. These same recordists have long expressed a desire for what, for want of a better term, we will call a location audio workstation. (I feel the acronym coming on already -– LAW). The LAW should be simple to operate, at least when recording, and complement other location recording machines.

The elves at Sadie’s R&D centre have been listening attentively to all this and LRX is the result. A rugged box with versatile I-O, DSP, hardware control and software optimised for location recording.

In overview, LRX can be considered as a conventional Sadie workstation. The special software version, MTR, or multitrack recorder software, is intended for users unaccustomed to Sadie, or with computers and workstations in general. Also ideal for hire work, this is designed to be a very simple, one-window interface, location recording package.

Although the MTR software enables the user to record audio with a minimum of foreknowledge and button presses, the LRX also comes with the familiar Sadie 5.x workstation software you would find on a PCM-4, PCM-8 or H-64 multitrack. The LRX control surface can access all the Sadie mixer strips, input and output, EDLs and project files in MTR and the full Sadie 5.x are identical.

Key to success is the flexibility conferred by the three ‘Slither’ I-O slots. I had some nice fantasies about how this name arose but the real explanation is rather more prosaic — one of the designers used ‘slither’ to describe the action of inserting an interface card and the name stuck. Slither cards, originally developed for the H64, are available in many flavours.

Perhaps the most significant in LRX context are 16channel AES I-O, 16-channel analogue line in, 16channel analogue line out and 16-channel mic/line in with proper fader control of the analogue, pre A-D gain. A 56/64 channel MADI Slither will also be available. Depending on type, physical input and output channels can be routed singly or in pairs to any logical Sadie I-O. LRX is no lightweight. The unit’s decidedly hefty steel case also provides a platform for the heaviest laptop to sit on.

April 2006

PROS

Well aimed; construction inspires confidence; versatile.

CONS

Fan is somewhat vocal; unit can seem a bit bulky when used without a laptop.

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Transport keys are internally illuminated and are suitably industrial in feel. Not that you should ever hit buttons like a gorilla but when the pressure is on, it happens. Even the most banana-fingered recordist will have no problem here. A temperature-controlled fan keeps the LRX cool. Not the quietest I’ve ever heard, even when the speed is reduced by software. Signal processing, mixing, busing and Sadie effects, is undertaken by the onboard DSP. The PC is used for control, display, processing Direct-X and VST plug-ins and to read and write audio data from the hard drive(s). Data transfers between the LRX and the host computer are over USB-2. In most circumstances, Sadie recommends an external FireWire or USB-2 drive for audio storage when used with a laptop. A 7200rpm drive will generally be adequate for recording up to 48 tracks of 48kHz 24-bit audio.

At 96kHz 24-bit high track counts will require splitting across a couple of drives, something the Sadie software handles with ease.

According to Sadie’s Jim Gross, the original LRX concept was for a 16-track portable recorder with three Slither slots populated by 16 channels of analogue input, 16 channels of analogue output and 16 channels of AES I-O. With the optional DSP expansion (circa UK£500 + VAT) 48-track recording becomes possible, so you might well have all three slots populated by analogue input Slithers or AES I-O Slithers. Obviously, it is possible to mix and match to suit the application. Base price for an LRX is £4500. Slithers start at £800.

MTR has been kept deliberately clean and simple. Apart from the main record page there is a clip store with a pop-up yellow window to view metadata.

Below the clip store metadata can be entered. Take numbers are automatically incremented on record. This metadata is written as the file is recorded but can still be modified after the event if necessary. At the bottom of the screen the navigator pane allows you to move rapidly to anywhere in the project.

Currently, there is no record buffer, but this is high on the wish list for the next version. At present it takes around half a second for recording to begin after pressing the button.

Waveforms are generated on the fly, as with all other Sadies. Primary and secondary record destinations can be specified so you can have an immediate safety copy. Files are continuously updated during recording so a catastrophic failure, e.g. pulling the mains plug, will lose at most ten seconds of audio.

An ‘optimised record mode’ improves performance with high track counts and standard drives. Essentially, this means that any track armed for recording does not play back the existing EDL, reducing the load on the disk.

Many location-recording applications require a stereo mix at the same time as a multitrack recording. In fact the multitrack is often just a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card if the mix engineer makes a mistake. The LRX can produce a controlled stereo mixdown concurrently with the multitrack. The mix is based on the contribution of the LRX faders when in Output mode. Similarly, Pan affects mono channels’ contribution to the stereo mix. Recordings can be made in many different file formats and also, using MacDrive, directly to a HFS+ formatted FireWire drive. If editing is done in Sadie on location, the project can be exported: AES 31, AAF, Pro Tools Session (5) and OMF import and export are all supported. As with all other Sadies, the full V5.x software can record and playback a video stream within the playlist using Windows Media Player as the underlying engine. Typically, FireWire is used for input with an external convertor box. The video stream can be manually edited or conformed to a change EDL. When used with a desktop PC, Sadie usually supplies a special Matrox Parhelia graphics card to improve accuracy and stability.

Sadie considers the LRX to be unique. Whether for classical music, radio OBs or trolley recording for film the LRX has all the controls you need, including touchsensitive motor faders, on a single panel with no need for a mouse. Add in the possibilities of 48 phantom-powered mic channels and MADI interface option and I’m inclined to agree. When compared with a Sadie studio system with hardware control surfaces and Timecode, etc. the LRX also makes a lot of sense. With linein and AES slithers, the DSP upgrade and CAT RS422 card an LRX costs around £7500. LRX can, of course, accept any of the usual Sadie options such as CEDAR processing.

So, the LRX is easy to use, convenient and reasonably secure. As Jim Gross says, ‘If you want to further reduce the hazards of location recording, run off a UPS and have two drives, primary and secondary. For the totally paranoid, put it in record and leave it alone and take along a second recorder.’ ■

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The Antidote to Compromise Considering the critical role monitors play in audio production we believe this is one place where compromise is simply unacceptable!

“If you want a monitor’s opinion of your mix these speakers will tell it like it is – warts ’n’ all.”

Play Magazine Nov / Dec 2005

“Probably the best specified, most flexible monitoring system in this price range.”

MusicTech, June 2005

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Now the great-sounding monitors we build will sound great where it matters; right there in your studio!

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Tannoy United Kingdom

T: +44 (0) 1236 420199

F: +44 (0) 1236 428230

E: enquiries@tannoy.com

Tannoy North America

T: (519) 745 1158

F: (519) 745 2364

E: inquiries@tannoyna.com

Tannoy Deutschland

T: 0180 1111 88 1

F: 0180 1111 88 2

E: info@tannoy.com

SADIE, UK: Website: www.sadie.com

April 2006

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review

Steinberg Wavelab 6 It plays second fiddle to Steinberg’s flagship Nuendo, yet Wavelab enjoys a strong reputation as a powerful and accessible audio editing and mastering suite. Uncovering a hot rodder’s approach to DAW evolution, ROB JAMES comments on the latest nips and tucks.

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HEEL ARCH EXTENSIONS, go faster stripes, a loud exhaust and fluffy dice don’t make a boring car go faster or handle any better. A stage two head (or these days a new chip) and some suspension and brake mods will do the trick and, if you’ve any sense, you’ll leave it looking innocent…

Many incremental releases of DAW software have a lot more in common with the former approach. Driven (sic) by the exigencies of marketing, manufacturers are under a lot of pressure to add features for the sake of it. So it comes as a nice surprise when an update arrives with a turbocharger bolted under the hood and a load of other genuinely useful stuff to improve the handling.

As our illustrious editor pointed out in the last issue, despite all the ingenious and difficult to implement features that have appeared in DAWs over the years, one highly desirable function has been unaccountably missed. I refer, of course, to convenient and transparent integration of external physical processors, in other words outboard. No matter how many plug-ins you have or how accurate the modelling becomes, there is no substitute for the real thing. The premium prices on original Neve modules, Fairchild compressors, etc. make the point better than I can.

Wavelab 6 includes an ‘External Gear’ plug-in that goes a long way towards remedying the deficiency.

Using ASIO this can accommodate from 1 to 8 input and output channels. Wavelab automatically compensates for the ASIO driver latency and the external latency in render mode but you still have to set latency compensation for the external processor(s) manually for real-time auditioning.

Time stretch and pitch shift have been upgraded with the inclusion of Stephan Bernsee’s DIRAC engine.

This is very good but, since there is no such thing as a free lunch, rather slow. The original algorithms remain available if you are in a hurry. The almost obligatory pitch quantise processor function has also arrived for people who can’t sing or play in tune. The Wavelab implementation isn’t great. Sample rate conversion benefits from the inclusion of the Crystal Resampler plug-in.

Nicely mirroring the current debate about loudness, especially in relation to CDs, Wavelab has acquired a Loudness Normalizer and Bob Katz’s K-System VU meter modes. Insert Silence also enables you to insert an ambience file, great for dialogue editing. The wave window and overview can be set to display the loudness envelope of the sound.

On the housekeeping front there is a new rename function that can automatically update all file references in other documents such as montages.

Files clips and markers can be batch renamed. There is a long list of smaller but nonetheless useful changes that aid productivity and general usability.

One change with no obvious user benefits has a whiff of inevitability about it. Copy protection now comes courtesy of a USB dongle rather than the former occasional CD insertion. While I can appreciate the necessity for this it means one more dongle to 24

lose and, in commercial environments, theft can be a problem.

The most spectacular innovation is the Spectrum Editor. Based on ‘powerful linear-phase filters’ with slopes tending to infinity, the Spectrum Editor is primarily aimed at restoration, although I have no doubt it has creative possibilities as well. It can be used in real time in the Master Section to enable a specific frequency range to receive different processing to the rest. Used in ‘surgical processing’ (offline) mode, the Spectrum Editor is a temporal and frequency domain editor. Putting that into English, once you’ve switched to Spectrum display mode, you can define a region in the ‘normal’, horizontal, time editing sense and also in the vertical, frequency dimension. Once defined, a region can be processed, i.e. gain cut or boosted, it can be filtered or it can be cut, copied and pasted as you would with an audio clip but with the additional frequency parameter. You can also copy a region exactly or copy the ambience. This is the equivalent of copying with dispersion applied (see below).

Apart from the usual Band-pass, Low-pass and High-pass filters, the Spectrum Editor has two further options, Blur Peaks and Dispersion. Blur Peaks analyses the region to find the frequencies with the highest peaks then reduces the level of these frequencies. Dispersion ‘smears’ dynamics and pitch while retaining the same average frequency spectrum.

This is most useful at lower frequencies. If by now you are getting a strange feeling of déja vu, well I’m not surprised. The Spectrum Editor offers a lot of tweaks but, even if you stick with the defaults, the results are almost scary.

As regular readers will be aware I am something of a Wavelab aficionado. I’ve been evaluating and writing about DAWs for many years and spent a lot of time doing pretty much the same thing as a facility manager for some years before that. In any one year I resolution

get to look at half a dozen or so new or heavily updated DAWs and that puts me in a rather privileged position.

You can be pretty sure that anything I’m still using on a regular basis must have something special going for it. Principally it is this: I can return to Wavelab after weeks or months using other applications and produce a quick CD in ten minutes. If I need to do something more complex it doesn’t take hours to remember how it’s done and many of the built-in tools are world class.

The Spectrum Editor is such a stunningly useful audio restoration tool for music and post that it could easily justify the UK£400 plus VAT asking price of the whole Wavelab package.

My only real gripe is the less than comprehensive video file handling and video functions in general.

This is a shame since Wavelab would seem to be an obvious candidate for mastering audio for video.

Perhaps this area is next on the list?

Phillippe Goutier and his team have done it again by adding immense value and genuinely useful features to an already excellent package. For existing users, upgrading from previous versions is a complete no-brainer and everyone else would be well advised to take a look. ■

PROS

Builds on the firm foundations of previous versions; Spectrum Editor alone will sell it to many new users; still the quickest and one of the most comprehensive.

CONS

Needs a fast machine to get the best out of some features; still no way to add AVIs complete with audio in one operation or replace audio in an AVI.

Contact STEINBERG, GERMANY: Website: www.steinberg.net

April 2006

review

Fatman (by TL Audio) 2Fat and Fat Funker TL Audio has released the first two units in a new series of affordable Fatman branded products. Slim GEORGE SHILLING lets out his belt a few notches to take stock of the prospect.

J

UST WHEN YOU thought your Christmas bingeing waistline had slimmed back to normal, along comes all the chocolate of Easter. And then these two, umm, Fatmen. The original Fatman series comprised a pair of uniquely-shaped boxes, priced to appeal to the lower end of the market, but including valve circuitry. These new models have dafter names, but conform to a more sensible format, being rather, yes, fatter 2U rackmounters.

These two are both complete recording channels.

The 2Fat (UK£410 inc. VAT) is the simpler and cheaper of the pair, with instrument and mic preamp, and compressor with variable controls and function presets. This is an update of the original Fat 2 with bonuses including -30dB pad, a preset one-button ‘Fat EQ’, and a digital output option (this is also on the Fat Funker) with the DO-2 SPDIF card allowing up to 24-bit 96kHz resolution. The Fat Funker (UK£586 inc. VAT) claims to be oriented towards guitarists, but is clearly the better featured of the two, with many more knobs and a few more connections — could it be that the 2Fat is for drummers?

Despite the two units being designed for similar tasks, due to their development history, the control layouts, legending, and even some terminology is different between them. For example, Input selection and Meter switching are rotary controls on the Fat Funker but pushbuttons on the 2Fat. The more expensive Fat Funker runs its valve circuitry at 150 volts, while the cheaper 2Fat is at 100 volts. Any sonic difference is very subtle, but when driven into overload the Fat Funker is slightly honkier.

Both mic preamps sound full, with the opportunity to drive them (two LEDs illustrate the amount) for harmonic richness, or just slight enhancement from the valve circuitry at more sensible levels. They are not as polished sounding as more esoteric and expensive units, but are musical, and easily outperformed a more expensive British unit in terms of detail. Both include 90Hz 12dB/octave high pass filters which I expected to be too dramatic, but in practice were not and achieved a juicy, tight low-end.

26

2FAT — The 2Fat’s rear panel is simplicity itself, with an XLR for mic input, and balanced TRS jacks for line input and output. The front panel’s Instrument input takes priority over the rear connectors, and a switch chooses between the two rear inputs, or two different level settings for the instrument input.

However, there was a bit less level available here compared to the Fat Funker’s Guitar input, although this was still enough for the quietest single-coil guitar (just). A single Gain knob controls all input levels. The unique selling point with this box is the Program knob, which selects between 15 different presets. These govern all compressor settings based on particular instrument or vocal types. All the user needs to do is set Input gain to govern the overall amount of compression taking place. So it is useful to set the Meter to GR mode, and also to observe the Input section’s Drive and Peak LEDs. Threshold and Ratio are set according to programme, along with Attack, Release and Knee, so the only control still operational in the Compressor section is the Gain Make-Up knob, and using this or the Output knob means you can easily compensate for compression. The settings are great, and the compressor is very warm and sounds excellent for general purpose gain reduction.

The Output level metering includes a +10dB option that drops the reading down 10dB, useful when you want to send more level into a DAW without bending the needle.

The superb Fat EQ circuit adds a preset ‘smiley’ EQ — low end boost, mid cut and high end boost. It sounds great most of the time — it is not too overdone, but just adds a pleasant sweetness to many signals.

FAT FUNKER — The Fat Funker is essentially the same feature set as the popular TL Audio Ivory 5051. Guitarists such as Coldplay’s Guy Berryman had started using the Ivory as a front end for live use and initially there were plans to optimise the unit for guitarists by tweaking the EQ and Compressor characteristics. However, following user tests, it was discovered that nothing needing altering, so the Fatman version is essentially a tool to relaunch the Fatman brand, with announcements at Frankfurt of resolution

nine new Fatman MI and live products.

This unit loses the 2Fat’s compressor presets and Fat EQ, but gains features elsewhere. The rear panel is more populated, with separate XLRs for Mic and Line, and a separate unbalanced jack line input on the rear.

These line inputs share a +4/-10dB button. The Fat Funker’s unbalanced insert TRS is slightly unusual in that it is not included in the signal path, but merely used as a sidechain for de-essing, etc. A useful Link jack enables stereo operation of the compressor with two units.

Apart from the loss of the presets, the Compressor includes similar controls to the 2Fat, but gains extra settings for Attack and Release, with four-position knobs for each, allowing a little more flexibility and more extreme settings — undoubtedly useful. A 4-band EQ section is included, with High and Low shelving and two peaking Mid bands, each band featuring four preset frequencies. It is sweet and musical, with great warmth. A simple one-knob Gate section is very easy to set up and has sensibly set time-constants. The cute little illuminated Meter gains a useful Input setting.

For anyone setting up a budget studio these are highly recommended. If you plump(!) for the Fat Funker, consider whether you prefer the deep red of this model or the creamy look of the almost identical Ivory version. But for any musician setting up their first studio, or just wanting something to improve the quality of home recordings, the 2Fat is fantastic value, very easy to use, and sounds truly full-fat. Mmmm.

Now, where’s the FatLady? ■

PROS

Great value, especially the 2Fat with its lovely Fat EQ and idiot-proof presets; flexible; solid sound quality throughout.

CONS

You have seen these designs before.

Contact TL AUDIO, UK: Website: www.fat-man.co.uk

April 2006

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review

Klark Teknik Square One Dynamics Representing something of a departure for the manufacturer in presentation and format, KT would target this unit at its traditional live sound market, yet it has obvious applications to the studio environment. ZENON SCHOEPE looks at an 8-channel box with many flavours of compression and gating.

P

RESENTED IN A TASTY shade of purple and offering eight channels of dynamics processing in a 3U, the Square One Dynamics is a fine looking unit, if a little busy. Eight channels of dynamics means eight channels that can each be employed either as a gate/expander or as a compressor. This is an interesting twist on the traditional format of a compressor with a gate thrown in for good measure.

The Square One asks you to decide what you want to do on a single button marked Gate. Channels default to compressor but this switch flips to gating.

At this point the attentive will have spotted that the controls are shared between the two functions.

This could make things tricky but providing you clock the status of the Gate button’s LED you won’t come unstuck.

You get pots for Threshold, Attack and Release shared between the two processes but the Gate adds a dedicated Hold pot and the Compressor gets a Gain Makeup control. Both share a pot that does Ratio in the compressor and Range in the gate. Other shared commodities include input LED metering and a 10segment gain reduction/attenuation meter. Now, I was convinced that the latter meter would read nonsense in either or both conditions but by a stroke of genius it makes perfect sense in both cases. Similarly with the Ratio/Range pot.

The only complexity occurs if you have chosen to mix gates and compressors randomly across the eight channels because you might grab a pot thinking it was something else. More structured planning and patching reduces the risk of this but there’s plenty of room to scribble an indentifier below each channel.

The type of compression you’re playing with is dictated by the position of two buttons marked Vintage and Hard Knee. Predictably, with both buttons out the default response is soft knee and RMS sensing. While you can guess what the Hard Knee switch does, you’ll need to be told that the Vintage switch activates a peak sensing characteristic. Combining this with the 28

Hard/Soft Knee switch position changes the Vintage character and you could regard the compressor section as effectively offering four types, or rather characters, of gain reduction all with varying degrees of adaptive and manual control intervention.

That’s a more sophisticated circuit than I was expecting in such a compact channel but the options are there and certainly boost flexibility. My own favourite was Vintage/Soft Knee driven with gusto. A good sounding compressor – way too good for live!

A sidechain section allows you to tune in for the gate and expander triggering by activating the Filter switch with Narrow or Wide band width. As far as the Gating goes it does what you’d expect and I find it hard to get too excited about the presence of i-TS (intelligent threshold shift), which apparently reduces chattering. It works fine. Tuneability is not in Drawmer league but then that is not always required.

You can also apply the same sidechain process to compression for de-essing or just for mucking around with what the circuit is looking at. This adds enormous potential to what can be attempted with this box.

Rather than being a skimmed down quick and easy sort of affair, which it can undoubtedly do very well, you can truly problem solve and enhance with the Square One. If it’s a bad signal you can sort it out and if it’s a good signal you can make it even better.

An External Key input switch causes the channel to look to the rear panel 1/4-inch socket above each channel’s XLR I-Os. Really smart is a Solo switch that allows you to monitor the selected channel’s sidechain through a dedicated rear panel solo output XLR. Adjoining channels can be linked for stereo with the left hand channel taking control of all parameters apart from Make up gain and sidechain filter. It’s interesting to note that it’s possible to link any number of channels providing they are adjoining so a multichannel compressor is achievable. However, the refinement in prioritising channel threshold response and of interlinking within the whole group of channels resolution

is lacking so this box would only serve as the most elemental of processors in this capacity.

Build quality is good but there’s a tiny bit too much shaft flex for my liking. While I love the colour of the panel, the legending is for me a little faint in half light. It’s a matter that is compounded by the vertical layout, which I otherwise love. Horizontal orientation always gives move clearly defined space to control sections. Flip it upright and you have to compact the controls -– unless of course you want to create a 6U 16-channel dynamics box. When you can’t see clearly and if you’re in a hurry the arrangement and legending can frustrate. The answer is to light the front panel well and to get it up to around eye level so you’re not looking down at it with the controls obscuring each other. That’s particularly important if you have a mix of processing types arranged on the channels as mentioned earlier. Fractionally smaller pot diameters and variety of pot heights might have improved this. If the box was mine I’d probably also magic marker the tops of the non-LED switches so I could see more clearly if they were in or out.

Allowing for that, you can’t really knock the Square One on performance: it’s quiet, clean and the compression is sophisticated and flexible. What makes operation pleasing is that KT has got the ‘pot turn’ to ‘audible result’ ratio absolutely right — you don’t have to twiddle half a turn to get things happening as there is control available at all stages of the pots’ travel. It’s a crucial quality in outboard and I’ve never understood why some manufacturers continue to assign all the action in the first or last half of a pot’s rotation when the remainder is never used.

Square One Dynamics really can do an awful lot of different things and there’s a lot of processing to play with in what is not very much space at all. It’s a very timely and interesting box of tricks that, while it may have been intended for live use, undoubtedly has enormous potential for any studio environment.

Good gear. ■

PROS

Great package of processing; very capable and varied compression; sounds great; much too good for live!

CONS

Legending not great in half-light; there’s a lot of channel in not a lot of panel.

EXTRAS

Klark Teknik’s Square One Graphic has 45mm faders with integral dust guards;

signal present and clip LEDs; fully balanced I-Os; relay activated bypass; Proportional Q filters; high pass and low pass filters; universal power supply and a 3U steel chassis.

Contact KLARK TEKNIK, UK: Website: www.ktsquareone.com

April 2006

review

Avastor HDX-800 The importance of disk drives for professional audio has never been more apparent to NIGEL JOPSON, having recently experienced the failure of an internal PC drive and a 70Gb FireWire backup on the same day (Personally, I would have rushed out and bought a lottery ticket. Ed). He tests a drive with pro aspirations.

W

ITH INCREASING TRACK counts in DAWs, the days of tunes arriving on CD-R are long gone and productions inevitably arrive on FireWire drives, usually commonplace consumer models. This brings into question not only the robustness of the medium, but also identification for future archival storage. As Grammy-winning mix engineer Joe Chiccarelli told me: ‘I can name a dozen major albums I’ve worked on in the last few years that were done digitally and no one knows where the original hard drives are -- they’ll just never be found!’

Avastor aims to step into the breach with a range of professionally packaged portable drives.

The 250Gb Avastor HDX-800 (UK£228.92 + VAT) is supplied in a very nice lockable, anti-shock carrying container with drive labels, cables and a stand for vertical use. The drive case is made from hard plastic

material, top and bottom halves of which can be rapidly removed for maintenance by sliding out two grey side inserts (which also make fine surfaces for labelling). It looks able to withstand a small impact far better than most consumer devices. An alloy internal chassis houses a PSU, PCB, and a Western Digital Caviar EIDE WD2500JB hard drive. These high-spec drives are available as bare units from component suppliers for around UK£70 street price.

There’s a triple FireWire 800/400 and USB 2.0 interface via the respected Oxford 912 chipset. The disk has thin strips of neoprene set above and below as cushions -- certainly better than the postage-stamp sized piece of foam used in most consumer portable drives -- but hardly mil-spec. Avastor claims the HDX is the ‘smallest full-sized portable hard disk available with an on-board power supply and fan.’ This may well be the case, and good riddance to wall-warts, but the installed fan was an unfortunate choice for use in a music control room environment. Its whirring was noticeable to the ear of a critical listener, and became more obvious when vertically mounted.

There was no thermally variable speed control and the fan continued on full even after the drive was unmounted. If computer graphics card manufacturers can substitute heat sinks for fans on their MFLOPScapable slivers of silicon, I’m sure this type of fan could be eliminated from a pro-quality disk drive.

The only way to really test a drive is to use benchmark software to assess relative performance versus comparable products. I compared the Avastor to a Maxtor One Touch II 300Gb drive, a 7200rpm unit that also uses the Oxford FireWire chipset with a triple interface and, despite the slightly higher capacity and a 16Mb cache, costs a little less at a typical street price of UK£175. It’s exactly the sort of consumer drive Avastor is aiming to replace. Performance for up to 1Mb read/writes was very similar for the two, although the Avastor was nearly twice as fast for sequential reads under 64Kb, the Maxstor had the edge for random writes under 500Kb. To put this into perspective, random reads of this size for both drives were nearly twice as fast as that measured for a Lacie 7200rpm portable drive.

With larger file sizes of between 20Mb and 100Mb, the Avastor was consistently a very small amount faster than the Maxtor for writing, with read performance varying between the two according to file size. For example, for 100Mb the relative performance Avastor Maxtor was: Read 39.075—39.378Mb/sec, Write 37.674—37.214 Mb/sec. This is about one third faster than a Lacie portable for these file sizes. Reading and writing large files across the entire surface of a drive generally leads to a degradation in performance as the final 10% of the disk is reached. Testing the Avastor with 250Mb files, performance averaged 38.4—36.9 Mb/sec (read-write) dropping to a still respectable 33.3—34.2Mb/sec for the last 5% of the disk. The consumer Maxtor turned in a similar score except for the last 10% of the disk, which performed worse at 32.3-—30.6 Mb/sec (read-write).

The Avastor is a good performing drive packaged in a very sympathetic manner for professional audio use.

The device is let down by some fan noise, but would be quite happy stacked up via its rubber feet/recessed top cover indents in a machine room. ■

PROS

Performance; robust construction; packaging.

CONS

Fan.

Contact AVASTOR, US: Website: www.avastor.com Website: www.protape.co.uk

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April 2006

resolution

29

review

DW Fearn VT-7 Harking back to the days when people built gear as a statement of what was possible, this box is big, it’s red, it’s very heavy and a lot of the time you won’t hear it working.

GEORGE SHILLING tells you why you can’t go wrong.

S

UCH IS HIS PERFECTIONISM, Douglas Fearn spent nearly 10 years researching and designing this stereo compressor. You’ve seen the picture, it’s a 3U case, but in the flesh it is an even more imposing construction, with a great thick bevelled-edged front panel, and a paintjob seemingly thicker and shinier than a brand new steam train. The unit is extremely heavy, approaching 10kg, and the case is very deep.

Despite an all-valve Class A signal path, a surprising quantity of solid state electronics governs the compression characteristics. The case packs in circuitry of all types, from hand-wired components to surface-mount chips. Although I did not experience excessive heat it is recommended to allow 1U of space above and below. Furthermore, there is a sidemounted fan, which was a little noisier than I was comfortable with, with the unit unracked. But this was Serial No. 006, which had evidently been bashed around a bit.

Under the thick steel top panel there is an internally mounted thick steel sheet holding an entire city of components, including five PCBs, eight valves and four Jensen transformers, two labelled as custom made for Fearn. One PCB includes large capacitors and resembles an oil depot. The other boards are stacked in pairs, and include surface mounted components.

Several larger items hide underneath the metal sheet, including the mains transformer and aforementioned cooling fan. Eight separate regulated voltages are supplied to the plates.

The inner workings of this lovingly assembled monster are quite something to behold. Controls are in mirror formation on each side of the front panel, these correspond to left and right channels. Great big toggles switch the VUs from gain reduction to level indication, and these are proper official VU meters -– their characteristics conform to the relevant ASA standard, despite the cute stylised vintage surrounds.

These are pleasantly rear-lit, and there is also an orange ‘pilot-light’ when power is on. To be picky, orange legending on a red background doesn’t make for the most legible of labelling (But it does look good.

Ed). And the mirror layout of the knobs is counterintuitive, so I was frequently turning the wrong knob!

However, none of the knobs are labelled with any calibration so you just have to use your ears.

30

The rear of the deep, thickly panelled case includes XLR connections for the inputs and outputs, an IEC mains socket and voltage selector, plus a ground binding post. Also found hidden here beneath the IEC socket is a power rocker switch — not the most convenient location on a deep rack mounting unit.

After ditching the LA-2A concept, Fearn chose an unusual approach to compression. According to the manual, using a very high frequency carrier signal, a pulse-width modulator controls the duty cycle of a gain reduction element. Despite the solid state boards witnessed under the lid, the signal does not itself pass through this complex gain control, but instead a shunt circuit controls gain reduction, thus avoiding degradation and distortion. So this is no Fairchild — the sound is incredibly clean, quiet and neutral for a valve compressor, and relatively transparent.

However, despite the transparent nature, it sounds big and natural, effortlessly controlling signal dynamics.

There is no discernable colouration, even when working fast and hard. And it can certainly do that -– the time constants range from extremely fast to very slow.

The uncalibrated pots work smoothly, although the rotary Separate/Linked switch had worked itself loose on the review model. The Threshold knob reveals a resolution

fairly hard knee as it is turned clockwise. There are conventional Attack and Release knobs, but rather than a ratio control, there is a Harder-Softer knob. This control is difficult to fathom at first. Often, it seems moderate changes to this have little sonic effect, mainly because the compression is so clean, but it adjusts several characteristics. At Harder, the ratio is increased, but also, fast attack and release times seem to get even faster, so that large amounts of gain reduction on the fastest settings can start to introduce break-up of the sound on, say, drums. With a fast attack, it is possible to make drums sound choked. Slowing the attack and keeping the Release fairly quick produces great crunchy drum ambience, but this breathes better with the knob at full Softness. Turn towards Harder for more constipation. (George? Ed).

With all settings there seems to be something of an automatic release occurring, with fast transients flipping back and longer notes keeping the needle down for a very slow recovery when they stop.

Due to this clever circuitry, it is difficult to overdo other instruments and particularly vocals. Harder is generally better for tightening up bottom end, bass guitar is tamed in a very natural way with no apparent choking, although Softer can be more exciting, allowing more freedom for the signal to breathe. Because of the interaction with the Attack and Release knobs, it is best to tweak all three when setting up. The make-up Gain controls range from around -3 to +15dB, a good range with plenty of gain available and allowing fine adjustment. In Linked mode, all the control is on the left channel, with the right’s Gain knob the only active knob on that channel.

This makes stereo setup very straightforward.

The VT-7 (UK£2895 + VAT) represents one very dedicated man’s vision of the ultimate compressor and that vision is that it should essentially be invisible.

It doesn’t shout and boast, but instead performs an honest job of keeping dynamics in check. It is very hard to make this unit do anything bad; even if you set everything as fast as possible, the distortion is far from nasty. For all the solid state electrickery, you get a big natural valve sound, and even the hardest compression won’t colour the sound. You really can’t go wrong. ■

PROS

Straightforward, honest, intelligent, clean, valve compression; almost never sounds bad; compression can be virtually inaudible.

CONS

No bypass; no sidechain input; fan noise; rear power switch; mirror layout not intuitive; poor legending; heavy; expensive; compression can be virtually inaudible.

EXTRAS

Other really rather special boxes in the DW Fearn range include the VT-1 single-

channel vacuum tube mic preamp, VT-2 dual-channel version of the same, and the VT-4 vacuum tube LC equaliser.

Contact DW FEARN, US: Website: www.dwfearn.com UK, ASAP Europe: +44 20 7231 9661

April 2006

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review

Celemony Melodyne V3 It’s hard to categorise a piece of software like Melodyne. Is it a plug-in? A sample editor?

A DAW? A sequencer? Even after two solid days of putting Celemony’s latest release through its paces, the best JON THORNTON can come up with is none of the above, but at the same time all of the above.

F

OR THOSE OF YOU who may not have encountered this little software gem, it’s best initially described as a tool that enables pitch and formant shifting, time-stretching and editing of digital audio files. Available in a variety of guises (see Extras), the package on review is the all-singing alldancing Melodyne Studio.

Before looking at what’s new in V3, it’s worth just revisiting the general concepts. Taken at face value, Melodyne doesn’t do anything that a host of other plug-ins and/or outboard boxes can't do.

Pitch shifting and correction, even formant corrected shifting is hardly a new thing, and time compression or expansion are pretty commonplace techniques today. What sets Melodyne apart is the user interface and the ease with which these techniques can be applied to audio material in a very intuitive and musical fashion.

Audio can be imported into Melodyne as .WAV, .AIFF, or Sound Designer 2 formats. Alternatively, given a compatible I-O device, it can be recorded directly into the package. Once an audio file has been imported or recorded, Melodyne proceeds to analyse it, identifying information about both pitch and timing.

With short audio files this is virtually unnoticeable, with longer files it takes a short while, but this latest version marks a considerable speed improvement in this regard. Once a file has been analysed, Melodyne stores the metadata in a separate definitions file, so that subsequent opening of the audio doesn’t require a rescan.

The audio file is then displayed on the main edit screen, but segmented into ‘blobs’ (yes, that is the technical term used in the manual). These blobs look like familiar waveform views, except for the fact that they are not displayed in a straight horizontal line, but move up and down the screen according to their detected average pitch — very much like a sequencer’s grid edit page. Given the presence of suitable clues in the source material, Melodyne will also make educated guesses about the tempo of the piece, and split the audio into meaningful chunks, whether they be individual notes, drum hits or individual spoken words. What you are presented with, then, is your audio material on a grid with bars and beats on the horizontal axis, and pitch on the vertical axis.

Perhaps the biggest change in V3 is the increased reliability of this detection process, and the ability to apply it to a variety of source material. Rather than being constrained to monophonic source material with melodic content, V3 is happy to analyse non-melodic content, such as percussion or speech, complete mixes and even polyphonic sources. It can also intelligently decide which of the available detection routines is most suitable for a particular piece of audio, although this can be overridden by the user if desired.

Before you get too excited, the polyphonic analysis isn’t able to identify and separate individual notes within a guitar or piano chord, for example. But it is able to separate audio into musical events, each of which can be edited in terms of timing and pitch.

And this is really where Melodyne comes into its own. Blobs can quickly and easily be moved up and 32

down the screen to change their pitch, with or without formant correction. They can also be moved along the horizontal axis in terms of timing — and this is where Melodyne gets really clever. Particularly in the case of monophonic melodic material — for example, vocals or bass/string lines — individual blobs are still viewed as a continuous audio track. So moving the position of one blob will also automatically shorten or lengthen its length, while extending or shortening the length of its neighbour. Of course, you have a degree of control over this if you wish, and blobs can also be cut, copied and pasted at will, and as long as there is ‘space’ in the track, can be moved without altering other events. It is this transparency of operation at this most fundamental level that has won the hearts of so many users –- it looks and behaves entirely musically. Sure, you could do the same job in any number of DAWs with a combination of editing, pitch shifting and time stretching, but Melodyne does in seconds what could take hours. And the quality of the time-stretch and pitch-shift is simply staggering when used in moderate amounts, and not too shabby when used to excess.

There are a raft of other features — for example, blobs can be automatically pitch corrected to a variety of scales, and automatically quantised with respect to the timing grid either to the tempo Melodyne has determined for the piece, or to another tempo defined resolution

by the user or by another audio track. Formants can be shifted on individual blobs or groups of blobs independently of pitch, and there are tools to edit the detected pitch data on the very rare occasions when Melodyne gets it wrong.

V3 has rationalised the way the user accesses these functions, by separating the pitch detection window away from the main edit window, and by introducing context sensitive tools that perform different functions according to where the cursor is positioned with respect to the blob. The overall result is a package that looks more streamlined and handles more elegantly than previous versions.

Melodyne Studio also incorporates an arrange window that allows unlimited (dependent on CPU and disk speed) tracks of audio playback together with a basic audio mixer. This is useful for working on arrangements, or creating harmony structures within the package itself, and although it has its own basic effects and supports VST and Audio Unit plug-ins, it’s probably not going to worry Digidesign, Steinberg or Merging Technologies that much. For many users, then, a key question is how they will integrate Melodyne’s functionality into their DAW of choice.

Again, this is an area that has been improved in V3, with a revised ‘Bridge’ plug-in that squirts regions out of a DAW and into Melodyne and then back again, or by using Melodyne as a ReWire master or slave. Both of these approaches work, but it still feels a little clunky at times and the CPU and disk overhead in running two completely separate apps needs to be factored in here.

But despite this, the interface wins you over, and the quality of the results that can be obtained in a disgracefully short time will surprise you. Equally adept at vocals or fixing an errant bass guitar, flute or viola note — or at editing and re-timing drum parts — Melodyne seems to have come of age. In the past it might have been viewed as a slightly leftfield software curio; now it more than deserves to be regarded as a fully-fledged professional audio tool. ■

PROS

Intuitive and productive user-interface; extremely high quality pitch-shift and time-stretch; pitch-detection is extremely quick and accurate; ability to work with non-monophonic sources.

CONS

Integration with DAWs still feels a little clunky

EXTRAS

Melodyne is available in three different flavours. The high end Melodyne Studio (Euro 699) offers playback of unlimited audio tracks in its arrange page, and features detection and playback of polyphonic and complex material.

Melodyne cre-8 (Euro 319)offers only 8 tracks of audio playback, and doesn’t feature the polyphonic/complex material capabilities of Studio.

Melodyne Uno (Euro 169) has no multitrack capability, and has more limited editing capabilities than its stablemates.

Contact CELEMONY, GERMANY: Website: www.celemony.com

April 2006

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review

Waves SSL 4000 Collection Plug-in emulations of the automated console that typified an era and defined modern operational methods were inevitable given the drive to integrate everything into the DAW. GEORGE SHILLING dons flying goggles and helmet and revisits the resurrection of an old favourite.

T

HE MAJORITY OF my engineer flying hours were clocked up on SSL 4000 Series consoles. I have often fended off criticism of these desks from engineers who preferred rival manufacturers’ products.

This denigration invariably centres on the quality of the audio path. My defence is usually based on the superior operation and ergonomics of the SSL, the layout of the controls is wonderfully clear, and the integrated automation computer simple to use, its operation rarely interrupting the workflow. I can use a 4k with my eyes half-closed!

Although many loved the onboard compression, the integrity of the mic preamps, EQ and signal path were, in fairness, open to question. I never chose an SSL 4k room because of the sound of the desk. But I rarely found this a problem –- the sound of the SSL was undeniably crunchier than that of contemporary Neves, but in reality, the studio was booked, and you just made the best of whatever equipment was at hand. Plenty of hit records seemed to survive and prosper despite or because of this character (and the skills of engineers!) And part of the myth of the SSL sound was more to do with the all-too-tempting ease of popping in the characterful channel dynamics. My eyebrows raised when I learned of this product from Waves. After years of listening to people moaning about the sound of older SSLs, here was a plug-in aiming to emulate that sound!

The package (Price US$1000 native; US$2000 TDM), which was developed under license from Solid State Logic, comprises three separate plug-ins. The centrepiece is the E Channel which has the EQ, Filters and Dynamics sections of the ‘black-knob’ EQ vintage desk (superior to the earlier ‘brown knob’ EQ), along with a useful channel fader. The graphic rendering and shading is truly impressive.

But rather than representing them authentically inline, the sections have been placed more conveniently alongside each other. Sonically, the EQ seems very authentically recreated, with tremendous power and poke.

All the EQ bands and filters sound remarkably close to the SSL, albeit inconveniently 34

controlled by mouse. The green knobs operate the expander/gate and this also seems very closely emulated. The expander was mainly useful for reducing tape hiss; an application that is mainly redundant here.

The grey-knobbed compressor section is by contrast slightly disappointing. It seems to lack the dynamic punch of the original, and the auto-makeup gain doesn’t entirely convince. I may be mistaken, but it really doesn’t seem to add quite enough gain as the compression is increased, except with percussive signals. The Fast Attack mode’s character is closer to the original, but some of the magic still seems to be missing, and it needs to be pushed hard to start pumping like the original. When pushed to extremes, the break-up doesn’t really sound quite the same as I remember.

There is a separate plug-in for G Series EQ. Rather than high and low frequency bell-curve buttons, the extreme bands are fixed as shelving, while the middle two bands feature frequency shift buttons — divide by 3 on the low mid, and multiply by 3 on the high mid. I found this an irritation, the shift is an unmusical interval, and I missed the bell curves on high and low bands. The low-pass filter is inexplicably missing from the emulation. However, the tweakier curve character of the G EQ seems fairly well emulated.

Finally, the Mix Buss Compressor is recreated as a separate plug-in.

This was muchloved by engineers as a convenient and easy way of beefing the mix up and making things gel. One obvious difference is that the Make-Up gain knob also ‘Makes-Down’ by up to 5dB. The compression seems to lack some of the body of the original, and the Auto release setting doesn’t really seem quite the same.

It’s certainly an approximation but there are other mix bus compressor plug-ins available. Switching the In button out behaves the same as the real thing with very slow or Auto Release settings — it is not the same as bypassing, and a slow release ensues.

Also included here is the Auto-Fade function although unlike the desk, the indicator doesn’t extinguish when a fade-in is complete. It can, however be instantly defeated with Fade In, Out and Off states.

All three plug-ins include an ‘Analog’ On/Off switch — apart from the bus compressor, these are rendered as sliding switches and my natural inclination to click and drag initially frustrated my efforts when a simple click is all that is required. This changes the character of the plug-in in a fairly subtle manner. The manual states that turning this off removes the emulation resolution

of the distortion of the analogue signal paths of the modelled circuits. I tested this mixing a rock band in-the-box with an E channel on almost every signal, a few G EQs elsewhere, and a G EQ following a Bus Compressor across the mix. Comparing mixes with all Analog switches on and all off the difference is easily audible — the high end is definitely sweeter, individual elements such as acoustic guitars have a little more air without the Analog switch engaged, there is perhaps less midrange power, but an undoubtedly warmer, deeper bass end. So, things seemed to sound better when much of that carefully modelled character is defeated! However, things improved with entirely different mix bus processing using a UAD Fairchild and Sony Oxford EQ. If you need that authentic 80’s sound, much of it is here, particularly in the E EQ. Despite the availability of better modern EQs, such as McDSP’s FilterBank, this gives you the character and perhaps undesirable qualities that many of us spent years battling against! Waves hasn’t quite nailed the personalities of the channel and bus compressors, but they are pretty close. ■

PROS

E EQ closely modelled; brings back (fond?) memories!

CONS

Compressors not so accurate; sounds arguably better when ‘Analog’ emulation is off; expensive; SSL 4000 was never the best sounding hardware!

EXTRAS

Z-Noise from Waves has an ‘exclusive’ Extract mode that can create a noise

profile from sources that contain signal, as well as a flexible Adaptive mode.

Z-Noise claims to employ a new ‘more musical’ algorithm that delivers better low-frequency resolution and improved time sensitivity.

Described as a true broadband processor it uses a 5-band EQ interface and real-time operation means you can monitor the entire output or just the noise being removed.

Contact WAVES, ISRAEL: Website: www.waves.com

April 2006

review

DPA 4090 and 4091 Just out of Denmark are a couple of microphones that some people would see as an answered prayer or a contradiction in terms -– an inexpensive DPA stick microphone.

JON THORNTON aims to find out which.

I know that this is very much horses for courses, and perhaps we’ve all become accustomed to the slightly pinched sound of an SM57 here, but there you go.

Moving on to drums, and the 4090 was first positioned as a single kit overhead. Again, in comparison with the 414, it seemed to instantly give a nicely defined sense of tone –- particularly in the bottom couple of octaves, and good transient response to stick sound and cymbals. As part of the rationale for the 4091 with its reduced sensitivity is to enable it to deal with high SPLs without the need for a pad, I was keen to put it to the test inside the kick drum shell. It certainly dealt with the sound pressure well, with no hint of distortion, and again did a good job of capturing the tone and resonance of the drum -– but I’m not a great fan of either an omni or a capacitor mic in this particular position, so it was quickly retired.

Moving further away, and set as a distant room mic for the kit, it gave a well balanced, if slightly ‘rounded off’ sound. Actually, in this application the sound was perfectly suited to the track, but compared with the 414 it seemed to roll off the HF in a much more pronounced manner, leading me to think that any critical application on the mid to far field probably wouldn’t suit these mics as well.

In comparison with other microphones with similarly sized diaphragms they aren’t excessively noisy, but you certainly notice the difference when compared to their big brother, the 4006, with its larger diaphragm. DPA’s own specs put the equivalent noise figures at 23dB(A) for the 4090 and 26db(A) for the 4091, which to my ears sounds a little on the pessimistic side, but it’s certainly noticeable with quiet, distant sources.

If you are looking, then, for a cheap alternative to a pair of 4006s, the 4090/4091 probably isn’t for you.

If, though, you want a natural sounding, versatile omni for instrument miking in pretty much any music genre, they put forward a very compelling case. ■

PROS

Price; natural, very open sound; sound great on stringed instruments.

CONS

A little noisy for some distant miking applications.

EXTRAS

T

HE TWO MICS being looked at here are both fixed pattern omnis, with the 4090 and 4091 differing chiefly in their sensitivity — the 4090 being a high sensitivity version (20mV/Pa) and the 4091 being less sensitive (6mV/Pa) but with a correspondingly higher SPL handling ability (each UK£295 + VAT).

At the sharp end, literally, as these microphones look like slightly stubby measurement microphones with a very tapered front end, both mics feature a permanently polarised capsule with a 5.4mm diaphragm. DPA aficionados might recognise the similarity here with the capsules employed in the highly rated 4060/4061 lavalier type mics, and it has to be said that these new models appear to have taken the underpinnings of these designs and packaged them in more rugged, XLR-interfaced and phantom powerable package. You can see the rationale here, not only is the whole thing potentially more rugged, but also it looks the part, particularly in certain quarters where the use of a lavalier might raise eyebrows…

The microphones ship in a tidy plastic case, and come complete with a foam windshield and a solid clip. Unusually in this price bracket (although not 36

for DPA), each mic is also accompanied by its own individualised frequency plot. Response is pretty close to linear from 20Hz to 20kHz, so much so that one of these could double as a reference or measurement mic in some applications. The accompanying brochure and press materials seem to position the 4090 and 4091 as instrument mics though, and so this was the application they were first put to work in.

First up was a double bass as part of a skiffle recording, and the 4090 sounded positively gorgeous in this application (Skiffle? Ed). Loads of body and fundamental tone to the instrument, coupled with plenty of definition and bite to the pluck sound. It also seemed very benign in terms of placement, with different approaches yielding instantly good, if different, balances to the instrument.

It was the same story on acoustic guitar, played strummed and picked –- lots of body without ever sounding boomy or overblown, together with a great attack to the sound that made a 414 on its omni setting sound quite brittle in comparison. Used close in on an electric guitar amp, though, was a different story. Both the 4090 and the less sensitive 4091 didn’t really do it for me in this application, seeming to round out the sound a little too much for my taste. resolution

DPA’s 4006-TL builds on the characteristics and qualities of the original while being equipped with

a state-of-the-art, transformerless preamp and 48V phantom power. The transformerless design of the 4006TL removes the risk of saturation at high levels of low frequencies, giving an extended low-frequency handling capability (10Hz to 20kHz +/-2dB).

Contact DPA MICROPHONES, DENMARK: Website: www.dpamicrophones.com

April 2006

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Ray Staff He’s one of the most respected mastering engineers of his generation and he continues to span multichannel and vinyl in his work. GEORGE SHILLING talks to Ray Staff about online mastering, MP3 and that confounded ‘hot’ CD issue.

R

AY STAFF’S FIRST JOB was working for Malcolm Toft at Trident in late 1970 and he became the in-house mastering engineer at this historic studio in its heyday. He mastered Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane albums, and Elton John’s Madman Across The Water. Seminal classics such as Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti and Supertramp’s Crime Of The Century also passed through Staff’s cutter head. Although much of his work is now for CD, he continues to master vinyl, and is highly regarded for his audiophile reissue work.

Recently he mastered the hugely successful Corinne Bailey Rae album, proving he remains current. Along with several ex-Sony Whitfield Street colleagues he joined the new Alchemy Soho team and is now situated on the 29th floor of London’s imposing Centre Point building. He uses large B&W floormounted hi-fi speakers rather than full-size studio monitors, ‘definitely the way for me for mastering’ he says. The additional benefit of these, combined with a low-profile console arrangement, is that the stunning views of London through the pair of large windows are unimpeded, with (thankfully) no piles of DAT machines in the way of the tweeters…

38

How has mastering changed since you started?

When I first started in 1971 or 72, it was more of a transfer process. The producers would deliver something, and people like Gus Dudgeon were so fussy that if it wasn’t cut flat, they’d be more inclined to do a remix than let us mess about with it. Now the biggest change is that people come to you and they expect you to make something out of it, it’s a much more creative process. You’re compensating for what’s wrong, and the final thing is how loud can you get it, how much crunch do you want.

Are you appreciated for different things now?

Yes, before it was a more engineering approach to cutting, it was how clean and loud you could get the transfer to vinyl without messing it up.

Are the changes due to the delivery formats?

No, as it progressed you noticed a big change in the early 1970s, people started to say, how can you improve it? And everyone wanted to match American cutting levels, so you had to learn to manipulate the sound and make things sound louder, even if it wasn’t resolution

physically louder. You could never match American cuts that were done on, say, a Westrex or Haeco Systems, because they had intrinsic character. You just couldn’t do it with a Neumann, it didn’t have that same signature.

How much has the change in formats affected you?

It’s certainly given you more to think about, because each format has its own problems, and you have to optimise for that format. Certainly when cassettes were around they had their own intrinsic problems and you had to make up a special cassette master.

With good experience, a good proportion of the time you can do something that works for CD and vinyl.

But a good proportion of the time, you can’t, because vinyl won’t accommodate it. A nice working day in the 1970s would be to come in and cut a couple of vinyl LPs, now you have to do the vinyl, the CD, the DVD, MP3, ringtones…

How do masters you receive differ?

Well years ago it was always quarter-inch…

But how does the content differ?

Oh, well some of it sounds good, if you’ve got good engineers and producers with a good budget, they’ve worked in a reasonable studio, they can come up with some great sounding tapes that sound as good if not better than what we’d have done 20 or 30 years ago.

On the other hand you get people working on a small budget in an all-digital environment, not always the best kit, and what you get can be a problem, it sounds brash and thin.

April 2006

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craft Is that the gear or the engineer?

I don’t think you can always get to the bottom of that, sometimes I’ve used the same systems and heard good results. But so many people are learning as they go, they don’t have that core experience we’d have got before — they’re let loose on the kit. The classic thing is when you get people sending files and they’ve run it through a plug-in to supposedly make it louder, which just ties our hands.

Do people generally know what they want?

Some do, if they don’t, I suggest that they bring some CDs to get a judgement on the room. You get some people who want something totally different, and you experiment. The other problem is you get stuff delivered through FTP, sometimes you’re working with people and you don’t know what they want.

I’ve seen people send stuff, not with me, but they’ve got stuff back and don’t like what they’ve got. And they haven’t even done a test on one track, they go the whole hog.

How do you feel about on-line mastering?

There is that problem, knowing what you’re going to get back. In terms of quality, it’s not an issue, although some people think it is. If you play a file on a different machine, it will sound different, I found even changing hard drive, computer, D-A and so on can make a difference to the jitter and the quality of the audio.

Some software sounds cleaner than others — for playback I use Wavelab, it’s a good, basic program, and for all PCM modes I haven’t got issues. It’s the system that changes the sound, the clocking and so on, but the file doesn’t change the sound. As far as the file itself, I’ve got no problems with that in terms of quality, it’s just how you handle it. I am concerned that with some FTP there is no verification or data compare, it’s just drag-and-drop, so there could be errors. You’ve got to do something that checks it’s right.

What’s to stop me setting up shop?

Yep, there’s nothing to stop you, but fortunately they keep coming back to us and not to you!

There are more projects produced, engineered and played by one person…

Oh yes, we get that. We also get people sending stuff as they go along, and they’re not sure how well it’s coming out. We’ll do one or two songs, then by the time they’ve done the album, hopefully they’ve found their direction.

Have you ever had people bring in their rig and finish the mix with you?

Oh yeah, that is a nightmare. It is really hard, because your mix will only sound as you wanted it in the room where you mixed it. When you take it into another room you’ll mix it to this acoustic, this set of speakers.

I’ve got to the point where I say to the guys, I don’t want to be confused by what you’re doing, if you want to adjust your mixes to my room, I’ll leave you for a while. But if you’re trying to master while people are tweaking in the background, that can be a problem.

That said, there was one instance it was very useful, we had a problem with a strange vocal sound, it was good but in some places it became brash and edgy; we put the Cranesong plug-in onto the vocal and smoothed it, and adjusted it track-by-track, and that really was handy. I could not have got at that in the EQ. But the producer hadn’t spotted it at home.

What do you think of the loudness war situation? Is mastering to blame?

Mastering is all to blame, because I assume it was mastering engineers who pushed it up there. It can sound very, very bad, it can sound so edgy, compressed and dull, it doesn’t sound so good on the radio — everyone thinks it makes it sound better on radio, but quite often it sounds worse. The other side of the coin is that there are some people who can make it sound loud and do it well, and people who do it loud and it isn’t done particularly well. Not that you could police or organise a standard, but it would be nice if there was a reference level that everyone adhered to, so that there was a certain amount of dynamic range, but I can’t see that happening.

It’s happened with film though…

Definitely within film, that seems to be better; I give Bob Katz his due with his K System, he’s thought it through.

40

resolution

April 2006

craft Is there any sign things might improve?

At the end of the day you have to give the client what they want. Hopefully some of the stuff we do here doesn’t sound as gritty and edgy as some others. All we can do is try not to damage the musical material if we can help it. Unless there is some agreed standardisation that everyone can adhere to, I don’t see what else we’re going to do. But you can’t police that, someone will come along and turn it up.

Do you do much surround?

I’ve done more recently, mainly live gigs remixed for DVD. I’ve heard some great 5.1, but a lot of the live gigs don’t give you that all-encompassing air you get in an auditorium. You often find that the mixes come in feeling very front and very back, so play a song and it almost feels like a stereo mix at the front, at the end the audience goes ‘Waaaay’ at the back, then the concert carries on in front, nothing joins it up. And sometimes it feels very multi-speaker, so separated out that it doesn’t feel real. Some people really over-work the sub, and it doesn’t make musical sense. Some clients prefer to keep it 5.0 and that often works much better.

What’s your dither of choice, and does it make much difference?

Yes, I did an album for an artist in Ireland and it sounded very nice, we didn’t do much to it. He rang me back and said it sounds great but something isn’t quite right. I ran him another CD with a different dither, and he rang back and said yeah, sounds great. I’ve sat there and listened to different types of dither and on some stuff it makes a difference, other times you can’t really hear. You’d be surprised how sometimes it can make things sound cleaner and ADC1 Half Resol 16-12-05 12/16/05 6:38 less grainy. I do like PowR, I like UV22, but I’d like

to get Dave Hill’s, I’ve heard good things about it. If I’m mastering for CD, I listen through the convertors at 16-bit with dither, so that I know what that dither has done to it — I’m EQing with the dither in, even though it’s a 24-bit file.

How much vinyl mastering do you do?

There’s been a nice increase in people doing 7inch promos and singles. Most of my cutting is for audiophile release; Pure Pleasure who I do a lot of work for just won an award for some of our work. I do three or four a month.

If you’re mastering for audiophile vinyl from analogue, does it get digitised along the way?

No it certainly doesn’t. You can work from analogue tapes and keep it analogue all the way. When I go home, I do not feel as fatigued as when I’m doing CDs. I did some Elvis Presley, which was from a oneto-one 1/4-inch copy from the original 1/4-inch, and it sounded stunning. A lot of that early analogue stuff doesn’t need a lot of EQ. But if it needs it we can EQ in analogue, we’ve still got a dual path A80 so you’ve got preview and advance. The only time I’ve taken them to digital is when we’ve had to rescue the tapes, when the tapes are falling apart, or if we want to edit into a different running order — when the tapes are that old I wouldn’t edit them because some are very delicate. I’ll do it at 96kHz and we’ll cut from that.

Have you mastered specifically for MP3?

Yes. First off you have to look at the software you use to write the MP3 files, they all sound different. I remember the first time we came to do it, and myself and the producer spent a long time using all different AM Page 1 encoders, we ended up with something on his Mac.

It’s not about EQing differently, it’s about finding the right encoder. It’s a nightmare! One thing that annoys me is that when you finish the album they send a CD audio disc to be ripped-in, that’s going to deteriorate the sound straight away. If they want to do the encoding we encourage people to take WAVs, especially if there’s a crossfade in the album, we can undo that and they’ve got a neat edit. It’s the same with the CD plant, I try and persuade people to take DDP rather than CD audio. It’s a small quality improvement, but every little bit helps. But I’ve twice seen people get quantities of duplicates of the DDP image from the plant! ■

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41

Florian Camerer As close to a multichannel audio evangelist as we get in broadcast, yet he is just an ordinary chap who spends his days in sessions and on projects. ZENON SCHOEPE talks with ORF’s surround meister.

F

LORIAN CAMERER PLAYED an important part in his own broadcaster’s adoption of multichannel sound and, because his employer is Austria’s ORF and was the ‘significant leap’ in worldwide multichannel broadcast, by definition he has played an important part in starting the movement worldwide. Despite this achievement, he’s not some high ranking management type but still spends his days in studios, on session, planning and training in his native Vienna. With the recent creation of two Lawo-equipped multichannel studios ORF has two fabulous rooms to create surround in and Florian remains in the thick of it all.

His education included courses in electrical and sound engineering and coming from a musical and engineering household it was always on the cards that he would combine the two in some way as a career. After sending his CV around all the major broadcasters in Europe he got a temporary break at ORF as a paternity leave stand-in. Predictably, he shone, was hired permanently, was mixing before long and set himself the goal of making principal 42

sound engineer in five years, which he achieved.

He was handed a leaflet on ProLogic in what he describes as a significant moment and says his path was then set. He is seen as a champion for multichannel in broadcast and continues to travel and spread the word. ‘Europe is gearing up for 5.1 in broadcasting and I travel around to help convince management,’ he says. ‘It’s usually easier for somebody from outside to come in and play some stuff — they take you more seriously… the in-house engineers are the crazy bunch, just like I used to be regarded here!’

Yet his attitude to his work remains as thorough and enthusiastic as ever and he’ll tell you that he always speaks up on sessions and that even as an assistant he couldn’t help himself from correcting the grammar of the voiceover script. Audio engineering in broadcasting carries enormous responsibility and he believes engineers should speak up and contribute because in many instances they are the first ‘outsiders’ able to appraise a project once all the diverse elements of a programme have finally been brought together. resolution

You identify that first encounter with the ProLogic leaflet as pivotal for you but how did multichannel develop at ORF? It started with this huge Arctic project [1993-1994 Arctic North East documentary that traced an Austrian expedition of the 1870s] that I started as an assistant on and I mixed as an assistant. The director was the first to get permission to shoot up there after the break up of the Soviet Union. It was the major project of my documentary life and I was only three years with the company. Through that director I also got into documentary film making and became responsible for every sound job in the course of the workflow. After that project I was also made a staff engineer.

I remember going into the director’s office as a nobody — as an assistant — and saying that I was interested in getting involved with the project when they were recruiting.

It’s also how surround started here because the director was doing mono and because it was such a big project and an environmental project I said we should do something different. I mixed the principal series in Dolby Surround in 1995 and that was our first ProLogic transmission. From then on, I started to remix a part of it in 5.1 in 1996 on the SSL Scenaria [modified to Omnimix]. Once I realised the freedom that you have with 5.1 compared to ProLogic then I really got into it and started to remix programmes we had done, documentaries, to get experience.

I started showing this to creative people, like directors, and to my peers and started to try to promote it internationally especially in documentary April 2006

craft film making because in 5.1 everything started in music — pop music in the States and classical in Europe — and feature films, of course. There was nothing in the regular TV business; no shows and no documentaries and it is so worthwhile to do documentaries in 5.1.

For years I was the only one travelling around internationally with 5.1 documentaries and it got to the point where it was: ‘Oh no, here comes bloody Camerer again with his stuff!’ But I got very proficient at it and I was very sure it was a good thing to do in broadcasting and I started to promote it in management but at the time they were very reluctant to go into it — it was new technology and the immediate benefit was questionable.

I always thought that when we do 5.1 we should be at the forefront and use it as PR to the public — ORF is modern, ORF does new things, uses new technology, we are not lagging behind. They didn’t really agree with me for years and I think they were happy when I left the room again — ‘We’ll let him do his stuff!’ — they sort of tolerated what I did but they didn’t really use it.

There was a change in management and I was already heavily promoting it inside the company — doing all the in-house training in 5.1, being in contact with the Dolby guys. When all the Dolby gear became a really closed system with all the gear and expertise you could need for the broadcast market in place, then it really started to get hot. The solution was there and it was clear that we would go the Dolby route because of the metadata and Dolby E, etc. Once all that was clear, a change in management here immediately understood what such a move would mean in PR value. We met in Munich at the AES Convention in 2002 at the Dolby booth, talked for 15 minutes, shook hands and said ‘let’s do it.’

It had to be a really big first production and we were asked if we could do the New Year’s Concert — we had half a year — we spoke to all the people responsible and we did it.

had to route the Dolby E signal around master control.

We are now rebuilding that and integrating it in a very nice concept that we didn’t have when we started. But basically it’s a bunch of Dolby equipment, installation costs, infrastructure adaptations and training and we equipped two complete transmission chains for around UK£250,000.

you’d just lay your stereo atmospheres back and front and that’s it — that’s your additional work. You could easily expand those type of programmes to 5.1 and you’d have your mono effects and Foley anyway to the centre or 3-channel front. From then on you could get composers more interested in it and delivering 4 or 5-channel music tracks to you.

What adaptations can be made to make 5.1 documentary work more efficient?

It depends very much on how the director is editing and story telling. The director I was working with was always looking for a fresh perspective, so he was giving space to creativity audio-wise. With a regular natural history ‘struggle for survival’ type of documentary it’s rather easy because all you would do is expand the atmosphere track to four or five channels and if you don’t record 5-channel atmospheres then

Are there ways of optimising workflow for 5.1 in TV drama?

5.1 recording in sync on location will never be done because what’s in the surrounds? The crew standing around chewing gum! There’s usually nothing significant going on in the surrounds when you’re shooting dialogue but you could have multichannel atmospheres recorded the next day, for example. I think it would be worthwhile; we once did a complete feature drama in M/S stereo for location sound,

And from then on 5.1 has been rolling at ORF? It’s been good. There have not been too many ‘official’ 5.1 jobs and a lot of stuff was done after the stereo transmission for DVD release and 5.1 for documentary is much more expensive because you need much more time. The easy thing is live programmes because to rig up a few more mics and your control room is a one-time thing and then it goes out live and that’s it.

In documentary you have to do a lot more in terms of track laying, location sound, mixing and it takes a lot more time.

Do you think that’s why the take up in broadcast will always be slow?

For documentaries yes, because when it comes down to it it’s a money issue. Nowadays the production departments won’t give you a penny more — the amount of additional time involved must be very low and the additional expense has to be below 10%. That is very tough to do for documentary. So, what we do is live programming because the increased cost for doing 5.1 is almost negligible.

I was surprised to discover that ORF’s switch to 5.1 didn’t cost that much yet the cost of infrastructure changes is frequently quoted as an objection to going 5.1.

There is one thing to bear in mind, we couldn’t route the multichannel signal through our regular master control infrastructure because we didn’t have that second bit-transparent route. So when we started we April 2006

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craft But if you think about story telling issues in surround sound then the programme and the story has to lend itself to it. Otherwise don’t bother; otherwise it’s too gimmicky.

I’ve listened to programmes where they’ve had the surround channels and they’ve panicked and had to put something in them. It takes time to accept that if something’s mono you can leave it in mono and if it’s stereo you can leave it as stereo without spreading it around — you don’t get punished for not doing that and there are no Surround Sound Police.

On the contrary, the contrast between all the different expansions of your sound field — mono, stereo, etc — and the cut/dissolve between all these things makes your programme interesting.

which is unusual, and we piped it through a whole postproduction chain in M/S and you get all the natural acoustics from the dialogue recording on-set.

The thing is that your programme has to allow for the possibilities you have in surround. What’s the point of doing news in 5.1 when there is no use for the surround channels? Programme makers have to appreciate that there is some additional value in doing a programme in 5.1.

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So you’re saying either factor in surround at the beginning of a production or don’t bother at all?

Expanding a stereo atmos to 4-channel is nicer to listen to than just the stereo, if only because you have the narration in the centre. Similarly 3-channel is better than two because you have a larger sweet area and that would be advantageous for news, particularly to how it connects the sound to the video.

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What are you happiest doing?

I was very happy when I was responsible for the whole audio chain from acquisition to final mixing and mastering. It’s not very usual in the drama and feature film world and it has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage is that you know exactly what you need on location and you can only blame yourself if you forget something. You also know what you need for the mixing stage and for the track lay and you also know exactly what you’ve got. It can be a nice smooth process and I like the complete control.

On the downside, the danger is that you get too narrow-minded and don’t have that broad view of the dubbing mixer in the States or UK who gets fresh material and judges it for whether it works or not and is independent of whether you are personally attached to the sound.

I’ve always liked the creative side of track laying — I love to work with atmospheres. My first stem mixes are always atmospheres and they are my most elaborate. If you do that well with a lot of variation it

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craft so quickly draws you into the story and sets the mood.

It’s what I’ve always found fascinating is that you can set the pace and mood with a nicely crafted 5-channel atmos track. Then everything else goes on top of that.

When you’re working on atmos tracks, what’s your workstation of choice?

When it comes down to tools I’m not so specific that I have to have a particular product. Tools are very often overrated — they have to have certain level of quality, of course, and it’s nice if you have certain features because that facilitates things, but you know in the old days of analogue and mono they made nice documentaries then too with nice atmos tracks. So it’s much more down to the craft.

I was lucky that I did most of my early stuff on the Omnimix and Scenaria systems from SSL, which were way ahead of their time, and we were lucky to get that system very early on. We began on the Scenaria and because it wasn’t able to do the surround stuff we upgraded it to Omnimix and that was one of the first installations. I really liked the Screensound editor because it was purpose-built for audio for video; it was perfect. It was my workstation of preference because it was the only one we had!

We now have Pro Tools and Nuendo and for projects now I would work on Pro Tools.

Do you have a preference for desks?

Again, not really. In broadcast it’ll be a digital desk now. The difference in sound between analogue and digital, if both are done right, in broadcasting is not of primary importance because your transmission channel usually disguises any differences anyway and the problems you are usually faced with are much more severe than the difference between the sound of a digital and analogue desk. I need automation; elaborate automation in a desk for documentaries is very important because it’s a feature film type mix.

I also like desks with complete DSP on every channel — I don’t want to be assigning EQ and how many bands of EQ I’ll need before I start. I’m very happy with the Lawo [mc282] consoles because the modular concept is very appealing to us. You can do the bigger mixes and the smaller everyday mixes easily, you have the cues for the voice talent, the automation. It’s a versatile desk that you can tailor to your needs.

What are the attitudes at ORF towards miking in 5.1 for concerts?

The music engineers pretty much use a system based on the omnipresent Decca Tree for classical recording.

Some 80% of all recordings are made with a pair of spaced omnis and a Decca tree arrangement for stereo and the arrangement is very easily adapted to 5.1. It has advantages in terms of downmix properties and they all know how to work a Decca Tree with spot mics because they have been using it for such a long time.

The downmix is very important, the stereo of the New Year's Concert is a downmix of the 5.1 so what 90% of the viewers listen to is a downmix. It’s a good transitional system and the omnis are nice for the low end and you have that artificial spaciousness of the spaced omni.

We changed our surround pickup following a big microphone comparison a couple of years ago where we recorded our ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra with seven different surround systems on a 48-track Sony.

We mixed it down and made an immediate comparison and the big discovery for the surround pickup system was the Hamasaki Square [after Kimio Hamasaki of the NHK Science and Research Laboratory]. It’s four fig-8s in a square arrangement quite far behind the April 2006

orchestra — you can use it quite high up in the hall — and the fig-8s are oriented so their nulls are pointing at the orchestra and you pick up only side reflections depending on how you orientate them.

The way they can be mixed is with the fig-8s nearest the orchestra into the front left and right and those at the back are mixed left and right surround so you have ambient signals in all four channels. If you have them very far back in the room, away from the main system, you have to time compensate them in postproduction. For live we use a modified Hamasaki square. We’re a little bit closer and below the echo limit of about 30ms, so that’s about 9-10m away from the principal system and we’ve also replaced the front fig-8s with cardioids facing slightly downwards but back from the orchestra to get more direct pickup from the applause but still to have that cancellation of the direct sound.

What are the things everyone has to understand about multichannel?

There are technical aspects and practical aspects to it.

Technically when you go to microphone setups you have to understand the basic rules about the speed of sound and how you derive your stereo system from that and then you expand that to surround sound.

You have to understand surround sound microphony — that there is voodoo, there is taste and there is science and that’s the basis for what you need on location. Then there’s room setup and these are practical things.

When you are actually working in surround there are maybe only two things to concentrate on. One is that you should use the additional channels in surround with clear intent and motivation. Just because you have two surround channels and speakers is no reason to use them all the time. You use the surround channels, you use the centre because you want to achieve this effect, that impression. If it’s black and white footage you put it in the centre in mono because you choose to do that. Some people panic and say ‘but we’ve only got a mono track, put it in all five channels!’ You can expand it out again when the black and white footage ends and you have a 5-channel signal again and it makes it more interesting.

The other thing is that we have to evolve from using surround as an effect to the point where it is an overall impression. We don’t want to be pointing with a sledgehammer to ‘Here is the surround channel, here is the centre,’ — ping ponging between all the channels. I always have a 5-channel atmosphere going, low in level or high in level, so you are constantly being drawn into it and not being drawn to the separate channels. You can also use phantom imaging between the channels — many multichannel music mixes are five times mono.

With good classical music you’re not aware that it is surround until you switch the surrounds off — people tend to exaggerate when they start off just like everyone does with a new technology. ■

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sweet spot

Genelec DSP monitoring technology Integrating DSP into monitoring requires a number of key decisions to be made in the design and implementation stages if the technology is to offer real benefits to the user. Genelec’s CHRISTOPHE ANET and ILPO MARTIKAINEN explain the company’s take on the subject and how it has been applied to its new monitor products.

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ACK IN THE 1970s the engineers who wrote the original Nordic Broadcast N12 specification for monitoring conditions in control rooms were very modern thinkers. One of the most advanced requirements was probably that the specification of the monitor’s frequency response was defined, with acceptable tolerances, in the control room at the engineer’s listening position.

This led to the question of how to guarantee meeting such specifications in varying room acoustic conditions. The solution was first to include calibrated rotary switches for frequency response adjustments in the monitors and these worked well and were later replaced by DIP switches. In the mid 1990s Genelec started to collect data from studios worldwide to observe and analyse what the real spectrum of room acoustic conditions was and how the products were set up. The results were somewhat surprising. The collected data was very useful in helping users to get the best out of their systems and to make their work as easy as possible. One result of the analysis is now included in the larger 8000 series monitors: the desktop compensation control that corrects the 160Hz boost caused by console-top loading when monitors are placed on the meter bridge. Another example is DIPtimiser software that works in conjunction with WinMLS measurement software. Based on the measured response, DIPtimiser calculates the

optimum settings for the DIP switches on the back of Genelec monitors.

DSP crossover filters have existed for more than 15 years in sound reinforcement and the first active speaker systems with DSP crossovers appeared in the consumer world around that time. Typically the frequency response was ruler flat but perceived subjective performance was not as good as one would expect. At the same time, understanding of the criteria for excellent subjective performance was somewhat limited. Now it has become evident that excellent on-axis performance is not sufficient; the off-axis and power responses are also equally important.

Equalisation of complicated errors is possible, but the problem of the listening area remains: optimising response at one point in space often means a less desirable response somewhere else. The old wisdom is true also here: it is better to prevent the errors from happening than correct them afterwards. Therefore the starting point should be pretty much as good as it can be.

So what are the benefits of using elaborate technologies? Steep crossover filters that can improve directional and off-axis performance are easy to construct with DSP. Equalisation of driver unit magnitude and phase responses is also straightforward but if the starting points are excellent the audible improvements may be small. However, correcting the room response is a very important feature, which can clearly improve the perceived response. If more of the possible DSP potential is to be exploited, the room response correction function needs a measurement system, including signal generator, microphone, software to analyse the results in terms of their audible effects and a way to inject the measurement results into the monitor. Technically this is straightforward engineering and psychoacoustics, but from the average user’s point of view such a

procedure should be automated.

Conversion of the market requirements to a complete product specification is always a challenging task. Inclusion of some features may exclude some others, but the end result should match most of 46

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sweet spot the real world needs. As said earlier, the starting point should be as good as possible. In our case the recently introduced 8000 series monitor design avoids all the common aberrations related to distortions, diffraction and uneven directivity, and hence it forms an ideal platform for using DSP in crossover filters and room response correction.

Hardware and electro-acoustic design were thus quite ready for 8240A and 8250A, the DSP counterparts for 8040A and 8050A. The change from stereo to multichannel productions in the analogue and digital production environment has caused major technology changes and has created new requirements for console manufacturers.

However, it will take some time before the installed base of analogue and digital mixing consoles have extended multichannel monitor routing and the appropriate volume controls.

As the installed base of mixing consoles have different monitoring outputs, DSP loudspeaker systems need both analogue and digital inputs.

There are many options for transmitting digital audio but to adhere to an industry standard, we chose AES-EBU. The obvious solution for the requirements of monitor grouping, global volume control and other similar functions, as well as automated room response correction is to connect all loudspeakers to a control network and have the software perform the necessary functions.

Many different audio control networks have been proposed, but none have gained unanimous popularity. Our industry has some way to go before it has the network standards that are common in many other industries (for example, CAN which is found in every modern car). We developed a bi-directional network using the physical layer of CAT5 cable, RJ45 connectors and related electronics with a proprietary network protocol. The user interface is called GLM, Genelec Loudspeaker Manager, and can control up to 30 loudspeakers. The GLM software runs on PC (soon on Mac too) and with it the user has global monitor volume control, user-definable preset levels, individual channel mute and solo functions, bass management bypass as well as system mute and dim commands.

The GLM software is designed with usability in mind. It is simple to use and has Cabling Wizards for setting up cables, channels, and basic system connections and an Acoustic Wizard for setting distances, room response controls and loudspeaker sensitivity level. The GLM software can be minimised on screen to have the basic controls visible. In addition to the graphical fader, the volume control can also be a hardware knob connected to a USB port.

However, all applications do not need full control of everything all the time and there are plenty of cases where it is actually better to limit user access. In these cases the system has two additional operational modes: Stand-Alone (stored settings) and Stand-Alone (manual) mode. Both can be used with analogue or digital sources. The ‘stored settings’ mode is very convenient in applications where the system needs to be properly set up and calibrated without the need for extra changes. After setting up the system with the help of the GLM wizards, the data is stored in each loudspeaker and the network can be shut down or disconnected. In this mode the console monitoring section (either analogue or digital) provides all monitoring options. The ‘Manual’ mode uses the April 2006

on the GLM control network. AutoCal uses a sine tone sweep generated in each monitor and subwoofer. This sweep is recorded using the 8200A Calibration Microphone at one (SinglePoint) or more positions (MultiPoint). The frequency response for every monitor is calculated.

AutoCal then determines the correct acoustical settings for flat frequency response at the listening position (or over an area), aligns for equal delay from all monitors to the primary listening position, and aligns output levels and subwoofer crossover phases.

AutoCal sets the four notch filters in the 7200 series subwoofers and four notch filters in the 8200 series monitors along with two high frequency and low frequency shelving filters. The automated calibration procedure aligns distances within 1.5cm and levels to within 1dB. A typical 5.1 system takes about five minutes to calibrate.

The technology in Genelec 8200/7200 DSP loudspeakers is not there to correct and fix mistakes in the electro-acoustic design but rather to offer improved usability and flexibility for often complicated and rapidly changing productions and to provide an efficient tool for integrating loudspeakers into the acoustics of the listening environment. The monitoring system should adapt to the working needs and situations as far as possible, not the other way around. Built on the solid acoustical foundation of the 8000 and 7000 series products, these new products are the logical step in the line of development to make the end user’s work easier, 3/4/06 3:52 PM Page 1 more enjoyable and more productive. ■

well-known dip switch controls common to the 8000 series analogue products. In this respect the 8200 series products emulate the 8000 series and this can be useful in facilities that have analogue and digital rooms.

The 7000 series subwoofers were the starting point for the 7260A, 7270A and 7271A DSP subwoofers.

They have full network control and an eight-channel AES-EBU bass management system. The 7200 series subwoofers can only be used with AES-EBU signals.

It is easy to identify that the most audible improvement potential of DSP based systems lies in automated room response correction. It is more rule than exception to read or hear comments of too much or too little bass and monitors are often blamed. maselec_PAR.qxd Although the perception is true, in most cases there is no problem in the monitor itself. The reasons are either in the room or in the H E B E S T S O U N D I N T H E W O R L D placement of the monitor in the room, or both.

My clients include the Foo Fighters, Bruce The Maselec Master Series from However, the magnitude of Springsteen, Bon Jovi and The Rolling Stones.

Prism Sound: the aberrations a room or The Maselec Master Series wrong placement can cause Leif Mases’ legendary engineering work from Prism Sound provides may exceed any reasonable with Led Zeppelin, Abba and Black me with the precision tools Sabbath led to the creation of the MEA-2 correction capacity, and I need to create the EQ and the MLA-2 Compressor. hence everything possible distinctive results my should be done to remove The MEA-2 EQ has a unique sonic clients demand. the root causes. As said in character made possible by its distinctive EQ curve shape.

The MLA-2 is a the beginning, it is better transparent but effective compressor that to prevent the errors from is totally intuitive, effortlessly handling the happening than to correct toughest dynamics. them afterwards. Also the microphone works in a To find out more about the Maselec story or to different way to an ear, request a demo call us NOW or visit www.prismsound.com so the correction algorithms should be carefully considered.

The Genelec AutoCal is a Stephen Marcussen fully automated acoustical Marcussen Mastering (Hollywood) calibration tool for a single www.marcussenmastering.com room multi-loudspeaker system. This software was preceded by the DIPtimiser work mentioned earlier.

The AutoCal system produces loudspeakergenerated test signals recorded by a high quality PRISM MEDIA PRODUCTS INC. PRISM MEDIA PRODUCTS LIMITED USA UK calibration microphone to Tel : (973) 983 9577 Tel : +44 1223 424 988 determine correct acoustical Fax : (973) 983 9588 Fax : + 44 1223 425 023 Email: sales@prismsound.com http://www.prismsound.com alignments for every loudspeaker and subwoofer

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meet your maker

Christopher Hicks

can allow us to extend the sophistication of algorithms we had previously been forced to simplify for lack of memory or processor speed.

CEDAR Audio’s senior engineer talks about the technology behind the company’s products, the algorithm refinement process, processing power hikes, and why he likes tea without sugar.

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HRISTOPHER HICKS HAS been associated with CEDAR since 1992 and has worked fulltime there since 1996. Prior to this he was at Cambridge University doing a BA and then a PhD in the Engineering Department and maintains his Cambridge University connection by teaching mathematics and electronics to engineering undergraduates at Churchill College for a few hours a week. As a senior engineer at the company his main responsibility has been the hardware products — the Series X and X+ rackmount units, the DNS1000, DNS2000, the Duo declickle and autodehiss boxes, and also the timecode unit that forms part of CEDAR Cambridge.

He was a committee member of the British AES section for many years, and was its chair for 19992000. Together with CEDAR’s Dave Betts he received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2005 for their co-design of the DNS1000.

In his spare time he sings with a local chamber choir, admits to playing the violin badly as well as doing a fair amount of classical music recording — ‘it’s nice to use the kit once in a while, not just design it!’ he says.

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ZENON SCHOEPE What is special about CEDAR products?

I hope that many things make them special, but I will concentrate on just one. At CEDAR we have, from the outset, been faced with the problem of making cutting-edge digital signal processing technology accessible to people who are not experts in DSP. This has implications both for how the algorithms are designed, and for how they are embodied as products. For example, on reading the academic literature one soon discovers that ‘robust’ algorithms are considered a good thing. This really means that the same algorithm will work well in a wide range of circumstances, is not particularly sensitive to changes in the audio, and does not require frequent parameter adjustments.

The practical upshot of robustness is that the exact setting of each control is not particularly critical and sometimes, as an algorithm is refined, it becomes possible to remove a control that one previously thought was needed. So, by designing our algorithms to be robust, our products become quick and straightforward to use, despite containing complex DSP. From the days of the original DC1 declicker, which we released in 1992, it was a standing joke within CEDAR that the default settings (Medium 10) would work for all but the most demanding applications of the product.

How do years of producing algorithms manifest themselves in your products — are we still listening to the same original declick algorithm?

Absolutely not. The research that grew into CEDAR occurred in the late 1980s. It used FORTRAN code, running on 80286-based PCs, and would take several hours to process a single side of a 78 — the principal focus of that initial research. Since then we have gone through several generations of DSP chips, several programming languages, and several generations of PCs and the like, so CEDAR has been implemented on numerous different platforms.

The easy way to revise a product for a new platform is to re-code existing algorithms and move on. At CEDAR, however, we have used each of these occasions as an opportunity to re-examine the algorithms and refine them. Furthermore, each platform generally represents an increase in computational power over the previous one, and this

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What are the common technical approaches involved when designing restoration algorithms and at what point do they start to differ?

Engineering is all about analysing problems, and solving them through innovation. A key component of that process is scientific method, where progress is based upon evidence gleaned from experiment.

However, engineering is differentiated from pure science by the existence of the customer. A perfect technical solution to a problem is unacceptable if it is impossible or impractical for the customer to adopt it, perhaps because of the final cost or the nature of the product that would result.

Furthermore, defining the problem can be a challenge in itself. Faced with a customer who says, ‘I have an analogue thingy, but my studio is going all-digital, so can you make me a digital thingy?’ one could, of course, comply by creating a digital thingy.

A deeper approach, and one that we regularly adopt, is to identify the problem the analogue thingy is being used to solve, and then to develop a solution to that problem; a solution that also happens to be digital.

This occurred in the early stages of the DNS1000 project, which was triggered by a request to produce a digital version of an existing piece of analogue equipment. By adopting the deeper design process, we improved substantially on the performance of the ‘analogue thingy’ and the DNS1000 consequently had much broader appeal than it otherwise would have had.

Which restoration algorithm is the most difficult for you to implement?

Broadband hiss removal. Let me explain.

I like my tea without sugar. Declicking is a bit like trying to fish the fragments of a badly-dunked Rich Tea biscuit out of a cup of sugary PG Tips; the individual bits remain reasonably intact, so if you’re quick and careful you can get most of them out and the tea remains drinkable. Removing hiss is like trying to get the sugar out; a chemist could possibly devise a sequence of chemical reactions with nasty reagents that would do it, but would you want to drink the result? The cure may be worse than the problem. Now to get back to signal processing...

It is a well-established tenet of Information Theory that information is lost when two random signals (for example, music and noise) are mixed together. It is therefore impossible to separate them perfectly, so ‘perfect’ dehissing is not possible. (Nor, as it happens, is it necessarily desirable, but that leads us into a discussion about psychoacoustics, which is probably inappropriate here.)

To make a useful attempt at separating the wanted

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meet your maker signal and the noise, we rely on at least one of the signals having some inherent degree of predictability.

This predictability might be embodied in a ‘fingerprint’ of the noise alone, or a statistical description of the wanted signal based on some assumption such as ‘music is composed of a multitude of sinewaves’.

Any deviation of the actual signal and/or noise from the chosen model (which there will inevitably be, the signal and noise both being random) could reveal itself as an undesirable artefact in the processed result. Choosing the models and refining them such that the artefacts are minimised is the complicated (and interesting) bit; finding a chemical reaction that removes the sugar without ruining the tea!

How reliant is the development of your restoration products on progress in processing power?

For technological reasons, CEDAR was later than many other audio equipment manufacturers to support the 88.2kHz and 96kHz sample rates.

When you double the sample rate, simple algorithms such as EQ, mixing, and compression require approximately double the memory and double the processor power. In contrast, many of CEDAR’s algorithms require up to about four times the processor speed to support a doubling of sample rate. We therefore had to wait longer before we could support these higher sample rates.

Having said that, it has only been 20 years since the aforementioned FORTRAN code was written, and it is remarkable to think that my laptop PC could process that 78 to a much higher standard in a matter of seconds!

Where are the limitations and bottlenecks in the technology you currently use and what advances will herald the next step up?

Humans (particularly males, I am told!) are poor at thinking about more than one thing at a time. One consequence of this is that we naturally break down solutions to problems into sequences of steps, one to be executed after the other. In the computer world, multiprocessor and multicore machines are rapidly becoming the norm, and to utilise these effectively requires a different approach in which we think about which steps can be executed in parallel with, and independently from, each other.

If these independent processes are working

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towards a common goal they will have to communicate and synchronise with each other at certain points.

This creates another set of problems, exemplified by the deadlock; four cars arrive at a miniroundabout simultaneously, and everybody waits for everybody else.

The situation is exacerbated when one tries to make a real-time audio application co-exist with a generalpurpose operating system and other software. If the operating systems in general use had been designed from the ground up with real-time applications in mind, it would make life a whole lot easier for realtime software developers. As it is, we all have to go to extreme lengths to ensure that interruptions to the audio stream do not occur.

The DNS1000 has achieved incredible success in post yet it is unusual in your product range as a standalone product type.

Can we expect to see similar ‘console-top’ type processors?

The reason that the DNS1000 is console-style has nothing to do with the requirements of the signal processing, and everything to do with the way our customers want to use it. The point is that each of our hardware products is a complete design, and not just an algorithm in a box; we take a great deal of account of the environment our customers will be working in, and how our products will best fit into their workflow.

The main market for the DNS1000 is in postproduction, where time is always of the essence. A

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principal requirement, therefore, was a simple, uncluttered control surface that could be operated quickly with one hand in neardarkness. The console-style with big buttons and faders fits that requirement well. We have other hardware products that are based more upon a ‘setand-forget’ approach, and a rackmount format suits those better.

Why did you release CEDAR for Pro Tools on PC rather than on Mac? At the moment, the PC environment has proved to be better for hosting and supporting CEDAR’s algorithms and products. For the future, we are keeping a close eye on the rapid changes occurring in Apple’s product lines and operating systems, although I would be loath to speculate where these might lead us.

How long-term is the business of restoration?

The supply of vintage recordings needing restoration is large, but finite, so I suppose an end to that business is inevitable, if a long way off. However, modern recordings also suffer from similar problems; electrical interference, equipment malfunction, operator error and other ‘technical hitches’ cause all manner of unwanted noises and distortions, quite apart from the background noise that is inevitable on location and in environments such as concert halls. Consequently, the need for audio restoration will never dry up; quite the opposite in fact, as increasing amounts of material are recorded and broadcast under greater pressure and on shrinking budgets.

And then there’s the matter of forensic audio investigation… but that’s a story for another day. ■

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in the picture

HD editing — decisions, decisions If you’ve committed to the idea of integrating picture capability within your audio facility then you’re going to have to think long and hard about which way you’re going to jump. ROB JAMES says you’ll also need to define what formats you’ll be working with and the precise nature of the type of work you intend to do.

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V PRODUCTION USING relatively low cost origination formats such as DV/DVcam and DVC PRO is a burgeoning cottage industry. As high definition becomes de-rigueur for pretty much every client from events (weddings) to high-end TV drama, the editing kit has to change. If you currently edit SD material, you need to be considering HD. To stay in the

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game, the stakes must be raised. Once committed to the idea, the fun really starts. I am in exactly this position so this is an attempt to give some insight into the trials and tribulations of the decision making process.

If you already edit using one of the common SD packages the experience will most likely colour the decision making process. It might be a case of ‘better

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the devil you know’, or you may have already decided it is time for a change. I’m not going to attempt to give a definitive answer to the question, ‘which editor for me?’ but I shall try instead to identify the questions you should be asking.

The first three factors to consider are these: what format(s) will material routinely arrive in, what format(s) do/will you need to deliver, and what type of work do you intend to do?

The format question is the least important, unless you have an immediate requirement. Why? Simply because any editing package that wishes to be taken seriously will support all the major current and future formats in the fullness of time. Early adopters can have all the fun of pushing manufacturers to support the formats they need now, but sooner or later the big boys will all fall into line. For the present this means HDV and DVC PRO HD. The Sony flavour of HDV (1080i) is already making inroads, but Panasonic’s latest camera looks set to give Sony a run for its money. Output for broadcast will depend on the broadcaster’s requirements and conversion is always possible (if not desirable).

Industrial and events output is really awaiting the imminent arrival of HD DVD and Blu-ray. Authoring packages are already available across the price spectrum.

Type of work is far more important. Long-form documentary or drama is less likely to require whizzy DVE effects, compositing and chroma keying, but generally requires comprehensive media library facilities, conforming and colour correction. Shortform, music videos, commercials, etc. are more likely to need every trick in the book and then some.

Which neatly brings us to the subject of media

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in the picture storage. SD is well within the capabilities of current you can amortise purchases quickly, this is just such generation ‘domestic’ storage. In editing, HD takes us a time. once more to the bleeding edge of what is possible at Back with the choice of editing packages, a lot reasonable cost. For long-form, editing in an off-line will depend on workflow. The detail devils are highly resolution then conforming the final version may be active in this arena. If you anticipate editing material an option. This can considerably reduce the size and with separately recorded sound, make sure your cost of storage requirements. For short-form work chosen editor supports the file formats you need and this will seldom make sense. In either case, RAID can accommodate the timecode and other useful arrays are the order of the day. For the lone operator information from your source format files. relatively simple directly attached storage is fine. In At the operational level, do you want an editor that big facilities the problems and costs of networked is easy to learn but may ultimately limit, or one that storage rise exponentially and having an IT expert on relies heavily on unintuitive keyboard shortcuts but is hand is a wise investment. highly productive once learned and contains almost Preview is also an issue. If you are planning to every feature you could wish for? If you’re going to be produce the finished article, then preview in the native using it every day the latter may well be attractive but output format is a must. Achieving preview at the full if editing is just one of your activities, as is increasingly LRX_advert_resol.qxd 23/08/2005 10:56 AM Page 1 output resolution requires a card capable of outputting the case, then something more intuitive may well the desired format(s) and some means of displaying it. While there are now plenty of screens able to cope with 720p at pocket money prices, 1080 native is still an expensive option.

The cheapest part of the deal is the editing software so don’t let the fact that a package looks expensive compared with its rivals put you off. By the time you’ve costed a sufficiently powerful computer, storage and I-O, etc. the difference is insignificant and will relate more closely to what you want to do than to the chosen package.

This is a rotten time to buy computers. Apple is in the middle of the transition to Intel processors, so you can bet your life that, despite protestations to the contrary, all the new goodies will only appear for Intel based Macs. There will be a lengthy period when things don’t work quite as they should and a Quad G5 will make a good doorstop in a year’s time.

Things are equally disturbed in the Windows camp.

Intel has been lagging behind AMD in performance for some time and the new Dual-Core chips appearing in PC laptops and the new Macs are the beginning of the fight back. Big price cuts on current inventory are imminent and AMD will be forced to follow suit. In short, you can’t win (And some things never change.

Ed). Although it is an IT industry axiom that this year’s superdupercomputer is next year’s doorstop, there are times when it is wiser to wait and, unless

suit you better. If your work involves a lot of effects then you would be wise to look at real-time preview performance, unless you are prepared to spend more time waiting for effects to render than actually editing.

Interestingly, the native versus DSP argument is just as hotly debated in video circles as in audio. Matters are complicated by the necessity of decoding and encoding images. Cards that simply provide I-O and a video codec in hardware can have a dramatic effect on stability and real-world performance, but will only help if they support the codec(s) you need.

In an ideal world, we would all be able to acquire a Discreet Smoke or similarly high–end editor with oodles of fast storage. The reality is that the majority of us are, or will be, producing material for HD disc, broadcast and even for cinema distribution on systems costing a tiny fraction of Smoke’s asking price. ■

....introducing the

SADiE LRX Flexible Location Recorder The remarkable new SADiE LRX has been designed to fulfil the needs of an ever more complex recording environment.

It is as effective in capturing original soundtracks for film and television production as it is for producing location audio recordings for release on distributed media such as CD or DVD.

The flexibility of the LRX hinges on its ability to utilise a standard laptop running Windows XP® via USB2 as the host computer together with combinations of the same high quality i/o cards as the SADiE H64 multitrack workstation. A tactile hardware control surface is employed, incorporating a small assignable mixer and full editorial interface, plus dedicated transport keys.

This powerful combination is supplied with a tailored multichannel version of the SADiE on-screen graphical user interface. Timecode and professional genlock facilities are incorporated and a video stream may be simultaneously captured for playback or on-set ADR. The system supports a wide range of industry file interchange formats, plus a second external drive may be simply attached via USB2 or Firewire to mirror recordings and provide simultaneous safety copies.

Contact your nearest SADiE dealer or main office and visit our website for further details and a brochure.

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April 2006

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DIGITAL PRECISION 51

business

On the cusp of tapeless Tapeless production is the buzzword for broadcasters and the BBC is gearing up for endto-end digital broadcasting. NIGEL JOPSON looks over the edge at what is required and what can be expected from taking the leap.

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O USE A COMPACT DISC analogy, broadcasters are on the cusp of the important transition from ADD to DDD. In Resolution V4.5 we examined the massive upgrade cycle already underway at the viewer end, with the introduction of DTT and HDTV. New research just released by the European Commission shows overall Digital TV penetration across the EU of 25%, with the UK as market leader with around 64%, and most viewers expected to buy at least one type of digital receiver between now and 2010. The Commission estimates the EU market for DTT receivers alone at up to 20m units per year. Japan has 27% of worldwide HDTV households, and in Australia five broadcasters are each mandated to transmit 24 hour’s of HD content per week. In the US, DTV transition has been underway for more than eight years, and according to the FCC 1,525 stations are now delivering digital content in all 211 US TV markets. Of 106m US TV households, 88% have access to five or more digital broadcasters and another 69% of homes are in markets with eight or more broadcasters. Globally it is predicted that 365m TV households (one third of the total) will receive DTT signals by 2010, and digital delivery by other methods is gathering pace — China is forecast to overhaul the US in Broadband Internet connections by the end of 2006.

Hardly a month passes without a press release heralding a new tapeless play-out centre to feed this burgeoning distribution network. At the end of last year, Ascent Media completed a typical installation for Discovery Networks Europe in west London. From the new centre, Discovery will originate and uplink 36 feeds to 104 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the system can be expanded to handle 60 52

channels. The entire operation is run from Omneon Servers and Omnibus automation, with programmes managed by Artesia digital asset management ... but the actual source is ten ‘ingest rooms’ where tapes are encoded and the QC work is done.

Similar playout centres have been constructed over the last few years for a multitude of broadcasters — from Southern Cross public broadcaster in Australia (Pinnacle Mediastream 900) to satellite operator SES Global in Germany (Front Porch Digital/ DivArchive), to Viacom’s huge MTV, TMF and Nickelodeon group operations (Front Porch in Bussum, Holland and Globecast in Los Angeles). In the UK, Flextech, whose channels include LivingTV, Bravo, Challenge and FTN, recently announced a seven-year contract with BBC Broadcast for end-to-end tapeless postproduction and playout. The solution includes desktop editing and is managed by BBC Broadcast’s digital asset management system known as MOMS (Media Object Management System). MOMS manages the digital storage and workflow of media, enabling easy and cost-effective manipulation and playout of content.

Tapeless has been high on the agenda at the BBC within the corporation and in the spun-off divisions, since BBC chairman Michael Grade and director general Mark Thompson unveiled a new strategy for digital TV services two years ago. To complete the switch to DTT by 2012, an ambitious plan was set out to transform the corporation’s traditional craft-based production departments to a fully tapeless environment within six years. ‘The delivery of many of our services, such as digital and interactive TV, WAP, Internet and radio are in digital format,’ said Paul Cheesbrough, head of technology for BBC Production. ‘The key issue we have is that resolution

the production process is all based on physical media such as tapes, but then right at the end we put it into a digital form.’ Cheesbrough has set a target date of 2010 to make the entire production process digital.

Last May, BBC Post Production completed the first tapeless delivery for transmission to BBC Broadcast.

Normally, content would have been transferred from an Avid to a DVCAM, then copied to a Digital Betacam tape, which a runner would then take to the Broadcast Centre, where an assistant would ingest the tape into the server ready for transmission: the production team could expect to wait a day for this process. The tapeless delivery was accomplished in less than 40 minutes, direct from an Avid at the Children’s Village at Television Centre to playout servers at Broadcast Centre. BBC Post exported the content with an appropriate template through its Webreview system, Anystream Agility converted DV into Omneon-compliant 30i MPEG and wav files, which were transferred via FTP. Metadata for the clip was also transmitted to Broadcast Centre: the metadata generated the schedule for the automation system to link the programme to CBBC interactive.

Metadata is a key component of any tapeless system — it’s going to carry not only the time and date stamp, the clip name, and the search terms for digital archiving — metadata may also be used to keep track of the edit points for the digital production team. A CG artist might liken this to a vector graphics description language such as POV-Ray, a musician could think of it like a MIDI file — the tapeless broadcast production team also need a descriptive language to keep track of content assembly across different platforms. One of the main selling points of digital production for large corporations is the cost savings. This doesn’t just relate to tape stock: the thinking is that creatives, like editors and directors, can view rushes and storyboard on ordinary laptop and desktop computers, with expensive fixed-location studios being reserved for hardware-specific tasks like colour correction.

The BBC team responsible for the acclaimed documentary The Blue Planet has developed a new series called Planet Earth, with five episodes due in 2006 and six more scheduled for 2007, and already billed as the ultimate portrait of the world we live on.

Production of the series at BBC Bristol was a flagship for tapeless feature work within the organisation.

Work on the documentary was completed using a nine terabyte Sledgehammer HD!O system. ‘The first step required for all the footage is to transfer the film to HD, using our Pandora Colour Corrector to record the material directly to the Sledgehammer,’ says Phil Meade, manager Post Production Resources, Bristol. ‘Sledgehammer is fully uncompressed with no data loss whatsoever, so for a graphics-intensive undertaking like Planet Earth, the ability to do 4:4:4based transfers is of enormous value since there is so much more information with which to work.’

Content was encoded at different quality rates, all stored on the server with matching metadata. A ‘focus quality’ Desktop Editable Format (DEF) was encoded at 13Mbits for creative fiddling and review, separate from the Broadcast Stored Format. When required for playout, the BSF is referenced using the common metadata. Producers can view DEF rushes on their laptops from previously ingested material that may be used before or after the content they are filming in the field. According to executive producer Alistair Fothergill, this process reduced the time taken to do a rough cut of a 50-minute programme from six to three weeks.

The last bastion of tape is the camera itself, and here it is the news gatherers who have been key April 2006

business drivers. Turning a laptop into a portable NLE has not been the problem, it has been the time-consuming task of transferring footage to the computer that has previously discouraged news crews from going non-linear. Now there are several cameras available that make this process as simple as drag-and-drop.

KNXV-TV Channel 15 in Phoenix, Arizona, chose the Ikegami Editcam3, which records directly onto removable hard drives. ‘The great thing about the Editcam3 is that you can edit right off the field pack,’ says Erin Gramzinski, chief news photographer at KNXV, ‘we wanted something that is fast with no digitising.’ Sony’s new XDCAM records onto DVDlike optical drives that encode video as MPEG IMX files at a scaleable bit-rate from 30 to 50Mbps, with 4:2:2 sampling, or a DVCAM file at 25Mbps. When recording at the highest quality of 50Mbps, it’s essentially DigiBeta quality without the tape. The discs offer random access to clips indexed by thumbnails, and an editor can work with full resolution material or low-resolution proxies. When connected to an NLE, the computer sees the disc as a hard drive and all of the material is easily accessed and ingested.

But the Panasonic DVCPRO P2 system is perhaps the most remarkable of this new crop of cameras, with no moving parts and requiring less power as it records direct to memory cards. Richmond, Virginia, based Media General has committed to the P2 for newsgathering at its 20 TV stations. ‘The industry has been talking about the tapeless television station for the past decade, but the roadblock has been field acquisition,’ says Ardell Hill, Media General’s senior vice president, broadcast operations. He has more than 90 P2 systems in use daily: ‘Our reporters spend less time dealing with the mechanics of video acquisition. This gives them and their photojournalists more time to consider what they’re shooting, what they’ve shot, and how the footage can be constructed into a more coherent, more compelling story,’ explains Hill.

The new P2 system was also recently in use at the 20th Winter Olympics in Torino, with BBC Resources delivering 100 hours of programming over the 17-day event, and 500 hours of content for online viewers. ‘The Winters were a good time to do it, because although it is quite high profile, the offsite operation is quite contained: it makes training issues easier, and provided a good environment to do a real-life test on live programming, but within controlled boundaries,’ explains lead postpro

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editor Charlie Cope. ‘We were certainly very impressed by the robustness of the Panasonic system, those are pretty testing conditions, shooting halfway up a mountain in a blizzard means a camera has to be robust.

We also didn’t have to consider the humidity issues you normally do with tape, when bringing cameras into warmer editing environments.’

The BBC P2 cameramen were filming to 8Gb memory cards, which were first backed up to a dedicated standalone drive connected to a PC on the

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production network. The next day, all cards would be reformatted and sent out again with the crews. ‘Either we edited straight off the cards if we were doing fast turnaround stuff, or in Sestriere we would drag the clip into the Unity-based system, then it became shared media so that any attached client could access it.’ When first introduced, P2 cameras defaulted to a rather unhelpful random numbering of clips (in an attempt to avoid overwrites on ingestion), but a new software revision allowed the BBC team to assign user

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names for each camera, and then increment clips with a more sensible sequential numbering system.

‘We made a decision early on that the time scale was not going to allow producers to set up PCs and load metadata prior to a shoot — that was never going to be a possibility,’ Charlie reveals. ‘It’s quite a lot for the production team to take on board, so we confined it to a fairly simple metadata flow.’ Before the team left for Torino they had prepared a digital archive of winter sports clips, and this archive was taken to Italy on disk drives and made available locally to the editors using the Unity system. ‘In sport the workflows tend to be very fast from capture to transmission, you are often talking just a couple of hours. We had laptops available with P2 viewing software for production, but often we were just bringing material in, plugging it into an Avid and turning it around in a couple of hours.’

Everyone I spoke to about tapeless production made the same point about archives: digital acquisition is

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only going to become of major benefit to organisations once the archive environment works on a tapeless policy as well. Large broadcasters like the BBC will

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develop network storage to accommodate immediate needs, but even the sturdiest of enterprise-level systems is going to require some form of longerterm storage that does not rely on magnetic heads floating 2 microns above platters spinning at 60mph.

Ironically, this may be just the application to breathe life back into a format like Sony’s Blu-ray 50Gb optical disc technology.

But ultimately it will not be the bits and bytes that determine how successfully the change to end-to-end tapeless broadcast is achieved, it is how production personnel within the megalith-broadcasters react to the increased flexibility demanded of them, and the acceleration of production work-cycles. ‘From our perspective it is not only a technology issue, how to integrate the new equipment and use it,’ explains Charlie Cope. ‘One of our biggest issues is how production takes those technologies on and change their workflows, that’s actually the hardest aspect to make a success of.’ ■

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technology

The reproduction revolution: taming three-dimensional audio The room/loudspeaker ‘system’ has long been identified as critical in the reproduction of faithful audio. CURTIS HOYT of Trinnov Audio explains how advances in research have resulted in an innovative solution to the requirement for ‘universally consistent’ audio.

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UDIO HAS GONE through many evolutionary changes over the years — tubes, transistors, ICs, DSP and now the current trend is on improving the acoustical reproduction elements with DSP tools: the combined loudspeaker/room system for studios and homes. We are quickly arriving at the point where sound can be spatially reproduced in the home as in the studio without elaborate physical constraints. This article will consider the obstructions in the way of consistent sound reproduction and will introduce a set of revolutionary tools created by Trinnov Audio, a Paris based acoustics/DSP research and development firm.

The need for improvement in the loudspeaker/room ‘acoustic system’ has long been documented. On the loudspeaker side, speakers are the weak link in the reproduction chain, generally adding many forms of distortion — frequency response, irregular dispersion, phase or group delay, and so on. Adding to the speaker’s distortion is the ‘room’, which can provide uneven power response, dramatic tonal changes based on speaker placement, early reflections, reverberation and absorption, low frequency room modes, and so on. Matters are further complicated when using more than one speaker, i.e. stereo, where phantom images rely on consistent performance from both loudspeakers over a wide frequency range. Throw surround sound into the mix – 3, 4, 5, 7 or more loudspeakers — and the situation becomes literally out of control for any but the most meticulously setup speaker/room playback system.

It is no wonder that audiophiles focus on stereo and, for the most part, completely ignore surround.

It’s hard enough to get two speakers working right — symmetry with the room and the relative listening position are an absolute must for correct spatiality.

For surround, the extra channels make matters

more complicated. To get surround right is practically physically impossible without a dedicated room, along with the proper orientation.

Surround speaker placement (based on the ITU standard) calls for five equal distant loudspeakers placed at degrees of 0, +/30, and +/-110. To get effective use of a listening space, you must use a ‘wide wall’ front orientation. With just this one consideration, rotating the system to a lengthwise orientation will dramatically reduce the useful space.

And when we examine the professional audio production environment, it doesn’t get much better.

Often mixes travel to various professional and home studios that can be dramatically different, and all will play havoc with the creative process and will call on trained ears to Figure 1. Typical before and after performances from the Trinnov Optimizer. remember not only their space, but also those of their co-creators. Everyone’s errors up to that point. formula for what works is different, but it is no Let us consider what would be required in the ideal wonder that at the end of the day, a good mastering acoustical reproduction system. While the underlying room/engineer is a must to get consistently good acoustical concepts are quite complex, we can use results. It’s their job to fix the many ‘playback system’ basic criteria to describe what we consider necessary:

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technology the ideal system would provide a consistent listening experience for the listener throughout the professional and consumer audio listening environments. For this, a minimum of two conditions would have to be met. First, the loudspeaker/room system must voice the same, and second spatiality must be maintained through consistent, standardised loudspeaker angular placement relative to the listener.

LOUDSPEAKER/ROOM VOICING — Why is loudspeaker voicing so important? On the pro audio production side, critical mixing relies on hearing a reference. When more than one room or facility is used, the reference is lost, even if the same model of speaker is used. Frequency response at the listening position varies dramatically with placement and room acoustics, the resultant being the ‘power response’.

Is it enough to get a well-known brand of pro speakers and mix? Of course not — you must take into consideration how the placement of the speakers within the room will colour the sound. Here is a list of considerations for consistent voicing: • Loudspeaker frequency response • Loudspeaker phase/group delay • Loudspeaker enclosure diffraction • Loudspeaker placement • Loudspeaker/Subwoofer integration — bass management • Room volume and geometry (cubic space) • Room early reflections • Room late reverberation decay • Room modes — low frequency • Room heating, ventillation and AC. The curves in Figure 1 point out typical improvements obtained with advanced loudspeaker/ room correction.

us to pause on this point now.

Let’s identify each element that will affect the listening outcome for two conditions first within a system and second between systems: 1. Loudspeaker to loudspeaker matching 2. Room to loudspeaker matching 3. Loudspeaker angular placement (azimuth and elevation) to the listener.

Predicted results of a combined Voicing/Spatiality Matrix looks like those in Figure 2.

We can see from the above matrix that the key to universally consistent sound is in providing matched speakers to matched rooms with a standardised placement. Big job, no wonder it’s seldom right and audiophiles have a tough time with stereo and look the other way when it comes to surround. Let’s now take a look at an elegant solution, based in part on mathematics that date back to 1870…

THE NEW FRONTIER — three dimensional manipulation of audio leads to universally consistent reproduction. Acousticians and mathematicians have been working for years to find ways to bring more flexibility to acquisition and reproduction. For years, sound could only be manipulated in a one dimensional way — frequency and amplitude. Early computers afforded folks like Richard C. Heyser to apply a second dimension — time. We know it today through extensive use of Time Delay Spectrometry and Fourier transforms, which allow us to analyse and manipulate both time and frequency. This is the current reality of audio and the basis for all DSP processing prevalent today in live performance, recording, and reproduction.

It’s gone a long way to solving the loudspeaker/room voicing puzzle and has trickled down to the most basic of consumer audio gear.

Now we are facing a new paradigm in audio

PLAYBACK SPATIALITY — Playback spatiality is what gives us the sense of localisation and depth in recordings.

Spatiality is the degree to which a listener can distinguish placement of a sound within an environment. Done right, images will have a sense of three dimensionality.

Historically, the only way this has been accomplished in sound reproduction is through standardised, critical placement of loudspeakers relative to the listener’s position. Further, for accurate phantom imaging between loudspeakers, voicing must be consistent for all loudspeakers within a given loudspeaker/room system.

This is an often overlooked criterion, perhaps because it is difficult to achieve from room to room, so it’s wise for

Figure 2: Reproduction Voicing-Spatiality Matrix.

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technology remarkable and it is revolutionary. Within reason (read within the constraints of the laws of physics), the system can make different speakers voice the same and retain spatiality of the original recording even if the loudspeakers aren’t placed anywhere near their ideal location. While the concepts for solving the problem are complex, the user interface and solution is rather simple and elegant. The day is coming where we can finally copy an original acoustic field and superimpose it on another space. The result is no longer constrained by the aforementioned matrix and sound becomes ‘universally consistent’.

The Optimizer Pro is dedicated to advanced audio applications and has been used in a variety of acoustic spaces over the past year including music studios, television and radio broadcast facilities, film and homes.

The Optimizer Pro’s interface allows for digital and analogue input and output thanks to optional internal or external conversion modules. The device receives multichannel or stereo signals, for example the outputs of mixing desk or a player/decoder. The outputs of the Optimizer are routed to the amplifiers, without taking care of the order or even the phase of the cabling. The system will measure the best feed for each loudspeaker and compensate for the imperfections of each loudspeaker/room couple.

Figure 3. 3D acoustic field remapping retains spatiality of the original.

where sound can be described and manipulated in a three-dimensional way using advanced mathematics — Fourier Bessel transforms. The transforms allow for the mathematical representation of an acoustic field and are quite powerful, as they allow the transformation of an acoustic field from one space (or room) to another. (See Figure 3.)

Trinnov Audio has done pioneering research in this area and is now bringing solutions to the audio industry through various professional and consumer audio products. Let’s consider the Trinnov Optimizer here.

The Optimizer solves the dilemma of reproduction: it has the learning capability to automatically gather information relating to over 30 variables regarding the loudspeaker and room with a single point, four-capsule microphone routed to a dedicated, high performance PC-based DSP engine. Information gathered during the calibration phase includes the domains of frequency, time, and direction. It learns the placement of the loudspeaker within 2 degrees elevation and azimuth, and distance within 1cm. This takes approximately one minute for a 5.1 surround system, and works equally well in a small room or a 200-seat theatre.

The Optimizer then uses the Figure 4: 3D calibration information to voice and spatialise the loudspeaker/room system calibration probe to a user preset standard. It sounds

The setting of the device consists of choosing the input format and the number of loudspeaker and placing the 3D acoustic probe at the listening position.

About one minute after having pushed the ‘start calibration’ button on the touchscreen, the installation has been measured and the compensation processing is running, transforming the input signals into signals that are specifically optimised for the installation. ■

Contact

Figure 5. The calibration mic acquires loudspeaker location relative to listener: distance, elevation and azimuth. Shown are a Top View and Map View in degrees.

TRINNOV AUDIO, FRANCE Website: www.trinnov.com Curtis Hoyt manages Trinnov’s USA operations. Trinnov’s European contact is Sebastien Montoya.

USA, email: curt.hoyt@trinnov.com Europe, email: sebastien.montoya@trinnov.com

Staggering Performance at an Unrivalled Price • Up to 240 Channels in a large format surround sound mixing system • Integrated 96Trk Disk Recording, Non Linear Video and Server Based Networking • Fully configurable mono to 5.1 Bus Structures with Bus to Bus Mixing • Ready now with Tri-Level Sync support for a full HD production environment • User specified surface options including In Line Panel with OLED display technology • Total Dynamic and Clip based automation with full Plug-in support including VSTs • Unmatched price/performance ratio with unparalleled system capabilities

Defining the Essence of Surround Mixing 58

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www.fairlightau.com April 2006

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Commonly used words with interesting origins One of the strongest indicators of community spirit is its use of specific and exclusive language. Pro audio suffers from its fair share of jargon but we also use words regularly with origins that are a little cloudy. KEITH SPENCER-ALLEN looks in on the derivation of some popular terms.

BUS — Our use of the word bus derives from busbar, usually a copper rod used to connect a number of circuits or carry current/signals that was probably first employed by the early telephone companies. Bus, however, has very much earlier linguistic origins with a range of meanings relating to ‘to carry’. So from the same source comes an ‘omnibus’, which carries people; a restaurant’s ‘busboy’ carries used plates to the kitchen; and a console’s bus carries multiple audio signals or data. Some add a second ‘s’, which is mentioned in the OED as acceptable, but ‘buss’ has the far more common listed meaning of ‘to kiss’.

EQUALISER — Another term from the phone companies for a circuit used to ‘equalise’ (EQ) a signal so that both ends of a telephone line were ‘equal’ despite any losses in the line. A similar technique was used to overcome the deficiencies in recording and broadcast. Later there was also a school of thought that used a simple variable equaliser to correct for deficiencies prior to the microphone due to positioning, still with the intention of maintaining a hypothetically flat response. It was then only a generational switch in thinking to liberate the equaliser to create the very opposite — as far from equal treatment of all frequencies as was wished.

DUBBING — Early film studios had a room set aside for making copies (or doubles) of recordings, referred to as ‘doubling’. The suggestion is that that was contracted to ‘dubbing’ although it was probably encouraged by the fact that there was already a verb ‘to dub’, i.e. the creation of a knight by a monarch by dubbing, the conferring of rights from the monarch onto a commoner, which has a parallel in making a copy from a master to a blank medium. (If you say so. Ed).

April 2006

FLANGING — Until the late 1970s the only way to create a flanging effect was to very slightly vary the speed of two identical analogue tape recordings in relation to each other. When these were combined, the slight difference in signals caused a comb filter effect that was most pronounced when the speeds were changing. Creating this time/tape speed change was generally done by grasping the edge of the spool flange to slow movement. There are many tales of how this term came about but the most plausible suggest it originated at Abbey Road on Beatles’ sessions — a question from John Lennon as to what effect they had added to his voice generated the name ‘flanging’.

PAN — This was a knob unknown before we had something other than glorious mono to deal with.

Early stereo consoles had quaintly labelled ‘panoramic controls’ but that took up so much console real estate that the contraction to pan was inevitable. It’s derived from the Greek word for a picture of a landscape in relation to a static position.

Clearly the audio application came via the film camera although while the visual side comprises a constantly changing image, its audio namesake is so frequently an illusion created by changing left/right levels. A true parallel to the camera would involve changing time delay and spectral change recreating, as far as panning can, a true analogy to physical positioning of a sound source.

FOLEY — The art of creating sound effects for on-screen filmed images has been around since the transition of silent film to the talkies in the 1920s. However, few realised what problems adding sound was going cause in terms of production techniques.

Jack Foley, who was working at Universal Studios in LA as everything from a stuntman to director, single-handedly established many of the techniques still used today, but with a legendary productivity and a claimed ability to create three footstep tracks simultaneously! In the last decade Foley has become adopted as the accepted term worldwide replacing, in the UK, the less explanatory term of ‘footsteps’. resolution

CARDIOID — Microphone polar patterns are named after the shape created when the sensitivity of the mic is plotted at angles around it. In an ideal world most of the shapes are self-explanatory — omni directional mics have a circular polar pattern, Fig-8 response looks like the number ‘eight’ — but cardioid? A directional mic with a high level of sensitivity across the front decreasing towards the rear gives a heart-shaped response, hence cardioid.

WRAP — As in it’s a ‘wrap’, one of the few film words that everyone knows but its origins may seem a little obscure.

Most likely it is an acronym of ‘Wind Roll And Print’ originating in old Hollywood when at the end of shooting, the camera film (the roll) would have to be rewound before removal from the camera, and then taken off for processing — hence signifying the end of work.

WHITE NOISE — Just as white light contains all wavelengths of light, a similar definition is applied to sound that has all frequencies, within the range of human hearing, present in equal amounts. And it doesn’t stop with white — ‘pink’ noise is white noise filtered at -3dB/octave to create equal energy across all the octave bands. And it goes on — ‘blue’ noise is +3dB/oct with rising frequency; and black noise is (again like light) basically silence. These are the noise types that there are recognised specifications for but name a colour and there is now a noise type using it.

None of this should be confused with the apocryphal tale of the ‘brown note’, the supposed frequency that causes a human’s bowels to evacuate!

PARAMETRIC — As in ‘parametric’ EQ would be an equaliser where the frequency, the amplitude and Q were continuously, independently variable parameters.

With this number of variable parameters the equaliser can be referred to as being parametric. Although some manufacturers added Q controls to graphic EQs and referred to them as ‘paragraphics’ this is a misnomer — the ‘para’ prefix is part of parameter and can’t be detached and still carry the meaning.

YOU CAN HELP US — I’m curious about a number of terms and haven’t found where they came from.

The origins of the word ‘gobo’ for acoustic screen; of ‘jitter’ (there are no English words beginning J-I-T before the creation of the word); and there’s nothing definitive about ‘glitch’ other than a possible Yiddish connection. ■ 59

katz’s column

How to optimise levels in an analogue chain With Becky and Fred away on a long project, BOB KATZ takes the time to look at some essential founding principles and the whole business of integrating analogue correctly in what is now a predominantly digital world.

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HERE ARE PLENTY of benefits from having analogue outboard gear, not least of which are the glazed eyes of clients impressed by all those wonderful-looking knobs. Plus, you can get sounds out of a good analogue compressor that are very hard to coax out of a plug-in. In a few years, more plugins will be oversampled, eliminating harsh aliasing effects audible in some digital compressors, and CPU power will not be so hard to come by, but even in the future an emulation may not sound as good as the real thing or be as easy to use. And the additional noise and harmonic distortion of an analogue chain may provide just the glue we’re looking for, the final ‘polish’ for a pop album.

In this three-part series we’ll get down to the nittygritty of interfacing, how to set those levels correctly.

But if you suffer from fear of voltmeters, get some counselling before trying this. The object is to get the signal from the digital world into the analogue processor and back with the least amount of loss or damage. To do this you have to learn how to measure analogue signal levels, find the weakest link in your analogue system by determining analogue clipping points, and finally, learn how to make the most of balanced and unbalanced connections. If you don’t own a tweaker screwdriver or an analogue voltmeter, then it’s time to get them! An oscilloscope to analyse clipping is optional. You also will need a digital level meter accurate to 0.1dB or better; preferably with a

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numeric readout in dBFS. Start by generating a sine wave test signal at 1kHz, -20dBFS in your DAW. This signal should be a dithered sine wave, wordlength at least 16 bits.

This signal should exit the digital domain via your very best ‘high-quality, jitter-immune’ D-A convertor.

A quality convertor will likely have XLR connectors instead of phono or TRS jacks, but this is not always the case.

Let’s see if your analogue voltmeter is suitable for doing reasonable audio measurements. It should have balanced or floating inputs (neither terminal should be grounded). Connect the output of one channel of your D-AC on pins 2/3, or tip and ring of the 1/4-inch to the voltmeter inputs. Adjust the D-AC’s output trim to read 0.775 volts on the voltmeter. If your D-AC does not have a trimmable output level, the designer has cut corners for cost and you may never be able to fully optimise your system levels.

Now, switch your voltmeter to a dB range. It should read 0dB, or 0dBu or 0dBm, depending on the model. Now let’s see if it has a flat response to 20kHz; change the sine wave to 20kHz (still at -20dBFS) and read the level again. It should be less than 0.5dB away from 0dBu. If not, then stop right here and get a technician to figure out what’s going wrong.

Now let’s see if your D-AC can be made to clip.

Many D-ACs are designed so their analogue stages can never be made to clip so you can never prove their internal analogue clipping points. Reset your tone to 1kHz and raise your sine wave level to -0.2dBFS, which is just below full scale as we don’t

want to generate a distorted sine wave. Sine waves at exactly full scale should not distort, but let’s not take chances with your unknown generator.

Start by turning the gain of your monitor all the way down! Make a Y-cable as in the diagram, so you can simultaneously listen to and measure the output of your D-AC. If you own an oscilloscope, you can also see the clipping. Now, very gently raise your monitor level until you hear the test tone. Since this is a very hot test tone, you will not have to turn the monitor gain very far to hear it. The tone should sound clean, undistorted. Using your tweaker, slowly raise the analogue output level of your D-AC while simultaneously lowering your monitor level to keep it from getting too loud. Continue to raise the analogue output level of the D-AC as you turn the monitor gain further down; at some point you may hear distortion, or you may run out of gain in the D-AC. You know you are at the clipping point if backing down the level a little drastically reduces the distortion. Measure the level at the clipping point, in dBu. In professional equipment +24dBu is not uncommon, +26 is better, and +30 or higher is superlative.

If you cannot make your D-AC clip, you will have to learn from the manufacturer about its architecture.

If the D-AC uses a discrete circuit and high voltage analogue power supply, then its internal clipping point could be very high. However, if it uses a typical integrated circuit and +/- 15 to 18 volt power supplies, then its internal clipping point is likely to be no more than +26dBu (balanced).

The objective is to never run an analogue amplifier close to clipping. Let’s make the assumption that your D-AC is ‘typical’. In that case I advise that you adjust it so it never exceeds +20dBu (balanced) on its outputs at 0dBFS (full scale). This will probably be 6dB below its clip point, will run your D-AC conservatively, and keep its analogue stage from getting into the harshsounding zone.

In the next issue we’ll continue with this adventure and construct an analogue processing signal chain. ■

Information Resolution recommends Bob Katz’s book Mastering Audio — The Art and the Science as an essential source of information for every pro audio enthusiast who cares about sound. You can buy it on line at www.digido.com

Why is compression needed?

Last issue I asked the question: why do we need compressors at all if bands can perform without them live? There are dozens of right answers to this question but here are a few.

The average listener cannot take the dynamics and high sound pressure level of the Rolling Stones in his living room. So recordings generally are reproduced 10 to 20dB below a band’s live performance level, which completely alters their dynamic balance. When you turn down the maximum level to keep from sounding too loud on the home stereo, the low level passages must be brought up so they can be heard in a typical home environment, which is a form of compression.

Another (little-known) reason why we must compress is that the very art of multitrack recording alters the dynamics of a performance. Close-miking a singer exaggerates his dynamic range — just try putting your ear 3-inches from Mick’s mouth and see if you can take his dynamics!

And here’s a third reason: you will hear far greater dynamic range from 5 close-mics in front of 5 saxes than from a pair of mics located further out in the room. So the very act of close-miking alters a group’s dynamics. The greater the ratio of direct to reflected sound, the greater the transient response and the apparent dynamic range.

April 2006

resolution

slaying dragons

Does humour belong in pro audio?

Ever conscious of the need to provide JOHN WATKINSON with a new challenge (It is April, right? Ed), the Editor asked whether there is room for humour in pro audio, or is there too much already?

john watkinson ‘There seems to be an ever-growing tide of marketing hype that is taking over in importance from good engineering. In part we encourage this stuff by accepting it when instead we should be showering it with derision.’

H

UMOUR IS INSEPARABLE from the human condition, therefore unless we cease to be human when entering pro audio, I cannot imagine the absence of humour. Furthermore, humour has so many uses that its absence could be a positive disadvantage. In short, it can be a powerful tool, which is why I use it wherever possible and have actually carried out research into it.

There are a number of reasons why people laugh.

The most basic is to express relief that something 62

didn’t happen to them by laughing when it happens to someone else. We see this in comedy from banana skins and custard pies to Mr Bean. It’s easy to understand, transcending languages.

Another definition of whether a joke or story is funny is whether it delivers entropy. This is relevant to an understanding of compression algorithms, a topic that one might otherwise imagine to be devoid of humour. However, according to Shannon, any fact that is already known to the recipient, or which could have been anticipated, cannot be classified as information. One definition of why a joke is funny is if the punch line is completely unpredictable from the build up. In other words the recipient could not have anticipated it and information had to be delivered. As an example I like the one about the newly married couple who didn’t know the difference between putty and petroleum jelly: all their windows fell out.

Knowledge of Shannon’s theory and compression algorithms also allows one to predict that party political broadcasts can be compressed down to a very low bit rate on the basis that there is little that the recipient could not have anticipated.

In logic, in legal cases or in attempting to find a fault in a system, in order to draw a meaningful conclusion it is often necessary to hypothesise what may be the case. Each hypothesis is then tested against the evidence to see what can stand. However, the testing progress must be rigorously logical. In my experience logical rigour is thin on the ground and one often finds people putting forward arguments for their passionately held views in which the argument is flawed and the conclusion does not follow from the premises. This is almost the definition of a high-end hifi enthusiast.

The usual scientific method doesn’t work on such people. However, what I have found to be very effective is a type of analysis called reductio ad absurdum. In response to a fallacious argument, I put forward a parallel argument using exactly the same logic, but applied to a topic that is common knowledge. I then follow the reasoning and show that from true premises it leads to a conclusion that is obviously incorrect, or absurd. If the premises are true but the conclusion is absurd, the reasoning must be flawed. I prefer to reach a conclusion that is absurd to the point of hilarity, not only to emphasise the point, but also to ensure it will be remembered.

The record companies often make claims about the amount of money they are losing because of home copying. However, it simply does not follow that everyone who contemplated copying a CD would instead buy it if copying was prevented. This requires a supply of money that doesn’t exist. However, the best description I heard of home copying is that it allows one to breach copyright in the piracy of one’s own home.

Certainly from the point of view of a lecturer, presentations that contain humour are more likely to be enjoyed, understood and remembered if the audience was falling about than if they were sitting in polite silence.

All industries have their own jokes and one of the consequences of working in audio is that there is no shortage of material. Of course there is a large overlap resolution

between audio engineers and musicians that increases the humour base. I now know that drummers are always found in the car park because they don’t know when to come in. Furthermore I have learned why pony tails are so popular with audio engineers. Lift up a pony’s tail and what do you find?

Production of certain types of musical genre is often accompanied by the use of hallucinatory substances.

I recall a mixing console going back for repair being impounded by customs because of all the white stuff that had fallen down the fader slots. Those variable resistors aren’t called pots for nothing.

I have argued before that one of the problems with audio is that the consequences of doing it badly are insufficiently spectacular. Generally there isn’t the fireball and wailing sirens that would be the case in more critical industries. This lack of spectacle means that there is very little regulation. If audio equipment had to be built and operated to the same standards as aircraft, there would be better standards of equipment and user ability and the absurd views would abate a little.

I have had the privilege of discussing audio with a large number of people, and I am no longer surprised when I discover that someone who evidently has a good grasp of the subject also turns out to be a pilot or a yachtsman or to have some other activity in which the consequences of failure are serious. The necessary discipline in another field translates to a more professional outlook in audio. The converse would be the situation in which aircraft are designed by the hifi industry. In that case it would be necessary to live below ground.

One of the most powerful uses of humour is to find out whether people are genuine or not. People who know what they are talking about and are not seeking to mislead respond to teasing quite differently to those who don’t understand their topic or who have a hidden agenda. The latter often take themselves far too seriously. One of the functions of the traditional court jester was to tease visitors in order to establish their bona fide. I have been acting the court jester for a long time now and I have learned that the people who matter don’t mind and the people who mind don’t matter.

There seems to be an ever-growing tide of marketing hype that is taking over in importance from good engineering. Much of this tide is either implausible or incorrect. In part we encourage this stuff by accepting it when instead we should be showering it with derision. Humour and satire are very powerful weapons against hype. They are also extremely effective against prejudice and bigotry and we should use them whenever something comes out of the woodwork.

People use humour in an attempt to deal with the most extreme and distressing circumstances. Such humour can be very tasteless indeed, but I find it difficult to be sanctimonious in such cases. In the aftermath of the New Orleans flooding, one US cleric was heard to say that it was due to God expressing his displeasure at an upcoming lesbian convention, whereas an Army engineer said the flooding was so extensive because there weren’t enough dykes.

Certain observations in this article may not be April 2006

slaying dragons politically correct. I have serious reservations about the effects of political correctness, or should that be rectitude? Political correctness appears to stem from a desire to avoid causing any offence whatsoever to anyone under any circumstances. This seems to be important to people that are voted for. However, if society is to make any progress, it is clear that the ways we presently do things and think about things must change. It is quite natural for people to resist change and take offence if it is suggested. How will any change occur without the risk of offence? If we all become politically correct, ultimately we will

be rendered completely anodyne with no opinions whatsoever. This is consistent with politicians transitioning from being leaders having opinions to administrators trying to align themselves to the views of the electorate. Given the choice of being innovative and offensive or anodyne and popular, I know which I would choose.

Political correctness is also diametrically opposed to humour, which is why I suspect its proponents to be humourless. I have said enough above about those who take themselves too seriously and rigorous political correctness is another symptom. It won’t

be long before negative feedback is banned because it uses the word negative and amplifiers might be offended by it.

There are plenty of PC terms that have been skilfully crafted and/or euphemised to avoid causing offence or negative connotations. My local rubbish dump is signposted ‘amenity site’. The correct approach to political correctness is to satire it. Besides, it is good fun to think up new terms. Say goodbye to baldness and become follically challenged. It’s far better to be aspect ratio impaired than to be short and fat or long and thin. ■

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your business

Who’s driving the bus?

What has become accepted as a natural order has been disturbed by changes in the dynamics of new business relationships. Erosion of the generation gap principle and big business interests have led to the most unlikely of bed fellows, according to DAN DALEY

dan daley

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‘This is the kind of conflict that’s inevitable as the tectonic plates of the old-school entertainment business and the next wave business models collide. There’ll be others.’

IVEN THAT THE Super Bowl is a contest played between US [American] football teams, and the World Cup is limited only to the rest of the entire planet, you might actually have been watching in February when Super Bowl XL (Roman numeral for ‘40’ but amazing how many people thought it referred to a Microsoft product) featured the Rolling Stones as the halftime entertainment.

Given some boring matchups in recent years — this year’s being no exception — the halftime shows, along with the commercials that agencies spend all year creating for the broadcast, have come to be more highly anticipated than the game itself. But when two halftime shows two years in a row feature the likes of Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones, you get the sense that the whole enterprise is likely headed for the bin in the not too distant future.

Perhaps the same can be said of the infrastructure of the entertainment business itself, of which major league sports is a part. This year’s Super Bowl is the perfect trope for that in other ways. When the Stones kicked off their three-song set with It’s Only Rock & Roll, it was with a previous agreement, negotiated with the National Football League, that the live sound mix would duck the volume when Jagger sang the last word of the line ‘You make a dead man come’. This self-censorship was a collaborative effort between two large corporations — the Rolling Stones, Ltd and the NFL, Inc. — assuring both that their pursuit of profit would not be hindered by the same sort of people who complained about Janet Jackson’s left breast making an unannounced cameo appearance two years earlier.

It’s certainly a far cry from 1967, when the Stones appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show — on the same day as the first Super Bowl broadcast, ironically enough.

That night, Sullivan and the CBS and sponsors’ censors compelled Jagger to change the hook of Let’s Spend The Night Together to ‘Let’s Spend Some Time Together’, which Jagger sang while rolling his eyes, introducing our young, impressionable minds at home

to a liberating conspiracy that now seems to have run its course. Almost 40 years on, the two corporations saw eye to eye on the matter.

The point is, there’s a lot of different forces now driving the entertainment bus these days, and while a few of them are the stalwarts of the last generation, it would be good to get to know what will be running the show(s) in the future.

Apple Computer, which created the template that the major record labels had been stumbling around looking for when it established iTunes, will run up against those hoary old machines when they all renegotiate iTunes’s royalty deal later this year. The labels, having been thrown a life preserver by Apple, are now asking for a lifeboat, preferably one with leather seats and chilled champagne. They want to rephrase the arrangement: instead of a one-size-fitsall 99 cents per downloaded song, the labels want to scale the cost per song to the song’s popularity. Given that a song’s popularity is determined by its sales, how you determine which song is worth more than another until the song has established its worth in the sales arena is beyond me.

This is the kind of conflict that’s inevitable as the tectonic plates of the old-school entertainment business and the next wave business models collide.

There’ll be others. Students of history know that change is rarely bloodless. But let’s review how the whole music production workflow has changed in the last decade. The enormity of that change demands it.

MUSIC PRODUCTION — This can be summed up simply by saying that young bands used to save up to go into the studio; now, bands save up to buy the studio, or at least the means of production (Karl Marx would love it). This paradigm has pulled the rug out from under the conventional commercial studio business, which we all know, though some would rather not acknowledge. But it’s also changing some other fundamentals. One is the notion of the LP.

EmbracingSound™ Technology involving your senses.

Embraced by Michael Beinhorn.

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your business Universal Music recently launched a custom label that abandons the idea of recording a dozen or so songs at a time for release on a disc. Instead, artists will release groups of three songs for download distribution every few months.

This seems to codify what’s putatively the case already: not only is the notion of the LP eroding, but so is the idea of the album as an ‘event’. Artists simply don’t sell 12 million copies of a recording anymore.

(Mariah Carey’s sale of nearly 8 million copies of Mimi was an exception, not the rule last year.) The industry moves too fast and is too diffuse today for a Thriller to be possible, useful or necessary.

The numbers truly are askew. The fact that the RIAA instituted awards for download sales two years ago seems irrelevant; the 400,000 single downloads needed to qualify for a platinum download award pale next to the estimated 1 billion downloads that P2P networks move in a month. Sales of full-length albums were down 7.2% last year, but the digital singles market grew by 150%, with 352.7 million individual songs sold online, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Interestingly, it was by far the highest figure for singles sales in any format since 1973.)

Producers and other music professionals absolutely need their own websites, and I suggest they either eschew Flash or have an alternate entry without Flash, because wirelessly exchanging URLs during business encounters is going to replace handing out CDs or even business cards. People will be able to see — and hear — your work on a PDA. Sources of income are also changing. The RIAA’s and IFPI’s litigious battle against P2P and other file exchanges has produced some results, but not all of them positive. For every pound they might save from an illegitimate download transaction, they may be losing hundreds or thousands in the long run, by turning off consumers to paying for music at all. And that hurts music producers.

I’ve long wondered if we’re headed towards the end of the royalty model altogether. It’s a relative blip in the grand scheme of human economic interaction, which for most of history has been: ‘I give you one bushel of wheat now, you give me one drachma now’. Ongoing financial participation in the ethereal notion of intellectual property is recent and limited to western countries. And even that might be changing. France is nearing legislation this year that would legalise file-sharing of music and

movies by consumers in return for a flat licensing fee. In fact, several recent French court decisions on illegal downloading have absolved Internet users in file-sharing cases, or simply imposed very light sentences, setting in place a body of case law that paves the way for more liberalised consumer downloading. And a legitimate Swedish political party, aptly named The Pirates, advocates the scuttling of all copyright protection.

It’s possible the French legislation never makes it to law, and the Chinese did file a record number of worldwide patent applications last year, suggesting that they might be buying into the idea of IP protection. But my money is still on the idea of futureproofing revenues by getting paid now. Front-load your revenue model and you not only get paid sooner than later, but possibly more, since payments will not be subject to the interesting accounting methods long favoured in the entertainment business.

Distribution of music and video is going to be incredibly diffuse. Already, cell phones are rivaling all other playback devices, and that will soon extend to PDAs, set-top boxes at home that will unify the TV and the PC, and other download configurations we haven’t even imagined yet. (Who would have thought cell phones five years ago?) The good thing about this is that there will so many more ways to get music out there. The hard part will be managing it all. My BMI statements now include digital download payments, puny as they are. But no way can the performing rights organisations immediately keep up with all the ways music can be distributed. Again, this argues for front-loading the revenue stream, but to the extent that royalties will be part of that for the foreseeable future, stay in touch with your PRO to see what kinds of technology it’s implementing to track your music. Digital watermarks have been the technology of choice so far, but their usefulness depends on a lot of factors, not least of which includes using versions of tracks that have been watermarked in the first place.

MARKETING — YOU AND YOUR PRODUCTIONS — is another area that’s been significantly impacted by the digital distribution revolution, but is complex enough to warrant an entire space, and we’ll look at that in the near future.

Meanwhile, look at what’s been going on as a big picture. That’s the only way you’ll figure out where you fit in it for the long term. ■

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April 2006

resolution

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headroom COLOMBIAN NOT CHILEAN

DUAL CONCENTRIC PUZZLER

I am a following faithful of your magazine. In the last issue (V5.2 p40) I have found a big mistake about the nationality of Andrea Echeverri and her group (interview with Rafa Sardina).

In the article Nigel Jopson says that the nationality of Andrea Echeverri is Chilean, even Aterciopelados (her last group). She and they are Colombian.

Mauricio Diaz L. Thank you for pointing this out Maurizio. Nigel has gone to have a lie down to recover. In the meantime here’s a picture of Andrea.

ZS

DELAY COMPENSATION Not a bad review (V5.2 Magix Samplitude V8.2 p22), but I just felt that I must point out that Samplitude has had plug-in delay compensation for both objects and tracks for quite a while now....maybe 7.x ? Not sure. Disable an effect on the mixer while the track is playing and you will hear the track in question lose sync with the rest. Maybe this is what Rob means, that all delay compensation is calculated before playback starts?

Nathan Power, Waterford, Ireland Mea culpa, I’m afraid, and nothing quite so clever as Nathan’s attempt to rescue me. Calculating the delay compensation according to the configuration before start of playback seems eminently sensible to me and I certainly wouldn’t complain about it. Obviously, I went looking for delay compensation, both in the manuals and in the software, before making the point. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, there is more than one way of doing things and, if you do it one way, it is obvious there is delay compensation in the mixer and if you do it another, it isn’t. Anyway, there certainly is delay compensation for plug-ins in the mixer and in objects. I suspect the very fact that it is automatic, i.e. there is no check-box for ‘auto delay compensation’ fooled me because I’m used to applications where it needs to be set. Not that it is any excuse, but you won’t find it in the manual under ‘delay compensation’.

Rob James

I am a bit puzzled by the article by Keith Spencer-Allen (V5.2 Ten enduring designs p53). Good to see that the Tannoy Dual Concentric is acknowledged amongst other ‘enduring designs’, however the supporting image used is (believe it or not — but it’s true!) a very brand new hifi speaker from our high-end Prestige range (for which we only ever uses Dual Concentric drivers) …and which still continues to pretty much outsell every high-end audio speaker range in the Far East generally …and in Japan in particular.

The small article contains several ‘anomalies’ …it refers to the Dual design being ‘virtually a point source approach’ and then implies that this has only been ‘recently recognised’. For the record, Tannoy has always …well for the last three decades at least (!) referred to the Dual as a ‘point source’ design and has strongly promoted the resultant constant stereo image and uniform dispersion characteristic amongst its many design advantages.

Another anomaly is the statement that ‘Tannoy has placed less emphasis on the technology in new models’ …’very untrue’ Tannoy’s Communication manager protested! The Dual is slap bang at the forefront of constant development and refinement …and whenever cost permits is ALWAYS used not only in our studio monitors but also residential audio (hifi/home theatre/ multi-room/installation) and commercial loudspeakers.

The use of a separate LF/HF driver configuration is only ever used on our entry level models where we can’t hit the price points demanded by this area of the market. Worth mentioning even here though is that even when using a discrete driver configuration, our engineers always strive to emulate the characteristics of the Dual Concentric by doing things such as bringing the acoustic points of the HF and LF as close together as possible. So I would summarise that the final sentence should have read ‘Tannoy is placing more and more emphasis on this technology as the years roll by!’

How about an extended feature on this very enduring design?

With tongue very firmly in cheek, I’ve attached a two page article that appears in the (soon-to-be-released) April 2006 issue of the long-running hifi rag Hi-Fi News.

God bless Tannoy and all who sail in her!

Tim Lount, Tannoy Limited, UK Keith hasn’t been able to get back to me with a response in time for this issue but I am sure he will as he does choose his words carefully. I am responsible for planting the retro Tannoy picture in the piece and did so in the full knowledge of what it was. I thought it was rather clever.

ZS

Advertisers Index AES ........................................................ 60 Audio Technica ...................................... 19 Broadcast Asia ...................................... 54 Calrec .................................................... 29 Dean Cook Productions.............Classified 63 DPA ....................................................... 11 Charter Oak .......................................... 45 Enhanced Audio .................................... 49 Enhanced Audio ....................Classified 63 ESE ........................................................ 64 Fairlight ................................................. 58 Genelec ....................... Inside Front Cover Golden Age Music ................................ 55 Harman UK ............................................ 27 HHB/Lynx .............................................. 37 HHB/Millenium Music ........................... 13 IBC ......................................................... 31 Jesa NPS (Interbee) .............................. 35 Klark Teknik ...............Outside Back Cover KMR .......................................Classified 63 Loud/Mackie ......................................... 07 Lydkraft ................................................. 18 Merging ................................................. 09 MJQ.......................................Classified 63 Neue Heimet .........................Classified 63 PMC....................................................... 15 Prism Sound .......................................... 47 Sadie...................................................... 50 SBES ...................................................... 65 Scheops ................................................. 17 SCV London/Universal Audio ............... 44 SCV London/Benchmark ....................... 41 SCV London/Fostex .............................. 43 Sennheiser ............................................. 56 Sonic Distribution/Apogee ................... 61 Sonic Distribution/Ghost ...................... 57 Sonic Distribution/SE ............................ 40 Sonic Distribution/Waves...................... 51 Sonifex .................................................. 53 Soundfield ............................................. 21 Tannoy ................................................... 23 Tascam ................................................... 20 Tesi ........................................................ 10 Total Audio Solutions ............................ 39 TL Audio ................................................ 33 TL Commerce ........................Classified 63 Unity Audio/Adams Audio .................... 25

AUDIOlookilikies

Patrick Swayze, actor

66

Dan Daley, Resolution contributor

The Smurfs

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Team Ultrasone

April 2006

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