Resolution V8.4 May/June 2009

AUDIO FOR BROADCAST, POST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V8.4 May/June 2009

The Eddie Kramer interview Picture size, sound level and dynamic range revisited Odds On: high rolling Las Vegas recording hot spot Tommy D on the plight of the modern artist How to calibrate your picture monitor Resolution Awards 2009 Nominations

£5

Reviews Brauner Valvet X Sonar V-Studio 700 TL Audio A2 Neyrinck SoundCode McDSP Retro Pack Marantz PMD58031 Milab SRND 360 Genelec 8040A

Some Questions are Easy to Answer “Where do these lumps in the lower midrange come from? Should I move my furniture or get a smaller display?”

“How can I add more bass trapping in my small room to avoid this boominess?”

“All this with a 5.1 system!

How am I supposed to find the time to calibrate my system accurately?”

“I should just get a Genelec DSP system!”

When you are building or fine-tuning your audio monitoring environment there are many aspects to consider: the design and geometry of the room, loudspeaker placement, acoustical treatments, the type of equipment to use and making sure everything works well together. When it comes to optimized audio reproduction and proper adjustments of your response curves, the decision is easy. Genelec DSP systems with AutoCal™ automatic calibration can attack common problems in your room response with just a few mouse clicks. Get familiar with our DSP systems at www.genelecDSP.com

Genelec DSP Series

AUDIO FOR BROADCAST, POST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V8.4 May/June 2009 ISSN 1477-4216

News & Analysis

4

4 News

Leader

16

Products

65

Broadcast aside

66

Headroom

Odds On Records and Recording

46

Resolution Awards Nominations

Sales, contracts, appointments and biz bites.

New introductions and announcements.

Baxter says it’s all about business and perception.

Craft

14

34 Eddie Kramer

High rolling Las Vegas recording hot spot with a multiroom complex and old-school plans.

He never tired of the experience ... on Woodstock, Hendrix, heavy metal, 5.1 DVDs and 45 years of classic rock.

Dan Carey

38

42

The Resolution Awards 2009 celebrate ‘Quality and Innovation’ in professional equipment.

48 Sweet spot

Acoustical simulations, electroacoustics and audio monitor systems explained in the last part of our WSDG self-build series.

From dub to Franz Ferdinand, producer Dan 54 Carey likes to be unorthodox. He talks guitars, studios, preproduction and car batteries.

Ten

Tommy D

Philip Newell revisits and updates his initial article in V7.3 with some new findings.

58

64 Your business

62 Slaying Dragons

Music shop salesman turned DJ turned producer and writer tells us about the plight and mindset of the modern artist.

Definitive digital dates.

Picture size and sound level

Business

50 Stayin’ alive

Many top commercial recording facilities still thrive; we look at the strategies and innovative ideas behind their continued success.

With revenue tides turning, producer record royalties are taking a hit. Dan talks about getting the point.

Technology

56 Display calibration

Sound facilities can no longer avoid knowing a little bit more about their picture, we tune in to a solution.

Can some people really hear better than others? Can hearing be trained? Watkinson argues that it can and should be.

Reviews

22 Sonar V-Studio 700 24 Brauner Valvet X 26 TL Audio A2 27 Neyrinck SoundCode For Dolby E Encode/Decode

Editorial Editorial Director: Zenon Schoepe Tel: +44 1444 410675 Email: zen@resolutionmag.com Editorial office: PO Box 531, Haywards Heath RH16 4WD, UK Contributors: Rob James, George Shilling, Jon Thornton, Keith Holland, Jim Betteridge, Neil Hillman, Nigel Jopson, Andy Day, Philip Newell, Jim Evans, Dan Daley, John Watkinson

28 30 31 32

McDSP Retro Pack Marantz PMD580 Milab SRND 360 Genelec 8040A

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NEWS

Appointments Roger Henderson has been appointed MD of Calrec Audio. He has many years experience at senior management level in broadcast companies in the UK and the US, including ProBel, Chyron and Ascent Media. His appointment follows the acquisition of Calrec by D&M Holdings Inc. in 2007 and completes a succession process for Calrec’s original senior management.

Henry Goodman has been appointed business development manager.

As sales manager for Calrec in Asia Pacific, he has been a key member of the sales and product teams for more than 10 years.

As a result of the new appointments, Stephen Jagger and John Gluck will move into non-executive roles within the company.

Studiomaster has appointed Max LindsayJohnson to the post of international sales manager.

Studer’s executive VP of sales, Bruno Hochstrasser, will retire at the end of 2009 making way for Adrian Curtis, previously VP sales for Soundcraft, to take on the mantle for both Soundcraft and Studer. Curtis will assume this position immediately while Hochstrasser will remain within the sales team for the remainder of this year to ensure an effective hand-over. Adrian has more than 25 year’s experience in Soundcraft, MBI Broadcast Systems, Amek and BSS. Vo i d Acous tic s has appointed Ken DeLoria a s V P, s a l e s a n d marketing. He will also head up the company’s US subsidiary, Void Acoustics USA, LLC, in Portland, Oregon.

Leader

The concept of perfection is a curious one because it immediately requires you to justify and quantify your measures and parameters. Yet its concept has followed us through the ages changing sometimes gradually, at other times dramatically, as witnessed by its portrayal in the arts. You could argue that an adherence to some target perfection, and the lengths that mankind is prepared to go in order to achieve it, maps quite reliably to periods of intolerance. While I don’t believe we live in particularly intolerant times, compared to even fairly recent history, the visual portrayal of perfection stares out at us continually. From the unrepresentative clothing sizes modelled by the non-average, to the depiction of domestic bliss, gravity defying physical enhancement, cooking delight and braces on so many children’s teeth, perhaps we strive to improve because we now can.

This notion of perfection won’t be new to you as a sound operator where the tools at your disposal will allow you to nip and tuck all the way to that wonderful smile on your client’s face. The danger with striving for perfection is that it never just appears, it has to be worked on. Nothing is ever just right because you know better. Anglers always believe that the biggest fish must invariably be under a tree on the other side of the river bank. Sound folk believe sonic perfection can be created; carved from some cruder natural substance. That’s certainly the way many people think today and the problem with playing under these rules is that you’re unlikely to ever really get there in a way that satisfies.

Most current music singles are masterpieces of construction. They are edited and mixed to such high standards of compliance to ‘the form’ that you can only interpret them in the one way in which they were intended. It’s unambiguous because all the variables have been removed with enormous skill and dexterity. Many older recordings weren’t nearly as refined yet you’d probably find a load of them higher up on some arbitrary scale of perfection than any amount of quantisation, autotuning, compression, and sub-beat EQ tweaking. To me that’s odd because the songwriting, performance and delivery are as effective. You have to conclude that the differences are attributable to technical issues; how these songs are cut.

Eras are defined by their soundtracks and I have a feeling that the one we are listening to at the moment is possibly not one of our finest. Just as we can raise an eyebrow at Reubens’ notion of the ‘perfect’ female form, so future generations may listen back to us and wonder what we were thinking of.

Zenon Schoepe

Shure buys Crowley and Tripp Shure Incorporated has announced the acquisition of Crowley and Tripp Ribbon Microphones from Soundwave Research Laboratories. Shure now owns all intellectual property, microphone process equipment, product designs, and other important assets related to the Crowley and Tripp line.

Shure will manufacture ribbon microphones in its Wheeling, Illinois, facility using the patented Roswellite shape-memory acoustic ribbon material developed by Soundwave Research. Shure will manufacture ribbon microphones exclusively in the US and will assume responsibility for ongoing service and support for existing owners of Crowley and Tripp ribbon mics.

‘Ribbon microphones have always been prized for their warm sound quality, but older designs are delicate, which

has limited their applications,’ said Scott Sullivan, Shure’s senior director of global product management. ‘With the acquisition of the Crowley and Tripp product line and their Roswellite ribbon technology, Shure is extending the use of ribbon microphones to the stage in addition to their use in the studio.’

‘We are very pleased to have the opportunity to work with the leading manufacturer of microphones to further the development and commercialisation of improved ribbon microphones,’ added Soundwave Research president Robert Crowley.

‘This new ribbon technology enables us to combine the characteristic ribbon sound with the durability for which Shure products are famous,’ said Chad Wiggins, Shure’s wired microphone products category manager.

Frankfurt numbers slightly up The Frankfurt Musikmesse 2009 was attended by 78,850 visitors, according to the organisers. ‘This year’s Musikmesse was once again an international barometer for the sector and characterised by an extremely good atmosphere,’ said Detlef Braun, member of the board of management of Messe Frankfurt. ‘The level of exhibitor and visitor satisfaction with the fair was high and there was an air of confidence that the musical-instrument sector will be able to ride out the current economic storm.’

There was a slight increase in visitor numbers over last year (78,491) and they came from 113 countries. There were 54,006 visitors from Germany (around 800 more than last year) and 32% percent of visitors came from abroad. After Germany, the best represented visitor nations were The Netherlands (2,460), Belgium (1,871), Italy (1,640), France (1,635), Switzerland (1,484), Great Britain (1,434), Sweden (1,182), Austria (1,072), Spain (859), Poland (779), Russian Federation (565), USA (557), South Korea (503), Japan (333), Australia (287) and China (254).

Next year’s Frankfurt Musikmesse will be held 24-27 March 2010.

Steve Levine appointed MPG chair The Music P ro d u c e r s Guild (UK) has announced the appointment of Steve Levine as its new chairman.

This follows the resignation of Mike Howlett who has left to take up the position of associate professor and head of music and sound at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

An award-winning producer, Levine is already a member of the Musicians Union’s executive committee and a director of PRS, MCPS and BASCA, which he represents on the UK Music board.

‘Mike has done a superb job, as witnessed by the huge success of the inaugural Music Producers Guild Awards earlier this year — an event that has significantly raised our profile. I intend to build on the positive effect that the Awards have achieved,’ he said. ‘My roles on the various music business boards will, I hope, be invaluable to the Music Producers Guild. Most creators share the same aims, trying to earn a living from those creative efforts. In this current climate the role of the record producer has become more important than ever.’

NEWS

Calrec Global in Oz Global Television, one of Australia’s largest broadcast facilities companies, has completed work on the latest additions to its fleet of HD and SD outside broadcast vehicles with the purchase of three 56-fader Calrec Sigma digital broadcast consoles, all equipped with the 5.1-ready Bluefin processing option.

The new consoles complement the existing vehicles in Global’s fleet, the majority of which are already fitted with Calrec desks.

Global has five SD vehicles and five HD vehicles, two of which are the recent doubleexpanding additions into which the new Calrec Sigmas have been installed. The third Sigma desk replaces a 48-fader Sigma Classic, which was moved to another of Global’s SD OB trucks. The consoles in the HD vehicles are additionally equipped with the Hydra networking system, remote I-O stageboxes and MADI interfacing.

‘As we have many different operators using our consoles, we needed a highquality reliable product that was consistent throughout our fleet, as well being intuitive,’ said Milan Milenkovic, Global’s technical services manager. ‘Our relationship with Calrec goes back to the days of the VCS digitally controlled analogue console, one of which saw active service in a Global truck for 17 years and which still works. The digital consoles have also proven to be intuitive, reliable and robust, not to mention offering superb sound quality. We particularly like the small-format remote I-O boxes, and the offline configuration software —- it’s handy for our operators to be able to build and modify console setups away from the truck, and it’s also useful for training operators.’

Thirteen Audients in Full Sail

Ha r m a n Pro Danish distribution will now be with a new company set up by its long-serving Nor wegian reseller s LydRommet A /S. LydRommet Denmark is majority-owned

by LydRommet (under the proprietorship of Joachim Wille) and executive director Flemming Bjerke (pictured).

Harman Professional has promoted Scott Robbins from senior VP of sales, Crown Audio to group-wide VP of sales to work with brandlevel sales executives to grow sales in emerging markets.

(l-r): Scott Dansby, industry relations; Greg Griffith, Eric Fruits, associate course director, sound foundations; David Dearden, Audient; Dana Roun, director of audio programmes; Luke Baldry, Audient.

Full Sail University in the US has installed thirteen Audient ASP8024 desks in its Recording Arts department. Twelve 24-channel consoles have been installed in what is known as the Analog Mix Lab and the thirteenth is set up in the lecture room. Greg Griffith, Sound Foundations Course Director at Full Sail University, explained: ‘Each station, including the one in the lecture room has a full patchbay, is loaded with time-based and dynamics processors and a hard disk based multitrack, enabling class demonstrations to be shown on the same equipment that the students will use in the lab.’

‘The students learn signal flow and the recording chain on these consoles; their straightforward design makes understanding how the audio gets from one point to another in the process easy and quick to learn,’ said Eric Abraham, console department chair at Full Sail. ‘The transparent sound quality of the console makes teaching other aspects such as compression, effects processing and mixing a lot easier as well, because the students can really hear the differences without the console getting in the way.’

AIR Mastering takes off

Lucinda Williams’ latest CD, Little Honey on the Lost Highway Records label, was produced by Eric Liljestrand and Tom Overby and employed MA-100 and MA-200 condenser mics from Mojave Audio.

LA-based producer/engineer Liljestrand engineered the album. ‘Both mics offer a really fat and open, yet un-hyped sound,’ he said. ‘There’s no exaggerated high or low end — just a really nice, big round sound.

Many people seem to have a preference for compressors and microphones that colour the sound. I tend to prefer keeping it as true to the source as possible, and that’s a big part of my attraction to the Mojave mics.’

Appointments

L o n d o n supplier KMR Audio has provided equipment to AIR Studios’ new mastering facility run by Ray Staff and Matt Colton, until recently at Alchemy Mastering.

‘We were aiming to keep everything as clean and natural as possible,’ explained Matt Colton, ‘we want to hear everything as it should be before affecting the sound.

That means we needed absolutely audiophile quality replay facilities.’

KMR Audio supplied four Crane Song

HEDD 192 A-D convertors, a Crane Song Avocet Surround m o n i t o r c o n t r o l l e r, a Neve 8051 s u r r o u n d compressor, API 5500 stereo EQ and the Manley Backbone mastering insert switcher as centrepiece of the mastering system. The room was previously an audio visual dubbing room and although the room is set up for 5.1 mastering, pride of place goes a huge pair of TAD Reference 1 monitors driven by Tricord amps.

Klotz Digital CEO Thomas Klotz and Euphonix CEO Martin Kloiber.

Euphonix will market and sell Klotz Digital’s range of broadcast products in North America. This will enable Euphonix to offer a wider range of solutions for radio, on-air broadcast, TV production and production trucks.

Euphonix has appointed Andrew Duafala as VP of global channel sales. He joined as director of retail sales, worldwide from EMU Systems in 2007.

Neutrik AG has appointed Pete Milbery as MD of Neutrik USA Inc. He was previously western regional sales manager.

London Soho postproduction f acilit y LipSy nc has appointed Robert Farr as rerecording mixer on a combination of television and film projects.

Farr was previously freelance but prior to that spent 14 years at Goldcrest Studios.

NEWS

Appointments

Amsterdam mastering opens

KMR’s Stefan Pope with Euphonix MC Pro.

London supplier KMR Audio Ltd has been appointed a value-added reseller

by Euphonix Europe and now features a full Euphonix MC Pro demonstration suite.

KMR Audio has also been appointed distributors of US Shiny Box ribbon microphones and studio electronics products in the UK.

(l-r): Sean Long (sales engineer, Concilium); Junior Qwabe (digital specialist, Radio SABC-RBF); Sarel Hlungwani (application support engineer, Concilium).

HHB has appointed Concilium Technologies as its distributor for South Africa and subSaharan Africa. Headquartered near Pretoria, Concilium already represents DHD, Harris and Maycom.

(l-r): Rightway Audio MD Danny Lau; Midas and Klark Teknik’s sales and marketing director David Cooper; Rightway Audio’s sales manager Alan Wong.

Rightway Audio Systems, Midas and Klark Teknik’s distributor for China, Hong Kong and Macau, has also been appointed to handle the brands in Taiwan.

Mega Audio has been appointed the Midas and Klark Teknik distributor for Germany.

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Amsterdam Mastering is the new home of mastering engineer Darius van Helfteren, who was chief mastering engineer from 2000-2008 at Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands.

According to Darius, the brief to the designer and the team of craftsmen was to build a no-compromise, cost-no-object mastering studio to rival anything anywhere after the search for the perfect space led to the purchase of an ex-photographic studio. The building offers 6m of height and 100sq.m of space. Highlights include a 1.8m deep bass trap, silent aircon, a stainless steel front wall, and an outer coating for the studio. There’s also a climbing wall.

Darius’ business is split equally between Dutch and international clients. ‘With the new studio we’re definitely looking to expand our international market share and feel we have the studio and experience to attract the top European artists who have previously been looking to the US for their mastering needs,’ he said.

Equipment is from API, Crane Song, Thermionic Culture, Weiss, B&W, Velodyne, Z-Sys, RME and Hypex with custom studio furniture by Sterling Modular.

Orhpeus saves Carly session for Filipetti Grammy award-winning producer Frank Filipetti had to put his faith in a Prism Sound Orpheus interface that he hadn’t even taken out of its box when disaster struck on a recording session for Carly Simon. Frank and a host of musicians were assembled at Carly’s house at Martha’s Vineyard to record tracks for her new album. The plan was to record using Carly’s Pro Tools rig in conjunction with a Digidesign 003 FireWire Interface. ‘For some reason the Pro Tools rig wouldn’t recognise the 003 and I spent several hours trying to get it to work. It turned out to have a hardware fault but we didn’t know that at the time.

Given the remoteness of Martha’s Vineyard — and the fact that it was a Sunday afternoon — there wasn’t much hope of getting a quick replacement,’ said Frank. ‘I had my laptop with me, with Cubase loaded onto it, so I decided to try that as a last resort.’ Fortunately Frank also had a brand new Prism Sound Orpheus unit in the back of his car.

‘It was one of those situations where there just wasn’t any other choice,’ he said. ‘Normally, with any new piece of technology, I’ll spend hours evaluating it in my studio before using it. But on this occasion I was desperate, so I took the plunge with the Orpheus — and I’m delighted to say it saved the day.’

Splice TV gets new acoustic Acoustic and studio design consultancy White Mark has completed an acoustic refit of the audio control room and voice-over booth at Splice TV in London.

White Mark’s involvement with Splice began soon after the company moved into a new facility where it occupies two floors of an old warehouse. With more space at its disposal, Splice added two audio suites — one for voice-over projects and the other with Pro Tools HD3 for stereo and 5.1 mixing.

‘The rooms looked really good but we felt we could improve on their tonal qualities,’ explained Nag Kirinde, Splice’s head of

©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

audio. ‘On the advice of Scrub, who installed all the equipment, we called in White Mark to see what could be done to make the rooms sound better.

‘It was a major project ripping out and rebuilding the walls and ceiling while working around the Icon. We were worried that the acoustic treatment might make the rooms feel smaller but in fact White Mark’s designs were so good that once the work was completed there was no discernable difference in feel.’

Splice’s facilities include non-linear editing in standard and high definition, sound design, effects and grading.

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.

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Mattlind Recording Studio has bought four Prism Sound ADA-8XR multichannel convertors. Established in 1991 by Gary Nieman, the Tuscon-based studio specialises in acoustic performances as well as mixing and mastering.

Prior to testing the Prism Sound units, he and his team thought they were happy with their existing selection of convertors.

‘They made such an enormous difference that we simply couldn’t ignore what our ears were telling us. We tested them by tracking a pianist who was playing our concert grand, using two high quality microphones. When we patched in the Prism Sound units the guys in the control room were just blown away. Even people with untrained ears could hear the difference. If you really care about the audio industry and production values, then these are “must have” convertors because they are so transparent and they don’t colour the sound in any way.’

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

May/June 2009

NEWS

Appointments G a u t h i e r Dalle has been appointed sales and marketing director at Innovason. He joins af ter seven years as EMEA sales manager

RNR1 in US recording debut

Antenne Bayern chooses ‘universal’ players

for L’Acoustics.

Yamaha has appointed Manuel Rivera to the position of commercial audio manager at its Iberia office in Madrid, Spain. He joined Yamaha in 2003 as head of the service department in Madrid.

Klotz Digital has a p p o i nte d A n d r e a s Bartsch as Worldwide sales direc tor for its public address division.

He previously spent 13 years with Licht-Technik Vertriebs GmbH Hagenbach & Grill, a manufacturer of lamp heads used in film, TV, opera and theatre.

Equator Audio Re s e a r c h h a s established a sales and marketing office in Singapore headed by Ken Tovich.

Se n n h e i s e r UK and APar t have extended their distribution agreement and Sennheiser will now distribute APart’s range of sound reinforcement products throughout Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Steinberg Media Technologies general manager Andreas Stelling has taken over the role of MD from Kazunori Kobayashi who has moved to a new role at Yamaha Corporation.

Showtime AES Europe, Munich.............7-10 May LLB, Stockholm................... 13-15 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

(l-r): Rupert, Keith and Paul.

The new SE RNR1 active ribbon was used to record renowned jazz pianist Paul English at Blue Rock Recording’s Third Anniversary Party. A pair of RNR1s were placed on the piano and recorded directly without any EQ, dynamics or artificial reverb. English played two sets, allowing the engineers and audience to audition the recording in the control room as well as listen to the performance live in the studio.

‘My own feeling is that subjectively, the microphone has disappeared and we are looking through a clear window into a sound picture that is only limited by the skill and imagination of the sound engineer,’ said Rupert. ‘An audio design engineer must understand the principles and limitations of microphones, loudspeakers, recording devices and the like — these will always constitute a challenge and when one has the privilege of working with people like SE’s master designer Siwei Zou, the challenge becomes an exciting adventure — one begins to see how one’s own expertise can be invoked to produce a truly seamless acoustic-electro transducer.’

Blue Rock’s chief engineer Keith Gary believes the RNR1 is destined to become a mainstay of the recording business. ‘The SE RNR1 is proof that active ribbon technology is here to stay. The mic can handle an extreme amount of dynamic range, without the need for compression, providing a deep, smooth, and natural reproduction of the acoustic source. Ideal for piano, brush drum overheads, strings, and great for a meaty guitar amp. A convenient high pass filter offers an option lacking in active ribbon competitors.’

DPA Hydrophone used to capture whales BBC sound recordist Joe bubbles. Stevens recorded the Stevens used the DPA 8011 whale song using a single DPA hydrophone, supplied by DPA 8011 hydrophone onto a solid UK distributor Sound Network, state recorder. The hydrophone to record whale sounds in was deployed from the filming Alaska and the Arctic for the boat and was let down as deep BBC One TV series Nature’s as the cable would allow, with Great Events. Filmed on HD, boat engines turned off. the series visits locations Stevens subsequently used where the natural world the DPA 8011 on a trip to the undergoes an amazing annual Canadian Arctic, where the team transformation, following the (l-r) Joe Stevens and James spent a month on the sea ice fate and lives of the creatures Kunuk listen for narwhals. finding and filming narwhals caught up in these events. during their annual journey through the inlets Stevens made two trips, the first to as the ice breaks up. The team worked on Southeast Alaska to capture the sound of the edge of the ice, again deploying the humpback whales bubble netting, which they hydrophone as deeply as possible to minimise do to surround herring with a rising net of the sounds of ice movement.

German private radio station, Antenne Bayern, has installed several HHB UDP-89 universal DVD/CD players. ‘We use multiple UDP-89s in our production department to preview music provided by publishers, and to evaluate video material — both of which are inevitably supplied on disc,’ said Christoph Lippert, studio designer and technical manager at Antenne Bayern. ‘The provision of balanced, multichannel, audio outputs and the wide variety of analogue and digital video outputs makes it very easy to integrate the UDP-89 into our editing rooms, and into the 5.1 production environment.’

Czech TV broadcasts Nordic Ski

Czech Television’s HD OB Van was in operation during the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in Liberec, Czech Republic, in which 120cm of snow over the period of the event meant that all the connecting cables from the truck to the remote stage boxes almost became a fixed installation.

‘Over 50 hours of live broadcast was made on the Vista 8, an integral part of Czech Television’s first HD OB Van,’ said Milan Gazdik, senior engineer of audio engineering, Czech TV Prague and a member of the EBU Production Management Committee. ‘This comprehensive live application confirmed that the Vista is able to meet our demanding expectations.’

Nashville-based television production company Camp Digital has installed a Soundcraft Vi4 as the centrepiece of its audio capabilities in its new Journey HD mobile production truck.

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May/June 2009

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International Distributors NEWS North America

Biz Bites The British music industry has grown its share of the US and Canadian m a r ke t s f o r the fourth year in a row, writes Nigel Jopson.

Coldplay sold more than 5m singles in the US last year, closely followed by 2006 X Factor champion Leona Lewis, who sold 4.75m tracks, and whose single Bleeding Love became the most downloaded song in America. British market share in the US rose to 10% during 2008 from 8.5% in 2007. In Canada, British artists accounted for almost 15% of album sales, up from 12.5% in 2007.

Figures from the BPI show that, despite challenging trading conditions, an expanding digital sector and strong releases helped the UK’s home music market exceed expectations. The UK single tracks market, driven by growth in downloads, grew by 33%. 2008 was the biggest year ever for units sold, with over 115m singles sold across all formats. The album market, which had been predicted to tank with a double digit decline, saw a modest slip of just 3.2%. The digital albums market grew strongly with 10m sold — a 65% increase compared to 2007. Kim Bayley, Director General of the ERA (Entertainment Retailers Association) said: ‘The fact that UK retailers sold more albums in the fourth quarter of 2008 than in 2007 is particularly striking. Given that they did so against the background of the collapse of Entertainment UK, a wholesaler supplying around 40% of UK unit sales, is a real testament to the work put in by retailers and record companies ... the big lesson of 2008 is that if the music is strong enough and retailers work well with suppliers to get that product in-store, music fans will respond and buy in their droves.’

BBC and UK Commercial Radio announced a new partnership ‘designed to place radio at the heart of Digital Britain’ — The Radio Council –- the BBC and the three largest radio groups: Bauer, Global and GMG. The Council will start three crosssector digital projects: the development of an online live radio player that streams all live UK radio, a common user interface and EPG (electronic programme guide) for listeners across all devices and a calendar of exclusive digital-only content for DAB. The Radio Council intends to co-ordinate with government the appointment of a CEO for Lord Carter’s Digital Radio Delivery Group.

Two rooms for audioEngine

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USA, CANADA: Synthax Inc. www.synthax.com South America CHILE: Videomedia LTDA. www.mediaycom.cl Brazil: Um Instrumentos. www.uminstrumentos.com.br

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Europe

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BULGARIA: Almar Co. Ltd. www.almar.bg CROATIA: Neuron www.neuron-d.com CZECH REPUBLIC: Disk Multimedia s.r.o. www.disk.cz CYPRUS: S&V Megasound Ltd. svmegasound@avacom.net DENMARK: Soundworks www.soundworks.dk ESTONIA: IS Music Trading Ltd. music@online.ee FINLAND: Studiotec Oy www.studiotec.fi FRANCE: SCV Hi-TeCH www.scvhitech.fr GERMANY, AUSTRIA: Synthax GmbH www.synthax.de GEORGIA: AES-Georgia www.aes-georgia.com GREECE: Logothetis Music www.logothetismusic.gr HUNGARY: Midisoft Studio Kft. www.midisoft.hu ICELAND: Tonabudin Ltd. www.tonabudin.is IRELAND: Future Sounds www.futuresounds.ie ITALY: MidiWare Srl www.midiware.com LITHUANIA: Midiaudio Ltd. www.midiaudio.com NETHERLANDS, BENELUX: AudioAG www.synthax.nl NORWAY : ProLyd www.prolyd.no

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New York facility audioEngine has added two high-end mixing studios to augment its original quartet of rooms. ‘We’re fortunate to be expanding in the current economic climate,’ said aE co-founder Rex Recker. ‘Last year when we attracted top-flight commercial audio mixer Rob DiFondi to our ranks, we promised to build him the room of his dreams. The Cabin In The Sky has totally fulfilled his workplace fantasy.

We’re drawing rave reviews from Rob’s clients, both for his mixing skills and for the spectacular accommodations.’

Recker and company co-founders Brian Wick, Tom Goldblatt and Bob Giammarco, who run the company’s audioEngine West complex in Phoenix, knew that a first class expansion was the only way to go. ‘We were committed to building a genuine showplace, and our partner/director of technical operations, Brian Wick was extremely well qualified to pilot the project,’ said Recker.

Created in collaboration with studio architect/acoustician John Storyk of the Walters-Storyk Design Group, The Cabin (Studio F) immerses clients in a 27ft x 20ft Adirondacks-style log cabin environment. Features include rough hewn, highly polished floors, a hand-set stone fireplace (with a 65-inch flat screen), custom furniture, and a rear wall diffuser. There’s Pro Tools HD3 with five Digidesign 192-1/Os, a Mojo SDI and B&W 5.1 monitoring with 803D mains, SCMS surrounds and an ASW855 sub.

Dedicated to 5.1 Dolby-approved theatrical sound mixes, the contemporary luxury of The French Quarter, Hillary Kew Martell’s new 29ft x 17ft Studio E, houses a D-command with a Martinsound Multimax EX system to control the JBL theatre spec main monitors and Bryston amplifiers. In addition to three Sharp Aquos 32-inch LCD monitors, Studio E features a Sony HD projector, a 122-inch Stewart screen and motorised blackout shades control the natural light. Studios E and F both include 100sq.ft isobooths with B&W WM2s and Bryston 2BST amplifiers.

Wick had personally designed two additional audioEngine rooms when the company acquired the 8th floor complex from LES Studios in 2001. Aware that Storyk had designed and built the original three-room LES facility in 1998, Wick was convinced the 7th floor expansion required the expertise of the WSDG team.

‘We clearly made the right call,’ Wick says. ‘They’ve been on schedule and on budget, and they’ve come up with some terrific ideas.’

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PREMIUM LINE Products: Lydrommet AS www.lydrommet.no

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POLAND: Audiostacja s.c. www.audiostacja.pl PORTUGAL: CCP www.ccp-sa.com ROMANIA: A.V. Audio Sys s.r.l. www.avaudiosys.ro RUSSIA: 4Sonic. www.4sonic.ru SERBIA, MONTENEGRO: Artist d.o.o. www.artistsystems.co.yu SLOVAK REPUBLIC: Sound Service www.soundservice.sk SLOVENIA: MTD www.mtd-el.si SPAIN: Microfusa www.microfusa.com SWEDEN: Fitzpatrick Import Group S.A. www.fitzpatrick.se

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SWITZERLAND: Music Network GmbH . www.musicnetwork.ch TURKEY: BL Muzik Co. Ltd. . www.blmuzik.com UKRAINE: Real Music Ltd. . www.realmusic.ua UNITED KINGDOM: Synthax Audio UK Ltd. . www.synthax.co.uk

PREMIUM LINE Products: Mixrommet AB www.mixrommet.se

Asia and Pacific Rim

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AZERBAIJAN: Promix www.promix.az AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND:

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Innovative Music Australia Pty Ltd. www.innovativemusic.com.au

Huart, The Fray and API Engineer/producer Warren Huart and group The Fray bought one of the first API 1608 consoles in 2008 to record their second album. Originally from England, Huart is producing and engineering the new Better Than Ezra album.

‘I came to this country in 1995 and in 1999 the band I was in recorded an album with the legendary engineer/producer Dave Jerden at his Eldorado Studios. I loved the sound he got from recording everything using his rack of 16 API microphone preamp cards he had pulled out of a console. He’s known as an SSL guy, but he records everything though APIs.’ In 2000, Huart partnered up with Phil Jaurigui at Swing House Studios in Hollywood and found a 20-input, 8-bus, 16-monitor 70s API desk. The Frays subsequently asked

Huart to put together a Pro Tools rig to take on the road to record demos in preparation for their second album and bought four API 3124 units for 16-channels of mic preamp.

When it came to record the second album it seemed to make economic sense to record at the band’s studio in Denver, Colorado but they had no console and Huart had heard good things about the 1608 although they had considered buying a vintage model. ‘If we bought an old board, you’re going to put $20k into it to get it usable,’ he said. ‘With the API 1608, we’ve got a real recording console with real mic pres, real EQs, busing, professional monitoring facilities at a really good price. We didn’t have to cut off an arm or sell one of my kids to buy it. It sounds like my other API or any vintage API console.’

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CHINA: Central Music Co. www.centrmus.com HONG KONG: Central Music (HK) Ltd. www.centrmus.com.hk INDIA: Modi Digital Audio Pvt Ltd. www.modidigital.com JAPAN: Synthax Japan www.synthax.jp KOREA: Gearlounge www.gearlounge.com INDONESIA: M-Station www.m-station.biz THAILAND,KAMBODIA, MALAYSIA: KDM Trading Co Ltd www.

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TAIWAN: MidiMall Inc. www.midimall.com.tw Middle East

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ISRAEL: Music-Shop LTD www.music-shop.co.il UAE, EMIRATES: Thomsun Trading Est www.thomsun.ae IRAN: Raajmaan System Ltd. www.raajmaan.com SAUDI ARABIA: Abu Moammar EST. www.abumoammar.com Syria: Ghali Electronics. www.ghali-electronics.com

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Africa SOUTH AFRICA:

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Tuerk Music Technologie www.tuerkmusic.co.sa

Worldwide Distribution

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PREMIUM LINE

M-32 AD / M-32 DA 32-Channel High-End 192 kHz reference AD & DA converters Analog to/from MADI and ADAT Fully remote controllable Also available as 16-Channel versions: M-16 AD / M-16 DA M-32 AD and M-16 AD provide an unique feature set: Analog limiters, three hardware reference levels up to +24 dBu, MADI and ADAT I/O up to 192 kHz, 6.3 mm TRS and D-sub inputs, remote control via MIDI, and operation across a wide range of mains voltages, all packed into a 2U enclosure.

M-32 AD and M-16 AD offer an outstanding AD conversion to MADI and ADAT formats. Balanced analog inputs guarantee excellent S/N and THD specs across a wide analog level range. Using upto-date converter technology working at up to 192 kHz, the realworld signal-to-noise ratio reaches 116 dBA – on all channels.

An extraordinary limiter, conceived and optimized for professional studio, stage, and broadcast applications, offers essential operational safety with its capability to limit an input’s overload by up to 17 dB without audible distortion.

RME´s SteadyClockTM guarantees perfect sound quality through efficient jitter suppression, making the device completely independent from the quality of external clock signals. Other renowned RME technologies like SyncCheck allow quick detection of clock problems.

M-32 DA and M-16 DA: High-end DA reference converters, easy to operate yet having a comprehensive feature set. The units combine excellent analog circuit design with the latest converter chips and RME’s superior SteadyClockTM, resulting in a state-ofthe-art DA conversion, with outstanding THD specs and a S/N ratio of up to 118 dBA. Both units provide separated driver stages for the analog TRS and D-sub outputs. When selecting +24 dBu the balanced D-sub connector outputs will provide the higher output level while TRS stays at the +19 dBu setting.

Remote Control. All M-series converters are fully remote controllable and configurable via MIDI. Control software for Mac and PC is supplied and allows easy remote control, also with MIDI transfer via MADI (MIDI Extender).

The M-series is an unsurpassed flexible basis for the realization of multichannel setups. Combinations of M-32 & M-16 AD/DA allow setups with 16, 32, 48, or 64 channels, according to your individual application or budget.

UK distribution

www.rme-audio.de

Synthax Audio UK Ltd.

Engineered and manufactured in Germany

www.synthax.co.uk

NEWS

Biz Bites Fabchannel, one of the most fun to watch and well-run live performance webcasters (as described in Resolution V7.3) has closed. CEO Justin Kniest offers a heartfelt explanation and chronicles the reasons on the homepage fabchannel. com. This was no pie-in-the-sky techie start-up, Fabchannel broadcast shows from two of Amsterdam’s most famous rock venues, the Paradiso and Melkweg.

This comes as YouTube says the music collection societies PRS (UK) and GEMA (Germany) are being unrealistic in their per-click royalty demands. PRS and GEMA counter that, while YouTube may currently be loss-making, parent company Google is a multibillion dollar behemoth, and if they want to transform YouTube into a new MTV they must pay a fair rate.

The PRS lined up songwriters like Guy Chambers, Beverley Knight and Pete Waterman to criticise YouTube. Waterman claims to have been paid a mere £11 for over 100m views of Never Gonna Give You Up — the same royalty he’d receive if the song were played once on Radio Stoke. The debate over the value of music videos on the web is a warm-up fight for the future debate concerning all music on the web.

Old rockers (and record labels) will benefit from royalties for longer, as the European Parliament voted to extend the copyright term for sound recordings to 70 years. A proposal to extend it to 95 years (the same as in the US) was turned down. This issue has been the subject of a long-running campaign waged by the BPI, the PPL, the Musicians Union and others. There is a counter argument, which suggests that an earlier entry into the public domain benefits songwriters, as reissues are more likely. A study in the US revealed that since the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, only 14% of material has been reissued by rights holders. The new European law would include some extra benefits: a new fund for session musicians who signed away rights (funded by a 20% cut in the labels benefits), and a clause to enable artists to regain the rights to a recording if the label has not made it available to the public.

Getty Images is getting into music licensing in a bigger way. Two years ago Getty purchased Pump Audio, who license unsigned act’s music online. Now Getty’s Premium Playlist service will licence songs to multimedia producers from more significant recording artists — Norah Jones, Soft Cell, Barenaked Ladies and star DJ Sasha were just a few I spotted. With sync becoming an ever more important moneymaking facet of recorded music, a global ‘onestop shop’ like this should prove a very useful storefront for rights holders.

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5.1 Smashing Pumpkins DVD

Dippold, Corgan and Brown.

If All Goes Wrong, a two-disc DVD feature-length documentary film and concert video of the Smashing Pumpkins, was mixed in 5.1 on a 32-input Rupert Neve Designs 5088 without automation by Kerry Brown at his Coldwater Studio in Los Angeles. It won the Cinema Audio Society Award for outstanding DVD Original Programming. Live front of house mixer Jon Lemon and rerecording mixer Brian Slack of Widget Post Production were also honoured by the CAS Award, as was Kevin Dippold, an engineer and musician who works with Brown.

‘Sonically, the board sounds fantastic,’ said Brown, adding, ‘we used the tape simulation with the drums and bass. They added a little bit of warmth to the digital signals that we had coming from Pro Tools.’

The DVD was the first of many projects featuring the Smashing Pumpkins that have been mixed on the console. ‘After that we remixed some of the catalogue songs, like Bullet with Butterfly Wings and 1979, for Guitar Hero. Then we went right into a TV commercial that aired during Super Bowl,’ he said. That song, FOL, premiered before the kick-off of Super Bowl XLIII on a commercial for the Hyundai Genesis coupe. Brown has worked with Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan on a variety of projects over the last 20 years and in March Corgan started working at the studio. ‘We’re using the console to write and demo some new songs,’ said Brown.

Sound college takes Midas/KT package

Midas Consoles Benelux has sold a package of equipment including two PRO6 live audio systems, a Venice 160 console and Klark Teknik Square One signal processing to the Deltion College in Zwolle, the Netherlands. The Deltion College provides around 16,000 young people with vocational training and education per year, and its technology courses include Stage and Events Techniques Training.

‘This is equipment you won’t yet see in

many real-life theatres; a dream come true for every instructor and every student,’ said Gert Venema, tutor on the course’s Sound and Theatre Techniques module.

‘A good specification is wonderful, but without passion it is sterile,’ said Midas Consoles Benelux’s Axel Nagtegaal. ‘The real added value and creativity of this project is the way the school, instructors and consultant have worked together in a concerted effort.’

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Jackman composes with PMC

Motion picture composer Henry Jackman has bought a pair of IB2S monitors in oak finish powered by a Bryson 4BSST amplifier.

‘My new monitors reproduce a wide dynamic range,’ he said. ‘I do not have a subwoofer in my composing room, but the system’s frequency response extends down to 20Hz, with a very controlled bottom-end. With my previous monitors, I was never really sure what was happening in the lower frequencies. This was a significant issue for film cues containing deep bass lines and low percussion. Now I am able to isolate these elements of my music’s dynamic range.

Jackman is based at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions in Santa Monica, California. He has composed additional music for a number of Zimmer’s recent projects, including Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Dead Man’s Chest, The Simpsons Movie, Kung Fu Panda, Hancock, and The Dark Knight. His latest project, Monsters vs Aliens, marks the first film for which he composed the entire score, including orchestral and electronic elements.

• Serbian State Broadcast’s Radio Belgrade has installed PMC monitors in all five of its control rooms. As part of programme of equipment renewal, nearfield and main monitoring have been replaced with TB2S-A and AML1 active two-way units with largescale three-way systems in the MB2S and BB5.

PMC monitoring was brought to the attention of Radio Belgrade’s technical director, Milan Orlic, after trials of PMCs at Radio Novi Sad that included three MB2S systems.

Producer and engineer Kevin Shirley has bought a 48-channel SSL Duality for his own studio in LA. ‘I had been mixing in surround for several projects with Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Iron Maiden and I wanted my studio to have this capability,’ said Shirley. ‘The first surround projects we will run through Duality are the upcoming Journey live concert in the Philippines, and Joe Bonamassa at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Duality is the first new generation console where the applications are only limited by your imagination with so many ways you can program it and so many ways you can change the way you mix. I just think Duality is an absolutely stunning console.’

May/June 2009

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FACILITY

‘We didn’t like manufacturing and found out that a bunch of music guys don’t do well in manufacturing so we sold that to a company called Now Disc,’ explains Robert adding that the operation is still next door. A record company was then a natural progression. ‘We wanted to get more into the music side of things, which is what we know best. We hired some key people — Ted Joseph, who was There’s a high rolling Las Vegas recording hot spot on the map with a multiroom complex and head of marketing and promotions at Warner Brothers for 23 years. old-school plans and ethos. ZENON SCHOEPE weighs up the gamble.

‘What we’re trying to do is put the music people back in charge of the music. as Vegas means many different things to different people: a dream That’s the era that Ted comes from, when everyone worked hand-in-hand and holiday destination or a nightmare for the reserved; a breathtaking feat developed acts.’ of architectural and business ambition or a glitzy and shallow façade; a Robert says they are trying to recapture the old-school record company approach place where anything is possible until the money runs out; the last word that existed before record companies adopted more short-term strategies. As before, in showbiz and glamour or the final resting place of the American dream. It’s a a studio is in the right place for this. ‘If an act walks in and blows your mind then place that welcomes everyone and beckons them back as they leave yet behind the you have to help these people out and give them a career. There’s monetary gain frontage, the noise and the lights there is a city that up until relatively recently was for us as well but we’re starting small, of course, we’re not Warner Brothers … but the fastest growing in the US. Where there’s people, there’s music and while Vegas who would want to be these days!’ remains an entertainment capital it has also become a music recording centre with They have signed established act Airsupply, new artists Ultraviolet Sound plus the opening of Odds On Records and Studios. adult contemporary artists Greg Medoro and Adam Lopez, working on the premise In Europe we regard performing in Vegas as the ultimate endorsement of an that you need heritage acts and new upstarts for a healthy portfolio. artist crossing over and being accepted by the American market; they’re in the big The transformation of the building, which is ten minutes from the Las Vegas time. Odds On studio manager, producer and engineer Robert Ferrari says that the Strip, has been remarkable given that they started originally with one small studio Americans have historically regarded Vegas as ‘the place where acts came to die and a 48-channel SSL 9000. ‘The CD manufacturing took up everybody’s time and and retire’ yet he acknowledges that that attitude is out of date as it’s long been a energy and after we changed management we sat down and asked precisely what happening entertainment venue and destination with a culture all of its own. sort of business we wanted to be in. We honed it down to studios and the record ‘I moved to Vegas originally for family reasons but then I saw a scene starting business and within four months of that change of management we had redesigned to emerge,’ he explains. ‘Since then we’ve had The Killers, Panic at the Disco, and the building and hired Carl Yanchar.’ some lesser acts coming through. The town is spawning talent, which means that With the offices and the original studio at the front of the building, Yanchar’s there’s got to be more to follow. When it’s one act and then nothing happens for design essentially built in to the 7000sqft warehouse that was behind it. There’s ten years — that’s an anomaly. When you have two or three right up the skirt of now a tracking room with a the biggest Duality in the US at 96 channels, a mixing the other one — something is going on.’ room with the original 9000 expanded to 80 channels, and the original studio now Aside from Odds On there’s also the established Studio at The Palms in Las houses a Matrix and is used for edits and overdubs. There’s also a finished acoustic Vegas, so the city now has a studio community and credibility as a recording space ready to house a mastering studio when an appropriate engineer is hired. destination, according to Robert. ‘There’s a certain destination factor,’ he says.

There’s a lot of space including lounges, relaxation areas, a tech room and ‘I grew up in LA and worked in studios there, I had country artist Blake Shelton some beautifully appointed live areas for the control rooms with fantastic line-ofhere for a week in our old SSL room before the expansion. At the end of the week sight between them. ‘We’re into environments; studios have lost having multiple he came out to thank us and he added that now he could say he went to Vegas environments,’ says Robert pointing out large booths housed within live areas that and made a record. It used to be “Now I can say I went to Hollywood and made a are big enough to house a whole band. record” but those attitudes are changing. The rest of the world perceives us in Vegas The two new control rooms are dominated by pairs of enormous freestanding differently to how we have perceived ourselves in the past.’

Allen Sides Ocean Way monitors. ‘We chose the Duality because I’m seeing a lot of The Odds On story goes back quite a few years and some might remember it young engineers coming up that use DAWs more and more and they want analogue being launched in the first instance as a full-service facility compete with a CD/DVD output or analogue tracking capabilities and they really want to use the workstations,’ replication plant. Eighteen months ago a change of management and a long hard he explains. ‘This new SSL does both. You can do large format stuff on it or hit the look at themselves brought the turnaround that was necessary. button and it becomes a HUI device. A guy who is not that analogue-savvy feels just

Odds On Records & Studios

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FACILITY

as comfortable in the room and has all the same bells and whistles. I see that this is where things are going.’

The Matrix room has a role in the facility’s plan. ‘One of the things a studio has to look at, because of budgetary constraints, is workflow. New artists can’t always afford to stay in a big room but they can come in here. There’s a live room so you can do overdubs and you can sit here and do all your vocal edits at a much cheaper price.’

‘The goal here is to not have any down time,’ states Robert. ‘You offer demo rates when there are three days of downtime for acts that are starting out and see what happens with them. It’s that old record company model again: let’s make something better than a demo and see if it hits. In the small room we do a lot of hip-hop stuff as there are a lot of local guys and we like to think we’ve got the cream of them using us. It’s never just about the big stars; you have to do both.’

In keeping with those old school principles, they employ in-house engineers.

Anyone recording at the facility gets guidance from two leading lights: three-time Grammy award-winning James ‘Bonzai’ Caruso, who is chief audio engineer and in-house producer, and multiplatinum engineer Sean O’Dwyer. Caruso is best known for his work with Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Mary J Blige and Missy Elliot. O’Dwyer has engineered everyone from Pink Floyd and Randy Newman to Blink 182 and Scott Grimes.

‘Besides having great gear and great rooms, you have to have great quality people who can offer the best in customer service,’ explains Robert. ‘At Odds On Records & Studios, you don’t get some level-one Pro Tools guy to try and make your record. You get someone who has not only made albums, but someone who has done so with

May/June 2009

much success, whether it be platinum or Grammy winning. You end up walking out of here with an even better product than you were expecting.’

Robert believes the timing is good for Odds On as they are tapping into a seam of talent that acknowledges the studio Ferrari and O’Dwyer. again in its rightful place as the crucible of creativity.

‘We’ve hit the point where guys with their Pro Tools rigs at home finally realise “My career’s not going anywhere and my recordings don’t sound like I wanted them to — I need to go to professionals again”. Any DAW at home is an amazing writing tool but you’re not going to make your record on it, you need to use professionals to do that. We’ve seen that with guys who have come in with a certain number of tracks and they go: “I’m not keeping any of this but here’s the song. Will you work with me from there?” That’s positive to me.’ n

Contact odds on records & recording, us: Website: www.odds onrecording.com

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GEAR

Products Equipment introductions and announcements.

Riedel MediorNet fibre network

Riedel has unveiled MediorNet as ‘the first step’ into fibrebased real-time signal transport solutions for uncompressed multichannel HD/SD video, audio, intercom and data.

MediorNet combines signal transport, routing and signal processing and conversion into one integrated real-time network. It is not designed just for simple point-to-point links but offers a real network solution with signal routing, allowing the user to send any incoming signal to any output or even to multiple outputs with a mouse-click or by a router control system. Each MediorNet mainframe provides a router for 32 x 32 720p/1080i signals, 184 x 184 SD-SDI signals, and 27,000 x 27,000 AES signals.

MediorNet has an open network topology, supporting ring, star, daisy-chain or any combination of these. It offers Link Cards with and without integrated CWDM multiplexing to network MediorNet mainframes with a bandwidth of up to 153Gbit/s on a single fibre link. A MediorNet fibre link always consists of duplex fibre to allow bi-directional signal transport. MediorNet‘s standard fibre transceivers have an optical budget of 18dB minimum, allowing for distances of up to 40km, with transceivers for longer distances available optionally. MediorNet’s routing algorithm looks for the shortest path to transport a signal and optimises the bandwidth of all fibre links available.

Significantly, MediorNet also includes software-based processing and conversion on board. The open structure of the software permits the integration of future processing and conversion tools from Riedel or third party manufacturers supporting the MediorNet standard, without any changes to the hardware.

Current features include a broadcast quality HD/SD Up/ Down/Cross convertor with interlacing/de-interlacing, up-/ down scaling, frame synchronisation and aspect ratio conversion (ARC). MediorNet provides a Multiviewer and a Test Pattern Generator and Text/Graphics Insertion and an Audio/Data Embedder/De-Embedder feature are to follow soon.

MediorNet is configured, controlled and monitored by MediorWorks software, which is Java-based. All MediorNet Cards provide signal monitoring and link status information, which can be monitored via the MediorWorks software, status LEDs on the cards and SNMP network management systems.

Riedel’s RockNet 100 is described as a cost-effective, 3-in-1 audio interface bundled with an expansion card for Yamaha digital mixing consoles. The audio interface combines the input and output sections of three RockNet 300 devices into one 19-inch 3u digital stage-box. Beyond digital multicore

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Spotlight: Calrec Calrec Audio’s Apollo is its most powerful console yet with more than twice as much processing power as its Alpha platform.

Apollo relies on Bluefin2, the next generation of its Bluefin high-density signal processing. At 48kHz, Bluefin2 gives Apollo up to 1020 channel processing paths, 128 programme buses, 96 IFB/track outputs and 48 auxiliaries.

At 96kHz, Apollo affords 510 channel processing paths, 64 programme buses, 48 IFB/track outputs and 24 auxiliaries.

Apollo features a second dynamics section in each channel, more than 70 minutes of assignable delay, and three independent APFL systems for multiple operator use. As with all Calrec designs, the facilities do not share resources and are available to the user at all times. Processing, power supplies, and I-O routing are all contained in an 8u chassis.

The Apollo control surface has OLED displays, touchscreens, and light-emitting knobs for ‘impossible-tomiss’ feedback about function and status. Individual operators can configure their own distinctive operational settings. In assign mode, the console mirrors the assign panels used on previous Calrec designs. In channel strip mode, the panels are configured to resemble an analogue design.

The Apollo is equipped with a dedicated integrated router so its I-O functions can be performed by Calrec’s networking system Hydra2, which uses high capacity 8192 x 8192 crosspoint routers and makes available a variety of I-O units to provide analogue, AES, MADI, SDI, and Dolby E formats. All use copper or fibre connectivity and can be fitted with GPIO cards. Console routers can be connected together to form large networks and standalone routers will also be available.

The desk has automatic hot-swap redundancy systems in DSP, control processor, router, power supplies, and connections.

Calrec has announced a close technology partnership with Riedel Communications. The partnership includes the integration of Riedel Artist intercom functionality into the Apollo, as well as the integration of the Hydra2 audio routing network into Riedel’s fibre network solution MediorNet. Apollo features comprehensive Artist intercom integration, which allows the control surface to show Artist intercom control panels directly on the fader control cells. Apollo can assign up to 124 buttons with full Artist functionality to any place on the console. Individual operators can configure their own operational settings, including the position of the intercom panel. www.calrec.com applications RockNet 100 gives access to RockNet digital audio network solutions.

It offers 16 line/microphone inputs (with 48V) and eight line outputs and the audio interface has the same preamps as the RockNet-300-series with a gain range of -66dB to 6dB in 1dB steps. With a transport capacity of up to 80 channels RockNet 100 is especially suited for smaller setups. The connection between the RockNet audio interface and the RockNet expansion card for Yamaha consoles is via Cat5 with a redundant ring topology.

RockNet 100 modules can be integrated into any RockNet 300 installation. The RockNet RN.141.MY expansion card for digital Yamaha consoles enables full remote control of all connected RockNet modules.

The Artist 5000 panel series is described as a very cost-effective matrix intercom solution with the full functionality of Riedel’s digital matrix intercom panels. The panels are available with marker strips or with 8-character, high-contrast LCD displays, which show the label for each talk key. The control panels with LCD-display are equipped with a ‘shift’ page, doubling the number of keys to 16.

The enclosure allows the panel to be rack-mounted, wallmounted or used on a desktop. Connection to any Artist or Performer matrix is achieved digitally via AES3 on Cat5.

The Actor intercom interface allows intelligent trunking between Riedel Artist Digital Matrix Intercom systems and third-party intercom installations, including all point-to-point

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connections with port alpha transfer and tally as well as group calls and conferences (partylines).

Actor operates as an interface between the two systems and shows the local resources of the Riedel Artist Digital Matrix Intercom to the third-party system as if they were an integral part of that system and vice versa. The system is selfconfiguring and auto-senses the number of available audio connections and understands the ‘language’ and functions of third party intercoms. Riedel says this helps to secure previous intercom investments and enables customers to move to future intercom installations with an Artist Digital Matrix Intercom solution from Riedel. www.riedel.net

Genelec 1038CF Genelec’s 1038CF 3-way active monitor is based on the full range 1038B 3-way and is a response to customer demand for the same mid/ high performance in a compact package.

The 1038CF’s main features are a very flat enclosure depth of only 235mm and dual 8-inch longthrow bass drivers.

May/June 2009

GEAR The company’s 1038B model, with low end response down to 30Hz, has always been praised for its even dispersion characteristics in the mid/high spectrum. With many audio production rooms often being relatively small and most multichannel environments using a subwoofer, the 1038CF has been designed to have a limited bass response, with a -2.5dB point at 57Hz, as the focus is on mid/high performance.

The system should be used in combination with a subwoofer in stereo or multichannel applications.

The system has a built in amplifier delivering 420W into two 8-inch drivers, 130mm proprietary Genelec midrange driver and a 25mm metal dome tweeter loaded into a DCW. The system is capable of delivering SPLs of 124dB maximum peak acoustic output per pair at 1m measured with music material.

The 8020A 2-way active monitor has been updated to the 8020B. The basic change in the B model is the addition of a mains power switch now located on the enclosure’s rear panel.

The rotary front panel control is used for sound level adjustment only. The audio signal can still be muted (the front LED stays on) in turning the front panel volume knob fully anticlockwise, but actual mains power is only switched off using the rear panel on/off power switch which turns the front LED on/off. Along with this change, the second rear-mounted XLR connector has been removed. www.genelec.com

More A-T lifetime Warranties Audio-Technica has extended its Lifetime Wa r r a n t y — currently only offered on its 40 Series studio microphones — to the Artist Elite and Artist Series live-oriented microphones.

The free-of-charge warranty (the longest offered by any microphone manufacturer) covers all wired Artist Elite and Artist Series models.

The Lifetime Warranty will apply to new Artist Elite and Artist

Series wired microphones purchased from authorised AudioTechnica resellers and registered on-line at www.audio-technica.com/warranty from 1 May 2009.

A-T’s ATH-M35 monitor headphones for studio, field recording, broadcast and live sound have a foldable design for storage in a rugged storage pouch.

They employ a low-profile, closedback design with neodymium magnets and a frequency response of 20Hz-20kHz. They have an adjustable cushioned headband and come with a gold-plated stereo 3.5mm connector with strain relief on a 3.4m of cable and a screwon ¼-inch adapter. www.audio-technica.com

www.schoeps.de/showroom/

Delec Oratis product family Delec’s digital Oratis product family is intended primarily to serve as building blocks for custom intercom systems, as the new components can equally build a networked commentary system or a combination of the two.

Oratis works at 24-bit, 48kHz with an internal resolution of 32 bits. The backbone of each Oratis system is at least one Matrix Frame — a full-summing digital audio and control-data router.

A new feature is network capability on managed Gigabit Ethernet and existing facility networks can form the basis of an Oratis installation. In all new Oratis boards, FPGAs replace conventional signal paths allowing changes to be implemented quickly and at low cost by simply reprogramming the software.

In the past Oratis was a pure intercom system whereas now a networked commentary system can be created using largely the same components. A commentator terminal has all the gain, mixing and processing facilities for three commentators and like all other modules it is connected to an Oratis Matrix Frame via Gigabit Ethernet. www.delec.de

May/June 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

Pyramix V6.1 debuts Many new features make their debut in Pyramix V6.1 as the result of Pyramix user requests and some of have been made possible by the extra processing power afforded by the MassCore processing engine. Samplerate conversion of files can now take place in real time, permitting the playback of audio files recorded at different sample rates to that of the main project without the need for an off-line sample-rate conversion first.

Other much-requested features introduced include the MT ASIO Bridge, which allows the output from ASIO audio

applications to be input directly into Pyramix’s mix engine and vice versa, zero-latency direct monitoring for musicians when overdubbing, a peak logger that notes and time-stamps waveform levels above a user-definable threshold on a trackby-track basis, and a new colour scheme for the fader caps in Pyramix’s mixer that allows users to determine mixer channel type (whether an input channel, effects return, aux send, or master) at a glance.

Reflecting its use in live concert recording applications, Pyramix now has a Safety Recording mode that disables the on-screen transport controls ensuring that live recordings cannot be interrupted by mouse or keyboard. V6.1 sees the debut of a new, highly efficient Pyramix waveform display file format, .PK2, which allows the workstation to display waveforms in real time as they are being recorded. Real-time waveform display is available for all audio formats, from 16-bit PCM to DXD and 1-bit DSD files. www.merging.com

Sennheiser evolution wireless G3

Sennheiser has launched G3, presenting new 100, 300 and 500 G3 series, as well as the 300 IEM G3 wireless monitoring system and ENG sets for reporters and filmmakers. The transmitters can be synchronised with the receivers via an infrared interface, the frequency management function makes more compatible frequencies available and all third-generation series now have a switching bandwidth of 42MHz. The system’s audio range now extends down to 25Hz and all series now have a Soundcheck Mode, which was previously reserved for the 500 Series. Soundcheck Mode can be operated even during a show: the audio level and field strength level are continuously measured, with the receiver recording the maximum values for AF and the minimum values for RF. The equaliser from the 500 Series is now fitted to all series.

The operating menu is separated into User and Advanced levels allowing the most important functions to be accessed quickly. The User level contains the selection of the frequency presets and the audio level, the Advanced level is reserved for direct frequency selection, reset to factory settings and — for the 300 and 500 Series — synchronisation and warning settings. All portable transmitters and receivers can be powered by standard or rechargeable packs.

The 300 and 500 Series are fitted with an Ethernet interface for connection to a PC with Sennheiser’s Wireless Systems Manager software. To improve multichannel capability, the standard output power in both series can be reduced from 30mW to 10mW, making it possible to accommodate even more channels in a given frequency range. www.sennheiser.co.uk

Cadac new lines Cadac has a new-look product line-up. The Live1 Series represents the first of three new compact analogue consoles — ‘providing the hallmark Cadac quality within a fullyspecified budget console’. There’s also a LiveWire 32/8 digital multicore stagebox and breakout system and the first production unit from the Cadac Classic 19-inch rackmount series of mic preamps, equalisers and effects units based on the audio circuitry from Cadac’s heritage products.

The Live1 Series incorporates many of the features associated with Cadac’s large-scale theatre and touring desks. Available in 16:4:2, 24:4:2 and 32:4:2 formats, facilities include input channels with a new mic amp design, individual phantom power and high pass filter switching, 4-band EQ with shelving high and low bands, PFL and Mute, 100mm faders with signalpresent and overload indicators, six auxes switchable pre/ post in pairs and 60mm aux master faders. There are four subgroups, four stereo inputs, six returns (four with sends to aux 5/6), two stereo returns on 100mm faders with sends to subgroups and aux 5/6, LR Master Output section with dual outputs and a talkback section.

The Cadac Classic ME2 2-channel mic preamp mixer has two independent audio paths, each with dedicated mic preamp and 4-band fully parametric EQ. Each path has balanced inserts, switchable pre- or post-EQ, in addition to balanced auto-compensating analogue outputs. An AES-3 output is also provided. Multiple ME2 units can be bus-linked together to create a small format multichannel console, with each audio path equipped with dedicated level/pan controls as well as mute and PFL. www.cadac-sound.com

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May/June 2009

GEAR

Lots of SPL

SPL has introduced two new high-end units, a three-in-one box for guitarists, and a bundle of its Analog Code plug-ins.

SPL has opened its proprietary modular system to API 500compatible modules. The SPL Rackpack 500 frame offers eight module slots to host four SPL and four API 500 modules.

The last three positions are variations on the original Pentode 2 settings. As the overdrive section has an additional 4dB gain, an extra overdrive position has been added which halves the available overdrive gain.

Artist MC Transport

The latest addition to the Euphonix Artist Series of controllers is the MC Transport, which has a high resolution optical jog wheel and shuttle ring with programmable soft keys and transport controls.

It ships with a set of preprogrammed soft The Little Bustard valve summing mixer has been designed keys for all major audio and video applications. All soft keys, to complement the Fat Bustard valve summing mixer by transport controls and numeric keys are also fully customisable increasing the number of inputs channels to 28 or to be used and can be easily programmed. The slim-line MC Transport independently. Features include 16 input channels arranged connects to your workstation via Ethernet and can be used as six stereo pairs with fixed gain at unity level with on/off either standalone or connected to additional Euphonix MC switches, four mono inputs with mute switches and pan pots, Mix and/or MC Control controllers to create a larger surface which can be defeated by another switch adding an extra 6dB (up to four MC Mixes, one MC Transport and one MC Control of gain. The master output section has independent left and can be connected). right 31-position output pots with a range of –17dB to +2dB.  www.euphonix.com www.thermionicculture.com

With the Frontliner, SPL has extended its range of channel strips with a full-featured, high-end preamp and processing channel. A special feature is its ‘analogue plug-in’ processing stages. The individual I-Os of de-esser, EQ, and compressor allow for independent inserts.

The Auditor is a headphone amplifier based on SPL’s proprietary 120V technology.

Compared to the company’s fullfeatured, 120V monitoring headphone amplifier Phonitor, the Auditor is a more straightforward concept.

The Cabulator is a combination of variable power soak, speaker cabinet simulator and DI box. Suited for live and studio applications, the guitarist can play through a fully torqued amp without high volumes.

On the software side, SPL is offering its first bundle of Analog Code plug-ins of Transient Designer, TwinTube Processor, Bass Ranger, Vox Ranger and Full Ranger. www.spl.info

Event Opal

PreSonus StudioLive

Digital mixing console

Eventide PitchFactor Harmonizer stompbox

Apple Logic Studio DAW software

Apple MacBook Pro Laptop

Anniversary Culture Vulture

Røde NT2000

Røde NT55

Røde M1

Studio condenser microphone

Instrument condenser microphones

Dynamic vocal microphone

May/June 2009

Sony MDR7506 Studio headphones

Universal Audio UAD-2 Solo Laptop Powered plug-in system

To celebrate its 11th anniversary, Thermionic Culture has announced the Culture Vulture Anniversary Limited Edition.

The Anniversary model is based on the company’s standard Culture Vulture but is far more ‘radical’ for guitar and bass applications. Production will be limited to 80 units and will have the front panel finished in Thermionic red.

The valves selected for the anniversary edition are Mullard and Philips. The two input valves are Mullard M8100/CV4010, these are very high gain, low noise versions of the EF95 and provide better coupling for guitar and bass inputs with an even fatter warmer sound. The distortion valve is different too; the M8196/CV4011 is a low noise version of the 6AS6 distortion valve used in the standard Vulture. A single Philips ECG type 5963 double triode valve is used as the output.

The distortion type selector switch now has ten positions instead of the standard three, the first two are triode and pentode as on the standard Vulture, with the next five all being Pentode specifically designed for guitars and basses.

Active monitors

HHB CDR-882

DualBurn CD recorder

Universal Audio 710 Tube/solid state preamp

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GEAR

AnaMod stereo limiter

AnaMod’s AM670 stereo limiter is based on the technology of its AM660 500-series compressor introduced last year. Both the AM660 and AM670 were created by the AnaMod Process in which mathematical models were created from the classic 1950s variable-mu 670 limiter and these models were used to synthesise the analogue hardware of the AM670. The AM670 duplicates the Lateral/Vertical (mid/side) modes of compression while adding a stereo link function. www.anamodaudio.com

Vorsis presets

KT Creative comps and gates

A new page on the Vorsis website contains presets created by Vorsis users and the Vorsis development laboratory: www.vorsis.com/presets.html Each preset creates a certain on-air effect and can be used as is or as a starting point to develop a signature sound for a station. New presets will be added on a regular basis. Vorsis also offers support from processing experts to help fine-tune customers’ station sound. The Vorsis line consists of seven audio processor products targeted at FM on-air, AM on-air, HD/DAB, internet streaming, and studio microphones. www.wheatstone.com

Klark Teknik’s DN540 Creative Quad Compressor claims ease of use and minimum set up time for ‘excellent results’.

It has a Harmonic Enhancement presence control, manual controls for all functions contributing to output levels, bypass, solo and other switches with status LEDs, channel linking with true power summing, external sidechain inputs and balanced I-Os. The DN530 Creative Quad Gate has ‘Transient Accenting’ as a means of enhancing the attack envelope. This can provide up to 12dB of additional transient energy and its primary application is to provide additional impact on drums and percussion instruments and can be applied independently of the gating function.

Features include an advanced band-pass side chain filter, rotary controls for all envelope characteristics and variable range, external key inputs and ducking facilities, bypass, solo and other major switches, and balanced I-Os. www.klarkteknik.com

Waves H-Comp and H-Delay The Waves Hybrid Line draws on its console/processor models (SSL 4000 Collection, V-Series, The API Collection, The JJP Collection) and has resulted in a new series of plug-ins that blends the ‘best of yesterday’s sound with today’s technology’. The Hybrid Line offers the colour and character of classic analogue hardware processors with the features and flexibility of Waves digital plug-ins. The first two products are the H-Comp Hybrid Compressor and the H-Delay Hybrid Delay.

H-Comp combines the modelled behaviour of transformers, valves, and transistors with a Wet/Dry mix option for parallel compression, analogue modelled release behaviour, a transient pass-through control, a BPM sync release function, multiple analogue character modes, output limiter/clipper modes and external sidechain support.

From slap-back echo, ping-pong delay and tempo-sync with modulation, to filtering, flanging, and phasing, H - D e l a y delivers vintage and PCM42-style effects. Features include a delay time of up to 3500ms (TDM), variable pitch delay time behaviour, multiple analogue character modes, infinite feedback support, LFO-controlled pitch modulation, a LoFi mode, and tap and BPM synchronisation.

H-Comp and H-Delay are Native and TDM. Waves Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Mercury V6 owners covered by the Waves Update Plan receive H-Comp and H-Delay at no additional charge. www.waves.com

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May/June 2009

GEAR

Golden Age Music 1660 The Golden Age Music 1660 is the first product in the company’s highend line and is an all-tube, variable-mu compressor containing 16 valves. Eight of these valves are a dualtriode with a performance close to the classic 6386 tube and the unit can also be ordered with 6386 tubes at an extra cost.

The 1660 has a fully balanced signal path and uses eight Lundahl transformers. Four of these are used for the all-tube sidechain section and a high-pass filter can be inserted in the sidechain. The regulated power supply is built in an external box.

Most variable-mu compressors have a smooth and more-or-less invisible compression characteristic and a transparent sound quality. This is also true of the 1660 but it can also be set for ‘character’. The Overdrive control can add colour and the different side chain controls can be set to provoke pumping and other compression artefacts.

The DP-1 preamp from TK Pro Audio is a hybrid of vintage and modern circuits as it contains a germanium stage, silicon transistors and integrated circuit, all in the same box. The input stage is built around a Lundahl transformer and an IC that operates in class-A. The preamp section is followed by a germanium unity-gain stage for colouration. Finally the DP-1 has two different output stages that the user can chose between: a transformerless IC-based output stage and a discrete transformer-balanced class-A stage, built around a Carnhill output transformer.

With the IC-based output stage, the DP-1 is said to be flat from 20Hz–100kHz. The vintage class-A mode activates the discrete, transformer-balanced output stage for a fatter low-end, more midrange character and a roll-off that starts at 20kHz. The germanium mode is rich in harmonics.

TK Audio’s BC-1 has evolved from one of the most famous bus compressors from the mid 80s and uses the latest generation of VCAs from That Corporation.

The unit has as a blend function and the choice between dual or single sidechain detectors. In the single mode the left and right signal are summed ahead of the detector instead of after and this means that the centre of the stereo signal will be 6dB higher when it hits the threshold detector. www.goldenagemusic.se

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ART mics A R T ’s M - S e r i e s o f microphones includes three wide diaphragm, side-address FET models and one compact format ribbon model.

The M-One is a cardioid wide diaphragm FET condenser with a stand mount adaptor, the M-Two adds a switchable high-pass filter (100Hz or 200Hz) and –6dB or –12dB pad and comes with a heavy-duty cradle and aluminium flightcase, while the M-Three is a multipattern wide diaphragm FET with the filters, pads, cradle and aluminium flightcase. The M-Five has a low-mass, low-tension 2micron aluminium ribbon element and a fig-8 pattern and comes with a cradle and flightcase. www.artproaudio.com

Optimod 8585 Digital Surround Orban’s Optimod 8585 Digital Surround Audio Processor solves the problems that HD 5.1 and 7.1 stereo broadcasters have had with local commercial and insertion loudness compared to the network content. Starting with the technology of the Optimod 6300 two-channel processor, the 8585 incorporates multichannel processing that reflects the latest psychoacoustic research into loudness perception.

The 8585 has 2-band and 5-band audio processing and with compression ratio controls and a mastering-quality look-ahead peak limiter it is said to be ideal for mastering audio in broadcast productions as well as productions for DVD and Blu-ray. It is built on Orban’s flagship hardware platform and features a GUI displayed on a quarter-VGA active matrix colour LCD. www.orban.com

May/June 2009

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21

REVIEW

Sonar V-Studio 700 After a time when the constituent parts of a digital production system became increasingly disparate and disconnected the mood has been returning to more integrated and singlebrand solutions. ROB JAMES looks at a studio-in-a-box.

W

onderful and liberating though DAWs are, or at any rate can be, there has always been a problem — compatibility.

First there is the obvious question of what PC (or Mac) will work best with your chosen DAW software at any point in time (and this is a shifting target) then there is the rest of the gubbins to consider, the hardware that turns PC and software into a complete audio and maybe video system. Of course, there are plenty of vendors vying for your custom when it comes to audio interfaces and control surfaces, but then, sooner or later, you are likely to find yourself in the middle of arguments as to whose fault it is when something doesn’t work as it should.

On the surface

Therefore there is a considerable attraction to buying a complete system from one vendor; there is just one butt to kick if something goes pear-shaped. Some while ago Cakewalk, author of the well regarded Sonar DAW family, became part of the Roland empire. Now billed as ‘Cakewalk by Roland’ a significant result of this alliance is the Sonar V Studio 700 which addresses the studio-in-a-box issue with very serious intent.

Not only do you get the full Producer version of Sonar V8 and the full version of the Rapture wavetable soft synth, but also the VS-700C dedicated control console and the VS-700R rackmount interface box. That isn’t the end of the story though because

The clear console surface is divided logically by function. Actual layout is somewhat unusual as are some of the controls. Three LCD screens in the mini upstand provide information about the controls beneath. The right-hand side is occupied by the red LED time display which also has USB, I-O indicator LEDs and the Timecode button that switches between SMPTE and bars and beats.

Each of the eight channel identical strips, arranged in two blocks of four, has a rotary encoder with a switch at the top followed by Mute, Solo Arm and Select buttons. The LED level meter has a mere five segments but is still extremely useful since it draws attention to things that need looking at on the much more comprehensive on-screen meters. Faders are 100mm throw touch-sensitive motorised devices. Not the nicest I’ve ever encountered but reasonably smooth and quiet in operation with adjustable touch-sense. To the left of the fader strips a column of buttons relate to the strips. Assign determines which parameter is controlled by the strip encoders. Functions available vary according to which Fader View mode is active — Track, Bus, Main or I-O control — selected on the bottom three buttons. Below Assign are so-called ‘Rude’ Mute, Solo and Arm buttons. These light whenever a strip has one of these functions selected, while pressing the button cancels the function globally. This is especially useful where channels with these functions selected may no longer be on the surface.

Next down are the automation buttons, Write/Off and Offset. Used with the Shift and Command modifier keys these give access to a range of other useful automation commands. Fader bank plus and minus buttons move the current view up or down in 8-fader blocks or one at a time when used with the Shift key. To the right of the eight

22

the 700R is also home to a full-blown Roland Fantom VS hardware synthesiser with expansion slot. This is not optional but an integral part of the system.

So, for a non-musician, you could argue that this is adding to the not insignificant cost for no obvious benefit. However, although I have no pretensions to musicianship I still value hardware synthesis — muso or not I’ve been using synths for a very long time to produce ‘doom tones’, stings, effects and the odd attempt at ‘music’ for picture.

The manufacturer does not maintain a list of tested PCs but the requirements are not unduly onerous. Stick with an Intel-based box of recent vintage with a Core2Duo or Core2Quad, at least 2Gb of RAM, 7200RPM hard drives and a decent USB2 implementation and you shouldn’t go far wrong.

Sonar supports 32-bit Windows XP or Vista and 64-bit Vista only. I used an i7-based box with 6Gb of RAM running 64-bit Vista Ultimate. To be honest, despite the increased memory addressing capability of 64-bit Vista, there are still too many limitations in terms of plug-ins that have yet to be rewritten and other bits of hardware and software lacking in rewrites or drivers to make it truly worthwhile.

Installation from scratch is lengthy, due to the sheer quantity of goodies, but not unduly onerous.

Roland has elected to use USB2 for the audio and control interface. I for one applaud this since I have had far fewer problems with USB2 than with FireWire. The downside is capacity. You won’t get the 48 I-Os claimed by some FireWire interfaces but the VS-700R gives you a respectable total of 19 inputs and 24 outputs at 44.1kHz/48kHz, reducing to 15 and 20 respectively at 88.2kHz/96kHz, and further reduction at 192kHz; it’s more than adequate for most purposes. While we’re in the area, changing sampling rates is a bit of a faff. Although there is a nice friendly knob on the front marked Sample Rate the actual procedure is quite involved. First close Sonar, turn off the power to the rack unit and console then use the knob to select the required rate. This is followed by switching back on again, starting Sonar and ignoring any Audio Driver Error messages, then selecting the required rate within the application. I feel sure this could be simplified.

The 2u VS-700R rack unit looks smart in black and silver. The console end-cheeks, like the silver surround, are plastic rather than alloy despite the

channel strips the Master Fader has global Flip and I-O Control buttons above it.

Since the surface falls into the ‘assignable strip controls’ category, at top left you get 12 rotary encoders with push switches arranged in four columns of three plus 10 buttons. Display determines which row’s parameters are displayed on the LCD. The four ‘On’ EQ/Send buttons enable EQ or Sends for the column depending on whether the EQ button is currently active. EQ used with the Command modifier opens the EQ property page. ACT enables ACT mode for the window with focus. Page left and right step through the selected track’s EQ Send or ACT parameters. Below the Channel Strip Control Section, five rows of four buttons comprise the Access section. It is here that Views can be opened and closed, focus can be shifted and utility functions invoked. The bottom row contains the modifier keys, Shift, Control, Alt and Command. The top 16 keys are assignable to user functions.

To the right of the faders the transport section has decent, internally illuminated transport keys and the jog/shuttle wheel, which also controls Zoom level and scroll.

It can be used for editing and there are cursor keys around the periphery. Above you will find the Record/Edit section and to the right, the Project Section. Above these are the T-Bar and Joystick sections with LFE send pot and View button and finally, top right, the Audio output section with Phone 1 and 2 and Monitor level pots, a Mute button and two Sub buttons to route the Sub outputs to the headphones. On the front of the arm rest there are two headphone sockets with a volume pot and an Aux jack input with Normal/hi-Z switch for instruments and a gain pot. Around the back there is just the LCD contrast knob, on/off switch and two sockets for footswitches used, for example, to control Play and Record. Two further sockets connect the VS-700R or go direct to the PC in standalone mode.

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May/June 2009

REVIEW countersunk hex bolts attaching them to the console.

The console surface is a steel plate in familiar Roland blue and the whole air is that of a professional and well thought-out workspace and a cut above most other control surfaces. There are internally illuminated buttons that make you want to press them and the shaft encoders and other controls are equally sensuous, with the possible exception of the jog-wheel. It’s not that it’s bad, just that it could be better. Having been spoilt by perfectly weighted chunks of metal, this plastic number is OK but doesn’t win any cigars. On the same basis, the faders are fine but not exceptional. The T-Bar, on the other

hand, is delicious. More commonly found on vision switchers/mixers the T-Bar is a much underestimated control in audio circles. Here it performs multiple duties as a front/rear fader, alpha adjustment for Sonar’s X-ray window function or, by default, control of the first usable ACT (Active Controller Technology) parameter. There is another reason for its presence. The VS-700C can also be used in conjunction with an Edirol video editing system, such as the DV-7DL, whereupon audio channels 5-8 and the master fader, transport controls, including the jog/shuttle wheel, Record/Edit tool section and, of course, the T-Bar itself can be used to control

Behind the scenes

It almost seems a shame to hide the VS-700R in a rack.

The front panel is informative, with LED indicators for USB connection to the host PC, Console connection, MIDI In and OUT, and Digital Audio In and Out, Sync Status, Monitor, Monitor Sub and Main Output, Outputs 1-10 and 8-segment bargraphs for Inputs 1-8 and Aux. A big Power switch is on the far right. Around the back you will find a plethora of connections. First up is a dedicated socket for the Console control connection with IEC power inlet below. MIDI in and out are followed by the USB2 connector to the host PC. Digital 2 In and out optical ADAT format Toslink sockets are followed by Digital 1 AES-EBU XLRs and SPDIF phonos. Word clock in and out are BNCs. Two rows of five jacks carry the ten outputs and a pair of XLRs deal with balanced Monitor Main with two jacks for Monitor Sub. Along the bottom eight mutually exclusive jacks and XLRs cater for the analogue inputs.

There is a digitally controlled mic preamp and compressor for all eight channels. These are controlled directly from the surface or from Sonar. On the top surface a flap secured by two screws give access to the ARX Fantom synthesiser expansion board socket and a DIP switch used for configuration. You need to power up in a specific order. Computer first, then the console followed by the rack, finally the monitor speaker amp(s).

If the I-O capacity really is too limited for your needs, then no problem. You can simply connect a second VS-700R to double the ASIO I-O capacity and give you a second Fantom. The extra unit connects to the host PC (on the same USB controller or via a USB2 hub) with a BNC Word clock cable linking the two units.

the editor. Alternatively, the VS-700C also supports V-Link over MIDI for audio video performance.

Software development has a little way to go. There are some inconsistencies in the console to Sonar interface. For example, some but not all of the Access Panel View buttons toggle the windows they relate to.

Others require you to use the Close button and I could only close Audiosnap with the mouse. I may well be missing the way to do it from the console but it is still inconsistent.

In Sonar the Track and Console views use colourcoding to indicate which tracks and buses are currently controlled by the VS-700C. Dubbed WAMI (Where Am I?) this is neat and clever. When used in conjunction with the strip locking facility WAMI really helps to keep track of what is going on in complex situations. The Fantom is inserted just like any other VSTi, but with the huge bonus of very low CPU overhead.

The V-Studio 700 is largely successful in its aim to be a complete studio in a box. The convertors are subjectively excellent and the ability to control analogue input gain and the compressors from the console is just the way it should be. The console is workmanlike in the best sense and I can easily envisage working with it on a daily basis. All this would count for nothing if the workstation software was not up to the job. Fortunately Sonar in version 8 has developed into a top flight DAW with plug-ins that stand comparison with the very best available.

Building on this estimable Cakewalk Sonar software base the Roland elements are exactly what you would expect, i.e. good looking, robust and effective.

A dedicated control surface is always going to be a better long-term proposition than a ‘one size fits all’.

The evidence is already clear to see and I have no doubt that, as user feedback rolls in, the synergy will increase still further. n

PROS

An over-used word but the V Studio 700 is unique; versatile in application; looks and feels professional.

CONS

A few logical inconsistencies; changing sample rate is a pain; jog wheel could be better.

Contact cakewalk, usa: Website: www.sonarvstudio.com

M-48 Breakthrough

Personal Mixing and Monitoring The M-48 offers performers flexible control over exactly what they want to listen to, providing the highest level of sound quality for headphones or IEMS (In-ear monitors), wedge and powered monitors.

A unique Ambient Microphone puts you in control of the mix while individual 16-channel and global EQ, limiter, local aux input and reverb make it ideal for tour, stage, broadcast and studio. Fully compatible with REAC Digital Snakes or M-400 V-Mixing solutions. www.rolandsg.co.uk or call 01792 702701

M-400 V-Mixer

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S-0816 / Cat5E / S-1608

S-4000 Digital Snake

REAC : Capture, Distribute, Mix and Record pristine 24-bit Multi-channel Audio over Cat5e and Fibre

May/June 2009

resolution

23

REVIEW

Brauner Valvet X Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the original Valvet, the X has been tweaked to be a bit special on vocals and solo instruments. Long-time Brauner appreciator JON THORNTON gets stuck into the matte black.

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ook on the Brauner website and you’ll see a nicely presented family tree of all of the company’s current designs. It’s notable for a few reasons — first it shows how the various products align in terms of what founder Dirk Brauner refers to as ‘natural’ or ‘charming’ sonic characteristics.

It also very clearly shows the brand DNA that exists from the daddy of all Brauner microphones, the mighty VM1. But perhaps most importantly it shows that, despite the company’s rapid growth in the last 13 years, there’s still evidence of new products being driven by the desire to innovate and tweak, rather than just consider the bottom line.

Of course, having an excuse to do so is always a bonus and in this case it’s celebrating the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the original Valvet microphone. It may be worth just recapping on the original for a while, as it may not be quite as well known as the ultra-high-end VM1/VMA, nor as (comparatively) ubiquitous as the FET-based Phantom and Phanthera ranges.

Introduced in 1998, the Valvet drew on Dirk Brauner’s experience with the first model in the Brauner range, the VM1. A large diaphragm, valve-based capacitor 24

microphone, the Valvet was an altogether more compact package and dispensed with the infinitely variable polar pattern of the VM1, opting instead for a choice between omni and a fairly tight cardioid pattern. In terms of response though, it was astonishingly similar to the VM1, exhibiting a natural and open response that gives a real sense of ‘being there’.

Knowing that some users want a little more ‘colour’ to the sound of a valve microphone, Brauner later developed the VMX — to all intents and purposes the functionality of the VM1 in terms of variable polar patterns but with a significantly different tonal response. And it’s actually the VMX that the Valvet X is most closely related to in terms of tonality.

The Valvet X is a compact, side addressed condenser with a form factor that will be familiar to those who have seen or used the Phanthera. It distinguishes itself from the original Valvet in terms of colour (matte black as opposed to nickel), and by the fact that it is a fixed pattern cardioid design with a single, centre terminated capsule. It ships in a sturdy aluminium flightcase that contains the microphone, suspension mount, external power supply unit and connecting cable.

I’m always impressed by the consistently high build quality of this manufacturer, which extends not only to the microphone itself but also to the suspension mount and indeed the power supply. This is nice to see, as so often these components seem like something of an afterthought. Connection from the microphone to the power supply is via a locking 8-pin connector — the cable itself is manufactured

by Swiss company Vovox. Microphone connection and XLR output are on the rear of the PSU, together with a three-position toggle switch marked H, L and S. This enables varying degrees of grounding or ground lifting on the XLR output to be set. H is a hard ground, L lifts the XLR’s ground, and S is a soft ground whereby the XLR’s ground is connected to the PSU ground via a decoupling capacitor. A useful function but in practice the switch positions made no difference in my particular situation. The front panel of the PSU simply has a power switch with accompanying LED indicator.

The published specs indicate an equivalent noise of <9dBA, a healthy sensitivity of 28mV/Pa and a maximum SPL of 142dB at 0.3% THD, which means that the lack of any pad switch shouldn’t really be an issue. Frequency response is quoted simply as being 20Hz–22kHz — it’s something of a matter of principle with Brauner that he doesn’t publish smoothed response curves, preferring people to judge microphones with their ears alone. So, duly powered up and left to settle for 15 minutes, I did just that.

The specs that are published marry very nicely with first impressions — an extremely quiet microphone with a nice healthy output level means that no preamp will struggle to marry with it. The fixed cardioid pickup is quite wide, which helps a great deal with what will inevitably be its primary application — recording vocals. On spoken voice, initial impressions of tonality are of a highly extended low frequency response — not lumpy but extremely revealing of the bottom two octaves.

This is coupled with a notably warm sounding low-mid range that catches and promotes some of resolution

the ‘gravel’ in a throaty voice. Unlike many valve microphones though, the high frequency extension is still there — not artificially exaggerated, but clear, detailed and accurate. The sum of all these parts is best described as a gutsy sound, but with plenty of air and space in it.

Moving on to sung vocals, and these characteristics are, if anything, even more pronounced. A little care needs to be taken in terms of distance on microphone as proximity effect can rapidly transform that low frequency extension into something overblown and unpleasant. Fortunately an extremely good level of rear rejection and very even off-axis response means that even when working at relatively long distances from the microphone, it still maintains a good level of focus and a very close-up sound.

While other microphones in the Brauner family have always seemed to be more comfortable with either male or female sung vocals, but not necessarily both, the Valvet X seems eminently well suited to both. With thinner voices it thickens things up nicely and with huskier voices it adds a nice sense of ‘air’ without ever making the low-mids sound too closed in.

Moving away from vocals, I tried the Valvet X in a number of other applications. With that LF extension in mind, I tried it on a kick drum (slightly off-axis and about 18 inches from the front skin) with results that surpassed my expectations. I’d expected a slightly uncontrolled sound, or one that simply picked up too much HF clutter, but the result was punchy, well balanced and eminently useable with just a touch of EQ and compression. On a bass guitar cab it performed in a similar fashion — loads of weight, some air and definition around the higher frequencies and some lovely warmth brought to the harmonics.

I’d hazard a guess that many prospective purchasers (UK£1850 + VAT) will view the Valvet X as primarily a vocal mic and it certainly excels in this regard. But the way in which it manages to sound flattering and accurate at the same time on a variety of sources makes it far more flexible than that. All of which goes to show that anniversaries are worth celebrating, and that Dirk Brauner’s predilection for constant tweaking and experimentation is something we should all be grateful for. n

PROS

Usual peerless build quality; a real ‘go-to’ vocal microphone; manages to combine ‘air’ and ‘guts’ at the same time; useful in many instrumental applications.

CONS

A little too much proximity effect for some applications; a high pass filter would be useful.

EXTRAS

Brauner’s Phanthera V adds switchable omni and fig-8 patterns to the original Phanthera’s cardioid pattern. There’s also a 10dB pad and phantom powering.

Completing the portfolio, Brauner has also released base models as the Phantom Classic basic and Phanthera basic mics that include more basic accessory equipment.

Contact brauner, germany Website: www.brauner-microphones.com UK, Home Service: +44 208 943 4949

May/June 2009

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REVIEW

TL Audio A2 stereo processor Black and chrome and combining the virtues of Class A and a driveable valve, the Ebony Series is attractive and sounds promising. JON THORNTON enjoys the drive on the A2.

T

L Audio’s Ebony Series is a range of processors that features discrete Class A electronics in the audio path together with a variable drive tube stage to harmonically enhance the signal if desired. The range currently comprises a two channel mic pre-amp/DI, a 16:2 summing mixer, a mono channel strip, and finally the A2 (UK£899 + VAT) stereo processor being looked at here. What’s on offer is essentially a stereo compressor and EQ together with that variable tube drive. Packed in a 2u the overall look is black and chrome, which could have ended up looking slightly tacky but it actually comes across as quite stylish.

The rear panel is simplicity itself with two balanced inputs and two balanced outputs on XLR. There is a slot here as well to install an optional DO2 card, which gives digital output in SPDIF at 44.1 or 48kHz sampling rates.

Centre stage on the front panel is a single illuminated VU meter, which seems a little strange for a stereo unit. Granted, there are individual peak LED indicators either side of the meter for the left and right channels, but only one meter. This can show you either input level or output level for the left or right channel, or gain reduction. What you’re looking at is determined by different permutations of pushbuttons located below the meter itself.

The remainder of the front panel is nicely laid out and feels very uncluttered and this is largely due to the fact that the A2 has been designed from the outset to process stereo signals. So there’s only one set of EQ controls, one set of compressor controls, and absolutely no sign of any form of stereo link function.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you using it for a single mono source but you can’t process two signals independently.

At first this annoyed me slightly, as it seemed so potentially inefficient, but as I used the A2 more and more it made much more sense. Working on a stereo source without having to constantly check settings across channels for EQ, or ensuring that the dynamics stages are linked was strangely liberating and helps to ensure that you’re concentrating on the sound rather than the operation of the device.

Starting from the left hand side you get an input Gain control offering +/-20dB of range. Directly above this are a pair of buttons allowing either of the two input channels to have their polarity reversed. Next in the signal path is the Tube Stage, which is controlled by a single pot and turning this drives the tube stage harder and introduces more (largely 2nd order) harmonic distortion. A pair of LEDs marked Drive illuminate progressively more brightly as the total THD added varies between 1% and 5%, and a pair of

26

peak LEDs illuminate if things start to get out of hand — typically when THD levels reach 10%. In use, this tube stage is really very useful, acting gradually on a signal and warming it up gently for the first threequarters of its travel, and then much more overtly in the last quarter. But even when cranked up quite high it manages to avoid sounding overly ‘gritty’ as some other units can tend too.

The EQ and compressor sections can be switched in and out of circuit independently, and the EQ can usefully be switched to be either pre or post the compressor, or taken out of the audio path and switched into the sidechain of the compressor. The EQ itself is a three-band affair with fixed shelving filters for HF and LF and a swept mid band. The turnover frequencies for the LF and HF bands are chosen sensibly at 80Hz and 12kHz respectively, while the mid band can roam between 150Hz and 7kHz with a fixed, fairly wide Q of 0.7. All three bands offer +/-15dB of boost. In use it’s a sweet sounding EQ section, which despite the fixed parameters in terms of frequency and Q is very effective at applying gentle EQ over an entire mix. Perhaps there are times when too much choice is simply a bad thing.

The compressor section is likewise an exercise in limiting your available options to some degree. You get fully variable Threshold, Ratio and Gain Makeup settings, and even a choice of a hard or soft knee function but the time constants are both fixed, with either a fast or slow setting available for both attack and release. For attack, the fast setting equates to 1ms and the long to 8ms, and for release the options are either 200ms or 2 seconds. Now, I can generally live with a choice of two attack times, but I do like to have a little more control of the release parameter than this so I was pleasantly surprised when this didn’t prove to be quite as problematic as I had anticipated. For gentle levelling it works well and imperceptibly on the resolution

slower settings, while there is still potential to use it to really pump a pair of room microphones on a drum kit quite aggressively. OK, it’s not flexible enough to really stamp on a single snare hit quickly enough and release in time to thicken up the sound, and it struggled to tame an errant electric bass line but for broadband mixes it’s not as limiting as it sounds.

All of which adds up to a unit that I had anticipated was going to be significantly lacking in flexibility but in practice turned out to be remarkably seductive.

When you take those component parts and add them together, the whole is a lot more than the sum of them. The A2 has clearly been designed with stereo mix processing in mind, and in this application it works extremely well. The discrete Class A circuitry is clean, quiet and very open sounding, the EQ nicely musical and the tube stage capable of warming up a mix without every sounding harsh or contrived. And even the compressor is more flexible than it might appear at first glance.

For somebody mixing in-the-box this would prove a useful tool to wrap a little analogue signal processing around the output or for anybody looking for an alternative mix bus compressor with some added features, and the flexibility, if pushed, to tackle other duties too. n

PROS

Tube drive works well and smoothly; nice, musical EQ; flexibility to switch EQ into sidechain.

CONS

Metering a little quirky; compressor time constants a little limiting for some applications.

EXTRAS

There are four units in the Ebony Series, all of which are assembled in England.

The A1 is a dual preamp/DI, the A3 a mono channel strip and the A4 is a 16:2 summing mixer in a 2u that has 16 balanced inputs on XLR and D-Sub with individual pan controls. The unit uses Discrete Class A circuitry throughout and also boasts the ability to activate an optional tube stage on the master bus.

The addition of balanced insert points on the master bus section means you can patch in a stereo compressor or EQ.

Contact tl audio, uk: Website: www.tlaudio.co.uk

May/June 2009

REVIEW

Neyrinck SoundCode For Dolby E Encode/Decode Neyrinck SoundCode For Dolby E is a Mac/PC software package enabling Dolby E encoding, decoding and monitoring. JIM BETTERIDGE contemplates the savings.

N

eyrinck SoundCode For Dolby E can run in Pro Tools as an AudioSuite or RTAS plugin or it can run as a standalone application.

It can open a 5.1 multichannel broadcast WAV file (MBWF) and spit out a Dolby E file about three times faster than real time. It can also monitor a Dolby E stream in real time, dynamically displaying details of its metadata, and (in its Audio Suite form within Pro Tools) decode a Dolby E file back into its MBWF also at triple speed (based on a 2.6GHz Mac Pro running OSX).

For those not yet entwined in the format, Dolby E allows up to eight channels of PCM audio and its attendant metadata to be encoded into a single AES pair. The eight channels can be virtually any combo of channel formats you can imagine, e.g. 8 x mono, 4 x stereo, LCRS + 2-mono, 5.1 + stereo etc, or just 5.1 alone (you don’t have to use all eight tracks). While all conceivable combinations are included in SoundCode and while many will have real applications in this multilingual, multiformat world, the one most likely to exercise readers of this magazine is Dolby Digital 5.1, which is mainly what I’ll be referring to here.

As more programmes are made in HD more of us are working in surround. And although Sony’s HDCAM-SR tape format (the de facto standard for HD television) provides a seemingly generous 12 digital audio tracks, these are nowhere near sufficient if you want to include an even modest array of deliverables in a 5.1 format.

For instance, we’re required to provide a Full mix, a dialogue/music/effects (DME) mix and a DE mix all in 5.1 plus Full mix and DME in LR stereo. That’d be 22 tracks as PCM. Originally, the only way to encode Dolby E was through Dolby’s DP571 rackmount processor: you run your six channels into its AES-EBU inputs and record its Dolby E output back into your DAW. Theoretically, you could record the Dolby E stream straight to tape but May/June 2009

the encoding process takes one frame and so it would be one frame late on tape whereas most broadcasters require it in-sync on tape. So for a one-hour programme, once you’d created your three 5.1 mixes (Full, DME and DE) you’d have three hours encoding plus an hour to lay them back to tape.

The actual process has other layers of complication too detailed to go into here (largely when there are 11th hour changes or fixes to do) but suffice it to say that the addition of Dolby E to a project will add more hours of extra work than you initially imagined and will hence tie up your DAW and studio for long periods of time.

So when Dolby launched its DP600 (reviewed Resolution V7.6), which offers five times real-time file-based Dolby E encoding plus a range of other useful processes it was a very attractive proposition. You can throw any number of files into its digital job bags across the network and return to your studio and its expensive DAW/controller to resume other work while the DP600 crunches rapidly through the list of encoding processes.

It’s a great bit of kit but at around £13,000, it’s not for everyone.

At US$4495 the Neyrinck SoundCode For Dolby E is only a bit more expensive than the DP571 and, while not providing the hardware, the range or the power of the DP600, it too allows you to free-up your DAW while it does the encoding three times faster than real time (assuming you have a spare PC or Mac, of course).

The process is essentially quite simple if you know what you want. In the Configuration page you navigate to the file you want to encode, set a few encode parameters plus a whole host of metadata parameters (that’s where you might need to do a bit of readingup), give it a name and destination folder and click the Encode button. The Dolby E file can be 16-bit, 20-bit or 24-bit. The 16-bit option allows only six channels whereas the 20-bit provides for the full eight and higher data rates. The 24-bit word length is relatively new and is not found on the DP571. It’s intended to offer still higher bit rates for newer tape formats like the HDCAMSR, which provide 24-bit audio tracks. You can also choose to compensate for the one frame processing time for the encode process only, the encode + decode, or none at all.

The current version has a small bug in that files over a certain length do not retain their timecode stamp in the Dolby E file — 61 minutes is OK, 65 minutes has no TC, so somewhere in between lies the maximum. I’m assured that, now pointed out this will be rectified.

Even if you’re not required to Dolby E encode your MBWFs yourself it’s still arguably a good idea to embed in them all the necessary metadata to avoid any future misunderstandings. For instance, you might have mixed at a dialnorm of -25 in a Dolby room set up for cinema where the surround levels differ from those in a domestic/DVD environment. When, months or years later, copies of copies of your files are re-ingested for encoding, the chances of any meaningful paperwork resolution

surviving are minimal. With all the metadata written into the file, however, the new engineer will know to drop the level by 2dB to hit the desired -27 and adjust the surrounds for their new purpose before encoding.

There’s even a space to type in a description of the file, e.g. Full Mix, Mix minus VO undipped, etc. With this in mind Dolby has developed the Dolby Metadata (DBMD) standard which it is working to standardise throughout the industry. SoundCode allows you to set and encode a DBMD chunk into a BWF file. In this way it is also presented as being an ideal tool to work in conjunction with a DP600 in that all the metadata can be enshrined in the MBWF to allow the DP600 to do its job without further human interaction. This DBMD function is also available for the less expensive SoundCode for Broadcast ($995), and it would be possible for a larger facility to have a number of them preparing files that could effectively be queued-up for the SoundCode For Dolby E to encode.

Apart from including its own high quality hardware, the DP600 offers the advantage of working at five times real time and being able to apply four different (or identical) processes to four separate files simultaneously including AC-3 and LtRt and LR fold-downs. It also allows you to set up separate folders for different combinations of jobs. Although this initial setting-up isn’t terribly easy it would make managing a complicated workflow within a large facility that much faster and more foolproof. SoundCode only uses a single processor irrespective of how many your machine has. If Neyrinck (and therefore its customers) were prepared to pay more for the license they too could offer multiprocessor operation. This might be an interesting future option — to buy access to the number of processors that suit your application. Ideally it would be possible to buy a time-limited key allowing use of extra processors when the need arises. A while back we had to reversion a 20-part series and render out three Dolby E streams per show. I would have paid a lot to have more power for a few days; although not £13,000.

Neyrinck is very open to user feedback and would certainly be influenced by user demand. A couple of suggestions that may well be in a future update: the facility to change a MBWF track format from LCRLsRsLfe to LRCLfeLsRs (or vice versa) when encoding; and also the measuring and correcting of a programme’s dialnorm before encoding (as per the DP600). It may also be made available in a VST version, which would have relatively limited function but allow the basic encode/decode from within DAWs other than Pro Tools, although personally I think the standalone format has a lot going for it.

SoundCode For Dolby E is simple to use and offers a very detailed level of information and control if needed.

If you have to do a lot of Dolby E encoding it’s a great halfway house between the real-time Dolby DP571 and the fabulous but very expensive Dolby DP600. n

PROS

Mac or PC; three times real-time Dolby E encoding and decoding; works within Pro Tools or standalone; can free-up your main DAW while a second computer gets on with the encoding.

CONS

None.

Contact neyrinck, usa: Website: www.neyrink.com

27

REVIEW

McDSP Retro Pack Tired of all those emulation plug-ins that offer yet another manufacturer’s take on the great and the old? If you’re looking for a fresh approach to EQ and dynamic control then strangely enough you’ll find it in the Retro Pack. GEORGE SHILLING says it’s not trying to be anything else…

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cDSP has, for more than a decade, been providing plug-ins that are much loved by professionals. In particular, the long-established FilterBank EQ and CompressorBank plug-ins are standard requirements for many mixers, with rock-solid sound quality and low latency. Elegantly designed interfaces combine with comprehensive parameter adjustments in both series, and both are able to emulate many classic units. In contrast, the new Retro Pack (HD US$995; Native $495) plug-ins go back to basics, taking a

novel approach to EQ, Filtering and Dynamic control where much of the cleverness is hidden in algorithms behind a streamlined and stylish interface. Despite the Retro name, there is no modelling of historic units here, and no trademark disclaimers — these designs stand or fall entirely on their own merits.

The 4020 Retro EQ provides four sweeping bands, along with high and low pass filters. The filters are described as complementary. Although everything looks very straightforward, there are complex changes going on when the knobs are turned. The

high and low bands are shelving, the two middle bands are peaking, but in all four bands the slope or Q gets steeper or narrower as the gain is increased.

Not a new idea, but this is something that cannot easily be achieved with FilterBank, despite its claims to emulating ‘Every EQ Ever Made’, as you would have to change two parameters simultaneously for the same effect. On the shelving bands there is also something of the Pultec effect with a small dip just before the boost frequency. It sounds musical, very smooth, and the resulting effect is extremely satisfying in use.

McDSP describes the middle two bands as ‘parametric’ but there are no bandwidth or Q controls, and the 4020 is no worse for the lack of these.

Minimal calibration of the controls is visible, with cut and boost simply marked at full range as +/-15dB, and four frequencies on each band labelled around the knobs; interestingly these correspond to octaves. You can determine exact settings by enabling automation and using the Pro Tools Edit window, but I didn’t ever feel the need to (Ears not eyes. Ed). Unlike many EQs, the ranges do not even overlap completely, but they cover plenty of useful areas and encourage general broad tone-shaping. As with API EQ, it is difficult to muck things up and introduce any nastiness, such is the coherence, integrity and sweetness. However, there is plenty of effect from cranking the knobs. The 4020’s quality is akin to the forgiving character of Massenburg EQ, but a bit less tweaky.

The High and Low Pass filter section is also innovative in that the slopes vary with frequency.

As the effect is increased, the slope goes from 6dB per octave to 24dB per octave for more dramatic effect. This works very naturally, and I had great success automating the high pass filter to eliminate extraneous traffic noise from a French vocal take (seemingly recorded in the middle of the Arc de

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REVIEW Triomphe). It worked smoothly and unobtrusively to duck out the worst parts with no unpleasant artefacts audible. I mixed about seven tracks by three different artists using almost no other EQ but the 4020; only once did I have to employ something else more surgical to nip out a problem frequency. The overall effect was a great clarity in the mix, with each instrument clearly separately audible, with no grunge and mush that can sometimes happen when using actual vintage (or modern) EQ. It sounds expensive. And with fewer parameters to tweak you tend to work faster, quickly zoning in and adjusting. Usefully, the plug-in provides a phase polarity button and Input and Output trims with plenty of range. There is an ‘Anti-Clip circuit’ at the output that prevents nasty digital clipping, although I wasn’t entirely sure what it was doing; distortion was certainly still possible when cranking up. Remarkably the total latency for the TDM version is just 3 samples.

The 4030 Retro Compressor looks pretty conventional, but as with the EQ there are clever algorithms at work here. Conventional controls are provided: Threshold, Ratio, Attack and Release, plus a Make-up Gain. Additionally, and less conventionally, there is a Mix control, for perfect blending of any amount of compressed and uncompressed signal with full phase coherency. This increasingly popular technique is made easy here and it can sound terrific.

The 4030’s other cleverness is in the detector section, which provides a degree of automatic control of all standard parameters depending on signal. The compressor responds to minimise artefacts, and there is again an ‘Anti-Clip circuit’ at the output stage.

The Ratio control lowers to 2:1, but more subtle compression can be achieved using the aforementioned Mix control. It can sound very smooth indeed, and works well on most signals. Even winding in large

amounts of compression, things stay smooth and controlled thanks to the automatic adjustment of parameters. Drums and percussive instruments can sound exciting using extreme settings with much of the character (but less of the distortion) achieved by more typical vintage vari-mu type compressors. The tracks I mixed using only the EQ also employed only this compressor (apart from on the mix bus) and a sense of controlled clarity pervaded. As with the EQ, it’s hard to mess things up using this plug-in and the results sound satisfyingly hi-fi.

The 4040 Retro Limiter completes the set. It has a very simple interface with just two knobs and similar metering to the Compressor. Here, a little more latency is introduced, but still at just 37 samples this easily beats off the competition. The controls work slightly differently from how you might imagine: Gain drives the sidechain into limiting while Ceiling is actually a gain control or, more accurately, a gain trim for lowering the subsequent level. Pumping on vocals was more audible than a favourite rival plugin, but across the mix as a loudness maximiser it retains a pleasant character and its strength is that no distortion is ever audible. However, it does start to audibly pump when pushed, and beyond a certain Gain setting no perceivable benefit is obtained by cranking further. For individual tracks more variety and more extreme effects can be achieved with the 4030 and I would probably only employ the 4040 in a situation where a strict maximum (distortion-free) programme level is required.

All Retro Pack plug-ins provide excellent huge LED style meters for Input, Output, and where appropriate, Gain Reduction. Interfaces are stylish, clear and easy to understand. The tasteful clarity of these processors is possibly more suited to acoustic music than electronica or noisy rock but I happily used them on a variety of material. The lack of fiddly

or esoteric parameters is a bonus when working fast, and you can be confident of retaining signal integrity and character, even with radical settings. The CPU usage is low enough for these to replace pretty much any standard plug-ins you might be using, so there is little not to like about these classy sounding processors. n

PROS

Smooth, musical, characterful processing; ultra-low latency; simple no-nonsense controls.

CONS

4040 Limiter can pump.

EXTRAS

McDSP now offers permanent options to build your own HD or Native bundle.

Options include Analog Channel, Channel G Compact, Channel G Surround, Chrome Tone, CompressorBank, DE555, FilterBank, FutzBox, MC2000, ML4000, NF575, Revolver and Synthesizer One. Customers may purchase any two of the above HD plug-ins for US$795, three HD plug-ins for $995, or four HD plug-ins for $1195. Customers may also purchase any two of the above native plug-ins for $495, three native plug-ins for $595, or four native plug-ins for $695.

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

www.audient.com

REVIEW

Marantz PMD580 As solid-state memory has become more affordable, so a rash of audio recorders leveraging the technology has become available. ROB JAMES is encouraged that each of the ones he’s encountered addresses different applications.

C

onstructed in the ubiquitous 1u rackmount form, the alloy front panel of the Marantz PMD580 network solid state recorder is sparse. A protected power switch and blue indicator, headphone jack and level pot, memory card access door and access light, a Shift key, USB port, Menu/Store/Utility button, Display/Lock button LCD display, Transport controls and meters compete with a multifunction jog wheel with push switch. The back panel is also less than busy. Analogue I-O on XLRs and phonos, digital I-O on XLRs and phonos, a remote jack, RS232C 9-pin D-Sub connector, IEC power inlet and the all-important RJ-45 LAN socket. Record formats are 16- or 24-bit PCM at 44.1kHz or 48kHz and MP3 at bit rates from 32kbps (mono) to 320kbps (stereo).

The PMD580 uses the older, larger form factor CF (Compact Flash) cards. There are a number of pros and cons when Compact Flash is compared with the more recent SD (Secure Digital) and SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) cards. CF is bigger but the connector is more vulnerable. A CF slot can, and in this case does, accept Microdrives. SD is smaller, has a more secure connection and is available in larger capacities.

It is possible to use SD cards in this machine with an adaptor. The card loading door can be secured with a supplied screw to discourage tampering or theft but the door is fairly flimsy plastic.

Each track is marked with the date and time at which recording commenced and a new track is generated every time you initiate recording. If AutoTrack is selected a new track is generated at 1/5/10/15/30 minute or 1/2/6/8/12 or 24-hour intervals. Pressing the Record button while already recording results in a new track, although the user manual does mention that ‘a small break may be heard on playback’ so, unless you like living dangerously, I wouldn’t use this in the course of a continuous recording. Thus, the two strategies for locating specific recordings are keeping track of the track number and noting the recording time of day.

A potentially dangerous Auto Delete function is off by default. When selected the PMD580 checks the available memory space before recording and ensures that the required amount of space (selectable between 1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 hours) is available. If there is insufficient space it erases files starting with the oldest.

This process happens automatically while the machine is in Stop mode and can take up to 30 seconds to complete, during which time recording is not possible.

Only files with the read-only flag set are erased. In practice this means files that have been archived using the Network Archive feature and any file imported from

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CD-Rom that has the Read-only flag set.

A user defined name can be set for recordings.

If this is done files will be named in the form: My_ Show_072345_MZ002.wav etc. Weirdly, although spaces are allowed, entering a space exits the User Area so you have to return to it to continue with the naming. Similarly, you can set the Machine ID for inclusion in the file headers. Files can be sorted by number or date.

As the name implies the PM580 can be connected to a computer via Ethernet and the clever stuff is available once you have connected it to a network.

If your network has a DHCP server simply leave the IP Address setting on Auto and it is plug-and-play.

If necessary you can manually set a fixed IP address and subnet mask. Once connected you can control the machine from the computer on the network and you can also set up automatic archiving to a shared folder.

Archiving can be set to occur either automatically, when the unit is in Stop mode, or at a scheduled time, although you will need to know the IP address of the server where the shared folder is located. The machine can also be password-protected to prevent unauthorised tampering.

Alternatively, you could use the USB connection to transfer material between the unit and a PC or simply remove the CF card and insert it in a reader.

Other remote control options are a jack for simple contact closure with a choice of three functions and comprehensive RS232C serial. The protocol is in the manual.

Input selection is made through the menu. The analogue Input and Output reference levels are independently selectable between -20dB (default) and +4dB. Analogue input level is manually adjusted with the jog wheel in Record or Record Pause or can be set to ALC (Automatic Level Control). Digital input level is not adjustable. Record balance between channels is set with the same knob plus Shift — curiously there is no numeric indication of when you are at the null position, there are just a row of blocks on the screen.

A prerecord buffer helps to avoid missing the start of critical recordings and this is active in Record Pause and can be set to 2 or 4 seconds or Off. A scheduled recording feature offers the possibility of recording at a specified time on a specified date and for recording at the same time every hour/day/week. A ‘Silent Skip’ feature offers the option of pausing recording when audio input falls below a threshold level for a specified period with recording resuming when the level rises above the threshold.

Using the front panel controls to navigate the menu resolution

structure and set parameters is not the most intuitive of user interfaces I’ve encountered. However, connecting the PMD580 to a network and using the built-in software to make settings more than makes up for this.

Settings can be stored and recalled as presets.

Unlike other superficially similar solid state recorders, with the PMD580 the emphasis is firmly on recording. There are a few clever playback features on offer though: Random plays all tracks in random order; Repeat plays either the current track continuously or repeats all the tracks on the card; and Auto-Cue skips any silence at the start of a file and pauses where the sound reaches the threshold level.

Single mode determines what happens after playback of a single track. Stop does what it says, Next cues up the next track, and Rescue returns to the start of the current track.

So it’s a case of horses for courses. For more comprehensive playback options, look elsewhere. If you want maximum flexibility and control over sound acquisition at standard sampling rates with automatic archiving and a stack of other useful options the PMD580 needs investigating. n

PROS

Properly set up, can record and archive ad infinitum; relatively simple, rugged unit; good web browser interface.

CONS

Limited to standard sampling rates; on-board menu navigation not as intuitive as it could be; Auto Delete needs care to avoid unnecessary stress.

EXTRAS

The PMD661 solid state recorder is a robust professional handheld PCM/MP3 recorder that supersedes the PMD660 with an improved form factor, a superior feature set, and the use of SD media.

It has a significantly smaller footprint than the PMD660 and has an improved top facia layout with fewer buttons and a more highly developed use of multifunctional operation.

It includes an integrated stereo condenser mic, a 128 x 64 OLED and features balanced mic and line XLR inputs, as well as phono outputs and a secondary unbalanced line-in on 3.5mm jack. It has a 24-bit/96 kHz recording option and Mark Editor software allows the marker points made on the recorded file to be adjusted post-recording, and a new file created, meaning basic editing can be carried out on a laptop and files posted for immediate distribution.

Contact marantz, japan: Website: www.d-mpro.com

May/June 2009

REVIEW

Milab SRND 360 There have been number of different solutions over the last few years to the thorny problem of recording directly to multichannel formats. JON THORNTON encounters a multichannel mic that is clever and different.

L

eaving aside the debate over whether spaced arrays or a coincident arrangement is better theoretically, there’s no doubt that a compact, easy to rig and vaguely portable multichannel mic solution has many advantages in the studio and on location. Witness the introduction of products such as the Holophone range, DPA’s new 5100, and plugins to process the outputs of Ambisonic designs such as the SoundField to deliver a 5.1 output.

From the land that gave us Abba, Volvo and Saab comes yet another take on the subject. Milab’s SRND 360 is a deceptively simple approach, which really just builds on well-accepted principles of coincident microphones for stereo recording. What makes it special is its inherent flexibility and a little bit of creative thinking on Milab’s part.

F u n d a m e n t a l l y, the SRND 360 is based around three matched, near coincident cardioid capsules placed at 120 degrees to each other within a single microphone body. The capsules employed are the same rectangular designs employed in the company’s

May/June 2009

DC196 microphone, which I’ve always found to give a particularly smooth off-axis response in the vertical plane. Of course, three capsules isn’t enough for a coincident arrangement to provide sufficient channels for 5.0 or 6.0 recording and that’s where the creative thinking comes in.

Most multipattern microphones work by adding/ subtracting the outputs of two opposing cardioid capsules and Milab has extended this approach with the SRND 360. By combining the outputs of two adjacent capsules and subtracting an amount of the opposing capsule, the three physical capsules can generate three additional ‘virtual’ capsules with an effective cardioid response. This results in simulating the effect of six near-coincident cardioid capsules placed at angles of 60 degrees relative to each other — corresponding to Left, Centre, Right, Left Surround, Back Surround and Right Surround. In this configuration, L, R and Bs are generated by ‘virtual’ capsules, and C, Ls and Rs are generated by physical capsules.

The matrixing necessary to do this is performed by an external box, which also supplies power to the microphone. A single fivepin connector on the front panel connects to the microphone and the six outputs are available on XLRs at the rear. Power to this unit is supplied by a ‘wall wart’ type adapter. All of these ancillaries, together with the microphone itself and a suspension mount, are supplied in a neat aluminium case.

The microphone is, by necessity, of significant girth but also relatively short in length, which gives it quite a squat, Daleklike appearance. In comparison to the Holophone or DPA 5100, both of which seem geared up for the rigours of location recording inside or out, the SRND 360 is probably far more comfortable indoors. Initial testing was performed with the microphone set up in a mediumsized, quite tight sounding live room. Playback was via a Klein and Hummel 5.1 system, with the rear speakers in the ITU designated positions.

A quick walk around the microphone shows that it’s extremely good at localising direction with sources that appear directly on-axis to either a physical or virtual capsule translating accurately to playback. There’s also an extremely smooth sounding location of audio as the source moves around the microphone and between channels with little in the way of objectionable phase artefacts. I was pleasantly surprised by this as resolution

given that the physical arrangement of the capsules is somewhat less than coincident I was expecting this to cause some issues.

Tonally, the SRND360 sounds extremely solid.

My experience with other compact 5.1 microphone offerings has largely been confined to those that employ small diaphragm capsules, such as the Holophone range. While these are great for detail and accuracy, I sometimes find that the overall tonality can verge on the clinical. Milab’s offering is a great antidote for this, giving on overall fairly neutral sound that verges on warm that it manages to convey closeup and at a distance.

I tried the SRND 360 on a small acapella choir and on a drum kit in the same room. The choir were arrayed in a semi circle about six feet away from the microphone, and the drum kit a similar distance but with the microphone raised slightly and tilted down.

In both scenaria the SRND 360 proved fabulous at generating rock-solid imaging when played back in 5.1, and in the case of the drum kit, again very little in terms of smearing of transient sounds. Where it wasn’t quite as good was in capturing a useful surround ambience in the rears, so feeling this was partly to do with the room in question I relocated the choir to a much larger, more lively space. Although this helped to some degree, it still felt as if the recording would benefit from a little help by playing with the levels of the rears and wrapping a short reverb around them and the other channels. I guess that’s the trade-off between a compact coincident array and a spaced mic technique for surround work.

Any shortcomings in this respect, though, are more than made up for by the SRND 360’s size and by its flexibility. For example, it’s perfectly possible to use it simply as a stereo microphone by swivelling it around so that two real capsules are facing forwards and taking the appropriate outputs. Or indeed, to use it to record LCR using the front virtual capsules or the physical rear capsules for a super-wide image, with a bit of centre thrown in for stability. It’s this flexibility together with its very straightforward ‘plug-and-play’ approach that makes this microphone distinctive. It positively encourages you to be creative and perhaps to try recording in surround when you might not previously have considered it worth the bother. n

PROS

Neat and compact; easy to use and set up; flexible enough to work in a number of stereo and surround configurations; big sound and tight imaging.

CONS

Not really suitable for outdoor location work; can lack a little in terms of ‘envelopment’ without additional processing.

EXTRAS

Milab’s BDM-01 is a bass drum microphone for the studio and the road. The condenser capsule is handbuilt by Milab and claims ‘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.

Contact milab, sweden: Website: www.milabmic.com

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monitor benchtest

Genelec 8040A KEITH HOLLAND

T

he Genelec 8040A is a small 2-way active speaker consisting of a 165mm woofer and 19mm metal dome tweeter housed in a cast metal box.

The tweeter is mounted above the woofer and, in common with many Genelec designs, radiates through a shallow horn-like waveguide. The box contains all of the crossover, amplifier and protection circuitry. At the rear is a flared rear-facing reflex port and a control panel with sensitivity and equalisation controls along with a recessed IEC mains input socket and on/off switch. The sensitivity control is variable from +6dBu to -6dBu (for 100dB SPL @ 1m) and the equalisation switches are Treble Tilt (+2dB to -4dB at 15kHz), Bass Roll-off (0dB to -6dB at 45Hz), Bass Tilt (0dB to -6dB at 100Hz), all with 2dB steps, and a ‘desktop low frequency control’ that puts a -4dB notch at 160Hz. This review was conducted with all equalisation controls set to Off.

Genelec specifies a crossover frequency of 3kHz and amplifier short-term power capabilities of 90W each, endowing each loudspeaker with a maximum shortterm acoustic output of 105dB SPL at 1m (halfspace, 100Hz to 3kHz) or 115dB SPL peak for a pair mounted on a console at 1m distance with music input. The walls of the cabinet are all curved — including the bottom — so the speaker is supplied with an IsoPod, which is like four rubber balls and gives vibration isolation from the surface on which it is mounted and stability as well as adjustment of vertical tilt for correct alignment. Each speaker has overall dimensions of 350mm high by 240mm wide by 225mm deep and weighs 8.6kg.

Figure 1 shows the on-axis frequency response and harmonic distortion performance

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

of the 8040A. The response is seen to lie within +/-3dB from 42Hz to 20kHz and is commendably flat and smooth. The low-frequency response is very extended for a speaker of this size rolling off with a rapid 6thorder slope through -10dB at about 36Hz, indicating the use of a high-pass electronic protection filter and ported cabinet. The harmonic distortion, measured when the speaker is radiating an output of 90dB SPL at 1m, is also very good for a small speaker, with both second and third harmonics lying below -35dB (1.8%) at all frequencies above 45Hz. The horizontal off-axis performance (Figure 2) is well controlled with only slight mid-range narrowing between 1500 and 4000Hz and no side-lobes, but deep notches are seen in the vertical plots (Figure 3) at the crossover frequency due to interference between the verticallyspaced drivers. This suggests that this speaker should be used with upright, portrait orientation (As Genelec recommends. Ed).

monitor benchtest

Fig. 2. Horizontal off-axis response.

Fig. 4. Waterfall plot.

Fig. 6. Step response.

Fig. 3. Vertical off-axis response.

Fig. 5. Acoustic source position.

Fig. 7. Power cepstrum.

The waterfall plot (Figure 4) demonstrates the penalty that is often paid for having an extended, low-distortion low-frequency output from a small box.

The decay at low frequencies is slow and somewhat lumpy which may compromise the reproduction of the low-frequency components of transient signals.

However, the rest of the waterfall is very clean with only very minor mid-range resonances. The acoustic source position shown in Figure 5 further demonstrates the low-frequency alignment compromise with the

low-frequencies effectively emanating from a position 3m behind that of the mid and high frequencies. One very good aspect of the transient performance of the 8040A is shown in the step response of Figure 6. This plot shows a very rapid rise, steady decay and accurate driver time alignment.

Overall, the Genelec 8040A is a very good small loudspeaker. If an extended, low-distortion lowfrequency performance is required from a small box then this is the speaker for the job. However, it

should be noted that the bass extension is achieved through compromise of the handling of low-frequency transients. The smooth, flat frequency response and accurate mid- and high-frequency transient response should ensure faithful reproduction of most programme material. n

Contact genelec, finland: Website: www.genelec.com

CRAFT

Eddie Kramer Eddie Kramer never tired of the experience ... NIGEL JOPSON talks Woodstock, Hendrix, heavy metal and 5.1 DVDs with a man whose work spans 45 years of classic rock.

A

fter studying classical piano at the South African College of Music, Eddie moved to the UK with his family and got his first studio job at PYE in 1964, where he recorded Petula Clark and The Kinks. Subsequently he joined Olympic Sound Studios — at the time the top London independent — where he engineered albums for a panoply of 60s greats including Traffic, The Small Faces, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Family and Jimi Hendrix. Kramer and Hendrix formed a bond that saw him go freelance, following Jimi to New York to work at the Record Plant. Eddie recorded seminal acts like The Nice, Curtis Mayfield, John Mayall, Derek and the Dominos, Humble Pie and Led Zeppelin — his name appears in the engineering credits for Zep II, Zep III, How the West Was Won, Houses of The Holy, Physical Graffiti and Coda. In 1969 Kramer recorded and mixed the epoch-defining Woodstock Festival for both album and film.

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Eddie was director of engineering at Electric Ladyland studios from 1970-1974, he recorded every Hendrix album from Are You Experienced to The Cry of Love, and after the untimely death of the guitar legend he co-produced War Heroes, Rainbow Bridge and Hendrix in the West. Some might have been content to hang up their headphones after such an action-packed decade: for Eddie it was just the start. In 1975 Kramer produced Alive, the disc that saved the career of masked merchandisers Kiss, and in 1976 he engineered Frampton Comes Alive, the sixtime platinum double-LP which became an audio and sales benchmark for live albums. Kramer took the production chair for five further Kiss albums, another album for Pete Frampton, plus an album for smokin’ Michigan boys Brownsville Station. The 1980s saw Eddie producing a menu of metal bands, including Twisted Sister, Fastaway, Triumph, Icon, Pretty Maids, Anthrax, Robin Trower and Loudness ... his ears survived, and during the 1990s Kramer produced Carl Perkins, John McLaughlin, Brian May, Paul Rodgers and Buddy Guy. He received a Best Contemporary Blues Record Grammy Award in 1996 for Guy’s Slippin’ It In, which he produced and engineered. The millennium saw Eddie delve into 5.1 and DVD production, notably The Festival Express movie (featuring Janis Joplin, The Band and Grateful Dead among others — Resolution V2.6) and surround-sound DVDs Jimi Plays Berkeley and Monterey Pop. Resolution met Eddie at Metropolis studios, where he gave us the first ever European preview of a Woodstock 5.1 DVD, to be released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the festival this year.

resolution

May/June 2009

CRAFT Where did you mix the Woodstock DVD, and did you use any special equipment or plug-ins?

I mixed it at Capitol studios and at Village recorders in LA. The mixes were tricky — can you imagine trying to make 5.1 from just seven tracks? But the result was good and I’m very pleased with it. We used an A-D convertor I’ve recently discovered: the Burl B2 Bomber.

It’s made up in Santa Cruz and it’s the best damn A-DC that I’ve ever heard. It gave a stunning sound to the transfers from one-inch 15ips. Once the 24-bit, 96kHz transfer was done, I had a pretty wonderful representation of what the original analogue sounded like. Just before we finished, when we were working on the lot at the Warner Stage, Rich Williams of Burl had just developed the D-A convertor, so we were able to run the mixes back through them ... it sounded fantastic.

Most of the mixes used a combination of Waves plugins and regular analogue gear. Quite frankly there were times when I couldn’t really tell the difference between the plug-in and the original analogue gear it’s emulating.

Waves are getting so good, and they are so close. Some of the things the Waves plug-ins can do, especially in the realm of de-noising, de-clicking and restoration ... you can’t beat it.

Kim King [a former engineer at Electric Ladyland] said about you – ‘Kramer was a director, there was no telling Hendrix what to play, but if he was “on” Kramer would channel him into something productive’ – I thought, that’s the definition of a record producer! That is quite accurate, and it’s extremely nice of him to say that ...

Does the new Woodstock DVD contain previously unseen footage?

It actually came about as a result of the Jimi Hendrix Woodstock DVD, which was released about three years ago. We realised there was a tremendous amount of stuff still in the vaults which had never been seen. Just to name a few artists: Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, Janice Joplin. Bill Rush at Warners had worked with me to find all the unreleased Hendrix material. He and I put our heads together and came to the conclusion there was so much high quality footage, perhaps there was more? He went on a search and came up with about ten hours of material that had never even been seen or heard. It’s monumental; it took about two and a half years of work and research.

How did you deal with technical or musical mistakes that spoilt otherwise great performances, the show must have been littered with them considering the chaos and chemicals at Woodstock?

Carlos Santana had apparently gone on stage in a rather delicate state; his tuning was so far out it was in another country. I replaced the first minute and a half of his guitar on Evil Way with a session player because basically the track was unusable, I sent a rough mix to Carlos and he said: ‘Wow, I can’t believe it, man, I’ll help you out.’ So we went up to San Francisco and he fixed those portions of the song with his original amp and guitar, he nailed it within an hour. It was fantastic; we salvaged a song that would never have normally been available.

That sort of thing went on a fair amount, usually the opening song from each set was a disaster because I had no communication with the stage, we’d be guessing as to which mics would be where, so stuff got lost. With Canned Heat we were able to punch in the original bass player Larry Taylor, playing his original bass with the original style of amp, to recover what hadn’t been recorded, and it sounds perfect. To me, there’s a legitimate reason to replace missing or spoilt parts with the original player and recreate the sounds on a particular song so it’s seamless. I don’t have any qualms about that whatsoever because we are saving songs which would never normally have been seen or heard.

May/June 2009

wouldn’t they?

Yes ... short answer!

If it were 2009, and you were recording the Electric Ladyland album with Hendrix, your management would probably have negotiated a production deal with royalties for you,

Hendrix was one of the first artists (apart from The Beatles) to use the recording studio as a writing tool. In the post-Chandler era, would he just hang out and jam to come up with ideas?

Chas Chandler not only helped Jimi with his earlier song writing, but also really restrained Jimi in his writing so that he worked to a shorter time frame. In the early 60s shorter songs were necessary for radio. So you can imagine all this amazing amount of talent and energy squished into a short time period. He started to drift away from Chas after the first album. He was bringing a lot of people – 20 or more — into the control room. Chas felt he wasn’t concentrating on the game, which was not really true. There was a very specific method Jimi used. He would go to the Scene Club, on 46th Street in NY. He would have the studio booked for 7 o’clock and we’d be sitting there ... Jimi would be at The Scene checking out the musicians ... who were the cool guys he needed to play with that night? There would be a plan afoot, once he’d figured out who the musicians were, he’d walk down to the studio carrying his guitar over his shoulder with this entourage — the sight must have been enough to stop traffic. Often they were British musicians as it was the beginning of the next wave of rock guys coming over, one evening Jimi turned up with Steve Winwood and Jack Casady [of the Jefferson Airplane]. They’d do one run through, then we’d start the tape, it was live off the floor, no overdubs ... that’s what I call genius.

I read that Jimi ran up a studio bill in 1969 at the Record Plant of $60,000.

Jimi was spending an inordinate amount of money at the Record Plant, in 69 anyway, when he was sort of just jamming away with nobody supervising him.

When I went down to the building he was intending to buy as a night-club, I said ‘Guys, let’s make this the best studio in the world.’ So Electric Ladyland was born ... but, you know, it cost about a million bucks! In 1970 dollars that was a lot of money. We probably made it back within a couple of years, but still it was a lot of bloody money!

After Woodstock, you carved something of a reputation for yourself with live recordings, you produced Kiss Alive for example ...

Ah, yes — a total recreation except for the drums!

resolution

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CRAFT Alive spent 110 weeks in the charts and the band went on to sell over 35 million records, but at the time it was released, I believe Kiss were at the end of their tether and Casablanca Records were pretty much bankrupt.

They were about to take a dump. We were very surprised, we didn’t think the Alive album was ever going to sell ... maybe a few thousand, but never the millions it did ... the sales and royalties, I’m very happy for that. I did a lot of live recording in the 70s with Kiss, Peter Frampton ...

The Frampton Comes Alive album has a very professional sheen to it.

There may have been the odd punch-in here and there, but that was very much live, I can vouch for that. The stuff I did was all 16-track, it was lovely. He played great, the band was terrific.

There are different stages to your career, in the 80s after Kiss you produced Triumph, Fastaway, Anthrax, this was definitely the metal era. After Hendrix, was this the equivalent for you of James Joyce writing a pot-boiler?

I love the reference! My father was a scholar of James Joyce and my sister and I used to read Finnegans Wake aloud to him when we were nine years old. Talking about pot-boiling, a couple of years ago I did a commercial for GM for the Silverado truck. It was a $170m ad campaign, the artist was John Mellencamp, so that shows you the extent of my pot-boiling! You have to make a living, and you choose to record people who you think will do OK ... or better ... you do music that you want to record. There’s a couple of bands that I’m working with now: Joey Santiago and Dave Lovering, the guitarist and drummer from the Pixies, have a band that I’m producing called The Everybody. They’re really good and I’ve just finished a whole bunch of tracks with them. We’ve been working on the project for about six months, I helped them out and loaned them some gear, then started producing. It’s an ongoing project.

When you produce guys like that, do you use an engineer?

It’s just me and them, they have their own studio, I bring my gear in and help them record then leave them alone for a while. They’re quite independent and selfsufficient. Once they’ve done their overdubs we fix it up together and I mix it.

Is that in Pro Tools?

It’s all in Pro Tools, unfortunately most people cannot afford the luxury of multitrack tape these days. However, I mix with an analogue console, often at this little studio

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in North Hollywood called LAFX, it has a lovely old API console with Martin Audio automation, and I mix onto half-inch tape at 15ips, using the Burl A-D convertor, which makes such a huge difference to the sound.

Is there still a way for top-class recording facilities to be commercially viable today?

This statement applies not only to recording studios but also to me and people like myself: diversify or die. As you can tell from my career in the last ten years or so, I’ve tried to diversify as much as I could. I still want to be active and involved, but I can’t rely 100% on producing records, I’m not 23 anymore!

You worked on an interesting guitar pedal for Digitech.

I’ve worked on a couple of pedals, the Hendrix pedal and the Brian May pedal.

More recently I’ve been working with Waves, I did a tour for them last year, one section was exclusively Waves, the second half of the year was Waves and Apple Logic. It was quite challenging and very cool because we worked with a live guitar player onstage.

Do you enjoy the educational theme of this sort of event?

I like the idea of passing on to the next generation something of what I’ve learnt. I do a lot of lectures in the US at universities like Berklee College, Full Sail and SAE ... the audio engineering schools, of which there are about 300 in the US. We’ll get a local band, find a song, then rip it apart, rebuild it: basically I show them how to make a record. It’s great because it also gives me a new perspective about what’s going on in the real world.

Do you feel that all those colleges might be training youngsters for jobs that don’t exist anymore?

They’re training monkeys, unfortunately. Not in every case –- maybe that sounds a little harsh — but I would say this: in every school there’s usually just 10%, maybe more if you’re lucky, kids who really, really get it. Who understand what it takes to be an engineer, and then possibly a producer later. It’s dedication, it’s the musical smarts ... the musical intuition that it takes to interpret. You’ve got to be a great interpreter of what the artist is looking for, you can’t just be a numbers pusher. It’s very easy to sit there in front of a computer and bang away at it. To be creative, you have to get in the studio where four musicians are going to look each other in the eye and say: ‘I hate you, but I’m going to record with you’. You want to get that interaction going

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CRAFT ... and how do you create the atmosphere to make it work? A musical education is, in my mind, the most critical part. If you can’t play an instrument, don’t even bother trying to become a production professional. You really have to be able to understand what it takes to make music, otherwise what the hell’s the point?

What are you working on at the moment?

There’s a band I’m working with in the UK called Eternal Descent, they’re quite hard to describe: it’s a comic book of metal heroes who play guitar, and it’s marvellous.

There’s this young man called Llexi, he’s designed the series of comic books, featuring heavy metal guitar players who manage to save the world ... so to speak!

We’ve got deals with ESP guitars, Faith Guitars, Buddha amps and people like that, it’s also going to be a game and possibly some sort of movie. I will probably be recording it at Metropolis later on this year. We’re going to use a big symphonic orchestra, and get all these guitar-hero types in to play. It will be a lot of fun.

When you first started work at Olympic Studios, the big money for artists was to be made from touring, the record was almost like a promotional device: is there a sense that, 45 years later, it’s come full circle?

It really has. The record business is down the shitter, we all know that, the industry as we knew it 20 years ago just does not exist. One has to apportion some of the blame to the record labels, their own stupidity and short-sightedness: trying to make the teenagers with their downloads go away –- wrong — now you’ve missed the boat!

If you were starting your career as a young man today, would you see enough value in recorded music to become an engineer or would you aim for something more multiskilled or visual?

With hindsight I would choose to be more multiskilled ... I think if one goes back perhaps a hundred years, it was an advantage to be considered a Renaissance-type person, interested in all of the arts, although I think it would be a bit bold for me to say that about myself! We’re at a sort of crossroads point: it’s wonderful on the one hand that kids can open up their laptops, plug in a little preamp and mic, record in the basement and come up with an album. Some of the attempts have been quite good, but it bears looking at because the end results often don’t sound that good, and I still think there’s work for great engineers in great studios. It’s just different Resolution Half Page 7/12/06 17:15 Page 3 — one has to approach it differently. n

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Putting Sound in the Picture

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CRAFT

Dan Carey From dub to Franz Ferdinand, producer Dan Carey likes to be unorthodox. He talks to GEORGE SHILLING about guitars, studios, preproduction and car batteries.

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an Carey played with tape machines from the age of seven and soon had his own home studio. Nick Manasseh, a dub producer, produced a band that Dan was in and invited him to do some reggae sessions in Brixton. He taught Carey about dub production methods and Carey moved to Brixton and set up a studio with Manasseh. A self-taught expert at programming on the Akai MPC60, Dan gradually acquired miking techniques (‘I’ve done loads of stuff with just one mic on the kick and one above, and they sound okay!’) Inspired by the recording studio that used to be at The Exchange mastering house in London, Carey’s current studio is an all-in-one combined control room and live room. It features an unusual second-hand Lafont console which had to be cut in two to fit, with a collection of ribbon connectors and cables joining the sections. Huge racks hold a selection of highly desirable and esoteric outboard. A major recent addition has been the installation, by Munro Acoustics, of a pair of Dynaudioacoustics C3A monitors, custom built by Munro with T1000 amplifiers and stands. Also much in evidence is a collection of instruments — unusual guitars, amplifiers, keyboards, a drum kit, and oddities such as a spring stretched across the ceiling as a reverb.

Carey’s CV features an eclectic mixture of artists that includes Hot Chip, Roisin Murphy, Emiliana Torrini, Lily Allen, The Kills and Dizzee Rascal. Perhaps most notably, Dan produced the latest Franz Ferdinand album, and he worked with recent chart toppers La Roux (‘They’re really into plug-ins.’) He had almost finished an album with Joe Lean And The Jing Jang Jong when Resolution dropped into his south London studio. He has plans to head off to New York for further work with Sia, followed by further writing with Emiliana Torrini and productions with Stephen Fretwell and Magistrates. (photos www.recordproduction.com)

Why did you set this studio up?

If I’m mixing or recording in big posh places it makes me do it in a different way, I think I ought to do it better, and might be more careful about things. I’ve done stuff with bands, but it makes people nervous. The whole thing about here is that I use this as the live room. The thinking is that anything that makes a noise is in the machine room, tape machines and computers. If I’m working with a band, no headphones, just point the amps so everyone’s happy when they’re playing and just work around that. Everything sounds better; if someone’s playing an instrument and they think it’s amazing, the actual sound’s better, then everything will be better. I try and set it up like it’s a rehearsal. I’ve got loads of small amps, they’re my favourite things because you can drive them hard and they don’t make

May/June 2009

too much noise. Sometimes I have amps pointing at the drummer for a monitor. If a guitarist wants to hear more of something, they just stand nearer, and I’m in the room as well.

How do you get the sounds?

It takes a bit longer because you have to record a bit and play it back and see if you like it. But I think that’s a more accurate way of judging something rather than in a separate room not being able to talk to them, or on headphones.

Did you do Franz Ferdinand here?

No, but we did it in a really similar way in Glasgow, they’ve got the same thing about studios, they hate it. They’ve got this rehearsal room in Govern Town Hall, a room twice the size of this with a desk in it, so we do quite a lot of recording in there, then for a different sound we can record in the big hall, and then under the stage in a hole for another sound. But none of the structure of a studio, we’d just wheel the rack of preamps in, take the Radar and just move it around. We did a couple of tracks with just one mic on the whole band, that Lomo. We spent ages getting the exact position. We’d record a song like that and just use a section, like one bridge.

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CRAFT What about guide vocals?

I don’t really do them. What I prefer to do is just rehearse, if people don’t know the song it doesn’t work quite so well.

in. Sometimes the Shadow Hills, it’s got optical and discrete. And normally I just do vocals in here. I tend to record quite close-up. I try not to do too much to vocals. I find the Pullet EQ is good, I tend to mix all the vocals together and brighten them up a bit.

Do you edit takes?

I don’t really like doing that. What I normally do is practice once or twice to get the vibe, then hype everyone up, do a couple of takes, then pretend I’m just about to run out of tape, then do one more take. I always record on two-inch tape, 16-track, then choose the best one, then put it in through the Radar ADA into Logic at 96k.

What’s the advantage of 96k?

I’m not sure; it takes up more space.

Sometimes I think it sounds better. If I record on tape and transfer into the computer at 48k, then I often get the feeling it doesn’t sound as good, but I never get that feeling at 96k. But it’s hard to say whether it’s a psychological thing, because you feel more secure that there’s twice as much there. I’m really unsure about the whole thing.

Definitely after a day tracking on tape I have no tiredness at all; it’s like the sun’s been shining all day. If you just work on a computer all day you definitely feel much more wired. I do like that feeling, but it’s a different thing. 96k is somewhere in between.

Do you do any quantising or correcting?

No, not quantising, I do quite a lot of hard gating, so that it almost sounds like a drum machine. I like the Strip Silence thing, so that the snare’s just ‘Khhk, khhk,’ and then there’s an overhead, but I try and keep the mics to a minimum. This is my current favourite setup with a 4038 near the low tom-tom, a Lomo on top, then an RE20 and SubKick on the kick, and then a mic under the snare, which gets really gated. What I hate is drum sounds where everything has got a mic on it. But maybe that’s because I’ve come from a background of programming, a track always feels wrong to me if the kick and the snare aren’t really forward. I try not to stick to the same [approach]; I could get into that thing of, ‘this sounds brilliant’, but then after a few songs I’ll just scrap it and try something different so I don’t get stuck in a pattern.

How do you catalogue your samples?

It’s a really clever system, they’re just all over the place — there’s no system at all! I’ve given them all names that mean something to me. I like an element of randomness, I don’t like always being able to find what I’m looking for! A couple of sounds have cropped up recently that I haven’t used for nine years.

Do you mostly work with an engineer?

Yeah, Alexis [Smith], he’s brilliant. The two of us zone in on the fine points. There’s two sides to the whole business, one is the very technical thing of how to get a sound or construct a mix, but I rely on Alexis because the other half is the musical thing, just deciding what chords should be there, and if it’s not that, just relating to the band. You have to stop thinking about all the technical stuff, we can have a chat about what approach we want to take. I have to convince the singer they can sing!

You own quite a few instruments…

I play everything. The way this room is set up is what I thought studios were like when I was a kid. I thought there’d be someone who could play all the instruments and just have all of the stuff around in a big circle, so I just collect all this stuff. It’s quite nice when working with bands to have a selection of guitars. I picked that up from Franz Ferdinand, when I went to their place they’ve just got so many guitars, I just couldn’t believe it. And so many amps, Alex knows so much about amps, if you’re trying to get a certain sound. Since then I’ve started buying more amps. It allows you to construct a more layered sound without EQing. I don’t like recording three guitar tracks and then EQing them to be different, if they are different it’s so much better.

Do you use the desk mic preamps?

No, it’s only got four, it was more affordable because it’s a bit of a weird thing to have no mic pres. I use the Shadow Hills Gamma. You can switch the metal of the transformer from iron to steel to nickel, and it has a different sound for each. It’s like a tone control, but really hard to describe. Sometimes there isn’t a difference, but on vocals iron sounds closer, steel sounds older, it’s a funny control. I use that and the Great River — I’m unlikely to record more than ten things at a time. Then maybe the Chandler [TG Channel], I use that quite a lot. I use the Culture Vulture quite a bit, not to distort but just to add a bit of hiss.

Why did you get these Dynaudios?

The Dynaudios are quite big but much better at low level. I quite like the KRKs, but after a day of mixing my ears are really tired, and I want to put it louder to hear more music. But on the Dynaudios I don’t get the urge to turn it up because it sounds really clear. They’re brilliant for listening to records, they uncover what’s going on.

How do you do vocals?

That’s a Wunder CM7, I use an SM7 quite a lot, the Manley Vari-Mu on the way 40

I noticed that the first two Franz Ferdinand tracks go all reverby in the middle eight…

That’s because we recorded the middle eight in the big hall. I like reverb if it’s an actual effect, like a spring reverb, but I don’t really like useful reverb that helps you get things to the right level. I think as a child I used to get scared of records that had reverb, I used to be terrified of Good Vibrations. I love it now.

How did you write Kylie’s Slow?

I was working with Emiliana Torrini on her album, and I think Parlophone were trying to sign her, and as an incentive they said we could write something for Kylie.

We did this super-minimal electro thing on the MPC in 15 minutes, and Emiliana immediately came up with the chorus, and then I switched it off by mistake and we couldn’t remember how it went. We managed to get it back because when she did the guide voice her headphones were really loud, and we rebuilt the whole track listening off the spill from the cans. Kylie didn’t want to come to Brixton so we went to The Townhouse; it was pretty quick. I took it home and mixed it really badly, it’s amazing how wrong you can get four things. The vocal’s really loud. I really would mix it differently now.

Do you do preproduction?

To me, the idea of preproduction doesn’t make any sense. If there’s a song, you start recording it and part of that process might be — are you sure it needs that bit there? Record companies want you to do a couple of weeks of preproduction where you’re not doing anything, just thinking about it, and then start recording, but it doesn’t make sense really. Joe Lean are really able to adapt, and are not fazed by anything. We’ve done some mad stuff, on one of the songs we wanted this really fierce guitar sound. I thought it should sound like sparks. I got the guy holding the guitar, tuned it to an open chord, and then got a set of jump leads and connected them to the car battery outside. With the two wires coming through the letterbox, with one connected to the pegs and the other to a wire brush for drums, when you touched the brush onto the strings it would complete the circuit and you’d get this Kchhhnnngg and it set the strings going — with sparks and smoke. I’m into anything that’s unlikely to have been done before. You can try to think of a different approach, but I think the important thing is to actually do it. n

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CRAFT

Tommy D He’s a music shop salesman turned DJ turned producer and writer and he tells GEORGE SHILLING about working at home and the plight and mindset of the modern artist.

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s a youth, Tommy D took a job in a music shop and asked them to pay him commission in equipment rather than in money. He became a great salesman and soon built up a studio from the proceeds. He rapidly found success as a club DJ with an international career, and through DJing he discovered Right Said Fred and produced their huge hit I’m Too Sexy. This set him on the path of production, and he later branched out into writing. His career has included producing Catatonia’s number one album Equally Cursed And Blessed, and Tommy has co-written and produced songs for Kylie (More More More), Janet Jackson, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Lily Allen and Kanye West. He remixed a track for 42

Michael Jackson’s History bonus disc and it became the B-Side of Earth Song. He has been instrumental in setting the careers of both KT Tunstall and Corinne Bailey Rae on the path to success, co-producing and co-writing singles for both artists, whose albums both achieved number one status.

Tommy previously had a private studio at London’s RAK Studios, and although he still uses the larger main studios at RAK for band recordings, he now mostly works in his London home, a stone’s throw from RAK, where he writes, records and mixes. Being a multi-instrumentalist, his room includes a choice collection of vintage instruments around a Logic setup and his DJ roots are also very much in evidence with many shelves of vinyl records. He recently purchased an SSL Matrix console as the centrepiece of his studio, which is accompanied by a generous complement of high-end outboard. Tommy is currently working on further material with KT Tunstall for her new album (‘slightly Beck-ish, stripped back and a bit crunchy, very simple loop and acoustic vibe’), writing with Jamie Scott (‘he has a blue-eyed soul thing, his vibe is more Jeff Buckley, our stuff is like psychedelic northern soul’), and working with a German artist Zascha Moktan. The effervescent Tommy enthusiastically welcomed Resolution into his home studio. (photos www.recordproduction.com)

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CRAFT Why do you work from home?

I always liked working from home, I always missed the freedom of walking out and in. One of the best ways of getting perspective is just to walk away from the studio. There’s nothing quite like having it in your house, and since I’ve had kids I’ve found I wanted them to be a part of what I do, so they come running in when we’re in the middle of vocal takes. I think artists like the informality. That thing of: ‘Right, we’re going to do vocals now’, it always sounds far too serious and music making and recording should be a fun process that is spontaneous and enjoyable. I’ve made some great records in my bedroom, so it’s not a big deal.

Do you separate writing and production?

I did a writing session recently with KT Tunstall and not only are we writing, but she’s wanting to hear a little bit of the direction where the song could go.

Gone are the days when you could go to A&R with your guitar and say, I’ve got a smash, and the A&R guy goes: Let’s get this person, that person and an orchestra! You have to give them absolutely everything on a plate. In some ways that’s sad, in other ways it’s a quicker process, it cuts out the middle man. It does annoy me that people in the business making decisions can’t hear the direction something could go in, therefore one has to spend hours doing things with it. But with someone like KT we’ll start the process with a lot of tea, a lot of biscuits, a lot of catching up, a lot of finding out what’s been going on — this may go on for a good three or four hours. Invariably, off the back of that, I’m listening, I’m thinking

about where she is in her life, listening to her stories and thinking about potential lyrical ideas coming through that. I think it’s important that an artist who sings their own material should be encouraged to write about what’s going on in their life. It’s good to question them, because it makes them think about it. We sit down and go — let’s write a song about that. That will start the process. I may well have come up with some ideas beforehand — possibly just beat things, possibly some chords I might have found on guitar or piano, I might have a melody that I’ll record into

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CRAFT my laptop. Maybe you won’t use any of those things, they might not like them.

Sometimes someone comes in with a killer song, but they need another bit, then you’ll spend a bit of time — it’s always inevitably a chorus that they need.

The great thing about this room is that it’s all set up for other people as well to work in, it’s quite intimate. Someone can be sitting at the Wurli, I’m jamming on the guitar, we’ve got a beat going, and we can record things very quickly. I like to mess around straight away with sounds and put the Wurli through some boxes to make it sound weird. I like to get that going quite quickly, because that often inspires where the song could go. Alternatively I like to not use any equipment at all and just sit with an acoustic guitar and write a song. It really depends on the artist, if the artist has the ability to carry that song — a lot of new artists need the whole fashion sound of the song as well, and also A&R. There’s no point in me doing a writing session with Lily Allen, writing three great songs on acoustic guitar and sending them to Jamie Nelson, he’s never going to get that — no disrespect to Jamie, but he’s going to go: ‘Great, do something with them, put a beat behind them, get some keyboards.’ So you have to approach each artist in how their sound is perceived in the modern world. The more established an artist is, the less likely they are to want to change.

Do you like to challenge that?

I do. I also do orchestral arrangements with my wife Rosie Danvers, together we did a show with Jay-Z, he wanted to do something with an eight-piece string section.

We managed to talk him into doing it with an entire orchestra, we got Talvin Singh involved and we tried to push those boundaries. He comes from two [turn]tables and a microphone, now since he’s gone more into the live area, and I think we helped to ease him [into that]. Often your job is not just to make something good musically but to try and encourage them to see where they could go.

Why the SSL Matrix?

I’ve always loved mixing on SSLs, it’s a fat, crunchy sound, it crunches in a good way. I thought — what a great concept, it’s exactly how I work. The great thing about it is this big focus button here, when you press it you’re in analogue mode, you press it again, you’re in DAW mode. Such a straightforward, simple idea. All of my outboard is wired into the Matrix Send and Return, and then I can go to the software and go to the insert matrix and just plug in what it is that I want — then you can set up chains [of outboard]. And the SSL sound is great. The great thing about this is having the freedom. I can recall all my gear with Teaboy, a great programme, you download the software and it’s online. You replicate the settings and do recalls,

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CRAFT it’s free, a brilliant piece of software. You can be properly mixing as you go along.

Whenever I mixed in the box I was always thinking that I love this ability to switch backwards and forwards, it’s very important. But the thing is to actually have the luxury to do both quite easily — having the sound of the SSL, the ability to plug some of my favourite bits over that, and doing it in a quick, easy way.

How do you find samples to start a track?

My first port of call would be to go to what I’ve found, I’ll make up beats or go through sample libraries or records. I’ll amass bits and bobs and in iTunes, I’ve got a beats and ideas [playlist], just all different feels and styles. If you get the groove feeling good first it’s much easier to put a song on top than it is to get a song feeling good and then search for the groove because the groove will change the structure of the song.

What’s it like doing vocals in here?

Most singers enjoy the process of me sitting there bobbing my head and dancing round the studio. Singers can be quite insecure, and to see someone enjoy what they’re doing vibes them up more. Getting a performance out of a singer is the art to production more than anything. If you get the singer sounding good, feeling good about themselves, feeling good about what they’re singing, you’re going to get a good recording. If a singer’s sounding good, they’ll perform to that. I definitely found that when I was working with bands. If you tell the singer that the vocals are just scratch, they don’t do it enough, whereas if you say: ‘Look, if it’s good I’m going to keep it.’ They go for it, the band subconsciously go up a notch as well. So no-one seems to worry about singing in here, I’ve got the most beautiful mic in the world, a valve 47, that new SE 4400 is brilliant as well for recording guitar.

an injustice by not listening to them. It’s a collaborative process, if they come in and don’t like something, then I really ought to do something about it. It’s very important that they enjoy the process; artists need to be self-sufficient. I had that with Kanye West, I sent him over some string ideas, and he was trying to sing back the line, and I said, just record it in GarageBand, drag the track in, record it how you want it, save it as an MP3 and email it back and we’ll copy it. He was like, you can do that? I said yeah, and proceeded to tell him, and he said, I’m going to do my whole album like this! He’s a child, and because he’s a child, anything goes, and that’s what makes it so exciting to work with him. He’s always changing his mind, it’s frustrating but exciting, and you get wrapped up in his vision and enthusiasm.

What’s the secret of your success?

I think it’s possibly due to the fact that I’m sympathetic to musicians; they get a bum deal in this world. They come in, and I’m like, Let’s take on the world! I’m really enthusiastic about ideas, and even having done this for 15 years it still feels to me like every day I’m so lucky to be doing this. Obviously you get bored sometimes… n

How good an engineer are you?

I’ve done this for so long now that I can trust my ears a bit. It’s more about getting set up as quickly as possible, so we can capture that moment. KT for instance, she’s on acoustic, she’s on the Wurli, she’s on a bass, she’s like, give me that, give me that! You’re trying to keep up, and that’s what you’ve got to be like.

Was I’m Too Sexy’s ‘upwards’ drum fill your idea?

I did that in my bedroom, it’s a snare drum with pitch bend. I had an Atari 1040 and an Akai S1000, a Roland U220 and a DX7. I was really into pitch-bending hi-hats to get the sound, it was feeling really good, it made it sound realistic. One day I accidentally pitch-bent my snare and thought, that’s cool. I made that record in three hours in my bedroom. It was a good fun tune, and I think humour’s an important part of music. There’s certainly not enough of it in today’s music. Especially in these troubled times, it’s important we look for entertainment, first and foremost. I can’t knock Britain’s Got Talent or X-Factor, because they provide a service.

I just wish the more high-brow artists in this world had a little bit more humour about them. I’d love to see Radiohead do a children’s album, why don’t we put that to them? And I don’t understand why people don’t collaborate more. Paul Weller told me when he was doing the Jam stuff there were three magazines, three TV channels, and you had all this time to sit around and write songs, do gigs. Whereas now, as an artist, you have an incredible amount you’re expected to cover, and that’s why you see artists come back with really dodgy second albums, they use all their best songs for the first album, they haven’t got time to write anything new unless they’re amazingly prolific.

Do you involve the artist in the mixing?

I like to involve the artist as much as possible in the process, they can get in the way a lot of the time, because you have a vision and sometimes that’s just a distraction. But it’s their record, and they’re the one that’s on the sleeve, so I think I’m doing them May/June 2009

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Desk-Controller API 1608 Resolution V8.2

A small-format recording console based on the 1604 that API produced in the 1970s and early 1980s. A well-appointed 16:8:2 with the attractions of 16 mic preamps and a 500-series slot per channel loaded with a classic EQ module.

Euphonix Artist MC Resolution V8.3

The MC Control and MC Mix work together or on their own with Ethernet connection to the host Mac OS X computer for handson control of many DAWs.

Described as a new tool for modern dynamics processing it provides ‘fat and freaky’ sounds by employing punchy control, characterful colouration and extreme settings.

Tonelux TXC Able to perform in-module parallel mixing of dry and compressed signals, it has Feed Back and Feed Forward compression, the ability to over compress with the Ratio control, and Tilt in the sidechain.

Tube-Tech RM8/CM 1A Resolution V7.3

The Compressor module’s controls from the RM8 series reflect the larger format CL-1B unit with circuitry that is very similar, complete with metal toggle switches and mini bakelite-style knobs.

EQ Arsenal Audio V14 A single channel 4-band equaliser designed for the API VPR500 Rack format modelled on the API model 562 EQ with all bands in a peak/dipping parametric configuration.

Gyraf Gyratec GXIV Resolution V7.4

A stereo Parallel-Passive Equaliser, essentially providing a single set of controls covering two channels of 5-band parametric EQ. All frequency controls are switched with a choice of eleven frequencies on each band.

Thermionic Culture The Rooster Resolution V7.8

Subtitled ‘Valve preamp with EQ and attitude’, The Rooster continues the tradition of bold, mildly eccentric, all-valve, proudly English outboard with powerful ‘vari slope’ EQ.

Tonelux Equalux

Fairlight Xynergi Resolution V7.1

Heralded as some kind of incredible QWERTY keyboard, the keys are 40 pixels-square computer monitor screens and the technological heart lies with Fairlight’s Crystal Core CC-1 FPGA card.

RND 5088

Tube-Tech RM8/EM 1A Resolution V7.3

Resolution V7.1

Continuing the theme of the Portico units’ compact size, high audio quality and slightly unconventional feature sets, this desk combines them all in fully discrete modular package.

This EQ follows the traditional Pultec layout for the RM8 module series. No corners have been cut feature-wise; this is exactly the same circuit as the PE-1C, the only difference being a different make of rotary switch.

Analogue Tube AT-101 Resolution V7.8

The result of 5 year’s development based around the Fairchild 670 stereo limiter/compressor, this unit is a blend of modern technology and traditional construction.

Resolution readers who vote online for the Resolution Awards 2009 will automatically be entered into a draw to win an SE Electronics RNR1 ribbon microphone, kindly donated by SE Electronics.

Only registered readers of Resolution magazine are eligible to vote. The Voting page can be accessed after logging in with your unique reader code and postcode (as displayed on your magazine wrapper) in the My Subscription section at www. resolutionmag.com. (If you can’t find Prism Sound Orpheus Resolution V7.6

Provides affordable Prism Sound performance, sound quality and clock technology in a dedicated FireWire multitrack audio interface. It has a variety of I-Os and a monitoring mixer.

RME HDSPe MADIface Resolution V8.1

An HDSPe ExpressCard with MADI and a breakout box that offers 64 I-Os, up to 192kHz sample rate, MADI embedded MIDI transmission, TotalMix and low latency and CPU-load.

Universal Audio UAD-2 Resolution V7.7

Even the baby of the range, the UAD-2 Solo, still manages to offer an average of 2.5 times as much grunt as the original UAD-1 card.

Microphone Crowley and Tripp El Diablo A ribbon mic that is phantom power and windblast proof, and extreme SPL capable. It features Roswellite high-strength, shape memory ribbon technology.

Interface

Dynamic

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A discrete parametric EQ in which the filter Q control relates to the Boost and Cut control and uses a ‘Constant Energy Curve’ that keeps the bandwidth wider at lower levels and narrower at higher boost or cut levels.

Nominations

iZ ADA Resolution V8.1

A multichannel A-D and D-A convertor.

Each ADA is madeto-order with 8, 16, or 24 channels of iZ Technology’s Classic, Nyquist, or S-Nyquist convertor cards. Interfaces with all DAWs via MADI or with Pro Tools via the iZ Dual Pro Tools HD interface card.

resolution

Josephson C720 Resolution V7.4

The unusual construction houses a dual, large diaphragm capsule. Each side delivers a cardioid response and comes with a captive cable terminating in a 7-pin XLR and a splitter lead delivers the output of each capsule half.

May/June 2009

RESOLUTION AWARDS 2009 Primacoustic Recoil Stabilizer Resolution V7.2

AWARDS NOMINATED

2009

your log-in details drop an email to register@resolutionmag.com with your name and address).

Readers have seven votes to cast in the eleven product categories and can vote only once. Votes from manufacturers will be identified and discarded. Voting will close in the middle of June.

Neumann TLM 67 Resolution V8.1

Billed as a modern take on the U67, the TLM67 is a large diaphragm, multipattern condenser that features the same twin K67 capsule as the original U67. This new version uses solid-state electronics and a transformerless output stage.

Schoeps CCM 22, MK22 Resolution V8.1

A pickup pattern designed to be somewhere between the very wide cardioid pattern of the CCM21 and the more traditional cardioid pattern of the CCM4. It is dubbed the Open Cardioid.

of your monitors.

SPL The Phonitor Resolution V7.8

A headphones amp that replicates a loudspeaker setup on headphones. Derived from the company’s 120V-rail camp of ultra high-end products.

Plug-in Abbey Road Brilliance Pack Resolution V7.7

An in-house design straight from that studio in St John’s Wood, these plugs represent depictions of the EMI EQ blocks they used to have to play with.

Audio Ease Speakerphone Resolution V7.1

Described as the ultimate speaker simulator plug-in it comprises 12 different processor modules plus a ‘Sample Bay’.

Dolby Media Meter A software loudness meter for Mac and PC that uses measurement techniques, such as Dialogue Intelligence technology, adapted from the Dolby LM100 Broadcast Loudness Meter.

Sonnox Oxford SuprEsser Resolution V7.4

A very highly-featured De-Esser and a Dynamic EQ with a simple mode for quick fixes and an advanced mode for increased functionality and fine-tuning.

UAD/SPL Transient Designer Resolution V7.1

Based on the new RackPack hardware version of the Transient Designer rather than the original 1u versions, it has controls for Attack, Sustain and an Output Gain.

Røde NTG-3 Resolution V7.6

This shotgun is an RF biased, 48V phantom powered, condenser with very low self noise. It comes packaged with a foam gag and the option of a furry cover.

Monitoring

Resolution V7.8

An isolating pad for monitor speakers consisting of a pad of high-density foam topped with a hefty chunk of steel and finished off with a non-slip neoprene top layer. It improves the performance

The Resolution Awards 2009 celebrate ‘Quality and Innovation’ in professional equipment shipped in 2008.

Preamp AEA RPQ

Puts all the controls for ribbon mics at your fingertips: 80dB of JFET gain, P48 phantom power, and LF trim and HF boost controls that are tuneable and defeatable.

Dangerous Music D-Box Resolution V7.2

Subtitled ‘Valve preamp with EQ and attitude’, The Rooster continues the tradition of bold, mildly eccentric, all-valve, proudly English outboard with a mic amp that is big and commanding.

Tonelux MP1a A discrete preamp that is identical to the original MP1 but with the addition of an output fader to control the record level of the Output.

Processor AnaMod ATS-1 Resolution V8.1

Using analogue ‘building blocks’ to model specific aspects of audio processes, the ATS-1 models the effects of analogue tape with two channels sharing all controls apart from level.

Bricasti M7 A s t e re o h a rd w a re algorithmic reverb processor with a user interface that is intuitive and musically relevant.

Cedar DNS 3000 Latest generation of CEDAR’s Dialogue Noise Suppression technology, combining the tactile control of the original DNS1000 with the Pro Tools integration of the DNS2000 and more.

Universal Audio UAD-2 Resolution V7.7

Even the baby of the range, the UAD-2 Solo, still manages to offer an average of 2.5 times as much grunt as the original UAD-1 card.

Recorder HHB CDR882 DualBurn Resolution V7.8

Dual-drive CD recorder breaks new ground with DiscSpan recording across multiple discs and DualBurn simultaneous recording to two drives.

Marantz PMD661

Beyerdynamic Headzone Pro XT

Updated and more professional version of the original Headzone portable surround sound mixing system that uses DSP for headphone-based 5.1 surround sound reproduction and a headtracking system to locate the orientation of the listener’s head.

Thermionic Culture The Rooster

Focusrite Liquid 4PRE Uses the Liquid Channel’s Liquid technology to deliver the sounds of 40 vintage and classic microphone preamps. Ninety-nine Unit Setup Memories provide recall of all parameters across all channels.

Solid state handheld that supersedes the PMD660 with an improved form factor, a superior feature set, and the use of SD media.

Sony PCM-D50 Resolution V7.7

A 96kHz/24-bit recorder with 4Gb of internal Flash memory and a Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo slot for additional storage.

Sound Devices 788T Resolution V7.7

RME DMC-842 Resolution V7.2

A combination of summing box and monitor controller in a 1u, it has been dubbed the DAW user’s Swiss Army Knife.

May/June 2009

The first multichannel digital microphone AES42 controller.

Mode 1 and Mode 2, as specified in AES42, are currently supported by Neumann, Sennheiser and Schoeps.

resolution

8-track recorder designed for multitrack on-location productions with eight mic inputs and numerous additional I-O and data connections. n

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SWEET SPOT

Acoustical simulations, electroacoustics and audio monitor systems After studying issues such as site selection, layout consideration (V7.6), defining and achieving appropriate sound isolation (V7.8) and well-balanced room acoustics (V8.2) for our dream media production facility we’re getting closer to the end result. After a brief digression into acoustical simulations DIRK NOY, from Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG), talks about the icing on the cake — the installation and calibration of the audio monitor system.

O

nly a few years back, detailed acoustical simulations and auralisations low frequencies and for small rooms. These tools are based on the so called could only be performed by playing with large architectural scale models, ‘Boundary-Element-Method’ or BEM (related to the Finite-Element-Method FEM) using tiny sound sources and equally tiny receiver microphones, or by and allow numerical solving of the wave equation using the available boundary using ultra expensive mainframe style academic grade supercomputers. conditions. The results can then be visualised at predetermined discrete planes.

The digital revolution has brought this technology to desktop size and economics The process requires substantial computational power (essentially a numerical and commercial acoustical simulation software now runs on standard Windowssolving of the wave equation for every single lattice point in the volume). The based PCs with no additional hardware requirements. resulting pressure distribution and frequency response at the listening position allow Performing meaningful acoustical simulations is a three-step procedure. In specification of appropriate low frequency absorbers. step one, the space needs to be translated from architectural information (such as drawings and measured dimensions) to a so-called ‘model’ — the model is a three-dimensional representation of architecture in the digital domain. In step two, the model will be dressed up with acoustical surfaces. Every surface of the model (usually walls, floor, ceiling, but also furniture, curtains, installed acoustical materials etc.) needs to be assigned specific acoustical properties, such as absorption, diffusive reflection and transmission.

Step three is the fun part. In this step, the user can perform virtual acoustical measurements in the model and learn from the virtual measurement results.

One example would be the study of the decay of sound in a recording space; another would be the study of speech Fig. 1. Acoustical intelligibility in an airport simulation model of a terminal. Yet another Theatre. The colours indicate example would be the Fig. 3. Sample BEM simulation result. Top: listening plane view (height = 1.20m) at acoustical surface properties.

60Hz; bottom: section view (centre plane) at 60Hz. Credit: Carlo Fickler, WSDG, frequency response of using ABEC simulation software. the First Violin at the Conductor’s lectern. Or at the oboist’s position. Or in the Credit: Gabriel Hauser, WSDG, using CATT-Acoustic simulation software. hallway. As with any experiments, the test results offer answers to specifically asked questions; therefore Positioning the audio monitors — Acoustical simulations are the test setups (questions) helpful to determine the specification and location of absorbers and will need to be driven by the diffusors but they also assist in evaluating loudspeaker positions nature of the task. The results and finding optimal solutions. Common audio monitors display an of these tests are presented in omnidirectional radiation pattern below a certain frequency, typically a diagram format. Decisions below 120Hz, for example. Hence at low frequencies a listener in a can be taken to go back room will most definitely hear the direct sound but he will also hear to step one or two and a number of reflections from the surrounding walls, especially from modify some architectural the surface behind the speaker — the addition of direct and reflected parameters or acoustical sound is called Speaker Boundary Interference or SBIR. To eliminate surfaces to hopefully obtain these effects audio monitors are often flush-mounted directly into better acoustical results. the wall. Alternatively they can be positioned either very close to Regular acoustical adjoining surfaces (so the low frequency reflections are practically simulations are a valuable in phase with the direct tool, but offer no information sound) or very far away in the low frequency octaves from adjoining surfaces due to their inherent ray(so the reflections are trace algorithms, which significantly lower in are valid for statistical level and later in time). wave field conditions. For Additionally, for a correct low frequencies and small stereo representation, rooms, non-statistical wave the left and right field conditions (the modal audio monitors must behaviour) can go up to Fig. 2. Sample simulation results. Top right: direct sound pressure be equidistance from about 200Hz. New tools have level distribution; bottom right: reverberation time distribution. each other and from recently become available to All at 500Hz. the listener position, Fig. 4. Audio monitor geometry for stereo systems. allow acoustical studies at Credit: Gabriel Hauser, WSDG, using CATT-Acoustic simulation software. respectively.

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resolution

May/June 2009

SWEET SPOT

Fig. 5. Impulse response measurement.

Frequency response measurement of a two-way active audio monitor system.

Medium and large scale audio monitors with an active crossover may offer process is the listening test. I carry a carefully selected bunch of reference CDs and adjustment in the time domain, which are the phase relationships between the .wav files on my iPhone with me for this final step. Sitting down in the engineer’s individual low, mid and high frequency drivers. The goal is to compensate for position, listening to the audio system and the room for half an hour I will always differences in time-of-flight from these drivers to the listener positions such that a suggest some further minor modifications to get the top-notch reproduction quality fully coherent wavefront arrives at the listener’s position. In fact, these are very small we worked so hard to obtain. This of course is a deeply satisfying moment and differences but it is astonishing how much a correct phase setting at the crossover is also the last day of the project’s design, construction and installation –- which frequency contributes to a pristine, clear, well-staged and transparent sound. Correct again is the first day of a meaningful, enriching and hopefully successful life for the phase or delay settings are found by measuring the individual drivers’ Impulse facility and its owners. n Responses, evaluating the respective time-of-flight and phase conditions, and properly delaying the drivers Interesting websites System calibration System calibration More simulation graphics and auralisation processors analogue processors digital closest to the listener’s position. An Impulse Response Meyer Sound CP-10 — www.meyersound.com Meyer Sound Galileo — www.meyersound.com soundfiles: www.wsdg.com —> Technology measurement of the entire system should then result in Apogee CRQ-12 — www.apogee-sound.com Apogee DLC24 — www.apogee-sound.com a single-peak graph as shown in Figure 5.

Commercial simulation and Audient ASP 131 — www.audient.com Rane (various) — www.rane.com Many audio monitors offer some crude on-board auralisation software Rane (various) — www.rane.com Weiss EQ-1 LP — www.weiss.ch ABEC — www.randteam.de/Abec/Index.html SPL (various) — www.soundperformancelab.com Z-Systems RDQ1/RDQ6 — www.z-sys.com adjustments in the frequency domain. This is helpful, CARA — www.cara.de/ Avalon AD2077 — www.avalondesign.com DEQX PDC 2.6 — www.deqx.com but more often than not a dedicated analogue or digital CATT-Acoustic — www.catt.se/ Millennia NSEQ-2 — www.mil-media.com DFMAES/2 — www.dfm2000.de/ outboard parametric equaliser or loudspeaker processor will EASE — www.auralisation.de/ TL-Audio EQ 5013 — www.tlaudio.co.uk Klark Teknik Helix — www.klarkteknik.com be employed. The goal is to obtain a linear reproduction Odeon — www.odeon.dk/ Klark Teknik (various) — www.klarkteknik.com BSS, http — www.bssaudio.com XTA (various) — www.xta.uk.com throughout the audio spectrum. Generally, reducing Loudspeaker simulation data HK Audio DSM2060 — www.hkaudio.com energy is preferable over adding energy. Parametric CLF Group — www.clfgroup.org/ Trinnov Audio Optimizer — www.trinnov.com equalisers offer the ability to precisely tailor the correction Lab Gruppen Dolby Lake — www.labgruppen.com suited for a particular problematic frequency range.

Xilica (various) — www.xilica.com/ When the measurement results are satisfactory, the last and utterly critical step in the System Calibration

May/June 2009

resolution

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BUSINESS

Stayin’ alive Falling CD sales and a price-squeeze from project studios spelt the end of the line for many top commercial recording facilities, yet some still thrive. NIGEL JOPSON looks at the strategies and innovative ideas behind their continued success.

I

t must be 20 years since I last fell asleep over the faders in a control room.

Last week I was in a top UK studio where I felt that, had I just woken Rip Van Winkle-like from two decades of sleep, I could have leant forward in the Aeron and restarted the session without missing a beat. Same big black monitors, NS10s, yards-long SSL, Larc, patchbay ... if the lighting hadn’t been dim I might have noticed some joker had stuck a different number at the end of the SSL logo, and a trip to the machine room would have revealed no tape and a Digidesign rack. But the point of this somnolent recollection is to observe that, had Eddie Kramer fallen asleep at Olympic Studios in 1969, he’d have got a big shock when he awoke in 1989 and would have needed days to get up to speed. While complaining about the current state of our industry, some seem complacently pleased with their equipment, room designs and business models.

This attitude is in stark contrast to the approach of owners and managers currently making a success of commercial facilities: if there’s an un-booked room they get twitchy — there’s no compunction about radical decor, monitoring or equipment changes — goodness knows what wheeling and dealing goes on to implement them. ‘If you’ve got rooms that aren’t getting work you have to look at the reason for it: is it that nobody wants to work on that type of console, is it that nobody wants a studio of that sort anymore? ... the answer could be yes to either,’ says Richard Boote, owner of Strongroom and AIR studios. ‘We’ve just bought

a Digidesign Icon for one of our studios because customer demand suggested an Icon for music, and a lot of our Post work required it. So that room has changed: it used to have a Euphonix, before that it was an SSL. One of the rooms at AIR, a postproduction room which wasn’t used very much because the work was being done at Strongroom, became the space we converted into a mastering room. I look at what’s not being used, try and work out why it isn’t, and look at what else we could be involved in which would help bring work in.’ AIR Mastering, with engineers Ray Staff and Matt Colton, is already doing good business.

On the opposite side of London at Metropolis studios, new MD Ian Brenchley has a diverse range of projects on the go. A new service called iMixing will be introduced to coincide with the studio’s 20th anniversary. This unattended multitrack mixing service will share the online submission and delivery systems of the existing iMastering business, with a discount being offered for clients purchasing both. ‘These days, when you are being continuously battered down on rates, you’ve got no choice but to diversify,’ Ian explains. ‘I think the innovative and dynamic companies will be the ones which will survive, because they will have found new ways of utilising the building and equipment they have to make money.’ In his former job as DVD and broadcast director at Universal Music, Brenchley longed for a one-stop-shop for media production, and this is the name he’s given to his new sales initiative at Metropolis. He has cherry-picked specialists to add to the Metropolis team to handle TV ads, online graphics, websites and programming. He cites the recent Stevie Wonder Live At Last DVD as an example of the new turnkey operation: ‘They commissioned us to do the DVD, we did the Blu-ray, then we made them a teaser trailer to get the artwork job.

They liked the teaser trailer so much they made it the US cinema ad,

Disney Hall L.A.

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BUSINESS

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24/04/2009

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Studio E - Metropolis Studios, London, UK owners of more than 20 ADA-8 and ADA-8XR interfaces.

we won the artwork, we did the print artwork and then the billboard work.

We did everything except for film the concert!’

Ian’s idea that a turnkey service will appeal to customers is supported by others: ‘I would say I have evidence that entertainment producers are not necessarily spending less in total, but they are spending it for a wider range of distribution media,’ observes Joe Caterini, executive VP, sales, of PostWorks in New York.

Expanding into areas complimentary to, but outside core competencies can be more of a challenge than it first appears.

‘I thought — audio postproduction, it’s got to be simple, if the guys in Soho who don’t really know about audio can do it then we can do it!’ confesses Richard Boote. ‘I very soon realised that a music studio might think it knows audio, but it doesn’t understand audio for postproduction.’ Richard started a separate division, Breathe Post Production, and recruited key people with post experience like managing director Dan Gable (Resolution V7.6). To bring in the associated audio work, sometimes it seems you have to become an expert in a totally new area of entertainment media. ‘It was difficult to get clients who were working in a video editing studio in Soho to come to Strongroom just for the audio side of it.

So we thought — we need to be doing the whole job so we built a load of video editing suites and employed people who speak that language. We’re able to offer the full package: you can come here and do online, off-line, colouring, grading, HD, 2k ... whatever it is, we’ll do it ... and the audio as well!’ In fact, Richard has just taken over another 8,000sq.ft building and is constructing a new picture postproduction facility.

Whereas once the emphasis when constructing or rebuilding a studio was all about clever acoustics, monitoring and mixers, successful owners today will prioritise flexibility and diversity of use. ‘Being diversified, that, at the end of the day, is what makes the difference,’ says Paul Sutin, owner of Swiss multiroom facility Dinemec Studios (Resolution V6.3).

Paul used his experience as a classical engineer to specify adjustable acoustics suitable for orchestral recording in the large 573sq.m main room, but designed-in lighting systems, staging, power feeds and backstage facilities to allow use for events such as concerts, TV shows, auctions, product launches and fashion shows. Last July a VIP amphitheatre was created around a ‘secret box’ for the launch of the new Ferrari California sports car. The audience was treated to 20-speaker surround sound effects (recorded at Dinemec) of the engine accelerating, ending with the illumination of the new vehicle and an audio-visual presentation. Like Strongroom Studios, Dinemec has a healthy hire division, which offers the opportunity of an up-sell for events.

Catwalks, staging, lights and PA are available plus the unique-selling-point — an event filmed, recorded and authored to a DVD. There’s also Dinemec records, with 34 albums currently available, and a publishing company that manages music and DVD titles on a world-wide licensing basis.

The early 1970s concept of the in-house production or label is alive and well in the 2000s as a diversity play. Ian Brenchley is starting an imprint called Voyage at Metropolis, a deal has been struck with the BBC for access to archive content and the first release — a Dusty Springfield retrospective — is already scheduled.

This is to be followed by a DVD series called ‘The British Invasion’, covering the music of the beat and pop musicians who enjoyed US success between 1964-66.

Sometimes the studio itself can be part of the story: since opening in 1931, EMI’s Abbey Road Studios has been synonymous with great music. Drummer Pete Van Hooke came up with the concept of a performance/documentary TV series filmed at the studio. The first season of twelve one-hour shows of ‘Live From Abbey Road’ May/June 2009

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The near fanatical loyalty of Prism Sound users is a testament to the success of its product range. Whether it be multi-track recording, mixing, cd-mastering or on location, Prism Sound products deliver robust, reliable performances every time.

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BUSINESS aired in 2006 on the Sundance Channel in the US and Channel 4 in the UK; it’s now seen in 120 countries in 27 different broadcast markets. Artists featured include Norah Jones, Snow Patrol, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jamiroquai, Kasabian, Paul Simon and Gnarls Barkley. The series is directed by cyberpunk Max Headroom co-creator Annabel Jankel, the shows cleverly leverage the magic of Abbey Road with a cinematic-35mm look, and the absence of a live audience gives an intimate vibe that makes viewing feel more personal.

Producer Michael Gleason told me: ‘I’m very happy with our arrangement, and so are the studio, it’s a win-win for everyone. Abbey Road have a lot of people they do deals with, and we have the rights to do the TV series.

The Abbey Road name is linked to great musicians, and we’re very honoured and pleased to have the license to make this show.’

Michael is a former board director of MGM studios, so listening to him explain the project hadn’t quite broken even by the third year, and how hard it is to persuade mainstream broadcasters to air music programming of this type was a salutary experience. Arranging licensing for further use of material can also be tricky, Live From Abbey Road only cleared 25 artist tracks for their first season DVD. Using a recording studio as a TV showcase for well known artists signed to major labels is not a quick road-to-riches. ‘It’s one thing to fund and make the film,’ explains Michael, ‘but you’ve got to have a way for someone to see it. Freemantle Media have been distributing our show around the world, and they’ve done just an incredible job.’ There are other filmed-in-the-studio TV projects, but none have yet achieved the recognition and impetus of Live From Abbey Road. Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich has his ‘From The Basement’ show, which is broadcast on Sky Arts in the UK and the IFC (Independent Film Channel) in the US. The most recent series, featuring Damien Rice, Autolux, Eels and Architecture in Helsinki was recorded at Bob Clearmountain’s Berkeley Street Studio in LA.

Other diversification initiatives by Abbey Road include audio products: six pieces of pro-audio hardware recreating the EMI TG series of equipment, made by Chandler Ltd; three plug-ins, the Brilliance pack, Mastering pack and TG12413 emulation; samples — a Propellerhead Reason ReFill pack called Abbey Road Keyboards (including the famous Mrs Mills piano). Abbey Road also offers what it terms ‘Asset Management and Supply’ services: these include copying and encoding, restoration, mass digitisation, video encoding and audio archiving ... anyone who’s worked at Abbey Road will have at some time negotiated the serried ranks of recording machines past, present and best-forgotten which often temporarily park in the corridors.

Abbey Road has also not been shy of marketing initiatives: until the end of April 2009 unattended mastering was on offer at £90 per track.

Cynics may note that none of the facilities mentioned is at risk from spiralling premises values or building lease issues.

But even faced with the property-pinch, the strong will survive.

George Martin moved AIR Studios from its central London Oxford Street location to Hampstead in 1992. In 2005, two of New York City’s largest facilities, Right Track and Sound on Sound, took the dramatic step of merging their operations. The resulting successful company, Legacy Recording, is now undergoing a monumental reorganisation to fit in with Manhattan’s soaring real-estate values. Legacy’s huge West 38th

St room is closing (despite being fully booked), Dreamhire is moving to Queens, two new rooms are being built at the 48th street location and the SSL 9096J is being moved from West 38th to Studio A at 48th. Broadway casts will adopt modified recording procedures, consoles will be trundled down city streets, new rooms will be built. No complacency: the show must go on.

The key to continued success for large commercial facilities is not just diversification, it’s creativity and generating a buzz. Both Metropolis and Strongroom studios have bars and eating areas, where small live concerts and music industry events are held.

Production rooms are hired out not necessarily as a core part of the business but to bring the right people in. ‘If you get the right producers in they’ll bring in good artists to hang out in the building, who in turn bring in the right record company people,’ Ian Brenchley observes.

It’s notable that Strongroom/AIR, the most prominent London studio group, also runs a producer and engineer management company — as Jill Sinclair did so successfully for Sarm Studios in the 80s. The successful studio managers I spoke to all have a remarkable willingness to summon resources to throw at new ideas, to change course in midtack if necessary, and to constantly widen their skills base in an inclusive manner.

‘I believe too many studios think — we know what we’re doing’, Richard Boote suggests. ‘We do know what we are doing as far as recording goes, and I now think I know what I’m doing as far as video postproduction goes, but I’m not an A&R person, so I’m linking up with people from that background as well to drive it forward.’ So not just diversity and creativity, but creative managers as well. As I left Metropolis, Ian called down the stairs: ‘Hey — did I mention my idea for a Rock-Institute ...’ n

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ten

Definitive digital dates The Digital Dream — a SPARS/APRS-inspired promotional film from the early Eighties — is now a reality. Everything is digital. As digital downloads and MP3 players takeover, JIM EVANS logs some of the key digital developments of the past 70 years.

1937 — Alec Reeves (1902-1971) devised Pulse-Code Modulation in 1937.

Reeves, a natural tinkerer, grew up in the Home Counties in the UK and his first job was developing longwave transatlantic radio communications in the 1920s. He also helped develop short-wave and microwave radio systems.

Reeves became acutely aware of the shortcomings of analogue communication and this led him to develop PCM. It was a long time before the work was fully appreciated, but in 1969 he received the CBE and a postal stamp commemorating PCM was issued.

Reeves was peace-loving and reluctant to work on offensive weapons, so during the Second World War he developed pinpoint bombing aids, which helped reduce civilian casualties, for which he received an OBE.

1943 — In 1943, Bell Telephone Laboratories developed the first digital scrambled speech transmission system, SIGSALY. In cryptography,

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SIGSALY (also known as the X System, Project X, Ciphony I, and the Green Hornet) was a secure speech system used in World War II for the highestlevel Allied communications. It pioneered a number of digital communications concepts, including the first transmission of speech using PCM. The name SIGSALY was not an acronym, but a cover name that resembled an acronym — the SIG part was common in Army Signal Corps names (e.g. SIGABA). The prototype was called the Green Hornet after the popular radio show The Green Hornet, because it sounded like a buzzing hornet — resembling the show’s theme tune — to anyone trying to eavesdrop on the conversation.

1957 — In the year that Buddy Holly recorded That’ll Be The Day, Max Mathews developed the process to digitally record sound via computer. The father of computer music, pioneering researcher Mathews (born 1926), programmed the first c o m p u t e r- g e n e r a t e d sounds, setting into motion a technological and creative revolution that continues.

A telecommunications engineer and amateur violinist working in Bell’s acoustic and behavioural research department during the mid-50s, Mathews was originally assigned to explore the digital transmission and recording of speech patterns, a process he realised could be easily adapted to the composition and playback of music as well. In 1957, he created the first music synthesizing programme, MUSIC 1, transforming the computer into a new kind of instrument, one theoretically capable of generating any sound transmitted through a loudspeaker.

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1962 — Thomas Stockham was an American scientist who developed the first practical digital audio recording system and pioneered techniques for digital audio recording and processing as well. While at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, he noticed several of the students using an MIT TX-0 mainframe computer installed at the campus to record their voices digitally into the computer’s memory, using a microphone and a loudspeaker connected to convertors attached to the TX-0. This led Stockham to his own digital audio experiments on this same computer in 1962. In 1975 he founded Soundstream, Inc. The company developed a 16-bit digital audio recording system using a 16-track Honeywell instrumentation tape recorder as a transport, connected to digital audio recording and playback hardware of Stockham’s design. Soundstream Inc. was the first commercial digital recording company in the US. Stockham was the first to make a commercial digital recording, using his own Soundstream recorder in 1976 at the Santa Fe Opera.

1972 — As the first home-video recorders went on sale in the UK, Denon launched the first practical 8-channel digital recorder, the DN-023R. It was a huge machine, consisting of a tape transport, monitor and a signal processor. 1981 brought the DN-3000FE, the first professional-use CD player. Only one year later, in October 1982, the DCD-2000 hit the market as the first consumer CD player. In 1992, two decades after the company became the first to have put digital recorders to practical use, Alpha Processing was announced. An epoch-making technology it had the capability to interpolate the 16-bit data of a CD to 20 bits. It was first incorporated in the D-A convertor DA-S1 released in 1993.

May/June 2009

TEN and recording tools of the day. Notable early adopters included John McLaughlin, Pat Metheny, Michael Jackson, particularly on his 1982 album Thriller, and Frank Zappa, who composed his 1986 Grammywinning album Jazz From Hell on the instrument.

The system was nearly as famous for where it was not used, as it was for the list of premier studios in which it was.

1977 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The first commercially available digital audio recorder was the Sony PCM-1.

Introduced in 1977 it converted an incoming analogue signal into a digital one, which was then recorded onto a standard video cassette in a VCR. Initially, digitally mastered records were still released on vinyl discs, however, in 1982 Sony and Philips released compact discs and players. In 1987, digital audio tape (DAT) was introduced. Due to record company opposition to a medium that allowed flawless copies of CDs to be made, few DAT recorders were released to the North American public. They did, however, become widely used for professional recording.

1979 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; In 1979 the first major label digitally recorded album of popular music Bop â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Til You Drop by guitarist Ry Cooder was released by Warner Bros.

The album was recorded in Los Angeles on a 32-track 3M digital machine. The album yielded Cooderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biggest hit, an R&B cover version of Elvis Presleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1960s recording Little Sister. Also in 1979, the first digital Compact Disc prototype was created as a compromise between sound quality and size of the medium.

1982 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; New England Digital debuted the Sample-toDisk option on the Synclavier -â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the first commercial hard disk recording system in 1982. Originally developed as the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer

by Dartmouth College professor Jon Appleton, in association with NED founders Cameron W. Jones and Sydney A. Alonso â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and subsequently under the marketing guidance of Brad Naples who spotted the business potential of the design â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Synclavier became one of the most advanced electronic synthesis May/June 2009

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1996 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; In November this year, DVD players went on sale in Japan. Early DVD releases include Twister, The Mask and Bonnie & Clyde. In 1997, the first music video titles are released on DVD, among them Eric Clapton: Unplugged. A year later, DreamWorks announced it would support DVD, becoming the last major studio to do so. By December, 1.4 million DVD players were in US homes; 23 million discs were sold for the year. Computer makers announced shipments of 6 million PCs with DVD drives.

2007 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; On Friday 17 August 2007, the CD celebrated its 25th birthday. The CD was jointly developed

by Philips and the first CD produced was The Visitors by Abba. Piet Kramer, who was a member of the optical group at Philips during the discâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s development, said, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;When Philips teamed up with Sony to develop the CD, our first target was to win over the world for the CD. We did this by collaborating openly to agree on a new standard. For Philips, this open innovation was a new approach and it paid off.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; He said the companies had never imagined that the computing and entertainment industries would also opt for the CD as a storage system for content. Jacques Heemskerk, who was one of the senior engineers involved with the optical side of CD players, said the team knew they were building a revolutionary product. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;It was revolutionary in many fields â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the optics were new, the disc was new. At the start of development there wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even a laser that would work well enough for our needs.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; n resolution

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TECHNOLOGY

CIE-HDTV before.

Display calibration Sound facilities can no longer avoid knowing a little bit more about their picture monitor than was historically acceptable. JIM BETTERIDGE looks at the problems and investigates a solution.

CIE-HDTV after.

T

here was a time when the average sound postproduction facility didn’t have to worry too much about picture quality. We were given a one-light telecine or a low-res Avid output on some form of video tape and hoped they’d be sufficient pixels to make out the lips. Filmmakers didn’t generally expect to see proper pictures and the ‘you’re here to do the sound’ attitude persisted in television even when laying back to the graded BetaSP or DigiBeta master.

But expectations have risen. With the advent of cheaper and faster storage, hi-def video and ever-better NLE systems, it’s increasingly common to be given a high quality QuickTime to work with fairly early on in the process. Combine this with the flood of affordable HD flat-screen displays and projectors and we can find our clients being a bit more demanding on the visual side of things.

So with client satisfaction in mind, I suspect there will be more than a few people reading this article who have taken the plunge and bought a pretty decent 1920 x 1080 display or projector. In addition they might well have picked up a Black Magic or Aja video card and breakout box for their computer.

Then, connecting it to a suitable HD source, they will have laid the CIE colour space chart.

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results before their client, anticipating gasps of awe and gratitude. In all likelihood, however, such gasps will not have been forthcoming. In fact, the picky little ingrates are quite likely to have made disparaging comments about the colours not being ‘quite right’, irrespective of which preset was chosen from the device’s menu.

The surprising fact is that, although there are clear and unambiguous standards, most manufacturers apparently prefer to give their products a little extra here and there in an effort to make them look a bit special and set them apart from the pack.

Your client will hopefully have on-lined their programme using a broadcast monitor which will be aligned to the relevant standards and so won’t be impressed with any boom ‘n’ tizz added by your display.

In 1931 the results of research done into the range of colours visible to the human eye were published by the International Commission On Illumination including the now familiar CIE colour space chart and remains the basis for this type of work. It shows the gamut of red, green and blue we can see and the colours in between that can be created by combining these three primaries. When properly balanced, the combination of these three colours will result in white, as seen at the centre of the chart. As you move out from the centre of the chart the colours become more saturated. Calibrating your display is not simply a matter of adjusting the strength and hue of these three elements, however, because there’s also the strength of the luminance signal to be taken into account — from black to peak white. This adds a Z axis to the colour chart to create a rugby-ball-shaped 3D model of which the image shown here is a cross section. Changing the brightness alters the eye’s perception of colour and this too must be taken into consideration when making adjustments. Most of the detail in a picture is in the luminance signal.

Cranking up the brightness may give an impression of a better picture but if (say) 95% white is actually hitting the peak white limit of your display you’ll simply be losing all the detail found in the last 5%.

In the CIE Gamut image shown here the triangle marked with the coloured squares shows where the HDTV range sits within the visible gamut. What it doesn’t show is that there is also a set of numbers specifying points on the Z axis, defined as a percentage of the brightest white a display can produce. Interestingly, in terms of colour saturation the HDTV range is not all that greater than PAL. The real difference is to be found in the scope of the luminance signal.

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May/June 2009

TECHNOLOGY Limited perception — Trying to make sense of all this armed only with a remote control and a spotless pair of spectacles is hopeless. The human eye is far too adaptive to make any amount of naked squinting usefully objective (Doesn’t stop them telling you your picture’s a bit off though. Ed). What you need is a Spectroradiometer, or Gamma before.

Colour Analyzer, connected to a PC with associated test software. You also need to know what you’re doing, which would eliminate me from any applicants’ shortlist. So I asked a couple of completely unconnected colleagues involved in the video business who they’d recommend for the job and they both instantly suggested a man called Gordon Fraser of Convergent AV. For around Gamma after. £350, Gordon will visit your UK facility or home and align your system for PAL, NTSC and HDTV. He can only do this to the extent that the colour management system (CMS) on your device will allow. Many inexpensive (and some quite expensive) devices have very limited CMS facilities and a good percentage of those that display the parameters apparently don’t actually do what they’re meant to.

When I came to replace my trusty Sanyo PLV Z2 SD projector a few months back, right below ‘cost effective’ on the wish list was a decent CMS. This I found, on paper at least, in the Epson EMP-TW2000. At around £2,250 it was not expensive and was generally well received by the press. I would happily have spent a bit more and indeed there were other projectors that received more glowing reviews from journalists in the popular press but which didn’t offer the level of control of the Epson. It’s also worth noting that, whereas a monitor that’s made to high enough standards could conceivably come out of the box in perfect alignment, the calibration of a projector has also to take into account the screen it’s working with. Different screen materials bias the image differently: some high contrast grey screens, for instance, add considerable blue to the image that needs to be compensated for.

Gordon showed up with the requisite kit and spent several hours projecting blocks of various colours on to the screen, nudging the projector’s array of interactive variables and generally impressing me with his grasp of the subject.

For each of the three primary colours the brightness, saturation and hue were adjusted, the last allowing each colour to be moved clockwise or anticlockwise towards the other two on the chart. The gamma curve was also adjusted; this relates

to the way in which gain is added to the luminance signal as it passes through the projector. As each variable was adjusted its effect on the others had to be repeatedly checked to build up an overall understanding of the system’s performance.

Reducing errors — The software Gordon uses shows deviation in units called delta error, RGB before. which take into account chrominance and luminance, where one unit represents the smallest difference the human eye can detect in a static image. With a moving image the difference needs to be about three units for it to be detectable and it’s the aim of the calibration process to reduce the error for each of the three primary colours to below three. The Epson CIE-RGB after.. turned out to be reasonably true to its printed word and the CMS worked largely as it should, allowing a good overall balance to be achieved and certainly a big improvement on its out-of-thebox performance with only the blue saturation figure showing a delta error greater than three.

If your device doesn’t have a decent CMS you can pass your signal though a separate box that’ll take care of all that. For instance, Gordon had a Lumagen Radiance which, at around £3,500, offered a wide range of inputs, upscaling and a full CMS, ideal if you’re dealing with multiple sources and display devices.

So how did all this go down with my client? Using a top of the range Sony SRW5500 HDCAM-SR tape deck connected via its HD-SDI output, through a Black Magic HDLink to the HDMI input on the projector, I projected the 1920 x 1080 master… and yes, he did think it was much better than he’d seen it previously and felt more comfortable seeing the pictures he’d slaved over for so long in their proper light.

There are naturally other performance differences that set a hugely expensive professional CRT broadcast monitor (or even the new type of LCD monitor) apart from a £2,250 DLP, LCD or plasma device but getting their colour/luminance calibration close to right will go a long way to making the final layback process a more pleasurable and reassuring one for your customers. n

Contact convergent av, uk: Website: www.convergent-av.co.uk

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sweet spot

Picture size, sound level, and dynamic range

test, the process was repeated with the 31-inch screen.

In all cases, as each person entered the room, the fader was fully closed. The results suggested that the people chose a higher listening level, (around 5dB more) when watching the bigger screen.

The test was repeated a few days later, but this time using a documentary as a source, without music or Picture size has a bearing on what we perceive as an appropriate accompanying SPL and special effects. The results were closer, but the general tendency was still to listen louder while watching a equalisation character. PHILIP NEWELL revisits and updates his initial article in V7.3 with bigger screen. These tests were conducted in a mixing room of relatively low decay time, normally used for the some new findings. mixing of television sound. t the Reproduced Sound 24 Conference of the Institute of Acoustics I A second test was carried out using a single screen, presented a paper on the effects of visual stimuli on the perception of but this time moving the listeners away from the screen, what could be considered to be a natural sound level and equalisation step by step, and asking them to adjust the sound to a for a given size and distance of picture [1]. It was co-written with eleven comfortable level. The programme was again an action other authors, of five different nationalities, and related to a series of tests carried sequence, with dialogue, music and effects. The set-up is out during 2008 in Switzerland, Spain and the UK. shown in Figure 1. It was carried out in the hemi-anechoic Table 1. Mean values In the world of audio for picture, the two must combine well to create a chamber (hard floor) at Vigo University. The environment of chosen level change believable reality. It has long been known that visual and audible stimuli are to was chosen so that the room, itself, would only minimally with distance some degree affected by each other; however, the ways in which these variables affects the results. The interact has not been particularly well documented. The paper presented the results loudspeaker always stayed of several controlled experiments, which dealt with some of the separate variables below the screen, and the individually, to try to assess the effect that each one had on the overall perception. sound pressure levels noted The experiments related to the problems of soundtrack compatibility between were always those at the cinemas of different sizes, mixing environments of different sizes, and between ears of the listeners. Tests cinema and domestic reproduction. were made at distances of The need for multi-format rooms is growing, but the practical realisation of such 1, 2, 3 and 5 metres from rooms has not enjoyed much success; partially due to a lack of a full understanding the screen. The test was a of what was under investigation in the paper. more controlled repeat of The experiments â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The first experiment consisted of two video monitors a test undertaken a year placed 1.5 metres from the viewers. One screen was of 10-inches and the other earlier, and the mean 31-inches. About 20 people took part in the test in which they were asked to results are shown in Table enter a room, sit in a chair, and push up a fader until they were comfortable with 1. Although the results of the level of the soundtrack (a battle scene from an action film) while watching the two experiments were the image on the 10-inch monitor. They were tested in small groups, so that not precisely the same, they when one person had done the first test, they would leave the room and the did both show a tendency next person would enter. When each person of the group had completed the first for the listeners to expect less loudness as the screen receded from them.

A third test, the concept of which is shown in Figure 2, also varied the distance from the viewer to the screen. However, in this case, the screens were larger as the Figure 2. The layout distance became greater, of the screens for the maintaining the same variable-size/variabledistance test. subtended angle from the

A

Figure 1. The test set-up in the hemi-anechoic chamber, in Vigo.

58

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May/June 2009

sweet spot viewer to the edges of the screens. The improved, but the need was not seen to be there. results are shown in Table 2, which In fact, as part of the first experiment described in this article, a indicates that the natural, comfortable test was made without picture, and the chosen level (with people listening level increased as the distance being told to imagine that they were listening to a radio drama) was increased; quite contrary to the result greater, on average, than when viewing the 10-inch screen. A probable of the test when increasing the viewing implication of this is that the small screen gave rise to people expecting distance from a screen of fixed size. The a sound level which was equally diminutive. test was carried out in a sound control Table 2. Screen size and distance versus ‘natural’ SPL To put this into perspective, it is easy to imagine watching a battle for constant viewing angle. room of low decay time. scene with explosions reaching the maximum level permitted by A fourth test took place in the listening room Dolby of 115dBC when watching an 18-metre of the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, wide screen in a huge room. Conversely, when at Southampton University. This test had a set-up watching the same film on a mobile telephone rather similar to the first test, with screens of two screen, such a level would seem to be not different sizes at the same distance from the viewers. only ridiculous, but also, possibly, distressing.

However, in this case, the sound level was fixed. The In a previous paper, which was summarised two screens that were used were of 7 inches and in Resolution V7.3, a curve was shown that 42 inches. When the participants entered the room indicated what would probably be a reasonable the sound level was pre-set, but the bass and treble representation of how the dialogue reference level controls on the amplifier feeding the loudspeaker were in mixing rooms of different sizes could be adjusted, both set at minimum. The scales and indications had to compensate for the difference in the level that also been obscured, so that the flat position was not was perceived to be appropriate as the distance to obvious. Each participant was asked to adjust the bass the screen changed, (given a constant 50 degree and treble controls to taste, while watching an action viewing angle). Christian Beusch responded to this sequence with dialogue, music and effects. The test first (in Resolution V7.5, pp69-70) with a formula. He took place with the small screen, and later with the was invited to join the team for the preparation of larger screen. The results, shown in Table 3, indicate the latest paper, and his curve is reproduced, here, that the desired level of treble was virtually the same Table 3. Screen size versus chosen high and low frequency in Figure 3. when viewing either of the screens, but the desired equalisation.

The dynamics dilemma — The fact exists that level of the bass was, on average, around 4dB higher at 60Hz when viewing the feature film soundtracks continue to be mixed in large dubbing theatres, and Dolby larger screen. [The figures in the table relate to the knob positions. The difference will not certificate studios with less than 5 metres from the mixing position to the at 60Hz between the two mean positions was measured.] screen (with a 40-50 degree viewing angle) because at 3 metres, for example, peak Implications from the above results — It appears from these tests that as the levels of 115dBC at low perceived size of the source increases, the viewers/listeners expect to hear a higher frequencies (and 105dBC sound level. When the distance to the screen remains the same, the absolute size of above about 100Hz) are the picture dictates the ‘natural’ level, but when a screen of fixed size recedes into totally overpowering. For the distance, the greater distance appears to lead people to expect a lower sound this reason, soundtracks level, which seems to be intuitively reasonable. When the viewer’s angle is kept mixed in smaller-thanconstant, and the absolute screen size increases with distance, the brain seems to permitted rooms that were infer that the ‘real’ size of the source must be greater, and so it leads the person to calibrated to standard expect that it should be louder. Furthermore, when the image size increases, or is Dolby levels would tend perceived to increase, it also had become apparent that a ‘natural’ sound perception to lead to quieter levels also calls for more low frequency content. in the public theatres.

This finding is not surprising because in nature it is unusual to find small objects [The fact that this could that produce high levels of low frequencies. Of course, it could also be that we now be desirable will be have become accustomed to hearing films on small screens via correspondingly discussed later.] If this small loudspeakers, but if this had not been deemed to be realistic in the early were the case then the stages of the development of television, something would probably have been level to be expected in done to address the situation, rather in the way that the bass response of music public theatres could not reproduction systems was improved when the technology became available. That be judged as well as it Figure 3. A possible level versus screen size/distance is to say, by the 1960s, the bass response of televisions could have been radically currently can be [public curve for a 50º viewing angle.

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59

SWEET SPOT theatres are expected to be adjusted to the same calibration levels as the dubbing/ mixing studios.]

So, we have just discussed how the maximum level that can be considered not to be overpowering in larger rooms is greater than that which can be tolerated in smaller rooms. However, the quietest levels that can be clearly understood over the background noise (generally) is the same in all cases. The background noise limit for all rooms is specified equally. Therefore, this means that the quietest perceivable to loudest acceptable sound range (i.e. the dynamic range) is greater in large mixing rooms that it is in small mixing rooms, so the soundtracks can be expected to be mixed with more dynamic range in larger rooms. There is no simple solution to this when it comes to mixing in very small rooms, such as used for television mixing, because there is no form of automatic compression, either upward or downward, that can judge the relevance of the highest or lowest sounds in terms of their relative artistic importance or the dialogue intelligibility.

Brightness, and the public preferences of sound level â&#x20AC;&#x201D; In the earlier paper, and in Resolution V7.3, reference was made to a possibility that picture brightness could also be a factor in determining how loud the appropriate soundtrack should be. The initial indications were marginal, and within the limits of test error, but a more controlled test was devised for the later paper. Two projectors were used for the test, which took place in a mixing theatre with an 8-metre screen. The participants were asked to enter the room, one by one, with the image being screened via a video projector of somewhat less than adequate brightness. They were then asked to raise a fader until they felt that the sound level was comfortable for them. The test was then repeated using a film projector, with a 3kW short-arc lamp, of full cinema-brightness. The results were remarkably consistent, and no difference was noted in the selected levels. Somewhat surprisingly though, it was noticed that nobody (none of the participants were from the cinema industry) chose levels even within 10dB of the reference level at which the film would be shown in public theatres.

The very same loudness wars that have beset the music recording industry have now taken hold in the cinema industry. Digital recording systems requiring no headroom, along with the advent of multi-band compression, have allowed film directors to assault the ears of the rerecording (dubbing) mixers and the cinema-going public, alike. The incidental finding from the brightness tests, plus conversations with the owners of two theatre chains who admitted to turning down the playback levels in the cinemas to avoid complaints from the public, plus a recently received letter from a former high official of Dolby, have all confirmed that cinema playback levels, in very many cases, are perhaps now too high.

When many films are shown in smaller theatres, and the level is reduced to avoid complaints, it can be the case that the low-level dialogue becomes lost in the background noise of the room, or is simply too low to be adequately audible or understandable. The usable dynamic range is thus reduced by the lower regions being lost.

Other conclusions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Another outcome of the tests was the indication that studios with smaller screens at shorter distances will tend to give rise to soundtrack mixes with less low frequencies, because the seemingly correct frequency balance for the desired effect will be different than when mixing in a larger room. If all the public theatres showed similar reverberation time (RT) characteristics, it would be easy to imagine applying a low frequency roll-off on

the monitor systems in the smaller rooms, so that the mixing personnel would mix with a little more bass. However, the allowable RT at low frequencies is quite broad in the Dolby specifications. One of the authors of the paper was asked to mix, to a guitar reference track, a very dry bass drum and a very â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;roundâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, resonant bass-guitar recording. The original recordings of the instruments had been convolved with the impulse responses taken from two different rooms, with very different low frequency decay times, yet both were within Dolby specifications and adjusted to the X-Curve (See Resolution V7.2). The person doing the mixes was not told what he was doing, or why, but was just asked to make the most appropriate mix from an artistic point of view, and to note the relevant fader levels. The result was a 4dB difference between the relative levels of the bass drum and bass guitar from the two different rooms.

As explained in Resolution V7.2, when rooms are aligned with pink noise, the overall level at the measurement position is the sum of the direct and reverberant sounds. Therefore, the direct sound level in a dry room will be higher, for any given alignment, than in a reverberant room, if the same overall level is to be achieved. The problem is that transient signals do not excite the reverberation as much as resonant signals. The result is that the transient sound of the dry bass-drum would be almost equal in each case, but the resonant bass guitar would be reinforced by room reverberation, and therefore would need less direct level in the more reverberant room, hence the difference in the fader positions during the mixes. Equalisation is a frequency domain correction, but in the two aforementioned rooms the problem lay in the time domain. Using equalisation to correct a time domain difference is like trying to have a shave with a blow-lamp; it is the wrong tool for the job, and is likely to do more harm than good (despite the fact that the latter still removes the whiskers).

A lot has been learned from this series of tests and from the many discussions they have provoked. There is also much interaction in the consequences of changing the shapes and sizes of the rooms, and the distances to the screens.

Given the fact that the very large, reverberant cinema is now largely a thing of the past, and that an ever-smaller proportion of films are seen in cinemas of over 600 seats, my own feeling is that it would not seem to be wise to work in mixing theatres of more than about 800 cubic metres (say about 160 square metres by 5 metres high), unless the low frequency RT was very low for the size. I think that the mid-sized mixing environment is likely to give much better translation of soundtracks to a wider range of cinemas, including home cinemas, and that any loss of dynamic range is really unlikely to be noticed when the films go to large theatres, as a large audience, even when sitting quietly, will still substantially increase the background noise of a theatre. Conversely, very high dynamic range soundtracks give rise to much greater problems when the films are screened in smaller spaces. n REFERENCE Newell, P R, Holland, K R, Neskov, B, Castro, S, Desborough, M, Torres Guijarro, S, Pena, A, ValdigĂŞm, E, Suarez Staub, D, Newell, J P, Harris, L, Beusch, C. The Effect of Visual Stimuli on the Perception of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Naturalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Loudness and Equalisation.

Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 30, Part 6, pp15-16, Reproduced Sound 24 conference, Brighton, UK (2008).

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slaying dragons

Golden ears or not?

The phrase ‘golden ears’ is often heard in audio circles. Can some people really hear better than others? Can hearing be trained? JOHN WATKINSON argues that it can and should be.

I

have stated before that hearing evolved as a survival tool long before the development of speech and music. Evolution is brutal and we are, by definition, the survivors. Had our ancestors had deficient senses, they would be less likely to produce offspring. What we laughingly call civilisation is extremely recent when considered on an evolutionary time scale. When Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of western civilisation he said he thought it would be a good idea. Nevertheless there has not been time for substantial deterioration of our senses because of our less hazardous recent lifestyle.

Evolution does not produce a Gaussian distribution of ability. When the weak don’t make it, one side of the distribution is curtailed. Thus I suspect that the spread of hearing ability is not as great as is often claimed. On the other hand the possibility exists for people with better senses but with diminishing probability.

So while a very small number of people may have technically better hearing, I tend to favour the view that the dominant factor in acuity is not the technical performance of the ears, but the way in which the auditory system extracts information from what the ears provide. This, of course is performed in the brain, and so is capable, under the right conditions, of development.

The human brain has evolved all manner of strategies to prevent information overload. In particular, inputs from various senses are compared and if all senses are detecting the same thing then careful study is not required. In some cases the task may not require careful study. When driving, the overriding concern is not to hit anything, and it is not necessary to be aware of every detail of another vehicle in order 62

to avoid it. Fortunately modern vehicle styling is such that there is no compulsion to make any more detailed study than would be warranted by a cow pat.

In general the senses in many cases seem to extract no more from the environment than is needed for survival. As a result most people most of the time look without seeing, listen without hearing and accept without questioning. A direct consequence is the success of phenomena as varied as cue dots, camouflage, cartoons, magic tricks, hi-fi journalism, pick-pocketing and MP3.

In other words, if you don’t think there’s a lot of difference between Donald Duck and a real duck, or between Homer Simpson and a real retard, then you probably won’t know the difference between MP3 and real audio either.

The average man in the street has never seen a cue dot, never seen the hinge in that coin the magician put in the bottle and thinks that DAB and iPods sound great.

The key to understanding the situation is the presence of the word average in the previous sentence.

In an increasingly commoditised society, goods deemed suitable by the average person are all that are available in a lot of places. The problem is that there is no such thing as an average person. There is an inevitable statistical distribution of ability in society as well as a distribution of the extent to which people use their senses. People on the observant end of the scale tend to be dissatisfied with commoditised goods.

None of the above should be taken as an argument that achieving high standards in audio is pointless.

Even if nobody else knows, the satisfaction of performing good work is rewarding. There is only one key to performing good work and that is the ability to be self-critical. Self-criticism is a classical example of negative feedback. The result is compared with the goal and the quality is turned up until the goal is reached.

The most striking thing about the Mona Lisa, for example, is that it illustrates that da Vinci could see when he looked. Once you can see, it becomes obvious when the painting doesn’t resemble the subject. Most people shrug at that point and decide it will have to do. To do good work you have to go beyond that point and conclude that, actually, it won’t do. Understanding the principles only shortens the path between that conclusion and the goal, but the key is to set off on the path.

The natural corollary is that bodgers always meet criticism with denial. They are above criticism and beneath contempt. Clearly no feedback system can work if performance cannot be measured accurately and there are no goals. Is it better this time or isn’t it? In audio the measuring system ultimately is our hearing system.

Anyone can improve their standard of hearing; all that is needed is a reason to do so. Close your eyes and have a colleague silently move the palm of his hand towards your ear and listen for it. Again with your eyes closed, hiss through your teeth and move a hand around in front of your head listening for where it is. Try it making transient noises instead. In many locations ambient noise is adequate. Traffic noise is enough to bathe a street in sound that reflects and resolution

allows objects to be located with the ears alone. Go for a walk and find out what you can hear. Learn that hedges sound different to fences; learn to hear the boundary between grass and pavement. Get someone to shut you in an anechoic room and learn what silence sounds like when it is shattered by the sounds of the blood flowing in your ears.

Once you have learned to hear the spatial information in real life noises and how accurate it is, you have some idea why I dislike dead control rooms so much. I can’t assess sound for realism when the sea of ambience that I expect to be around me is suddenly absent. Equally you will understand why I am so disappointed with compression algorithms that can only manage the large sound objects and omit the sea of ambience in the image. Some people refer to ambience as the air in the sound.

You will also understand how the precise images available in real sounds are frequently destroyed by unsuitable microphones and loudspeakers. Lack of air in reproduced sound often indicates that the loudspeakers have inadequate directivity performance.

If you can’t hear that spaced omnis can’t reproduce an image, and you can’t hear the characteristic colour of a cardioid microphone, then you need more practice.

I can’t stress enough that music is recent in evolutionary terms. Our sound imaging skills evolved before music. You can’t assess the quality of an audio system using music alone. Instead begin by assessing the quality of natural noises, because they contain more information and are harder to reproduce.

Real noises require minimum phase reproduction for realism, whereas a lot of musical instruments don’t.

So get out there with the coincident microphones and the PCM linear recorder and record some noises, like kicking dustbins, slamming garage doors, Diesel engines, then quickly play them in your dead control room with its time-axis-demolition-technology ported speakers and learn how unrealistic it sounds.

Then you will understand why Philip Newell and I have been banging on about the importance of the sealed woofer enclosure which is the only configuration that has a chance of delivering time accuracy.

Go listen to a real ‘cello and learn the breadth of its sound spectrum. Then play it through your passive loudspeakers and listen to the combination of flawed crossovers and the directivity step between the drive units saw the middle out of the power spectrum of the ‘cello. Find an old Quad electrostatic and play the ‘cello again and marvel at how loudspeaker design has gone backwards.

Once you can hear all these things you are beginning to make progress. You may feel obliged to make changes to your equipment, especially your monitors, of whose shortcomings you should now be painfully aware. Be aware of the pitfalls of poorly designed experiments. Change one thing at a time to be certain it is causing the result you can hear.

The greatest difficulty with flawed monitors is that you get imprinted on them so they sound right and everything else is wrong. This is good reason to get out and listen to live performances and real sounds as often as possible. By the same logic don’t listen to MP3 or DAB for long periods in case it resets your quality expectations.

Avoid at all costs monitoring at excessive level.

It’s a matter of fact that the critical bandwidth of the ears gets wider at high level making hearing less discerning. Listen at realistic levels. Monitoring at high level is self-indulgence or a sign of deafness. Protect your hearing from all hazards.

Wear ear defenders when using power tools or when flying on airliners. n May/June 2009

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your business

Where’s the point?

With the revenue tide turning inexorably towards live music and physical sales still spiralling, producer record royalties are taking a hit. DAN DALEY says you got to roll with it…

U

sed to be that ‘points’ was a cherished term in record production circles, referring to the three-or-so percentage points of a record’s sales that by the 1980s had come to be the average for record producers with any decent standing and track record. Some producers could push those numbers higher, as much as five points, which in the context of the usual 12 to 15 points that most artist deals specified could take as much as a third of the available mechanical royalty pool. And even if three out of a hundred might seem insignificant, tie that to a few million records over the course of a multi-year career and the numbers begin to look quite different.

On top of fees that often reached upwards of SummitResAd2:27.pdf 2/27/09 AM £75,000 for an entire album, the royalty10:41:12 structure might have seemed excessive to some, not unlike the

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bonuses handed out to the RBS and UBS executives earlier this year. But in reality, they were no more than a pension scheme, and a modest one, at that, for the vast majority of record producers who might have a few major hits and a bunch of minor ones. And those royalties were under constant attack by record label accounting departments that were, and are still, notorious for their legerdemain. Producers occasionally fought back — there was never a shortage of stories in Billboard about litigation between producers and record labels over back royalties, or producers who were plaintiffs as part of artist/label lawsuits over back-owed monies from record sales. But, for the most part, those in the producer game for any length of time came to expect that sort of thing and built it into their expectations, just as the high street shops factor in what the retail business euphemistically refers to as ‘shrinkage’. Larceny by any other name would reek as bad.

But the record sales that were the foundation of the royalty point system have tanked horribly in the last seven years. Worse, what revenues there are derived from commercial music sales are increasingly taking two forms: live performances and digital downloads, neither of which are terribly beneficial to producers.

According to Reuters earlier this year, turnover from the global live music business rose by 10% in 2008 to US$25 billion. Ticket sales were up 8% at $10.3 billion, while sponsorship, resold tickets, ticketing fees and merchandise at venues also rose. This phenomenon has also thus far proven largely resistant to the economic downturn: live concert ticket sales in the US hit a new high in 2008, increasing more than 7% to $4.2 billion US across North America, and 2009 sales have been pretty robust so far.

Digital sales are still a fraction of prerecorded music sales, but they’re gaining. By June 2008, digital music sales generated around $2 billion in revenue, with tracks available through 500 online services in 40 countries, representing around 10% of the total global music market. A threshold of sorts was crossed when the RIAA and IFPI agreed a couple of years ago to

count the sale of 10 individual song downloads by the same artist as equivalent to one LP sold. It’s hard to forecast producer royalties when the economic foundation that was once there has been turned into a pile of so many bits of broken bricks.

The most widely used tactic to counter this trend has been to try to garner more royalty participation by co-writing the songs with the artist. However, Tony Drootin, partner in SevenSeas Media Management in New York, which represents producer/mixer writers like Marshall Leathers and The Copenhaniacs, says that writing with artists has become even more critical as producer fees decline. ‘The days of the Neptunes or Rodney Jerkins getting a million dollars a song are over,’ he states. In fact, royalty participation via publishing is becoming so much more important in the money mix that some composers have moved closer to becoming producers themselves in order to gain better access to artists. ‘[Producing] is a way for them to fulfil their delivery requirements to their publishers, pay back on their advances and get their publishing deals renewed.’ A-ha — a possible explanation for the proliferation of producers in recent years.

Another issue has been the wildly fluctuating price of CDs. With artists selling them from websites and the boot of their cars at gigs, and through a myriad of distribution channels like Amazon and the Orchard, the same CD can cost $2 from one source to $18 from another. Producer manager Bennett Kaufman, who heads up BK Entertainment Group in Los Angeles, says he’d like to go to a flat rate proposition — X amount of money in advance for production work and then 40 cents per LP sold, which presumably would be adjusted pro rata for single-song downloads. ‘Then you can sell [CDs] for $1.00 or $18.00, it doesn’t matter,’ he says, happy to have mitigated at least one variable in the forecast.

In fact, scuttlebutt in the business seems to indicate that certain producers are getting these fixed rates, including some who have taken it to the fractional level, negotiating a nickel per song, whether it’s on a CD or a download. But mostly producers and their managers are trying to figure it out as they go along. Aaron Wilhelm, a manager at Nettwerk Producer Management in LA, which numbers David Botrill, Bob Clearmountain and both Tom and Chris Lord-Alge among its producer clients, says that each successive deal seems to get more complicated, as 360 deals proliferate (do you count t-shirt and concert ticket sales as part of what you calculate a producer’s

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broadcast aside royalty on?) and artists and labels fund projects in ever-more arcane ways. ‘What we’re trying to do is figure out how to get our client the equivalent of what we think he would have gotten with a traditional deal from all these new configurations [of financing and revenues] we’re encountering,’ he explains.

CDs offered a predictable marker in the shell game of back-loaded revenue. As revenue sources have become more diverse and disparate, there’s little in the way of shared references upon which to build deals. ‘I was asked to do a project recently and the artist had no money to pay a producer advance, so they asked me would you take a point?’ recalls Steely Dan recordist and surround champion Elliot Scheiner.

‘I said, a point of what? A point of a download? What are you kidding? It makes no sense.’

The pullback in royalty revenues is being felt at all levels of the business. Michael Brauer mixed the biggest-selling record of 2009, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. Its 9 million copies sold were probably 40 to 50 percent less than the top-seller would have been five years ago, Brauer estimates, adding that he’s seen his royalty revenues drop commensurately. He’s also seen mix budgets fall, affecting ‘all-in’ deals in which the budget covers his fee and his studio time. ‘There was one album I started negotiating for last November and by the time the budget was approved early this year, it had been cut in half,’ he says, reducing his studio to six days from the anticipated twelve.

Brauer, who has done mixes for artists including John Mayer and The Fray, says his management will eventually find ways to structure royalties to include other aspects of the revenues generated by the artists he works with. ‘The record labels have figured out the accounting intricacies of the 360 deal, so it’s really a matter of time until producers do, too.’

Bill Szymczyk produced some of the biggestselling records in history, including most of the Eagles records, all of which continue to pay sales royalties.

‘The catalogue’s been very good to me because [the Eagles’] audience typically doesn’t download — they still buy CDs,’ he says.

But change is penetrating even that paragon of old-school back-end accounting. The Eagles’ last record, Long Road Out Of Eden, was distributed exclusively by Wal-Mart. Irving Azaoff, the band’s manager, negotiated a deal in which royalties — including Szymczyk’s points — were to be paid upon manufacturing rather than when they are actually shipped or sold. The initial order from Wal-Mart was 3.5 million units, at a list price of US$19.98. Do the math. Royalty participants received healthy cheques within weeks. However, in the next payment period, Szymczyk’s cheque was for a grand total of $97 — Long Road had not been re-ordered at that point and the paltry sum was for digital downloads of the record, underscoring Szymczyk’s earlier point about the Eagles’ current demographics. But he says it made him realise how things were changing. On the next Cat Stevens record, for which he produced five tracks, he asked that the producer points extend beyond album sales to include any film or television synch licenses for the music.

The rules that once shaped producer royalties have not only changed — they’re pretty much out the window. Until the music industry once again finds some footing, every deal could be a different proposition. Nettwerk’s Aaron Wilhelm puts it this way: ‘As CD sales keep declining, the producers who are willing to be flexible in how their deals are structured are the ones who are surviving. The ones who aren’t are just not getting the deals like they used to. If you can’t roll with how things are changing you’re going to get left behind.’ n May/June 2009

The art of sound It’s all about business and perception. DENNIS BAXTER encourages us to pick up our brushes.

I had a few extra hours in Chicago and found myself standing in front of George Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86) at the Art Institute. As usual, I’m paying as much attention to the sound around me as I am to the painting in front of me. A woman in a leopard skin jacket and gold shoes says ‘This painting just looks like a bunch of coloured dots when you stand close to it, but when you walk away, the dots blur into something you understand.’

The man by her side, a reflective smile on his face, said, ‘Yeah, kinda like life, isn’t it?’

Notably, Seurat is one of the most famous examples of the artist-as-scientist. A French painter who pioneered the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Seurat used complex, scientifically based lines and geometry that gave his works order and unity. He created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work, but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance.

And so, you ask, what does this art history have to do with broadcast sound? Art is subjective. In fact, when Seurat’s work was first shown, critics ridiculed it. It was a totally new interpretation of reality. Sound is subjective, too. New technology, new techniques and new practices give rise to new audio interpretations of reality. Some people like it, some don’t. There are a couple of factors that I believe influence why that is true.

First there’s the business factor. Let’s face it: broadcasting is financed by advertisers and everyone is crying the money blues. Budgets are under scrutiny, and as a result, mediocrity is the new normal. Mediocre programming with mediocre quality is rapidly becoming an international problem. Not long ago, a retired sound engineer wrote that he could influence production resolution

without fear of reprisal. Well, I hope he did! And I hope I do.

Yesterday’s broadcast world was much more focused, much less fragmented. A handful of deeppocketed networks controlled production and paid their fulltime broadcast teams to produce assembly line shows. Today, there are hundreds of broadcast channels, tens of thousands of hours of programming, and nearly as many independent broadcast engineers.

These professionals live the nomadic life of gig-to-gig … going wherever the work is. And this makes the challenge of producing quality audio for broadcast even more difficult –- especially walking that thin line between the budget-conscious producer and the innovative sound guy.

Then there’s the perception factor. It’s a broadcast village — flip through your cable channels and you can see programming from around the world without leaving the room. But we’re not a homogenous society.

We have unique expectations and perceptions of sound that are both cultural and personal.

I have studied sports production around the world and there is a significant range in the production interpretation of the image and soundtrack. Producers and viewers alike will interpret the quality of the programming relative to their own perceptions and cultures.

Our acoustic influences are geographical, cultural and generational. The psychological and physiological interpretation of a person’s sound experiences forms a cultural base of relevance in life. Take music for example — think Latin tempo, European waltzes, African rhythm, American loud. Listener expectations are grounded in their experiences from birth.

Generationally, there are differences in audience perceptions. A generation that only experienced black and white TV with mono sound is far less critical of the sound than Mr Home Theatre. Fortunately, TV with mono audio has been replaced with hi-def and surround sound and audiences enjoy the experience.

Technologically, the Internet and video gaming influences are even more direct. The younger generation has grown up with SFX animation and virtual reality gaming in their daily life. Think about it: digital sound starts with the alarm clock and narrates your day through your car, phone, iPod and computer.

So, what does this subjectivity of sound mean for the broadcaster, producer, and audio engineer? It can be a unique factor in production. As visual content continues to incorporate reality and SFX (notice your TV screen and your computer screen –- they do start to look alike), sound becomes as important as the visual — and, quite possibly, the difference. Play David Beckham’s football video game and take a listen if you don’t believe me.

The reality of today’s productions — regardless of medium — mean that broadcasters, game designers, web producers and advertisers are all competing for consumers. Creating compelling content includes the visceral experience of sound and the creative producer understands this.

So here is the challenge: given the factors I’ve mentioned, how can you create your own unique sound solution and pioneer the future? Perhaps there is a cue to be taken from the artistic genius of Seurat — reinterpret reality with a new brushstroke, colour and tone and practice the art of sound. n 65

HEADROOM An American telling us about football?

What an interesting concept, to get an American to tell us Brits how to mix sound on a football match (Broadcast aside, V8.3). Dennis Baxter, from a country that totally abuses compression to produce a sound that is so tiring to the ear that all you want to do is turn it off! OK, you might be able to hear the referee and the players, at times, but do we really want sound like that coming from our speakers?

I like to think that I, along with many others, pioneered close pitch miking in the 70s and 80s when you could hear contact with the ball and players shouting to each other (much to the annoyance of the FA) — but to get this it does require a bit of light and shade in the crowd effects. Modern football mixing does not have any light and shade because producers think that if the crowd isn’t very loud all of the time, the match must be boring to the viewers at home.

Also, when I was mixing, most of the time I was a staff sound supervisor and consequently could, within reason, stand up to producers and directors who tried to get me to mix the sound their way; knowing that my job was safe and I would still be there to fight another battle the following week. All sound supervisors that mix football matches on ITV and Sky these days are freelance and so cannot fight their side because if they did, next week they would be on the dole. It is as simple as that, you get what the producer wants.

So Mr Baxter, perhaps it would be a better idea to go home and put your own house in order rather than tell us how it should be done...we already know!

Paul Faraday, sound supervisor (retired), UK. I’d like to clarify that even though I was born in America, it doesn’t mean I have the Stars and Stripes tattooed on my ass. It’s a global ‘house’ that we live and work in and one with a new audience who may want ‘in-your-face-sound’.

What you are describing as ‘overly compressed sound’ (which I detest as well) sometimes facilitates the delivery of this type of visceral sound for certain formats. And, at the end of the day, innovation always sounds different from what we’ve known before.

But in all honesty, you do have a point. Sound quality, regardless of current trends in broadcast, should never be sacrificed. Despite budget cuts, workflow changes and uninspired producers, the sound practitioner must be the advocate and problem solver. We cannot sit complacent or be intimidated about losing our jobs.

Think like a producer. If you want a camera, extra microphones or surround sound you must present a compelling argument to the broadcast producer promoting the benefits of quality sound. He or she is responsible for the budget and creative aspects of every show and needs your input, ideas and solutions. Audio is experiencing a renaissance because of the creative vision of audio producers and engineers — one show at a time.

Every audio guy, practicing or retired, should be proud to say that they’ve been a part of innovation. My hat’s off to you and those at the BBC that set high standards to strive for.

Dennis Baxter

When is a fake not a fake?

Having read Nigel Jopson’s excellent article The Business of Counterfeit (V8.3), I feel that I must comment.

To a certain extent, manufacturers have brought this situation upon themselves. As a purely random example, I have a bread maker of a well-known British household brand. Its construction is typically shoddy; the plastic mouldings are appalling and the timer display fell in!

It’s not fake (but it might as well be). The fact is that by off-shoring their fabrication processes, companies have (generally speaking) prostituted their standards to the point that nobody expects anything decent any more.

Take the humble MK [13A] mains plug. I recently encountered an example with ordinary ‘screw-terminal’ pins instead of their unique ‘binding posts’. Thinking that I was looking at an illicit copy, I enquired of the maker as to whether such terminals were authentic. As it turned out, they did use this method for a short time — to cut costs.

So how does one tell if an item is ‘fake’ or ‘genuine’ when the ‘genuine’ article is often just as poor?

And does it matter? I wouldn’t mind betting that half the time they’re off the same line anyway! Is it so inconceivable that, when a production run is commissioned, the factory in question (already tooled up) churns out the same quantity again, undeclared, to be passed off as ‘real’ but without the constraints of the official distribution chain?

Naturally there are exceptions, and the Chinese especially are capable of making extremely fine goods (if you pay them enough). But for the most part nowadays, if something’s shabbily constructed we can’t just assume that it’s forged.

Richard Poole, broadcast engineer, London

It’s always disheartening for people who care about the quality of their own labour to encounter poor workmanship, so I’m sorry to hear about the problems you’ve had with your bread maker. Perhaps it’s worth remembering how very fortunate we’ve been in the last 50 years to have benefited from cheap mass produced goods: my mother would have been thrilled to buy a bread maker for less than it cost to fill her car with petrol, however shoddily it was made. At Resolution we’re not against cheap equipment per se, we quite like the idea of the Psychology of Optimal Experience being enhanced for musicians by desktop recording equipment, and of Flour Power in the budget kitchen. But buying on price alone has never been a good long-term strategy. In the last six years I’ve cheaply purchased two ‘no-name’ decorative and effective Espresso machines for my own kitchen — only to have them each break after little more than a year.

I could have saved money in the long-term by buying the famous Italian coffee machine I now own: it also breaks down, but Gaggia have a fixed-price out of warranty repair service that guarantees to return the machine in working order.

Not all cheap mass-produced equipment is crap, but unfortunately the wallet-friendly price tag has ‘expendable’ written on its flip-side. Had I not been tempted by shortterm savings and treated my first Espresso experiment as a learning experience, I would have saved the world some serious recycling and CO2 emissions on the second Espresso-expiro.

Not every audio designer is as absorbed with Analogue as Simon Saywood or as thorough with Thermionics as Vic Keary (Resolution V7.8), not every microphone designer is as committed to manufacturing in their home country as Dirk Brauner (Resolution V7.5), and not every guitar-tech knows as much about the obscurities of guitar pickups as my former colleague Seymour Duncan. If production professionals pay a premium for this sort of experience, they’ll be rewarded with that 5% of extra sparkle to their sound — the bit that’s hardest to polish-up from a lower base — and they will own equipment which will stay the course and hold its value.

For a live report from the Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau of counterfeit seizures in 2009, please visit this rather long url: http://www.icc-ccs.org/index.php?option=com_f abrik&view=visualization&controller=visualization. googlemap&Itemid=237 Nigel Jopson

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