Resolution V7.7 October 2008 by Resolution

AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

v7.7 oCtoBEr 2008

The Jack Joseph Puig interview Tristan Ivemy — combining skills and making better records Why AES50 is the way forward for live audio production Mosﬁlm modernises in Russia’s growing ﬁlm market Meet your maker: Wolfgang Neumann — SPL The Manger sound transducer explained rEviEWS: UA UAD-2 Solo • Sound Devices 788T • SSL Pro-Convert V5 Lexicon PCM96 • Sony PCM-D50 • Drawmer A2D2 • SE Electronics SE4

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AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

v7.7 oCtoBEr 2008

iSSN 1477-4216

News & Analysis 4

leader

Products

New introductions and announcements.

News

Headroom

mosfilm

ten

Jack Joseph Puig

tristan ivemy

the Soundhouse Studios

Sales, contracts, appointments and biz bites.

Further evolution of an Icon.

Craft Russia’s oldest and still leading full-service ﬁlm production facility modernises in a growing market. A producer/engineer who also holds a job in A&R. JJP on the ﬁrst draft, compressors, Waves plug-ins and doing something right.

Young gun engineer at home in a variety of roles and with a variety of skills at his disposal.

Reasons to think again about a laptop for audio.

Sweet spot

A look at the technology of the Manger sound transducer — a loudspeaker based on human perception.

meet your maker

Wolfgang Neumann — the founder and technical guru of SPL is in the chair.

It’s one of London’s busiest and most experienced recording and postproduction facilities yet it’s not in Soho.

Business 52

viacom vs Youtube

Viacom is suing Google for US$1bn — we unravel the events that may deﬁne the future of online media copyright.

Your business

The need to network has always been an essential for creative types and creative deals.

Technology 60

aES50

It has the potential to deliver great beneﬁts for the live audio production industry. The technology explained.

Slaying dragons

Watkinson ponders some electronic gizmos and instruments.

Reviews 22 24 26 28 30

lexicon PCm96 Sound devices 788t Universal audio Uad-2 Solo Sony PCm-d50 SSl Pro-Convert v5

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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SE Electronics SE4 drawmer a2d2 dmS-3 abbey road Plug-ins Brilliance Pack Yamaha mSP7 Studio

advErtiSEmENt SalES EUroPE: Clare Sturzaker, tel: +44 1342 717459 Email: clare@resolutionmag.com EUroPE: lynn Neil, tel: +44 208 123 5040 Email: lynn@resolutionmag.com

ProdUCtioN aNd laYoUt dean Cook, the magazine Production Company tel: +44 1273 467579 Email: dean@resolutionmag.com

US: Jeff turner, tel: +1 415 455 8301 Email: jeff@resolutionmag.com

21/9/08 21:08:01

news news appointments JAMIE ENGEN has stepped down as chairman and CEO of Loud Technologies. The board has named Rodney Olson as the new chairman and CEO. Olson joins after a decade with Cardinal Brands, a Kansas-based $170 million ofﬁce products company, where he has served as CFO, president and, most recently, CEO. Prior to that he served as CFO at Sabreliner Corporation, a $250 million aviation company. James Stewart has been named as chief operating officer at Loud Technologies. He joins with more than 28 years of experience in the technology industry. FA I R L I G H T U S has appointed Jeff Goodman as national s a l e s m a n a g e r. He has previously worked for Tonelux, Loud Technologies, AMS Neve and Otari Corporation. AUDIO AGENT LLC has been appointed West Coast representative for Fairlight’s Pyxis product line. Fairlight has appointed Total Audio Solutions as its new Business Partner in the UK.

iBC2008 breaks records

leader

Even a none-to-critical eye or ear can appreciate that for all its cost-saving and efficiency and creativity boosts, modern broadcasting technology still can’t sort out lipsync errors and drops in intelligibility. But then it is not the equipment’s fault, it is the fault of the operators. two likely scenarios cross my mind: either the operators can’t hear that the dialogue is too low to be understood easily and can’t see that the lipsync has gone to cock or they can but they can’t do anything about it or they don’t care. Either way it’s rubbish because it means that the operators are oblivious or incompetent; i struggle to decide which of those is the most offensive in this day and age. the reverend dan daley delivered a riveting sermon on the appreciation of autotune in the last issue that i enjoyed immensely. i’ve heard some cracking yarns about the processor’s multichannel ‘supportive’ use on live heart-throb band performances and they used to make me laugh but it is beginning to ring a little hollow with me now. anyone who walks into a room during the auditions, or even the heats, of the latest tv series of i’d Kill to be Famous would have to concede that Britain’s Got talent not nearly as much as it ain’t got pitch. and this doesn’t just apply to members of the public ‘having a go’, it extends to those who supposedly sing for a living when they have to do it live. Yet look back at most any live tv performance footage from two or three decades and you’ll witness pretty much pitch-perfect performances from singers without in-ear monitoring, in fact often without any obvious monitoring at all but with the comfort of only some vocal Pa reinforcement out front and the occasional finger in the ear. and these bands were loud. How can it have got so bad so quickly? You can say the same about intelligibility and lipsync. it comes down to a natural ‘technical’ aptitude, the desire to work at it to get it right/better, a pride in the craft and, most importantly, giving a damn. Just as i can’t understand how anyone can go on network tv with the moves, the stylised delivery, the heavy breathing and the vibrato but no meaningful relationship with a musical scale that i recognise, so i can’t understand how you can have a panel discussion on the radio — yes, the radio, it’s not as if you can even see them to take a stab at lip reading — where you can’t hear what the panellists are saying. it beggars belief. oblivious or incompetent? Probably a bit of both. Zenon Schoepe

Polar Audio launches for UK distribution

(l-r) Ian Jones, MD HHB; Bob Sloss, MD Syntec; Matthew Fletcher Export Sales HHB.

HHB HAS appointed Syntec as exclusive distributor of its products in Australia and New Zealand. P E T E R M AY h a s joined Sennheiser UK as sales and marketing director. He joins after ten years as channel sales director at Philips.

©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

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Polar Audio is the new face of Beyerdynamic GB Ltd in a move that underlines its role as a UK distributor. ‘Beyerdynamic GB Ltd has always been an independent company, not a subsidiary, but as such it has conducted its operation as a distributor very much in the image of Beyerdynamic Germany,’ explained MD John Midgley. ‘This of course has had huge advantages, but in many ways it has coloured our image and led to some inaccurate perceptions of who we are as a company today. ‘We are no longer a distributor of microphones and headphones only; we are a supplier of Intelligent Audio Solutions adding value to the products which we supply. To meet the demands

S2 Publications ltd or the editor can be held responsible for its contents. the views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the Publishers. Printed by the Grange Press, Butts rd, Southwick, West Sussex, BN42 4EJ.

of our customers we now offer a host of professional services including system design, product integration, project logistics and programming assistance in addition to the marketing and sales of the brands we represent,’ he said. Polar Audio is the exclusive UK distributor for ASL, Aviom, Beyerdynamic, Biamp, Blue Sky, Cue, Dynacord, Gallien Krueger, MC2, Novasonar, Renkus Heinz, WHD and XTA. Midgley added that Polar Audio is a trade-only supplier and that there will be no move away from Beyerdynamic as a brand, and, as the largest independent Beyerdynamic distributor, it is planning for growth in its core markets of MI and broadcast, and in the conferencing and installation business.

S2 Publications ltd. registered in England and Wales. Company number: 4375084. registered office: Equity House, 128-136 High Street, Edgware, middlesex Ha8 7tt.

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IBC2008 was a record-breaking year in visitor numbers, registrations and exhibitors, according to the organisers. ‘IBC2008 has been the most successful show ever with a record attendance of 49,250,’ said IBC COO Mike Crimp. ‘The quality of visitors and the experiences has led IBC2008 to be a very exciting and vibrant show. The feedback received from the exhibition ﬂoor was that it was buzzing. Why? Because IBC offers a compelling proposition which all comes together under one roof, proving that the show was the only place to be at this time of the year.’ IBC2009 will be held 11-15 September.

Counterfeiter gets three years in jail A counterfeiter of luxury goods, music and movie DVDs in South East London has been sent to prison for three years following a hearing at Blackfriars Crown Court in September. Officers from Lewisham Council and Bromley Police, assisted by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the BPI, carried out a three-year investigation into Neil Anthony Norton, after they discovered he was making illegal copies of music and ﬁlms and selling the CDs and DVDs on the Internet. He was also selling a variety of counterfeit luxury consumer goods. It is estimated that Norton’s counterfeiting operation netted him between £450,000 and £850,000. ‘Thanks to a well planned and executed multi-agency operation a major counterfeit “business” has been taken out of action,’ said Kieron Sharp, FACT director general. ‘The sentence handed out shows the gravity with which the courts will now treat this serious criminal activity.’ ‘Illegal downloading has created new challenges for the music business, but physical commercial music piracy remains a huge problem,’ added BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor. ‘Successful multi-agency enforcement operations significantly disrupt and deter this criminal trade.’

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October 2008

21/9/08 21:08:08

news Gateway School of recording closes Gateway School of Recording, one of the first schools of its kind to be established in the UK, has been placed into liquidation. The organisation, Gateway Sound Education Trust Limited, was placed into liquidation with £846,056 owed to unsecured creditors and a further £16,088 to its employees, who are now preferential creditors. There were 118 students without courses for September, including 36 who had paid course fees in advance and now rank as unsecured creditors. The school had become an educational trust prior to moving from its former home at Kingston University to a new facility in Clapham and high hopes for its future were strengthened when the organisation formed a relationship with Digital Village, who moved one of its outlets into the second floor. However, the burden of the cost of the move coupled with ongoing debts from its time at Kingston, forced the trustees to take advice on the school’s ongoing financial position. Attempts at a rescue were made earlier in the year, but negotiations were unsuccessful. The joint liquidators are Julie Beavis and Jeremy Oddie of Mitchell Charlesworth Chartered Accountants and Business Advisors. www.mitchellcharlesworth.co.uk

iBS mic placement masterclass

toivanen Finnishes upgrade

Composer, arranger and producer mika toivanen has joined Quested’s growing Finnish customer base with the installation of a Q212 monitoring system. toivanen works from his Helsinki-based Utopiah Productions studio and in preparation for his first solo recording project he was looking to upgrade his facilities. ‘this is where art of Noise meets Finnish tango,’ stated toivanen, ‘and, having worked with my friend Jukka immonen’s Q412 system at Fried music, i knew that i wanted to work with a Quested system. my room is a little smaller so when i made enquiries, Quested distributor in Finland, SarkaPro, suggested a Q212 system. my great hero is Hans Zimmer, who has been a long-time user of Quested monitors and of course, i’m very happy with my new Q212s.’ a student of the Sibelius academy, toivanen’s more recent work includes songs for top Finnish singers Jari Sillanpaa and Paula Koivuniemi. Credits also include work with Eurovision entrant Geir ronning of Norway and a Eurovision collaboration with Jari Sillanpaa. toivanen also works as a musical director for television, including tangomarkkinat and me Starat, and has conducted Finland’s Seinajoki orchestra.

System 5-MC at foundation of Ton of Bricks

Following on from two previous Microphone Placement Masterclass seminars, the Institute of Broadcast Sound has announced dates for two further presentations of the training seminar for 29 and 30 November at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios in West London. The masterclasses are open to anyone interested in developing their knowledge and understanding of microphones and microphone placement but places are strictly limited. Full course details, prices and reservations from Malcolm Johnson at the IBS on +44 300 400 8427 (malcolm. johnson@ibs.org.uk).

Composer and mixer Ray Fabi transformed a factory in the heart of Montreal, Canada into his Ton of Brick Studios for his music scoring and postproduction company. The 2,500sqft studio room has Pro Tools HD, Adgil Design Director monitoring section and EQs, and K + H 500 monitors around a 24-fader Euphonix System 5-MC integrated DAW controller.

‘When I designed my studio I decided to go the Euphonix/Logic Pro route and I am very happy with that choice,’ he said. ‘I compose in Logic Pro and edit in Pro Tools. The Euphonix EuCon protocol allows that to happen with a press of a button. The fun part is going back and forth between Pro Tools and Logic without moving an inch.’

appointments W H E AT S T O N E C O R P O R AT I O N has appointed Howard Mullinack to the newly created position of director of marketing, reporting directly to president Gary Snow. He previously worked for Sierra Automated Systems, GrahamPatten and Orban. Wheatstone has promoted Jay Tyler to director of sales. He joined in 1996 as sales manager for the Audioarts Engineering product line. AUDIO-TECHNICA HAS restructured its UK operation with Isabelle Alran assuming the position of European sales director. AudioTechnica’s UK area sales managers will now report directly to London-based Alran. UK sales and marketing assistant Tom Harrold will assume responsibility for building on relationships with some of AudioTechnica’s smaller accounts. M A S T E R I N G ENGINEER John Davis has joined Metropolis from Alchemy, which has closed. Metropolis Mastering is celebrating 15 years this year.

(l-r) Synthax Audio’s Helmut Oestreich (marketing), Heribert Blätterbauer (line production/quality assurance), and Christof Mallmann (CEO Synthax GmbH).

ALL TRUE Systems products will now be distributed in Germany, Austria, and most of the EU by Synthax Audio AG.

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October 2008

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news appointments THE HARMAN Music Group has p ro m o t e d R e e d Grothe to executive VP of sales and marketing and

Cata increases efficiency

appointed Harman Professional veteran Buzz Goodwin to the position of VP of domestic MI sales. H a r m a n Professional has opened Field Sales Offices in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Kuala Lumpur office will be led by David McKinney, who is promoted to senior director of sales, Asia, Harman Professional. The San office will serve Latin America and Canada and will be led by Jaime Albors, who is promoted to senior director of sales, Intercontinental, Harman Professional. Both offi ces will soon add new staff in field sales and technical support. JBL Professional has promoted Harman Professional veteran Stephen Morris to executive VP of sales, JBL Professional. Morris previously led group-wide sales and marketing for Harman Professional’s cinema business and prior to that held sales and marketing roles at Crown Audio.

RIEDEL HAS relocated its US HQ to a new 3,200sqft facility in Glendale, California. ‘Our significant growth in the US over the last two years — we almost doubled our revenues each year — brought us to a point where we needed to optimise our approach,’ said Riedel’s business development director Paul Rivens. PROPELLERHEAD SOFTWARE has appointed Microfusa as its distributor in Spain.

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located in the heart of madrid, Cata (Centro de arte y tecnología aplicada) is one of the city’s landmark production facilities for music, video postproduction and film mixing and is home to a film production suite, three video postproduction rooms and three audio rooms, including a mastering suite. as technical manager luis del toro explained, the decision to install a 48-fader digidesign icon d-Control and avid Unity system was motivated by a desire to deploy the most convenient, efficient and up-to-date technology. ‘We wanted to incorporate our Pro tools systems and worksurfaces into a complete avid Unity system with the option to transfer files via digidelivery,’ he said. ‘Now we have eight rooms that are interconnected. We can offer our clients multiple rooms with matching equipment, such as the Sync i/o, 192 i/o, midi i/o, Jl Cooper Surround Panner and avid mojo video interfaces, just as we would offer different types of preamps and monitors.’ the main audio room has the 48-fader d-Control and Pro tools|Hd 6 accel system while another editing suite, equipped with Pro tools|Hd and 24-fader d-Command, was recently used by composer alberto iglesias to complete his oscar-nominated soundtrack for the Kite runner. ‘icon, for us, means productivity,’ explains Cata director angel Quintanilla. ‘We now have hands-on control of the mix directly within Pro tools, and an absolute control over plug-ins running natively. Ultimately this saves us time and increases efficiency, making our business more profitable.’

SD7 aids Aussie production education The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia is one of the country’s leading educational institutions and offers a range of technical courses including a Music Industry course. A Digico SD7 console was involved in a collaboration between two RMIT departments for a twoyear Certificate and Diploma that focuses on the skills necessary to become an audio engineer or producer. ‘There are a number of providers offering similar courses,’ said John Phillips, programmes manager for the courses, ‘but RMIT has consistently had the highest number of graduates securing ongoing employment in the industry, attaining positions as studio engineers, live engineers, working in music, television, ﬁlm and theatre and other audio production areas.’ As part of the second year curriculum, the

students are involved in a project that involves staging and recording a live performance at a Melbourne venue. The performance is recorded to Pro-Tools and then mixed in RMIT’s 5.1 studio and released as a DVD. ‘The recording rig comprises an OB van supplied by Ernie Rose, who is, of course, an important part of Australian recording history, being the main man behind Metropolis Studios, which was the benchmark for Melbourne studios for many years,’ said Phillips. ‘As Ernie Rose’s OB van now features the SD7, we were keen to be able to access the new desk. ‘Staff and students alike were impressed with how surprisingly intuitive the SD7 is, making it possible for ﬁrst time users of the console to achieve desired results quickly and effectively, which is, of course, paramount in a live recording and mixing situation.’

resolution

ari varla

Ari Varla, long-standing principal electroacoustic design scientist at Genelec, died in August after a long illness. Ari was born in 1956 in Tampere, Finland and received an M.Sc in electronic engineering from Tampere University of Technology in 1987 but had joined Genelec in 1980 during his university studies. He was one of the key figures at Genelec and the company would not be the same without his life-long contribution as he was centrally involved in designing most Genelec products — more than 60 loudspeaker system designs most of which are still in active production. His principles of maximising the total system quality and the methodologies for achieving them are deeply rooted in Genelec engineering methods. Ari was one of the most renowned experts in speaker system design. His pioneering work with waveguide-loaded direct-radiating mid- and high-frequency drivers, dubbed DCW by Genelec, began in the early 1980s and resulted in its global acceptance as a significant part of modern multiway designs for professional monitoring. He was also a central figure in the development of the low distortion LSE subwoofer enclosure concept. He holds several patents and has published numerous papers on loudspeaker design. Ari was an inspiration to all of us at Genelec. Despite his serious illness he elected to continue to work intensively with new loudspeaker designs as long as he could, displaying that acoustics and loudspeaker design were truly a life calling for him. He was a firm proponent of applying the highest engineering standards in loudspeaker system design. He advocated novel designs, drawing from the very principles of acoustics in an inventive manner. His expertise was wide, from driver and loudspeaker system concept design to optimising production methods and tools. His work was methodical and systematic, and together with his deep knowledge and excellent intuition for acoustic phenomena inspired several generations of younger engineers who had the privilege to work under him. Ari had a great sense of humour and could see the comic side of many issues. He frequently made well-observed remarks about the triviality and artificiality of human life. All who knew him will remember his magnificent laughter. Even though we knew he had cancer for some time, the rapid final progression of the illness has left his family, his friends, and the whole of the Genelec community in a deep and sudden grief. Aki Mäkivirta, Ilpo Martikainen, Veikko Hyvönen, Lars-Olof Janflod, Siamäk Naghian.

October 2008

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news appointments ICM IN Germany has taken on the exclusive distribution of the complete product line of Aphex Systems.

Highway XCS first

Jason Kelly of Midas and Andy Huffer of HD Pro Audio.

MIDAS’ UK distributor Shuttlesound has appointed Egham-based HD Pro Audio as a main UK dealer for its new PRO6 console. MICHAEL ZIRKEL has become a member of the board of directors at Ultrasone AG. As chief operating ofﬁcer he is responsible for marketing and sales, strategic market development, strategic product development, and worldwide process optimisation. AUDIO CODEC specialist APT has appointed Marc Benard as product manager for the WorldNet Oslo Multiplexer. He previously worked at Digigram and as an Outside Broadcasting sound engineer. SENNHEISER HAS been appointed distributor in Canada, China and the UK for Italian high technology PA manufacturer K-Array.

(l-r) Haro, Rotllan, Alberdi, Ribo.

SPANISH DISTRIBUTION agency Seesound has expanded its sales force with the addition of David Haro, who joins from Lexon, Lluis Rotllan from Adagio Pro, and Carles Ribo, formerly of design company Smart Audio Projects. They will join MD Nacho Alberdi. APOGEE ELECTRONICS has appointed SCV Audio as its distributor in France. TEVIDO LLC has been appointed agent in Middle East and North Africa for Chromatec and Chord Professional audio monitoring, Chromatec video display and openGear products on behalf of Michael Stevens & Partners.

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Highway television in Paris has become the first postproduction facility in the world to invest in a Fairlight Constellation with Xynergi Centre Section. the 230-channel Constellation has been installed in Studio one and is driven by Fairlight’s CC-1 digital media engine and incorporates integrated Pyxistrack video. Both of the facility’s studios were previously equipped with dream Stations powered by QdC. ‘With so many of our customers now working with Hd video and 5.1 surround, we needed a much larger console that could give us more channels and more power,’ said Huges Bonnet (pictured), chief engineer at Highway television. ‘the new Constellation is the perfect solution because it has plenty of additional channels for plug-ins and provides an open platform that allows us to work with any file format. ‘Switching to the new Constellation gives us the ability to speed up workﬂow without compromising stability and synchronisation,’ added Bonnet. ‘By incorporating Xynergi into the desk, we now have a system that not only delivers a fast editing and mixing interface but is also incredibly easy to use. this is the perfect combination for a facility like ours where speed is of the essence.’ also in Paris, three-studio facility virtuel audio has installed a Xynergi with a 12-fader sidecar driven by CC-1 Crystal Core. ‘the decision to install a Xynergi and move to the CC-1 platform was taken for purely commercial reasons: we wanted to improve our workﬂow and increase efficiency,’ explained virtuel audio’s sound engineer laurent Herniaux. ‘Xynergi offers a much faster editing and mixing interface and its ability to handle all widely used surround formats means that we are in a much better position to deal with whatever file format our clients come in with.’

HHB ships 10,000th FlashMic HHB has shipped its 10,000th FlashMic. Launched at IBC three years ago, the digital recording microphone is now an interview recorder of choice for many journalists. German public broadcaster NDR has used FlashMics since their launch and increased its inventory for its coverage of the Olympic Games. ‘The FlashMic enables our journalists to concentrate on the story, not their

equipment,’ said Ernst Bostelmann, director of Outside Radio Production, NDR Broadcasting Centre Hannover. ‘Even those who don’t have technical skills and are using the FlashMic for the first time can start interviews immediately without the need for complex, menu-driven operations. Our journalists favour the FlashMic not only because it’s easy to use, but also for its sound quality.’

resolution

Winfield rocks in d-Box

Hard rock producer and engineer Sterling Winfield has been exclusively mixing through the Dangerous Music 2-Bus analogue summing system at Gary Long’s Nomad Studios in Carrollton, Texas and has added a D-Box to his home studio as a result. Winfield works regularly at the Texas studio, which along with the 2-Bus also uses the Dangerous Monitor and Dangerous MQ products in its hybrid analogue and digital environment. ‘My ﬁrst experience with Dangerous gear was the 2-Bus at Nomad,’ he said. ‘I had pretty much mixed a project already and Gary [Long] asked me if I was ﬁnished and I said yeah but that it wasn’t mastered yet. He said “Do yourself a favour and get back into the mixes” and he gave me the low-down on the concept of the 2-Bus. Sure enough when I started monitoring the mixes through the 2-Bus, I could hear the difference immediately in clarity and how everything opened up. I heard the difference and had to have it. ‘In heavy metal and hard rock music it’s not always just a wall of sound — a lot of people don’t understand that there’s a lot of intricacy to that style of music as well,’ he added. ‘And that’s where the Dangerous gear helps, it really retains the low end in the mix, and that’s essential when you are trying to add depth.’

aSP8024 goes into Cowes

A 48-channel Audient ASP8024 console has been installed at Studio Luka on the Isle of Wight, UK. Studio Luka is owned by Jim and Rob Homes and is tucked away in the old water tower on Queen Victoria’s estate in East Cowes. ‘Our old desk was very limited in scope and we were looking for something to give us that extra space in the mix,’ explained Jim Homes. ‘Cenzo Townsend at Olympic Studio originally turned us on to Audient. He has nothing but praise for his 8024. ‘The desk has given depth and weight to everything we work on,’ he continued. ‘That was always a struggle on our previous desk. Together with our IZ Radar V Classic multitrack recorder we can now create a fantastically open sound.’

October 2008

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news Biz Bites

The music industry is getting excited ahead of the launch of the new MySpace Music, writes Nigel Jopson. MySpace president of sales Jeff Berman said the project includes: ‘Sponsored album releases where albums will be available for free download sponsored by a brand, other free download opportunities, unlimited streaming and unlimited custom playlisting powered by brands in different ways.’ MySpace has cunningly co-opted some of the best music-is-free ideas, for example user-generated mixes in the style of the RIAA-tormented Muxtape.com. ‘We already have the infrastructure — 75m active users in the United States, a national sales force, a first rate marketing team,’ explained Berman ‘... now we have the ability to do a lot more.’ Universal, Sony and Warners (but not EMI) are equity partners in the venture, and sources say multimillion ad deals have already been struck with McDonalds and Toyota. MySpace Music gives the majors a new channel through which to sell songs, ringtones, T-shirts and tickets: the 5m artists already using MySpace to promote themselves have made the site a big online music destination. MySpace presently takes US$743m in advertising revenue, the majors could realistically expect to share at least the same within 3-4 years if they continue recruiting Internet-savvy marketing staff. Sony has won permission from the European Commission to buy full ownership of Sony BMG, which will now be called Sony Music Entertainment Inc (SMEI). Indie label association IMPALA lamented the lack of an in-depth EC investigation, but in the current economic climate the decision is likely to go unchallenged. Meanwhile EMI is selling its music activities in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan to its Chinese joint venture partner Typhoon for $12.8m. In another deal EMI described as a ‘multiyear license agreement,’ Warner Music Group will market and distribute EMI’s world-wide repertoire in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand. The two majors already have a partnership covering India, the Middle East and North Africa, where EMI has distributed WMG physical products since 2005. Partnership in adversity or preparing for recorded music merger? Veteran metal rockers Metallica are releasing their ﬁrst album for ﬁve years simultaneously as a CD and a computer game, the album and bonus material are available via Guitar Hero III with extended guitar solos from Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield.

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WSdG returns to Buffalo

twenty-five years ago John Storyk designed trackmasters in Buffalo’s historic allentown district. the studio built a solid reputation as one of upstate NY’s bestsounding and most artist-friendly facilities. in 1986 John rzeznik and robby takac formed a band they christened Goo Goo dolls and today they own the studio. their first move was to rechristen it inner machine and their next was to invite Storyk and the Walters-Storyk design Group back to redesign and upgrade the place. the studio was originally designed primarily to record music for tv and radio commercials. ‘it’s an interesting building, and the rooms have a distinctive sound,’ said Storyk. ‘John and robby’s mandate was to create a fresh, live acoustic feel, particularly in the large tracking room, and to integrate a much needed technical recording and processing equipment update.’ ‘they have outfitted the control room with over 14 racks of vintage gear,’ added WSdG systems designer Judy Elliot-Brown. ‘retro instruments, Universal audio, teletronix, and other tube compressor/limiters; including a rare Fairchild 670, plus mercury, Gml and Chandler limited EQs; lexicon, Eventide, amS and other delay, reverb and effects units. they’ve got a pair of custom-built augspurger speakers and air 15 nearfield monitors and a classic 48-channel aPi legacy Console. they’ve built a terrific collection, one of the largest we’ve seen in a commercial audio control room.’ ‘over the past 25 years, trackmasters hosted sessions for dozens of outstanding clients,’ said robby takac. ‘We cut a lot of our work here, and artists ranging from ani difranco to the Flaming lips, Yes and Barenaked contributed to its legacy. in the late 1990s the studio was vacated and fell into disrepair. ‘today, after nearly a decade of silence, we’ve re-occupied this classic space, and with the cooperation and blessings of trackmaster alumnae mike Sak, alan Baumgardner, and Kim Ferullo, we are committed to breathing new life into this iconic Buffalo recording studio,’ he added. ‘We were really inspired by what allen Sides and Jack Joseph Puig are doing at ocean Way,’ John rzeznik concluded. ‘our game plan is to make inner machine available to outside dates when we’re not using it for our own projects, but we’re not interested in turning it into a profit centre. thanks to our Buffalo location, we’re blessed with a very low overhead.’

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news Biz Bites Fortunately for the music industry, gamers are keen to buy songs to sing or play on controllers. Guitar Hero owners have bought 20m songs to test their skills, and players of Sony’s Karaokestyle game SingStar have downloaded 2.2m songs costing 99p in the UK. Passionato.com will sell high quality classical music 320kbps MP3s or lossless FLACS online. The venture capital funded UK-based startup is headed by former Baltimore Symphony CEO, GeoCities VP and president of AOL MusicNow James Glicker. The site allows orchestras, many of whom no longer have record deals, to release their own recordings: ‘They don’t have the capability to build their own download site, they don’t have the same bandwidth or storage costs we do,’ explained Glicker. As well as a music store, the site incorporates community features such as blogs, reviews, and forums. Music subscription service Napster, with 700,000 subscribers, has been bought for $120m by US retail giant Best Buy. It proved harder than expected to sell the benefits of subscription music services, despite the obvious feature of immediate access to a panoply of music. Criticism from illinformed commentators (shocking dirty secret: users cannot keep music when subscription expires) and consumer’s unwillingness to sign up for any product requiring monthly payment has meant marketing costs have been prohibitive. The likeliest future solution seems to be to conceal the monthly fee by bundling music rental with hardware. The management team that acquired Virgin Megastores and re-branded it Zavvi has announced successful ﬁrst year results, with like-for-like sales up 10% and online business up 148% — despite a UK-wide slowdown in retail spending. Virgin media racked up huge losses, but Zavvi’s new strategy has been to concentrate on ﬁlms and video games, with games now generating 30% of sales. Victory in the hi-def format war has prompted a 300% increase in sales of Blu-ray discs at Zavvi.

rtl France buys seven auratus

(l-r): Paul-Henry Wagner (44.1), Philippe Magniez (RTL), Arnaud Vallin (RTL).

France’s private radio broadcaster rtl has ordered seven Stagetec auratus consoles through distributor 44.1 as part of a revamp of the studios in its Paris broadcasting centre. the desks integrate into the existing audio-network at rtl as a Stagetec Nexus network was installed there two year’s ago. ‘despite the high level of integration between auratus and Nexus, the decision to go for the auratus was by no means a sure thing,’ explained Stephan Salzbrenner, md marketing and sales. ‘the auratus was selected by all the rtl-operators after extensive evaluation of rival brands.’ Since all the studios will be equipped with u-shaped furniture, rtl wanted mixing desks to adapt to this form. rtl will take delivery of custom-built split consoles consisting of a central section in the middle with fader modules arranged either side. the telewizja Polska Hd Hdtv-enabled oB truck of the Polish public tv broadcaster has a total ﬂoor area of approximately 70sqm. in addition to a video control workstation and a video machine room with four slow-motion workplaces and a separate vtr room, it also has a 7.1 audio control room. the audio system is based around a 48-fader auratus and a Nexus network offering around 900 inputs and 700 outputs. the majority of the 152 digital microphone inputs are made available by two mobile Nexus Base devices.

telex/rtS rocks mtv

Telex/RTS’ intercom technology is playing an important role in the refurbished master control room at MTV’s European headquarters in Camden, North London, which provides switching for three on-site studios and more than 50 television channels across the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe. ‘Telex’s key panels, TBUs and the RVON options offer our operators just what they need: simplicity and clarity,’ said Robert Cranﬁeld, senior systems engineer at MTV. ‘Once built the whole talkback system was migrated to Telex over a period of three days.’

rSS Snakes determine college design Seven years after they designed their first college classrooms for teaching the BTEC National Diploma in Music Technology in the UK, Robert Parrett and Dan Armstrong have brought their experience to bear on a facility for the Herefordshire College of Technology. Linked to three studios, the five control rooms are equipped with industrystandard equipment and six RSS Digital Snake multicore systems that govern the network functionality of the complex. A recent relocation provided an opportunity for the college to expand from a single control room and live room, to a threestudio complex with five control rooms. Four of these are identically equipped, while the larger fifth room has an Audient ASP8024 console and Alesis HD24-48.

Showtime AES US, San Francisco .. 3-5 October Broadcast India, Mumbai .........................17-19 October Siel & Satis, Paris ...... 20-23 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

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R.E.M. are touring the world with two Midas XL8 systems and a Klark Teknik DN9696 hard disk recorder, provided by US rental company Rat Sound. (l-r) R.E.M. monitor engineer George Squiers and FOH engineer Brett Eliason.

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Parrett and Armstrong used the Cat5based RSS digital multicore to achieve interconnectivity between all rooms and have seen an immediate hike in the quality of projects coming through — they partly put this down to the fact that signal ﬂow and patchbays are now so easy to understand.

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facility

Mosfilm It bills itself as the biggest film production base in Russia and in Europe and can take on the complete cycle of production from writing to printing the film copies. Mosfilm has 14 film stages, shoots films, TV serials and commercials and has the capacity for more than 100 films a year. ZENON SCHOEPE visits its Sound Complex.

he history of the ‘film town’ situated on the Vorobyov Hills in Moscow began in 1920 when the operations of film producers Khanzhonkov and Jermol’ev were nationalised. The origins of Mosfilm were founded on this in 1924 when the first full-length film, Up on the Wings directed by Boris Mikhin, was released and while it wasn’t named Mosfilm until 1935 it has been producing films continually since then. Its memorable and evocative emblem — Mukhina’s sculpture of the Worker and Peasant Woman — first

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appeared on a film header in 1947 on Grigoriy Alexandrov’s film Spring. Mosfilm’s scale and complete portfolio of services displays the sort of cohesiveness and bigger picture planning that totalitarian states are so good at. As such, its structure represents a very early analysis of what the film making process is and a solution for what it needs. Thus we see some of the earliest examples of compartmentalised blocks for film staging, shooting, editing and dubbing and film development and printing, plus all the ancillary support services. Not only did they create a film town; they also created a ‘film factory’. In 1948 the building of the ‘Greater Mosfilm’ project added several blocks of film stages, office premises, and many other buildings and there have been many phases of construction and expansion since. Consequently the architecture reflects the times, moods and ‘message’ of its masters as the facility was integral to the State machinery and grew with it. Mosfilm’s ‘First’ film stage is an example of constructivism and is still much as it was from the outside with its staggering 3000sqm inside. Even the original Sound Studio block gets a mention as an example of classicism in Mosfilm literature. But it is the new Sound Studio, one of the last buildings raised resolution

in the 1980s, that we will be focusing on here. The Sound Complex covers 6000sqm over four storeys and houses music studios, editing studios, dialogue recording studios, Foley and mixing theatres. Taking pride of place are undoubtedly the two music recording studios. The large orchestral room of Studio 1, which is big enough for a symphony orchestra and a 100-piece choir, is equipped with an SSL 9000 and is next to the smaller 4000 G+ equipped ‘pop’ Studio 2. These were designed in 1987 by Tom Hidley but Studio 1’s control room was reconstructed for multichannel in 2006 by Roger D’Arcy of Recording Architecture. There are postproduction rooms with SSL Avant and Digidesign Icon, a lovely old Foley room equipped with an SSL C316 and two large Icons in small mixing theatres for TV and DVD production. In the audio department, most things revolve around Pro Tools and the recent addition of the two Icons is a response to a market that is getting busier. This builds on the strong presence of Avid and Digidesign systems at Mosfilm although its particular set of circumstances means that it looks at the technology in a different way to smaller facilities, as chief engineer Igor Bogdasarov explains. October 2008

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facility They are particularly happy with the Icons which they regard as very promising technology. The operators have remarked that they are incredibly powerful with many more facilities than their experiences with their SSL Avant Plus, for example. The two rooms are employed for higher turnover projects for TV and DVD in multichannel — projects that are less protracted in their creation than feature films. The cinema industry in Russia is developing rapidly and in five years the Sound Complex has seen the proportions of its workload change. Five years ago 80% of their work was for TV whereas now the same proportion is for cinema production. It’s been driven by changes at the consumer level and State-owned Mosfilm is benefiting. ‘The cinema boom started with the building of more cinema theatres and multiplexes,’ says Bogdasarov. ‘Not so long ago the cinemas were broke. The concept of family entertainment and big film productions has been embraced by the viewing public — that’s coming from the Hollywood blockbusters, which need dubbing and create a local demand for production facilities. However, there is also a growing demand for local productions that people can relate to and those sorts of real Russian films are emerging.’ There’s an air of efficiency and real-world awareness at the facility that is a far cry from the Soviet times when Mosfilm employed around 5000. Today, it’s a much leaner 900 although estimates do suggest that when there is a lot of work on some 5000 can still be working on the 34-Hectare plot. ‘The industry is growing very rapidly and Mosfilm’s growth is probably a lot better than most others,’ says Bogdasarov. ’This is due in part to our constant investment in equipment and staff training to keep us in the position as the top studio in Russia.’ ■

‘The policy of Mosfilm is not just to invest in the equipment to perform the production cycle but also to maintain its status as a top studio in Russia and hopefully also in Europe,’ he says. ‘Regarding Avid and Pro Tools, technically speaking the two things happened hand in hand and in 1999, when the studio was investing in a lot of equipment and when the first Avid systems were installed, so were our first Pro Tools systems.’ Prior to this they had worked with Lightworks systems and Akai editors, which he says were adequate for the time, but he stresses that they regard the sound and picture elements in their production cycles as living in parallel and only really joining together in the laboratory. ‘That makes it difficult to regard it as an integrated environment because our facility here provides mix and match services to so many different types of project with different people and at different times. So it is very rare for it all to work together as a whole,’ says Bogdasarov. ‘My opinion is that a properly organised production doesn’t depend on the equipment. The integration is useful on different scales — for small studios that have one or two projects at a time it’s very convenient for them to have the central storage of everything, for example. But there are so many different projects and so many different outsourced customers here who don’t actually want to keep their material any longer than it is actually required. ‘From the point of view of preproduction picture editing it is not that important — you’re dealing with raw material and that can be done anywhere now, even at home on a PC. Avid is obviously a better and more productive system but it is not necessary for all customers. The quality of the soundtrack, on the other hand, is always much more important.’ So if the degree of integration between the Avid and Pro Tools systems is useful but not critical, why not buy other systems instead? ‘It comes down to popular demand — what the customers ask for. It’s also a matter of training staff and it’s a standard,’ replies Bogdasarov. They are selling facilities after all and not the final product.

M A NGER P r e c i s i o n

i n

s o u n d

it’s simply a question of time

STUDIO MO N I T O R MSM c1

www.m a nge r- a udi o.c o.uk UK t e l : 0161- 304- 0099

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review gear

Products Equipment introductions and announcements.

digico Sd8

The SD8 console from Digico has a fixed architecture and employs a smaller super FPGA than the SD7, yet benefits from all the features and versatility of the Digico D Series, plus the advances made in the SD7. The company claims it gives a ‘superlative performance to price ratio’ for an entry-level console with remote preamps. The SD8’s control surface has 37 motorised faders, dedicated and multifunction control knobs and electronic labelling. It also has a 15-inch touch-sensitive TFT LCD backlit display. The SD8 has 24 main channel faders and 12 assignable aux and touch-sensitive master faders. Each bank of 12 faders can be instantly assigned as channels or masters, allowing all 36 main faders to control inputs if desired, while any bank of 12 can be assigned to the touchscreen for fine-tuning. The desk provides, as standard, a 12 x 12 output matrix, its 12 buses being additional to the console’s 24 stereo, solo and master buses, and 60 mono or stereo channels — the equivalent of 120 channels of full DSP processing. The system comes with a 48/8 Stage Rack and a 100m digital MADI snake and has on-board local I-O with 8 mic/ line inputs, 8 line Outputs and 8 AES I-O. The Tiger Sharc FX engine provides an extensive range of built-in effects. www.digico.org

midas Pro6 Midas has unveiled its second networked digital audio system, the PRO6. Employing technologies developed from the XL8, the PRO6 offers the same samplesynchronised audio performance in a compact package. The PRO6 standard system comprises a Control Centre, with a footprint comparable to a 32-channel Verona, and two 7u rack units and provides 80 simultaneous input processing channels and 32 (+3) discrete mixes, all with EQ and dynamics. By adding additional I-O hardware the PRO6’s network can be expanded to 264 inputs and 264 outputs. These connections can be patched and routed on a scene-by-scene basis via snapshot automation. The FX and dynamics algorithms are incorporated within the PRO6’s automatic delay management system, so wherever they are patched the audio will be phase-coherent. www.midasconsoles.com

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dPa mi and 5.1 mics DPA has unveiled the first four microphones in its new 4099 microphones series aimed at the MI market. The models are the 4099 Guitar, 4099 Sax, 4099 Trumpet and 4099 Violin. Each is designed and optimised for one particular instrument family and to ensure the finest audio reinforcement when performing live. Further instrumentspecific mics are in the pipeline. All 4099 condenser mics feature supercardioid patterns and are capable of handling high sound pressure levels. Despite their size and lightweight design, 4099s are rugged and stable, while the versatile gooseneck provides stable positioning. The mics can easily be unclipped and repositioned or moved to another instrument with only one hand and the mounting system is designed to be extremely gentle, never marking the finish of the instrument. The DPA 5100 is a mobile surround microphone for 5.1 recording that can be mounted on a camera or microphone stand, suspended or handheld, and requires no additional signal processing. Lightweight and portable, the 5100 is also robust and resilient to inclement weather. The 5100 employs five miniature pressure transducers that exhibit low sensitivity to wind and mechanical noise, low distortion, consistent low frequency response and wide dynamic range. Optimum channel separation and directionality are achieved through a combination of DPA’s proprietary DiPMic (Directional Pressure Microphone) technology, which mounts interference tubes on the LCR capsules, and the use of acoustic baffles that further preserve the accuracy of levels between the discrete analogue output channels. The 5100’s three front microphones are time coincident to eliminate comb filtering while the rear microphones, which feature omnidirectional patterns, are optimally spaced from each other and the front array to simulate natural time arrival differences. The LFE (.1) channel is created from an LR sum, which is then attenuated 10dB in comparison to the signal from the main channels. The 5.1 output of the 5100 runs through a multipin Lemo connector carrying all six channels electronically balanced, while an enclosed 5m six-pair Mogami cable breaks out to six Neutrik XLRs. The centre channel can be overridden by an external boom or lavalier microphone attached via a built-in XLR connector. www.dpamicrophones.com

Pack and Go with Calrec Flypack Available on the Calrec Omega and Zeta consoles, the Flypack is designed for use in places where a mobile truck cannot get to or is prohibitively expensive to ship. The desks use military spec connectors for fast, reliable and rugged connectivity offering a highly adaptable solution to OB requirements without unnecessary expenditure. Calrec’s standard Flypack enables all DSP, power supplies and I-O to be housed in a compact double rack that allows the control surface to be mounted on top. The Flypack is sold with or without a ﬂightcase so customers have the option to custom ﬁt their cases with supplementary equipment, or take advantage of Calrec’s robust package. www.calrec.com

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riedel digital wireless intercom

Riedel has introduced the Acrobat Digital Wireless Intercom series, which features partyline and point-to-point communications, digital audio quality and no interference with radio microphones or IEMs. Taking the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard, with its license-free, cellular architecture and seamless hand-over, as a starting point, Riedel developed new technologies to implement its Acrobat VoIP-over-DECT platform. Riedel’s Enhanced Channel Agility (ECA) allows Acrobat to make use of the complete DECT frequency and channel spectrum by dynamically allocating calls to any free RX or TX time-slot. This removes the previous limit to the number of beltpacks in a DECTbased system. In addition, Enhanced Sync Automation (ESA) optimises the system performance when used in environments with other DECT-based systems, such as telephones. The Acrobat system is made of one or more Acrobat Cell Controllers with up to 80 Acrobat Cell Antennas. The Cell Controller serves as the heart of any Acrobat Digital Wireless Intercom installation and handles the VoIP-overDECT cell management. The 2U rackmount connects to any partyline or matrix intercom via eight analogue 4-wire ports and 12 GPIOs. For Riedel Artist digital matrix intercoms the device provides an intelligent connection via AES3 ports. Acrobat Cell Antennas are connected to the Acrobat Cell Controller via Ethernet. Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) simpliﬁes the antenna installation and Acrobat Cell Antennas have a range of 275m under line-of-sight conditions or 75m indoors. The Acrobat Wireless Beltpack is a light, compact, digital headset station with two individually conﬁgurable channels for intercom and IFB use. www.riedel.net

Sennheiser mKE 1 The Sennheiser MKE 1 professional clip-on mic is now available. Care has been taken to ensure the microphone capsule is fully protected from moisture, enabling the MKE 1 to operate in harsh conditions longer than many other clip-on mics. It can be provided with a multipurpose cap that diverts any humidity past the microphone and doubles as a windshield. And from within, a thin, acoustically open stainless steel membrane protects the capsule. The anti-kink sleeve has been improved to increase the life of the Kevlar-reinforced cable. With a diameter of 1mm the cable is resistant to handling noise while a special plastic coating ensures it tangles less readily. Also included is a small frequency response cap, which provides a treble boost of 2.5dB for applications where the mic is hidden within a costume. The MKE 1 comes with three make-up protection caps and several thin plastic tubes for shielding the cable when attaching it with clips or adhesive tape. It is available in beige and black and comes with a 3-pin plug for Sennheiser bodypack transmitters or with an unterminated cable for other transmitters. www.sennheiser.co.uk

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gear more volume with Waves With high and low level compression controlled by a streamlined interface, the MV2 is described as ‘the simplest, most flexible way to control your sound’. With du al fa de rs fo r quick dynamic optimisation, MV2 is available at no additional charge to users of Gold, Broadcast & Production, Platinum, Diamond, and Mercury covered by Waves Update Plan.

With six channels of high and low level compression, nine Link Modes, and an intuitive interface, the MV360° is said to be a simple and efﬁcient way to control surround sound dynamics. MV360° is available at no additional charge to users of Mercury and 360° Surround Tools covered by Waves Update Plan. www.waves.com

modern Fairchild The Analoguetube AT-101 is the result of 5 year’s development based around the Fairchild 670 stereo limiter/ compressor and is a blend of modern technology and traditional construction. The original was developed during the 50s and the AT-101 shares the same circuit and components used in this technology, but using new transformers and long-lasting, close tolerance, modern components. Chassis mounting XLR connectors are fitted at the rear of the unit and the new generation 6386 tubes indirect heaters are now powered by a modern slow start-up linear supply that is more efficient than the original constant voltage transformer. Hovland Musicap Polypropylene film capacitors have been fitted throughout with an improvement in clarity, focus and dynamics. Silver Mica capacitors have also been fitted, the construction materials used in these components are non-ferrous — minimising any inductive effects and these are traditionally used in tube audio equipment where high temperature stability and wide frequency response is needed. Ceramic tube sockets are used throughout and some of the matrixing circuitry has been removed and replaced by a stereo link switch. This replaces the old Lateral/Vertical positions used for record cutting. Finally, a simple traffic light system has been fitted to warn the user of increased operational temperature. It is completely isolated and is intended as a visual warning that the AT-101 has reached 60 deg. www.analoguetube.com

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Bock audio mic

two invisions

The Bock Audio 5-Zero-7 hand-built, large body valve mic is aimed at vocal reproduction and is the ﬁrst mic to take advantage of a patent-pending elliptical large capsule design by David Bock and George Cardas. In development for more than ﬁve years, the new capsule is hand manufactured in Germany and is claimed to offer many technical advantages over existing round capsule designs. The mic has a beefy tube, audio transformers, fully discrete electronics and a custom power supply very similar to those found in 1947 era microphones. www.transaudiogroup.com

Rycote has two new InVision models — INV-9 and INV10. With a 30mm Lyre support clip at the front of its support assembly and a 19-25mm clip at the back, INV-9 is designed to hold mics such as Shure’s SM57 and SM58, as well as the Neumann KMS105. INV-10 is designed specifically f o r S e n n h e i s e r ’s MKH range with two flat-sided clips, to accommodate the flatedged mic barrel, on a 70mm support bar. www.rycote.com

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.

Unrivalled versatility SCHOEPS GmbH Spitalstr. 20 76227 Karlsruhe, Germany resolution

www.schoeps.de mailbox@schoeps.de Tel. +49 721 943 200 17

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review gear Holophone H2-5.1 Holophone is offering the power and quality of the H2-Pro i n a n a ff o rd a b l e 5.1 package with the H2-5.1. The H2-5.1 has six DPA microphones arranged to correspond with a typical 5.1 speaker setup. The mic’s six channels are output to six XLR connectors. The H2-5.1 retails for $5,400 ($600 less

than the H2-PRO). The company has also previewed the H5-X as its new topof-the-range mic. Designed specifically for critical recording situations, the H5-X has five high-quality small-diaphragm mic elements for 5.0 recordings. Its head is detachable from the multichannel audio snake via a 24K gold multipin connector, which allows for multiple cabling options. The H5-X is expected to come to market in late 2009. www.holophone.com

SoundField upmixer

SoundField previewed two new products at IBC. The UPM-1 is a hardware stereo-to-5.1 upmix processor, designed for HD broadcasters who use a lot of archive stereo material and want to generate 5.1 broadcast mixes from these stereo soundtracks. The UPM-1 generates the material for the extra three channels by analysing the source stereo signal over time. SoundField’s processor can detect reverberant content in the stereo signal, differentiate it from the direct sounds in the mix, and separate it out. As with SoundField’s surround microphone systems, users can adjust the details of the processing from the front panel with control including the level of the direct and ambient components in the front and rear channels, and the divergence of the Centre channel in the generated 5.1 mix, with options from a discrete Centre channel at one extreme to a phantom Centre at the other. The UPM-1 is planned for release in early 2009. The SMP200 is a 4-channel mic preamp, designed to complement the SPS200 softwarecontrolled microphone, which is now shipping. The four-capsule SPS200 is SoundField’s most affordable product, and achieves this by offering software-based decoding and processing, rather than shipping with a hardware processor and control unit. For preampliﬁcation purposes, the SPS200 can be used with any multichannel mic pre or digital interface with onboard preamps. However, the output of the SPS200’s four capsules still needs to be gain-matched, and the SMP200 is designed as a one-box solution to address this need. The SMP200 differs from other multichannel preamps by offering a ganged master gain control, 48V phantom power and a low-pass ﬁlter that can be applied simultaneously across all four channels. It will also ship at the beginning of next year. www.soundfield.com

dolby E decoder board for Nexus The XDED (neXus Dolby E Decoder) is a slide-in board for the Nexus that splits a Dolby E-encoded stream into eight separate channels. These are available subsequently for individual processing on the Nexus network and the Aurus consoles connected to it. As the Nexus is certified for transparent forwarding of Dolby E signals, an AES-EBU line carrying a Dolby E-encoded signal can be connected to a remote Base Station and then transmitted over the Nexus network to the OB truck. There it is decoded using the new XDED board. Another application is the use of Dolby E in conjunction with SDI — Dolby E signals are often embedded into an SDI stream — the Nexus de-embeds the signal using an (optionally HD-enabled) Nexus SDI board and subsequently decodes the Dolby E data stream. www.stagetec.com

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gear Cl-8 for 788t

Sound Devices’s CL-8 controller for the 788T recorder provides additional capabilities to the machine without a significant increase in weight. It has eight large, rotary faders to control the eight inputs of the 788T and control of input settings, including high-pass filter, limiter, polarity, and mute. When used with the CL-8, the 788T input controls function as input trims with the CL-8’s controls used for fader control. With the CL-8 users have access to two additional recording tracks (Aux 1 and Aux 2) through the CL-8’s associated firmware, for a total of 10 record tracks. These new tracks can be used to provide auxiliary sends for more comprehensive setups. Inputs can be assigned to Aux tracks pre- or postfader. LED’s indicate when signals are present. The CL-8 can be connected to a keyboard via USB. Compatible with Mac and PC, Wave Agent software provides comprehensive metadata editing tools for .WAV as well as file playback for sound files recorded on the company’s 7-Series recorders — 702, 702T, 722, 744T and 788T. www.sounddevices.com

m-audio dSP monitors The Studiophile DSM1 and DSM2 reference monitors from M-Audio have built-in DSP and were developed in collaboration with sister company Digidesign. The monitors have 1-inch Teteron soft-fabric tweeters with Neodymium magnets and custom lowfrequency drivers with anodised aluminium cones (6.5-inch on DSM1, 8-inch on DMS2). The onboard DSP manages the 4thorder digital crossover and provides EQ and ‘Acoustic Space Controls’.

The boxes have bass-reﬂex ports, SPDIF and AES inputs (up to 24-bit/192kHz), XLR and ¼-inch balanced inputs and are bi-ampliﬁed with Class D power amps — 100W (low frequency) and 80W (high-frequency).

The ProFire 610 FireWire audio interface builds on the M-Audio FireWire 410 and uses many of the design elements found in the ﬂagship ProFire 2626 interface. Two preamps with ‘Octane’ combine with multiple analogue and digital connection options, and an onboard DSP mixer to create multiple monitor mixes. Simultaneous 6 x 10 I-O permits the creation of 7.1 mixes in 24-bit/192kHz. www.m-audio.com

Schoeps open Cardioid The MK 22 microphone capsule is the newest addition to the Schoeps ‘Colette” series of modular condenser mics. This 21st capsule in the series offers a new type of directional pattern called ‘Open Cardioid’ that combines the directional effect of the MK 4 cardioid with the sonic character of the MK 21 wide cardioid, and is suited as a spot or soloist’s microphone. The open cardioid is less critical than the classic cardioid with respect to the movement of sound sources away from its main axis. This can be advantageous when miking vocal soloists and voices. A pair of these capsules is well suited for ‘quasi-ORTF’ stereophonic recording and the new STC 22 mounting bar facilitates this recording arrangement. The angle between capsules is 110° with a distance of 21cm. The Colette-series MK 22 capsule and its CCM 22 counterpart are available immediately. www.schoeps.de

Fearn valve recording channel

The DW Fearn VT15 combines the mic preamp from the VT-2, the DI input functionality of the new VT-3, the dynamics control of the VT-7 compressor and the mostoften used features of the VT-4 equaliser in one unit. www.asapeurope.com

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review gear Wheatstone releases

Soundcraft Si3

Wheatstone’s E2 Audio-over-IP mixing and routing system is described as a ‘second-generation’ product and has analogue and digital I-O, mixing, routing, front panel metering and profanity delay in a cost-effective, selfconﬁguring package. The Vorsis AP-2000 broadcast audio processor for FM and digital broadcasting has been completely redesigned. The 31-band processor has VoiceMaster Technology to separately optimise the processing o f v o i c e , S w e e t S p o t Te c h n o l o g y t o m a x i m i s e

consistency, and Vorsis Bass Management for bass enhancement. The Vorsis VP-8 multimode broadcast audio processor is designed for FM, AM, MPEG3, HE-AAC, HDC, and wideband VoIP applications. It has a 4-band AGC and 8-band limiter. www.wheatstone.com

Soundcraft has launched the Si3 as a mid-market partner console to the Vi Series. It all comes in one chassis — console surface, all input and output connections and power supply. The compact desk can handle 64 mono inputs, 4 stereo inputs and has full connectivity for all 35 output buses (24 aux/group, 8 matrix and LCR mix buses). Added to this are four Lexicon effects processors, 12 VCA groups, 8 mute groups and bargraph metering for 35 bus outputs. Above each fader is a rotary encoder, the function of which changes according to the mode selected. This ‘bank’ of encoders, known as the VCS or Virtual Channel Strip, can be set to control every function of a channel and also incorporates all the switching you would ﬁnd on a channel strip. Alternatively, in Global mode each encoder controls the same function for each channel. The encoder and OLED displays located in the output section are used primarily for output signal controls, such as EQ and dynamics, but also double as controls for the four onboard Lexicon processors. Like its bigger sisters the Soundcraft Vi4 and Vi6, the Si3 uses the patented Soundcraft FaderGlow system to show what mode faders are in. www.soundcraft.com

New mayah generation

New PD Series Location Recorders

Audio acquisition that’s as versatile as you are.

There are 14 models i n M a y a h ’s n e w C11 audio codec family with features distributed among the products to reach the best price/performance ratios. The products are based on Centauri II technology and each C11 device ﬁts in a half-rack space. All the models provide Audio-over-IP according to the EBU N/ACIP standard. Additionally C1140/1 and C1160/1 models support up to four ISDN BRI for transmission of audio with higher quality over ISDN. Other C11 family members offer dual Ethernet or ASI interfaces. With optional interfaces, a C11 can be turned into a POTS codec and can transmit and receive audio over wireless 3G/ UMTS networks. Advanced C11 versions offer simultaneous transmission and audio logging onto an SD card or USB memory stick. C11 supports G.711/G.722 and MPEG Layer 2/Layer 3 to MPEG-4 HE AACv2, AAC ELD and Linear (PCM) audio to 24-bit. An apt-X/Eapt-X range is offered optionally. Devices are easily stackable and can be run off a power supply that powers eight C11 units. www.mayah.com

Designed from the ground up to excel in ‘real-world’ applications, wherever you happen

www.fostex.jp Fostex Company, 3-2-35 Musashino, Akishima, Tokyo, Japan 196-0021 Email: info_sales@fostex.jp

to be in the world. The new PD606 (8-track) and PD204 (2-track) location recorders both offer spectacular audio quality, flexible recording to 12cm DVD-RAM, hard disc or a combination of both, rock solid timecode implementation, extended battery life, loads of ‘instant access’ knobs, buttons and switches plus a whole battery of interface options. But impressive features are only part of the script. Fostex’s unrivalled pedigree in designing and manufacturing world class location recorders for over 16 years and our unique understanding of the broadcast, film, tv and audio acquisition environments means that these new recorders aren’t just the best PD recorders ever, they’re simply the best professional location recorders available today.

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digitalmonitor enhanced RTW’s DigitalMonitor 10500X-PLUS has been enhanced with a new hardware platform providing an integrated loudness display in compliance with ITU guideline BS.1771. Further enhancements include a full-screen mode that enables an expanded display showing the individual instruments being used, as well as a Stereo Sound Analyser; a stereo version of the Surround Sound Analyser found in the SurroundMonitor and SurroundControl product lines. www.rtw.de

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gear WorldNet oslo enhanced

APT has introduced AES-EBU synchronisation for audio over IP, single frequency networking, support for SIP/SDP/ RTP and a new range of voice transport modules for its WorldNet Oslo platform. Adding an external AES-EBU synchronisation input to the IP transport module enables the use of a common audio reference clock in all units on the IP network. With a GPS input, the platform can enable single frequency networks over IP links with the precision of digital GPS timing. Support for SIP/SDP/RTP ensures compliance with the IP standards laid down by the N/ACIP project within the EBU and enables interoperability with all compliant manufacturers’ IP audio codecs. www.aptx.com

m 80 dynamic

mk3 Ultralite

Telefunken | USA has introduced the Ela M MOTU’s UltraLite-mk3 is a portable bus-powered FireWire 80 dynamic cardioid mic. The rugged mic audio interface with on-board effects and mixing. Features is designed for stage and studio include a compact form factor with rugged lightweight and combines a low-mass voice alloy chassis, two XLR/TRS ‘combo’-style mic inputs coil with an extremely thin Mylar with high-quality preamps, hi-Z guitar inputs, a total membrane and a high quality of 10 inputs and 14 outputs, 192kHz analogue I-O, a step-up output transformer. 32-bit ﬂoating point DSP for digital mixing and effects It ships with a leather pouch, processing, front-panel LCD programming, FireWire busm i c ro p h o n e c l i p a n d powered portability and standalone operation as a digital chrome head grill. mixer/processor. Telefunken | USA is also The mixer allows users to apply no-latency effects offering the M 80 in a processing to inputs, outputs or buses directly in limited edition Studio Set the UltraLite-mk3 hardware, independent of the computer. package that ships with an Input signals to the computer can be recorded wet, dry, or additional head grill wooden mic box. dry with a wet #24274 black - UAD-2 ad and Reso Junior 15/9/08 10:46 Page 1 monitor mix. www.telefunkenusa.com www.motu.com

dbx dis Dbx has two new DI boxes. The dB10 passive and dB12 active direct box have cast-metal chassis. The dB10 has a ¼-inch input and parallel ‘thru’ jacks, transformer isolation, balanced XLR output, and a ground lift switch. Its 3-position pad switch accommodates instrument, line level and speaker level signals and there are also polarity invert and high-cut ﬁltering functions. The dB12 includes all the features of the dB10 but in an active version. Driven by phantom power from a console’s mic input, a power LED shows power status. Its high input impedance and lownoise buffered active circuitry are said to preserve the tone and signal characteristics of the instrument source. www.dbxpro.com

Nuendo 4.2 Nuendo 4.2 and NEK 4.2 are available as a download for all registered users from www.steinberg.net. Nuendo 4.2 offers full support for Advanced Integration functionality with the MR816 CSX and MR816 X DSP studio hardware. These include user interface integration, True Integrated Monitoring and the use of VST3 plug-ins as DSP FX in the Nuendo mixer. Steinberg’s CC121 Advanced Integration Controller is also supported. Nuendo 4.2 offers enhanced support for Yamaha MOTIF XS series and the KX USB Music Studio series are now more tightly integrated. Nuendo 4.2.2 includes improvements to enhance its stability as well as several workﬂow enhancements. There’s support for VST Sound, a new and improved universal media management format. VST Sound is a fundamental part of VST3 and integrates audio and video ﬁles as well as plug-in and track presets directly into the Nuendo MediaBay. The 4.5 versions of Cubase and Cubase Studio also have support for the DSP studios and Advanced Integration controllers. Cubase 4.5 also introduces VST SoundT, an improved universal media management format that is a fundamental part of Steinberg’s VST3 standard www.steinberg.net

October 2008

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review

Lexicon PCM96 Lexicon’s long-awaited latest processor, which is not included in some console’s effects package or in a DAW front-end’s bells and whistles, harks back to the ﬁrm’s past but has an unmistakable go at interfacing to the future. JON THORNTON is in the room…

exicon has long been synonymous with highend studio reverb, with flagship models such as the 480L and more recently the 960L earning rack space and admiration in studios the world over. Not forgetting the other end of the marketplace, the company has also produced a steady stream of lower cost models, making its expertise in synthesised digital reverb and effects available to those without the fiscal wherewithal to stump up the significant amount of cash needed to acquire a 960L. But between these two extremes, there’s been little development in the way of new products for some time now. Instead, potential mid-range customers have had no real choice other than the PCM90 and PCM91, which are essentially updated versions of the PCM80 and PCM81 — designs that are more than a decade old. In one way this is completely understandable when the signal processing landscape has shifted as dramatically as it has done towards plug-ins, there were obviously some significant decisions for a hardware manufacturer like Lexicon to make. Assuming that abandoning hardware development entirely and focussing on plug-in creation isn’t an option, the choices are either to develop a plug-inbased solution running on dedicated hardware that streams to and from a DAW like SSL’s Duende, or to carry on with the dedicated hardware box route. The answer is that the new PCM96 is effectively both of these solutions in a single unit — the question is whether it really is the best of both worlds or whether it just sits on the fence… Unpacking the 1U shows that there’s certainly been a huge cosmetic shift from the PCM90/91 — the rather austere black has been replaced by a warm silver finish. Also changed for the better is the user interface. Much as I love the sound of the PCM80/90, I always find navigating around them deeply unintuitive. Here, a bright and easy to read (though still rather small) OLED display manages to give a lot more information, and most operations can be easily accessed by one large and three smaller push-to-click rotary encoders. Six dedicated pushbuttons, a Compact Flash card slot and basic LED metering for left and right signal input complete the front panel. On the rear panel, audio I-O comprises a pair of balanced inputs and outputs for analogue connectivity, and an AES input and output for digits — all on XLRs. The unit can operate at sample rates of 44.1, 48, 88.2 or 96kHz. Clock can be derived either internally or externally from the AES input or a separate Wordclock input on BNC. A pair each of FireWire ports and Ethernet ports finish things off round the back,

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giving remote control capability and (in the case of the FireWire ports) audio streaming options to and from a DAW — more of which later. Internally, the PCM96 features a single dedicated processor that can be configured to share its power between up to four virtual machines. Each of these machines can then run a preset based on the available algorithms. The simplest configuration to understand is what Lexicon terms ‘Super Stereo’, in which all available DSP is given over to a single stereo algorithm. Other variants include ‘Super Mono’ — the DSP here is split between two separate machines, each running a different (mono) algorithm — ‘Cascade Stereo’ using two virtual machines each running a stereo algorithm connected serially and some other variants. This is quite powerful, as entire presets can be saved storing the appropriate configuration, with each virtual machine populated by the desired algorithm. The limitation here is that in conventional operation, a maximum of two channels of physical input and output can be used to address the unit. There’s no way, for example, to divide the processor into two separate stereo virtual machines with independent input and outputs. Lexicon provides some useful system presets making use of the various permutations to get you started, or you can start from scratch and build your own. This is probably the most confusing part of the PCM96’s operation — but once you get the hang of the fact that a ‘system preset’ defines the configuration of virtual machines, and that then each machine can have its own ‘machine preset’ loaded into it, the rest is plain sailing. Editing machine presets is straightforward enough — the three smaller rotary encoders on the front panel are mapped to the parameters in each preset that you are most likely to want to tweak. Pushing the first of these encoders banks through a total of nine of these ‘soft row’ parameters. It wouldn’t be a Lexicon, though, if there weren’t a vast array of parameters available to tweak in each algorithm to fine tune the sound and any of these can be freely assigned to the ‘soft row’ bank for editing. The algorithms themselves are all new, although some of them are deliberate recreations of some of the older Lexicon reverbs. On offer are Chamber, Random Delay, Hall, Random Hall, Plate, Dual Delay, Resonant Chords, Chorus/Flange, Concert Hall, Room and Signal Generator. A quick audition of some of the machine presets in each of these areas very quickly reveals a sound that is classically Lexicon — lush and rich with plenty of complexity and realism for what is, after all, synthesised reverb. The new Hall algorithms provide resolution

an excellent contrast to the (vintage sounding) Concert Hall algorithms. They sound richer and smoother during the decay phase coupled with a very gentle and unobtrusive initial build-up. Most impressive though is the Room algorithm. Although the PCM96 doesn’t use convolution in it’s processing, the Room algorithms are modelled on actual impulse responses taken from a number of real rooms and spaces. If necessary, a reverb tail can then be added to these early reflections. The result is a collection of very useful and convincing ambiences that are equally at home in music and post applications. In terms of editing and tweaking, existing Lexicon users will feel right at home, particularly those who are familiar with the 300L or 480L. There’s the same wide range of parameters with familiar names and actions, plus a couple of newer additions. Most notable among these are much more flexible multimode filtering options at various stages in the algorithms, allowing greatly enhanced tailoring of the tonal characteristics of the reverbs, and a parameter that allows the perceived stereo width of the reverb tail to be altered via matrix processing. So far, the discussion has centred around using the PCM96 as a conventional standalone box. However for DAW-centric users there is another possibility, which brings the FireWire and Ethernet connectivity of the unit into play. Accompanying software (Mac only) installs a number of components. The first is a control panel application that appears in System Preferences. This allows you to define the communication interface required (Ethernet or FireWire), and acts as the tool to perform firmware updates. Also installed is a PCM96 plug-in, in both Audio Unit and VST formats. Pro Tools users (as per this review) can also install an RTAS wrapper to allow its use, although it should run natively in Nuendo and Logic. The simplest option with the plug-in is to use it as a GUI remote for the unit. In this mode, instantiating it in Pro Tools will tell you which of the available inputs of the device it is mapped to (either left or right for a mono instance, or both for a stereo instance). The plug-in window then gives complete control of loading machine presets and fine-tuning of parameters, always remembering that the actual audio will need to be routed to and from the DAW separately. As soon as the plug-in is instantiated, the front panel display of the PCM96 switches to ‘Application Lockout’, and stays that way until the DAW program quits or the PCM96 is power cycled. Ethernet or FireWire can be used for this remote control functionality, but if FireWire is chosen for control, you can also set (in the Control Panel October 2008

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review software) audio to be streamed between DAW and the PCM96 over the same FireWire connection. This method of operation effectively makes the PCM96 work like a plug-in using remote DSP — a la Duende. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. Latency is an obvious issue, although automatic delay compensation in Pro Tools more or less nails this. And in this mode there is no way to use the cascaded machine configurations of the PCM96 for serial processing. On the plus side, it does allow up to four simultaneous audio streams to and from the unit in any combination of stereo or mono virtual machines, overcoming the limitation that exists when using the PCM96 with the analogue or AES I-O. In either of these two plug-in modes, the GUI is simple and clear, with a set of expanding windows and tabs to access and adjust all parameters — overall a much quicker experience than using the front panel controls. This experience is tempered a little by some niggles and stability issues, despite upgrading the unit’s firmware and the plug-in software to the latest versions before commencing the review. First on the list here is the fact that it takes some time for the computer to properly see the PCM96 — you often need to go through several cycles of inserting the plug-in and then removing it before Pro Tools acknowledges that the device actually exists. Once communication is established things are generally fine so this might not be as big an issue had I not experienced a significant number of cases of Pro Tools unexpectedly quitting on an otherwise very stable system. It’s hard to identify exactly what caused these, but they seemed to be generally related to activating the plug-in or duplicating a track including inserts. When it happens, going through the process of rebooting both Pro Tools and the PCM96, and then re-establishing communication puts a serious dent in

your workflow. So, at the moment, we seem to have a story of two halves. As a standalone box, the PCM96 is more than worthy of its illustrious badge in terms of its sound and performance, and marks a huge step forward in general user friendliness and flexibility. For anybody wanting that big Lexicon sound for significantly less money than a 960L the PCM96 is an excellent choice. On the other hand, using it in conjunction with a DAW lacks a little in stability — it’s certainly not the best of both worlds yet. The good news is that software is software, and I’m sure that the remaining stability issues can and will be sorted out in the near future. And you can, of course, simply ignore that layer of functionality in the meantime and enjoy what is a simply lovely sounding stereo reverb. ■

ProS

a dedicated reverb that fills an obvious gap in the lexicon range; variety and quality of presets on offer; user interface a huge improvement over PCm80/90; flexibility of standalone or daW integrated operation.

CoNS

display could be a little bigger; only two simultaneous channels of i-o in standalone mode; plug-in mode stability needs improvement.

Contact lEXiCoN, US: Website: www.lexiconpro.com UK, Sound technology: +44 1462 480000

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www.resolutionmag.com October 2008

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review

Sound Devices 788T It’s compact, intelligent and eminently up to all the tasks a sound recordist could throw at it. NEIL HILLMAN has gr8 expectations for the 788T and ponders the signiﬁcance of the number while counting his ﬁngers.

or those of us involved with audio, eight is an interesting number; and not just for our formative relationships with eight-bit computer systems, the eight-bits-make-a-byte schoolboy mantra, or even the reminder that the first real plug-and-play media was the 8-track cartridge. No, it runs deeper than that — 8 is also the atomic number of Oxygen (This better not be heading towards Jean-Michel Jarre. Ed), and there are eight notes in an octave of a major or minor diatonic scale. But even before that relationship was formalised, eight was significant: in Europe’s middle ages, eight was the number of unmoving stars in the sky, and symbolised incoming planetary energy, while further East, exactly eight Islamic angels carried The Holy Throne of Allah to heaven (Enough of eight already… Ed). Even the Buddha’s principle teaching manifests itself as the Noble Eight Fold Path. Which all leads me to believe that it was therefore pre-ordained that I, and the other chosen-ones like me, should become sound mixers: because notwithstanding my twin opposing thumbs, the number of digits I possess to move faders with, is eight. Perfect timing then, in an evolutionary sense, for the eagerly awaited Sound Devices 788T, launched at NAB 2008; an 8-track location recorder that acts as the flagship and a coming-of-age for the Sound Devices 7-series product range, which up to now has been limited to a maximum 4-track capability. It has some stiff competition as it steps up a league, however, its peer group includes the serious engineering of the 6-track Nagra VI, the Fostex PD6 and the yet-to-beseen Sonosax SX-62R, the 8-track HHB Portadrive and, of course, the Deva 2 from Zaxcom with its integral 8-input mixer and 10-track capability. Even with just a model number on the front face, the 788T is unmistakably a member of the Sound Devices 7-series family; and that is certainly no bad thing. They all share similar satin and brushed 24

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aluminium looks, and equally one other important characteristic — the ability to inspire confidence from the very first touch. The 788T certainly looks as capable as the other 7-series products — the 744T, the 722T and the baby 702T — for handling the very harshest of environments, so what does the 788T offer a location sound recordist, to get them to take it on the road with them in the first place? In short, eight high-quality line/mic inputs with 48V phantom powering, peak limiters and adjustable high-pass filters; coupled with a routing flexibility that allows each input to be directed towards mixed or isolated tracks, which can then be recorded with variable Time Code rates, to either an internal 160Gb SATA hard drive or on-board Compact Flash media with UDMA support, or sent externally to a FireWire or DVD-RAM drive (although the bus-powering of those drives does depend on the 788T working from its mains supply). The 788T can even act as a high-speed mass storage device for Mac and Widows computers equipped with USB2 and FireWire 400/800; and if that précis is the kind of thing that sounds interesting to you, you will find the detail of the 788T even more so. With more and more location shoots requiring the sound recordist to provide feeds to and from multiple camera set-ups, the 788T can hold its own in terms of connectivity at least. For cameras with AES3 audio capability — such as the Sony XDCAM range of disk-based camcorders — it offers eight channels of balanced AES3 digital input and six channels of balanced AES3 digital output. The 788T can be clocked from Word clock or from video syncs, and the on-board timecode reader/generator includes an auto-record feature to chase external record-run signal sources, as well as the ability to Record Run, Free Run, Free Run/Jam Once (sniffing and jamming to an external timecode source) and 24 Hour Run (when the generator free-runs from the time-of-day clock resolution

on power-up). Conveniently, metadata such as roll, disk or take number, or the shooting date — the stuff normally assigned to tape User Bits or Broadcast wave iXML or bEXT header chunks — are easily entered by using the plug-in USB keyboard option; more suited to a production mixer with a trolley of course, rather than a recordist operating ‘over-the-shoulder’. The analogue line/mic inputs are on the left-hand side of the machine; the first four being XLR-3F sockets, with inputs 5 to 8 being neatly arranged space-saver TA3 connectors. I would be interested to know if the mic amps are the same as the 744 I tested a while ago now, because on this 788T they seemed even quieter — which is no mean feat, given how impressively quiet the earlier models were. Alongside the four small input sockets on this left-hand side is the knurled knob of the headphone volume control, an infinitely adjustable pot. The bottom panel houses the 7.2V Sony L-type Li-ion camcorder battery, secured in place by a simple but neat pivoting latch and ball-catch; the Compact Flash slot for Type I, Type II and Microdrives; the USB-A female connector for the USB keyboard, and the multifunction DE-15 pin connector that acts as AES3 inputs 1-8, AES3 outputs 5-6 and Logic In and Out. The right-hand side panel is busier, yet still neat, with four TA3 connectors carrying the analogue balanced outputs, next to the two headphone sockets — ¼-inch and 3.5mm — alongside which is the mirror image of the right hand panel’s headphone volume knob, a multifunction rotary switch that curiously does not control the volume of the headphones it sits next to, but instead steps through and selects the menu parameters on the front panel screen — it’s the only illogically positioned control on the whole device. Analogue outputs 5 and 6 are available unbalanced on a 3.5mm socket, situated next to the twin October 2008

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review

headphone sockets. The balanced AES3 output pairs of 1&2 and 3&4 sit on two further TA3 connectors, next to the familiar miniature 5-pin Lemo timecode I-O connector, above which are located the FireWire 800 and 400 sockets, used to connect the 788T to a computer or a FAT32-formatted FireWire drive; and a USB-B socket that is used to connect the 788T’s internal hard drive and Compact Flash card to a computer. There are BNC connectors for Word clock/ video sync. In and Word clock out are mounted on an elegantly recessed end-panel at the bottom right corner of this side, accommodating the tall nature of their bayonet sleeves, and also housing the 4-pin Hirose connector for the external 10–18V DC In. The first third of the front panel is taken up with the eight rotary input-gain pots, surrounded by a tristate LED ring showing their input activity: glowing green is an indication that a digital or analogue signal is present at the input, and an increase in intensity means an increase in the signal level; with red showing the input level is approaching clipping, and with yellow showing the input limiter is attenuating the input. Between the two rows of rotary pots are non-latching, spring-loaded toggle switches that are used as input selectors and solo switches: push to the left for odd numbered inputs, to the right for the even inputs. Selecting an input using this switch solo’s the channel in the headphones, and displays the channel settings in the display window for as long as the switch is held. The central LCD display screen is

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beautifully backlit according to its operating state: Red when in Record, Green in Playback mode and White in Standby mode, and provides the essential sound recordist HUD — showing battery level, time and date, Fs and timecode frame rate, file name and number, the drive in use, bit depth, the monitored channels, and largest of all, the timecode display itself. At each corner of the rectangular screen are small, oval, rubberised push buttons: the one top left — Menu — accesses the set-up menu tree, which is scrolled through with the right-hand panel’s rotary selection switch. Bottom left is the HDD file-viewer button, used to navigate between storage media, folders and files, editing file properties and for selecting files for playback. Top right is the Tone key, which is pressed and held to activate the oscillator; its frequency, level and routing being determined in the set-up menu. The bottom right button toggles the intensity of the LCD screen and front panel’s backlighting. Centrally below the LCD screen are familiar transport buttons for FWD, Play and REW; further to the right are the Stop and REC buttons. Two further pushbuttons, above the Level Meter LEDs, control Input Track Routing and Power On/Off. When the Input and Stop buttons are simultaneously pushed, the routing menu is accessed, allowing any of the inputs to be routed to any of the recording tracks. Multiple tracks can be routed to a single track to create a mono-mix or sent to a pair of tracks to create a stereo recording. Eight 13-segment Level Meter LEDs

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indicate recording level with respect to dBFS, and their ballistics and peak-hold times are selected through the eminently straightforward set-up menu. The first two segments of each pair of the track Level Meters are Track Arm LEDs, and these show solid blue when at least one input is routed to it. As for the recordings themselves, the 788T can record either mono or polyphonic interleaved .WAV files, the tracks of which can be later separated by using the Sound Devices Wave Agent software; and each track in a file can be given a unique and descriptive name, making tracks easily recognised in postproduction. If it sounds like a complicated product, be reassured that it is; but then they all are in this group. The reality is that the 788T is superbly engineered, and in use it is more subtly sophisticated than devilishly deep. In fact all it takes to get confidently underway with this capable recorder is a smattering of familiarity with file-based recording; that and a pair of thumbs opposite your eight fingers — the input faders are rotary knobs. ■

ProS

infinity and cosmic consciousness are synonymous with the number 8, apparently; well here’s two more: affinity and cost-consciousness; at less than US$6,000 the 788t is a steal at almost whatever the exchange rate.

CoNS

it’s a recorder, not a mixer; those rotary faders are just a little too fiddly and un-feeling to herald the end of the dedicated mixer, quite yet.

Contact SoUNd dEviCES, US: Website: www.sounddevices.com

21/9/08 21:11:15

review

Universal Audio UAD-2 Solo Universal Audio is already shipping its newly launched UAD-2 powered plug-ins and PCIe DSP accelerator card for DAWs in three different strengths and with three different bundle ﬂavours. ROB JAMES savours the long-awaited successor to the UAD-1.

niversal Audio has a pedigree that runs all the way back to Bill Putnam Snr's signature hardware products, such as the Teletronix LA-2A and UA 1176 and not forgetting the indispensable Urei 565 ‘Little Dipper’ Filter Set. The company now makes successful reproductions of classics but has also made a considerable name for itself with the UAD-1 series of DSP cards and expanders. These run some of the most desirable plug-ins around including recreations of UA classic boxes, the excellent DreamVerb and Cambridge EQ, along with licensed recreations of classics from other manufacturers I reviewed the original UAD-1 back in 2002 and found it impressive. It is important to get your head around the philosophy of this approach. I don’t believe for one moment that the user experience of a software recreation of classic hardware matches up to the real thing. It isn’t simply a matter of faithful reproduction of sonic character — it’s the whole deal of tactile knobs and switches, the smell of cooking insulation and the sheer physical presence of the originals. That said I’m a pragmatist. I’ve known and loved a lot of audio hardware, not least during many years spent behind Neve consoles, but I could never afford to buy now nor do I have the space to accommodate them.

So, if convincing copies are available in software at affordable, if not ‘pocket money’, prices then that’s a good thing. The UAD-1 was good for its time but nothing stands still in IT and CPUs now have the power to do pretty much anything that a dedicated DSP chip can achieve, with the bonus that every time you buy a new CPU you get more power and more instances of plug-ins. Is there still a case for add-on DSP cards? UA obviously thinks so because it has just released this series of 1 lane PCI-e cards based on Analog Devices Sharc 21369 floating-point processors. I remember that UA was rather reticent about the processor employed in the UAD-1 but it is not so shy now it can emblazon a big AD Sharc logo on the UAD-2 carton. The new range comprises three cards — Solo, Duo and Quad – and as the names imply these have one, two or four Sharcs respectively. Each card comes in one of three packages that vary the bundled plug-ins and on-line store credit included: Basic, Flexi and Nevana (guess what’s in that bundle). If you have enough free slots or an expansion chassis it is possible to install up to four UAD-2s in the same machine. I had the most basic (and thus the cheapest) package, the UK£339 (+ VAT) UAD-2 Solo, which comes with the standard bundle and a US$50 voucher to use at the online store. Despite being the baby of the range the UAD-2 Solo still manages to offer an average of 2.5 times as much grunt as the original UAD-1 card. This means that not only do you get more instances of plug-ins but there is scope for more processor intensive plugs to be developed. Installation is straightforward. Software first, followed by the card, then downloading an authorisation file for the bundled plug-ins. UA has cunningly included 14-day trial versions of every plug

Lexicon Reinvents Reverb

TECHNOLOGY

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

21/9/08 21:11:19

review

in the range. Get thee behind me Satan! For the present, the new cards do not support RTAS and some of the original plug-ins have not yet been ported to the new architecture but all this will come free in a subsequent software revision. I popped the card into a Mac Pro running Final Cut Pro and SoundTrack and was up and running in very short order. Despite the 366-page PDF manual, operation is mostly self explanatory. A control panel application with several pages enables you to view the currently installed plug-ins and their license status, activate them, monitor resource levels and change configuration options. It is evident from these that a lot of work has gone into ensuring maximum compatibility with different hardware platforms and DAW software hosts. However, you should consult the list of compatible hosts before purchase as there are some surprising omissions, e.g. Pyramix. Such applications may well work but there are no guarantees. Turning to the plug-ins themselves, when I reviewed the UAD-1, although I was impressed by

the various bundled and optional vintage plugs, I was, and still am, knocked out by RealVerb-Pro. The good news is that while RealVerb Pro is still included, UAD has developed it still further into DreamVerb. The bad news is that it’s a chargeable option although at a very reasonable price. I’ll stick my neck out here and say that, used carefully, this is the best thing I’ve heard since the original Quantec Room Simulator. UAD-1 and UAD-2 versions of all plug-ins are different but, at least for the present, UA is offering free updates to the UAD-2 version for existing owners. Other plugs that are new since I last looked include Neve, Harrison and Helios channel strips and the SPL Transient Designer (not yet compatible with UAD-2). My all-time favourite analogue console is an older Neve and my all-time favourite compressor/ limiter is the Neve 33609. Reproductions of this and the 1081 Equaliser, 1073 Equaliser and 88RS Channel Strip, all exclusive to UAD, are very welcome. Sadly there isn’t a version of my favourite Neve EQ, the 33114. Not having an 88R to hand, or the other hardware modules, I cannot comment objectively on the veracity of the simulations but they do produce a highly seductive sound. The 33609 certainly performs exactly as my memory tells me the (still current) hardware 33609 does. I do miss the tactile experience though, but the price is a lot more manageable. All the Neve processors come with ‘SE’ versions that provide less exact simulations but with a lower processing overhead. One of the joys of UA’s hardware and software combinations is the complete absence of zipper noise and glitches when altering parameters. All of which

makes me as happy as a pig in poo. All plug-in parameters can be fully automated, sample rates of up to 192kHz are supported and many of the plug-ins up-sample for maximum quality. I consider these devices to be a perfectly reasonable compromise between somewhat soulless plug-ins and expensive and bulky hardware boxes, analogue or digital. They have more character than many native or TDM plug-ins while being a great deal more affordable and practical for many of us than a room full of hardware. If you haven’t already heard Universal Audio processors, hardware and software, you really should make the effort to do so. ■

ProS

Exclusive plug-ins; extra horsepower for supported daWs; Ua’s own reverbs.

CoNS

Not compatible with all daWs; not yet up-to-date with all previous plugins; best effects use a lot of available resources.

EXtraS

Solo, duo or Quad Uad-2 cards can be mixed or matched in any combination of up to four cards. Each Uad-2 is powered by single and multi-chip configurations and offers 2.5x (Solo), 5x (duo) and 10x (Quad) the power of a Uad-1.

Contact UNivErSal aUdio, US: Website: www.uaudio.com UK, Source: +44 208 962 5080

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

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A Harman International Company

21/9/08 21:11:23

review

Sony PCM-D50 New Sony pro audio products are quite a rare sight these days, so when ANDY DAY had the opportunity to get hold of the new PCM-D50 portable recorder he jumped at the chance and promptly ran into the Antipodean bush with it.

he D50 is a stereo portable recorder that records to solid state memory using PCM. This might not sound like anything particularly new but the D50 is a simple to use, high quality recorder that is perfect for recording on the go. It has built-in electret condenser microphones that can be positioned to achieve X-Y or wide stereo recordings. This makes it easy to take out on location and record some really great sounding atmos tracks. It can record at a wide range of sample rates, from 22kHz to 96kHz in 16 or 24-bit. Unlike some other portable recorders on the market it has memory built-in (4Gb), so you don’t have to splash out on memory cards but you can add another 4Gb by using the memory stick slot on the side of the unit to give you nearly 6 hours recording time at 48kHz, 16-bit. After recording you can connect the D50 to your PC (or Mac) using USB and copy the files onto hard disk, ready to import into your DAW or editing system. The construction is really solid. Unlike some of the budget solid state recorders out there, Sony has done a great job in making it feel chunky and professional. The controls are well laid out and there are very few menu items that you have to deal with for basic recording. This makes it ideal for radio reporters and journalists. You’re not stuck with the built-in mics either; there is a stereo mini jack on the side for connecting an external stereo mic and there is an optional XLR adapter pack that includes phantom power. The LCD has a switchable backlight and is very clearly laid out with some ‘long range’ metering. A Display button allows you to toggle the display from recording time to remaining memory time. You can also use the D50 to record line level signals from analogue or digital sources (via a dual purpose stereo mini jack/optical jack) and this opens up the possibility for its use as a portable 96kHz mastering recorder. Another nice ‘mastering’ feature is the inclusion of Super Bit Mapping for 16-bit recordings, which improves the dynamic range significantly. Taking the D50 out for a spin couldn’t be easier; just pop in four AA batteries and you’re ready to go. The batteries are supposed to last for around 12 hours if you’re recording and monitoring and this rises to around 14 hours if you use rechargeable AAs. I headed out in to the bush to record bird and atmos sounds and the results were great, especially with the wide stereo position of the 28

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Drawbacks with the in-built mics include the occasional bit of handling noise, which can be improved by attaching a hand-held mic stand to the built in mic stand adapter, and some wind noise but there is an optional Rycote-style windshield available to improve this. While recording you can divide a track by pressing the divide button and this is useful when you’re recording performances. I recorded a couple of different performances at my local bar including a jazz singer accompanied by a pianist and double bass player. The quality was amazingly good and while it’s no replacement for a proper live recording it is a useful reference for musicians to hear what they really sound like live. For a louder band I switched in the built-in limiter and padded the mics down and the results were still good. The D50 can also apply a digital pitch control, which allows you to slow down or speed up a recording without changing the pitch. The range is from -75% to +100%. The audio quality does suffer though, particularly at the extremes, but it’s still very useful for musicians that want to slow down recordings for transcription. Other extra features include a low cut filter to help with wind noise (in addition to the optional windshield) and the ability to play MP3 files, making this a very posh iPod. The PCM-D50 (UK£460 + VAT) is a very capable portable recorder, with plenty of uses. It’s quite reasonably priced too and way better build quality than some of other portable options out there. The lack of timecode capabilities is disappointing and restricting for some TV and film applications. Generally though it’s definitely worth a try if you’re in the market for something that’s easy to use and very portable. ■

ProS

very well built; easy to use; good quality mics; Super Bit mapping; sample rates up to 96kHz, 24-bit.

CoNS

Xlr mics need an extra adaptor module; built-in mics susceptible to wind noise; be wary of handling noise; no timecode capability.

EXtraS

the PCm-d50 adopts many of the features of the Sony’s original PCm-d1 model but at a lower price.

in-built mics. I got some really wide bush-type atmos recordings and with the SBM it maintained a really high S/N ratio. resolution

Contact SoNY, JaPaN: Website: www.sony.co.uk/biz/view

October 2008

21/9/08 21:11:27

0300_

Audio

perfection

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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

23/4/07 12:28:45 pm 21/9/08 21:11:27

review

SSL Pro-Convert V5 On the day that an intrepid manufacturer released the second example of a DAW onto the market something else also arrived — a nasty and persistent problem. As workstations have multiplied and grown in capability and complexity this perennial bugbear has become the stuff of nightmares. ROB JAMES refers, of course, to ﬁle and project interchange.

onversion between most current audio file formats is now a trivial, if boring, exercise, although there is sometimes the attendant risk of degradation. Legacy Mac formats such as SD2 are best avoided simply because of the resource-fork problem. This can be dealt with but can also be a major pain especially across networks. However, this nuisance pales into insignificance when compared to the fun and games to be had when attempting to convert entire projects. In many ways this is directly analogous with converting video editing EDLs (Edit Decision Lists) and in fact video EDL formats, or at any rate modified video EDL formats, are often used to move simple projects between audio workstations. In their most accessible form, EDLs are text lists of instructions that tell the hardware to play sections of given audio (or video) media files at specific times and for specified durations out of specified outputs. So straightforward are formats like the granddaddy of them all, CMX, that, with care, they can be edited in a simple text editor. At there most complex, EDLs can and do contain a wealth of other information about fade duration and shape, crossfades, panning, EQ and plug-ins, automation and metadata, etc. The more complex EDL formats often cannot be read by a human directly and are not amenable to modification in a simple text editor. Most DAWs can, in theory at least, import and export in a number of formats for project interchange purposes. Some cannot and indeed, despite paying lip service to open formats and interchange, one or two manufacturers make life difficult for anyone wanting to try. In reality, the whole business of interchange is fraught with problems. Even when a workflow is working nicely, a small change in either the source or destination software can cause major problems. By far the best answer is to stay with one ‘standard’ all the way through a project. Recognising that this is often just not practical in the real world, any tool that can help with the process has got to be welcome. Written originally by German software house Cui Bono Soft, founded by Axel Gutzler and Wolfgang Packeiser, Pro-Convert has been around since 2000 as EDL Convert. The last version I can find details 30

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for was 4.2 in 2004 with a price around the 250 to 350 dollar mark. SSL bought the software in 2007 and have now produced a new version, ProConvert V5, at UK£349 (+ VAT). Pro-Convert approaches the interchange problem on several levels. At the top is full native compatibility. This means taking a project from one DAW or NLE in its native format and converting it into the native format of another with everything translated (apart from mixer snapshots, plugins and MIDI, which it doesn’t deal with). The next level requires the source to export in an intermediate ‘wrapper’ format such as XML or OMF. At the lowest level Pro-Convert can use the EDL formats with the broadest compatibility such as CMX. It can also convert between audio media file formats when necessary. The killer feature is its ability to read and write Pro Tools Session formats above version 5.0. I’ll repeat that, Pro-Convert can read and write Pro Tools 5.1-7.x, *.ptf and *.pts format Session files (and V5.0 as well of course!) The current list of native formats supported also includes Adobe Audition, Steinberg Wavelab montage and, naturally enough, SSLs SoundScape. Other applications, such as Samplitude/Sequoia, SADiE, Final Cut Pro, Logic and Nuendo, all require resolution

projects to be saved in a suitable interchange format. Others, such as Pyramix, Avid, Sonar, Digital Perfomer and Audiofile, currently have to use OMF (or XML) as the intermediate and a number of templates are provided for this. The default parameters work well enough in most cases, but when they don’t there is a vast range of tweaks. When things don’t work out quite as anticipated the problem often lies in the capabilities of either the source or target. This is one application where reading the manual really is likely to save a lot of time and head scratching. A detailed index would be helpful. Although 32-bit Windows only, Pro-Convert should also run on Intel Macs via Boot-Camp, Parallels, etc. Installation is simple enough and there is a dongle for copy protection. Machine requirements are modest although if you are planning to do a lot of media file conversion, then the more grunt the better. It’s worth noting that despite the fact that this is primarily an audio tool it will deal successfully with references to a single video file. Since it cannot handle plug-ins or mixer layouts (to avoid an exponential rise in complexity) where these are an issue you need to export projects with ‘frozen’ or consolidated tracks with the effects included. Also worth mentioning is that it is a good idea to stick to the most common audio file formats and avoid exotic multichannel interleaved types. The interface is as simple as it can be with browser windows and dialog boxes as necessary. In operation I experienced some aberrations but, with careful attention to the settings these were relatively minor. SSL assures me that development work is proceeding apace to include more native formats. Tom Schuh, Pro-Convert product manager had this to say: ‘We are in discussion with ALL major DAW manufacturers and working hard to eliminate the missing names in the list of Pro-Convert supported applications. The list of supported DAWs will change over the course of the next 12 months, however in which order other DAWs will be supported heavily depends on the pace of contribution by other manufacturers.’ Pro-Convert V5 is an essential addition to any facility house toolkit. Conversion is an imperfect science and the quicksand is constantly shifting as the DAW manufacturers update their software. It will never be a substitute for a properly designed workflow but, when it works well, it does open up a lot of possibilities. For music it means an easier route for people who wish to use the DAW they are familiar with in the early stages of production and later move to a different studio for final mixing. Similarly, in sound for picture it will enable less fraught collaboration between people using different DAWs. In the professional context, if it saves a day or so of reconstruction or sheer fiddling about, ProConvert only has to work once, on one project, to justify its asking price. ■

ProS

reads and writes Pro tools 5.x – 7.x session formats; lots of tweaks; cheaper than a day messing about.

CoNS

Not a perfect process (but what is?); limited number of daWs supported natively; operator intelligence required.

Contact Solid StatE loGiC, UK: Website: www.solid-state-logic.com

October 2008

21/9/08 21:11:50

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21/9/08 21:12:08

review

SE4 Matched Pair SE Electronics’ SE4 is designed as a replacement for the popular SE3, which itself was top of the range of its low cost but high performing stick condensers. JON THORNTON discovers that it’s all in the chassis and in the replaceable heads.

hen reviewing this original SE range of stick mics — SE1a, SE2a and SE3 — I remember viewing the SE3 as the pick of the crop with its sweet, neutral sound at a very affordable price point. In all it was a very accomplished microphone, so why the replacement of it with the SE4? Well, SE clearly knew that the SE3 was fine as it was, as they state that the SE4 is engineered to sound and perform exactly the same as the SE3. And according to James Young from Sonic Distribution, users around the world also voted with their feet, resulting in the SE3 vastly outselling the SE1a and SE2a. No problem with that, except for the fact that SE3 users began wondering why it wasn’t available with interchangeable capsules like its cheaper sibling, the SE2a. The problem came down to the chassis design of the SE3, in that although the capsule unscrews neatly, the rear entry ports were formed in the main chassis itself. So developing an elegant way of adding capsules with different polar patterns became slightly problematic. The SE4 has a re-engineered chassis to overcome this and

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allows the use of interchangeable capsules, with cardioid, omni and fig-8 versions available. The name change is there to reinforce the fact that the new capsules aren’t backwardly compatible with the old SE3. The SE4 is available singly, or as a matched pair as supplied for the review. The matched pair is supplied in a compact and sturdy aluminium flightcase containing the two microphones, two small suspension mounts and a useful stereo bar. There are also cut-outs in the flightcase to accept up to four additional capsules, so you could carry the whole set around in one neat package. Unfortunately, these are an extra cost option and weren’t supplied with the review models, so we’ll content ourselves with the standard fit cardioid option. Side by side, the SE3 and SE4 with the cardioid capsule look almost identical, save for the point at which the capsule unscrews. While they were at it though, SE added a two-position pad with settings of -10 and -20dB (the SE3 had only the -10dB setting). The high pass filter stays the same as before. Construction is very much what we’ve come to expect from SE, functional more than elegant, resolution

but it gets the job done and is well put together. In extended use though, some of my own SE3s have shown that the fine mesh protecting the diaphragm can be a little fragile in terms of how securely it’s anchored to the frame, and it’s not clear whether this has been addressed in the redesign. Accessing the internals is also easy, in common with other SE mics, and reveals an almost identical circuit board to the SE3 (the only change here seems related to the additional pad setting). Discrete components are used throughout and a transformer handles final output duties. Sensitivity is quoted at around 12mV/Pa and equivalent noise at 14dB (A) — fairly respectable figures for a small diaphragm microphone. The matched pair also comes with individualised frequency response graphs, which show that the mics are fairly consistently matched to within 0.5dB or so, albeit with a response that seems lumpier than you might expect in the bottom octaves. In use, it’s clear that the aim of not changing the characteristics of the mic has been achieved. Side by side comparisons with an SE3 give near identical performances — my SE3s sound a little softer but I’d put that down to diaphragm ageing more than anything else. Overall tonality is slightly bright and forward, just managing to avoid sounding too brittle or harsh on sound sources like acoustic guitar and piano. There’s a good sense of weight to the bottom octaves, and a progressive and smooth off-axis response. SPL handling is also good, but the provision of that extra 10dB of pad comes in very useful when used for close miking guitar cabs, an application they are really suited to. Moving slightly away from the typical pop and rock studio context, I also tried them as a coincident and near-coincident (ORTF) pair using the supplied stereo bar. Venue and source here was the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool with a string quartet, set back from the performers by about 10ft. Perhaps slightly unfairly the comparison here was a pair of Sennheiser MKH-800s on a cardioid setting, but the SE4s acquitted themselves reasonably well. The sound here was slightly harsher and more ‘voiced’ than I’d prefer, and they’re noticeably noisier than the MKH-800s. But this needs placing firmly in the context of price. The Sennheiser solution is almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the SE4 pair. And I’m not sure that I’d ever stick an MKH800 in front of a guitar cab. The SE4 remains just as impressive in terms of price and performance as the SE3 was, and has the added flexibility of interchangeable capsules. And with a properly matched pair available that’s extremely flexible in studio applications as well as delivering workmanlike location recordings, they make a lot of sense. ■

ProS

added ﬂexibility over SE3 with same overall sound; competitive price; matched pair a nice compact solution.

CoNS

Struggle a little as distant microphones; may be a little too forward sounding for some applications.

EXtraS

the SE4 allows the use of interchangeable capsules with cardioid, omni and fig-8 versions available.

Contact SE ElECtroNiCS, CHiNa: Website: www.seelectronics.com UK, Sonic distribution: -44 845 500 2500

October 2008

21/9/08 21:12:19

Focal

Colourless. Clean. Transparent. Smooth. CMS Active Nearfield Monitors from Focal Professional Based upon Focal proprietary driver technology, the new CMS 65 and CMS 50 simply offer outstanding performance and exceptional versatility. We could bore you with the superbly finished aluminium die-cast cabinets which offer unconditional rigidity, the internal damping and bracing which banishes unwanted colorations, or the unique Al/Mg (aluminium/magnesium) inverted dome tweeter which easily extends up to 28kHz at -3dB, with a close to perfection pulse response. But you probably just want to know how they perform. And how much they cost. Brilliantly. And less than you think.

Focal Professional Users

Distributed by SCV London: Call 020 8418 1470 for your nearest dealer

www.scvlondon.co.uk

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Del Palmer

Chris Tsangarides

Sean Genockey

Kate Bush

Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Tom Jones

Manic Street Preachers, Kula Shaker, Tom McRae

- uses the Twin 6BE

-uses the Solo 6BE

- uses the Solo 6BE

21/9/08 21:12:21 10/9/08 15:42:41

review

Drawmer A2D2 DMS-3 Outboard conversion has long been an accepted equipment category but it hasn’t always been appreciated for all the right reasons. ROB JAMES says the game has moved on recently and that it’s important to keep revisiting the subject to stay on top.

ou already have a well stocked mic cupboard and one or more ‘boutique’ mic amps that you love even more than the dog/cat. You also have the killer, all singing, all dancing DAW. So how do you ensure that the pristine analogue output from the mic pre still sounds the same when it is converted to digital and is in the workstation domain? The importance of top quality conversion is becoming ever more apparent. We’ve known for years that with anything digital the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) rule applies. Convertor chipsets have improved dramatically in recent years and extremely high quality conversion is now within most people’s reach. But there is another issue; clocking. If the

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system clock is imprecise or unstable then results are likely to be ultimately disappointing — no matter how good the convertor chips may be. The A2D2 DMS-3 AES Grade 1 Dual Output A-D convertor, to give it its full title, combines an AES Grade 1 Word clock generator with high quality A-D conversion, precision analogue controls and, as the name states quite unequivocally, dual outputs. In fact, each of these dual outputs has three concurrent connections. Round the back you will find XLR AES-EBU, SPDIF coaxial and SPDIF optical (Toslink) but the really significant feature is the ability to set different sample rates for each group of outputs, 1 & 2. The Word clock output follows the Output 1 setting. Using the dual output feature it is thus

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possible to record at 192kHz for the audiophiles (and bats) and record a simultaneous 44.1kHz version for CD. All the standard sampling rates from 44.1kHz to 192kHz are supported but there is no provision for the pull-up and pull-down rates often found in sound for picture work. We are living in an age when ‘repurposing’ has become a fundamental of the production lexicon. An audio recording may well have a life as a top-end high sampling rate premium product, as a soundtrack to an HD or SD video product, as a humble CD or even that Uriah Heep of audio recording, the MP3 (Presumably because it’s dreadful just like the band. Ed). To achieve the best quality possible for the higher-end products and CD or even just to

October 2008

21/9/08 21:12:26

review provide a backup, it is desirable to digitise at more than one sample rate and on more than one recorder. Storage is now cheap and abundant so the extra disk space this approach requires really isn’t an issue but, duplication of convertors and the added hassle might be. Enter the silver knight. Drawmer’s UK£875 (+ VAT) A2D2 is made for the job. A single pair of XLRs is provided at the rear for analogue input. Coming around to the alloy front panel the unexceptionable analogue variable gain knobs are business-like but not sexy. On the other hand, the recessed multi-turn (20) trimmer pots for the calibrated input option are not only a welcome return to real analogue precision but damnably attractive too. An internally illuminated button toggles between calibrated and uncalibrated modes. Output sample rate is set independently for each output by left and right cursor keys. When you try to step beyond the highest sample rate it jumps back to the lowest and vice-versa so you have the best of both worlds. Each output is also endowed with Ext sync source and Lock LEDs. A single Word clock input BNC on the rear feeds either or both output convertors when the Ext option is selected. Word length is toggled by a button for each output between 24 bits and 16-bit dithered. In the middle of the panel the blue Drawmer logo glows quietly. All of the front panel LEDs are bright and, in the case of the white ones, they are arguably too bright. The 24-segment plus overload bargraph meters are great though and with almost 150mm between -50dB and overload the resultant ‘at-a-glance’ visibility makes a welcome change. Why are so many meters so small these days? Three LEDs arranged vertically on a 1U panel are as good as useless. With Burr-Brown analogue input stages and a linear power supply instead of the more common

noisy, but cheap and lightweight, switch-mode compromise, the auguries are good for audio veracity. It’s probably worth noting that there is one drawback with the linear power supply. If you need to change voltages the switch is inside the box. I’m told the unit is calibrated to 0.1dB and I can believe it as there is an air of precision about it. The circuit topology is interesting. Instead of using two stereo convertors there is one stereo convertor and two sample rate convertors. The convertor is run at 210.9kHz continuously and this is derived from a thermally stabilised 27MHz crystal. All the output sample rates are down-converted by the two sample rate convertors from the fixed rate analogue to digital convertor output. The practical benefit of this approach is that when an external clock source has to be used, any jitter present in the signal is taken care of by the SRCs without damaging the pristine output from the A-D. In operation the A2D2 does not disappoint. Conversion is as clean and uncoloured as my ancient ears would wish and it would take long

and serious comparative listening against expensive convertors in ideal conditions to identify any positive or negative nuances. The A2D2 really is a highly refreshing piece of digital kit. There are no multifunction buttons, so no learning curve and no confusion. With the big precision bargraphs, it is indeed the very model of clarity. It is designed to do one job and does it well. As a bonus, with three AES Grade 1 Word clock BNC outputs on the rear it can also be pressed into service as the master clock for a small studio. This is the most analogue example of a digital box I’ve seen in years and is all the better for it. We’ve allowed the manufacturers to make our lives more difficult for far too long. Drawmer is trailblazing with the A2D2 and I hope this excellent ‘user interface’ is but the first of many. Nice box, nice price. ■

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

ProS

Excellent convertor; superb user interface; aES Grade 1 clock.

CoNS

does not support pull-up or pull-down rates (except with external clock); the knobs are a bit boring; mains voltage switch is internal.

EXtraS

m-Clock Plus is a master clock generator offering clock rates from 44.1 to 192kHz, coupled to two sample rate convertors, which allow material to be re-sampled and synchronised to the selected high precision clock. in addition to the internal clocks, m-Clock Plus can sync to external Word clock or clocks from aES-EBU signals while precision clock frequency measurement and display indicates the exact frequency of the selected clock, whether internal or external, to an accuracy of 2ppm.

Perf preamect for am pli p the m lifier deliv fying a v in e any c ool n rs the kin tage ribb ew fe o d of h a igh n mic, m tu prett y clea res and e fidelity p odern co nh nd er r – th e m10 anced pe formance enser, or rform a plu 1 is o previo ne re g volut ance for t usly only ged-in ac ionar he sa o y little me p available ustic guit rice a ar, ou t piece o the st r of pr u o aud he origina pper clas new m101 mic s. No l, and io ge ar. Fo w r the the pictur consider e bec mass omes es.

The R

October 2008

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21/9/08 21:12:33

review

Abbey Road Plug-ins Brilliance Pack An in-house design straight from ‘that studio’ in St John’s Wood, these plugs represent depictions of the equalisation blocks they used to have to play with. GEORGE SHILLING harks back to a time when engineers smoked at the ‘desk’, had sideburns and wore a tie to work.

bbey Road used only EMI-manufactured desks until well into the 1970s, and the EMI REDD.37 and .51 four-track ‘Stereosonic’ mixing desks (used throughout the 60s for most Beatles records) provided 2-band EQ at fixed frequencies — the top end boost was at 5kHz when the ‘Pop’ plug-in module was installed (as opposed to the ‘Classic’ module). This provided bell-curve boost and shelving cut. To expand the possibilities, the technicians of the day designed an outboard EQ box. These were the 127th pieces of equipment designed in house, and were thus designated the RS127 Brilliance Control, adding or subtracting treble at three selectable frequencies. Known by the engineers as ‘the presence box’, multiple grey RS127s were rackmounted below the patchbay. However, more units were sometimes required, with the need to sometimes daisy-chain two boxes for extra boost, so a green portable version was also built. According to the excellent Recording The Beatles book (Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew, Curvebender Publishing, 2006) ex-staffers Jerry Boys and Richard Lush both recalled the RS127 with affection. And disc mastering engineer Richard Langham tells of using a touch of RS127 despite the goal of a transparent transfer process. Lester Smith, technical engineer and custodian

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of the vintage equipment at Abbey Road, dusted off some original units for current Abbey Road chief engineer Peter Cobbin, who was working on some Beatles and Lennon-related mix projects. When Cobbin tried these units he was bowled over by their ‘instant zing!’. The boxes are passive and unpowered, losing about 10dB of gain. In the 1960s there was a change in impedance standard, and when Cobbin heard an RS127 through an EMI interfacing transformer he discovered the transformer effect exaggerated the EQ curves. Therefore, this plug-in suite includes the original grey rackmounting RS127, and, although the original standalone green box was technically similar, this has been dedicated in plug-in form as a transformer-enhanced version. Thanks to comprehensive session setup documentation, there is evidence of the extensive use of these boxes throughout the Beatles recordings, with their frequent employment on drum microphones, particularly for snare sounds, as well as guitars and vocals. Especially heavy use was made of these during the making of Sergeant Pepper, and a number were even sent to Apple Studios for Let It Be sessions. According to Ken Townsend, +10 at 10k was a popular setting. They were even used as a side-chain processor to turn the Fairchild 660 into a de-esser, and were also

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inserted across Chamber and Plate sends. To boost frequencies between the desk’s 5kHz and the RS127’s 10kHz, another box was devised, the RS135. This was originally designed to operate at 16.4kHz but was modified to choke down the frequency to 8.192kHz. This is a single frequency boost-only device, and a recreation is also included here. This suite of plug-ins comprising recreations of these three boxes is available from the abbeyroadplugins. com website and nicely complements their TG plugins, which are still available. However, unlike the TGs, these new plugs have been developed in-house (without the help of Chandler), with the technical assistance of Softube AB of Sweden, who also developed the Tube Tech CL-1B plug-in. These processors come in Mac or PC flavour, with versions for TDM, RTAS, AU and VST. Installation is straightforward and authorisation is via iLok, so this is all very easy. The plug-in supports mono, stereo, multichannel and multimono configurations and sample rates up to 192kHz. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that there was no AudioSuite version — offline processing in Pro Tools can still be useful, especially when you might need to free up a plug-in slot and with single-band EQs, five slots can fill up fairly quickly. The RS127 Rack opens in an enormous window

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review — it is especially huge considering there are just two knobs to adjust. This grey-coloured version features boost and cut in 2dB steps from -10 to +10dB, and a three-position frequency selector with 2.7, 3.5 and 10kHz. The boost is a broad bellcurve response, while cutting uses a slightly narrower curve. For a touch of gentle top boost at 10k, this sounds lovely — elegant and silky smooth. It can be like removing the blankets on vocals. The 3.5k setting makes things poke through (Through the blankets? Ed), or with a little cut settles aggressive sounds back in the mix. The 2.7 setting adds a touch of ‘honk’, but it’s still fairly genteel. This plug-in never gets harsh, even with large boosts, and you can understand how daisy-chaining multiple units became a useful technique. However, for normal use on well-recorded signals, one instantiation is plenty, and if you need a bit more poke, the green version makes a good alternative. The RS127 Box is the transformer-hyped version and although the controls are identically labelled, the effects of this green-faced version are slightly different

October 2008

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from the Rack version. The interfacing transformer shifts the centre frequencies of the available settings, so they now in reality become 2.9kHz, 4.2kHz and 11.5kHz, giving an extra sparkle. When boosting at higher settings, the transformer effect creates a narrower bandwidth, and there is significantly more boost than at the equivalent settings on the Rack version. This is great for poking certain signals out from the mix, and I can’t envisage wanting two of these in series as there is plenty of boost here. The two lower frequencies add characterful midrange honk reminiscent of many Beatles tracks. The 3.5/4.2k setting s o u n d i n g potentially slightly nasty, and the 2.7/2.9k setting adding a telephony character with full boost. The RS135 with its prototype Dymo labelling

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and (pretend) patching area couldn’t really be any simpler. It has a ‘medium-sharp’ bell-shape boost at 8.192kHz with boost only settings from 0 to +10 in 2dB steps. It can be very useful for giving a different colour to a signal, making it blend better with tracks where the other plug-ins in the suite have been used. It has the subtler flavour of the RS127 Rack, and 10dB boost is perfectly reasonable to use on many signals, although +6 or +8 is usually plenty to lend a lovely sparkle to muffled vocals. None of these plug-ins emulate anything other than EQ curves; no distortion, noise, or any other funny business is going on, just accurate emulations of the curves of the original units. But they work really well and sound exceptionally musical. It’s a lot of fun being a 1960s Abbey Road engineer! ■

ProS

a fun way of adding treble for Beatlesfan-engineers.

CoNS

No audioSuite versions; settings are not retained when switching between versions of the rS127; unnecessarily large windows (although that’s part of the fun!)

EXtraS

Here are some of the originals. the Brilliance Pack is priced at US$499 for tdm and $249 for lE/Native.

Contact aBBEY road PlUG-iNS, UK: Website: www.abbeyroadplugins.com

21/9/08 21:12:46

monitor benchtest

Yamaha MSP7 Studio KEITH HOLLAND

he Yamaha MSP7 Studio is being marketed as ‘carrying on the tradition of the NS10M’. However, although it is a 2-way loudspeaker of similar overall proportions, on paper a least it is a very different loudspeaker. The MSP7 is an active loudspeaker comprising a 6.5-inch woofer and a 1-inch titanium dome tweeter mounted symmetrically above it, with no difference between the left and right of a stereo pair. The tweeter radiates through a shallow horntype waveguide and the cabinet has two bass-reflex ports. The power amplifiers, crossovers and adjustment electronics are all housed in the cabinet and the heatsink on the rear has vertical fins which, along with the vertical driver layout, mean it is essential that these loudspeakers are only used in the upright, portrait orientation. Yamaha quotes the power amplifiers as having outputs of 80W into 4ohms for the woofer and 60W into 6ohms for the tweeter. The crossover frequency is 2.5kHz with 5th-order (30dB/oct) slopes and the specified maximum output level is 106dB at 1m. Beneath the heatsink are the input sockets and controls; input is balanced line via an XLR socket, and there are controls for level, low trim (+1.5, 0,

-1.5 and -3dB at 45Hz), high trim (+1.5dB, 0 and -1.5 at 15kHz) and low cut (flat, 80Hz and 100Hz). Although the cabinet is quite small for a loudspeaker of this type, having overall dimensions of 330mm high by 218mm wide by 235mm deep, it weighs a hefty 12.2kg so some care will be necessary to ensure a secure mounting position! Both drivers are magnetically-shielded. Figure 1 shows the on-axis frequency response and harmonic distortion for the MSP7. The response is seen to be smooth and flat in the midrange, lying between ±3dB limits from 55Hz to 8kHz, with a gentle upward slope from 200Hz to 1kHz, and a somewhat uneven response at high frequencies. The main difference between this response and that of the old NS10 is in the low-frequency range. The NS10 has a 2nd-order (12dB/oct) slope below about 100Hz, whereas the MSP7 continues flat down to around 60Hz below which the response falls with an extremely rapid 8th-order (48dB/oct) slope with -10dB at an impressive 40Hz. The adoption of a high-order, high-pass electronic protection filter is evident, and must be necessary to extend the response of such a small loudspeaker to these low frequencies. The harmonic distortion is impressively low for a loudspeaker of this size, with the 2nd harmonic peaking to -30dB (3%) at 45Hz and

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

-40dB (1%) at 70Hz and the 3rd harmonic remaining below -50dB (0.3%) at all frequencies. The horizontal off-axis response (Figure 2) is very well controlled up to beyond 15kHz with no appreciable mid-range narrowing or change in directivity through the crossover frequency. Figure 3 shows that the vertical off-axis response shows only a very narrow dip in the downwards direction at the crossover frequency due to the interference between the outputs of the drivers. The time domain responses for the MSP7 are depicted in Figures 4 to 7, which show the step response, the acoustic source position, the power cepstrum and the waterfall plot respectively. The response of the loudspeaker to the leading edge of transient signals can be assessed from the step response and acoustic source position. The step response for this loudspeaker is fairly typical for a compact 2-way loudspeaker with the mid-range components of the signal peaking around 500

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monitor benchtest

Fig. 2. Horizontal off-axis response.

Fig. 4. Step response.

Fig. 6. Power cepstrum.

Fig. 3. vertical off-axis response.

Fig. 5. acoustic source position.

Fig. 7. Waterfall plot.

microseconds after the high frequencies. The acoustic source position is, however, not typical, showing that the low frequencies are delayed such that they effectively emanate from a position nearly 5m behind the loudspeaker. This is an inevitable consequence of the adoption of an 8th-order roll-off and demonstrates one of the compromises that result from this design philosophy. The power cepstrum shows only slight evidence of an echo after about 500 microseconds but is otherwise quite smooth. The waterfall plot (Figure 7) shows how quickly the tail end of transient signals

decay. The MSP7 has a very clean waterfall plot with no evidence of any mid-range resonances and a fairly rapid decay at low frequencies, despite having such a rapid roll-off in response. Overall, the Yamaha MSP7 Studio does its intended job extremely well. The designers have chosen to extend the low frequency response of this small loudspeaker without introducing high distortion and in doing so have compromised the integrity of the leading edge of low-frequency transient signals. However, the compromise has been managed very

well and the result, given the intentions, is probably as good as could be expected. This aspect of the design of the MSP7 is very different from that of the old NS10 though, and those people who use the old speaker because of its particularly fast low frequency response may possibly not take to the new one. Oh, and it has a black cone. â&#x2013;

Contact YamaHa, JaPaN: Website: www.yamahacommercialaudio.com

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21/9/08 21:13:28

craft

Jack Joseph Puig He’s one of the very few producer/engineers who also holds a job in A&R. JJP talks to NIGEL JOPSON about the ﬁrst draft, compressors, Waves plug-ins and doing something right.

ack Joseph Puig is a Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer with a long track record of successful productions and chart-friendly mixes. He began his career engineering at MCA Whitney studios, later becoming the legendary Bill Schnee’s protégé. Along with Schnee, he lists Arif Mardin and Glyn Johns — Puig engineered 8 or 9 albums for both producers — as major influences. In the mid-90s, he became one of the select few US mixers whom labels turned to as a ‘comfort brand’. The list of acts Jack has worked with is immense, and includes The Black Crowes, Robbie Williams, Weezer, Hole, Stone Temple Pilots, The Counting Crows, Beck, No Doubt, Green Day, John Meyer, The Rolling Stones, Sheryl Crow, Vanessa Carlton, Stereophonics, Sum 41, Black Eyed Peas, The Pussycat Dolls, Mary J Blige, John Hiatt, Fergie, Macy Gray, Queen Latifah, Lifehouse, U2 and Eric Clapton. Puig has chosen to work at Ocean Way’s Sunset Boulevard studios for 40

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over a decade, arranging his huge collection of vintage outboard equipment and music memorabilia into a creative cave resembling a million-dollar version of a funky art-deco rehearsal hall. Recently, Waves launched the JJP plug-in collection (reviewed in Resolution V7.6), emulations of Jack Joseph’s vintage Fairchild compressors and Pultec EQs. In 2006 Jack was appointed executive vice president of A&R at Geffen/MCA records. He is currently working with The Pussy Cat Dolls, Daniel Bedingfield and Panic At The Disco. (Photos: Arik Weiss)

What was the breakthrough album for you as a producer, was it the Black Crowes with Amorica, or was it Lemon Parade by Tonic? I think Tonic was one of my first big commercial successes that made me feel like I could really do it. There’s been a few different breakthrough moments. Lemon Parade being one, Wind Beneath resolution

My Wings by Bette Midler plus Iris from the Goo Goo Dolls. Heavier Things by John Mayer, Big Girls Don’t Cry by Fergie. All of those are great, successful records. All were Grammy records — those records were what basically created the sound of those acts — and that’s the notch on the belt: not how great the bass drum sounds, not how good the cymbals sound or the cool thing on the electric guitar, none of that shit matters. When you have that kind of success over a period of time, it gives you a level of confidence — ‘You know what, I can actually do it!’ Anyone can do it once, but when it’s that many times and that significant, then you’re doing something right.

I believe you’ve had the longest lockout session ever at Ocean Way Recorders? Thirteen years, that’s correct. I’ve just moved upstairs from Studio A to Studio D. I took all my outboard with me, 95% of the equipment you’ve seen is owned by me. I’m now working on a recording console that is far more advanced than the console I was on before. The Focusrite I was working on in Studio A was great at the time, but I outgrew it. Now I find I have the need to be able to do a recall at the touch of a button. I need a console that is more expansive and extensive in terms of the technology. October 2008

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Is the mix recall aspect of the Neve 88R in Studio D very important to you? We are at the point now where when people ask you to do a mix for them, the first thing they say to you is OK, send me the first draft. They are already planning the changes. You haven’t done anything yet ... you actually haven’t even turned on the system. You may be five days from doing the mix and they are talking to you about the first draft. We live in a world of total recall, people expect you to do it. Are you mixing on the Neve, or just using it as a giant summing amp? Oh no, I’m mixing on it. I have experimented with working completely in-the-box, and it’s possible to get some good results. I wish it was better. But there’s no question in my mind that it sounds much better mixing through an analogue board. I’m using both analogue and digital, I have an equal love for both. I think they are both pertinent, and when you can get them to shake hands and get along, you get something on a whole other level. Sometimes there’s something in the analogue world which is a better fit and can perform better than something digital. I’m using the dynamics section on the 88R channel strip and they’re amazing. Everything about the desk is amazing, with its ability to switch EQ in and out and automate the sends ... it’s just the whole flexibility. It’s a great creative tool. The change from mixing on the Focusrite to mixing on the 88R was fantastic. I’m really enjoying it and I think I’m getting some results which I could not be happier with. October 2008

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When you’re mixing on the Neve, do you put a basic balance in with the Encore automation and then leave the faders in Touch Record? Once I get to that position, yeah. What it should be doing is following me, recording me — I should not be following it. The first thing I do is, I quickly put up what my instinct is, I don’t listen to a rough mix or someone else’s bounces, I just throw it up how I think it should feel. I find you have a large part of the feel within the first 15 or 20 minutes. I usually put that down quickly as a reference, then I go off creating. Do you ever reach the point where you need to use Trim Faders to nudge a group of levels back down? Here’s the thing: you can use any of these systems the way they want you to use them, or you can get very, very creative with them. In other words, you should be running it, it shouldn’t be running you. The Neve 88 I’m working on is fully loaded with every possible option you can imagine. When you get a song to mix, what is the workflow outline for you? We get the session, then we prepare it. Part of that preparation is practical elements, as well as creative elements, some particular routings or plug-ins that I like as a default starting point. In terms of the practical element, it’s as simple as colouring the tracks with colours that I know are always applied to certain instruments. Guitars are always yellow, drums are always blue, bass is always a darker blue, vocals are always red, keyboards green. What this allows me to do on resolution

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craft secondly they remind me — because what happens is, the more and more options you construct, build, come upon, create — sometimes you can forget some of those options, this reminds me of it so I can grab it over and try it.

If it’s a project you haven’t worked on before, do you have a quick listen to the song and then maybe have your assistant mix some tracks down or combine them in a way that will enable you to work faster? No, no I would never do that! I mix the record. That’s not cool for the client. The client didn’t hire him, they hired me. You’ve had some of the jewels from your outboard collection modelled in software by Waves. What was your motivation to lend your name to a plug-in collection? Waves is the Bentley of plug-ins, in my opinion. So lending my name to Waves is associating my a session is shuttle very quickly between where I name with a company that is extremely established, want to go without giving it a thought. That is very massively respected, and arguably maker of the best important because when you are in a creative space, plug-ins. Secondly, I loved the idea of archiving, partly what will destroy that creative space is if you in a proper way, classic equipment which future have to go into the intellectual space. Once you are generations most probably won’t be able to use. Our in that intuitive space, you don’t want to come out bodies wear out and equipment wears out too: there of it. The object is to set everything up in such a way will come a point where these physical goods will where you can move effortlessly from one situation have an end. Now people can continue to profit from to another. the way my equipment actually sounded. We spent I have some of my own presets that are really a three and a half years making sure that when you great starting place. For example, there might be a instantiate the Puigchild, it does what my Fairchild couple of compressors or equalisers I like on bass, does: it doesn’t sound perfect, it has a hum, it’s got I have them set up next to the bass channel and some hiss, it has an attitude ... digital plug-ins don’t name the strip ‘bass hold’. That particular strip is then have that, they’re neutral. Waves’ effort is a major holding plug-ins that I like. Two reasons: they are accomplishment and it feels great to have other Calrec Resolution Ads 28/8/08 12:29 Page 3 easy to grab and stick over the channel and try, and mixers whom I respect use these plug-ins.

The Puigchild has a very smooth sound compared to many of the Fairchilds still in operation. I spent years looking for the one I’ve got and I’ve kept it in tiptop condition. I collected the parts that were necessary, so that years later I would have spares: I thought ahead. When we modelled them I always made sure that every part in them was absolutely in perfect condition. I acquired a lot of my equipment before we were in the state that we are now [with vintage gear], which meant that there were a lot of choices. I remember when I chose my Neve 2254 compressor, I chose it out of 15 or 16 different units, I had that good fortune. I can hear a huge amount of compression on John Mayer’s vocal and guitars on Heavier Things, but you’ve set it up so the initial transient of the sound always gets through. Out of all the tools I have as an engineer or a mixer, compression is by far the most creative, by leaps and bounds. If they told me they were going to take equalisers away I’d say OK — I could handle that — but not compressors. The compressor is the only device that changes time and feel. That’s why I like it. I don’t use compression to see how loud I can get it, I use compression for the feeling that it gives me. I can make something feel like it’s breathing, or add a feel to a track by the mere fact that the compression is moving the time constant. That, to me, is the sexiest thing about compression, which I can’t get out of anything else. Do you use vocal compressors as an insert or in parallel? All of the above. Every possible way you can imagine, I use them side-chained, inserted ... you

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Putting Sound in the Picture

October 2008

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craft name it, I’ve done it. I’ve experimented the hell out of compression. I own 115 compressors, every day I find something else that’s cool which I didn’t think of before.

You’re an EVP of A&R at Geffen, how does that work for you? Are you working exclusively with Geffen acts? The notion or mentality that comes along with being a record producer is something that could be attractive to a record label. I’m not just working for Geffen, I’m working for other labels as well. Right now I’m mixing Panic At The Disco’s next single, which is on Atlantic Records. It’s a bona fide arrangement, I have an office at Geffen and so on, but in my deal I’m allowed to do a few things outside the company, which of course is very healthy and important, because if you don’t do that you lose objectivity.

yet. One of my concerns is that a lot of people are going outside of their core competence, into areas they really have no business going in. In a sense, we’re failing as a business. We are not selling what we need to sell, and everyone is panicking, so they’re all trying whatever they can try, just to come up with the answer. It’s not unlike the digital revolution that transpired in record making: I know for a fact that the first set of mixes and sessions we did with Pro Tools we ruined. We were figuring it out. Hardly anyone knew what they were doing so there were a lot of casualties. Digital music sales never will catch up [to replace CDs]. We are now going to make up the bottom line with multiple parcels. The notion that there’s going to be one stream that is somehow going to erupt, that’s going to fix everything, is madness. Now we are in a day and age where a percentage from

multiple sources are all going to add up to what a record made years ago.

Are we going to see a lot more put-together, non-song writing, pop acts as labels try and maintain control of the complete value chain? There’s always going to be that and we’ve always had that: we had it with Menudo, we had it with The Spice Girls, that’s not anything new. Label people might think they need to control some of the financial lanes that are so profitable: making a T-shirt for $1 and then selling it for $20, that’s a lot of money. At the end of the day, we can talk about all the different options and ways that things get done, but the one thing that always seems to happen is that when the song is great, then the record is great. That’s my observation. ■

I heard that Ron Fair [chairman of Geffen] has an SSL C200 plus Pro Tools rig in his ofﬁce, has Geffen got some sort of strategy to take production in-house? I think it’s not that aggressive as a ‘grand thought’, it’s just people who are record makers, working with artists. The difference is that we actually know what we are talking about and what we are doing, as opposed to lots of A&R people who really don’t know much about the recording process. Are you doing A&R for acts that you are not producing or mixing? They are two separate jobs, they’ve nothing to do with each other. I don’t put myself into a position of mixing or producing something because I’m from the record company. It happens because someone asks me to do it. I’ve even been in a few situations where I knew it wasn’t right, but I had to let them go through it. Someone might turn to me and say: ‘Why don’t you fix it?’ — OK. I don’t believe in throwing myself into something, the artist would have to ask me. From your special viewpoint, what are the most signiﬁcant things happening today in the music industry? The digital revolution. Unfortunately I think that we [the music industry] as a whole don’t understand it

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craft What did you bring to The Holloways’ Generator single? Simplicity. I went to see them live, it was quite shambolic, that was the beauty of it. Really catchy pop tunes, it was quite aggressive, and I realised that this was a live band, it was going to be tough to get it on record. So I treated it as trying to get a live band coming out of the speakers as live as possible, but not sounding ambient — I wanted the pure aggression of the performance, but still as hi-fi as possible. We experimented with the guitar sounds — I don’t think they knew it, but they had their own characteristics. Rob had a very tweed, Fender-y thin sound, it was quite gritty, then Alfie’s guitar was quite warm and buzzy. When you bring the faders up they automatically sit well. Did they help with the mixing? No, I did that on Pro Tools at home, in the box. I listen back and cringe, but obviously I did something right. They released it with the Clive Langer mix, it wasn’t a lot different — it was a lot more flush, but I think with the arrangement, there was one little change, so that was nice to know I wasn’t that far off. What do you most like doing? I came up from Britpop where it was a bit more commercial, nothing overly clever or cool, but I like doing the cool North London stuff, where it’s quite shambolic, I quite like trying to make that sound as big as possible. There’s not a lot of money, so you might not have a good studio, the band will have rubbish instruments, and you’re fighting a battle that’s impossible to win sometimes, but I think that’s good learning. What’s your favourite music? I’m a big fan of The Beatles stuff, but not sonically. I like Tom Lord-Alge, Weezer, mix-wise it’s absolutely brilliant, you hear the snare and it’s just powerhorsing, it’s so tight. But The Beatles, it doesn’t sound in-yourface, it’s not aggressive, but that’s a testament to the songs they did, and the cleverness of it back then.

Tristan Ivemy At home in a variety of roles and with a variety of skills at his disposal, Tristan Ivemy is characteristic of the new breed of producer/engineer. GEORGE SHILLING asks the questions.

rowing up in Portsmouth, Tristan Ivemy started playing piano at age 6 although he says he was never interested in classical lessons: ‘I started doing power chords!’ At 12 he started learning guitar and formed a band, and soon moved onto bass and drums. He studied music at South Downs College, simultaneously studying Music Technology. Befriending a lecturer who had his own studio, he embarked on a solo album project at the age of 15, and his interest in studios was underway. He grew up enjoying mainstream pop-rock like Queen, and was a huge fan of Britpop (‘I was 13 when I started liking Oasis’). The sound of Morning Glory intrigued him, ‘A lot of people and professionals disagree, but I still think there’s a lot of character in that record. And I liked the click of the kick drum in heavy metal records, and a lot of that kind of thing stuck with me.’ Following his college course, he took a course at the North London SAE where he gained experience on Neve and SSL consoles. He then found employment as night receptionist at Metropolis Studios, and started attending gigs in North London. He literally bumped

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into the singer from The Holloways at The Garage in Highbury. After The Holloways heard some of Ivemy’s recordings, they asked him to produce a track in 2005. They spent two days doing Generator, which quickly found heavy rotation on Radio 1’s Zane Lowe and Steve Lamacq shows. After this success, Ivemy pursued further projects in different studios ‘I knew I had a lot of catching up to do.’ While The Holloways went on to record an album with Langer and Winstanley, he continued to work with the band on further tracks for B-Sides, and has more recently completed their shortly-to-be-released second album, mixing it with John Cornfield at Sawmills. Other credits include Towers Of London, Frank Turner, Clocks, The Alones and The Runners, and Ivemy has set up a small production room for mixing at the former Battery in West London. Now 25, Tristan’s early successes led to Dangerous Management chasing the young producer to offer him management. ‘I was pretty shocked when I got the call, I thought I had a few more years to go!’ He will shortly be recording Six Nation State for Jeepster, and working with Public Service Announcers. (photos www.recordproduction.com) resolution

What’s different about the more recent Holloways recordings? With the second album, I’ve tried to introduce a lot of string work with them. The first album was so raw, I wanted it to be more an all-rounder, and they wanted to reach a wider audience. Rob the guitarist is a great violinist as well. So we got two different violins and a viola and I made a Rob orchestra over a day — he had bleeding fingers by the end. Sonically we changed it, we doubled up, changed the harmony, doubled that, did it on a different violin, did a different inversion, used the viola as well, and it really helped. It made a kind of new crossover towards the pop scene, but still keeping the underground indie element to it. I like that sort of thing, maybe it’s from the classical background. I hate classical music, but having learnt Grade 8 piano it’s probably subconsciously in me. And The Beatles as well, there’s probably a lot that’s in my heart from those records without me knowing. Have you ever used analogue tape? No, that is one thing that is not very good! But then, you probably have a fresh perspective and no baggage… True. But I think a lot of mid-90s records sound good, and I assume it’s the tape thing. I’ve messed around with tape plug-ins, but every time I went to a different college, I was in the first year not to do tape. I think there was some splicing at SAE, but I think I didn’t get up that day, and missed the splicing! October 2008

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craft And you’ve not really had to deal with limited track numbers? Well, I have because in my studio I’m on Pro Tools LE, I stay inside the box because of the horrible convertors. So I have to do a lot of bouncing. I don’t like messy Pro Tools sessions, they all get messy but I like to think that I’m going to keep them organised! It was interesting to work with John Cornfield and see him using SoundScape to mix, he mixes in-the-box, as does Dave Bascombe who I really like, so if they can do it, why not? But if you’re in a studio with an SSL…? I will use the board, I haven’t had much experience with the SSL plug-ins, they’re on my shopping list, but I’d always use the board, especially the SSL, it gives a glossy glue over it all. Did you learn most of your techniques at SAE? I learnt a lot, but the only thing I didn’t learn that really annoyed me when I got to Metropolis was that they had tie-lines everywhere, and they didn’t have them. I thought, why is there a patchbay in the live room? I didn’t have a clue! I learnt a lot from Rich Wilkinson who’s done a lot with Jim Abiss, and he mixed The Magic Numbers, he’s been a really big brotherly figure for me. Because at Metropolis I didn’t get put into the assistant role. It really upset me, but I think the management knew I was producing, so they were like, you can’t be in the room, because you’ll be telling them what to do! So I had to learn outside of that. But I would be next door producing and learnt that way. But it is the long way round, I don’t get to see these guys producing a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time and tears bringing mixes home and it’s frustration! But if I’m not very good at something at first, once I try it myself, I find it’s a way of practical learning.

What techniques do you use to get your tracks sounding good? The problem I face is small budgets, so I have to cheat a lot to get the results I want. I’m one of these guys who is never happy, so the drum replacement technique is something I use a lot. I use BFD and Addictive Drums plug-ins on Pro Tools. It’s hard to explain to a musician — your kit’s not very good — so obviously they’re hearing something that’s not great. You’re thinking, this kit’s terrible, and he’s thinking, this guy’s terrible! So drum replacement has always been a big thing, and once I learnt about Addictive Drums

and then BFD, I thought it was amazing, because you don’t get the same hit twice, it’s easy to change it. I have an instrument track above the audio track. I get the MIDI note for the kick, change that to a region, copy the region, then use tab-to-transient. But you’ve got to copy the note first, then group them, then it takes the one above as priority. Then I can hear it in the track and choose which sound I want. Before, I had to copy in loads of different kick drums and paste six or seven. Now I can have one MIDI note and keep changing it within BFD to see which kick drum — and snare — suits best.

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craft Will you mix in the original sounds? I don’t use the replacements as a main, unless I really have to, and that’s not normal. But some of the projects I have, you’ve got one day in a drum room to get two or three tracks, and it’s not always going to come out great. You haven’t got time to change mics loads, and, stick a 57 on a snare, if it doesn’t sound good it’s the snare, not the mic. Or it’s the player. And with cheap budgets you don’t get to hire in a kit, you can’t have five different Ludwig, Pearl, to choose from. I do try to reinforce rather than replace. Do you spend time on tuning the drums? Yeah, but you’d be surprised how many drummers don’t know how to do that. I know a bit myself, but sometimes it’s just not right. I’m quite picky about my drum sounds, so sometimes you’ve just got to dig out the old drum samples.

Is there anyone you’d like to work with? Well I really liked the first Coldplay album, I was about 15 and chilling out after parties, there was something really nice about it, but not cheesy. But I don’t like their new stuff. I know bands need to progress, but I don’t like that when bands change, because nine times out of ten it’s a bad change. Oasis have changed — badly. I guess it’s because I liked those bands when I was young. What guides your tastes? It all depends on each different band. I do like a lot of aggression, hence why I really like SSL EQ. I don’t like overly ambient, live sounds, like John Bonham drums for example, I don’t like. There’s something about having a direct kit that has a bit of life to it, but I like things to be hard and tight. Today, you listen to records on the radio, and it’s got to be punchy. Things

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have to keep changing, you have to put as much as possible into the production to make them listen.

What are you good at? Communicating. And where I’ve been on the other side of the window, I know what a musician wants to hear, and how they’re feeling. I’ve got a total understanding of their gear as well, my musical background, I’ve got most things covered. I push faders up and try and make it sound how I want it to be like, I don’t wimp around. I normally get into a monitor mix, I’ll dive into EQ straight away, I won’t sit there and wait until the mix, I’ll make it sound as good as possible, even if they’re waiting around, then whack it up, put it through the SSL compressor. Then everyone can hear what I want from an early stage. Just so when I bring up the master fader there’s something we all agree with, I don’t know what that factor is, it’s hard to explain. How do you get the artist relaxed? Well that’s why it’s hard to answer the last question, I don’t like to be cocky, I don’t want to be looking down on people. People skills is something I think I’m good at, I don’t have any problems, my family are pretty good at that. And I guess people can trust me when they know I can play what they can play as well, they suddenly relax, it’s the trust factor. Showing confidence in the room, but not being cocky, I like being a member of the team. And I know how to push people in certain ways, whether they need mothering, whether they need discipline. Some people like to be driven, and you hear that in the performance, you get something else out of them. A lot of the bands I’ve worked with like a lot of the same records as me, so we’re aiming for the same thing. ■

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deeley.

The Soundhouse Studios It’s one of London’s busiest and most experienced recording and postproduction facilities yet it’s not in Soho. JIM EVANS goes out West to report on an expanding facility with an interesting take on the role of analogue and digital in its work.

he Plays of Shakespeare, Thomas The Tank Engine, Harry Enfield and Sir Derek Jacobi share at least one thing in common. All are people or projects that have passed through the doors — and through the mixing consoles — at West London’s Soundhouse Studios. You could also add to that list the likes of Batman, Superman, Ewan McGregor, Dennis The Menace and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist — an eclectic collection in anyone’s book, all that’s missing, you might fairly suggest, is the Band of the Waldorf Astoria. They might well roll along later, meantime back to business. A recording and postproduction complex of 21 years’ standing, The Soundhouse has bucked a number of trends in its time, seen many changes in technology and built a most impressive client list while attracting work from a spread of disciplines. It offers a wide range of professional audio services to producers working in the broadcast television, radio drama, animation, spoken word, corporate and multimedia markets. And most interestingly, the company is not based in Soho, operates on 48

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strict working budgets and all the while embraces technologies old and new — analogue and digital. It is also home to some of the Capital’s top audio post operatives. The business was founded in the mid-80s by then freelance engineers Paul Deeley and Phil Horne. They are still at the helm today, along with fellow engineer/ director Mark Oliver, while the resident engineering team includes Darrin Bowen, Wilfredo Acosta, Benje Noble, Robyn Smith and Gerry O’Riordan — who for many years managed Snake Ranch Studios in nearby Chelsea. ‘Back in the late 70s and early 80s, Paul and I were working together as a freelance team,’ says Horne. ‘Much of our work was doing sound design for corporate projects and to do this we dry-hired studios around London. They were busy days and eventually we realised it would make sense to have our own studio. We found these premises, took on the first unit in 1986 and moved in in February 1987 — Friday 13th as it happens.’ That proved a far-from-unlucky date. Since then, the complex has trebled in size and now boasts resolution

six studios. Horne continues, ‘We built our second studio in 1989 and around that time started to pick up business from the radio drama sector, the BBC in particular where it was then operating the “producers’ choice” scheme whereby 20% of the output went to outside suppliers.’ Deeley, himself a former BBC man, persuaded producers to come and check out the Soundhouse facilities. ‘One producer in particular, Dirk Maggs, was doing some quite adventurous work in surround sound, using Pro Logic which the BBC wasn’t really handling at the time,’ recalls Deeley. ‘We did this Superman adventure series for him and gradually we won more BBC radio drama work. At this point we had the opportunity of moving into the next door unit. We’d already taken the digital plunge, having invested in Pro Tools in 1992. We thought — Let’s go for it — and built our third room — Studio 3.’ ‘As we all know, the ways of working in our industry were changing,’ says Horne. ‘Business was drifting more and more towards peoples’ desktops, and they were able to do more and more stuff at home or in the office. The whole corporate market October 2008

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facility was dying away for a number of reasons, not least the recession, and budgets were being slashed. Much of the corporate work was being taken in-house or the soundtrack being done in video edit suites. There was a move away from big projected images to video; but this dove-tailed with us moving increasingly into the radio drama side. ‘With Studio 3, we decided to go for what people can’t do in their offices or at home — to have a large room in which you can record a lot of people, which is what we did rather than building smaller editing and production suites.’ So how do they decide on what equipment and technology to install? ‘Our clients are happy that the equipment we choose will deliver the audio quality they need,’ says Horne. ‘We’ve always worked within reasonable budgets, over the years we have found some extremely good pieces of equipment within our budget. Obviously there are pieces of kit we would love to own if money were no object but we have to be realistic and cost aware.’ All studios at The Soundhouse are equipped with Pro Tools and Studio 3 can also record and mix in Dolby 5.1. Two of the smaller studios have Digidesign C24 control surfaces and the other control rooms have Audient ASP 8024 analogue consoles. The most recently installed is in Studio 6 — another spacious facility designed and built along similar lines to Studio 3 and catering for larger drama productions and cast recordings. ‘In these bigger rooms where much of the work is radio drama, there are particular requirements. You need very quick hands on operation. We talked to our engineers and concluded the assignable desk route was probably not the best way to go if you’re looking for layers to find things and alter them,’ says Deeley. 5000series_Beijing (Resolution) 125x216mm.qxd:Mise en page 1 ‘On a traditional analogue desk like the Audient,

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you can do things very quickly, it’s a very hands-on approach. The recording we do here is still very much a live performance. We tend to use Pro Tools in these studios as a tape machine for the initial recording and we need a good analogue front-end. We’ve owned DDA consoles before so naturally we were very interested in Audient. We really like the mic amps in

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these desks. The sound is so different. A remarkable difference in fact.’ Horne concurs: ‘I’ve always been a bit of a cynic about people talking about the sounds of different pieces of equipment. OK you can hear EQs doing more or less on different consoles, but when we put in the first Audient, it was remarkable. The clarity was

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stunning. One of our producers asked if we’d bought a new microphone. It simply sounds different. It’s not just the mic amps or whatever. It must be the whole thing, the structure of the desk, how it’s built. It is noticeably quieter than our previous desks. Which in the digital age is so important.’ And has Pro Tools made a difference too?

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facility ‘Absolutely. The ability to do things so quickly. You wonder how we did things in the past, and Pro Tools has become almost the industry standard so there’s a compatibility between different facilities.’ The studios attract work from several key areas. Deeley: ‘Radio drama continues to be one of our mainstays and long may that continue, voices for animation, series re-versioning for companies like Disney, TV dubbing and mixing, English language training for audio publishers — Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, that’s a good slice of what we do. There are only a few studios that cover this sort of language work. It’s a continuous output process for them. The language is always changing so they are constantly having to revise existing programmes and create new ones. ‘We also do some library music work for KPM and other music recording projects. One great project we worked on lasted three years. A client wanted to record for audio CD release every play Shakespeare had written. It was financed by a wealthy individual whose passion was Shakespeare and featured starstudded casts. We recorded all the incidental music too. This ranged from a simple guitar duet, a 22-piece string orchestra, and then 18 percussionists in one room, which proved quite challenging.’ So how do they account for their continuing success in an increasingly competitive market? ‘Probably because we’ve always tried to be very flexible in our approach,’ says Deeley. ‘We cover a broad spread of work areas and we like it that way. We’re fortunate. If one side is quieter than another, we can adapt. ‘Like many other studios, we find sound to picture is still sometimes seen as the poor relation and it can be hard to convince the client to budget for a proper soundtrack. While there are talented video editors who are good at sound, they often can’t devote as much time to the audio as it deserves. We can provide added value. ‘The radio work will, we believe, continue. We have been lucky to be involved with some great productions. We recently completed Bora Bora with Sir Derek Jacobi, Number 10 with Sir Anthony

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Sher — no guesses as to what that is about. Ewan McGregor was in to record Othello. Then there was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist with Johnny Vegas and Paul Whitehouse and we also recorded the last two series of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy — great fun.’ Teamwork is also an important ingredient. ‘Phil and I are both still hands on,’ says Deeley, ‘but it’s nice to be able to sit back and not to do all the sessions. We have nine full time employees of which six are engineers. Gerry O’Riordan, who used to run Snake Ranch, is now based here and it’s working out very well for all of us. Mark Oliver used to run a studio called GDO. We always wanted him to join us and persuaded him over five years ago; he’s now a co-director. We also have ex-BBC engineer Wilfredo Acosta, Darrin Bowen and Benje Noble — all highly experienced sound engineers.’

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The team also includes a young engineer Robyn Smith, who came to The Soundhouse from the Brit School. ‘It’s nice to be able to mould someone in to our way of working,’ says Horne. ‘She is doing brilliantly and has taken to the job like a duck to water. It’s good for us to have someone of Robyn’s age — we need young blood in the company. ‘We’re optimistic — despite all the talk about credit crunch and recession. And of course, not being located in Soho, we don’t have such massive overheads and can offer competitive yet realistic rates. Another advantage of being where we are is that there are no parking problems while we are still within easy reach of the West End.’ ■

Contact tHE SoUNdHoUSE StUdioS, loNdoN: Website: www.thesoundhousestudios.co.uk

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business

Viacom vs YouTube Viacom is suing Google for US$1bn and has a court order to obtain data for every YouTube video we’ve ever watched. NIGEL JOPSON unravels the events that may deﬁne the future of online media copyright.

ant to see a crazy guy in a glider suit flying down a mountain, or take a peek at the Grammy Awards? YouTube. Among the 84m video clips on YouTube there are millions of musical gems: want to see Atomic Rooster rocking out in 1972 with Chris Farlowe? They’re there, along with Led Zep, Clapton & Beck, Madonna’s first gig and Charlotte Church and Amy Winehouse performing Michael Jackson’s Beat It. Any music fan hankering after the un-EQed slap of beater on skin and the crunch of Marshall, or with a taste for wobbly live vocals, can listen and watch hours of footage — most of it uploaded by fellow YouTube viewers. YouTube was created in 2005 by three ex-Paypal coders. Any browser can view the videos and registered users can upload clips, the service uses Adobe Flash technology to transform video frames into bandwidthfriendly streaming content. In 2006, figures emerged indicating 100m videos were watched every day, by July that year over 65,000 videos were being added per month from over 500,000 user accounts. This many eyeballs proved irresistible to search-engine giant Google, who acquired YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65bn of highly valued Google shares. It’s reckoned YouTube now consumes as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in the year 2000, and telecom costs to Google have been estimated at $1m a day. In the UK, YouTube accounted for almost 50% of the 3.5bn videos watched by web users in March 2008, according to the latest comScore figures. The cost of sending out 300bn gigabytes of video each month means YouTube is a long way from being

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a profitable enterprise, with earnings mentioned as being ‘not material’ in a recent Google financial report. Wall Street is keen for Google to turn all those videos into a money machine and Dave Eun, who heads Google’s content business, has promised to ‘turn up the dial on monetization’ in 2009. ‘We’ve been careful about testing different monetization approaches,’ Eun said at a Bear Stearns analyst’s conference earlier this

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year. ‘We’ve purposely not taken the easy money. And frankly, there was a lot of easy money out there. We could have taken cut-down TV ads and pushed them down our users’ throats with pre-rolls.’ Google has been experimenting with overlay ads on premium videos provided by YouTube’s content partners: the adverts run at the bottom of the screen like a news ticker ten seconds after a clip starts playing, the

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business viewer can choose to close the ticker or click to expand the advertisement. Research firm eMarketer estimates US advertisers will spend $1.35bn on online video advertising this year, just 1.5% of the spend on television, but predicts this number will rise to $4.3bn in 2011. Many are unhappy about YouTube building a highly-valued growth business largely on the back of unauthorised use of copyrighted content. Yes, there are sweet children, pussy cats and trampoline accidents — user-generated content aplenty — but also a bucket-load of copied TV shows and DVD extracts, and a high proportion of amateur videos sporting copyrighted music soundtracks. Millions of songs have been uploaded as videos — the visual portion normally just a picture of the CD cover — and there are several free music ‘search and stream’ web sites like jogli.com that rely almost entirely on YouTube content. The glider suit man and Atomic Rooster clips mentioned in my opening paragraph were extracted from commercial DVDs, the Church and (wasted) Winehouse rendition of Beat It, with 4.3m views, was copied by a user from a show broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4. In March 2007 media conglomerate Viacom, owner of MTV, Paramount, DreamWorks, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, decided enough was enough and slapped GooTube with a massive $1bn lawsuit, accusing YouTube of intentional copyright infringement. ‘YouTube is a business built on infringement,’ said Viacom spokesperson Jeremy Zweig. ‘Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement; conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA’ (the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, US legislation that says Internet firms are not responsible for content users put on hosted websites). Viacom said it had identified more than 160,000 pirated clips from shows such as South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV Unplugged. The infringement included the documentary An Inconvenient Truth which had been viewed 1.5bn times. Viacom put out a press release saying: ‘There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.’ In July 2008, there was uproar after Viacom won a court ruling granting access to the login names and IP addresses of all viewers who had ever watched a video on YouTube. An IP (Internet protocol) address is a number in the format http://72.14.207.99 which identifies an Internet user’s geographic location and access provider. Court orders or subpoenas have been used by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) to force Internet providers to identify individual users from their IP addresses in music sharing prosecutions. US District Court Judge Louis Stanton dismissed privacy concerns as speculative, and ordered YouTube to hand over 12 terabytes of data. The sweeping nature of the order meant YouTube was being instructed to reveal its collected data to a company it will eventually have to do business with. It’s hard not to conclude that gaining a look into the inner workings of YouTube and the user-generated video business wasn’t at least part of Viacom’s motivation in bringing the lawsuit, whatever the outcome. Nevertheless, courts may be growing more sympathetic to intellectual property owners’ arguments. Websites like YouTube increasingly look like they’re cannibalising revenues of content creators, because October 2008

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creators are trying to make money from appending ads to roughly the same clips and distributing them via their own online networks. Hulu.com, News Corp and NBC-Universal’s joint venture, is an increasingly popular service that serves ad-supported clips exclusively from studios and networks including (recently) News Corp arch-rival Viacom. After considerable outcry from personal privacy activists, and a healthy sprinkling of vitriol from deranged YouTube users, Google struck a deal to protect the personal data of millions of video viewers. Google will make user information and IP addresses anonymous before handing over the YouTube data. The agreement Google struck also applies to other litigants pursuing YouTube user information over copyright claims in a class action, including the FA Premier League, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organisation and the Scottish Premier League. YouTube is to assign each

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user a unique number so viewing patterns can be determined without necessarily being able to figure out who viewers are. Part of the Viacom lawsuit suggested YouTube didn’t do enough to prevent copyrighted video from appearing on the site, and that once it did, not enough was done to remove it. This lead YouTube to introduce the Video ID system last year which allowed content owners to quickly check the digital fingerprints of their material with videos uploaded to YouTube. If a company found a match it could issue a DMCA takedown notice to have the offending video removed. However, in contrast to News Corp’s MySpace, which introduced similar functionality available to all, the YouTube Video ID was initially only offered as part of broader negotiations with content partners on licensing. Renamed Content ID, the system has just recently been offered to all legitimate content

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business originators. The technology now offers new options: companies can either issue a takedown notice, track user views, or alternatively show ads alongside infringing clips, creating a new revenue stream for both YouTube and the content owners. YouTube executives say they’ve been surprised by the interest in the ad option. David King, a product manager at YouTube, said 90% of content subject to copyright claims made using the identification tool remained on the site and was converted to advertising inventory. Over the last months, CBS, Universal Music, Lionsgate Entertainment, Electronic Arts and others have started selling advertising against videos. ‘We don’t want to condone people taking our intellectual property and using it without our permission,’ said Curt Marvis, president of digital media at Lionsgate, ‘but we also don’t like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content. For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it.’ Video game publisher Electronic Arts has taken Content ID further: in a promotion for Spore, EA encouraged gamers to upload to YouTube original Spore creatures they created using a software program. There were more than 100,000 uploads, some attracting thousands of views. EA used Content ID to claim the most popular user videos and share in the ad revenue. There’s no doubt YouTube has moved the video market forward fast and the result has benefited Internet users. If it had been left to Viacom and the like to develop Internet TV, we’d have no free hosting for videos and still be watching everything in Realplayer. Established companies didn’t introduce new systems, and suddenly find themselves contending with an innovator driving more viewers to their content than they ever could. Fearing loss of control of distribution, suing seemed like the best option for apparently antiinnovation companies such as Viacom. Entrepreneurs like Michael Robertson (founder of MP3.com) have applauded a 27 August court decision in favour of Veoh — a YouTube-like service — which ruled Veoh was protected from financial claims resulting from hosting copyrighted videos, because it acted within the safe harbour of the DMCA. ‘We’re not there yet,’ Robertson wrote in The Register, as he argued that lack of clarity in the law is the real culprit, ‘but if a few more courts conclude

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as the California court did in the Veoh case that the DMCA protects online services, this will dissuade media companies from their legal attacks and bring them to a negotiation table.’ Eric Goldman, associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and director of the High Tech Law Institute, commented: ‘The reason that this case is such good news for YouTube and other service providers, is that the court recognises it is impossible to eliminate infringement and that Veoh should be recognised for the hard work they are doing.’ Having written reams over the last eight years in this magazine criticising media conglomerates and the likes of the RIAA for suing individual file sharers, I’d normally find myself siding with entrepreneurs and liberal-minded professors. But I’m left wondering if a pink-mist has obscured the vision of my fellow champagne-socialist technology commentators. What would be the reaction if I started a wonderful new web-based business: YouBook.com? People can scan chapters from their favourite books, or books they have written, and upload them. Other consumers can read them online — free! The chapters from

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Paul Theroux’s new book Ghost Train to the Eastern Bazaar will be available to read online. If you know how to open the Activity window in Safari — or whatever browser you’re using — you can save the chapters to disk, and then copy them to your PDA to peruse on the train. How long would it take for publisher Hamish Hamilton to have YouBook.com erased from the Internet? I guarantee there will be no talk of bringing book publishers to the negotiating table, and no university dons will complement my ‘hard work’. When it’s the novels of Doris Lessing and Hanif Kureishi at stake, there’ll be none of this ‘prove ownership, then ask to take down’ malarkey. It seems that, just because music and TV programmes are media capable of broadcast, supposedly insightful commentators believe laws don’t apply. Stealing a Mars Bar and stealing a Mercedes are clearly different crimes deserving different penalties, but they’re both theft, and the world would cease to function in a civilised manner if a start-up corporation suddenly made it possible for people to take and distribute what they pleased from confectionary shops. ‘Hey dude, have a Hershy, I downloaded some from the 7-eleven. Freaking rich money-grubbing corner-shops!’ Or maybe we could invent a new business model: look at an advert for a second then take the sweets. I think most shopkeepers would prefer the very 19th century solution of small coins, stout steel containers and difficult to open sliding drawers. The ongoing YouTube legal battle with Viacom will set major precedents for how copyrighted content can be used in the digital era. Viacom will not accept Google’s defence that it can’t be held responsible for copyright infringement by users. Viacom’s analysis of viewing data will indicate what proportion of YouTube’s success is attributable to copyright material and may possibly confirm what many suspect: the pussycat gets the click-on-awhim, but the visitor came to YouTube to watch clips of Colbert, an MTV video, or a scene stolen from a DVD. In just a decade, the world has come to depend so heavily on Google that Microsoft’s omnipotence seems mundane by comparison. What if Google were to exclude all Viacom’s content from their search results — they have the power — and isn’t that what competitive business practice is all about? The US court ruling, expected within months, will have huge consequences for the music business and the entire media production industry. ■

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ten

Reasons to think again about a laptop for audio An increasing number of people are using portable computers for very serious audio and video recording and editing. ROB JAMES is not a huge fan of the laptop/notebook for these applications and he tells us why.

he advent of the ExpressCard slot, which gives access to the PCI-e bus, opens up lots of possibilities for audio and video interfacing and storage on laptops. When an RME MADI ExpressCard interface arrived for review I decided to bite the bullet and buy a laptop to replace my ancient 300MHz Toughbook. I did my research and my first discovery was a real surprise. I’d always thought that the big name laptops were made by the companies themselves. Not so. With some exceptions they are bought in whole in custom cases or as components from Far Eastern suppliers. The internals can vary widely even with examples of the same model. Small wonder then that it is very difficult to get sensible answers to what is inside the box. And price is no guarantee that a laptop will work for audio/ video — some of the cheaper models have the right components but are lacking in power and storage. BATTERIES — I hope your life insurance is up to date. Despite the massive recalls of Sony laptop batteries a year or two ago, laptops are still demonstrating an alarming propensity for catching fire. Needless to say, in the incestuous world of laptop manufacture, dodgy batteries are not confined to any one make or model. Then there’s the exciting question of battery life. The one thing you can guarantee is that whatever the quoted run time, this will only apply when the machine is doing nothing more taxing than displaying the time of day. In real-world use you will be lucky to get half the quoted time. CPU POWER — Despite general increases in CPU power, laptop processors still lag behind their desktop counterparts and invariably give fewer bangs for the buck. For example, quad-core CPUs have been freely available in desktops for over a year and are only now October 2008

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EXPRESS CARD — Lest you think you can get around the FireWire chipset issue by using an adapter in the ExpressCard slot, think again. The ExpressCard slot chip needs to be TI as well and if the FireWire isn’t then it’s likely this one won’t be either. Another problem is lack of security. ExpressCard is a mechanical disaster. It doesn’t lock and people are using all manner of tricks to prevent the cards from being inadvertently yanked out in mid recording. Everything from commercially available clips and spacers that don’t really solve the problem to gaffa tape, Velcro and a bit of civil engineering that would look at home on the Forth Bridge. STORAGE — Most laptops use 2.5-inch hard drives. These are distinguished by being generally slower, more expensive and smaller than their desktop equivalents. You can obtain speed and reasonable capacity, at a price, but today you won’t find anything larger than 320Gb generally available. Extremely quick but low capacity flash drives are starting to appear — at a price. FRAGILITY — With a few honourable and extremely expensive mil-spec exceptions, laptops are much more fragile than desktops. Connectors are especially vulnerable. Heat is the great destroyer of high power machines although this is improving with the latest low power chips. Although there are lots of add-on coolers available, doesn’t that rather defeat the object of the exercise — portability?

beginning to creep into very expensive laptops. For recording, CPU power is irrelevant, for audio or video effects and plug-ins, it matters. GRAPHICS — The same applies to the graphics. Not really important for audio but vital for certain video editing software and anyone doing 3D graphics. There are also compatibility issues with some DAW software.

FIREWIRE — It is next to impossible to find a laptop other than Apple with a full size FireWire socket. The mini ones are horrible and a failure waiting to happen. That’s if they work in the first place. I’ve been researching this extensively and the only chipsets that can be reasonably expected to work for real-time audio are made by Texas Instruments, TI. Getting chipset information out of the lappy suppliers makes blood from a stone seem mundane. It’s taken me a fortnight to discover from Lenovo that my top-ofthe-list choice has the wrong chipset. I’m still waiting for an answer from HP. In case the Mac fanboys are feeling smug, Apple is not immune. From late 2007 and well into 2008 a LOT of Macbooks were made with an Agere chipset. Guess what? It doesn’t work properly for audio. resolution

KEYBOARDS AND POINTING DEVICES — Keyboards are mostly unpleasant with short travel and no feel. Unless it’s a large screen machine the keyboard will not be full size and a nightmare for touch-typists, and many keys are in the wrong place; not important for recording but a trap for power users of hot-keys for editing. Touch pads are loved or loathed in equal measure. I like the Track Points found on some Lenovo and HP machines but others hate them. Trackballs have almost disappeared and many people use a small conventional mouse. COST — The high-street price of laptops has undoubtedly fallen. However, by the time you have up-speced a laptop to the point where it can do anything useful, CPU, storage, memory, etc. it is still way more expensive than a desktop equivalent. Then there is insurance. Given the fragility and the difficulty of sourcing components, not to mention fitting them, it is a really good idea to insure laptops against failure as well as the more obvious dangers of loss or theft. UPGRADES AND REPAIRS — Audio and video professionals are not often fazed by the idea of digging around in the innards of a desktop PC or Mac for upgrades or minor repairs; laptops are a much more daunting prospect. If even a minor component dies it is likely to mean a trip to the makers. Laptops seldom have more than two memory slots and can be very finicky about the specific type. Once again, memory is more expensive than desktops. Processors can sometimes be upgraded — at a price. ■ 55

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sweet spot

Manger sound transducer Manger has returned to the studio market with a new reference monitor – the MSMc1. Key to its performance is the Manger sound transducer. DANIELA MANGER, the daughter of the inventor, describes the Manger sound transducer — a loudspeaker based on human perception.

manger sound transducer front and back.

lmost 30 years were spent searching, testing, and researching before the vision of the natural resonance-free radiation principle became an acoustic reality. The decisive factor in the Manger sound transducer was the turning away from the 75 year-old transducer principles used in conventional loudspeakers and doing without their piston-like movements and their faulty reciprocal overshooting. Instead, Josef Manger, the inventor of the Manger sound transducer, relied on the principle of bending waves which start from the centre of a plate-like diaphragm and travel to the outside, like waves after a stone is thrown into the water. The rigidity of this thin flexible panel increases from the centre to the outside at an equal ratio, very similarly to the basilar membrane in our ear. High frequencies quickly run out in the inner area of the membrane, whereas long waves (low frequencies) concentrically reach right to the edge at the starshaped damper and there they are absorbed so that no reflections can come from the edge. In this way the Manger sound transducer controls the frequency range from 80Hz to 40000Hz on its surface and is at the same time close to the ideal of a point sound source. The conventional splitting of different frequency ranges into the tweeter, mid-range and woofer is therefore avoided. The active surface of the 19cm diameter flexible diaphragm becomes smaller as the frequency increases so that the effective surface is always kept small in comparison to the wavelength to be radiated. That the Manger sound transducer – with its wide frequency range and its sensitivity of 91dB 1W/1m — can achieve a fast rise time of 13µs is attributable 56

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to clever design. In the woofer range, large displacements are necessary, so this would require a long, and therefore heavy, moving coil and that in turn would be much too slow for fast movements with the mass. The solution is simple but difficult to produce — two voice coils, mounted mechanically in series and switched electrically in parallel, use aluminium wire on an aluminium backing and copper strip leads to create an overall long, but nevertheless extremely light driving coil. This is unique for a wide-band transducer with a possible displacement of ±3.5mm and a total weight of only 0.4g. A further advantage of this design is a drastic reduction in non-linearities, which are common with larger displacements. In addition, this arrangement of a double voice coil, for which Manger received a patent in 1969, considerably suppresses the

a well-known 3-way speaker. the time displacements and transient errors of the tweeter, mid-range and woofer can be seen. this speaker has been designed exclusively for a smooth frequency response. October 2008

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sweet spot

Cross-section through the manger sound transducer with its complex and precisely tuned functional elements. the manufacturing process demands tolerances of 0.008mm.

the images made with laser doppler vibrometrics show the concentric wave movement of the bending wave diaphragm at various frequencies.

natural resonance and compensation of the resulting EMF through movement in the magnetic field. A total of 15 neodymium magnets concentrate their magnetic field of 1.32 Tesla on an air gap of only 0.95mm width, in which the lightweight 70mm diameter coil moves, and supply the drive for the diaphragm and are responsible for the fast rise time and the high sensitivity of 91dB, 1W/1m. Because it is not rigid as in conventional piston speakers, this flexible sandwich diaphragm represents a frequency-independent impedance for the driving force. To put it more simply, it behaves like an ohmic resistance in a power circuit. Neither leading nor lagging forces are stored, i.e. neither potential energy (spring/capacity) nor kinetic energy (mass/ inductance). Such stored forces lead to the transient errors or transient noises of piston loudspeakers (an electrodynamic dome tweeter is, for example, a piston

loudspeaker). The inventors of the electrodynamic piston loudspeaker, Rice and Kellogg, said some 70 years ago that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the membrane with ideal resistance in contrast to the mass-spring type is the only one where the exerted electrodynamic force is directly proportional to the desired diaphragm speed.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; This is exactly the type of diaphragm with an ideal resistance that is used in the Manger sound transducer. This has also been confirmed theoretically by acoustics/structure-borne sound authority Prof. Dr Manfred Heckl: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;...it turned out that the radiation principle selected by you, at least in the idealisation I investigated, produces a radiation in line with the current at all times; i.e. transient noises and similarly annoying effects do not occur...â&#x20AC;&#x2122; For anyone who listens to music, the advantage is quite evident: a perfect impulse behaviour without any transient errors. The incoming signal is converted directly into sound. Initial transients from vocals and instruments are reproduced with absolute precision â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a prerequisite for our hearing to recognise and localise different musical sounds in a given space. And, due to the total absence of transient noise, the Manger sound transducer cannot be heard nor localised, as can all conventional loudspeaker drivers. It means you can listen for hour after hour in a professional recording studio without suffering from listening fatigue. Although the development of the Manger sound transducer started 30 years ago, the principle is still applicable and relevant to todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reproduction of audio. With its fast rise time and even high cutoff frequency (these values can be mathematically

the image shows the excitation of air in front of the diaphragm.

Step response of the mSmc1 measured at a distance of 2m.

converted internally) of 40kHz (-3dB), and 60kHz (-20dB) it is excellently suited to modern format requirements. â&#x2013;

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21/9/08 21:16:33

meet your maker

Wolfgang Neumann The founder and technical guru behind the SPL range of products talks to ZENON SCHOEPE about the rich and varied world of his equipment design.

hat is special about SPL products? Every device we design is used by us personally in our recording or mastering studios. There in the work flow we come up with the wishes and needs to make something sound better or easier and faster to use. We listen to the wishes of many engineers and combine these with our own and see where the pro audio market is going and bring all these aspects together with a lot of patience. That’s at the heart of our analogue development process.

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We also do listening tests over a long period of time not just short listening test during the evolution of the boards. Most important is the long-term testing in an active recording or mastering environment as this gives us a lot of information on how a device will do later on in the customer’s studio. At the same time we spend time and expense on testing and listening to the basic technical circuits including the single components — passive and active. Doing all this is how you can guarantee that in the end you will have a wonderful sounding, useful analogue audio device.

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What is different between designing mastering consoles, like the MMC, and cheaper SPL products? Before I started to design the 120 Volt (+/-60Volt) mastering audio device range I worked for many years, over and over again, on designing our own ‘audiophile’ high dynamic discrete amplifier. There where several reasons to design our own SPL op-Amp — missing dynamic range, absolute headroom, audiophile sound and a small package. There are also the benefits of the audiophile sound after long periods of working because your ears don’t get as tired. I am sure everybody in a recording studio knows this phenomenon — you hook up a new device and the first moment you listen to it you are very impressed with the functions and the sound is wonderful. But over several hours and days of working and listening you start to feel that the device is making your ears tired. Pychoacoustic effects are taking place, which could be created inside the electronic circuit of the device by the total harmonic distortion, different harmonics and other physical effects. Op-amps on the linear component market, like AMD, Texas, Burr Brown, Linear Technology and others, did not really satisfy me in terms of sound and most of all in their dynamic range — I’ve been collecting op-amps for more than 20 years and my sample box is quite big now. Most of these op-amps run at around +/-18Volt, some a little bit higher, but to drive gain to the output that is higher than 30dB, including unwanted THD, they need a higher supply voltage and this starts to get difficult. Inside the op-amps, THD and other unwanted side effects are created that have no place in a good analogue audio device. For the component industries the ‘audio industry’ is not a major market so they don’t feel obliged to build special audio op-amps. Their op-amp designs are for a wide range of technical applications so you find a technical silicon section on the sulphate in the op-amp that is not really useful for a special audio application. Sometimes they say they have designed an ‘audio’ op-amp but after listening and looking into the specs I have my doubts. This doesn’t mean that all op-amps are bad and we use regular Linear op-amps too because you have to if you want to make an audio product that many people will be able to afford. We take care and do a lot of listening and measuring to find the perfect op-amp for a given technical application/circuit, such

October 2008

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meet your maker as input, output, and the EQ section, and we do a lot of fine tuning with passive components around the op-amp to make the audio device as good as possible. We also use Burr Brown, Texas Instrument and some other op-amps but for creating something really new in the world of pro audiophile sound with an extremely high dynamic range these components have no chance. So, slowly but steadily I designed our own SUPRA symmetrical Class A op-amp. Many different transistors and passive components were checked out and many prototype PCBs with several different technical ideas and PCB-Layouts were made. With a lot of listening we finally ended up with a nice small SIL printed circuit board with extremely low noise high voltage transistors including heat sinks and special resistors. This hybrid op-amp runs on a maximum +/-160Volt and gives us many open design possibilities for future projects.

Are your high performance designs not limited, and therefore wasted, by the other pieces of equipment in the sound chain? It’s a great when you have, for example, the MMC1 or some other of our Mastering 120Volt/Master/Monitor Controllers, to know there will be no clipping or THD inside the heart of the Studio Controller, even when you drive the input with a very high gain. All our Mastering Controllers have an Insert Port where you can insert other devices or our Switching/Routing Box where the outboard is connected and can be selected or programmed into a chain. Our new Phonitor is a good example, too. The extremely high input and freedom of clipping gives the user a totally new dimension in headphone listening. We’ve received a lot of feedback from users who say that the Phonitor brings back the fun of listening to music over long periods of time without getting tired. How real is the DAW ‘summing’ issue and where do the problems lie? When the DAWs come into pro audio it seemed that mixing inside them was very fast, easy and cool — they offered presets, recall and editing. Digital fader controllers followed to make mixing a little bit easier but they didn’t have the right feel and the sound was different depending on where the fader and the bit resolution was. At this point analogue summing systems came to improve the analogue sound at stereo downmix. The units do a fine job and the sound is better than it was before, but now I see that the user is coming back to analogue fader/summing systems and we will end up with a console again; where it started from years ago. The DAW will be just inserted as a recording/editing machine. When you have clients in your studio I am sure in their head there is always the picture of a traditional recording studio, where you sit behind a mixing desk and listen to the musical recording production process. It has a familiar atmosphere that is very important for music. When you sit behind flat-screens it feels very different but we do appreciate that some recording processes have different demands and that it’s not always necessary to have a mixing console. Is your use of valves ‘purist’ or a means of adding sonic flavour? Tubes were always a big issue for me in development but they have to make sense — it is not just about showing the glimmering orange effect of the tube. I used three tubes in the Tube Vitalizer for a separate Gain control/limiter amplifier function or in our parametric equalizer Qure Filter I used the tube as October 2008

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a special element to do something very important to the circuit and worked with around 300Volt. Using tubes is always a question of where the tube has its positive effect and makes the complete device work in a way it wasn’t working before. In our new Rackpack Module system we have some new cards with tubes too. Also an acoustic preamp that I’m working on now has a wonderful tube preamplifier circuit.

What are the problems of supporting modular ‘lunchbox’ style formats? We designed our Rack Pack system for holding eight modules. We leave the power transformer for the supply externally to take away the hum. The power supply is designed for tube and linear modules and every module you put in the rack has its own input and output sockets. Most of our modules have two active outputs, so they can be used as a split, which makes them very useful for live recording. For the future we will be introducing new modules for the rack system and we are also planning to design adapter cards to install modules from other companies in our system. For all its broad product range, SPL has remained resolutely analogue, why is this? In the past we had some joint ventures with universities and soft and hardware companies to design our red digital range. We also have several joint ventures with companies that transfer our analogue devices onto a software platform. So we are not really concentrating just on our analogue range, we always have an eye on the digital side. But we put a lot of money into digital development and we ‘burned’ our fingers well! So we see and saw how the market creates its own rules. Now we have a new partnership with people coming from the analogue side who have the knowledge to transfer ‘analogue’ into software very successfully and this will open a new digital platform for us. But we are still doing the basic development and research in the analogue field.

generation further and the VCAs that are available on the market are not really the best. They do a fine job in most audio circuits/applications and they are easy to use but their sound is limited. There are some audio companies that have spent a lot of time getting around the regular VCA but this makes the device very expensive and I think very sensitive to the trimming process inside the device — and these parameters can drift after a while. The VCA is one of the long-term projects that I’m working on but I have not found the technical solution yet.

How different are the units that you are designing today to what you thought you would be designing when you started SPL? In the beginning in 1979 I had a recording studio with MCI devices and everything was very expensive at that time. I had the technical knowledge so I started building my own equalisers, noise gates, compressors, limiters, VU/LED bar displays, machine tape controllers, video convertors and all the other tools I needed for my studio. Other studios started asking if they could buy this equipment and eventually I sold my studio and started SPL. I can say that there is no real change from the beginning to now because I again have a surround mastering/recording studio and I am still designing audio equipment that does the best job possible. Which unit are you most proud of? Ha! I can’t be proud of a single product because it’s more a matter of being proud of the SPL team. Everyone in the company is part of the product and gives their best to bring our spirit and joy through our products to the pro audio market around the world. ■

Is there a component, t e c h n o l o g y or a cognitive breakthrough required before we step up to the next stage in analogue quality? Yes, I think VCA technology has to be modified and needs a new breakthrough. There are some physical aspects in the VCA that are not very useful for the audio. When Blackmer, and later Allison Research, designed their VCAs they got it right for the time they came out in. But now we are a resolution

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technology

AES50 — audio networking for live production AES50 has the potential to deliver great beneﬁts for the audio live production industry. SIMON HARRISON, research and development director at Midas and Klark Teknik, explains the technology and why he believes its open, standards-based approach rather than a proprietary solution is the way forward.

rear panel of midas dl461 audio router showing aES50 and HypermaC connections.

ack in July 2005, the Audio Engineering Society published AES50-2005, describing a method of using standard Cat5 computer cable to transmit multiple channels of digital audio. The technology behind AES50 had been developed by Sony Pro-Audio Lab, Oxford, and initially Sony promoted the adoption of the standard by offering to licence its technology to other manufacturers. A number of companies signed up for licences, and some developed products that provided AES50 connections. By far the largest commercial application so far has been the decision by Midas to use this technology for the audio and control network of its XL8 live performance mixing system. Shortly after the standardisation of the format by the AES and the launch of the XL8, the decision was taken at a corporate level within Sony to put the networking part of the Sony Oxford Lab up for sale, and the technology was acquired by Klark Teknik. This transition inevitably caused a loss of momentum for the standard, and only now is the way forward for this technology becoming clear again. Why is AES50 needed — don’t we have enough networks already? There are quite a number of techniques available for moving audio over Cat5 cables, so what is unique about AES50? The majority of networks that are commercially significant in the audio industry use computer-industry standards — typically the TCP/IP protocol. This bundles up a collection of audio samples into a ‘packet’, with a header containing information about the source, destination and so on. This can then be delivered over standard Ethernet networks, and the packet decoded at the receiver. This has the advantage that it uses the maximum amount of standard hardware, such as network switches. Unfortunately these standard switches are optimised for generalised computer traffic rather than low-latency audio. If you are downloading a large file from the Internet you only notice the total time taken. If the transfer stopped completely for ten milliseconds, you wouldn’t care at all. As a result commercial switches tend to buffer up data into economically-sized packets, and send them ‘efficiently’ from the point of view of fitting around other network traffic. However, with audio at 96kHz you would have lost 960 samples during that ten millisecond pause. To provide smooth audio playout, TCP/IP systems typically have to buffer up an amount of data to ensure that the variability of the network can be compensated for. The effect of this is to increase the latency or delay of the overall system. Some TCP/IP systems can provide a few

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channels of audio at low latency, but only by making very inefficient use of the available bandwidth. This is because the Ethernet preamble, header, error check, and idle space are a fixed size (38 bytes) — if you only send a few bytes of audio data you use up most of the bandwidth sending headers. AES50 is a very different concept. It uses the physical layer only of the Ethernet technology — the cables and transceivers at each end. However, the signals that are sent are not based on the TCP/IP protocol and instead it uses a deterministic protocol that is essentially a time-division multiplex (TDM) at the hardware level. Put more simply, there is a fixed pattern of data sent in a repeating fashion — there is no need to send and decode complex header information because the link is only designed to send AES50 data from point to point, not generic computer data across the Internet. TERMINOLOGY — The terms AES50, SuperMAC, and HyperMAC merit some explanation. AES50 refers to a protocol standardised by the AES. As such, it defines the signal on the link between two pieces of equipment. It is an open standard, and anyone can implement hardware that conforms to this standard without any reference to any other parties. SuperMAC refers to a specific implementation of AES50, developed by Sony, and now owned by Midas/Klark Teknik. This is typically used as a ‘sealed box’ core, supplied as code for a FieldProgrammable Gate Array (FPGA) that can be incorporated into a manufacturer’s product. While it is possible to implement AES50 without the SuperMAC technology, it provides a proven off-theshelf solution that is known to work well. HyperMAC is a relative of AES50 — in essence it provides a similar interface concept but is based on Gigabit Ethernet rather than 100Mbit. It can be carried over Cat5e or Cat6 cables, or optical fibres. Although very closely related to AES50, HyperMAC is not currently covered by an AES standard but it is planned to submit it for standardisation in the near future. A table of channel counts shows the relationship between AES50, SuperMAC and HyperMAC — note that all links are bi-directional with the same number of channels in each direction. aUdio Format AES50 SuperMAC HyperMAC 44.1kHz or 48kHz 48 channels 384 channels 88.2kHz or 96kHz 24 channels 192 channels 176.4kHz or 192kHz 12 channels 96 channels resolution

The audio data is arranged in frames, with a ‘cyclic redundancy check’ forward error correction scheme. This means that individual bit errors can be corrected at the receiver. The data is ‘scrambled’ in such a way that adjacent bits relate to different samples, which allows burst errors to be fully corrected. This means that a poor quality link (due to a bad cable or external interference) can be detected by the receiver, while still passing perfect audio. CLOCK DISTRIBUTION AND SYNCHRONISATION — In addition to the audio data, these formats provide for accurate, phase-aligned clock distribution. SuperMAC achieves this by using the additional copper pairs in the Cat5 cable, and HyperMAC uses timing markers embedded in the data stream. In both cases this allows reliable, low-jitter clocks to be delivered to the end-points of the system. As digital audio systems in live sound develop from the current ‘islands’ of digital electronics connected by analogue cables into fully digital systems, this ability to deliver high-quality clock signals with the audio will become increasingly critical. CONTROL DATA — In addition to the audio, these formats provide a control data channel interleaved with the audio. This allows remote equipment to be controlled without needing an additional network. This control data is presented to the equipment side interfaces as ‘normal’ TCP/IP Ethernet — so although the transmitted data on the cable is not packaged using TCP/IP, to the equipment using the control data channel it looks as if it is. This makes it extremely straightforward to carry existing control protocols across AES50 links without requiring any additional engineering work. AES50 provides a 5Mbit/s control channel and HyperMAC provides a 100Mbit/s channel. Conventional flow control is employed to manage the bandwidth and since this data occupies a fixed part of the TDM frame, there is no possibility that a flood of control data can interrupt the audio. This can be a real issue with non-AES50 networks if control data and audio data use a common TCP/IP connection. It is important to note that there is no defined control protocol or language associated with AES50 — there is no fixed way to transmit ‘set gain to +1dB’, for example. AES50 merely provides a way of delivering Ethernet control packets to the remote equipment. It is assumed that individual manufacturers will use their own proprietary control protocols across the network. Thus equipment from different manufacturers will inter-operate perfectly from an audio standpoint (assuming the same sample rate) but any control data will simply be ignored. History suggests that getting agreement on control protocols between manufacturers is a difficult process. Obviously it would be a very desirable future development for this to occur if AES50 achieves the widespread acceptance that is anticipated but it should not stand in the way of the immediate goal of audio compatibility. PERFORMANCE AND RESILIENCE — The AES50 and HyperMAC formats provide a low-latency transmission path of less than 70 microseconds per link. This is possible because of the TDM nature of the link, and cannot be achieved by any of the TCP/IP October 2008

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technology

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A1 Discrete Class A and Tube Dual Preamp / DI

A2 Discrete Class A and Tube Stereo Processor

A3 Discrete Class A and Tube Mono Channel Strip

belief that as our industry moves forward into the digital age, we need open standards. In analogue, we just assume that we can walk across a crowded stage with an XLR in our hand, plug it into a mixing console, and it will just simply work. It doesn’t occur to us to check who made the mixing console, or what version of software it is running… wouldn’t it be great if the same were true of a digital interface? For stereo signals AES3 has served us pretty well, so it seems that it is time for a similarly standardsled approach to the next generation of interfaces. AES10 (MADI) has done a pretty good job in the past, but lacks many of the features required for a true network. One major barrier to the adoption of the TCP/ IP–based formats has been the commercial model. Because the companies involved were audio networking companies, they needed (very reasonably!) to make money based on royalty payments — typically on a ‘per connection’ basis. This acts as a disincentive to manufacturers to fit these network ports to their products ‘just in case they are useful’. Again, consider an analogue mixing console with its rear panel covered in direct out sockets, insert points, and the like. At any one time perhaps a third of the sockets are actually in use but you don’t know which ones they will be. Imagine if you had to pay a royalty on every jack socket — there would be an immense temptation to leave off the insert points on half the channels… If AES50 is to be as useful as we think it can be, manufacturers should be positively encouraged to add more ports, not dissuaded from doing so. Since Midas/Klark Teknik is not primarily an audio networking company, we can take a rather different view. We believe that AES50 will be useful to the industry in general and do not see it primarily as a source of revenue. Of course, we expect to make money by building good products that use AES50, rather as a company like Cisco makes money from making good Ethernet switches. So our intention going forward is to make the SuperMAC and HyperMAC technology available without royalty payment to anyone who wishes to use it. Key features of our approach are: • Providing ‘sealed box’ SuperMAC and HyperMAC technology freely. • No royalty fee payable on each product shipped. • A small ﬁxed licence fee at the start to cover administration, initial support, and a ‘use of patent’ fee in line with the relevant AES policy. • A ‘recommended practice’ document to maximise interoperability with regard to sample rates, etc. • Putting forward HyperMAC to the AES for standardisation. • Working closely with several third-party contract design companies as ‘authorised expert developers’ so that other manufacturers do not have to come to Midas/Klark Teknik for advice and design expertise. We believe this approach can provide real benefits to end-users, allowing products from diverse manufacturers to interoperate far more easily than at present. There will still be many applications where the TCP/IP approach is the best fit, but if genuine, deterministic, low-latency performance is needed across a resilient, flexible network, we believe that the AES50 approach has a unique blend of technical advantages. It is also easy to use, especially in systems that are regularly reconfigured. This coupled with our enthusiasm for an open, standards-based approach rather than a proprietary solution makes us confident that AES50 and HyperMAC have a strong contribution to make to our industry. ■

protocols for a large number of audio channels. Why is this so important when latencies of 1 millisecond or so are typically regarded as acceptable? The problem comes when the user starts to build genuine networked systems as opposed to simple point-topoint digital snakes. If a Cat5 audio network is used for ALL the connections in an audio system, as opposed to a single path, then the latencies start to add up pretty quickly. In a Midas XL8 network system, for example, the signal path might be microphone -> splitter system -> router -> DSP -> router -> output box -> speaker. This involves four network links, so the latency will be below 0.28 milliseconds. If a network were used with 1 millisecond latency, there would be 4 milliseconds — probably unacceptable for use with in-ear monitoring. If we are to exploit the real potential of digital audio networks for live sound, we cannot ignore this issue. A network that forces you to pick only the very simplest network paths to keep the delays acceptable is not a good solution. Another key characteristic of AES50 is its resilience. As has already been mentioned, it provides forward error correction. This is in contrast to TCP/IP protocols that assume that if a packet is dropped, it is OK to re-send it later. Fine for Internet downloads, but not much use if you needed an audio sample at a particular moment in time. In addition, the SuperMAC and HyperMAC cores report status information about the link — noting data errors, clock synchronisation, and so on. This makes it very easy to provide health reporting to the user and to implement dual-redundant links with manual or automatic change-over. ROUTING TECHNOLOGY — A significant advantage of the TCP/IP–based formats is that they can use off-the-shelf Ethernet switches to provide network routing. However, in practice this is not as simple as it appears. To guarantee uninterrupted audio performance, good quality ‘managed’ switches are required, together with the expertise to set them up correctly. If control data is to share the same network, then it is necessary to establish Quality of Service parameters (typically by separating the network into several separate Virtual Local Area Networks or VLANs). This protects the audio from interruption by limiting the control bandwidth, but again requires considerable knowledge to set up for each individual type of switch. Also, the switches only provide routing for whole Ethernet packets — it is not possible to separate a single audio feed from the other signals in the same packet. In contrast, AES50 and HyperMAC require dedicated routers, designed for the purpose. While this is to some extent a disadvantage, it does mean that they can be a much better fit to the actual requirements of an audio network. Typically such a router provides individual one-to-many routing for every discrete audio signal and incorporates a conventional Ethernet switch for the control data, which is treated separately from the audio. The routers are also typically used as the clock sources or slaves in the system, allowing the synchronisation strategy to be extremely flexible, and avoiding the need for a separate Word-clock distribution system. Because such routers are designed specifically for professional audio applications they can also use ruggedised connectors, such as the Neutrik Ethercon, rather than the fragile RJ-45 connectors typically used on commercial Ethernet switches. A major advantage is that no specialist networking knowledge is required to set up such a router — it is merely a matter of connecting up the AES50 connections and selecting the clock source. One of the key considerations that led to Midas/ Klark Teknik adopting the AES50 approach was a

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slaying dragons

And then there was electricity This issue JOHN WATKINSON opens for business with his Old Electro-acoustic Curiosity Shop, whose motto is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;How the Dickens does that work?â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

he historical path that music has taken is strewn with all manner of artefacts for the archaeologist to discover. Digging carefully among the fossilised pools of vomit and discarded hallucinatory substances, researchers occasionally find the remains of what appears to be a machine for making sound. These are painstakingly restored in case they can shed some light on the life forms that created them or the ceremonies of the culture in which they were used. Some of them died out, but some can be seen as the fore-runners of what we have today. Traditional instruments were purely mechanical or acoustic, but the discovery of electricity led to a new breed of instrument that could not previously have been made. The Theremin is an electronic instrument that has two antennae. The name is an anglicised version of Termyen, its Russian inventor. It is played by moving the hands in proximity to the antennae, thereby changing the capacitance they see. The degree of capacitance change that this allows is quite small and not appropriate for an audio frequency oscillator. Termyen overcame that by using a fixed oscillator to beat with the hand-controlled one in order to produce a frequency within the audible range. Moving the hand with respect to one antenna controlled pitch over a wide range. The other antenna functioned on

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the same principle, but the output signal was modified to control the level of the output. Termyen discovered the effect while trying to make a metal detector and thus may be the first nerd in history. The electro-theremin was an audio oscillator where the frequency knob was connected to a slider so it could be played like a trombone. This appeared on a number of Beach Boys recordings. Interestingly, the late Dr Robert Moog started off by making Theremins, but that is another story. The Gizmo, also known as Gizmotron, was invented by Godley and Creme of 10cc fame. This was a device that was intended mechanically to bow the strings of an electric guitar, so it would produce sustained sound somewhat like a violin. A box containing a motor was fitted to the guitar, and the drive shaft passed above the strings near the bridge. It was operated by pressing buttons, one for each string, that would bring an idler wheel into contact with the motor shaft and the string. The string could be fretted as normal. To make it work, the idlers had to have small teeth so they would grip the strings, and the toothpassing frequency was sometimes heard in the sound. Although used in a number of albums, it was not a commercial success. It would be quite easy to make a modern version of the Gizmotron using transducers instead of a motor.

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The Hammond organ uses a set of motor-driven rotating discs, or tone wheels, each of which has a different number of teeth. The tooth-passing frequency is picked up by a coil, in the same way that anti-lock brake sensors work in cars. The secret of the Hammond is that for each key that was pressed, the signals from up to nine harmonically-related tone wheels could be mixed. The proportions of the mix could be adjusted using drawbars. The Hammond organ was at its best when played through Leslie loudspeakers, a fact which Hammond actively resented. Leslie speakers were very large active speakers that, in addition to the drive units, contained motorised rotating assemblies. One of these was a horn (and a balance weight) that revolved above a fixed pressure driver. The other was a baffle arrangement that rotated below the woofer. These rotating devices produced both vibrato via the Doppler effect and tremolo via directivity changes and were meant to simulate the beating between pipes in a conventional wind organ. The Leslie speaker has been used with many different sources for various effects. The Rhodes electric piano was developed to be played by servicemen injured in World War II. Instead of the usual strings, the hammers struck a kind of tuning fork that had a guitar-type pickup so the sound could be amplified. While it met its original goal, the

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slaying dragons music world also discovered that the Rhodes piano was a lot lighter than a conventional piano and could be amplified arbitrarily. The Mellotron was an early attempt to make random access to prerecorded sounds under the control of a keyboard. The recording medium is magnetic tape and the unit consists of a long horizontal drive capstan under the keyboard, with a large number of parallel tapes running just above it from front to back. Each key carries a pinch roller and a pressure pad. The act of depressing a key traps the tape between the pinch roller and the capstan and between the pressure pad and the playback head. Whatever is on the tape is then reproduced. Typically the tapes would have recordings of different notes corresponding to the key that activated them. A musician would play each note in turn on a flute, violin or ‘cello, for example, to create masters for the tapes the Mellotron played. It is commonly thought that the Mellotron works with tape loops, but this is incorrect. When the key is pressed, the tape needs to start from the beginning in order to reproduce the attack of the note. A loop would not be able to do that. In the Mellotron each tape is laced back and forth between pulleys in a W-shape. As the tape plays the two lower pulleys move upwards and extend a tension spring. As it emerges from the capstan, the tape falls into a vertical bin, where it stacks in a zigzag pattern. As soon as the key is released the pinch roller and pressure pad disengage and the tape is smartly pulled back to the beginning by the spring. In order to have a wide range of sounds, the tapes were 3/8-inch wide and carry three tracks that were each long enough for eight seconds of recording. All

of the heads are mounted on a bar and can be shifted sideways as an assembly so that all heads select the same track. With care, the entire tape cassette assembly could be replaced with another having different sounds recorded on it. The keyboard and a cover panel have to be lifted off, and a bar at the back of the machine that holds the head end of all the tapes is unscrewed. The bar is then moved towards the cassette so that all of the tapes retract and the bar is located in the top of the cassette, which can then be lifted out. It will not come as a surprise that the Mellotron is incredibly heavy. Not the kind of thing to take on a tour, you might think. Nevertheless a number of bands did just that and the complex delicate mechanism got humped around with the rest of the kit. Success often depended on the constant presence of someone who wasn’t too scared to open it up and make it work. Some bands had two machines to ensure that one of them would be working. Strong parallels with Jaguar ownership there! The Mellotron has a sound and a charm all of its own. The generation loss between the master recording and the tape that was put in the machine ensured that all of those nasty sharp bits on the waveform were rounded off. There would be a little burst of tape hiss after the tape started and before the note arrived under the head and sometimes when releasing a note the tape would begin to rewind itself before the pressure pad was fully retracted so there would be a burst of sound in fast rewind. Tuning a Mellotron is dead easy. You can’t. The exact pitch that comes out depends on a long series of variables including the original performance, the

speed stability of the machines that were used to master the tapes, the temperature at each stage and the speed of the drive motor. The unit had a motor speed control on the capstan and that was it. The Mellotron will forever be associated with the music of a certain era. Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues and Wooly Wolstenholme of Barclay James Harvest were both accomplished players. Pinder did much to popularise the unit, having worked for the manufacturer at one time, and this resulted in its appearance on Strawberry Fields Forever. What is interesting is that all of these devices should have been eclipsed by synthesis and information technology. With the exception of the Gizmo, which disappeared, they never went away. Original Mellotrons are sought after and valuable and new ones are being made. Theremins are still around, as are Hammond organs and Leslie speakers, many of which are originals that still work. The Rhodes piano went through a phase of being synthesised, but now it too has its tuning forks back. In marketing speak, new is synonymous with better. In the real world it isn’t. I’m still using that hard-totune old analogue radio they deride in the commercials because it sounds a hell of a lot better than DAB. Radio has never sounded better…my arse! ■ Got a problem? Puzzled by a technology? Confused by seemingly contradictory ‘facts’? or simply always wondered why something happens the way it does? then John is listening and willing to have a go at explaining it for you in his usual self-effacing manner. Send your questions via the editor at zen@resolutionmag.com

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your business

Getting out more and mixing The need to network has always been an essential for creative types and creative deals. No wonder no one is buying records anymore — we’re all too busy making them, concludes DAN DALEY.

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was reading a press release recently from Merlin, the London-based global rights body that purports to represent the independent music sector (which is probably a lot like herding cats). The numbers they used to estimate the market seemed right, with indies now accounting for 27.5% of the prerecorded music business, the data having pedigrees from the BPI and Nielsen Soundscan. But the number that jumped out at me was their announcement of Merlin’s membership in its first month: 12,000 labels. Not 12,000 people but 12,000 record labels. You can count the number of remaining major labels on the fingers of one hand, even if you happened to be careless with fireworks, but you need an algebraic calculator to keep track of the indies. It’s jarring stuff like this that makes you realise just how much things have changed. First off, there’s likely little distinction within that number between record label and individual person; in a digital context, it’s not unusual for a label to be comprised of a single person who, thanks to the technology and the Internet, can be the chief cook and bottle-washer for the entire enterprise, nor would it surprise if an individual had numerous labels of their own, just as most of us have multiple email addresses and 15/9/08 websites. 2:55 PMWhen Page Time1magazine awarded its then-stillsomewhat-prestigious year-end ‘Person of the Year’

honour in 2006 to the amorphous ‘You’ — which is to say, ‘us’ — people snickered at what at the time seemed like pandering to the Millennials and Gen Ys who were getting their news solely off the Internet and who, if they deigned read a magazine at all, read Wired. But Time was right. The world is increasingly made up of individual islands whose interaction tends towards social networking rather than socialising because there’s so much that can be done on one’s own now. No wonder no one’s buying records anymore — they’re too busy making and marketing them. (Besides, ‘You’ was still a preferable choice to 2006’s other nominees: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chinese leader Hu Jintao and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il. It was a weird year.) So, where can studio owners, managers, producers and engineers interact in a meaningful way with artists, musicians and each other in a digital universe? The operable word here is ‘meaningful.’ The MySpace or FaceBook page has become the successor to the website as a promotional vehicle, and it’s about as effective, which is to say, not very. The problem with websites and social networking pages are that they aren’t dynamic — they rely on the owner to update them (and we know how often that happens with our websites) and/or upon the inclination of visitors to interact with the sites and pages. Social networks make it easier for people to leave messages and link to, but do you really know who your ‘friends’ are? Sting and Jimmy Page, among other music luminaries, seem to have befriended a hell of a lot of people out there recently, and using widely available stock photographs of themselves while doing so. There are other, more dynamic venues that musicians and others are using. Twitter, with its limitation to a terse, 140-character neo-haiku, is

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your business highly dynamic, but it also risks banality. I mean, how many people really need to know what you’re up to at any given moment of the day. However, I can see Twitter messages, properly worded, organised and spaced, as a kind of mobile blog. There are people who would enjoy keeping up with the progress of a project on a nearly minute-byminute basis — ‘We’re about to do guitar overdubs… The first pass went well but neglected to hit “record”… Guitarist over fit of pique and now doubling the solo…’ It has the potential to become a sort of real-time radio drama that, promoted adroitly, adds dimensionality to a person and a project. But again, keep in mind the rootword here — too much detail and too many posts can simply make you look like a twit. As live music has become the saviour of the industry’s revenue stream lately, it also makes the venues that it takes place in that much more valuable — if occasionally deafening — a place to interact in. This is something musicians never let go of, and there are legions of stories of Strokes-like discoveries just before last call. Clubs — the good ones, anyway — are a sort of fleshand-blood Facebook, a place where certain people make it known that they can be found. As Woody Allen was fond of saying, 80% of life is just showing up, and there is no substitute for being there. But as with Twitter, a balance needs to be struck: you need to be there enough to be recognised as a notable feature of a landscape but not so much as to make others suspect you have no place else to go. CBGB’s, The Bottom Line, Tramp’s, The Whiskey, Max’s Kansas City — these and other dearly departed loci might have had music on the marquee but they had business going on regularly in their red vinyl banquettes; the bar served as a desk and the serviette holder as a stationary closet for more deals than we’ll ever know. In a more health-conscious era, the idea of hanging around in bars may no longer be as attractive as it once was, but the point is that there are still hives around that music people can swarm and in the process do some face-to-face networking. Music stores and schools in particular have been arranging networking events, as have a growing number of organisations such as the National Association of Record Industry Professionals (NARIP) and the Recording Academy in the States, and Music Tank in the UK. A useful caveat about these sorts of gatherings, however, can be found in yet another aphorism, this one by the wonderfully linguistically challenged baseball great Yogi Berra, who, when asked why he had stopped going to a particular restaurant in St Louis, replied, ‘Nobody goes there no more, it’s too crowded.’ Which is to say, you let a committee determine a rendezvous in Hipsville at your own risk. Work the fringes and don’t do it on weekend nights, is my advice. But do put yourself in harm’s way — the most it’ll cost is the price of a pint. And while there may be far fewer of them than a few years ago, don’t count out the multiroom studio facility as a still-viable agora for the music business. I don’t mean to disparage the single-room facility, the October 2008

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village grocery (or chemists, perhaps more accurately) of the recording business, but there is nothing that compares to the synergy of several creative teams bumping into each other in the lounge. What I don’t see enough of is recording studio managers flipping through Outlook and organising gatherings of their own at studios, proactively trying to ignite those kinds of sparks. Not that they don‘t have other things to worry over. The record labels that once used to routinely pay thousands of dollars a day for artists and musicians to take months to make a single recording are now gone or near broke, suing their own customers to pay the salaries of A&R personnel who spend more time looking over their shoulder for the sack slip than out looking for new talent. But some of the money that’s no longer going into studio coffers from record labels is still being funnelled into the infrastructure from other sources. One of the city’s major multiroom facilities was bought nearly three years ago by a wealthy Persian businessman for his son. The place has been haemorrhaging money, which is typical of this scenario. However, regardless of the circumstances by which a large multiroom studio keeps its doors open, the fact that they are works in favour of record producers, engineers and artists, who will have the benefit of a place to potentially interact while they work. And some of the ubiquitous hedge fund and other market-based money that’s been floating around Hollywood in recent years, capitalising films instead of factories, is also finding its way into the infrastructure, seeding more than a few studios along the way. It’s possible to avoid being seduced by the seeming ease of the Internet. Use it for the magnificent search engine that it is, but don’t expect it to be a surrogate for showing up yourself. Computers are great at distributing music and storing music, and to some extent for making it, but they don’t make the deal. Whether in a studio or a club or a networking event, there is still nothing like being there. So get out and stay out. ■ resolution

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headroom EvolUtioN oF aNotHEr iCoN I was amazed to learn from Wes Dooley’s article (V7.6), that the RCA ribbon was under continuous development. As an announcer and producer, I had used the RCA in the mid 50s, and before than the ‘junior’ (or cheapo!) version in the late 40s. Between those periods, I used the BBC Type A ribbon, which became the BBC standard studio mic in the late 30s. That was followed by the Type B, which was not such good quality and quickly withdrawn. The late 40s produced the Type C, now manufactured by Coles. At the same time, a prototype of a Type D was built, but as the SNR showed only a slight improvement over the Type C it was never put into production. I always thought the Type A was every bit as good as the RCA: Glenn Miller loved them! They might be worth an investigation. John Johnson, Ace Comms John, I like the BBC Type A, and own two of them. As with the RCA 44, or any product that is in production for a long period of time, the Type A evolved during its production life: first to the AX, then to the AXB, and finally to the AXBT. There is information on this progression at http://www.btinternet. com/~roger.beckwith/bh/mics/axbt.htm The microphones shown are from the Chris Owen collection, and this BBC history site was compiled and edited by Roger Beckwith. This site also has pictures and commentary about the BBC Type B and the BBC PGS and the PGD designs which I believe you refer to as the BBC Type C and D ribbon microphones. The BBC has their 1955 Monograph No. 4 which details the early 1950s development of the PGS and PGD on the web at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/archive/pdffiles/monographs/ bbc_monograph_04.pdf H.D. Harwood, who later designed the BBC LS3/5 speakers and Harbeth Acoustics line, was heavily involved in this project. We now take ribbon microphones for granted, but in 1932 the RCA 44A was revolutionary. It had an excellent native fig-8 polar pattern which dramatically increased the positioning choices an audio engineer could make. All earlier

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microphone types: carbon button, condenser, and moving coil dynamic were natively omnidirectional. The carbon button and condenser microphones also required external power supplies, and were sensitive to humidity. In contrast to earlier RCA designs with internal electromagnets, the 44A used newly developed permanent magnets. This eliminated the expense, weight and need for maintenance of an external power supply. All the microphone electronics could be in the control room and could be changed quickly if necessary. With excellent frequency and transient response, and impervious to humidity, the fig-8 RCA 44A completely changed the microphone landscape. The 44B was introduced in 1936. A double magnet design with more powerful magnets and considerably more output, it had the profile of the 44A, but with striking black and chrome art deco graphics. The 1938 44BX revision had a less reflective TV umber finish and other minor production changes to make it easier to manufacture. No sonic changes occurred at that time, however a substantive sonic change was made in the mid 1940s when Retinger’s patent for ribbon damping was implemented, and the internal puff shields were eliminated. AEA’s ribbon mic service shop began making spare parts for RCA microphones in the 1990s. AEA achieved 100% 44 spares in 1998 and reissued it as the AEA R44C. The sound and look accurately matched original RCA 44BX production and parts for the AEA R44C microphone are interchangeable with the original 44BX. A custom transformer from Cinema Magnetics matched the RCA transformer’s sound, and the ribbon material was New Old Stock dating from the mid 1970s. The black and silver radio finish graphics were borrowed from the 44B. A higher output version, the 44CX, was developed for engineers who needed more dynamic range for digital recording. It has additional Neodymium magnets and a very strong stray magnetic field. This version is often used to strongly accent left and right strings, as John Kurlander did for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The new phantom-powered AEA A440 ribbon is the outcome of our ongoing dialog with 44 users. It was a collaborative effort between AEA, Lundahl Transformers, and Fred Forssell to see how much more performance the 44 might still yield. As with another 1932 classic from our Southern California hot rod tradition immortalised by the Beachboys, The Little Deuce Coupe, the 44 continues to amaze us. Wes Dooley, AEA

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advertiser index Al.So Dynax ....................................... Classified 63 API ......................................................................67 Audient ..............................................................38 Audio Technica ...................................................49 Calrec .................................................................42 Charteroak .........................................................56 Dangerous .........................................................37 Digico ................................................................03 Fairlight ..............................................................45 Fostex.................................................................20 Genelec ............................Outside Back Cover 68 Grace ..................................................................35 Holophone .........................................................51 Josephson ..........................................................59 KMR Audio ........................................ Classified 63 Lydcraft ..............................................................18 McDSP ..................................... Inside Front Cover Merging Technology ..........................................34 Microtech Gefell ................................................25 Midas/Klark Teknik .............................................09 Millennia .............................................................13 Mytek .................................................................62 Prism...................................................................64 Radial ..................................................................31 RME / Alva ................................................... 10-11 RND ....................................................................65 Røde ...................................................................07 Schoeps ..............................................................17 SCVLondon ........................................................33 Sonic Distribution / Apogee .............................46 Sonic Distribution / RND ...................................43 Sonic Distribution / SE .......................................53 Sonic Distribution / Waves ................................23 SEA Brauner .......................................................64 Sennheiser ..........................................................29 Sonifex ...............................................................54 Sonnox ...............................................................19 Sound Technology........................................ 26-27 Source UA ..........................................................21 SPL......................................................................57 Studio Spares .....................................................47 TL Audio .............................................................61 TL Commerce .................................... Classified 63 Tonelux ...............................................................36 Vertigo............................................... Classified 63 Vintage King.......................................................41 WSDG.................................................................66

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