Resolution V5.1 January/February 2006 by Resolution

AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

V5.1 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006

Hugh Padgham — chart topping and ‘that’ drum sound Ken Scott — a true production and engineering great SuperMAC and HyperMAC explained How copyprotected CDs have screwed up PCs Meet your maker: Joe Bull — SADiE Ten pro audio trivia talking points REVIEWS: Schoeps CMIT 5U • Waves Tune • Fostex DV824 • Mutec iClock • Joemeek OneQ • BonsaiDrive • Pro Tools HD7 • SSL X-Rack Dynamics

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January/February 2006 V5.1

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

News & Analysis 16

Products

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

Headroom

Bohus Studio

Sweet Spot

Hugh Padgham

Still chart topping, he talks excitement, record companies and ‘that’ drum sound.

In the picture

Ken Scott

Steinberg Top Tips

Leader

News

New introductions and announcements.

More marketing hype and more audio lookilikies.

Craft

46 48

Gothenburg studio with history has plans, professionalism and sound business sense.

He worked at Abbey Road and Trident in the golden age and has engineered and produced some of our greatest and most enduring talent.

Broadcast

Rome’s Videotime has installed a Vista 8 in its news studio to test its digitisation plans.

59 60

Meet your maker

Joe Bull — SADiE’s technology man on education and maintaining standards.

Taking low frequency modulation transfer functions (MTFs) across the room to the ears of the listener. Digital cinema — selling dreams? Controlling surround in Nuendo 3.2 with MixerDelay

Ten

Pro audio trivia talking points

Katz’s column

Becky and Fred are back with their mix and this time it’s without bus compression.

Business 54

Copyprotected CDs

There’s a dark side to the disc and it can put all sorts of stuff on your computer.

Your business

Get a new job — Daley investigates career alternatives for the technically gifted with time on their hands.

Technology 56

SuperMAC and HyperMAC

We explain the promise of low-latency, highly-reliable audio interconnection on Cat-5 cable.

Slaying Dragons

Watkinson bemoans the state of design and identiﬁes a lack of imagination and too many bean counters.

Reviews 22

Fostex DV824

Digidesign Pro Tools HD7

Waves Tune and DeBreath

Mutec iClock

Rosendahl BonsaiDrive

Røde NT6

Schoeps CMIT 5U

SSL X-Rack Dynamics

Grace Design M906

Joemeek OneQ

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

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

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

news Appointments CADAC HAS appointed Bob Thomas as MD. Formerly MD of TEAC (UK), Bob takes up the post as Clive Green formally retires after more than 37 years at the helm. ‘The prospect of leading one of the original great independent British desk manufacturers was something I couldn’t refuse,’ he said. ‘The prospects for the future are excellent, and there is great potential for expansion across the new digital line-up, as well as the traditional analogue products.’ THE EUPHONIX board of directors has appointment Martin Kloiber chief executive officer of the Company. Kloiber has been with Euphonix since 2000, most recently as chief technology officer and takes over the position from Jeff Chew. Mike Franklin has been promoted to VP of Broadcast Sales at Euphonix for the Americas. STEFAN GUBI has been appointed president at AKG. His work experience includes positions on the executive committee of Austrian IT firm Kapsch Business Com AG, MD of the Upper Austrian National Publishing House and in senior management positions with Ericcson Austria. PRISM SOUND has appointed Ian Crighton as CEO. He joins from National Instruments, where he was MD — UK and Ireland. Prism Sound has appointed Juke Box as French distributor for its range of studio products. A M A N D A CHESTER has been appointed marketing communications manager at Harman Pro UK. She joins from Digidesign, where she was UK marketing and PR executive.

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

Leader

Maybe it’s the time of year but you don’t have to look far to see people struggling with the concept of technology. Just recently I’ve listened to two ladies of pensionable age discussing the relative merits of ‘inevitably going digital’ with their TVs and witnessed an electrical goods salesman compare the difference in picture quality between various large TV sets to car tyre quality — ‘My tyres cost £200 and last me two years but my friend’s cost three times that and he has to change them every six months — so you don’t always get what you pay for…’ Then there is the enduring assault by a few PR companies who continue to deliver pictures in inappropriate file sizes — either so big that they could be printed across the side of one of those ridiculous people carriers or files that are of completely inadequate quality to begin with that are bumped up to more impressive sizes by some form of digital picture witchcraft. The problem is that the people simply don’t understand the technology and most of the people who sell it to them don’t understand it either. Most tragically of all it’s becoming clear that those who design and build the stuff don’t fully understand what the consumer wants and don’t seem to appreciate the level of misinformation. It’s a disastrous scenario for the long-term because if ignorance is so rife now — while there is still some strong simple residual legacy technology to compare against — what hope is there when all these references are finally removed? I want to believe that at the highest level within manufacturing organisations — at the very conception of a new technology product type — there the desire to improve things for the user must be at the very core of any new idea. What happens is this ‘purity of idea’ takes a knock as soon as it hits the rest of the organisation because it encounters levels of ignorance and confusion within the companies themselves. Is it really any wonder that by the time it hits the consumer the vital marketing message is often so wide of the mark? In many ways I believe that our industry’s professional users are in a perfect position to understand why anyone would want to buy this TV, that entertainment system, that format player or that mobile device, but unfortunately we are not typical of the average consumer who, if he bought the cheaper TV set after that car tyre analogy, needs to grasp more technological information than he is able or prepared to absorb. I have an old friend who was among the very first to get serious digital into his facility and I still smile when I remember how he felt about the whole process, how dangerous and unpredictable it all felt, the unmistakable pioneering spirit, that flying by the seat of your pants. They should be handing out flying caps and goggles to consumers in preparation for the moment when they look down and realise they are flying. Zenon Schoepe

Sanctuary Mobiles MBO

Cooper, Dyckhoff, Summerhayes. Sanctuary Mobiles has been acquired from Sanctuary Studios by a management buyout team consisting of Ian Dyckhoff, Tim Summerhayes and Ian Cooper. The

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.

business will trade under its original name of Fleetwood Mobiles, which was acquired by Dyckhoff and Summerhayes in 1993 before being sold to the Sanctuary Group in 1999. The duo remain onboard as MD and operations director respectively. Fleetwood Mobiles retains all assets of Sanctuary Mobiles as well as mobile recording team engineers Mike Silverston, Dave O’Carroll and Ollie Nesham. Cooper, who assisted Dyckhoff and Summerhayes with the buyout, has joined the new company as finance and commercial development director.

S2 Publications Ltd. Registered in England and Wales. Company number: 4375084. Registered ofﬁce: Equity House, 128-136 High Street, Edgware, Middlesex HA8 7TT.

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APRS 2006 sub and member changes To make the process of becoming a member of the APRS trade association even simpler, the organisation has transformed its membership categories to attract smaller audio businesses. It has launched a fourth membership category and developed a four-tier subscription matrix. The new categories, named A, B, C and D, were introduced in 2005 to the studio sector and will be extended to all other sectors from 2006. The APRS Board is now investigating ways to differentiate member categories separately from ‘services provided’ so that all members share a wider range of services. There has also been a modest increase to subscription rate (the first since 1999) and the association intends to increase rates by 20% over the next two years to continue to maintain and develop member services. More details at www.aprs.co.uk

CBS adds two Constellation XTs CBS Television City has bought two Fairlight Dream Constellation XTs for its Los Angeles facility where it produces promos for the entire CBS TV network. The two Constellations will be networked with Fairlight MediaLink and run alongside Fairlight Pyxis picture systems. ‘CBS has been a Fairlight systems user for many years,’ said Stuart DeMarais, Fairlight sales and marketing director, ‘so they are used to fast, reliable editors. In addition to these core requirements, the new system had to deliver an HD-ready platform with “real” mixing facilities and professional monitoring capabilities. Our Dream Constellation XT is the only solution that addresses all of these requirements.’

Adobe completes on Macromedia Adobe has completed its acquisition of Macromedia. The combination of Adobe and Macromedia creates one of the world’s largest and most diverse software companies and brings together strong software brands and technologies for creating, managing and delivering content across multiple operating systems, devices and media. The move also accelerates Adobe’s ‘strategic initiative’ to advance a powerful software platform, based on PDF and Macromedia Flash technologies, that scales from mobile devices to highend servers.

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January/February 2006

news Thomson buys third stake in Canopus Thomson has signed an agreement to acquire 33 1/3% of the issued and outstanding shares of Canopus, the desktop video editing software manufacturer, and has disclosed that it will launch a public tender offer for the remaining Canopus shares. This is said to be part of Thomson’s external initiatives for its Grass Valley Broadcast & Networks business. Canopus products will strengthen Grass Valley’s position in several markets to the tune of $1 billion, according to Thomson, with opportunities existing in professional video and professional A/V as markets that Thomson does not address currently. ‘Canopus brings important products and technologies that allow us to address multiple facets of our growth strategy and accelerate key elements of our R&D roadmap,’ said Marc Valentin, president of the Grass Valley business within Thomson.

Retouch Tools US ﬁrst

The first sale of Retouch for Pro Tools in North America is to audio services company Indian Hill Media, which has bought Retouch for installation at LA post facility Wild Woods to use alongside its DNS1000. Indian Hill Media’s Terrance Dwyer oversees the audio postproduction at Wild Woods on the prime time series’ Fear Factor and Survivor and mixes both series. ‘Cedar Retouch has the magical ability to reduce to a whisper screaming layers of insects that would diminish — sometimes demolish — the intelligibility of a scene,’ said Dwyer. ‘A very important tool when your projects are recorded in jungles around the world, its effectiveness is astounding and, combined with the Cedar DNS1000, it is the only must have, can’t-work-without sound tool that I’ve come across in 25 years of mixing.’

Shure’s top-end UHF-R system fitted with Beta 87A heads was used by all the showbiz hopefuls on the recent UK TV talent show The X Factor.

Ten 21 is right time for Audient

Appointments HELMUT WITTEK has joined Schoeps as a sales and development engineer. He previously worked as a researcher at the IRT in Munich. CHARTEROAK ACOUSTIC Devices has appointed Helios Recording & Broadcast and Imporaudio as its dealers for the Netherlands and France respectively.

A 36-channel Audient ASP8024 was first choice for Sean Kenny to form the centrepiece of Ten 21 studio, an example of a successful mid-sized UK studio. Based in Kent countryside, the studio was set up to offer recording techniques to suit virtually any style of music recording. ‘When I was looking for a console, I got to hear about a number of high profile users with ASP8024s in their facilities, so I had to check it out,’ said Kenny. ‘I was immediately impressed by the look and the sound of the console, so there was no other choice. My favourite feature is the bus compressor; it just does exactly what you want a bus compressor to do.’ In the US, New Jerseybased Sound Strike Studio upgraded its facility recently with an ACS8024, which combines the sound and feature set of the ASP8024 desk with a Control Section bay with Command 8 fitted for Pro Tools control. ‘Each session I learn some new way that I can patch things around. Having the DAW built into the board makes it way more user-friendly,’ said owner and engineer Thomas Smead. ‘I actually have a dozen outboard preamps in my racks including Neves, APIs and Millenniums, but I usually end up using the 8024’s preamps because they sound great. The EQs are set up perfectly for audio; and who can complain about 14 aux sends?’

London-based ﬁlm and TV facilities supplier Picture Canning Company employed a Midas Verona console on Optomen Television’s The FWord series hosted by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey. The company also used DPA 4060 miniature omnis for all the lavalier mics. ‘When we were ﬁrst approached to supply the facilities for The F-Word, we were asked to meet a very

precise speciﬁcation by sound supervisor Rob Ashard,’ said Picture Canning’s senior sound engineer Mike Horn. ‘We required a mixing desk with lots of features but a small footprint, as the audio facilities for the show were squeezed into a very small room above the studio/restaurant. The Verona fitted the bill perfectly a n d A s h a rd w a s delighted with its performance.’

DPA HAS appointed Prosound as its South African distributor. With its head office in Johannesburg the company also has ofﬁces in Durban, Cape Town and Dubai.

UNITY AUDIO is distributing Great River Electronics products in the UK. SSL HAS made several promotions in its US sales and service departments. George Horton has been promoted to sales manager for the US, Western region, Mexico and South America. He moves over to sales after 16 years as a service engineer and manager. In the Service Department, Phill Scholes moves from SSL New York to LA to replace Horton as Los Angeles service manager. Bill Brown has joined the SSL LA team as service engineer after 14 years with AMS Neve. Rob Penney, service engineer at SSL UK, moves into the same role at SSL New York. ADRIAN RICHMOND has joined the RTS Telex Intercom team as sales engineer in the UK. He previously worked for the BBC and ITV and most recently as executive manager at the Anglia studio complex.

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January/February 2006

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news Appointments

DPC-II remakes Quatermass

Texim’s Pierfranco Galeone. MIDAS HAS appointed Milan-based Texim srl as its Italian distributor. SHURE DISTRIBUTION UK has made two appointments to its marketing department. Uzo Onuora, formerly of international media monitoring agency, Romike, is now marketing manager of Commercial and MI & Entertainment Divisions. Faye Chang is press and communications ofﬁcer and joins from the book publishing industry. Anthony Short has joined Shure as commercial area manager for the North of England. Jay Walpole is now MI and Entertainment area sales manager for the South West, South Wales and the Western Home Counties.

API AUDIO has appointed KMR Audio as its exclusive distributor for the UK and Ireland. KMR has also been appointed exclusive retailer for the Roll Music Folcrom passive summing mixer.

A Soundtracs DPC-II played its part in making BBC history, when the Corporation decided to produce its ﬁrst live-to-air drama for more than 20 years. Broadcast on BBC Four, the programme was a remake of the classic Nigel Kneale story The Quatermass Experiment (originally broadcast in 1953) and the DPC-II was used for the audio contribution. Broadcast audio specialist Sound Moves took one of its 40-foot mobiles to a disused Ministry Of Defence/QinetiQ site in Chobham, Surrey and much of the shooting was done in an old tank testing area. As well as the sound for the live production, the DPC-II fed a 96-track recording. ‘It was a heavy duty job,’ said Sound Moves’ Steve Williams. ‘It was full-on for the desk and mobile. We ran the ﬁbre optic MADI link to two locations, the furthest being a radio mic receiving point some 300m from the truck. ‘We also had the atmospheres and sound effects guys in the mobile, using a new PC-based system. And on top of that we had a musician in there who was playing the incidental music live!’ he said. ‘Overall we had several hundred inputs,’ said Williams. ‘Because it was broadcast live, we needed to be able to access a large range of those sources at the same time, without scrolling through loads of menus. The DPC-II gave us all the advantages of the digital technology, coupled with the large operating surface which has allowed us to do that.’

RIBBON MIC manufacturer Crowley and Tripp has named Futureware in Denmark as its exclusive distributor in Scandinavia.

Project Harvest was dreamt up by Johnnie Burn and Warren Hamilton from Soho post facility Wave Recording and involves two people travelling the world putting together a sound library for use in TV, film and radio post. The finished product will contain a comprehensive selection of stereo and surround sound ambient atmospheres and sound effects. The sound team involved are Joss Gardner and Craig Loftus and they’re currently travelling around the UK with a portable recording setup including two DPA 4060 miniature omnis with MMA 6000 preamp, two 4028 compact wide cardioids, a 4011 cardioid and a Windpac. ‘The reason we chose the Windpac rather than other wind-proofing systems was that it is much more portable and versatile,’ said Gardner (pictured). ‘It takes up much less space and allows us to use it with a variety of different microphones. This is an issue as two of us have to live and work out of one van.’

TopVision’s HDTV ﬂagship will be Aurus

U K R E TA I L E R S HHB and Media Tools have been appointed exclusive retailers of Steinberg’s Nuendo ﬂagship postproduction package.

A&H’s Bob Goleniowski with Sindo Exports’ Koh. ALLEN & HEATH has appointed Sindo Exports as its distributor in Singapore and Malaysia.

DPAs to travel world for sound library

Sound Designer Thierry De Vries has bought a matched pair of 4051 compact omnis plus a Windpac. De Vries runs his own Brussels-based A Sound post company and is using his new mics to record ambient sound and effects.

German outside broadcasting specialists TopVision is preparing for HDTV with an HDTV-enabled OB truck with 24 cameras and Stagetec Aurus, which will become the ﬂagship of its ﬂeet. The Aurus will have 7 DSP boards and more than 200 audio channels accommodated in a space-saving mainframe with 48 faders plus a very large Nexus network — 16 Nexus base devices and a Nexus Star router provide 1,776 x 1,732 I-Os. This includes 208 mic inputs all of which have 28-bit TrueMatch

convertors. All three monitoring stations in the audio and video control rooms are 7.1ready and the audio control room link to the intercom system is established via the new integrated intercom interface of the Aurus without requiring a separate system. In 2000, a Cantus/Nexus system was installed in the audio control room of Ü4, which was at that time TopVisions’s largest OB truck (pictured). The firm provides Bundesliga, Champions League, and other sporting event coverage to German private and public TV stations.

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F i n n i s h broadcaster YLE will broadcast from the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin with a 16+8+16-fader Lawo mc266, a zirkonXL and a Nova73 HD Router provided by Lawo on a rental basis. The broadcasting will be based in the International Broadcast Centre in Turin where studios and control rooms are being set up for the event in February. Radio and TV broadcasters will use these facilities for producing individual programmes for their countries and for broadcasting the sports reports. Lawo cooperated with YLE in a similar manner for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

January/February 2006

news Appointments M E T R O P O L I S M A S T E R I N G has expanded with the strengthening of its mastering team and facilities. The company has recruited mastering engineers in Noel Summerville, Mazen Murad and Frank Arkwright. Summerville joins from Transfermation to create ‘Transfermation at Metropolis’ and has been working with John Goldstraw and Crispin Murray at Metropolis to build a new room to house his desk and lathe. Murad and Arkwright join from Whitﬁeld Street Studios. KLAUS HEITZENRÖDER has been appointed sales manager (Europe, Africa and the Middle East) for Electro-Voice and Blue microphones at EVI Audio. TANNOY IS now supporting and servicing all dealers in Germany that were previously supplied by TEAC Europe GmbH, Tascam Division. ALCONS AUDIO has announced the appointment of Anders Uggelberg to head cinema market development for the Alcons cinema product range. He was previously director cinema products Europe for Digital Theatre Systems (DTS) and before that he co-founded A&T Ljudproduktion in Stockholm. ANGEL STUDIOS in London has appointed Alex Watson as chief technical engineer. A graduate of University of Surrey To n m e i s t e r c o u r s e he worked at Cadac for a year before joining Angel.

STRONGROOM STUDIOS in London has appointed Matt Ward to the position of technical manager and Linda Dixon to the post of studio booker/receptionist. Ward began his career as a service engineer at HHB Communications and then spent ﬁve years with the Metropolis Group as a technical support engineer. Dixon joins from Sarm West Studios where she held a similar position.

Vista 8 for BBC Sound 4

A 52-fader Studer Vista 8 has been installed into BBC Radio & Music’s new flagship 14m-long OB vehicle, Sound 4, which houses a central main control room, an apparatus room at one end and a 5-person sound-proofed studio at the other. The truck was designed to meet very tight acoustic specifications, and the Vista 8 is capable of sliding forwards or backwards by some 600mm enabling producers and engineers working in different programming genres to improve their listening position by adjusting the console’s distance from the monitors. Dubai TV has bought a Studer 928 analogue console for on-air broadcast in a new purpose-built facility dedicated to news and sports. Dubai TV is operated by the UAE’s Department of Information and was the first station in the region to broadcast via satellite to Europe and North America. ‘We have a large number of desks here, both analogue and digital,’ said senior broadcast engineer Mahmoud Ibrahim. ‘For this particular studio set-up, we agreed on the 928 as we all felt comfortable with an analogue console. We are all familiar with the architecture and it is a reliable board with fantastic power supplies. No further customisation was required, and our engineers were fully operational after just a single 30minute tutorial.’

Czech TV buys 17 VCubes

Czech National TV has bought 17 Merging Technologies VCube hard disk video player/ recorders for its post department. The machines, supplied by dealer Interlab, are connected using a 1Gb Ethernet network to a central multi-terabyte central storage via two RAID servers. The facility currently uses 12 Fairlights and has a Dolby equipped dubbing theatre with custom-built ADR systems for dubbing that use the VCubes. ‘Everything is running ﬁne, our engineering staff were surprised at how quickly end users got used to the VCube, VTRs are forgotten for ever and a return back to them would probably not be accepted,’ said Czech TV engineer Peukert Otakar.

Portico for location

Dual function studio takes ‘Console in a Rack’ Engineer Michael Helpern has opened a studio within the office block of Vo x o n i c i n Manhattan — a firm that uses patentpending software to replicate any human voice into any Helpern and Finkel. language. ‘We had been doing a lot of voiceover work at Right Track Studios,’ said Halpern. ‘I told my boss — who also happens to own the building we’re in, a 100,000 square-foot space on East 33rd Street — “Look, I have equipment, and you have an office building. Why don’t you build me a recording studio, I’ll bring my equipment, you use it during the day, and I’ll use it at night. It will be mutually beneficial.” We broke ground almost a year ago.’ The 700 square-foot studio is Vox Studios

m o n d a y through friday during regular business hours; but at all other times, it’s Dirty Kicks. ‘At night, we’re making rock records,’ he said. ‘And t h a t ’s t h e nature of successful studios these days: finding situations that work for everyone involved. For the most part, we’re always working around the clock on something.’ The control room has an API DSM 48 ‘Console in a Rack’, which offers workstation flexibility, a superb summing bus, and no mixing in the box, according to Halpern. ‘I had to take the studio to the next level and ﬁnd the right engineer,’ Helpern continued, ‘and we were lucky enough to get Jason Finkel from Right Track to join us.’

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US Location recording enthusiast Chris Jones has acquired a Rupert Neve Designs Portico 5012 Duo Mic Pre as part of his transportable collection of high-end mics, convertors and hard disk recorders. On the road, Jones typically records through the Portico 5012 to a Mytek Digital 192 A-DC and a Sound Devices 722 2channel hard disk recorder using DPA 4011, 4015 and 4022 mics. Closer to home, local New York shows are generally captured through the Portico preamps to an Apple laptop using Metric Halo Mobile I-O. ‘Typically, I record artists with liberal taping policies that allow audience members to capture their performances,’ explained Jones. ‘I’ve been recording the Dave Matthews Band since 2000. That got me started. The Dave Matthews Band community led me to other renowned acts with similar attitudes toward audience recording, and I’ve been fortunate to record others such as David Gray, John Mayer, Trey Anastasio, Howie Day, and Jason Mraz.’

January/February 2006

news The big picture

BIZ BITES — According to UK telecom regulator Ofcom, 66% of UK households now have digital TV, writes Nigel Jopson. The total number of households viewing digitally grew 5.9% in the July-September 2005 period to almost 16.5 million. There were more than 1 million sales of Freeview set-top boxes and TVs with integrated DTT tuners over the same period, a 55% year-on-year increase. Meanwhile, Toshiba delayed the launch of its next generation HD DVD players as the AACS Licensing Authority — co-founded by Toshiba — failed to meet its goal for version 1.0 of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) copy-protection technology. Toshiba had hoped to introduce HD DVD players by the end of 2005, ahead of Bluray disc players. Blu-ray manufacturers have little opportunity for glee as they also rely on AACS. Increasingly sophisticated handsets are making mobile telephones the hot new media-delivery device. In the US Sprint launched a US$6.95 per month service in conjunction with Mspot giving subscribers access to 5-minute movie ‘chapters’, in seven different genres. Rival Verizon partnered CBS to offer video news segments from CBS News, Entertainment Tonight, CSI and the Letterman show. The global mobile games market doubled in 2005 to over US$2 billion, and will be worth $8.3 billion by 2010, according to market research firm Screen Digest. Europe and in particular the US have seen rapid growth — now accounting for 52% of mobile games revenues.

Quested in Deep Blue

Deep Blue Studios in Plymouth UK handles recording and mixing of music, voiceovers and TV soundtracks and recently installed Quested VS3208 monitors. ‘The VS3208s were the perfect size for the control room and they sounded flatter than all the other makes we tried,’ said Deep Blue’s Matt Bernard. ‘Working with them over long periods of time is less fatiguing than with other monitors I’ve used and they had by far the best off-axis sound. When you moved out of the sweet spot with all the others, the sound was gone.’ The studio features a Neve Series 51 desk, Pro Tools HD2 and Logic Pro 7 suites and has clients that include local bands and Little Britain’s Matt Lucas and David Walliams. In London, Townhouse studios engineer Max Dingel and producer Alan Moulder have both bought Quested S8 monitors. ‘Alan was looking for some new nearfield monitors and I had the task of sourcing some different models to try out,’ said Max Dingel. ‘I’ve found that a lot of manufacturers tend to under spec the power amps in active monitors, but when I saw an advert for the S8s in one of the trade magazines the power amp specification seemed to be just what we were looking for.’

FX supplies Tools for new album

Pribble with Islam. Napster has launched its digital music subscription service in Germany, offering a library of 1.5 million songs, including 20,000 German albums and 135,000 local artists, for Euro 9.95 per month. Individual songs are Euro 0.99 and unlimited Janus/DRM downloads to portable players cost Euro 14.95 per month. Napster has partnerships with German electronics retailer MarkoMart, TV broadcaster SAT1 and MP3 player maker Trekstor to promote the service.

The FX Group has sold a Pro Tools rig to Yusuf Islam, the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, who is using it to record his ﬁrst commercial album in almost three decades. The Pro Tools HD 2 Accel complete with 192 I-O, 192 AD and DA expansion cards, Sync I-O, DigiSnake cables plus a G5 Apple Mac has been installed into London Studio Y, which Islam co-owns with producer Martin Terefe who is assisting on the album. ‘I’ve built up a strong relationship with them [FX Rentals] over the years, and I know

they’re very experienced when it comes to selling Pro Tools systems,’ said engineer and studio manager Kelly Pribble. ‘The fact that they’re open 24/7 was also very important, as it goes beyond just buying a rig from a dealer.’ • FX has also supplied equipment for a two-month hire at Forum Music Village in Rome, where Morrissey is currently working on his new album with producer Tony Visconti and long-term writing partner Alan White.

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Belgium anthem beneﬁts from ADA-8s

The King of Belgium, Albert II, has expressed his appreciation of a new version of his country’s national anthem, which was recorded by Belgium producer Lorenzo Schoovaerts using Prism ADA-8 convertors. ‘I now own three Prism Sound ADA8 convertors and I use them to connect software synths and effects from my Pro Tools system to my SSL analogue console,” said Schoovaerts (pictured), who owns and runs Grooveyard Studios near Antwerp. ‘They were certainly part of the equation when I recorded a new version of our national song, The Brabançonne, and I think they made a signiﬁcant contribution to the overall quality of the sound. ‘These convertors may not be the cheapest on the market but I think they are well worth the extra investment because they sound much better than any other product I’ve tried and they help me work much faster,’ he said. • SSL has taken delivery of its 11th Prism dScope Series III audio test and measurement system, which will be used to test X-Rack Dynamics and XLogic E Signature Channels.

Gilmore travels with Tracktion 2

Guitarist and composer David Gilmore has spent much of this year on tour with Grammy-nominated singer Joss Stone. ‘I’ve got my laptop, a little preamp and Mackie’s Tracktion 2 software,’ Gilmore explained. ‘I love working with Tracktion because it’s quick, it’s easy to use, and it really does everything I need. There’s no messing around with an arrangement window here, a mixer window there, different EQ and processor windows — it’s all laid out, and nothing’s more than a couple of clicks away. Tracktion’s got a nice, intuitive workﬂow, and I can spend my time and energy making music rather than clicking through menus.’ Gilmore has recorded and performed with artists like Randy Brecker, David Sanborn, Don Byron and Cassandra Wilson.

January/February 2006

news The Big Picture In the UK, the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) and songwriters represented by the Musicians Alliance are at loggerheads over royalty rates, both sides have ﬁled claims with the UK Copyright Tribunal. In Resolution V3.4 Whitfield Street studios was proﬁled after Robin Millar saved the ex-Sony/CBS facility from

closure. Eighteen months on, the last large orchestral recording space in central London shut its doors for the ﬁnal time. Illustrating the editor’s point in his last leader about the broadening of the production community, 200 bidders at the studio and 300 online bidders cleared the decks of 550 lots of equipment in a single day. Digital dreams predictably became digital doorstops (Sony 3348 - £500), but the prices for audio classics (8 Neve 1081s £6,000+) indicated many enthusiasts were bidding on their own account. The studio’s vast array of microphones sold for reassuringly classic prices.

5.1 ATC at Phoenix

Phoenix Sound completed its first orchestral recording sessions just three months after moving into an empty sound stage on the Pinewood film and TV production plot that it has transformed into a high-end multitrack recording and mixing facility. The 40sqm control room is now fitted with 5.1 monitors from ATC with Recording Architecture’s Roger D’Arcy acting as design consultant for the new room. ‘Recording Architecture is accustomed to building around ATC monitors, and, like us, have heard the ATC system proven in many different control rooms,’ explained Phoenix MD Pete Fielder (pictured). ‘Most of the engineers that are going to use the studios like and prefer to use ATC, and we know that the system is popular with film people as well.’ SCM200ASL Pro 3-way actives are installed as the main LCR with powered SCM20ASL Pro units for the rear channels. Two SCM 0.1/15 Pro subs built into plinths extend the LF down to below 20Hz. The control room is equipped with a 72-channel Neve VR working to Pro Tools HD, Radar and Sony 3348. The studio can accommodate 30 musicians and with the involvement of David Ward (formerly of Gateway Studios) in the Phoenix enterprise, the studios will also host professional development courses for, among others, the film industry.

Broadcast is primary work

• SKY WILL launch a mobile TV service on Vodafone’s 3G network with customers able to receive a 19-channel TV package that will include Sky News, CNN and Bloomberg among others. BskyB COO, Richard Freudenstein, said the deal with Vodafone would run exclusively until March when the broadcaster would look at expanding the service onto other networks. ‘This just highlights where the world is going,’ he said. ‘Customers want flexibility, convenience and choice to consume media wherever they are.’ • STEVEN SPIELBERG is to make three original video games with Electronics Arts as part of a long-term agreement with the world’s biggest video games publisher.

SHOWTIME CabSat, Dubai ...................................7-9 March Prolight + Sound, Frankfurt ..... 29 March-1 April NAB, Las Vegas ................................22-27 April AES, Paris ..........................................20-23 May Broadcast Asia, Singapore................20-23 June IBC, Amsterdam .......................8-12 September PLASA, London ......................10-13 September AES, San Francisco ......................... 6-9 October SATIS, Paris ..................................... 7-9 October SBES, Birmingham .................. 15-16 November Interbee, Tokyo....................... 15-17 November

The Wroxham School in Potters Bar, UK is a thriving primary school with an ethos that states that ‘everyone should have a voice’ and with the aid of Soundcraft it has set up a broadcast facility for the beneﬁt of its 4 to 11-aged pupils. The development was stimulated by a government initiative to promote communication opportunities in primary schools. Soundcraft supplied an E8 Series mixer and amplification and the school contributed £500 for loudspeakers and CD players. ‘Radio Wroxham’ is based in the school library and broadcasts in school during Breakfast Club, lunchtimes at the Wroxham Café and after school at Kids’ Club. It is also hoping to get some outdoor speakers to enable it to broadcast

out to the playground. Further help from Soundcraft in the form of a BSS Soundweb will enable it to route broadcasts around different areas of the school selectively. ‘The school is run as a democracy in which we try to give our children exciting learning opportunities,’ explained head-teacher Alison Peacock. ‘When the government sent out their information packs our deputy head Simon Putnam suggested we promote speaking and listening via a full broadcast facility. ‘We have gone from strength to strength, with the result that we have won the Herts ICT Award for radio and have now attracted interest from Capital Radio. We are also working with Simon Balle School in Hertford, making jingles and rap — and we even have our own little rock band,’ she said.

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US producer/engineer Michael Wagener, at his Wireworld Studio with two Enhanced Audio M600s universal mounts and a Soundelux 251. ‘Sometimes it’s the small things that make a big difference in audio recording. The M600 is one of those, I have tried it with my trusty Elux 251 on vocals, percussion and violin and with a Schoeps on acoustic guitar and I hear a definite improvement in the clarity of the sound,’ he said. (Photo: John Jennings)

VornDick converts to C&T ribbons

Studio Vocalist, Soundstage Image, and Proscenium ribbon transducers mics from Crowley and Tripp have earned a spot in recording engineer Bil VornDick’s impressive microphone locker. ‘If you can make a musician happy, that’s half the battle,’ said VornDick. This philosophy has greatly influenced his choices in equipment, especially in the microphones he uses for his acoustic instrument-based releases. ‘Any new mic intrigues me, but especially one that is built extremely well, where the sonic curves and frequency responses well match the instruments I record a lot,’ he said. After getting them back to his Nashville private Mountainside Recording Studio and inside his frequent Music City studio digs, such as Quad, Ocean Way, and Masterlink, VornDick became hooked. ‘Their warmth impressed me,’ he explained. ‘They were nice, fat, and warm and sounded good on acoustic instruments as well as amplified instruments. I’ve used them on vocals, saxophones, trombones, horns, as well as Marshall and Fender cabinets, and even overheads for drums. The Soundstage Image was used as a single overhead drum image on a psychedelic rock album I’m working on. ‘If I EQ anything, I use a high-pass filter,’ he said. ‘That’s pretty much it. And depending on what key the song is in, if there’s any overlapping in what I call “resident dominant frequencies” between acoustic instruments, I’d rather duck frequencies than increase them. For this, the microphones I use are important, and the differences offered by each Crowley and Tripp microphone allow you to really be creative in their application.’

January/February 2006

NOTHING ADDED. NOTHING TAKEN AWAY.

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Bohus Sound Studio With a history that is intrinsically linked to the recording industry of Sweden, this Gothenburg studio has endured many changes of ownership and fortune in its 30 years. However, bricks and mortar endure as do dreams, professionalism and sound business sense.

UILT IN 1976 for Streaplers — Sweden’s biggest country dance band at the time — Bohus Studio has a rightful claim to the title of ‘the first studio in Sweden to be built correctly,’ according to owner Dragan Tanaskovic. Built by Tom Hidley as a large control room and studio area for proper band recording, it’s a very special place with a lot of character and charm. The Gothenburg studio’s history does, of course, include ABBA, who recorded here in the late 1970s before opening their own Polar studios complex in Stockholm, but it also takes in many other high profile Swedish acts and the occasional international act, such as Status Quo who recorded Rocking All Over the World here. Much of the original 1970’s Hidley design is still apparent in the 150sqm studio and 50sqm control room which smacks of retro vibe with a distinct ‘disco’ feel to some of the areas. Isolation is superb and the place is over-engineered with versatile alcoves and acoustic ‘zones’ plus the booths, which take in individual iso booths on the studio floor and the partitions afforded by the sliding glass doors between adjoining areas. The room sound is extremely natural and it’s interesting to note that editing sessions are often performed in the live area because the space is so comfortable to live and work in. It’s also an equipment goldmine with a selection of analogue 16 and 24 track machines, 2-tracks and 14

ZENON SCHOEPE

ProDigi and DASH behemoths and outboard racks that are crammed with the highly desirable and the rare and wonderful. But things have not always been so stable with the last 30 years seeing many changes of fortune and ownership. The Streaplers connection ended in 1980 and the studio changed hands regularly throughout the 1980s until it ended up being used as a warehouse.

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‘I’d been to this studio to record as a musician in 1986,’ explains Dragan. ‘I had built a smaller studio in the centre of Gothenburg and I called the owner of this building and asked if the studio was available to hire. He’d only just rented it out as a warehouse but he took my number and one and a half years later he phoned me up. That was 1993 and in the first instance I rented the building and bought it in 1998.’ Dragan started with an MCI 600 and accompanying 2-inch, but he raised the bar with the purchase of a 64channel SSL 4k in 1996. He started renting rooms at the back of the building often fitted with the equipment that was left over from upgrade process, which was relentless. Dragan admits to having gone through a crisis of confidence towards the end of 2000. ‘I was asking myself “Why is it that I don’t enjoy doing this anymore, why isn’t it fun?”’ he says. ‘I realised that this race for buying stuff, trying to have the best things, was driving me mad. I decided to

January/February 2006

facility pay off all my debts so I could own everything that I had and that’s what I did. I sold the SSL and some other stuff and paid off my bank and everything apart from the mortgage on the building. Then everything began to be more fun again! I had ended up doing gigs that I didn’t want to do just to pay off the bank and that was frustrating for me.’ He ended up with a Euphonix CS3000 which he ran with Pro Tools and all the machines he had. Part of the streamlining released cash for him to build a mastering room in 2002 and this is what Dragan concentrates on now. Yet in 2005 he replaced the Euphonix with a Neve VXS. Rather than signalling another round of Dragan’s spending, it marked the arrival of Tobias Lindell, an engineer/mixer with a DJ background, and together they’ve launched the Bohus Entertainment production company. The Euphonix is being housed in a new lower priced studio built in what was previously the studio's large and grand reception area. The pair have a plan and a lot of energy. ‘Business has changed lately and the requests for a cheaper room have proved strong,’ explains Dragan. ‘We noticed that we lost some gigs to other studios and to be competitive with those types of job we won’t drop the price in the Neve room but we will be able to accommodate them in the new Euphonix room.’ These lower price jobs do lead to repeat business and Dragan says it’s better to get those clients on the Bohus Studios ladder rather than somebody else’s. ‘It means they can mix the two single in the Neve room and the rest on the Euphonix rather than the whole lot at some other studio.’ The cheaper production room will be able to accommodate the in-house productions as well and keep the big room ﬂexible to still accept bookings. Prices are remarkable at £350 a day for the Neve room and £250 for the Euphonix — also making the

January/February 2006

facility highly attractive to foreign business. Dragan says that once you set a price you have to stick to it, and that means it must be realistic to begin with. He says it’s better business to build another room that can work for a lower rate if you can, than drop the rate of your best room. Reducing debt, owning the building and being established as a high-standard facility means they can. ‘I remember five years ago everyone was telling me I should have this studio in the centre of Gothenburg where everything is happening,’ he says. ‘Yes, perhaps I should have but it was expensive and, today, look who is still here!’ The mastering also fits in with this plan and serves as the biggest source of income for the facility. ‘Many of the record producers are not 100% certain if their mixes are ready for radio or CD and they need an extra pair of ears,’ comments Tobias. ‘And they also don’t want to have the final responsibility — they can blame it on someone else if it’s not good!’ adds Dragan. ‘To me, you’re not an engineer just because you’ve bought a sound card, but a lot of people today think they are,’ he observes. ‘They buy a small Pro Tools, Logic, they mix their own stuff. Mastering has to

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compensate so much for a bad mix now -– it was supposed to be a final touch! There is now such a big difference between the final master and the final mix and it was not supposed to be like that. Ten years ago everyone had a good engineer, producer, professional studio and of course the albums sounded better because there were professional people involved. Today the producer is mixing the album he is producing and recording — he’s more into the musical thing but he has to take care of the other bits because he can’t afford to go to a studio and hire an engineer. The only thing he doesn’t want to do is master it himself even if he does have the plug-ins!’ Tobias is now doing progressively more rock work in line with Sweden’s high quotient of rock bands and Gothenburg’s position at the centre of its Heavy Metal universe. Dragan says their skill sets are extremely complementary and he now has a very level-headed attitude to studio ownership and what makes a good and successful business. ‘It’s not about the gear but certain elements of it tell the client that you are serious,’ he says. ‘Then it’s all about the result and once you’ve achieved that you don’t actually have to do any more than that. If you show that you know your stuff and give them good results then they will come back whether you buy another ten boxes or not.’ ‘We’re very keen on getting people to buy the package here — recording, mixing and mastering all here,’ says Tobias. ‘It’s a way to control the production and its quality and to get the best result,’ adds Dragan. ‘We want people who come here to feel very comfortable and safe about what they’re buying.’ ■

Contact BOHUS SOUND, SWEDEN: Website: www.bohussound.com

review gear

Products Equipment introductions and announcements.

Waves Z-Noise

Z-Noise from Waves is different to noise reduction methods that require a section of pure noise to deliver optimal results. Z-Noise has an ‘exclusive’ Extract mode that can create a noise profile from sources that contain signal, as well as a flexible Adaptive mode. This dynamic noise profiling is said to deliver unparalleled results when reducing noise that changes over time. Z-Noise claims to employ a new ‘more musical’ algorithm that delivers better low-frequency resolution and improved time sensitivity. Combined with its advanced adjustable transient enhancement, Z-Noise is said to let you remove noise while retaining the power and punch of your source recordings. Described as a true broadband processor it uses a familiar 5-band EQ interface and real-time operation means you can fine tune parameters and hear your changes as you make them. You can monitor the entire output or just the noise being removed and Z-Noise allows you to choose between increased frequency resolution or improved time resolution, or a combination of the two. Waves has also added its IR-L Convolution Reverb plug-in to six of its bundles: Native Power Pack; Renaissance Maxx; Gold Bundle; Platinum Bundle; Diamond Bundle; and Broadcast & Production. Waves’ GTR (Guitar Tool Rack) package now supports Pro Tools 7 for Mac and Windows. www.waves.com

AKG Perceptions

Platform news: Digidesign Digidesign is now offering two versions of Pro Tools|HD by continuing to provide the existing PCI version and releasing a PCI Express (PCIe) version too. Digidesign has qualified Pro Tools|HD systems for PCIe with the new range of Apple Power Mac G5 computers. Windows-based computers equipped with multiple PCIe expansion slots are not yet commonly available. Digidesign is planning to test and qualify its PCIe systems with Windows-based computers once machines with at least three usable PCIe slots as standard are introduced to the market. Since the new Power Mac G5 computers have only three usable PCIe expansion slots, initial Digidesign support for PCIe-based Pro Tools|HD systems is limited to a maximum configuration of three cards. If you plan to use the new PCIe-based Power Mac G5 computers and want to build an expanded configuration (beyond three cards), you will need to use the PCI version of the Pro Tools|HD cards in conjunction with the newly introduced Digidesign Expansion|HD expansion chassis. More information on hardware exchange and crossgrades is available on the website. Digidesign has announced iLok support that enables Pro Tools system users to purchase and download Web licenses (or authorisations) from the Digistore in real time. Plug-ins and other software options can be licensed at the point of sale, and can then be securely and immediately transferred directly to any inserted iLok USB Smart Key or deposited into a user’s iLok.com account. Digidesign has also made Web licenses available for plug-in rentals using the same DigiStore purchase, download, and licensing model. Rental periods are flexible, allowing the user to choose between 2-day, 14-day and 31-day periods. Once the rental expires, it can be renewed using any iLok. Full purchase and rental licensing are also completely embedded into the Pro Tools workflow. Users of plug-in demos can now purchase or rent a plug-in directly from the plug-in’s user interface within Pro Tools. www.digidesign.com

Transformer Culture Vulture

Thermionic Culture has met demand from mastering engineers and studios by producing a transformer-balanced version of the Culture Vulture stereo valve distortion device. The MV has the same front panel controls and operation as the standard Vulture, but features bypassable Sowter transformer-balanced I-Os on stereo jacks. The unit also has large indented input drive controls and indented output controls. www.unityaudio.co.uk

SoundField for Sound Devices

Sound Devices and SoundField have announced the immediate availability of SoundField B-format surround decoding on Sound Devices’ 744T 4-track production audio recorder. 744T ﬁrmware revision 1.57 (and greater) now offers B-format-to-stereo decoding without additional hardware. www.sounddevices.com AKG has launched a large diaphragm cardioid condenser, the Perception, for the budget studio market. Available as the Perception 100 and Perception 200, the 100 includes a stand adapter while the 200 includes a full-sized studio suspension cradle, a hard-shell road case and adds a 10dB pad and 300Hz 12dB/octave bass roll–off ﬁlter. www.harmanprouk.com

Lawo mc266 Release 1.3 Lawo’s release of 1.3 software for its mc 2 66 console introduces dynamic automation designed specially for use in production studios and mobile control rooms. Remotecontrol of workstations is now possible with channel

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parameters like fader, mute and solo sent via MIDI. This has been achieved by creating a new GeneralPurposeChannel (GPC) and up to 256 channels of these are available in the mc266 and the mapping of individual parameters can be adapted to other systems. The GPC can be assigned freely to the console like a ‘real’ channel, working with automation, snapshot, audio-follow-video, labelling and all other channel functions. GPCs are also used to remote control and store camera microphone preamps settings for use in TV OB vans. All camera parameters are controlled directly at the console and are stored in a snapshot. The mc266 has also been extended to integrate 19-inch third-party talkback and matrix panels. www.lawo.de

Rosetta 800 is 192 Apogee has standardised its Rosetta 800 line at 192kHz sample rate. Previously, Apogee had two versions of the Rosetta 800, the standard being at 96k with an optional 192k upgrade. The Rosetta 800 offers SoftLimit, UV22HR, and Intelliclock together with optional FireWire and Pro Tools connectivity. www.apogeedigital.com

January/February 2006

review gear Fabrik R and C have MINT

Soundcraft BB100 for broadcast In a consolidation of Harman Mixer Group products, Soundcraft has released the BB100 console (formerly available from Amek) as one of its analogue Broadcast consoles as part of the restructuring of the Broadcast offerings from Soundcraft and Studer. The configurable desk is available in four frame sizes, and can be built with or without up to eight subgroups. Each model has a choice of mono and stereo inputs, with eight aux buses and up to five stereo returns (depending on module configuration). It has up to four Cleanfeed Outputs with talkback that can be changed (using internal jumpers) to an output matrix fed from the groups and main output. The Control Room Monitor section has external inputs and outputs for Main and Nearfield speakers and one of the sources has a 4-input

sub mixer for returns from video machines. Other features include ‘soft’ Mute circuits, fader starts as standard, external mute control, stereo input channels with M-S (sum and difference) switches, direct outputs on all mono input channels and conductive plastic faders. www.soundcraft.com

Two new PowerCore plug-ins, Fabrik R and Fabrik C, feature a different user interface called MINT, Meta Intuitive Navigation Technology, which allows the user to respond easily, quickly, and intuitively to any audio material at hand. Underneath the interface, hundreds of high resolution parameters are adjusted leaving the user with a few simple controls. Fabrik R is a reverb tool with four TC reverbs and Fabrik C is a high-resolution channel EQ, de-esser, and 3-band/full-band compressor. PowerCore 2.0 software includes several improvements to the graphic interface and demo versions of plug-in licenses. The new interface design provides an overview of CPU power and RAM, as well as the status of plug-in licenses and all PowerCore devices running on the system. PowerCore 2.0 enables a fully functional 20-hour trial version of a number of optional TC plug-ins. These plug-ins will be included with the installer in all future versions and simplify the download procedure when buying optional PowerCore plug-ins. All PowerCore users are automatically eligible for a free upgrade to PowerCore from the website. PowerCore Unplugged is the same piece of hardware as PowerCore PCI mkII but without the plug-ins. www.tcelectronic.com

Single speaker stereo iPod Embracing Sound Experience has licensed its single speaker stereo technology to sound company Geneva Lab for use in the consumer market with a single compact loudspeaker that allows direct docking of an iPod. Only one power cord is required and the player can be controlled using a remote. The Geneva Sound Systems modules also include CD and radio and can be connected to external audio sources. The sound modules are available in two sizes and in a variety of colours. www.embracingsound.com

January/February 2006

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review gear AMS Neve post desks AMS Neve has added two consoles to its MMC range. The MMC 300 and the MMC 400 both feature a new central panel giving engineers control over monitoring, source and surround mixing as well as eight assignable faders that can be used as group, stem, aux or master faders, or additional input channel faders. The MMC 400 is ﬁtted with conventional channel strips while the MMC 300 uses

a knob per function assignable channel, both have touchsensitive controllers. Surround mixing is said to be central to MMC’s design with a powerful monitoring section, intelligent panning to surround buses and simple routing of multiple surround sources and destinations including simultaneous mixing in multiple formats. Encore Plus automation integrates control of Pro Tools, Nuendo and Pyramix workstations. www.ams-neve.com

Tools conﬁgured patchbay

Switchcraft has extended its Easy Norm range of patchbays by adding a version to work with Pro Tools 192 I-O system interfaces and similar products. StudioPatch 6425 has 64 TT/bantam Easy Norm jacks that allow the normals to be set from the front panel. It is internally wired using 110ohm cable to eight 25-way D-sub connectors on the rear — four inputs and four outputs. The grounds are bussed to enable the passing of phantom power. www.switchcraft.com

KT Square One

Klark Teknik’s Square One range of processors consists of the Square One graphic equaliser and the Square One dynamics, an 8-channel, 3U conﬁgurable dynamics processor. Square One units address a new price point for the company.

The Graphic has 45mm faders with integral dust guards; signal present and clip LEDs; fully balanced I-Os; relay activated bypass; Proportional Q ﬁlters; high pass and low pass filters; universal power supply and a 3U steel chassis. The Dynamics allows users to select the required mode of operation, allowing the multi-mode dynamics processor to function as a default compressor (RMS sensing type); vintage compressor (peak sensing type); broadband frequency-conscious compressor; Hi-Q frequency-conscious compressor (de-esser); limiter; expander or gate. Square One Dynamics also provide i-TS (intelligent threshold shift) in conjunction with the gate hold function to reduce chattering within the gate; stereo and multichannel operation, solo bus operation; 6–segment, 3-colour input meter, and a 10-segment attenuation depth meter. www.klarkteknik.com

Audionics LAN-enabled Audionics’ new family of LAN-enabled products can be used to develop audio systems that can be controlled without the need for hardware control panels. They can be integrated into broadcast playout systems under direct control of the playout software, or in audio visual system applications controlled centrally from Crestron or AMX control systems. Audio systems can now be controlled from your desktop at any location. The ﬁrst three products in the family are the eMM88 an 8 x 8 audio combiner, eWM88 8 channel audio mixer and the eMX88 8 x 8 audio router. All the units have a LAN interface with an embedded web server. The simple client/server control protocol enables users to develop their own control systems, or use the supplied Windows-based GUI. The web server also has an embedded Java Applet enabling control from standard web browsers. www.audionics.co.uk

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January/February 2006

review gear Switchable-tone mic pres

A Designs Audio has introduced a series of switchable-tone MPA mic pres, which includes the MP-1A all-tube mono mic pre and the MP-2A mono/stereo version. They are said to be the ﬁrst mic pres designed with tone switches enabling the units to sound like totally different preamps. Each unit has two-tone switches per channel and when used in combination this results in four different sounds. Additional features include a Jensen input transformer coupled with a custom-wound output transformer. They also have 60dB gain, -20dB pad, balanced XLR I-O, a vintage VU meter, phantom switch, phase switch and a front panel DI. www.adesignsaudio.com

Portable wireless receiver Lectrosonics’ UCR401 Digital Hybrid Wireless compact diversity UHF receiver is targeted at film production, documentary filmmaking, ENG and videography applications. Compatible with the range of Lectrosonics Digital Hybrid Wireless and analogue transmitters, as well as some analogue transmitters from other manufacturers, the UCR401 receiver incorporates features that claim ‘best-in-class’ RF reception across 256 user-selectable UHF frequencies. Digital Hybrid Wireless overcomes channel noise by involving the

patent-pending process of combining digital audio with an analogue FM wireless link and is said to eliminate the artefacts of a typical compandor design. www.lectrosonics.com

Rycote bits Rycote has five new accessories. The Hot Shoe Extension allows camcorder users to fit multiple hot shoe attachments to their equipment while the Hot Shoe 3/8-inch Adaptor attaches any ﬁtting with a 3/8-inch thread to a camera hot shoe. Multimount v2 is available in three sizes and allows the user to ﬁt the Softie mount to either a camcorder hot shoe or to a boom pole with 3/8-inch Whitworth tip. The Softie Mount CCA camcorder clamp adaptor attaches shotgun microphones to camcorders fitted with a microphone clamp (25-27mm diameter). The Softie mount provides isolation against lens motor and general handling noise. www.rycote.co.uk

AEQ’s smaller pro portable A E Q ’s PA W 1 2 0 w i l l replace its DR 100 portable recorder this year. The PAW (Palm Audio Workstation) is the ‘ultimate’ portable recorder for journalists. It replaces some of the more consumer-type features of the old model with a more professional feel but remains hand-held. It has a built-in speaker, aluminium case, OLED dualcolour display and uses two AA dry cells or rechargeable batteries. It appears as a USB removable external device on Mac and PC and records and edits linear PCM and MPEG audio, supports BWF, and has 512Mb of Flash memory. It has a built-in mic with connection for mono or stereo external mics with phantom power, a mechanical switch to activate AGC, and voiceactivated recording. www.aeq.es

January/February 2006

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review gear Canford on-line and in colour Canford has more than 800 new products available on line. The company took the decision to launch the new products through its website immediately in advance of the publication of its catalogue. The 2006 edition marks Canford’s 30th anniversary and is the ﬁrst to be printed in colour throughout. www.canford.co.uk

Safﬁre V2.0

Fostex rack monitor

V 2 . 0 s o f t w a re f o r Focusrite’s Saffire includes enhanced 192kHz and FireWire operation, improved graphics contrast, rollover help for SaffireControl in the for m of Tool tips, Bug removal, and improved interface clarity — Mute, Solo Dim and Hardware control buttons (within the output mix sections) use a new, bright colour scheme. www.focusrite.com

Fostex’s digital input RM-2 is a rackmounted powered stereo monitoring system with stereo analogue balanced +4dB inputs with combo connectors (XLR and 1/4-inch) and AES-EBU digital input on XLR working from 44.1kHz to 96kHz. The control panel includes a 26-dot stereo LED meter, biaxial stereo gain control, phone jack, channel select switch and input select switch. The MR-8HD 8-track hard disk recorder succeeds the VF-80EX and works to a 40Gb drive and is capable of recording 4 tracks simultaneously. Built-in digital effects include mic and amp simulations and ﬁles can be transferred via USB to/from Mac or PC. www.fostexinternational.com

CB USB-422 interface CB Electronics’ USB-422 is a dual RS-422 USB interface suitable for use with most DAWs including Pro Tools, Avid, Final Cut Pro, Pyramix, and Sadie. Built in a rugged extruded aluminium box with compatible drivers for Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP, MAC OS-X, and Linux, the two RS422 ports are provided using 9-pin D connectors wired to standard Sony RS-422 pin-out. Port A may be configured as a Controller (O/ P) or Device (I/P) using internal links, Port B is configured as a Controller (O/P). Tx and Rx LEDs are fitted to both ports for diagnostics. Slew Rate Limited RS422 drivers are used to minimise EMI and reduce reflections. An optional video sync reference input is available. www.colinbroad.com

Audix MicroBoom

The Audix MicroBoom is a 50-inch carbon ﬁbre boom arm that attaches to any microphone stand. Designed as an accessory for the company’s The Micros series of miniature condensers, the MicroBoom has a diameter of less than 7.4mm and weighs only 78g. The MicroBoom can be used with any of the Micros series. The M1290 is 90mm long with a claimed response of 40Hz–20kHz and is available in cardioid, hypercardioid, omnidirectional, and supercardioid (shotgun) patterns. The M1245 is 45mm long with a frequency response of 80Hz–20kHz and is available in cardioid, hypercarioid and omni patterns. www.audixusa.com

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January/February 2006

review gear A&H upgrades WZ20S Allen & Heath has upgraded its stereo WZ20S MixWizard console to WZ 3 status, joining the WZ316:2, WZ312:2 and WZ314:4:2. The new WZ320S beneﬁts from several design improvements, including a new mic preamp, advanced grounding scheme, more responsive 4-band EQ, and the addition of a dedicated mono output fader for use as a mono sum of LR, or as the aux 6 master. The dual stereo channels now have a sub-panel switch, which allows the TRS A inputs to route direct to the LR bus, plus, the B inputs have been upgraded to XLR. Designed for mixing multiple stereo sources, the WZ320S retains 4 mono mic/line channels, 8 dual stereo input channels and two stereo return inputs for a total of 44 connections and 22 sources to the mix. www.allen-heath.com

Super.fi earphones The Super.fi earplugs range from Ultimate Ears has been developed to address the interest in high quality, universal fit earphones for pro audio and for the iPod/ mobile listening market. The super.fi studio 3 are single armature, full-range earphones, the super.fi 5 Pro is a dual armature driver earpiece, while the super.fi 5EB is more of a specialist earphone ‘with loads of low end headroom’. The 5EB is a dual-driver hybrid earpiece with a conventional transducer for the low end and an armature driver for mids and highs. All three products are available in black or white. www.handheldaudio.co.uk

Crest HP-W

Abbey Road limiter

Sharing the same London’s Abbey Road Studios and US frame sizes as the manufacturer Chandler Limited have company’s HP-Eight released the EMI TG 12413 Limiter Series, the Crest Audio plug-in. It is based on the original HP-W features two additional sets of alternative stereo outputs, compressor/limiter module built in including a dynamics section that can be used for recording the 1960s as a component module of purposes. Other features include an ambient mic input and a the TG 12345 mix desk. The 24 mic, dedicated stereo input module with four mono and four stereo 8-track mixing console was used to record a host of classic inputs. All mono inputs feature line inputs via an additional jack albums of that era including The Beatles Abbey Road and to the XLR mic input. Another new module features 8-channel Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. automix which can be disabled. All input modules feature a BNC Key features include the option to conﬁgure from mono connector for adding a light while auxiliary outputs are XLR. Other to 7.1 surround and the plug-in is available in RTAS and provisions include eight assignable scene mutes or snapshots and TDM versions, for PC and Mac. VST and AU versions will frame options are 28, 36 or 44 channels. follow soon. www.crestaudio.com www.abbeyroad.com Res_Smart AV_07.05 29/6/05 10:40 am Page 1

”The most exciting new product in years.”

Sony shotgun

In an industry where new product launches come thicker and faster each year, reactions like the one above are extremely hard to come by, yet this is the most frequent comment we’ve heard from seasoned professionals and hardened critics alike on first seeing the revolutionary new Smart AV Console.

Sony’s ECM-674 electret condenser shotgun mic claims a wide frequency response with low inherent noise and has internal battery and external power options. It weighs 220g, is 20cms long and has a diameter of 26mm. New products in Sony’s UWP Series UHF synthesised wireless microphone system range include the UTX-P1 UHF Plug-On Transmitter, the UWP-C3 UHF Wireless Microphone Kit and the F-112 Dynamic Interview Microphone. www.sonybiz.net

Designed for use with today's most popular DAWs including Apple Logic, Digidesign Pro Tools and Merging Technologies Pyramix, the Smart Console represents a quantum leap forward in ergonomics and is radically different from any other console on the market today. Operation via patented ARC technology is so intuitive that the learning curve is measured in minutes rather than days, and project completion times are slashed. A bold claim, but when you find out more about the design, it’s easy to see why: THE ARC

Behringer sub and amp The Truth B2092A active 360W studio subwoofer claims 32Hz performance with two long-excursion 8-inch loudspeakers. It has dedicated LCR I-Os, a band-pass ﬁlter enclosure design, an active crossovers at 80Hz, overload-protection circuitry, and Phase and Room Compensation controls. The Reference Amplifier A500 offers 2 x 230W into 4ohms and 500W into 8ohms in bridged mono and features a servo-controlled design, convection-cooling for noise-free operation, and precise level meter and clip indicators. Input connections are on XLR, 1/4-inch TRS and phono, speaker outputs on ‘touchproof’ binding posts and 1/4-inch TS connectors and independent thermal overload protection with LED indication on each channel. www.behringer.com

January/February 2006

EQ FAN DISPLAY

The Console’s patented touch-sensitive ARC allows instant one-touch selection of any channel or group of channels from those currently in use on the DAW - custom sets of channels can be called up onto the faders in a second or two. What’s more, the ARC also allows instant muting, soloing (or any other custom function) of any channel, even if it’s not currently active on the console.

DISPLAYS

CHANNEL DISPLAY

In addition to the stunning metering on the ARC itself, channels marked on the ARC in your own handwriting appear in the super high-visibility electro-fluorescent display above each fader bank - this can also optionally display your DAW track names, or both. Meanwhile in the EQ department, dualconcentric touch-sensitive EQ pots show the current gain and frequency information on hi-res LED fan displays, whilst detailed plug-in control is available on the central LCD touchscreen with its own dual-concentric touch-sensitive pots.

The touch-sensitive aux send knobs are also motorized, as are the pan knobs with their handy LED surround pan displays and a central motorized touch-sensitive surround panner is available to all channels.

MODULARITY The entire Console is highly modular, and in additon to the components already described, also comes as standard with support for 3rd party surround monitoring controllers and remote mic pre-amps, a 48, 72 or 96 channel ARC, one or two optional ‘floating’ subsidiary ARCs, and an optional Edit Panel with high quality jog wheel, 40 custom function buttons and built-in 12" hi-definition LCD screen.

SOUND INVESTMENT

MOTORIZATION

Most of all though, the Smart Console makes good commercial sense - other than the undeniable client ‘wow’ factor, tests have shown that productivity is massively increased versus any other existing console design, and operator stress levels significantly reduced - how much could this be worth to your business?

The Console can be specified with either industry standard ALPS touch-sensitive motorized faders, or optionally deluxe ultra-fast Penny & Giles models when only the best will do.

Call today to find out more about the Console and flexible finance arrangements, or to book your personal demonstration.

+44 (0) 20 7692 6611 www.smartav.net smartav@mediatools.co.uk

EDIT PANEL

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review

Fostex DV824 By luck or by design, the number 8 is big in the world of audio post and has been adopted as a means of carrying track data between production stages. How you choose to carry it is another matter but digital tape has now finally been laid to rest in the wake of the arrival of this latest advance from Fostex. NEIL HILLMAN finds himself largely satisfied on pretty much all counts.

ACK IN 2003, after Fostex had introduced its DV40 4-track DVD Master Recorder, the hugely complimentary Resolution review (V2.1) carried this rider: it’s great, it’s a huge step forward over DAT, but when can we have 8 channels to enable us to replace our obligatory DA-78/88/98s, please? This logical progression from 4 to 8 tracks seemed to be an obvious development for the DV40, given the need from the audio post community for continuing the long established procedure of supplying 8-tracks of audio with any syndicated television programme on a DA-88 tape; or the similarly well-established procedure of supplying 8-track tapes containing 5.1 stems for film and DVD production. TV work generally breaks programme components down to a so-called ‘DA-88 mix’; a typical layout looking something like Tracks 1&2: Main Stereo mix (or the main Dolby Surround LtRt mix), Tracks 3&4: Clean Stereo Effects; Tracks 5&6: Clean mono Sync (on 5), Clean Commentary (on 6); Tracks 7&8: Clean Music. In a 5.1 environment this DA-88 process can archive the 6 stem tracks, with a ‘guide’ Dolby Surround LtRt mix parked on the first 2 tracks. So while this is all pretty efficient as a storage or delivery medium, at the other end of the remixing process, the linear importing of this stuff is frustratingly time-consuming; real-time is not really an acceptablyefficient transfer speed now. In fact, from time to time — when we find ourselves playing buzzword-bingo with our client’s production managers — their use of phrases like ‘reversioning pipe-line’ and ‘re-editing 22

work-flow’ certainly help our long, winter evenings to fly by. Oh yes, I know we’re a crazy, zany, mad-cap bunch in audio post, but there is a more serious point to this: for a client, where time is money spent on postproduction, unless you’re very careful in pricing a job, their expectation is for these sizeable transfer times to be absorbed at your own cost. Which is why, for me, the Fostex DV824 (UK£2199 + VAT) is the most significant audio postproduction product of 2005. It’s almost taken care of everything on my wish-list. I say almost, because of two teeny-weeny yet fundamental shortcomings. First, due to the linear process of DVD as opposed to the random nature of hard-disk, the time-saving ability to ftp the Broadcast Wave .WAV files off supplied field recording disks and into a DAW, works only in one direction — from the 824; and in this lazy, IT-based world we now exist in, I would really, really like the option to just drop-anddrag finished mixes the other way, straight back on to the DV824. Second, you can’t overdub. In fairness, the first you can’t do with tape either — but with an optional hard disk fitted to the Fostex you can at least write in multiple media recording modes including CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW, copying to the DV824 via that internal hard disk; but with the second gripe, of course with tape, you can easily overdub. With the introduction of the DV824, Fostex would seem to have now completed its DVD-based audio production chain family and let’s face it, it is no stranger to digital audio. It invented the timecode resolution

DAT 15 years ago, introducing timecode capable location versions too. The successor to these fondlyremembered location PD2 and PD4 models — the PD6 — introduced the DVD format to feature ﬁlm location recording, and quickly established itself as a digital, versatile, disc-based platform: sales have already exceeded the magic 500 number. Fostex has been robust in championing the DVDRAM format as the natural successor to DAT, and its reasoning is sound enough: DVD-RAM has a proven durability — 100,000 rewrites are assured; the cartridge-held disc offers better protection from the bumps and grinds that could cause external damage to the disc itself; it offers good editing facilities and built-in error correction capabilities; and with the realtime, error-free recording afforded by Fostex’s Verify/ Write technology, the Film industry has taken to it. Now, with the introduction of the DV824, television studios and postproduction houses will also be taking note, while location drama recordists will welcome the extra capacity and ﬂexibility afforded by the device. It’s a sophisticated beast, yet not complicated. The DV824 can record up to 8 channels of simultaneous audio, in a plethora of permutations: as well as mono and stereo track modes, the device offers 4, 5, 6, and 8 track modes, with the capability to handle 8-track simultaneous recordings at 24-bit/48kHz, and 4track simultaneous recording at 24-bit/96kHz. This new Fostex continues to use Type-2, one sided discs, offering a capacity of 4.7Gb (typically 96 minutes of 8-track at 48kHz/16-bit, or 64 minutes of 8-track at January/February 2006

review 48kHz/24-bit). As with all Fostex DVD products, the discs are formatted in accordance with the Universal Disc Format (UDF), and data on the DV824 is stored in uncompressed Broadcast Wave (.WAV) format interleaved files. This means that the discs may be read by any of the main computer operating systems, including Windows, Mac and Linux; making for easy transfer to external editing systems. That optional 40Gb or 80Gb hard disk enables dual-disk recording, as well as offering an auto backup facility. Further options can also be found on the timecode/Sync card, which allows for internal and external timecode to be generated and integrated into the recording process, and includes a biphase input for synchronising the DV824 to a film projector. The slim 2U device externally breaks-down into two major sections: front and rear. All connectivity is accessed through the rear panel: its eight +4dBu, balanced XLR-3 analogue inputs sit in a row above the eight analogue output XLR connectors, and its digital I-O is via a D-sub 25-pin with pin connections conforming to those found on Yamaha kit. This connector handles AES-EBU and SPDIF. The unit may be controlled remotely through a mini-DIN 8-pin connector, or through a conventional video-controller RS-422. A second ‘through’ 9-pin echoes the signals received at the master 9-pin connector, enabling multiple units to be controlled. A 100ohm slider switches terminates the 9-pin connector, while a second, similar switch terminates the Word In signal. Two BNC connectors carry the Word clock I-Os while an RJ45 socket is used for the Ethernet port. This enables the DV824 to be connected to an Ether network conforming to 100/10 base-T. Accordingly, two lights illuminate the port’s status: the Link lights when recognising the network, and the ‘TX/RX’ lights when receiving or sending data. Power is supplied to the unit from an AC adaptor. The front panel is an altogether busier place, as a whistle-stop tour will confirm. The first three eyecatching features are the disk loading-drawer on the left hand side above the power On/Off switch, this disk tray is operated by a key adjacent to the tray; the eight 18-bar level meters, showing the recording or playback levels of tracks; and a 132 x 64 dot-matrix LCD. The large, 7-segment time-display is located below this LCD, with the time displayed selected through the use of a Time Select/Contrast key, which

cycles through Absolute, TC In, Generator and LTC. Like many of the front panel buttons, it has a shifted and un-shifted function. A column of small indicator lamps on the right hand side of the display panel show which mode is selected, including Drop-Frame. A USB keyboard port is useful for quickly naming ﬁles and there’s also a Phones section with a 1/4inch headphone socket, volume pot and switchable matrix combination allowing a variety of sources to be selected, including mono mix, stereo mix, stereo tracks and soloed tracks. Sandwiched between the edge of the disk tray and the level meters are two indicators related to disk access, indicating the condition of the currently selected drive. With the optional hard disk installed and selected, the HD light is lit; when the DVD drive is selected, the DVD light is lit. These tri-state lamps show green when a drive is selected, orange when reading data and red when writing. Below the level meters, time display and display panel are the familiar ﬁve transport buttons. A three-by-four layout of buttons on the right hand side of the central display area takes care of various direct data entry/’shifted’ functions. These cover functions such as alphanumeric entry, File Select, Drive Partition, Pre Record Slate Tone, List Play, Edit EDL, Chase, Time Select, Contrast, All Input, Safe: Ready, Mark:Cue, Locate, Edit Time and Clear, among

others. These buttons work in conjunction with the Skip/Cursor left/right keys on the bottom right hand of the front panel, the Shift key, and the Menu dial/ Enter:Yes dual function turn-to-select, push-to-accept knob. The DV824 neatly completes the Fostex suite of DVD-RAM products, and justifiably sits at the top of its family tree. Anyone familiar with the ubiquitous DA-88 will quickly feel at home using the DV824, and barring my petty gripes about the small inflexibility inherent with using DVD rather than tape, I am sure that the DV824 will soon become a familiar fixture in postproduction studios. ■

PROS

Almost everything you could want from an audio postproduction master recorder is here.

CONS

Readily reads ‘family’ discs from the DV40 and PD-6, but not DEVA II; special software is needed to play DEVA IV and V.

Contact FOSTEX, JAPAN: Website: www.fostexdvd.net UK, SCV London: +44 208 418 1470

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January/February 2006

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review

Waves Tune and De Breath Waves’ latest bundle of plug-ins is more than simply a re-packaging of existing offerings. Yes, the Vocal Bundle does include some old favourites such as Doubler, Renaissance Channel and Renaissance DeEsser, but it is also the showcase for two brand new plugs geared speciﬁcally towards vocal postproduction.

OTH TUNE AND DEBREATH are at one level pretty selfexplanatory in their action. What is perhaps slightly harder to understand, particularly in the case of Tune, is why Waves has waited quite so long to ﬁll such an obvious gap in its processing line up. Tuning correction of vocals and other monophonic sources is hardly a new idea, and in some genres and production styles it’s become as commonplace as compression. Such has been the domination of Antares’ product in this area that the product name, AutoTune, has almost become a generic term for the technique. More recently, Celemony’s Melodyne has also appeared on the scene, and has quickly garnered an enthusiastic user base that appreciates its rather elegant and intuitive user interface. What Waves has come up with is a product that has clearly looked hard at these two competitors, and seems to merge together some of the best features of both. While AutoTune functions as a plug-in in a conventional sense, Melodyne has always been a standalone application. Miniature plug-ins are available to work with most DAWs, but these simply act as a bridge to stream audio into Melodyne for processing and then back into the DAW for playback.

JON THORNTON

Tune sits somewhere in the middle of these approaches — it can be inserted as a plug-in across any track in your DAW of choice, but before it starts work the audio in question needs to be scanned and analysed. This initial pitch detection forms the basis of the pitch correction curve that the plug-in will apply to the chosen track, which the user can ﬁne-tune and tweak in real time. This approach means that Tune is best used when the vocal track in question is pretty much ‘locked’ with most comping, etc. ﬁnalised, as subsequent drop-ins or editing of the original track will mean that altered sections will need to be rescanned by the plug-in. Up to ten minutes of audio can be scanned and analysed in one pass, and if necessary this ten-minute stretch can be offset to any point within a longer session. Subsequent tweaking and tuning of the track happens entirely within the plug-in window, and as this inevitably means a certain degree of navigation around the audio to audition, loop, start and stop playback etc., all of these functions are available from within the plug-in itself, which synchronises itself with the host DAW’s timeline using Propellerheads’ ReWire protocol. As the audio is scanned, the top of the plug-in window displays a waveform view of the audio, and markers

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and loop points can be entered on here to control playback from the DAW after the scan is complete. The main bulk of the plug-in display is given over to the edit window, and here you can see similarities to both AutoTune’s and Melodyne’s interfaces. Along the left hand side is a ‘piano roll’, indicating specific pitches. The range and scale of this can be changed, of course, to suit the audio in question. In addition, a pop-up menu allows you to choose from a myriad of scales, tunings and keys, which will then highlight ‘illegal’ notes on this display — in other words notes that do not belong in that key or scale. By clicking on the piano keys, you can set rules for pitch correction in terms of whether an input note falling on an illegal note is corrected to the nearest legal note, or correction forced to the nearest legal note either above or below the input note. It can also be set to bypass — in other words input notes will not have correction applied to them if they are not part of the defined scale. As the audio track is scanned by Tune, it is ‘segmented’ into notes that appear on the main edit window in a fashion similar to a MIDI note editor. Orange blocks define the position of notes, which are overlaid by a constantly varying orange line, indicating the detected pitch of the input audio, and a green line that indicates the corrected pitch. The parameters by which audio is both segmented and corrected can be set before the initial scan, but also altered afterwards either globally, or on individually selected notes. Segmentation into notes is controlled by the chosen scale and the segmentation tolerance setting. Higher tolerance settings mean that short glitches in input notes or marginal detunes will not be split into individual notes, but will remain as one note segment. Exact values for this are best found by experimentation, and are very dependant on the source material and singing style. Natural vibrato has always been a problem for this type of processing — as it can lead to a note with vibrato being segmented into two or three rapidly changing notes. Although increasing the tolerance parameter helps here, Waves has also implemented a vibrato detection function. Once enabled, it will look for natural vibrato occurring in the whole section or a selected area, and will segment notes based on the average pitch. Pitch correction has three main parameters. Speed sets the speed of correction within a note in milliseconds. Low values have the effect of pretty much flattening any pitch variation, higher settings allow some natural variation in pitch. Note Transition defines the speed at which correction is applied from note to note in the scale — short values sound a little jumpy and artificial, longer values allow more ‘glide’ in the corrected pitch. Finally, Ratio defines how much of the pitch correction curve is applied to the original audio, ranging from no correction to 100% correction. Again, these settings can be applied globally or on individual notes or selections of notes. Editing in this window is made very easy by a selection of tools. Notes can be simply picked up and moved to a different scale pitch, with the correction curve being redrawn instantly based on the parameters outlined above. Notes can be joined together or split apart — again, very straightforward and familiar to anybody who’s ever used a MIDI sequencing package. The correction curve can even be redrawn directly on the screen, either with a pencil tool or a breakpoint style tool. Where this is done, the audio is re-segmented into new notes based on the segmentation settings, allowing for example, a vocal glissando to be produced where none existed previously. January/February 2006

review All in all it’s a very straightforward and easy user interface once you’ve spent a little time with it — and its strength is in the way you can go from general correction to fine-tuning notes in surgical detail and back again almost instantly. The ability to navigate through the audio from within the plug-in is also a huge bonus, as is the ability to hear the audio and edit it while listening to it in context with the rest of the mix –- although I have to say that this did require me to upgrade my Pro Tools software in order to get the ReWire functionality working on an HD system, and I couldn’t get it to work at all with an older Mix3 system using PT 6.1. Sonically, Tune performs very well. A choice of formant correction or straight shifting is available, and while most users will never stray far from the formant corrected option for vocals, it does give additional flexibility when working with non-vocal sources. The default correction parameters applied on the initial scan can sometimes sound a little heavy-handed on first listen, but these are easily adjusted, and I found myself very quickly doing some fairly advanced editing on individual sections to tweak odd pitch problems while leaving the broad correction curve at lower ratio settings. Used in this manner Tune can very quickly produce natural sounding results. Finally, there are a couple of other features worth pointing out. In addition to detecting natural vibrato for the purposes of note segmentation, Tune can also either modify natural vibrato in a note, or add synthetic vibrato where none exists. Once final correction is achieved, Tune will also export the data as a MIDI file, which can then be used to double up the vocal part with MIDI instruments in a sequencer or DAW. I had to laugh when I read the website blurb that accompanies DeBreath, which opens with ‘Breathing is something singers seem to insist on doing, even when it spoils a perfectly good take…’ Whether you agree with this sentiment or not, DeBreath is a very powerful little plug-in. Although in essence it is similar to a noise gate in functionality, the way in which it detects breath noises is more sophisticated than simply a function of level. Incoming audio is monitored and compared against a database of breath type ‘signatures’. The plug-in displays a rolling window that graphs the similarity of the incoming audio to a breath noise, ranging from 0 to 100%. Immediately below this is another rolling window that indicates overall signal energy. On the basis that a breath sound is likely to have a high similarity level coupled with a low energy level, the detection of breath sounds can be very accurate. Two threshold levels, one for similarity and the other for energy, can be set by the user, and the plug-in only acts when breath similarity exceeds the threshold and energy stays below the threshold. The plug-in effectively has two audio paths as outputs –- one for breath noises and the other for voice signals. When the detection conditions outlined

January/February 2006

above are met, the breath sound is faded out of the voice path and into the breath path. The timing of this fade is user-deﬁned, as is the reverse — i.e. when the signal is faded from the breath path and back into the voice path. Similarly, the amount of movement of the signal is also variable, so that some breath noise remains in the voice path, but is attenuated by a certain level. While the output of the plug-in can only be either one path or the other, it’s a trivial matter to have the plug assigned to two tracks, each with an identical vocal line, and have one monitoring breath and the other voice — enabling rebalancing of these components or different treatments, for example a slightly darker EQ on the breath track. If it is being used simply for breath removal, there is an option to have DeBreath automatically insert low-level white noise as a kind of room tone when breaths are removed, in order to compensate for any unnatural sounding silences in the track. It sounds quite involved, but in actuality it’s a breeze to set up and use, and it works wonderfully well, almost fully automating what can be a very long-winded editing process if performed manually. Of the two new offerings, Tune is clearly the big gun here but I think that Waves has chosen its moment well, and has produced something that takes the best of what’s currently available and put it together into a powerful, but intuitive package. Add DeBreath and the somewhat older favourites, and the Vocal Bundle is an extremely powerful proposition. ■

PROS

Elegant, easy to use but powerful interface for Tune; high quality pitch correction; can be as general or as surgical as you like; DeBreath powerful and simple.

CONS

Tune doesn’t have the multitrack or timestretching functionality of Melodyne; ReWire implementation problematic on older Pro Tools systems.

Contact WAVES, ISRAEL Website: www.waves.com UK, Sonic Distribution: +44 1582 470260

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review

Rosendahl BonsaiDrive One of the main objectives of working to picture is to a have a reliable and high quality picture source to work to. Random access picture has been around for a while but it’s now become truly affordable, compact and standalone with the arrival of this video recorder/ player. ROB JAMES goes bonsai.

IDEO PLAYBACK HAS long been a source of angst in sound for picture post. In a TV environment the choice is between using the transmission format tape or nonlinear, or an offline transfer, again either tape or nonlinear. These alternatives all have advantages and disadvantages trading off cost against convenience. In ﬁlm mixing, the same applies. Picture quality is often compromised and/or the advantages of nonlinear instant access are lost due to the use of a tape-based playback machine. Sync accuracy and ease of setting offsets are frequent issues. The UK£1395 (+VAT) Rosendahl BonsaiDrve is described as a professional portable video and audio multitrack recorder. Mains or 12V DC powered

versions are available. It records and plays back PAL or NTSC video sources along with up to ten 48kHz, 24-bit audio channels on standard ATA-133 IDE drives and only consumes 40Gb per hour in full 4:2:2 thanks to the use of a lossless 2:1 compression huffman codec. A synchroniser is integral with LTC/ MTC chase, Sony 9-pin (P2) protocol control, Word clock and gen lock. Professional is an oft-misused word but in this case seems entirely appropriate. In fact the case is a good place to begin. Heavy gauge pressed steel is used for the body and hard disk carrier. The front panel is an alloy casting while the ten positive, internally illuminated, transport control buttons would not disgrace a high-end console. After screwing in a single

Connections and other good stuff

Removing the front panel reveals two D-Sub sockets, a 9-pin remote connection and a 15-pin GPIO interface. The panel itself has three 9-pin connections, a male and female mirror and a Sony P2 remote socket. Before anybody asks, you cannot use the BonsaiDrive panel as a remote control for other P2 machines. The RS422 serial control supports cable lengths up to 100m, ideal for remoting to machine rooms of even the largest dubbing theatres. Around the back, two Toslink optical sockets provide 8-channel digital audio I-O in ADAT format. Four phonos cater for the 2-channel analogue audio I-O. Two more phonos connect timecode I-O and there are two Dins for MIDI I-O. Analogue video is taken care of by three BNCs each for in and out. The precise function of these is configured in the menu system. Composite and Y/C (S-Video) can be used together, with the option of Component or RGB instead. An option slot accepts either a bi-directional SDI board, supporting 270Mbit I-O with up to 8 embedded audio channels, or (soon) a variety of other connection boards. Recordings are organised as unique clips. Up to 255 clips can exist simultaneously. In BonsaiDrive, timecode is not recorded on a separate track, but is regenerated (calculated) from a fixed offset. The timecode value required at any position can be set at any time. For example, 10:00:00:00 on first frame of video, then 10:10:00:00 on first frame and so on when producing multiple audio versions of a single video clip. This is generally simpler than offsetting everything else in the system to suit a fixed video offset. Timecode, clip number and audio bargraphs can be burnt in to the outputs.

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retainer the front panel simply unclips to become a small and neat remote control. However, it takes a great deal more than good mechanics and cosmetics to define truly professional kit. To ‘play nice’ in a complex environment requires meticulous attention to detail. For example, colour phase adjustment can be essential. This unit does not disappoint providing phase adjustment in 1.8 degree steps via a menu. When composite video signals are destined to be mixed they must be locked to the full PAL 8 field sequence. For this reason, BonsaiDrive offers the choice of 2 or 8 field sync lock modes. If set to 8 Field the composite outputs will be phase correct to house sync without the use of an external timebase corrector. Rosendahl already has a considerable reputation for clock generation so it should be no surprise to discover that the BonsaiDrive’s internal clock is of extremely high quality. In fact, good enough to run your entire studio. There is no cooling fan so the only extraneous noise is generated by the hard drive. If quiet operation is important for the application, careful choice of drive will pay dividends. The review unit was supplied with a 160Gb Samsung to prove the point. Drives up to 800Gb are supported but it is worth bearing in mind that the larger sizes run much noisier and hotter. In use the BonsaiDrive performs flawlessly. Recording is straightforward enough but it is when playing back under 9-pin control that it really shines. Subjective picture quality is excellent from stop to 64 times speed. In the current ‘plain vanilla’ form I can see one or two snags. First, it would be a lot more convenient in many facility house applications if clips could be up and downloaded over a network connection or from external drives. Rosendahl is planning to implement a special FAT32 partition together with a BonsaiDrive QuickTime codec. After which it will be possible to add IEE1392, E-SATA, USBII or Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The other issue is that this is strictly a standard definition machine. With high-definition rapidly growing in importance in broadcast and film this may make some potential purchasers pause. However, Rosendahl is planning an extra interface box with HD-SDI I-O and two SD-SDI I-Os. An array of two internally linked SD BonsaiDrives will be able to record and playback uncompressed HD-SDI. These observations slightly miss the point — the BonsaiDrive you can buy today is inexpensive and small. It is just as practical to carry one from place to place as an external hard drive and interfacing it is a whole lot easier than the familiar niggly problems of SCSI, FireWire and incompatible versions of software. BonsaiDrive is a stunning achievement at this price point. A truly professional piece of kit capable of much more than video ‘for’ audio playback duties. It will also find applications in video assist, location playback and, thanks to its looping and 10 track audio capabilities, point of sale displays and multimedia for theme parks and museums. I can also envisage its use as a broadcast playout device. With the projected enhancements it will become even more desirable. ■

PROS

Professionalism; price; form factor.

CONS

No High Deﬁnition — yet; no editing; no networking — yet.

Contact ROSENDAHL, GERMANY: Website: www.rosendahl-studiotechnik.de

January/February 2006

review

Schoeps CMIT 5U Depending on how you look at the issue, the ﬁrst shotgun from Schoeps is either the mic that everyone has been waiting for or a dive into a crowded market full of long-lived ‘industry standards’. NEIL HILLMAN believes that this changes everything.

Y WIFE HAS A new car, you may be pleased to hear. A Ford Focus Ghia, top-of-the-range, now you ask. With only one previous lady owner, it had the right mileage, the right service history and it sold at the right price. Apparently, squire, it’s never been raced or rallied. She’s delighted; ipso-facto, I am too: and my inheritance of our old faithful — a 1996, 126,000-miles-and-still-counting, Turbo diesel estate –- made us a two-car couple. I could now venture off my preferred 2-wheels for the warmth and security of four, which made my daily commute sheer luxury as the first flakes of winter snow fell. I should have been pleased by this inherently more stable mode of transport, given that the icy mornings were now upon us; and I was, for a whole week; in fact right up to the point that I drove Mrs Hillman’s new purchase for the first time. But then I experienced the sensation of using two similarly-purposed products separated by 10 years of development. The response was smoother, the handling was lighter, it was less noisy and my sense of security was heightened; overall, the performance was simply superior. I was experiencing the benefits of a new generation. I had been happy with the old car, but now all I can focus on are its inadequacies. To compound my misery, at the same time I made the mistake of placing my old, faithful, trusted, workhorse shotgun microphone, side-byside with the pretender to what I thought, pretty much, was an occupied throne. Unlike its modular Collette range — this one is not interchangeable — the Schoeps CMIT 5U (Condenser Microphone, Interference Tube) is a new departure for the German manufacturer; it has never before made a shotgun microphone, even though it has been consistently pestered by recordists keen to supplement their supercardioid Schoeps CMC 641s. This is an eagerly-awaited product; and all the more so for originating from the pen, pad and PC of Schoeps’ technical director Joerg Wuttke. As a former student of Professor Günther Kurtze — the inventor of the Interference Tube shotgun microphone, no less — he should start with more than half an idea as to what constitutes the ultimate shotgun. Joerg is also a champion of small capsule microphones, explaining that the smaller the diaphragm, the faster the transient response can be; and arguing that given their smaller mass, they are also not prone to the phase non-linearity suffered by large 28

diaphragm capsules. Given this background then, the first Schoeps shotgun should be a very interesting microphone. And it is. From the moment its polished-wood case is opened, it looks very special indeed. Glance down its anodised, electric blue body and your eyes arrive at three filterselect pushbuttons, mounted within subtly machined oval recesses, with six tiny associated LEDs, two per filter. Accessible and discreet — the legends on the microphone body are engraved in white. This microphone exudes quality at rest; if the CMIT 5U had a voice of its own it would whisper: ‘Plug me into the Phantom’. And while heavy with expectations, at 89g, it is feather-light. The three pushbuttons control two roll-off filters and an emphasis filter, with either a red LED showing the ‘off’ state, or a green LED showing that the appropriate filter is in-circuit. The top switch provides a high-frequency emphasis of +5dB at 10kHz, which is designed to enhance speech intelligibility and compensate for any HF loss due to the use of the optional but obligatory Rycote Windjammer. The middle switch is a steep low-cut filter, providing an 18dB/octave slope with a roll-

over frequency of 80Hz, and designed to minimise any handling or wind noise. The bottom switch is a gentler 6dB/octave roll-off filter, operating below 300Hz. This is primarily designed to compensate for the proximity bass tip-up typically associated with shotgun microphones — the some time bane of a dubbing mixer faced with close-miked voiceovers from a location recordist desperately striving to eliminate surrounding extraneous noise from the recording. The filter settings are remembered when the life-giving +48V phantom power is removed, and the LEDs are easily viewed in daylight once the windshield end-cap is removed. The CMIT 5U is marketed to be of use in the studio, for music and voice, as well as outdoors; but its design philosophy would seem to indicate that Schoeps has the location recordist very much in mind. The mic’s directional pattern is consistent in both the horizontal and vertical planes, unlike some other leading manufacturers’ models; it enjoys low off-axis colouration due to the low and high frequency pickup angles being closely matched; there is extra ‘suck’ from the CMIT’s unusual degree of directivity built-in to its mid-frequency response, while its HF pickup pattern is looser than other shotgun microphones. In short then, it has all the attributes a production mixer is looking for in a microphone that will be mounted and worked in the free space at the end of a boom pole, and especially when a boom operator is working hard to keep actors on-mic during busy dialogue scenes. These frequency design details should more enable a boom operator to gently drift off artistes as their individual lines come to an end, but be bang-on axis for the start of each actor’s successive line. It’s an old trick, but it works. The CMIT 5U (UK£1151 + VAT) is uniquely, reassuringly, expensively, Schoeps: clear, light, neutral, airy, transparent, spacious, accurate — what adjectives can I draw on without delving into the ephemeral lexicon of a home hifi reviewer? Perhaps the highest compliment I can give it is that it disappears as an interface between what you want to record, and what you want to record to. It certainly heralds in a new generation of shotgun microphones, and

signiﬁcantly raises the bar. The response is smooth with its weighted frequency design; its touch is light, it’s quiet; and with a robust attitude to RF interference, it inspires total conﬁdence. My old faithful four-one… oh, you know which one, suddenly feels very high mileage now. ■

PROS

The quality and passion is in the detail; imagine it as the equivalent of driving to the location in a Ferrari 360.

CONS

‘Once listened, forever smittened’. OK, I’ve invented a poor slogan — but you will be. Prepare to cough-up some cash.

Contact SCHOEPS, GERMANY: Website: www.schoeps.de

resolution

January/February 2006

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PASSIONATE ABOUT TUBES

review

Grace Design M906 While most attempts at monitoring controllers have concentrated on ‘high value’ attributes, just as in everything else an upper elite category has also materialised. ROB JAMES takes pipe, slippers and tired-but-comfortable cardigan and attempts to go audiophile.

N THE PAST, dedicated monitor controllers were generally only found in film and broadcast installations. In the film world monitoring is, or was, inextricably linked with record and machine control. Broadcast often has requirements unique to the specific installation. For the most part, monitor control in production and postproduction environments was more than adequately taken care of by the mixing console. Now, the mixing console is an endangered species in many applications, its crown usurped by the workstation. Once you accept that there is no need for a conventional console, the requirement for some sort of monitor controller, at the minimum a precision volume control, becomes clear. Grace Design’s concept for the M906 began with exactly this premise although there is a great deal more to the UK£4,300 (+ VAT) M906 than simple volume control. Based in Colorado, Grace Design’s core products are mic preamps, designed with an audiophile approach. Attention to detail is meticulous, possibly even obsessive, with the ambition of producing products demonstrating impeccable specification figures and real-world performance to satisfy the most goldeneared practitioners. The new monitor controllers and headphone amplifier are a logical extension of the same design philosophies. The M906 is a three-box design. The linear power supply is a separate unit feeding the main 2U rackmount processor. The control surface is relatively compact and connects via a 15-pin D-Sub. The M906 can handle a variety of digital and analogue inputs in stereo and 5.1 and offers two alternative sets of 5.1 speaker outputs plus headphones, cue and a ‘fixed’ 5.1 output for recording. Analogue inputs come in 5.1 balanced and unbalanced flavours plus two

balanced stereos. Digital input options are 5.1 AESEBU, 5.1 ADAT, stereo AES x 2, stereo SPDIF and stereo ADAT. Convertors can be clocked to any of the digital inputs or a high stability, low jitter internal clock. The M906 also features a PLL reclocking feature dubbed s-lock. This is claimed to be able to deal with less than perfect external sync sources and provide a stable, low jitter clock to the D-ACs. Connections are well thought out — Tascam DA-88 format 25-pin D-Subs for each of the 5.1 outputs with parallel wired left and right XLRs for the two speaker sets. There are two common approaches to the problem posed by monitor control of analogue and digital sources. Digital sources can be converted to analogue when they arrive at the unit or analogue signals can be converted to digital with digital to analogue conversion as the final stage on the way to the speakers. It might appear that there are advantages to the latter approach when the majority of sources are digital, as is often the case in a workstation environment. However, any change in level means that the signal requires dithering before conversion. Chances are that any digital signal you are listening to has already been dithered and multiple dithering is not a recipe for pristine audio. The digital approach does however bring control convenience, especially in broadcast situations. As might be expected from a company with a reputation built on audiophile mic pres, Grace follows the ‘convert to analogue on input’ approach. Circuit topology uses balanced ‘transimpedance’ (current feedback) input amplifiers. The gain control elements are digitally controlled attenuators. All audio switching is made with sealed gold contact relays and the output amplifiers can drive long lines at impedances as low

as 300ohms. All resistors in the analogue signal path are 0.5% tolerance surface-mount thin-film. The only signal coupling capacitors (polymer film) are used to eliminate any DC offset at the attenuator inputs. Digital to analogue convertors are of the preferred multibit variety — Burr-Brown PCM1730s to be exact. The separate power supply employs a shielded EMI filter before the torroidal transformer, followed by separate regulated supplies for the digital and analogue circuitry. Additionally, each circuit section has its own regulation, 24 in total. All good audiophile stuff (Pause to tap out pipe. Ed). Brushed, non-magnetic, stainless steel, blue alpha LEDs and the round, pretty and functional, internally illuminated buttons all conspire to give the units a classy feel, somewhat reminiscent of esoteric hifi. The surface is laid out logically with input selection in the top two rows on the left and the individual speaker channels Solo/Mute plus function toggle below. Separate bright blue LED alpha displays show the current headphone and main output levels. On the right, the System LCD is at the top with Select, Monitor+Cue and Cal buttons in the top row, Mono, Dim and Mute above the main volume and Speaker set toggle, and Talkback send alongside. All switching is done with relays and level control comes courtesy of digitally controlled attenuators. As a result of this, all the I-Os can be trimmed in 0.5dB increments while maintaining a claimed 0.05dB tracking accuracy. In operation, the M906 swiftly becomes entirely natural. All the buttons you will use when monitoring act silently but positively and the rotary controls are nicely detented. Calibration takes a bit more thought at first, but the comprehensive options available more than compensate. Performance is subjectively in line with the paper specifications and Grace Design’s reputation. In terms of transparency and accuracy the M906 is a black belt contender in a tiny, elite group. Lengthy comparison tests with its few real rivals will be the only way to separate them sonically. The M906 will be completely at home in mastering suites and plush listening rooms where money is no object. ■

PROS

One manufacturer’s take on the purist approach to monitor control; distinctive appearance; construction.

CONS

Appearance may be too distinctive for some; main unit runs surprisingly warm; audiophile price.

EXTRAS

There is an AES loop-thru option available for the M906 — factory ﬁt UK£285 (+ VAT) or subsequent upgrade UK£325 (+ VAT).

Two stereo versions, the UK£2,150 (+ VAT) M904 with front panel controls and the UK£2,795 (+ VAT) M904b with a similar remote control to the M906, are also available. Optional remote for m904 is UK£1,075. The M902 Headphone ampliﬁer (UK£1,215 + VAT) is also noteworthy not only as a reference headphone monitor but also as an excellent stereo D-AC.

Contact GRACE DESIGN, US Website: www.gracedesign.com UK, Aspen Media: +44 01296 681313

resolution

January/February 2006

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review

DigiDesign Pro Tools HD 7 While it hasn’t enjoyed quite as much fanfare as some of the earlier revisions, PT7 still delivers some signiﬁcant progress in a number of key areas. GEORGE SHILLING says it’s all important stuff even though someone’s rearranged his CD collection.

HIS UPGRADE REPRESENTS an ‘evolutionary leap’ according to Digidesign, which perhaps means that it should work pretty much the same, only better... Well, following the new splash screen and logo icons, things certainly look entirely familiar to 6.x users. The screen layout and shortcuts remain unchanged. But like when your partner takes it upon themselves to tidy your messy pile of CDs, Digidesign has undertaken a radical revamp of the top-screen menu structures, leading to a far more logical grouping of items with sub-menus where appropriate. And just like the partner scenario, this is a big source of irritation for users familiar with the original menu item positions, which hadn’t previously moved for a long time. For example, Delete Tracks was previously on the File menu, but now resides under the new Track heading. Strip Silence moves to the Edit menu, while Beat Detective moves to the Event menu. So it’s exactly like those CDs that were lying around — you knew where each was, roughly, even though they were untidy. And if you were going to tidy them up, you’d have catalogued them alphabetically by ARTIST! You’ll ﬁnd them again of course, with a bit of rooting around… (Glad you’re taking it so very well. Ed). Perhaps mirroring Logic 7’s much improved audio editing, PT7’s greatest improvement is arguably in the MIDI editing department, albeit mostly to cover functions found on dedicated MIDI sequencing software for decades. All MIDI editing dialogues seem to have been enhanced with extra parameters, randomise functions, and so on. Furthermore, playback parameters can now be speciﬁed for Quantize, Duration, Delay, Velocity and Transpose for MIDI Regions or Tracks, with the option to make these permanent by writing them to the original. Sure, all these things are mostly the stuff you used to do on Atari Cubase or Notator (Some people still do. Ed), but it is certainly possible the enhan00ced MIDI operation will lure away one or two prospective Logic 32

customers, even without all the bundled instruments. The cumbersome method of instantiating virtual instruments on audio channels then creating a controlling MIDI track is no longer necessary with the introduction of Instrument tracks, much like those found in Logic. These add an additional display section on the channel for the necessary extra parameters, and this is certainly a more elegant working method, although it doesn’t preclude the old-fashioned way of doing things. Apart from the menu changes, there is little to stop 6.x users from immediately using PT7 in a familiar way. For general editing a fairly major new feature is Region Grouping, this can be done across tracks to include MIDI and audio regions. Groups can even be nested, and Multitrack Region Groups create nested groups by track before grouping across tracks, this is useful when working with edited drum tracks. Another use for Region Groups is when you’ve created a pattern on Tick-based tracks with, say, short percussion samples –- grouping allows overall editing and processing of the parts. REX and ACID formats now claim support, but importing REX files had me puzzled at first as using the Import commands simply converted them to the session’s file format. Dragging a mono Recycle file from the desktop had the desired effect, changing the loop’s length to match the session tempo, and creating a Region Group of the individual files. Even the TC/E tool worked to change the duration of the loop — fab! However, although MIDI and audio files can also now be dragged in, I couldn’t seem to drag stereo Recycle files. For mixing, things are improved in a number of areas. RTAS plug-ins can make full and proper use of dual-processor Macs, with even more efficient processing possibilities for plug-in developers who code for the new RTAS environment. However, Digidesign admits that some plug-ins presently perform worse with single processor Macs and Windows machines resolution

running LE. RTAS plug-ins can now be inserted on Aux Inputs and Master Faders, which is useful. There are now a possible 10 sends per channel and these can now be copied or moved using drag and drop, similarly to inserts. I still wish they could be instantiated on-the-fly (they cannot), and there are still only five possible inserts per channel, which is not disastrous but certainly inferior to some competing DAWs. Automation data can thankfully now be cut, copied and pasted using the additional Special menu functions. All the additional features have led to the inevitable change in the session save format — remarkably this is the first change since version 5.1. Saving to older formats is easily achieved using the ‘Save Copy In…’ dialogue, even all the way back to version 3.2. Pro Tools is possibly the closest DAW to an industry standard for music production and is popular with the post fraternity. This major re-tweak mostly leaves the familiar stuff we know and love well alone. The most obvious improvements are the MIDI and compositional features to lure away Logic users, while new tool tips make the interface even friendlier for new users. But for music and post, mixing and editing is also significantly improved. The new Separate At Transients (or on Grid) feature is fantastic, and will certainly save time. But although you can automatically create fades, I’d still love Logic’s snap to waveforms’ zero crossing feature for editing seamlessly, or why not even improve on that and apply the principle to punch-ins? Other improvements include claimed additional software optimisations for faster and more powerful operation — this is more difficult to assess without having identical ‘before and after’ systems sideby-side, but most program functions seem pretty snappy. So although visually things haven’t changed immensely, it seems that under the bonnet this is a bigger change than the update from 5 to 6, even though that went from OS9 to OSX. And that is probably why, irritatingly, HTDM has been abolished, and Logic 7.1.1’s ESB/DAE operation does not presently work with PTHD7 installed. But on balance, it’s all very impressive. And at the end of the list of improvements comes news that the software now supports the traditional Chinese language — now there’s a sign of the times. ■

PROS

Essentially familiar operation; upgrade price nominal; vastly improved MIDI/Compositional functions; more efﬁcient native processing; LE and MPowered users also get most of the improvements.

CONS

Mousers will initially curse the re-jigged menus; HTDM plug-ins obsolete; some other plug-ins need updating; Logic ESB/ DAE incompatible.

EXTRAS

MIDI improvements: Instrument Tracks; real-time MIDI processing; mirrored

MIDI editing mode; Remove Duplicate Notes; sample-based MIDI tracks; enhanced Groove Quantization features; Zoom Toggle between two user-deﬁned settings; enhanced functions for Select/ Split Notes, Change Duration and Transpose windows.

Contact DIGIDESIGN, US: Website: www.digidesign.com

January/February 2006

review

Mutec iClock In any discussion of infrastructure, there is the risk of tedium. In general we are all happy to ignore the rather boring but vital underpinnings until something goes wrong whereupon they suddenly assume the centre stage spot. ROB JAMES assumes centre stage with a clock for all applications.

N THIS DIGITAL AGE clocks are everywhere. Usually unseen and disregarded, clocks are the bedrock on which all else is built. From a talking Christmas card to a big broadcast facility, there is a clock at the heart of the machine. It is not simply catastrophic failure that causes problems. Incorrect rate matching, incorrect phase relationships and just plain lack of accuracy are responsible for a host of more or less egregious problems in audio and video. Even when clocks are accurate and jitter free, the sheer variety of different rates in common use is a daily nightmare for many, especially people dealing with transatlantic projects involving NTSC video and 24Frame film. Anything that could help to make life easier by dealing with at least some of this intelligently, and without operator intervention, would be very welcome. Enter the UK£1100 (+ VAT) Mutec iClock. The iClock premise is this: unlike conventional clock synthesisers and video sync generators, the operator can define a number of required output clock rates and formats. These can include simultaneous pullup, pull-down and varispeed. Once set, these output rates are then maintained regardless of changes to incoming reference signals. For example, if you begin with a 44.1kHz input that then changes to 48kHz, the defined output rates will remain the same. The rear of this 1U box is populated by a prodigious number of connectors. Two BNCs and an XLR for the three external inputs, two pairs of BNCs for video out, four pairs of BNCs for Word clock out, two pairs of XLRs for AES-EBU out and two phonos for SPDIF out. Each pair of Word clock and AES-EBU outputs can be independently set, as can each SPDIF output. The RJ45 socket is for an RS485 connection to a PC. A bright, back-lit, LCD is the operator’s window into the world of iClock. All settings are made with four cursor keys. Three blue LEDs show the lock status of the currently active clock source and five red LEDs indicate the status of various iClock system parameters. For such a versatile device the menu system is commendably simple and logical starting with reference sources followed by the various outputs and concluding with global options. Apart from the comprehensive range of standard input and output rates, the iClock can apply pull-ups and pull-downs to the Word clock outputs at the commonly used 34

REFERENCE SOURCES: PAL/SECAM + NTSC video; Word clock; Word clock x 256 (Super Clock); DSD64, DSD128 + DXD (384); AES-EBU3+11; AESEBUid3+11; SPDIF; GPS; Telecom; DCF77 (German atomic clock); MSF (UK atomic clock — on request); internal oscillator; further formats via option cards. OUTPUT CLOCK SIGNALS: PAL + NTSC Black+Burst or composite video sync; Word clock; Word clock x 256 (Super Clock); DSD64, DSD128 + DXD (384); ﬁlm and video frame and ﬁeld rates; AES-EBU11; SPDIF; further formats through option cards.

factors, +0.1%, -0.1%, +4.16% and –4.0%. Less common pulls can be accommodated by the varispeed function within a +/-20% range in 0.0001% steps. All this regardless of whether the reference is internal or external. Mutec has included a number of features aimed at maintaining stable output in the face of loss or change of the reference. iClock enables tolerance ranges to be set for external references and the time interval before it will attempt to lock to the next reference and the time it will spend updating its clock source to the new rate. iClock can be set to Hold i.e. ﬂywheel at the rate last received from the chosen input, or attempt to lock to the three external inputs and the internal generator in turn. This can either be done once (Sequence Synchronisation) or recursively (Cycle Synchronisation). When Cycle Synchronisation is active, if an external source is lost from, say, Input 1 then iClock will (after the relevant time intervals) lock to the next available source. However, once this has taken place it will then periodically interrogate Input 1 until it ﬁnds a good signal. When and if it does, it will resolution

re-lock to it. SoftReLock comes into play whenever a reference changes or resynchronisation is required, to ensure a gradual and interruption free transition of the iClock’s output signals to the new base reference. iClock covers all the bases for audio with input and output Word clock rates from 8kHz to 24.576MHz including all the standard sampling rates and the DSD and DXD frequencies. The standard film and video frame and field rates are also provided to accommodate Pilotone resolvers, film projectors, etc. Stability and jitter performance is first class and Mutec has included niceties such as different output levels to suit a variety of interfaces and conditions. You can even add a DC offset to the SPDIF outputs for devices that don’t like ‘blank frame’ on their inputs. The only omission is tri-level sync as used by some high definition video equipment. Mutec tells me it is working on it and something will arrive in 2006. Currently available options include: a second power supply module for redundancy in mission critical applications; an extra video sync generator module for simultaneous PAL and NTSC outputs and conversion from PAL reference to NTSC output or vice-versa; and iC-Alarm which adds relay-coupled alarm signalling outputs. For the option slot, Word clock or AESEBU modules are available. Each adds a further four outputs in the relevant format. iClock is the most comprehensive solution I’ve seen to the clocking needs of an entire installation. If you need even more outputs, you can always add distribution amplifiers, much to be preferred over daisy chaining. In the real world we operate in, the multiple simultaneous output formats and versatile rates are the clincher. Even in a complex installation this may well be the only clocking device you will need. The redundant PSU and alarm options make it equally suitable for broadcast use. At this price, the iClock is a steal. ■

PROS

Versatile; accurate; convenient.

CONS

With this number of adjustable parameters preset memories would be useful; nothing I can think of.

Contact MUTEC, GERMANY: Website: www.mutec-net.de

January/February 2006

review

Røde NT6 Røde has been quietly carving out a niche for itself in some specialist areas over the last couple of years, most notably in broadcast and theatre applications. JON THORNTON reports on a compact capacitor.

HE NT6 SHOULDN’T come as much of a surprise for those who have been watching Røde’s progress as it further expands its range to include a small diaphragm, true capacitor microphone in as compact a package as possible. Designed for use in situations where placement possibilities are limited, or where visual impact needs to be minimal, the NT6 follows an established design philosophy of separating the capsule and the associated electronics, and connecting the two with a dedicated, lightweight cable. Internally, the business end of the NT6 features the same 1/2-inch capsule found in the Røde NT5, giving a cardioid pickup. This connects to the amplifier with a supplied 3-metre Kevlar reinforced cable, terminated at both ends with a miniature 3-pin connector. The preamp body has a –10dB pad, and a switchable high-pass filter (80Hz, 12dB/octave), something that is actually lacking from the NT5, so it’s nice to see here. Also supplied in the kit is a standard mic clip for holding the preamp, a foam windshield, and a rather elegant clip for the capsule. This is of solid metal construction, which the capsule screws firmly into, and incorporates a swivel joint to allow accurate positioning even in fairly tight spots. Quoted specs put equivalent noise at 19dB SPL (A weighted), reasonably typical of a small diaphragm design, but certainly noisier than the NT5 which shares the same capsule. How much of this is down to differences in the electronics, and how much to the additional cable between capsule and preamp is difficult to say. In use, though, the microphone does not seem unduly noisy, even with gobs of gain on very quiet sources. The sound of the microphone is broadly similar, as you’d expect, to the NT5, although perhaps a little brighter sounding in some applications. The NT5 always seemed to roll off its HF response quite early to my ears, and the NT6 is similar in this respect, making reasonably closely miked stringed instruments sound fairly smooth in the upper registers but performing less well as distance to source January/February 2006

increases. Compared against an AKG SE300 with cardioid capsule, the NT6 stands up well. Mid range detail is good, and there seemed to be a little more transient detail than the SE300 when used at the bridge end of an acoustic guitar. Low frequency response is smooth and progressive here — although I couldn’t compare them directly — this seems fuller than the NT5 in this regard. Used close in, proximity effect comes in rather suddenly and in a very pronounced fashion, but is countered nicely by the high-pass filter if desired. Given the likely application of this microphone in situations where space is at a premium and/or discretion is the order of the day, I also tried the NT6 set at the bottom of a snare drum. Positioning the mic was easy, and the pad seemed to keep the electronics out of clipping in all but the most extremely close positions. It certainly wouldn’t be my first choice of microphone in this application though, but it’s perhaps an unfair test to simply restrict its use to the studio. With this in mind, its final test was in a very confined pit band as a vibraphone overhead. While having a pair would have been useful here, the NT6 worked very well in terms of the sound it delivered from the vibraphone, and indeed in terms of the relative smoothness of its off-axis pickup, which meant that the inevitable bleed from the brass section wasn’t at all problematic front-of-house. There is mention in the manual of some interchangeable capsules for the NT6, offering a range of pick-up patterns although I couldn’t find any details about these on the company’s website. Certainly, if this were a potential future offering it would add to the versatility of the NT6 (UK£229 inc VAT). As a microphone that would spend the majority of its life in a studio situation, I wasn’t really won over by the NT6. But as a flexible solution in broadcast, theatre or live sound applications it offers a good balance of price and performance. ■

acoustic measurement software

ACCURACY THROUGH PRECISION } Tannoy Dual Concentric™ point source drive unit } WideBand™ SuperTweeter™ extends frequency response to over 50kHz } Digital amplification with analogue and digital inputs } Automated Activ-Assist™ software driven digital calibration

PROS

Tidy and unobtrusive package; useful and well designed clip; not too noisy; good value.

CONS

HF response and noise may limit its use in some applications; no alternative capsules at present.

ACTIVE STUDIO MONITORS Tannoy United Kingdom

T: +44 (0) 1236 420199

F: +44 (0) 1236 428230

E: enquiries@tannoy.com

Tannoy North America

T: (519) 745 1158

F: (519) 745 2364

E: inquiries@tannoyna.com

Tannoy Deutschland

T: 0180 1111 88 1

F: 0180 1111 88 2

E: info@tannoy.com

Contact RØDE, AUSTRALIA: Website: www.rode.com.au UK, HHB: +44 208 962 5000

resolution

review

SSL X-Rack Dynamics Following on from the successful XLogic outboard range, the X-Rack Dynamics unit marks SSL’s ﬁrst foray into the familiar lunchbox-style modular rack format popularised by manufacturers such as API. GEORGE SHILLING compresses and expands.

URING THE 1980S the SSL 4000 Series desks introduced a number of revolutionary features and two of the main ones are represented here in this box — Total Recall and channel dynamics. The eight mono dynamics modules each feature a Compressor and a Gate/Expander similar to that found on the XL-K Series console. The vertical control arrangement certainly makes operation simpler and immediately comfortable for anyone used to using an SSL desk. The X-Rack is 4U high, but comes with chunky rubber feet attached, and an Allen key for removal of the feet or the rack ears to suit the installation. A smaller Allen key is also supplied for the removal of the eight modules, for servicing or replacement with (at the time of writing) as yet unannounced alternative modules, or blanking panels if you can’t afford, or don’t need, the full complement. A mere 8-inches deep, the unit is surprisingly light, yet feels beautifully constructed, as neat and elegant as a fullsized XL-K Series console. The rear of the rack is equipped with an IEC inlet for power with a useful retaining clip, and the PSU is happy to accept any voltage without adjustment (despite the contradictory information

sheet — the excellent manual is correct). There are a pair of D-type connectors for Total Recall functions when chaining multiple units, or even connecting an AWS 900 console. Further, there are MIDI I-Os for Sysex dumping of the internal stores, or updating the software. The rear of the Dynamics modules have XLRs for input, output and Key input, plus a pushbutton for +4/-10dB switching. While the layout is simple and the labelling perfectly clear, numbering the module slots on the front and the rear would have been helpful. On the front panel, a large area in front of the PSU simply bears branding legending. Alongside this is the Total Recall section with LED display, a knob and three related pushbuttons, and below this is the large main power button. This is unusual and impressive, although disappointingly the vertical slit didn’t light up blue as it appears to in the publicity photos — the review model’s remained dark. I have always enjoyed using the 4000 Series’ channel dynamics. In the days of analogue tape, the expander mode provided useful noise reduction, and the compressors would make drums and, well, anything sound punchy and present. The auto makeup gain always added a tiny bit of extra gain with

PROS

Familiar, characterful SSL dynamics; convenient vertical layout; terriﬁc build; comprehensive recall.

CONS

Module numbering front and rear would help; recalling is time consuming and ﬁddly; original Pullfunction knobs were better than extra buttons; Expensive.

EXTRAS

The XLogic E Signature Channel delivers the classic sound of the original early 1980s E Series console with the choice of selectable transformer driven or Variable Harmonic Drive (VHD) mic amps and the ‘Listen Mic’ Compressor.

The dynamics section is identical to the circuit of the Class A VCA chip used in the early consoles. The compressor contains additional switching options to defeat the over-easy curve in favour of a linear release. The result is a compressor with three distinct voicings. The EQ section defaults to the original ‘Brown Knob’ circuit that was standard on all early production E Series but also reproduces the Black Knob EQ that was developed in conjunction with George Martin for the ﬁrst SSL installed at AIR Studios.

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small amounts of compression, providing a great way to slightly boost a signal when mixing, without having to fiddle with the automation. With the advent of the 9000 series desks, the Gate/Expander gained a Hold knob, and the whole act was cleaned up with the brighter, classier and less crunchy sound from the improved signal path. So, of course, it is the cleanest possible SuperAnalogue incarnation we have here. There is also the ‘Pk’ button to switch from RMS sensing to Peak sensing for a different character — the SSL squash remains, but a harder knee is most evident. A Link button on each channel connects the gain reduction control voltages — this works even if the linked source channel is bypassed, which is great for ducking effects, although it will also mute the signal if the other channel’s gate is closed, so proper linking of gates is achieved using the Key XLR. The Gates’ Expand mode is excellent for click-free noise reduction, while the Fast Attack setting will snap open superbly on transients. Similarly, the Compressor’s fast attack mode will squash transients before their full weight pounces. They sound great, and I love the little LED meters because they tell all you need to know. The rack’s Total Recall functions are very similar to those found on SSL’s full-sized consoles. Basic saving and loading of setups couldn’t be simpler using the 32 numbered internal memory locations. Twiddling the knob (D-Pot) scrolls through the numbered memories, and a push on the knob recalls settings, while pressing the Save button stores instantly into empty memories (indicated by the Empty LED). Two pushes are required when over-writing. Upon recalling, the modules’ SEL buttons’ LEDs illuminate, flashing until settings are matched, when they become solidly lit. Using these buttons it is possible to copy or swap settings between modules. Matching knob settings is done using the tiny LED indicators above each knob — red indicates anticlockwise and green indicates clockwise movement. When perfectly matched, the LED goes off. The buttons’ accompanying LEDs light up until their status is matched, whether latched up or down. The simplicity of the Recall section belies the hidden functions accessed by pressing and holding the Setup/MIDI button. This accesses a whole Setup submenu that is scrolled with the D-Pot, then pushing the D-Pot takes you another level down for the settings associated with that particular submenu. Pressing the D-Pot again saves the setting and returns you to normal operation. This slightly mysterious world means keeping the manual handy to decode the obscure hieroglyphics that appear on the twocharacter seven-segment display. Entering this mode is required for MIDI Sysex dumping, but achieving this is actually very straightforward using a MIDI sequencer on a computer. The Recall operations are elegant and simple, but in this modern computer age, the act of having to actually turn the knobs and push the buttons to achieve recall seems a little archaic. But these dynamics modules are certainly of terrific quality, and reassuringly familiar to the legion of SSL users. With the number of large commercial music studios seemingly in decline, the home/producer Pro Tools studio is an ideal market for this type of product, and although expensive (UK£4620 + VAT fully loaded), I would love to own one of these. ■

Contact SOLID STATE LOGIC, UK: Website: www.solid-state-logic.com

January/February 2006

review

Joemeek OneQ The most famous range of green outboard has undergone a facelift and retweak that has resulted in new permutations of old favourites. ZENON SCHOEPE explores a mono recording channel with lots of everything and, of course, that compressor.

HE NEW RANGE of Joemeek products is a completely different proposition to the last generation of products. The beauty and the appeal of the original Joemeeks was without doubt the sound and the fact that at the time of their introduction they were coming from a decidedly different direction than most other outboard products of their type. I think it would be safe to say that Joemeeks were standard bearers for a completely different take on the outboard theme. While most other boxes at the time were largely anonymous and slick in their delivery, Joemeeks presented character as an essential element, a retro feel combined with a quirkiness that was as curious as it was charming. The problem was that other brands seized on these popular attributes and ended up doing it all a bit better than Joemeek did whose gear started to look a little saggy while the range was widened and taken uncomfortably down market. This reincarnation of the Joemeek brand, which includes the OneQ (UK£323 + VAT) being looked at here, aims to redress that balance and I have to say that it has managed to retain the bits that those who loved them loved about them. There’s still an element of quirkiness and character and they still deliver high value in terms of the versatility and power. Best of all, this box demonstrates that the brand has shunned some of the quality issues that had begun to dog the old Joemeek units and puts the brand right back up there with the contenders, where it always should have been. Designer Allan Bradford has done a fantastic job of breathing a little magic on the circuits (he was the man behind the design of the superb CLM Dynamics Expounder and DB 8000s outboard) and the whole package smacks of quality — the new Joemeek green is more Aston Martin BRG metallic than that old sudden shade favoured by BMC. And there is a lot on this unit, which despite appearances is actually only a single recording channel. The TwinQ offers stereo compression and Meequalization in a 2U but drops the enhancer and de-esser of the OneQ so it’s not immediately comparable. So let’s whizz through the front panel and I’ll try to refrain from continually crossreferencing to the original units to highlight differences because those that know the old units will be able to work those out for themselves. You’re getting a preamp section, optical compressor, Meequalizer, enhancer and deJanuary/February 2006

esser together with a large meter that is switchable to monitor output, input or gain reduction. The rear panel includes a digital output section with optical, SPDIF phono and AES-EBU XLR ports to 96kHz plus Word clock I-O. This section effectively outputs the culmination of the OneQ signal path but the other leg of the stereo can be inserted via a rear panel jack, which means you can add an additional channel into the conversion stream should you wish. A bit on the marginal side of handy but it ticks the quirky box. Analogue rear panel connectors take in XLR mic and balanced output, balanced jack line input and -10/+4 jack output plus an insert socket that is immediately after the preamp. There’s also a compressor Link socket with Master/Slave selector switch that does what you’d think it might when two OneQs are coupled for stereo. The front panel gets an XLR mic input and instrument jack input plus switches for phantom, pad, phase reverse, mic/line-DI switch selection, high pass filter and peak LED to run with the Gain pot. There’s also an Iron switch to select transformer coupling for mic input. The opto compressor comes next although it is possible to switch the EQ ahead of it. We get pots for Compress (threshold), Slope (ratio), Attack (1100ms), Release (0.1-3s) and 20dB of Gain Makeup. You can rest assured that the compressor has retained the essential interactive and adaptive nature of the original boxes in the way that the response ‘slides’ and ‘tilts’ depending upon the pot settings and the intensity of the source. However, there’s something altogether more polished about this circuit -– you can hammer into it really hard with superbly satisfying results and then go to 11 and like it even more. It has the ability to do more subtle/transparent stuff at more delicate settings and it’s more flexible and certainly more refined than the original. I was pleased that it still sounds like no other compressor — there would be no point to it if it didn’t. The Meequalizer is 4-band with two-frequency switchable LF and HF bands (80/120Hz and 7/14kHz respectively) and sweepable mids covering 200Hz2kHz and 1-6kHz with +/-15dB across each band. Now, I liked the original Meequalizer although I know many who found it less than useful or spectacular. This new incarnation is substantially removed in having more bands and the ranges of the two mids are nicely restrained. So, on paper at least, it’s more proper EQ resolution

than ‘tone’ control and in use it’s certainly more flexible than the original while still being kind and flattering. Enhancers have not been a weapon of choice for me since the 1980s and it’s curious to see one here but Joemeeks have sported a few over the years. This one offers a pot for determining the frequency above which enhancement is to occur, a Q pot to dial in a resonant peak at the aforementioned frequency, and a control to adjust the amount of the effect. It’s convenient to have this sort of processing on a box like this as it can be useful to add a bit to a vocal but it might have been better in a stereo configuration, which this box isn’t. It all depends on whether you will use it. More genuinely useful to me is the inclusion of a really rather good de-esser with pots that allows you to tune in on the offending frequency — while listening to the sidechain on a dedicated switch — and set the threshold for the gain reduction which is signalled by a LED. We’re then down to an output fader pot, some LEDs for Peak and external clock lock indication, and the individual bypass switches for the EQ, de-esser, enhancer and the compressor. Only the compressor gets a bright blue On LED, all the others are green and in my opinion not distinct enough from the yellow of some of the other function buttons to be clear. I really like this unit because it sounds great and it is stacked full of features. The preamp is superb offering super-quiet delivery and a fast fat sound on mics with plenty of capacity for delicacy. The Iron button’s a nice touch. The whole channel is of course available to line level signals and the DI is useful. All in, a great tracking tool that’ll give quality results with a quality signature. I’m not surprised that I’ve enjoyed the OneQ as much as I have but I am surprised by the build quality and presentation, which is very much higher than anything I’ve ever associated with the brand. There are no scratchy pots, wonky bits and no not-quite-finished feel. It’s testament to the appeal of the old units that they were forgiven so much. The OneQ is smooth, the switches are a delight, the meter is great and the colour and simple sculpturing of the front panel is lovely. Best of all I can read the legending at arm’s length, which is more than can be said of the old black on green. If the intention was to take all that was good about the old Joemeeks and bring it up-to-date and to make improvements where improvements were possible then I have to concede that this has been achieved. Traditionally around this point I should be going off on one about the fact that the unit is only mono and that if only it were stereo then I could mark it the full ten. Strangely I’m not inclined to pursue this line as the channel is so comprehensive and powerful that I don’t think I’d enjoy the prospect of a stereo box with this amount of functionality on it. The OneQ is quite clearly up there with the very best front-ends that you are likely to encounter. I’m not saying that there aren’t boxes that are classier in certain respects but nothing quite delivers the features, performance and unique character combination of the OneQ. ■

PROS

Sound; character; that compressor; the package; build quality.

CONS

Stereo digital output on a mono unit novel; On LEDs could all have been blue.

Contact JOEMEEK, US: Website: www.joemeek.com UK, PMI Audio: +44 1803 215111

Hugh Padgham Still chart topping after a good few years at the studio tiller, Hugh Padgham talks to GEORGE SHILLING about clicks, excitement, record companies and ‘that’ drum sound.

INCE THE LATE 1970s Hugh Padgham has been one of the giants of British record production. In his youth he was rather taken by a photo of a recording studio, which he spotted in the back of Beat Instrumental magazine, so despite careers advice to join the BBC and become a newsreader, he applied for studio jobs and served apprenticeships at Advision and Lansdowne. Establishing a successful engineering career — most notably at the Townhouse — he also started producing when he realised that he had the ability in that area. He has built up an incredible CV that includes Sting, The Police, Genesis, XTC, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, The Bee Gees, and famously Phil Collins, for whom he invented the trademark 1980s ‘gated’ drum sound. Proving that he is still very much a current producer, he produced, engineered and mixed McFly’s latest number one album. Recently he acquired the main studio at West London’s Stanley House, renaming it Sofa Sound (‘State Of the eFﬁng Art!’) and equipping it with an SSL G+ console. He now regularly works there with his Pro Tools operator, assistant and collaborator Jay Reynolds. (Pictures by www.recordproduction.com) 38

How do you remain current? I think if you just stay where you are, eventually it comes around. I’ve been doing this last McFly record, which I suppose is current, but I was asked to do it because the A&R wanted someone to record the band ‘old-style’. Four guys standing in a room playing together. I don’t know what is current and what isn’t. If you’re talking about making synthetic albums in a bedroom with drum machines and synthesisers, I’ve never really done that anyway, and I wouldn’t know how to do that. It’s not what I like doing, so to me it’s just doing things how I’ve always done them, but encompassing new technology. The whole thing of the editing and so forth in Pro Tools is absolutely amazing. But to me, things still sound better on analogue. So I try and amalgamate the two technologies. I have a 24-track analogue tape recorder here. If I’m working with a band I mike the band up, record it all to 24-track, depending on whether we want to edit there and then, we copy the analogue into the digital, and now we’re running at 96kHz the resolution is much better than what it used to be. We think we’ve found a good way of resolution

working where you’re using the new technology but encompassing the old stuff as well.

Is there anything you miss from the pre-Pro Tools days? I miss the excitement of recording everything on analogue because from a producer point of view now you don’t have to make your mind up at any time, because if you’ve got a decent Pro Tools setup you never run out of tracks. In the old days, you’d have to make your mind up, because there were only 24 tracks or latterly 48 tracks. And I still try, even though we’ve got Pro Tools, never to have more than 48 tracks when I sit down and mix. The other thing I miss — although I’d never go back — is mixing without computers, very much a full-on experience where you’d have everyone and their dog helping you mix. Now it’s like, ‘Well we can always come back and do it again’, and there’s always that in the back of your mind. There would be more excitement in the music too. Everybody’s used metronome clicks for a long time, and of course a lot of dance music relies on that. But with the pop or rock January/February 2006

craft music that I do, it’s really nice if you’re working with great musicians, which, generally I am, to not have to rely on that. In some ways, when we do stuff with a click it’s great, because you can take a bit of vocal and move it, cut and pasting. The last few sessions I’ve done with Jay without click, and we’ve wanted to move something, Jay’s managed to do it by stretching it or doing whatever. So I’m trying to go back to doing it more old-school — it’s nice if it speeds up a bit perhaps.

What’s your miking philosophy? If you are experimenting you might want to stick a mic up the singer’s armpit, or whatever, to get a different sound, but otherwise, I was taught when I worked at Advision and Lansdowne when I was young, there are fairly set ways of miking things like orchestras or a ﬂute or a clarinet — they are what they are, because time has told you that’s the best way to mike that instrument up. I’m always trying different mics, one experiments as much as one can. Another great thing about having one’s own studio here is that you’re not necessarily under the same time constraints. In the last few years, if you’re at a commercial studio that’s costing a lot of money per day — and we all know that budgets have gone down — you don’t have time to experiment the same. I remember working with Peter Gabriel in the early eighties and to spend a day or two miking up an electric kettle or something, you’d think nothing of spending two days, whereas now, ﬁve minutes would be your limit!

One other thing that annoys, is that I have not heard the words — nobody actually seems to care whether records sound good or not – ‘have you heard that record, it sounds wicked’. In the old days record companies had quality control departments. When you mastered a record you got sent a TP, a test pressing, and you would see how it sounded, and the producer had control on whether that was released or not.

Do you use desk automation despite Pro Tools? Yes, I try and use Pro Tools like a tape machine. Sometimes there are moves that you really feel are so tight that with the resolution of these faders, then maybe we’ll make the odd move in Pro Tools, but that comes down to the ‘why does a dog lick its balls’ syndrome — because it can. The fernickitiness

What are your attitudes about someone else mixing your stuff? It doesn’t happen massively often. Saying that, just yesterday we sent a Pro Tools file to America for someone to mix a McFly track, and if they think that having X’s name on it will sell more records then that’s fine. I’m old enough not to throw my toys out of the pram, because I know that I can mix as well as anybody. There is something to be said for someone else looking at it objectively, although historically I’ve tended to mix my own stuff and had a reasonable amount of success. If everything I did was taken away to be mixed by someone else I’d probably get a bit shirty! What do you get shirty about? Record companies. Otherwise, I think through doing it for so long you get laid back about it, able to handle difficult situations better. When I started producing I found it difficult to handle the engineering side of it as well, because I’ve always been a stickler for tape levels, line-up, etc. because I think if you’re careful of every aspect along the line, there’s less chance of things going wrong. But going back to the question, as many records are being sold as ever, and the budgets are smaller, and therefore it doesn’t take the Brain of Britain to work out that some people are making more money, and the people who provide the content, which is the bands and us who make it, seem to be losing out, and that’s unfair. Most of the record companies are big corporations having to satisfy their shareholders, and their quarterly reports are more important than the music. When I started, bands would get signed because the A&R guy liked the music, they wouldn’t talk about singles necessarily or anything like that. You’d go in the studio and make a record, and when it was finished they’d go, ‘Oh, that track might be good as a single’. Whereas now it’s just so commercially driven. I don’t want to sound like an old fogey, but I don’t think music is any better now than it was 30 years ago, from technology or whatever. January/February 2006

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craft that we now do because we can, you just wouldn’t have bothered with. I don’t think our brains had that amount of ﬁne-tuning 20 years ago. Records these days are more ﬁnely tuned, and even with a singer who can sing, the likelihood is that it will have been lightly dusted with Autotune, I imagine.

Do you write down all the settings for the Total Recall? You have to really, it’s the assistant’s worst nightmare job. Even though you can see tons of outboard, I don’t tend to use an awful lot. Anything that hasn’t got numbers for input settings I’ll try and have exactly at 12 o’clock or something to make it easy. Pro Tools people say you don’t have to do all that, but when they had the auction after Whitﬁeld Street [London studio] closed down, everybody wanted 1176s and Neve compressors, that old stuff — whoever thought a dbx 160 would have been that valuable? People do like these things. I can’t tell if you put a compressor on Pro Tools between an 1176 copy and an LA-2A copy, whereas analoguely I can. I don’t know whether it’s a psychological thing. Saying that, SSL did a copy of the Listen Mic compressor, we A/Bed the original one to this, and it’s pretty good really. Why are you good? A lot of it is getting on with people. Half of it is your ability to communicate, to understand what they’re on about and make them feel at ease and at home in a studio, which can be a threatening environment. Most musicians didn’t become musicians to work in a studio, they became musicians to stand on a stage and have thousands of people adulating them. Knowing the technical things is important, but a lot of the job is how you get on with people, and I think I’m quite easy going. And you want to have a good time as well. ■

That drum sound and the SSL

Is the famous Phil Collins’ drum sound an irritation to you? No, it’s great to be known for something. The only thing is, it doesn’t work on everything. In the mid-80s people wanted me to get that drum sound on anything, and it didn’t always work. Now, I like big drum sounds, dry drum sounds, it just depends what you’re doing. The gated thing came through the famous SSL Listen Mic on the console. It’s so hard to look back and realise what a huge leap forward the SSL console was, because no console before had a compressor, a limiter and a noise gate on every channel. You were lucky if you had four noise gates, Kepexes in those days, obviously you had compressors, but if you had a 32-track console, you certainly didn’t have 32 noise gates or compressors around. Everything before was so pre-meditated, you had to ask the tape-op to patch one in, and the drum sound came through the listen mic button because no console had had that before. If you wanted to listen to the studio before, you had to plug a mic in and bring it up a channel on the console, so that was a great idea, and SSL had put this massive compressor on it, because the idea was to hang one mic in the middle of the studio and hear somebody talking the other side. And it just happened that one day we turned it on when Phil was playing his drums, and we thought that was good, and I had the idea of feeding that back into the console, and putting the noise gate on so that when he stopped playing it sucked the big sound of the room into nothing. That was the gate on the channel, and it was so easy to switch it in. We loved the SSL console immediately. At the Townhouse, we were the ﬁrst commercial studio to get one of those, and it quite soon morphed from the B Series into the E Series. And essentially, 25 years later, you’ve just bought one which is almost identical…! It’s kind of, how could they improve on it? I’ve had a long afﬁliation with SSL and Colin [Sanders] became a good friend, I helped develop the automation system, and a lot of the maintenance guys at the Townhouse ended up working at SSL. The other day I was mixing 5.1 on another well-known manufacturer’s console, and it has about 14,000 more knobs on it, and I can’t work out if it does anything more than this. This is a classic design, almost like certain things like the internal combustion engine, that they can’t really improve on. Ergonomically these consoles are brilliant because they can do virtually anything, and if you look at some consoles there are so many buttons that you can make mistakes, because you can’t see them, because they’re hidden by another knob. I like the sound of them, it’s a subjective thing, some people hate SSLs — I remember Gus Dudgeon saying you couldn’t make a hit on an SSL!

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January/February 2006

Ken Scott There’ll be records he was involved with in your collection yet he’s surprisingly low key for a man of his skill and experience. Ken Scott worked at Abbey Road and Trident in the golden age, engineering and producing some of our greatest and most enduring talent.

EN SCOTT’S VERY ﬁrst session was as an assistant at Abbey Road, recording The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night LP. He went on to engineer Magical Mystery Tour and the legendary White album. Later he worked at Trident studios, recording the likes of Harry Nilsson, Elton John, Van Der Graaf Generator and Procul Harem. His ﬁrst job as a producer was with David Bowie on Hunky Dory, with whom he went on to produce the groundbreaking Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups LPs, and record and mix Lou Reed’s legendary Transformer album. In 1974 Ken produced Supertramp’s smash hit Crime Of The Century, and in the 1980s he continued to produce albums at the cutting edge with Devo, Level 42, The Tubes and Missing Persons. More recently he delivered Pop Trash from Duran Duran, and remixed the epic Ziggy Stardust for 5.1 surround. Ken is now based in Los Angeles, and met with Resolution during a brief visit to his old alma mater in St John’s Wood. (Pictures at Abbey Road by www.recordproduction.com) 42

NIGEL JOPSON

After recording The Beatles, what persuaded you to leave Abbey Road for Trident? I had problems with a new manager who’d been a classically trained musician and didn’t like the pop stuff. As far as he was concerned, an engineer should do only what was technically correct, not what the producer or artist wanted. I recorded a reggae record produced by Gus Dudgeon, and reggae has lots and lots of low end, so that’s what we did. When this manager heard it he said ‘Why did you put this much bass on it?’ — because that’s what the producer wanted — ‘You don’t do what the producer wants, you do what is right!’ He did all he could to get rid of me, I won that battle but I knew I’d never win the war so it was time to move on. Gus did a lot of work at Trident and said ‘I’ll get them to call you.’ You then engineered several Elton John albums with Gus didn’t you? I did three albums with Elton, the two that I did all were recorded at Strawberry studios and Château resolution

d’Hérouville in France — the ‘Honky Château’. It took a little work in France to start with, one of the things we had to deal with was trying to match up to the Trident piano sound. That Trident piano was amazing, it was so harsh. Classical musicians would absolutely abhor it, but for rock ’n’ roll it was perfect, it had all of the cut. Hey Jude was probably the ﬁrst song it became famous for, and that carried on through Supertramp, Queen, Carly Simon ... the piano in France wasn’t quite as good, Gus had a big box made that went over the top of the piano with holes for mics so we could have some separation.

Bowie’s Hunky Dory was the ﬁrst album you produced, how did that opportunity arise? I had recorded the Space Oddity album, then The Man Who Sold The World. There was an amazing atmosphere at Trident, musicians just came round and hung out in the reception area. You could walk out of the studio and you never knew who would be sitting there. David came in to do a single with a friend of his, I was starting to get fed up with engineering and wanted more artistic say, he told me on a tea break he was about to start a new project — he was going to do it himself — would I like to co-produce it? What was I going to say? What was EMI’s reaction to Ziggy Stardust, quite a radical concept at the time? When I was working with David, there was 99.9% lack of input from the record company, which was January/February 2006

craft good. We just did what we did and they happened to like it. When I produced Supertramp there was a little involvement at one point — and it terriﬁed us! We were about two weeks into the project and going very slowly — I obviously had something in my mind at the time about a particular drum sound, so it took like a day and a half just to get a snare sound — insane!

It is quite a nice snare sound... Thank you! I would change it, most definitely, these days ... but that was what we were after at the time. We had got almost nothing done, and a guy from A&M records said that Jerry Moss [the M of A&M] was going to be in town and wanted to come to Trident and hear our progress! We nearly shit our pants... he came in, we played him what we’d got, it was my first time dealing with the boss of a record company ... he stood up and said ‘very nice, thank you’ and left. We thought that was it, tomorrow all studio time was going to be cancelled. But we got the word back next day that Jerry had loved what he heard, we had all the time in the world and anything we wanted, and he was behind it 100%! How do you feel when you hear recordings you made 30 years ago — like when you remixed All Things Must Pass with George Harrison for the double CD boxed set in 2000? First of all we were astounded, all those years later, to be working on exactly the same stuff. Back then the life of an album was 6 months, if it lasted more than that we were amazed. If people were still talking about the first album by the time the second album came out, youHalf knew Resol you’d made it. ADC1 16-12-05 12/16/05 6:38 AM

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resolution

craft What was your initial reaction when you pushed up the faders on My Sweet Lord? It sounded over the top! We actually accepted all this? It was unbelievable ... we were quite shocked, I know I hadn’t listened to it for some time and I don’t think George had either. When we sat down with it, we wished we could take off all the reverb and deSpectorise it, as they did with Let It Be. We knew at this point in time we couldn’t do that, what people wanted was the original, but in the best quality we could give, which is what we attempted to do.

you could become an engineer, you had to go upstairs and do some mastering. How could you be expected to put the right stuff on tape if you didn’t know what would work on vinyl? The sense behind that — which a lot of other studios missed — was amazing. Upstairs, the ﬁrst time you had an EQ controller in front of you it was: ‘it needs some high end — so I’ll turn that one all the way up ... now it needs some low end — wuuum.’ Next week you realised the error of your ways, I feel sorry for the people who got those particular playback acetates! But when you came to sit in front of the board you really knew that one click was probably enough.

Are major labels committed to re-releasing classic albums in new formats? I don’t know if they believe in it 100%. And when surround versions are brought out, I don’t know how much promotion is put behind them. I’ve seen very little for Ziggy, I think many people don’t know it’s been done in 5.1. When quadraphonic first came out, that was much the same: I got a phone call about doing Crime Of The Century in quad. I was asked how long it would take, and estimated no more than a couple of weeks. They said: ‘Are you kidding, we’ve got a guy who says he can do it in an afternoon!’ That’s the principle labels often work on, if they save $100 they’ve made that much more profit. When you mixed Ziggy Stardust for 5.1, how did you handle the film-orientated components of the format, like the centre channel? My thought process was more surround — as in four speakers — but the hard part for me was the subwoofer. We never had loudspeakers like that before, and trying to get the sub to actually do anything I had to add some really low stuff, I wasn’t used to hearing the record with all that low end. It felt kind of weird for me. What were you mixing on? I was using the SSL, David had the original multitracks copied to Pro Tools for me to mix. I was matching up to the original as much as I could, I’d pull up a track, do some EQ — the frequencies I work at have never really changed — so that made it relatively simple. I got each track so I thought it sounded similar to the original, but by the time I had put up all the tracks there was a harshness there that wasn’t on the original. If you listen to a couple of tracks it sounds fine, it’s something about the particular digital format

Do you believe the recording equipment side is overemphasised now? I think it all has its place, the problem is, as human beings, we always have to overdo everything. Go back to the wha-wha: it was used on one record, a month later it seemed to be on every single that came out. It was the same with synth sounds: ‘I like that sound — I’ll use it on my record’ ... then it’s on every album.

that the more you bring in and combine, the harsher it becomes. I was mixing it in Studio 3 upstairs with Paul Hicks — who is great with Pro Tools.

Nowadays the second engineer sitting next to you is likely to have a degree in recording technology, and has maybe paid over $10,000 per annum in tuition fees to get it. What’s your reaction to that? When I started no one even knew what a recording engineer was. Now it’s: ‘We’ll become producers, record a hit and make a fortune!’ ... and there are corporations who play to that idea. Nobody quite realises what’s really involved: it’s a lot of hard work, a lot of luck, and a lot of being in the right place at the right time. I went through the greatest training you could possibly have here [at Abbey Road]. Starting right at the bottom assisting on sessions, then, before

So when you mixed You Shook Me on Jeff Beck’s Truth album, drums to the left and bass on the right, had pan-pots recently been discovered, were you seeing how much you could use them? I guess I was! I remember that whole thing of having a repeat or delay from the guitar panned to the opposite side, that was very new then. Actually, there’s some of the best vocals Rod Stewart has ever sung on that album. I was just engineering on Truth, later I produced an album called There And Back (1976) for Jeff, he’d started with Jan Hammer producing but then they fell out. I’d worked with Jeff on and off for years, I produced some Stanley Clarke albums and there’d always be a track that Jeff guested on. You produced three albums for Stanley, four for Billy Cobham and you engineered the seminal Mahavishnu Orchestra Birds of Fire album and produced Visions of the Emerald Beyond. Do you think there was more of a demand from audiences for virtuoso playing in the 1970s, and were labels more indulgent of that? It’s that guitar hero thing, it isn’t there in the market anymore. We started Birds of Fire at Trident in London

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Do you think this has to do with the blandness and lack of original programming on US radio? All DJs are just told what to play by central programmers now — there’s nobody like John Peel — why not allow the DJs to play what they want to play? The public can hear it and make their decision to buy it or not. Then DJs would rise or fall on the merits of what they played — don’t leave it up to a promotions department to decide what we want to hear. We need people who are prepared to go on the line and play a Bohemian Rhapsody — which everyone said could never be a hit because it was 7 minutes long! Or someone who would play A Walk On The Wild Side — it ‘could never be a hit’ because of the lyrics — but one person played it and it took off from there. That’s what we need, and it’s not there. What’s next for you? I have spoken at a couple of universities in the States, and although I’m always terrified going in front of an audience to start with, I finish up really enjoying it. I’m putting a lecture together at the moment about my work with David Bowie, I’ve got a 5.1 system set up so I can play the surround mixes I did. There’s one major point I want to get across: in the US music is so segmented by genre, if people listen to rap day and night, they will never get any other influences. I want to get over how things cross and you develop a personal mixture of influences. When David and I were growing up there were only three radio stations you could listen to during the day: the BBC Home Service, the Light Programme and the Third Programme. If you didn’t like a song there was nothing you could do! Eventually you’d get to like it or you’d really know you hated it, but it would always be implanted somewhere in your brain as an unusual influence for a riff. Led Zeppelin: all of the stuff that Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones played on when they were session musicians — the most inane music — influenced them. David has always said he’s a melting pot, he’s taken everything he ever had and put it together. I’m going to play them some parts of the awful songs Rolf Harris did with the stylophone — guess what — David must have heard that, or whatever, and then he used a stylophone on Space Oddity. Clive Dunn’s soppy 1971 hit Grandad — Herbie Flowers wrote it and played tuba on it — then he came up with the bass line on Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side. Talk about strange mixtures! It limits you if all you ever do is listen to and play one sort of music — all this music can be pulled in and made part of your own sound. Give people freedom, don’t do it by committee. ■

06 ) 29 – 31. 3. 20 IS V A C ly r e rm Congress (fo ultipurpose halls and arenas Theme: M

Trade Fair and Congress for media technology and systems integration Prolight + Sound is the leading international trade fair for event and communications technology, AV production and entertainment. A dedicated area in Hall 8.0 showcases products and services relating to media installations for event facilities and public areas as well as security and communication technology for multipurpose halls, arenas, conference centres and shopping centres. Come to Frankfurt! CONT@CT Frankfurt Exhibitions Ltd. Phone (020) 7688 6655, info@uk.messefrankfurt.com GeoLogistics Ltd., LEP International Phone (01) 8 66 74 00, info@ireland.messefrankfurt.com Supported by VPLT – Professional Lighting and Sound Association of Germany, and EVVC – European Association of Event Centres

Frankfurt am Main 29. 3 – 1. 4. 2006 www.prolight-sound.com With Abbey Road chief engineer Peter Cobbin.

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and ﬁnished it in New York. The only record company involvement was the union representative engineer CBS had to use in NY, he’d come along at the beginning of the session every day to ﬁnd out what time he had supposedly stopped working the night before, apart from that we never saw him! For the kind of music it was, it did very, very well sales-wise. I feel that type of music doesn’t really exist anymore, the jazz that is being done now is so watered down that the majority of it is like elevator music.

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Videotime The Berlusconi Mediaset media empire has installed a Studer Vista 8 console into one of its news studios to serve as a benchmark study of its planned audio digitisation process. ZENON SCHOEPE visits Rome to get a feel for the progress.

HEN IN ROME, it is very important to remind yourself that in among the fantastic architecture, monuments, ruins and history a very busy capital city is trying to get on with its business. Hindered as it is by the continual stream of infuriating tourists, the capital is crammed full of

people on their way to somewhere else in a hurry. A national movement to condemn fast food and to reinstate slow food and the traditional extended lunch may lodge in the mind of outsiders as an attractive idea; but the average Roman still has to get to the other side of what happens to be one of the most

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beautiful cities in the world before he can contemplate it. Nothing reinforces this state of extremes quite so well as the existence of a news TV studio within a stone’s throw of the Coliseum of all places — that definitive Roman ruin that now serves as the core of a large and predictably manic roundabout. The Mediaset media empire runs its TV news operation here in Palatino. Mediaset is Italy’s most important privately-owned communications and broadcasting group and was created in 1993 following the restructuring of Fininvest´s television operations. Fininvest is one of Italy’s largest companies and is 96% controlled by the family of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Mediaset’s shares have been traded on the Italian Stock Exchange since 1996 and it broadcasts three terrestrial channels in Italy: Canale 5, Italia 1 and Rete 4. Canale 5 is a general entertainment channel with news programmes, fiction, light entertainment and sport and began operations in 1978 as local TV station Telemilano. It changed its name and went national in 1980. Italia 1 was acquired by Fininvest in 1982 and is a general entertainment channel with fiction, films, light entertainment, sport and cartoons and is targeted at younger audiences. Retequattro was bought by Fininvest in 1984 and targets an older audience and is particularly popular among older women. It shows news, films, fiction, light entertainment and arts programmes. RTI is the group company that holds the broadcast licenses for the channels and heads up the Italian Commercial Television Division and manages the three channels through its subsidiaries Videotime, Elettronica Industriale, and Mediatrade. Videotime is the television production arm of the group with television centres in Milan and in Rome and regional studios. Elettronica Industriale owns and manages the broadcast signal infrastructure for the three channels while Mediatrade is responsible for international rights trading for films, television series, cartoons, documentaries and sport, as well as the production and coproduction of television fiction. Mediaset’s interests extend into many other areas but it the Videotime TV news broadcasting operation at Palatino that we are looking at here. Some two years ago the company decided to transform the Palatino site into a news centre. Prior to that it had been used for entertainment productions and these have been moved to another part of Rome where there are number of studios running analogue Studer desks. The Palatino plot historically is one of the oldest film production sites in Rome and this is evidenced by the ‘stage’ nature of the building with its incredibly high outside doors, by the presence of many large windows and a very high percentage of natural light inside the building. From a technical standpoint, what is notable is that it houses the first digital Studer Vista in the organisation. There are two studios: the first taking care of regular news bulletins through an analogue Studer and the second employing a Vista 8 in a room created to handle live to air production duties on the recently launched Matrix news chat show. Both have their own dedicated studio areas and vision rooms. The organisation adopted Studer as its analogue standard desk as it wanted to have the freedom to be able to move engineers and technicians around throughout the company without equipment familiarisation problems. The choice of the Vista was arrived at by a protracted process of appraisal and selection that started a year earlier but was suddenly forced to a rapid conclusion when the management decided that it wanted to go to air with the Matrix programme January/February 2006

facility without delay and needed studios and equipment installed to produce it with. The studio went live towards the end of last year. Much is often made of the impact of the digitisation process on a broadcaster’s infrastructure but technical engineer Alberto Cotronei says the process had been better than he’d expected. ‘From a technical point of view the experience has been extremely positive,’ he says. ‘Engineers often are not keen to change from what they are familiar with but the migration to the Vista has been without problems. ‘Much of this has to do with the application. For news we have very few microphone feeds whereas live entertainment programming can have 60 channels and a live orchestra coming in from a separate mixer and that way of working is completely different — changing that is far more difficult than it is in a news application.’ The desk was ‘budget compatible’, to use a higher management term, the decision to go digital had been made, and the application was an easy benchmark to judge against. The Palatino install is clearly being regarded as the trial digital install for the organisation and its progress will be watched carefully as it is likely to have a bearing on developments elsewhere in the group. One of the interesting points about the Vista room is the presence of a Yamaha 02R as a backup to the Studer despite its built-in redundancy. This requirement for a physical back up is apparently standard practise within the organisation and is a process that is seen throughout all audio and video operations. There are some 150 journalists and around 50 technicians working in what is a very big news complex built in perhaps one of the most expensive bits of real estate in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Land costs are undoubtedly high but the positioning of the news complex is remarkably central and, by definition, extremely close to all the government offices. This convenience means that politicians and public figures are able to drop in for interviews and it also means that when something happens and the ENG troops are launched they can get there quickly. A squadron of mopeds, motorbikes and scooters are parked outside the newsroom building; many showing battle scars. But then it is Rome and you’ve got to be in a hurry… ■

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meet your maker Plus, we understand how important customer support is to the professional user.

How do you optimise a DAW for a particular application? By carefully analysing the workﬂow and honing the machine’s capabilities to maximise the operator’s efﬁciency. This is the same for any form of ergonomic tool design whether it’s designing a cockpit for an aircraft or a grip for a golf club. Far too many people make the assumption that a cheaper tool is better, ignoring the fact that they are spending much longer creating a worse sounding product than they would if they were using the appropriate tool. It’s a question of analysing the real cost of a product and its operator over the lifetime of the equipment and working out whether a lower capital expenditure is really going to save money in the long term.

Joe Bull Founding director of SADiE and the guiding man behind the DAW manufacturer’s technology talks about maintaining standards, the need for education, going native, and creative software.

OE BULL BEGAN his association with pro audio in the late 1970s as a recording engineer at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge. Spaceward was a leading independent recording studio initially specialising in punk and new wave and worked with artists as varied as Stiff Little Fingers, Gary Numan, The Stranglers, Scritti Politti, Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin and the Higsons. As the role of independent recording labels diminished in the UK, the studio diversiﬁed into audio visual and audio for video work and this eventually led to the formation of Spaceward Microsystems, which developed Broadcast Computer Graphics equipment. This subsidiary grew from an initial staff of three with a tiny turnover to a multi-million dollar enterprise with a staff of around 100 in just over 5 years. However, things were too good to be true and a competitor, Quantel, claimed that Spaceward had 48

ZENON SCHOEPE infringed some core patents of its Paintbox product and after a lengthy high court battle the company was forced to close. A subsequent battle with Adobe over the same patents saw Quantel lose all the claims. Using the experience gained from developing high-tech solutions for the video graphics arena, ﬁve members of the Spaceward team formed Studio Audio and Video Ltd in 1991. After trying to establish a business as an OEM supplier of digital audio cards to a nascent digital audio industry, Joe decided the best route was to develop a simple editing application to show off the power of the hardware. The Studio Audio Disc Editor (where the acronym SADiE comes from) gained rapid acceptance within broadcasters and was followed by good markets in post and mastering as well. As a founding director and MD Joe Bull continues to have a high level of input into the company’s wide range of digital products.

What’s special about Sadie products? SADiE products are and always have been designed by people who understand the professional audio industry. We’re not a bunch of frustrated musicians who want to change the world with our latest gizmo — we have all grown up in the pro-audio industry making our living from ‘professional’ audio. This gives us a unique insight into the way that machines need to be designed when they are to be operated by engineers and producers who also have to make their living from professional audio. This is rather different from products that have migrated across from a Music Industry application because their designers think that ‘there can’t be that much difference in pro-audio’. resolution

What are your opinions on the Mac versus PC issue? It’s only an issue for tiny minds. For professional applications where operators are using a tool to enhance their productivity you’ve got to be particularly anally-retentive to care. From my perspective, it’s a bit like worrying over whether one should have a cheese or ham sandwich for lunch. Get a life! There are so many more important issues in the world than what host computer is used on the core tool of your trade. Once you have booted the system (and they all take time to load the operating system and all the popular operating systems are buggy if they are not maintained correctly) and loaded the program that you use to perform your job, then you are using a tool. That tool is either as useful to you as a chisel to a carpenter or a trowel to a gardener or it isn’t. If it isn’t as efficient as it can be then it’s probably not the right tool. Who cares if the handle is colour coordinated? I think that the recent excitement/trepidation caused by Apple’s announcement that it will be moving over to Intel-based processing is a similar distraction. If you waste your time worrying about the colour of the furry dice in your car then you maybe ought to consider riding by bus. For anyone serious about audio (and by that I mean earning their living from it), the platform should be utterly irrelevant. Do you believe that the future is native? I haven’t donned a grass skirt as yet but who knows, they may come into fashion again. Until they do, I’ll probably continue to wear trousers — though cross dressing has a certain appeal… On the other hand, as host processors continue to become more powerful it is inevitable that general audio software with wide consumer appeal will move towards the native environment. However, in more specialised application areas, such as professional audio where the marketplace cannot be measured in millions of units, it is debatable whether our industry is large enough to be able to afford to compensate developers for converting existing products to native applications. If it cannot, then it has to decide whether to accept amateur tools that may be cheaper to purchase by a factor of 100, but be far less productive or instead to invest in more specialised solutions that can generate its developers sufficient profits to concentrate on the small specialised market that is professional audio. To give an example, it is unlikely that a product with a retail price of £100 (and I’ve seen some native products bundled for under £10) will properly cope with, say, the more esoteric frame rates that our customers encounter. The choice may therefore be audio that drifts out of sync or takes the operator January/February 2006

meet your maker twice as long to conform, or a more expensive dedicated product that does the job properly and leaves the operator more time to polish his programme material. I know what I’d prefer to listen to when I get home from work, but it may be that I’m in the minority now.

Where are the current inadequacies or limitations in computer-based DAWs and how are they popularly concealed from the end user? Talent, creativity and adequate training of the user seem to be the most significant limitations. In the same way that poets are not necessarily the best public speakers, composers and musicians do not necessarily make the best audio engineers and producers. The democratisation of audio production and delivery allied with the penny-pinching attitudes towards audio for video and film is dragging down the quality of recorded audio faster than anyone could have imagined ten years ago. I am all in favour of the girl who, having recently fallen out with her boyfriend, decides to use Windows XP to write a song about her experience as the adverts suggest she should, but let’s not pretend that it’s art. The same goes for Apple. It’s all about big companies marketing their blunt-instrument products into an ever decreasing professional market. The net losers are the professionals trying to make a living out of creating quality audio for an increasingly disinterested population. Providing it’s loud and the meters don’t move off the end stops it must be good. I fear that we’ll look back in a decade or so and realise what we have collectively allowed to happen. I sincerely hope that before we completely degrade and eventually lose the skill sets that have been painstakingly built up over the last century, we will call a halt to the downward spiral that seems to have overtaken our industry, but I don’t think it’ll happen next year. From a technical standpoint in what you do, what will be the next big thing? Talking cornflake packets — soon everything will sound that good! Seriously, in such a competitive market where the major corporations are now fighting it out for the mass market, the best place for the professional industry is in niche markets that are hopefully too small for these corporations to be interested in. From this perspective, it becomes very important to play one’s cards close to one’s chest so that ideas we may be developing are not instantly taken up by competitors. We have been developing more products for mobile recording and post — trying to take the back-breaking and tedious tasks out of the professional’s working day to allow them more time to exercise their creative talents. This is the most productive way that we can help our customers to achieve their potential rather

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than contributing to the malaise of poor quality sound. The fear is that as we enable our customers to do the tedious parts of their job (such as providing multiple stems in multiple formats to the next people in the postproduction process), their budgets get yet more squeezed and they still are not able to improve the quality of their output.

Do new processors and chips lead to new creative software or is software creativity a state of mind? It’s often a bit of both. New hardware can spark ideas in an equipment designer’s mind. Sometimes you are just looking for more grunt processing power for example. There are also designers who will study the way that their customers work and devise new methods of making their lives easier or shortcutting tedious parts of their job to allow them more time for creativity. It’s these workflow improvements that are often most sadly lacking in the cheap and cheerful products that are really designed as toys for the domestic market, but are increasingly coopted into professional environments on capital cost grounds alone. At SADiE, we obviously will use new processors when we can see a specific advantage for our customers but we are not slaves to new technology. It’s much more effective to analyse what our customers are trying to achieve and give them methods that will help them in that aim. Sadie has recently released hardware control based systems, many end-users have been crying out for the return of hardware control for ages — why has it taken the industry so long to come around? We have been selling the SADiE hardware control panels for our standard products for 12 years. The BB2-J was developed after consulting a number of our broadcast customers who wanted the speed of operation that a professional workstation provides combined with a physical interface to reduce the risk of repetitive strain injury caused by constant editing with a computer mouse. We have recently developed a new control surface for the H64 and we have the LRX which is a truly innovative product combining a portable workstation with an integrated control surface. I fully expect more products of this type from the SADiE camp in future. Why it has taken the rest of the industry so long is anybody’s guess. Maybe they don’t listen to their customers carefully enough, or assume that providing hooks into an also-ran control surface will suffice. Why do end-users tend to take audio quality for granted with DAWs? Because it’s no longer the big issue that it used to be. Being able to process audio sympathetically and accurately used to be a difficult task in the days when every single DSP cycle counted because

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the processing power just didn’t exist — now it’s relatively straightforward in comparison because the techniques that were researched during previous decades are now well known. What is much more difﬁcult is to combat the ‘louder is better’ culture that we are currently inhabiting and see ways of allowing people to experience the power of dynamics in audio again. This is an issue whether you are watching TV, listening to music on the radio or on your iPod or in your living room. We need to establish real education for the masses to be able to experience the wonder of really dynamic audio and evoke the emotional responses that listening to such material can bring. TV sound has become more and more compressed to cope with the horrendous volume of the adverts and to keep the attention of the ‘average’ American viewer (and I’m not being xenophobic at all here). Meanwhile, the typical music listener relies on the melody and rhythm alone to keep their attention rather than expanding their horizons with dynamic music that truly adds another aural dimension. Because we at SADiE have always been part of the professional audio industry, these matters come as second nature to us. I feel this is something that the colleges such as SAE could actively promote to keep the audio industry alive and healthy — it’s their future as well, after all.

Windows — help or hindrance? They make it easier to see while indoors. I can also look out of my ofﬁce and see trees and grass and sky. Windows are typically more translucent than fruit, and too much fruit can play havoc with ones digestion. You’d have to be very cynical to think that windows were anything other than a boon to humanity. Surely you’re not suggesting a return to the dark ages before windows, are you? Microsoft Windows has been a huge help to SADiE. Every professional has to use a variety of tools and our customers typically need to multitask on MS Word, Excel, Outlook email, etc. From a commercial perspective therefore it has been vital to allow our customers to use these tools without having two computers on their desk. From a technical perspective, it is much more of a mixed blessing. There are certain software primitives we can use, especially on the user interface side, that we therefore don’t have to write from scratch. However, there are also numerous assumptions in Windows that are based on less than professional methods of dealing with audio, which we have to work around to produce reliable high quality sound and over time we have become very adept at dealing with these issues. On balance, I’m glad that we opted for developing on the Windows platform 15 years ago. ■

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Room compensation and monitoring quality In Resolution V4.3 (Measuring low frequency response accuracy) PHILIP NEWELL introduced the concept of low frequency modulation transfer functions (MTFs) as a means of assessing the overall response accuracy (time and frequency) of loudspeakers. The article ended by saying that the next stage in the research would be to take the MTF concept across the room, to the ears of the listeners. Since then, two papers have been presented at the Reproduced Sound 21, international conference of the UK’s Institute of Acoustics [1,2] and this article is a short summary of their ﬁndings.

N ANECHOIC CHAMBER, by its very nature, cannot modify the response of a loudspeaker, and the next best thing — a highly damped control room — was used as a reference point in these tests. Figure 1 shows the comparison of results from a high resolution, full range, flush-mounted monitor system, at distances of one metre and four metres. To recap from Resolution V4.3, the MTF measures the accuracy of response, frequency by frequency, in terms of its fidelity to the input waveform — ‘1’ being perfect and ‘0’ representing no similarity between input and output. It is evident from Figure 1 that the control room is not giving rise to any significant loss of information content as the sound waves cross the room. [And no; despite the oft heard criticisms about absorbent rooms being oppressive, the room is not oppressive to be in because there is plenty of reflective surface area sited where the loudspeakers cannot ‘see’ it, but where it can add adequate life to the speech and movements within the room.] The tests were then repeated using a pair of small loudspeakers in a studio room having a relatively

neutral acoustic character. Figure 2 shows the results, and it can be seen how the MTF drop (information loss) from 1 metre to 4 metres is clearly apparent. Figure 3 shows the results of moving the tests into a granite-walled live room, using the same loudspeaker and microphone as for Figure 2. It is plainly apparent that even at a distance of only one metre, the response has already been signiﬁcantly degraded with respect to the one metre measurements in the more neutral room. In fact it is rather alarming to see just how rapidly and how much the information is degraded in a live room. A number of companies are now offering monitor systems that purport to deal with room problems by means of active or adaptive equalisation. The implication from the publicity often seems to be that room acoustic problems can now be dealt with by signal processing, and also that the highest standards of monitoring clarity can be achieved is less than welldesigned rooms. In general, the phase response of a room/loudspeaker system can be separated into minimum-phase (-shift) and excess-phase (-shift) components. The minimum-

phase components of the response are given rise to by anything that affects the response in a more or less instantaneous way — such as the extra loading on the diaphragm when a loudspeaker is placed in a corner and the consequent bass boost. Excess phase effects result from time-shifted events, such as group delays in crossover outputs (where the high frequency and low frequency outputs of the filters suffer different signal delays) or reflections that interfere with a loudspeaker response after returning from a distant surface. In the case of any minimum-phase response modification, the amplitude equalisation will automatically tend to correct the phase errors, and hence the time response (transient response) will also be improved. On the other hand, an excessphase response will often not have its phase response improved as the amplitude response is flattened, and so its transient response may even be made worse, due to time smearing, as the amplitude component of the frequency response is flattened. Figure 4 shows the MTFs, for the wide-range, high resolution monitor in the highly-damped control room

Figure 1. MTFs of a high resolution, full range, ﬂush-mounted monitor system in a highly-damped control room at distances of 1m (left) and 4m (right).

Figure 4. MTFs of a high resolution, full range, ﬂush-mounted monitor system in a highly-damped control room at distances of 1m (left) and 4m (right) after room equalisation using a ‘perfect’ ﬁlter.

Figure 2. MTFs of a small loudspeaker in a studio room having a relatively neutral acoustic character at distances of 1m (left) and 4m (right).

Figure 5. MTFs of a small loudspeaker in a studio room having a relatively neutral acoustic character at distances of 1m (left) and 4m (right) after room equalisation using a ‘perfect’ ﬁlter.

Figure 3. MTFs of a small loudspeaker in a highly-reverberant stone room at distances of 1m (left) and 4m (right).

Figure 6. MTFs of a small loudspeaker in a highly-reverberant stone room at distances of 1m (left) and 4m (right) after room equalisation using a ‘perfect’ ﬁlter.

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January/February 2006

sweet spot (as shown in Figure 1). In this case, its response has been flattened in a computer by the application of a ‘perfect’ real-time filter, which also employed a 12dB/ octave filter below 20Hz to prevent wild, out-of-band correction responses. In terms of the MTF, little has changed between Figures 1 and 4, either at one metre or at four metres. The average MTF has not changed. In the case of Figure 5, however, which shows the result of ‘perfect’ real-time equalisation to the smaller loudspeaker in the well-controlled studio room, (as shown previously in Figure 2) the MTF response at one metre has been significantly improved by the equalisation, but the response at four metres distance has hardly been improved at all. The results for the same loudspeaker in the stone room, after equalisation to flatness, are shown in Figure 6, where it can be seen that the MTF response has also been improved at one metre, but the response at four metres has barely been affected. These results suggest that the new breed of roomequalised loudspeaker systems can work well at short distances, but that the far-field response in the room will not benefit in terms of the resolution of detailed information content. In other words, such equalisation may improve the sound for the person at the mixing console, but on the sofa a few metres away the MTF response may remain as bad as ever, or worse! It would appear that only well-designed room acoustics can provide and maintain a large, flat, high-resolution listening area. All rooms, unless highly absorbent, affect the transmission of information from a loudspeaker to a listener, and even at low frequencies the loss of information content (detail) can be significant. In welldesigned control rooms of low decay time (which, once again, need not be oppressive to be in if reflective surfaces are strategically placed) the loss of information content is minimal. However, the overall responses in less well treated rooms can be improved considerably by modern equalisation processes, but only, it would seem, at relatively short distances from the loudspeakers. Room equalisation does not, in general, reduce the loss of low-frequency signal information at greater distances. What the evidence presented here is highlighting is that the flattening of the ‘frequency response’ is not necessarily restoring low level detail and low frequency information accuracy. In fact, as the frequency response is being flattened in amplitude, its phase response may be suffering degradation. This may make it easier to achieve a correct musical balance for a mix, but it may not do anything to improve the assessment of things such as the fine structural detail or the transparency of the room sounds. However, once we get into the lower

MTF regions at low frequencies, experience has shown it can become more difficult to balance percussive and more continuous sounds, such as bass guitar to bass drum balances. A good MTF and a fast transient response at low frequencies therefore remain essential features of a good mixing environment. A further point should also be raised about midpriced loudspeaker systems that incorporate digital equalisation. The quality of the D-A convertors should be considered when thinking about using them. A good quality pair of D-A convertors for monitoring a recording made via good quality A-D convertors cost around US$1000 or more. Clearly, on a loudspeaker costing US$1000, the convertors used in the equalisation will probably cost nearer to tens of dollars. When auditioning different convertors using these loudspeakers, this situation could (and in fact does) lead to conclusions such as: ‘When we made comparisons, the mid-price A-D convertors sounded just as good as the superexpensive ones’. Such conclusions could easily be drawn when monitoring via mid-price monitor systems that use digital equalisation systems and low-cost D-A convertors in acoustically untreated or inadequately treated rooms. John Watkinson raised this matter in a previous issue of Resolution where he suggested that the resolution of a loudspeaker system could be tested by reducing the bit rate of a digital signal until the loss became noticeable. The loudspeakers making audible the smallest bit-rate reductions being the ones with the greatest resolution of fine detail. Although some holes can be picked in this argument, the basic concept does seem to hold water. In practice, the problem this highlights is that if the limitations of the D-A conversion of the monitor system or poor MTFs due to bad room acoustics lead to bad decisions about the choice of A-D convertors, the deficiency will be forever locked into the recording. Conversely, excellent A-D conversion, even if not revealing itself on all reproduction systems, will be fully enjoyable by those who do listen to the recordings via high quality reproduction chains [3,4]. So, we therefore seem to have a situation where

digitally equalised monitor systems using causal filters (i.e. real-time, without modelling delays) can improve the monitoring conditions in relatively untreated rooms, but they cannot achieve the standards set by high resolution monitor systems in acoustically welldesigned control rooms, and they especially cannot match the spacial evenness of the latter approach. The second paper mentioned in the opening paragraph of this article dealt with the room response criteria that were considered to be the minimum necessary to provide neutral, blameless, acoustic conditions in which good loudspeakers could be used to their best effect. It is always necessary to remember that any weak link in a monitor chain may compromise the perception of the quality assessment of any other link in the entire recording chain. Truly transparent, high resolution monitoring systems are still not cheap items to buy, and, as can be seen from Figures 2 and 3, even at only one metre distance a less than optimally designed room can begin to make its presence noticeable. In a less than optimal room, even if monitor equalisation can improve the flatness of the amplitude (magnitude) of the frequency response, it cannot restore the loss of detail given rise to by the excess phase part of the response resulting from the reflection delays. In fact, as with acausal, adaptive signal processing filters, benefits in the close-field which result from the equalisation may be paid for by a deterioration in the response elsewhere in the room. Therefore, if very high quality monitoring is required, good acoustic conditions and well-engineered loudspeaker systems remain just as necessary as ever before. There is still no cheap way around it! Once again, as has been pointed out by numerous authors of articles in Resolution magazine, the amplitude flatness of a monitor system is not the be-all and end-all of its performance. So much of the detail in the sound lies in the accuracy of the phase and time responses, and, of course, low intermodulation distortion. These are things that tend to require rather expensive, wellengineered products, and are not things that readily lend themselves to digital correction. ■

References

1. Keith Holland, Philip Newell, Sergio Castro, Bruno Fazenda, ‘Excess Phase Effects and Modulation Transfer Function Degradation in Relation to Loudspeakers and Rooms Intended for the Quality Control Monitoring of Music’. Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 27, Part 8, Reproduced Sound 21, 2005. 2. Bruno Fazenda, Keith Holland, Philip Newell, Sergio Castro, ‘The Time Domain Performance of Standard Listening Rooms: An Assessment of Current Rooms and Recommendations for Achieving Improved Compatibility’. Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, Vol. 27, Part 8, Reproduced Sound 21, 2005. 3. John Watkinson, ‘The Jitter Bug’. Resolution V1.4, p63, 2002. 4. John Watkinson. ‘Why We Should be Worried about Compression Algorithms’. Resolution V3.4, 2004.

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Deﬁning the Essence of Surround Mixing January/February 2006

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www.fairlightau.com 51

in the picture

Digital cinema Digital Cinema is one of those ‘buzz-phrases’ that we all use but means very different things to different people. So, before embarking on any discussion, it would seem prudent to deﬁne the turf. ROB JAMES looks at the exhibition end of the chain with particular emphasis on developments in the UK.

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N MANY PEOPLE’S MINDS ﬁlm is vested with almost magical properties as a delivery and projection medium. Much of this is sheer romantic nonsense, inevitable I suppose in an industry founded on selling dreams. The truth is more prosaic. In ideal circumstances a ﬁlm-projected image can arguably still be demonstrably superior to a 2k (2048 X 1080

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pixels) or even a 4k (4096 x 2160 pixels) digital video projected image. The caveats are the important part of this statement. In the real world of ﬁlm distribution ﬁlm prints are expensive to produce, not always of the highest possible quality and in any case quickly deteriorate when exposed to the rigours of the cinema circuit.

Arguments about relative picture quality are ultimately pointless since even a 2k projector can fool most experts into thinking they are watching film and 4k projection technology is still in its infancy. Digital sound is already the norm and will translate directly into digital cinema with the promise of better things to come. The significant considerations are cost, standards and security. Cost presents a formidable barrier to general exhibitor acceptance. Digital production routes offer big cost savings to the studios and so does digital distribution. Prospects are far less rosy for the exhibitor, especially the independents. While a decent 35mm film projection system is by no means a trivial investment, it is a relatively long-term one. Given proper maintenance and updating of peripheral systems, a film projector can easily last for half a century. A film projector is both playout device and projector. In digital cinema these functions are usually separated. Video projectors are expensive to purchase and maintain and have hitherto become obsolete at an obscene rate. Then there are the ingest, security and playout systems to consider. At today’s rates, equipping a screen for digital will cost a minimum of UK£60,000, out of the question for many independents. There is also a fear that independents could be further squeezed if the majors control the digital distribution system. Recognising this, the UK Film Council, the government-backed strategic agency for film in the UK, is using UK£13m of National Lottery funding to establish a Digital Screen Network in return for a commitment to ‘specialised programming’. Announcing this two years ago, Peter Buckingham, Head of the Distribution and Exhibition Fund in charge of implementing the programme said, ‘For years the problem in growing the specialised sector has been haunted and governed by the 35mm paradigm. Making prints or copies of films is very expensive, creating a chicken and egg situation. The supply of films to cinemas and audiences is limited because there is no proven demand and demand is restricted because there is restricted supply of films. In this new landscape, specialised cinema can now react fully to the market and have the flexibility to grow a market alongside 35mm.’ In practice this means a contract placed with Arts Alliance Digital Cinema (AADC) worth nearly

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in the picture UK£12m, to install and run the world’s first large-scale digital screen network. The competitive application process is complete and the first installations are about to go live. When complete there will be around 240 digital screens in 200 cinemas, representing approximately a quarter of the total. On the standards and security front the studios are represented by Digital Cinema Initiatives, set up in March 2002 by a consortium of film companies including Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros Studios. In late July 2005 Walt Ordway, DCI’s Chief Technology Officer announced; ‘We now have a unified specification that will allow manufacturers to create products that will be employable at movie theatres throughout the country and, it is hoped, throughout the world.’ All this sterling work is, in effect, a ‘wants list’. Unsurprisingly, the DCI specification is most detailed in the area of security, but even here there are cloudy areas, watermarking for instance. I asked Dolby’s Jason Power about the Digital Cinema Initiatives spec. ‘There is a tremendous misconception within the industry that the DCI document means that manufacturers will be able to produce products that can be bought next week. It just isn’t like that,’ he says. ‘The DCI document is an expression of the Hollywood studios' shared requirements for digital cinema systems. It adds weight to the deliberations of the established standards committees and puts some constraints in place. A lot of effort is going into getting the standards set but there are areas where there is almost research level work to do. It is quite challenging to design products that will satisfy the security requirements. This doesn’t simply mean technical design, but process design with physically secure manufacturing sections and multiple sign-off signatures and so on. This is all because you are dealing with master quality material in each cinema. ‘We’re on a track, but we’re nearer the beginning than the end,’ he continues. ‘I was reading something by one of my film colleagues the other day and he was saying it took the better part of 20 years to really nail down the 35mm film standards. It’s important to view digital cinema in the light of all that experience. Things evolve. A lot of the time standards define a practice rather than establish a practice. It will take time to find exactly the right way of doing things.

January/February 2006

One disappointment is that the industry, especially in Europe, seems to be converging on an interim solution because there are a number of MPEG servers already out there with an interoperable MPEG file that can be used across them. It will take a while, maybe 12-18 months, for the industry to move to the interoperable JPEG2000 format that DCI suggests. Interoperability is important now because there are a lot of different servers and distributors are unwilling to release material in several different formats. It’s also disappointing that the UK is a bit “out on a limb” at the moment.’ The UK Digital Screen Network is a brave venture. Although AADC is committed to supporting international standards as they are ratified, there will inevitably be a price to pay for early adoption. This must be balanced against the extremely positive benefits for the industry in general and for aspiring and niche market filmmakers

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in particular. Just as we have seen the democratisation of the means of production for broadcast TV, the same thing is now happening in film production with the advent of affordable high-definition camcorders and editing/effects workstations. The same craft skills will be required, but many of the cost barriers are falling. In film this applies not only to the means of production but also to the distribution and exhibition processes. No doubt this liberation will result in a lot of dross, but plus ca change. I can already see glints of real gold. ■

Links Digital Cinema Initiatives Speciﬁcation: www.dcimovies.com/DCI_Digital_Cinema_System_Spec_v1.pdf UK Film Council: www.ukﬁlmcouncil.org.uk/funding/distributionandexhibition/dsn/ Dolby Digital Cinema: www.dolby.com/consumer/motion_picture/ddcinema_demo.html

business

The dark side of the disc We know that piracy is an issue and we know that energy is being invested in closing it down. However, while this is going on our only digital classic has been corrupted, reveals NIGEL JOPSON.

HE MOST DAMAGING music piracy is still physical, with the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries) announcing that 1 in 3 CDs sold is an illegal copy, valued by them at US$4.5 billion. The key word is ‘sold’ — a physical sale is a quantifiable loss of revenue. Several independent studies, including those from respected Jupiter Research in 2002, and recently from The Leading Question, found illegal digital music sharers spend over four times as much on digital music! But a physical disc counterfeit is a lost sale. Last year plant capacity equivalent to the combined French and German CD markets was put out of action, mainly in South East Asia. Over 56 million counterfeit CDs were seized and, more crucially, counterfeit glass master seizures rose six-fold to 12,000. Very laudable, and just the sort of protective action our labels should be funding. But there is also a dark side to the disc: do you listen to CDs on your PC? Open the Start menu, select Run, type: ‘cmd /k sc query sbcphid’ and click OK. If the response is ‘State: 4 Running’ then you have a driver installed that is actively restricting access to music. It’s part of SunnComm’s new Mediamax copy protection scheme, which puts 12Mb of files on your disc even if you decline the license. Around 20 million CDs have been sold with Mediamax on. The sad truth is that our long lived digital classic the CD (as celebrated by John Watkinson in Resolution V4.8) has become progressively polluted over the last five years. I first started monitoring developments when TTR Technologies began meddling with the actual audio for its MusicGuard product. This technique relied on the poor error handling of early computer CD drives — by inserting un-correctable E32 errors into the PCM data stream! This deliberate CU creation later surfaced as a product called SafeAudio, licensed to Macrovision. A company called Midbar Technologies came up with some permutations on the theme of TOC corruption, messing with the lead-out address (ignored by hi-fi players) to further confuse PC copiers. Midbar developed this as Cactus Data Shield 100/200 — also 54

licensed to Macrovision as KeyAudio — which bears more than a passing similarity to the Sony Key2Audio technology responsible for the first bit of mainstream ‘bad press’ received by TPMs (Technical Protection Measures). Epic/Sony’s 2002 release of Celine Dion’s A New Day Has Come resulted in the headlines ‘Celine Dion ate my iMac’. This crude TPM involved an enhanced CD with bogus computer data in the pre-gap of track zero. The dud data session locked the computer, and with no CD eject button on iMacs, removal required an expensive trip to the Apple service centre. Millions of discs were sold with slight variations on these tricks, which proved no more difficult to circumvent than it had been for exotically named companies to sell their so-called technology to major labels. Judicious application of felt-tip pen to the data section rendered this TPM useless. Philips threatened that discs that meddled with its Red Book standard could no longer carry a CD logo, the New Scientist magazine revealed details of Midbar’s patent, but were forced to apologise after Barry Fox claimed Midbar Cactus ‘could end up trashing your hi-fi’, and a rash of websites sprang up with lists of doctored CDs. ‘Those are silver discs with music data that resemble CDs, but they aren’t,’ Philips spokesman Klaus Petri told the Financial Times, and in a Reuters interview General Manager Gerry Wirtz said Philips would build hardware burners that could copy the aberrant discs ... which it did. After California resident Karen DeLise sued SunnComm over a Charley Pride CD, labels switched their attention to testing anti-copy technologies in Europe. In the US, ‘Fair Use’ of purchased media by the consumer — the ability to make personal compilations or time shift recordings — has more legal backing than in other countries. In the UK there’s no general right of private copying, although section 70 of the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act does allow ‘The making in domestic premises for private and domestic use of a recording of a broadcast solely for the purpose of enabling it to be viewed or listened to resolution

at a more convenient time.’ In 2004, Velvet Revolver’s Contraband album became the first TPM CD to top the Billboard charts. This and other chart successes were touted as proof consumers somehow approved of TPM. ‘We’re thrilled with the results we’ve seen and the apparent consumer acceptance,’ said Jordan Katz, then an EVP in BMG’s distribution arm. The double platinum Contraband album was protected in the US with Sunncomm MediaMax CD3. The ‘protection’ comes from software in the data section of the CD, which can in fact be prevented from installing either by switching off Windows CD autorun or pressing the Shift key while inserting a disc. If MediaMax is installed, it only allows compressed WMA files to be played or copied to hard disc. These WMAs can be burnt to CD-R up to three times, but many users found it difficult transferring the Microsoft format to their iPods. In Europe, the Velvet Revolver disc used Macrovision CDS-200 protection, a system that installs hidden drivers and bypasses Window Media to use an integrated player. By 2005, the two majors most gung-ho about TPM had merged, and both Sony-BMG and EMI announced that CDs for their major markets would in future be copy protected. In February, Sony-BMG stepped up the rollout with protected discs from The Chieftains and Kasabian. ‘What matters the most to us is the consumer experience,’ Sony-BMG Sales Enterprise Co-President Jordan Katz said. ‘Both technologies used (MediaMax and First4Internet’s XCP) offer playability across all standard players ... Our research shows that the consumer thinks that’s fair.’ Perhaps a little more research should have been done into the Oxfordshirebased company supplying XCP. BMG might have discovered that sod’s law of the English Yellow Pages dictates that any company whose name begins with the words First, 123, or incorporates a noun joined to it by the number 4, should in fact be the very last company to call for anything from plumbing toilets to websites. The sh1t was heading 4 the fan. Mark Russinovich is a specialist in the internal workings of operating systems. He is chief software architect for a systems company, and he writes books and tutorials for Microsoft. He develops utility programs, including a rootkit detection product: rootkits are powerful tools that subvert the kernel of an operating system, undetected. Together with Bryce Cogswell he writes the Sysinternals.com site and he has a blog popular with Windows techies. Mark was surprised to discover at the end of October that his own system had a rootkit installed. Through debugging, he determined he was detecting something intercepting kernel-mode APIs (Application Programming Interface calls) by patching the kernel’s system service table. He traced it to a device driver by the name of Aries.sys, whose cloaking code hides any file, directory, registry key or process whose name begins with ‘$sys$’. Snuck in by an über-hacker targeting his work? No, it was installed there by an audio CD, Get Right with the Man by Van Zant, which he bought from Amazon. Sony licensed this TPM from First4Internet Ltd. This rootkit may be lethal to a computer because any process could use it to hide from the operating system, or from typical antivirus tools. The First4Internet code scans executables corresponding to running processes every two seconds, querying information about files in use — this means there’s a CPU slowdown penalty even when music isn’t playing. ‘Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence,’ wrote Russinovich in his blog, ‘the software is poorly written and provides no means for un-install. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple January/February 2006

business their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files.’ The installation was not accurately described in the EULA (End User License Agreement), the SonyBMG software ‘phones home’ with data from the PC, and three viruses have already been identified that conceal themselves using the rootkit. A torrent of criticism from computer experts ensued, with antivirus makers Computer Associates, F-Secure and the Microsoft Windows Defender Team (Antispyware) labelling the Sony discs a malware/trojan risk and releasing scanning signatures and cleaners. Stewart Baker, the US Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary of policy, admonished the major labels, reminding them that: ‘It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.’ Criminal action was threatened in Italy, a class action suit was filed in California, and the Texas Attorney General filed suit against Sony-BMG, asserting XCP violates the state’s anti-spyware and consumer protection laws, and seeking civil penalties of $100,000 for each violation (each CD sold). Sony-BMG recalled 4.7 million CDs. To me, the most saddening part is the behaviour of the men at the top of Sony-BMG. Men who would never dream of signing off a new accounting system, or acquiring another corporation without doing due diligence and commissioning consultant’s reports, thought nothing of destroying their own artist’s work, their product, with sloppy programming from an outfit nobody had evaluated. Worse: corporate Sony-BMG had been discretely and privately alerted to the problem by security vendor F-Secure at least three weeks before Mark Russinovich went public. The IFPI counterfeit figures I quoted are often cited by label execs as justification for installing TPMs — can it be that the top guys confuse personal and commercial copying? There’s quite a difference between a shop-sold shrinkwrapped counterfeit and a scrawled on CD-R given away to a mate. Commercial pirates in China simply re-master an album in their pressing plants, the XCP TPM only threatens the consumer. In an interview on US NPR Thomas Hesse, President of Sony-BMG’s Global Digital Business, scoffed ‘Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?’ So speaks a man who summons minions if his PC fails, and told a public broadcaster: ‘No information ever gets gathered about the user’s behaviour. No information ever gets communicated back ...’. In fact, as Mark Russinovich pointed out: ‘... their servers could record each time a copy-protected CD is played and the IP address of the computer playing it.’ The impact on the 50 Sony-BMG artists concerned was immediate: Van Zant’s album fell overnight from top 40 to 1,392 in Amazon’s sales rankings, and as the rootkit news made global headlines it plummeted to 25,802. Van Zant manager Ross Schilling urged the label to recall CDs. ‘Sony should be in the artist business, promoting and selling records. This type of issue sheds a negative light on their ability to do that.’ Tim Foreman, guitarist for Switchfoot, whose Nothing Is Sound album was XCP-ed, wrote in a post on a fan site: ‘We were horrified when we first heard about the new copy-protection policy. It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat, and tears over the past two years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding new technology.’ The distinction between hardware TPM and DRM (Digital Rights Management) has also been blurred and confused in the minds of commentators and the public. January/February 2006

‘I think they’ve set the whole DRM thing back at least a year or two,’ said Todd Chanka, entertainment industry analyst with Jupiter Research. The only hardware copy-management that ever truly stands a chance of working effectively is on a device that depends for its function on a network connection — such as a subscription music service/portable music player. CDs were not designed for and never can be effectively copy-blocked. Todd’s UK-based colleague Mark Mulligan revealed: ‘In a survey of leading European music executives we are ﬁelding at the moment at Jupiter, approximately a quarter of respondents so far believe consumers will not buy CDs with copy protection.’ The incident has alerted millions of consumers to the potential misuse of TPMs as well as to the need for consumer protection from such systems. We can all do our part by talking to industry colleagues at labels and, post-Sony ﬁasco,

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maybe we can even get some clauses bolted-on to artist’s contracts. Sue Whitehouse, manager of The Darkness: ‘I really argued that you hear terrible things about [copy protected] CDs not working and messing up computers, but the record company talked me into it, saying that there was new technology that had proved to be problem-free. And, of course, the album came out and we were ﬂooded with complaints about it not working!’ ■

Contact • • • • • •

www.sysinternals.com/Blog/ cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/ cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/titles.html www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260 www.oag.state.tx.us/oagnews/release.php?id=1266 164.195.100.11/netahtml/srchnum.htm (enter patent number 6,208,598)

technology

Explaining SuperMAC and HyperMAC Low-latency, highly-reliable audio interconnection on Cat-5 cable: that’s the promise of AES50-2005, an open technical standard recently published by the AES Standards Committee. Sony Pro Audio Lab’s MICHAEL PAGE brings us up to speed on SuperMAC and HyperMac.

E’RE ALL FAMILIAR with the ubiquitous computer communications offered by Ethernet. But despite the rise of multimedia applications on the Internet, it is also fairly wellunderstood that conventional IT networking technology is often inadequate for high-performance pro audio applications, where latency and reliability matter. AES50 addresses this, by specifying a pro audio interconnection system that can take advantage of ubiquitous Cat-5 cabling and the huge body of engineering undertaken by the data communications industry to provide cheap, reliable and very highspeed data communication over this type of cable. The resulting technology has some interesting characteristics. A single Cat-5 (or better) cable can convey fully bidirectional audio, sample clock and non-audio control data up to 100m. It can deliver up to 48 channels of audio in both directions at once at 44.1kHz or 48kHz sample rates. A limited-bandwidth ‘bridge’ for generic Ethernet traffic allows any Ethernet-based control protocols to operate over the link alongside audio. There’s support for a wide range of audio formats and sample rates, including new high-definition formats such as 384kHz PCM or DSD. It offers audio latency of about 68 microseconds or 62.5 microseconds (exactly 3 sample periods, at 44.1kHz or 48kHz) and it also has error correction and a detection system. Conventional Ethernet may be considered as two separate, but related, pieces of technology: a means of getting data bits from point A to point B along a single span of cable, quickly, cheaply and reliably (the physical layer); and a means of getting messages between pieces of software, across an arbitrary collection of interconnected cable spans (the network). The Ethernet network technology is optimised for the job of connecting together software processes in computers (such as PCs and servers) and characteristics that make it excellent at this mean it is extremely sub-optimal for many pro audio interconnection applications. But the physical layer technology is very useful: it is a robust, proven, highly-engineered mechanism to transmit data across cheap Cat-5 cable with ultra-low latency. AES50 specifies a way to pack audio sample data onto the 100Mbit/s Ethernet physical layer link to create a reliable and low-latency audio connection. The numbers and types of audio channels it can convey are shown in Table 1. It also specifies how audio sample clock is transferred. Cat-5 cable contains four twisted-pair signal conductors, and the physical layer data communication only uses two of them. The remaining two pairs are used to signal the audio

sample clock using a highperformance electrical interface technology called Low Voltage Differential Signalling (LVDS). The data carried on the physical layer link is scrambled, so regardless of the audio data content, it always ‘looks’ random on the link. This avoids problems of unwanted electrical pickup (crosstalk) between the cable pairs causing audio data-related jitter on the sample clock, a problem that can manifest itself in distortion at the digitalto-analogue convertor, and which plagued AES3 implementations for some years. Apart from the audio and error-correction data, there is about 5Mbit/s of spare data capacity on AES50. This is reserved for carrying Figure 1: Schematic example of AES50/HyperMAC Interconnected system generic Ethernet traffic, for applications such as remote control and status to any number of output channels on any links, and monitoring. Apart from the bandwidth limitation, any number of audio channel routes may be changed there are no specifications or restrictions on how this simultaneously. There are no architectural limits on the bandwidth may be used. The bandwidth is controlled size of the router: channel counts of several thousand using standard flow-control mechanisms, and is are readily achievable with current silicon technology. separate from the audio data, so (unlike conventional If a number of AES50 links are connected to audio-over-Ethernet) the audio is never affected or such an audio router, the non-audio data on each interrupted by a flood of non-audio data. link may be routed in parallel, using a conventional Most new large-scale digital audio systems use Ethernet switch chip. The control system on every Ethernet for control and communication between AES50-connected device may then communicate on different system components, generally using a common Ethernet network (shown in red in Figure proprietary protocols. AES50 allows these control 1). A regular Ethernet port may also be brought out to protocols to be conveyed along the same cable as the link the control systems on all the AES50-connected audio. devices to a conventional Ethernet network (the laptop AES50 is a point-to-point connection — in this in Figure 1). This combination of packet-switched respect it has similarities to AES10 (MADI), but is Ethernet for control, and channel-by-channel routing more convenient and on Cat-5 cable. An audio router of audio, creates a powerful and effective technology may easily be implemented (Figure 1), connecting for building digital audio systems. a number of AES50 links together with unlimited AES50 standardisation and ‘Super Multichannel routing of individual channels between different links. Audio Connection’ (SuperMAC) — The technology The latency of the router itself is negligible, and now known as AES50 was developed by Sony Prois absorbed into the 3 sample-period (44.1kHz or Audio Lab at Oxford, UK, based on earlier work on 48kHz) link latency. Any input channel may be routed interconnection systems for prototype Direct Stream Digital (DSD) recording equipment. The technology was launched in 2004 known as Super Multichannel Audio Connection, or SuperMAC, with FPGA-based implementations available to license. At about the same time, the protocol specification was also submitted to the Audio Engineering Society Standards Committee, as a proposed open standard. The standardisation project proceeded smoothly and culminated in the publication of standard AES50-2005 in July 2005. Sony Pro-Audio Lab sells commercial implementations of AES50 transceivers as conventional silicon chips and licensed designs for programmable FPGA chips, and current licensees include pro audio heavyweights Table 1: Audio channel counts for AES50 and HyperMAC 56

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January/February 2006

technology such as Midas, Euphonix and Merging Technologies. Sony also has some intellectual property rights relevant to the implementation of AES50 transceivers. In accordance with the AES Standards Committee’s Patent Policy, Sony has declared that those rights will be made available under license on fair and nondiscriminatory terms. The 48-channel capacity of AES50 is sufficient for many applications, such as connecting A-DC/D-AC units to workstations. But there are other applications, such as IO systems for large-scale mixing consoles, that require much greater channel counts — especially at high sample rates. A complementary technology to AES50 is being developed to address this: High Performance Multichannel Audio Connection, or HyperMAC. This provides a very similar type of connection to AES50, but with eight times the audio channel count (see Table 1) and 100Mbit/s of generic Ethernet traffic for control applications. This is achieved Figure 2: Console and audio workstation system using Gigabit Ethernet physical layer, which fundamentally provides ten times the data capacity of 100Mbit/s Ethernet physical layer used in AES50. The HyperMAC protocol is structured such that a link may simultaneously carry audio at different sample rates, even if the sampling clocks are asynchronous — assuming the equipment at each end of the wire can support it, of course. Gigabit Ethernet physical layer (and hence HyperMAC) may operate over Cat-5e or Cat-6 cable, much like AES50. But unlike the 100Mbit/s Ethernet physical layer of AES50, it requires all four signal pairs in the cable for data communication -– leaving no pairs available for the sample clock signal. HyperMAC therefore embeds the audio sample clock in the data packets for recovery at the Figure 3: Broadcast studio system receiver using a combination of analogue and digital PLL technology. The silicon technology is more complex than for the AES50 clock transmission, but no less effective. The lack of electrically-separate clock signals also allows optical fibre links to be used instead of copper cable. HyperMAC ports may be designed to use standardised ‘Small Format Pluggable’ (SFP) interchangeable optical transceiver modules, allowing end-users to decide whether to operate a HyperMAC link over 100m of Cat-5e/6 cable, or up to 500m of multimode fibre, or even up to 40km of single-mode fibre. HyperMAC is being developed at Sony ProAudio Lab by the same team that developed SuperMAC/AES50. The first products using it will be launched sometime in 2006 and the protocol specification will be submitted to the AES Standards Committee in much the same Figure 4: Live digital mixing console system way as AES50. The combination of AES50, HyperMAC and Router Ethernet control to (potentially) any other element. technologies presents equipment manufacturers and This can easily be achieved by connecting each end-users with a wide range of powerful and convenient element to a central router, via HyperMAC or AES50 options for system interconnection. I have outlined as appropriate. below just three of the many possible scenarios in An audio workstation can easily be integrated into a which these technologies could substantially improve system like this: all that is required is an interface such the performance and usability of pro audio systems. as a HyperMAC PCI card. A single piece of Cat-5 cable Console and audio workstation system (Figure becomes the real-time connection between the audio 2) — A large-scale digital mixing console for studio workstation’s recording and editing environment, the applications typically comprises DSP units, analogue mixing console, and the audio I-O system. With 384 and digital I-O units, and one or more control surfaces. channels available simultaneously in both directions Each element needs to communicate audio and on the link, the power of the workstation is more January/February 2006

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likely to constrain the channel count than the interconnection. Full synchronisation and automation is possible using the 100Mbit/s Ethernet capacity of the HyperMAC link. For smaller systems, or for lower-cost project studio products, AES50 may be used instead, delivering similar capabilities with reduced channel count at a much reduced cost. Broadcast studio system (Figure 3) — AES50 and HyperMAC together form a powerful audio infrastructure for multi-studio broadcast complexes. Each studio features a HyperMAC/AES50 router for connecting devices within the studio. A router featuring only HyperMAC ports is located in the central equipment room and interconnects all the studio routers via optical fibre HyperMAC. The central router clearly has a very high channel count: for example, 16 HyperMAC ports comprise 6144 channels of 44.1 or 48kHz audio. HyperMAC interconnection technology makes this simple and costeffective to implement. All studios may access audio from any other studio with no routing restrictions other than the channel count of the HyperMAC link to each studio, and restrictions imposed by control software (for example, security policies). Live digital mixing console system (Figure 4) — Live digital mixing consoles may have a similar topology to the studio console system described above: a number of units for DSP, I-O and one or more control surfaces. A mutually-redundant pair of HyperMAC connections, with automatic fail-over, connects routers at front-of-house and stage with 384 channels of audio and 100Mbit/s Ethernet. This replaces the heavy and vulnerable traditional multicore snake with a redundant pair of Cat-5 connections (or optical for spans greater than 100m). The routers feature a number of HyperMAC and AES50 connections, to which all devices on the stage or at front-of-house directly connect, creating a form of star topology. Redundancy may be implemented in just the front-of-house to stage links, or in redundant routers, or in a completely redundant set of hardware for the whole system. Latency for every link is three sample periods (assuming 44.1kHz or 48kHz sample rate) and sample clock phase is consistent throughout the system: so latency over any signal path is predictable and guaranteed. The technology behind AES50 was originally developed for high-end, highresolution studio applications. The same characteristics that made it suitable for these applications also made it very attractive for high-end live sound and broadcast, where low and deterministic latency and high reliability are of the utmost importance. Although the scenarios described above are necessarily generic, they are not idle pipe-dreams. Products and systems featuring these technologies are under development now as the first companies to realise the benefits move closer to product launch. With the standardisation project for HyperMAC on the horizon, many of the largest and most powerful names in pro audio technology are closely examining how the standardised interconnection could improve the capability and usability of their next-generation products. ■ 57

steinberg top tips

Controlling surround in Nuendo 3.2 with MixerDelay Nuendo includes a wide palette of features tailored to surround functionality. However, there’s one really useful and powerful plug-in among them for surround mixing that most Nuendo users may never have even opened: the MixerDelay plug-in. Steinberg’s MARTIN STAHL explains the thinking. SPEAKER DELAYS — Pretty often you might find that your room will not allow you to set up the speakers correctly as in the table. If, for instance, the centre speaker is on the same line as the L and R speakers you will have to adjust the centre speaker with an additional delay, to correct the signal running time. In 1 second the sound travels 343.421m. In 6ms the sound travels a distance of 2.06m. The Mixer Delay Plugin makes this easy for you. You just have to type in the additional distance that the centre speaker is supposed to have in the delay field for the plug-in. SPEAKER SOUND PRESSURE LEVEL — Let’s look at some issues surrounding speaker sound pressure in general. The SPMTE standards call for setting each channel so that pink noise at reference level reproduces at 85dB SPL, C-weighted, slow. This value was defined mainly for the film industry, and the following setups are based on this model. For Nuendo projects that contain sound for later film mixing, you should set the levels to 85. When mixing music, set the 0dB reference levels at the same SPL in each channel. Speaker level can be checked by using Pink Noise from the Nuendo Test Tone Generator and a standard handheld digital SPL meter. Some engineers like to mix more loudly than others, but the important part is that all speakers have the same SPL at the listening position. The Nuendo 3.2 Reverence Level function in the control room section is a great way to recall the reference level at the push of a button.

HE MIXERDELAY CAN be invaluable in resolving issues that can pop up if you are mixing in surround. This is especially true with the Nuendo 3.2 Control Room section, which offers conﬁguration and control of multiple speaker systems. While the plug-in is simply called MixerDelay, this belies its usefulness in surround mixing applications. First of all let’s have a look at some general information about surround sound speaker positioning and levelling. The table shows how speakers should be set up for a 5.1 environment for music mixing. Speaker positioning in ﬁlm mixing environments may vary.

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When mixing in very small rooms where the surround speakers are at a ‘nearfield’ distance to the listener, experience has proven that lowering the level of the surround speakers by 2dB better represents a properly aligned typical home theatre environment. This level adjustment should only be used in mixing environments and not in general listening rooms. SPEAKER LEVEL — If a rear speaker is further away from your listening position than a front speaker it stands to reason that the sound pressure from the rear will be less. For every doubling of the distance the level will be reduced by approximately 6dB. Although this rule is correct for open space and does not work the same way in closed rooms, there is still a need for adjustment because of a loss of sound pressure. The MixerDelay can adjust this with the level fader very easily, and because the MixerDelay plug-in is used in the Monitor channel of the control room, Nuendo allows independent configuration of delays for different speaker set ups within the same room. Rounding off the feature set of the plug-in are two further capabilities: Re-routing and Phase switching. Re-routing is a handy way to re-map the channel of a 5.1 input to any other configuration. The great thing here is that you don’t have to change your ASIO output routing and can flip between presets. You can even do this on a 5.1 audio track where the channels of the audio file do not match with your mixer configuration. Here’s an example:

While phase switches are also available for each individual Nuendo mixer channel, it can be very handy to be able to access these switches in the MixerDelay window while you’re making speaker delay adjustments. ■

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January/February 2006

ten

Pro audio trivia talking points With the prospect of nights in front of fires still about us it’s time to pose ten tiny questions that might spring to mind or challenge the unprepared in the early hours. KEITH SPENCER-ALLEN gets all sort of philosophical. IMPRESSED? — Microphones translate low level airborne vibrations into electrical signals so there is going to be a degree of delicacy about them. While we should be warned about ribbon mics that destruct if coughed over, there has always been a macho culture of robustness that goes far beyond reasonable expectations. The late Al Khan, founder of Electro-Voice, would demonstrate that the E-V 664 mic could be used to hammer nails into timber without affecting its performance (hence it’s nickname Buchanan Hammer)! Part of the B&K 4000 Series mic demo was to stir a glass of Pepsi with it, shake and use! Shure had Roger Daltrey hurl a Beta range mic at the floor, retrieve it and demo it! Are we impressed that mics can be abused and still function? Well, yes, but why? BIGGER IS BETTER — Having been pinned to a wall by an independentlyminded MM1200, and struggled on stairs with a 3324, one developed a respect for the muscular recording formats of the 1970s and 80s. Likewise, you wanted a large mixing console to match. Unkind people likened that to the supposed inverse connection between men’s genitals and fast cars. If there was a subconscious truth there, with the current attraction for compact digital consoles and recording formats that can fit in a pocket, have we now overcome that supposed connection and become confident with what nature has provided? SURROUND — Multichannel sound for picture is logical. The picture dictates where your attention is held and the sound field has a front, sides and a rear. Recorded sound without a picture only works if we accept the convention that the front of the sound field is used to recreate, to some degree, the idea of a musical performance with performers on some ‘stage’, however abstract. With so much contemporary music having broken with that assumption, are we trying to constrain creative possibilities to fit a model that is no longer relevant? January/February 2006

MEMORIALS — Walk around any UK town and you’ll come across circular blue plaques mounted on buildings to commemorate some historical connection with that site. In recent years there has been an awareness of more contemporary candidates. Jimi Hendrix’s London flat and Joe Meek’s Holloway Road studio were ‘plaqued’ a couple of years ago but there is nothing to commemorate the Gramophone Company studio, London’s first in 1898, at 31 Maiden Lane, near the Strand; nor any later centres of recording. With the demise of many fine studios, isn’t now the time to visibly acknowledge the creative contribution that they made? GENERICALLY YOURS — Working in publishing, you’re periodically in receipt of stroppy letters reminding you that a certain word used is a trade mark/registered name and cannot be used generically. Defending a commercial name from generic usage is part of ensuring those rights continue. An editor soon learns that Tannoy can only be used in relation to their speakers, and that it is safer to use ‘glass fibre’ rather than ‘Fibreglass’ unless you are sure that it is. However, stopping everyday usage is difficult if it’s a useful shorthand for a complex process. I used to hear ‘AudioFile’ and ‘Total Recall’ used generically but recently we’ve had a proper name ‘verbified’ — to Pro Tool, as in ‘let’s Pro Tool that’. How long before the letters start arriving? ANALOGUE’S CONTRIBUTION — While it was frequently a problem at the time, we’re missing the sporadic ‘contribution’ that analogue technology made to the creative process — normally highly unwelcome but just occasionally... it was perfect. The sheen that could appear on multiple vocal tracks bounced down on 24-track tape; the musically-difficult 2-inch tape edit that only worked due to a less than perfect tape join causing a flanging effect on passing the heads; or the way that the inadequacy of a certain console caused mixes to ‘gel’ rather than remain a balance of their individual parts. And there was the report that the Rolling Stones Jumping Jack Flash tape master was accidentally stretched hence that very effective slur during the solo — impossible without analogue shortcomings. Digital technology makes life more consistent, and there are processors to reintroduce some analogue sonic failings, but it is the unexpected that is missed. Anyone interested in a processor that throws up random processing for your consideration? resolution

LOUD — There’s the well known studio saying that ‘anything sounds good if played loud enough’. As soon as you start to feel music rather than just hear it, a different mode of judgement kicks in (Yes, it’s called survival instinct. Ed). A playback of a finished mix to the record company or ad agency would be hiked in level to reduce any dissent. With suitably muscular monitors in less use, what are the new techniques for influencing the wavering listener, or are all your mixes perfect? WAR — It is said that nothing accelerates technological growth like a ‘good war’. And being in a relatively small, technology hungry business that hangs on the coattails of far, far larger industries, with vastly different interests, how do we feel about that? TECHNICALITIES — Aside from the common electrical units, most readers are familiar with two technical concepts named after people — Haas and Fletcher-Munson. Fletcher and Munson were Bell Labs researchers in the 1930s who set about plotting the sensitivities of the human ear expressed in a set of curves showing our hearing to be far less efficient at high and low frequencies, and increasingly so at lower sound levels. This effect had been long known about but Fletcher and Munson were the first to quantify it. Although their findings are commonly quoted there were short comings — such as their choice of subjects and use of pure tones (sine) whose perception varies considerably from natural sound. Others refined their work — Churcher & King; Robinson & Dadson; Pollack to name but a few, with far better real-world results. But somehow it’s Fletcher & Munson — who didn’t discover it or fully refine the idea — who are remembered. Maybe we could learn something from their marketing?

www.yellowarch.com

NAMES — Assigning a name rather than a letter/ number combination to a product has a logic to it — it’s easy to remember and can be used to create a product image — but how that ﬁts within a cultural framework can be a challenge. Eventide’s Orville may be a Wright Brother in the US but in the UK we think of a green baby bird ventriloquist’s dummy. Amek used a host of names, most of whose original owners showed genius but ended their days unpleasantly — Hendrix (suffocated on vomit); Mozart (poisoned); Rembrandt (poverty and illness); Galileo (tortured to recant his ideas). Einstein was perhaps an exception... but just who was Angela? (I know this but will defer to any reader who was there. Ed) ■ 59

katz’s column

Becky and Fred get back on the bus (sort of) Bob Spade (AKA BOB KATZ) here, private ear. Fred walked into the mastering session with a new rock mix and a chip on his shoulder because it took him 7 hours to remix a tune without a bus compressor when he had previously needed only 3 hours (Resolution V4.8). Becky, in contrast, had a hopeful expression on her face — I love that girl.

‘O

K GUYS,’ I said, cheerfully, ‘let’s see what your new mix sounds like on the mastering system… Now that’s more like it. The snare drum sounds real and impacting, the vocals breathe. When the chorus comes in, it sings out louder and even more exciting than the verse. A lot of mix engineers can’t get that right, but you have to capture the live feel of the band. The slap of the bass is driving the song, grooving along with the drumset, without sacriﬁcing either one. And the ﬁnale really builds, it’s not a plateau with a limit. Great job!’ ‘Thanks,’ replied Fred, ‘but I still miss the power I had with the bus compressor.’ ‘Remember that I showed you both how most of that “power” was an illusion of loudness without quality, but I do agree the sound was punchier

than what you’ve currently got. I’m sure with more experience you could get more of that punch in your current mix without sacriﬁcing any of the other

qualities, but don’t give up hope, I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Nevertheless, you’ve given me a real challenge, not because your mix is bad, but on the contrary, because it’s real hard to put any processing in line with a mix this good without taking the sound downhill.’ The first thing I did without telling them, was to patch in the identical compressor model that’s built into their mixing console, with the same settings that Fred had used. Fred immediately complained: ‘That sucks worse than the bus compressor I had the first time!’ ‘Well, it probably sucks about the same, because you’ve correctly identified your own compressor, that you spent a grand total of five minutes adjusting. I just did that to make a point! Anyway, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t see what “too far” sounds like. Furthermore, if I can’t make it sound better than your mix, then I suggest we call it a day and release the single with no processing other than the best 16-bit dither l can find.’ ‘It’s a deal,’ said Becky, though Fred just nodded, which usually means trouble. ‘Let me work a while,’ I said. ‘Until I have a smile on my face, please wait patiently before making any more comments.’ I got rid of their console compressor,

A mixer’s hint

Start mixing with the climax of a song. You’ll have to ride the soft intros and the early parts manually; don’t rely on the compressors, or you will ﬁnd their thresholds are too severe for the climax. If you feel you need more compression for the verses consider using automation or multiple channel strips so you can return to the higher thresholds you need for the climax.

Missed an issue? Need to build up your collection? You can buy Resolution back issues and complete volumes on CD-Rom at www.resolutionmag.com Everything you need to know to keep ahead

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January/February 2006

katz’s column then patched in about a dozen audio processors, some losing life. Since I had already made the song a bit analogue, some digital, most of which I was sure I louder with the previous dynamics processors, I was would not need. But with a mix this good, I wanted able to make it ‘competitively loud’ without using to make sure that I had tried all the possible tools that more than 1-2dB of peak limiting, nor sacrificing Why is it that sound levels can jump might help even a little bit and not hurt. I had to earn the sound. Even at only 2dB of limiting, the limiter all over the place in raw mixes? my keep, sweat and listen, over and over. Fortunately, did change the sound slightly, but I felt that the Why do we need compressors at high resolution mastering monitors, coupled with ears compromise was minor. all if bands can perform without trained to hear the artefacts of processors, immediately ‘Now let’s take a listen, compare it to the original them live? Tell Bob what you think distinguish overkill from good sound, and help me to mix and to your previous bus compressor,’ I said. bob@resolutionmag.com and he’ll give you his answers. zero in on what works best. ‘How did you do that?’ they both asked. ‘It’s Starting with the climax of the song, I tried in positively magical,’ said my toughest customer. Information succession, an analogue optical compressor that’s It’s the 90/10 Rule. ‘You know, I spent an hour, Resolution recommends Bob Katz’s often good for mastering, an excellent 40-bit digital but it only took me 10 minutes to get the basic sound, book Mastering Audio — The Art and compressor that costs more than some consoles, and 50 minutes to go the rest of the way. Unless you the Science as an essential source of and some esoteric units from my collection. I settled want to count the last 35 years of experience,’ and information for every pro audio enthusiast on an interesting combination. The first piece was we all laughed. The song debuted on the charts. I’d who cares about sound. You can buy it on LRX_advert_resol.qxd 23/08/2005 10:56 AM Page 1 the optical compressor to fill in the holes and help like to think that I had contributed a little bit to its line at www.digido.com glue everything together. Its very slow attack time success. ■ and gentle release let the transients through and retained the basic liveliness. It also helped that I was not using more than 2dB of gain reduction on the loudest passage of the piece and between 0.5 and 1dB throughout. The second piece was an upward expander in the digital box. It may seem counterproductive to put an expander and a compressor together, but for this single the two made beautiful music together. I used the upward expander to get a bit of edge in the sound, enhance the build into the final chorus and retain the liveliness, it also was tempering the molasses of the The remarkable new SADiE LRX has been designed to fulfil optical compressor. While I was adjusting each of the the needs of an ever more complex recording environment. It is as effective in capturing original soundtracks for film dynamics processors I was also making minor tweaks and television production as it is for producing location in equalisation because dynamics processing affects audio recordings for release on distributed media such as CD the tonal response and EQ must be done in context. or DVD. I then moved to the soft introduction to the song, and I tried another processor, a digital multiband The flexibility of the LRX hinges on its ability to utilise a parallel compressor. Normally I’m not a fan of standard laptop running Windows XP® via USB2 as the host multiband processors except to help fix bad mixes, computer together with combinations of the same high quality but I intended to use the parallel compressor as a i/o cards as the SADiE H64 multitrack workstation. A tactile hardware control surface is employed, incorporating a small dynamic equaliser, giving subtle presence to the low assignable mixer and full editorial interface, plus dedicated level passages without making the higher passages transport keys. strident. I saw a subtle smile creep into Fred’s visage, so I knew I was making progress, but I kept a straight face, because I had only just begun! I then spent 15 minutes tweaking the interaction between the equalisation and the three dynamics processors. Sometimes the sound jumped out unpleasantly as I tested some extreme settings of the expander, but it was all part of the experimentation to optimise the processing for this song. When the song started to take on a new life that felt considerably better to me than Fred’s already excellent mix, I knew I had something going. Now it was time to put the icing on the cake. I changed the parallel compressor into M/S mode and This powerful combination is enhanced the S channel with a touch more parallel supplied with a tailored multichannel compression, which subtly brought up the ambience version of the SADiE on-screen graphical user channel at low levels and gave the song a deeper, interface. Timecode and professional genlock facilities are richer character. At each stage I A/B-compared what incorporated and a video stream may be simultaneously captured for playback or on-set ADR. The system supports a I was doing to the mix to make sure that I was not wide range of industry file interchange formats, plus a second changing the intent but rather helping to take it in external drive may be simply attached via USB2 or Firewire to the direction that I felt Fred was going in the first mirror recordings and provide simultaneous safety copies. place. The next processor I tried was one of my own Contact your nearest SADiE dealer or main office and visit our invention, that brings out the inner detail and depth of website for further details and a brochure. the music, but I decided that we already had enough ear-candy, so I rejected my own processor. However, when I listened to the reduction to 16-bit, I restored a little bit of my ambience processor to help reduce the pain of reduction. United Kingdom: SADiE UK The Old School, Stretham Ely, Cambs. CB6 3LD. UK Tel: +44 (0)1353 648 888 Fax: +44 (0)1353 648 867 The last step was to see if I could further increase USA: SADiE Inc the recording’s absolute loudness without taking the 475 Craighead Street, Nashville TN 37204 USA Tel: +1 615 327 1140 Fax: +1 615 327 1699 sound downhill. This involved a high-end digital Europe: SADiE GmbH limiter and experienced ears to make sure that the Villa Leinen, Kollwitz Strasse 16, 73728 Esslingen. Germany Tel: +49 (0)711 3969 380 Fax: +49 (0)711 3969 385 DIGITAL PRECISION transients were not being degraded or the song was

Readers Quiz

....introducing the

SADiE LRX Flexible Location Recorder

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January/February 2006

resolution

slaying dragons

Design Like many other skills, design is in short supply in these commoditised days. JOHN WATKINSON argues that declining design is inevitable in the main but need not be universal.

john watkinson ‘Although the audio industry isn’t a mass market, a lot of manufacturers are acting as if it is. The problem with this commoditisation is that it ends up as an economic battle to see who can make it cheapest. Design always suffers in these battles.’

N MY LAST ARTICLE the concept of classic designs was examined. I have a great interest in the process of design and, rightly or wrongly, I choose to reﬁne my own design process by studying how earlier good designs came into being. Interestingly, 62

I ﬁnd that the principles actually change very little from industry to industry and little over time. Sydney Camm, the designer of the Hurricane and the Hunter aircraft, said you produced your best work as part of a small team under pressure. resolution

Our educational system does not teach how to design. Most of education is about analysis, taking things apart if you will, whereas design is synthesis. Good design requires familiarity with a whole range of subjects and an ability to balance strengths in one area against weaknesses elsewhere. There is no scientific explanation for how that is done well by a few and badly by most, so I would contend that it is an art, hence the use of the term in my book titles. These subjects include not just the technology of the device and how it is manufactured, but also topics such as ergonomics, psychology and aesthetics. A technological education generally excludes aesthetics and human factors, whereas a classical or social science education excludes technology. Several things follow from this fundamental mistake. We get inarticulate scientists and engineers, aesthetically challenged products and politicians and accountants who are ill-equipped to take decisions in a technologically based society. It is almost the hallmark of a politician that there is no ability to take scientific advice or to interpret statistics. It is almost the hallmark of an accountant to hold that research is pointless because it doesn’t show a profit. Modern education is increasingly specialist. Not surprisingly one finds highly successful designers with little or no academic background. There are a few fundamentals that it is unwise to transgress. The existence of a professional marketing process is of incalculable value. Proper marketing is bi-directional and it is just as important that the designers are told what the customer wants as it is to tell the customers what they can have. A good designer listens very carefully to what customers say they want, without forgetting why they are saying it, and then figures out what they need. There are a number of reasons to embark on a new design. Staying ahead of the competition is a common driver. However, as was remarked in the last article, after a technology matures all that can be done is to make it cheaper. Regrettably an increasingly common driver for new design is the doubtful pursuit of novelty. For some reason the consumer is supposed to equate ‘new’ with ‘better’. Maybe when technology was evolving rapidly that equation held. Today with depressingly regularity ‘new’ means untested. When a new technology comes along, the consumer is again supposed to equate ‘technology’ with ‘desirable’. It cannot be sufficiently stressed that people don’t want technology; they want results. We can make refrigerators that work on the ammonia cycle powered by burning gas, using a mechanically driven compressor or using the Peltier effect. These are technologies. What the consumer wants is a cold beer. He doesn’t give a primate’s how the temperature was maintained. The same can be said for audio amplifiers. Competently designed and kept out of clipping, I don’t care if the things use vacuum tubes, FETs or transistors, they will all sound the same. Naturally this is anathema to the hifi industry, but then design has been all but eliminated from that sphere as is made clear by the fact that we don’t see any progress. While all good amplifiers sound the same, not all are equally efficient. The Class A amplifier is analogous to driving with a brick on the throttle and controlling the speed with the brakes. Clearly the future of audio amplification lies with switching devices. New technologies put special demands on marketing skills. If the technology is really new, the customer can’t be expected to understand it and so asking for his views may not be fruitful. The technology has to be explained first. Ultimately the level of understanding may be so low that proponents of new January/February 2006

slaying dragons designs pull their hair out. The Wright brothers failed to interest the US military in aircraft until they flourbombed a naval vessel from the air. Charles Parsons failed to interest the Royal Navy in steam turbines until he ran rings round a fleet review with a ship that nothing in the navy could catch. Frank Whittle’s turbojet engine met a wall of apathy. The apathy is not just from authority, but is also commonly found within large companies. The quality of design is influenced by many factors. When a new technology is invented, the inventors will be deeply interested in development and will ensure that design rules are followed. The wall of apathy will mean that often the only way to get moving is to start a new company, thus forming the small team under pressure. The first products are successful and the company grows. This is where the danger lies, because as successful companies grow rapidly, the recruiting process is never very good and the company starts to take on people who will ultimately stultify it. As the company grows further it becomes too valuable to take risks and its actions become increasingly conservative. At this point the creative founders have become bored and leave (Usually with handsome pay-offs. Ed). The company is now run by accountants who have no knowledge of the technology. The only thing they understand is how to make it cheaper. That is the start of the decline, because making things cheaper isn’t design; it’s production. And if a young inventor approaches them with an idea, they will turn it down because

they don’t understand and he will start his own small company and take business from those who declined him, hastening their end. I recall that when workstations started to be built, using disk drives for audio and video editing, there were two companies that had the resources to make these effortlessly. Ampex actually made hard disk drives at one time, and Sony invented the 3 1/2-inch floppy. Neither of them saw the way that audio and video production was going and it was left to DAR, Lightworks and Avid, all new companies, to reap the benefits. In my view a lot of professional audio equipment has gone down the road of making things cheaper. Although the audio industry isn’t a mass market, a lot of manufacturers are acting as if it is. The problem with this commoditisation is that it ends up as an economic battle to see who can make it cheapest. Design always suffers in these battles. Ultimately it may not be possible to recover because the margins are so low that there is insufficient funding for research. Another indication of design bankruptcy is the retro look. Products are made to look like older products that had achieved some kind of status. The old Mini was hardly a triumph of design. The distributor cap was right behind the grille so it couldn’t be driven in the rain, the subframe rusted alarmingly and in an impact the passenger compartment folded up, but it did at least have good primary safety on account of its innovative suspension (Up until the subframe collapsed that is. Ed). The new Mini from

a technological standpoint is totally conventional. It is also enormous in comparison and just resembles an old Mini from a distance. The new VW beetle is in the same category. This isn’t design; it’s somewhere between pastiche and kitsch. Commoditised products are all the same. The control panels are smaller than they should be and the number of controls is reduced by using multilayer menus that are an ergonomic nightmare. A feature of commoditised design that drives me nuts is the use of symbols. Once upon a time a control was labelled in plain English, or the language of the country where it was sold. Now there is a symbol that is equally incomprehensible in many countries. In audio equipment, it’s frustrating. In other ﬁelds it can be dangerous. When a symbol lights up on a car dashboard, it takes longer to interpret the symbol than it does to read the plain English legend. We also ﬁnd politically correct legends nowadays. My coffee machine has a control marked ‘strong’ at one end of the scale, but ‘light’ at the other end, probably because some oaf argued that putting the word ‘weak’ on a product would imply inadequacy. However, I discovered that the legend was not resistant to de-scaler. Because it’s a poor design, the legend soon dissolved. In many cases the best designs came from people who couldn’t buy what they needed and had to make their own. Being your own customer is a powerful design tool as if it’s not right it gets changed. Today the gulf between designers and users has never been wider. ■

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January/February 2006

resolution

your business

Get a (new) job You might have noticed that, as the technology gets more and more powerful, more and more people are calling themselves producers and mixers of music. They are also doing so at a time when the conventional music industry itself is in a steady decline. In other words, more and more people are vying for a piece of a business that’s getting smaller and smaller.

dan daley

‘I bring this up partly as a churlish reminder that as difficult as the music business has become in the last five years or so, it has the potential to get significantly crappier.’

HE VERY CONCEPT of the producer is in danger of becoming as commoditised as the music itself has. In a long-overdue article in the New York Times last November that exposed the ‘beats’ that form the core of hip-hop for the mindless machine-driven drivel that the vast majority of them (and the songs they spawn) are, noted producer Dallas Austin commented, ‘[The market] has become so overflooded [sic] with producers, they say, “Just listen to my tracks and if you hear a beat you want, pick it.” They do the beats hoping artists will say, “That one sounds like me.”’ Although producers, such as the Neptunes, can command six figures for a beat, the vast preponderance of them are virtually given away by a surfeit of young novice producers desperate to get a cut. P Diddy has reportedly assembled a crew of beat makers in a sort of well-padded sweatshop, churning out hundreds of beats that he will choose from for his next album. I bring this up partly as a churlish reminder that as difficult as the music business has become in the last five years or so, it has the potential to get significantly crappier. But it’s also an opportunity to talk about other equally interesting and rewarding things that those same production talents can be applied to in fields that may not get you laid regularly but will keep you well-fed. Forensic Audio — Forensic audio is the stuff TV docudramas are made of, extracting critical information out of a sea of sonic noise and artefacts. Listen to forensic specialist Arlo West recall a notuntypical case and compare it to one spent doing 100 takes of the same line of a vocal. ‘A police department in Texas sent me a tape of a lady who dialled police emergency 911 when someone broke into her house, and she stayed on the line while the intruder was in her house. She never hung up the phone. Not even when he killed her.’

DAN DALEY West owns a one-man forensic audio operation in the small town of Auburn, Maine. Nearly two decades ago, he was a regular client of Dallas Sound Labs in Texas, where he worked on ﬁlms like Titanic and with artists like U2. A few career upheavals and a chance meeting with a barrister trying to parse a bad cassette tape changed all that. Compared to the £250 or so a day that most in-the-trenches engineers earn for a day’s labour (and they’re the lucky ones), West’s card rate for work such as audio enhancement and track cleaning is £100 per hour, with a minimum £300 retainer required just to walk in the door. He gets £500 a day for in-court testimony, plus expenses, and can charge £30 for a CD-R copy of any work he does -– the same CD-R most engineers give away at the end of a session. What’s perhaps more astounding is that he rarely gets any dickering on costs — ‘Attorneys just want to get the job done, and they’re used to paying pretty steep fees for expert work and testimony,’ says West — and that he considers his rates on the low side of what similar service providers get, noting that his relatively remote location won’t allow him to charge what someone in, say, New York might get. West has a relatively Spartan equipment complement; most of his work is done in Sound Forge v.6, running on three homemade computers. In addition to an array of Direct X plug-ins for EQ and de-essing, he’ll occasionally employ a Focusrite Platinum Voicemaster Pro for outboard processing. Low overhead, high payback, and a CSI-level of glamour. That’s a lot of buck for relatively little bang. Audio Archiving — The British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress. Massive repositories of audio on everything from old Edison cylinders to the music of the spheres — celestial creakings recorded for the still-ongoing SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project. And

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January/February 2006

your business spoken words — oral histories recorded to document not just the speciﬁcs of a life but its emotions, as well. Historians estimate there are literally tens of millions of hours of such oral histories stashed at governmental, organisational and academic institutions globally, and most are on analogue tape, and many of them are deteriorating faster than they can be saved. Projects such as the Ellis Island Oral History Project and the EU-sponsored Echo Project are challenges to audio archivists globally. It may not be as ﬂashy as forensic audio, but it is just as emotionally and professionally demanding and rewarding. Curtis Peoples once spent years scavenging for assistant engineering jobs until he decided he needed to secure his future and went back to college to get a degree in another area of personal interest: history. At Texas Tech University in Lubbock, he volunteered to work on the university’s Vietnam Archives project, which was collecting and organising artefacts from the war. As it turned out, these would eventually include thousands of hours of oral histories recorded on analogue tape, much of which was decaying. Peoples applied his knowledge of audio and researched ‘stickyshed’ syndrome — the breakdown of the binding emulsion that holds the tape formulation to the tape backing. ‘I discovered that tape emulsion formulations had changed in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly due to more intense demands by the music industry to increase tape’s technical characteristics,’ he explains. But what was good for music at the time wasn’t necessarily good for legacy. ‘The newer tape formulations were more prone to collect ambient moisture, especially if they weren’t stored in climate-controlled conditions.’ Peoples eventually became the chief archivist for    



the Vietnam project, and since then has moved over to the same position for the university’s Southwest Collections archive, which chronicles the region’s history. Using a Cube-Tec Quadriga system, which digitises audio into BWF as well as automatically logging metadata and audio artefacts for later cleaning, Peoples now digitises oral histories by the dozens. It’s all been a serendipitous convergence of personal passions and skills. But he’s already looking to the future, realising that what’s going on in academia now is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the oceans of analogue information that will have to be digitally archived. ‘The commercial potential for this is enormous,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be nothing but a growth area. It’s a very good start-up type of business, since it doesn’t require a lot of capital. But it does require some very speciﬁc skills.’ The Corporate Reel World — With globalisation the buzzword in the corporate world, corporate sound is perhaps truly the most international of audio avenues. Paul Guzzone, producer and owner of Triple Z Music in Brooklyn, found that out when he ﬂew to Japan for IBM to create the music for the global computer maker’s sponsorship efforts for the 1998 Winter Olympics there. He worked with the Japanese band Kotoza to create a theme track for IBM based around the traditional Japanese instrument the koto. ‘We wanted to take koto music and create a song using it in a western pop music form,’ Guzzone explains. ‘Ultimately, I took a track of a solo koto played by the woman in the band — the koto is traditionally played by women — and brought it back to my studio on a DAT and built a new track around it. Then I sent the track back to Japan where she played the solo part again but to the new backing track.’  

Guzzone, a producer by ambition (he’s coproduced a Bacon Brothers record) and an engineer by necessity, sought to augment his income about 15 years ago by going to work for a corporate event production company. He learnt the trade and gave it his own spin a dozen years ago, doing productions for new auto introductions and Time magazine’s 75th anniversary party at Radio City Music Hall. ‘I got into it at a good time,’ he says. ‘I hit my stride as corporate events were getting bigger and more elaborate.’ It’s not a piece of cake -– he can count on perhaps a couple of major events a year. But the rewards can be good — as much as £25,000 to £40,000 per major event, plus between £2,000 and £3,500 per demo. But that includes sometimes seemingly endless meetings with clients and other media producers on the event, and often as many rewrites, plus the time spent waiting for approvals of lyrics and melodies, less the cost of additional musicians on tracks, and time spent on site before and during and event. And not every bid will get accepted — there is competition out there. ‘It can be a good living, but you will have to work for it and at it,’ says Guzzone. Everyone here started out with a desire to produce records. But when the odds of success at that — which are long to start with — didn’t pan out, all of them found alternative paths for their audio talents and passion. And instead of waiting for SonyBMGWarnerEMIUniversal to pay that longoverdue invoice for one track a couple of years from now, you might instead be forensically checking voice mails in a lawsuit, or recording an oral history of someone in prison, or doing the production on Shawn Fanning’s Napster II roll-out extravaganza. All in a day’s work. ■

 

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January/February 2006

resolution

headroom LETTER TO TIM SUMMERHAYES Dear Tim, We read with interest your recent proﬁle in Resolution magazine (V3.6). Did we laugh or cry? You guessed it...we laughed. We’re interested to know why a person of your apparent professional standing should feel the need to put down fellow professionals in this way. We too heard the start of Live 8 because we were there mixing it. Nigel Godrich and Steve Lillywhite were also in the truck and they liked the mix and approved it. Within the hour, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by Paul McCartney and U2 was available for download, went instantly to number 1 and stayed in the download top ten all summer. That, in our humble opinion, is a result. It’s a mystery why the BBC’s Live Music Team were asked by the Live 8 organisation to handle such a complex and important event, given that, in your opinion, our ‘absolutely appalling’ approach to live music recording makes every band ‘sound the same’, ‘as though they’re a jazz group’. A possible explanation is that we confused Live 8 with a jazz festival. That could also explain why notable jazz groups like Coldplay, Radiohead, Super Furry Animals, Faithless and the Foo Fighters insist that one of us do the sound when being recorded for BBC Radio and televised festivals. We have the added burden of trying to make the ﬁrst number of a live set sound as good as we possibly can. It can only be put down to the misguided notion on the part of radio producers and TV directors that a band walking on stage and starting with one of their big hits is somehow exciting and important to capture. Your solution is so elegant. Mess it up so they can’t use it for broadcast. This mantra, the ‘Summerhayes Method’ will from now on be an important chapter in all BBC training and attitude manuals. Oh, and your thoughts on synchronisation. Don’t worry. We don’t understand it either. Don’t take this personally, Tim. After all, we are all professionals. Miti Adhikari, Simon Askew, Mike Walter, Paul Long

and made many radio programmes about the subject in Holland as well as in Germany. Please could you forward this e-mail to him. Thanks in advance and also thanks for your wonderful magazine. Jos Janssen, Sonology, Arnhem, Netherlands

MORE MARKETING HYPE Bravo on another great issue. I also appreciated the E-Trap article and will be investigating it myself at some stage and I think I’m in agreement with you on the importance of marketing (Headroom V4.8). But we’re lucky in this business because I think most of us know what the marketing is trying to sell us but have you seen the advertisements plastered all over Dixons and the other high street electrical suppliers on the run up to Christmas? I can’t imagine what ordinary people are supposed to make of it, I know it means absolutely nothing to my old mum. They’re selling gadgets — pretty girls or handsome men holding small shiney gadgets of indeterminate purpose or function. People are buying into the lifestyle without knowing what it does or really caring. It’s a terrible waste when so many genuinely good audio ideas have not caught on with consumers because they were never marketed right to them or explained properly. Ken Pripps, Shefﬁeld, UK

Advertisers Index API ................................................... 27 Audio Technica ................................ 20 Calrec .............................................. 58 Digico .............................................. 09 DigiDesign....................................... 52 DPA ................................................. 11 Enhanced Audio ............. Classified 63 ESE .................................................. 64 Fairlight ........................................... 51 Genelec .................Inside Front Cover Harman Pro ..................................... 31 HE Studio Technik .......... Classified 63 Euphonix ............ Outside Back Cover HHB Lynx ....................................... 65 HHB Millennia ................................. 13 Loud/Mackie ................................... 07 Lydkraft ........................................... 19 Merging Technologies .................... 41 MJQ................................ Classified 63 NAB ................................................. 33 Pro Light and Sound ....................... 45 Sadie................................................ 61 Schoeps ........................................... 17

GAMELAN RESULT In the November/December (V4.8) issue of your magazine I read the Headroom letter from Giovanni Sciarrino. I am interested in giving him some advice on recording Gamelan music. Since 30 years I am a location sound engineer, composer of electronic music as well as a gamelan musician. I have recorded many gamelan performances

SCV London/Benchmark ................. 43 Readers who wondered about Ken Scott’s comments about the Trident Studios piano in this issue might be interested to know that they can buy a rather nice t-shirt from the post outﬁt that now occupies the space where the studios were. www.tridentsoundstudios.co.uk

AUDIOlookilikies

SCV London/Fostex ........................ 47 SCV London/Universal Audio ......... 15 Sennheiser ....................................... 23 Smart AV ......................................... 21 Sonic Distribution/Apogee ............. 25 Sonic Distribution/SE Mics ............. 55 Sonic Distribution/Waves................ 53 Sony Plug-ins ................................... 39 Tannoy ............................................. 35 Tascam ............................................. 18 TESI ................................................. 44 TL Audio .......................................... 29

Steve Martin, Actor

Dave Neal, Soundcraft/Studer UK

John F. Kennedy, former US president

Andy Day, Resolution contributor

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TL Commerce ................. Classiﬁed 63

January/February 2006

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