Resolution V7.6 September 2008 by Resolution

AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V7.6 September 2008

The Chris Porter interview Paul Borg’s ‘production concept’ on Etran Finatawa’s second album Ten things that make postproduction challenging Evolution of a ribbon: RCA-44A to AEA A-440 The business of digital TV in the UK The technology behind Event’s new Opal monitor Reviews: Prism Orpheus • Drawmer M-Clock Plus & Lite • Audient Mico Sennheiser MKH800 Twin • Dolby DP600 • K+H O 410 • Waves JJP

Designed to Adapt L i ke N a t u r e, G e n e l e c DSP ser ies products h ave t h e a d va n c e d ability to adapt to their environment. To solve challenging acoustic issues associated with smaller working environments Genelec introduces the new SE (Small Environment) DSP System. With it, the new SE7261A 10'' DSP subwoofer provides connectivity for up to eight 8130A digital bi-amp monitors. Newly designed GLM.SE software provides computer control of all essential monitoring functions. Genelec AutoCal™ optimizes equalization, level and distance compensation through the SE7261A low-pass/hi-pass outputs to quickly adapt the subwoofer and each loudspeaker to its immediate environment, even in multiple locations. Genelec’s pioneering work in measuring and calibrating customer systems worldwide using our proprietary Room Response Controls led us to develop our new range of DSP monitors, bringing more flexibility and accuracy for our customers. The Genelec SE System brings your listening confidence to professional levels, and provides the most natural and accurate audio monitoring to today’s smaller environments.

www.g enelec.com

AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V7.6 September 2008

ISSN 1477-4216

News & Analysis

4 Leader

18 Products

New introductions and announcements.

News

Headroom

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music

58 Evolution of a ribbon

62 Meet your maker

68 Ten

70 Savalas

72 Sweet spot

The first in a facility-build series of articles from WSDG.

Your business

74 Slaying Dragons

34 Klein + Hummel O 410 36 McDSP DE555, NF575 & FutzBox 38 Røde NTG-3 40 Audient Mico 42 Waves JJP Collection & V6

Sales, contracts, appointments and biz bites.

Rooms à la mode.

Craft

Chris Porter

About painting walls, climbing psychological walls, and how to stay successful in pop music.

50 Dan Gable

A new-build studio at the National University of Singapore is its designer’s biggest control room ever.

Postproduction specialist swaps Soho for Shoreditch and his faders for a management job.

53 Desert Crossroads

Producer Paul Borg gives his account of making African band Etran Finatawa’s second album on a tight schedule.

The oldest mic still in regular use is the RCA 44 ribbon. We look at the progress from 1932 RCA-44A to 2008 AEA A-440. Michael Grace — the man behind the technology of Grace Design. Things that make postproduction difficult/challenging. Europe’s first Dolby Premiere certificated theatre has opened at this Glasgow facility.

Business

56 Digital TV and the UK

Digital terrestrial TV is passing through changes but the UK may yet be the first to implement the new DVB-T2 standard

Auto-Tune in the crosshairs of a public posse that suggests its use constitutes fraud. Daley to the rescue.

Technology

64 Event Opal

An explanation of the technology — new and applied — in Event Electronics’ new ‘statement’ monitor.

Watkinson clears his throat and discusses the sound generator that is the human voice.

Reviews

24 Prism Sound Orpheus

26 Drawmer M-Clock Plus & M-Clock Lite 30 Sennheiser MKH800 Twin 32 Dolby DP600

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, Jon Thornton, Keith Holland, Jim Betteridge, Neil Hillman, Nigel Jopson, Andy Day, Philip Newell, Jim Evans, Dan Daley, John Watkinson

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news news Appointments Mike Franklin has been named executive VP of worldwide sales at Euphonix. He joined Euphonix from SSL in 1997 as sales manager for the company’s Southern region and was then promoted to lead broadcast sales in the US.

(l-r)Rivens and Miedek.

Riedel Communications has started to market its products and services directly in the UK with the formation of Riedel Communications UK Ltd. The division will be headed by business development director Paul Rivens with the international sales team managed by sales director Jens Miedek. Fleetwood Mobiles in the UK has appointed Lise Regan as sales and marketing manager. She joins from managing Livingston Studios and previously had a long association with Dave Stewart’s The Church Studios in north London. Mike Silverston has taken on the role of general manager of Fleetwood’s facilities, with overall responsibility for technical and logistical aspects of the operation. Mike has been Fleetwood’s technical manager since January 2000.

SMS general manager Hervé Le Guil and AE Pro’s Steve Phillips.

Acoustic Energy Pro has appointed SMS France in Provence to act as its French distributor.

©2008 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

Leader

While I admit that ‘Famine approaches but plough prices at an all time low’ was never a headline that might have graced a medieval newspaper, the march of technology and its forced adoption has always been unstoppable. Thus it is that recent statistics in the UK report that the price of food, energy and of raw materials continues to rise, but it’s never been a better time to buy a digital camera, your first shiny little bit of technology, or a computer as the prices of these goods have been falling consistently. So embedded has the small, ultimately trivial but so beautifully packaged personal technology become that it seems to have become factored into the equation for calculating our cost of living. Which makes me think that things are a little bit crazy when we clearly can’t feed the world with any great efficiency or conviction — perhaps we don’t really want to feed the world — but we can change lives not with pencils, writing paper and books but with a piece of bright plastic that helps you to organise your life when it never needed organising. It is the forced adoption of ‘technology’ that I resent most. If you choose to resist it, then costs will eventually conspire against your opting out. At some stage you will be looked at as if you have a mental illness and shouldn’t really be out alone in the community and at some other it is guaranteed that someone will play the ‘it’s not green to not change’ card at you. Apart from feeding our egos and indulging our desire to enjoy a reward for all our hard work, the pack of gizmos that litter our modern lives are only ongoing replacements that feed the world’s manufacturing mills. It has always been so and while there were practical reasons why evolution progressed beyond the gramophone and CRT, there have been points beyond which ‘progress’ has been marginal for years and it’s only the hype and the capturing of the buying public’s imagination that keeps those particular stones rolling. A run-of-the-mill digital camera still has a long way to go to equal the quality of a market equivalent run-of-the-mill 35mm camera from days past. In fact, you could argue that it is unlikely that it ever will purely because our economies and manufacturing priorities are simply not geared to delivering quality in quantity; it mostly devises ways to make it seem that it does. So are we really so comfortable now that we have become disconnected from the nitty-gritty of reality and allowed confusion between the essential and the meaningless? Without a doubt. When I was my children’s age there little black children dying of starvation in African dust bowls on the TV. Today, while the picture quality is undoubtedly better and I can press the Red Button if I want to see ‘More’, there are still little black children dying of starvation in dust bowls in Africa. You won’t see an iPod, digital camera or mobile phone among them. Zenon Schoepe

Strongroom takes over management of Guillemots’ studio Strongroom has taken over the management of a new studio in Bethnal Green, London. Strongroom 33 offers a 1500sqft recording space with a vaulted church ceiling. The decision to take over the running of the studio came as a result of working closely with the band Guillemots, who converted the old synagogue into its current form for the recording of their recent album, Red, in conjunction with AIR Studios’ engineers and technical team. ‘It was the model that the band (Guillemots) used to record their album that attracted us,’ explained Richard Boote, owner. ‘What their studio allowed them to do was use the space to write and record ideas in a relaxed, creative environment and then take these ideas and finish them in either AIR or Strongroom’s Neve/SSL rooms, while also staying within budget. We believe that this route will be attractive to emerging and established artists alike especially in these times where budgets are being slashed.’

SBES – moving onwards The organisers of SBES2008 say that 70% of exhibition space is already booked. The annual Sound Broadcasting Equipment Show will be held at the NEC in Birmingham 5-6 November. The organisers says that ‘from the microphone to the transmission system’ there will be exhibitors at SBES2008 with information, advice, demonstrations and products to suit the needs of those involved in sound broadcasting and particularly anyone wanting to start their own radio station/studio. www.sbes2008.com

FR2-LE to go into space The Fostex FR-2LE Field Recorder has been selected by NASA to travel on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station in the Autumn of 2008 as the primary audio capturing device. Greg Smith, who for more than 20 years has been working with IMAX Space Systems developing sound recording systems to fly aboard the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, said that his role was ‘to choose a workable recorder and train the astronauts who would be doing

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the actual recording in space.’ Having graduated from analogue cassette to a DAT recorder, NASA deemed that IMAX was ready to fly again after a long hiatus, and needed to update the recorder. The factors considered included: size, weight; ease of operation; alkaline battery power; and the responsiveness from the manufacturer to solve problems. Back on earth, the Victorian College of The Arts in Australia has bought 20 PD204 location recorders for its School of Film and Television.

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resolution

Telegenic in the UK has installed PMC TB2S-A and DB1S-A 5.1 monitoring systems in T16, its most recently commissioned OB vehicle. T16’s primary objective is the broadcast of Sky Rugby Union with a varied roster outside the rugby season. The configuration consists of TB2S-A LCR with a pair of DB1S-As as rear channels with a TLE1S active sub woofer. In addition, the VT area features a pair of DB1S-As.

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September 2008

news Aquarium expands into Worldwide Studios

Appointments

Audio postproduction company Aquarium has completed the refurbishment of part of Worldwide Studios to provide it with two further rooms offering, for the first time, full Dolby accredited sound. The refurbishment of the studios, located in St Anne’s Court, Soho, London comes at a time of growth for the company, which boasts 15 sound designers and mixers. ‘It’s a crying shame that these studios, which were at the centre of TV production for over 30 years, have fallen out of favour with the post community.’ said Peter Joly, MD of Aquarium. ‘Our reason for acquiring them is not only to bring Worldwide Studios and its reputation to a wider client base, but to re-energise this great recording space for the industry.’ In the main studio, Aquarium has installed a 24-fader DFC Gemini while Studio 2 has been regenerated as an ADR and Foley recording room. The Worldwide Studios complex was constructed more than 30 years ago and played host to feature films, TV series and documentaries, including A Room with a View (Merchant Ivory) and A Private Function (Handmade Films) to ITV’s London’s Burning, Inspector Morse and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries.

DiGiCo MD James Gordon and Mick Anderson.

Rap superstar Snoop Dog and country icon Willie Nelson recently got together to record the track My Medicine with Sven Lens engineering the session at Wisseloord Studios. ‘When people sing through the Gemini, it sounds like they are three feet closer to the mic compared to others, which gives you a more modern sound –- that’s addictive! I actually bought the Gemini I used with Snoop and Willie right after the session, since it sounded so good. It is my first [choice] mic for vocals now, so I don’t have to look what the studio has for me, as I always bring my own.’

Lawo big in Olympic sound

Glyndebourne buys Sequoia

Two years ago, the Glyndebourne opera house in Sussex, UK decided to form its own CD label to release material from its huge archive of live recordings from more than 45 years. An in-house mastering capability was added in March this year with John Barnes, who has managed the archival recording activity at Glyndebourne since the early 1960s, bringing in French tonmeister Sébastien Chonion to run the original recording and remastering activities. Glyndebourne has installed Magix Sequoia Version 10 for new original recording and remastering, primarily because of its multitrack editing capabilities and the wide range of plug-ins available.

DiGiCo is working with Mick Anderson Consulting for its international business development. Hans-Christian K j æ r g a a r d Hansen, a member of the NTP Technology management board since 2003, has been promoted to MD. M i k a e l Ve s t h a s joined NTP Technology as sales director. He previously worked at NTP, RE Technology, BarcoNet and more recently he was a partner and CEO at Digital Audio Denmark. LA A u d i o h a s appointed Audio Ethics as its Indian distributor. Founded by Mejo C Jose (pictured), Audio Ethics is a distribution and retail company active in the portable PA and touring market.

More than 50 Lawo mc² consoles were employed in Beijing for the Olympic Games. Lawo desks were installed by Lawo’s rental company Audio Broadcast Services (ABS) in 17 surround control rooms in Beijing. ABS was also responsible for planning, delivery, project engineering and on-site support and held a pool of Lawo equipment available for hire, including a flight-cased mixing console system. The OB van fleet from Europe with mc²66 consoles on site included Alfacam, Outside Broadcast and Prisma. Finnish broadcaster YLE (pictured), equipped with mc²66, zirkonXL and zirkon consoles used on-site sound control rooms for national and international feeds, in conjunction with a YLE studio in Helsinki. In Beijing, YLE used a Nova73 HD router as the central matrix, to which five Lawo consoles were linked: one mc²66 for YLE TV 2, one

zirkonXL for YLE TV FST-5 and one zirkon for YLE Radio Suomi. German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF shared ZDF’s new mobile production unit for central signal processing at the IBC. For routing, the unit had a Nova73 HD with a capacity of 8,000 crosspoints and provided access to 87 redundantly linked Lawo Dallis frames with over 4,000 I-Os. Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) deployed its new container-based control room for the first time in Beijing with sound production for South Korea’s national TV and radio coverage mixed on a 48-fader mc²66. The largest Chinese broadcaster, China Central Television, used two mc²66s in its new HQ for the broadcast of the games. The consoles, with 40 and 32 faders, had an HD core with 96 DSP channels and a routing capacity of 3,000 crosspoints.

SEA has taken over Brauner Microphones and Vovox distribution in North America. Neil Ziesing from Group 55 Technology Consulting will be responsible for the dealer support on the Eastern Seaboard and Fred Z of Z Product Guy will be the representative for the Western Seaboard states. Dealers in Canada and all other US states will be supplied directly by SEA. Mark Flanagan has joined Tannoy’s UK marketing department. He previously worked for UK retail chain Sound Control as marketing manager and editor of the company’s customer magazine (Reverb).

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September 2008

resolution

news Appointments

(l-r) AMTEC president Andrés Martínez and DPA founder Morten Stove.

DPA Microphones has appointed its first-ever distributor for Mexico, AM Tecnología (AMTEC), based in Mexico City. Jim Mack has been appointed CEO o f P re s o n u s . M o s t recently he served as VP, sales and business development for SaneWave but his previous positions include general manager for Tascam USA and VP sales and marketing for Alesis.

DPA expands manufacturing

DPA has opened a new factory alongside its existing one at its manufacturing base in Asnaes, Denmark. The new plant will offer an enormous increase in throughput and is integral to the company’s announced plans to show a 25% increase in revenue by the year 2011 and to double sales with ‘robust growth’ that will open opportunities up for further growth. The new factory adds 1400m2 to the original 1200m2 plot. It majors on intricate plastic production to a level of expertise and quality that DPA benefits from in its own products. It also allows the company to offer these tooling and mass plastic component manufacturing services to businesses outside of the pro audio industry. Crucial to DPA’s ‘Plan 2011’ is the strengthening of its existing markets while also building up in new associated areas. It intends to grow in new geographical territories and market sectors. Product releases will reinforce this new thinking with high-end MI-type products expected to be launched at the PLASA show and what is likely to be a surround mic for broadcast applications launched at the IBC exhibition.

Wells masters CD and vinyl Dangerously

(l-r) GC Pro director of sales Rick Plushner and Ocean Way studio owner Allen Sides.

Ocean Way’s Hi-Res Main Monitor S y s t e m s a re n o w a v a i l a b l e f o r demonstration and purchase through Guitar Center Professional (GC Pro), the outside US sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users.

(l-r): Rightway MD Danny Lau; Midas and KT’s David Cooper; Rightway sales manager Alan Wong.

Mi da s an d K l a r k Te kn ik h ave appointed Rightway Audio as their Chinese distributor. Rightway has headquarters in Guangzhou as well as branches in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.

Mastering Engineer Mike Wells relies on his Dangerous Music setup as the heart of his system. Through his use of the Dangerous Master for inserts and routing, Dangerous Monitor for input switching and monitor control and the Dangerous MQ for metering and headphones, Wells can turn out CD master and Vinyl premaster files simultaneously, saving record labels and bands time and money — all while keeping a consistent high-quality sound without tedious comparison listening. ‘I had wanted to put a system like this together ever since seeing and hearing Dangerous Music gear for the first time and because of Chris Muth’s reputation in the industry for designing and building

transfer consoles for countless top mastering studios,’ he said. ‘The feature set I was looking for, as a result of building and tweaking my own routing system, Chris and Bob [Muller] at Dangerous Music had already addressed in their mastering rig — the combination of Dangerous Master, Monitor and MQ. When I had the chance to try the gear out, it totally delivered on all that I had hoped for. It is certainly a far more elegant solution to anything I saw that was available then or even now because of its simplicity, its sonic power, and its well thought-out design. It certainly trumped what I had built for myself. The MQ, the Monitor and the Master together create the modern-day transfer console.’

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A-T road show deemed great success

A visitor survey conducted during the recent Audio-Technica Road To Success tour has revealed an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the concept and content of the UK-wide roadshow, held in May and June. More than 90% of respondents to the survey found their roadshow visit useful and would attend such an event again. And 20% of survey respondents were not AudioTechnica dealers or re-sellers. ‘The survey results show that customers were very receptive to Audio-Technica going out to see them, rather than having to travel to us in the usual trade show environment,’ said Audio–Technica senior UK marketing manager Harvey Roberts.

Vistas at the heart of Saudi HD plan Three orders totalling seven broadcast consoles have put Studer at the heart of the ongoing program to upgrade TV facilities to HD for State-run Saudi TV in Saudi Arabia. These are the first digital desks to be deployed by Saudi Arabian government-owned TV stations and the Vista consoles are being delivered by Riyadh-based First Gulf Company. The first three Vista 5s have been installed in the Riyadh TV Centre, which houses the facilities for the Saudi Sport and Saudi News channels. Two Vista 5s are due to be installed in the new TV centre in Dammam, where they will be used in the TV production studio and TV news studio. Two other consoles are destined for on-site HD TV studios at the mosques of Mecca and Medina. Meanwhile, government-owned Emirates Media in Abu Dhabi has taking delivery of four Outside Broadcast vehicles equipped with Vista 8 and Vista 5, which have been built by Thomson in France.

Streaky starts own online mastering service

Mastering engineer Streaky has started his own online eMastering operation with www.StreakyMastering.com which he says takes the concept to the next level with the use of video calls and instant messaging between client and engineer.

September 2008

news Appointments Jason Kelly has been appointed technical sales manager for Midas and Klark Teknik. He spent the last four years working for Midas and Klark Teknik’s UK distributor Shuttlesound and was also team leader for the development of Klark Teknik’s DN9696 hard disc recorder.

Sonygraf is ES first for Spain

Shuttlesound has recruited former SSE project manager Rob Hughes to join its UK sales team, principally to look after the Midas and Klark-Teknik lines. Franz-Josef Menke has joined EVI as its sales manager for microphones with responsibility for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. CharterOak Ac o u s t i c s h a s expanded operations in South East Asia with a new office in Singapore under the leadership of manager Kamal Mahtani. CharterOak Acoustic Devices Asia Pte Ltd will handle sales, product distribution and technical support for the region, including Singapore, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Philippines.

Barcelona-based production company Sonygraf has installed the first Digidesign Icon D-Control ES worksurface in Spain into its Digit Sound dubbing studio. Specialising in television and film audio postproduction, the facility contains seven editing rooms and four mixing stages, with the 48-fader Icon D-Control ES and a Pro Tools|HD 3 Accel system in the main Dolby-certified stage. The studio has several Pro Tools|HD and Pro Tools LE systems, each controlled by a Digidesign Control|24 or Command|8. ‘Working on the console, we have the same features as analogue mixing desks, but with the enhanced workflow available through a digital environment,’ said Ricard Picalló, the studio’s chief engineer. ‘All the parameters can be easily accessed, and two outstanding features, Preview and Capture, and the Custom Faders let us work in a smooth and personalised way.’ ‘Installing an Icon D-Control ES in our facility was a natural next step in order to keep progressing as a business,’ explained Miguel Torres, technical manager for Digit Sound. ‘Digit Sound has been working with Pro Tools on a large-format [48-fader] ProControl for film mixing since 2003.’

WDR installs five Xynergys

Wilkins produces with Sonnox

Songwriter/producer Wayne Wilkins has a discography that includes work for Oasis’ No Doubt, Leona Lewis’ Take A Bow, Michelle Williams’ We Break The Dawn and Beyonce’s Beautiful Nightmare and is currently enjoying success with Natasha Bedingfield’s Pocket Full of Sunshine CD and Love Like This single with Sean Kingston. Sonnox Oxford Plug-ins play a supporting role in most of his productions. ‘I was just in Miami with my production team, The Runaways, working on Energy, a single by new Timbaland artist Keri Hilson,’ he said. ‘We made good use of Oxford Dynamics and Inflator while programming that single. They’re especially helpful in fine-tuning my style of music. I’ve used them on virtually everything I’ve done, especially vocals, and the master bus.’ Wilkins finds the Dynamics Plug-in particularly helpful on stereo mixes with Logic. ‘We’ll end up printing the individual parts out of Logic even if we go to Pro Tools and mix on an SSL,’ he said. ‘We use that sound on every record I do. We’ve compared our tracks with and without Dynamics, and they truly sound a lot better with.’

Music 4 upgrades with multiple Blue Sky

Mackie has appointed Laz Harris as Asia-Pacific market manager. He joined Loud in 2004 and was most recently product specialist. APT has opened an office in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The office will be headed by Jonathan Corkey who has been re s i d e n t i n R i o d e Janeiro for a number of years, and was previously MD of Myriad Media. Audio Agent LLC in the US has appointed Tom Menrath as VP of brand management. He was formerly director of business development for Guitar Center. Clear-Com Communication Systems has appointed Tilts Integration as its distributor for Latvia. Danmon and Soundware are now distributors for Clear-Com in the Scandinavian market.

WDR’s chief operator for Xynergi, Matthias Fischenich.

German public broadcaster WDR has installed five Fairlight Xynergi systems at its facilities in Cologne. WDR has been a Fairlight customer for more than 10 years and has MFX3+s in a number of its studios. In recent years its has upgraded two of these rooms to Dream Station and Constellation systems. Two Xynergi MPC96 systems with SX-48 MADI interfaces are used for operator

training while the three remaining systems have a 12-fader Sidecar and two CC-1 upgrades for the Dream Station and Constellation systems. ‘All of the systems will be connected to Fairlight’s SFX Library Server AudioBase 3, which will allow the broadcaster to speed up workflow and share audio files between studios,’ said Mario Schmitz, Fairlight’s head of European operations.

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London Soho post house Music 4 Studios’ recent expansion from one to three studios offered an opportunity to upgrade its equipment and part of the enhancement included installation of two Blue Sky Big Blue 5.1 systems in studios 1 and 2, and a Big Blue 2.1 System for Studio 3. ‘Our studio engineer was looking at speaker options and had heard about the Blue Sky speakers through a friend at another facility who had purchased them in the States,’ explained facilities manager, Sarah Davis. ‘He requested a demo, and the decision to purchase was almost instantaneous once we heard the speakers in our studios. ‘The Blue Sky speakers were particularly impressive at all monitoring levels. We also found that a great mix on the Blue Sky’s transferred really well to many other sources right down to built-in speakers on a plasma TV, so they’ve proven to be extremely accurate, too.’

September 2008

news Biz Bites

Sky and Universal Music have joined forces to launch a range of monthly music subscription packages through Sky Online, writes Nigel Jopson. UMG is keen to have Sky cross-promote the service to its 8.8m subscribers. ‘I want this to be big,’ said BSkyB CEO Mike Darcy, ‘if I can get good penetration by bundling it with Sky Broadband or Sky TV then I will do that, but I am not going to do that to the exclusion of other opportunities.’ Hiding the cost of music in a bundle seems like part of the grand plan for UMG head of digital Rob Wells, who engineered the Nokia Comes With Music deal. No details of pricing have been revealed, but Sky’s ability to execute far-reaching ideas should not be underestimated, legitimate downloads represent only 8% of UK music sales, and making the plan work could leave Sky owning the majority of the UK digital market. Nokia has now signed up Warner to its Comes With Music plan. O2 and Sony BMG have launched an à-la-carte download music store (so last season), and Guitar Hero aims to take on iTunes with an online music platform. The merger of Activision (Guitar Hero’s publisher) with Vivendi Games was completed i n J u l y. T h e new company, Activision Blizzard, would benefit from Vivendi’s ownership of Universal Music, and has a US$3.5bn cash war-chest (originally intended to fund a tender offer), which at current valuations might allow Guitar Hero to buy both Warner and EMI. (Only joking, dear Editor.) Collective music industry grimaces greeted the $600m (plus a $300m retention of cash reserves) figure Sony has paid Bertelsmann for the remaining 50% of Sony-BMG. The sale does include a 6-year CD pressing contract for a Bertelsmann subsidiary and some European music-rights catalogues ... but still. A purchase price of 4.5 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBTIDA) leaves other recorded music valuations looking very stretched — Warner Music Group was previously trading on a multiple of 7 times EBTIDA. Meanwhile, EMI has appointed Elio Leoni-Sceti as chief executive of its recorded music division, ending months of speculation about who would get the top post ... not a music man. Mr Leoni-Scetis has been with Reckitt Benckiser for 16 years and was previously a brand manager at Procter

Barcelona post ups to 5-MC

Estudis Roca Produccions, one of Barcelona’s top full-service post houses, has installed a Euphonix System 5-MC in its main Nuendo-equipped recording and editing studio. ‘With the System 5-MC I didn’t have to change my way of mixing, because the combinations of console Layout presets gave me the chance, for the first time, to adapt the mixing system to my way of working, allowing me to bring different layouts of tracks that I need in front of me, at the push of a button,’ said Xavi Andreu mixing engineer at Roca. ‘Thanks to the total integration of the System 5-MC channel strips with Nuendo, accessing Nuendo commands from the central module’s soft keys, and the visual feedback on the surface and console screens, you forget that behind the console is a DAW.’ In the UK, the National Film and Television School has bought three Euphonix System 5s for its expanded film mixing department. Each console is a 24-fader, 78-channel system with DAW control of Nuendo, Pro Tools and Logic Pro. Mixing engineer/ sound supervisor John Ross (left) has built a mixing studio in his Hollywood home. 424 Inc. is a large film dubbing stage and Ross recently upgraded his Euphonix System 5-MC into a dual-operator, 80-fader System 5 by adding more than 300 channels of DSP and E u C o n H y b r i d DAW control for each operator. The System 5 is fed with five Pro Tools and four Nuendo Systems, used for editing, as recorders, and playback. ‘I wanted to provide clients with a world-class dubbing experience in a unique and special environment tailored to the needs of their project and their privacy,’ explained Ross. ‘The Euphonix System 5 is the only mixing system that can achieve these goals right now, and I especially like the EuCon Hybrid connectivity to the workstations we use for playback -– no other system comes close to this mix of DSP and DAW control. It’s also very important for me to be able to bring in top film mixers when necessary, and the System 5 gives them the confidence and familiarity they need to work at their best.’

Constant Q at Electric Mastering London-based Electric Mastering has taken delivery of a SPL PQ EQ from Funky Junk. The PQ is the latest addition to the mastering room, which also features an EMI TG console. ‘Some years ago, I had read an interesting article about Darcy Proper at Galaxy mastering who had based their

studio around an SPL MMC1 and were also using SPL PQs, so, I arranged to get a demo on the PQ,’ said engineer Guy Davie. ‘It sounded open and energetic. I always say to people that with the EQ in, the PQ sounds assertive and confident; I just hadn’t heard anything like it.’

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news Biz Bites & Gamble. From dishwashing powder, Clearasil and Neurofen to Coldplay and Pink Floyd. BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse — the UK’s six biggest ISPs — have agreed a plan negotiated by the British government with the music industry to tackle piracy online. Thousands of letters will be sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music. The plan also commits the internet firms to develop legal music services, and persistent file-sharers could see their broadband connections slowed. I believe a simple education programme would be better than all those wasted stamps. Napster, Limewire, eMusic, eMule, 7Digital, Kazaa, MP3tunes, AllofMP3 ... which parent knows the difference? Put a list of naughty and nice music sites/ programmes on the ISP home page and on all promotional material. Explain the dangers and give each home the option to block the naughties. Done. When I wrote about the HDMI interface in Resolution V5.4, I mentioned the prospect of forced deactivation of analogue outputs. This facility is a requirement of the new Freesat specification, and has already been used during some BBC HD broadcasts. A recent software update for Humax’s FoxSat-HD set-top box has enabled flags in transmissions blocking the output of HD content via component connections. Future studio planning should take into account the possibility of a sudden deactivation of all non-HDMI connections via software, and discount the possibility of inserting recorders downstream of HDMI. HD TV is old hat already — the BBC will be participating in trials of NHK’s Super Hi-Vision video system, with a stunning screen resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels and 22.2 channel surround audio. The demo at Amsterdam’s IBC exhibition will combine content shot in Japan with live pictures from London. Make sure to have a fovea extension and tympanal organ update before checking it out.

SoundField Vision fest

Stefan Heger, chief engineer at Supow Studio, Cologne, Germany, recorded the 13th annual avant-garde Vision Festival held in New York City in full surround using the SoundField MkV microphone. With five acts performing every night — 30 in all — it was hard to find a mic setup that would properly capture every act and in the six previous years that Heger has recorded the Vision Festival he has tried to find a system that works. He relied on the SoundField for the surround signal. Using SoundField’s Surround Zone software with the four channels of information during mixdown allowed Heger to change every aspect of the imaging. ‘The ability to change the mic position during mixdown has many advantages,’ said Heger. ‘I can bring things closer to the listener without losing fidelity or introducing odd spatial artefacts. And the sound of the microphone, apart from its spatial ability, is clear, deep, open and wonderfully transparent.’ During the performances, Heger monitored with a Dangerous D-Box using the preamp’s stereo output and printed the four SoundField channels using Apogee AD16x convertors.

New Oslo Opera House starts with large Stagetec

More than 300 million people heard the final whistle on the UEFA Champions League Cup final this summer thanks to Calrec Audio. A Calrec Alpha with Bluefin console provided every global audio feed from the match in Moscow, while two Calrec consoles completed a very British coup at the historic Luzhniki Stadium. UEFA appointed Br0itain’s Sky Television to handle all the production requirements. The game was hosted by Russian broadcasters RTR and NTV, although the infrastructure for global coverage was provided by two NEP Visions trucks, while England’s 021 Television provided coverage for ITV Sport. ‘The UEFA Cup final has been in HD for several years and we have been involved in every one,’ said Keith Lane, Sky’s Sports operations manager. ‘Following a tender proposal, NEP Visions provided HD3 as the multilateral truck to produce the international feed on their behalf. We were already involved with providing the feed for Sky using Visions’ HD4.’ Working on his third UEFA Cup Final in as many years, BAFTA award-winning Robert Edwards mixed the world feed in HD3. ‘This was an interesting game and having three Calrec consoles on site made things so much easier,’ said Edwards. ‘We use a SoundField mic to capture the 5.1 crowd bed, and we supplement that with other crowd mics. An additional 16 mics are placed around the pitch and I spend all my time chasing the ball around with the faders! It’s a very comprehensive mix.’

Studiospares new website at 25

Showtime Plasa, London..........7-10 September IBC, Amsterdam....12-16 September AES US, San Francisco... 3-5 October Broadcast India, Mumbai .........................17-19 October SBES, Birmingham..... 5-6 November Tonmeistertagung, Leipzig................... 13-16 November InterBEE, Tokyo..... 19-21 November NAMM, Anaheim.....15-18 January 2009 Prolight + Sound, Frankfurt.........................1-4 April 2009 NAB, Las Vegas........ 17-23 April 2009

Calrec don’t miss a shot in Moscow

The New Opera House Oslo, which opened its doors in April, is preparing for the start of its second season after the summer break. The Opera House has three identically configured Aurus consoles integrated into a Nexus network. Each desk has 24 faders with 8 layers but there are differences in their DSP power. The systems in the main and small halls each contain the maximum of seven DSP cards for up to 300 audio channels while the console in the control

room is fitted with four DSP cards for 170 audio channels. When classical opera performances are on the programme they are served by the 24-fader Aurus in the control room. Musical and contemporary music performances usually require a larger console and in these cases an extra 40-fader Aurus controller is used in addition to the control-room console. Given the compact footprint of the consoles they can be setup side by side for 64-fader operation.

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Professional audio supplier Studiospares has launched a new look website with updated features, advanced navigation control and improved functionality. ‘Feedback from our customers suggested the old site, while quite adequate, was a bit slow and difficult to find your way around,’ said general manager Richard Venable. ‘Partnering with Venda, a top-ranked web design and hosting company with high-profile customers such as BBCShop, DeBeers and Fatface, means our customers benefit from their reliable and flexible web platform.’ The company celebrated 25 years in February and in that time has grown from occupying a 2000sqft dress factory to a 20,000sqft warehouse, and developed into a leading retailer of professional audio equipment in the UK.

September 2008

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facility

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music A recently completed new-build studio at the National University of Singapore has set the bar at a new high for the region and also houses designer Eastlake Audio’s biggest control room ever. JIM EVANS flies in to find out.

hey don’t do things by halves in Singapore — especially at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (YSTCM) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) where the stunning facilities now include a fully-fledged recording studio. Detail-designed by UK-based Eastlake Audio to meet an exacting brief and equipped to the highest professional standards it is fairly described as one of the most advanced recording studios in South East Asia and sits comfortably in the premier division of any world studio league. The studio’s prime purpose is to record the work of the students of which there are around 200 enrolled on four-year degree courses at any one time. When time allows, it will undertake commercial work. It will also be a ‘classroom’ for the practical elements of a new Recording Arts and Sciences major and a sonic arts graduate programme, both courses aimed for launch in 2009. A joint collaboration between the National University of Singapore and one of the world’s leading music schools, the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, the Conservatory is working closely on programme and facilities development with the Peabody faculty. Established in 2001 under the name Singapore Conservatory of Music, the YSTCM was renamed after the daughter of its benefactor, Dr Yong Loo Lin, whose family made a generous gift that supports student scholarships (all students are fully funded) and allows the conservatory to undertake special projects. The Yong Loo Lin Trust recently made a further donation of Sing. $25m to the Conservatory, stating, ‘We believe that this will help bring the Conservatory one step closer to becoming a centre of international standing in music education.’ Students are drawn to the Conservatory from all over the Asia-Pacific region, and undertake studies in music, performance and composition during their four16

year undergraduate coursework. This year will see the first intake of students from Europe. ‘Our opening concert in 2003 was a great success, a confidence booster and people realised we are serious about what we are doing here,’ says Dr Ho Chee Kong, associate professor and head of composition. ‘In the early days we were finding our way, but now, five years later we see ourselves as Asia’s international conservatory and are building on that.’ ‘This is a relatively new institution and new institutions have unique issues and challenges — and possibilities,’ says American-born assistant professor Dr Peter Edwards. ‘We don’t have the burden of 150 years of history and tradition where it’s like trying to turn a container ship when you decide to go in a different direction.’ Alongside the studio, the Conservatory features a 600-seat concert hall, orchestra hall and recital studio, all of which are connected to the studio’s expansive control room to allow live recordings from these venues. The studio’s large live area itself can comfortably accommodate 60 musicians. ‘This was a ground-up project that we were working on for around 20 months and everyone involved is more than happy with how it has all materialised,’ says Eastlake’s David Hawkins. ‘The Conservatory’s own concert hall in the building in which the recording facilities are housed was inaugurated in October 2006 and the studio was finally completed and fitted out in Spring 2007. It’s a significant project for a number of reasons, not least the fact that at present there aren’t many 60-man studios that are built from ground-up in the world every year, let alone in South East Asia.’ Studio manager Xiaodong Zhou, himself a graduate of the Peabody Institute, agrees with Hawkins. ‘Everything is going fine. We are very pleased with how it has turned out,’ he says. ‘The main work for resolution

this recording studio is to provide a first class recording service for the students and faculty members of the Conservatory — recording their concerts and recitals. We have started to do some commercial work, but we must always give priority to our students and faculty members. This is without doubt the biggest recording studio in Singapore and the immediate region. And the most recent. As in other territories, the studio industry has changed here and artists don’t need so much professional studio time. ‘We can of course also record directly from the main performance areas as well as from the studio,’ he says. ‘We are also planning to develop a recording arts department. I believe it’s important for students to get a rounded education — besides traditional courses like production technology and acoustics study, we will be covering more elements such as video editing, podcasting, streaming media and sound design for video games… which will give them greater opportunities to develop their careers in the future. We’re going to be teaching the students here — so this studio and control room will also serve as a classroom — a good reason for it being the size it is.’ ‘This is certainly the largest control we’ve ever designed,’ adds Hawkins, who was back in Singapore to give the facilities a final inspection and check out the isolation and reverberation times. ‘It has not been designed for rock ‘n’ roll primarily — so it’s not necessary to have blood from ears sound pressure levels in here, but accurate monitoring is essential and it’s catered for within the system that has been installed.’ Did Eastlake encounter any major problems in constructing a control room of these dimensions? ‘The one thing that did concern me,’ says Hawkins, ‘was the sheer size of the outer glass pane. Initially, I worried about being able to source it. But we ordered it from the local Agent of a Japanese manufacturer who shipped it in with no hiccups. Secondly, I worried September 2008

facility about actually getting it into place because of its weight — glass is incredibly dense, very heavy and this is a big lump of 18mm glass. And the structure on which is sits had to be checked to see that it wouldn’t literally give way.’ Hawkins continues, ‘Singapore is by no means a Third World place. The industrial infrastructure here is highly developed and anything you want that’s manufactured anywhere in the world is obtainable here either from local stock or via a local agent. No problems. The timber you see is either European or North American oak, but will have been finished in cabinet making or timber milling facilities here in Singapore.’ SSL Asia, Quested distributor in Singapore, supplied the console and the monitors. The 48-channel, 216input SSL C200 console has been teamed up with a Quested 5.1 surround-sound system made up of the Q412d as main LR monitors, which also handle the .1 feed, a Q212dn for the centre and Q210d for the surround channels. The studio playback and rehearsal room monitoring is handled by a pair of Q210d and two QSB118 subwoofers. ‘Originally they were looking for some other monitors, but I convinced Alan Kefauver, the US consultant to take some listening tests on the Questeds, and a meeting with Roger [Quested] at London’s Sarm West studio was arranged, and like they say, the rest is history,’ says Chan Kheng Wah of SSL Asia. As to these key elements of the control room, Xiaodong Zhou notes, ‘SSL has a great reputation and also great representation here in Singapore. They have very high standards and it’s an excellent console for the students to learn on. Similarly, Quested also has a great reputation. If you listen to the loudspeakers, they just sound so real. We don’t need any colouration, we just need real sound. ‘We are constantly busy here, especially during term time. We record everything for the archives. We just don’t know when we might be recording the classical music stars of tomorrow.’ So how did Eastlake first get involved with this project? ‘Eastlake had previously worked on recording studios and recording tutoring facilities for Perth College in Scotland and I was therefore particularly interested to learn from SSL’s Singapore representative that this project was being planned and that there would be a requirement for developing and detailing the basic concept which the Peabody Institute’s Alan Kefauver had come up with,’ says Hawkins. ‘We progressed that into working drawings and mechanical services specifications to produce something that would be practical to construct and would — at completion — perform to requirements.

September 2008

‘We liaised closely with Alan Kefauver at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University throughout the design and build processes. When the actual construction started we sent over an experienced ex-pat studio construction specialist, Stephen Russell, who worked with a local contractor over a four- month period and made sure that the work was tackled in the correct sequential manner and that the accuracy was respected — essential to get ultimate acoustical performance and timely completion,’ explains Hawkins. ‘And of course there’s also the finishing where some of the techniques that are used in the cosmetic finishing of studios are fairly specialised. Stephen can almost do that sort of thing on auto-pilot, while a local contractor, no matter how competent, would have had to think about it while taking a great deal more time to complete. ‘There are several facets to any studio project — the isolation and efficiency that’s required of the isolation systems and the internal acoustics, the geometry, the amount of absorbent and reflective surfaces, diffusing surfaces and so forth. In a big modern building like this, with thousands of square metres of space, there are building acoustics components that need to be considered at the same time as the architectural planning,’ he says. ‘This was provided by a European based building consultancy. Within the fundamental construction, there was isolation put in so that the

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loud noise making areas were acoustically isolated from one another at that early ‘concrete stage’, and subsequently additional isolation that we specified was built in to further isolate these areas. I’m happy to report everything is working excellently.’ The Conservatory’s studio facilities are certainly among the most prestigious in South East Asia. And as to this region in general, David Hawkins observes, ‘Generally, the music studio build business in this part of the world is quiet. And you can see it when you look at the announcements from the major console manufacturers, there’s nothing like the level of activity that there was ten years ago, for exactly the same reasons there’s not that level of activity in Western Europe. ‘Interestingly, Singapore, which ironically used to be an enormously popular source of counterfeit goods of every kind, has cleaned its act up, as indeed has Hong Kong, whereas mainland China and across the border in Malaysia, there’s no end of ripped CDs, DVDs and computer games available,’ says Hawkins. ‘Clearly that’s working against anyone investing in a facility that nobody will be able to afford to record in.’ Earlier this year, the NUS signed an agreement to renew the collaboration between the Conservatory and the Peabody Institute. Chairman of the Conservatory’s Governing Board Mr Goh Yew Lin stated, ‘Six years on, the foundations firmly established, we are now ready to grow further. The renewal of the agreement allows us to build on the strong foundation established in the past five years and to expand the scope of collaborative activities between our two conservatories.’ And the President of the Republic of Singapore S. R. Nathan was suitably impressed with the studio when he visited the Conservatory and enjoyed a live recording session of the New Music Ensemble led by Chan Tze Law. ‘Projects like the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music’s Recording Studio don’t come up every day — unfortunately!’ reflects Hawkins who is currently working on projects in the Middle East and Ireland. n

review gear

Products Equipment introductions and announcements.

Event Opal Event has launched the Opal nearfield monitoring system. The 8-inch two-way speaker features the EX8 driver with a claimed response of 30Hz-10kHz and a power handling of 1000W. Its neodymium motor offers 24mm of linear excursion while the EBT1 tweeter combines beryllium with what is claimed to be one of the most powerful neodymium motors of any system available. The tweeter is mounted on a rotatable waveguide and the cabinet is machined from aluminium with front-mounted variable impedance bass reflex ports. The Opal’s drive electronics provides 750W and a proprietary expansion system allows for the addition of interface modules, including AES-EBU. (Full story page 64.) www.eventelectronics.com

Merging VCube V2.0

V2.0 software for the VCube video player/recorder includes a new ADR package for visual countdowns that integrates with Merging’s Pyramix system and a video cueing and sequencing capability that integrates with Ovation, its live Media Server and Sequencer system. Version 2 also supports Avid’s DNxHD codec for QuickTime, AVI and Cube file formats together with support for IMX30 and IMX50 for generated MXF media files. Another key capability is the introduction of a USB sync card that enables RS-422 and LTC control when VCube is used as a standalone system or integrated with other DAWs. www.merging.com

CEDAR offers in August CEDAR has sale offers on CEDAR Tools, DNS2000, both Duos, and a trade-in offer for the DNS1500 and DNS3000 all valid until the end of August. The complete suite of CEDAR Tools is being offered at 29% off RRP, there’s 25% off RRP for the CEDAR DNS2000, and the CEDAR Duo DDC Declickle and DDH Auto Dehiss are being offered at 29% off RRP. Users who upgrade from a DNS1000 to a DNS1500 or a DNS3000 and return their DNS1000 to CEDAR, will get a £500 reduction in the price of the new unit. www.cedaraudio.com

Platform news: Digidesign The MassivePack 7 and MassivePack Pro 7 mixing and sound processing plug-in bundles offer registered Pro Tools|HD owners an opportunity to get significant savings on eight of the most in-demand Digidesign Development Partners plug-ins from Eventide, TC Electronic, Abbey Road, Brainworx, and others, as well as a choice of eight more plug-ins from Digidesign’s own collection, including Eleven, Digidesign’s new guitar amp emulation plug-in, ReVibe, Reel Tape Suite, and more. The upgraded MassivePack Pro 7 includes an HD Accel card (in PCI or PCIe format) and two additional plug-ins from TC Electronic. Both bundles are Windows XP- and Maccompatible; many of the plug-ins are also compatible with Digidesign Venue live sound systems. The Transfuser virtual instrument for Pro Tools comes with nearly 2Gb of loops and phrases and combines a series of modular drum machine/sound generators, dedicated sequencers, loop manipulation tools, and effects with a drag-and-drop composition/ editing interface. Users can create, manipulate and perform loop- and rhythm-based music on the fly with Transfuser. Since downloading a preview, The Crystal Method’s Scott Kirkland has become a huge fan of Transfuser. ‘What’s great about it is that those of us who have collected loops and record a lot of our own things can now easily drag and drop them right into Pro Tools and manipulate samples differently than we’ve ever been able to do before...without having to open up another piece of software. It’s all inside [Pro Tools] now and that makes things so much easier.’ Pro Tools 7.4.2pr provides expanded Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard support. It is being provided for Mac-based Pro Tools 7.4 users who want to begin their transition to Leopard before a fully tested and qualified version of Pro Tools becomes available. www.digidesign.com

Waves adds G Series The SSL G-Channel from Waves is an addition to its SSL 4000 Collection and is the fourth modelled plug-in developed under license from Solid State Logic. The G-Channel consolidates the EQ and dynamic controls of SSL G Series consoles. The EQ module delivers preboost dip, pre-cut rise, and broad Q for extreme frequency manipulation, while the Dynamics section features soft-knee compression and limiting, a gate/expander and automatic makeup gain. Three Waves audio processors are being bundled with Harris Corporation’s new Velocity ESX on-SAN editing system, a turnkey high-resolution workstation for journalists, reporters and broadcasters, which is part of the Harris NewsForce HD/SD news platform. The Velocity ESX bundle features tools for time compression, pitch shifting and equalisation. These Wave components include UltraPitch, a pitch shifter and voice disguiser, Renaissance EQ, and SoundShifter, a time compression and pitch shifting processor. www.waves.com

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Sonnox Elite Collection Sonnox has introduced Sonnox Elite as ‘the ultimate collection’ of its entire product line. The boxed set includes all the Oxford plug-ins: EQ, Dynamics, Inflator, Transient Modulator, Reverb, Limiter and SuprEsser. It is offered at a 40% discount from individual unit prices and is available for TDM and Native. Sonnox Essential combines the Oxford EQ, Dynamics, Reverb and SuprEsser plug-ins and is offered at a 30% discount from individual unit prices. Sonnox Enhance is a collection of Oxford Inflator, Limiter and Transient Modulator plug-ins. www.sonnoxplugins.com

Lynx AES16e interfaces AES16e and AES16e-SRC PCI Express digital audio interfaces from Lynx Studio Technology are now available. The AES16e offers 16 channels of 192kHz AES-EBU I-O. Also now available, the AES16e-SRC features 16 channels of sample rate conversion. www.lynxstudio.com

September 2008

gear Tone generator

The RB-TGHD from Sonifex is an 8-channel audio tone generator that provides line identification for multichannel audio systems, including BLITS 5.1 and 7.1 surround, typically used in HD TV broadcasts. By using a range of accepted industry standard tone sequences, channel identification and associated levels can be determined easily. Correct channel configuration in fold-down mixes can also be highlighted when a broadcaster needs to mix several audio channels into a stereo feed. Available tone sequences include EBU R49, GLITS and BLITS stereo line-up, EBU R49 and BLITS channel identification and a standard Phase check. The RB-TGHD is available in two variations, each with analogue and digital outputs. The RB-TGHDX has balanced AES-EBU outputs on XLR and the RB-TGHDB has unbalanced outputs on BNC. Both types also have eight balanced analogue outputs on XLR. www.sonifex.co.uk

Live and broadcast mics from Røde The M2 live performance condenser from Røde has a tailored response to reduce feedback, as well as an integrated shockmounting system to minimise handling noise. A locking on/off switch can be locked off. The Røde Procaster dynamic microphone for broadcast has a tight polar pattern and tailored-forvoice frequency response. It has a high output dynamic capsule, a balanced, low impedance output, internal shock mounting of the capsule for low handling noise, internal pop-filtering and all metal construction. www.rodemic.com

RSS V1.5 upgrade Version 1.5 update for Roland Systems Group’s RSS M-400 V-Mixer enhances the user interface, offering operational shortcuts and speeding up workflow. Features include increased flexibility in compressor and gate assignment, the addition of eight matrices, and direct channel output assignment for increased flexibility when using personal mixing systems and recording splits. There’s now Tap Tempo for delay settings and the addition of many shortcuts for faster access and rapid setup. The update is free for download. www.v-mixingsystem.com

Riedel’s intercom-over-IP products Riedel Communications has introduced a range of intercom products including a new intercom-over-IP solution along with an updated version of its Digital Partyline system interface C44. Connect IPx8 is a 19-inch rackmount that converts eight bi-directional AES or analogue signals into IP data and vice versa and is a ‘perfect’ team mate for Riedel’s Artist VOIP-108 G2 client card. The solution provides high-quality intercom interfacing to IP-based networks and allows matrix-tomatrix connections, matrix-to-control panel connections as well as the distribution of audio lines over IP. Connect IPx8 is available in three versions. The Cat5 and Coax versions are for connecting panels and other AES signals, while the AIO version is for the connection of 4-wire and other analogue sources. The Connect IPx8 can connect up to eight standard Artist 1000, 2000 or 3000 series control panels with full functionality to an Artist matrix via an IP-network.

MK 22 OpenCardioid With unique polar pattern – a blend of cardioid and wide cardioid. It is an ideal soloist or spot microphone – directional with a natural sound.

Riedel’s updated Performer C44plus system interface now incorporates Audio Assignment Software for easy editing of the internal 24 x 24 matrix. It integrates digital partylines into matrix intercom environments. The software edits the settings of eight preprogrammed configurations, which can be activated through DIP switches on the front of the C44plus. This enables the C44plus to serve as the heart of a small standalone intercom solution offering a 24 x 24 matrix with four 2-channel powered digital partyline outputs, eight AES digital I-Os and eight analogue 4-wire I-Os. In addition, GPIs enable the C44plus to be combined with a RiFace radio interface to integrate wired and wireless communications environments. www.riedel.net

Unrivalled versatility

Neutrik bling Neutrik’s XX series connectors have been blinged up with Swarovski crystals. Named, CrystalCon, the connector line is geared towards users looking for that extra sparkle on stage and is the first time the company has decorated its connectors to enhance their visual appearance. www.neutrik.com

September 2008

SCHOEPS GmbH Spitalstr. 20 76227 Karlsruhe, Germany resolution

www.schoeps.de mailbox@schoeps.de Tel. +49 721 943 200 19

review gear Surround mic from Milab Milab’s SRND 360 is a coincident surround microphone built around three matched rectangular capsules. The capsules are used as cardioids and placed at 120° to each other. By combining the signal from two adjacent capsules, a virtual output is created in between them. The SRND 360 combines its three real capsules and three simulated capsules in different configurations to produce six individual cardioid outputs at 60º to each other. These outputs can be used in a wide variety of stereo, multichannel and surround formats, such as 6.0/6.1 or 5.0/5.1. Noise level is claimed as being 12dB and the maximum SPL 130dB. Price is UK£2888 (+ VAT). www.milabmic.com

Audix USB mic

RME PCI Express Hammerfall card

The Audix USB12 is a low-profile desktop gooseneck prepolarised condenser cardioid microphone designed for recording voice and acoustic instruments directly into computer via USB. It has a 12mm modular threaded capsule and supports 44.1k and 48k sample rates for PC and Mac. It also has a membrane switch for ‘steady on’ or ‘momentary on’, a heavy base for stability, a double gooseneck for precise positioning, a headphone jack for real time monitoring and a bass roll-off filter. It includes a 6ft USB cable and is available in a matt black or white finish. www.audixusa.com

RME’s DIGI 9652, commonly referred to as ‘the Hammerfall card’, triple ADAT card was replaced by the HDSP 9652 in 2002, and is now available as a PCI Express version with a greatly extended feature set -the HDSPe RayDAT. The 72-channel 192kHz ADAT/ AES/SPDIF PCI Express card provides four ADAT optical I-Os (up to 192kHz via SMUX), one SPDIF and one AESEBU I-O (192kHz), and two MIDI I-Os. RayDAT includes TotalMix, RME’s DSP-based real-time mixer/router, with hardware calculated level metering and complete MIDI remote capability via Mackie protocol or dedicated MIDI commands. All 36 inputs and 36 playback channels can be routed and mixed independently, including SPDIF and AES-EBU, which are simultaneously operational due to separated hardware and record/playback devices. The card is equipped with SteadyClock, RME’s own clock technology, and HDSPe RayDAT also supports the optional TCO Module for timecode support and Word clock/video synchronisation, and the optional TEB expansion board for TDIF I-O. www.rme-audio.com

Nexus Star boards Stagetec is offering two new component boards to complement its Nexus Star large scale audio routing system. The RMF 02 is a MADI board that expands on the functionality of its predecessor. The standard version features BNC connectors and receptacles for SFP optical modules, allowing for copper or optical connections for conversion between optical and copper based I-Os on a single board. Numerous optical SFP modules are available including multimode, single-mode, and CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplex). The input circuits automatically detect the channel count and formats within the incoming signal. The outputs can be set to the channel count required (56 or 64 at 48kHz, 28 or 32 at 96kHz) and the 96kHz output format can be switched between legacy and double-frequency formats. Rsync is a sync board for the Nexus Star that addresses users running Nexus Star with RCX CPU/multiplexer boards incorporated. Rsync enables the audio network to be synchronised to a wide variety of sources. Because it incorporates AES and Word clock outputs and distributes the clock to the network, it can be used for Word clock conversion and distribution simultaneously. www.stagetec.com

StudioDock Samson’s StudioDock 3i USB monitors feature an onboard iPod dock. It has a 3-inch magnetically shielded, inverted cone, copolymer woofer with butyl surround and a 25mm silk dome tweeter in a bass reflex vented cabinet design with 15W power per side. The front panel has 3.5mm stereo aux input jack, headphone output jack and volume control and rear panel phono inputs. www.samsontech.com

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September 2008

gear Reinhardt grips and mounts

Mojave MA-201fet condenser Mojave Audio, a company founded b y D a v i d R o y e r, h a s a n n o u n c e d the MA-201fet cardioid condenser microphone. The mic’s FET circuitry and Jensen transformer are said to deliver low noise and high quality performance. The solid state, large diaphragm condenser has a cardioid pattern and a 3-micron thick, 1-inch gold sputtered capsule. It claims a frequency response of 20Hz20kHz +/-3.0dB, a sensitivity rating of -39dB, with a distortion rating not exceeding 1% @120dB SPL and 3% @134dB SPL. The microphone operates on 48V phantom. www.mojaveaudio.com

Reinhardt’s PG3 Pistol Grip has lower handling noise than the PG2 and comes in basic and advanced versions. The advanced has a built in XLR cable with Neutrik connectors and an adjustable boom pole mount. Both versions have interchangeable mic mounts for different sizes of microphone and the hand grip of the PG2. The CamMount is based on the same head as the PG3 and allows the user to place a microphone on the camera while isolating it from handling noise. An extender is also available that allows the microphone to be moved further back and thus can accommodate some of the biggest shotguns. The Soft-Zep windshield has been updated and now has moulded glass re-reinforced rings and baseplate that makes the construction stronger than the older aluminium ring and baseplate. A shorter version is now also available. Reinhardt has also released a rain cover that is available in several different sizes. www.reinhardt.tv

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The Bricasti Model 10 remote for the M7 stereo reverb processor can control multiple units and connects to the first M7 via RS-422 with serial loop-thru to the other units. The Model 10 features eight front-panel meters that display levels for four stereo audio sources, providing simultaneous metering of four connected Model 7s. Selection is by a Machine key. A Setup key is provided for the M10’s local memory, configurations and settings. Future enhancements will include control of multiple M7s for multichannel applications. V2.0 software for the M7 includes two new Soundstages, which are said to expand ‘the user’s sonic options threefold’. V2.0 also features Bricasti’s Second Algorithm, which claims to bring ‘the next evolutionary step to perceptual or larger than life spaces’. www.bricasti.com

M - A u d i o ’s rackmountable Fast Track Ultra 8R 8 x 8 audio MIDI interface has USB 2.0 connectivity, MX Core DSP mixer, and eight preamps with ‘Octane’ technology. Features include 48V phantom, signal/peak LED indicators and a pull-out gain knob that activates a 20dB pad. All eight inputs accept line level signals and there are two front-panel ¼-inch instrument inputs. The MX Core mixer employs eight individual DSP cores for near-zero latency effects and a matrix for channel routing accessible via a control panel with a separate mixer for each pair of outputs. The mixer provides for up to a 16 x 8 configuration. The interface also has analogue inserts on the first two channels. www.m-audio.com

September 2008

Te l e f u n k e n | U S A is shipping the Ela M 260, a newly constructed and modernised version of the small diaphragm condenser microphone first manufactured in 1959. It has a NOS Telefunken EF732 tube and is packaged with a set of three interchangeable capsules (cardioid, hypercardioid and omni). Each system comes with a microphone box, 10m Gotham Audio cable, owner manual and one-year warranty. Also included is an adaptor to allow the use of any original AKG CK series capsules, and other modern capsules made by JZ/Violet and Blue Systems. www.telefunkenusa.com

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M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R

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resolution

05/08/08 13:04:19

review gear Fan panel

Avastor SDX drive

Avastor’s SDX portable hard disk drive line is a more competitively priced version of its HDX external drives. The SDX are consumer drives with pro features, including Aimed at applications where heat-generating equipment external 3A grounded DC power is located with microphones, engineers and on-air supply that auto senses 90-240V and an ultra-quiet cooling talent, Middle Atlantic Products’ Ultra Quiet Fan Panels fan. SDX drives are available in an all-metal design and their (UQFP) provide thermal management coupled with quiet AC adapter uses extra heavy gauge wire as well as a heavy operation. duty connector with oversized pins for 5VDC and 12VDC. UQFPs occupy 2U and feature a choice of two or four The SDX line is available in three models: SDX 200, SDX ultra quiet fans that never emit more than 27dB of noise. 400 and SDX 1000, each with a choice of 80Gb, 160Gb, It has an intelligent digital processor that varies fan speed 250Gb, 500Gb, 750Gb or 1Tb capacities. All drives are proportionately to internal cabinet temperature and a remote available in various combinations of USB 2.0, FireWire FR-2LE Resolution 142x194 5/1/08 12:58 PM Page notification system that indicates fan failure or overheating. 400/800, and1SATA interfaces. www.middleatlantic.com www.avastor.com

Elegant, Professional Field Recording to CompactFlash™

Dynamic Drive Pool and Pro Tools

24bit 96kHz Field Recording to CompactFlash™ Fostex have done it again with the launch of the new FR-2LE - a compact audio recorder designed from the ground-up to meet the needs of professionals in the field.

Softube Tube plugs

The FR-2LE records to CompactFlash in Broadcast WAV Format at 24bit 96kHz quality and it's equipped with two professional phantom powered XLR microphone inputs complete with precise control over the recording level. In addition, it features a 1 take equals 1 file recording system which eliminates overwrites and the 2 second ‘pre-record’ buffer means there should never be a missed take or lost soundbite. There’s even an MP3 mode and built-in stereo microphones designed for interviews. Feature rich and elegant in operation, the pedigree of the new FR-2LE looks assured.

Interview

www.fostex.jp 22

Sequel 2 music creation and live performance software introduces many new features. A Controller Learn Mode permits easy setup with almost any hardware controller to offer tactile control over any Sequel 2 function, instrument or parameter. Track Freeze enhances CPU efficiency, while new Track Icons visually label tracks. The Sequel MediaBay sound management system has also been improved, while new Audio Reverse effect and Audio Warp features offer more creative options. Steinberg has also released three new Sequel Content Sets for the genres of Rock, Industrial and Hip Hop. Each content set adds 200-300 loops. www.steinberg.net

Ardis Technologies, a storage provider for audio, video and film, has succeeded in developing its DynamicDrivePool (DDP) RAID based storage system to allow project and file level sharing for Pro Tools at very high bandwidths using standard Ethernet. With no latencies, users can simultaneously read and write the same drive/volume while a file locking and delete protection mechanism prevents accidental erasure of data. Fairlight, Logic, Sequoia, Nuendo, Pyramix and others are also supported. Because DDP uses iSCSI (SCSI over Ethernet) technology the bandwidth of a DDP is more than three times higher then any NAS-based file server. DDP bandwidth can also compete with the best fibre channel systems but without the complexity often experienced with installing or maintaining such systems. DDP claims SAN speed with NAS functionality and Pro Tools virtualisation in combination with ease of installation, operation and maintenance at a very competitive price out of one box. www.dynamicdrivepool.com

FR-2LE

Effect acquisition

Steinberg Sequel 2

Musical notepad Fostex Company, 3-2-35 Musashino, Akishima, Tokyo, Japan 196-0021 Tel: +81 (0)42-546-4974 Fax: +81 (0)42-546-9222 Email: info_sales@fostex.jp

resolution

Softube is shipping the Tube Delay plug-in for VST, AU and RTAS. Described as ‘a marriage’ between analogue and digital, the effect is said to be ideal for fattening vocal tracks, adding slapback echo to drums, getting a gritty delay for guitars or using it just as a dirty tube preamp. With a vintage style passive EQ and several independent ‘tube’ stages, it offers 1000ms delay and sync tempo to host. The Vintage Amp Room plug-in for Pro Tools and Venue features three vintage amp models that have a 3D rendered photorealistic user interface, complete with continuous click-anddrag mic positioning. www.softube.com

September 2008

gear TC Desktop Konnekt 6 T C ’s D e s k t o p Konnekt 6 is an audio interface with dedicated monitor control features including a tracking reverb, a volume knob and a 3-mode high resolution meter. It has two simultaneous analogue inputs, each with a gain knob control; one XLR analogue input featuring an Impact mic preamp and two ¼-inch line/instrument level analogue inputs. Furthermore two ¼-inch analogue monitor outputs can be used for passive or active speaker systems or an external mixer, and a stereo headphones output has a separate level control. TC NEAR (Network Expandable Audio Recording) makes it possible to stack several Konnekt audio interfaces together to obtain double or triple the amount of I-O and DSP effects channels. To obtain zero-latency monitoring it is possible to control what signals are passed directly from the inputs to the outputs without running through the DAW. Desktop Konnekt 6 can be bus-powered via the FireWire cable from most computers. www.tcelectronic.com

New cards

Jog Shuttle

Digigram has a new generation of sound cards with enhanced features, such as higher-resolution audio, a choice of PCI or PCI express bus formats, Microsoft signed drivers, and Visiblucapability. The VX822HR (PCI interface) and VX822e (PCI express interface) are multichannel sound cards designed for broadcast applications. For applications such as automated recording and play-out, multichannel production and all applications requiring two stereo I-Os there’s the VX442e multichannel sound card. www.digigram.com

E l e c t ro n e E u ro p e a n d C o n t e c h Electronics have for med a partnership to supply the video editing and broadcast market with a range of new products. The distribution agreement will allow Contech access to the Electrone System200 Jog Shuttle control pad for use in video-editing environments. The System200’s two-line LCD display allows bidirectional communication and specific commands to be issued directly to the operator without interrupting what is displayed on any monitor. Complex user tasks, such as queued shots during editing and live-to-air action information, can be displayed using the in-built display. www.electrone.co.uk

Ti Series bridges out

MC2 Audio’s new T3500 2-channel amplifier offers 1750W per channel into 4ohms. The Ti Series of network audio components for Cobranet and Ethersound systems offers a solution for those who want to combine remote monitoring, configuration and control with MC2 Audio amplifiers and XTA digital expertise. The Ti Series is the first fruit of the collaboration between the MC2 and XTA research and development teams since the companies merged in 2007.

The Ti Network Bridge allows control, monitoring and audio to be distributed by either Cobranet or Ethersound via the Ti Network Break-out Box, which comes in 8 and 16 channel versions. The 16-channel version is fitted with Phoenix Eurostyle connects and the 8-channel version can be fitted with Phoenix Eurostyle or standard XLR connectors. Core Ti models include five power amplifiers: Ti 1000 (500W/channel into 4ohms); Ti 1500 (750W/channel into 4ohms); Ti 2000 (1000W/channel into 4ohms); Ti 3500 (1750W/channel into 4ohms); and the Ti 4-250 (4 x 250W/ channel into 4ohms). All amplifiers include remote level, mute, standby and load/status monitoring. www.mc2-audio.co.uk

September 2008

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review

Prism Sound Orpheus There has been a flurry of FireWire I-O boxes recently as manufacturers grasp the opportunity that the interface offers. However, many have also been plagued by the foibles of FireWire in audio. ROB JAMES spends some quality time with the long awaited contender from Prism.

T marketing and general hype would have us believe that technology is progressing at an alarming rate of knots. In many areas this is obviously true, such as storage, but in others a seemingly promising technology can take an unconscionable amount of time to become stable and useable. FireWire (IEE1394, iLink) was first unleashed on an expectant world in 1995 and has been developed continuously since that time. Apple was the principle driving force behind it although Sony and others quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Originally intended as a SCSI replacement, you might imagine it would have been designed from the ground up with robustness in mind and indeed, properly implemented, this is the case. However, a number of problems have arisen in real-world use. Because FireWire can, and often does, carry power there is a danger of blowing chips when hot-plugging and this has happened to a great many video cameras. Some chipsets have proved to be less than compatible with others and a variety of problems arose when people attempted to use FireWire for real-time audio applications. Given its somewhat flaky reputation in professional audio circles it may come as a surprise to discover that the 800 version, 1394b, has applications in military aircraft and the space shuttle. One very interesting recent development, 1394c, includes the capability of using gigabit Ethernet cabling and connectors. So far, and to the best of my knowledge, no manufacturer has released audio products employing this, which is a shame. I have always been somewhat sceptical about the notion of using FireWire as a real-time audio interface and many previous articles have not changed that view. However, when it works, it works and I cannot deny the utility and convenience of a single cable connection between the computer and audio interface. I believe the more problematic examples suffer from trying to cram too many channels down the pipe and attempting to compete in the ‘features’ arms race. Over the last few years FireWire audio interfaces have been characterised by increasing channel counts and features lists, declining prices, long development cycles and lots of problems. It is refreshing to find one from a legendary convertor manufacturer that is reassuringly expensive and with a relatively modest number of channels. The UK£2745 (+ VAT) Orpheus arrives in a huge package, most of which is full of fresh air. Once the colourful outer sleeve is removed and the box opened Orpheus is revealed as a 1U box with a silver grey alloy front panel. The box itself is steel and rattles a little when tapped, of no consequence when rack-mounted but not so impressive when used on a desk. Eight analogue inputs and outputs 24

plus ten concurrent digital inputs and outputs, two independent headphone outputs and four mic pres provide the headlines. Although I can, of course, see where Prism is coming from with the name there are some very unsavoury aspects to the Orpheus myths that have nothing to do with music. Let’s hope the Prism Orpheus isn’t similarly tainted. Apart from bi-directional conversion and acting as a computer sound card the unit offers a number of carefully considered extras. Channels 1 & 2 have three alternative inputs — Mic, Line and high Z Instrument. Channels 3 & 4 can be Mic or Line and there is individually switched 48V phantom power on each of the first four channels along with a high-pass filter -3dB at 80Hz, 40dB/decade (12dB/octave). A sample rate convertor is available for patching into the 2-track digital input or output. I was delighted to discover that vinyl is catered for since the Orpheus is equipped with an RIAA de-emphasis filter on input channels 1 & 2. RIAA is presented as an option in the high-pass filter dialog. Selectable MS matrices on channels 1 & 2 and 3 & 4 are the icing on the cake and MIDI I-O is also provided. Although there is no dedicated MS width control the desired result can be achieved by varying the analogue mic gains. If you want to use the MS matrices with line inputs then width control can only be achieved if the source has suitable gain controls. The master volume control on the main unit can address any or all of the analogue or digital outputs. Thus it can be used as a monitor level control for surround formats up to 7.1 or to control any of the outputs you might wish. Installation is simple enough, although there is the annoyance of having to patch the Mac OS on V10.4.11. Orpheus is compatible with Windows XP and Vista. ASIO and WDM drivers are supplied. As usual, the Windows drivers have not been submitted for testing (read: paid the Microsoft tax) and this may catch out the unwary. Like most FireWire interfaces this one uses a small application for routing, mixing and metering. All settings are also made in this Orpheus Control Panel applet. Once set up, Orpheus can also be used standalone with no computer in sight, since settings are retained with the power off. Multiple units can be connected by daisy-chaining the FireWire and are controlled though a single iteration of the applet. The fixed size window has Unit and Global settings at the top and a modern tabbed interface below that presents all the necessary information and controls clearly and concisely. I particularly liked the ‘diagram’ page which provides an instant aide memoire of what goes where. Annoyingly though, on both Mac and PC, the window does not remember its last position on screen. resolution

All settings can be saved to disk and reloaded. The built-in mixer is also controlled from here. Every output has its own independent mixer, ideal for providing multiple individual foldback feeds with a mix of workstation outputs and all or any of the inputs. The virtual mixer strips can be stereo or mono and have pan/balance, mute and solo controls. When Stereo is selected per pair of channels they are controlled by a single fader, mute and solo buttons. Each strip can be fed from DAW returns or Orpheus inputs. Mic amp gain is controllable in 1dB steps and more than 60dB of gain is available. In operation Orpheus is a revelation. There is no discernible colour here, just ultra clean conversion in both directions. The mic pres are equally impressive. If you want dirt or colour, you will have to add it elsewhere. The ‘Overkiller’ circuits on the eight analogue inputs are instantaneous progressive limiters and provide the most unobtrusive clip prevention I can remember hearing. They follow the input gain setting (+4dBu or -10dBv) without requiring any threshold setting and Orpheus is extremely quiet, subjectively. The way many people work these days, bringing signals out of the DAW to patch in analogue outboard or for analogue summing, means that the excellent D-A convertors are likely to be used for a lot more than monitoring. The two-channel digital output offers the choice of the four Prism Sound SNS noiseshaping curves and includes synchronous samplerate conversion, enabling outputs to external devices at sampling rates other than the system rate. To nit-pick a little, the main shaft encoder doesn’t feel as secure as the pots, i.e. you can feel some wobble even after tightening up the retaining screw. This would probably not give rise to comment on a sub £1k box but on a professional device at this price it most certainly does. Also, the IP and OP LEDs bleed onto the channel one meter on the front panel. The meters themselves are very pretty and bright ranging from blue through green to orange with red for overload and an Overkiller activity light at the bottom. However, the meters are too small to be informative in a quantitative way. If you need numbers, the meters in the Orpheus Control Panel Applet are much more useful. There is no indication on the box if a digital input is at the wrong sampling rate but there is an indicator for SPDIF in the Orpheus Control Panel applet. There are ways of confusing Orpheus. On a Mac at least, if the computer is allowed to go to sleep, the unit is not rediscovered when the Mac wakes up again. Similarly, I found that changing ADAT mode requires the unit to reboot and the Control Panel applet then loses communication with the unit (and therefore silence ensues). Communications can be September 2008

review re-established by closing and re-opening the Applet. However, I did experience a Mac crash during this part of the testing. Prism suggests that the DAW is closed while changing ADAT modes and that ADAT I-O is left switched off when not in use to conserve host computer resources. In the end it was safer to reboot the Mac when changing ADAT modes. In the interests of completeness I also installed the Applet on a PC running Wavelab. This time changing ADAT modes only caused a momentary loss of Control Panel info, restored when Orpheus had re-booted. However, if you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t close Wavelab when changing modes it loses the Orpheus ASIO connection and reverts to the PC default. In short, you MUST

close the DAW before changing modes. On the Mac I was using Soundtrack Pro which uses Apple Core Audio and all was clearly not well whenever ADAT Send or Send and Receive modes were activated. After conversations with Prism, a firmware update fixed this problem.

Oily bits

Rack ears and an allen key are supplied along with rubber feet already attached for desk mounting. Despite the low power consumption (35W) Orpheus can still become pretty warm, hence the recommendation to leave 1U rack space above it. On the left of the front panel lie two Âź-inch instrument input jacks. The centre is occupied by the display with analogue input source indicators for mic, line and instrument, the main eight analogue input or output channel meters and a further two for the stereo digital inputs or outputs. Meter selection is made in the Orpheus control panel. Further LEDs indicate when the unit is clock master and the chosen sync source is present and at the correct rate, whether SRC is active and if the SPDIF input is unlocked. To the right is the main volume knob (assignable level control) with annular LED position indicators and the two independent headphone level pots, softly lit by green LEDs, are slightly recessed into the panel. The associated headphone jacks and a standby complete the picture. When in standby, the FireWire interface remains active so the unit is still recognised by the computer despite the fact that the inputs and outputs are inactive. Orpheus supports sample rates at the standard frequencies between 44.1kHz and 192kHz and a wide variety of sync source options. The rear panel has a fuse, the usual IEC kettle plug power input socket, two 6-pin FireWire sockets, MIDI in and out/thru DINs, Word clock I-O BNCs (output can be configured to output Superclock), Toslink optical SPDIF/ADAT I-O, coaxial SPDIF/AES3 I-O (software selectable for level, etc.), eight Line out and channels 5-8 line in analogue Âź-inch A-gauge jacks and four Mic/Line Combo XLR/Jacks for channels 1-4 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Mic on XLR, Line on jack. The analogue outputs are â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bootstrappedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in other words, level is maintained if one leg is grounded for unbalanced operation. In ADAT mode the optical I-O supports eight channels at standard sampling rates or four channels at high (88.4kHz and 96kHz) rates in ADAT Smux format.

The Revolution Continues.

In 2000, the model 101 helped fuel a revolution. When people took professional recording into their own hands, it was there with all of the quality and performance of a high-end mic preamplifier, but with a price that made it available to the masses. 8 years later, and the cause moves forward with the newly redesigned m101. With its impressive list of new features, the m101 is ready to give any mic preamplifier a run for its money. Consider the new audio signal path with 0.5% precision metal film resistors, 12 position gold plated rotary gain switch, a built-in universal AC input module, or our exclusive RIBBON mic mode - and the picture becomes clear: This is now a fully professional, state of the art precision mic preamp that roundly outperforms anything in its class. All this at the same affordable price of the original model 101.

This re-incarnation of Orpheus is indeed highly talented as was its legendary predecessor but, like the mythical minstrel, there are some foibles and irritating habits. Some of these can be avoided by adopting careful working practices. Leaving aside its undoubted virtues in music production and sound for picture, Orpheus will also lend itself well to vinyl archival duties. In comparison to my in-house â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cookingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; convertors the sound is just excellent. Without having anything in the same league on hand for comparison purposes, I believe it is up there with the best convertors available. It would be interesting to organise a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;golden earsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; shoot out. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m still not totally convinced about the FireWire and software side of things but Orpheus is certainly a great way to get your hands on state-of-the-art Prism convertors. n

PROS

World class convertors; thoughtful extras; could be the only interface you will ever need.

CONS

Needs more attention to manufacturing detail; hassles with the Control Panel Applet on Mac; no wrong sync indication for ADAT In.

Contact prism sound, uk: Website: www.prismsound.com

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t t t From podcast to concert hall, the m101 brings the build quality, refinement and performance to t revolutionize any recording facility. t

Audio signal path uses 0.5% precision metal film resistors 12 position gold plated rotary gain switch Higher performance output line driver amplifier and HPF amplifier RIBBON mic mode (also great for dynamic mics)- Relay bypass of phantom power decoupling capacitors, increased input impedance, and 48V lockout. Wide 10-75dB gain range Three output connectors: XLR balanced, TRS balanced and TS unbalanced Bold and bombproof laser-etched black anodized frontpanel Sealed gold contact relay for HI-Z input switching Built in power supply / no wall-wart!

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Power â&#x20AC;˘ Detail â&#x20AC;˘ Grace

review

Drawmer M-Clock Plus & M-Clock Lite We’re at the stage where most users understand that they need some sort of clock in their setups even if they don’t necessarily understand why they do. ROB JAMES explains the implications with reference to these two smart boxes from the North of England.

long with the ubiquity of digital audio comes the risk of complacency. The basic principles are now sufficiently well understood such that most people involved in audio production are at least vaguely aware that some form of sample rate synchronisation between various bits of kit is a prerequisite. In the simplest form this can mean just a daisy chain with the first device providing the clock for all subsequent bits of kit. This can work well enough with domestic equipment and, indeed, where there is no provision for slaving to external sync, for example cheap flash recorders, CD players and many sound cards, the only alternative to this approach is to use a sample rate convertor/ synchroniser on the input of the next device. Every interface card, source and mixer has an

internal clock and it is often tempting to just use what is there without considering the effect this might be having on audio quality. It is reasonable to assume that most people will notice if there is a big sync problem since this usually gives rise to obvious and objectionable clicks. However, internal clock sources are frequently prone to jitter. If you consider the price of the entire item this should not be surprising. Internal Word clock generators are rarely specified to AES 11 Grade 1 — i.e. 1ppm accuracy — which really should be the minimum for serious work. Achieving such stability requires careful design, selection of components and good engineering, none of which comes cheap. In any event, once the number of devices increases to three or more and timecode and video are involved, something more robust is

a much better idea. Apart from clicks, the effects of using lesser-specified sync sources vary from subtle degradation of imaging to unpleasant granularity. Convertor noise floor goes up and THD deteriorates (read: if you have ears, you’ll hear it). In most cases the obvious answer is to install a single point source for master sync. Ideally this will have multiple outputs and the option of a synchronised expander for yet more outputs. Following this approach enables every piece of suitably equipped audio kit to have its own, dedicated sync feed in a star topology. In bigger facilities and broadcast, the generator itself will be jam synced to a ‘house’ Word clock or video syncs source. For the seriously anal, keeping cable lengths similar and short is supposed to retain more of the inherent ‘goodness’ of a high quality clock

Lexicon Reinvents Reverb

TECHNOLOGY

Distributed in the UK and Eire by Sound Technology Tel: 01462 480000 www.soundtech.co.uk

review M-Clock Plus — At the heart of the master clock generator are two temperature-compensated crystal oscillators running at 24.5760MHz and 22.6792MHz. The output of these is divided down to give the familiar 48kHz and 44.1kHz basic rates and their multiples up to 192kHz. Eight Word clock BNC outputs are provided on the rear panel together with two XLR and two phonos that supply AES 11 standard blank frame (DARS) in AES and SPDIF formats. Two further BNCs on the front panel are Word clock outputs 9&10. All outputs take the same sample rate. Two buttons increment and decrement the sample rate selection — 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 88kHz, 96kHz, 176kHz and 192kHz are the internally generated options along with Ext. If the last of these is selected then the choice made with the adjacent Ext Source button comes into play. The choice is between AES and Word clock with indicator LEDs and Lock LEDs. The Word clock input BNC and XLR are on the rear.

The other half of the unit offers two independent stereo channels of sample rate conversion. Sample rate convertor One and Two outputs are available on the rear panel in AES and SPDIF coaxial and there is also a Toslink optical SPDIF output. Note that this is not ADAT compatible. The SRC Inputs are available in the same formats as the outputs with SRC Two inputs on the rear while SRC One inputs are on the left of the front panel along with the controls for both convertors. Said controls are simply Input select and the choice of 16 or 24 bits. The outputs are all locked to either one of the internal clock generators or one of the external Word clock inputs — i.e. the same as the current Word clock outputs. Sample Rate Convertor Inputs with higher or lower rates are automatically converted to this rate.

M-Clock-Lite — In performance terms the DMS-4 gives nothing away to its big brother. The published performance figures are identical. It uses exactly the same clock generators and also offers a total of 10 BNC Word clock outputs, 8 on the rear panel and two on the front. The BNC Word clock input is on the rear. The front panel controls are reduced to a pair of increment, decrement frequency buttons with the same options as the DSM-5 and the addition of 352.8kHz and 384kHz DXD rates. Since there is only one external input there is no need for an input selector.

source. In reality this approach works very well with professional kit but there is the remaining problem of devices that cannot slave to external sync. The answer here is a synchroniser or sample rate convertor. An asynchronous SRC is the ideal since it can deal with asynchronous sources at the same sampling rate and can also convert between rates while removing

excessive jitter in both circumstances. When Drawmer introduced the M-Clock DMS-1 in 2003 it addressed exactly these requirements. It was a ‘one box’ solution to two problems at a price within the reach of smaller studios as well as major facilities. The first subject of this article is the new UK£875 (+ VAT) M-Clock Plus, or DMS-5 to its friends. This

follows the same formula as the original M-Clock but adds some convenient and useful extras while removing a few other features at the same time. The M-Clock Plus is a smart looking unit with flat alloy front panel, very bright LEDs and a 16-character blue LCD alphanumeric display set into the Drawmer logo.

PCM96 Stereo Reverb/Effects Processor 28 new and legendary Lexicon reverbs and effects delivered by powerful hardware processors, controlled and automated by your DAW. Get the full story at www.lexiconpro.com

A Harman International Company

review Operation is ludicrously easy. The left-hand side of the front panel is concerned with the rate convertors and the right-hand side handles the clocks. All the front panel buttons are internally illuminated with additional status and indicator LEDs above relating to their function. Each rate convertor will take an asynchronous or different sample rate input stream and output it at the rate set by the generator. This brings us to the first major difference between the DMS-5 and its predecessor. The DMS-1 had four SRCs, this unit only has two. These convertors operate without drama, fuss or complex settings and sound excellent subjectively. In the absence of very expensive digital measurement equipment it is impossible to verify the manufacturer’s claims regarding stability and accuracy but a reasonable judgement can be made by just listening and comparing. My house sync generator is a Rosendahl Nanosyncs and I can’t really say I noticed any audible difference, but it was a different story when I made a comparison with a sound card I-shall-notname’s internal generator. This time the change was subtle but audible and pretty easy to discern. If pushed, I would say the imaging was slightly superior and there might be a bit less midrange crunch. It is worth pointing out that there are at least two approaches to dealing with external references. The simple version just takes the input, strips it from an AES stream if necessary, buffers it and uses it as the source for the distribution amplifier. The complex approach uses the external source as a reference for the clock generator’s internal frequency synthesis. Here, if the block diagrams are to be believed, the former approach is used. The advantage with the more complex approach is probably of more benefit in multimedia and video studios. For example, with some generators you can give them a sniff of

some weird sampling rate and they will continue to ‘flywheel’ i.e. synthesise and output it exactly and for protracted periods, up to a year in some cases. There are some omissions. This device is aimed squarely at music production so, although it can deal with and display the pull-ups and pull-downs associated with video and film production, when fed from an external source, it cannot generate them. There is no video sync provision, either generation or reference input. Also the Superclock option, i.e. 256x the nominal sync rate, while present on the DMS-1 is missing from the DMS-5. Superclock is commonly used with Digidesign equipment. Turning to the baby of the family, the £545 (+ VAT) M-Clock Lite, or DMS-4 if we are being informal, you will find that it offers exactly the same Grade 1 generator performance and adds the 352.8kHz and 384kHz rates used for DXD in SACD production by the Merging Technologies Pyramix workstation and others, but drops the sample rate convertors, the LCD

resolution

display and only has a Word clock input. The M-Clock Plus does everything you would expect. The addition of external sync reference inputs broaden its appeal and the +/-2ppm accuracy of the ppm and percentage pull-up/pull-down display options are useful and increase confidence. The M-Clock Lite scores over its big brother with extreme simplicity of operation and the inclusion of the two extra rates it offers. Performance is not compromised. Much the same comments apply to both units. The quality is high and operation is simple. Ten BNC outputs should be plenty for most people but if they are insufficient then Drawmer has the answer in the shape of the D-Clock distribution amplifier. High quality cables and connectors are a must. There is no point in spending the time and money installing a proper studio master clock if you use wet string for the interconnects. The Plus has the not inconsiderable bonus of SRCs and some ability to cope with external references, but if video is part of your daily life you should probably look elsewhere. A wide choice of master sync generators is now available with widely varying feature sets. Surprisingly few of these use AES grade one standard crystal generators and those that do tend to be expensive. Drawmer is offering the required stability at something of a bargain price. If you major on music, the M-Clocks will provide a firm basis for your studio at a sensible price. n

PROS

Cost effective; simple to use; accurate.

CONS

No Superclock; no pull-up or pull-down from internal generator; no flywheel.

Contact DRAWMER, UK: Website: www.drawmer.com

September 2008

Total Integration = Musical Creativity

Vincent di Pasquale - Producer, Artist, Remixer Recent Projects: Madonna’s Hard Candy “4 minutes (rebirth remix)” “The Euphonix System 5-MC and Logic Pro work together as one and I get to choose my favorite Apogee converters. It’s all one integrated tool. So for me it’s fast, it’s flexible, it’s fun to work on and it really has taken Logic Pro to a whole new level.”

P o w e r Tr i o

Apogee, Apple and Euphonix, have

joined together to form a Power Trio of creative solutions for music composing, recording, editing and mixing. From Logic Pro

the new Artist Series to the largest System 5-MC and System 5 music and film dubbing consoles, Apple’s Logic Pro and

Symphony Systems

Apogee’s audio inter faces now totally integrate with Euphonix’ entire range of DAW controllers and mixing consoles. Euphonix high-speed Ethernet EuCon™ control protocol is now built into Logic Pro and Apogee’s Maestro software giving Euphonix control sur faces unrivalled System 5-MC

euphonix.com

access to these software applications.

Experience the Power Trio at IBC Stand 8 .C63

review

Sennheiser MKH800 Twin Take a well regarded two-capsule mic and re-engineer its back-end so you can control it externally in the old-fashioned way; it’s what Sennheiser has done with its MKH800. JON THORNTON discovers that he has a twin.

ennheiser’s MKH series has always been something of a rarity in the modern microphone world, falling into the category of Radio Frequency (RF) capacitor microphones rather than the more usual Audio Frequency (AF) design. The MKH800 Twin takes this unusual approach a step further by taking the basic design of the multipattern MKH800 and allowing the signals generated by the two capsules to be output separately and processed externally, rather than mixed internally by the microphone. To start with, it might be useful to recap how an RF capacitor microphone differs from a more conventional design. The capsule in a typical AF capacitor microphone is externally biased by a DC power source, in conjunction with a high value resistor to ensure that the charge remains reasonably constant as the capacitance of the capsule changes with variations in sound pressure. This leads to a changing output voltage proportional to the change in capacitance of the capsule, but is inherently a high impedance circuit. This means that impedance conversion is required, using either valves or FET transistors, and also means that there is some susceptibility to environmental factors such as humidity. In an RF design, the capsule forms part of a circuit that modulates a high frequency but low voltage RF signal generated by a crystal oscillator. Following demodulation, the audio frequencies responsible for this modulation are recovered. This is easy to describe, but quite tricky to do in practice, but it’s a technique that Sennheiser, almost uniquely, has refined over the years. The key advantage of this approach is that the capsule is now part of a low impedance circuit. This means that there are fewer environmental problems caused by moisture and humidity, and also that subsequent amplification can be performed by ‘ordinary’ bi-polar devices with inherently better noise performance. Although based on the MKH800 variable pattern microphone, the MKH800 Twin is actually a little shorter in length as it doesn’t need the internal pattern switches and associated electronics. It’s available in Nickel or non-reflective Nextel finishes, and ships with a compact suspension mount and a fixed clip. The supplied lead converts the 5-pin XLR on 30

the base to two 3-pin XLR outputs, one for each of the two capsules. Power is standard 48V phantom, and this is required down both of the two legs for the microphone to function. Two recessed LEDs on the mic body indicate that phantom is present and healthy — one for the front facing capsule and one for the rear facing capsule. Each of the capsules has a native cardioid characteristic. Two further advantages of this type of design are that the microphone’s electrical sensitivity is very high — 40mV/Pa means that the noise contribution of the microphone preamplifier is substantially reduced — and the frequency response rises gradually above about 10kHz but doesn’t really start to roll off until 50kHz. The net result of all of this is a microphone whose sonic characteristic is really about resolving detail and definition rather than adding any of its own character to the recording. Like its stablemate the MKH800, it isn’t a microphone that really favours close positioning, so the test for the day was recording an acapella choir in a reasonably large (14m x 10m) studio space. To start with, the Twin was rigged forward facing, roughly ten feet from the choir who were arrayed in a semi-circle around it. As a reference, an AKG 414 XLS was also set up in the same position. First impressions are that, despite the inclusion of a fixed clip, you’d probably never use it in preference to the suspension mount, as the Twin does seem very susceptible to structureborne noise. This is exacerbated by the lack of any onboard high pass filter but in most cases the Twin would be used in conjunction with some form of mixer, so this isn’t a huge issue. Starting with the standard cardioid pattern of the 414 and simply using one output of the Twin, the initial sonic impression is one of the Twin having noticeably more ‘reach’ — revealing more detail in individual sung voices than the 414, and seemingly a more extended low end. Switching the 414 to its wider cardioid pattern, and achieving the same thing with the Twin by mixing in a little of the rear capsule really only reinforced this perception. The Twin seemed to resolve the reverberant sound much more accurately — helped in part by that low and high frequency response extension. Accurate isn’t always the same thing as pleasant, though and any shortcomings in a venue’s acoustics are really shown up by resolution

the Twin. Fortunately there’s always the possibility of tweaking this somewhat in postproduction by simply recording the two outputs separately and then rebalancing them later. As a slight extension to this approach, I also brought a standard MKH800 into play as a fig-8 microphone using the double MS technique. Recording all three signals separately (fig-8 and both outputs from the Twin) allows quite a bit of potential for postproduction. Front and rear left and right can be had by simply matrixing the fig-8 signal with the front and rear signals from the Twin respectively. Then if necessary, a front centre and even rear centre channel can be established by combining the outputs of the Twin as required. The results of this were technically very good when matrixed and played back in a control room with 5.1 monitoring. I say technically, because aesthetically it wasn’t brilliant but this had more to do with the acoustic of the venue than anything else. Still, a nice tight centre was achieved using a slightly super-cardioid response derived from the Twin’s outputs, with excellent stereo imaging across the LR speakers and some nice coherent ambience in the rears. For anybody who has used other microphones in the MKH series, the performance and reach of the MKH800 Twin shouldn’t really come as a surprise. And if you want this performance simply packaged as a multipattern microphone, then the standard MKH800 is probably the better bet. But what is surprising is just how capable and versatile the Twin is in conjunction with another fig-8 microphone. For MS stereo and surround applications, it makes a neat, compact and very high quality solution. n

PROS

Excellent reach and resolution; flexibility of continuously variable pattern on the fly or in postproduction; quiet and sensitive; extremely versatile in MS or double MS applications.

CONS

Quite susceptible to structure-borne LF noise; can be a bit fiddly if all you want is a quick single pattern other than cardioid.

EXTRAS

Sennheiser’s MZD 8000 digital module allows MKH 8000 series mics to be

digitised directly at the microphone head. The compact digital module is screwed onto the microphone head in place of the XLR module. Like all signal-carrying components in the 8000 series, the module is designed with two channels and converts the microphone signal according to AES 42, turning the signal of the MKH 8020 (omni), MKH 8040 (cardioid) and MKH 8050 (super-cardioid) into digital. The module also contains a DSP unit which, with the aid of PC control software and an AES 42 interface, allows microphone settings, such as the lowcut filter, attenuation and limiter, to be remote-controlled. The interface also provides phantom power and Word clock.

Contact SENNHEISER, germany: Website: www.sennheiser.co.uk

September 2008

The champion: Lawo’s mc² series.

More than 50 mc² mixing consoles winning in Beijing. In Beijing it won’t just be the athletes that excel with superb achievements; powerful audio technology will also guarantee a brilliant performance for billions of people around the world. That’s why amongst the champions of the Games will be the more than 50 Lawo mc² series consoles that will also convince during this mega event. For more information about the mc²66 and the brand new mc²56 — which is on the starting blocks for the first time — please visit www.lawo.de

Lawo | Rastatt / Germany

review

Dolby DP600 While most audio facilities wait for decent and on-going 5.1 commissions, the business of outputting all your multichannel mixes in the various forms required just got easier with the introduction of the DP600. JIM BETTERIDGE says it makes perfect sense for bigger facilities with a lot of throughput.

s I’m sure you’ve heard, the HD 5.1 broadcast revolution is upon us. It has been so for some time apparently but, while there is undoubtedly an increasing amount of surround work going on, most of the UK’s sound houses wait, like inland villages waiting for sight of the armies of a long heralded invader, for their first serious broadcast surround commission. How to best ready oneself for the onslaught, rather than simply staring vacantly at the horizon, is the subject of much debate. A few more speakers, an upgraded DAW, upgraded acoustic, 5.1 metering, 5.1 monitor controls, 5.1 reverbs — there’s a fair amount to think about and nervously budget for. One expense that’s less obvious than 3.1 extra speakers is Dolby E. Dolby E is becoming the de facto standard used by broadcasters all over the world as a delivery format for 5.1 audio. And again increasingly it’s being asked for laid back to a Sony HDCAM-SR (hereinafter called the SR) master video tape. This format supersedes the plain old HDCAM as Sony’s flagship format and offers better quality pictures and 12 audio channels as against just four on the original HDCAM. In the good old days of stereo, 12 channels would have been a lot (1.5 times a DA88) but for 5.1 it represents only two mixes — a full mix and an M&E, for example. This is far from sufficient in today’s world of complicated international deliverables. This is where Dolby E comes in and indeed it’s long been a broadcast solution for moving multichannel, metadata-rich, programme around. It allows eight channels of audio to be encoded into an AES pair that can be recorded on a pair of tracks on a DAW or digital VTR. The HD documentary series we’re doing requires three Dolby E 5.1 mixes: full UK; dialogue + music + effects (DME); and dialogue + effects (DE). Plus two stereo PCM mixes: full UK and DME. So once the mix is signed-off we have to render out a full set of stems: VO, Dial, Music and Effects, from which we render the three 5.1 mixes in their raw sixtracks form plus the two stereo mixes. The wonders of the Pyramix mixer make this relatively straightforward and certainly faster than real-time. From there, though, we have to make the Dolby E streams. To achieve this we pass them, one six-track mix at a time, through a Dolby DP571 encoder that faithfully 32

spits out the corresponding Dolby E stream in real-time. Before I do this I have to ensure that the full mix meets the dialnorm spec of the broadcaster; for this I have to play the programme through another Dolby box, the LM100. The required figure is -27 so if it comes out -25 I simply need to reduce the overall level of the mix by 2dB. In theory this should be sufficient but, based on the measure twice cut once concept, you might like to run it through again to check the reading. So all in all that’s another five hours of processing time to check and then encode the mixes. I then set up a separate project to take the five mixes and lay them back to an SR deck. The Dolby E streams are monitored in real-time, off tape, via a Dolby DP572 decoder through the normal surround monitor chain. The DP571 takes a frame to encode the audio and so the Dolby E streams are nudged a frame to the left within the layback project to bring them back in sync on tape. The DP572 takes a frame to decode so the SR machine has a setting to delay the picture by a frame to realign things. Dolby’s DP600 Program Optmizer is a big quad computer capable of running four processes at once at about five times real-time. The only connectors are a couple of IEC mains sockets (one of the two PSUs can expire and the system will still continue unimpaired) and a gigabit Ethernet connector. Once set up on your network, you simply drag a file into the relevant in box, wait a while, and then pick up the duly processed equivalent from the relevant out box. So in my case I drop my 5.1 full mix at -25 in and 28 minutes later it’s measured its dialnorm, rerendered it 2dB lower, encoded it into Dolby E and dropped at the correct point of collection. This sounds like brochure-born theory but this is more or less what happens and it’s most gratifying. The DP600 is capable of a long and growing list of processes, depending on what model you buy: I could also ask it to spit out an AC3 version, a Dolby Pro Logic II version and (after a chargeable upgrade) a 5.1 upmix of a stereo file. There’s no limit to the number of files and processes you can have queued-up ready to go and so, in a large facility, any number of studios can throw their files into the appropriate folder and know that the appropriate processes will be applied to them ASAP resolution

with the processed files ready for collection in their own specified out folder — four processes at once, five times real-time. What’s more, there’s no one frame processing time and so no nudging to the left on the timeline when laying back. One odd thing — it spits out BWFs but, even though it was timecoded BWFs that went in, those that came out had lost their time reference which is not ideal. There were a few tiny little IT-style issues when setting up and when booting up each morning but nothing of any significance; basically it did just work. I had two episodes to do that week, signing off the mixes on the Friday ready for a Monday layback. Without the DP600 I would have had a good day of fairly constant messing about, but I was able to simply drop the six 5.1 files into the in box, go and have a leisurely lunch and return to some pristine Dolby E files ready for layback. This, of course, isn’t the only use for the DP600. It can also be used in broadcast playout chains and for VoD encoding to solve loudness inconsistencies and smooth workflow, as well as helping broadcasters meet recently introduced loudness regulations. The price for a fully loaded DP600 is in excess of £13,000 (prices start from £8975 + VAT). This could conceivably replace both the DP571 encoder and the LM100 loudness meter, the combined list price of which is around £3,600. So you’re still looking at the best part of £10,000 difference. For a facility of some size with a number of suites and a constant flow of international surround work, the decision to buy a DP600 is a no-brainer. With just one series in 5.1 and the rest of our broadcast work being stereo, it isn’t quite worth the expenditure for me. Another ongoing HD 5.1 series might just tip the balance… anyone..? n

PROS

Fast, multistream processing; very simple to use (once set up); no 1-frame processing delay for Dolby E; built like a tank.

CONS

A bit pricey for smaller facilities.

Contact dolby, us: Website: www.dolby.com

September 2008

IBC2008 RAI Amsterdam

12th - 16th September

Hall 7 Stand J29

REDEFINING AN ICON

“ICON’s direct integration with Pro Tools optimizes the time spent at the desk, letting us focus on the mix and improving the quality

With tighter deadlines, post-production facilities such as Sonygraf Digitsound are in search of better technologies and solutions to meet increasing demands. At Digidesign, we strive to continuously improve our

of our product. The D-Control ES quickly fitted

products in order to ensure that customers like Sonygraf

into our established working environment. ”

Digitsound have what they need to get the job done

Miguel Torres

quickly and easily. For this reason we developed the enhancements found in ICON D-Control™ ES.

Technical Manager, Sonygraf Digitsound

Visit www.digidesign.com/icon_res or visit your local ICON dealer to learn more about the D-Control ES worksurface, and how ICON is revolutionizing the art of mixing.

digidesign.com © 2008 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Avid, Digidesign, D-Control, and Pro Tools are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Product features, specifications, and system requirements are subject to change without notice.

monitor benchtest

Klein + Hummel O 410 KEITH HOLLAND

he Klein & Hummel O 410 is a 3-way active loudspeaker comprising a 10-inch woofer, a 3-inch soft dome midrange and a 1-inch dome tweeter with the midrange and tweeter radiating through shallow horns. The power amplifier, crossover, equalisation and input electronics are all housed in the cabinet, which has dual front ports and rear-mounted input sockets and controls. The mid- and highfrequency drivers are mounted on a removable sub-baffle which permits either portrait or landscape mounting arrangements and, quite cleverly, the rear heatsink fins are angled at 45 degrees so they remain equally effective in either orientation. The overall cabinet dimensions are 645mm high x 330mm wide x 444mm deep and each one weighs a hefty 36kg. The rear panel contains the usual IEC-type mains socket and power switch, along with a balanced-line XLR-type signal input socket. Also on the rear panel are a set of controls for input gain and a switch from 100dB to 114dB output level, equalisers for treble (-2dB to +1dB), mid (-4.5dB to 0dB) and bass (-7.5dB to 0dB), and a switchable parametric EQ with adjustments for gain (-12dB to +2dB), Q (1 to 8) and frequency (20Hz to 200Hz). This review was

conducted with all of these controls set to 0dB and the parametric equaliser bypassed. K&H specify the power amplifiers as having continuous power outputs of 340W for the woofer, 160W for the midrange and 180W for the tweeter. The crossover frequencies are 600Hz and 2kHz with 4th-order slopes and there are individual protection circuits for each driver. Also specified is a high-pass protection filter with a turnover frequency of 15Hz and a 2nd-order slope. Figure 1 shows the on-axis frequency response and harmonic distortion performance for the O 410. The response is seen to be very flat, lying between Âą3dB from 30Hz to 20kHz with a particularly smooth mid frequency range that lies between Âą1dB from 90Hz to 2kHz. The low-frequency response extends down to a commendable -10dB at 25Hz with a rapid 5th order roll-off. Equally as impressive is the harmonic distortion performance. These are measured while the loudspeaker is reproducing 90dB SPL at a distance of 1m. Both second and third harmonics are seen to lie below -45dB (0.56%) at all frequencies above 30Hz and below -60dB (0.1%) from 150Hz to 6kHz. These are very low levels which, although they say little about the sound of any distortion produced by a loudspeaker, indicate that the loudspeaker behaves in

Fig. 1. On-axis frequency response and harmonic distortion.

a very linear manner, so that other forms of nonlinear distortion (e.g. intermodulation) should also be low. The horizontal and vertical off-axis frequency responses are shown in Figures 2 and 3. Directivity in the horizontal plane is seen to be wide and very well controlled with no evidence of side lobes or beaming at all frequencies up to around 16kHz. The performance in the vertical plane is also very well controlled with some evidence of an interference notch between the midrange and tweeter at the crossover frequency of 2kHz, but this is only really evident at 30 degrees off axis. It is evident from these plots that the frequency domain performance of this loudspeaker, in terms of on- and off-axis frequency response and distortion leaves little to be criticised. However, the following description of the time domain aspects of its performance show up some of the inevitable compromises made in achieving this. Figure 4 shows the response of the O 410 to a step voltage input. It is clear from this plot that the

Sumo

The right tools for the right job. Audient Workstation Peripherals When it comes to recording excellence, Audient are the masters of analogue design. The sonic integrity of their high-end consoles, the ASP8024 and ACS8024 is legendary. Audient offer the same classic sound with their range of workstation peripherals - a collection of high specification tools designed to create the optimum signal path in the analogue domain. For more information, see audient.com

Ten21 Studio (UK). Control room featuring Audient ASP8024 Console

High Resolution Summing Amplifier

monitor benchtest

Fig. 2. Horizontal off-axis response.

Fig. 4. Step response.

Fig. 6. Waterfall plot.

Fig. 3. Vertical off-axis response.

Fig. 5. Acoustic source position.

Fig. 7. Power cepstrum.

mid- and low-frequency components of the signal rise later than the high-frequency components with the woofer responding approximately 1.5ms later than the tweeter. The acoustic source position (Figure 5) shows that the low-frequency components of transient signals apparently emanate from a position around 2.5m behind the loudspeaker. Also apparent in this figure are some unusual phase-shifts in the mid-frequency range that show as a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bumpâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in the source position between 400Hz and 1kHz. Figure 6 is the waterfall plot for the O 410. The price paid

for the extended low-frequency response and low distortion is the very slow decay of the low-frequency components of transient signals seen between 20Hz and 60Hz. These figures suggest that the time domain performance of this loudspeaker is not as accurate as its frequency domain performance. Overall, the O 410 is an impressive loudspeaker with first class frequency response, distortion and directivity performance. However, this performance is let down by non-ideal time domain behaviour demonstrated most by the step and waterfall plots.

However, the large size of this loudspeaker, compared to many in this series of reviews, must be borne in mind when making comparisons. The debate of frequency domain performance versus time domain performance continues. Ideally we would like both, but for now, it appears, you pays your money and makes your choice. n

Contact Klein + Hummel, GERMANY: Website: www.klein-hummel.com

Centro Monitor and Foldback Controller

ASP008 8 Channel Variable Impedance Mic Pre

- think clarity

www.audient.com

Distributed in the UK by SCV London. Tel: 020 8418 1470 www.scvlondon.co.uk

review

McDSP DE555, NF575 & Futzbox New releases from the McDSP camp have expanded its portfolio of processing with some novel plug-ins. With a de-esser, a noise filter and Futzer, GEORGE SHILLING says that good things come in threes.

oining the variety of brands recently launching new de-essing plug-ins, McDSP throw its hat into the ring with the DE555 (the name sort of looks like DE-ESSS [but more like DESSS. Ed] and takes a leaf out of the Propellerheads’ Reason book of device naming). It follows the green housecolour scheme, and like other McDSP plug-ins is enhanced with a few graphs to show the workings. Thankfully there are rather fewer controls than the Sonnox rival. The plug-in takes a no-nonsense traditional approach to the de-esser, with a sidechain filter feeding a compressor, and controls are logically laid out separately for both sections. Filter frequency is selectable from 500Hz to 15kHz, and is switchable between band pass and high pass, with a handy Listen button to switch it into the main path for auditioning purposes. The knob labelled Focus usefully adds gain at the turnover frequency in High Pass mode, and narrows the bandwidth in Band Pass mode, allowing emphasis of the chosen frequency (and therefore more gain reduction around that area). Focus is scaled from zero to 100, with maximum boost in High Pass apparently around 10dB. All these adjustments are clearly reflected in the Frequency Response/Key graph below the controls. The section labelled De-Esser is the compression part of the signal path. Range equates to the Threshold, with the settings of zero to 36 roughly reflecting the dB setting below zero. Ratio ranges from 2 to 20, and these two settings are reflected on the Dynamics graph. Release runs from 1.0 to 100mS, but with 10.0 roughly half way round, and there is an HF Only setting, plus an Output Level knob with +/-24dB. At the far right, tall narrow level meters simultaneously display input, output and gain reduction. It’s difficult to make de-essing seem glamorous and McDSP sensibly hasn’t really tried to. Instead, this is a straightforward but efficient and great sounding plug-in. The only minor problem I found was that if you boosted the corner frequency enough, it was sometimes impossible to set the Range (or threshold) high enough for very subtle or minimal de-essing — effectively it sets the threshold up to about -10dBFS, which means that without trimming down the input to the plug-in you might be de-essing more than you want. Apart from this the DE555 (US$495) works very well indeed, with a beautifully simple setup and excellent graphical indication. It was particularly useful for a female jazz vocal where it tamed the shrill 36

sibilants without seeming to dull the gorgeous valvemiked breathiness. I also had plenty of success with male rock vocals and mastering settings work well, with transparent processing in all instances. At first glance the NF575 plug-in might appear to be a standard type of EQ, with rows of knobs for different bands, and a frequency graph, but it behaves rather differently, with some unusual filtering features. The NF575 (US$495) provides high and low pass filters, both covering 20Hz to 20kHz and with slopes of 6 to 36dB per octave. So far, so normal, but in between these are five tuneable notch filters that overlap and each covers seven octaves, spanning frequencies from 40Hz to 20kHz. Dubbed the ‘Noise Filter’, this is perhaps something of a misnomer, as the features and capabilities are suited to all kinds of uses other than simply filtering ‘noise’. This is a rather different tool to noise reduction software such as Waves X-Noise and Bias SoundSoap Pro. The notch filters’ frequencies are linkable, with frequency relationships maintained while sweeping, and boast variable Q, a range of 40dB and individual bypass. There are also individual band Solo buttons. These drop the overall level and flip the notch to a band-pass, essentially boosting the target band so you can sweep around and find the offending frequency. Towards the end of the review period this plug-in came into its own when a jazz vocal recording (with live improvisatory pianist) suffered a whistling valve mic on the only master take of a song. Using the NF575 I quickly found the offending frequency, guessing that it was about 8kHz and sweeping a soloed band I found it to be centred around 7.25kHz. Un-soloing, the default setting reduced the whistle perfectly with little apparent degradation of the signal, and the day was saved! Other typical uses might include filtering out mains hum or any annoying resonances. By using automation you can also create terrific phasing effects. As usual with McDSP there is an excellent collection of presets. The concept of the FutzBox (US$495) plug-in is not dissimilar to that of Audio Ease’s Speakerphone, and much ‘futzing’ fun is to be had, creating distorted, low-fidelity versions of audio signals. It is not quite resolution

as sophisticated and complex a processor as its Dutch rival, but it is easy to set up, includes plenty of possibilities, and makes efficient use of computer resources. Advantageously there is a TDM version, and the latency is an astonishing 3 samples. There are seven different processor sections that can each be separately enabled. Synthetic Impulse Modelling (SIM) provides categorised radios, headphones, phones, toys, containers and suchlike, each accompanied by a photo. There are hundreds of these, and the related Tune parameter behaves differently depending on the modelled item. Often, it seems to usefully change the frequency of any resonance, making the item seem larger or smaller. The Lo-Fi section reduces sample and bit rate and includes a filter to reduce aliasing. The Filters section provides more comprehensive High and Low Pass filters. There is a Distortion section with 10 types and three knobs for control. Following this there is an additional parametric EQ band with further filtering possibilities. A Noise Generator includes yet more filters for shaping, and a Noise Duck section for convincing radio conversations and the like. Finally, a comprehensive Gate section can keep a lid on extraneous signal or create static or signal dropouts for effect, with extended parameter ranges. A very useful Mix control knob seamlessly blends processed and unprocessed sound to moderate the effect. In and Out levels enable the effect to be driven to different degrees and the level compensated for. The categorised and sub-categorised presets cover a huge number of starting points, and it is also interesting to just scroll through the SIM settings — ‘futzing’ is fun! All three plug-ins are available for all types of Pro Tools plug-in and all channel configurations; they are sonically unimpeachable, practically and elegantly designed, and would make a terrific addition to your essential plug-in collection in all branches of music and postproduction. n

PROS

Exceptionally low latency; transparent de-essing; efficient filtering; unique Futzing!

CONS

Pro Tools only.

Contact mcdsp, us: Website: www.mcdsp.com

September 2008

Audio

perfection

The current state of technology in the recording and reproduction of sound is at a very high level today thanks to tireless efforts of a handful of pioneers. This relatively small group of researchers and innovators, all of whom were continually striving for sonic perfection included Horst Klein and Walter Hummel. In 1945 they courageously founded a company that is still to this day, exclusively dedicated to the perfect reproduction of sound. www.klein-hummel.co.uk

review

Røde NTG-3 Adding to an already impressive collection of gun type mics, Røde has now released its main contender. ROB JAMES gets an early look at the short shotgun complete with a kit of accompanying fluffy bits.

t is likely that anyone who has stood in the pouring rain in a muddy field with a mic on the end of a pole will already appreciate the benefits of RF bias for condenser microphones. Even comparatively modest levels of humidity can cause conventional DC biased microphones to play up, crackling, breaking up and ultimately not working at all due to the capsule, in effect, shorting out. For more than 30 years Sennheiser has pretty much owned this field (muddy or otherwise). There have been, and still are, other short (and long) shotguns but, in professional use, none has ever achieved the success of the ubiquitous MKH415 and later MKH416 RF biased short shotguns. The more recent MKH60 has the same virtues but sounds even better. However, there is a snag, these mics are pretty pricey. Australian manufacturer Røde already has a name for high quality microphones at affordable prices. There are already several shotguns in the range and, to declare an interest, I already own an NTG-2. This is fine in its way but suffers from the damp and really isn’t in the same league as a 416. The UK£382.93 (+ VAT) NTG-3 represents a considerable step up for Røde but is still a fraction of the price of the serious opposition. The mic comes packaged with a foam gag and the option of a furry ‘dead cat’ cover for that. The NTG-3 itself is presented in a rather smart black anodised aluminium storage cylinder which resembles a ‘push-me-pullyou’ Maglite torch i.e. both ends have knurled screw caps but instead of batteries the mic is nestling inside, snug in a foam sleeve and protected from moisture by rubber O-rings. There is also a new pistol grip, the PG2 and a windshield, the WS7. I was fortunate enough to receive both of these direct from Røde in time for this article. The £38.29 (+ VAT) PG2 comes with two rubber suspension rings to accommodate microphones with either 19mm-20mm or 21mm-22.5mm diameters. The £25.52 (+ VAT) WS7 can also be used with other microphones having a diameter of 19mm-20mm and a maximum slot length of 186.5mm. Swapping the suspension rings is quick and simple and involves nothing more than undoing a couple of screws with the supplied allen key, removing the retaining plate and inserting it into the other ring and refitting the screws. Angle of dangle is adjusted by flipping back a silver lever, repositioning the handle in relation to the mount then locking the lever. A small knob on the opposite side adjusts the locking tension. The mic cable can be routed through the pistol grip to emerge 38

at the base. This involves removing a retaining plug at the bottom followed by the grey rubbery handgrip at the back. An XLR connector can (just) be wangled up through the hole in the base and out at the top. The cable is dressed into the handgrip and the plug replaced. I found the cable to be a rather tight fit. (I was using my usual Van Damme star-quad cable, not particularly huge in diameter.) The pistol grip is light and comfortable and can be attached to a boom pole with a 3/8-inch socket in the base. The WS7 ‘Large Deluxe Windshield’ is constructed from a stiff open cell material. Think knitted pan scourer rather than foam. This is covered with permanently attached synthetic fur with

a pile length of around 25mm. The windshield is a push fit over the microphone tube with a rubber gasket of the same diameter as the PG2 mount. The NTG-3 is an RF biased, 48V phantom powered, condenser with very low self noise on paper and subjectively. Finish is in handsome matt silver but you don’t see much of it when the windshield is fitted and it is installed in the pistol grip. Røde has constructed its own XLR socket in the interests of radio interference rejection and the rest of the design is optimised to minimise the RF pollution we all now have to deal with. I had no trouble even with a mobile phone in my pocket. I didn’t have a 416 on hand for direct comparison but the NTG-3 has a slightly wider front lobe and slightly less suck. This makes it more forgiving of less than perfect poling and I think it has less objectionable phasey artefacts when waved about. There is no built in bass cut but the 416 doesn’t have it either and, since my Sound Devices 442 mixer has variable bass cut, it didn’t pose a problem. As is normal with shotguns, the NTG-3 is at its best in the great outdoors. The rear lobe inherent with these designs tends to accentuate room reverb when used for interiors. A much shorter super-cardioid is usually a better bet. Outside, wind noise is almost always a problem, especially here beside the sea. While obviously not as effective as a full Zeppelin windshield with ‘Dougal’ cover, the combination certainly held the wind noise at bay where the NTG-2 with ‘dead cat’ did not. Røde is rumoured to be working on a basket type resolution

windshield and I shall be very interested in that if and when it appears. Handling noise is good but not outstanding. I suspected it would be better in an O-ring type suspension and this proved to be the case. However, I’m sure I could improve this dramatically by using a much lighter cable down to the bottom of the pistol grip. In character, the NTG-3 is smooth for a shotgun with good side rejection and the expected back lobe sensitivity. It might be a little bass light but that is no bad thing in the context this mic is intended for. Rapid pans with the sea on one side did not give rise to objectionable phasing and it was easy to follow a seagull flying past squawking. It is miles better than the NTG-1/NTG-2 and I would expect it to acquit itself well up against a 416. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. On this basis and at this price it could well be the saviour of many an impecunious recordist. Time will tell if it is robust enough for life on the road but the signs are promising. I was sufficiently impressed to buy it and price was not the determining factor. I really like the sound of the NTG-3 and the low noise. Top of the wish list now is a matching RF biased fig-8 for MS. A short super-cardioid version for interiors would be nice and, while I’m at it, an omni. How about it Røde? n

PROS

RF Bias means resistance to humidity; impressive sound; commendably quiet.

CONS

Pistol grip is a bit fiddly to set up; matt black finish would be preferable for video studios; not a lot else.

EXTRAS

The PG1 Cold Shoe Pistol Grip supports the Røde VideoMic and Stereo VideoMic independent of a video camera but additionally supports all standard cold shoe compatible devices, such as lights and other attachments. The WS6 windshield is designed to fit the NTG-1 and NTG-2, as well as any shotgun microphone with a maximum slot length of 160.5mm and a diameter of 21-22.5mm.

Contact RØDE, australia: Website: www.rodemic.com UK, Source: +44 208 962 5080

September 2008

Loudness Measurement You Can Trust. Now available in software!

Dolby® Media Meter is powerful new software that accurately measures program loudness just as viewers subjectively experience it. Well suited to the needs of both broadcast and post-production facilities, it’s an ideal tool for program-creation and quality- control applications, and perfect for optimizing broadcast, packaged media, VOD, and game media. Dolby Media Meter can be easily integrated into Mac® and Windows® platforms for use at any point along the broadcast chain—providing a level of versatility previously unavailable. It’s based upon technologies already proven in the award-winning DP600 Program Optimizer. Use it as a stand-alone application or as a plug-in with audio workstations performing either real-time or ﬁle-based loudness measurement.

Dolby Media Meter Features • Dialogue Intelligence™ technology • ITU-R BS.1770-1 algorithm • Loudness measurement and logging

Mac/Windows • Stand-alone application for file-based measurement • Digidesign® RTAS plug-in for real-time measurement • Digidesign AudioSuite plug-in for file-based measurement

Mac OS® • Minnetonka AudioTools™AWE plug-in for file-based measurement Find more information on Dolby Media Meter at dolby.com/dmm.

If you’re looking for a software application for loudness measurement, Dolby Media Meter is the cost-eﬀective choice.

IBC 2008, September 12-16 RAI Convention Centre, Amsterdam Hall 2, Booth B28

Dolby and the double-D symbol are registered trademarks of Dolby Laboratories. Dialogue Intelligence is a trademark of Dolby Laboratories. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners. © 2008 Dolby Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. W08/20219

review

Audient Mico Curious name — how do you pronounce it? As in ‘microphone’ or as in ‘pico’? Perhaps the confusion is deliberate, alluding to the diminutive nature of this two-channel microphone preamplifier from the Dearden and Davies design team at Audient.

JON THORNTON

ico has clearly been designed as either on a desktop. Visually, it sports the same styling as a desktop-bound or a portable solution the ASP008 and Sumo in the Audient range, which for recording, although you can strap is to say predominantly silver with a scattering of a pair of them together in a rackmount square, illuminated pushbuttons. It’s clearly laid out kit if desired. Based on the same discrete Class A with enough space between controls that even the design preamp employed in the company’s ASP008 largest fingers shouldn’t have trouble. The only slight 8-channel mic preamplifier and ASP8024 recording negative here is the use of dark grey for the front console, at first this might seem like an exercise in panel legending — against a silver background this repackaging the same designs in a slightly different can be hard to read in some lighting conditions unless form factor. But dig a little deeper and there are some you’re looking at the unit absolutely straight on. interesting little twists to the equation. The rear panel gives microphone (XLR) and line Actually, despite the name, it’s quite a hefty little level inputs (TRS) on Neutrik Combo connectors, and box, weighing in at 2.5kg minus the external power analogue outputs on XLR. Inputs and outputs are supply. But it’s small enough to slip easily into a bag electronically balanced. Mico also comes as standard 5000series_Beijing (Resolution) 125x216mm.qxd:Mise en page 1 5/08/08 16:28 Page 1 for location work, or to not take up too much room with a built in A-DC, with digital outputs available as

an AES3 channel pair on XLR and as SPDIF format on phono and optical Toslink. The A-DC can be internally clocked at 44.1, 48 or 96kHz, or can be externally clocked via a Word clock input on BNC. A bank of DIP switches on the rear panel sets the sample rate, internal or external clock source and termination for the latter — easy enough to access if the unit is being used standalone, but slightly irritating if you do have it permanently racked. Each of the two input channels share the same core feature set. Gain is continuously variable from +6 to +66dB, or -4 to 56dB if the -10dB pad is selected. Phantom power and a polarity reverse are also available via dedicated illuminated pushbuttons, and a 12dB/octave high pass filter can be engaged with three different choices of roll-off frequency (40, 80 or 120Hz) selected by engaging different combinations of two pushbuttons. Metering is crude but effective — four LEDs indicate signal at -36, -12, -6 and 0dBFS referenced to the A-DC input, with 0dBFS equating to +18dBu. At this stage, each of the channels diverge somewhat in terms of features. Channel 1 sports a high impedance input on the front panel for DI purposes, and also features the HMX variable harmonic distortion circuit introduced on Audient’s Black Series. So as not to feel left out (and to balance the front panel layout), Channel 2 has an additional pot marked ‘variphase’. This allows a continuously variable phase shift of between 0 and 180 degrees to be introduced to the signal courtesy of an all-pass filter. Claims that the front-end design is the same as that employed in the ASP008 and ASP8024 are borne out in use, as the Mico sounds near identical to the ASP008. It’s a balanced sound, erring slightly on the softer side when compared to Focusrite designs for example, but not lacking anything in low punch or

Capture the emotion. At the last Winter Games, one of the audio challenges was... Setting 42 channels of UHF wireless, conforming to national regulations regarding frequency band, spot frequency allocation and maximum power transmission. Then setting this up around a 30 m x 60 m ice rink and having constant operation of up to 12 hours a day. At the last Winter Games in Torino, Audio-Technica was successful in rising to this challenge and has transmitted the emotion at the Beijing Games 2008 using their flagship Artist Elite 5000 Series UHF wireless system to achieve noise free transmission and pure audio path. If you need to transmit the emotion of your next event, whether it be a sporting event, a rock concert, an opera or a business presentation, Audio-Technica is ready for the challenge. Let Audio-Technica be the supplier for your own games to begin.

Artist Elite 5000 series wireless system

www.audio-technica.com

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September 2008

review transient detail. And although the gain control seems a little more progressive at the top end of its reach when compared to those on my ASP8024 consoles, there’s still the feeling that there’s just a little bit of a struggle for absolute headroom when cranking the gain really high on low output microphones. It’s not that you ever really run out of headroom, just that you feel that it’s a bit close sometimes. Playing with the HMX control again held few surprises, as I’d heard it previously on the Black Series preamp. If anything, it’s effect seems a little more noticeable here as the Mico preamp seems a little less dark sounding than the Black Series to begin with. It’s a subtle control, and you hear it most clearly in the mid-range presence band on vocals or guitars — there’s a little more graininess to the sound as it’s dialled in, but this tends to soften, rather than harden the overall timbre. But perhaps my favourite feature was the VariPhase control. With two SM57s slung over and under a snare drum, your usual option is to flip the polarity of one of them and then hope for the best. If things aren’t quite right you can move one or the other around, but this is often a compromise here in terms of spill (It also means you might have to talk to the drummer. Ed). Having the option of any degree of phase shift on one of the microphones helps out here, enabling you to really zero in on the resonances that you want to reinforce, or indeed those you want to cancel. It still involves quite a bit of trial and error, but it’s a nice option to have. It’s a similar case when using the DI input in combination with a microphone on a bass cab. The DI input itself works well — particularly as the channel with the DI capability also features the HMX circuit that helps to inject a bit of added grunt to the Calrec Resolution Ads 7/8/08 17:46 Page sound. Tweaking the VariPhase control here helps to

solidify the sound when combining the two signals in a slightly more predictable manner than inserting a tiny delay. The Mico (UK£359 +VAT) stands or falls primarily on the quality of its preamps, which are extremely competent if not quite in the ‘boutique’ league. But it’s the inclusion of these added extras, coupled with a high quality A-DC as standard that really make it more than just competent, but really a rather useful little box. n

PROS

HMX and VariPhase features useful rather than gimmicky; A-DC as standard; high quality, neutral sounding preamplifiers.

CONS

Front panel legending a little difficult to read at times; feels like it could use a little more headroom at times; Word clock settings difficult to access if racked.

EXTRAS

Following on from the Black Series, Audient has released the BR4 as a smaller, portable version of the units. The BR4 has an integrated power supply and space for 4 modules from the range, including the analogue Pre, Comp and EQ modules and the A-DC and Time Machine modules. Features like HMX harmonic control, Glo, Overtone and Overcomp are therefore now available in a much smaller package.

Contact audient, uk: Website: www.audient.com

WHEREVER THERE’S SPORT CALREC AUDIO IS THE BIG PLAYER

calrec.com

There’s no more demanding environment than outside broadcast, so it’s not surprising that demanding production companies consistently choose Calrec consoles, time after time. Whatever the competition, Calrec is the runaway leader in the field of sport. In EMEA countries and in the US, there are more Calrec consoles in HD trucks than any other make. And our reputation for reliability is second to none. From Premier League football to lawn tennis, athletics to motor racing, cricket, rugby and horse racing…we’ve got it covered. And thanks to our award-winning Bluefin HDSP, it’s all in glorious, fully controllable 5.1 surround sound. Putting Sound in the Picture

If you share our passion for sport, find out more at calrec.com

September 2008

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review

Waves JJP Collection & V6 While it has been first with many models and recreations, the Fairchild and Pultec names have remained largely absent from the Waves range. This has now been addressed with characteristic aplomb in the Jack Joseph Puig Collection. GEORGE SHILLING crows on about the quality and looks at V6 too.

aves entered into the plug-in market very early on with its high quality processing and stable software that became, and remains, something of an industry standard. Many professional mixers reach for them instinctively as tried and trusted workhorses, despite newer rivals sneaking up and sometimes stealing their thunder. But the Waves processors are all reliable, sonically proven, stable and neatly designed. The controversial WUP (Waves Update Plan) remains with V6, indeed V5 owners need to have a valid WUP subscription to earn their free upgrade to V6, but there have been improved upgrade deals available to mitigate this expense. Furthermore, WUP now includes TLC or Theft and Loss Coverage. This protection plan is a valuable bonus, as iLok theft or loss has been something of a difficult area when it comes to equipment insurance, with not all underwriters fully understanding the concept or being willing to cover the true value of the assets contained on the little plastic thingy. A related Waves annoyance was a rather complex and convoluted authorisation procedure. Waves

has used iLok authorisation for some time, but getting the authorisations onto an iLok was less than straightforward. This, I am pleased to report, has benefited from the new adoption of iLok.com

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support with V6, where you can make use of the iLok website for authorisation and related activities such as transferring authorisations between iLoks for the first time. However, Waves hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t gone the whole hog; there are still further steps to enabling the plug-ins. Another immediately noticeable improvement with V6 is the simplification of installing the larger bundles. All-encompassing installer packages are now provided, making the selection for installation much simpler and easier, rather than having to juggle multiple installers. V6 also brings complete compatibility with Leopard and Vista operating systems. Extra Plug-ins are added to a couple of bundles in V6. The Broadcast and Production bundle now includes the S1 Stereo Imager, while SuperTap 6-taps has been added to the Native Power Pack. And one completely new plug-in is added to the SSL 4000 Collection: a G Series version of the Channel Strip. The JJP Collection was released just before V6 and is not included in the WaveShell 6.0 plug-in component, but other elements for Mercury Bundle and Studio Classics Collection are presently loaded from a single WaveShell file inside the plug-ins folder. Indeed, apart from JJP, no prior Waves installations can run alongside V6 and will be removed by the installer. The JJP Collection comprises recreations of familiar hardware devices: the two popular Pultec passive EQ units, the EQP1A and MEQ-5, plus the two famous Fairchild valve limiters, the mono 660 and the stereo 670. Plug-in versions of all these devices were popularised some years ago by Bomb Factory, and more recently Universal Audio created highly respected versions that are current UAD card favourites with many users. The twist with the JJP Collection is that the particular unit modelled is the favourite unit owned by Jack

September 2008

review Joseph Puig, American producer and mixer of exciting and accomplished recordings by the likes of Counting Crows, Black Crowes, Sheryl Crow and Robbie [‘The Crow’?] Williams. Visually the recreations are up to the expected high standard that Waves are known for, and all the usual Waves conventions apply: the WaveSystem Toolbar includes the usual Preset handling, A/B setups and Undo/Redo. All controls include useful pop-up value displays, and dragging around knobs enables multiple simultaneous control. I’m not convinced about the plug-in names: the PuigChild and the PuigTec, but at least it makes them relatively easy to find in the plug-in list. The PuigChild 660 is modelled on the left channel of the 670 rather than an actual 660 mono unit. Most controls are similar to the real unit, and thus Left/Right mode acts as two separate channels, Lat/Vert splits the channels to operate on Sum and Difference signals before re-combining into stereo, but additionally Linked mode takes the key from both channels but uses the upper set of controls, greying out the lower knobs. The PuigChild has a rather gentler temperament than many real Fairchilds and their emulations, with wild needle swings resulting in a surprisingly subtle, wonderfully smooth and gentle compression, and a beautifully open sound, but perhaps lacking some desirable crunch. On setting 4, vocals sit beautifully in the mix, and across the mix bus the auto-release of setting 5 works to really gel things. Input Gain is stepped like the original, but with the addition of a

September 2008

useful fine tune Output Gain knob added for 0.1dB accurate trimming of the final level, making setup easier than the hardware. There is some authentic harmonic distortion when the levels are pushed, but this seems benign compared to the glow from some real units I have encountered. Mr Puig apparently keeps his Fairchild in tip-top condition. The On/Off toggle disables compression while keeping this very subtle distortion in circuit. For full authenticity there is a Mains Hum enable toggle, selectable between 60Hz, Off and 50Hz. This defaults to 60Hz which my European ears found quite annoying, the hum is low in level but with multiple plug-ins on a mix this soon builds up. The 50Hz setting seems quieter and far less offensive and adds some real world authenticity, although I’m not sure this will enhance your mix… The large interface window models the front panel with enormous knobs, but these don’t seem to operate as smoothly as you might expect — fine adjustments are

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possible, but sometimes the mouse operation seems a tiny bit jerky. The PuigTec models copy the equivalent Pultecs designs, adding useful output level knobs and VU meters with Peak Hold LED. Again these windows are large, and again there is a slight lack of smoothness when mousing the knobs, possibly related to the draggrouping feature. All the anticipated transparent sparkle and warmth is evident, it’s amazingly realistic — small boosts are extremely subtle, just as with real units, the exact non-linear scaling of real units is modelled especially well. As with the PuigChild, some subtle harmonic distortion is modelled, and this is retained when the EQ is enabled or disabled with the In toggle. The Mains hum is similarly modelled here too. Neither of the TDM PuigTecs would load onto a free Process card, but apart from this glitch and the lack of smooth control, everything worked seamlessly and sounded fabulous. I’d have preferred a crunchier sounding PuigChild, but this is still a great compressor and the PuigTecs sound utterly gorgeous. n

PROS

Gorgeously open sounding JJP plug-ins; stable software; V6 iLok.com support.

CONS

Expensive; WUP incurs further outlay; authorisation still not straightforward; 670 too clean!

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

craft

Chris Potter Chris Porter talks to Nigel Jopson about painting walls, climbing psychological walls, and how to stay successful in pop music.

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September 2008

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hris Porter has enough gold, double/three/ five-times platinum and diamond pop albums under his belt to put stars in the eyes of any assistant engineer. Starting out at Tony Visconti’s famed Good Earth studios with a paint brush in his hand, he engineered albums for the likes of The Alarm and Gary Moore before forming a long and productive association with Wham! and George Michael, spanning Wham’s aptly named Make It Big, through George Michael’s 20m-selling solo record Faith, to the Listen Without Prejudice and Older albums. Along the way he produced Take That’s double-platinum Nobody Else, and several of Gary Barlow’s solo cuts. He produced the Pet Shop Boys’ Bilingual and Pop Art albums, and has worked with Tina Turner, Elton John and Cliff Richard. Porter produced Steps’ 2001 Buzz album, recorded the bestselling live comeback tour DVD for Take That, and has produced five albums for Chris De Burgh. Resolution met up with him at his private studio within London’s Stanley House facility, which he co-owns with Hugh Padgham. (photos www.recordproduction.com)

It must have been quite a coup to get a job as an engineer at Good Earth studios? Incredible luck, really. In the 70s I was the singer in a band that came second in a TV talent contest called New Faces. [Producer] Mickie Most was a panellist on the show, and he signed our band. I moved to London with drummer Andy Duncan, we thought we’d got it cracked: we’d be signed to Rak Records, and in a few months be stars! Of course it didn’t quite work out like that, I ended up doing various jobs, still doing gigs or session vocals occasionally. After four years I decided I was going to be a painter and decorator, because I’d basically built my own house after studying the Readers Digest book of

home maintenance! As I knew something about making records, I got a job building a studio for Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy in his garage. Phil was working on the Live And Dangerous album with Visconti. I ran into Tony a couple of times, and built him a ‘live’ drum room at Good Earth — the ambient sound was just becoming fashionable. This led to other jobs like partitioning in the office, so I worked there for four months. I had never considered the idea of being an engineer, I’d always thought of myself as a performer. But the more I saw what was going on, just the other side of this door I wasn’t really allowed through, it seemed like a really alluring place to be. The degree of jiggery pokery that went on for the Alive And Dangerous album was amazing to watch ... what had started off as a live recording was manipulated and manipulated — it’s won awards and it’s still a great rock album — but there’s very little live about it, in actual fact! Watching that process happen was rather thrilling, I was thinking: ‘I really want to do that!’ Tony sensed this and offered me a job as assistant engineer — the pay was about £1,700 a year. I had to do advertising jingles in the morning, then, from about 1pm it would move on to a John Hiatt session, or whatever Tony was working on at the time. I was 26 so I felt I had to learn fast. I spent about 18 months mainly living at the studio, I slept underneath the Trident desk in a sleeping bag. I’d get up around 8am to clean the studio from the session the night before, then work until 2am, or whenever everyone decided to finish and go out to a club.

I believe you sang BVs on three Bowie albums? That was such a great session to be involved in, I am in complete awe of David Bowie for what he has achieved and the sort of performer he is. Of course I

media production centre

Pure Inspiration record • edit • mix • create Fairlight Xynergi_Resolution mag1 1

September 2008

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13/8/08 12:40:53 PM

craft George and Andrew ended up at Good Earth. They had to make a B side for Club Tropicana, and only had 11 hours to finish it. I don’t think we ever finished it properly — but George and Andrew enjoyed working with me. After I left Good Earth, I got a call asking me co-produce Wham’s second album with George. The first recording we made was Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, which was a huge hit and a huge boost for us.

We’re sitting here in your nearly completed control room, is it a necessity for a producer to have his own studio these days? For me, it is absolutely necessary. I don’t find the process of making records easy, that’s part of the reason I’m still involved in making music. Because if it became easy — and there have been times in my career when I’ve thought ‘Oh, this is easy’ and repeatedly been proved wrong — it always comes back to bite you. In actual fact, you never know how to do anything, the ground is moving under your feet: tastes change constantly and things move along.

was always going around the studio singing (hoping someone would recognise that I could!), so when he needed backing vocals on some of the songs Tony, David and myself would go in and do them.

How did your long association with Wham! and George Michael begin? Again: just sheer good luck. When I was still working at Good Earth a friend of mine, Bob Carter,

was asked to produce Wham! Rap. They couldn’t afford to record it at Good Earth, so Tony let me go and engineer it at Matrix. George and Andrew didn’t get on with Bob very well, they both had strong opinions about the way they thought things should be, but Bob (being ten years older) thought he should have the final say. Of course, we all know that doesn’t work anymore in music — and it didn’t work then either. Four or five months later,

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You have an interesting room layout with the Euphonix mixer off to the right side and your computer keyboard and three screens in the centre. This has been a long term dream of mine and I’ve only just had the courage to do it. I can remember in the 1980s when the Lexicon 240 came out with its remote control, I thought how great it would be to sit in a chair between a perfect pair of monitors with just a little workstation in front of you and control everything like that. Of course, it’s still too cumbersome; what lets us down is the awful interface [mouse and keyboard], but the concept of having all the information in front of me on the screen — I’ve got

September 2008

craft the Sadie mastering off to the left, the next monitor will be showing me my ADA [Radar], all the music is displayed here in Logic — and off to the right side I’ve got the beautiful clean sounding Euphonix desk ... all it’s doing now is acting as a giant summing amp for the computer!

Do you have the Sadie so you can do your own mastering? I could do, but I’ve just found it convenient to have the same format as most of the mastering houses. When I leave here, I go away with my Sadie drive and a dongle and say: ‘there you go, here’s what I’ve been doing with it, see what you think.’ I still believe it’s very important to have a good mastering engineer do all the usual things like making sure there is a consistency of EQ across the whole project, sometimes when you’ve been working on a project for months, that last little stage is quite taxing. I think the mastering engineer is still worth his weight in gold. Is it difficult to remain focused and inspired when you’re working in your own facility and are your own boss? Getting things right is a perpetual problem, in a way it’s what keeps me going: I come into the studio with the track to struggle against. It would seem ridiculous for someone who doesn’t know anything about the business to see you with a lovely piece of music, played by great musicians, in front of you to work on ... but (to the producer) it’s become psychologically a wall to climb and conquer and, eventually ... you do! It’s that feeling of achievement when you’ve managed to get all those disparate things that were recorded at separate times to all come together. The track I’m working on at the moment was written two years ago and recorded as a very substantial demo. Then of course it’s gone through various key changes, everything which was programmed has been recorded live at various studios over a period of months, and you have to bring all those different things together and make them sound fresh and interesting ... when it’s a song which you’ve known for two years and have spent countless hours working on in various guises ... that’s a whole discipline in itself. I do really enjoy working with vocals when I’m mixing, perhaps because I was a singer. I like to always leave them until last — although I’m constantly referencing — it’s no good if you make everything so bright that the vocal has to sound like a laser beam to pierce through it all. But I like to set the vocal up as a final thing and really devote time and attention to it. It’s the little cherry that shines there on the top, and makes sense of your ice cream cone. September 2008

Do you do a lot of mix moves in-the-box? Yes, I think there are plug-ins which are absolutely incredible, better than any of the effect-type outboard gear we used to have. The Audio Ease Altiverb is an astonishing tool. For instance, last year I was working with tenor singer Alfie Boe, something I had never done before, working with orchestras with traditional Italian instruments, guitar and mandolins. I did a lot of the orchestral recording at Angel studios. Alfie had been suffering from pneumonia and he was whispering some of the vocals, so I knew the vocals would have to be replaced, but I wanted the tracks to sound as if they were in the same space as a starting point. So we took an impulse response of the room, and it was incredible how easy it was, at a later stage, to introduce that with the vocal and integrate it with the orchestra and other instruments. I’d love to do some more IRs of the Angel live room. Do you work with an engineer when recording? I still tend to want to do things myself. I’ve always found delegating that aspect of production hard, I suppose because I like doing what I do. It’s ever so difficult to tell someone how something should sound. When I was making the Listen Without Prejudice album with George, I was badly injured in a horse riding accident, and for about the last third of the album I couldn’t move about or even sit in a chair. So I had to come in on crutches and lie down. I had to describe what to do: ‘try taking a bit of 250Hz out of the kick — no, not that steep on the Q!’ It was an incredible strain to have to articulate everything, and not just reach out and do it. The other thing about working on your own is you can try things and then go back and change them later. If you tell people what to do, you have to remember and follow up on it, otherwise all experiments stay in place. When I go to other studios I try and do as simple a recording as possible, a good clean recording with a good vibe, and try and get as much as possible down. Then I come back here and sort through it. Do you have favoured microphones you take to other studios? I have an M49 which I bought from Puk studios when we were doing vocals for the Faith album. George is very particular about the sound in his headphones for singing: exactly how much top-end he has, how much reverb and how long it sustains so he can sing comfortably. It’s a beautiful old microphone and I’ve had it refurbished once by Neumann. I’ve compared it resolution

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craft with the new ones and the new mics are slightly brighter, but not as scruffy sounding. There’s a nice scruffiness about my M49. Unfortunately, when I first took over this facility my vocal booth was far from perfect, I needed something that would isolate the microphone from the nasty reflections off the glass window and ceiling, so I got an SE Electronics Reflexion Filter which did the job perfectly. When I was working with Alfie Boe, because he has such a loud voice — all tenors do, they can develop incredible levels — you might have the microphone two metres away, but the diaphragm was still in danger of distorting. The Reflexion filter helped a lot.

Was that something of a departure for you, working with an opera singer? It was a really steep learning curve for me, with Alfie. The first mixes I put in they were appalled by — I

thought they were great — but they were way too brash for that market. It was awful, it was one of the first times I’ve been seriously worried and questioned myself for many, many years. I literally lay awake at night thinking about how, without losing the basis of the sound we had recorded, I could change the way I work for this new genre of music. The artist had to educate me, Alfie said: ‘I can’t sound like that, I’m an opera singer!’ He explained his career was going to be in classical opera, he couldn’t afford to sound like Bocelli. I had approached it as if I was making a pop record — the label did want some crossover appeal — but there had to be a middle ground. It was a question of going through the takes thinking to myself: ‘I’ve got to change the way I listen and respond to this’ ... and then let that become a pleasure. And it was, in the end. I get a little fed up, actually, about this whole loudness thing, this obsession with

being edgy and rough ... this whole distortion thing! Some of it is anathema to an engineer, because there is a real joy to recording something well.

How do acts come to you, have you got management? I’ve had all sorts of managers, over the years. I was once managed by Jonathan Shalit, we spent about four years together before we parted company. He works incredibly hard and is a very honourable man, but he thought he could turn me into some sort of R&B producer, which I’m not. Now I have an informal arrangement with my publishing company, they have a division which does management, the relationship has largely been driven by writing, and then clients saying: ‘We like that song, and the demo sounds good — who did the demo?’ and things develop from there. Then there’s word of mouth and so on. What are you working on at the moment? I’m producing five tracks for X-Factor winner Leon Jackson. Have talent shows replaced pop A&R? There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of A&R around my project! But nowadays there is definitely less A&R in the studio: they hear material, then respond with comments. As far as Simon Cowell is concerned, and Tim Burn who is working with me at the moment, I think the A&R has been very good. It’s been ruthless, there’s no pussyfooting around with opinions, but they are well considered opinions for their market and they are very direct. To me that’s good A&R, it’s very constructive. I like the fact that it all goes on at a remove, so they don’t interfere with the session — that couldn’t have happened before — 20 years ago your A&R man had to be in the room because that was the only opportunity, you could never even rely on a SSL Total Recall [for a mix]. The idea of ‘Recall’ was only as ‘Total’ as the engineer’s commitment to not fiddle with it! I actually love the way the industry has moved on. There are some awful things about it ... it’s not earning enough money, I guess. Work has become very difficult in some respects, but the technological advances have been very good, and I don’t see any drop in quality overall, there’s still some great music out there. There’s some fantastic pure pop music. n

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September 2008

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craft mixing Wild Weather for BBC1. When the ambitious Resolution operation recently closed its doors, Dan was approached by Richard Boote to fill the GM post at Breathe Post Production, which was formed in 2006 from the post divisions of AIR Lyndhurst and Strongroom, occupying facilities in Shoreditch and Hampstead. (photos www.recordproduction.com)

In your new role as general manager have you still got your fingers on the faders? My history is of mixing, but it’s a management role. I’d like to be involved in training. At Resolution I spent a lot of time trying not to mix — not because I didn’t want to — but because it gets to the stage where there are a lot of people coming up the ranks who are probably better at it. I have not really been mixing full time for a few years now. What tempted you to make the move from Soho to a company which, while handling some very high-end post mixing, had its roots firmly in the music recording world? Post is not just about edit suites and workflow, it’s about people and the environment. I’ve been around Shoreditch for a long time because Resolution had a building here. We’ve got the Strongroom bar and it’s just a really vibey place, it reminds me a bit of what Soho used to be about. You hear a lot of talk about companies getting into trouble in Soho because the rent is so extortionate — here we can give value for money — and it’s a very creative vibe. Sonically, there’s a good history here [at AIR and Strongroom] of building studios that sound great. Music traditionally has a huge amount of very talented technical people that post doesn’t have. So Breathe has that technical backup, all the rooms sound good, having a music or feature film background means that the suites are going to be of a higher standard. I think the heritage of Breathe, through AIR and Strongroom, is what music people have understood for a lot longer than post, which is a creative environment ... I’ve learnt myself from coming here, there’s an atmosphere that is very creative and it’s not fake. That’s what attracted me: there’s a professionalism without having to be showy and pretend you’re something you’re not. It’s old-school engineering talent and a nice atmosphere.

Dan Gable Dan Gable talks to NIGEL JOPSON about swapping Soho for Shoreditch, leaving his faders for a management job, and the importance of training and workflow.

an Gable was first bitten by the audio bug when, as a youngster, he was beguiled by the ambient sounds and unusual noises used for dramatic effect by pioneering filmmaker Jacques Tati. With a father in Tele, the 16 year-old Gable already had a pretty good idea of where his career was headed when he got his first job as a runner for production company 20/20 TV. After a brief stint in radio Dan became a picture editing and audio understudy at venerable British firm Pickwick. Composer Keff McCullough taught him music recording techniques and, unusually for a postproduction engineer, he gained early experience mixing music — including albums for Burt Weedon

and Acker Bilk. Dan then moved on to become a dubbing mixer at Carlton, later CTV. He worked on a range of programmes including TV docs Jonathan Dimbleby in Kosovo (LWT), Dispatches; The Killing Fields (Carlton), The Word (C4) and The Brit Awards. He has mixed several corporate films, video releases — including Gladiators, The Rugby World Cup and Big Brother Uncut — short films and on-air promos for the likes of MTV, Fox Kids and Discovery. In 1998 he became a director and co-owner of post production house Resolution. He has mixed over a dozen episodes of Top Gear, and many other series such as Spy, Faking It, Teen Dads and Gay Vicars. In 2003 he was nominated for a BAFTA for resolution

You came from being co-owner of Resolution for 11 years, do you see some sort of convergence between music recording and postproduction at the top end of the market? I do. Strongroom, AIR and Breathe are not just music and post facilities. There’s also a hire company and a management company. This is an operation perfectly suited to do managed hire and location recording, we have a well-respected hire company that currently rents Pro Tools rigs, what we are hoping to do is hire more Avid systems, and have a managed hire service. I can understand why some production companies may need to offline in-house, because their budgets are getting squeezed, and they may have just one or two execs who work over quite a few projects: they may want to have them in-house because it saves a lot of time. I think a collaborative approach is needed, it always works better when there is a relationship between production house and facility. If that means helping to supply Avid systems in-house and help manage a workflow between offlining in-house and then bringing audio, editing and grading to Breathe, I think that’s a great model. September 2008

craft The early generations of digital workstations for music recording and postproduction were very different, the hardware based DAWs were very purpose-specific. Is it true that the latest generation of Pro Tools has brought about a kit convergence with these two branches of audio? Yes, absolutely. Early audio postproduction was just being able to lock multitrack tape or mag machines to picture. The process of synchronising sound with picture was a big deal, so audio postproduction was just about getting things so they were broadcastable. The music guys were doing all the fancy stuff. I actually started doing postproduction on tape machines, where if you wanted to move something you had to lock two transports, dump it off onto another machine, offset it and drop in. The first digital workstation I used was an SSL ScreenSound, I remember it took me about two weeks to learn how to drop in accurately with it because I was always going in too early, thinking of tape! That was a revelation, when digital workstations first came out. But the kit is effectively the same now, Pro Tools for both. A skilled dubbing mixer is like a skilled music producer, I don’t think there’s any difference at all. There’s a music mix and there’s a mix in dramas and documentaries as well.

Z1 cameras and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. On the postproduction side that will all have to be finessed. There are so many plug-ins and tools now, it’s amazing how TV sound dates. Even if you only look back five or ten years, it seems very dated. The equipment is no longer the limiting factor — it used to be that you never had enough tracks or outboard equipment — you knew what you’d like to make it sound like but didn’t have the resources to do it.

How do you cancel out unwanted ambience recorded from on-camera mics? Cedar does it really well. You can also go too far nowadays. I have mixed reality TV shows where I’ve got it sounding too clean, and I’ve gone back and undone it all because it didn’t feel voyeuristic enough. You can clean things up too much.

Do unscripted shows mean you have to run through the scene and log peaks and EQ changes? You get a feel for it really, there’s no mechanical system. I believe it’s all in the faders. It probably took me six years to even learn to fade a bit of music down properly! It’s a really delicate art in that respect. Equipment is good for some things, but having it too automated is dangerous. It’s a sensitive process, one of my pet hates in terms of postproduction are mixes with no soul to them. I remember one director saying about someone who was being interviewed on camera ‘he doesn’t sound like a victim anymore.’ It was just because his voice had been EQed with a bit more bottom end — something as simple as that. You can play around with levels and EQ and it makes people on screen be perceived in a different way. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

I imagine the advent of reality TV shows and covert-filmed docs has added to the audio postprocessing quite a lot — I’ve noticed the camera work is allowed to be a bit unsteady but the audio can’t ever be too ambient or noisy; audio has to be spot on! Exactly. There was that famous test where an audience were shown two identical picture-quality scenes and asked to ignore the different audio and just rate the picture. The overwhelming majority thought the identical picture with the best audio also had the best visual quality! Good quality sound puts the money on the screen. If you look at a lot of poor picture quality work such as hidden cameras, it’s always the sound which gives it professionalism. Look at a dodgy wedding video and imagine it dubbed — it would probably make it feel a whole lot better! I’ve done a lot of reality TV and it has a different grammar of how audio has to work. As with news, you are representing reality, but you want it to have a high production value. This involves a huge amount of postproduction, those shows took a lot of work. There are more protagonists than news, the audio work for reality shows must become something of a restoration project. There’s a lot of Cedaring, de-noising and EQing. Every clip has to be EQed. You are really at the mercy of what the directors want editorially. I worked on shows like Wife Swap and Faking It, you have to make them seem high quality, but the truth is you are capturing a slice of life — which you can’t mistake — the mics aren’t always in the right place when someone says something! Do you get participants way off mic or with distorted voices? Some of it is terrible quality, to be honest. But this is often because the programme makers are trying to be as un-intrusive as possible. Sometimes there won’t even be a sound person, there will be one camera operator doing everything, because the aim is to get intimacy, and to get participants to deliver. If you had a big boom mic hovering, it would put people off. A lot of it is domestic September 2008

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What’s your opinion on the quality of postproduction training offered to youngsters by media schools? Training is really important. I’ve worked with Skillset on the media development council, their remit is to train people up for the future. Every organisation has a duty to bring people up through the ranks. If you look at colour graders and dubbing mixers, these are quite new skills, relatively. There was quite a big skills gap, where you would have old-school mixers and very young people coming up, but a slight gap between the two. That’s why there are only a few colour graders and not that many good dubbing mixers getting alot of the work. It’s probably a five year cycle to train people, so I believe it’s good to keep that process going. Now that equipment is cheaper, there’s no reason why it can’t be done. I think media colleges have to take much more of a brief from industry. What they teach may be valuable, but there needs to be more of a context for students concerning what they’re learning. A good example would be someone I was training (who had been to one of the schools), he sat in on a mix and at the end of the session I asked him what he thought. He said ‘Oh my God, you’ve just done in an hour what we did in a whole term!’ The students had no concept of how fast they needed to work. I think industry and colleges should work much closer together, and that’s what Skillset is promoting. There’s training you would never be able to get ‘on the job’, but industry can show what results are expected. Who would be a typical client here at Breathe? It could the BBC with a high-end drama, or a production company, like Firefly, who might come in with a series of documentaries that need

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to be edited, mixed and graded. Breathe has a duality about it: very high-end drama mixing — we do the ADR for Dr Who and Torchwood, for example — Pip Norton is a very well respected drama mixer, a lot of this work is done at AIR in the big DFC room. The other side is a full service documentary workflow management-type of company. We can do multipart documentaries, music videos, we’ve got offline and online, picture grading and audio. The audio for drama is very different than the audio for documentaries. For an audience to engage with a documentary, the audio has to be doing something quite clever, and there’s a skill involved in doing that. There are some subtle things that can be done to draw an audience in, it’s not to do with purist audio quality, it has to do with sound becoming part of the narrative.

How would you define postproduction workflow management? If you are doing a multipart series you need to be on top of all the rushes, how it all locks together; if you have multiple edit suites doing multiple jobs, it’s almost like a different company compared to drama mixing. In a full postproduction project, there are a lot of tasks which make that job happen: you have an offline edit, an online edit, a dub, a grade ... maybe for multiple programmes. The logistics are such that you need a very clear plan about how this thing is going to unfold, and then make sure it’s executed. Most problems in postproduction are down to planning, because every element has a knock-on effect. Every overrun means that the task which was scheduled next may not be able to happen, and a project can unravel quite quickly. Sometimes managing that process is more valuable than sitting in a suite! n September 2008

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Desert Crossroads in London N22 Take an African band on its second album and throw in a tight schedule and an interesting ‘production concept’ and you have a recipe for something different. Producer PAUL BORG gives his account of the proceedings.

y first encounter with Etran Finatawa (Stars of the Desert) was a purely visual experience. ‘Look at this lot,’ exclaimed a colleague as he pushed a copy of the Introducing album (2006) across my desk. ‘Wow, they look good!’ Although I did not have time to listen to the album on that particular afternoon, I did spend a few moments examining the photograph on the CD cover. Apart from the obvious distraction of yellow face paint, feathers and the distinctive Tuareg head dress (tagelmoust) I was intrigued by a guitar held by one of the figures in the photograph — a righthanded Stratocaster-style body with the neck from a left–handed guitar bolted on creating the effect of an ‘upside–down’ guitar when held by a right–handed musician. A right–handed Jimi Hendrix fan perhaps? Six months passed and I was in a meeting with Phil Stanton, director of Riverboat Records. I met Phil through my work with Mory Kante and Abdel Gadir Salim, when I had rather unwittingly demonstrated an ability to deliver potentially complicated recordings while working under extremely limited time constraints. Once again, I found myself looking at the CD cover of the Introducing album — the man with the upside–down guitar was still there — only this time I was obliged to listen to the recordings. It was an immediately engaging sound: impressive North African blues guitar, underpinned by acoustic percussion and a melodic sensibility that is unnervingly familiar and September 2008

yet quite foreign. I detected another unusual element that offers something strangely unique from other similar electro–acoustic Saharan bands that I was already familiar with. I soon discovered that this unique quality is partly a result of the band’s Wodaabe contingent. Wodaabe music is largely a traditional vocal pedigree, though when fused with the electric guitar and musical arrangements of the Tuareg, an utterly compelling sound is produced — and that sound is Etran Finatawa. Would I be interested in producing their next album? Almost without any hesitation I jumped at the opportunity of getting into a recording studio with such an interesting subject. Where, when and how long have I got with them? ‘Ah, well that’s it you see Paul — we only have a small window of opportunity when the band are next touring Europe.’ Exactly how small is this window and can we get an album of 12 songs through it? ‘Four days actually…’ This was all sounding very familiar. My initial enthusiasm was quickly replaced by a more pragmatic and sober mindset as I considered the likely logistics. While it is true that a record producer is largely responsible for the more practical aspects of recording an album — and the producer will be acutely aware of these responsibilities when faced with a four-day ‘window of opportunity’ — part of the brief is also to consider the stylistic influence of the production approach. The production approach is largely dictated resolution

by the nature of a project, and in the case of Etran Finatawa — an apparently traditional electro–acoustic group with no obvious desire to embrace music technology beyond a guitar amplifier — it seems appropriate that the production should also take a more traditional approach. Given the aforementioned time constraints I took much comfort in those stories of how The Beatles recorded most of their debut album (Please Please Me) in one day. Then an unusual thing happened while I continued to refer to the Introducing album as part of my preproduction and research. I realised that I was becoming a real fan of these recordings and enthusing to all about ‘my new discovery’. Not good! Now I felt under even more pressure, as I would now have to produce an equally engaging album. It’s early July 2007 and just two days before we start recording, I meet with sound engineer Sandor Jozsa at a small live venue in London’s West End. Etran Finatawa are performing a set that includes some of the new material they will be recording with us as well as other titles that I am already familiar with from my now ‘favourite album’. Once I am over the initial visual impact of the group I start to focus on the sound that Etran Finatawa create when performing together. I deconstruct and isolate the various percussive elements and try to match what I have heard on CD with this now physical incarnation. It occurs to me that what I now hear is similar to, though sonically quite different from, the group’s existing recordings. While it is still a thrill to hear some of my favourite cuts from Introducing ‘live’, the live sound, as is so often the case, offers quite a different listening experience from that of the recordings. As I continue to watch and listen, I also begin to define — in my own mind at least — a concept for the production. Without this, I will not be able to articulate my ideas or offer visual analogies to the artist and production team. It is worth noting that a ‘production concept’ is not the same as an ‘album concept’, which you would expect, or hope, to be largely defined by the artist themselves. It is the first day of recording at Livingston studios in North London. Sandor is trying to locate the nearest garden centre as we have been informed that the tendé-drum (Tuareg percussion) requires two 16kg bags of earth to keep it secure when being played. The studio assistant is collecting buckets of water from the kitchen to fill the water-calabash (azakalabo) up to the required level — as instructed by Mamane (Wodaabe percussionist and backing vocals). Bammo (Wodaabe lead vocal) is jangling away in a corner of the room as he ties the Akayaure (small metal rings

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Etran Finatawa — Desert Crossroads. TUGCD1048 Riverboat Records/World Music Network 2008 www.worldmusic.net

on metal plate) to his right leg. I approach Ghalitane (Tuareg vocals and electric guitar) and offer him my Fender Stratocaster to try out. He reaches forward to take it while speaking his first English words to me: ‘Ah, Jimi Hendrix.’ I knew it! Most of the group are in position. They begin to rehearse while the engineer checks his levels. I stand in front of the group and listen. The sound is even more impressive without the distraction of a nightclub environment. The percussion has a dynamic quality and impact that I had not expected. The dry-calabash and water-calabash are stage left and right respectively and they play unusual counter rhythms, rather like stereo kick–drums. The watercalabash is keeping straight down beats, while the dry-calabash seems to work off this more regular rhythm part. Ghalitane seems content with the Fender Strat and Alhousseini (acoustic guitar, bass guitar and vocals), plays a distinctly Tuareg rhythm on an acoustic guitar. Every now and then one of the group will sing a few tantalising lines before breaking off.

It is a quite breath–taking sound, and I want to try and capture an audio image that is as close to this first–hand experience as possible. Recording sound will only ever produce an interpretation of the event — or how we think that event actually sounded. Some recordings almost sound like an audio snapshot, or ‘picture–postcard’, of the actual performance and experience and while we may get a sense of the spirit and energy from that original performance, often we miss resolution, dynamics and presence. The recording process is almost the same as it was when I began working in the recording industry some 25 years ago. The band runs through a song three or four times and hopefully we get a good take. ‘A Good Take’: this is when the timing, tuning and performance are all deemed to be of a good enough quality to merit keeping for eternity. In the case of Etran Finatawa, defining a good take is not quite so simple. An example: Day two and we are on take-two of ‘Kel Tamasheck’. The tempo pushes and pulls, the

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guitars are not exactly in tune, though they are not exactly out either, but perhaps more importantly, the group are all in the same time and space and that is all that seems to matter. Halfway through this Camel Funk classic, everyone in the control room looks around at each other — the magic is working. The band are smiling and so is the producer. The job just got that bit easier and these guys have got it. What is ‘it’? Who knows? In such circumstances, the producer becomes a guide through the recording process and can remain quite transparent in the production itself. Alhousseini, along with Bagui (dry-calabash/ odilirou and vocals) is now performing as lead vocalist on record for the first time. He records a title called ‘Iguefan’. It is reminiscent of an early delta blues piece from the 1920s, though it is actually a classic Tuareg arrangement. The acoustic rhythmic guitar part evokes an image of a meandering, undulating river. Once again, the form bears some similarity to a ballad that might be sung by a lamenting Charlie Patton — verse, chorus–melody, guitar turnaround, verse again, repeat chorus–melody, and so on… The producer makes a suggestion: ‘how about a little “lead electric” for a few bars? Let’s try and introduce another colour to the track.’ Alhousseini smiles, though seems a little unsure about performing what is in effect a guitar solo. Two or three takes later and we have the purest of lead interludes that helps to bring some punctuation to the arrangement. ‘Any chance we could double–track those hand claps, Bammo?’ He gives a gracious bow and prepares himself for the red light. That’s about as hands–on as a producer needs to get when the artist has that indefinable quality that allows them to deliver a truly engaging performance in front of a microphone. Sandra van Edig, the group’s very capable manager, informs me that much of the new material on this album has been developed over the last two years during the band’s touring schedule. I sense that this exposure to strange and foreign environments, as well as the previous experience of recording their debut album, has had some impact on how the group now approaches this present series of recording sessions. The individual musicians within the group are keen to assert themselves more and experiment with ideas as their confidence in the studio grows. During one of the many tea ceremonies, Bagui shows me a long, thin wind instrument called a Doudandou. He uses strips of leather to adjust the

September 2008

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The Process

pitch. It produces an extremely loud tone that is not dissimilar to a set of Celtic pipes. He tells me that the instrument is used to help drive livestock across the savannas back in Niger and that he would like to recreate such a scene by recording the Doudandou along with some herding calls. But he’s very specific. Sandra translates his vision: ‘It should sound as though you — the listener — are sitting behind a bush and hear Bagui coming out of the distance, then right up to your bush, before disappearing again into the distance with his herd.’ The result is now tagged as an introduction to the title Gaynaako for your listening pleasure! It is the last night of recording and we all sit together in the control room to review our work. This offers me an opportunity to check the final arrangements before the group return to Niger, leaving me alone to mix. Have I got everything I need? Can I cut the handclaps on the chorus? Is that additional measure at the end of the third verse deliberate, or was it a mistake? Alhousseini seems slightly concerned that I might be feeling the pressure and starts to massage my right foot as I highlight more points from my list. Producer–artist relations were never this good. We continue to listen, and as I dissolve into my chair I realise that I am listening to an album — a body of work — that has form, vision and a cohesive quality rather than merely a recording of the group’s present live set. These nomadic journeymen are maturing. They are becoming recording artists. n

Curious?

The intention, right from the outset, had been to capture complete and comprehensive performances from the band’s core musicians, with the use of overdubs restricted to those required through either practical necessity, or moments of inspiration. The musicians were set up in a ‘medium-live sounding’ room to accommodate clear inter-band visual communication, while considering an appropriately balanced stereo image — thus allowing for accurate localisation with a spaced, omnidirectional stereo pair. While spaced-pair is not necessarily the most accurate stereo configuration, it does provide the potential for exaggerating, or indeed reducing, the stereo image during the mix, and, perhaps, with more natural results than mid/side. As well as the stereo pair, close microphone placement was deployed using a combination of conventional approaches, and in some cases, improvisation. For example, I decided to approach the ‘calabash’ (a large dried-out seed cut into two semispherical pieces) rather as though I were recording a kick drum with some necessary adaptations. A ‘dry’ calabash is generally secured to the floor with tape, thus creating a sort of airtight chamber that results in a low, dark thud when hit with the palm of the hand. Before sealing the calabash to the floor with Gaffa-tape, I placed an old AKG D12 inside, also taped to the floor, and facing upward. A Neumann U-47 was positioned on the outside of the calabash to capture a more natural sounding representation of the subject. A similar combination of dynamic and large-diaphragm capacitor was used on the water calabash, the main concern here being to make sure we didn’t give one of Livingston studios’ Neumanns a quick dip in the water. This approach worked well and afforded me some useful options during the mix, and importantly, the U47s contrasted well with the closer dynamics and made for a very natural sounding reproduction. Isolation and separation were only a serious consideration in respect of the guitar amplifier. I placed this in a storage space at the back of the studios, with additional microphones placed in an adjacent live room to capture some natural room interaction with excessive pre-delay. This then allowed me to

record the lead-vocals as part of the initial takes — important, given the traditional nature of the music and performances. As with many of my world music projects, budget often determines that I record to hard disk with Pro Tools (96kHz) as opposed to my preferred recording format: analogue tape. This now very familiar approach subsequently led to one of the most frustrating aspects of making these recordings. Born out of a decision to entirely bypass the analogue console in an effort to maintain a relatively clean and transparent record and monitor path — a nice idea in light of Livingston’s extensive collection of outboard microphone preamps — I found myself sitting between the speakers with no physical control over individual monitoring levels during takes. If I then want to adjust levels or solo individual channels to quickly establish a clear understanding of what is actually being recorded, while keeping an eye on performance (an important part of the production process, you understand) then the procedure would go something like this: ‘Hey Sandor!’ (engineer, who sits at far end of desk hunched over his keyboard and computer display) ‘Can you just turn down the second acoustic guitar on the left and try panning it over to the right instead? No, not that one mate, the one on the…’ Producer then moves to end of desk, points at the arrange window and establishes the relevant tracks, makes a group, turns down and pans to right, moves back to centre of the desk, assesses result; not quite right yet. ‘Can you turn them up a bit now and just cut that second calabash?’ — too late, the band has now finished the take. ‘So how was that performance guys, and who’s producing this record anyway?’ I’m sure this scenario is very familiar to many readers, and I fear that it might be a result of the lack of standardisation within the recording industry. Every recording studio I work in is often configured to its own very unique specification and requirements. However, it is important not to overlook this fact when planning a production approach, and consider the sometimes very intuitive and fast pace of a recording session, where second chances are a luxury that can all too often lead to a dull performance.

See you at IBC, Stand 10.131

ARTIST DIGITAL MATRIX INTERCOM

The Solution for World Class Events.

Riedel Communications GmbH & Co. KG • Uellendahler Str. 353 • 42109 Wuppertal • Germany • www.riedel.net September 2008

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business

Digital TV and the UK Analogue transmission is being phased out. NIGEL JOPSON finds the ones and zeroes of digital terrestrial TV passing through a blizzard of changing codecs and multiplexes, and discovers Britain may be the first to implement the new DVB-T2 standard

t 3:27am on the morning of 14 November 2007, the first phase of the UK switch-over to Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) was completed at the small coastal town of Whitehaven. The inhabitants of this small Cumbrian port lost their analogue signals but were able to enjoy 20 channels of free-to-air TV from their Freeview set-top-boxes (STBs). The UK has opted for a phased switch-off of analogue transmissions, the Border region (Scotland) will be next in 2008, followed in 2009 by West, ITV Grampian (Aberdeenshire/Scotland), and Scottish TV (ITV). Scotland will be the first country in the UK to be digital-only, with the Ulster region being last to switch in 2012. The release of analogue spectrum will enable the launch of new transmissions, such as additional TV channels, data and mobile services. For the majority of UK viewers — 36.6% of whom already watch DTT via Freeview today — the TV

experience will significantly improve. The free channel selection has increased from analogue’s puny six to a digital 42, and 26 radio stations may also be received. The Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) offered by Freeview presents on-screen details of the next seven days viewing so if you have a Freeview tuner/DVD recorder or a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) with hard disk, the EPG can be used to schedule recordings. The UK has a special logo, the digital approved product tick, which the public has been advised to look for when purchasing new equipment. Some Integrated Digital TVs (IDTVs) and STBs have CAM (Conditional Access Module) slots for adding extra pay-channel viewing cards. Top Up TV is an extra service offering a Top Up TV+ Box with a monthly UK£9.99 subscription, to watch an on demand combination of Top Up TV content, recorded Freeview programmes, films and

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other subscription content including Setanta Sport. The PVRs cost £89.99 and £99.99 for 160GB and 250GB models respectively. Top Up transmits 20 hours of extra content overnight selected from 23 channels such as Cartoon Network, Living, UKTV Gold, Paramount Comedy, TCM and MTV. A movie subscription called Picture Box (£5 per month) offers a new movie every night and provides a selection of the last seven features on demand, selected movies are sent overnight to the TV+ Box. Freeview works to an open specification that has allowed services like Top Up and BT Vision to use the platform with products that only support selected aspects of the spec. The simplest types of Freeview STB can now be purchased for under £15 among the aisles of fruit and veg in Britain’s supermarkets. DTT signals are broadcast in the UK over six multiplexes, with two operated by the BBC, two by National Grid Wireless, one by SDN (owned by ITV) and one by Digital 3&4 (an ITV/C4 consortium). The DVB-T standard provides a multiplex that can arbitrate the number of services and the picture/audio quality. Some multiplexes allocate more bandwidth to supply a smaller number of higher quality channels. BBC One on Multiplex 1 is carried as a 4.4mbps stream, while Sky Sports News uses 2mbps. Multiplexes can use statistical multiplexing at the MPEG-2 video coder to dynamically vary the bit-rate allocated to a channel, depending on how challenging the picture content is at that moment, and how much bandwidth demand there is from other channels. Complex pictures with more detail may get a higher bit-rate at the expense of another channel in the same multiplex, if the other channel is currently transmitting pictures that are easier to encode. The only constant bit-rate channel is BBC One. This is so the Regions and Nations can do a simple T-Mux operation and insert their local versions of BBC One over the London feed straight into Multiplex 1, without requiring extra equipment to re-encode the entire multiplex at each regional centre. After the analogue switch-off, Ofcom plans to auction the newly-released spectrum for new services. The MPEG-2 encoding, overnight downloading, talk of a ‘digital dividend’ at switch-off and spectrum auctions unfortunately remind me of mistakes made in the UK with DAB (outdated codecs and low bitrates over-hyped to the public), and the 3G mobile spectrum auctions (none of the telecom operators have seen a return on the £22.5bn they overpaid for their 3G at the height of the dotcom boom). Pressure for more bandwidth for DTT in the UK is being driven by new high definition (HD) technology, with some fine content already delivered by the BBC. BBC HD was launched on a trial basis from May 2006 to December 2007, with the first HD originated programme shown being the spectacular Planet Earth. BBC HD became a full service on 1 December 2007. The broadcasts are two to five hours per day, and include simulcasts with regular BBC channels, such as Michael Palin’s New Europe, and replays of HD programmes, such as Torchwood and Hotel Babylon. Live coverage of events such as Wimbledon, Eurovision and Euro 2008 have been broadcast. From 8 August BBC HD showed coverage of the Olympics, extending the channels operating hours to do so. Apart from some DTT test transmissions in London, HD is currently only available via satellite and cable. The successful trials of HD seemed to bring the free-to-air broadcasters together, and a not-for-profit satellite service was recognised as a way of filling the gaps in Freeview DTT coverage. Freesat was launched on 6 May 2008, with 20 BBC and ITV channels on launch, and another 28 September 2008

business available by July. ITV’s HD offering is exclusive to Freesat, starting with the UEFA Champion’s League matches in August, and is a ‘red button’ application: an HD logo will appear on the screen while viewers are watching ITV1, pressing the red button on the remote control will switch to HD resolution. One of the key promotional messages on launch was that Freesat can offer digital TV to 98% of the UK. Broadcasts come from the same group of Astra 2 satellites used by Sky at 28 degrees East: it can interface with any existing Sky installation, for example a shared building with a communal dish. Freesat does not rebroadcast channels, all it does it give free access via its STBs to satellite channels that are not encrypted. ‘We’re offering our own platform management system and our own Electronic Programme Guide, to present a consumer interface designed to help people navigate their way through the multichannel world,’ says Richard LindsayDavies, commercial director of Freesat. ‘We break our content down into simple genres such as Sport, News and Entertainment and [unlike Sky] we only show [a listing of] channels that you can actually watch.’ Freesat has its own closed specification DTG (Digital TV Group) tested equipment, the EPG enables PVR features like serial recording and EPG access from any channel. A free-to-air channel that wants to appear on the Freesat guide will have to pay around £35,000 annually — about half what it cost to snag a free-to-air spot on Sky’s competing satellite EPG. Ofcom’s latest set of 2008 quarterly figures show that only 74,000 households attached a new Freeview receiver or installed a new IDTV as the main DTT set, versus 673,000 new DTT households in 2007. This drop could be for many reasons — waiting for the Freesat launch, waiting for switch-off — or the entrenched ‘urban myth’ that Sky subscription is the only digital option outside major conurbations. A new report from respected analysis firm Screen Digest blames a lack of free-to-air HD broadcasts for the slow spread of the format in Europe. At the end of 2007, nearly 20% of European households owned an HD display, but less than 1% of this group had access to HD broadcast content. Senior analyst Vincent Létang said: ‘In the next five years, HDTV will remain little more than a pay TV product in Europe — primarily on satellite. Analogue switchoff, which will happen between 2010 and 2012 will free-up bandwidth capacity on the digital terrestrial

Curious?

platform and will kick-start the next phase of growth in HDTV.’ In November 2007 UK regulator Ofcom put forward a plan to reallocate the channels on Multiplex B, licensed to the BBC, to other multiplexes and use new transmission technologies to broadcast up to four HD services — BBC HD, ITV HD, Channel 4 HD and a proposed HD version of Five. Ofcom claimed adoption of the new European transmission standard, DVB-T2, and a switch from MPEG-2 compression to MPEG-4 compression on Multiplex B could increase capacity by at least 30%. That would leave extra space for applications from mobile TV to wireless broadband in spare spectrum — and mean more cash from auctioning it off! In February, Dermot Nolan, the head of the DTG (the UK’s digital TV industry association) called Ofcom’s plan to put four HD services on Freeview ‘totally inadequate’ ... ‘One analysis said by 2020, without Freeview, 50% of people will be watching HDTV, with Freeview it would be 90%,’ he declared. ‘Freeview is now the largest platform by some way. The BBC Trust would not agree [to more HDTV channels] unless it is on all platforms.’ Nolan also said it was clear that sales spoke for themselves concerning HDTV: ‘It is already available on other platforms and it is the fastest growing platform they

have ever had. On everything else HDTV is becoming the norm. France is launching seven HD channels this year. In Japan 90% of homes own an HD TV. It is definitely the future. The UK is falling behind.’ In March 2008, a group of boffins from the DTG published proposals for future use of spectrum in the UK: two national single frequency networks that would allow for an initial eight additional HD channels. Using SFNs would mean a restriction in the number of regional opt-outs used by the public broadcasters for local news and advertising. ‘If you look at the richness of the offerings available from satellite and cable, by the time we get to analogue switch-off the offer would be sufficient for the consumer to buy into the terrestrial platform,’ claimed Dr Ian Childs, who chaired the group. He said that a way needed to be found to migrate totally to HD and the use of SFNs could enable 40 HD channels across just 22 frequencies — ten less than at present. Ofcom has resisted the public broadcasters’ calls for gifted or loaned spectrum to develop HD channels, and during August 2008 the channels will have to duke it out to win Ofcom approval to use the newly cleared capacity on Multiplex B. Existing Freeview equipment will not be able to display the services, and Ofcom is looking for broadcasters to give consumers a good reason to buy new STBs or IDTVs. Applicants should demonstrate how their proposed content ‘would be likely to encourage members of the public to adopt reception equipment which is compatible’ says Ofcom’s draft statement. The new terrestrial HD services are expected to be the first time the new DVB-T2 transmission standard, which was only agreed internationally at the end of June, is employed in a major project. DTG members met the day after DVB-T2 was agreed in Geneva and work has begun on updating its D-Book, which specifies how UK DTT receivers should work. The BBC, which took a leading role in developing the standard, has begun test transmissions. ‘There is a lot of work going on and we are moving quicker than we had originally anticipated,’ says Simon Gauntlett, technology director of the DTG. Gauntlett says a possible test demonstration of DVB-T2 at this year’s IBC in Amsterdam would improve the possibility of manufacturers meeting the 2009 target. ‘I think there is a lot of excitement around and there are a lot of people who are looking to see what happens at IBC in September.’ n

See you at IBC, Stand 10.131

PERFORMER DIGITAL PARTYLINE INTERCOM

The Solution for World Class Events.

Riedel Communications GmbH & Co. KG • Uellendahler Str. 353 • 42109 Wuppertal • Germany • www.riedel.net September 2008

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technology

Evolution of an icon The oldest piece of pro audio equipment still in regular use is the RCA 44 ribbon mic. A revolutionary microphone design, it became a reference standard yet it was developed when audio tests were difficult and critical listening was crucial to the process. WES DOOLEY of AEA explains how they went from the 1932 RCA-44A to the 2008 AEA A-440.

r Harry Olson is credited as the inventor of the ribbon microphone. He adapted the concept of the ribbon loudspeaker, invented in 1924 by Erwin Gerlach, by reversing the transduction process. He realised you could use a conductive ribbon lightly suspended in a transverse magnetic field, as either a speaker or a microphone. That insight led him to develop the first highperformance directional microphone in the world, the bi-directional 44A. The 1932 RCA model 44A was Olson’s first commercial success. ‘Two major characteristics of this type of microphone are particularly attractive from the standpoint of high fidelity sound reproduction, namely

The A-440. 58

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a uniform response frequency characteristic over the entire audio frequency range and a uniform directivity pattern over the entire audio frequency range. The ribbon-type velocity microphone was the first widefrequency-range and high-quality microphone which exhibited a uniform directivity pattern over the entire audio frequency range.’ (Olson, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, June 1970) The rapid advancement of permanent magnet technology in the 1930s had freed Olson’s ribbon microphones from the constraints of using an electromagnet. The 44 had an accurate full-bandwidth fig-8 pattern, a transparent wide-range sound, excellent dynamics, required no external power, and was immune to humidity. These characteristics made the audio engineer’s job much easier, and set a standard to which others aspired. The 44A was soon joined by the 77A, the first cardioid microphone. The 44A was replaced in 1936 by the 44B which had more output and a gorgeous black and silver Art Deco case. The 1938 BX revision kept the 44B’s high-output, double Alnico magnet design, but had a less reflective umber finish suitable for the newly emerging medium of television. The 44BX remained in production until the mid 1950s. In the mid 1970s RCA ceased all microphone production. However, the 44B and BX and its cousins the RCA77D and DX remain in continuous use in recording studios and on scoring stages. As magnetic tape became the dominant media for recording, ribbon microphones fell out of favour. Magnetic recording with its greater linearity and dynamic range solved many disc and optical recording problems and pioneers such as Les Paul and The Beatles became quite creative with multi-generational magnetic recording. However, there was always a slight loss of highs from generation to generation. Large capsule condenser microphones helped resolve this problem as they have a number of high-Q resonances in the 8 to 12kHz range. Ribbon microphone elements are tensioned very lightly and are linear above resonance. Condenser microphone capsules are tensioned tightly and are linear below resonance. The resonance structure of condenser capsules shows up as a number of narrow high-Q resonances. This can impart a pleasant airy quality or become a major problem when a sibilant frequency lands on top of a resonance With the advent of digital recording, ribbon microphones made a major comeback. Their ability to record fast transients accurately without adding upper-range resonances became a positive attribute, as high-frequency transfer loss was no longer a problem. Users have also become more familiar with the usefulness of a ribbon microphone’s native fig-8 polar pattern and proximity effect bass tip-up. With fundamental tunings as low as 16Hz the 44 is the king of bass. The 44 is flat down to 20Hz from a distance, and if used closer than six feet starts to have bass tip-up. No wonder announcers love them. AEA began restoring and repairing RCA ribbon microphones soon after RCA ceased production September 2008

technology and service. In the early 1980s AEA also began servicing and importing STC/Coles 4038 studio ribbon microphones. Over the next two decades AEA started making replacement RCA parts, and finally developed a complete set of external parts for the 44 based on the classic RCA 44BX built in Camden, NJ. During this period appreciation for the 44’s sonic character continued to grow. Antique and radio collectors also admired them, which decreased their availability and increased their price. Mentored by Jon Sank, one of the last engineers who worked for the RCA microphone division, I, as AEA’s owner and chief engineer, began work on reproducing the interior parts. The 44 had been produced in Camden, New Jersey; Hollywood, California; London, England; and Australia. While repairing and analysing these different versions, we correlated which design elements had the most pleasing sound quality for their owners. The AEA R-44C incorporated those design elements. The primary difference between the AEA R-44C and the RCA-44B/BX is in the magnets. The RCA-44B/BX used high-output Alnico magnets, the best available at the time. By the 1990s, neodymium had replaced Alnico as the best material for this purpose, so it was used in the AES R44C. True to our origins in providing repair services for these classic microphones, all of the assemblies of the AEA microphone are directly interchangeable with the original RCA. AEA’s service department was already fortunate to be using NOS ribbon material from the 1970s that had been made for RCA. Once a custom microphone output transformer was developed that matched the original RCA sonics, the culmination of this work was the introduction of the AEA model R44C at the 1998 AES Convention in San Francisco. AEA has continued to make use of modern technology to create new versions so as to bring this classic microphone closer to Olson’s ideal: the best microphone possible for music and voice work. The AEA R-44CNE was released in 2001 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the NAMM. As with RCA 44s produced in England and Australia, the R44CNE has a simplified shell and cushionmount assembly. The internal parts are the same as the ‘museum quality” R44C series. By simplifying the shell and cushion-mount this version sells at a lower price than the model R44C, the 1936 museum replica. AEA developed the ‘X’ motor option using higher energy magnets to increase the output of the microphone by 6dB. This version was developed at the request of scoring mixers who needed a lower noise floor, and did not need to match exactly the sound of original RCA 44s. This allowed Lord of the Rings scoring engineer John Kurlander to mix his AEA R44 string pair almost as high in the mix as his main Neumann M-50 tube microphones on the Decca Tree. Detail changes continue to be made to the AEA 44 series as AEA gains more experience. The most dramatic technical revision was changing the internal wiring from the top of the ribbon to the transformer input leads. Examination of the RCA 44 production from England revealed that their wiring scheme reduced hum sensitivity by 20dB without altering the sound. This wiring was immediately adopted for all R44 microphones. More recently the yoke material casting on the R44C was changed from zinc to bronze. The original RCA zinc yokes were found to fail when the plating wears through and the zinc is exposed to moisture. More recently the R44C cushion-mount cable-clamps were changed from cast zinc to machined brass. September 2008

Recalling Olson’s prediction that a well designed ribbon microphone might have the lowest selfnoise of any microphone type, AEA next focused its attention on lowering the noise and extending the linearity of the ribbon microphone/microphone preamplifier interface. The 2005 AEA model TRP ribbon microphone preamplifier was designed specifically to deliver high gain while reducing noise and increasing linearity. This JFET design has a low noise floor, is DC coupled for wide bandwidth, and has a no-load, ultra-high input impedance design that delivers exceptional frequency response linearity and better signal to noise with ribbon microphones. The output impedance of the RCA 77DX, a narrow, high-efficiency ribbon design, will rise from a nominal 250ohms to 1600ohms at its 50Hz resonance point. The output impedance of the Coles 4038, a wider, more tolerant design, will rise from a

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nominal output impedance of 300ohms to 600ohms at its 45Hz resonance point. The output impedance increases at resonance for all ribbon transducers. With passive ribbons, this change in output impedance at resonance interacts with its microphone preamp’s input impedance to create a dip in the low frequency response. Many preamps noticeably load down a ribbon microphone at all frequencies, and interact at resonance to add a dip in the bass response. A 250ohm source impedance RCA 77DX driving a 1000ohm preamp load impedance will lose about 2dB in level. The rise in output impedance to 1600ohms at resonance would create a 6dB dip at about 50Hz. The 300ohm output impedance of a Coles 4038 causes a broadband loss into a 1500ohm load of 1.6dB and the resonance EQ dip at about 45Hz will be about 1.3dB deep.

technology In comparison, a 77DX driving the 30,000ohm plus input impedance of an AEA TRP would lose less than 0.1dB of broadband output, and the additional resonance dip would be less than 0.4dB. The Coles 4038 would lose less than 0.1dB of broadband output, and the additional resonance dip would be less than 0.1dB. An AEA R44C would lose less than 0.1dB of broadband output, and the additional resonance dip at 30Hz would be about 0.15dB. Following on the widespread acclaim for the TRP, the next logical step was to incorporate similar circuitry inside the microphone itself. The AEA model A-440 debuted at the NAB Show in April 2008. Its internal phantom-powered JFET buffer amplifier is combined with a new, higher-ratio transformer to provide 12dB more gain than the ‘X’ motor alone. The equivalent acoustic self-noise of the combination is 9dB(A) or less — making it among the quietest

microphones made. Although the acoustic frequency response of an A440 is the same as an R44CX, the sonic character is different. This character is often described as warmer or more tube-like and the bass is reported as having more weight. Placing a buffer amplifier inside the A440 radically reduces the distance between the ribbon step-up transformer and the first electronics stage. This decreases mic-line noise interference. It also buffers the mic preamp from possible low frequency EQ effects as a ribbon’s output impedance rises at resonance. The A440’s audio-band output impedance is a constant 92ohms for flatter low frequency response when driving typical mic preamps. The trade off with such an active studio ribbon design is a reduction of the 165dB SPL capabilities of AEA’s passive R series ribbon mics. While microphone positions that exceed 135dB SP are

CMY

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rare two examples are extremelyclosehornand percussion microphone position. Under such circumstances, moving the microphone back three to six inches can solve the problem. The A440 has the ability to drive a 1,000-Ohm load at SPLs up to 135dB and a high sensitivity of -33.5dBV at 94dB SPL (30mV/Pa). The A440 matches conventional mic preamplifiers quite well. The A440 draws 7mA of P48 phantom power. This amount of current allows it to achieve a noise floor of 9dB(A) or less with a headroom limit of 135dB SPL. Knowledgeable engineers never stopped using the 44. In the mid 1960s remote recording pioneer Wally Heider always used RCA ribbons on big bands and horn sections. Capitol Records Studios maintains a large collection of 44s and has used them continuously on projects since the 1940s. Performers The R44c. such as Bing Crosby owned their own personal 44s. Young Frank Sinatra’s use of a 44 in live performances was brilliant. He understood how to work the 44 to change his sound dynamically during a song and increase its dramatic impact. Contemporary scoring engineers also consistently use the 44. Scoring engineer Shawn Murphy typically records his string solos with a Blumlein pair of ribbons forward, and a pair of Schoeps MK2H omnis further back. Itzhak Perlman’s solos in Memoirs of a Geshia (2005) were recorded using AEA R44Cs as the Blumlein pair. In 2005, EmmyLou Harris won a best female country vocal Grammy with The Connection which Nashville producer/Engineer Brian Ahern recorded using a single ‘X’ motor AEA R44. In 2008 The Turtle Island String Quartet album A Love Supreme won a Grammy for Best Classical Crossover album. All the closer microphones were AEA ribbons, with the electric cello on an AEA R44CNE. Is the A440 the best 44 incarnation ever? Time will tell. The A440 is a very useful development of the 44. Engineers who have considerable experience with both RCA and AEA 44s like it very much. On Hollywood scoring stages and at world class studio facilities, such as Blackbird in Nashville, it is being used on major projects. The 44 is an astonishingly good microphone which is why AEA started reproducing it in 1998. It has been evolving for over 75 years, and has adapted amazingly well to contemporary studio needs. There is likely a lot more that will happen in this ongoing story, and AEA is honoured to be part of it. n September 2008

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meet your maker

Michael (left) with brother Eben.

Michael Grace

noise, distortion, and bandwidth are becoming less and less significant.

The man behind the technology of Grace Design explains why not all preamps are equal, why quality and longevity is green, and why he doesn’t know how to build down to a price. ZENON SCHOEPE

ichael Grace dropped out of engineering school after his freshman year to work for a high-end audiophile amplifier company in his home town of Colorado Springs. For six years Jeff Rowland (Jeff Rowland Design Group) was his mentor and he learned much about purist signal path design and critical listening. During this time his younger brother Eben (now his business partner in Grace Design) was becoming an accomplished guitar player and Michael was compelled to learn the art of recording to make demos for Eben’s various bands. This led to tinkering with the recording chain and the first mic amplifiers that came out of this were adapted from high performance phono preamplifiers. In 1990 Michael quit and set out on his own and made a living primarily by doing remote recording and studio maintenance at local studios. He says this gave him a great insight into what breaks and bit by bit he started getting custom equipment orders and some contract design jobs. In 1994 he officially established Grace Design with brother Eben and began production on the original 801 microphone preamplifier. They took the first one to New York for the AES Convention and, since they didn’t have a booth, they carried it under their arms and showed it to anyone they could stop in the aisles. Located in Boulder, Colorado, Grace Design has maintained a steady pace to developing new products and technologies in a product line that has evolved into a definitive collection of microphone preamps predominantly but also with monitoring products. 62

What is special about Grace products? I think what is special about Grace products is that they are not designed by a committee to fit a perceived market. Instead they are conceived while working in actual recording environments. Eben and I are both regularly active in recording projects (Eben more in the studio and myself more on location) and this gives us plenty of time to contemplate how we would like things to work whether for improved sound quality, flexibility, or efficiency. As well, having spent plenty of time in live location recording situations I have developed a low patience level for equipment that is not completely reliable. As a result I think our products provide the proper balance of performance, reliability, and flexibility. Has the choice of components you can use continued to improve? Yes! I am always amazed at the constant improvements being made in analogue, digital, and passive components. While the improvements are incremental in most cases, when you look at the cumulative effects of many small component improvements across a whole circuit design the results can be surprisingly noticeable. Also, modern manufacturing technology has improved the consistency of the components that we buy which means less hand selecting and fallout during testing. Particularly exciting right now is a new wave of significantly advanced performance amplifier circuits from makers such as Burr-Brown and National Semiconductor. The traditional trade-offs between resolution

What defines classic/vintage preamp designs? First I must state that I am not an authority on classic or vintage designs. But since you asked, I would think that input and output signal coupling transformers surrounding a single-ended amplifier stage was a common configuration before the availability of amplifier designs with high common mode rejection and precision output balancing. Many of the preamplifiers that are considered classic now owe that moniker to the fact that they were well made and are still serviceable today. What are the variables that you cannot control in a mic preamp? The two most significant variables that can not be controlled are the microphone output characteristics (coupled with the mic cable characteristics) and the output cable and load characteristics. On the microphone side the mic’s source impedance and cable reactance combine to give variable frequency response. What is the difference between a Grace preamp and a good mass market product? This comes back to the basic design criteria of performance and reliability but with the addition of longevity. While there are many fine mass market preamplifiers out there I think that to really achieve the highest possible performance and reliability you have to spend more time on the design and more money on the raw materials. The materials that go into electronics products come at a great cost to our planet in terms of natural resources and energy. I feel it is our duty to build products that will last a very long time. To do this we buy the highest quality components we can and then make sure that the design margins are sufficient that each component will have a September 2008

meet your maker

very long life. For instance, the gain switch on our m801 and m201 preamplifiers is a Swiss-made Elma. It probably costs 150x what the gain pot in a mass market preamplifier does but it will still be working flawlessly long after the wiper track on the cheap potentiometer has worn through rendering its host unusable. Personally I would rather spend five times as much money on a quality toaster and have it last a lifetime than buy cheap ones and discard them as they wear out. Along these same lines, I always try to design-in appropriate technology that is mature so that the obsolescence curve is as flat as it can be. A pure analogue microphone preamplifier will probably never be obsolete (as long as people like using their old microphones) but this is not true of digital technology. We waited for many years before developing A-D and D-A convertors for our products so they would not be put in the closet to collect dust when the convertor technology changed.

Are we already at the limits of what we can achieve with analogue? While analogue performance has been approaching the theoretical limits for some time there is certainly a whole landscape of possibilities for controlling classic analogue circuits with digital brains. From simply controlling the gain of a microphone amplifier to creating compressors with DSP side-chain processing analogue circuits are finding enhanced functionality and performance. Is the lack of truly affordable Grace products a marketing stance or a production reality? While I would argue that our m101 preamp is truly affordable I can’t deny that there are less expensive preamps! But, to answer the question, it is a production reality and more. I have no skills as a designer of products built to a price point and for mass production. This requires a totally different mindset where each design decision is made with the cost and assembly efficiency as the primary criteria. I much prefer to daydream about the absolute best way to do something than the cheapest way. Also, we build every preamplifier by hand here at our Boulder, Colorado factory. While some components (like circuit board assemblies) are contracted out to local vendors, we control all of the assembly process. We just could not handle the production volume of low-priced, mass-produced products and maintain our current level of testing and quality control.

forgetting about the preamplifier during sessions and focusing on the music, then the preamplifier is probably doing its job. As for quality, the first thing I would do is look at

the manufacturer’s warranty. Will they stand behind it for more than 90 days? ....a year? ...5 years? This is probably a good bellwether as the manufacturer knows what kind of quality has been put into the product. n

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What’s the smart way to appraise the quality and performance of a preamp? For performance this is, of course, dependant on what type of preamplifier you are evaluating. Is it designed for transparency or is it designed to have a colour or ‘vibe’? For the former, if you find yourself September 2008

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Creating the Event Opal Event Electronics launched its new ‘statement’ monitor at a glitzy gathering in Las Vegas recently. MARCELO VERCELLI, director of engineering, explains the technology they developed specifically for the Opal and how they reapplied existing solutions.

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rom its inception, we wanted Opal to be a very special product but we never thought of it as a speaker that had to have more of everything. Instead, we looked at Opal as an opportunity to integrate ideas and develop technologies that would help us achieve what was a very subjectively defined ‘ideal’ sounding speaker system. We were very aware of what we did not like in two-way studio monitors, and derived design objectives to improve mid-range and vocal definition, improve transient response, lower distortion and control noise floor, create a consistent tonal character as output level increases, improve low frequency response and improve phase response. We knew that to get close to our ‘ideal’ speaker system we needed to develop new transducer technologies that would allow us to maximize system performance. EX8 driver — When development of the EX8 woofer began, we had the idea to develop a driver using shorting coil technology to control inductance and therefore increase the operating range. We had seen how effective this technology was when applied to mid-range drivers, and knew that it would lead to improved mid-frequency performance. What we did not know then, however, was how to integrate a shorting coil into a woofer with a substantially longer excursion than any mid-range driver exhibits. X-Coil — Over the years, we had seen the benefits of implementing a shorting coil on a speaker’s pole piece and then connecting this out of phase with the speaker’s moving coil. A speaker’s rising impedance curve relative to frequency prevents current from flowing through the coil as impedance rises. The impedance rise is caused by the speaker’s inductance characteristics that are further defined by a number of elements including motional impedance, BL curve, magnetic circuit geometry, etc. By flowing current into the shorting coil in the opposite direction of the moving coil we can cancel a large proportion of the voice coil’s inductance. By implementing a shorting coil, you can realise linearisation of the speaker’s impedance in mid to high frequency band pass, an increase in sensitivity in the mid to high frequency band pass, an increase of the transducer’s speed, improved control of the transducer’s mass and minimisation of the transducer’s harmonic distortion generation. Initial woofer development indicated that a shorting coil would provide improved mid-range performance and overall dynamics with very low distortion characteristics [1]. What we needed was a way to achieve higher excursion without impacting the effects of the shorting coil or reducing efficiency. After multiple testing modelling exercises, we developed our patented magnetic motor design known as XBL Split Gap Technology. XBL technology dramatically increases the woofers linear excursion capabilities. This split gap circuit creates two separate magnetic gaps instead of one. Through careful modelling, we found a very long and flat BL curve can be achieved instead of the bell shaped curve found in standard magnetic circuit designs. As the coil moves away from the centre, it is actually sitting in the magnetic field’s force for a much longer period of time. XBL technology linearises the strength of the motor’s force field over the woofer’s usable mechanical excursion. This flatter BL curve also significantly lowers distortion and compliments the shorting coil effects by further reducing induction. The result was a woofer that has the lowest distortion and the highest speed as well as an excursion capability of greater than 28mm peakto-peak. Along with this we had very high power September 2008

technology handling capability in a driver that behaves like a midrange speaker above 500Hz. We simply had never before heard anything like it. Cone and voice coil considerations — Over the years, we have concluded that a paper cone provides the finest sound ‘texture’. The Opal’s cone is manufactured using a combination of paper and long strand carbon fibre that provides extreme stiffness and low mass. The manufacturing process introduces additives that lead to improved strength and consistency. The cone is attached to a large diameter dust cap providing optimal high frequency output and linearity. The assembly is then connected to a uniquely shaped ‘sine wave’ suspension designed to provide consistent, linear excursion over a very long stroke. To ensure that we continued to keep the mass low and the power handling capabilities high, we used a polymide-glass composite material for the coil-former, which provides up to 350 degrees Centigrade of heat resistance. The voice coil diameter is 63mm and was chosen primarily for improved power handling capabilities at smaller diameters. A poly-cotton spider with optimised geometry delivers well-behaved compliance characteristics for the cone assembly and is the primary tool used to derive the speakers’ resonant frequency. High frequency assembly — The high frequency assembly for the Opal was to be a new purpose-built metal dome tweeter mounted on an elliptical waveguide. One of the critical design objectives was the horizontal and vertical control of the speaker system dispersion characteristics, which meant implementation of a waveguide and the use of a metal dome. Waveguides, even shallow ones, create an acoustic load on the surface of a piston requiring a certain amount of rigidity for the piston to properly deal with the load. Metal domes are inherently stiffer than cloth or silk devices. While the metal dome will act more like a piston right up to the point where it reaches its resonant frequency and break up, a soft dome tweeter will be more likely to break up gently and absorb discontinuities. This behaviour, although ‘softer’ sounding, tends to mask transients and highlevel audio signals. In our experience, a titanium or aluminium metal dome would be the ideal material for the Opal tweeter. Well-designed conventional metal dome tweeters provide excellent performance and high output, and we were on our way towards finishing the design using such material when we received Beryllium dome samples. Pure Beryllium has some handling and manufacturing issues, so the material we specified and tested was an alloy, which includes small traces of titanium and copper. This alloy improved the material stability and consistency for our manufacturing process. Extended linear behaviour and reluctance to ‘break up’ makes the OPAL dome behave like a piston at all audible frequencies. This provides a rigid piston capable of dealing with the acoustic loads created by the waveguide. We immediately found significant improvement over the metals we had been testing in terms of frequency extension and the moving of the aforementioned break up modes, which were well above the audibility range, resulted in lower harmonic distortion. We also benefited from Beryllium having a very low mass, which makes it easier to control. We designed an ultra high force neodymium motor structure for precise control of the dome assembly, which translates into very low distortion at all power levels. Painstaking attention was given to integrating the principle elements of the high frequency assembly so the relationship between the Beryllium dome, the September 2008

tweeter’s radiating suspension, its motor structure, and the waveguide was optimised for output, directivity control and power response. To ensure smooth transition between the tweeter and woofer at the crossover frequency, we studied the acoustic output of the high frequency waveguide and tailored it to match the acoustic output of the woofer. The Opal uses a complex elliptical waveguide that is contoured into the cabinet and can work in the vertical or horizontal position simply by rotating the waveguide into the appropriate position. Variable Impedance Ports — From its inception, we wanted Opal to have front-mounted bass reflex ports. In our opinion, a front firing port can provide tighter, better-defined bass response than a rear firing one and that makes the system simpler to set up. We felt that given enough time, we could overcome the primary disadvantages of front-

mounted ports and take full advantage of our woofer’s extended excursion. At first glance, the Opal seems to implement a set of simple slot ports. Slot ports have higher port noise caused by increased air turbulence as they have more wall area for a given cross section than a corresponding round port. To lower and control typical port noise and ‘chuffing’, an asymmetrical geometry was implemented in the vertical and horizontal axis. This also provided a tool for adjusting the acoustic tuning frequency without having to implement a very long port assembly to lower tuning. The asymmetrical cross section actually lowers port velocity and the associated air distortion to a point low enough that it becomes transparent at normal to high output levels. One of the advantages of a bass reflex port that fires to the rear of the cabinet is the elimination of mid-frequency leakage. This is where a port actually

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The X-Coil

EX8 Driver

Tweeter and Waveguide

releases the mid-frequency energy emanating from the back of the woofer cone into the cabinet. The Opalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ports have a built-in acoustic low pass filter that eliminates mid-frequency leakage. This feature is embodied in the port design by a 180 degree bend at the end of the port assembly. The cabinet â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Many loudspeaker cabinets are rectangular and have sharp edges and corners. As the energy being created by the woofer and tweeter reflect off these edges and corners, secondary waveforms are produced that can create interference and cancellation as they integrate with the primary wave front. In designing the Opal cabinet, care was given to minimising surfaces and edges that could create

diffraction problems by integrating complex radii in nearly all of the outer surfaces. The cabinet also has a complex internal shape that assists in eliminating standing waves and resonances. The cabinet is comprised of several high-pressure aluminium moulded parts and once assembled it provides extraordinary strength and rigidity that also contributes to acoustic performance. Amplifier and control electronics â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The Opal has individual high frequency and low frequency amplifiers fitted onto a large finned aluminium heat sink. We chose Class B topology capable of very high power and low distortion. In terms of the woofer, we needed enough power to accurately manage the

cone assembly mass and its 28mm of peak-to-peak excursion. Since we had a woofer with a 63mm voice coil capable of handling very high power, we wanted to be able to reproduce those transients at the peak levels while maintaining extremely low distortion. To achieve this, we looked closely at the low frequency ampâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s burst power capability. There are many ways to test an audio amp and certainly there are standards that are indisputable relative to how well an amp performs. In our case, we had to look at how the amplifier performed within the context of its very specific application. For the low frequency design, we made sure that the amp could deliver 80V into a 5Ohm coil in â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;burst modeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (1280W).

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We feel that ‘burst’ more accurately represents the type of duty cycle created during music playback. No instrument, other than a pipe organ, comes close to simulating the constant power of a sine wave signal so we don’t put a lot of weight on an amp’s ability to deliver a given amount of constant power. By testing and designing for ‘burst’ power, we ensure that the amplifier can deliver the power required to reproduce low frequency transients consistently. To put this in perspective, if the system is turned up and trying to reproduce a low frequency transient, say the low string on a bass guitar, it will take less than 50 milliseconds to discharge the output capacitors. In our opinion, we feel that it is important for the amp to recover from this situation as quickly as possible to deal with the next transient. How well the amp deals with this type of situation depends on how well the voltage amp and AC power supply are designed. The typical burst test staged for amplifier testing is set up to deliver bursts at 40, 60, 80 or 100Hz where the signal is on for 40 milliseconds and off for 120 milliseconds. This type of test more closely resembles the duty cycle represented by typical music playback and provides feedback relative to how well the amplifier operates under high output, high transient conditions. The Opal has a Class B output with a proprietary amplifier bias topology that delivers rock solid thermal stability. Transducer testing revealed the most important amplifier design objective to be the need for extremely low distortion. The EX8 woofer is completely transparent and will reveal any signal anomaly found at the electronic level. This creates a real requirement for the amplifier to have extremely low distortion characteristics. In standard systems, distortion emanating from the tweeter, or the surface of the cone, is so high that it will mask amp distortion until the signal clips or a September 2008

protection circuit is engaged. This is not the case with the Opal. We designed a soft clipping circuit that allows the amp audio signal to maintain a ‘rounded’ waveform structure even as the amp enters clipping. This type of waveform drastically reduces the audible harshness produced as the amplifier tries to reproduce transient waveforms that tend to go square. The last task was probably the most important one and that was laying out the circuit board. There is no black magic involved here, but there are rules learned from years of experience that have delivered these optimal results. We ended up with a four-layer PCB that has a circuit generating less than 0.005% total harmonic distortion (THD) at full power. This is 10 to 15 times lower distortion than that found in the integrated circuit based amplifiers commonly used in many modern high-end studio monitors. Control electronics were carefully developed and a design objective was to achieve the flattest phase response possible, which meant looking closely at the type of audio filters used for the crossover and equalisation curves. For protection, a standard LDR circuit lowers the input signal when a related circuit finds average RMS power to be above an established value. There are individual circuits for the tweeter and woofer. We also developed a very fast system that detects amp distortion caused by clipping, and works in parallel to the RMS protection circuit. The engineering team at Event Electronics feel that the Opal expands the performance envelope of modern studio monitor technologies. The monitor introduces important new audio developments and builds on traditional, well-known solutions that have influenced the high-fidelity listening experience for decades. n Footnote: 1. More information on shorting coils: Inductance Minimising in Loudspeakers. Carlisi, Di Cola and Manzini. 118th AES Convention May 2005. resolution

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Things that make postproduction difficult/challenging Postproduction has changed radically over the last 10 years. Similar to the technological changes that spread though the music industry in the 90s, video and audio postproduction is now available to the ‘masses’. However, with revolution come new challenges. ANDY DAY amasses some blinders. and NTSC. Suddenly a frame became 2 fields and timecode was born. Not just one type of course: 24, 25, 30, 29.97, drop frame, non drop frame, etc. Now we have HD with 14+ different frame rates and resolutions, let alone interlaced and progressive methods of display. On the broadcast side there are at least three different ‘standards’ used worldwide and on a consumer level every new TV says HD ready, but few really are. Despite the ongoing confusion it’s a license to print money for the people that have the skills to guide confused Production Managers through the HD production process. Oh, and the Olympic opening ceremony looked great in HD. OMFI — Open media Framework Interchange was the great white hope of the late 90s. Originally developed by Avid and subscribed to by a few audio manufacturers, it promised the end of audio conforming sessions. Now you could import an OMF file into your DAW and all the audio from the edit would magically appear in your timeline. Great idea but fraught with problems in the early days. With various different implementations out there, more often than not you had to reconform everything anyway. If you did manage to get an OMFI to actually work there was still the fundamental problem of sloppy audio digitising by the editor (or more usually the edit assistant). Analogue interfaces were rarely aligned and channels often in the wrong place. Now several years later things are much better, thanks to OMFI type 2 files being the norm (except for a few old Fairlight systems needing type 1) and most audio digitising coming through AES, FireWire or SDI. HD — How to make video even more complicated. First there was film, a frame was a frame and projectors ran at 24fps, life was simple. Then came video with PAL, SECAM

Noise — Now we have the ability to do everything i m a g i n a b l e postproduction-wise on a Mac Pro there’s a new emerging dilemma — how to deal with fan noise. The computers themselves have got quieter but the stuff you plug into them has got noisier. Because we’re using super fast direct attached RAID drives to cope with large files, we now have to contend with the ‘jet engine’ fans needed to cool 16 hard drives down. Most RAID products are designed for IT applications, so noise is not an issue as they are usually kept in clean air conditioned rooms, along with servers. Traditionally edit suites have everything in the room, which makes life easy for adding CD tracks and other files as you can just open the CD drawer and put in a disc. Because of the RAID problem many small operations now have to move everything out of the room and use Cat5 extenders for keyboard and mouse. No more noise but really annoying when your client can’t make up their mind which library music track they want to use…

First there was mono — You can probably guess where this is going... Home theatre is everywhere. Consumers have embraced multichannel audio pretty much the developed world over. This has been great for Dolby and DTS but also for many facilities with the knowledge and experience to provide good content. HD TV is also using multichannel audio, so the requirement for content continues to increase. Unfortunately for us, so does the number of new formats. Not content with 5.1 audio, there are now strong suggestions for 7.1 in a consumer environment — ridiculous when you consider the layout of most lounges. I believe someone has even proposed 10.2 channels. Maybe we’ll actually be living in cinemas soon and surviving on popcorn and hot dogs. Mmmmm… I n v estme n t — Technology has brought us amazingly fast computers capable of uncompressed HD pictures and software that can do everything older products costing several thousand pounds could do just a few years

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ten ago. This is great for new facilities just starting out, but for facilities that invested in the original high price stuff this can make competing difficult to say the least. An example of this is Apple’s inclusion of the application Color in Final Cut Studio 2. Previously this was a product called Final Touch which sold for US$40k. Apple bought the company and included it as part of FCS2 for $1300.

Credit: pdphoto.org

Upgrade or die — A major challenge facing the modern postproduction facility is the constant upgrade path of both hardware and software. It’s a bit like a shark — if you stop moving you die.

Money — I’ve saved the biggest for last — getting paid and staying in business. The Music TV and Film industries are renowned for being tough. Because of the vast number of facilities out there, coupled with the technological advances allowing low-cost solutions to be used in various areas, rates are hard to maintain in a madly competitive market. The bigger production companies are also ruthless with their payment terms and this plays havoc with even the healthiest of cash flows and has been the downfall of many facilities in the past. The best advice I ever got was walk away if the rate is too low to make a profit and make friends with a good lawyer for the bad payers. n

Natural break — Another side effect of technology is the inclusion of video file support in most DAWs. While this makes life considerably easier, it does kill the ‘rewind’ time we used to have while some nasty 80s synchroniser got everything to lock up. At least you had a chance to get your hands on the right faders. Price right — Production managers are now much more clued up on what can and can’t be done within a certain timescale. Many production companies actually have their own offline facilities to minimise the amount of external work they have to do. Thankfully audio is usually not done in-house, so there are opportunities out there for those being realistic about what they charge.

Credit: pdphoto.org

Client BS — Client egos unfortunately haven’t changed and with the brave new HD world comes a load of BS from clients who are still clearly out of their depth. Despite the excesses of the 80s being long gone, there are still clients who insist they know better than you and demand double decaf macchiatos from Nero, with a chocolate topping from Starbucks. September 2008

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Savalas Recent developments and a spate of building and equipping has put Scotland, and Govan in Glasgow in particular, on the postproduction map with the opening of the first Dolby Premiere certificated theatre in Europe. JIM EVANS goes North of the border.

n times past, Govan was perhaps best known the world over for its shipbuilding industry, although today you could be excused for overlooking this as only one yard survives. The area has experienced many peaks and lows during a colourful history. In the world of shipbuilding it was responsible for the execution of a number of firsts in marine architecture with many a famed vessel and today, Govan can boast another first as the home to the first Dolby Premier certificated theatre in Europe. This facility, designed by UK-based White Mark, is an integral part of Savalas, Scotland’s biggest audio postproduction facility and whose studio complex is housed within Film City Glasgow, a media production initiative located within the former Govan Town Hall. There is more than a little 21st Century technology to be found inside this imposing brick building which dates from 1887. Savalas was established 10 years ago by composers and film mixers Kahl Henderson, Giles Lamb and Michael Mackinnon. Alongside its Dolby Premier theatre, Savalas has a Foley and ADR stage, two TV dubbing studios and three sound suites—all designed by White Mark. These are used to provide audio postproduction for TV and commercials, a fully supervised audio post and sound design service for feature films, and high-end bespoke music composition by Savalas Music. Savalas moved into Film City Glasgow at the beginning of 2007, having outgrown its previous premises. Dolby Premier certification takes into account room acoustics, monitoring standards, equipment selection, installation, synchronisation accuracy, mixing competence and technical expertise. Savalas’ Dolby70

certificated Theatre One is equipped with 35mm, 16mm and DLP digital projection. The 50sqm room boasts a custom Exigy monitoring system and two Pro Tools HD controller desks with dual mixing capacity. White Mark was called in to work on the acoustic design when the room was already under construction. Head of systems and mixer Chris Sinclair recalls, ‘We were in an interesting situation. It didn’t make any sense for a company who had never built a Dolby Theatre before to be working with an architect who had never built a Dolby Theatre before and an acoustical consultancy who had never built one before. It needed someone to bring some experience to the table. That was the problem,’ he says. ‘White Mark knew why it wasn’t working. Like a mechanic being able to identify why black smoke is coming out of the back of the car.’ For Savalas, moving to Film City Glasgow provided the opportunity to build new sound postproduction facilities from scratch. ‘We were determined to achieve Dolby Premier Certification for our main film room because we knew this would make us unique in Europe and give us a competitive edge,’ says director Giles Lamb. ‘To do this, it was imperative that we had the right studio design company on board because room dimensions and reverberation times are a critical part of the Dolby Premier Certification process. ‘We researched a number of companies and chose White Mark because they were streets ahead of everyone else,’ Henderson continues. ‘They have a formidable track record and were fantastic to work with. Both the film mixing theatre and our main television dubbing studio have 5.1 monitoring systems that were custom-designed by Exigy. The resolution

fact that White Mark and Exigy have worked together in the past on facilities like Grand Central and Midnight Transfer in London made the fit even more comfortable.’ White Mark’s Alan Cundell notes, ‘When we came on board, the isolation shells were already under construction. Though they weren’t how we would have designed them, it wasn’t practical for us to change them and we worked from that basis.’ And the results were satisfactory for all concerned as Sinclair reports: ‘Everyone comments on the room being a comfortable space to work in.’ David Bell, White Mark’s MD adds, ‘Working on a project for which the highest standard of performance is the only target is always the most rewarding. Design work often involves the correct management of compromises that are inherent in many projects, but there is great satisfaction when the opportunity comes along to aim high with performance and have everything work out so well. We are proud to have delivered what Chris Sinclair and the Savalas directors wanted.’ The new room is proving a more than satisfactory investment. ‘Turning down bookings is becoming a habit,’ says sales and marketing manager Owen Thomas. ‘We are fully booked until the end of spring 2009. We can slot in the odd day here, three days there, split a project over three weeks, that kind of thing. But for the long form stuff we’re completely full. This work consists primarily of TV dramas, long form serials for the network TV channels — BBC1 BBC3, plus we’ve two feature films coming through. The plan is to be able to run with at least two TV dramas and feature films at the same time.’ September 2008

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As to Savalas philosophy, Thomas suggests, ‘Untypically for facilities like this, it’s owned and operated by the people who set it up in the first place. They’ve brought more people in as board members or shareholders. But they’re all active engineers and mixers — unlike so many facilities that are capital driven; owned by businessmen, they are profit oriented. In contrast, Savalas is very much a business that is run and maintained by people who care about what they do. They make their living from it and that’s given them the opportunity to choose how they work and what projects they want to get involved with. The result has produced a breadth of experience and a curiosity about what’s out there and what can be done with sound that few other facilities offer. Savalas has always tried to hang on to the idea that there’s something extra they can give because they take the job personally.’ When it came to equipping the new room, Sinclair and the Savalas team worked to a tight budget. ‘Every single penny was accounted for. Our entire engineering budget for this room probably would not even have bought a Neve,’ he says. ‘We had to be clever. Fortunately we did two or three projects over in Main Stream in Copenhagen. Europeans are a little bit more forward thinking when it comes to studio equipment and we learnt a lot from them. They are more inclined towards experimentation. Main stream’s a busy studio reflecting the thriving Danish film industry. They’ve got two theatres and are always busy, doing about 20 films a year. Working there and taking into account what we’d learned at Ardmore, De Lane Lee, Goldcrest and various other places we’d been to, we arrived at our way or working — two separate Pro Tools systems ganged together through a custom matrix.’ Regarding the speaker system, Sinclair says, ‘We tried to establish what other people were using and rang around the various manufacturers. It September 2008

was White Mark that put us onto Exigy and we’re very pleased with the results. I have to say I did call one major manufacturer — whose products are found in many cinemas — and got zero response to my calls, letters or emails.’ The Dolby Theatre at Savalas is the fulfilment of a dream for New Zealander Sinclair who admits to being a child of the digital age. ‘When we were in Savalas’ previous facilities in Woodlands Road we had two mixing rooms, but always a plan at some point to put in a bigger room,’ he says. ‘We had got off to a good start — the first feature film we did was The Magdalen Sisters which attracted a lot of press and did very well worldwide. After that, we continued to do a number of projects and always had to travel to complete the mix. That caused its own set of problems. It was frustrating. That sowed the seeds for the development of the new room. “When I came over From New Zealand, I always had this dream of building a room such as this. I worked first at STV and then for another company called Waterfront Studios. I moved to Savalas because I believed they might make this investment. I’m not claiming the room as my idea, but rather as a collective vision.’ And there are future plans with that vision. ‘Our next phase will probably be to add a third Pro Tools system,’ he explains. ‘With only one theatre we have to be clever with the way we manage deliverables. As it stands at the moment, we have no mechanism for actually putting the deliverables into a transfer bay. It’s all done in the theatre. The ability to actually play out deliverables in another room will be an advantage.’ And a final word comes from Owen Thomas. ‘Historically, there has been no base for full feature film post in Scotland. Now, the rest of the world can see that Savalas is capable of that scale of work. Clients can come here with confidence.’n resolution

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Site and layout considerations The creation of a new facility involves a number of stages that have to be tackled in an orderly fashion. Dirk Noy of the Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG) has put together a mini series of Media Production Facility Building Blocks. This will cover room-within-room construction, room acoustics, absorption and diffusion and electroacoustics and audio monitor systems. However, he starts at the beginning with site and layout considerations.

magine it: you rub the next beer bottle you stumble across and there he is — the genie in the bottle — and he’s here to grant your probablynot-so-secret wish of having your dream facility built just for you. The nature of this dream facility will depend on the type of person you are, the type of projects that interest you, the workflow you prefer, the number of people you plan on collaborating with, the sort of infrastructure you intend to use, and the kind of materials and colour schemes you like. If the genie solution could be this varied then the real-world scenarios, which have to be within the limits of actual buildability, site limitations, materials availability and economics, are even more diversified. In fact, that’s exactly why folks like us at WSDG still have a job. Let me mention from the onset that the facility itself is not the real goal of any design and construction project — the real goal is enabling a creative process with the result of a properly produced, great sounding, pleasing, and hopefully well-selling end-product. So let’s put some order in the thinking process that goes into the design of a media facility to create an understanding of the process’s contributing parts and complexity. Programming — The first step in successful media production facility design (and a term borrowed from architecture in general) is programming, which is simply defined as the analysis and ultimately the refined listing of all the elements that will be needed for the facility. In its basic shape this is often a spreadsheet listing of all the required rooms with their sizes. This spreadsheet can hold further specifications such as information regarding the large equipment to be put into the rooms, architectural criteria, such as adjacency, ergonomics and daylight, as well as acoustical and other engineering criteria, for example quietness levels and heat loads (Figure 1). Summing up the floor areas of the rooms, adding circulation space plus the area used for the actual wall-building (this ‘net-to-gross’ ratio is often in the region of 25–35%) then gives the size of real estate you can go on the lookout for. Site selection — You would think that with

the programming the hard part is done but a number of other aspects now come into play. First of all there’s economics. With selecting a site contracts are signed and real money is spent. The real estate business has a life of its own and it’s interesting to note that the disappearance of some traditional large studios has had as much to do with irresistible real-estate offers as it has to do with a failing recording business. The selection of a site has internal and external implications. The external implications are given by the geographical location of the facility: a remote paradise island resort will attract a different clientele than a breezy loft in the new hip part of town. Ad agency people will appreciate a coffee shop nearby while the high-profile producer might prefer a discrete and secure back-door entrance. The internal implications are the criteria given by the facility’s physical needs. Key topics are: • Architecture (e.g. ceiling height, masonry or wood structure, column spacing, structural soundness, egress (access), daylight availability, car parking requirements). • Acoustics (e.g. quietness levels, neighbours, traffic). • Electrical power considerations. • HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) considerations. For the ‘typical’ media production facility an ideal physical site should be a masonry or concrete structure, have a ceiling height of about 3m or more, few widely spaced columns, a slab weight limitation of 500kg/ m2 or higher, at least two independent access options, quiet (or no) neighbours, three-phase AC power provisions, easy parking and load-in options, and a convenient place to put HVAC machinery. Daylight, of course, is always a plus but it can be blocked out if it is unwanted — the opposite is quite difficult. Master planning — Having dealt with two main ingredients — the programming and the site selection — we can actually have some fun. The Master Planning phase combines the programming statement and the chosen site into a number of sketches, schemes, drawings that at the end will show

Fig. 1. Programming Spreadsheet. 72

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Fig. 2. Master Planning — bubble diagram (author: Romina Larregina, WSDG).

Fig. 3. Master Planning — hand sketch (author: Romina Larregina, WSDG).

real walls and doors and hallways and production rooms and will be used as a base for the final layout decision. The Master Planning phase often starts with a bubble diagram — a site plan with bubbled clouds to roughly show a particular room’s size and location (Figure 2). When an interesting configuration has been identified this then can lead to a hand sketch (Figure 3). The one, two or three most promising configurations are then properly drawn for presentation to the client (Figure 4). Often, constructive dialogue with the client will result in a fourth, fifth, etc. revision of the layout, until an agreed-to Master Plan is created. Acoustical considerations and budget — Besides architectural layout studies, the Master Planning phase is also the moment where the facility’s acoustical requirements are discussed and defined. Depending on the type of project, a variety September 2008

sweet spot Regular two-wall systems with floating floors and suspended ceilings can achieve a noise isolation value (Sound Transmission Class) of about 60-70dB. This is fine for a control room to iso booth wall, but not sufficient for two adjacent, independently operated postproduction rooms, which means that three-wall or even more complex systems need to be employed. More bad news: it’s not only the wall systems that need to get more complex, so do the sound isolating windows, doors and HVAC systems. In terms of construction budget, the easiest way to properly isolate two rooms with strong quietness requirements is to position them far apart from each other, which is not always feasible. Second best is to have the rooms on separate concrete slabs, which is usually only possible in ground-up construction. All those who need high sound isolation in close proximity will have to brace themselves for construction

complexity, which we’ll cover in the next article on room-within-room construction. Alternatively they can continue rubbing those beer bottles. n Footnote: Walters-Storyk Design Group (www.wsdg. com) was founded by John Storyk and Beth Walters, and has designed more than 3000 media production facilities worldwide. WSDG credits range from the original Jimi Hendrix Electric Lady Studio in Greenwich Village to New York City’s Jazz At Lincoln Center performance complex, broadcast facilities for CBS and WNET, and corporate clients such as Hoffman-La Roche or T-Mobile. Recent credits include private studios for Timbaland’s Tim Mosley, Tracy Chapman, Aerosmith, Green Day, Jay-Z, Goo Goo Dolls, Bruce Springsteen, R. Kelly and Alicia Keys. The firm maintains offices in New York, San Francisco, Argentina, Brazil, Beijing, Mexico City and Switzerland.

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Fig. 4. Master Planning – two alternative layout versions.

of acoustical target values are to be considered. The parameters used most frequently are: • Target RT60 reverberation times — usually given as upper and lower limits over frequency (Figure 5), as a function of room volume and use. • Target permissible background noise — usually given as Noise Criteria (NC) or Grenz Kurve (GK) Value, as a function of room use (recording spaces are usually specified to have lower permissible background noise). • Preferred loudspeaker placement — angles and distances, as a function of room use and audio configuration (stereo, multichannel, DVD, TV, music or film work). • And last but not least the amount of isolation between the facility’s rooms and the neighbouring areas (which could be the outside of the building too). The sound isolation is the one requirement that is most influential to the construction budget — high noise isolation equals complex construction technique equals higher cost. In most modern facilities some form of room-within-room construction is required due to the sheer density of the rooms.

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slaying dragons

The Voice Extending the musical instrument theme ever so slightly, JOHN WATKINSON clears his throat and discusses the sound generator that is the human voice.

the-art-of-microphones.com

s more is learned about the forms of life that inhabit this earth, it becomes increasingly clear how similar humans are to other animals. When we find animals having strong similarities in DNA to us, having social structures, displaying emotions such as pleasure and grief, using tools and so on, the concept of humans differing from animals because we have souls becomes risible. One of the few ways in which homo sapiens (this term is either an oxymoron or utterly pretentious) differs from other species is the range of sounds that can be made and the uses to which they are put. Speech allows debate which in turn stimulates evolution of logical thought, thereby requiring a greater vocabulary to articulate those thoughts. It would seem reasonable to me that the evolutions of speech and intellect must have been parallel. The view held by many researchers is that understanding the development of one aids the understanding of the other. The final step allowing the evolution of NOW AVAILABLE AS BASIC EDITION musicians would have been the discovery of alcohol. The power source for the human voice is primarily air expelled by the lungs, although some sounds are possible while breathing in. The dominant sound source is the vocal cords, which are flaps stretched across the windpipe. They are situated just below the epiglottis, which acts to direct food to the digestive system and air to the lungs. The vocal cords produce continuous sounds, and are not unlike the reeds of musical instruments. The tension in the vocal cords can be changed by muscles that alter the • mounting clip fundamental at which they vibrate and the THE ART OF MICROPHONES harmonic structure. Lung pressure also affects the

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pitch. Transient sounds are made by the tongue and mouth. All sounds are modified by resonances in the lungs, throat and mouth. The shape and volume of the latter can be altered over a wide range. Operating the vocal cords with the mouth closed and the nose open results in humming. The physical properties of the vocal cords and lung size differ between the sexes. The adult male has larger lungs and bigger, heavier vocal cords and accordingly has a lower voice than the female. It is important to appreciate that the vocal range does not have hard limits. Instead, the voice loses the ability to project towards the ends of the range, and so in un-amplified performance ceases to be useful. One could regard the vocal system as a low-Q resonator, where the output falls when the excitation is too far away from the centre frequency. A typical useful vocal range is a little more than two octaves, although individuals may famously exceed that. Knowing one’s vocal range is more than just academic. Apart from being less harmonious, prolonged use of the voice outside one’s range can do actual harm and should be avoided. In the past composers would write pieces for specific singers that suited their range perfectly. Not surprisingly, different types of music have developed different terms for vocal ranges, or, if the same term is used, it may refer to different actual range of notes. Space doesn’t allow a discussion of that here. The female ranges of soprano, mezzo-soprano and contralto overlap one another by about an octave, as do the male ranges of tenor, baritone and bass. The counter-tenor is a less common male vocal range that overlaps the female range considerably. It is universally known that the prepubescent male has a significantly higher voice that can be classified as treble. In those chauvinist religions where women must remain silent in church, the only way of obtaining that register in the short term was to have young boys in the choir. Boys with particularly fine voices might wake up to find that God had removed their testicles, although a good many didn’t wake up at all because of the rudimentary anaesthetics and standards of hygiene. Being castrato meant that hormonal changes of puberty never took place, leaving the child’s voice intact. Another consequence was that bones tended to grow longer than average, producing large rib-cages ideal for good breathing. The reader can imagine the other consequences. Having a history of employing castrati doesn’t sit well with the opposition by the Catholic Church to the use of contraception. If ever higher notes are attempted, there comes a point where the tonality of the voice changes. In some people there may be a gap in the notes that can be produced. Commonly called a break, this is where the normal vocalisation, also called the chest register, ends and the falsetto voice, also called the head register, begins. The falsetto voice relies on harmonics of the vocal cords. With suitable training or practice, singers can extend the normal range up and the falsetto range down, so there is an overlap. Within a narrow range, it is possible to switch between the two voices to obtain yodelling. The human voice is capable of being a musical instrument or of communicating information in the form of speech. Information theory tells us that there is no information is a sine wave because it has no bandwidth. In other words all of the cycles look the same so there is no novelty. Speech on the other hand is full of transients, and the consequent increase of bandwidth tells us there is information. So here is another example of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the voice can either be a September 2008

showcase pitched instrument or it can speak intelligibly, but it can’t do both at the same time. Thus the more musical the voice gets, the less intelligible, as is amply demonstrated in opera. The talkin’ blues seems to be one solution. Another long standing solution appears to be to compose lyrics having predominantly mono- and bi-syllabic words. Successful examples over the years include Father and Son, Your Home Town and Carry You Home. In each case the care taken in composition is such that the simplicity is far from obvious. Speech requires extensive use of the nose, mouth opening and cavity, tongue, teeth and throat to articulate all of the sounds. Sibilant sounds involve blowing air through thin gaps formed in various places. The resulting white noise is filtered by resonances in the mouth. Try saying ‘sis’, ‘this’ and ‘fish’ to note the different air paths used (But not when pished. Ed). Sibilants are steady state sounds and can be extended. In contrast plosives are events that take place when pressure is released. To say ‘Bob’ pressure is released by the lips, whereas to say ‘dock’ it is released by the tongue. In the glottal stop, the plosive is formed by release of air from the vocal cords. In English, the glottal stop is not employed by the well spoken, but it is frequently found in dialects. Try saying ‘artichoke’ with a Cockney accent and the glottal stop will appear instead of the ‘t’. In addition to communication, speech may be intoned to suggest boredom, impatience, concern or even one’s place in society. Given the subtleties of inflection this requires, it is hardly surprising that computer generated speech often falls short of realism. On the other hand it is not uncommon for those appearing on radio and television to overenunciate in an attempt to sound more exciting. The trouble is that when everything has become exciting, nothing is exciting any more. My all time favourite broadcaster was the late John Peel, whose radio voice was the same as if you had just bumped into him, as I was once lucky enough to do. I first heard John Peel on Big L in the 60s. Radio London was a pirate radio ship moored off Clacton. In Yorkshire, reception required a good valve radio (transistors in those days simply weren’t sensitive enough) and a hundred foot long antenna in the back garden. The result was a lifelong interest in electronics, music and audio. If it weren’t for that, I might not be writing this. The fundamental characteristic of the human voice is that it is always accompanied by net air movement, just like a pipe organ. You wouldn’t think of putting a microphone 6-inches away from an organ pipe, but most people seem to think that microphones should be as close as possible to their mouths. With the single exception of live events where feedback is an issue, this is universally a bad idea. An excessively close microphone produces sibilance, gets blasted by plosives and suffers from popping and displays the proximity effect, also known as bass tip-up. In addition to a poor recording, the microphone gets damp from the moisture in the speaker’s breath. A useful trick is to put out two microphones. One is a cheap cardioid for the performer to fill with moisture, and some way behind it is the condenser microphone that you are recording from. The cardioid is used to set the distance from the performer to the real microphone. It’s probably more acceptable than a windshield about a metre in diameter and made of barbed wire, although the latter makes the point. n September 2008

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your business

Pitching it right Auto-Tune continues to find itself in the crosshairs of a public posse that suggest that its use constitutes fraud, but no one ever went broke giving the public what it wants.

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in Nashville massaging the vocals of country singers in reaction to market pressures to make it perfect. The article sought to portray Auto-Tune objectively, though the consensus seemed to be that tuning someone’s vocals after the fact is specious, at best, fraudulent at worst. Does Auto-Tune need to be defended, particularly in this space, where it is, so to speak, among friends, not to mention co-conspirators? Not in the illicit sense, of course, but perhaps to the extent that Auto-Tune serves as a metaphor for the production of music itself. The kind of indictments that Auto-Tune has engendered have never been levelled at Hollywood, which has been in hock to CGI-heavy film production for a decade, to the point where actors deliver lines to blank spaces that will later be filled in with rendered animations. To the contrary, suspension of disbelief is a requisite conspiracy between filmmaker and moviegoer. We expect to be fooled and we’re disappointed if we’re not. Music, by contrast, is supposedly all about ‘keeping it real,’ a phrase popularised by urban music genres despite the fact that few live drummers have ever seen the working side of a rap recording session. Drum machines didn’t simply replace a musician, they changed the way the instrument was played, creating a kind of super drummer banging out patterns that no human — particularly one with some taste — could hope or want to copy. But that didn’t negatively affect sales of rap records, or any other record that relies on a drum machine, from Shania Twain to Jay-Z. Not keeping it real has long had a place in pop music, from the sloppy lip-synching of Top of the Pops-type programmes to the incredibly precise ‘help’ that certain pop artists that aim at teen and ‘tween audiences avail themselves of, routinely augmenting the live vocals with prerecorded ones. A famous

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or whatever reason, Antares’ Auto-Tune has been making the rounds of the popular press lately, as though it were an author with a steamy memoir to be trotted out onto the talk-show circuit. In no less a venue than the venerable New Yorker magazine, pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones did a whirlwind tour of the technology’s roots. Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune’s inventor, spent 18 years in a field called seismic data exploration using audio to map the earth’s subsurface, looking for oil deposits, with an algorithm that could discern the difference between two pitches and the coverage went right through its sub rosa use as the producer’s secret weapon and finally to its current widely used application as an effect as commonplace as reverb or digital delay, by the likes of rapper T-Pain, for whom the zero-speed setting is standard operating procedure. The story came literally a week or so after I got a Google alert reminding me I had been interviewed for and was quoted in a mainstream press article, in Gelf magazine, about Auto-Tune. In a bit of my own medicine, I found that the outcome of a 40-minute interview was one sentence in print, and I was misquoted, though not fatally. My area of record was the early 1990s, when Auto-Tune was truly a covert proposition, with one or two surreptitious practioners

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your business incident that took place during the musical segment of Saturday Night Live a couple of years ago saw Ashlee Simpson booed not only off the stage but damned near off the planet after she apparently forgot which song she was about to sing on live national television, then picked the wrong one (she had a 50-50 chance since SNL musical guests only get two), whereupon her anything-but-music-minus lead vocal from the other song came up on the faders. The fact that this kind of conspiracy at the national network level requires a lot a participants underscores the fact that for much of music, the illusion of a perfect performance is critical to success. Like her or not, Simpson’s debut album, Autobiography, was 2004’s biggest debut album by a female artist, and was awarded triple platinum certification. The Auto-Tune controversy seems to have attracted unusually obsessive attention. Those who believe it’s the devil’s work have gone to great lengths to document incidents. A sidebar in the Gelf article reads like a Nuremburg indictment, not only naming tracks by artists like Maroon 5, Sean Kingston, Green Day, T-Pain (big surprise there) and Natasha Bedingfield, but also identifying to the second where each alleged or apparent application of pitch correction is to be found. (‘Green Day, Wake Me Up When September Ends’ WHERE: The word ‘what’ in [the phrase] ‘what I lost’ — 1:45.) There are several top-ten lists of the same floating around the Net. The fact is that the very process of recording music takes it into the realm of deception. Time slipping didn’t start with waveform editing, it started with Edison shouting ‘Mary had a little lamb’ into a megaphone and playing it back from a rolling cylinder a minute later. It remains mysterious as to why critics that marvel at what computer-generated graphics can create on film take the attitude that similar technical slight-of-hand is less legitimate on music recordings. The line between what’s acceptable and what’s not gets even finer when it comes to live recordings (which, in light of what we just said about Edison suddenly becomes somewhat paradoxical, but never mind). For a while, the two giants of live music production, Live Nation and AEG, were working on services that would provide concertgoers with recordings on CD of the show they just attended, wrapped and ready for

them as they exited the venue, thanks to high-speed CD-R duplication systems developed specifically for those services. Both companies realised that such a memento of the concert would be valuable precisely because of the uniqueness that any flaws in the performance would confer upon it. Anyone can have the perfect studio version of the song, but only a select few would have the version where the guitar player didn’t quite make the leap from one riser to the next during the solo. The beauty of this kind of roughhewn document is that there would be no chance for the artist to do any quick postproduction tweaking — it would go out warts and all. YouTube on a disc. I could imagine these discs becoming collectibles in the fashion of irregular stamps or discoloured pound notes. Markets would grow up around comparing the differences between performances. The Grateful Dead and other jam bands have proved that the uniqueness of each show has a value in strengthening the bond between artist and fan by letting them record them freely. And these days, what more valuable commodity is there? Too bad both concert producers have shelved plans to continue the service. The ability to adjust a vocalist’s pitch is, in a sense, emblematic of the enormous range of stuff that producers, engineers and recording artists can do in the course of making a record. By the same token, it also represents everything that they can also choose not to do. Forty years ago it was a given that you would try to make the best-sounding record you could. Today, ‘good’ is a relative term and people go out of their way to make records sound like they did 40 years ago. Auto-Tune is a tool, like hundreds of others in the arsenal of pro audio. No producer should ever have to apologise for having used it, for subtle pitch correction or brazen Cher/’Believe’-like warbling. The media peanut gallery that insist on tossing rocks at it (often in the same publications that use Photoshop to enhance a celeb’s biceps or calves) needs something else to chirp at. Abraham Lincoln, the 19th-century American president, famously said, ‘You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’ That is, unless they enjoy being fooled. And it looks as though plenty of them do. n

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Aes............................................ 49

Holophone................................ 60

Sonic Apogee............................ 63

Al.So Dynax.............. Classified 75

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Sonic RND................................. 48

Audient.................................34-35

Lawo.......................................... 31

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Audio Technica.......................... 40

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Sound Technology................26-27

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Fairlight..................................... 45

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Tl Audio.................................... 76

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September 2008

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C:\Documents and Settings\Dave\My Documents\Dave’s D\DataD\SBES 77 05 August 2008 16:55:17

headroom Fat Track addendum TL Audio has alerted me to the fact that I had a preproduction version of the Fat Track for review (V7.5) and that a number of changes have been made in the full production versions. The channel strips do now have EQ bypass buttons and the labelling on the stereo return inputs has been changed from 2Tk1, 2Tk2, etc. to A, B, etc. on the production models. ZS

Rooms à la mode I was speaking to you a few weeks ago about this subject and I meant to send you the attached plots. I was telling you about a studio which I had just finished, and where the principal engineer did not like the

monitoring. He insisted on using his Alesis loudspeakers, the response plot of which, when measured in the room, is attached here. He has had some reasonable commercial success with his previous recordings, and tells everyone that the Alesis M4 is the only true reference loudspeaker, and that only these loudspeakers tell you the real sound on the street. This is, in fact, not too far away from what Greg Penny was saying in his article in Resolution a couple of years ago (V3.1), to the effect that high quality monitors were simply not real. The engineer in question said that the main studio monitors, which were respectably flat down to 25Hz, had little or nothing to do with reality, and he wanted me to change their responses to correspond to the Alesis loudspeakers. I refused, and said that anyhow, even if I did want to, I would not be able to do so without severely restricting their headroom. Putting in

a 10dB boost at 150Hz would be sure to soon destroy them when used at high levels. And yet, he still speaks with such authority about the true excellence of the Alesis M4s. He has absolutely no interest about what his recordings might sound like on an audiophile system, because in his opinion such systems are just built to impress, and are in fact, acoustically speaking, a pack of lies. To him, the sound on the street is what ‘everyone’ hears, and his job is to get the best recordings for the majority of the people to enjoy. Even if this means totally screwing up the music to get the best possible sound out of that equipment which cannot be claimed to be even approaching high fidelity, then so be it. This is his philosophy, and he is certainly not alone in believing in it, but it removes all concepts of any standardisation of fidelity goals, as the industry references are simply subject to passing fashions and trends. Unfortunately, though, at the moment, fighting against this trend is like swimming up a waterfall. Philip Newell, Moaña, Spain

AES Amsterdam comment

Room plot with Alesis M4s.

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Room plot with the main monitors.

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I have had numerous notes of support and agreement with the content of my Leader in the last issue (V7.5) in which I commented on the AES in Amsterdam in May. For these I am grateful. I consider the matter still open. I still feel the same way about the organisation and direction of the AES Convention in Europe and I believe there is a need for immediate discussion and debate between the organisers and its exhibitors. At press time, I have had no comment or communication from the AES. ZS

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