Resolution V8.2 March 2009

AUDIO FOR BROADCAST, POST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V8.2 March 2009

The Bernard Butler interview Live, studio and video with James Towler Sonic differences between linear and switch-mode PSUs Watkinson asks why radio and TV sound is so bad Meet your maker: Neil Grant — Harris Grant Audio over IP with LUCI Live 2

£5

Reviews SE Electronics RNR1 API 1608 CharterOak SCL-1 Waves UM 225/226 Blue Coconut Unity Echo Verb Digidesign Pro Tools 8 HD Sonifex RB-MTV1 Rycote InVision Tannoy Precision 8P

The Engine Room

No other tool in the professional recording chain has more stringent requirements than the audio monitor – it is the last piece of a complicated chain of events. At Genelec our goal is to deliver sound experiences to you as it is intended by the original performer. Genelec core technologies, including active crossovers and optimized amplifiers with protection circuitry for each driver, offer you an undistorted, dynamic and natural sound without adding to or removing anything from the electronic signal. No matter how hard you drive your monitors, there is always a Genelec system that suits your needs. www.genelec.com

8000-Series Features

Active Crossovers Dedicated Amplifiers for Each Driver MDE™ - Minimum Diffraction Enclosure DCW™ - Directivity Control Waveguide Drive Unit Protection Circuitry Room Response Controls Iso-Pod™ - Isolation Positioner/Decoupler™ High Performance Reflex Port

AUDIO FOR BROADCAST, POST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V8.2 March 2009 ISSN 1477-4216

News & Analysis

4 Leader

16

Products

4

65

Broadcast aside

66 Headroom

News

Sales, contracts, appointments and biz bites.

New introductions and announcements.

Dennis Baxter shares his recipe for acoustic soup.

Craft

14

A T urkish audio for commercials facility has grown into film and video.

Melodika

46

36

Bernard Butler

50 Ten

Applying LUCI Live 2 for broadcasting live audio over IP for the Art’s Birthday celebrations.

Significant streets of London.

A look at the technology and operational principles behind Riedel’s Acrobat Digital Wireless Intercom.

40

James Towler

44

Sweet spot

Broadcast

UK Brit-winning and best-selling producer

Bernard Butler on how he applies his musical 52 sensibilities to the production process.

As comfortable with the many facets of recorded and live audio as he is with video, James Towler uses all his skills with Steve Winwood.

We’re planning and building a dream media production facility and considering room acoustics, absorption and diffusion.

54

Wireless intercom in the spectrum squeeze

Meet your maker

Neil Grant — More than a quarter of a century of Harris Grant.

Business

48 Digital Britain gets the digit

64

The British government’s Digital Britain plan is less a road map to the future as directions to where we’ve already been.

Your business

Ever thought of a producer compilation?

Daley says there’s power in numbers and in context.

Technology

58 PSU noise and distortion

Investigating the sonic differences between linear and switch-mode power supplies and working out a way to measure them.

62

29 Blue Coconut Unity Echo Verb 30 Digidesign Pro Tools 8 HD 32 Sonifex RB-MTV1 33 Rycote InVision 34 Tannoy Precision 8P

Slaying Dragons

Watkinson asks why radio and TV sound is so bad and applies his Law of Insufficient Derision.

Reviews

22 SE Electronics RNR1 24 API 1608 26 CharterOak SCL-1 28 Waves UM 225/226 Upmixers & Center

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, Nigel Jopson, Andy Day, Philip Newell, Jim Evans, Dan Daley, John Watkinson, Dennis Baxter

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

PRODUCTION AND LAYOUT Dean Cook, The Magazine Production Company Tel: +44 1273 467579 Email: dean@resolutionmag.com

NEWS

Appointments

Kim-Poh Tan and Jünger’s Peter Poers.

Dynamics processing specialist Jünger Audio has established a subsidiary company in Singapore to supply its customer base in Asia. Jünger Audio Asia will initially share premises with Singapore-based IPK Broadcast Systems Ltd, Jünger Audio’s Asian distributor.

The new company has its own staff and is headed by MD Kim-Poh Tan, formerly director of sales and marketing at IPK. Riedel Communications has opened a dedicated UK office located at Pinewood Studios in Iver Heath from where it will cover rental and sales activities and direct customer support in the UK. The office is managed by Paul Rivens, business development director. Struan Robertson has joined Riedel’s UK office as system support engineer.

Rick Fisher, Telex sales manager for more than 20 years, has joined Riedel’s US team as regional sales manager for the Southeast and Midwest regions. Dave Letson, former international sales manager at Calrec, has joined Riedel’s office in Sydney, taking over responsibility for sales activities in Australia and New Zealand.

Leader

So much of life is about selfcontrol and maintaining a professional attitude and outlook. It’s what most people actually get paid for in one way or another be it how well they pack the salami they’ve sliced for you and how sincerely they ask you if there is ‘anything else’ to not shouting out your bank balance and overdraft limit within earshot of everyone else in the bank. Yes, turning up is important but having pride in your professionalism is ultimately what gives job satisfaction.

Yet public collapses in professionalism are now plentiful. Thus we witnessed the sobbing-andblubbing-so-much-I-can’t-sing acceptance performance of the UK Song for Europe contender, the hysterical so-on–the-edge-it-makes-you-uncomfortable display of the last X-factor winner, and the genre-defining latest batch of film award acceptance speeches. Some of this stuff was so cringe-inducing it could be used to diffuse civil unrest. Although we live in a world where to ‘really, really want this...’ in itself is enough qualification to participate and where ruthlessness and greed ‘only prove you’re human’, when these people actually get what they want there’s a strong chance they’re going to let themselves down. They don’t give the definitive performance that silences their critics and doubters with dignity and proves they deserve it.

It is OK to lose it in front of millions — it makes good TV — that sobbing and dripping uncontrollably at that magical point of success is expected. (Perhaps we have all become desensitised from years of watching widows weeping in ruins around the world.) Professionalism is perhaps deemed too elitist; we appreciate the amateur within just as we commend those who pretend to do something really well (Guitar Hero) rather than those who really can. I saw Yngwie Malmsteen play at NAMM, I’m not a fan, but it’s evident his talent is a cocktail of natural aptitude and an awful lot of hard graft. I also saw some dorks carrying around guitars with buttons where the strings should be.

I expect professionals to be professional, to do their job to the best of their ability, keep it together and to go the extra yard. There’s a female politician on a political programme I watch every Thursday night that is always barely intelligible because she is miked incorrectly. Every week it’s the same — it never gets any better but then it never gets any worse either so it is at least consistent. Somebody puts the mic on her every week and somebody also gives the resulting sound the thumbs up even though it is completely at odds with every other miked voice on the show.

I am reminded of the words of John Watkinson who suggests that professional audio is an oxymoron and wonders how different it would be for us all if we were governed by the standards of the aeronautical industry. The reason we aren’t, he says, is because nobody dies; nobody dies when a lavalier gets tucked around the wrong side of the lady’s lapel or you’re a bit slow on opening up that fader or your mix doesn’t so much have a smiley face on it as a grimace. It doesn’t matter enough.

What you never did hear was: ‘OMG, OMG! I really need to like put down in like the Hudson...’ Now that was professional.

Zenon Schoepe

Resolution Awards Nominations are in

Mike Genievieve (SR sound designer), Dave Kerzner (CEO), Martin Warr (Audio Pros MD) and Ryan Holquist (SR sound designer).

Florida-based sound development company Sonic Reality has appointed The Audio Professionals as its UK and Ireland distributor.

©2009 S2 Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publishers. Great care is taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this publication, but neither

4

The Nominations code and Postcode AUDIO FOR BROADCAST, POST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION for the Resolution (as displayed on Awards 2009 are their magazine’s now in and viewable address label) and on the Resolution website – follow the links at enter them in the My Subscription section of www.resolutionmag.com the website. On logging in they will receive Nominations have been drawn from an an exclusive link to the Resolution Awards exceptional panel of industry experts and Voting page. Each reader can vote once and practitioners and are presented in eleven has a maximum of seven votes to cast in the product categories. Only registered eleven product categories. This limit has Resolution readers are eligible to vote. been set to encourage considered voting.

Resolution readers should take their Reader Voting will close on the 24 April.

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.

S2 Publications Ltd. Registered in England and Wales.

Company number: 4375084.

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

resolution

Soundking buys Cadac

The Soundking Group Company Limited of Ningbo, China has acquired the assets, trademark and intellectual property of Cadac Electronics plc. Under the ownership of Soundking Group, all 25 Cadac employees are being retained, with R&D and production continuing to be based in the UK. Bob Thomas has been appointed general manager of the new operating company, Cadac Holdings Limited.

‘I am personally delighted that I have been able to bring the world-famous Cadac brand and its outstanding products into the Soundking Group,’ said president and founder Xianggui Wang. ‘I am also extremely happy that we have been able to retain all Cadac employees and to protect their jobs in this time of economic uncertainty. The Cadac R&D team will form the European core of Soundking Group’s global R&D effort, enabling us to draw on Cadac’s high level of expertise in analogue and digital audio and translate this into new products across the Group.’

A German TV documentary expedition has retraced Charles Darwin’s voyage around the southern tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn in a replica of the HMS Beagle. The camera crew, led by Ralf Brauner, opted for a complete Rode microphone set-up of NTG-3 shotgun, Blimp windshield, WS7 deluxe windshield and Boompole. ‘The NTG-3 was 100% reliable in an environment where moisture and condensation is a top issue,’ said Ralph. ‘My normally very reliable field recorder was not — it just stopped working when humidity and condensation became too high; in those cases, I used the NTG-3 directly with the camera and got fantastic recordings.’

Subscribe www.resolutionmag.com Annual Subscriptions: UK £37.00, Europe £46.00, Rest of the World £53.00

March 2009

NEWS

Schmitt nominates Tube-Tech

Shapeshifters shift to Genelec

Grammy-nominated albums Just A Little Lovin’ by Shelby Lynne and Still Unforgettable

by Natalie Cole were both mixed by Al Schmitt using Tube-Tech equipment, and most particularly the SMC 2B stereo multiband compressor.

‘I use a lot of the Tube-Tech equipment, but I use the SMC 2B on everything,’ says Schmitt. ‘That’s my favourite, although I love all their gear. I usually use it when I’m mixing. I use it on specific instruments and sometimes I use it strapped across the two-track bus.

‘I use very little compression; just a tiny bit — maybe 1dB all the way across. I use it more for the sound, because it just sounds so good. What I basically like is the warmth.’

Schmitt has had his SMC 2B for four years but has been using Tube-Tech equipment for decades. ‘I did a Willie Nelson recording years and years ago where I used a TubeTech preamp and compressor on his vocal, which worked great.’

A variety of projects have benefited from Schmitt’s touch and Tube-Tech equipment including a new Diana Krall album that is due for release in March. ‘I also did a DVD with her that will be out in April. We went to Rio to do that,’ said Schmitt.

First European Everest to Germany

Genelec has supplied an 8250A Bi-Amped DSP monitoring system and an 8020A system to chart-topping DJ team The Shapeshifters for their newly refurbished studio in West London.

When the time came to upgrade their studio they auditioned many different speaker brands but were knocked out with the DSP Genelecs. By their own admission, the acoustics of their control room are far from perfect but with the Genelec automatic room set-up, the acoustic deficiencies were soon addressed and resulted in a much truer sound.

‘We had had our old monitoring system for many years and thought it was good, but when we fired up the Genelecs it was like night and day, the difference was stunning,’ said Simon.

‘Our workflow is much faster now, as we do not need to adjust our final mixes to the extent we used to, the result is much truer,’ added Max. The team met in 1996 and they say their partnership combines Simon’s love of house music and Max’s studio experience. Lola’s Theme was their first collaboration and became an international number 1 and was followed by Back to Basics and Incredible. The pair run their own Nocturnal Groove record label with Simon’s wife Lola.

Appointments UK supplier KMR Audio Ltd has appointed Stefan Pope as sales manager.

He was previously manager of the Barnet branch of Digital Village.

Audio-Technica UK has appointed Ben Wood as areas sales manager for London and the South, specifically catering to the needs of the MI market, while AudioTechnic a’s technic al support manager Logan Helps has joined the marketing team as training and product support specialist.

HHB Communic ations has been appointed distributor for Wohler Technologies in the UK.

Euphonix-mixed film makes Bollywood history Focusrite/Novation sales director Chris Gooddie has resigned from an active role in the company to pursue his interest in bird watching.

507 music in Munich is the first European studio to buy the new Everest ECS-410 Channel Strip from Summit Audio. ‘When I tested the Everest prototype in December, I was blown away,’ said studio co-owner and producer/composer Michael Ellwanger. ‘It is not only the fantastic sound of the ECS-410, the versatility of the TouchPatch Routing is simply outstanding.’

Jewel & Esk College has installed four SSL AWS mixing desks as part of the technical refurbishment and complete redevelopment of the college’s Edinburgh campus.

Hindi blockbuster film Ghajini was mixed entirely on a Euphonix System 5 at Anand Recording Private Limited’s Mumbai-based postproduction facility and earned US$30 million in its first week of release, which set a box office record for a Bollywood film. Additionally, the movie’s original soundtrack was composed A.R. Rahman, also a Euphonix System 5 owner, who has won Academy Awards, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for his soundtrack on the film Slumdog Millionaire.

‘Being that Ghajini was an action film, it required a very complex soundtrack. I had to build a highly flexible mix setup that could

be routed in any way I wanted,’ explained Anand film mix engineer Anup Dev. ‘With the Euphonix it was very easy to do that, yet still modify and update the setup as required without sacrificing any set ups. Euphonix’ ability to store multiple complex mixes also allowed the film’s director to keep his options open as long as possible. Overall I had the full flexibility of a film mix console in a single user configuration.’

Anand Studios’ single-operator System 5 is a dual-core, 154 channel system with 56 faders and is outfitted with a film-style monitoring panel that includes PEC-direct switching and joysticks.

Johnston, Beeston, Hawley and Nick Venables.

Damian Hawley has been promoted to the newly-created position of global sales manager for Focusrite/Novation. Nick Venables will continue his efforts in the UK north and support the European market. Rob Ascough (formerly MD of Shure Asia) has been appointed in a freelance capacity to represent Focusrite and Novation brands in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, working out of Hong Kong. UK sales manager Steve Beeston will receive support from UK sales executive Neil Johnston.

Subscribe now online at www.resolutionmag.com UK £37 • Europe £46 • Rest of the World £53

March 2009

resolution

5

NEWS

Appointments

Magnotti relies on Equator Q8s

Jay Easley has been appointed manager, Midas and Klark Teknik, for the Americas.

He most recently served as director of live sound for the Bosch Communications Systems family of Pro Audio brands (Dynacord, Electro-Voice, Klark Teknik, and Midas).

Five dealers have been appointed by DiGiCo to handle sales of its entry level SD8 console in the UK and Ireland: Autograph Sales, London; Hawthorns, Midlands; Stage Electrics, South West; Wigwam, Nor th of England; and Ireland’s Rea Sound.

Simon Kenning has joined Roland Systems Group in a sales and support capacity from Stage Electrics where he was business development manager for the last seven years. Another addition to the UK team is Helena Lewis who is the RSS point of liaison at Roland’s national headquarters in Swansea.

C l e a r - C o m Communication Systems has appointed Ahmed Magd Eldin as regional sales manager for the Middle East, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. He has previously worked for Almasa IT Distribution, Silicon21-Dubai and Cisco Systems.

Multiple Grammy Award-winning recording, mixing, and mastering engineer Phil Magnotti says he relies on Equator Audio Q8 monitors for all his work.

‘The Q8s are among the most phase accurate monitors I’ve ever used,’ said Magnotti.

‘The centre imaging is positively astounding -— you’d think there was a centre speaker in front of you when you’re mixing. Equally important, these monitors are amazingly linear from low through high SPL. I hear tremendous detail no matter what level I’m working at. When I need the playback level loud, the Q8s deliver. When I want to work at more moderate levels, the Q8s are equally detailed.’

On his travels to ‘acoustically challenged’ control rooms with the Q8s he has come to depend on Equator Audio’s Secondary Reflection Correction (SRC) software. Part of the Q Series Room Analysis Calibration Kit, SRC software identifies secondary reflections. It takes a few minutes to setup the software and to enter the control room’s largest dimension then running the analysis routine directs the Q8s’ digitally-controlled transducers to optimise the listening position.

‘For engineers who work in their home studios, which typically are not all that acoustically accurate, this software makes a huge difference in one’s ability to achieve accurate monitoring results,’ he said. ‘For engineers who, like me, move between multiple facilities in the course of their work, the SRC software is invaluable in terms of helping one achieve a consistent and accurate mix.’

Rietzas gets his own M7

Holophone has named AppleWorld Distribution as its UK distributor.

A p p leWo r l d Dis t r ib u t io n is t he distribution arm of Planet Audio Group, which is also made up of Planet Audio, Planet Video and MacUniverse.

6

Ex-Decca chief engineer James Lock died in February at his London house. Jimmy started work at Decca in 1962 and soon became a prolific in-house sound engineer, following in the steps of his mentor Kenneth Wilkinson.

He joined forces with Sir Georg Solti and Lucciano Pavarotti on most of their discs, leaving us a unique legacy of reference recordings. He was, at the same time, the man Herbert Von Karajan would ask for in two trademark opera albums he did for Decca, La Bohème and Madama Butterfly, in 1972 and 1974.

Winner of two Grammy Awards (one for Mahler 9th Symphony with Solti), James Lock’s recordings always presented us with a lush and very pristine sound, atmospheric but, at the same time, with pin point instruments.

In June 2007, he joined the staff of O Ganho do Som studio in Portugal as resident engineer and consultant, helping in film soundtracks recordings. He was in the final planning of mixing two operas from his friend and composer Gian Carlo Menotti — The Media and The Telephone. Last summer, he had started to write The Other Side of the Microphone, an autobiography about his Decca years and the human experience of recording great musicians.

He was the best classical music engineer of all time but I will remember him as an educated, nice and warm human being. He liked to dress well and had a good sense of humour. He has gone for his last setup but has left us a hard to follow recording legacy.

Recordings will never sound the same.

João Ganho

1608 replaces digital desk at Charleston

D K-Te c h n o l o g i e s has appointed Peter Harrison as regional sales manager with particular responsibility for the US and the Far East. He has previously worked at Border TV, Neve, Amek and most recently Calrec Audio.

Universal Audio has appointed Greg Westall as VP of product marketing.

He was previously hardware marketing manager for Digidesign and director of online services at Line 6.

James Lock (1939-2009)

Engineer Dave Reitzas has bought a Bricasti Model 7 stereo reverb processor. ‘Outboard reverb provides a unique sound that I’ve yet to hear from a plug-in,’ he said. ‘High-end dedicated hardware reverb offers a lot more processing power than I find with most DAW plug-ins resulting in exceptionally robust algorithms that deliver the rich, full enveloping sound that I strive for.’

Reitzas first used an M7 on the David Foster and Friends DVD and CD project, Hit Man. The concert was recorded live at the Mandalay

Bay Arena in Las Vegas. ‘I fell in love with the M7 in the Hit Man mix sessions, and then used it while tracking Seal’s new record Soul in Studio A at Capitol Studios, Hollywood. I also borrowed a unit from Summit Audio [Bricasti’s US distributor] late last year for a new client’s project of just piano and strings that I was mixing at The Record Plant in Hollywood,’ he said. ‘I had worked half a day with other reverbs before the Bricasti arrived at the studio, and when I added it to my mix I knew right then that it was time to have my own M7.’

resolution

Charleston Sound in Mt Pleasant, South Carolina has installed a 32-channel API 1608 to replace a digital console, which itself had replaced a string of other digital consoles in its Wes Lachot acoustically designed room.

‘We were never quite getting the sound we wanted to get,’ said chief engineer and owner Jeff Hodges. ‘The digital consoles were great for automating plug-ins, and we spent many, many hours tweaking plug-ins with them.

But there’s something to be said for a great analogue board like the 1608. It gives us the sound we want from the very beginning. And it does so much more quickly and reliably than trying to find it after the fact with plug-ins.’

Meanwhile, SuperControl Recording Studios has become the first commercial facility in Southern California to install a 1608. The 16-input 1608 was bought from Vintage King and complements the personal equipment collections of business partners Paul Ludemann, Brian Siegel and Kris Haavig.

March 2009

NEWS

Appointments Kevin Campbell has r e t u r n e d t o A P T ’s Belfast HQ to take up the position of senior vice president of global hardware s ales. He previously headed up the company’s North America sales operations.

Dav i d Sys tems has appointed David Diederichs as head of product management.

He joins from AMD where he was responsible for the product marketing of various consumer and commercial products in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Jürgen Vollmer has been appointed director sales. He has worked for Compaq and EMC and most recently for OneVision.

Andy Brown has been promoted to head of digital console strategy for Soundcraft Studer. He has more than 20 years of experience across a number of functions at Soundcraft including product management.

UK distribution of Euphonix Artist Series products has been transferred to Euphonix Europe in Hayes in a move ‘intended to offer the UK dealerships a more streamlined response to all their needs’.

Gavin Haverstick has been promoted to lead acoustical engineer at Auralex Acoustics. He started i n t h e e ngi n e e r i ng department and was later Midwest regional sales manager.

TC Electronic has been appointed European distributor for all products and accessories of Blue Microphones.

Showtime Prolight + Sound, Frankfurt....1-4 April NAB, Las Vegas..................17-23 April AES Europe, Munich.............7-10 May IBC, Amsterdam......11-15 September Plasa, London..........13-16 September AES US, New York..........9-12 October SIEL/SATIS, Paris...........19-22 October Broadcast India, Mumbai........................27–31 October SBES, Birmingham........... 3 November InterBee, Tokyo.........18-20 November

8

CBC installs intercom

CBC Cologne Broadcasting Centre, the TV production, technology and broadcast provider of Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, has equipped its new broadcasting facility with a Riedel intercom matrix system of five Artist mainframes and more than 100 control panels.

Two Artist 128 mainframes are used in the two control rooms of the main studio. Additional Artist 128 frames are installed in the master control room and in two other studios while an extra Artist 64 is set up in the broadcasting operation room. In addition to the Artist intercom matrix, 35 AIR headsets are also used.

Three large theatres in Germany have installed Riedel intercom solutions — the State Theatres in Meiningen and Dresden opted for Performer 32 intercom matrix/stage management systems while an Artist 64 intercom matrix is used at the opera house in Halle.

‘With Riedel’s intercom solutions we found the perfect system for the installations at the opera house in Halle and the Schauspielhaus in Dresden. The modular layout made it possible to tailor the intercom to the exact needs of each individual theatre,’ said Uwe Weissbach from the system integrator HFE Elektroakustik. ‘While we chose a Performer system for Dresden, a Riedel Artist 64 was an ideal solution for Halle because it offers the option to expand it later.’

Council of Europe selects Marantz recorders T h e Te c h n i c a l Management Department of the Council of Europe has selected Marantz Professional PMD570 and PMD580 solidstate recorders for its recording and archive requirements t h ro u g h o u t its Strasbourg headquarters. The department has replaced its analogue compact cassette systems with ten PMD570 and 30 PMD580 units.

The systems were supplied and installed

by IEC Strasbourg, supported by Alain Mielle, head of IT and Multimedia at the Council of Europe. ‘When IEC’s Strasbourg office first contacted me, the PMD580 was not yet commercially available,’ explained Pascal Papin, sales and marketing director of DMi France. ‘But we shared the advance product information we had with Eric Hezarifend, business sales engineer, IEC, and agreed that the PMD580 specifications

fitted the Council of E u r o p e ’s requirements perfectly.’

The machines are deployed throughout the Council of Europe to record Council of Europe meetings, Parliamentary Assembly sessions, European Court of Human Rights hearings, congress meetings, and meetings conducted either in dedicated meeting and conference rooms or in the hemicycle. Recordings are multilingual, often trilingual, comprising the speaker’s native language plus French and English. Once recorded, the information is transmitted via the network to the transcription department after which recordings are archived and preserved as part of the Council of Europe’s ‘Audio Heritage’. Audio is recorded in MP3 for conferences and transcriptions and as PCM for press release and archival purposes.

resolution

DPAs sum in Gainsbourg tribute DPA Microphones French distributor Audio² provided DPA MSS6000 microphone summation systems and 4060 miniature omni mics to the Cité de la Musique in Paris for two Serge Gainsbourg tribute concerts.

The concerts covered the French singer’s 70s concept album Histoire de Mélody Nelson and Jean-Claude Vannier’s L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches and featured: vocalists such as actor Mathieu Amalric, Placebo vocalist Brian Molko, French singers Daniel Darc, Alain Chamfort, Brigitte Fontaine, and British singer Martina Topley Bird; the Orchestre Lamoureux; a rhythm section comprising drummer Pierre-Alain Dahan, bassist Herbie Flowers, guitarists Claude Engel and Thomas Coeuriot; and a young Parisian choir.

This provided a challenge to the sound engineers, who had to manage a huge input count, including more than 70 voices, which is where the two MSS6000 microphone summation systems came in. Designed to reduce 10 or more individual mics down to a single stereo pair, each MSS6000 has independent level and pan controls, allowing the engineers to considerably reduce the number of inputs to the mixing console and cutting down on cabling.

‘The 4060s were perfect for this application for several reasons, first, of course, for their sound characteristics, but also for their mounting accessories, which enabled us to close-mic each violin,’ said Cité de la Musique engineer Bruno Morain, who oversaw the sound and mixed the concerts. ‘We showed the musicians how to attach the mics to their instruments just once and then they did it themselves for the following rehearsals and concerts without any problems.’

Comms gap bridged at Canal Sur Radio Canal Sur Radio (CSR) in Spain has installed a Clear-Com Eclipse Median Digital Matrix intercom system, along with nine 4-way VoICE interface frames, at its Seville headquarters.

These are key components of a massive IP network that provides intercom connectivity to more than 45 local and regional stations.

CSR, with the assistance of systems integrator Aicox Soluciones, installed the Clear-Com Eclipse Median at the Seville headquarters. The 64-port matrix serves 15 local stations, as well as eight regional centres comprising four stations each, along with a regional centre in Málaga, which has a Clear-Com Eclipse PiCo matrix used by eight stations. The headquarters also include nine 4-way Clear-Com VoICE IP interface frames with another nine at the regional centres, allowing a direct intercom link between all locations and using the VoICE systems as remote panels.

March 2009

AIM HIGH By utilising building materials created for the Aerospace industry in our console design, some people think we go overboard with our attention to detail. But how else can we ensure you save valuable weight in OB applications? Ergonomics and failsafe architecture are other key factors that are constantly being addressed by our R&D team in Berlin and help us keep at the forefront of console design. Our goal is to meet your highest expectations!

STAGETEC delivers

HALL 8.0 / BOOTH B12

AURUS The Direct Access Console

LIGHTWEIGHT using materials designed for aircraft a typical surface weighs just 88 kilos!

SECURITY high level fail safe built-in redundancy.

RUN-UP TIME to roll and networked in 30 seconds using NEXUS. HEAR THE increased dynamic range provided by TrueMatch >150dB converters.

MADE IN GERMANY German Precision in Audio Engineering.

PROVEN RELIABILITY

Industriegebiet See 96155 Buttenheim Germany Tel.: +49 (0) 95 45 440-300 Fax: +49 (0) 95 45 440-333 sales@stagetec.com www.stagetec.com

NEWS

Biz Bites

Whatever the artistic merits of the 2009 Brit awards, they proved something important, writes Nigel Jopson: exposure on television to a mass audience of 5m+ (21.7% of people who watched TV that night) translates into music sales.

We l s h s i ng e r Duffy swept the Brits with three awards including the best album prize for Rockferry: according to the OCC (Official Charts Company) Rockferry was downloaded four times more than the average on the night. Similarly, Estelle’s single American Boy doubled its marketaverage sales. After Elbow collected Best British Group they tripled album sales, as did British breakthrough nominees The Ting Tings. In the growing on-demand content-to-mobile market, MTV is the top video provider, with more than 90% growth year-on-year. Last year MTV announced it had streamed more than 57m mobile music videos. Universal Music Group is the most viewed channel in the history of YouTube, with 3.4bn views on a stock of more than 9,200 clips. Sony Music and Hollywood Records own the second and third slots, with ChrisBrownTV, JonasBrothersMusic, RCA Records and Michael Jackson not far behind. People like music. So where’s the prime-time music on terrestrial TV? The world’s largest concert promoter Live Nation and its biggest ticket-seller Ticketmaster have merged to create Live Nation Entertainment.

Many have expressed concern over the deal, including Bruce Springsteen who wrote on his website: ‘The one thing that would make the current ticket situation even worse for the fan than it is now would be Ticketmaster and Live Nation coming up with a single system, thereby returning us to a near-monopoly situation in music ticketing.’ The combined group would have revenues of $6bn and sell more than 150m concert tickets a year, promoting some 22,000 concerts.

It would handle more than 200 artists and run more than 140 venues. The US Justice department has announced it will investigate the merger.

YouTube monetised video content, now MySpace is doing the same. MySpace has launched a pilot advertising scheme that places interactive overlays at the bottom of some videos, allowing users to purchase

10

Tango in Blue with Pyramix

UK-based supplier eMerging has delivered its first pair of SmartAV Tango integrated control surfaces to The Blue Studio, a commercial recording, mixing and mastering studio in north-east London, where they run Merging Pyramix.

‘I wanted some assignability, because with the larger projects I work on, I’m often up to 60 or 70 tracks,’ explained Andrew Tulloch, owner and chief engineer. ‘My last desk had only 48 channels, and I was forever submixing. I’d never fit an enormous Neve or SSL in here to accommodate those projects, to say nothing of the expense, so an assignable surface seemed like a good idea. But at the same time, I didn’t want endless nested menus and contextual options, nor a cheap eight-fader box. And some of the control surfaces I looked at seemed like an awful lot of money for something that doesn’t have any audio going through it.

‘Tango had everything I’d been looking for, at about a third of the price of some of the other surfaces I’d been looking at,’ he added. ‘Now, if I want six channels of drums and then a Fender Rhodes next to it on the console so I can experiment with the balance, I just assign the channels to the faders I want and save the whole arrangement as one of Smart’s Ergonomic Spreads. If you want to call up the vocals and experiment with levels against various instruments, you can engage the Hold on the vocal channels and then they stay locked to the same faders while you assign different instruments to the other channels or switch banks.’

Meanwhile, eMerging has completed the integration of a new audio postproduction dubbing suite at Scottish facility Bees Nees, which is near the BBC’s new headquarters at Pacific Quay. It has an upgraded Merging Pyramix, Ramses control surface, VCube digital video playback unit, and Genelec DSP monitoring. With two video editing suites and large new rooms for live music and audio recording, mixing and postproduction, Bees Nees offers a mix of video editing and music and audio recording and dubbing facilities.

Sennheiser drives Top Gear audio The TV show Top Gear Live took in stops at London’s Earls Court, Birmingham’s NEC and Dublin’s RDS Simmons Court, with audio for the event handled by Gareth Davies. ‘I’ve done this show for the past three years,’ said Gareth. ‘We have had issues with RF in the past so when I approached Stage Audio Services of Stourbridge to put together the specification and the quote for this year’s show I said it had to be Sennheiser RF technology.’

He specified Sennheiser SK 500 bodypack transmitters for the presenters, SKM 535

hand-held radio mics for interviewing audience members, and ew 300 IEM G2 monitors for the entire performing team. ‘This year the presenters have told us how much they’ve been impressed by the technology, because they haven’t had any problems.

We were amazed by the area they covered.

The three presenters are in a large arena being surrounded by cars much of the time.

The arena at the NEC was about 50 metres across and nearly as deep. The presenters can be anywhere in that space. The in-ears work even while they’re still in the green room.

We’ve been really impressed,’ he said.

resolution

NEWS

Biz Bites the song they are listening to, or jump to the artist’s home page. The interesting part is that the content identification and ad-placement is done automatically using technology from Auditude. No tedious programming or tracking and monitoring of users required — the ads are inserted when the content is recognised.

How much is free on-demand, ad-supported music streaming worth to artists and labels? Last.fm is paying half a cent per stream. So the current most listened-to last.fm track, Viva La Vida, has earned Coldplay $211,393.

Warner Music shareholders had a nice surprise when the company announced better-than-anticipated quarterly profits of $23m, despite revenue falling by 11% to $878m. Digital sales were up by 21% to $171m, and now account for 31% of total sales. In a similar demonstration of the benefits of a sharp tug of leather through buckle, EMI announced it had nearly halved losses over the last six months to £155m from £324m for the previous period. EMI’s digital revenues have also risen to £102m versus the previous half year’s £74m.

The US Congress has postponed a nationwide digital TV transition from 17 February to 12 June. 641 stations, or more than one-third of US full-power stations, switched on the original day (with FCC approval) to all-digital programming. The main reason for the delay is that the US Commerce Department $1.34bn fund for coupons to help consumers pay for digital TV convertor boxes has run dry — there are nearly 2.6m coupon requests on the waiting list. Research firm Nielsen released data showing 5m US households, 4.4% of all homes, remain unprepared.

Large chunks of the 700MHz analogue band that will be freed up by the digital switchover have already been auctioned off to wireless providers. They’ve invested billions in preparation for using it, and the four-month delay will thwart the launch of new services.

President Barack Obama’s choice of new chairman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is ex-Harvard Law man Julius Genachowski. He’s an advisor at equity firm General Atlantic and masterminded the innovative internet grassroots-engagement plan during Obama’s campaign. Most notably, he is a known advocate of ‘net neutrality’, the principle of a broadband network free of content restrictions, traffic management (throttling) and tiered services. Obama is committed to introducing net neutrality laws, having said while campaigning: ‘I think charging [for guaranteed service] destroys one of the best things about the internet — which is that there is this incredible equality there.’ Contrast that to the UK’s recent Digital Britain report (p48)…

12

KMR supplies Limerick

UK audio supplier KMR Audio has supplied The University of Limerick, Ireland with a range of equipment for its Centre for Computational Musicology and Computer Music, which has added two new music studio suites and upgraded its other facilities.

KMR supplied Digidesign HD3Accel Pro Tools with a 24-channel D-Command ES, two 192I/O interfaces, and a PRE 8-channel preamp. The studio is configured for surround with five Genelec 8040s controlled by a JL Cooper Surround Panner. Additional facilities include two music technology teaching labs equipped with 36 iMacs and 16 MacPros, a postproduction room with a Euphonix System 5 MC and Genelec 1037C main monitors and a 32.2 channel surround system consisting of Genelec 8030/7070 speakers.

‘Throughout the development of the new studios, KMR proved to be an excellent partner, ensuring that we got the best possible balance between performance and value,’ said the centre’s director Jürgen Simpson. ‘Their advice and flexibility make them an ideal source for professional audio equipment.’

M-400 in BBC Radio Theatre refit

ST350 on walkabout

SoundField’s portable ST350 microphone was used extensively to capture 5.1 location ambience during production of Baz Luhrmann’s recent cinematic epic Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It also featured in one of Apple’s Set To Screen series of short video clips about film production. The 10-minute MP4 episode on sound design for Luhrmann’s latest film features supervising sound editor Wayne Pashley using the ST350 to record wind sounds, salt flat ambience and musical performances on location in 40-degree temperatures for Australia.

Most of the film’s location recording took place in the barren north-western corner of Australia. ‘I could have dragged five microphones and a Pro Tools rig around the remote countryside, but that didn’t really appeal!’ said Pashley. ‘The combination of the Sound Devices recorder and the single SoundField mic was a lot easier to carry, and just as flexible in terms of what we could capture with it.’

Recording in SoundField’s four-channel proprietary B-Format, Pashley was able to create 5.1 mixes of his recordings during the postproduction stage using SoundField’s Surround Zone decoder plug-in for Pro Tools.

Audient gets in training in France As one of the final components in an extensive technical refurbishment of the BBC’s largest radio studio, an RSS M-400 V-Mixing System has been installed in the broadcaster’s Radio Theatre in London’s Broadcasting House.

The venue for many historic recordings since the 1930s, when it was known as the BBC Concert Hall, today the theatre’s 312seat auditorium also includes an 80-track recording facility. The RSS M-400 mixes for the two PA systems in the theatre — a d&b compact line array and a distributed speech system. More than 100 mic inputs are sent from stage via MADI to the main control console for the on-air broadcast mix. From the stagebox, a smaller selection of 40 inputs is split to the RSS S-4000 Digital Snake stage unit, travelling via Cat5E to the M-400.

With the M-400 halving the footprint of the analogue console previously used in the Theatre, and the RSS Digital Snake 32x8 stage unit and 8x32 front-of-house unit fitting into a 12u rack, the system is suitably

compact and portable for an environment that has limited space. ‘If necessary, we can strike the system really quickly,’ said events manager Mark Diamond. ‘With some Radio OB vehicles using the same Snakes and M-400 consoles, we can turn up at very short notice and provide broadcast splits fast.’

Stage Electrics has specified and installed an RSS M-400 V-Mixing System into Scotland’s only 5-star arts attraction, The Byre Theatre in St Andrews. The console and two snakes are part of a package that includes Sennheiser radio microphones and RCF monitor speakers.

resolution

A 24-channel Audient ASP8024 console with patchbay has been chosen as the centre piece of family-owned Solis-Prod studios in Aubais, Southern France which is running professional training courses.

Situated not far from Montpellier, the facility’s recent upgrade allows husband and wife team Cédric Robert and Patricia Desroches, owners of the commercial studio, to draw on their own experiences to teach. ‘We wanted an analogue console,’ said Cédric. ‘Something to look and sound professional, but that wouldn’t break the bank. We spoke to Pierre Valentin at Funky Junk who recommended that we try the Audient.’

March 2009

Pinewood Studios Group Dual - Operator System 5

2nd Sense – S5 Fusion

Wave Studios – System 5-MC

One Vision With a commitment to quality, a dedication to per for mance, and a high standard of ex c e l l e n c e , Euphonix studios – of any size – epi t o m i s e w o r l d c l a s s p e r f o r m a n c e f or music, feature film, and HDTV audio postproduction. Thanks to the EuCon protocol, Euphonix consoles and controllers deliver the per fect combination of power ful DSP and external DAW control demanded by today’s computer- based workflows. Come share our vision of a superior working environment.

50 : 50 Studios – Artist Series MC Control & MC Mix

euphonix.com

© 2 0 0 9 E u p h o n i x , Inc. A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d. I Newport Road, Hayes I UB4 8JX, UK I Phone: +44 (0)20 8561 2566 I Fax: +44 (0)20 8589 0766

facility

Melodika An audio for commercials facility has grown into offering full-service film audio production services and added video editing at the request of its clients. ZENON SCHOEPE visits Istanbul to discuss the reasons for its success.

T

he great cliché that eventually arises in any conversation about Istanbul is that is represents the place where East meets West. When people say this they refer primarily to a cultural interfacing but they overlook the underlying issue, why does it meet in Istanbul? The answer to that has been the same for a very long time — East meets West in Istanbul to do business; lots of business. With a massive and extended population and convenient geographical proximity to a lot of new markets, Istanbul is as important now as it’s ever been.

And its traffic is as bad now as it’s ever been too. It’s not just the volume and density of the stuff; you’re struck by the finesse, inch-perfect precision and the speed at which drivers miss each other without lifting off. And, at the end of every journey, there’s the business of finding somewhere to park and squeeze your vehicle into any available space. Combine native skill, speed and daring with a lot of business and you could be describing the essentials for a commercials postproduction facility. In the case of Melodika, you would be correct.

Located in a splendid green and high-rent residential-style region of the city, which is close to many of the advertising agencies, Melodika has carved a name for itself as a top flight audio post player. It operates from a large plot that was once two houses that have since been connected together. While you just accept the layout and division of areas when you are inside the complex, you can see how it has been achieved architecturally much more clearly from the comfort of the in-house bar/bistro located in the garden grounds. Husband and wife team Taylan and Didem 14

Oguz started with one house and then integrated the one next door.

Melodika has been in its current location since 2001 but it was started in 1995.

While the commercials market still accounts for the lion’s share of its business it has seen film work as a means of expansion. It now has a department that handles location recording for feature films, TV series and commercials to Deva Fusion, Deva 4 and Tascam HDP2 plus HD cam with SoundField mics available.

The significant recent addition at the facility is a Dolby mix theatre with Digidesign Icon. Taylan says there was an inevitability about building the room as it meant they are able to offer the complete production package from beginning to end for Turkish films and for international work too. The commercials to film ratio at Melodika may be 60:40 but the facility sees clear opportunities to share resources across both seemingly disparate disciplines.

Didem heads the in-house dubbing casting agency — ‘We handle all the celebrities with all the best known voices, the most famous actors and actresses,’ she says — and there are clear synergies between commercials and Turkish language film dubbing.

There is a desire to span disciplines and to avoid the eggs-in-one-basket syndrome while at the same time not compromising the commercials or the film work. The Icon theatre is a case in point as Taylan explains. ‘We are happy working on the worksurface and we can change the room very quickly from a big feature film space to somewhere we can work on commercials in. It gives us flexibility. If

resolution

March 2009

facility

there are no feature films in the summer then I can invite my commercials clients to work in the room,’ he says.

‘I checked all the desk options out and the problem with standalone desks is that if you need to recall everything on a project a year later then maybe you won’t be able to get it all back. That could be complicated. The Icon is actually a really fine solution for us.’

Taylan was an early adopter of Pro Tools and he’s stuck with it as he’s found that on the rare occasion that a client does ask for a DAW, then they will always ask for Pro Tools. ‘The other thing is that I’m still an engineer and I have to use equipment that I know how to operate!’ he adds.

There are six Pro Tools HD systems in the facility with a variety of D-Command and Control24 controllers. The control rooms vary in size but all are well presented and most have access to a studio for dubbing. What the Dolby room lacks in width it certainly makes up for in volume as it spans over what were two floors in the house and ends at the roof. Taylan fitted Genelec monitoring, with 1038s behind the screen and 8030s and 8040s at the sides and back, because he says he needed a monitoring system flexible enough to cope with the demands of film work and commercials. You’ll find Dynaudios in one form or another in most of the other rooms for what Taylan calls ‘historical reasons’. ‘Bit by bit I find myself moving to Genelec. I really like the sound of them in our theatre,’ he says.

Melodika has recently also branched into video editing with Final Cut Pro and Smoke as a response to market pressure. Taylan believes flexibility is the key and that you have to stay on your toes and keep your options open in what can be a fickle business. There’s a clear indication that certain rooms are targeted at different budgets and this seems to coincide with the age of them. Each new room when it was opened was priced at a higher level, which moved Melodika as a business upwards culminating in the Dolby theatre. All rooms have had cosmetic updates and March 2009

their equipment inventories are kept current too.

‘Of course, you can’t tell the future but the number of rooms we have now is about right because we can keep them all full. And we do a good job and customers come back,’ says Taylan who pushes faders every day for commercials clients who still ask for him. Consequently he’s in touch with his customers and is acutely aware that the personal multimedia revolution has not been missed by his clients, who are now more than a little familiar with the loose concepts of what is going on in the control room. It’s why Taylan believes that the desk controller, certainly in the case of the Icon, puts a lot of technology space between the client’s ‘home’ system and the one they pay for in a studio.

Clients may still pay primarily for the operator rather than the technology in commercials postproduction, but they know more than they used to. Taylan adds that going too downmarket with your prices and your technology puts you in competition with other lower level facilities, but eventually it also puts you in competition with your customers. ‘You’ve got to be giving more,’ he says, ‘that’s why we have concentrated on the high-end even down to the location.’

With a staff of 15 in the building, a total of 25 if you include the location recording department, it’s a busy place and Taylan prides himself on the very high proportion of their location sound that makes it on to the final soundtrack. They’ll move projects around the rooms to fit in with clients’ needs and when there’s a film on the nightshifts kick in for around-the-clock operation.

‘My plans are actually to not get any bigger!’ he says. ‘Getting bigger brings problems with it. The size we have is comfortable and this year we’ll see how well Smoke does for us — we have a good engineer operating it. But it was my clients that pushed me into video. They were having to go somewhere else for the video and they wanted to be able to finish the job here.’ n

Contact melodika, istanbul, turkey: Website: www.melodika.com.tr

resolution

15

GEAR

Products Equipment introductions and announcements.

McDSP Retro Pack The Retro Pack is a collection of ‘classic’ plug-ins that have a strong retro vibe but without actually emulating anything else. All Retro plug-ins use a McDSP-designed output stage topology to eliminate digital clipping at any output level and produce a smoother distortion characteristic. This feature is in addition to McDSP analogue saturation modelling. The McDSP Retro Pack also comes with a preprogrammed McDSP Green iLok and is ready to plug and play right out of the box.

It is available in HD and Native formats.

The 4020 Retro EQ is a 4-band EQ and complimentary filter set. The HF and LF bands are shelving EQ, with two additional parametric EQs at the HMF and LMF bands. All bands operate on a gain-dependent variable slope/Q system for a vintage smooth sound and increased boost/cut frequency selectivity at high gains. The HPF and LPF filters use a split-octave design giving a 12dB/octave slope near the selected frequency, and a maximum slope of 24dB/octave.

The 4030 Retro Compressor has a wet/dry mix control to balance compressed and uncompressed signals. An active attack and release design allows aggressive compression settings with minimal artefact generation. The 4040 Retro Limiter combines a look-ahead brick wall limiter function with several subjective treatments to make the limiting action subtle yet vintage.

Channel G Compact delivers the same sonic experience as McDSP’s Channel G with a smaller DSP footprint. The interface integrates with Digidesign D-Control and D-Command control surfaces as well as Venue D-Show and Profile live sound consoles. Shipping late Q1 2009, Channel G Compact HD will be available individually and as an upgrade to Emerald Pack 4.0.

Channel G Surround is a Compressor/Limiter optimised for 5.1 using four compressor sets — LR, C, LsRs, and LFE — and can key from any combination of these. Individual compressor controls can be linked across various surround channels and the LFE channel includes an optional low pass filter. www.mcdsp.com

Milab bass drum mic The BDM-01 is a bass drum microphone for the studio and the road. The condenser capsule is handbuilt by Milab and provides ‘superb’ attack and high-frequency response when compared to dynamic capsules. The dynamic range, frequency response, sensitivity and pop filters have been optimised for the sound and power of bass drums and other bass instruments. The electronics are said to handle 155dB without audible distortion. www.milabmic.com

16

Spotlight: CEDAR Audio CEDAR Audio’s Cambridge Series III audio restoration and speech enhancement system has more than double the processing power of any previous CEDAR Cambridge hardware and more storage capability than previous CEDAR Cambridge Servers.

It is available now. Every Series III is a server-grade ‘powerhouse’ capable of processing more audio, more quickly, and for more simultaneous users than ever before. The core software of Cambridge and every processing module has been rewritten to take advantage of Windows Vista and the system ships with Windows Vista 64 as standard.

‘Series III has eight processors with a combined peak calculation speed of close to 120GFLOPs -– that’s 120 billion 64-bit calculations per second!’ said CEDAR’s MD, Gordon Reid. ‘The first CEDAR System (released in 1990) was considered groundbreaking because it generated 25MFLOPs, yet we now have approximately 5,000 times more processing power than that. This makes it possible to run dozens of power-hungry processes simultaneously and to implement advanced filters that would not have been practical on previous platforms.

This will be of particular interest to our audio forensic customers.

‘The same increase in power and facility is true when you consider the storage capability of Series III, which includes as standard three TeraByte hard disk drives capable of storing around 10,000 hours of uncompressed audio,’ he added. ‘This makes every Series III suitable for use as a restoration server in demanding environments such as national archives and libraries, in which a single CEDAR Cambridge system can simultaneously service the needs of numerous studios and users.’ www.cedaraudio.com

Repeatable precision mic positioning Grace Design’s S p a c e b a r microphone holding system is a solution for those seeking a high degree of precision in their stereo recording applications.

Available in 30 and 66cm versions, the Spacebar allows for precise and repeatable setting of microphone capsule spacing, angle of incidence, and rotation around the X axis.

With precision scales for angle and distance engraved on the Spacebar components, it becomes easy to make perfectly repeatable stereo microphone setups.

It is precision fabricated from machined aircraft aluminium, brass, and stainless steel. The SB-30 includes a 30cm Spacebar, mic stand clamps, standard height mic holders and a tall mic holder. The SB-66 is a 66cm version. www.gracedesign.com

Summit Everest four in one Summit Audio’s ECS410 Everest Channel Strip is a four-section analogue processor and mic preamp. Each section is completely independent with its own balanced I-O and the ability to route each section together internally with TouchPatch routing.

It has a tube/solid state preamp, passive EQ, dual mode dynamics, and a DriveBus output.

The modular design of the Everest makes service and updating simple as well as giving separation for each section with direct power, audio, and ground connections. Each card has double redundant contacts to the main board and uses wire rather than ribbon cable. www.summitaudio.com

resolution

Cakewalk Sonar V-Studio 700 Cakewalk’s Sonar V-Studio 700 is now shipping. It matches the Sonar 8 Producer DAW with the VS-700C V-Studio Console multifunction control surface and the VS-700R V-Studio I/O, equipped with onboard Roland Fantom VS hardware synthesiser, which includes ARX expansion capability.

The VS-700C has deeper integration into Sonar’s editing and mixing capabilities than any off-the-shelf control surface and has ACT (Active Controller Technology), which automatically remaps controls to what has the focus. The VS-700R V-Studio I-O interface takes advantage of Sonar’s flexible busing capabilities and integration with external hardware. The mic preamps are also digitally-controlled. SONAR V-Studio VS-700 complete is UK£3,999.

The Sonar 8.3 Update adds new enhancements, engine optimisations, classic Roland sample content for Dimension Pro and Dimension LE, and drum kits for Session Drummer 2.

In addition, the update addresses various performance issues reported by customers after Sonar 8’s initial release. www.sonarvstudio.com

BMD Komit Burgin McDaniel Design, a Texas manufacturer of boutique analogue audio gear, has released the Komit compressor/limiter. Features include one-knob operation, a feed-forward design, postlimiter auto–gain makeup, an independent limiter, three switched auto presets and a Link button for true stereo operation. It has a discrete analogue signal path with balanced, floating transformer I-O, true hard wire bypass and an analogue gain reduction meter.

It fits the API 500 Series Lunchbox standard. www.burginmcdaniel.com

March 2009

GEAR

Redbox for video

The RB-VHDA8 is the first broadcast video product developed

by Sonifex and is a one input, eight output 3G/HD/SD-SDI distribution amplifier for reclocking and distributing a 3G, HD-SDI or SD-SDI source to eight outputs. The unit provides automatic input detection, reclocking and cable equalisation of the input signal to 200/400m (HD/SD) of coax cable. The rear panel has a single BNC input and eight buffered BNC outputs.

The Redbox RB-DSD1 digital silence detection unit is designed for radio station master outputs and transmitter sites and switches between two digital inputs on loss of audio.

Similar to the existing RB-SD1 analogue silence detector, the digital version has AES-EBU, SPDIF and TOSLink I-Os, threshold, manual or automatic return and TTL Word clock and AES-EBU sync inputs. www.sonifex.co.uk

Fostex mixer and recorder combo The Fostex LR16 is 16:4:2 mixer with a built-in 16-track recorder. A separate Connector Box contains the recorder and the I-O and this can be connected to the Controller/ mixer via Cat5 cable to a distance of 50m. The digital desk has analogue-style operation with 16 input faders, four bus faders and a master fader. It has a built-in 80Gb drive for 16 hours of 16-track at 16-bit/44.1kHz or 9 hours at 24-bit/48kHz. There’s one-button record and a choice of MTR standalone or integrated operation. All channels have 3-band EQ, digitally controlled trim and a limiter and there are built-in effects. www.fostexinternational.com

Secure wireless intercom Condor is a hands-free secure wireless intercom system produced by miniaturised hearing device specialist Phonak Communications. It is useable straight out of the box and comprises a palm-sized, easy-to-wear radio unit and the user’s choice of Phonak headset.

The Condor system ‘liberates’ small teams by allowing up to six colleagues to communicate in full duplex mode (simultaneously talking and listening) without having to activate a push-to-talk button. Any number of additional colleagues can also listen in via the same closed network. Condor does not require connection to any form of base station and is therefore free to move with the professionals wearing it. It employs free-to-use frequencies, no licenses are required, and the system can be deployed instantly wherever and whenever required at distances of up to 800m. www.phonak-communications.com

www.schoeps.de/showroom/

RSS personal monitoring solution The Roland Systems Group RSS M-48 Live Personal Mixer and RSS S-4000D Splitter and Power Distributor are monitoring solutions for live performance and studio applications.

The M-48 offers control over 40 audio sources that can be managed in 16 assignable stereo groups. This is enhanced by level, pan, solo, and 3-band EQ on each group, built-in reverb, an ambient mic for communication with band members, as well as physical inputs and outputs for multiple headphones, wedges and powered monitors, interfacing with iPods, metronomes and external recording devices.

It employs Roland’s Ethernet Audio Communication (REAC) Cat5e protocol. Power is supplied via the RSS S-4000D Splitter and Power Distributor, which can provide the digital audio stream and power eight M-48s. Multiple S-4000Ds can be used in a configuration.

Configurations are straightforward with the ability to control, save and recall all connected M-48s from an M-400 V-Mixer or a PC (when using RSS Digital Snakes with other consoles). www.rolandsg.co.uk

KRK R6 Passive The R6 passive monitor incorporates design cues from KRK’s Rokit line, including radiused edges along the front of the cabinet. The curved front baffle minimises diffraction of high-frequencies and also houses a moulded front-facing bass port. The R6 voicing is designed to mimic the voicing of the Rokit 6 monitor and features 5-way speaker binding posts, a precision crossover and is capable of handling 100W RMS. www.krksys.com

March 2009

Unrivalled innovation Excerpt from a contribution to an Internet forum:

“Wow, one of the best online presentations I've ever seen.”

SCHOEPS GmbH Spitalstr. 20 D-76227 Karlsruhe resolution

a practical comparison of recording techniques

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

GEAR

SPL TwinTube plug-in The third member of SPL’s Analog Code plug-in line is the TwinTube, which is modelled on SPL’s RackPack modular system. Emulating two separate, independent tube stages, the TwinTube combines the two main tube artefacts of harmonics and saturation effects. TwinTube’s harmonic processing can be applied to four different fundamental tone frequency bands to improve presence and clarity without raising signal levels significantly. The saturation control can be compared to the sound of tape saturation.

The TwinTube is available as native and TDM versions. The native version supports RTAS, VST and AU formats and the TDM license also includes all native formats. www.theanalogcode.com

Sanken COS-11D beats RFI Sanken Microphones has introduced the COS-11D, a new version of its popular lavalier that overcomes digital transmitter RFI. The performance of the COS11D has been verified and endorsed by digital transmitter manufacturers Lectrosonics, Sony (verified by Digital Wireless transmitter DWT-B01), Trantec and Zaxcom.

To provide a wide scope of applications, the mic is available in black, grey, beige and white. www.sanken-mic.com/en/

UAD-2 Solo/Laptop Universal Audio has announced UAD-2 Solo/Laptop, a compact ExpressCard version of its UAD-2 Solo DSP Accelerator card. The card supports VST, AU and RTAS plug-in formats on MAC and PC. It will be available in early Q2.

The Solo/Laptop includes UA’s 1176SE Compressor/Limiter, Pultec EQP-1A Equaliser, RealVerb Pro Room Modeler, and CS-1 Channel Strip, and offers access to the entire Powered PlugIn library. www.uaudio.com

Tony Maserati Collection The Tony Maserati Collection, the first in the Waves Signature Series, is a collection of six application-specific plugins that capture Maserati’s personal production, engineering and mixing style.

It consists of the Maserati VX1 Vocal Enhancer, Maserati DRM Drum Slammer, Maserati ACG Acoustic Guitar Designer, Maserati HMX Harmonics Generator, Maserati B72 Bass Phattener, and Maserati GTi Guitar Toner.

More than 50 Waves plugins are now compatible with Digidesign’s D-Show Software.

Customers are able to employ Waves TDM plug-in bundles such as the SSL 4000 Collection, The API Collection, the C4 Multiband Compressor and the L-Series limiters. www.waves.com

RME Advanced-Input-Output The RME HDSPe AIO is the successor to the well-known HDSP 9632 PCI card and has 192kHz A-D and D-A convertors with a SN ratio of 116dB. It has analogue, AES-EBU, SPDIF, ADAT and MIDI I-Os and all 18 inputs and 20 outputs can be used simultaneously. Four additional analogue I-Os, an eight-channel TDIF I-O and a Word clock I-O can be added by optional expansion boards.

The HDSPe AIO ships in a basic version with unbalanced analogue phono breakout cables. An analogue breakout cable with balanced XLRs is optional.

There’s a hardware and firmware update for the 8-channel mic preamp and AD-convertor Micstasy. V2.1 adds a test oscillator that is switchable to one of the eight channels allowing the routing in large setups to be checked. Additionally an optional Display Dark mode is now available. Currently shipping units have an improved Common Mode Rejection Ratio of 20dB at the microphone inputs. www.rme-audio.com

18

resolution

March 2009

GEAR

Benchmark MPA1 preamp

Benchmark’s MPA1 2-channel mic preamp has an input stage designed with high-voltage headroom (+29dBu) and a singlestage gain control to maximise signal-to-noise ratio. The MPA1 maintains its noise performance across the entire gain range (74dB) by using precision-matched, low-noise, transistor quadarrays. A servo-controlled circuit minimises DC-offset and maximises headroom.

The MPA1 low-frequency performance is achieved with a dual-capacitor AC-coupling design. Gain is controlled via a 38-position, switched resistor ladder set up in a continuously rotating orientation via relay control. This gain control circuit offers 2dB per step, 0-74dB of gain without attenuation, and interchannel gain precision of +/-0.03dB. A make-beforebreak scheme creates a silent switching circuit. The transistor stage is protected from phantom power surges with an ultrafast, multi-stage protection circuit. www.benchmarkmedia.com

Pin 1 testing

AEQ Opera

NTI has introduced ‘Pin 1 Cable Tester’ capability for the Minirator MR-PRO. It detects the proper connection from the cable shield or third conductor wire to the XLR connector pin 1. The Minirator impedance test function measures minor capacitive differences between the two wires and the shielding of an XLR audio cable, thus senses false pin 1 connections accurately. www.nti-audio.com

Based on its popular BC-500 audio console, AEQ has launched its replacement — the Opera. While Opera has the same basic features as the BC-500, it is modular. There are equalised mic/line modules, stereo dual line modules, input- output modules and output modules. Using the standard configuration, Opera can be upgraded later by adding new modules. There’s a digital telephone hybrid with frequency extension and a multiplex option and all inputs and outputs are balanced with transformers in the mic/line inputs and the outputs. The remainder are electronically balanced.

The maximum size of an Opera console is 17 input/outputs. www.aeq.eu

V10.2 Sequioa and Samplitude The new features of Samplitude 10.2 and Sequioa 10.2 include FLAC format compression, improved MIDI implementation and functionality, improved Folder Tracks manipulation and handling and updated video codecs and project exchange (EDL Format 1.7) with Magix’s professional video editing software, Video Pro X. There are also enhanced dithering options, improved FFT filter and Spectral Cleaning, Take Manager/Composer improvements, an improved Crossfade Editor, improved Clipstore and database interface handling (Sequoia only), and improved multi-CPU support for third-party plug-ins. www.magix.net

AE Pro compact 5.1/2.1 system Acoustic Energy Pro has introduced the ProSat and ProSub compact active monitoring system. Through employing closed box bass loading and thermally bonded, black anodised aluminium bass and bass/mid driver cones, the ProSub and ProSat are designed to offer surround and compact desktop monitoring users similar time domain, distortion, and compression optimised performance characteristics as the AE22 nearfield monitor.

The ProSat is a 4-litre active closed-box monitor employing a 130mm bass/mid driver and 25mm ring-radiator high frequency driver. It incorporates amplifiers rated at 50W and 25W. Third order Bessel function active filters integrate the drivers at 2kHz. It has balanced and unbalanced inputs along with input sensitivity, low frequency extension and high frequency EQ options.

The ProSub comprises two 250mm anodised aluminium cone drivers in a 34-litre closed box powered by a 200W amp. It offers low frequency extension to 25Hz and incorporates balanced and unbalanced inputs along with 70Hz or 100Hz second order high pass filtering. It is also suitable for use with AE22 or AE1 monitors. www.acousticenergypro.com

March 2009

resolution

19

GEAR

Soundcraft Si2

All In Audio Ease

HME digital wireless intercom

The Soundcraft Si2 is a smaller The Audio Ease All In bundle comes in two partner to the Si3 and has varieties: one with the XL (TDM surround) 48 mic inputs version of Altiverb 6, and one with the mapped to 24 regular Altiverb 6 in it. faders (the Si3 has Besides Altiverb, the All In bundle 64 inputs) but like the Si3 includes Speakerphone and all other plugit uses a combination of rotary ins from Audio Ease: Periscope, Riverrun, encoders and OLED screens. The Si2, like the Si3, has four Deep Phase Nine, Orbit, Follo and Roger. dedicated Stereo Line channels, four dedicated FX Returns Speakerphone version 2 features many newly sampled guitar from the four stereo Lexicon FX processors, eight balanced amp cabinets, antique phones, toys, answering machines insert sends and eight balanced insert returns. The Si2 has 24 and megaphones. Added is a microphone simulation module Group/Aux buses available at all times, eight matrix buses and that hosts microphones ranging from Royers to toy mics. a full complement of monitor talkback and main bus outputs.

Among the new modules is one that is called ‘Coverup’, A feature of the Si series is that every input and output has its which can place a sound inside tin cans, cardboard boxes, own dedicated socket on the back of the console. under blankets or in the closed trunk of a car.   www.soundcraftdigital.com www.audioease.com

Shotgun Mics: The killer package Users and reviewers agree, the Røde NTG-3 is an amazing shotgun mic at an even more amazing price.

And with a full range of high quality, low cost accessories available, Røde makes it easy to put together your own killer shotgun mic package.

The DX121 One-to-One Digital Wireless Intercom from HM Electronics ( H M E ) comprises a BS121 base station and a charger for a BAT41 battery pack. The DX121 is designed for flexibility with applications in production studios and control room operations, as well as for live-event crews.

The DX121 can be plugged into a standard intercom station or beltpack headset jack, or connected to a matrix intercom system via its four-wire interface. It enables wireless intercom links to be established quickly and easily up to 300m.

An assignable relay closure allows the appropriate matrix channel to be selected from a beltpack and a single DX121 can support up to four HME remote Communicator Beltpac or Headsets. The system’s FHSS ‘Spectrum Friendly’ technology offers partial-band selection, enabling eight DX121 wireless intercoms to be used simultaneously for multichannel applications.

The DX121 can be packaged with any of HME’s remote communicators, such as the BP200 Beltpac, the WH200 All-InOne Wireless Headset, or the WS200 Wireless Speaker Station. www.orbitalsound.co.uk

PT LE bundles

NTG-3 £539.00

All prices RRP including VAT

£229.00

£89.99

Blimp Windshield

Telescopic Boompole

“After just a few weeks of use, I’d rate the NTG-3 as an essential bit of kit.” Audio Media

£59.99

PG2 Pistol Grip

“I was sufficiently impressed to buy the NTG-3 and price was not the determining factor.” Resolution

£49.99

WS7 Windshield

“The winner of these shotgun shoot-out tests is the NTG-3 and for its price it is an amazing piece of kit. Focus

Apogee discontinues Windows support Apogee Electronics will no longer develop products for the Microsoft Windows platform. It has made this decision to focus all research, development, and support resources on the Apple platform. Apogee will continue to develop and manufacture convertors, microphone preamps, clocking solutions, and supporting technologies for Mac-based production environments. www.apogeedigital.com

Exclusively distributed in the UK & Ireland by Source www.sourcedistribution.co.uk/rode • T: 020 8962 5080

20

Digidesign is offering two Pro Tools LE system bundles: 003 Factory Complete and 003 Rack Factory Complete. Both combine a Digidesign 003 hardware interface with the new Complete Production Toolkit, which combines a variety of plug-ins for music and postproduction applications.

The Complete Production Toolkit adds 7.1 surround mixing and support for up to 128 simultaneous audio tracks to any Pro Tools LE 8 based system. This bundle includes Digidesign virtual instruments and plug-ins including Eleven LE classic guitar amp emulator, Structure LE advanced sample player, Hybrid 1.5 high-definition synthesiser, Smack! LE compressor, DINR LE noise reduction, TL Space Native Edition convolution reverb, X-Form time compression/expansion and pitch shifter, and Neyrinck SoundCode Stereo surround-to-stereo down mixer.

In Pro Tools LE the toolkit unlocks multitrack Beat Detective, DigiBase Pro file management, and DigiTranslator 2.0 for importing/exporting of OMF, AAF, and MXF files. www.digidesign.com

resolution

March 2009

GEAR

Zaxcom additions

1 – 4. 4. 2009 creating emotions

DU: 09.01.2009 GB

Zaxcom has enhanced its wireless microphone product line with the introduction of the TRX992, a boom pole unit that performs the functions of an audio transmitter, monitor return receiver, backup recorder, and phantom power supply. Zaxcom’s TRX992 features patent-pending internal recording that backs up transmissions to guard against lost audio files. Users can record up to 24 hours of audio to SD card. There’s a user-selectable power output from 10mW to 100mW. The audio dynamic range is 106dB. The QRX100 four-channel RF audio receiver takes advantage of today’s cameras recording four or more discrete audio channels. It can receive four channels of audio from two Zaxcom stereo or mono digital transmitters. The QRX100 will then output these received audio channels as analogue and AES digital.

The QRX100 doubles as a timecode receiver with an optional video sync/SMPTE timecode output and an optional integrated IFB transmitter.

New sunlight-readable screens are available for Deva hard-disk and Fusion audio recorders that have three times the luminance of existing displays. www.zaxcom.com

Mobile I-O 2d Card upgrade

52126-011 • Messe FFM • PLS • Audio • Resolution (2. Schaltung) • 102x253mm/ssp • CD-ROM • ISO CMYK • jh: 11.12.2008

Metric Halo has a 2d Card. Powered by the new Card, the 2d Processing architecture expands and enhances the fundamental processing, routing and mixing engine of the FireWire audio interfaces. Included is Metric Halo’s ‘Character’ processing engine, which adds the low-order distortions found in classic analogue devices to the inputs and mix buses of the Mobile I-O. There are 15 different flavours of Character.

The new DSP has 5.5 times the available processing power of the original Metric Halo +DSP implementation and includes a SIMD engine that enables an additional two-times increase in power for operations, like mixing.

The Card also includes a new ADAT implementation that includes optical SPDIF support — independently switchable on input and output — and asynchronous SRC for the optical SPDIF input. Since the optical input and output are independently switchable, a wide variety of I-O configurations are supported.

Version 5 of the MIO Driver and MIO Console software, delivered with the 2d Card, features a new customisable mixer and unified control of all the mixing and processing resources of all connected Mobile I-O Expanded hardware.

Included is a bundle of basic production plug-ins, including MIOStrip (channel strip with gate, compressor and 6-band EQ), HaloVerb, Mid-Side Decoder, Sample Delay and Dither. www.mhlabs.com

Blue miniatures Blue Microphones’ Icicle is an in-line USB convertor and preamp, making connecting XLR mics directly to a computer simple.

Icicle features a studio quality microphone preamp, 48V phantom power, fully balanced low noise front end, analogue gain control, Plug and Play driverless operation, and a 44.1kHz/16-bit convertor.

Mikey is a recording device for the iPod. It has a stereo condenser capsule, three-position user-selectable gain settings, a built-in speaker for playback, and a user-positionable head. Eyeball is a webcam with audio and has a condenser capsule, a camera-off privacy position with a lens pop-in and -out feature to prevent accidental broadcasts, and Plug and Play connection. Using the same stand and case design as Blue’s Snowflake USB mic, the Eyeball also includes a monitor adapter. www.bluemic.com

Snake and patch Zaolla Silverline has released the ZDTT-800 Series balanced snakes and ZTTS-800 Series balanced patch cables with Neutrik TT connectors.

ZDTT-800 Series DB25 to TT TRS balanced snakes are available in a variety of lengths to suit any studio application. ZTTS-800 Series TT TRS balanced patch cables are available in 1.5ft and 3ft lengths.

The cables feature high-density, tinned-copper braids for durable and effective EMI/RFI rejection plus aluminium Mylar foil for additional EMI/RFI rejection and reduced capacitance. The ZDTT Series balanced snakes feature an additional Al-Mylar shield around the leads. www.zaolla.com

March 2009

resolution

Come to Frankfurt am Main from 1 – 4 April 2009 and find out about the most important new industry trends. Only here will you discover key inspirations for your business as well as technological innovations – e.g. in digital technology, multi-channel audio and fibre-optic communications – that will open up radically new opportunities. Give free rein to your creativity and exploit the huge potentials offered by Prolight + Sound, the leading international trade fair for event and communications technology, AV production and entertainment.

Tel. +44 (0) 17 84 41 59 50 info@uk.messefrankfurt.com www.prolight-sound.com Supported by VPLT – The Professional Lighting & Sound Association of Germany, and EVVC – European Association of Event Centers

21

REVIEW

SE Electronics RNR1 It’s been the most eagerly awaited microphone of recent years and sees the dramatic combination of one of the oldest and one of the newest brands in a new venture.

JON THORNTON reports on a mic that sounds like no other ribbon yet looks like the Shanghai World Financial Centre…

T

he RNR1 is the first of what is promised to be a series of microphones resulting from a collaboration between Rupert Neve and SE Electronics founder Siwei Zou. The seeds of this collaborative journey were sown nearly four years ago when Rupert approached a range of microphone manufacturers to explore the possibility of working jointly to develop some ideas he had.

Having spent the majority of his life designing the signal path upstream of the microphone, he felt that it was time to turn his attentions to the electronics employed in the microphone itself.

22

This was never going to be simply an exercise in re-badging, though. Rupert’s ideas involved the creation of a wholly new microphone from the ground up, with attention to detail, hand-built meticulousness and high quality (read expensive) component choices being crucial. As a result, surprisingly or unsurprisingly depending on your point of view, the established high-end players fell away as potential partners. That left what we might call the ‘mid-market’ still in the negotiations, and the development partner of choice ended up being SE. The choice of a relatively young company with resolution

a Chinese manufacturing base might come as something of a surprise to some, but you have to remember that SE has really raised its game in recent years — investing heavily in its manufacturing and R&D provision. And yes, its range includes the ludicrously cheap (but still sweet sounding) SE1, but also includes microphones such as the Gemini, which has won the hearts and ears of many a jaded engineer.

Rupert’s views about the importance of HF to the audio path, even ultrasonic HF, are widely known.

Even if you can’t hear those high harmonics, he argues, they have an effect on our perception of lower frequencies. So the choice of a ribbon design as the first of the microphone series may seem a little strange. Although long favoured for their smooth response and sense of ‘being there’, most ribbon designs, whether vintage or modern, exhibit a gradual HF roll-off starting at anything between 5k and 10k. The advantage, though, is that while this falling response starts earlier, it’s nowhere near as steep as that of a typical capacitor microphone. So the first step in the process was to design a new ribbon element that had as extended a response as possible before the Rupert electronics were put to use.

SE is no stranger to ribbon designs having launched two of them in recent years, but the element in the RNR1 is a wholly new design that has learnt from this experience and it’s not a case of simply grabbing an existing part off the shelf. The element in question is a fairly standard corrugated aluminium ribbon that even without the help of an active stage, maintains a reasonably flat response up to about 7kHz. Purists could argue that that should have been enough, and the addition of a passive output stage should finish things off nicely. But that would have defeated the object somewhat. Instead, the addition of no less than two custom-designed transformers (one as an impedance convertor prior to the electronic stage and one as an output stage), and the same discrete single-sided circuit topology employed in the RND 5088 console treats the output of the ribbon to a good deal of signal conditioning.

Of course, the addition of an active output stage to a ribbon microphone isn’t a new idea and it’s been an approach that has been taken by manufacturers such as Royer Labs for some time and with a good deal of success. At the very least, it means that the issues surrounding source/load impedance matching and the resulting colouration and potentially low output levels are addressed. But the Rupert design was always intended to do much more; to try to reveal some of the HF detail that has been the historical Achilles heel of ribbon designs.

The result is a supplied frequency response that is interesting to say the least. There’s the usual inherent bass lift that tips the response up below 100Hz, but thereafter it remains reasonably flat with a very gradual rise to a slight peak at about 3kHz. From about 5kHz it drops gently to end 10dB down at 15kHz, but then rises again so the output at 25kHz is more or less the same as that at 5kHz. Before attempting to explain how this actually sounds, it’s worth examining how this particular confection is packaged. The RNR1 (UK£1895 + VAT) is supplied in a hard shell flightcase and comes with its own suspension mount. The microphone itself has its own wooden storage box, which looks fabulous from the outside, but a bit tatty inside, as the fabric used to line it was already peeling away.

I appreciate that this was one of the first production versions but users will expect these kinds of detail to be sorted.

March 2009

REVIEW The microphone itself is extremely well screwed together but I dare say it will divide opinion in terms of its looks. Finished in a no-nonsense battleship grey, it has an incredibly statuesque form factor that tapers away from the cylindrical base into a soft wedge shape. It actually brings to mind the Shanghai World Financial Centre skyscraper. On balance, I like the look of it — it’s not self consciously retro in its design and it’s not as outright wacky as some offerings from the likes of Violet Designs or JZ Microphones. I’m left wondering whether it needs to be quite so tall though, as you can see the ribbon element standing off on a good four inches worth of screw thread behind the grille.

The supplied suspension mount screws into a thread at the base of the mic and provides a snug fit; it’s a very long thread though, so it does take a good while to get it firmly attached. The only external control is a very welcome high pass filter that can be switched in to tame the LF bump typical of ribbons when used close up. The active circuitry derives its power from standard 48V phantom, although somewhat curiously and no doubt due to those transformers, you do actually get some output from the microphone without powering it first. The output in this case is neither big nor clever though, as I somewhat embarrassingly found out when first setting it up. There must be something deeply ingrained in my subconscious about ribbons and phantom power, as I completely forgot about this and spent a couple of minutes wondering why things sounded so feeble. Providing Rupert’s circuit design with power changed that quite dramatically!

First impressions on spoken voice are of an incredible weight and texture to the low end, nice smooth mids, and more detail to the HF than you might expect. That’s not to say that it sounds like a

m8 01

eight

With vast headroom and ultra-wide bandwidth, the m801 is detailed, musical,

capacitor microphone as it’s nowhere near as bright, but the gradual HF roll-off doesn’t seem to go hand in hand with a loss of definition. The polar pattern is fig-8 as you would expect, and moving around the axis of the microphone shows a smooth drop in level towards the null points with no objectionable shifts in frequency response.

Like most ribbons, the RNR1 seemed to deliver the most flattering overall sound when given a little distance from the source, but when switching to (male) sung vocals, capturing a close sounding vocal without too much room sound intruding required moving in a little closer ensuring, of course, that a pop shield was firmly in place first. At this point, the LF starts to sound incredibly overblown, a situation helped to some degree by switching in the high pass filter on the microphone, but requiring a little more help from additional EQ with some voices. As a comparison for testing, I also set up a Royer R122 ribbon, which shares a similar design philosophy (ribbon element, active output stage). On the same male vocals, the Royer seems to have a little more in the way of presence in the mid-range; it’s a slightly warmer sound in this application. But it can’t match the RNR1 for sheer guts and solidity at the low end, and in that sense of detail to both the mid-range and HF that the RNR1 captures so well. Granted, when used close-up, the Royer is a little easier to tame than the RNR1, as it doesn’t have quite such a hefty LF lift but this works against it when set at greater distances to source.

Moving on to a 12-string acoustic guitar, normally a job I’d assign to a nice large-diaphragm capacitor to really grab all of that harmonic and transient detail, and the RNR1 was actually more of a revelation. It needs a good bit of working distance — 40cm or so from source — to balance out the sound, but once

c h an

nel m icr

o p ho

ne p rea

more you get that sense of solidity and definition to the sound together with a distinct lack of some of the more irritating squeaks and the slightly spikey sound that a capacitor microphone might give you here. ‘Solid’ seems to be the adjective that best sums up the RNR1 in appearance and in sound. But that solidity is coupled with the smoothness that most people associate with ribbon microphones, and a sense of detail to the sound that is more than simply an elevated HF response. I wish I had had a little more time than I did with this microphone, because based on what I heard it would have sounded sensational on electric guitar, piano, drums and strings. But it was the only one in the country, and it had a fairly tight schedule to adhere to.

It would be well worth a demo, particularly if you’ve considered investing in a ribbon microphone but felt that it wouldn’t be quite as flexible in application as you’d like. It really does sound very different to any other ribbon design I’ve heard. And the SE/Rupert Neve collaboration doesn’t end here.

A couple of large diaphragm capacitor designs are also in the pipeline. If they work as well as the RNR1 does, I can’t wait. n

PROS

Huge sounding, solid LF response; smooth HF roll-off without sacrificing detail; quiet; looks.

CONS

Needs care when worked close-up; price; some issues with the finish of the packaging.

Contact SE Electronics, China: Website: www.seelectronics.com UK, Sonic Distribution: -44 (0)845 500 2500

mplif ier

open and pure. It will effortlessly resolve even the lowest level ambient information, resulting in recordings of astonishing clarity and realism, which reveal the essence of the music being recorded. Regardless of genre, source or application, the m801 faithfully captures what the microphone hears, allowing you to focus on the sound.

fully balanced, transformerless design / ribbon mic mode / precision gold contact gain controls / no electrolytic capacitors in the signal path / sealed gold contact relays for all signal switching / regulated linear power supply with custom wound toroidal transformer / highest quality components used throughout / five year warranty on parts and labor

JO UIF 6, "TQFO .FEJB -UE

t XXX BTQFO NFEJB DPN t XXX HSBDFEFTJHO DPN

March 2009

resolution

23

REVIEW

API 1608 Few manufacturers enjoy the sort of unconditional respect that the API brand attracts and the company’s latest desk offering offers users at a different end of the market a piece of that legacy in a smaller footprint. GEORGE SHILLING appreciates the effort.

T

he 1608 is a small-format recording console based on the 1604 that API produced in the 1970s and early 1980s. Although I have never encountered one in the UK, examples in the USA are still cherished and lovingly

restored. Designed by Jeffrey Bork, the 1608 (UK £38,000 + VAT) adds modern features including a few concessions to 5.1, but essentially this is a well-appointed 16:8:2 console with the enormous attractions of 16 of API’s legendary mic preamps

built in, and a 500-series slot per channel loaded with a classic EQ module. Additionally there are eight Echo Returns with full routing, each with their own corresponding (and patchable) 500-Series slot and you can even load eight 512Cs for a full 24 mic preamps. All console buttons illuminate and the master section is comprehensively featured. The rear panel is covered with clearly labelled connections but a substantial patchbay would be needed for all these.

Topping it off is a beautiful VU-equipped meterbridge.

Optional 16 channel expanders can be connected to provide up to 64 channels.

The fader board comprises two 8-fader units housing Alps 100mm faders that have a light touch and a conventional fader top — no doubt cheaper and probably easier to use than the retro API type. There is blank space below the Sends/Returns sections (submaster trims are on little pots rather than faders) with a stereo master fader far right with unity at the top.

The 548B Input module sensibly employs large momentary illuminating Solo and Mute buttons above the fader. PFL, AFL (both with level trim) and SIP modes are available from the master section. Solo Safe is available per channel and there is also a handy Mute Group operated from the master section. All switching seems to take place elegantly and crisply and great care has been taken to ensure signal integrity, with no VCAs or FET switches anywhere.

Unusually (but sensibly) located near the bottom of the strip is the input section. The mic preamps are similar to the 212L type fitted to the Legacy Console with separate (XLR) Line and Mic inputs along with a jack Instrument input on the rear. However, jack insertion defeats the channel’s Mic input, so you will either need to permanently assign necessary channels for instrument or line use, or crawl around the rear of the console to plug as necessary. Gain

Disney Hall L.A.

The sound you can’t forget...

Because you’ve always known it

Find great spaces to place your music

The M7 Sterero Reverb Processor

www.bricasti.com

The M10 Remote Console

REVIEW

for mic or instrument is up to 55dB but switching to Line defeats the gain knob. The fixed line gain can be reduced by only 6dB using the Pad button but on a mic signal the pad is -20dB. Individual Polarity and Phantom switches are also available here as befits a professional console.

Working upwards you next encounter Aux/Echo Sends. There are eight sends with prefade switching in pairs — 1-4 are arranged as two dual monos, with dual-concentric gain pots and individual On buttons, while 5-8 are arranged with similar knobs arranged as stereo level and pan and a single On button per pair. So far, so sensible, but additionally Sends 7/8 are equipped with a To Subs button that allows you to additionally send some of the main signal to the first four of the eight routing buses via the channel routing buttons, pre or post fader. Signal is sent independently of the Send On/Off button, which is still in circuit with regard to the Send 7/8 outputs.

Clever stuff, which still allows sending the main fader directly to buses 5-8 for supreme flexibility and 5.1 scenarios, for example.

Above the Sends is the routing section, dominated by the Pan pot. This has a neat, tight, centre detente and is always in circuit to the main mix, which you select by pressing the PGM (Programme) button. The Pan button is only relevant when routing between odd and even bus assignment buttons at the top of the strip. A patchable Insert is also switchable here, it is post-EQ, but there is an additional pre-EQ nonswitched insert point available on the rear of the console. All connections for inserts are on balanced jacks. There is also the added bonus of a High-Pass Filter, located on the channel output, -3dB at 50Hz and 6dB/octave — very useful. As well as routing to PGM and the eight buses, the signal is also always present at a Direct Output, postfader. I would have liked the option of prefade outs to enable recording and monitor mixing simultaneously, but that can be bodged if really necessary using the Insert point (although it would preclude use of the filter).

500 series slots are filled as standard with 12 reissue 550A 3-band plus filter EQ modules. The remaining four channels are each equipped with the 560 10-band graphic. Both of these models employ the Proportional-Q characteristic, which narrows the filter at extreme settings, always seeming musical and rich, and preventing you from doing anything nasty.

The Echo returns and master Sends modules are awash with buttons, (usefully illuminating but unfortunately all in yellow) with myriad options.

The Returns feature full level, panning and routing options, with large Solo and Mute buttons, and Solo Safe. As well as the main line level inputs (on a D-Sub) there are jack inputs that you can switch to by selecting Aux In. Additionally, the Sends can even blend another external input to their signals by connecting a jack source and pressing Ext In. Simple Submaster controls for the eight buses allow March 2009

for trimming (unity is at full-tilt on the knobs but these can be tweaked with a Cal pot), On/Off, latching Solo and separate left and right programme assign.

Again all buttons are yellow.

Separate Mutes and Cal pots are provided for each monitor of a 5.1 arrangement, and comprehensive switching is here for two additional stereo monitoring setups. All three external inputs also provide for 5.1 and stereo Echo Send monitoring enables checking of headphone mixes.

The main control room level is a stepped knob but it has an accompanying continuous Dim control allowing for pretend fadeouts. Talkback is comprehensive with an inbuilt mic, and an Oscillator and a Headphone output add useful functionality. Meters can helpfully be set to show Preamp, Direct Out or Submaster out levels while there are separate Send meters. And there is even a switchable Programme Insert on the main

stereo bus.

This console is exactly what a modern API should be. It is comprehensively featured, looks and feels great, and with regard to audio quality I trust no other manufacturer more than API. n

PROS

Legendary API quality; comprehensive features for many scenarios including 5.1.

CONS

More colour-coding of button LEDs would be useful; pan pot a long reach from fader.

Contact API, US: Website: www.apiaudio.com UK, KMR Audio: +44 208 445 2446

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

Focal CMS Resol Jnr 30-10-08.indd 1 resolution

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

30/10/08 09:57:48 25

REVIEW

CharterOak SCL-1 Gain reduction has long been the healthiest, in terms of choice, of the outboard product sectors but most variants concern themselves with subtleties of flavour rather than dramatic differences in operating principle. GEORGE SHILLING is blown away by a new and wonderfully unique compressor.

C

harterOak has been making boutique microphones since 2002. Endearingly, rather than boosting his ego, founder Michael Deming (an engineer and producer of some note) named the company after a local Connecticut landmark. With a product catalogue comprising mainly exotic microphones, CharterOak has surprised everyone with this highly unusual stereo compressor (MSRP US$2899), an early example of which I was lucky enough to try.

Flipping the far left toggle to On makes the large VU light up. The two channels’ controls are arranged above each other and each channel has seven pleasantly tactile knobs. These machined aluminium knobs are etched around the rims with a zero to 10 scale and they are smoothly damped, although a few of the knobs were snagging very slightly on the front panel of the review unit. CharterOak is already aware of this early problem and now simply mounts them slightly further from the front panel when the hex nut is secured.

At the far right a pair of toggles select between Dual and Stereo mode, and Metering of Channel 1 or Channel 2 Gain Reduction. In Stereo mode the Channel 1 controls become master, with the control signal derived from both channels. Input and Output gains sensibly always remain independent, allowing for precise left-right calibration.

The manual suggests fairly extreme initial settings as a starting point to help you understand the concept. Of course, I initially didn’t read this(!) and wondered why the meter was so far off zero.

First, the Input gain should be set at full tilt, which provides the lowest noise floor, with the furthest right Output gain knobs needing to be set at around 5 for 0vu output. The next knob is Static Threshold and this effectively calibrates the unit. It is recommended initially to set the unit to stereo mode and the metering to Channel 1, and tweak this knob until the meter settles on zero.

Lowering Static Threshold (clockwise) moves the meter past zero, providing a harder knee — as when pushing all the buttons in on an 1176 but less extreme, and continuously variable. Raising this (anticlockwise) gives a softer knee by creating less potential for swing in the control circuit, and simply setting it a dB or two below zero softens the knee. Next along is the more conventional Dynamic Threshold control. It is recommended to crank this to 7, i.e. a fairly low threshold. The review model needed a fairly hot signal to enable a suitable threshold to be set and a couple of resistor

26

values have been changed in more recent examples allowing for 10dB lower threshold.

Attack and Release knobs are merely labelled 0 to 10 and work in opposite directions to each other — fast Attack is anticlockwise while fast Release is clockwise. These should initially be set to fairly fast and then you set the compression Ratio. This knob varies continuously between 1:1 and 1:20 so setting it halfway at 1:10 is recommended. Having made these adjustments, with a little tweaking it was possible to see average compression of -6dB or more on the meter, and hear, well, very little obvious effect! The transparency of the gain reduction and the effect of the gain make-up in the circuit results in an astonishing smoothness and clarity. Comparing a section of programme with and without the SCL-1, average perceived level was several dBs higher when using the processing of the SCL-1 (when normalised), and a delightful, subtle overall glow is revealed. The subtleties of different settings gradually become apparent, but large changes frequently sounded fairly subtle.

The design brief was to achieve complete transparency and Deming says it turned out even better than he expected. After 25 years of mixing without a bus compressor, he now has it hard wired across the mix. It is faster and cleaner than any other compressor I have ever encountered. There is always a measure of ‘auto’ recovery taking place, so with release set fast, dynamic material, like pop music, will make the meter waggle like crazy. The Auto circuit always releases to the constantly changing average level and this is what prevents any pumping or gasping.

The control circuit is effectively a discrete VCA circuit, with a control circuit governing the FET, which in turn goes to the gain cell. Cleverly, the circuit also makes up much of the gain automatically.

However, this, and the lack of a bypass can make it difficult to tell what the SCL-1 is actually doing, such is the subtlety of the compression in some situations.

There is no Bypass, but I understand that by request relay bypass is being planned as an option (as is a mastering version with 11-step potentiometers).

Even with extreme compression, the stereo image stays remarkably true, and there is no discernable loss of top end, a by-product that you tend to expect with most compressors.

I initially had the unit for a classical/showtune vocal and piano session, and used it for piano recording and again subsequently for mix bus where it proved to be the perfect processor for the resolution

job — invisibly and subtly reducing dynamics a little, without any discernable pumping or artefacts.

In fact, I was way too cautious with the settings; it really is rather difficult to overdo things with the SCL-1. However, despite the transparency and lack of apparent distortion, there is certainly some enhancement audible with heavy compression settings. Some impressive solidity was noticeable in the low frequencies of a pop-rock mix when the SCL-1 was driven fairly hard.

The unit offers a ‘soft symmetrical clip’, so the mix certainly cooks, while retaining much of the dynamic range. I did find the metering a little misleading as it doesn’t take into account the subsequent gain make-up, so even if the meter is off the scale past -20dB, total gain reduction is rarely more than about 6dB. CharterOak is considering switchable metering to show net gain reduction at output, which I think would be useful.

While there is some narrowing of the dynamic range, this kind of compression is generally too subtle for rock vocals. However, I did have remarkable success, making a dynamic vocal sit perfectly in a track by connecting the two channels in series using Dual mode, and using what would be fairly brutal settings on any other unit. The warmth, presence, size and microphone character shone through, and the vocal glowed rather than sounded squashed.

The SCL-1’s philosophy has been cleverly executed and this is a wonderfully unique processor. n

PROS

Uniquely transparent gain reduction; excellent auto-recovery; clever gain make up circuitry.

CONS

A few early-model niggles — all promised to be sorted; too subtle for some applications.

EXTRAS

Charteroak is primarily a microphone manufacturer but it builds accessories too. It claims its PF-1 Pop Filter outperforms others in three areas.

The SaatiTech Hyphobe Acoustex fibre used in its construction is extremely effective at repelling moisture. The B010 Acoustex used in the PF-1 is said to stop plosives without compromising the frequency response of the microphone.

The filter is designed to eliminate the need for bulky mic-clip/goosenecks and secondary mic stands, as the PF-1 comes attached to a Velcro strap that will fit most side-address large diaphragm microphones.

Contact charteroak acoustic devices, us: Website: wwwcharteroakacoustics.com

March 2009

It’s back...

The Lowest Prices...

The Fastest Delivery...

The Biggest Catalogue...

www.studiospares.com Tel: 08456 441020

REVIEW

Waves UM 225/226 Upmixers & Center These are two plugs from Waves that share common approaches even though the ultimate effects are very different. ROB JAMES upmixes and can’t resist doing that karaoke thing.

T

he UM and Center processes from Waves both rely on the same basic idea, splitting the phantom centre (M) from the stereo information (S) then processing separately before either decoding and redistributing in the UM or decoding back to stereo in the case of Center. No doubt this is a variation on conventional matrixing to M&S. To my ears Center offers little more than can be achieved with a suitable console. However, it offers the process plus useful filters and a bit of fairy dust in the shape of the Punch control, in a very convenient package. Much the same applies to UM but here the advantage compared with the inconvenience of achieving anything like the same effect using a console, delay and reverb, etc. is much more marked.

Neither plug-in will be to everybody’s taste but they are good additions to the arsenal.

Upmixers — As the names imply, the UM225 and UM226 upmix stereo material to 5.0 and 5.1 surround respectively.

Waves lists host apps that the plug-in is known to work with as Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Digital Performer, Nuendo and Cubase.

Since I didn’t have one of these loaded or handy I used Pyramix and this required a bit of thought. After a couple of false starts, it became obvious that the way to use the UM in Pyramix is to insert it into a 5 or 6 channel surround mixer input strip. The next hurdle was channel order.

In the wonderful, standards filled world we live in there are several possible mappings for assigning the five or six channels to speakers.

Pyramix uses the Film mapping. The UM 225/6 user manual doesn’t say how the I-O is mapped so time for a bit of detective work. With a stereo cue in the timeline it became apparent that the VST plugin input mapping is not the same as the output i.e. with the L&R tracks routed to the L&R inputs of the LRCLsRsLfe 5.1 strip the plug-in input meters light up but the outputs appear in strange places. After some experimentation using the plug-in’s convenient speaker channel output mutes it became obvious that while the inputs worked as expected the output mapping is in fact L,R,C,Lfe,Ls,Rs. Fortunately, Pyramix includes a routing matrix in surround mixer strips so re-routing to the correct buses is simple.

Other applications not included on the approved list 28

may well support the UM 225/6 in a similar fashion.

Once re-routed the effectiveness of the UM 225/226 process was immediately apparent (Native US$300; TDM $600). Eight Modes describe the application or input content. The mode determines which parts of the stereo content will stay in the front left and right channels and what will be used to create the centre and surround channel content.

Surround 4 All generates a mild surround effect from any stereo content. Film 1 is intended for material with a wide dynamic range and heavy sound effects, such as action blockbusters. Film 2 is the converse of Film 1 and is for dialogue-driven films.

Center Dialog keeps all centre-panned dialogue in the Centre channel for news and sport, while Steady Center recreates a centre phantom image in the Centre channel for a wide range of programme material.

Stereo Preserve spreads the stereo content across the surround channels while retaining the original stereo image, mostly for music, and Music Spread creates a wide surround image from the original stereo image. Finally, Music Loops delivers a wide Front image with Centre punch for music loops and samples.

The only slider on the interface is a wet/ dry control that allows you to balance the amount of effect. A high-ish setting makes it easier to gauge the effect while making adjustments.

Front LF and HF controls alter the L/R and Centre balance for Low and High frequency content and a Punch control is then used to achieve the most pleasing spread of transients between L/R and Centre. L/R width allows the front LR image to be widened (I would counsel caution).

For the rear channels you can set delay, limit bandwidth and add Ambience, which determines how the rear content is diffused from small dry space to big dry space. Finally, with the UM 226 variant you can also generate LFE output. An LPF rotary controls the cut-off frequency of a 4th order low pass filter and a LoAir button lowers LFE content dynamically by one octave.

The Mode settings work well for their stated purposes and my only real reservation is LFE. When I tried converting a stereo movie trailer into 5.1 the process transformed the phantom centre into a good hard centre while removing most of the resolution

dialogue from the front LR channels and producing a plausible surround effect. However, the dialogue also produced LFE output no matter what I did with the controls. The processor removes dialogue from the LR channels well enough so I don’t see why it has to end up on the LFE. Perhaps an extra control is needed? Simple answer, use the UM 225 and derive LFE, when required, by conventional means. With music the surround effect can be varied from subtle to surreal.

The surround display is well damped and easy to read and the transparency of the Centre, Ls, and Rs yellow beams shows their contribution to the surround field, depending on the position of the UpMix fader. The angle of the front Left and Right yellow beams indicates L/R Width. Output trim pots offer a maximum of 12dB boost or cut for L/R, Centre, Ls/Rs, and LFE outputs and the Master gain pot provides up to 24dB of overall attenuation.

Center — The name suggests a Karaoke tool but this is more than that (Native $400; TDM $800). It offers an alternative take for final mixing and when mastering. In essence, it allows you to re-balance the phantom centre versus the sides of a stereo mix. Where dialogue or vocals are in the centre of a mix this enables you to enhance them or remove them. You can also reduce stereo width and, that Holy Grail for recordists, reduce stereo reverb/ambience of location recordings. Mono compatibility can be improved and for music mixing the possibilities are manifold. Change the imaging of overhead drum pairs, rebalance recordings of individual or groups of acoustic instruments… Oh, and it can do the Karaoke thing too…(Knew it. Ed) The user interface graphics are nicely grungy, resembling a well used hardware front panel. Center attempts to isolate the phantom centre signal then remix it with the sides using two sliders. As with the Upmix processors, Center offers Low, High and Punch controls for fine-tuning the frequency and time detection processes along with a master output level pot. While complete elimination of the centre vocals in a mix is next to impossible if there is any stereo reverb present, the re-balancing capabilities are impressive.

The Center meter indicates when correlated content is detected i.e. mono shows up and completely de-correlated signal, such as two different tracks, will result in little or no display. n

PROS

Affordable upmixer and image manipulator with useful features; big time saver; UM produces convincing and sometimes magical results.

CONS

Not possible to completely kill Centre signal; LFE synthesis could be more subtle; UM may not work with non-listed applications.

Contact waves, israel: Website: www.waves.com

March 2009

REVIEW

Blue Coconut Unity Echo Verb Well, we haven’t seen a new one of these for quite some time — long enough, in fact, for a new generation to come through and even wonder what it does. GEORGE SHILLING laces up a loop and selects some heads.

B

rand new tape echo units are now rare and for good reason with the original devices being squeezed out of the market by transistor and digital processors and then plug-ins. And then there’s the price.

For a fraction of the cost of this new device you could pick up a mint condition vintage model or a hardware or plug-in emulation that comes pretty close to the real thing. So why might you spend so much on a new one?

UK pro-audio distributor Unity Audio has taken the business of creating the Echo Verb extremely seriously (UK£1595 inc. VAT). The designer Terry Macdonald includes Watkins/WEM on his CV, known for its popular Copicat devices that bear a passing resemblance to the new model. However, this British-built newcomer includes six heads and a ‘reverb’ mode, with switching and mode selection controlled by microprocessor.

The front panel includes a sexy blue-lit VU with chrome surround that also hides a red light behind it to indicate clipping. There are individual on/off buttons for each head with dual colour LEDs and nicely detented knobs. The deck plate looks industrial but the unit is surprisingly light. The Echo Verb seems extremely well built and a five-year guarantee on the electronics is reassuring. The look is marred only by the rather unnecessary printing of a wordy and slightly inaccurate explanation of mode function on the top plate — intelligent button legending could perhaps have averted this. The printed instructions are also lacking clarity. For the price of the unit, a professionally written manual should have been included; instead, the explanations include grammatical and typographical errors and just plain bad English: ‘The echo & direct switch between the echo playback off tape On or direct signal & echo. Best used with the send & return inputs.’ Thankfully, operation is fairly straightforward and most studio boffins will soon work out the unit’s functions and foibles.

The path of the quarter inch tape includes a capstan and a couple of flywheels, one holding the tape with some spring tension. The head assembly includes, from the left, an erase head, a record head, then six playback heads and a final cleaning pad. The heads are not spaced evenly, with a gradual slight bunching up from left to right, making for some March 2009

interesting multitaps and some not-quite-in-time rhythmic delays. Unlike the Copicat, which included a useful folding lid, the Echo Verb leaves the deck plate exposed when not in use and an optional dust cover is available but costs extra.

For studio users there are transformer balanced XLR connections on the rear but for musicians a front panel jack socket is provided with two different level settings — the higher gain setting has enough grunt to accommodate single coil pickups. An output jack is also provided. Additionally, the aforementioned Send and Return jacks provide a third set of connections — I had hoped these might provide an insert point but this is not the case. The input knob goes from 0 to 13 with three detente notches per unit. Dedicated buttons enable easy switching On or Off of the playback heads, while a Tone button provides two settings applied to the echo. One setting is effectively ‘flat’, with a bright, clear sound while the other takes some of the edge off. And, as you may have surmised from the manual extract above, there is means to enable or disable dry signal from the output. When mixing signals these can be balanced using the Echo Level and Output (overall) Level knobs. The Echo signal can also be muted using the front panel button or a footswitch. Choosing an appropriate setting is a mixture of choosing heads and also adjusting the motor speed knob, which has an unexplained centre détente and a reasonably wide (but not huge) range.

Sonically the Echo Verb is remarkably clean.

There is no trace of wow and flutter, little hiss or noise. In fact, unless it’s driven hard there are very resolution

few artefacts that might suggest you are hearing a tape echo, especially in most contexts where the direct signal and other mix elements partly mask the sound. Although real knob twiddling is hard to beat, I had almost as much fun abusing the crunchier UAD Space Echo plug-in. If the input level is pushed on the Echo Verb there is some tape compression and distortion to be had and the Sustain knob has plenty of range for inducing feedback to destruction.

However, because of the clarity of the unit this can be rather shrill. The overall tone coming off tape slightly lacks bass warmth and pressing the Tone button only helps reduce the brightness a little.

For a more washy sound there is a ‘hidden’ Reverb mode, whereby pressing the Head 1 button for two seconds sets it flashing. This creates a softer tone with an apparently more complex feedback path linking the first two heads. But when multiple further heads are selected and sustain is increased, a pseudo-reverb effect can produce interesting results, although this is an effect rather than a reverb. Playing a Telecaster through the Echo Verb took me straight into Joe Meek territory, with over-the-top echoes being the order of the day. As a mixing delay, I felt the Echo Verb lacked a juicy enough character to warrant having it sitting there rotating beside the mixing desk all day — I’d worry about tape wear and probably swap it for something without moving parts! It did initially suffer from some disturbing mechanical squeaking when the motor was left running for a short while. But I’m told this is because it was new and the bearings soon bed down.

The Echo Verb performs admirably and, if anything, it has been made almost too well. As a creative tool it encourages experimentation and performance, and switching heads on and off, and varying speed and sustain on the fly is great fun during tracking or bouncing. I’d have liked an even greater range of motor speed and stereo outputs with head panning would undoubtedly have made far better use of the six discrete delay taps, but this would have made things even more pricey. Even so, there is a great variety of effect achievable with the Echo Verb. So, if you want a reliable, capable tape delay that should give years of reliable service then the Echo Verb is the one. n

PROS

Thoroughly designed and engineered; well built; six heads; low noise; pseudoreverb mode; long warranty.

CONS

Overly clean, bright, sometimes harsh sound; mono only; expensive; dust cover costs extra.

Contact blue coconut unity, uk: Website: www.bluecoconutunity.com UK, Unity Audio: +44 1440 785843

29

REVIEW

Digidesign Pro Tools 8 HD Pro Tools 8 was released just before Christmas for HD, LE and M-Powered. The update provides a new look along with new MIDI and Score Editor windows, newly included plug-ins, plenty of new editing features, and myriad GUI enhancements and additions.

GEORGE SHILLING says ‘What’s New in Pro Tools 8’ is a rather large PDF.

L

aunching Pro Tools 8 brings up a useful Quick Start dialogue with provision for opening recent sessions from a list or creating a new one, optionally from a provided or user-created template. When closing sessions, a DSP cache now keeps plug-ins loaded for faster swapping between similar sessions.

The overall look of the program is far darker, with a theoretically easier-on-the-eye colour scheme. This is not, however, to everyone’s liking — some of the text has a harsh contrast, and I found trimming Regions difficult to see with some colours. Automation parameter lines are very thin, but multiple lanes for these and MIDI controller data can usefully now be displayed for each track.

In the mixer window the pan pots are now rotary and the mixer strips are now coloured by default.

Unnecessary new function labels waste a certain amount of screen space, all the more valuable if you take advantage of the additional five plug-in slots on each channel — useful in particular for complex vocal processing chains, or when using Abbey Road single-band EQs. On the Edit window, waveform views have been helpfully increased from 8-bit to 16-bit — loading old Sessions results in a minute or two of recalculation. The Colour Palette has been enhanced

and now includes Brightness and Saturation sliders for channel strips but not the Edit window. I spent days fiddling with these and the settings on my monitors to get a comfortable working environment.

Unfortunately getting Pro Tools bright enough to see clearly can result in plug-in windows, Finder windows and other programs appearing glaringly bright. The Universe view is now incorporated into the Edit window — although it can be hidden, it can sometimes be eating up space unnoticed. But, at long last, there is now a button displaying Insertion Follows Playback status for that infuriating ‘N’ shortcut, although the new button symbols for this and other functions are not as clear as they might be. The Edit Toolbar can now be configured to taste and all Transport controls can be shown here if you have a wide enough monitor (or two). These could possibly have been better organised — the Grid/ Nudge window wastes some space. But sections can be rearranged, simply by Command-clicking and dragging.

The new Playlist view usefully spreads out hidden playlists for audio tracks but not MIDI. If all playlists are in view, this now finally allows for global edits to be reflected in all recorded audio tracks (this doesn’t work for MIDI playlists). But the main aim of this feature is for comping and individual playlists can

be shown or hidden, given a rating, soloed, etc., and chosen audio selections can be jumped up to the main playlist using a shortcut. Other new shortcuts are associated with this feature, (some are wrongly documented) but we still don’t have shortcuts to select, create new or duplicate playlists, despite many

ASP8024

One analogue world ...hundreds of studios ...thousands of users

Prices start from around £12,000 plus VAT and Delivery. Options include DAW control bay and patchbay.

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

REVIEW

requests. Also, Expand Matching Takes to New Playlists doesn’t place regions at the original time stamp. However, the new features are welcome and are heading in a useful direction.

The new MIDI Editor is much like other piano roll editors and boasts most of the features of

rivals. Requested features such as Mute MIDI Note function have been included, and you can even display this at the bottom part of the Edit window, much like Logic Pro. Multiple parts can be shown, with multiple controller lanes (although oddly not multiple Velocity, this can become very cluttered.)

There is even a notation view in the MIDI Editor.

However, there is also a separate Score Editor, bearing the fruit of some code apparently borrowed from Sibelius. Although beautiful looking printed music can be produced, editing is rather limited.

There is no provision to change clef during a part, there are no symbols for slurs available, no means of providing dynamic markings or adding lyrics.

But for boshing out a quick part for a musician to refer to, it’s fine, and you can even generate a PDF. Despite the omissions, you can adapt display quantisation, insert chord symbols (the Edit window also now has a Chords ruler) and key changes, and easily show and hide different tracks/parts.

Musicians and composers will appreciate great new instruments from the AIR division. Mini Grand is a surprisingly good piano with presets and a lovely built-in reverb. Vacuum is a valve mono synth, DB-33 is a resource-hungry tonewheel organ and rotary speaker, Boom is a programmable drum machine, and Xpand2 is an improvement over the original. D-Fi, SansAmp, Maxim and TL Utilities are included, and there are 20 interesting new effects from the AIR department, although disappointingly these are RTAS only with no TDM. Also accompanying Pro Tools 8 is a 6Gb bundle of samples from Big Fish Audio. These are grouped by musical style and while nowhere near as comprehensive or elegant as Apple Loops, they nevertheless provide useful starting points for cobbling tracks together.

Strip Silence now has a threshold that goes down

to -96dB, far more useful than the previous -48dB, especially for classical music editing.

Grid Mode can now be combined with any of the other three edit modes — I soon started enjoying Shuffle-Grid mode for global editing, keeping things in time without having to constantly change modes. There are a handful of practical new video and Avid-related features such as QuickTime HD playback on a Mac with a qualified video card, and Video Satellite options. Multiple HD systems can now be linked using the Satellite Link software option, and D-Control, D-Command and Icon functions have been enhanced.

One new option that can be extremely useful is the method of opening a session with all plugins de-activated, by holding down the Shift key.

This is great when you want to go into a session quickly to export some audio regions, or if you’re troubleshooting.

So all-in-all some fantastic new features, but the new GUI colours possibly need a bit of tweaking for operators whose eyesight isn’t necessarily improving with age. n

PROS

New GUI; MIDI/Score Editors; new instrument and FX plug-ins; multiple automation lane view; too many enhancements to list.

CONS

New GUI colours and labels; still lacking playlist shortcuts; some windows yet to be updated to the new look; I had to buy a faster Mac; a few bugs and oddities.

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

www.audient.com

REVIEW

Sonifex RB-MTV1 Place commentators or correspondents in front of equipment that they need to interact with and you better make it simple. ROB JAMES assesses a contribution monitor with talkback that’s well bred and red.

T

o long-term fader pushers (pullers, if you’re old-style BBC) there is something more than faintly disturbing about the idea of a device with preset fixed gain microphone preamplification. However, there are many situations where such a device is not merely desirable but essential. Add a limiter, headphone monitoring of the mic output, programme and cue feeds plus talkback and you have a box that ticks a lot of boxes.

Finished in the signature Redbox series satin anodise, the anything but unassuming UK£499 (+ VAT) RB-MTV1 is housed in a shallow, 110mm deep, 1u rackmounting alloy case. As with several of the other Redboxes there are also horizontal mounting points for bolting the unit in place to a flat surface. Rear rack ears to provide extra support are an optional extra for installation in, for example, OB vehicles or mobile rigs. Once set up, the emphasis is on simplicity in operation. Front panel controls are minimal and several functions will differ depending on application and set-up.

A quiet red LED indicates that the unit is powered. The two buttons are big and friendly: Mic is latching and lights up in red to indicate that the mic is live; Talk is momentary and lights green. Pressing the Talk button when the Mic is live temporarily mutes the main mic outputs and routes the mic signal to the ‘Lazy Output’. This is intended to be used as a talkback send to a control room or colleague. Five LEDs form a bargraph meter with -12, -6, 0, +3 and +6dB trigger points. The range

is well chosen for the intended purpose. A further blue LED indicates limiter activity when the builtin limiter is inserted. Four pots, Mic, Talkback, Cue and Pgm (Programme) determine the headphone monitor mix along with dip switches on the bottom and rear of the unit. In the usual place, last on the right, is a ¼-inch headphone jack.

Typical examples of applications where the RB-MTV1 will be of use include in a voiceover booth for a commercial radio or TV station, using the microphone amplifier in the feed to a recorder with the guide-track for the voiceover applied to the stereo PGM input and the talkback from a producer/ recording engineer fed to the talkback input.

Major broadcasters frequently provide their own sports commentary and graphics for incoming foreign sports feeds. Using the RB-MTV1 a commentator can sit in a voiceover booth with the main live audio feed from the sports event coming through the PGM input and with the Cue input used, for example, for another audio track such as the referee’s comments or effects, plus talkback to and from a producer. The commentator is able to adjust the monitor levels of all these inputs in the headphones to suit.

A third and highly significant application is for a correspondent, reporter or voiceover artist in a private studio or commercial radio station (or even under the stairs if that’s the only available space), connected directly to an ISDN/IP codec link for injecting remotely into a broadcast or for recording reports, using the microphone amplifier fed to the

codec unit and with the return feed from the link fed to the PGM inputs for monitoring. Since the Programme feed can be routed to the main outputs, the unit can also be used standalone to mix voice onto a feed for direct output. However, this function would be more useful if a stereo programme feed could be passed through the unit. On the other hand, this would bring extra complexity since you would most likely want to pan the mic in the mix.

Maybe Sonifex will produce an RB-MTV2 stereo version if there is sufficient demand.

The joy of a unit such as this is that it can be configured to be as idiot-proof as possible. Always provided that the voice is reasonably consistent, careful adjustment of the multiturn mic gain and limiter threshold pots will result in consistent, decent levels leaving the artist to concentrate on the job in hand. The multiturn gain pot and switchable +20dB of gain accommodate an unusually wide variety of mic output levels. In situations where close control of levels by a professional is just not an option the unit makes a good case for itself. The remote control GPI/O extends the reach into more managed situations and the monitoring options cater for pretty much anything the presenter could wish for.

Coupled with a decent codec unit the RB-MTV1 is also a very strong contender for home contribution set-ups. Sonifex has built a solid reputation for designing and constructing boxes aimed squarely at specific tasks. They do a job and do it well at a sensible price. This unit is no exception. n

PROS

Presents a simple face to presenters; well thought out set-up options; accommodates a wide range of mics.

CONS

Stereo outputs might have been a good idea; not a lot else.

EXTRAS

The new version of the Reference Monitor can decode a Dolby E or Dolby Digital audio stream allowing you meter 8 or 5.1 audio channels respectively and listen to any two of those channels.

There are three Reference Monitor

Short back and undersides

Back panel left to right has a ¼-inch headphone jack in parallel with the one on the front panel. Apart from this, audio connections are all XLR. Outputs 1 and 2 (mono) with Mic/Line latching push switches are first up. Next is the Talk (Lazy) output, ProGraMme inputs Left and Right with +10dB push switches for domestic sources and Left and Right Cue Inputs also with +10dB push switches. This is followed by the Limiter on/off switch with multiturn Limit Level trimmer, Mic input multiturn gain trimmer adjacent to the Mic input XLR. A 9-pin D-sub socket offers remote control of the Mic switch with a tally and a further mic tally. Both tallies have simple switch and NPN emitter outputs.

An 8-way DIP switch sets a number of useful options. Switch 1 adds an additional 20dB of gain to the mic input for a maximum of +80dB, Switch 2 turns the LF filter off, 3 turns phantom power on, 4 Mutes the mic in the headphones when the Talk button is pressed, 5 Switches the mic on permanently, 6 keeps the mic meter on permanently (i.e. when the Talk button is pressed), 7 selects whether remote Mic switch operation is latched or not, and 8 sends a mono mix of the Cue Input to the Mono Outputs.

On the underside of the unit two further 8-way dip switch banks determine what will be heard in the left and right headphones. Switch 1 is Mic, 2 Talkback, 3 Cue Left, 4 Cue Right, 5 ProGraMme Left, 6 ProGraMme Right, 7 & 8 have no function currently.

32

resolution

products that can decode Dolby E and Dolby Digital signals and these are available as rackmount units or as add-on cards to existing RM-4C8s.

The cards can decode Dolby 5.1 audio from an AES audio stream or de-embed an AES stream from an HD/ SD-SDI source and then decode a Dolby encoded AES signal.

Contact SONIFEX, UK: Website: www.sonifex.co.uk

March 2009

REVIEW

Rycote InVision They’re the last thing many would think about yet they represent the fundamental point of contact for every microphone used. JON THORNTON discusses the microphone clip and mounts his mic InVision.

T

here’s always a danger that amid the regular announcements of new and exciting outboard, microphones, software, (More software. Ed), computers, consoles (tick whichever box floats your particular boat), all of that audio bling can distract you from remembering that the more mundane aspects of equipment can sometimes be just as important.

Microphone mounts are a case in point, although admittedly there have been few groundbreaking developments here recently (an exception being Enhanced Audio’s rather fine M600 solid mount).

Broadly speaking, microphone mounts fall into two broad categories — fixed clips and suspension mounts. The use of the latter is quite obviously to isolate the microphone from structure-borne (predominately low frequency) vibration so that it only picks up the sound you want it to. And with the exception of shotgun microphones on the end of booms (for obvious reasons), suspension mounts are almost exclusively the preserve of large diaphragm, side-addressed microphones. That seems strange as there’s nothing innate in the design of stick type microphones that makes them magically more immune to these sorts of problems.

These thoughts had clearly occurred to the folks at Rycote, a company best known for the manufacture of windshield and suspension mount systems for location recordists, but not a name that is quite as well known in your average studio. That may be about to change with Rycote’s InVision suspensions. These are designed to offer a discreet, compact solution to suspension mounting a variety of small diaphragm microphones -– ranging from compact types, such as the Schoeps CCM series, right through to standard short to medium bodies ‘stick’ condensers, and even the ubiquitous SM57.

In addition, they also feature some rather clever new approaches to achieving that suspension.

Most elastic suspensions are just that — a variety of takes on the use of elastic or rubber in solid ‘doughnut’ arrangement, as found on a lot of boom solutions, or the ‘cat’s cradle’ arrangement found in most studios. The solid doughnut works well and allows a good degree of isolation without too much March 2009

‘slop’ in terms of where the microphone is pointing, but can have some effects on the microphone’s pick-up pattern and frequency response. The cat’s cradle suffers a lot from slop, which is even more of an issue when positioning stick microphones, and is rather fragile to say the least. They’re also not as effective at low frequencies as they might be, as they need to be tensioned relatively highly to damp their movement. And all suspensions have their own resonant frequency, at which they will tend to amplify movement rather than suppress it, and they only really start to perform properly at about three times this resonant frequency.

The InVision design takes a different approach by exploiting the properties of a flexible polymer called Hytrel (Sounds a bit Middle Earth to me.

Ed). This material is extremely flexible and has what’s known as a ‘shape memory’ — in other words it will restore itself to its manufactured shape even after significant force has been applied. The InVision suspensions achieve their performance primarily by the convoluted shape of what they term Lyres, made from Hytrel. (Aha, the Lyres of Hytrel. Ed). This allows significant displacement

in the critical front-to-back axis of movement, but with much tighter control in the other axes, minimising slop. The material itself also damps smoothly and maintains these characteristics down to extremely low temperatures. The net result is that, even with very low mass microphones, the resonant frequency of the assembly can be 8Hz or less, meaning that the suspension is fully effective across the frequency range of the microphone.

The mounts come in a series of sizes, featuring two of these Lyre structures of different sizes into which the microphone body clips. The different sizes also feature different spacings of the Lyres to accommodate different microphone types, and different profiles for microphones to clip into — including a specific profile for the rather unusual shape of the Sennheiser MKH series. Regardless of type, the mounting bar arrangement is attached to a swivel, which incorporates a standard thread adapter for fixing to a microphone stand. With what is quite a bewildering range of options, Rycote has thankfully provided a handy tool on its website that will determine the appropriate model of suspension for a particular microphone.

They work very well indeed. Using the INV-7 for the most part, which fits the AKG C451, DPA 4011 and Earthworks SC20 used in the evaluation, the suspension did an admirable job.

In a very unscientific test involving tapping the mic stand and judging the effectiveness of the suspension, it did a better job than a traditional cat’s cradle arrangement. There’s also a sense in some applications (particularly when tracking drums) that the increased isolation tightens up the LF response considerably. As suspension systems they certainly do their job.

But maybe the best thing about these clips is the fact that they’re relatively cheap (UK£30 + VAT) and seem almost indestructible in everyday use — you can bend that Hytrel stuff every which way you like and it won’t snap (It’s from the Mines of Moria I tell you. Ed). The larger models are suitable for boom mounting and studio use, the smaller ones only for studio or installation purposes. The same technology also now features in the company’s range of windshield and suspension systems. I’m hazarding a guess that the name Rycote may well start to become as familiar in the studio environment as it is in the great outdoors. n

Contact RYCOTE, UK: Website: www.rycote.com

PROS

Price; almost indestructible; very effective suspension mounts.

CONS

Variety of different types could be confusing (but the website helps enormously).

EXTRAS

Rycote is best known as windshield manufacturer. Its lightweight suspension and windshield system — the S-Series — claims excellent wind suppression and vastly enhanced usability.

Comprising a one-piece web suspension made entirely of flexible, lightweight plastic, the design eliminates the need for elastics and is engineered to fit all diameters of microphone from 19mm to 25mm. A ‘pinch release’ allows the user to change the position of the suspension in an instant. The windshield itself features a twist-lock system attaching it to the chassis ring for quick, easy release and the acoustic fur covering is integral and provides no drop in performance with >30dB wind suppression.

Other features include an XLR cable with Neutrik NC3 connectors and the new pistol grip handle as standard. S-Series is priced between the Softie and Modular Windshield Systems and is available immediately.

resolution

33

monitor benchtest

Tannoy Precision 8P KEITH HOLLAND

T

he Precision 8P from Tannoy is a 3-way passive loudspeaker comprising a concentric bass/mid/tweeter and a separate ‘super-tweeter’. Tannoy has been producing its famous Dual Concentric drivers in a range of sizes for many years, and the 8P uses an 8-inch (200mm) paperconed woofer and a 1-inch (25mm) titanium-domed tweeter radiating through the apex of the woofer cone. The super tweeter is also a 25mm titanium dome unit that endows the 8P with a claimed bandwidth of over 50kHz (the measurements in this review are limited to 20kHz so this claim has not been verified here). The cabinet has external dimensions of 272mm wide by 440mm high by 288mm deep with a rearmounted port and connection terminals. The speakers weigh in at 12.7kg each.

Tannoy specifies power handling figures of 60W RMS and 160W programme which, along with a sensitivity of 93dB SPL for 1W at 1m distance under half-space conditions, gives a single speaker maximum output capabilities of about 111dB (RMS) and 115dB (programme) at 1m. The electrical impedance is a

nominal 6ohms and the drivers are magnetically shielded. The crossover frequency between the woofer and tweeter is stated as being 2.2kHz, but Tannoy does not specify at what frequency the super tweeter takes over from the concentric one.

Figure 1 shows the on-axis frequency response and harmonic distortion for the Precision 8P. Although a bit uneven at high frequencies, the response is seen to lie between +/-3dB limits from 55Hz to 20kHz, with a 3rd-order lowfrequency roll-off that reaches -10dB at a commendable 30Hz or so. The 3rd-order slope and slightly uneven roll-off suggest that Tannoy may have opted for an unusual port alignment with this loudspeaker, but this appears to work well. The harmonic distortion performance was measured with the loudspeaker generating a sound pressure level of 90dB at 1m (anechoic). The 2nd harmonic rises to a maximum level of 30dB (3%) at 45Hz, which falls to less than -40dB (1%) for frequencies above 80Hz, and the 3rd harmonic remains below -40dB at all frequencies above 35Hz. These figures are typical of

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

a passive loudspeaker of this size.

Figures 2 and 3 represent the off-axis performance of the 8P. As expected with concentric drivers, there is no hint of an interference notch at the crossover frequency that is a characteristic of most loudspeakers with spaced drivers. The vertical and horizontal 15and 30-degrees off-axis responses are all very similar and close to the on-axis response, and at wider offaxis angles the response is seen to fall with increasing frequency in a controlled manner.

The time domain performance is demonstrated via the step response, acoustic source position and power cepstrum plots (Figures 4, 5 and 6) and the combined frequency/time performance via the waterfall plot in Figure 7. The step response for the Precision 8P is one of the best of any loudspeaker I have tested so far, with an extremely rapid rise and controlled fall with little or no separation between the responses of the individual drivers. The acoustic source position is

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.

also commendable with the low-frequency parts of transient signals effectively radiating less than 2m behind the mid- and high-frequency parts. The power cepstrum indicates the presence of an echo after about 200 microseconds, which may be responsible for the slightly uneven high-frequency response. The decay of the low frequencies displayed in the waterfall plot is unusual in that there appears to be a rapid initial decay to about -20 or -30dB followed by a slower decay. This may be a consequence of an unusual port

alignment as mentioned above. All other frequencies decay rapidly with only very slight indication of the presence of resonances in the mid-band.

To sum up, the Precision 8P is a very commendable performer. Of particular note is the time domain performance with a very accurate step response, compact source position and fairly rapid (initial) lowfrequency decay; these suggest that this loudspeaker should be excellent at reproducing transient signals.

Probably the most notable feature of this performance

however, is that the accurate time domain performance is achieved with little compromise in frequency response, either on- or off-axis. Considering also the point-source properties of the concentric driver layout, it is clear that this loudspeaker should prove hard to beat for nearfield monitoring, at any price. n

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

CRAFT

Bernard Butler UK Brit-winning and best selling producer Bernard Butler is the man of the moment. He tells GEORGE SHILLING how he applies his musical sensibilities to the production process.

B

ernard Butler first found fame as the original guitarist and writer with Suede, but since then has kept busy with collaborations with David McAlmont, Edwyn Collins, Aimee Mann, Heather Nova and many others, often producing or co-producing as well as frequently writing, arranging and/or playing guitar. He also self-produced two accomplished solo albums. His production has increasingly come to the fore in recent years, with recordings by artists such as The Libertines and his own projects like The Tears.

36

2008 was something of a breakthrough year for Butler as a producer, bringing the enormous success of Welsh songstress Duffy with whom Bernard co-wrote and produced, collaborations with (the band) Texas’s singer Sharleen Spiteri on her solo album, and vibrant band recordings released by Black Kids, Sons & Daughters and 1990s. The Music Producers Guild judging panel unanimously voted him Best Producer at their recent awards which also gifted him the first BRIT Award for a producer since that prize was abolished ten years ago. Most of his recent work has been recorded and mixed at Edwyn Collins’ West Heath Studio in London, and it was here that Resolution chatted to him on a morning when he was working with Kate Jackson, formerly of The Long Blondes. He also continues to work with Duffy, recently spending a day recording a completely live track with orchestra at Abbey Road for a Richard Curtis movie, and working to picture for a Diet Coke advert. He is shortly to be collaborating with Catherine A.D. and there is to be further work with Duke Special and The Veils. (Photos www.recordproduction.com)

resolution

March 2009

CRAFT So you’ve become an engineer too…

Yeah, not by choice really, it’s just turned out that way, but it’s quite easy here. The great thing about it is if you’re playing, it’s all a massive hassle, but when you’ve got a player and I’m constantly adjusting the sound, for one thing it’s really quick, because I know my amps and guitars, and two, I know how guitar players work, you have to have a great sound, it completely affects your playing, the feel of your fingers, it has quite an impact..

Why do you generally work here?

Edwyn had a stroke three years ago which he’s recovering from, but he was in hospital for six months and the studio was empty. I got offered a few things, so I came in here. I used to work here with Edwyn, I was allowed to come in here occasionally, and we saw it as a dreadful waste. Everything he worked for was here — he put the desk together himself. Before he had a hit with A Girl Like You he had some of this stuff, and when I had an 8-track, he came round and gave me a C12A, an EAR compressor and a few other things, and he’s one of those really inspiring people… He would say: ‘You don’t have to know how to use this, you don’t have to be an engineer, it’s okay being a musician, and if you’re a fan you can understand how music is made.’ And I’ll never forget that, it did set off a fascination.

He’s now back working here every now and again, writing songs and rehearsing.

I think it’s important to keep the studio going. I think he appreciates it more these days, because he comes down, and there will be younger bands with me who’ve never seen a tape machine… My experience of studios was you’d turn up and see shiny surfaces, and you don’t know where to put your can of beer down, and this place is absolutely full of gear. The way these Neve channels are, they’re really simple. They’re easy for people to put their hands on, it looks like you can just do something with it, rather than feel like you have to get through a bank of computers just to turn the volume up. When Edwyn sees people here I think he feels quite proud, it is quite inspiring to people. Every band that comes here says they love it, because it’s like their bedroom.

Do you record to tape?

Until recently I always did. People can’t afford it. And I can’t be bothered to sit down and explain to people how the process is different — I want to know that, but I don’t really want the people I’m working with to be interested in that or to be talking about it, because I want them to be talking about what they’re doing themselves. Whether it be the computer or the tape machine, taking the process out of the equation is really important. Tape sounds great — there have been a few things we’ve done like the Black Kids album last year where we tracked to tape, got the bass and drums, put it all into the computer and worked from there.

That’s a great way of doing it because the bass and drums sound great on there.

There’s things I’ve done like some of the Duffy stuff which I did at home, then thought, right let’s do it properly and get out the tape machine, and it just sounded shit, and everything was the demos I did in the first place. I always say to people, it doesn’t say on the back of the record the list of equipment, and how this record was made, and how much better it is in analogue, or digital, or whatever. Your Aunt Flo in Carlisle doesn’t give a shit when she’s listening to it on her micro hifi.

If she doesn’t like it, she’ll just turn it off.

When did you decide to stop playing the guitar and produce?

I play more guitar now than I have ever done. I’m not on a stage. Generally if I’m writing, there’s a solo artist involved, and if there’s no-one else to play, I’ll be doing bass and piano and all the rest of it. But if it’s a band I won’t touch a guitar, it’s a rule.

Is that to avoid intimidation?

Well no I intimidate them, obviously, that’s part of the process [laughs], if you’re a guitar player some people are going to be intimidated working with a producer who’s known as a guitar player, that’s natural. It’s not intimidating, it’s great fun — I really enjoy sitting here, with a guitar player here next to me with a bank of pedals, getting them to play something I’ll be running through to the live room, and just going through amps while they’re playing — normally they don’t know what I’m doing, pulling the mics around, setting the mics up, then coming in here and getting on the desk.

March 2009

How did the Sharleen Spiteri tracks come together?

We did two weeks, she and Johnny McElhone were here and just let me do what I wanted. They’re very experienced, they’ve made a lot of records with a lot of great people — Nile Rodgers and people like that. They were really nice, and we wrote straight away. [We] had a cup of tea and talked about the football, then went and had a mess around on the piano. Within 30 seconds, Sharleen was singing, then five minutes later I was saying, shall I call Mako? [Makoto Sakamoto] Mako is my perennial slave that I need to exist, he was on the drums and we were recording by that afternoon. They just let me sit here — Johnny sat at the back and said, that bit’s good, and then he’d say, that’s not. I really love that way of working, I had a feeling all the time that they were encouraging me and putting trust in me, and that’s the best thing to feel as a producer, because that pushes you forward.

Tell me about Duffy and Rockferry, what was the process?

I ran a click, and you’ll know that because it’s still there on the record, which is really embarrassing. I was still setting up the mic and she was singing, and the click was bleeding through the wrong group and I hadn’t pulled it down, and it’s on the vocal track. But it’s a great vocal. The song is a cycled riff, there’s three parts, there’s no chorus, it’s just a riff, two chords that move down and then up in stages. But I wanted to get someone to go up and up, they go up a fifth, and then finally an octave. It was very conceptual. She just started singing, we talked about leaving spaces between the lines. We did a little bit of the first verse, and then I said, do exactly the same thing for the next bit, and talked about it being a journey through the song, and that tripped off the whole thing, she’s talking about trains and going somewhere. It’s very literal.

resolution

37

CRAFT But you could only do that with someone like Duffy, anybody else would be crawling into the corner thinking it was corny, but she totally got it.

I’d laid down the piano riff and was just playing the guitar, and the guitar is the guitar that’s on there. We did one verse then I said, let’s now move it up. She wasn’t sure, but we did it, and then I said, this is great, she said, I’m not sure about this.

I said, great, now we’re going up the octave. She hated her voice up there, she’d worked with someone who’d said, keep it down. I said, that’s exactly why I want you to go up there! So she did, sang it in three parts that day with the click, guitar and piano, and she never sang it again. I took it away, put the drums behind it, and put a crude drum loop behind it at home and tacky strings. I spoke to Jeanette [Lee, Butler’s manager] and said we’ve either done something that’s awful, or really fantastic. They were thrilled, it was something special that had happened. Duffy loves it now, I think musicians have to find something that redefines them, and that has to be something that changes them. It’s like getting a new haircut like this, you’re devastated the day you have it, because it’s so different, but then it defines what you are, following that. She was great about it — to sing that vocal like that the first time you’ve met somebody and the first time those words came up, it’s one of the real high points. That’s the essence of everything I do, I’ve done, or wanted to do — to meet somebody you don’t know at all, who doesn’t know anything about me, in a quite cold situation, and do something stunning that’s completely improvised, and doesn’t sound like anything else.

That can be an awkward situation…

Which is good, I think. I always try and avoid meeting people before working together, because I know I’m going to put them off! The sociable side is going to destroy it — I’ll say something stupid, or they’ll want me to be an entertaining character and I won’t live up to it.

But you are, naturally…!

No, not in the way that people want you to be, Mr Hey Let’s Have Lunch! Let’s talk about your hair or go shopping. I’m just not interested in people that way, apart from what you can do musically, because I’ve got friends already, and none of them sing! We’re here to do something. It’s scary for people, it’s scary for me, and I always make out that I’m not scared at all. But generally we just go into the piano room and once I start banging away and trying to think of ideas, they either run out the door terrified, or start singing out of terror. Recently, that works, I’ve had no-one leave.

38

resolution

March 2009

CRAFT

How do you approach mixing?

I do it all here. Basically we’ve got 12 1064As and some extra faders. So I mix out of the computer and bring up drums on two channels, submixed in the computer, by that I mean rough balances and panning. So when I look down I see drums, bass, vocal, stereo guitar, stereo keyboards, and more often than not that’s as far as I get. And then I might put the snare out of a different channel to treat it separately, or a guitar, or if there’s brass or something like that, but basically that’s it. When I look down, everything’s sorted out, already arranged, I’m just moving groups as a mix, and I put it down live. Another great thing about mixing into the computer is being able to drop in little bits. I’ll take a mix and run up to the lounge and play it to everyone, and more often than not it’ll be, vocal’s too quiet obviously, little bits here and there, and I’ll go back and drop in the changes, and normally that’s all it is. I don’t spend more than two or three hours on a mix, because I get really bored. I’ve spent days in studios on SSLs just dying, there’s a role for that, but partly because I’m engineering on my own, I’ve developed a little process that works.

You don’t write down the settings?

It doesn’t matter, because I always know what it is. We’ve got this Fairchild, a strange compressor with no controls over the drums, I’ve always got the LA-2A over the bass on 3, the silver 1176 over the vocal, I sometimes use the Gates, amazing gain on it, and then the EARs if there’s strings or backing vocals, and that’s all it is.

Do you rehearse with bands?

With Black Kids I did virtually nothing, the songs sounded like Reggie had been planning them for all of his life. We were just tightening things up, making sure of the parts, just little things with them, just nailing it. With Sons And Daughters it was their second album, they’d written 25 songs, but we went into a rehearsal room and I chose four or five good ones. It was the easiest thing to see from the outside that Scott, the guitar player who was writing, who’s got a baritone voice, was starting the songs off for Adele the singer, and everything was really low. And they’d never thought about changing the keys. I said, here’s a capo! Nearly every song we put a capo on two or three frets and it just liberated her completely, her voice was great, she felt more comfortable, just a simple thing, because bands don’t talk or think about these things. The second thing was that lots of the songs had a really similar drumbeat. I talked to Dave the drummer, I said everything’s got the same sort of beat. He said, yeah I know, I hate it. I said, well you’re the bloody drummer! So on lots of songs we just literally halved the beats and sped them up a little bit — the simplest thing. As soon as we did those two things, that was the record, in a sense. n March 2009

Why pay for just one modelled plug-in, when you can can have 60 high quality dynamic convolution plug-ins for less?

Liquid Mix HD gives you the sound of 40 different vintage compressors and 20 individual classic EQ’s, all running on a Pro Tools HD® system.

Run over 100 mono instances simultaneously on an HD|3 system.

Every instance operates with an unbelievably low latency of just 12 samples – ideal for mix-down, tracking or even live sound use.

More variety, better quality and greater flexibility than any other plug-in on the market; Liquid Mix HD is the biggest no-brainer in plug-in history. As a Pro Tools HD® user, why consider anything else?

www.focusrite.com/freetrial

40 VINTAGE COMPRESSORS AND 20 CLASSIC EQ’S IN A SINGLE TDM PLUG-IN IMPORTANT INFORMATION: FOCUSRITE, the FF logo, LIQUID TECHNOLOGY, LIQUID MIX CONTROL and the LIQUID MIX logo are trademarks of Focusrite Audio Engineering Ltd. DYNAMIC CONVOLUTION is a trademark of Sintefex Ltd. The Liquid Mix product is an independently engineered technology which utilises the patented process of Dynamic Convolution to actually measure examples of the sonic impact of original analogue products upon an audio stream, so as to electronically emulate the performance of the original product studied. The result of this process is subjective and may not be perceived by a user as producing the same effects as the original products studied. Digidesign, Pro Tools, and Pro Tools|HD are registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

CRAFT

James Towler As comfortable with the many facets of recorded and live audio as he is with video, engineer James Towler gets to exercise all his skills in his work with Steve Winwood. GEORGE SHILLING meets a thoroughly modern practitioner.

J

ames Towler recently shot to prominence following his award for Best Recording Engineer at the inaugural MPG Awards in London. The award recognised in particular his terrific work on the latest Steve Winwood release, Nine Lives, which made No.12 on Billboard’s chart. However, Towler’s skills are rather more wide-ranging than most of his peers, with expertise in live sound and video editing. He started developing his technical skills in his native Bristol, becoming involved in the DJ scene in the early 1990s and briefly collaborating with Jody Wisternoff of Way Out West using a Studiomaster desk and an Akai sampler. He took a senior role in Julian Richer’s (Richer Sounds) newly launched X-Music electronic instrument business and soon became an expert in computer recording setups. His skills were noticed by a client, multi40

instrumentalist Mike McEvoy (Sting, Soul II Soul, Bee Gees). As Steve Winwood’s musical director McEvoy employed James as Steve’s keyboard tech for live work, where Towler oversaw setups using MIDI and the Mac Duo Dock on stage: ‘Every day he had trouble with the MIDI interface, so one of my main jobs was to fix his interface and drivers each day.’

James then helped Winwood set up his Nashville studio, but returned to work with Shola Ama, Desiree, Missy Elliott and My Life Story. He was soon working with Steve Winwood again, full time. Winwood had an SSL in his home studio, but was starting to look at Pro Tools. Around 2000 Winwood started planning Wincraft Music Studios in a barn conversion a short distance from his Gloucestershire home, and Towler was instrumental in the design and specification of the studio which features a ProControl. The first project there was Winwood’s About Time album which featured some knob twiddling by your humble interviewer. As well as audio, James has become a skilled video editor. In 1994 Steve re-formed Traffic and when James arrived he acquired an Avid for editing the material recorded live and later moved on to Final Cut. He put together the DVD for Traffic, mixing the 5.1 audio as well as editing the pictures. Other DVD edits include the reformed The Only Ones live concert filmed at Shepherds Bush. Following the recent three-night stint by Eric Clapton and Winwood at Madison Square Garden, Towler had just finished mixing for the live DVD and CD when Resolution trekked through the snow to Wincraft to talk with him. (photos www.resolutionmag.com)

resolution

March 2009

CRAFT You didn’t start off with tape?

No when I started it was the Atari Falcon which had four tracks with the CBXD5 unit. I was living in Streatham in a house with ten people, I met Kumar Kamalagharan [later Winwood’s and now Razorlight’s tour manager] and we had a studio in the basement. A band called the Sugarplums lived in the house, I always got the job of recording the band to get them gigs.

Did you know about Steve Winwood before he employed you?

Amazingly, the very first record I bought was Keep On Running, which came out for the first London Marathon — I don’t think I was alive the first time it was released.

How did the acoustics get sorted out here?

We decided how the control room was going to be, then we got Nick Whitaker in to install his Black Box system.

So after installing everything you called me….

Yes, around 2002 we started to record About Time, and at that point I wasn’t a recording engineer with a track record. I’d done a few demos with Steve, but I’d never done an album before.

What was the process with Nine Lives?

It was taking what we’d done with About Time and moving it on. It was to do with being in the room, in between we recorded José Neto’s band and tried a few things there, so by the time we got to Nine Lives I pretty much knew where I wanted to go with the live room. The way Steve likes to cut albums is to do it live.

And it’s one enormous room with a high ceiling…

Yes, so basically I built these booths out of 2 x 4, down to the builders’ merchant and built these little drum and percussion booths. Then placed the organ and guitarist, and actually got a ClearSonic booth for the flute and sax player. So everyone had eye contact, glass in the front panel of the booths. We cut the entire album in nine days.

Did anything else change from About Time?

When we did About Time we had a black face Pro Tools rig, this time on HD there are less latency issues, it’s a different ball game with sound quality. Did it all at 96k — we had a discussion about doing it at 192 then we thought, no. It would

March 2009

resolution

41

CRAFT have taken up way too much hard disk space and we’d have had more crashes.

When you’re cutting live, Steve’s very much straight ahead, you’ve got to capture this. I’ve built Steve another little studio further up on the property, I’ll be here and he’ll be up there doing his vocals. Then he’ll pass it back down to me and I’ll check his comps.

How did you approach the recording?

I used the same mics I use on stage in the studio. I’ve got a duplicate set in America as well now. I’ve just worked out what’s best for the instruments, what I manage to get away with live now, because of new line array systems, and the Venue D-Show Profile desk. You can use a lot of condensers there which I’m now using back in the studio. Apart from Steve’s vocal mic — RE20. Live we use a Neumann KSM105.

How long did you spend mixing?

When you’re tracking, you’re kind of mixing at the same time. We probably spent three weeks in total. I’ve got an HD system at home as well, I did one of those room-in-a-box kits in my cellar in Cheltenham, and it’s quite a nice sounding room.

At night time I’d sometimes go back there for a different environment to work on,

do some mixes and bring them back up here. And Steve actually came down to my house and did some mixing and a bit of synth work — the invisible synthesis of Nine Lives, see if you can spot it, there’s quite a few synths in there. They’re very well hidden! With the Hammond organ it just adds a little essence.

Editing video when you are also mixing the audio must have advantages…

The timecode and the sync, you’re in both so if you’ve got problems you can nudge it around in the audio or straight back to the video.

And do you have a suite upstairs here?

Yes, but recently I did an advert for our recent tour, and I did that in Malaga in a hotel room on a laptop — it’s just great how computers have got fast enough to do that and upload it.

How was it recording Eric Clapton’s contribution on Nine Lives?

He came here, I used those yellow Radial boxes [JX44], because we had the amp up in the live room. Eric came and sat just there on the sofa. We did three passes, had lunch, which probably took longer than the recording, and that was that.

What was your role at Madison Square Garden?

I was just recording, they were using Digico boards and I bought an SSL MADI unit. I was in rehearsals in Bray with a big rack and the Venue desk, thinking, there must be a smaller way to do this, it can’t be this complicated. Had a look around and found this SSL unit on a Saturday, so I phoned Mike Banks [SSL] on Monday, and by the afternoon I had a unit there.

It came from the Digico stage box on one BNC into MADI, then it goes into the SSL box as optical, then its two Pro Tools DigiLink cables into the HD. That’s 56 channels. I was sat on the side of the stage with a G5 tower, 1U SSL unit, a 96I/O just to monitor back through with headphones, and a sync for timecode.

I’ve been sending my mixes over to LA. It was a bit of a rush job and I ended up in Avatar Studios in New York mixing the 5.1, but luckily there have been a few delays since, and I’ve managed to come back and go over the mix again here.

It’s all in-the-box?

Yeah, basically because I’ve been moving around, touring. Nine Lives was mixed in the box, but I am thinking about the Dangerous summing box. I’m not one hundred percent convinced yet, but I haven’t tried it for myself. One box I am loving is this Dangerous Music monitoring remote with the STSR. Steve thought I was insane wanting to spend £2,500 on a volume control, but it’s really changed things. It’s meant I can mix this. I was trying to mix on the ProControl last week and I couldn’t get a balance, it sounded all muddy. But this is on the analogue outs from the 192, and straight out to the Genelecs. I think when you first get into Pro Tools you go and get all the plug-ins you can, and then I think after a few years you start to hone down what you want. I came down to thinking all I need is [Crane Song] Phoenix and the Sonnox stuff, and that’s all I tend to mix with now. I’m used to those plug-ins and what sounds I can get with them.

Do you use a Phoenix on every channel?

Not every channel, I see which ones work — things like congas, they really work, and toms. I like the Dark Essence.

And do you use the Sonnox Reverb?

I do, I’ve been using that on this Clapton/Winwood project. The other one I used on this was the EMI compressor, the TG. I used that on a lot of the inserts.

I did find it tended to mix a lot better after I’d put them across and just tickled them on the compressor. Then Oxford EQ and Dynamics after that.

42

resolution

March 2009

CRAFT Did you separately filter the bass off for Steve’s bass pedal parts?

Steve wasn’t playing bass, it was Willy Weeks on bass. This is the first project I’ve mixed in a long time where it hasn’t been organ bass. Steve actually still plays, Willy said he loved Steve playing the bass because he used to be in a gospel band.

He has his drawbar settings slightly in, so it’s not really kicking.

looking at is the Sony Hi-Def cameras, the robotic ones, integrating them into the Pro Tools system, so that when we go out on tour I can do a multi-cam video shoot as well as mixing. There’s a Sony controller where you can pan, tilt and zoom in, then you’ve got seven different memory locations — that’s going to be next year’s project.

Did you put up audience mics?

Yes, you can shoot the room with Pro Tools with TrooTrace. You get the direct feed and the mic feed and it tells you the delay time, so then I can just instantly move it in Pro Tools, so I bring it in so it’s not sounding phasey.

What do you like best, studio or live?

I like the mixture of both, and doing both I’ve gained confidence. Being thrown into an arena with 18,000 people you’re pushing the PA and thinking, well it doesn’t sound like the studio! It’s scary. But with that, you’re diving into EQs, but now I find when I get back to the studio I’m diving into EQs faster and more radically. I think my sense of balance has got better. My live actually helps my studio.

You time-align everything in the rear?

Yes, I prefer it being in and it gives a better, solid mix.

So what’s next?

We’re looking to release a live Nine Lives, we’ve had the same band who recorded the album, been out on the road for over a year now. We did three months supporting Tom Petty, and some great versions were coming out. One thing I’m

March 2009

Do you thrive on high pressure situations?

I have been known to sell CDs at half-time, also leave the FOH desk, go onstage and fix the Hammond during the show, and pick up the check from the promoter as I walk out — multi-tasking I don’t have a problem with! I do enjoy that pressure, that’s something I don’t get in the studio, but in the studio I enjoy the creative side of it. n

resolution

43

sweet spot

Room acoustics, absorption and diffusion So, we are busy planning and building our dream media production facility. The basic issues of site selection and layout considerations have been covered (V7.6) and we’ve defined and achieved appropriate sound isolation between the facility’s rooms as well as to and from the neighbours with room-within-room construction (V7.8). If all you wanted was a well-isolated echo chamber then you’re done. DIRK NOY from Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG) invites all others to read on.

W

hen sound energy hits a surface we can observe one of three things or a combination thereof: the sound is geometrically redirected (reflection), the sound is attenuated (absorption) or the sound is distributed more or less uniformly (diffusion) (see Figure 1) — this is assuming we disregard the sound partially travelling through the surface. This fundamental behaviour is very much connected — absorption can be understood as an ‘attenuated reflection’ and diffusion is just a ‘redirected reflection’.

So let’s look at these phenomena in more detail so you can join the discussion.

REFLECTION

Reflection — If you have ever played pool or billiards then the concept of reflection will certainly be known to you. Just like a billiard ball bouncing off the cushion (and hardly losing any energy) incident sound bounces off an acoustically reflective or ‘acoustically hard’ surface. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends — targeted reflection of sound energy to the rear of a theatre auditorium can be great but on the other hand the focused reflections of a glass dome ceiling can cause an acoustical mess. Reflection in a control room environment can be used to redirect sound away from critical listening positions.

ABSORPTION

Absorption — Back to the pool table… imagine the cushions being veeeery soft and chewy and the billiard ball hitting that surface would clearly deform the soft cushion and thereby significantly lose momentum. The same happens when sound hits an absorptive material: some part of the acoustical energy is transformed to other types of energy (mostly heat).

Examples of acoustical absorbers are all sorts of porous foams or perforated/slotted surfaces. In both cases the underlying energy transformation mechanism is friction of air molecules. Absorption is useful to control unwanted reflections and consequentially to decrease excessive reverberation.

Diffusion

44

Fig.1. Reflection, absorption, diffusion. resolution

Fig. 2. Absorption coefficient of a slotted wood material.

Absorption coefficient — To characterise the properties of an absorbent material the absorption coefficient ‘alpha’ was introduced. This coefficient describes the material’s conversion ratio of sound energy to other forms of energy as a normalised percentage (0% to 100%, or 0 to 1). Alpha varies with the incident sound’s frequency — materials that have good absorption properties at low frequencies (alpha, for example, over 60%), often have little or no absorption at high frequencies (for example, less than 20%) and vice versa.

One of the tasks for the acoustical designer is to find a weighted compilation of the ‘right’ absorber materials for a given acoustic situation. On a side note, sometimes you can find absorption coefficients greater than 100% (or greater than 1). Although this might look like a mistake this is caused by additional participation at the material edges (and sometimes backside) of the absorber when measuring in a reverberation chamber.

Absorptive materials are available in dozens of designs, shapes, colours, and formats, and a current summary would encompass plastic, perforated or slotted wood panels, metal in various shapes, fabric, foam, various wall and ceiling plasters, microperforated foil, transparent laser cut panels and any combinations of the above. A selection is made according to the acoustical properties, the desired aesthetics and integration solution, and the available budget.

Please note that more expensive materials do not necessarily have better acoustical properties — high priced materials sometimes just offer specific aesthetics or a particular new functionality that will then justify the higher price tag.

Low-frequency absorption — Low frequency control is a main problem in small acoustic spaces due to the wavelengths of these frequencies being similar to the room’s dimensions. Membrane absorbers and Helmholtz resonators are absorber designs suitable for frequencies below about 125Hz. A membrane absorber is a moveable rubber, wood or metal membrane mounted in a frame. At certain frequencies (or, depending on the type: below a certain cut-off frequency), the membrane starts to vibrate when exposed to sound pressure thus transforming energy from the sound field to heat.

Helmholtz resonators work like a coke bottle that can be used as a whistle: a given closed volume (the volume of the bottle) has an opening with a particular length (length of the bottle neck) and a particular cross-section (diameter of the bottle neck). Helmholtz resonators are easily incorporated in a space where otherwise unused volumes are available (for example, a raised platform cavity in a home theatre or a void above a suspended ceiling).

March 2009

sweet spot

Fig.3. Left and right edges: exposed membrane resonators for low frequency absorption. Centre: QRD Diffractal (Courtesy of Sunshine Mastering, Vienna).

Fig.4. Same wall after installation of the acoustically transparent fabric (Courtesy of Sunshine Mastering, Vienna).

Fig. 5. Finished mastering room — rear and side wall diffusors, ceiling and wall absorbers (Courtesy of Sunshine Mastering, Vienna).

Diffusion — Diffusion is used to distribute sound uniformly in space and diffusors are available in a range of shapes and sizes. Where the size determines the frequency range that is diffused by the device, the shape will characterise the degree of distribution in space: a fully hemispherical distribution at all frequencies is desirable, but hard to achieve. At the moment there are two metrics to measure and characterise scattering surfaces — the Diffusion Coefficient d, and the Scattering Coefficient s, both are frequency dependent.

A commonly used approach is the so called QRD Diffusor, or quadratic residue sequence Diffusor. The device’s geometry is based on a prime number that

determines the length after which the sequence repeats periodically and thus also the number of wells the diffusor consists of. Typically one of the prime numbers 7, 11 or 13 is used. Some dimensional diffusors contain depth variation in one dimension, thus forming linear divided wells or steps of varying depth, whereas two-dimensional diffusors offer depth variation in two perpendicular directions, thus forming a lattice of divided cells or steps of varying depth — looking a bit like a skyscraper skyline.

Diffusion can be used to control reflections when the placement of further absorption is not desired, for example, when the reverberation times already are on the low side.

Putting it all together — After the design of the shell — the wall structures of the facility, including solving the sound isolation issues — a lot of design time is spent on the complex issue of balancing reflection, absorption and diffusion in a room. Aside from finding the optimal acoustical solution, these are the surfaces that are actually exposed to the eye and pleasing aesthetics are asked for as well.

To preview and study the acoustics of a space before construction a number of tools are available. Some of these, plus equipping the space with loudspeakers, and a calibration system will be touched on in the next and last article of this series. n

March 2009

resolution

45

BROAdcast

Checking the connection with ORF by phone.

Audio over IP for Art’s Birthday LUCI Live 2 is an interesting alternative for traditional ISDN lines and codecs as it can make a high quality full duplex connection with very low latency through the public internet. Belgian broadcast engineer and sound designer WARD WEIS explains his experiences with it.

I

t all started on 17 January 1963 when Robert Filliou declared that art had existed on that day for exactly 1,000,000 years because someone had thrown a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives and in recent years the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications-art.

The ARS Acustica group of the European Broadcasting Union join this celebration each year by reserving two satellite channels for the exchange of audio between its partners. Twenty four participants, including radio stations and independent sound artists, were involved in this year’s event and Austrian and Swedish radio each took care of one of those two satellite channels.

2009 was my 5th ‘Art’s Birthday’ as I started in 2005 on my dinner table sending sounds to a friend in Moscow by email attachments. These became live performances in 2007 that were sent to ORF in Austria by traditional ISDN lines for the uplink but as one of the independent sound artists I had to organise and pay for the temporary ISDN lines myself.

I met the people from Technica Del Arte at the IBC in Amsterdam some years ago and they showed me a little program running on a PDA that caught my attention.

LUCI Live 2 is a windows application that can create a high quality, low-latency, full-duplex audio connection over the public internet. It became the solution to cut the costs of those Art’s Birthday ISDN-lines.

LUCI Live 2 runs on Windows mobile, 2000, XP and Vista. Originally developed for PDA, it benefits from the fact that it uses the hardware configuration of the computer and doesn’t need any specific extra hardware. There is a high-end side to it as it can be used for real mobile use by reporters and the latest developments in mobile internet and mobile phones/PDAs have played a key role in the success of this product. It can be registered for a specific computer but is also available on a USB stick or SD card where it can be used on any computer the user encounters.

LUCI Live 2 is a client–server-based audio codec over IP. Both applications are identical but the server (station) is configured to listen to the incoming call of the client (correspondent).

These settings are set in a separate application where you can create profiles in which the preferred codec and bit rate, jitter buffer, in and output configuration and the network address are defined. These profiles are then applied to the LUCI Live 2 application, which as a consequence is very easy to use and is also protected 46

from unwanted changes. LUCI Live 2 uses MP2 32 to 256kbit mono or stereo as standard. AAC, AAC HE, and AAC SBR codecs are available as an option.

To use it you first need to install a LUCI Live 2 server, which requires some network skills. You have to define a port (for example, 5000), probably forward the server’s IP and port on your router and give it access through your firewall. If you have only a basic broadband connection and probably a dynamic IP then you have to register at a dynamic DNS service (for example, serverX.dyndns.org).

Then you have to define the codec preference. This can be fixed or ‘server follows input’ where the returning codec uses the same parameters as it gets from the calling client. Once all this is done your server is ready to receive calls from anywhere on the web by the address ‘serverX.dyndns.org:5000’.

The next part is configuring your LUCI Live 2 client(s). More than one server (station) and different preferences can be defined in the profiles. After this you can start the fun. Select the desired destination (serverX), push the antenna button to connect, and go online by pressing Mic. The buttons on LUCI Live 2 are big enough to be used without a pen on the touchscreen of a PDA. The small LED at the In level meter means all is fine but it blinks red when something is wrong with the connection.

More info can be seen in the status window, the most important data of which are the errors. Underruns tell you data packets are being lost in the network (the internet) and overruns means that the audio hardware is a bit too slow for the data it is getting. You don’t hear these errors as they are interpolated by LUCI error correction, but the status window does let you see that all is working smoothly.

You have to take care with background processes and it’s best to switch off all automatic updates.

So, is the public internet good enough to be used for this? From my own experience I’d say that it is. During the different tests I’ve conducted I connected my iPod to the input of my interface and used an external LUCI Live 2 server to return my audio over the internet. I listened for many days without any interruption to my own music while my family members where using the same home ADSL connection for their own enjoyment.

I’ve done live broadcasts from different locations with great success. I was connected for more than 4 hours to Austrian radio during Art’s Birthday 2009 in full stereo 128kbit without any dropouts.

I have to be honest and say that all the good experiences I’ve described had LUCI Live 2 connected by wire to the network. When WIFI or UMTS/G3+ is used

resolution

March 2009

broadcast lower quality settings have to be applied to get a stable result. I am sure this isn’t a limitation of LUCI Live 2; it is a condition of streaming high quality audio.

Also, getting access to the internet is not as easy as getting a phone and dialling a number. The assistance of an in-house IT specialist can be a great help as they hold the key’s to open the firewall and port requests from the outside world. Some network managers won’t allow the connection of ‘non company’ computers so you might need to convince them that LUCI Live 2 is safe software.

LUCI Live 2 can do more than just establish a duplex connection. It has a player that allows you to insert a premade edit into a live Main screen report at the press of a button.

The microphone input is muted during playback and un-mutes automatically at the end. LUCI Live 2 can also be used as a simple recorder. It can run with the same licence more than once on a server PC and using different hardware inputs and outputs you can have the server feeding more than one studio.

Other features are possible via the setup, such as fades, EQ (useful for correcting the response of the PDA internal microphone), digital gain for I-Os, automatic on-air, and button lock protection. An OSX version of LUCI Live 2 doesn’t exist but I know people who use it without problems with Parallels installed on a mini-Mac. LUCI Live 2 uses MP2 coding as standard with AAC as an option. AAC sounds much better than MP2 and lower bit rates can be applied for the same sonic experience with AAC HE 96 sounding much better than MP2 128. AAC makes LUCI Live 2 over the internet safer and more stable as it benefits from the fact that it needs less bandwidth.

For the purposes of the Art’s Birthday 2009 project I needed to find someone holding the key’s at ORF so I could employ LUCI Live 2. I had the luck to get in contact with Karl Petermichl and Michael Horner of the transmission department and once I was able to demonstrate the power and stability of audio over IP I got permission to use it for the live broadcast. We decided to use LUCI Live 2 at my end and a Mayah Centauri hardware codec in Vienna. The ORF IP department had to open its firewall for the transmission and the Mayah server acted as server with my LUCI Live 2 as client. In the setup program there is a Mayah compatibility setting.

We did a lot of testing in advance. Karl and Michael returned the output to the input

March 2009

of the Mayah and I was doing my iPod tests for many hours at home with great success. The connection was stable and very reliable.

All went fine on the day itself and everything worked as predicted. I had a bit of noise on the right channel and after some testing I found that something was wrong with the line input of my Edirol UA 25. I could fix the problem by using the mic inputs instead and using external –25dB attenuators. ORF connected the uplink as a return signal and it was used to create a listening space for the public with headphones. For safety I had sent a premix to the master control room in Vienna by FTP in case something went wrong but we didn’t need it. All went well without any Signal flow. dropouts and they used my feed as a fill-in when something was wrong with any of the other connections.

Perhaps we made a little radio history as one of the first live broadcasts by public internet using audio over IP. Technica Del Arte is constantly updating LUCI Live 2 with free updates.

Compatibility with other IP codecs is a priority — the integration of the N/ACIP protocol is one of the first to be implemented — and LUCI Live 2 as a VST plug-in is also on the drawing board.

LUCI Live 2 is not expensive (Euro250 for one licence, Euro69 euro for the AAC codec option) but it is rock solid. The audio sound quality is great and the latency is low (100-200ms). It can be used with any hardware configuration and with today’s powerful USB or FireWire interfaces all the equipment for live broadcast can now fit in a single flightcase or backpack. It’s a great alternative to traditional ISDN lines and codecs and is very easy to use. It can also be preprogrammed to act as a safe and secure tool for journalists so they don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of transmitting audio over the net.

Most important for me is the fact that we gain great artistic freedom and the live exchange of sounds becomes possible without great costs or specialised equipment. n

resolution

47

BUSINESS

Digital Britain gets the digit Road map for the future or directions to where we’ve already been: is Digital Britain carved in stone? NIGEL JOPSON thinks the media future for the British Government is all behind it.

T

he UK’s digerati have been waiting with bated breath for the government to reveal a plan with the potential to unlock value in the media economy, and to resolve several long running and frustrating stand-offs between content creators, broadcasters and telecom providers. But when the royalcrested scrolls were unveiled at the end of January by communications minister Lord Carter, the collective sigh echoed like the curse of King Tut around the pyramid’s tomb. It may as well have been Egyptologist Howard Carter dusting off the relics of an ancient past rather than Stephen Carter delivering a roadmap for the future, entitled Digital Britain.

A mere week or so previously, the news coming from Midem had been very positive regarding dialogue between the music industry and ISPs (Internet Service Providers). There were rumours of several ‘legal P2P’ deals between labels and ISPs, who have historically frustrated entertainment companies by refusing to take responsibility for their customers’ content-sharing (claiming common carrier status while marketing broadband on the strength of downloading music and films). Virgin Media has now suspended the launch of its groundbreaking Virgin Music Unlimited service, which was only weeks from launch. VMU intended to make use of Virgin’s newly installed DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) hardware to recompense rights-holders for Virgin broadband customers’ media sharing. Although Virgin cited unreasonable demands from Universal and Sony, it’s hard to tell if these were as a consequence of leaks revealing the Digital Britain report was about to move the online goal posts in favour of ‘no customer disconnection — ever.’

Virgin was the first to co-operate with the music business-ISP Memorandum of Understanding signed in July 2008, when warning letters were sent to customers and a ‘three strikes’ disconnection policy was mooted.

The interim Digital Britain report, released on the 29 January, commits the Government to 22 specific actions. Here are some highlights from the hieroglyphs.

Broadband For All — The headline grabbing item from Digital Britain is the promising-sounding pledge to provide broadband for everyone, in a similar fashion to the telephone line to every home that British Telecom was obliged to provide as a condition of privatisation in 1984. This is a step forward for the 1.75m rural homes that cannot receive broadband, but the snail-like minimum mandated speed of 2Mbps made technologists choke with rage. Britain already lags not only powerhouse Asian countries, but most of Europe as well. According to Speedtest.net, the UK average broadband line speed — whatever the claims of providers — is just 3.6Mbps.

This is way behind the 4.8Mbps in Germany, the 7.4Mbps in

48

Sweden, 10-100Mbps in Japan or 50-100Mbps in South Korea. Often mentioned as the gold standard, South Korea is able to achieve this thanks to Government subsidies and commitment to building a fibre-optic network. ‘I’ve been talking to people in Singapore about needing gigabytes by 2015,’ said film producer David Puttnam. ‘Either the authorities here are barmy and don’t realise what the British creative industries here need, or we are. There’s a massive gap of where the balance of credibility lies. Are we a 21st Century nation or are we equipping ourselves for the 20th Century?’

The real prize would have been building out HD-capable 20Mbps broadband to everybody. With a bit of leadership, well-incentivised companies would do this in big conurbations, and it would make sense for high-speed mobile broadband licences to be awarded on terms that help fill in rural gaps. Without incentives, companies will focus expenditure on make-do-and-mend approaches. While the report notes the importance of next-gen access at speeds of 20Mbps+, it doesn’t propose doing much about it. The government is hoping that BT, Virgin Media and others will deliver super-fast broadband without any official intervention ... which seems laughably optimistic. Now that we know where the government wants Britain to be in 2012, where will Asia Pacific and the rest of Europe be?

No to Net Neutrality — The concept of Net neutrality — access with no restrictions from government or providers — got short shrift. ‘The Government has yet to see a case for legislation in favour of net neutrality ... Traffic management will not be prevented.’ That’s bandwidth throttling by another name. At the Paris AES show in 2006, I pointed out that ISPs should not claim carrier status, as many were using devices such as the Sandvine Service Delivery Engine to re-route P2P music sharing requests within their own networks and caches. Peering points where networks join are expensive for ISPs, as they have to pay other providers for traffic. These data management devices can also introduce a network bias in traffic, turning entire providers into P2P leeches. In mid-2008 the US telecoms regulator censured giant ISP Comcast for violating ‘net neutrality’ principles by constantly resetting the connections of customers running Bittorrent uploads at times of peak congestion. The ISP is now appealing the FCC order, but is also facing multiple class action lawsuits accusing Comcast of ‘deceiving and misleading’ with P2P throttling, which it kept secret for 10 months.

In the UK there is no equivalent of the US requirement for neutrality. All sorts of traffic management is used to reduce costs with contended services. In March 2008 it was even discovered that BT was secretly using customer data to test targeted advertising technology from Phorm, a company previously tainted by association with computer spyware. The devices that would have made possible the Virgin Music Unlimited service, supplied by Israeli company Allot communications, can be used to prioritise application traffic to premium-plan subscribers, which enables ISPs to create revenue generating services from streaming video and such like, instead of just being passive purveyors of content. Bad news for anyone worried about a two-tier internet: it could mean you pay your TV licence fee, then you pay your ISP to use iPlayer, then you pay again to get high-definition content, for example.

Digital Britain imposes a new obligation on ISPs to snoop on customers. Under the proposed framework, copyright holders will first need to discover for themselves the IP addresses of infringers and then notify the ISP. The ISP is obliged to log the complaint, then after a certain number of repeat offences, the copyright holder can request to identify the account in a tribunal. UK Music chief executive Feargal Sharkey commented: ‘We do not believe that the form of intervention proposed by today’s report — suing customers — is the best way forward.’ Far from a roadmap to the future, Carter returns us to where we were back in 2006, before talk of three strikes, or any of the subsequent European rulings made in favour of copyright holders.

‘The threats are off the table,’ said Malcolm Hutty, head of public affairs for Linx, the joint ISP-owned internet backbone exchange in the UK. ‘The government has recognised that the principle responsibility for protecting their own property lies with the music industry. The ISPs’ duty is to co-operate. It’s not ISPs’ responsibility to solve the music industry’s problems completely.’ Richard Mollet, director of public affairs at the BPI (British Phonographic Institute), said: ‘It falls short of reaching the Government’s own commitment. If you want to reduce piracy by 70-80% you need to do more than send a few letters. The consultation document stated there should be codes of practice but the Government has backed away from that. It has recognised the value of the creative industry so it should have bitten the bullet and said we need ISPs to do more.’

resolution

March 2009

BUSINESS There will be a broadband tax ... or maybe not — Action 11 in the Digital Britain report talks of ‘the potential for a Rights Agency’ to act as a middleman between copyright owners and ISPs, empowered to ‘act to ensure that enforcement measures are effective and proportionate.’ Action 12 states: ‘Before the full Digital Britain report is published we will explore with both distributors and rightsholders their willingness to fund, through a modest and proportionate contribution, such a new approach to civil enforcement of copyright within the legal frameworks applying to electronic commerce, copyright, data protection and privacy to facilitate and co-ordinate an industry response to this challenge. It will be important to ensure that this approach covers the need for innovative legitimate services to meet consumer demand, and education and information activity to educate consumers in fair and appropriate uses of copyrighted material as well as enforcement and prevention work.’

Chris Bird, director of film strategy at LoveFilm, commented: ‘It’s one thing to say let’s address piracy on the web but you have to offer an alternative. The best way to combat piracy is to supply a legal way to access content.’ Is this it? There’s the inevitable quango required to administer and dole out the tax. The purpose of this new ‘Rights Agency’ is vague. Carter proposes a new tax, a new quango, and lots of administrative tasks to change behaviour. Not a word about new services that capture value from connected households’ existing behaviour, or return these to creators and investors in developing talent. Wait — that was going to be Virgin Music Unlimited!

FM radio will switch off in 2015 ... but only if 50% of us listen to DAB — Action 9: ‘We are making a clear statement of government and policy commitment to enabling DAB to be a primary distribution network for radio.’ Carter promises to create a plan for digital migration of radio, once 50% of radio listening is digital and DAB coverage reaches 90% of the population and all major roads (not soon, then). A Digital Radio Delivery Group will be created to increase the attractiveness, availability and affordability of DAB and to advise on the Digital Migration Plan (another quango.)

Meanwhile, Global Radio faces the prospect of losing its lucrative Classic FM licence after Carter recently rejected a proposal to extend it beyond 2011. Without a change in legislation, the Classic FM licence will be advertised within the next year and auctioned to the highest bidder. It’s the most profitable UK DAB station, making around £10m annually, and was a key asset in Global’s £375m acquisition of GCap Media last year. Despite concern about the economic viability of DAB, Global had proposed to launch a digital-only national speech station as part of an effort to capture FM listeners.

DAB is potentially a very viable method of broadcasting nationally, more bandwidth-efficient than internet radio. DAB also has the useful, if limited, ability to deliver data packets. With proper application this could ease traffic on the UK’s congested roads. But digital radio needs updating to the more efficient DAB+ (Italy, Switzerland and Germany use it). DAB+ is around twice as efficient as it uses the AAC+ codec. With a fraction of the effort government has put into sponsoring digital TV, digital radio could vastly improve the listening experience in the UK, transmitting public service and special interest stations that would never get a

March 2009

national reach on FM. Channel 4 will be a sustainable second public service organisation in the UK — There might be a U-turn on top-slicing the BBC TV licence fee to finance Channel 4 — an option that the regulator Ofcom ruled out in its public service broadcasting report published the week before Digital Britain was released. ‘There will be public service broadcasting beyond the BBC,’ Culture Secretary Andy Burnham said. ‘I cannot rule out top-slicing. It has to remain in the mix as a possible option.’ He said that the BBC will remain: ‘an enduring force, strong and secure’, but Channel 4 would work alongside it to provide local, regional and national news, plus programming for children. The most likely option for plugging Channel 4’s £150m funding shortage is a partnership with BBC Worldwide, although alternatives were not ruled out.

Carter scotched one of Ofcom’s suggestions to use the expected £130m surplus (generated by the switchover to digital television) to prop up Channel 4, by saying there may in fact be no surplus. As the ad-supported, free-to-air commercial terrestrial TV business model is wilting, the whole issue of Public Service Broadcasting needs a review in the UK. To keep public service TV at current levels in 2012, Ofcom estimates that public funding of £330 to £420 million will be needed — of which £185 million will come from existing subsidies. How many channels does the tax payer really need?

Apart from criticism concerning what was in the report, there was anger from some media giants at being left out. Ian Livingstone, creative director at Eidos, one of the UK’s largest video games publishers responsible for titles such as Tomb Raider and Championship Manager, complained: ‘The government has ignored us once again, yet we contribute more to UK PLC than the film industry does. Whether it’s a negative perception of games, or not understanding the skills and costs to make a game, we don’t seem to register on the radar of the government.’

There is legitimate cause for concern in the games industry, because governments in countries like Canada and Korea have grossly skewed the commercial playingfield by introducing massive tax breaks for nationally-based game developers.

Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey was livid as well. ‘The thud made by the 80 page Interim Report on Digital Britain as it fell on our desks today was matched only by our hearts sinking as we took stock of its content,’ she raged. ‘We are bitterly disappointed that the report makes only passing reference to newspapers — the word is used just four times — and the crushing lack of understanding of the urgency required for changes to merger regulations in the local and regional media sector.’ Newspapers are digital nowadays as well, Baron Carter.

Stephen Carter was created Baron Carter of Barnes in October 2008 to ensure his accountability to Parliament, as he’s not an elected MP. He started his career with J Walter Thompson, becoming MD in 1995. He went on to be chief operating officer of cable company NTL, leaving in 2002 after the company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with debts of £12bn. It was reported in The Times that he commented about shareholders: ‘What I tell them is nine-tenths bullshit and onetenth selected facts.’ He was subsequently named as the first chief executive of UK media watchdog Ofcom. He then got the top job at PR firm Brunswick Group. In January 2008 Carter became UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s chief of strategy and principal advisor at Number 10. It has been put to me that the man is so clever he has deliberately produced an obfuscated and infuriating report in order to gather the maximum amount of input from all interested parties for the final report in June.

At least, from those who shout loudest. n

resolution

49

ten

)NTRODUCING 2.$IGITAL S

.%7

$YNAMICS 0ROCESSING 0LUG IN

$ #OMPRESS OR %XPAND 4HE 2IGHT 7AY

(OW ABOUT AN AUDIO DYNAMICS PROCESSOR THAT SETS YOU FREE FROM THE RIGID PARAMETERS SET BY TRADITIONAL COMPRESSORS AND EXPANDERS 4HINK ABOUT IT FOR A MOMENT 5NTIL N 5NTIL NOW YOU HAD TO LIVE WITH THE VERY LIMITED DYNAMIC COMPRESSION OR EXPANSION CAPABILITIES OF EITHER HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE DEVICES AVAILABLE 7ITH $ S TECHNOLOGY IT IS NOW POSSIBLE TO ALTER THE DYNAMICS OF AUDIO MATERIAL IN ALMOST ANY WAY AND FORM YOU WISH !H FREEDOM !H

,EARN MORE AT

WWW RNDIGITAL ORG 50

Significant streets of London As the Astoria in Charing Cross Road and the Rock Garden — where U2 played their first London gig — close their doors for the last time, and once proud independent recording studios are turned into luxury flats and office suites, JIM EVANS pockets his A-Z of London and heads down memory lane in search of rock nostalgia and memorabilia.

Portland Place — The noted IBC recording studios (International Broadcasting Company) were located at 35 Portland Place, close by the BBC. In the 1960/70s the studios became internationally famous after being used by some of the biggest recording artists in the world. In the late 1970s, Chas Chandler bought the studios and renamed them Portland Recording Studios. The address was also home to George Peckham’s cutting rooms and Radiotracks Studios. It was later bought by Don Arden of Jet Records fame. Artists who recorded there include The Beatles, The Bee Gees, The Who, The Small Faces, The Kinks, Status Quo, Deep Purple and Duane Eddy. Among the noted engineers who worked there was one Joe Meek. Not far from IBC, at 23 Gosfield Street, was Advision Studios which also boasted an impressive client list and is now home to the Sound Company.

W ard o ur Street — The main thoroughfare of Soho, Wardour Street was the centre of the old British film industry and is still home to much of the current film industry. The street is also famous for its associations with the music industry and was the site of the Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street from 1964 to 1988 and the long-gone Flamingo where many emerging bands cut their teeth.

Musicians’ meeting place The Ship is still in business, while the Intrepid Fox has closed and re-opened close by Centre Point. Running off Wardour Street is St Anne’s Court, home to Trident Studios — now a postproduction house — which opened in the late 60s and was the launch pad for many artists including David Bowie, Elton John, Queen and Marc Bolan. Trident gained a reputation for its piano which can be heard on Hey Jude and many other songs. resolution

Holloway Road — Joe Meek operated his home studio, which he constructed at 304 Holloway Road, Islington, a three-floor flat above a leather-goods store. His first hit from Holloway Road was a UK No.1 — John Leyton’s Johnny Remember Me (1961).

When his landlords, who lived downstairs, felt that the noise was too much, they would indicate so with a broom on the ceiling. Joe would signal his contempt by placing loudspeakers in the stairwell and turning up the volume. A privately manufactured ‘black plaque’ (designed to ape the famous blue plaque, for which Meek does not qualify) has since been placed at the location to commemorate Meek’s life and work.

Maiden Lane, WC2 — 31 Maiden Lane was the home of the Gramophone Company where, according to the Berliner archives held by EMI, the earliest known London recording session took place in the basement in August 1898 — Soprano Syria Lamonte, who entertained at Rules Restaurant (London’s oldest restaurant) next door recorded Comin’ Thro’ The Rye. March 2009

TEN Brook Street — Jimi Hendrix lived at 23 Brook Street in the heart of Mayfair from 1968 to 1969. An English Heritage blue plaque commemorates the guitarist’s association with the address, the first such plaque to be awarded to a rock star. Coincidentally, two centuries ago another famous musician — the composer Handel — lived (and died) next door at number 25. When interviewed

by Don Short of the Daily Mirror, however, Hendrix was mistakenly informed that Handel had lived at 23 the guitarist was surprised. ‘I didn’t even know this was his pad, man, until after I got in,’ he remarked.

‘And to tell you the God’s honest truth I haven’t heard much of the fella’s stuff.’ In adjacent Savile Row was the Beatles Apple HQ, on the roof of which the foursome played their last live gig.

Whitfield Street — Variously known as CBS Studios, Whitfield Street Studios, Sony Music Studios and The Hit Factory, London, there was a studio complex at 31 Whitfield Street from 1972 until comparatively recently — producer Robin Millar being the last proprietor. Among the first to work there were The Byrds, Kevin Coyne, Iggy Pop, Mott The Hoople, Vinegar Joe and The Wombles. A feature of Whitfield Street from the off was its size, boasting the largest recording room in Central London. It is now in the hands of property developers.

Denmark Street — Often referred to as London’s Tin Pan Alley, this bustling Soho street has strong connections with the histories of British jazz, rhythm and blues and punk music. The Beatles and Jimi March 2009

Hendrix recorded in basements in the street. Elton John wrote his classic early song Your Song here.

Later, the Sex Pistols lived above number 6 and recorded their first demos there. The street contains London’s largest cluster of music shops. The Rolling Stones recorded their first album at Regent Sound Studios on Denmark Street in 1964. It was also the original home of London’s biggest science fiction and comic store, Forbidden Planet.

Oxford Street — Associated Independent Recording (AIR) was founded in London in 1965 by Beatles producer George Martin and his partner John Burgess after their departure from EMI. AIR’s first facility was on the fourth floor of 214 Oxford Street.

The complex included two large studios and two small ones. 1991 heralded the beginning of a new AIR Studios located in Lyndhurst Hall, a Grade II listed building in Hampstead. 100 Oxford Street remains the home of the celebrated 100 Club.

Broadhurst Gardens — The Decca record label’s recording facility was located at Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead and it is now used as rehearsal space by the English National Opera. Famously, The Beatles failed their audition with Decca Records at the location in January 1962 and subsequently signed with Parlophone instead. Many popular songs and albums were recorded at Decca Studios including John Mayall’s 1968 Blues from Laurel Canyon and most of the albums by the Moody Blues. Another major label studio, Pye Studios in Marble Arch, is now a casino.

Old Compton Street — Between 1956 and 1970 the 2i’s Coffee Bar was a popular meeting place in the basement at 59 Old Compton Street. The 2i’s was owned by Paul Lincoln, an Australian wrestling promoter. The coffee bar had live music and several stars were discovered or performed there including Tommy Steele, The Vipers Skiffle Group, Cliff Richard, Hank Marvin, Screaming Lord Sutch, Johnny Kidd, Jet Harris, Ritchie Blackmore, Mickie Most and Big Jim Sullivan. Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant was a bouncer at the 2i’s prior to his career in the music business. It is now the Boulevard bar and dining room. n resolution

51

TECHNOLOGY

Wireless intercom in the spectrum squeeze There’s now extra urgency to develop innovative wireless solutions in the face of the prospect of declining spectrum availability.

JOCHEN WAINWRIGHT, Riedel product manager, describes the technology and operational principles behind its new Acrobat Digital Wireless Intercom.

A

ny professional event or broadcast production requires a lot of frequencies (radio spectrum) to run wireless microphones, in ear monitoring (IEM), audio links, intercom, wireless video cameras and wireless data links for remote control management of lighting and sound. Yet today, available spectrum is becoming scarcer and scarcer. With the increasing demands for Digital Terrestrial Television and mobile phone applications, the UHF spectrum currently still available for professional wireless applications will at least be cut to a much smaller size and any new wireless technology coming up needs to cope with these new challenges. Efficient use of the available frequencies has become an essential for any future wireless system and Riedel Communications has introduced a new wireless intercom solution to meet these challenges. A closer look at the technological background to Riedel’s Acrobat Digital Wireless Intercom System highlights a good example of developing an innovative new way to advance existing technologies for future applications.

The only way to cope with less spectrum is to shift to digital technologies. Some intercom manufacturers already recognised that voice communication had to move out of the UHF range to leave the reduced spectrum for applications like wireless microphones.

As licence-free operation is also a requirement for the economic operation of such a system, the only two potential spectrums available are DECT and WiFi. WiFi is not suitable for mission critical real-time applications as anyone who has encountered WiFi hotspots will know, so early professional attempts at digital wireless systems for voice applications made use of the DECT standard.

DECT is a digital wireless technology that originated in Europe but is now being adopted increasingly worldwide for cordless telephones, wireless offices and even wireless telephone lines to the home. A younger brother of GSM — Global System for Mobile — it is by contrast a radio access technology rather than a comprehensive system architecture. DECT has been designed and specified to co-operate with many other types of network, such as PSTN (conventional telephone networks), ISDN (new digital and data phone networks), GSM (mobile phone networks) and more.

So DECT has become a truly versatile technology, providing a cellular network infrastructure not only for voice but also for data. The flip side of DECT is that the number of available channels is limited per DECT definition and would not allow for large-scale communications applications, such as the Olympic Games or big broadcast productions.

The new Riedel approach uses DECT as the wireless carrier technology for its system but above the DECT base layer Riedel has developed several new technologies to overcome the limitations and to come up with a product that is suitable for large-scale applications.

One of Riedel’s new approaches is the merger of the DECT carrier technology and Voice-over-IP (VoIP).

52

VoIP-based technologies have become increasingly popular and more accepted by the industry as IP technologies allow for efficient use of network technologies. It was therefore a logical step for Riedel to use VoIP-based technologies in a wireless product that is capable of packet-based data signal transport.

Since DECT allows efficient data transport, Riedel developed essentially a VoIP-over-DECT system by implementing the advantages of VoIP technology, such as low bandwidth needs, on top of the DECT infrastructure.

The Acrobat system consists of a cell controller, several antennas and a (unlimited) number of wireless beltpacks. The Acrobat cell controller serves as the

heart of any Acrobat Digital Wireless Intercom installation. The device handles the VoIP-over-DECT cell management including cell synchronisation, channel coordination, seamless hand-over and the audio coding and IP transfer. The Cell Controller also coordinates the communications between external wired ports on 4-wire or AES (panel ports) and the wireless beltpacks. Each cell controller is capable of managing up to eight wireless partylines.

Cell antennas are connected to the cell controller via powered Ethernet networks so a house network could be used to remote cell antennas. The cell controller offers connectivity to up to four active antennas directly (including powering over Ethernet) and up to 80 antennas over powered Ethernet network.

The user’s interface is the Acrobat wireless beltpack and this has been made as easy to operate as possible — it has the appearance of a wired beltpack but without cable. Operation follows the concept of Riedel’s Performer C3 Digital Partyline Beltpack with two large rotary level controls on top of the beltpack to combine talk-key and volume control for each channel. Turning the controls adjusts the listen volume, pushing the controls toggles talk on/off with momentary or latching operation.

System overview. resolution

March 2009

TECHNOLOGY The efficient use of frequencies also implies that any given wireless system should take into account the existence of other wireless systems and as such the Acrobat system can coexist with any existing wireless system. For broadcast and event applications there is no interference with wireless microphones (VHF/UHF), in-ear monitoring systems (VHF/UHF), analogue wireless intercom systems (VHF/UHF) and existing DECT applications in shared resources.

Riedel’s Enhanced Sync Automation (ESA) optimises the system performance when used in environments with other DECT-based systems (e.g. telephones) by detecting them and managing the Acrobat system frequencies accordingly.

The wireless system allows for cellular architectures that can cope with large studio applications, including floors, production areas and dressing areas, with each large area covered by sufficient cellular antennas and controlled by the cell controller. The wireless system allows seamless handover between cells and a given beltpack will be routed though the wireless system as it moves from cell to cell or from room to room.

The system makes very efficient use of the available resources in DECT. This is achieved by three major factors. First, the coding engine is optimised to generate audio streams with 32kbit/s as this data rate is the slot size of a single timeslot in the DECT architecture. Consequently the system does not have to deal with dual-channel timeslots (64kbit/s) to handle G.722 audio streams, like other existing

Listen mode on a beltpack.

solutions. These dual-channel timeslots would require a total of four DECT channels to be available for a handover process. Riedel has chosen a coding algorithm for native DECT slot use at 32kbit/s to make the handover process as easy and as resource-friendly as possible. The Riedel coding algorithm is optimised for voice operation, low latency and low bandwidths.

Second, Riedel has developed Enhanced Channel Agility (ECA) that 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.

Third, and probably having the biggest impact, is a new approach to wireless communication that surpasses the fixed allocation of channels to each intercom beltpack and replaces it with a mixture of fixed and dynamic allocation. Instead of only focussing on point-to-point communications, which previously made wireless communications very complex and limited the number of users, the Acrobat Digital Wireless Intercom also realises the benefits of partyline intercom in the wireless world. So all users in a system listening to the same source do so on the same channel and not by sending the same signal individually to each user, which could be seen as a waste of limited resources.

To explain the method of operation let’s look at a typical studio scenario.

The idea behind Acrobat is to make the most efficient use of the given DECT spectrum and to be

Talk from beltpack.

Finishing talk from beltpack.

prepared for coexistence of other DECT installations.

So, as the system is designed for studio broadcast applications, a given subscriber (stage manager) would listen to the director (maybe permanently). The director will give instructions to all people involved in show continuity. In most cases a large group of members will listen to the director and from time to time give an answer. The Acrobat system offers a total of eight ‘broadcast channels’ or partylines one of which will be the director ‘group’. All members of this group will listen to the director and this member group is unlimited in size.

In our given member group a member now needs to answer the director. What happens? All member groups have a pool of six talkback channels allocated for talkback (or answer). With a member activating a call, the system will take one of these allocated channels from the pool to establish the talkback channel. This happens automatically in background within a few milliseconds. As the pool for talkback channels per group is limited to six channels, a total of six members can answer a call at one time and all group members would hear the members answer.

This technique is used to share the DECT spectrum frequencies with other groups. It would not make sense to listen to more than six answers at one time as no member would be able to understand anything anyway.

When the conversation is over and the member releases the call the used talkback channel goes back to the pool of talkback channels and is available for other members.

This innovative use of technology removes the previous limit on the number of beltpacks in a DECTbased system and is a good example of the efficient use of frequency resources in a wireless world that is facing decreasing frequency spectrum. In particular, the dynamic allocation of channels saves (unused) resources and could also be considered as a model for other wireless applications. The potential disadvantages of blocked ‘lines’ can be managed by priority calls and additionally by defining fixed channels for certain users in addition to the dynamic channels. At the end of the day it’s about finding the balance between needs and available resources, and that is specific to any project and installation. The Acrobat system allows you to achieve this balance and to make optimal use of the available spectrum. n

A Legend In His Own Time

D

irk Brauner has been perfecting the art of microphones for over a decade. Hand crafted in Germany with a passion, it’s no wonder Brauner mics are coveted by the world’s most famous studios and producers.

For artists that deserve the best, Brauner is the only choice. Now Brauner offers a range of mics to suit a wide variety of budgets, all with the legendary sound that has made Brauner a name synonymous with quality.

“ Never before did I come across a microphone of this caliber. The VMA is the best microphone I have ever worked with. “ Elliot Scheiner : Steely Dan, Toto, Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, Sting, ... “ I got a call from a friend of mine who was working on a Janet Jackson mix that we had recorded vocals on and the producer, Rodney Jerkins, kept asking about the vocal sound, what mic we used, if it was a vintage mic. I had to smile when I told him it was not a vintage mic but a Brauner VMA! I LOVE my mic! “ John Horesco IV: Jermaine Dupri, Janet Jackson, Usher, Mariah Carey, ...

In the UK: The Home Service T: 020 8943 4949 E: sales@louisaustin.com

theartofmicrophones.com

meet your maker

Neil Grant For more than a quarter of a century, Harris Grant has been instrumental in realising the creative and aesthetic ambitions of recording artists, performers, and private individuals.

ZENON SCHOEPE talks to the man behind the operation.

O

riginally a UK subsidiary of the Cetec Corporation in Los Angeles, Harris Grant was incorporated as a specialist acoustic and technical systems consultancy in 1983. Since that time, the company has been responsible for the design of some of the world’s most successful commercial television, film and recording facilities along with many of the most extraordinary commercial theatre, cinema, and performance spaces.

Early studio design contracts included the first commercial LEDE control rooms in the UK at Chipping Norton and Swan Yard, along with the first large scale use of low frequency diffusion at Real World Studios in Bath and Rhinoceros in Sydney, Australia. Harris Grant won the first design competition outsourcing BBC Radio Capital

54

projects; the John Peel facility in Maida Vale. Large scale developments followed, such as the Hit Factory complexes in New York and London, Sony Classical Mastering in Hamburg, London, and New York, much of Sony Music, in New York and London, the Starstruck building in Nashville, and Hitokuchi-Zaka in Tokyo.

The company has designed acoustic treatment for parliaments in Bonn and the Palace of Westminster, concert halls in Oslo, Takasaki, and Eindhoven, Business Academies, private theatres in residences throughout the world, and two of the largest and most complex private studio facilities ever built.

Having successfully designed the first recording studio and theatre to be installed on a Feadship, the company has diversified into the development and installation of theatre and technical systems on large private motor and sailing yachts, with current new-build projects extending over the next six years, in addition to an extensive maintenance and refit portfolio.

On leaving St Andrews University, Harris Grant chairman and MD Neil Grant worked in Scottish multitrack and television studios before leaving for London in 1978. Working as an independent design consultant, he was head-hunted by Graham Harris of Cetec International in Wembley to act as technical director for the new consultancy subsidiary in 1983. The company started trading in 1984.

The company specialised in acoustic measurement and design; Harris Grant owned the first Techron Time Delay Spectrometry analyser in the UK, and TDS analysis was at the core of the company’s early work. Grant provided all the design and analysis skills, Harris, an accountant, ran the business bureaucracy. Grant and Harris had the opportunity of buying the firm shortly after incorporation, and a few years later Grant bought out Harris, moving the business to Pinewood, and acquiring a new financial director, Carolyn Hayter, who runs the business to this day.

resolution

March 2009

meet your maker

What’s special about HGA? I’ve always believed that you don’t go forward without taking some carefullymeasured risks. You can’t innovate without pushing the boundaries sometimes.

Over the last quarter century I’ve never stopped questioning received wisdom about what’s ‘right’ in an acoustic or design context.

When we started up we were largely focused on a domestic market, although we were involved in projects in North America and the Far East from day one. Of course, today our market is a global one and we’ve embraced that opportunity by strengthening our overseas operations. We’re also very flexible in looking at new routes to market. A great example of this is our marine business. Fifteen years ago we saw that market growing fast and there was an obvious gap for us to translate our core studio business skills into what was a brand-new environment for us.

While our approach and our markets have evolved considerably, we’ve always been underpinned by an extremely strong, stable team. Three of the principals have been together for nearly 20 years. I think that sense of unity has been at the root of our successful growth and development.

Why do people confuse interior design with acoustic design?

Well it’s true that the detailing and finish of control rooms and studios is sometimes regarded — unfairly — as a design playground for architects and interior designers.

But there are certainly very few rooms that live up technically and functionally to their initial visual impact. The success of these installations isn’t just reliant on the quality of the furniture and hardware installation. What you experience when you’re listening to a track playing back is a convolution of the speaker system, the installation, and the success of the room acoustics. And of course much of this may

Curious?

have defined the look and feel of the room itself.

A conventional commercial studio facility has many functional and physical layers. The original base building would have been assessed for isolation and structural flanking paths, then isolation shells would have been designed to float in the available spaces. Within these shells, acoustic treatment would have been installed. And at that point finishes would have been designed and integrated with the furniture, technical, mechanical, and electrical systems. The designer might have considered the package as a whole, but it’s hard for a casual observer to consider anything other than the immediately obvious layer.

Interesting furniture and finishes can go a long way to defining what is perceived as an ‘acoustic’ environment — especially if audio is relegated to a poor second cousin of picture. But it’s really important that all of the inter-related elements need to be genuinely designed and integrated. And if that’s executed successfully, then all these elements just disappear — just as they should in a well-designed facility.

What is the most common misconception about acoustics?

Perhaps one of the most surprising misconceptions is that just because somebody has spent time working at some level in and around the recording studio business, some type of osmosis has occurred that provides an understanding of the mechanics of acoustics and architecture that confers on them the status of expert.

The other side of the coin is that it is impossible to over-estimate the extraordinary listening and musical skills possessed by many of the people working in the business. It may be an industry with a low qualification barrier to entry, but the two extremes of ability are well represented.

See you at prolight+sound, Frankfurt, Hall 8 Stand K80

PERFORMER DIGITAL PARTYLINE INTERCOM

The Solution for World Class Events.

Riedel Communications GmbH & Co. KG • Uellendahler Str. 353 • 42109 Wuppertal • Germany • www.riedel.net March 2009

resolution

55

meet your maker What do you think of out-of-the-box acoustic panel systems?

Well it’s fair to say that the perceived value of studio design consultancy in the middle and lower end of the traditional market has been pushed to unprecedentedly low levels in recent years. And against this backdrop the cost of competent treatment-in-a-box packages is very attractive.

Companies like RPG produce a wide range of boxed treatment packages. While they’re perhaps a little minimalist and quite hard to integrate visually with many alternative finishes, they do exactly the job required. They can enormously improve a marginal installation at a cost that’s justifiable to many professionals and private facilities. And these are often people working in small rooms that would be hard to improve otherwise.

RPG can also offers software tools to assist with selection and location of panels.

This way you can really achieve a very competent result.

What is the single most common acoustic issue that you encounter?

Two issues seem to present themselves over and over again: poor imaging and uneven low frequency response. Though not always related, they seem to be signature problems in both commercial designer studios and private residential studios.

As often as not, a centre image is not present. Or, if it is present, it’s narrow and one-dimensional, with little depth and structure presented for analysis. Lateral head movement will cause the image to move towards the adjacent speaker and any vertical movement will alter the location and frequency content of the image.

Similarly, low frequency response will be irregular in and around the listening position. It will rise and disappear as the engineer moves around the console or accesses external equipment and patching.

Poor imaging is related to poor early reflection control and the distribution of later energy, with irregular low frequency response related to unhelpful room ratios.

This contributes to poor modal pressure distribution and a lack of low frequency absorption.

Both of these issues are exacerbated by the trend towards working in smaller rooms, with equipment adjacent to the mix position. But the good news is that they can be mitigated. Reflection control is relatively simple, lightweight and affordable.

Low frequency membrane absorbers are more costly, but they’re still applicable in SummitResAd2:27.pdf 2/27/09 10:41:12 AM most situations.

NEw!

C

M

Y

Outline the single most effective and lowest cost acoustic solution that a user can make to a space.

Control early lateral and contra-lateral reflections from adjacent side and rear walls.

And mitigate the first reflection across the console or work surface from near and mid fields monitoring. Absorption panels with a reasonable bandwidth are simple and cheap, and many are not unattractive...

How have attitudes to acoustics changed?

I’ve found that the recording industry can be remarkably conservative. There have been relatively few major developments in the design of control rooms and studios over the last 30 years, and each of these have been broadly imitated.

Optimisation software has freed designers from a formulaic use of standard panels and ‘studio’ geometries. This has allowed greater creativity, since conventional shapes and finishes can be employed successfully. As a result, we can now get closer to the feel of a standard ‘lounge‘ environment — a relaxing, comfortable living room that just happens to have a console and perhaps some processing and monitoring equipment installed. But to all intents and purposes it presents a more social, creative environment.

I think the biggest change in attitude is the willingness to make this ‘living-room‘ concept work. We’ve got to accept that this is an artist-centric process: it’s not necessarily one that’s built by and for engineers.

The approach we pioneered at Real World demonstrated the artist’s dislike of the layers of the conventional control room hierarchy. The bored band on the sofa across the back wall; the outboard racks; the barrier of the console; the engineer; the control room glass. And then, on their own in the studio, there’s the artist trying to hit a very public cue. There’s no reason why almost all of a record cannot be made ensemble in the one space: but this has taken a sea-change in the attitudes of designers and engineers.

What do you regard as the milestones in your acoustic design career?

Real World Studios, Box Mill: Mike Large had researched studio consultants from around the world, short-listing two practices based here in the UK, to compete for the Real World design contract. I have a clear memory of reviewing our winning drawing package with him, and noting his comment that whatever the drawings represented, he was sure the final result would be something completely different; the final choice having been made on the basis of the consultant most likely to be

Meet me at the Summit!

Al Schmitt “ It’s been about 25 years now...

My vocal chain has ALWAYS got the Summit in it” -Al Schmitt

CM

MY

CY

CMY

30 Years

K

( Barbara Streisand, Steely dan, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones)

+001 sound@summitaudio.com 56

resolution

March 2009

meet your maker able to realise the final design.

I spent three years working as part of the Real World design team, and that really is the key. For the first time a major music facility was being designed by a team of selected professionals, working with the artist and project manager as an integral — stimulating and demanding — part of the design team.

We de-constructed the existing recording process — one that Peter Gabriel had little love for — and designed a facility centred round the artist and players, with the engineer as an integral part of each performance. This was augmented with additional rooms that could be used or discarded as the sessions required.

It was a challenging and innovative group of people, and a facility that represented at the time a great creative risk on the part of the design team and the owner, but which has stood the test of time and constant use enormously successfully — and is now a studio icon around the world.

The Hit Factory, New York: I was originally asked to design a tracking facility on the location of two mix rooms and storage space for CBS. This became the Rooftop facility in Whitfield Street. When Eddie Germano became involved with the development of the building following its acquisition by Sony, Harris Grant was retained as design consultants for what became the Hit Factory in London, and then Sony’s Whitfield Street Studios.

Following the first stage of that building’s refurbishment, we were asked to take on the complete refurbishment of an existing warehouse building in the Midtown-West and Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood of New York. This represented an extraordinary gesture of confidence on the part of the Germano family, and we were given design lead for all aspects of the facility recording, mixing and mastering layout and design, in addition to monitoring and technical installations throughout the building. The Hit Factory New York was an extraordinary success, and provided the springboard into a whole series of further designs and installations in every sector of the American music, film and theatre markets.

Sony M1, New York: David Smith, technical director for Sony Music had already commissioned Harris Grant’s design work for a series of previous projects in Europe and the States; these included tracking, mix, and mastering rooms. The M1 facility in New York was different, however.

The room, designed exclusively for Vlado Meller, was the premier mastering facility in the New York complex, and was the first occasion that any designer had

Curious?

used optimised surfaces as the acoustic treatment for a music facility. Side wall and ceiling treatments were computer optimised in a series of curves and ripples — the result was not only aesthetically stunning, but acoustically impeccable, and the success of the optimisation technique confirmed Harris Grant’s evolution away from the use of conventional out-of-the-box acoustic treatment, allowing the optimisation of whatever surfaces had been selected to match the architectural design of the building or facility, thus freeing the design team from formulaic adoption of standard panels.

Cinerama, Seattle: As a teenager, Paul Allen had spent many hours at the Martin Cinerama Theatre in Seattle — his local cinema. When he heard that the building was scheduled for demolition, he decided to buy the site and have the theatre upgraded with modern acoustics, finishes, playback and project; yet still be capable of being transformed back into a cinerama facility for the yearly Seattle Film Festival.

Cinerama requires a very deep, curved screen assembled from thousands of tensioned vertical strips, all precisely angled, and three projectors front of house. We joined the design team and developed a completely new acoustic package for the building integrated with the architecture, using for the first time a new optimised ceiling array moulded in gypsum, an 80kW multiformat playback system, and a demountable screen system that allowed the entire facility to be reconfigured between cinerama and 35/70mm first run in an overnight session.

MY Méduse, Holland: We were approached by Paul Allen’s Vulcan group to explore the possibility of designing a marine recording facility. Paul was influenced by the Real World philosophy, and wanted a room designed that would act as a flexible rehearsal, writing and recording space as required on a 62m De Vries-built Feadship.

This was the first facility of its kind, and though other mobile facilities, such as Sting’s Steerpike system, can be taken and erected anywhere required, the ability to record one month up the Amazon, and the next in the Fjords, and the next in the Mediterranean, was intoxicating.

We designed the facility twice. The studio was completely refitted three years after being successfully completed as a further development of the original ideas and concepts, and is still in regular use today. We also designed the theatre and playback systems on the yacht, and the success of this project was absolutely pivotal in the company’s move into the top of the marine market since. n

See you at prolight+sound, Frankfurt, Hall 8 Stand K80

ACROBAT DIGITAL WIRELESS INTERCOM

NEW

The Solution for World Class Events.

Riedel Communications GmbH & Co. KG • Uellendahler Str. 353 • 42109 Wuppertal • Germany • www.riedel.net March 2009

resolution

57

TECHNOLOGY

Power supply units, noise, and distortion There are a lot of strange stories in audio engineering: sound reproduction is improved by using oxygen-free loudspeaker cable; sound reproduction is damaged by noise current flowing in a cable shield; digital recordings sound ‘thinner’ than analogue; and so on. TONY WALDRON believes that if a story is true then we should be able to measure what is going on as he investigates the sonic differences between linear and switch-mode power supplies.

S

ome 30 years’ experience of high performance audio system design and production has taught me that every now and again an audio ‘story’ turns up an unexpected insight into the physics of electronic engineering. In a previous Resolution article [1], I wrote about a case where one sound engineer’s exquisite hearing abilities led us to the reason why one microphone amplifier design was actually better than another. Indeed, there have been many such experiences in my working life. So, when Mike Walker — a famous and well respected theatre sound designer –- called with a strange complaint about another of my equipment designs, I decided that I had better check things out.

During a technical rehearsal at a West End theatre, one of the audio power supply units had developed a fault. CADAC mixers are normally powered by four units — separate supplies provide power for audio and logic circuitry and there is a second pair of redundant units for backup. The fault had caused one of these to ‘switch off’, leaving the mixer audio powered by one unit. Mike noticed that the quality of the audio reproduction had noticeably changed and went to find out why. He didn’t really want to believe that one power supply unit made a difference to the audio signal compared to another, but this was his conclusion that day. After the faulty power unit had been repaired, Mike arranged a special session to see if the result could be repeated. This was when I got to hear about it.

Professional engineers who work with sound every day of their lives develop hearing acuity that the rest of us can only dream about. So, when one of us normal chaps turns up to a listening test it can take a long time to tune in to what the expert listener is hearing. This time, there was no such problem. It was perfectly clear that the audio quality changed if a particular power unit

58

was switched off and then on again. If the other power unit was switched off and on instead, nothing changed. So what was the difference? On inspection, Mike Walker had found that the audio circuit power units were of two different models. One was a modern design, and the other was an older unit that CADAC had produced some 12 years earlier. It didn’t make much sense, but there was no doubt that when the mixer was only connected to the older power unit, the reproduction was more accurate, instruments were better defined, voices more natural, there was a more accurate sense of the acoustic environment.

Now, all this sounds rather like the HiFi-Snake Oil department in full swing, but we soon found that other sound designers and recording engineers had made similar observations with power amplifiers as well as mixing consoles.

So, to make absolutely sure about the phenomenon, we set up a listening test at a completely different venue and invited several extra people to give us their opinion. Once more, it was perfectly clear that the sound reproduction was better with one power unit than with the other.

Further listening tests back at the factory, using a different mixer with power units of the same type, produced identical results. We made some basic measurements, but the only conclusive difference was that one power unit was of a fundamentally different design to the other.

Let’s put an historical perspective on this. There are two generic types of direct current power unit design that rely on AC mains as the initial source of energy — linear (fully analogue) and switch-mode (sort of digital). The basic block diagrams of both types are shown in Figure 1.

The linear power unit has been with us throughout the history of electronics.

Its design is simple and almost anyone can build a good and reliable one.

However, to design and build a high current linear power supply we need to use

resolution

March 2009

TECHNOLOGY below a couple of hundred V, even in a high-output power (1kW) device.

Figure 1. Basic block diagrams of linear and switch-mode supplies.

transformers so large that their low impedance windings distort the incoming AC mains waveform. This is not popular with our electricity providers, since it means that extra power generation must be provided to overcome the power lost in the waveform distortion. Linear power units are also rather inefficient — well below 50%. Regulations are now in force to encourage electronics manufacturers to design power units that minimise power-line harmonic distortion using power factor correction circuits. The only way to do this is by building switch-mode power supplies.

The switch-mode design is a relative newcomer. Initially found only in large computer systems, the switch-mode power unit is now ubiquitous despite its design complexity and the high voltage dangers posed to engineers developing and testing the circuits. Switch-mode power units can now be found inside desktop computers, with laptops as battery chargers, and in most domestic and industrial electronic equipment. Given the same output voltage and current, switch-mode power units have some very desirable characteristics over the linear variety.

But there is one characteristic where the linear power unit wins hands-down and that is in terms of noise in the output current.

In a linear power unit there is some noise created by high voltage spikes in the rectifier circuit and a little bit of noise generated by the regulator electronics.

But the overall noise in the output current is always quite low — somewhere

The switch-mode power unit is unfortunately noisy in all respects. In particular, the noise created by the chopper circuit is extremely high. The problem is made worse by the fact that the chopper circuit is switching on-and-off at several hundred thousand times per second. Due to the interaction between the chopper and its adjacent circuits, high level noise harmonics are produced either side of the switching frequency. These harmonics extend down into the audio base band, and up to several tens of MHz. Power unit designers try their very best to minimise the switching noise in the output current but a switch-mode power unit always produces some hundreds of mV of noise. This is not a problem for a computer or any device where the transmission of information stays in the digital domain and is therefore robust to noise. However, for many analogue circuits — such as a microphone amplifier or an A-D convertor — high noise levels in the power line have been shown to produce significant noise and distortion [2].

It was, of course, the linear power unit that was preferred by all of the listeners in the tests. Mike Walker writes: ‘The linear supplies were able to reproduce the source sound far more accurately than the switch-mode supplies.

If you routed a mono signal (a radio mic for instance) through two loudspeakers the linear supplies allowed the sound to be recreated evenly while the switch mode supplies appeared to be causing the sound to “beam” so that the result was uneven across the two speakers. This translates to a stereo image having a hole in the middle while being uneven at both extremes of the frequency spectrum. It also flattened the depth of image of the soundstage.’

When we did some basic measurements, the wide-band noise in the output current of both types of power unit was pretty typical.

I calculated the difference in the noise levels of the two power units, based on these figures: Noise difference (+18V) in dB = 20*log10(0.198/0.00013) = +63.65dB Noise difference (-18V) in dB = 20* log10 (0.22/0.000146) = +63.56dB This means that the noise in the output current of the switch-mode power unit is some 1500 times greater than that of the old linear design. Is this enough to make an audible difference in the audio output?

Thinking back to 1977, when I had been involved in the development of the first equaliser with continuously variable frequency and adjustable Q for CADAC we had to do measurements way outside the audio frequency band to figure out why the original circuit configuration was unstable. In this case, the cause of the problem was only visible at frequencies around 100kHz. If we had not done measurements outside the accepted audio bandwidth we would not have found the solution to our instability problem. I therefore decided to use our spectrum analyser to have a look at the noise waveforms way outside of the accepted audio bandwidth.

!0 NENW ET 10

ROCK ight & Soun0d

Plug, plug, plug & play.

8 oL at Pr 8, Stand K Hall

RockNet delivers ultimate audio transport simplicity.

Riedel Communications GmbH & Co. KG +49 (0) 202 292 0 • rocknet@riedel.net www.hear-we-are.com

March 2009

resolution

59

TECHNOLOGY

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Wide band results

to control the level of such noise so that it is masked by the basic noise level of the analogue electronics. There is an excellent book available by Tim Williams that helps us to achieve the right results [3]. Figure 2 confirms that we did our job reasonably well.

But in the case of the switched-mode power unit, the noise in the audio power lines is dominated by interference from the power supply electronics, which is off the scale at 3MHz (Figure 3). The big noise peaks displayed are at frequencies well inside the response of the analogue and digital chips widely used by the audio industry. These chips will demodulate such frequencies and could result in audible noise.

So let’s consider noise in the audio outputs. It has become the custom for manufacturers to use band-limited (weighted) measurements when publishing specifications such as noise and distortion. The more well-known weighted measurements include dBA, dBC, CCIR, and DIN (this is not the place to go into

Working with the old linear design first, it took some time to find a reference level low enough to be able to display a significant noise level on the audio power lines.

The bandwidth of the analyser needed to be reduced to 100MHz before it was obvious that the only relevant noise feature was the hump at 16MHz. Some noise at 16MHz is not unexpected for a J-Type mixer, since that is the clock frequency of the Central Control Module processor chip. Now while this level of noise in the supply voltage is quite low, it has been known for many years that processor noise tends to get distributed on all power lines to all circuits in the design especially if the circuit boards are designed with multiple return conductors (referred to as earths or grounds by most people), instead of a single common plane (1). The noise can be detected and demodulated by any electronic circuit in the system, which results in noise that will be reproduced in the audio Calrec Resolution Ads 28/8/08 12:29 Page 3 band at frequencies that can easily be heard by humans. The trick is to be able

WHEN THE CURTAIN GOES UP TRUST CALREC AUDIO TO PERFORM

calrec.com

There are no second chances in live broadcast. That’s why Calrec desks have been delivering the world’s most memorable entertainment events – from Hollywood award ceremonies to the world’s biggest music festivals – since 1970.

Whatever the show, you can rely on us to produce an outstanding performance. All our consoles give you the flexibility to set up and handle multiple sources instinctively, access pre-sets, network your i/o and control the whole mix without missing a beat. And our Hydra network system enhances creativity for operators and studio managers.

With automatic redundancy and incredibly intuitive control surfaces – Calrec has everything you need to get on the air fast, and stay on the air.

Many broadcasters won’t entertain the idea of a live broadcast on any other console. Find out why at calrec.com

60

resolution

Putting Sound in the Picture

March 2009

technology questions about why who uses what) but ever since digital processors became embedded in audio equipment designs, I have found it useful to keep an eye on wide-band audio measurements. I always have the Audio Analyser input filter set to 500kHz during development tests. When we humans listen to audio, the bandwidth limits applied by the human auditory system are certainly not any of the weighted curves mentioned above!

What I have noticed over the years is that while weighted measurements do not always change when interference becomes audible, wide-band measurements often indicate where a problem exists. Using the spectrum analyser once more, I had a look at the noise in the audio output using both power units.

In the audio outputs, the characteristic Figure 4.

16MHz noise stood out when the linear power unit was connected but otherwise there was nothing remarkable in the noise measured out to 30MHz. When switch-mode power was applied, there was the usual business around the switching frequency (700kHz) and another group of noise spikes around 6MHz. Apart from a small increase in the average noise level, the only real difference from the spectrum of the noise measured on the power rails was the small collection of spikes between 10kHz and 20kHz (Figure 4). These spikes are some 10dB above the background hiss.

We have not established a causal link between switch-mode power supply noise and audio distortion. Indeed, many will argue that the noise frequencies found are too high for the human auditory system to be able to respond to in any way. However, active electronic components are known to become saturated by high frequency noise, causing the device to modify the signal current. If the frequency is suitably high, this will happen regardless of published data regarding noise rejection ratios. Saturation in active circuits happens when high frequency

noise on a cable shield is injected into the input of a circuit design that has the ‘pin1 problem’ [5], for instance. In this case, the input amplifier becomes overloaded at frequencies that are easily demodulated by the p-n junctions at the inputs of active devices, producing a wide range of audible harmonics. The resulting audio output is accompanied by twittering, and sounds as though a poorly adjusted compressor has been applied to the signal. Noise injected into the input and output ports on equipment that I have tested is certainly of the same order of magnitude as that shown in Figure 3, so there is very likely to be similar response in active circuits to noise on the DC power lines.

In part 2, we will look more closely at how active circuits become affected by noise in the power supply lines and how this may affect audio performance. n

Footnote

(1) Advantage of the common plane (sometimes referred to as a ground plane) is that all return currents use a single conductive structure, enabling individual return currents to follow the signal routing traces set out on the PCB. This minimises the loop area of each signal path, minimising the generation of significant electro magnetic fields [3] and [4].

References

[1] Resolution V3.8, p60: Why we should care about phase. [2] Texas Instruments paper sbas290b — page 20. [3] EMC for Product Designers by Tim Williams, Newnes, ISBN-10: 0750681705 [4] EMC for Systems and Installations by Tim Williams and Keith Armstrong, Newnes, ISBN 0 7506 4167 3. [5] Bonding cable shields at both ends to reduce noise by Keith Armstrong and Tony Waldron, EMC Compliance Journal, 2001. Resolution V1.3, p68: The correct way to bond cable shields.

Ramses MSC Lime Pictures - UK

March 2009

.com

It’s what our users say that matters...

Sounds In Motion - Wales

Sinus AV - Germany

“We needed a powerful solution that offered fully integrated recording, editing, and mixing with high-definition video and fully networked to our media server. Ramses, Pyramix and VCube ticked all the right boxes”

“Ramses is very effective, simple to use and a pleasure to sit behind. The power of the combined Pyramix, VCube and Ramses Package is fantastic”!

“The combination of Pyramix, Sphynx II, VCube and Ramses offers all features of a professional High-End-Studio, which leaves nothing to be desired.

Once an audio engineer has worked with it, he'll never want to change back”.

Chris Lovgreen Lime Pictures

Dai Shell Sounds In Motion.

Holger Krüger Sinus AV

resolution

61

SLAYING DRAGONS

Why is radio and TV sound so bad?

While the number of ways in which we can now be broadcasted at has increased, we still appraise the quality of the experience using traditional measures. JOHN WATKINSON applies his Law of Insufficient Derision.

W

hen we started Slaying Dragons we thought it a good idea. To look at myths, folklore, pseudoscience and misconceptions and inject a bit of reality with perhaps some mirth as a side effect seemed like it could be fun. We never thought it would run this long, but as the gap between the complexity of technology and what the man in the street can grasp widens, mythology seems to have been productionised. I’m starting to feel like a retired colonel writing to newspapers because he hasn’t enough to do. Except that I do have a lot to do.

Possibly not as much to do as Mr Obama, but it appears that he is a Resolution reader as he has promised the US a return to reality. His inauguration speech was effectively a list of Dragons that need sorting out. Turning Guantanamo Bay into a research establishment for solar energy would be a good move.

Not long ago I suffered an experience that directly resulted in my sounding off in the media. In fact what you are reading is the result. The regular reader will understand that I harbour certain prejudices against traditional loudspeaker design and as a result the Watkinson household is equipped with speakers that meet more recent o u n d psychoacoustic criteria.

Perhaps foolishly, I was listening to an FM radio station that I had not heard before. Reception was quite good and apart from the inevitable dynamic range compression and a DJ who could over-enunciate for England, the only thing that disturbed my serenity was the fact that the commercials appeared to be aimed at an audience with a mental age of about seven. If I want to be patronised like that I usually go and see my doctor, although with the present state of the health service staying at home and making chicken soup is often more effective.

Then the news started.

I may be getting old, but to be completely unable to make out what was being said on the news was a new experience. I could www.m a n g e r- p ro . d e make out the sex of the Tel: +49- 9776- 9816 newsreader, and there were

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

i n

s

it’s simply a question of time

STUDIO M ONIT OR MSM c 1

www.man g er-audio.c o.uk U K tel : 01 6 1 -304- 0099

62 Manger QP 1008.indd 1

resolution 19/9/08 11:30:38

word-like symbols that had a similar spectral content to heavily low-pass-filtered speech and formed a sentence-like structure, but those symbols were not recognisable as words. And there was a murky nonconstant background, as if someone was walking in gravel in time to the syllables.

I had begun to fear for my sanity (yes, I know I am not alone in this) when suddenly the ‘news’ was over and intelligibility returned. While this was an extreme case, this kind of thing is all too common.

Owing to the complete lack of intelligibility, the only news I was brought by this episode is that standards in broadcasting are desperately low.

The low standards are not confined to technical quality either. It seems to be the norm on commercial radio in the UK to have newsreaders who can’t pronounce things, traffic reports containing grammatical howlers and skipping CDs that go on skipping for ages because nobody is checking. Leaving the disc fader up after a track has finished, so the next track starts playing and other fluffs such as triggering jingles in the middle of the news are depressingly common. Having the FM transmitter drop back to un-modulated carrier for several seconds in the middle of a programme is not particularly unusual. A station that describes itself as ‘relaxing’ seems to do it quite often.

It’s not unusual for sound quality to go all over the place on the radio and TV. One of the problems is the excessive use of compression, by which in this instance I mean bit-rate reduction. I suspect that the reason for the intelligibility incident I suffered was that the news comes from elsewhere and it arrived via an IT-based network in which it was allocated just enough bit-rate to drive a subwoofer.

There are a number of problems with the use of compression. It’s complicated and few people understand how it works. As broadcasting de-skills, the number of those who do will reduce further. Used in a single generation, compression may work fine and sound OK, but compression is lossy and the decoded version isn’t as good as the original. The loss may be acceptable on a single generation, but when there are multiple encodes and decodes the quality goes down the tube quickly. In many cases, compression is also variable at the whim of the user. Many people choose March 2009

SLAYING DRAGONS a high compression factor because they want longer playing time or quicker transfers, without realising that the result isn’t capable of surviving any further processing.

It could be called the tragedy of compression.

Like overgrazing or over fishing, no one individual is responsible for the problem, but the problem is undeniably there.

David Mellor appears to have found his own solution to compression. When…he…speaks…on… the…radio…he…leaves…spaces…between…the… words. Just what is needed to let the buffers re-fill in the codecs. And he can pronounce Gennadi Rosdestvensky’s name properly.

One of the most annoying defects in television is the almost complete lack of lip-sync. I feel a bit foolish having written books claiming that synchronism between channels is readily obtained in the digital domain. I suppose in the next edition I will have to qualify that and state that synchronism is readily obtained provided someone feels it ought to be.

The design of the MPEG encoding and transport system allows perfect synchronisation between multiple streams in the same programme. The 27MHz master clock of the MPEG encoder is recreated in precise synchronism at the set-top box by clock reference transmissions. This is divided down to form the basis of MPEG’s equivalent of time code.

Presentation time stamps are added to audio and video packets that determine at what count of the master clock the decoded information should arrive on the screen or at the loudspeakers. The system is incredibly accurate, but there is evidence to suggest that a lot of set-top boxes don’t properly implement

it. Audio can emerge with a different relationship to video if the STB is re-powered.

In my naiveté, I would classify such a unit as noncompliant, but it appears that making a complaint to that effect does not necessarily result in a fix. Even if your MPEG decoder is compliant, the chances are that the lip sync is out when it arrives at the transmitter.

How else could it be out on an analogue TV? The path taken by television pictures in today’s production systems can best be described as tortuous.

The widespread adoption of digital techniques means that data can be recorded and communicated without loss an indefinite number of times, which was impossible in the days of analogue. While synchronous playback from media is easy, the problem with transmission is that the two ends of the link are unlikely to be gen-locked and as a result the receiving end will use a frame synchroniser that puts a varying delay in the picture to lock it to the local reference.

The delay put in by a single frame synchroniser isn’t very much, so traditionally the audio would not get a compensating delay and nobody noticed, in the same way that a lot of people don’t notice the quality loss due to a single generation of compression.

But you’ve guessed what happened. As production systems got more complex and DVEs, standards convertors and other tricks started to enter the chain, all of those negligible delays compounded into the present mess.

How did we get into this? I would place a lot of the blame at the door of the excess of monetarism that has permeated practically the whole of human endeavour.

If the only criterion for success is profit, then anything that increases profit is good. Profit can be increased by

firing all the engineers who traditionally would test equipment to see if it was good enough. Profit can be increased by squeezing bit rates to get more channels.

That’s the tragedy of DAB. Another social problem we have is the insipid spread of political correctness. No one can complain about anything in case someone gets upset. The consequences are predictable from Watkinson’s Law of Insufficient Derision. Anything that deserves mockery but doesn’t receive it may well come to pass.

Anything that survives mockery is probably OK. We have all witnessed in no uncertain terms that the models used by many financial institutions were negligently wrong. The idea that indefinite economic growth is possible on a finite planet is so obviously wrong that derision is the only possible reaction.

I can recall listening to the late Kenny Everett on the radio. Not only was he funny and innovative, but technically the show was spot on. And he had a good line in mockery, such as playing one channel of Beatles ‘stereo’ recordings to remove the vocals and then singing along. Or airing Elvis Presley’s version of Old Macdonald had a farm. If you haven’t heard that you haven’t lived.

I think what made Ken great was that he was doing it because he loved doing it.

We very badly need to get back to those days. n

showcase

March 2009

resolution

63

your business

The producer compilation There’s power in numbers and in context for record producers. DAN DALEY introduces us to the concept of the ‘name’ producer compilation and some really rather dubious collections of his own…

I

n Australia, Triple J network radio presenter Melissa ‘Mel’ Brampton has for several years now put together the Producer Series, a collection of one-on-one interviews with notable record producers including Steve Albini, Prince Paul, Butch Vig and others, interspersed with sections of recordings from various artists and albums they’ve worked on. Back in 1999, reggae label Trojan Records assembled a boxed set not of its artists but of their producers, with 50 tracks done by names like Niney, Lee Perry, Clancy Eccles, Alvin Ranglin, Harry J. and Joe Gibbs, with a short biography on each featured producer.

What is surprising is that there aren’t more of them. The record producer as a category has been terribly underexploited, not least by the record industry itself. Where are the boxed sets of Phil Ramone, Phil Spector, Mike Chapman, Trevor Horn, Tony Brown, Glyn (or Andy) Johns, and so on?

The collected works of a recording artist are both homage and visceral biography, conferring upon the artist that accolade that goes one grand step beyond the greatest-hits collections while at the same time bringing near-academic perspective and context to a career. It’s a place where the listener can find the threads that made up the fabric they enjoyed so much over the years.

Yet the idea of doing exactly this with the people who produce those records remains incomprehensibly unloved. We have our share of celebrity producers — Mutt Lange’s legendary elusiveness combined with his successful work with Shania Twain and their ultimately less successful marriage made him grist for many of Rupert Murdoch’s seedier dailies. Then there’s Phil Spector… There are some accidental producer portfolios built around other media projects, like film soundtracks. A good example is the music for ‘Oh Brother, Where Art Thou’, whose mountain music tracks from a slew of artists all passed through the prism that is T-Bone Burnett. And there are the record label-founding producers, like Bruce Iglaur at Alligator Records and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, whose works are aggregated in a single place by periodic albums celebrating the labels’ histories. But the breadand-butter people out there, the Bill Szymczks and Bones Howes of the world, remain uncollected, 64

resolution

so to speak, their critical contributions scattered among the hundreds of boxed sets of the artists they’ve produced.

If the music industry seems disinterested in presenting the best of these visionary mechanics in the same way they do their recording artists, it won’t be because of a lack of interest on the part of the public. Head over to www.funtrivia.com to play surprisingly sophisticated quizzes about record producers in general, as well as some genre-specific ones, quizzes based on genres like hip-hop, as well as tributes to individual producers like Rick Rubin, Timbaland and even Joe Meek, whom you might have thought was way too esoteric for all but the musicologists out there.

The public has shown some appetite for books about record producers, but again, there’s not that much to choose from. Howard Massey’s generally excellent Behind The Glass nicely balances the technical with the narrative, as does his more recent collaboration with Geoff Emerick, and there are a few others, like George Martin’s All You Need Is Ears.

But most tend to be list-like (the soporifically titled The Encyclopaedia of Record Producers), lamely how-to (the prosaically named How To Become a Record Producer), well done but too technical for a mass market (too many to list there), or simply disappointing, like Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music, the snoozer memoir in which the great Phil Ramone fails to do justice to his own magnificent career.

I made up my own ‘side one’ of a virtual Phil Ramone boxed set: 52nd Street/Billy Joel, Too Late For Goodbye/ Julian Lennon, Still Crazy After All These Years/ Paul Simon, Luck Be A Lady/Frank Sinatra & Chrissie Hynde (Duets II), Evergreen/Barbra Streisand, plus outtakes. When you have songs like these lined up in front of you, the producer takes on a third dimension, the guiding hand emerges.

You begin to hear drum sounds on Billy Joel that are echoed with Julian Lennon and so on. A&R Studios begins to have a distinct sound that’s recognisable from record to record. Even the reverbs sound familiar.

I asked a select and diverse few to match some songs/artists with producers. The results are interesting.

• Entrepreneurial engineer Mark Hornsby suggests producer Bill Bottrell: Black or White/Michael Jackson, Vogue/Madonna, The Ballad of Jenny Ledge/Toy Matinee, All I Wanna Do/Sheryl Crow, 100 Years/Five for Fighting.

• Technical writer/guitarist Michael Ross chooses an obscure name with high-profile credits: the late Alex Sadkin’s productions of Pull Up To the Bumper Baby/Grace Jones, I Scare Myself/Barry Reynolds, Hold Me Now/Thompson Twins, Look What You’ve Done/Joe Cocker, I Want To Know What Love Is/Foreigner.

• Australian music author Jeff Apter reveals a connoisseur’s understanding by recommending (his words ‘the ringmaster of androgynous, often trippy Britpop’) Tony Visconti: Maybe Tomorrow/ The Iveys, Jeepster/T Rex, I Like Girls/Sparks, Golden Brown/The Stranglers. And ‘the quiet achiever of Gen X pop’, Nigel Godrich: Fake Plastic Trees/Radiohead, Tropicalia/Beck, She Will Have Her Way/Neil Finn, Driftwood/Travis, Love What You Do/The Divine Comedy.

• Maureen Droney, director of the Producers & Engineers Wing of the Recording Academy, falls for Robert John Mutt Lange: Pour Some Sugar On Me and Armageddon It/Def Leppard, Waiting March 2009

broadcast aside For A Girl Like You and Jukebox Hero/Foreigner, Everything I Did I Did For You/Bryan Adams, You Shook Me All Night Long/AC/DC. • Matt Harper, erstwhile editor-in-chief of a pro audio magazine that had a very long run with a very short name, likes these for Steve Albini: Prayer To God/Shellac, Then Comes Dudley/The Jesus Lizard, To The Wind/Neurosis, Yearning/ Mono, Two-Step/Low, Sea Above, Sky Below/ Dirty Three. (What, no Pixies, no Fleshtones?)

It’s so much fun I get to do one more, on Tony Brown: Copperhead Road/Steve Earle, Nobody Answers When I Call Your Name/Vince Gill, I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You/Lyle Lovett, Single White Female/Chely Wright, Little Love Affairs/ Nancy Griffith.

We could go on but you get the picture — record producers can benefit by creating context around themselves. Naturally, it would work well for name producers but I don’t see why it wouldn’t do as well, in a scaled manner, with producers at any stage of their career, so long as they’ve got a body of work that spans multiple artists and/or genres.

There’s another aspect to this worth noting, minor as it may seem. While you can certainly collectivise your production oeuvre as an iTunes playlist, the boxed set should be just that — a physical proposition on disc. I’m of the opinion that the virtualisation of music, from vinyl to file, has contributed to some extent to its real and perceived devaluation. Putting it back onto physical media and putting it in a decently designed package brings some gravitas to the whole thing.

And just one brief and completely unrelated observation. The dissolution of the conventional record industry has apparently opened the floodgates for literally hundreds of music competitions globally.

Sonicbids.com, which has over 130,000 bands, artists and songwriters for whom the website acts as a hub for promoting their careers, has nearly 100 contests listed on its site at any given time.

That’s all well and good. Sometimes you’ll even find someone breaking out of one of these contests and making a major career out of it, like Celine Dion did with Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin in 1988.

But I’m also noticing recording studios getting into the act, usually as one of the prizes, like this one from the press release of a newly opened facility in the States: The GRAND PRIZE winner will receive a production deal including a professional recording session (at ____ Studios); digital distribution, promotion and marketing to record labels and a performance at a live venue TBA. I have mixed emotions about this. I suppose it could be considered marketing the facility but it strikes me as also undermining its value and, by extension, the value of the studio experience. On the other hand, it could introduce a talented someone who had heretofore thought that music is recorded into a laptop to the idea that there are dedicated places to make music, surrounded by people who know their stuff and are more than happy, for what is really a reasonable fee, to let you just be creative.

Abbey Road Studios don’t need to let contest winners in for free –- they have a gift shop and they own the IP of the logo on all those coffee mugs.

But Abbey Road are unique in this regard; Studio A at The Hit Factory in New York is now three condominiums and the gift shop is a guy selling fake Gucci bags by the kerb. The professional studio is an experience that should retain an element of aspiration, not desperation. Though a gift shop’s not a bad idea… n March 2009

Acoustic soup Downtime is not wasted time for a soundman, but while capturing reality has to be the goal there are times when it needs to be supplemented by practicality, according to DENNIS BAXTER

C

lose your eyes. Go ahead …no matter where you are (unless you’re doing 120km on the autobahn) close your eyes and listen. Stuck in Salt Lake City’s airport in a snowstorm while returning from Vancouver where I’m working on the sound design for the Winter Olympics, I began to think in the dimension of sound. Propped against my bags with a magazine across my chest, I closed my eyes and listened.

Suddenly it’s acoustic soup — a baby cries, soothed by a mother. The click of fingers on keypads.

The ring of a cellphone. Footsteps passing. Teenagers giggling. The Allman Brothers playing in the sports bar with rugby on the telly and beer glasses clinking.

Laughter erupts. Dishes rattle. Flight cancellations announced — again.

The way I see it, it’s not time wasted. It’s practice for a soundman. Immersion into the acoustic soup of sound is as easy as closing your eyes, but translating this to the broadcast medium is as difficult as creating the sound you expect to hear.

Broadcast engineering is complex. With more cameras and cuts than a kaleidoscope, the sound engineer has a choice to make: you reproduce the sound to fill the airspace; or you produce the sound to amplify the experience. Personally and professionally, I like to produce the sound.

When working on broadcast sound design, I imagine the desired effect and I call it ‘the sound theatre’. Critically speaking, what are the viewer expectations? For example, in a cathedral you have a subconscious expectation of how sound should sound. The same applies to Wimbledon where you expect a distinct tone, a unique sound theatre.

Visualisation is the process of how we picture something in our minds. Auralisation is how we hear something in our mind. You should hear (in your mind) a space before you attempt to capture it.

A golf course, racetrack or a football arena all have a unique acoustic space and as your mind moves around the area you can focus on specific acoustic resolution

excitation. When your mind auralises a space it is the start of the process of a sound design.

I liken producing the sound to an opera house where the acoustics enhance the recording or sound capture — because of the enhanced soundfield that the viewer/listener experiences, venue tone and visual perspective are major considerations in sound design. Too often in broadcast, the sound of a venue is not considered and the venue atmosphere (the room tone) ends up being the sum of all the microphones. Not so good. The venue tone is a combination of audience, atmosphere and acoustics.

Atmosphere and acoustics are specific to each venue, location or space. Any soundman worth his salt strives to capture and produce the different sound elements that are unique to each location.

Now it gets interesting. Focus on the different sounds that comprise a complex soundfield and every single sound ingredient contributes to it — the kick, punch, whoosh and slap, plus the reflection of sound waves and a dash of PA and HVAC interference — it all adds up to an acoustic soup. Admittedly, the capture process can often be very tedious and proper microphone selection and placement is critical but then I never said that being a soundman was easy.

Once again, envision that final sound mix. I’m not a purist in the production of sound and especially sports sound because you have to consider the entertainment and emotional aspect of sound. Your audience has become very sophisticated over the years of listening to music, movies and games. Ask yourself, is it real sound?

John DiPalma, my therapist and one-time Olympic Rowing hopeful, said to me ‘You know what? I was there in person in ’96 in Atlanta. But Beijing televised in high def sounded better than being there — more real. Richer, more slap of paddle on the water, more crowd reaction, more sweat.’

‘More sweat?’ I say.

I’m here to tell you what goes on behind the ‘sweat’. The camera lens has become extremely powerful and focused but the same cannot be said of the microphone. Television coverage for Olympic rowing requires chase boats powered by gasoline engines that often have a detrimental impact on the quality of audio. You see the rowing, see the water, but hear the drone of the chase boat.

As a soundman, your job is to create an entertaining soundscape. You know there are rowing sounds and oar sounds plus water and athlete sounds, but the engine noise is overwhelming. There is no practical way to create an interesting audio track without some sort of sound supplementation. As a chef, you can produce an acoustic soup by sweetening the rowing venue. Add the slap of the oars hitting the water, the creaking of the boat and the waves lapping against its bow.

Technically, the days of birdie loops off tape machines have given way to polyphonic keyboard samplers with sound envelope control and velocity sensitivity. A keyboard sampler places an entire sound machine at your fingertips. Creatively, you are the designer. It’s your recipe for exciting, entertaining sound. Soup’s on! n 65

HEADROOM ADA points addressed Thanks for the review (iZ ADA, V8.1). It looks great. To address a couple of your notes about the ADA. The newest version of ADA includes an on-screen sample rate indicator and it detects if the sample rates in Pro Tools and on the ADA match. This is displayed on the ADA screen and it flashes if the sample rates do not match. Users using only MADI (as opposed to the Pro Tools connection) can choose to have the ADA automatically adjust to new sample rates sent by their DAW. Also, our hardware engineer was interested in your observation that there is a difference in latency of an ADA and a 192. He wondered if it would be possible for us to get a copy of the test recording. We don’t have a 192 here, so it’s not something we’ve been able to hear in our labs. For users using a combination of convertors, the latency value of our convertors is available and Pro Tools can compensate for that.

Hope that clears things up.

Thanks again for a great review, Jason Fearon, marketing coordinator, iZ Technology Corporation

Kimsey interview Congratulations on nailing the legendary Chris Kimsey down for an interview (V7.8).

I nearly managed it a few years ago but failed, alas.

I would imagine there’s either more on the MiniDisc than can be printed, or George Shilling had to eke out

every Rolling Stones comment with a crowbar.

Anyway, well done you guys. I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Andy Wood, Windsor, UK

Advertiser Index Al.So.......................................... Classified 63 Audient..................................................30-31

Ten to Eleven I always enjoy the Ten articles in Resolution but would like to draw your attention to the Ten independent labels in the current issue (V8.1) having eleven entries.

I quickly checked back through other issues in case you’ve done this before but couldn’t find any. So, is this a mistake or am I missing something?

Keith Bowan, Ipswich, UK Guilty as charged. However, it was a deliberate mistake rather a complete oversight as Jim Evans and I both (eventually) spotted the extra digit and decided, as we couldn’t agree on which one to cut out, we’d leave it at eleven and see if anyone noticed. And of course they did. We’ve not exceeded the total before but we get a lot of fun out of the Ten articles, which frequently run to tens of entries before they are whittled down.

In retrospect, Fourteen might have been a better title for the series but it doesn’t scan nearly as well. Thank you for your attentiveness as you have unwittingly yet conclusively dispelled the theory that Resolution readers are unable to count beyond ten. Together we will make the industry great again. We’re always open to ideas for a good Ten. ZS

Brauner.......................................................53 Briscati........................................................24 Calrec.........................................................60 Cedar Audio...............................................68 CharterOak................................................51 Euphonix....................................................13 Focusrite....................................................39 Genelec........................... Inside Front Cover Grace..........................................................23 He Vertigo................................. Classified 63 Resolution Awards........... Inside Back Cover Josephson Engineering.............................64 Jz Microphones.........................................41 Kmr........................................... Classified 63 Lydcraft......................................................18 Manger Audio............................................62 Mcdsp........................................................07 Merging Technologies...............................61 Mytek.........................................................49 ProLight + Sound.......................................21 Radial/Primacoustics.............................34-35 Reidel............................................ 55, 57, 59 Rme/Synthax........................................10, 11 Rnd............................................................50 Stagetec ....................................................09 Schoeps......................................................17 Scv London (Focal)...................................25 Sonic Distribution................................19, 42 Sonifex.......................................................47 Sonnox.......................................................43 Source........................................................20 Studio Spares.............................................27

I not sure who the woman is but this chap looks familiar…as indeed do these two fellows on the right. It is, of course, the MPG Award and Brit Award winning Producer of The Year Bernard Butler with Duffy and Recording Engineer of The Year Award-winning James Towler with Steve Winwood.

Other winners in the UK’s first Music Producers Guild Awards ceremony aimed at recognising the skill and talent of music recording professionals included: Brian Eno — The Joe Meek Award for Innovation in Production; Best Mix Engineer — Cenzo Townshend (Resolution V4.6); Best Mastering Engineer — Ray Staff (Resolution V5.3); Best International Producer of the Year — Danger Mouse (AKA Brian Burton); Best Remixer — Calvin Harris; Best Newcomer — Paul Epworth (Resolution V7.5); Best Studio — British Grove Studios; and Unsung Hero -– Andy McBride. There was also a Music Producers Guild Special Recognition Award to the late Chris Blair.

66

resolution

Summit Audio............................................56 TL Commerce.............................................63 Tonelux.......................................................38 Vintage King...............................................54 Violet..........................................................58 March 2009

Us ey ou r ri gh t to

The Resolution Awards 2009 Rewarding Quality and Innovation in professional equipment AUDIO FOR BROADCAST, POST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

Nominations are in Nominations for the Resolution Awards 2009 are viewable on the Resolution website — follow the links at www.resolutionmag.com Nominations have been drawn from an exceptional panel of industry experts and practitioners and are presented in eleven product categories.

Only registered Resolution readers are eligible to vote.

Resolution readers should take their Reader code and Postcode (as displayed on their magazine’s address label) and enter them in the My Subscription section of the website.

On logging in they will receive an exclusive link to the Resolution Awards Voting page.

Each reader can vote once and has a maximum of seven votes to cast in the eleven product categories.

Voting will close on the 24 April.

www.resolutionmag.com

vot e