Resolution V4.4 May/June 2005 by Resolution

MAY/JUNE 2005 V4.4

THE NEXT GENERATION AUDIO PRODUCTION MAGAZINE

Tony Visconti The master

Post: Steve Price’s orchestral approach Broadcast: Laurie Taylor on mixing broadcast sound Infrastructure upgrades at Slovak Television Bob Katz turns audio investigator Meet your maker: Ole Brøsted Sorensen — DPA Ten trend-setting mobiles

REVIEWS • Fairlight Dream Constellation • • • •

• Audio-Technica AT2020 • Hear Technologies Hear Back TL Audio M4 • Propellerheads TC Electronic VSS3 Reason 3.0 SRS Labs 6.1 • Enhanced Audio M600 Mackie Big Knob • DAV Electronics BG4

dialogue editing gaming development mobile b ro a d c a s t

24p video

post production QC for CD / DVD background music

composing / scoring on location

EXPERIENCED Introducing the Genelec 8020A - the newest model in the Genelec 8000 MDE™ Series. This 4” bi-ampliﬁed monitor offers all the genuine Genelec quality you’ve come to expect from the leader in active monitoring in a package that ﬁts into the smallest space and budget.

8000 series

The new 8020A monitor draws upon 27 years of Genelec engineering experience and introduces you to a new category of playback monitor. Revolutionary Minimum Diffraction Enclosure™ technology provides pinpoint imaging and the lowest distortion levels, with a frequency response extending to a remarkable 65 Hz. As part of this new product introduction, Genelec offers the new 7050B 8” Active LSE™ 5.1 channel subwoofer. Combined with the 8020A this system offers an astonishing 25Hz - 21kHz experience in a wide variety of stereo and multi-channel environments. Go ahead, play games with other monitors. If you want some serious sound in your audio suite, the choice is clear. It’s Genelec.

www.genelec.com International enquiries: Genelec Oy, Olvitie 5, FIN-74100 Iisalmi, Finland T +358 17 83 881, F +358 17 812267 Email genelec@genelec.com In the USA: Genelec, Inc., 7 Tech Circle, Natick, MA 01760, USA T +1 508 652 0900, F +1 508 652 0909 Email genelec.usa@genelec.com In China: Genelec China Rep. Ofﬁce, SOHO New Town, 88 Jianguo Road, D-1504, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100022, China T + 86 10 8580 2180, F + 86 10 8580 2181 Email genelec.china@genelec.com In Sweden: Genelec Sverige, Box 5521, S-141 05 Huddinge T +46 8 449 5220, F +46 8 708 7071 Email info@genelec.com

8020A’s shown with 7050B LSE™ subwoofer

May/June 2005 V4.4

ISSN 1477-4216 THE NEXT GENERATION AUDIO PRODUCTION MAGAZINE

News & Analysis 6

Leader

News Sales, contracts, appointments and the bigger picture

Products New introductions and announcements plus Digidesign and Steinberg platform news.

Headroom Line array awry and craft appeal.

Craft 16

48 52

Slovak Television

New European Union States are updating their broadcast infrastructures and leapfrogging technology generations.

Tony Visconti

The Master on musical standards, the fear of commitment, and why recording is no great mystery.

Ten

Sweet Spot

Laurie Taylor

Steve Price

Mixing broadcast sound with a good plumber’s mentality for sitcoms and music. An orchestral recordist counts tracks, stems and the importance of getting the band happy.

Trend-setting mobiles Small active monitor technology explained with reference to level and application.

HD and the PC

Progress and developments in picture acquisition.

Katz’s column

Bob turns audio investigator with Becky and Fred.

Meet your maker

Ole Brøsted Sørensen — the man behind DPA’s technology discusses the quality issue.

Business 60

Direct to disc

Live acts are recording gigs themselves, we look into the mechanics and the proﬁt.

Your business Producers will ﬁnd the once clear-cut deﬁnitions of what they do changing in the new entertainment model.

Technology 68

Crafting the signal

Analogue processing can involve a maze of components that alter the sound. We look at some classics to see what is happening.

Slaying Dragons Impedance crops up a lot in audio. Watkinson thinks that complex is cool.

Reviews 24

Fairlight Dream Constellation

Mackie Big Knob

TL Audio M4

Hear Technologies Hear Back

TC Electronic VSS3

Propellerheads Reason 3.0

Audio-Technica AT2020

Enhanced Audio M600

SRS Labs 6.1 Circle surround

DAV Electronics BG4

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, Jim Evans, 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 PRISM MEDIA Products has expanded its US operation with the appointment of Frank Oglethorpe as US recording sales and technical specialist. He was formerly technical director of UK rental house FX Rentals.

S A L Z B R E N N E R S TA G E T E C Mediagroup has appointed Tokyo-based General Traders as its distributor for the Japanese broadcast market.

Burkhard Elsner (Mega), Henrik Holm (Lydkraft), Uwe Grundei (Mega). LYDKRAFT HAS appointed Mega Audio as its new distributor in Germany and Austria. Lydkraft has also appointed Barcelona-based Microfusa as its distributor in Spain. EUPHONIX HAS appointed Steve Morris as director of product development. He previously worked for Skywalker Sound and AMS-Neve. CHANDA COOK has joined Loud Technologies as public relations coordinator for the Mackie, Tapco and EAW brands worldwide. Loud Technologies has appointed Jim Shaw to the position of director of operations. He has previously worked for Alerton & Novar, Microsoft, Index Sensors and Controls, and Carver Corporation.

©2005 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

The resurrection of the Dr Who TV series in the UK has helped me to understand why we accept and absorb our entertainment the way we do. Two episodes in and there was an outcry about the programme being too frightening for small children to watch — this being a judgement from a generation that freely admits to having watched the early Dr Who series from behind their parents’ sofa. The difference is in the relative attitudes of the two generations to the delivery medium and their expectations. We hid behind furniture because the TV was still relatively new to us and the Daleks were in the room and they could get us. Children today understand that it’s a programme — a scary one perhaps — but it is delivered through something they are quite at ease with. It’s a TV and they don’t expect to be got. The recent multipart televising of Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl live show spectacular left me bored to distraction yet I am reliably informed by others that it was great to see and experience. I, not unreasonably given the high-cost posturing of the production, expected to be entertained. It’s not just about taste, it is about expectation. Are we now so bombarded with mediocrity that we settle for so little? This same lack of appreciation for excellence means you will hear ordinary folk telling you that you need a really good pair of headphones to really hear the beneﬁt of MP3. They’re ingesting not eating. I wonder if we’re not perhaps guilty of a similar low expectation when it comes to choosing our audio gear. Low price can focus the mind and cause us to justify pretty much anything yet we’re outraged if similar approaches are applied to hospitals and transport. So nobody dies because of pro audio, but it does matter and we should know better. We should expect excellence and demand it. Zenon Schoepe

BEIRG formed to protect UK RF Founder members of BEIRG — the British Entertainment Industry Radio Group — intend to appoint a consultant to collate the RF requirements of the production, broadcast, theatre and film making industries and to present them to Ofcom as the industry’s case for continued access to workable, clean RF spectrum. The group has been formed to address the issues arising from the potential sell-off of RF spectrum. A three-month consultation into the future of the UK RF landscape by Ofcom is due to start at the beginning of June 2005 and intends to have plans for Programme Making and Special Events RF usage in the UK by April 2006.

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.

In a joint statement Dennis Harburn, MD of Shure Distribution UK, and Paul Whiting, MD of Sennheiser UK, said: ‘The situation is potentially very serious. This is not a brand versus brand thing, but cuts right across the industry as a whole. Rather than scaremongering, BEIRG is a response to a real situation, happening now, that will not go away. Pressure on spectrum has never been greater and we need to make sure that, as an industry, we do all we can to ensure continued access to clean spectrum. The only people that can do this is ourselves, so as an industry we need to organise, and quickly.’ www.beirg.org.uk

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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APT buys out of SSL Belfast-based audio compression specialist APT has secured signiﬁcant equity and debt funding to complete a management buyout from its former owner Solid State Logic. Equity for the buyout was provided by venture capital companies Crescent Capital and Trinity Venture Capital and APT’s MD Noel McKenna and commercial director Jon McClintock. Bank of Ireland provided the debt funding. ‘This deal is something that Jon and I have been striving towards for some time,’ said McKenna. ‘We have both been with the company for 11 years and we are delighted to have the opportunity to participate in its ownership. Our aim is to continue to develop new products that will allow the radio broadcast industry to continue to deliver high quality audio. We will also be tackling multichannel applications for embedded audio into video and increasing our licensing portfolio for the professional and consumer audio markets. These areas have huge potential for the future of the company.’ McKenna added that they would appoint ten new members of staff over the next year.

Shelton’s banjo trial

Veteran producer Garey Shelton has taken delivery of a Mackie Digital X Bus desk for his Seattle-based studio. The Grammywinning bassist/engineer/producer’s ﬁrst project on the mixer was the upcoming release from avant-garde banjoist Danny Barnes (pictured left with Shelton). ‘I’ve been a Mackie D8B user for as long as the board has existed,’ Shelton said. ‘In fact, I took delivery of serial number seven. ‘I was thrilled with the fact that almost all the key commands I’m used to on the D8B are carried over to the Digital X Bus. My workflow is really unchanged. The touchscreen is a phenomenally stellar interface — it’s so intuitive, I can literally tailor it for the way I work. And I love the fact that most of the features I use all the time are hardware-based, so I can just reach for a knob or fader without even thinking about the interface.’

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May/June 2005

news Frankfurt up The Musikmesse and Prolight + Sound exhibitions in Frankfurt saw 92,720 trade visitors and members of the public from around 100 countries attend over the four days of the show. ‘Both fairs not only attracted 1% more visitors than last year but also rounded this off by setting a new record of 2,250 companies from 53 countries on the exhibitor side,’ said Detlef Braun, member of the board of management of Messe Frankfurt. The majority of visitors travelled from The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland while the list of overseas visitor nations was headed by the USA, South Korea, Japan and Israel.

Zurich posts with DS-00 Two Soundtracs DS-00s have been installed in the newly opened audio postproduction control rooms at TPC, the television post centre of Swiss national television in Zürich. A compact DS-00 with two 8-fader expanders has been

installed in Audio Suite VR2 while an unexpanded version is employed in the smaller Audio Suite AS2. The ergonomics of the control surface and touchscreen technology plus the practical MADI connection to its Pyramix systems were the features that led the studio to the DS-00. ‘The extensive automation features make the DS-00 an outstanding work instrument for us audio engineers,’ said Manfred Gysi, audio editor specialist at TPC.

Radio Hillingdon adds ‘Patientline’ room

Martin Mayer of Mister Master was a w a rd e d a n O P U S — D e u t s c h e r Bühnenpreis in the category of Sound Design at Prolight + Sound 2005 in Frankfurt. The award was for his work on the 5.1 open-air production of Aida for the Opera Festival in St Margarethen’s Roman quarry in Austria.

Hospital Radio Hillingdon completed its first phase of refurbishment in Studio 1 ﬁve years ago with a Sonifex Sovereign desk and has installed a second identical desk in its newly added Studio 2. The new studio will act as training area for new presenters and will also be used by the privately funded Patientline service when it comes on stream. Patientline provides a terminal at each patient’s bedside that includes T V, I n t e r n e t a n d e m a i l services. As part of the new build the station’s old rack room was refurbished with the installation of a range of Redboxes from Sonifex including two six-way distribution amps, stereo to mono

You enjoy and value your copy of Resolution.

May/June 2005

360 SYSTEMS has acquired a new 23,000 square foot building in Westlake Village, California to provide room for growth in engineering, sales, marketing and manufacturing. 360 Systems, 31355 Agoura Road, Westlake Village, CA 91361. Telephone numbers remain the same. KLOTZ DIGITAL has appointed Fred Leitner as senior sales manager Europe. He has worked as head of engineering at a number of European radio stations and worked at Audio Media Service, Tecnomatix Technologies, iSEG Technologies and Glory Media Consultants. SAV has signed an agreement to be Klotz Digital’s exclusive sales partner to cover the French radio broadcast market.

Level Magic sales

Jünger Audio has received an order for a system of 96 Level Magic processors with SDI interfacing from Astro Measat (Malaysia) for its new digital multichannel TV playout for Indonesia. A C8000 system with 48 processors and SDI interfacing has been ordered for Spain while other clients include Mediaset (Italy), Showtime (Dubai), Plaza Media (Germany), Sailing Channel (Italy), and Fox News (New York). Other operators currently evaluating Level Magic technology include Pro7Sat1Produktion (Germany), ESPN (New Jersey), Echostar (Wyoming), and Singapore Cable Vision (Singapore).

APPOINTMENTS

convertors, dual unbalanced to balanced convertors and twin stereo limiters. A RB-LC3 light controller that indicates mic live, studio live and telephone ringing has also been added.

AUDIO-TECHNICA Germany has taken over the sales, distribution and service of the complete Allen & Heath product line in Germany. TL AUDIO has added new distributors in Australia (Technical Audio Group), the US (Independent Audio) and Denmark Luthman Scandinavia. LUTZ BERNEKE has been appointed managing director of EVI Audio GmbH, with responsibility for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He has previously managed companies in North America, Brazil and Germany, working mainly in the mechanical engineering industry. Amptown Sound & Communication GmbH (ASC) has taken over the distribution of Telex/RTS intercom systems in Germany. MARTIN BURNS has been named managing sales director for Harrison console manufacturer GLW. He first served as general sales manager at GLW when the company was formed in 1989 and has since held positions at Siemens Audio, Fostex, 360 Systems, and ENCO Systems.

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news APPOINTMENTS TEAC EUROPE in Wiesbaden has taken on the distribution of ART products in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Wigmore Hall goes live

DIGIDESIGN HAS announced its worldwide sales and marketing team for the Venue product line: CJ Alvarado, logistics coordinator; Mike Case, European sales manager; Steve McCale, senior applications engineer; Masayuki ‘Mack’ Miyamura, Japan sales manager; Jeff Priepot, product specialist; Sheldon Radford, product manager; Christian Reichardt, sales manager (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland); Robert Scovill, market manager; and Lee Stein, North American sales manager. MILLENNIA MUSIC and Media Systems has appointed Joel Silverman as MD. He has 30 years’ experience in professional audio, including 15 years as VP sales at Lexicon. EVENTIDE HAS promoted Jason Beck to chief operating o ff i c e r. H e j o i n e d Eventide in 1999 as an engineer.

London classical music performance venue Wigmore Hall has added an in-house recording studio to serve its new CD label — Wigmore Hall Live — which aims to release 16 discs in its first year. With an inventory of mainly Schoeps, Sennheiser and AKG mics feeding Focusrite ISA 428s to a Yamaha DM1000, material is recorded and edited on Samplitude and backed up onto HHB CD-R recorders and a Tascam DA-98HR. Monitoring is ATC SCM20pro actives with more to be added with the imminent move to 5.1. ‘It is critical to have good monitoring whatever you do, and I have found ATCs to be extremely natural with sufficient dynamic range to recreate accurately the live performance in the studio,’ said Patrick Allen from Opera Omnia Productions who specified and installed the equipment. ‘Quite simply, if it sounds right in the studio then you can be confident it will translate well to other systems, something that is not always the case with more coloured monitors. Because we’re located some distance from the auditorium, we have a video link, although this is not always used as visual cues can sometimes distract you from what you’re hearing through the speakers.’

Queen’s Award for Broadcast Bionics

Broadcast Bionics has been awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise 2005 in recognition of ‘the significant impact its products have had on the broadcasting industry’. The company’s product PhoneBox is a computerised phone-in system designed for radio and TV. ‘The Queens Award for Enterprise in the category of Innovation is a fantastic achievement, and one that everyone at Broadcast Bionics is rightly proud of,’ said director Dan McQuillin (pictured left with lead developer Adam Wylde). ‘We’re based in rural West Sussex, UK, and employ local talented people, all of whom have contributed to the company’s success. It’s likely that very few people have actually heard of Broadcast Bionics, yet by listening to radio or even watching TV, many have unwittingly experienced our products, such is their popularity.’

Metropolis upgrades D

Constellation sales for France and Asia Flyline’s Andreas Michel and Eventide’s Ray Maxwell.

EVENTIDE HAS named Flyline Music AG its distributor for pro audio products in Switzerland. B E Y E R D Y N A M I C has been appointed UK distributor of Blue Sky speakers. APOGEE ELECTRONICS has moved to new premises at 1715 Berkeley St, Santa Monica, CA 90404, USA. Tel: +1 310 5849394. SONIC8 HAS been appointed UK distributor for Sontronics microphones. OTARI USA Sales has appointed Tim Murray as director of sales and marketing. He worked for Otari from 1997 to 2002 as regional sales manager and returns from Sennheiser Electronic Corp.

Fairlight has sold Dream Constellation consoles to French networks France 3 and TF1. Long time Fairlight user TF1 is using the MediaLink server to work the Constellation in parallel with two Fairlight Fame systems. Fairlight Dreams have also been selected by broadcasters and postproduction houses including NHK, Azabu Plaza, Crow Studios, Studio Impact, and Sapporo TV House in Japan and 3H Productions (pictured) in Taiwan and Hampdon Sound in Australia.

Hollywood-based World Wide Wadio recently installed a Fairlight Dream Constellation along with a StationPlus.

resolution

Studio D at Metropolis studios London has undergone an overhaul and installed a Digidesign Icon to run with HD3 Accel Pro Tools systems. The main stereo monitoring remains Genelec 1034A with the addition of a M&K 5.1 system. To support video playback, a Panasonic 52-inch plasma screen and a Canopus DV playback unit with the option of a Sony Digibeta have been added. ‘This is now an ideal room for our clients to bring to us projects from smaller production rooms and enjoy the benefits of our superb monitoring, outboard and expertise,’ said Metropolis chief engineer Matt Lawrence. ‘This could be overdubbing a major artist or finished final mixes. Studio D gives us the chance to combine the speed and costeffectiveness of working with Pro Tools with a more familiar user-interface and all the other great facilities here at Metropolis.’

May/June 2005

news

news SHORT NEWS

Aurus for Fuji TV

GIOIA MOLINARI has been appointed head of marketing and communications for Italian manufacturer RCF. She has a degree in marketing and languages and previously worked in the banking sector.

PMC’s Miles Roberts and AviTech’s Edvard Potisk. PMC HAS created a sales, distribution and service centre in V ienna in partnership with its Austrian distributor AviTech. AUTOGRAPH SALES has appointed Mike Mann to its board of directors, with responsibility for sales and business development and handling design and installation projects. He has variously worked for Meyer Sound, Cadac Electronics, Soundcraft, Drake and the Royal Opera House.

Japanese TV broadcaster Fuji TV has equipped one of its recording studios in its broadcasting centre in Tokyo with a Stagetec Aurus console. ‘Since dual use for live mixing and production was intended, Fuji TV was seeking ﬂexible equipment that adapts to both tasks,’ said Tadayoshi Shiraishi, MD of Japanese distributor General Traders. ‘With the combination of Aurus and Nexus we were able to close the gap between these two different applications and offer a perfect solution: compatibility to almost any digital or analogue format including SDI forwarding via Nexus; easy integration of supplementing equipment such as VTR or Pro Tools; full dynamic and static automation for recording; extreme reliability thanks to redundant layout and — last but not least — excellent sound quality.’ The desk features 40 channel strips and DSP power for 168 audio channels plus 128 mix buses. A Nexus network made up of ﬁve base devices complements the installation and provides for 220 multiformat I-Os.

Matthews lands own room at Ardent

The B-52’s recently booked Ardent Studios. (L-R) Fred Schneider, Keith Strickland, Cindy Wilson, producer/engineer Tom Durack, Kate Pierson, producer/engineer Pete Matthews, assistant engineer Adam Hill. Matthew Fletcher (HHB), Wayne Gilbert (HHB), Caroline Cook (HHB), Ian Jones (HHB), Robb Blumenreder (SEC), Thom Salisbury (SEC), Jim Schanz (SEC), Henry Edwards (HHB). SENNHEISER ELECTRONIC Corporation has been named HHB’s 2004 worldwide distributor of the year. SEC handles distribution of all HHB products in the USA, Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

Producer/engineer Pete Matthews is such a mainstay client for Ardent studios in Memphis that they recently opted to build him a new, private studio stuffed with the API gear he loves. ‘I’m really psyched about it,’ he said. ‘Among the API gear I have are 26 channels of 512C mic/line preamps, 25 550B 4-band EQs, four 560 graphic EQs, six 525 compressors, and a 64-input 8200 summing mixing system with a master section and bus compressor. My goal for the studio is to take some of the ﬁnancial burden off my development projects and make it a little easier on that end. Studio time costs money, and industry proﬁt margins aren’t what they used to be. As a result, record labels aren’t developing like they used to, either. Now the responsibility of development falls to guys like me.’

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m Visit ibution.co istr mation d c i .son nfor wwwor more i f

news THE BIG PICTURE

Sound works for Cardiff Icon

• NETGEMS’ IPLAYER+ digital terrestrial receiver combines the elements of a high-end digital terrestrial receiver — 7-day Electronic Programme Guide, TopUp TV ready, advanced interactive services and multiple AV outputs — with the additional functionality of a home entertainment system and communications centre. Users can watch free-to-view digital terrestrial channels, listen to a digital radio station, email or surf the web, send and receive SMS text messages via the TV, or stream MP3 ﬁles and JPEG images from a PC located in a different part of the house. The box can also function as a telephone answering machine and show who is calling on the TV screen and a USB Port permits direct play of audio and video from a portable multimedia player. Available online at www.iplayer. co.uk iPlayer retails at UK£89.99. • ALLISBLUE SAYS that more than 400,000 sms2mails have been sent to request information (in different forms) via its patented sms2mail communication platform. sms2mail allows anyone to send an sms to a short number and in return receive the requested information by email. This information can be sent in the form of a Powerpoint presentation, an Internet link, a video clip or a MP3 ﬁle to be downloaded. The short number is announced by a company as part of a promotional campaign and the model makes it possible to quantify in real time the results of a media plan. www.allisblue.com • DIGITAL ADVANCED Broadcasting, a pilot project to deliver advanced mobile entertainment, has been launched in Germany. The project uses DAB-based DMB technology (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) to broadcast radio and video content, as well as data services, to new portable receivers. The pilot will take place in Regensburg, Bavaria, and is expected to last for two years. It will work towards comprehensive coverage of FIFA World Cup 2006 via mobile entertainment devices. In Spain, the Government Council of the autonomous region of Murcia recently authorised the creation of a regional DAB digital radio public network. This decision is the result of an agreement between the Council for Economy, Industry and Innovation, which will allocate €527,000 to the project, the public broadcaster Onda Regional and the Integra Foundation. The new DAB network will be rolled-out and run by the Integra Foundation, while Onda Digital will provide content for two DAB-only programmes. The network will also allow space for data services.

Cardiff-based facility Soundworks has ordered two Digidesign Icon systems with D-Control from Scrub, the Soho-based post division of HHB. Established in 1991 by Simon Jones, Soundworks is a multistudio facility specialising in sound for TV, ﬁlm and digital media, with a reputation for high quality work in animation. A 32-fader D-Control console will form the centrepiece of a new studio currently being built and an additional 16-fader console has already been installed in a revamped Studio 2. ‘We have around a dozen Pro Tools systems with a variety of mixing solutions including Pro Control and SSL Axiom,’ said Jones. ‘For us, the Icon D-Control is ideal; providing the complete edit-and-mix integration we’ve become accustomed to with the Pro Tools/ProControl combination, while offering the kind of user feedback and functionality previously on offer only from consoles costing well into six ﬁgures.’

Paris Vista is all talk

Les Grosses Têtes is France’s oldest and most popular radio talk show and is broadcast from the Grand Studio at RTL Paris, where its is now produced on a Studer Vista 7. Installed as part of a complete refurbishment of the studio, the desk is equipped with 60 faders, 10 of which are in a remote bay. ‘The versatility of the console, which offers full dynamic automation and can also be completely reconﬁgured, was one of the key criteria,’ said Philippe Magniez, in charge of engineering at RTL. ‘We can keep the continuity with Studer, which has already equipped five RTL studios with digital consoles. It also offers continuity for the freelance sound engineers who use the studio, many of whom are already trained on this console in France.’

Motormusic splits with KT

Quested is back with new monitor range The Barcelona AES sees the return to the limelight of studio and monitor designer Roger Quested with his new S range selfpowered monitors. The monitors are the result of two years intensive research and development between the acoustic and electronic know how of Quested and MC2 Audio’s Terry Clarke (pictured) — two of pro audio’s most respected designers. The design brief was ‘to achieve the highest sonic quality and integrity at a price that would be accessible across a broad spectrum of monitor markets’. MC2 Audio directors, Ian McCarthy and Terry Clarke, recognised the synergy between the two brands having already OEMed ampliﬁers to Quested for its active systems for some years when they acquired Quested Monitoring Systems in 2003. Roger Quested, who started the company in 1985, has continued in his role as loudspeaker designer and technical director. ‘We are very excited about these new products, which are the ﬁrst to integrate MC 2 Audio electronics and Quested speaker design,’ said McCarthy. ‘The S

range has given us a sound foundation on which to build and I believe that with our commitment to promoting the highest standards of audio quality and reliability in manufacture, the future for Quested looks very promising indeed.’

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Belgium recording facility Motormusic has bought a 60-input Klark Teknik active splitter system for its mobile trucks. The operation offers two recording studios in addition to two mobile trucks that specialise in the recording of national and international live pop, classical and world music concerts as well as live broadcast. The format of the KT system suits Motormusic as it has enabled both mobiles to access a modular system that can be quickly conﬁgured to suit particular applications. ‘We chose Klark Teknik for several reasons,’ explained studio manager Hans Bellens. ‘First of all for its unsurpassed sound and headroom, and also because the 12-unit format is a lot handier than having all channels together in one big system, which also means less weight and more flexibility! Another important factor was that our system is conﬁgured as standard with 12 pair cables.’

May/June 2005

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news THE BIG PICTURE • GERMAN CHANCELLOR Gerhard Schrøder and director general of Deutsche Welle, Erik Bettermann, launched a new Arabic language service of DW-TV in Kuwait. Germany’s international television service will broadcast three hours of programming daily in Arabic. ‘This strengthens the position of Deutsche Welle in ArabicIslamic regions,’ said Bettermann. ‘DW-TV is the ﬁrst European television broadcaster to present news with Arabicspeaking anchorpersons.’ The programme is based around two daily news shows of 26 minutes covering politics, business, the arts and sport. The shows are transmitted via the Nilesat satellite and reach about ten million viewers in more than 20 countries from Morocco to Saudi Arabia.

• THE 3000TH album on SACD is Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. The album was launched on CD originally in 1985 while that format was still in its infancy and went on to sell more than 20 million copies and to record No.1s in 22 countries. The 20th anniversary of the album’s launch is being marked with the release of a remixed and remastered hybrid surround sound version of the album on SACD.

NX-6A 3rd Resol 9-5-05

5/9/05

Biz bites

A storm of controversy greeted the inclusion of digital downloads in the UK Official Charts, writes Nigel Jopson. In a move that BARD (British Association of Record Dealers), co-owners of the OCC (Official Charts Company) with the BPI ( who represent British major labels) might soon regret, the new chart was launched despite strenuous protests from indie label representative body AIM. Many indie labels still do not have their repertoire available on market-leading download service iTunes, owing to intractable negotiations with Apple. Alison Wenham, Chief Executive of AIM, requested either a weighting system to compensate for this, or a delay in launching the charts. This request was ignored, so AIM lodged an official complaint with UK watchdog the Office of Fair Trading. If the OFT finds there was a breach of the Competition Act, a fine of up to 10% of a company’s UK turnover can be levied. Wenham said: ‘We regard it as an option of last resort, but clearly sense does not seem to have prevailed, which is why we’ve taken it to the OFT.’ Downloads now overshadow physical single sales, accounting for a 53% share of the market. During the first quarter of 2005, Universal and Sony-BMG commanded a 64.2% share of the singles market. The only act in the top selling singles top 10 (Q1) not signed to either of these majors was Stereophonics (V2). A mere week later, it was BARD who was crying foul as EMI issued a very limited-edition 7-inch single of Gorillaz track Feel Good Inc, to sneakily circumvent the rule that states a chart download single must be accompanied by a physical release. How limited? Well ... there were just 96 physical sales in the week the single climbed to 21, bolstered by 5,162 downloads. Retailers fumed as they were left with gaps on chart walls, market leader HMV took it particularly hard, having been strong supporters of the Official Charts, and of Gorillaz in particular. After an angry meeting of the Chart Supervisory Committee, EMI papered over the cracks by claiming it had been a one-off and would not be repeated. Imagine how many more single sales there might be if there were instant CD-single burning kiosks in stores. With current technology, a 2-track mini-single could be burnt and printed in the time required to process the transaction at a till. Nokia has launched the N91 mobile phone, equipped with a 4Gb hard disk and capable of storing up to 3,000 MP3, WMA or AAC encoded tracks, it will retail for around UK£450. We can also look forward to a Walkman branded phone from Sony Ericsson, and the much rumoured iTunes compatible Motorola/Apple cellphone. Downloading tracks from DAB radio will soon be possible after a deal between radio group UBC media, radio manufacturer Pure, and Universal Music, EMI and AIM. Rajar figures show DAB listening increasing and sales of DAB radios in the UK have passed the 1 million mark. Warner Music Group is expected to raise at least US$580m from its IPO (Initial Public Offering), and EMI is forecasting annual group profit slightly ahead of estimates at UK£141m. The Naxos label suffered a setback in its court battle to sell UK public domain recordings in the US. Capitol argued the reissued CDs competed with their own releases. Clear Channel and MCD Productions now own an 80% stake in Mean Fiddler Music Group after buying out founder Vince Power. Clear Channel currently run Cardiff International Arena, the Point in Dublin and the Hammersmith and Manchester Apollos. The Mean Fiddler deal gives control of Reading, Homelands and Leeds festivals as well as The Astoria, Mean Fiddler, The Garage, The Forum and Jazz Café venues.

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VAP Sound Inn Studios in Tokyo has installed two SSL AWS900 consoles to handle vocal dubbing and smallscale recording projects. The complex has seven studios including its ﬂagship Studio A, which was recently equipped with a XL9000 K Series.

Live sound specialist Sound Creators Inc in Tokyo has become the ﬁrst Japanese company to install a C200 console in a mobile truck. ‘The C200 was perfectly suited to our requirements because it has fantastic 5.1 capabilities and a large number of inputs, which is ideal for live sound recording,’ said SCI MD Fumiaki Saito. ‘It also offers exceptional audio quality and is very user friendly, which is an important consideration for the freelance engineers using our vehicles.’

HEAR YOUR SOUND At last there is a choice. Monitors which tell you how good you sound, or monitors which ‘make’ you sound good. Listen to a pair of powered Fostex NX-6A monitors and you’ll discover a sound free of the ‘enhancements’ often found in other speakers. A natural sound, transparent and precisely defined even at high sound pressure levels - including all those elusive low frequencies. Your sound, not our sound.

NX-6A Professional Active Studio Monitor

Exclusively distributed in the UK by SCV London. Tel: 020 8418 1470 Email: info@scvlondon.co.uk www.scvlondon.co.uk

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May/June 2005

mix outside the box...

D-Command is the new ergonomic mixing surface for Digidesign Pro Tools. Using ICON technology, this is the ideal centrepiece for your Pro Tools|HD studio. D-Command includes 8 high quality touch-sensitive motorized faders, a comprehensive monitor section, metering and transport controls. Expandable to 24 faders. Touch-sensitive rotary encoders incorporate 15-segment LED rings for immediate visual feedback. Dedicated EQ and Dynamics sections provide intuitive “one knob per function” control. Encoders and faders immediately display parameter values when touched. Includes XMON™ remote, rack-mounted analogue I/O audio monitor system capable of monitoring up to 5.1 surround. High-speed Ethernet connectivity provides 200x more bandwidth compared with MIDI controllers, enabling higher resolution and rock solid reliabilty. D-Command truly puts you in the driving seat of the industry’s leading audio platform. Please contact us for further information or to arrange a demo.

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EQ PANEL — twelve rotary controls provide Freq, Q and Gain over four bands. 5.1 wide streaming selection, and output metering. Alphanumeric LCD. Save, Save As, and Master Bypass switches.

DYNAMICS PANEL — six rotary controls for dedicated compressor/limiter functions, alphanumeric display, 5.1 wide streaming selection, output and gain reduction metering.

MONITOR PANEL — allows operators to control two 5.1 surround inputs, three stereo inputs and two cue sends. Also includes talkback, mono and dim functions.

protools@digitalvillage.co.uk « « www.dvproaudio.com a division of

Slovak Television The new European Union States are enjoying the opportunity to update their broadcast infrastructures but they’re also leap-frogging technology generations. KEITH SPENCER-ALLEN visits Slovakia to take in the sights and a broadcaster’s vision.

ROSSING INTO SLOVAKIA from Austria by road tells you much about this country. The border’s treeless open space is a reminder that, until 16 years ago, this was the route of the Iron Curtain and was kept purposefully bare. The cursory passport check proves that after crossing the border you’re still in the EU as has been the case for the last year. Almost immediately you’re crossing the Danube with historic castles high above bends in the river ﬂanked by hills covered in drab low-rise apartment blocks that date from the communist era. Large

billboards advertise Tesco and almost every car on the road looks new and with motorway construction everywhere, soon even the roads themselves will be. Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, is right on the border and just 60km from Vienna. It’s one of those places that still send most West Europeans looking for an up to date atlas. But to make it easy, Slovakia is the East end of what was Czechoslovakia after the union with the Czech Republic was ended in 1993 shortly after the fall of Communism and decades of relative isolation from western Europe. It gives every

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impression of a country with a distinct tradition and culture to reassert, and an infrastructure to rebuild, and that includes broadcasting. And after decades of little change they’re in a hurry. According to the official Bratislava website, the Slovenská Televízia building is the tallest in the city. At around 30 storeys and strategically positioned on a hill in an essentially low-rise town, it’s easily visible. Built in 1975, in a very different culture, this ‘mini skyscraper’ is apparently almost empty following a heavy staff cull by a new management team brought in 18 months ago. Its space may soon find an alternative role but that will not affect the studios and operational areas, which are to the sides and rear. Slovak Television was set up in 1991 as the national broadcaster for Slovakia to take over from Czechoslovak Television following the splitting of the country. It runs two TV channels that are funded by a mix of government money, a license fee and advertising with regional studios in Kosice and Banska Bystrica. Commercial broadcasting was licensed in 1995 with the privately owned TV Markiza, and a mix of smaller cable and satellite operators. From being the dominant broadcaster, Slovak TV lost significant market share to the commercial TV operators but the new management has instituted a continuing investment that is transforming the technical facilities while programming is becoming more populist. And leading this transition and influencing the technical changes is Slovakia’s own version of Pop Idol, known here as ‘Superstar’ The facilities are about halfway through the planned upgrade project. First was the construction of a large news studio to allow the creation of virtual sets, where news anchormen wander against a green screen tracked by four robotic cameras, and are then matted into complex 3D environments as required. STV has used Centron, a Bratislava-based equipment and service company as a partner on many facets of the project. Centron’s Richard Varkonda acted as acoustic/audio consultant and was able to optimise the acoustic environments with budgets that were primarily slanted towards equipment rather than the studio fabric. More obvious is his insistence on the positioning of the audio station within the control room perfectly central at the rear of the room with a Sony DMX-R100 digital console. Centron also designed most of the furniture including the video monitor wall and penthouse arrangement with CD players, Minidisc and DK Audio meters over the console. Most of the audio upgrades are replacing equipment that was originally installed in communist times and although broadcasting was always well funded it normally meant sourcing equipment from local manufacturers. Tesla supplied most of the consoles and other equipment while the monitor speakers were either Tesla or a Bulgarian make. The exceptions to this were Studer for tape machines and AKG/Neumann for mics. The remaining Tesla consoles are now reaching the end of their working life and available support is limited. Studer 900 Series consoles are fitted in some of the OB trucks but future changes are more likely to be along the lines of the new audio control room for Studio 4, the largest of STV’s production studios. Operational since November, the studio is based around an Euphonix Max Air digital console. According to Centron’s consultant Varkonda, STV was looking for a console with around 80 inputs that had an analogue feel with knobs, fitted the budget, and was 5.1 capable. The 400sqmetre studio floor is below the control room and used for large scale variety shows with the Pop Idol series being typical of May/June 2005

facility

the demands, including an orchestra, singers, groups and audience. The chosen console has 32 faders, 182 inputs with optical cables running the 100m to the studio ﬂoor with a choice of four wall boxes patched according to the project in hand, and replaced an old Tesla console. The wooden wings and penthouse area was designed by Varkonda to provide space for a 360 Systems Instant Replay unit, TC System 6000 Icon remote, and CD and MD machines. A bank of convertors is used to interface all the peripheral gear including the Fostex 2424LV hard disk multitrack to the MADI infrastructure. A freestanding LCD monitor is used to repeat the Max Air screen or display the DK Audio metering with access to analogue, digital and SDI embedded audio levels via the router. The 5.1 surround capabilities of the new control room together with full Dolby encode/decoder units, are an investment for the future. The room had originally been planned for stereo use but the proximity of digital broadcasting changed the attitude. The all Genelec system — 1032s all round with 7070 subwoofer — is currently being used in stereo and has been cleverly integrated within the video monitor wall. ‘The monitors sit upside down on shelves within the wall,’ explained Varkonda, ‘in a way that it is possible to adjust the vertical angle to put the speaker axis in the right position. They are then surrounded by stiff foam to isolate then from the frame. The rear speakers are ceiling mounted.’ Genelec monitors are used throughout the studios and OB vehicles, whenever a room comes up for refurbishment. Technical director Mracna said that of all the equipment choices, standardising on Genelec had been the easiest.

‘The first priority when we started this project was quality; the second was the best monitoring of sound. We’d had some good experience in the past with Genelec monitors and felt that it would be the easiest way to obtain good monitoring conditions for stereo and multichannel formats. And now it would have to be something miraculous to change our minds to another make.’ Budgets precluded significant changes to the acoustics of a room originally designed for mono work while STV had specific requirements that differed from Varkonda’s specification. ‘STV insisted on rear access to the video wall and acoustically the front speakers are not in the optimum position. A secondary wall was not in the budget. Also the rear speakers are not ideally positioned. However STV and its engineers are very happy with the sound because this is still the best sounding control room they’ve had.’ The acoustic treatment is a repeating pattern of floor to ceiling resonating panels and wide band absorbers that is most effective in mid to low frequency regions and certainly proved adequate in earlier times. Luckily this is a large control room and with the operator being at the centre, the ratio of reflected sound to direct is fairly low and very workable. Varkonda expects to be back to deal with acoustic modifications when the rear channels come into use and as budgets allow tuning the acoustics will become more of a priority. The video control area is adjacent with provision for nine-camera operation and all the technology needed for large-scale live programme making. The later stages on Pop Idol had to be moved to a local sports hall when the 1500 audience outstripped the capacity of the studio’s versatile space and used one of STV’s nine OB trucks. As with many European broadcasters, STV is moving towards Sony’s MPEG IMX video format, which is close to DigiBeta in quality but less costly. Usefully an IMX VTR can still replay all analogue and digital Betacam formats so that production/ postproduction is still possible in other formats. It can also handle 8 audio tracks that will be applicable as part of multichannel digital broadcast and a future plan for implementation of Dolby E has been allowed for in the infrastructure. The other advantage of IMX is that there is an identifiable path towards File-based operation, which is important for the following stages of studio upgrades. ‘Although we still use a lot of tape, server technology is not new to us,’ explained Jozef Mranca. ‘We’ve used a Tektronix Profile server for transmission signals since 1997. The second phase of development

involves full digitisation of the studio infrastructure with heavy use of server technology; and fully digital news production with journalist self operation. ‘On the audio side, we plan to build 3 or 4 language dubbing studios that will be connected to one large server. These new studios will be built around the server and machine room where the working copy for dubbing will be prepared and the new language inserted into the programme master. There will not be any tapes and it will be much more efficient. And we do 60% of all STV’s dubbing of foreign programming — no subtitles — it’s important. This arrangement will then be extended with another postproduction studio also connected to the same network.’ The full digitisation of the studio infrastructure is in progress — the master continuity suites are completed but all the individual servers, including those Avid suites handling picture, are still to be integrated. Such developments will also mean that Studio 4 and the 5.1/Euphonix will be able to take work from other studios that need better facilities. As mentioned already, the approach of Digital broadcasting has been the driving force behind much of the change at STV and, as with most European broadcasters, the process is in progress. DVB-T test transmission began in 2004 and the results have been encouraging. Slovakia is a small mountainous country that shares its borders with five other States and their own broadcasting systems. Coverage and frequency co-ordination has always been difficult and solving this is a major interest. The digital terrestrial transmissions enabled good reception in areas that analogue hasn’t, and with smaller aerials. The population is keen as well with over 1200 settop boxes purchased just to receive unpublicised test transmissions. With an unwillingness to fund analogue and digital transmission, a domestic equipment subsidy is under consideration with STV keen to see a switchover within just 12 months of implementing DVB-T transmission, possibly completed by 2007 rather than 2015 originally given to the EBU! During my visit I was told a tale that I assume to be true but shows Slovakian spirit even if it is not. In the 1950s and 60s when television services where being started in the then communist countries, the powers that be selected the SECAM broadcast format rather than PAL. On the fall of communism, most of the broadcasters, stuck with complete Secam production chains, had the cost and difficulty of migrating to PAL. In Slovakia, they had optimistically chosen to work in PAL with just a SECAM convertor before transmission. The cost of changing to PAL for them was simply the time taken to unplug the convertor! ■

“loudness & Leq(m)”

Create the Loudest Trailer and Commercial • Graphical readout of loudness vs SMPTE timecode • Supports: stereo / 4.0 / 5.1 / 6.1 / 7.1 • Measures Leq(m), Leq(A), RMS, Flat

• Automated START/STOP feature • ISO 21727 Leq(m) norm • Printable report

Optional Features: Spectrum Analysis, Surround Sound Display, Monitor Control, Up to 32x16 Matrix Control, Jelly-Fish™

“solutions in Audio & Video” www.dk-technologies.com

May/June 2005

DK: info@dk-technologies.com

Germany: info.de@dk-technologies.com

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UK: info.uk@dk-technologies.com

US: info.us@dk-technologies.com

gear

Products Equipment introductions and announcements plus news on Digidesign and Steinberg.

PORTABLE SOUNDFIELD The portable ST350 offers SoundField’s unique technology in a miniaturised package that can be powered by mains or battery. It consists of a lightweight multi-capsule microphone and a compact mic pre/control unit that generates surround and stereo simultaneously at balanced line levels. Control features include high performance mic pres with discretely switched 6dB gain steps and composite 5segment LED bargraphs for level monitoring. Continuously variable control is offered over the stereo polar patterns from omni to cardioid to fig-8 and a Width control provides everything from mono to wide image stereo. End Fire and Invert controls are provided to correct for three-dimensional mic positioning and other features include Hi-Pass filtering, switchable M/S output and headphone monitoring. SoundField has released the Surround Zone TDM plug-in for Pro Tools. It combines the hardware features of the SP451 Surround Processor and MKV System and is designed to accept B-Format information generated by current SoundField microphone models. Surround Zone provides a choice of three separate 5.1 arrays, individual 6.1 and 7.1 arrays, independently variable width of the front and rear pairs, phase coherent LFE and individual level controls with Mute and Solo all with bargraph metering. The software also provides Rotate (360 degree horizontal rotation), Tilt (adjusts the mic pick-up angle by plus or minus 45 degrees in the vertical plane) and Zoom (for zooming in on sources). www.soundfield.co.uk

POWERCORE PCI MKII PowerCore PCI mkII is a combination of 14 plug-ins and 4 x 150MHz DSPs on a PCI card. Price i s E 1 1 4 0 ( + VAT ) . T h e blue PowerCore PCI mkII card yields the same performance as the rackbased PowerCore FireWire and measures only half the size of the existing green PowerCore PCI cards, making the PCI mkII compatible with new short computer types. The NonLin2 stereo effects reverb for PowerCore is the second reverb ported directly from the System 6000 and is capable of generating compact vocal ambience, dramatic drum sounds, percussive sounds, reverse reverbs and completely new and twisted effects. www.tcelectronic.com

Platform news: Digidesign The Icon D-Command offers exclusive Pro Tools system functionality in a mediumformat console worksurface. Similar to the ﬂagship Icon D-Control, D-Command features dedicated EQ, dynamics, and monitoring control panels and control over many processing functions, routing, and automation modes directly from the worksurface. The D-Command main unit has an easily accessible central control section with straightforward monitoring and communications controls. Equipped with eight channel faders, D-Command is expandable to 24 faders by adding a 16-channel fader module. Control of parameters is through channel strips and provides LCD displays, LED rings, and bargraph meters. Combined with the Pro Tools|HD Accel DSP mix engine and modular Pro Tools|HD interfaces and peripherals for system I-O, D-Command is said to give operators control on a relatively small, yet expandable, console. Pro Tools 6.9 software brings a new cross-platform feature set to TDM and LE systems with an emphasis on postproduction and advanced mixing. It delivers enhanced picture support for Avid systems, improved Avid workgroup integration, and advanced mixing functionality for D-Control, including a non-destructive solo mode with AFL/PFL auditioning, easy automation capabilities, and simpliﬁed tracking and monitoring. 6.9 also adds functions to organise plug-ins and facilitate session collaboration through the DigiDelivery network appliance. www.digidesign.com

DRAWMER S3 AND THREE-SUM

Drawmer’s S3 3-band stereo valve opto-compressor forms the basis of a new ‘Signature Series’ and offers ‘previously unattainable control and tonality’ over each of the three frequency bands. The signal path has I-O transformers, passive components and ten valves in a fully balanced Class A design. The Light Dependent Resistors in the opto-compressors are temperature sensitive and the S3 houses an ‘electronic oven’ that sustains the optimum LDR operating temperature. Large scale VU meters can be switched to Peak mode and two further VU meter rescale modes are available to display the unit’s ability to output levels up to +30dBm.

The Three-Sum 1U enables individual processing of up to three bands prior to re-summing. A stereo signal is split into two or three frequency adjustable bands that can be sent to external processors before returning to the Three-Sum where they are re-combined. The unit claims a high quality signal path culminating in a variable threshold, brick wall limiter with bypass. The limiter is ‘two stage’ and applies different processing to the HF content of the material. The Tourbuss live dynamics plug-in suite for

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Digidesign’s Venue console consists of a noise gate, compressor/limiter, expander and bracketing filter. The plug-in layouts are based on popular Drawmer units and incorporate programme adaptive algorithms for easy setup. www.drawmer.com

UNIVERSAL AUDIO CLONES LA-3A Universal Audio’s LA-3 A class ic audio leveler ‘is an exacting clone’ of the solid-state optocompressor ﬁrst launched in 1969 with only three small concessions to modernity — XLRs to complement the barrier strip, IEC power, and a rear-switch for the popular ‘Gain Mod’ option. LA-3A features include custom reissue UA transformers and T4 cell plus a discrete, Class A amplifier for up to 50dB gain. The TDM Quad Pak is a collection of UA’s premium compressor and equaliser plug-ins for TDM Pro Tools systems, including the 1176LN/SE, LA-2A, Pultec EQP-1A and Cambridge EQ. Available for XP and OSX. www.uaudio.com

May/June 2005

gear review FAR SOFT CONTROL Monitor manufacturer FAR h a s a s o f t w a re c o n t ro l platform for its loudspeakers that permits ﬁne tuning of the EQ in the room. It allows access to tone control, an EQ display, delay settings and presets while a Scan window reveals all the data settings of connected speakers. The control can also be locked out against unauthorised access. www.far-audio.com

expansion cards, advanced integrated sync and machine control including HDTV tri-level sync, time-stamped Broadcast WAVE ﬁle format, front-panel transport, track arming, project management and meter functions, built-in 80Gb drive, two FireWire and four USB 2.0 ports, +/-12.5% varispeed, and Gigabit Ethernet. Price is expected to be US$4,999. Tascam has improved two of its audio CD recorders to write to high-speed CD-RW media (4x-10x), finalise CDs at 8x write speed, and delete CD-RWs at the same speed. The CD-RW-402 V3 has two CD drives with separate displays and separate connections (balanced/unbalanced, optical/coaxial). Pauses between titles can be removed on copying and CD Text can be entered using a computer

keyboard. Both decks include pitch control, jog wheel, external control, and a cable remote. The third edition of the CD-RW2000 has a new drive that can process high-speed media and allows manual setting of index marks, setting the level to digital zero, displaying or changing trim value and querying the ISRC and RID. www.tascam.com

AKG CRYSTAL CLEAR SOUND MICS AKG’s CCS Series entrylevel microphones has models for instrument, vocals and speech use. These include the cardioid D 11 XLR bass microphone and D 22 XLR drum with an integral stand adapter, and the vocal and instrument oriented cardioid D 44 S, D 55 S, and D 77 S. Lead vocals are taken care of by the supercardioid D 88 S. Five different microphone heads are now available for the WMS 4000 handheld transmitter HT 4000. The new C 414 B-XL mic draws a current of about 4mA from 48V phantom sources, so the circuitry of the A 48 V adapter used to power it in outdoor use from the AKG B 18 (single-channel battery supply for phantom powering condenser microphones) has been modified to accommodate the increased current draw. www.akg.com

DYNAUDIO SMALL Dynaudio Acoustics’ BM 5P is a 2-way passive nearﬁeld monitor equipped with a 170mm woofer and 26mm soft dome tweeter. Price is E580 (+VAT) per pair. www.dynaudioacoustics.com

TASCAM 48-TRACK Tascam’s X-48 is a 48-track hybrid hard disk workstation with the ease-of-use of a standalone recorder and the GUI, editing features and plug-in compatibility of a computer-based workstation. The X-48 boasts 96kHz/24-bit recording across all tracks and 192kHz re c o rd i n g a c ro s s 2 4 tracks. Its ﬁle interoperability and synchronisation surpasses the MX-2424 and it has a VGA display output, powerful editing functions and DVD+RW backup. There’s also a built-in dynamically automated 48-channel digital mixer with 6 stereo returns, 24 buses, 6 aux sends, stereo bus, dynamics and 4-band EQ per channel and 4 VST plug-in inserts on each channel, group and aux return. It is controllable using the Tascam US-2400 24-fader Universal Controller. It has built-in 48-channel TDIF I-O, SPDIF I-O, two 24-channel option slots for analogue, ADAT or AES-EBU

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gear NEUTRIK USB AND FIREWIRE Neutrik has extended its Dchassis line with USB and FireWire receptacles — NAUSB and NA1394-6. The chassis of the USB and the FireWire connector ﬁt to the D-panel cutout established by Neutrik and both are available in nickel or black nickel. The NAUSB comes with an A/B feed-through receptacle that may be customised on site, having either of the two connector types at front. The NA1394-6 FireWire D-chassis connector is equipped with a 6-pole FireWire (IEEE 1394b) feed-through receptacle at both ends. www.neutrik.com

EUPHONIX SYSTEM 5-MC System 5-MC is a mixing system designed for integration with DAWs that support Euphonix’s open architecture EuCon protocol, such as Nuendo and Pyramix.

Based on the Euphonix System 5 control surface that can be ﬁtted with 8-48 channel strips, it comes with the MC Intelligent Application Controller for master console functions and integral control of the DAW. The MC can also control any other software application running on the workstation through keyboard commands mapped to 56 SmartSwitches. The System 5-MC is packaged with the Euphonix’s Studio Monitor Pro, which resides on the application workstation and controls the way audio is routed between applications that support ASIO hardware and the ASIO hardware. ASIO applications send their audio outputs through the Studio Monitor Pro application, which acts as a monitoring system. The base package includes 8 channel strips, MC centre section, System 5-MC frame, Studio Monitor Pro Application and a high-powered dual AMD Opteron workstation running Nuendo EuCon. The system can be expanded with additional channel modules and the Euphonix line of convertors and routers. The MC Intelligent Application Controller can function as a standalone workstation control surface and has a keyboard and dual trackballs for standard operations plus 56 LCD SmartSwitches, 4 faders, 9 rotary controls plus a monitoring section. www.euphonix.com

DK LOUDNESS DK has a loudness software package for its flagship MSD600M++ audio meter. The graphical Leq(m) software allows users to mix to the highest level on the Leq(m) loudness standard and a SMPTE timecode input brings automated Start/Stop points and gives a direct readout of where the sound material can be optimised for louder trailers/commercials.

Platform news: Steinberg Version 2.1 of the Audio Stream Input Output (ASIO) offers support for the DSD format. The SDK for the new version is available for download from www.steinberg.net. ASIO architecture forms the backbone of Steinberg’s Virtual Studio Technology and supports variable bit depths and sample rates, multichannel operation and synchronisation. An upcoming update to WaveLab will offer integration of the Algorithmix reNOVAtor mastering, sound repair and audio forensic plug-in. The Grand 2 virtual concert grand piano product features an entirely new grand piano, surround capabilities and a range of features designed to maximise computer resource efficiency. Added key click and pedal sounds as well as hammer samples further increase the level of realism. A 4-channel surround implementation allows The Grand 2 to be placed anywhere inside a virtual room, with the position adjustable from within the VSTi’s user interface. RAMSave technology allows for highly efﬁcient use of the host computer’s RAM by ‘freezing’ the instrument and automatically unloading unneeded samples from memory. T-Online has adopted Nuendo 3 in its development and production facility to create T-Online’s next-generation Video On Demand (VOD) products. ‘T-Online has created a top-quality production environment, both from a technological and structural standpoint, and Nuendo 3 plays a central role in this environment,’ said Roger Nonnenmacher, product development manager for multimedia at T-Online. T-Online has been using Nuendo to ascertain the quality and suitability of audio codecs in the context of VOD content, the development of preprocessing standards for VOD, and the evaluation of VOD surround capabilities. www.steinberg.net The remote controllable multichannel audio monitor, the MSD660R, incorporates a base unit that is usually housed in a machine room and a remote panel with a VGA display and control buttons housed in the control room. Connection is via CAT5 and software covers Overs and Mutes, surround compatibility to 7.1 and facilities to monitor up to 32 channels of audio. www.dk-technologies.com

SMALLEST GENELEC Genelec’s 8020A is its smallest speaker to date and features a 4-inch bass driver with a 19mm tweeter loaded into a Directivity Controlled Waveguide. Bass and treble are each powered by 20W amplifiers and the monitor can be combined with the 7050B LSE subwoofer to provide a powerful, bass-managed and wide bandwidth surround sound monitoring system. The subwoofer features a single 8-inch proprietary driver with a 70W power ampliﬁer. www.genelec.com

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SENNHEISER FREEPORT

Sennheiser freePORT RF wireless systems are available in Vocal, Instrument and Presentation versions. All three allow four switchable frequencies to be operated simultaneously and have a Diversity receiver installed in a metal housing, a dynamics processor and jack and XLR outputs. The Vocal system includes a hand-held transmitter with a dynamic capsule and a receiver. The Instrument version has a bodypack transmitter with a jack plug cable and a receiver while the Presentation set includes a bodypack transmitter, a receiver and a clip-on microphone with an omnidirectional pattern. The HD201 and HD215 are described as ‘entryhigh-end’ headphone designs. Both are closed, dynamic sets. www.sennheiser.co.uk

May/June 2005

gear review VDC CATALOGUE AND WEBSITE UK cabling specialists V D C Tr a d i n g h a s launched a website and a comprehensive catalogue containing over 8,500 product lines. For further details or to order a catalogue, contact the VDC sales department on +44 20 7700 2777. www.vdctrading.com

EVENTIDE OBSCENITY DELAY

BEYERDYNAMIC IN-EAR MONITORS

Beyerdynamic’s IMS 900 in-ear monitoring Eventide’s BD600 obscenity delay has seamless integration system is said to be with HD installations and expanded delay capabilities up capable of matching the clarity of the company’s headphones. The IMS 900 is to 80 seconds. A Panic feature allows a .WAV ﬁle stored on a compact Flash card to be played when the Panic said to be easy to set up for multichannel applications with button is hit and while it is playing the delay buffer rebuilds, 16 preprogrammed UHF frequencies per bandwidth. The transmitter is housed in a metal case with a LCD indicating allowing programming to continue as soon as the jingle has completed. group/channel, LEDs for audio levels, combo inputs and An optional BD600 Extended Remote offers 16 bipolar headphone output with volume control. The beltpack receiver is equipped with a mono/stereo opto-isolated inputs that may be conﬁgured to drive many BD600 functions or to act as general purpose delay inputs. switch, volume, balance control, and a switchable limiter. Tube 20Year Resolution Ad 05|05|2005 14:16www.beyerdynamic.co.uk Side 1 www.eventide.com

FAIRLIGHT PICTURE DEVELOPMENTS Fairlight has launched two versions of its Pyxis nonlinear video system offering support for High Definition video in uncompressed and compressed formats. The Pyxis family now includes a standard definition player/recorder, a standard definition player/recorder with Genlock and SDI IOs, an HD/SD network player and an HD/SD player recorder with SDI and Genlock supporting JPEG Compression or 4:2:2 uncompressed video. All operate in NTSC or PAL at any standard frame rate. A new HD sync separator card is available for all QDC platforms and provides the technology required to integrate HD into production workflow. Tri-level sync enables systems to operate at 24 and 23.98 frame rates while referenced to a high definition Tri-level video sync. When connected to a Pyxis HD nonlinear video system, all video mixing, automation, recording and editing functions are now supported in a true native HD format. The Dream Suite Package includes a 48-track DAW, StationPlus fully automated 56-channel/24-bus surround sound mixing, Creamware plug-ins with 80 plug-in suite license, networking and the Pyxis Pro NLV video system. Fairlight’s Audiobase3 enables searches within hard drives, networks, Extranet systems and the Internet and also accommodates multiple file formats including iTunes. www.fairlightau.com

sound engineering

NEUMANN BROADCAST DYNAMIC The BCM 705 is the second microphone in the Neumann broadcast line and the first Neumann dynamic mic. It uses a Neumann-redesigned version of the Profi Power Sennheiser MD 431 handheld stage microphone and capsule housed in the same body as the previously introduced BCM 104. To enhance low frequencies, the entire chamber surrounding the capsule in the BCM 705 is enlarged and acoustically coupled to a rear entrance port and while it is designed for close talking there is relatively little lowfrequency build-up due to the proximity effect. www.neumann.com

May/June 2005 21

20 YEARS. NOT A SINGLE DOWNLOAD [WHY CHANGE A GOOD THING?]

Come celebrate with us - AES booth 1613

LYDKRAFT

www.tube-tech.com resolution

The biggest selection of high end pro audio gear in northern Europe

��

gear

vintage design - handmade in Sweden. Very high quality, very affordable!

dmp

- Dual Mic Pre/DI

CA73

- 1 ch Mic Pre/DI/3-band EQ

CA81

- 1 ch Mic Pre/DI/4-band EQ

CL1 Mk2- 2 ch Compressor & Limiter

SU1

- 16 ch Summing Unit

(prototype pict. w/o meter)

A 16-channel, expandable summing unit with discrete electronics and a passiv, balanced mixbus followed by a 1272style mix amp for vintage style voltage summing. -10/-20 dB pad on each channel makes it possible to get the right level on inserted outboards on low level channels. Mono / Stereo switch on channel 1-8. Two stereo sidechain I/O´s for parallell processing. LED meter, master level and more! NEW!!

M81 / M81R

1-channel mic pre with Carnhill transformer balanced I/O´s and and two discrete 1081-style opamp stages. Max gain: 80 dB, impedance switch. Desktop or rackmount version. Great, classical sound, very affordable!

Golden Age Project R1 -

50 x 5 mm, 2 micron ribbon assembly and an improved output transformer. Sensitivity: -50dB Max SPL: 154 dB

Ribbon Microphone

A new high quality ribbon microphone with a great allround sound and a very low price. Suitable for recording most instruments. 39 x 5,5 mm, 2,5 micron ribbon assembly mounted in a round grille. Sensitivity: -50dB Max SPL: 135 dB

Daking - made in the US. Very high quality, very low prices!

Mic-Pre IV

- 4 ch Mic Pre/DI

A great sounding “Trid. A-series” Mic Pre! Amazingly affordable at around £290 / 420 EUR per channel. Check out the recent rave reviews on the 52270B pre/EQ and the FET Compressor II in Resolution mag.

Golden Age Music AB ��

SYNCHRONISED RADIO NETWORK Riedel’s Synchronised Radio Network provides extensive and interference-free two-way radio coverage without the use of higher antenna height and more transmitting power leading to overshoot. It consists of a central matrix, such as the company’s Artist S or M intercoms, connected to several base stations via ﬁbre, CAT5 or Coax Cable. Each base station consists of one SRN-2065 controller unit and up to two SRN-1001/SRN-1004 transmitters. www.riedel.net

360 Systems’ 2470 Broadcast Time Delay includes embedded audio, AES-EBU and analogue audio, SDI and Composite video, and transmission of VBI data. The 2470 is able to maintain single-frame accuracy over an inﬁnite time period while its four-drive RAID array guards against programme loss. Image Server 7000 is described as a full-featured, 6channel broadcast server for US$25,000. Designed for satellite ingest, production and play-to-air, the 2-input, 6-output multiformat design supports MPEG-2, DV and TARGA graphics. Up to 600 hours of internal RAID storage is available, plus redundant hot-swap power supplies. New features in the Image Server 2000 include Advanced Playlisting software, a RAID-5 drive array with up to 170 hours of storage, embedded audio, remote-location of the server GUI, and built-in frame sync. 360 Systems has announced a fully redundant server package for television broadcast that employs new Image Server software to create an immediate protection copy of stored content. The system works with standard automation controllers, and requires no third-party software or additional serial ports. www.360systems.com

SANKEN MULTICHANNEL MICS

Ribbon Microphone

The natural and musical sound of a classical ribbon microphone at a very low cost. A stunning realism and the typical large and mellow ribbon sound quality with a very smooth top end and an extended low end and a lifelike transient reproduction.

R2 -

360 TIME DELAY AND IMAGE SERVERS

S a n k e n ’s CUW-180 is designed for stereo X-Y recording as each cardioid condenser capsule can be independently adjusted through any angle to 180 degrees. The close coupling of the capsule pair maintains phase coherence. For surround recording, pairs of CUW-180s in dual X-Y mode can provide a conceptually simple method of recording front LR and rear LR signals. For 5.1 surround, one CS-1 short shotgun is added as a hard centre microphone. The COS-22 is the ﬁrst dual capsule lavalier microphone and measures only 31.6mm in length. The two-channel, dualomnidirectional COS-22 is designed for stereo applications for ambience and music recording, and redundant lavalier live broadcast use. It can also be used for noise canceling by reversing the phase of channel 2 and then summing the two channels. www.sanken-mic.com

resolution

DAYLIGHT LCDS Wohler’s Daylite Series video LCD monitor give ‘exceptionally, clear picture quality’ in all sunlight conditions. Backlighting on them has been made more efﬁcient, a precision lens is bonded to the front of the assembly to eliminate glare and a new generation of control electronics has been used. They are available in 6.5-inch and 10.4-inch versions. www.wohler.com

WHEATSTONE DESKS Wheatstone’s Generation Six is the latest addition to its family of networkable control surfaces. It provides integration with the Bridge Digital Audio Router and allows system-wide access to a station’s on-air and off-air audio resources via interlinked CAT5 or ﬁbre optic cable. In addition to standard features, such as Ethernet protocol, VDIP configuration, X-Y controllers and 8-character controller displays, the G-6 offers an expanded number of aux sends and increased Preset options to boost saverecall capability. The Net-75 Panel is designed to combine worksurface technology with a standalone console. Wheatstone’s D-75 digital console can be modiﬁed with the Net-75 panel to provide a fully integrated network system with the option of autonomous console operation when needed. Four output buses along with eight digital inputs and outputs are provided within each panel. The rackmount 5200-D is a networkable news mixer with front and rear panel mic inputs, a single segment LED VU meter and two output buses with Programme and MXM options. A built-in Ethernet Bridge X-Y controller is standard, as well as a cue speaker and headphone, cue level control, monitor selector and headphone volume control. www.wheatstone.com

CLEAR-COM CELLCOM Clear-Com’s CellCom digital wireless intercom product is based on its FreeSpeak technology and the CellCom beltpack delivers a wireless version of a traditional wired intercom control panel for communications including point-to-point and party line (conference) without multiple frequencies or manual selection. It is claimed to be the ﬁrst wireless system to include local route programming, crosspoint level control, assignment of IFBs, groups and full non-blocking mixing facilities. With 7kHz audio, full-duplex operation and low-power microwave technology, CellCom is said to eliminate the noise, interference and performance issues associated with traditional radio talkback systems using congested UHF and VHF bands. www.clearcom.com

May/June 2005

gear review UPGRADED 400 TRANSMITTER

The Lectrosonics MM400A transmitter has been updated as the MM400B to include a waterproof, programmable switch, a steel cable battery door retainer and an IFB compatibility emulation mode. The MM400B transmitter, like its predecessor, features 100mW RF power with a circular isolator at the output for reduced IM distortion. The case for the transmitter is highly water-resistant and plated with a special corrosion-resistant surface. www.lectrosonics.com

G5 RACKMOUNT The Yellow Technology G5 Rackmount for Apple’s Power Mac G5 is a custom-designed solution for those who want practicality and aesthetics. The modification involves the removal of the existing handles and the attachment of a frame to which the anodised front panel is fixed. Airflow and access to the inside of the machine is unhindered. The solution is supplied with support rails for supported rack cabinets and the front panel can be custom-engraved at extra cost. The package costs UK£385 (+ VAT) and takes around two weeks from receipt of the computer. www.yellowtechnology.co.uk

GLOBALSAN X-24 Studio Network Solutions’ globalSAN X-24 conﬁgured iSCSI SAN solution for Mac and W indows includes 6Tb of SATA storage and six iSANmp user licenses that can be upgraded to support additional users/storage. It employs iSCSI to enable an IP-based Storage Area Network and is described as a cost-effective pathway towards achieving performance nearing that of Fibre Channel. www.studionetworksolutions.com

Rory Kaplan Brazilian Bossa Brazilian Romance David Alan

Ian Nelson Placebo

Dave Bracey Robbie Williams The Cure

John Pellowe

Simon Osborne Sting

Jim Ebdon Sting Annie Lennox Aerosmith

Dave Roden Stereophonics

‘Big’ Mick Hughes Metallica Slipknot

ART TRANSFORMERS

Pavarotti

world class engineers... ART’s T8 is a totally passive audio interface that uses eight transformers to separate input and output signal grounds. The transformers are wound for 1:1 unity gain and are designed to be used with impedances from 600 ohms to 100k ohms. It provides balanced XLR, 1/4-inch jack, and phono connections on all I-Os. The USB MicroïPRE acts as an interface between the computer and a wide variety of analogue and digital sources. Analogue inputs are switchable between phono and line level signals and there’s a low cut ﬁlter, gain trim control and signal/clip LED. The front panel USB monitor/ headphone jack and the optical output on the rear panel can monitor audio output from the computer. A phono preamp circuit is built in. www.artproaudio.com

Nathaniel Kunkel Sting Crosby & Graham Nash Lyle Lovett Fuel

May/June 2005 23

Moray J. McMillin Deep Purple

. . . who chose to specify audio-technica microphones when working with world class artists. Why not create your own world class performance by joining the ever increasing number of A-T users creating professional sound?

ARX PRO DI ARX Systems’ Pro DI Direct Box converts single ended unbalanced signals to low impedance balanced signals and features a 1/4-inch jack input with hardwired Loop Out and a Speaker Level input at -40dB attenuation. For stereo and dual channel applications, the Pro DI is also available in ARX’s ‘double header’ 2-channel format as the Pro DI Duo. www.arx.com.au

Chuck Ainley Mark Knopfler George Strait Vince Gill Trisha Yearwood

world class microphones

Technica House, Royal London Industrial Estate, Old Lane, Leeds LS11 8AG Tel: +44 (0)113 277 1441 Fax: +44 (0)113 270 4836 e-mail: sales@audio-technica.co.uk Web: www.audio-technica.co.uk

resolution

review

Fairlight Dream Constellation Building on a grand lineage and pedigree that is appreciated by those in the know, Fairlight has upped the ante on its approach to total audio production in post and introduced some recent enhancements. NEIL HILLMAN likes it, he really does.

AIRLIGHT IS A NAME borrowed exactly three decades ago by two earnest young Australians, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, from the stern of a Sydney harbour ferry boat for their infant electronic musical instrument company. They launched their original 28kHz, 8-bit creation on an unsuspecting world and started a revolution: ﬁrst in music, but then ten years later by turning their attention to audio postproduction. Challenging AMS-Neve’s harddisk sound-editor, Fairlight offered a product with a faster, more intuitive interface based around a new architecture and running its own rock-solid operating system. The MFX — an abbreviation for Music and Effects — is now a name synonymous with the best audio editor in the world. Along the way, Fairlight has risen phoenix-like from the ashes of previous incarnations, salvation coming in the form of its own products; its constant innovation and high quality standards ensuring a steady demand in the market. Hit particularly hard by the doublewhammy of funding a company growing too quickly and the global economic crash of 1987, Fairlight became Fairlight ESP in 1989. By 2003 the company yet again had to undergo major surgery; but it emerged stronger from the lessons learned from repeating its mistake of dependence and over-exposure to the ﬁckle and unforgiving world of Venture Capitalists. It is now armed with a new family of products that claim to represent a major change in the hardware/software

interface for recording, editing and mixing. Enter then, the Fairlight Dream; in true Fairlight fashion, a mnemonic derived from Digital Recording, Editing and Mixing. The reality of these latest sea-changes in the parent company is that there seems to have been no break in the usual high standards of service and supply that Fairlight owners have long been accustomed to; and reassuringly, UK Fairlight customers are now served by Tekcare: an independent company headedup by the familiar Fairlight UK faces of Graham Murray and Rene Brandon. I looked at the Dream Constellation installed in their demonstration room in Potters Bar north of London. The Dream Constellation sits at the top of a product line previously occupied by the Fairlight Prodigy 2: a well-proven combination of the Amekconstructed digital Fame desk with an integral MFX3-plus audio editor, which is said to be installed in some 200 studios worldwide. While the kernel of the new system still revolves around the powerful QDC engines first used in the Prodigy 2, the way in which it unlocks its processing capabilities is presented in a way that at first glance, does appear to be radically different. As someone who plies his trade daily on a Prodigy 2, it was quickly apparent that while the Dream and Constellation’s combination is laid out with a much busier control surface than the more industrial Prodigy 2, the logic of the Constellation’s console lay-out is easily assimilated, aided by the carefully arranged ergonomics of the Dream binnacle editorcontroller. Put it this way, by the time the second coffee and plate of chocolate digestives had been dispatched, my programme’s pictures had digitised into the Fairlight Pyxis picture-manager, the AAF for the project had transferred to the Dream editor across the Fairlight MediaLink from CD, and I was confident enough to examine the desk in detail and resolution

appreciate its flow; only occasionally fumbling to locate the next step in any console process. The Constellation is an impressive console, all the more so with its integral Dream recorder/editor offering up to 96 tracks, and a 96kHz capability. It wears its heart on its sleeve; or at least lays out its console control surface functions before you, as opposed to the Prodigy 2’s methodology of a frugal array of desk buttons being supplemented by separate on-screen settings for such things as automation status or insert points. It’s what you get used to of course — I love my Prodigy 2 immensely — but the Constellation design gives the feel of a return to a more ‘conventional’ bigdesk layout, making an easier transition for operators coming from other large-scale desk systems. The overall impression is of an eye-catching retro design — its apparent acres of polished aluminium bringing to mind American diners and Airstream caravans; yet look closer and everything is completely contemporary and in-context, with nothing superfluous added for effect. It is, in short, beautiful to behold. The Dream Constellation offers an up to 192-channel mix engine, routable with up to 72 mix buses. Those 72 available buses are used to provide a main bus, 8 sub-buses and 12 Auxiliary sends; each of which may be in 7.1, plus 16 mono multitrack buses, and with surround work very much in mind the Constellation’s busing allows for the simultaneous generation of multiple surround formats. The monitoring is configurable to allow switching between up to nine different speaker sets, allowing fold-up or fold-down between formats. The physical Input and Outputs are available in AES, analogue or MADI formats, with the ability to freely route inputs, outputs and buses to any internal or external destination. The console is available in two chassis sizes, a 3 or 5-bay, with the maximum number of physical faders in the 5-bay being 60. The base system may be thought of in modular terms and added to as required. Both chassis sizes come as standard with a Fader Panel of 12 motorised faders, a Channel Switch panel, a Channel Assign Panel, and an Editor Panel. The optional meter bridge carries the already included main Meter Unit, which is supplied with a VU and phase meter as standard, and subsequent Channel Meter units — each channel unit offering 12 assignable, high resolution, 53-segment bargraph meters, available to complement each 12-pack fader panel fitted. The Fader Panel, in addition to the touch-sensitive faders themselves, houses the controls for panning, with Solo and Mute buttons being positioned above each fader. A backlit LCD above the fader shows the channel name, scribbled by the operator if required, with Pan and Level positions also displayed. Further LED indicators show channel bus assignments between the Main, Sub and Multitrack buses, with an LED used to show when a channel is armed as a track-feed for the Dream recorder. An Auto button is used to punch-in automation for a channel, with a soft button providing the means for inserting it into the automation. More LEDs indicate the mode of mix automation in use: Touch, Latch, Safe, Read, Write or Trim. Other LED indicators are provided for showing if a mixer channel is a Track, a Feed or a Bus. Signal presence, Insert, EQ and Dynamics are also indicated by individual LEDs when in use. Most of these serve as examples of how many functions have been brought back out onto the Constellation’s desk, from the primarily on-screen approach of the Prodigy 2. May/June 2005

review

The Channel Switch Panel, mounted centrally above the Constellation Editor Panel, accommodates the talkback microphone and provides access to the Track, Return, Bus and Live Feed signals as well as the various speaker sets, speaker mutes and automation enable. A tri-colour LED provides the status and selected mode of each switch — Recording by red, Automated by green and Trim by amber — with set-up switches used for Bus assignment, Bus format, Group linking, Input and Output patching and Stem assignment. Most notably, a dedicated switch enables desk automation to be cut, copied or pasted between tracks or clips simultaneously with any audio edit carried out via the binnacle Editor Panel. This a fabulous improvement over Prodigy 2 and other rival systems, and ends the need for painstaking offset calculations or the precise shuffling and capturing of old and new timecode positions while chasing an edit. A Call button on the Channel Switch panel routes a channel to the Channel Assign Panel, home to the Input controls, Dynamics, EQ, Aux sends, and the surround pan control modules; with the console’s dedicated mixer screen showing the adjustable parameters graphically. The input controls of the Channel Assign Panel allow access to the level, phase, insert, I-O patching, bus assign and plug-in parameters. Over 80 DSP plug-ins are available through the Constellation Plug-In Manager, using Creamware hardware for reverbs, delays, flangers, chorus, EQ and dynamic filters; a wide range of popular VST plug-ins are also supported by the Constellation. The various plug-in controls are automatically mapped to the appropriate knobs and faders on the Fader Panel. On-board the console, a two-stage Dynamics section consists of a Gate and a Limiter/Expander. The first stage is a compressor with adjustable ratio and threshold, level, attack and release time, hold time and makeup gain. The second stage may be used as a limiter, with similar adjustments available to those for the compressor; or when used either as a Gate or an Expander, the reduction depth or expansion ratio may also be adjusted. The Channel Assign Panel’s 6-band EQ section has level compensation and can be independently switched in or out of circuit manually or by the automation. Bands 1 and 6 are switchable between a shelving or a Low/High Pass Filter, while parametric equalisation is available on bands 2 to 5, complete with a shelving response. Each of the 12 Auxiliary buses can be defined within a surround format up to 7.1, with a rotary control for each channel’s send level or panning. Just a single joystick is used to pan either individual mono feeds or multiformat feeds within the Constellation, as opposed to the two of the Prodigy 2; a Spread control affects the width of the signal to be panned, while the Rotate control turns the entire sound field around a fixed central listening position. Uncluttered on-screen graphics May/June 2005

offset but in either case adjustable, smooth transitions between old and new automated events are created, with the automation data safely and neatly wrapped and stored within the disk recorder’s corresponding project ﬁle. The introduction of the Dream Constellation to Fairlight’s product range offers existing owners a credible, logical and tangible upgrade path, and invites new users to think again — very, very carefully — about their options for a grown-up, large-format, automated mixing system. The bangs-for-your-bucks, price versus performance ratio of the Constellation is simply staggering. It’s fully compatible with any of the

provide a clear picture of any adjustments made. The LFE channel is provided with a separate level control within the panner. The Constellation Editor Panel houses the Fairlight binnacle controller for the recorder, plus dedicated controls for the transport functions, an input pad with GPIO capability for writing to 3 banks of 9 programmable macros, auto-location, project menus, dual-destination talkback keys, monitor speaker selection, and — importantly — the master fader. A small LCD screen in the editor panel shows detailed menu functions such as edit modes, project navigation, system settings and set-up plus Virtual Studio Runner — a system that uses Fairlight’s MediaLink server technology as a host and detects incoming files and automatically posts them to the studio’s or the client’s FTP site or burns the file to any available network CD or DVD drive. Virtual Studio Runner can even notify the client that a file is available for them via an SMS text message. This Constellation Editor Panel is in fact a facsimile of the standalone Dream Satellite system but incorporates essential mixer functions too because central to the design philosophy of the Constellation is the fact that this is a complete multitrack recording and editing system, not just a comprehensive mixing console. Using the automation is certainly straightforward enough, made easier by the immediacy of a selection process that is mostly of a one switch, one touch duration. Motorised knobs, as well as the motorised faders, illuminated switches, backlit buttons and status LEDs provide a clear indication of their relative position, as well as enabling instant access to many of the controls while under way with a mix, either directly at the channel itself, or more globally at the central controller. There are those several modes of writing or updating mix information including manually punching in and out with dedicated keys and this is also used for defining automated dropin points. Touch mode, however, is the general application of automated mixing that most dubbing mixers would use, where the automation is enabled on faders, knobs and buttons only when they are touched as the transport plays. The mix data may be written in an absolute mode or trimmed with an resolution

usual cinema playback formats up to 7.1, it delivers up to 96 tracks from its fast and stable integral audio editor, with up to 192 mixer channels driving up to 60 motor faders. Just imagine the smile of satisfaction from your bank manager when you painstakingly explain all this. Failing that, declare your intention to achieve 90% of an AMS-Neve DFC’s features for just 20% of the cost, and help keep those circling vultures of Venture Capital at bay. ■

PROS

Neat, thought-through touches appear at every visit to the mixer — for instance, touching a speciﬁc soft key plus one of the faders and the desk instantly resets to its default or unity settings.

CONS

Its maximum size of 60 faders may be seen as less impressive a statistic by some ﬁlm stages demanding a desk the size of an oil tanker.

EXTRAS

Fairlight’s Constellation XT is powered by a 240-channel, 72-bus QDC engine with 6-band parametric EQ, two stage dynamics, 12 aux sends, 48 or 96 track recorder and integrated plug-ins on each channel. The control surface also boasts a new high-resolution display technology. Organic Light Emitting Diode displays (OLEDs) provide detailed information on any selected parameter value. Unlike traditional LCDs, OLED displays are crystal clear in all light environments and have a viewing angle of up to 160 degrees. An In Line Panel (ILP) provides dedicated and assignable controls of the channel’s input settings, EQ and dynamics ﬁlters, auxiliary sends, surround panner and all of the currently inserted plug-ins.

Contact FAIRLIGHT, AUSTRALIA Website: www.fairlightau.com UK, Tekcare: +44 1707 620090

review

TL Audio M4 The M4 is the third valve console in TL Audio’s current range, bridging the gap between the well-established ‘pro’ VTC and the little M-3 Tubetracker. With frame sizes of 16, 24 or 32 channels available, the M4 is aimed squarely at the DAW user market — according to TLA. GEORGE SHILLING is impressed.

HE M4 IS PRICED very competitively starting with the 16-channel model at UK£3995 (+ VAT) up to the 32 at £5995, with a 24-channel version in between, which was the configuration of the prototype looked at by Resolution. Despite the low pricing, it’s a very professional looking beast, with lovely carved oak end and front panels, chunky buttons reminiscent of MCI desks from the 1970s, and big knobs with a smooth, oily feel to their damping. Legending is clear throughout. With all the wood, large well-spaced controls and valve innards, it is fairly big and heavy, and seems very old-school in a world of fiddly plug-in graphics and is perfect for engineers with big hands! The power supply is a separate 2U rackmount that connect via a snake cable. Neither the PSU nor the console get overly hot or emit any physical noise. The angle of the control panel serves several functions. It creates the necessary internal room for the valve circuitry, allows plenty of space on the rear panel for all the necessary connections, and makes it easy to see settings when you sit behind it. It also makes the M4 look like a proper professional desk. Every channel includes a valve microphone preamp, 4-band EQ, four sends, and a 100mm fader in a clear and conventional layout. Something not included and which is found on most studio recording and mixing consoles is any routing, there is only a stereo mix bus. However, the M4 is designed for multitrack recording and each channel has a Track Out jack on the rear. Many desks feature direct channel outputs, but the difference here is not only the individual +4dB/-10dB pushbutton accompanying each of the sockets, but the Track level knob on each channel. This is a large control positioned within easy reach just above the panpot, with a range of +/-15dB and a centre detente. Accompanying each of these knobs is a button for sending the signal to the recorder as pre- instead of post-EQ. You can easily track at optimum level while monitoring a sensible and useful balance in the control room, adding EQ in the monitoring or to ‘tape’. You can simultaneously generate two mono or one stereo prefade headphone mix using the Auxes. Of course, playing the recording back through the desk at the same balance isn’t possible without resetting, but you could set a quick internal balance in the DAW and bring it up the 2-track input for checking back the takes. You might miss the facility to submix, say, the 5 tom-tom mics into stereo, but when you are tracking into a DAW with capacity for virtually unlimited tracks, it is not a serious handicap to have to record each signal separately. After recording the band, flip the channels to Line and bring up your separate DAW outputs for a valve overdubbing and mixing experience. Rear panel layout is clear, with almost all connections on jacks. At the rear of each channel, the connections are directly in line with the controls. At the top, the 26

mic input XLR has a proper latch, along with a phantom power switch — this might have been better on the front channel strip with an LED, but it’s not difficult to reach over to find it, and it’s easy to tell if it is pushed in. Line input is a jack, then there are separate Send and Return jacks for the Insert. Not only is this switchable from the front panel, but there is also a Post button on each channel, referring to the EQ. Usefully, the Send and Return jacks on each channel have their own -10dB/+4dB button, as does the final Track Out jack socket. In the centre section, each Aux output jack has its own -10dB/+4dB button, as do the stereo Returns. Connecting just to the Left jack of these causes them to become Mono and their Balance knobs become Pans. The main Stereo Output is on XLR, while the Monitor Output and 2-Track input (again with level selection) are jacks. Finally stereo bus inserts similar to those on the channels appear here too. Connectivity is certainly comprehensive, with a sea of jack sockets and red level buttons, but the layout is clear. Each channel features a TL Audio valve mic preamp. Possibly not the most exquisite valve mic preamps, they do sound remarkably open and honest; warm, rich and woody, and you can certainly drive the gain resolution

for some pleasant harmonic crunch. This is aided by Drive and Peak LEDs at the top of each fader, the red Peak light reacting very quickly to transient peaks, with the yellow Drive LED glowing when subtle additional harmonic distortions are introduced. There are Pad and Phase buttons beside the Gain knob, which has a centre detente for use with the Line inputs. The -30dB pad seems a bit strong, but allows a very wide range of input signals. The EQ (with Bypass button) features ﬁxed top and bottom frequency shelving bands with midrange peaks sweepable over wide ranges (500Hz to 18KHz and 50Hz to 2kHz), these with ﬁxed bandwidth. Again, there are more sophisticated outboard valve EQs, but this is pleasant to use, powerful without being nasty. With 15dB of cut and boost (centre detented) available on each of the four bands, there is plenty of scope for manipulation — I mostly found myself making fairly small gains and cuts for desired sonic shaping. The Mid sweeps both have quite a narrow Q, with a very evident wah-wah effect when sweeping at high boost. The 10kHz shelf adds a natural open clarity and sheen when boosted, without sounding forced. Similarly, the low frequency band May/June 2005

review is a fixed 100Hz shelf — for really sumptuous bottom end the trick is sometimes to back this off slightly, then boost with the Low Mid peak at a slightly lower frequency. This EQ does the job really well in most situations, whether tracking or mixing. Think of the powerful 1980’s Amek M2500 with extra warmth, or even possibly vintage Harrison or Neve, especially at the top-end, rather than gentler and broader API or washy SSL (brown-knob) E-Series. You also get a useful 90Hz high-pass filter. This EQ handles most requirements with ease. Of course if you want to get more fiddly, you’ve always got your DAW plug-ins. The channels each include four useful Aux Sends, there are no Off buttons for these, but the first two are switchable to Prefade, and talkback can route to each of these. Pans are centre-detented, the Mute and Solo buttons click satisfyingly, with clear LED indicators. The faders are smooth and accurate, if a little lightweight in feel. The main section includes four Aux Master pots, each with PFL, two stereo Returns with Level and Pan/Balance knobs plus PFL, and a talkback section with a mic socket, level knob and latching buttons to Auxes 1 and 2. There is no built-in talkback mic, nor any ‘mix to cues’ or ‘talkback to mix’ functions,

which could be a nuisance. There is a knob for overall PFL trim, with an LED when in use. The centre section is clearly laid-out, with pretty VU meters, a nice big control room Monitor volume knob, and a headphone output beside the pair of main faders. The last of these usefully has a separate volume knob, (although located a long way from the socket) with the headphone source following the monitors. The separate Left and Right Master faders seem unnecessary, making it tricky to do balanced fades. There will be optional digital boards available for interfacing directly with your DAW for the stereo output, and ADAT boards available for each bank of eight channels, with outputs normalled to the Line Inputs and inputs sourced from the track outputs. It is difficult to find fault with this console at the price. It is quite different from any similarly-priced competition — no-one else is making valve consoles, most ‘budget’ desks from major manufacturers are considerably more expensive, (you would pay more for just one pair of reissue Neve 1081 channels), and other alternatives are mostly digital. Obviously it is built to a price, but I would sacrifice the individual +4/-10 buttons on the Track Outs for a global selector (or banks of 8) and instead perhaps add some

refinements to the talkback section, with a built-in mic, TB to mix, and optionally non-latching buttons. The overall sound of the M4 is big and warm, and operationally it is a pleasure to use. The build quality is excellent, the knobs and buttons seem reliable, and there are no nasty clicks or pops when you press any of them. The real question here is whether you could work without any groups or buses. With all the flexibility afforded by modern DAWs, this is easier than ever. In the case of the M4, it is a matter of your style of working and, of course, your budget. In many ways, this is a big grown-up desk of the old school, and it is well suited to tracking and mixing. In the age of the DAW, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better companion for your rig, and the M4 will make an excellent centrepiece for any small studio. Hats off to Mr Larking. ■

PROS

Price is low for what you get; sound quality is great; build quality is superb; good ergonomics; separate Insert Send and Return jacks; I-Os all switchable +4/-10; easily adjustable separate Track Output levels.

CONS

No groups or buses; dual master faders make fades tricky; phantom power buttons on the rear; no ‘mix to cues’ function; no ‘talkback slate to mix’ function.

Contact TL AUDIO, UK Website: www.tlaudio.co.uk

May/June 2005

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review

TC Electronic VSS3 Adding to the arsenal of plug-ins available for its PowerCore platform, TC has ported over a reverb from its ﬂagship System 6000. ROB JAMES experiments with time and space.

EVERBERATION IS PROBABLY the most seductive effect in our arsenal. Very few dry recorded sounds do not benefit from the application of a little reverb to bring them to life. In the real world we are usually completely unaware of just how much of the sound we hear is reflected until the delay time is above 30-50mS and we notice echoes. Even in the countryside, the ground, the trees and other features all contribute to the reverberant field. I remember the first time I head a shotgun fired in a wood (Those gamekeepers come well armed. Ed). The real thing sounds completely different from what you tend to hear as a sound effect in a film. This is the crux of the matter. A slavish replication of reality does not always convince. A world without reflected sound is a very alien place. Anyone who mixes sound should make it their business to experience an anechoic chamber at least once. The sense of isolation and disconnection should help them to understand the problem. Although present in almost every realworld situation, natural reverb does not usually hinder imaging. The psychoacoustics of localisation are still only incompletely understood. What is certain, however, is that conventional artificial reverb can smear imaging in a way that doesn’t happen in a natural environment. Conventional artificial reverb can, and often does, suffer other maladies, notably unwanted pitch shifting and modulation. One much touted alternative is sampled or ‘convolution’ reverb. However, while this can be an excellent way of placing an entire mix in an acoustic space it is less effective with individual sounds and has several other limitations, notably that RT60 times tend to be relatively short. The TC Electronic PowerCore concept is simple enough, rather than overburdening a computer’s CPU with signal processing tasks, it provides DSP horsepower optimised for the purpose but presented in the form of conventional plug-ins. The ‘catch’ is that the extra power is only available to dedicated plug-ins. TC’s counter to this has always been that its supplied and optional plug-ins are sufficiently attractive to justify the PowerCore’s existence. At UK£345 plus VAT, VSS-3 is the latest fulfilment of the TC promise to make some very serious effects available to PowerCore users. A port from the System 6000, VSS-3 is dubbed a ‘Source Reverb’, which gives the clue to its forte — individual sound sources, such as solo instruments or, in the film context, voices or sound effects. TC highlights the disadvantages of using a conventional ‘generic’ reverb for individual sources, specifically the blurring effect, inferior imaging and pitch modulation. With the VSS-3, even when the controls and source are identical, the reverb effect is subtly different every time. This is much closer 28

to what happens in real life due to the complexities involved. The downsides are that Source reverb is less effective with moving sources, confers no real advantage with a composite source and requires lots of aux sends and returns if the maximum benefits are to be obtained. VSS stands for Virtual Space Simulation and TC says it uses ‘chaotic response’ algorithms and that the early reflected signals are manipulated separately from the decay or reverb tail of the signal. Notwithstanding the effort put into research and number crunching, the fine-tuning involved a lot of ‘golden eared’ listening and tweaking with results that more than justify the exercise. The VSS3 algorithm has almost 800 parameters, mercifully these have been condensed into a comparatively simple user interface. The first thing to strike you when opening VSS-3 for the first time is its unconventional appearance. There isn’t a ‘virtual knob’ in sight. However, a glance at the System 6000’s dedicated screen explains where the look and feel originates. I have a few reservations about the lack of colour and the tiny fader representations. In the context of the System 6000’s Icon remote controller, with its faders and touch screen, it all

makes sense but I wasn’t so convinced the translation of this interface to a plug-in would be quite so successful. However, in operation it proved to be fine. It isn’t necessary to be accurate with the mouse, so long as you click somewhere on a button and drag, the parameter follows. The paradigm is tabbed pages of parameters, grouped by type — Main, Early, Reverb and Mod. The bottom row of buttons are designated as ‘Focus Fields’, which by default are the parameters TC considers most likely to require adjustment. However, it is easy to assign the Focus Fields to whichever parameters the user considers most useful. Helpfully, the Focus Fields can present parameters from several different pages. If you have an hour or two to spare, the degree of control on offer here allows you to dig into the minutiae of a patch and to design a preset from the ground up. Given the time, the control available enables you to construct really impressive spaces and to emulate many less impressive, but ‘difficult’, environments. In the time-conscious, pressured world of film, designing spaces from scratch is frequently out of the question so a wide variety of presets is essential and VSS-3 has them in abundance. Divided into logical groups to make them easy to locate, film has 12 folders and music 7 with a total of around 200 presets in all. If a preset isn’t quite appropriate for the purpose, a quick tweak is generally all that’s necessary to fine-tune. With many reverbs, mono-ing the output is a recipe for disaster and means big compromises when mono compatibility is an issue. One of the VSS design aims was to maintain mono compatibility and I was thoroughly impressed with the results. The VSS-3 manages to add character to sources without drowning them in a wash of reverb. The sense of ‘being there’ can be almost uncanny. To put this another way, treated with the appropriate preset, a dry sound can be convincingly placed in an instantly recognisable environment. If you cannot afford a System 6000, the PowerCore VSS-3 proposition is a sensible choice. I just wish I had had tools like this a few years ago. ■

Contact TC ELECTRONIC, DENMARK: Website: www.tcelectronic.com

PROS

System 6000 reverb at a killer price; excellent for sound for picture; interesting interface.

CONS

Mono Stereo only; interface takes a while to get used to.

EXTRAS

TC-Helicon’s VoicePro is described as ‘the most technologically advanced voice-processing unit on the market’. A combination of proprietary voice processing algorithms and a voiceoptimised compilation of vocal effects, including classic TC algorithms, it is designed to allow all aspects of a vocal performance to be altered once the talent has left the studio. Features include TC-Helicon’s VoiceModeling, Hybrid Shifting and Flextime algorithms that permit the pitch, time and character of a voice to be reﬁned and manipulated. Sound designers and music producers will beneﬁt from a Transducer algorithm that emulates telephones, radios and other quality reducing devices.

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May/June 2005

review

Audio-Technica AT2020 If one thing has gone along with the proliferation of workstation working methods then it is the proliferation of affordable microphones. JON THORNTON looks in at an entry-level contender from one of the original democratising microphone brands.

T WASN’T TOO LONG AGO (or am I getting old?) that if you were in the market for a reasonably priced capacitor microphone that still performed in a manner suitable for professional work, your options were pretty limited. AKG’s venerable C1000 springs to mind — a small diaphragm back electret design admittedly, but a good all round performer. Still, in those days large diaphragms and externally polarised microphones meant serious kit, and serious kit meant serious money (Yep. You’re getting old. Ed).

Today, the situation couldn’t be more different. The rise of the project studio coupled with the entry of a variety of offerings of chiefly Chinese origin has seen the lower priced end of the microphone market explode. It’s not surprising, therefore, that some of the more established brands have started to look at this end of the business seriously. A case in point is Audio-Technica’s AT2020, which from the outset makes no assertions to be anything other than a new milestone in price and performance and aimed squarely at the project/home studio market. With a street price of just under the UK£100 mark it represents a serious assault on this sector of the market. First impressions of the microphone are of a compact, side-addressed design that looks and feels rugged and well screwed together. The no-frills packaging limits itself to a zippered vinyl pouch and a solid microphone clip that screws into the base of the microphone. So far, so very Audio-Technica. Dig a little deeper though, and the AT2020 throws up some interesting details. You’ll notice that so far I have not mentioned diaphragm size and that’s because I’m not entirely sure how to classify it. Typically, we view diaphragm diameters of about 1inch (2.5cm) to be ‘large diaphragm’ capacitors, but the diaphragm employed in the AT2020 is roughly half that diameter at 16mm. Not only that, but it’s a back-electret rather than an externally polarised design — which makes initial comparisons with a C1000 seem much more apt all of a sudden. Or indeed with an AKG C2000, which uses the same approach of taking a small diaphragm capsule and mounting it in a larger side-addressed housing. Polar pattern is cardioid and fixed, and no pad or switchable filters are provided — it’s very much a case of what you see is what you get (or maybe not from the diaphragm size point of view...) But it’s what it sounds like that counts and male vocals were the first order of the day. Audio Technica’s products have always had a certain sound to me, certainly in their large diaphragm offerings, and is probably best described as ‘glassy’ but still neutral and flat. The AT2020, though, doesn’t seem to share these attributes. Yes, there’s some good detail in the mid and high registers with a sense of clarity as opposed to warmth. But overall, particularly on vocals, it sounded quite brittle and thin, which was only

Contact AUDIO-TECHNICA, JAPAN: Website: www.audio-technica.co.uk

PROS

Tightly packaged, well put together; price; reasonably versatile.

CONS

Can sound a little brittle at times; low frequency extension not great.

EXTRAS

partially resolved by working the mic very close. Part of the reason for this becomes clear when examining the quoted frequency response, which starts falling off around the 200Hz mark with a little resurgent peak around 40Hz. This seems to make the microphone quite quirky in terms of matching its response to source material, with some voices sounding very thin and others slightly more balanced. On an acoustic guitar this trait manifested itself in a sound that was bright and aggressive, and would certainly cut through a mix well enough, but in a solo instrument context seemed to be lacking a little in substance in the bottom octave. Moving on to electric guitar, and the AT2020 was tried in a very close (SM57 type) position, and at 30-40cm distance. Actually, it worked very well when used very close — like an SM57 with added bite and grunt, but started to sound overly ‘roomy’ as the distance increased. As only one microphone was available for review, I also tried it as a single overhead on a drum kit, positioned to slightly favour the kick drum side. Again, it did a reasonable job at revealing high and mid detail, but verged on brittle sounding with the cymbals. Low frequency information was a little subdued — maybe not a bad thing in this application though, especially if a kick drum mic is already employed. If all of this is starting to sound like damning with faint praise, then I guess that it is. But you’ve got to appreciate this in the correct context. First, it’s a microphone that has clearly been built to a price — and a very affordable one at that. And in some ways it’s more honest than some of its competitors in that its sound is obvious and apparent right out of the box, instead of having aspects of its response masked by electronic tuning which sometimes means that shortcomings are hidden until it’s too late. Secondly, it’s very clear that Audio Technica has deliberately produced a microphone geared towards users who may use it for a bit of everything, with little or any choice of alternatives. And it does a reasonable job of everything that you throw at it. ■

A-T has made similar progress in the affordability stakes, as demonstrated with the AT2020, with its new UHF system. The 2000 Series UHF true diversity wireless mic system offers many of the advanced technologies and features of A-T’s high-end wireless systems at a highly competitive price. Easy set up and automatic frequency scanning facilities combine with up to 10channel frequency-agile operation, for high quality, interference free performance.

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May/June 2005

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review

SRS Labs 6.1 Circle surround encoder/decoder Matrixed surround has an increasingly important role to play in delivering a wider sonic experience through traditional stereo infrastructures. ANDY DAY looks at the latest Pro Tools plug-in offering from another player in the game.

ESPITE THE UNIVERSAL acceptance of 5.1 audio on DVD, there are still some ‘bottle necks’ in the delivery of multichannel audio to the masses. The music industry is limited to stereo on CD, and terrestrial broadcast (in Europe at least) is still stereo. In the past, broadcasters have used Dolby Surround as a way to get LCRS mixes to millions of viewers with Pro-Logic decoders at home. This has been updated fairly recently with Pro-Logic II, an improved system allowing LCR plus Left Surround and Right Surround mixes to be matrixed into a stereo signal. I was surprised to ﬁnd that SRS Labs has also been doing this in parallel to Dolby, with considerable success. SRS develops and licenses a wide range of technologies to most of the major consumer manufacturers, not only surround sound products but bass and voice enhancement products too, with several manufacturers incorporating Circle surround decoding in their multiformat AV receivers. This TDM plug-in allows Pro Tools users to encode (and decode) projects all within the Pro Tools environment. The plug-in can be purchased online or via retail. Authorisation is made to iLok, so you have to be running Pro Tools V6.x or above on Windows XP or Mac OS X. In order to use the plug-in, you just need to create a 6.1 track, and insert the SRS encoder. The encoder has signal present indicators and output level meters for LtRt (Left total, Right total — the name given to matrixed stereo signals). It can take up to 6.1 channels of audio and combine them into a stereo signal, this is done by some kind of phase shifting and summing to combine the stereo surrounds

and centre information into the LtRt outputs. The .1 or LFE channel is encoded by summing into LtRt. In mixes with lots of LFE this can result in excessive LF information in the LtRt, so there is an option to bass manage the other channels by rolling off the LF, which prevents overload. The decoder can be inserted on the same track or ideally on another 6.1 track. This allows you to record your LtRt into Pro Tools and simultaneously monitor through the decoder. As with the encoder there are level indicators and meters for the outputs, as well as trims for individual channel adjustment. You can switch between Circle surround, LCRS (Pro-Logic style), stereo and mono decoding, which is useful for testing downward compatibility. There are also options for different Centre modes, phantom Centre and Centre Surround (Cs) on/off. Certain Circle Surround consumer decoders also have the option of other SRS technologies, True Bass and Dialogue Clarity, both of which can be emulated on the plug-in. True Bass is a very effective bass enhancement process that derives bass from the LtRt and Dialogue Clarity is a dialogue frequency based enhancer, which helps to improve dialogue intelligibility, particularly in busy mixes. Both these technologies are optional and user controllable in a consumer decoder, so while it’s useful to hear what people might do at home, it’s not advisable to mix with them switched in. Setting output levels is simple using the built in pink noise generator, and then you’re ready to go. The channel separation is surprisingly good, particularly in the surrounds, I used an existing feature

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ﬁlm 5.1 track and A/B tested the two. The image width is slightly narrower in Circle surround, but still very good considering it’s a matrix system. The LFE channel is a bit hit or miss, but given the added option of True Bass settings in a consumer decoder it always will be. Any extreme pans translate well, even in the surround channels. As with any matrixing process, mono compatibility is a potential problem, basically anything sent exclusively to the surround channels cancelled out in mono. However, with stereo listening becoming more common, due to DAB and Sky, mono compatibility is less of a consideration. I also A/B tested Circle surround decoding against Pro-Logic II, to see if the plug-in could be used as a PLII encoder. The results were very good, I assume this is because PLII has a similar way of encoding and decoding. Even regular Pro-Logic decoding worked OK. The LtRt signal is quite robust and can be post processed, as long as the phase correlation and levels of each channel are not changed. There is a tendency for the LtRt level to get quite high, especially on busy soundtracks, the only way to avoid overloads is to decrease the level of the material before the encoder. It would be useful to have an input trim included on the encoder, to make this simpler. The stereo LtRt signal can have signiﬁcant out off phase content, especially when Ls and Rs are at full whack, so for broadcast programmes you would need to keep an eye on the amount of Ls and Rs in the mix, to pass network tech reviews. Music is a great application of SRS, as CDs are limited to stereo making CS encoded mixes is a nice way to introduce 5.1 music to consumers. The Circle Surround plug-in is a useful tool, not just for CS encoding, but as a PLII or even a PLI encoder. As the Circle Surround process becomes more available on consumer decoders, there may be more use for actually creating CS programmes. The decoder can be used to decode stereo signals into 5.1 or 6.1 and using the ‘post processes’, improve dialogue intelligibility or derive an LFE channel. At US$799 it’s not exactly cheap, but given the versatility for PLII encoding it’s quite reasonably priced. ■

PROS

Surprisingly low channel crosstalk; good compatibility with PLII decoding; not too heavy on Pro Tools DSP; Dialogue Clarity works very well on high action scenes.

CONS

No input level trim on the encoder; LFE encoding not great; slight image narrowing compared to 5.1 discreet.

Contact SRS LAB, US Website: www.srslabs.com UK, Unity Audio: +44 1440 785843

May/June 2005

review

The Direct-Access Console

Instant access is essential in live situations. This is exactly what the unique AURUS Direct-Access concept provides. Developed from scratch, the AURUS Digital Audio Mixing System sets new standards in the high-end digital audio market. Features: • Totally new design • Perfect for live and production applications • Instant control access via unique dual concentric encoders in the channel strip • Up to 96 channel strips and 300 audio channels • Patented 28-bit TrueMatch converters • NEXUS STAR-based • Compact, portable, and silent – fan free

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review

Mackie Big Knob Another offering in the seemingly continuous stream of new monitoring controllers for DAW use, this one has a curious name that evidently is less humourous on one side of the Atlantic than it is on the other. ROB JAMES resists the temptation for Frankie Howerd innuendo.

HE DAW HAS CHANGED the way we work — things will never be the same again. One of the things the DAW has made obvious is that for many applications any conventional mixing console is overkill and probably not ideal for the purpose anyway. Time to analyse what is really required to support a DAW. A lot obviously depends on just what the DAW is used for. If you routinely work in surround, the Big Knob isn’t for you. But for many people stereo is as complicated as it gets. In many cases, the whole point is the variety of stereo tasks that can be undertaken. So, as a minimum any box with the title ‘Monitor Controller’, or in this case the rather more grandiose ‘Studio Command System’, needs to cater for several. Monitor level control and switching are top of the list. For studio recording, talkback and foldback are essential. Signal routing and level control for recording to and from external machines are nice to have. There is an argument for including mic pres in the equation

but I feel this is probably better left to a separate unit. Choice of mic pres and/or ‘channel strip’ type front ends is a very personal decision and there is a lot to choose from. Mackie has had a look at the monitor controller market and added a few wrinkles of its own. There are four independent, summable stereo main inputs plus a phones mix input. A talkback mic is built in to the surface and there are two talkback send keys. One of the main inputs is dedicated to phono complete with an RIAA preamp. The Big Knob unit is reassuringly heavy with a built-in power supply. The unit has a solidity and an air of quality about the knobs and buttons that belies

Up front

All the buttons, apart from talkback, are mechanically latching. The main monitor out has Mono, Mute and -20dB Dim keys set in an arc beneath the main volume control. A pot sets level from the talkback mic and further pots set studio output level and independent volume for the two front panel headphone outputs (1/4-inch jacks). The Studio output also has an On/Off button and fairly rudimentary, but adequate, six-segment LED meters show the level of the currently selected stereo source(s). Input Source Select gives you four additive buttons selecting the DAW mix output, 2-Track A and B, and Phono. In the Phones section a button selects between the phones picking up the main, Input Sources, mix or the independent DAW Phones Mix input (fed from, for example, an aux out on the DAW via a separate physical output.) Three further latching buttons select the three possible stereo pairs of main monitor outputs. Typically, these might be used for Nearﬁeld, Main and Subwoofer. Since they are additive, it is simple to compare the sound with and without the sub. In the bottom right-hand corner the talkback level pot is accompanied by two momentary buttons sending talkback from the built-in mic to either the two-track outputs, or the phones and studio outputs. If a footswitch is used, it sends talkback to all destinations.

Backside

All the back panel audio connections apart from the gram input are 1/4-inch balanced jacks. Each pair of monitor outputs and the Studio output has a trim pot with a range of -10dBV to +4dBu. 2-Track and DAW inputs each have a -10dBV/+4dBu switch and +/-10dB trim pot. The 2 track, DAW and Phones Amp outputs each have a level push switch selecting between +4dBu (out) and -10dBV (in). The DAW Phones mix input has the same. The Phono input is on two phono sockets with a +/- 10dB trim pot. Mackie thoughtfully supplies two phono shorting plugs for situations where this input is not required, to minimise the possibility of added noise in case it is accidentally selected. In traditional fashion a separate grounding screw terminal is also ﬁtted.

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the UK£276.60 plus VAT asking price. All the audio connections are on the back of the unit with the exception of a couple of headphone jacks. If this is a serious problem due to the sheer bulk of the cables, then you need a much more expensive two-unit solution. The volume control is the most prominent control on the surface, which, (fnarr, fnarr) and much as it pains me as a lifetime devotee of double-entendre, is about as close as you’re going to get to a Carry-On joke. Although less ‘purist’ than some recent passive designs, the Big Knob may well be more practical in the real world. Simple matching of -10dBV and +4dBu sources and destinations, an RIAA gramophone input and talkback with AGC add to the appeal. Smooth switching between input sources for comparison checks requires some manual dexterity and practice, but quickly becomes instinctive. The only strange omission is the lack of an automatic dim option on the main, A, B and C, monitor outputs when talkback is invoked. The resultant howl-round will be a salutary reminder to drop the input mic level(s) (or hit the Dim key) before pressing the talkback button. Apart from sound quality, the most critical element of a monitor controller is control layout. Buttons and pots should fall naturally to hand without the operator needing to look or consciously think. Obviously, some acclimatisation is required, but Mackie’s designers have it spot on with the Big Knob. Careful attention to design and the feature mix has produced a keenly priced unit. Mackie has clearly done its homework. The addition of a dedicated gramophone input is a welcome bonus to those who frequently need to input vinyl to a DAW, whether for restoration or sampling purposes. The Big Knob should be on the short list for anyone seeking a monitoring and routing solution to support a simple DAW installation. ■

PROS

Aggressive pricing; good mix of features; easy adaptability to various source and destination levels.

CONS

No auto Dim when talkback is invoked; active circuitry must introduce artefacts; may be a bit big for some installations when fully cabled.

Contact MACKIE, US: Website: www.mackie.com

May/June 2005

review

Hear Technologies Hear Back Personal Monitor Mixer System While the idea of personalised foldback systems isn’t a new one, the last couple of years have seen some new entrants to the market that exploit cheap and robust implementations of digital audio transmission, rather than the slightly more clumsy analogue implementations of old. The latest contender comes from US based company Hear Technologies, and, in JON THORTNON’S view, raises the game.

IRST IMPRESSIONS ARE good from the moment you see the Hear Back box, which although quite large comes complete with carrying handle. Inside, neatly packed, are further boxes containing everything — and I mean everything — you need to get going. This is truly a complete system and includes the Hear Back hub unit, four personal mix stations and all necessary cabling. The hub itself is a fairly deep 19-inch rackmounting unit. The back panel allows the input of up to eight audio signals in either analogue or digital format. Analogue inputs are via a 25-pin D-Sub connector following the standard DA88 convention (a breakout cable is included in the box), whereas digital inputs are via an ADAT lightpipe input or Hear Technologies’ proprietary HearBus format — more of which later. A small slide switch on the front panel selects which of these three options is the audio source for the hub. Eight RJ45 sockets cater for connection to the personal mixer stations, which are connected via a standard CAT5E cable — again a 50-foot cable for each of the personal mixers is included. This CAT5E cable carries all 8 audio channels as multiplexed digital audio as well as power for the personal mixers. As far as I’m concerned, this is where the Hear Back system scores over a similar system from Aviom — no ﬁddly AC adapters for each mixer. Of course, the disadvantage of this is that you can’t ‘daisy-chain’ the mixers together — the hub is effectively the centre of a star network. Some people might gulp at the prospect of sending +/-18 volts down a CAT5 cable, but each output from the hub features automatic solid-state fuse protection should a cable short occur, ensuring that power is

maintained to all other mixers. The front panel of the hub shows signal metering for each of the eight input channels with three LEDs — green for signal presence and red for signal clip. The middle, blue LED operates at two brightness levels — dim for -10dBu and bright for +4dBu, and is surprisingly easy to use. The system makes the assumption that the first two input signals will be a stereo pair, with the remainder of the signals either mono sources or stereo sources — and this is reflected when looking at the mixer stations themselves. Controls on these are extremely straightforward and offer a total of nine pots. Audio channels 1 and 2 are treated as a stereo pair with a single level control, the remaining six channels each have their own level control. A link button between logical pairs allows them to function as stereo sources, with the left hand level control becoming the master for the pair. While there is no facility for altering the balance of a stereo signal other than at source, in practice this is not too limiting, and the directness of a simple pot is better for many artists rather than the select switch/encoder operation of Aviom’s system. A master level control governs overall level to two (paralleled) headphone sockets, and to a stereo/ mono line output available on two 1/4-inch TRS jack sockets. A 3.5mm stereo jack input also allows an additional audio source to be directly injected into a specific mixer. In this increasingly health and safety conscious era, Hear Technologies has also very thoughtfully provided a built in DSP-based brickwall limiter with an adjustable threshold setting — useful for dealing with any unexpected audio events. There are some other thoughtful touches to the mixer stations. In the base of each is a microphone stand thread, which immediately solves the problem of how to mount them. The units themselves are also light enough for this to never be a problem, even when mounted right at the end of a boom. Built-in strain relief channels for the RJ45 cables in the underside are also going to prevent problems at the weak point of the connector in the rough and tumble of a session. Perhaps the only thing lacking in this area is the lack of scribble strips next to the channel level controls. It’s nothing that a bit of tape wouldn’t solve but this is inevitably going to lead to the usual sticky mess on the units. In use, any reservations I had about the performance of the headphone amplifiers was put to rest immediately. Capable of resolution

driving into loads of between 8 and 600ohms, there was always plenty of level on tap, and reasonably distortion free unless really cranked. The sound was perhaps a little ‘thin’ sounding in comparison to more conventional headphone ampliﬁers, but certainly nothing to complain about. Latency is also not really an issue — the specs quote less than 1.5mS total system delay, and nothing I experienced would seem to contradict this. If eight headphone mixers aren’t enough, Hear Technologies has also designed the system to be eminently scalable. The HearBus output on the back of the hub unit allows the audio fed into that hub to be passed to another hub’s HearBus input via a single CAT5 lead, and if necessary daisy-chained on to yet another hub. Each additional hub can then feed up to eight more headphone mixers. Up to 31 units can be connected in this fashion, and each HearBus cable is good for runs of up to 500 feet. An ADAT optical format to HearBus convertor box is also available — useful for taking signals from a digital FOH mixer to a hub located on stage, for example. There’s an awful lot to like about this system because it’s ﬂexible, easy to use and rugged. If you’re in the market for this kind of thing, it’s going to take a lot of beating. ■

PROS

Intuitive, direct user interface; scalability; no external PSU required for mixers.

CONS

Star network topology only; scribble strips would have been the icing on the cake.

EXTRAS

Also from Hear Technologies is the self-explanatorily titled Talk Back 600

MV. Designed for situations when a conventional console is not in use, this 19-inch rackmount allows monitor level control and switching between two pairs of monitors, and the insertion of a talkback feed across up to six analogue audio signals in conjunction with monitor dimming. Optional wired or infrared remotes are also available for both talkback and monitor switching.

Contact HEAR TECHNOLOGIES, US: Website: www.heartechnologies.com UK, SCV London: +44 208 418 1470

May/June 2005

review

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review

Propellerheads Reason 3.0 Since the beginning, Reason has been hugely attractive both visually and sonically, and each successive update has always increased the appeal with the addition of new sound sources, effects processors and expanded sound libraries. GEORGE SHILLING continues to have fun and says it’s fab.

WAS DELIGHTED TO SEE in the Propellerhead website Flash trailer for Reason V3.0 a glimpse of a Baby HUI, as I happen to own one, and the promised support for motorised control surfaces as one of the headline new features. The others include the new MClass Suite — a virtual rack of four processors typically used together for adding some overall gloss and manipulation to your masterpiece. The Combinator is a new way of joining together units from the Reason palette to create sound sources or effects that use multiple virtual devices. And a new File Browser makes it easier to find the sounds on your computer among that steadily growing Refill library. There is also a handy new Line Mixer with six stereo channels and an FX send and return; other new features are mostly in the details — there is still no audio recording, and the sequencer remains largely unchanged, save for the useful addition of Mute and Solo buttons for each track, along with ‘release’ buttons for these at the top. One loss is support for older Windows operating systems and also Mac OS9. I don’t miss the latter, it has been a long time since I have booted my machine thus, although undoubtedly there are still a few die-hards (More than a few. Ed). Installation is straightforward, I was supplied with all the serial numbers and codes to type in, and refreshingly no Internet connecting or challenge/response carry-on was required. As before, there are three discs for Installation, Factory Sound Bank, and Orkester. The Factory sounds from 2.5 are all present but have been expanded from 530Mb to 699Mb with some fab new sounds and samples in addition to all the originals, created by third parties who also offer their own commercial ReFills. After a brief exploration I was keen to get the fader controller working. To my dismay, none of the HUI family feature in the supported controllers list. An email to Propellerheads confirmed the lack of support, and they were reticent as to whether this would ever appear. However, there is much improvement with multiple faders and keyboard MIDI controllers can easily be configured from a new setup page. A large number of new demo songs are provided and it is well worth studying these for inspiration as they prove that Reason is not just for dance music

— a vast catalogue of different styles is covered here in a most entertaining collection. The Combinator combines units for instant recall of favourite combinations with all their potentially complex ‘rear panel’ connections. It makes layering sounds from several devices a doddle. And keyboard

splits augment the possibilities for live use. Any devices can be grouped together into a hosting Combinator rack module, and at any stage dragged back out again. The main panel usefully includes pitch bend and mod wheels, and four assignable knobs for real-time or automated manipulation. These are assigned in the drop-down Programmer panel, which also conﬁgures key mapping and velocity range settings. Combis can comprise Effects or Instruments or both, and you can even design ‘skins’ to change the Combinator’s

Reason Drum Kits

A commercial a d d - o n f ro m Propellerheads, this Reﬁll comes on a DVD and includes several drum kits, exhaustively sampled and carefully recorded. For Reason users wanting realistic sounding drums, this is a relatively cheap and easy way of acquiring a very good real drum simulator, without having to run dedicated software such as BFD. There are some clever touches — repeated notes trigger different samples — and the ‘hypersampling’ is incredibly exhaustive, but you’ll need plenty of RAM.

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appearance. On the rear, you can access the entire Combi patch with the Combinator’s dedicated inputs, useful for effects chaining. At least one unofficial dedicated Combinator website has already appeared for the exchange of patches. The MClass processors comprise a 4-band parametric EQ, a 2-band Stereo Imager, a variable-knee single-band Compressor, and a Maximizer that uses look-ahead limiting and soft-clipping. All can be loaded individually or as a special Mastering Suite Combi with all four together. These are very high quality effects, whether used for mastering or general signal processing, but for overall mastering they are only available for tracks created entirely within Reason. With Propellerheads still resisting the temptation to add audio recording to the package, you still have to either Rewire an audio sequencer or import audio into the sampler to create and master tracks including recorded sounds. The new File Browser makes it far easier to search for and find patches. Different Reason devices are loaded as necessary to audition sounds from your library, and from the main Reason menu I quickly gained the habit of selecting ‘Create device by browsing patches’. Previous versions of Reason have been impeccably stable and worked beautifully straight out of the box. Unusually, 3.0 shipped with a number of bugs, some of which potentially crash the program, particularly when loading old songs. I also discovered problems with the Reload utility that converts Akai CD-Roms into NN-XT sampler instruments or Refills. If you generally use Reason rewired to a host, this update is incremental rather than revolutionary — there are no new sound modules, and the Mastering Suite components, while excellent, won’t necessarily see a huge amount of action for mastering, as opposed to the treatment of individual sounds. The file browser certainly helps the workflow, the Combinator is useful, but I won’t be spending much time designing ‘skins’ for it. However, there are some nice improvements here, and the program is a wonderful source of sounds and inspiration, looks great, and is always terrific fun to use. ■

PROS

MIDI controller support; improved ﬁle browser; backwards compatible; plenty of free and commercial Reﬁlls available; still inspiring and fun.

CONS

Uses more system resources than previous version; no new sound sources; a few bugs; no HUI support; no real-time counter or tempo mapping in sequencer.

Contact PROPELLERHEADS, SWEDEN Website: www.propellerheads.se

May/June 2005

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review

Enhanced Audio M600 A microphone suspension? Not just an ordinary mic mount but one that unlike most proprietary models ﬁts a very wide range of microphone types. Oh, and it also makes your mics sound better too. JON THORNTON is pleasantly surprised.

HIS WAS ALWAYS GOING to be a tricky review. The designer of the M600 microphone mount had already let slip to me that the initial thinking behind it had stemmed from looking at ‘performance enhancing’ accessories for hi-fi systems. Secondly, I still had the words of last issue’s Slaying Dragons column echoing in my brain and extolling the dangers inherent in audiophile testing. But perhaps most intriguingly was the collection of testimonials from some extremely well respected individuals about the performance of what seems, at first glance, to be a bit of audio voodoo. Time for some more details. The M600 is first and foremost a universal microphone mount, capable of firmly holding pretty much any microphone whose external diameter doesn’t exceed 65mm. It consists of

two rings of machined aluminium, each of which is drilled and tapped at three equidistant points. Through each of these points is an adjustable screw, which terminates in a plastic thrust pad. A microphone is then held in position inside the rings and all six screws adjusted so that it is clamped securely at six points. The material used to manufacture the thrust pads ensures that they don’t twist against the microphone body, and also protects the microphone casing from damage. The two rings are attached to some further machined aluminium parts that incorporate a swivel joint ending in a standard microphone stand thread. In all, the looks are equal measures of engineering elegance and instrument of torture, but in practice it works very well, securely clamping all types of microphone body styles. That could be the end of the story — a nicely engineered universal microphone mount (and incidentally the only one I’ve found other than the original clip that can hold an ElectroVoice RE20!) But the claims of the designer, David Browne, go much further than this. Convinced that the traditional suspension mounts or solid clips supplied with most microphones were compromising their performance, the materials employed in the M600’s construction were chosen to ensure a very low resonant frequency. This, coupled with the rigidity of the clamping mechanism is claimed to reduce the transmission of infrasonic, structure-borne vibrations to the microphone. While conventional wisdom would suggest that these frequencies are going to have little effect given the frequency response of the microphones and the range of human hearing, tests would seem to suggest otherwise. In order to remove as much subjectivity and bias as possible, a matched pair of Schoeps CMC5s with omni capsules was initially set up — one in a conventional ﬁxed clip and the other in the M600. Both were patched through identical Amek 9098 mic preampliﬁers, and recorded. The microphones were kept as coincident as possible, and a variety of sources used, including male and female vocals, acoustic guitar and percussion. Due to a slight comedy moment involving a duff shield on one of the mic cables, and the attempts at identifying this via deduction and substitution, at the time of audition nobody was really sure which microphone was which. We elected to keep it this way until the recordings had been played back, and

only then did we subsequently check — again, trying to remove any preconceptions about the effect of the M600. An assistant was employed to switch between the recorded tracks in a random pattern, and several pairs of ears invited to give their judgement. There was unanimous agreement that there was a difference between the recordings. It’s slight, but very obvious. Most notable was a sense of ‘tightening’ in the low mids and bass, creating a very ‘solid’ sound. Coupled with this, or maybe as a result of this, was the sense that some of the more objectionable room sounds — a kind of 300Hz honk — was suppressed. Other differences were harder to quantify, and were not unanimously identified. Some listeners thought that there was a greater sense of high frequency definition, others not. Just to be on the safe side, and to eliminate the possibility of signal path differences, the microphones were physically swapped in the mounts, while retaining their original signal path. The results were the same for the microphone in the M600. Having tried a small diaphragm microphone, the same comparison was made using a pair of C414s — again on an omni pattern, with the ‘control’ 414 in a conventional suspension mount. If anything, the ‘tightening’ characteristic observed with the Schoeps was a little more pronounced, particularly as the distance from source to microphone was increased. There are downsides, of course. Suppression of mechanical noise (i.e. kicking the microphone stand) was much better with a conventional suspension mount than with the M600, and I’m sure that there are some microphones out there that are wider than the 65mm capacity of the clip (Blue Bottle owners are going to have to give this one a miss). Then there’s the cost — at around £150 this is an expensive microphone clip — although you’ve got to put that in the context of the £80 or so that Neumann will charge you for a conventional solid mount for a U87. Nevertheless, this is a very well engineered, flexible microphone mount that does seem to alter the way a microphone sounds — so for the money you could argue that it effectively gives you a whole cupboard full of new microphones. Audio Voodoo? I have to admit that I went into this review sceptically and came out surprised. I’m not going to even attempt to debate the underlying theory or establish why it works — although as one user testimonial points out, this does make for some interesting arguments over a pint or two... ■

PROS

Well engineered; ﬁts nearly every type of microphone; seems to tighten and enhance the low end of microphone response.

CONS

Not as good at mechanical knock suppression; expensive.

Contact ENHANCED AUDIO, IRELAND Website: www.enhancedaudio.ie

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May/June 2005

“It’s the first thing I plug in now. I love it. It just sounds great.” Garrett Lee a.k.a Jacknife Lee - Artist/Producer - U2, Snow Patrol, Eminem and others too many to mention.

“Great idea, sounds fantastic and you can link several together for 7.1- Perfect” Simon Osborne – Sting

“What a great product! Not just a great sound, but great value too.”

“Focusrite have made it possible for me to enjoy sounds I thought you could only buy at auction in Southebys.” Guy Sigsworth – Britney Spears, Bjork, Madonna, Julio Iglesius and many more.

“A creative palette; bold strokes, vivd colours, pure... filth!” Cenzo Townsend – Graham Coxon, New Order, Ordinary Boys, Kaiser Chiefs. Beastie Boys

believe

“For someone who uses all the vintage units… it’s quite simply fantastic.” Spike Stent – world-renowned Mix engineer.

“you don't have to re-patch a single cable to try unlimited combinations.” Khaliq Glover - Paisley Park Studios

Dave Hampton – Herbie Hancock, among others

“I’m stunned how authentic the box sounds compared to the original devices”

“the results are sonically brilliant & it’s a huge time saver”

Nigel Bates - Producer/Engineer for Paul carrack, Steve Winwood, Mike and the mechanics and many others

Steve Levine record producer - the official DEC tsunami record 'grief never grows old', Verbalicious, Culture club, Beach boys, Honeyz, Deniece willialms, Ziggy Marley

Any mic pre and compressor in history The ultimate analogue-digital hybrid

F O R F U R T H E R I N F O R M AT I O N , C A L L D I R E C T O N 0 1 4 9 4 8 3 6 3 0 7 O R V I S I T

w w w. ff l i q u i d . c o m

Disclaimer: FOCUSRITE, the FF Logo, LIQUID CHANNEL, LIQUID TECHNOLOGY, LIQUIDCONTROL, EVERYONE NEEDS LIQUID, and the LIQUID CHANNEL Logo are trademarks of Focusrite Audio Engineering Ltd. DYNAMIC CONVOLUTION is a trademark of Sintefex. All other product names, trademarks, and trade names are the properties of their respective owners, which are in no way associated or affiliated with Focusrite or its LIQUID CHANNEL product and which have not endorsed Focusrite’s LIQUID CHANNEL product. These other product names, trademarks, and trade names owned by other companies are used solely to identify the third-party products whose sonic behavior was studied for the LIQUID CHANNEL product.

review

DAV Electronics BG No.4 At a time when a lot of analogue gear is earning its keep as a means of colouring and warming up signals before or after they hit the digits, it’s interesting to ﬁnd an analogue box that majors on cleanliness and purity. GEORGE SHILLING checks out the Broadhurst Gardens No.4 limiter/compressor.

S A FORMER DECCA employee, DAV Electronics’ Mick Hinton is well qualified to recreate designs from the legendary Decca Studios’ R&D workshop. This model revisits a 1976 stereo mastering limiter circuit, the original of which would have been used for most of the mastering of rock, pop and MOR material passing through the Decca cutting room from that era onwards. This was the device used to ensure maximum level without clipping for vinyl and cassette masters. It was designed to sound as clean as possible and this new version is probably even cleaner and clearer sounding than the original as it benefits from better performing and less noisy modern chips. Considerable additions and improvements are provided over and above the original Decca unit, such as a filter network and a Gain Make Up control on each channel. The 1U case is lighter than it looks, but lacks the styling refinements afforded by volume manufacturers. This may not matter to the user, but the slightly homemade appearance might not make your clients swoon. Despite the high build quality, it looks like something your inventor uncle might have put together, and indeed, each unit is hand constructed and tested by the designer. This does assure rigorous quality control and exact tolerances. Hinton also saves on costs by declining to provide a manual, arguing that anyone using such a device should find the controls familiar, which is mainly true, although some features deserve explanation. The knobs fit closer to the front panel than those on the BG3 I tested previously, there are no protruding nuts, and although the legending is very small, the knob pointers are clear. The rear panel simply provides balanced-only XLR audio connections and an IEC mains socket. On the front, the two side-by-side channel controls comprise five stepped knobs and a pushbutton for Limit or Compress. In the centre are buttons for Limiters Off and Stereo Couple, the former seems to kill the feed to the detector circuit, the latter joining the two detectors’ signals together — all individual channel controls remain active in Stereo mode. Bi-polar transistors are used for the gain reduction circuits, these being chosen because they are quieter and have lower distortion than FETs. The Limit mode is set at a ratio of 10:1, while Compress is 2:1. The amount of gain reduction is set using the Threshold knob. This is switched with 12 positions, and oddly labelled from 1 to 20dBu. This unusual calibration is carried over from the original Decca unit, where the numbers were set to represent roughly the maximum 42

output level when the signal was limited. However, the original lacked any Gain Make Up controls and fortunately these are present on the BG4 — 11 positions from zero to 16dB. Gain reduction is shown on each channel’s clear LED meter, providing a scale of 8 LEDs from 1 to 12dB, the first four in single dB steps. Compression and Limiting attack time is fixed and set to a very fast time in order to catch peaks, which it does very effectively. It shapes hard-edged transients pleasantly, especially bass drums, controlling their attack without any nastiness or splat. Release is controlled by a three-position knob, with settings of 0.3S, 1S and 3S. The slowest, at 3 seconds, makes any gain reduction almost inaudible with most sources. Which of the other two settings is more audible depends on the source material and filter settings, but they both tend to enhance the dynamics, especially with pop and rock material, lending dynamic excitement without distortion. The tonal character is very neutral, with huge amounts of gain reduction achieved without colouration or distortion, retaining clarity and sounding un-hyped. High pass sidechain circuits feature on units such as the API 2500 and the Drawmer 1968, but the concept has been implemented in a slightly unusual way here. The mode is selected by a knob for LowPass, High-Pass or Wide-Band modes. Accompanying this is a frequency selector knob with six positions at 100Hz, 250Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz, 2.5kHz and 5kHz. The original Decca unit was permanently full range or ‘wide band’, but this is undoubtedly a very useful feature. It works particularly well with this unit’s fast-attack gain reduction characteristics. Each of the frequencies can be used as High or Low Pass corner frequencies. In High Pass mode, setting the frequency to 100 or 250 allows for the biggest and beefiest dance bass drum to pound away without

the whole track’s volume pumping and sucking. Using different frequencies you can almost use the unit as an EQ shaper — particularly when using the slow release. With most programme material the gain reduction can hover around a constant amount and therefore effectively EQ the track without any perceived distortion, and some interesting effects can be achieved using these filters. In terms of technical performance the BG4 is superb, with exceptionally low noise floor and distortion and excellent headroom — it overloads as gracefully as any analogue circuit when pushed to the limit. However, one thing the BG4 will not tolerate is being connected to an unbalanced circuit — part of the design philosophy invokes the superiority of balanced circuitry, and you will hear something very nasty if you don’t disconnect pin 3 on the XLR when interfacing with semi-pro gear. When so much analogue gear is engineered to deliberately distort and exaggerate ‘warmth’, with valves and FETs adding crunch, it is refreshing to find a unit designed for a crisp and clear analogue signal. Limiting and compression is achieved without fuss, and choices of settings available are flexible without being over-complicated. Should you not require the filtering, there is a much cheaper alternative in the shape of the BG6 which is brick-shaped like the BG1, and a mere £450 ex VAT. But the filters are great, the BG4 sounds grown-up and effortless, and with recent price reductions in the DAV range it represents splendid value for money at £1234 ex VAT. ■

Contact DAV ELECTRONICS, UK Website: www.davelectronics.com UK, KMR Audio: +44 208 445 2446

PROS

Clean analogue gain reduction; unusually ﬂexible ﬁlter sidechain control.

CONS

Looks somewhat home-made; no manual.

EXTRAS

DAV’s BG5 is an audio channel unit with a high impedence instrument input with pad and phase switches, a mic amp from the BG1, and a switched 50Hz HPF. There’s a two stage EQ with the Bass and Treble stepped circuit from the BG3, an LED output meter and a wide-band only version of the limiter/ compressor from the BG4.

resolution

May/June 2005

review ICON EMPOWERED “ICON is a big step forward in functionality and ergonomics ...

... and the guys at Scrub could not have been more helpful.”

Dan Gable / Resolution

“ICON combines cutting edge technology with the look and feel of a traditional console ...

... we gave Scrub a tight deadline to install the ICON and they stuck to it.”

Dave Wyatt / Anglia TV

“With Pro Tools and ICON, the talent and creativity of our engineers really shines through in the end product ...

“ICON excels at both post and music ...

... the team at Scrub know ICON inside-out.”

John Rawlings / Scramble

... from our initial enquiry right through to final training, HHB and Scrub really delivered.”

John Goldstraw / Metropolis Group

“ICON delivers complete edit and mix integration with the functionality previously available only from consoles costing well into six figures ...

... Soundworks has a long-standing and very productive relationship with Ben and the Scrub team.”

Simon Jones / Soundworks

BY SCRUB A DIVISION OF HHB THE UK’S LEADING DIGIDESIGN RESELLER

BOOK A DEMO

020 7025 6020 scrub@hhb.co.uk

Scrub - A division of HHB 2nd Floor, 80 Berwick Street London W1F 8TU Tel 020 7025 6020 scrub@hhb.co.uk

www.hhb.co.uk/scrub

Tony Visconti You’ll ﬁnd his output in everyone’s record collection, yet this control room trailblazer is still doing it and still as enthusiastic as ever. ZENON SCHOEPE talks to him at Sun Studios about musical standards, the fear of commitment, and why recording is no great mystery.

T’S DIFFICULT TO KNOW where to start when introducing Tony Visconti as he’s pretty much done it all. An American who came to England and cut his reputation in the studio business, he’s a musician, arranger, producer, engineer, producer/engineer, and commercial studio owner who has worked with some of the biggest names — David Bowie and T.Rex are adequate credits although there are very many more. Most signiﬁcantly the stuff he’s done has become the stuff of legends and passed into the common book of verse for music recording — the progressively opening mics on Bowie’s vocal for Heroes, the quick take nature of the Bolan singles, just how live was Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous... What characterises his continued progress is the use of new technology, as and when it has become available, and a real solid sense of experimentation. He’s still doing it. He’s remixing Bowie back catalogue for multichannel yet he’s still working with exciting current bands. We caught up with him on sessions with Denmark’s best band Kashmir in Studio A at Copenhagen’s superb Sun Studios.

How did the sessions end up at Sun Studios? The band has its rehearsal studio across the courtyard here and recorded much of their last album there and took it to London to mix [Eden Studios]. I met them last July and we did three days working out ideas together and seeing if we liked each other. I liked their last album and we’d done some transatlantic phone calls but you can’t really get a feel for people like that. They took me across to see Sun Studios and I thought ‘What is this, this is amazing!’ I was really surprised when I came up here and saw all this wonderful equipment, a great room, all the daylight, it just had so many bonuses. I’m here for a month now and there’s nothing wrong with anything! The microphone collection is legendary — if you go over to the mic cupboard you’ll see mics that you’ve only ever seen pictures of. We’re doing the album here and we’re going to New York to mix at my place. I wouldn’t mind mixing here but they want to go to New York because it’s important for them to raise their visibility with Sony America. resolution

What’s the dynamic with a band like Kashmir that you’ve never met before, what are you looking for? We have to know if we like each other and that’s what the meeting in July was for. We not only rehearsed during the day, we went for meals at night and hung out socially. We wanted to work together. The distance was still a challenge for communication but we have the Internet now and I was getting weekly MP3s from them. I’d listen to it, I’d make comments, write back. Some of these songs have six versions of them. I would also give them encouragement as well as criticism. The relationship became an email one and we were doing preproduction via email. When I came here to do the album we planned to spend about a week in preproduction but we realised we had done so much MP3ing each other that we’d broken the back of it, so we came into the studio a few days earlier. How are you working? Analogue desk and Pro Tools at 88.2 because it folds down to 44.1 nicely. What was the last analogue tape album you did? Bowie’s last two albums [Heathen and Reality] we started analogue with a romantic notion. It was good, the drums sounded really good on analogue. When I do go back to analogue, then it’s just to record the drums and the bass because it’s really charming, especially the low-end. You transfer it to highdeﬁnition digital and you don’t lose it because you hit the analogue tape ﬁrst. I’ve found that locking up May/June 2005

craft Have engineers without this approach influenced the way music sounds in a detrimental way? I think what’s more insidious is the fact that a lot of people who really don’t play very well are making records. Take Bowie again, we’d used 15 tracks and we had one track left for the vocal — I couldn’t keep the vocals and I had to erase the previous vocal if we wanted to try it again. Now we have an infinite number of tracks so you just keep singing! In the old days people who were really great stepped up to the Does that sort of approach contribute to your continued enjoyment of the music microphone and they could handle that situation, making process? they had nerves of steel, they practiced, they trained, 09/05/05I see 11:03they Side ItResolution_PoCo_MK2_AD.qxd does. I use Pro Tools with classic sensibilities. were1the cream of the crop. They made it up that the end product all the time. I don’t lose my way! mountain and they left all the wannabees behind. have five guitars that I had to bounce down to two tracks and I did a lot of work on that. The Beatles worked 4-track and when they’d come to the mix they probably put the four faders in a line and it mixed. Bowie came up with a good phrase: ‘You discard the mire of options’ when you do things like that. When you commit to a bounce down it’s done, there’s very little you can do to it then — you can make it brighter or duller but you can’t change the levels.

analogue with digital is almost as time consuming as the good old days when you’d lock up a slave reel. It’s not instant, it’s not always reliable so I’m really happy once we have the analogue part done to switch over to digital and stay there.

What’s your ideal setup? For tracking I’d go to 16-track analogue — I never did like 24-track. I started out 4-track, 8-track and it was always that multiple 4, 8, 16. With 24, it went funny because now you were dividing the tape into more slithers — kick drum and bass guitar never sounded right to me on 24-track — I’m a bass guitarist. I would end up recording the kick drum on two tracks to get some more width. When I occasionally went back to 16-track I would hear the sound I always loved. That was my golden T.Rex period, the early Bowie stuff, all 16-track. Even 8-track had something about it. You started on 4-track and worked your way up, how have you seen the creativity change from those restrictive track counts to the virtually limitless track counts of today? There are two arguments here for what is good and what’s bad. With 16-track if you were going to do multiple backing vocals you had to plan ahead, you knew that eventually you needed 8 tracks for the two guys in the band that could sing and that you would bounce that down to two tracks or even one. That was planning, you had to think ahead. Therefore you kind of forced yourself into having a mental picture of the end product. Today, with the unlimited number of tracks, the end product is further and further away from reach. I have to discipline myself, I have to remember to think in the old analogue way. I know that it’s a speedier way of working nowadays — much, much faster because I don’t have to bounce anything down. Whereas I used to enjoy that, it was a bit of fun, make a little submix — sometimes you’d EQ, sometimes you’d pan between two tracks, sometimes add reverb — so when you put up those two channels a lot of work had already been done. I miss that, I really do. Now you get to a mix and you’ve got a desk full of signals, it could be anything... Then you have to be ruthless, then you have to start shaping, and mixing does take longer. In the good old days when it was 16 or 24-track I could mix two to three songs in a day because a lot of my submixing was done. The special effects were printed — the guitars had their reverbs. With T.Rex I’d sometimes May/June 2005

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Nowadays the wannabees are making records. It’s a terrible situation. With Autotune, with comping, 25tracks of vocals, moving syllables around and all that. I can do it. I like to get a singer up there and my way is I coach them. I’ve been in sessions where a young engineer has said ‘Oh, just sing a bunch and I’ll comp it.’ You know, even Kashmir were used to that and they didn’t know any other way.

Yet they’re very much a live band... They are and that’s why I took them on. I was convinced they could play and that we wouldn’t have to do too much digital trickery. For them the digital trickery wasn’t a substitute for lack of talent because they are very, very talented. These guys can play. So there are wannabees making records, engineers and producers working differently now, and musicians who are also record makers and engineers. That’s another can of worms you’ve opened up. Everyone can afford a Pro Tools rig now or a Roland workstation and recording is no great mystery, just as picking up a guitar and learning six chords is no great mystery. But then there’s that and there’s Segovia — and the gap in between! I don’t mind if a guy comes in and says ‘I recorded my guitar last night, I was inspired at 3am and I just threw it into Pro Tools’ and there’s fuzz and hum on it but he felt great and natural when he did it. I’m all about performance; I’ll take performance over engineering and technical mastery and I’ve always been like that. Look, I worked with T.Rex! I was so disciplined to get the sounds as fast as possible and a lot of them were take 1s to take 3s, it rarely went over take 6 on resolution

anything. They were energetic grooves and I could see that keeping them in the studio for hours with the kick drum going continuously was not going to be productive with a band like that. There are some bands who love that, they’ll take days to sound absolutely great. But recording is no great mystery. Having said that I respect engineers like Geoff Emerick who, when forced to record a four-piece band on 4-track, did some balancing. You have to get the EQs right and your compression and you have to get four musicians on one or two tracks well balanced, almost like it’s a final mix. Those guys are the Segovias, that’s the Segovia level. They’re masters and geniuses and there are too few of them now. I encourage young people to hire these engineers because you have a lot to learn from them. When I record here I’ve got some preamps and I prefer to get a mic sound from three microphones and balance it and then eliminate the mire of options and get a great sound from three mics. I love doing that, I do it well and I don’t want to lose that. A lot of engineers would rather have a stack of preamps and they’ll put a mic in the preamp and take the output of that and put it into Pro Tools — no EQ, no compression. Now, my 13-year old daughter can do that with 5 minutes training. I don’t see that as engineering, that’s simple, it’s too, too easy. Then they’ll spend days balancing it all and they have the option to do that, to rebalance it and then EQ it. When I work with young guys and they see me do this they’re horrified — ‘But you can’t change that!’ I say ‘I know! And I don’t want to change it!’ Every time I push those faders up I want the sound to knock you over, I want the band to be inspired, I don’t want to have to be doing all this stuff and have the guys all sitting around. Nowadays a session is five May/June 2005

craft people watching one guy on a computer. There’s no creativity in that. I want to be able to push these faders up and within ﬁve minutes have a mix and have them come in and say I can’t wait to do my vocal; that sounds fantastic.

You’ve been doing multichannel remixes of some Bowie albums, how much multichannel work have you done? We’ve done David Live and Stage and we’ve just finished Young Americans. Heathen and Reality were done multichannel, then there’s Electric Warrior. The multichannel world is not well served, all these got great reviews but you wouldn’t even know where to find them in your record shop. I’ve also just done Born to Boogie the T.Rex film. How are you approaching the live mixes? Luckily I had the foresight 30 years ago to put up two mics over the theatre. You can feel the size of the room. There are a couple of other live albums, like Live and Dangerous with Thin Lizzy, that I wouldn’t mind doing. I don’t keep the band ‘flat’ at the front — I kind of wrap them around a little bit to get the experience of being enveloped. I use the centre channel very sparingly, I put a little bit of kick drum, bass guitar and vocal just to focus. A studio album is different. For Young Americans I do put primary instruments in the rear speakers. You can put backing vocals, handclaps, sometimes a string section sounds very attractive in the back with the reverb coming to the front. The real rhythm section goes at the front coming around you and the vocalist stands in front of you. In the old days we’d ADT on the left and right channel and now I can put a little bit of that in the rear so you have like a triangle from a primary source. You have the advantage of remixing work that you actually recorded, was it easy to get into it again? Yes. I listen to the stereo and I remember what I’d done, some of it’s printed and I recreate the stuff that wasn’t. You can hear everything better [in multichannel] because if I take the string section and put it in the rear you’ll hear the viola player sniff. I find multichannel easier. I think the sweet spot is less critical than in stereo and as you move around the room you can get a different perspective all the time. I really like that. How much of the remixing for multichannel do you do on a board and how much happens in Pro Tools? There are some things that are very easy on a digital board but really quick level changes, like if Bowie goes off mic for a little bit, I’ll do in Pro Tools. I’ll divide my effects — some of the plug-ins are so good these days, especially some of the reverbs — between plug-ins and external stuff about 50:50. I insist that if I’m doing something old I get a transfer at the highest resolution possible. Many of the tapes are not in very good nick now but we get them baked and then have about three goes across the heads. Do you still enjoy what you do? I love it! The fact I have a laptop — and I could master in that thing if I wanted to, burn CDs, play around, edit songs — to me it’s a new lease of life. I like the idea of having both traditional studios and digital studios and carrying one in my briefcase on a plane. It’s another way of working. When I was a May/June 2005

youngster I was always doing cutting edge stuff — I had the first Harmonizer in Europe, I had to have the first Eventide digital delay, I was always looking for the newest equipment if it did something that I couldn’t do before. I had to have it. I’m still like that now. I thought about getting an analogue board [for my own studio] but I worked on the DM2000 and the sound was as warm. I spoke to Frank Filipetti and he said that in his experience once you hit the digital domain, stay in it. If you’re going back and forth between analogue and digital then you’re going to lose quality every time, no matter how much you try to preserve it with high definition. I tried that philosophy and I’ve been very, very pleased with the results. ■

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the audience enough so the next week I really hung onto the audience. After that one he said, ‘Well, what about the music I paid £800 for?’ About then I began to realise it was a bit more complicated than I thought. More than equalisation, more than compression you succeed by doing good programmes. My career really started with The Goodies. It succeeded and once that happens more people ask for you and it builds on itself. I was let loose on standard shows like, The Good Life, the Generation Game, Hi-De-Hi, Don’t Wait Up, etc. Then Paul Jackson and Geoff Posner burst on the scene with an exciting new concept, The Young Ones.

Any truth in the rumour ‘Neil’ was partly based on you? I don’t know if it’s true, but when I read Neil’s character description, ‘long-haired vegetarian, appalling cooking and even worse guitar playing’, I thought, that’s me. A lot of credit goes to my gram op, Ian Tomlin, who played effects in live. The cricket bat, hitting people, was a lip ribbon in the control room banged on the side of the tape machine.

Laurie Taylor He’s one of the greatest names in BBC TV sound yet he combines his skills with a ‘plumber’s’ mentality. ROB JAMES talks to him about sitcoms and music, desk layout, and making mistakes.

AURIE TAYLOR IS STILL WORKING. The weekends are getting longer and he has more time to devote to exciting projects such as a digitally controlled ﬂash-steam plant. But TV sound is still beneﬁting from the ‘Taylor touch’. The Royal Television Society recognised his talent and dedication in November last year with the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award. Laurie has been recording since he was 11 and, despite the attractions of the local chemical and steel works in his home town in North Wales, the BBC was a natural choice. Recruited in 1962 at a time of expansion, due to ITV and the start of BBC2, Laurie’s rise was little short of meteoric. By 1970 he was a sound supervisor.

How did you make it so fast? The main reason was the tremendous increase in pop music. Lots of established mixers didn’t want to be in the same control room with the long-haired people, and that probably included me. So at that board [job interview] they decided they wanted somebody different. For two years I did Late Night Line-up, Colour Me Pop and Disco 2 and then the ﬁrst The Old Grey Whistle Test. It was really eclectic. From London Opera to Rory Gallagher, Pink Floyd and umpteen bands that didn’t make it. Lots of bands and the most incredible facilities, eight proper channels and a subgroup of four, no EQ and a 25dB or 45dB toggle for gain. You had to analyse a band when they came in and stick pads in the wall. Really, really primitive. In 1972 I started doing Top of The Pops which was live. I mean ‘live’, live with an orchestra. 48

I remember your laid-back attitude. There’s something about live, apart from the abject terror, because there are no retakes and you go home at the end! But it was a more forgiving time because nobody knew quite what they were doing really. Some things were just death defying leaps in the dark. You certainly stood out in the BBC — long curly hair, shaggy coats and a handbag. What did the hierarchy make of this yeti in a sea of tweed-jacketed conformity? The sound supervisor who trained me had been reprimanded for wearing a polo-neck jumper on a Saturday! I had two ‘special interviews’ to do with the length of my hair because it was felt it might offend production people. For the second I brought my wife along, who was working in West End theatre. It completely nonplussed the BBC establishment and it was just dropped, forgotten. What led you to sitcom? We were divided into groups by programme type. I was originally in a drama group so I did things like The Onedin Line. The fact that I did ToTP was an anomaly. Eventually I moved to Light Entertainment where it was expected that you would do both music and Situation Comedy. I was a very young sound supervisor and made lots of mistakes. I remember, Me Mammy, the ﬁrst sitcom I did, and the director Sidney Lotterby saying, ‘Excellent lighting, good camerawork and Laurie, I’ll speak to you about the sound afterwards.’ I was not really mechanically competent. Sidney felt I hadn’t featured resolution

What’s different about sitcom? You can’t let go of the beast. There is no gap, speech mixing is syllabic, going between two booms on the same set you can’t hold them both up for any appreciable time or you get a phase or ﬂanging effect and you have to be aware of every shadow the boom is casting. Music is much more preparatory, you have a large number of channels coming up to you and you have to meticulously check that all the bits are working and levels are roughly as you expect. Sitcom is a long continuous, arduous discussion with my good lighting friends and the designer. Fundamentally the booms interfere with both the lighting and the camerawork and whatever any director might say to you, they’re only really interested in vision at the time they’re recording and sound by the time they come to the dub. My best ever phrase to a director was to the redoubtable Alan Boyd who was shouting at me, as most LE directors do from time to time. I said, ‘Alan, if you shout loud enough I’ll do what you say instead of what you want.’ Go to any meeting and people will tell you what you should have done, which usually consists of using radio mikes. People have tried it, but it really isn’t the answer to sitcom. The only answer I know is fairly directional hypercardioid microphones and competent boom operators. I’ve settled on one mic for the last 18 years which is the AKG C451 with a CK63 capsule. Lately that’s become the 480 with the CK63. The more directional microphones like the 815 are not suitable. If a microphone looks too directional, people tend to think it’s too directional. I don’t know if many directors appreciate that most common directional microphones are as wide as a wide-angle lens and then a bit shady around the edges. Were you involved in the great ‘stereo’ debate? I was very early in experimenting with MS pick-up and straightforward AB and it led me down a single road. As soon as I put a stereo microphone on a boom I can hear all the things I’ve spent all my life excluding. I do not want the ambience of the studio, the audience coming in the back of the microphones, spurious positioning. I tried panning as well, to the point where one of my friends called me the ‘Master of the whip panned syllable’. The thing I love in stereo is ambience. A nice May/June 2005

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reverb or appropriate room sound are magic. But for me, speech is irretrievably mono. There is a phenomenon, which I’ve never found a word for, which originally happened with monks. Their job was to copy the word of the Lord. Eventually they got into doing pretty pictures on the ﬁrst letter and eventually illumination got to be the key of what they were doing. I think any body of professional people tends to derive their own goals and objectives and stereo has been a bit like that.

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Do you work to a formula? My theory about over elaborate routings is almost the reverse of driving. When you learn to drive people say, ‘always imagine the other person is an idiot.’ I think when you’re mixing you should be fairly convinced that you’re the idiot. Unless it’s easy to understand, you can bet your life that in the heat of the moment, you won’t understand it. I have very set standards so there are things I can believe in. I normalise the desk so that all the outgoing feeds are peaking sort of programme level. Then I pad or apply gain to the device itself. For example the PA amps we have need a 20dB pad because they achieve their designed output with a 100mV input and I’m feeding them about 2V. Then I know, if I’m peaking on the PPM, I’m providing an adequate level of PA. When I say adequate, the most I can get is 75-80dB. I also know that when the artists see the whites of the audiences’ eyes they’ll speak 10dB louder. So if the PA level is alright in rehearsal I know it will be well alright on the night. I love a traditional work surface because I have to grab so quickly to adjust an EQ. I’ve used assignable desks right from their inception and I still make the standard error of reaching out for the assign panel without pre-selecting it. I know it sounds stupid but this material really is very quick indeed. When you’ve got a personal mic on somebody on a game show and they turn their head, the amount of HF is enormous and you need to get at those equalisers very, very quickly. I’m very cautious with my use of dynamics because I’ve gone down almost every hole you can go down. Almost every time you use a dynamic, you make your spill situation worse. You have to bear in mind that a dynamic is only doing something while

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its needle is working. If it’s stuck, with a very long time-constant, you might as well put in a pad or move the fader back. I only use limiting at about 5 1/2 because limiters react faster than I do. A lot of what I do is masking one thing with another. The art is what you can hide under the carpet. People often ask if I put DDLs in the audience feed. Bearing in mind I’m always trying to suppress material that I don’t want, anything that separates the received sound from the original is detrimental if

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craft it makes the spilled sound more apparent. A recent problem’s arisen with using plasma screens above the audience. Unfortunately they are delayed by a, slightly variable, frame and a half or two and there is pressure to delay the sound to match.

What do you reach for first? Gain control. That’s absolutely definite because it’s so non-intuitive. If you present a complex mix to a child, they will tell you something is too loud and what you must always do is think in those terms. Never that something is too quiet. Two sides of my mind do two different things. This is not conscious. My right hand mixes between the booms and my left controls the overall level of that relative to the audience. How about toys? Curiously, when matching to studio I find the reverbs called ‘plate’ match more closely. Because of the multiple sound sources the studio is a much more distributed phenomenon than would be implied by its size. I sometimes use a Lexicon 224 or a Klark Teknik DN780. By and large, I’m like Rolf Harris doing his large paintings. I’m a cartoonist. So something like the SPX90, which makes it quick and easy to get lots of very approximate things, is of more use to me than definitive reverbs. The Akai sampler was superb at playing in. It’s now been totally replaced by a PC based multiscreen playout device called Spot On, made by Dave Markie. I use it for almost all play-ins, sound effects, with remote triggers for game shows and for shows like lotteries where there are umpteen beds and they change with each ball that falls.

they want to produce. It’s hard to imagine the isolation that a director feels. They want what you want, someone to help them make this programme.

Who do you like having around you? In an assistant, I’m looking for support. Paying attention to what I’m doing and, if their job happens to be easier, unobtrusively helping me out. I make mistakes and I welcome an assistant whose judgement I can rely on. If some thread of the programme is occupying you, you can miss something incredibly gross. They’ve also got to be able to do their own job. Sitcoms are critically dependent on boom ops. I need the people on the ﬂoor to evaluate what they can cover, not what they can achieve in a bit of ‘derring do’, but what they can reliably come up with each time.

Is there a key to success? Once I’m doing a job I have to do the absolute best I can do. I expect everyone else with me to do exactly the same. You need a good plumber’s mentality. You come in, do the job and, if you’ve got anything complimentary to say about the house, say it, but you certainly never make any adverse comments about a production, whatever your feelings, ever, ever at all. People will work with you because they like you, because you are keen on producing the production

How has the process changed? With independent productions the power is more diverse and I suspect some production associates don’t know what I’m there for. I was doing a Never

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Mind the Buzzcocks and, during the opening titles, one of the producers came to me and said, ‘Laurie, I have a sound problem’. Innocently, my brain switches away from the programme and I start worrying about maybe a radio mic’s gone down or maybe there’s no sound feed over the audience. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘How do I get my vinyls onto my MP3 player?’ There’s an almost total blurring between multicamera pick-up and traditional single camera recording. People expect to manipulate the material in a dub in the way that they could with a single camera. This implies a whole lot of complexity. For example, if a sequence is recorded in the studio with ongoing music you may find it later needs to be removed and relaid. It helps if you’re aware this may happen and you cheat a little. If you establish the music at the top so people know what they’re doing, during the first laugh you can lower it. In Post a vast change has taken place. I worked with the very early moving fader desks and they are very useful in dubbing. But now I feel that, with the singular exception of ongoing background music, almost all the other detail work can be done better with some form of hard disk editor. The dub is now usually part of an edit package in an outside facilities house. So when I do Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps I don’t dub it. This has changed my attitude in the studio. Before, I wouldn’t ask for so many retakes because I knew what I could fix using rehearsal takes and so on.

What about the future? Technologically, almost everything I ever wanted has arrived. Bearing in mind that when I was a gram op I played sound effects from 78rpm records, it all seems so ﬂexible and ﬂuid now and the ability to manipulate the sound, to grab hold of it, is something I could not have even dreamed of. I would like to see the next generation of digital sound desks with surfaces closely corresponding to the analogue, knob per function, ones I was used to, but with any advantages that digital might add. The way things are developing I see that should be quite possible. But the digital dream has dulled a little. You still have to check you’ve actually got something at the end of a recording...Trust nothing! ■

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Steve Price He’s recorded more orchestral sessions than most and established himself as a big session deliverer of results. The pianist’s son who turned engineer talks to GEORGE SHILLING about track counts, stems, and the importance of getting the band ‘happy’.

TEVE PRICE WAS INTRODUCED to the studio world at the age of seven, when he would accompany his father, busy session pianist Ronnie Price, to sessions. Ronnie’s work was mainly in the jazz and light entertainment ﬁeld, and it was during one of these childhood outings in the 1970s that Steve noticed the big thing in the control room with all the knobs and lights, and decided that being a sound engineer was probably the best job in the world. When he was 18, his father alerted him to a job opportunity at CTS Studios, where he took a tea boy/ tape op job, and fell in love with ﬁlm music when he was almost literally blown away while witnessing at close range the brass section playing to the famous James Bond ‘iris’ title sequence. Having learnt from experts Dick Lewzy and the late Paul Hume, and assisting on memorable soundtrack sessions for Batman and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, he was engineering within three years. In 1993 Steve took a job at Angel Studios,

where he is still an employee. He has engineered a large number of ﬁlm music sessions, having recently worked on Hitch with composer George Fenton and The Wedding Date with Debbie Wiseman, and his other work includes frequent orchestral and string overdubbing on mainstream pop and rock material such as Stereophonics and Jamiroquai. Steve is also frequently involved with music recording for TV, and there is the through-ﬂow of library music recording and mixing, often for Angel Studios’ parent company DeWolfe Music. Resolution caught up with him in Angel’s impressive and recently refurbished Studio 1.

How has your role changed over the years? I use Pro Tools every day, to me that’s one of the biggest changes in the music business in the last 10 or 15 years — in good and bad ways. It gives you the ﬂexibility to keep everything. Unfortunately, it gives you the ﬂexibility to keep everything and at some point you’ve got to make the decision! resolution

Do you do a lot of editing? Yeah, most of the work we do here now is either on Pro Tools or Radar. The last album I worked on on tape was three years ago. There are some who like the compression and sound quality that tape gives you, but the flexibility that Pro Tools gives you outweighs that, in a strange way. And when Pro Tools is working perfectly, it’s a dream to use. Presumably it’s faster to edit... To let people hear it within a minute of recording it, within reason as it’s going to be, and knowing that edits are going to work and that tempos are going to work between edits, is fantastic. Just doing a quick vocal comp in five minutes, and from possibly 40 takes, but making up a new Playlist as you go along, and at the end of the piece somebody coming in and going, ‘Can you just put something together?’ — it’s already together, and I’m not sitting at the desk trying to fluff through five faders over the course of a song or a piece of music. Do you use high sample rates? Only in experimentation so far, not in anger. It sounds amazing. I think ultimately the problem is the storage, and then the backup of the storage. On a few movies I’ve done recently, I’ve ended up at 126 tracks, and hundreds of takes. We’ve done a week of rhythm section, and 48 tracks of orchestra, and it’s just a colossal amount of information, and to add that time May/June 2005

craft on at the end when you go, I’ll just back that up... And likewise it starts to limit the number of voices you can use with Pro Tools. If you’ve got three or four drum tracks running at once, suddenly you’ve got 24 tracks of drums, eight tracks of bass, 28 tracks of guitars, and it just goes mental. And it’s so easy to do that nowadays. I remember ten years ago if somebody said ‘48 track’ everyone got nervous, locking up with timecode. Whereas now you’re permanently over 24 tracks on 85 or 90 percent of things you do. And the way orchestral studios work, it’s all about preparation and knowing that everything’s going to work at ten o’clock in the morning, within reason; where you put the mics... The headphones are basically preset — there are always minor adjustments on the session. But you could have a rhythm section and orchestra of 60, and you have to be ready to record at twenty past ten. And nobody’s played a note before ten. If you don’t have the preparation you’re really screwed. You rely on people you know in the business, like the drummer, to be there ten minutes beforehand. And thankfully, I know most of the guys, they’re happy to get a drum sound because it gets their headphones going.

way of working. I’ll shout instructions to the assistants and submix as we go. I’ll get on it at the end of the day and make a few adjustments, and leave the desk [faders] in a straight line. You can do that now, you don’t have to worry about signal-to-noise as much as you used to. When I mix I’ll have three or four sets of 5.1 channel outputs, an orchestral output and some solo channels as well, then I can just assign as we go.

Surround sound is something else you’ve had to learn... When I started, Dolby Surround was only just around, your surround track was mono, had no top, and everything was pulled into the centre — the Dolby Quested_S8_Resolution_ad_5-05.qxd box. I come from the era of trying to fool the 4/5/05 Dolby box — short delays to make things wider.

What’s the Dolby box? The domestic title is Pro Logic, it’s the encoder-decoder box, using the console and listening through the box to hear what it’s going to do to the score... To see how much it’s ruining everything? Yes exactly! So the way the box sees a stereo mic is it sees it as the same signal, and anything common to both sides is pushed to the centre. Basically so that wherever you sit in the cinema you can hear what’s coming out. Unfortunately, stereo ambience mics, you want to hear them as stereo, so you ended up with lots of tricks like delay one side, only tiny little delays, but suddenly the box didn’t see it as a mono signal. 2:13 pm came Pagearound, 1 Then 5.1 and that’s been a revelation, from the cinema side of life, which is fantastic.

Do you use a Decca tree? I come from a ‘more control’ school. I’ll have the Decca tree, but I’ll multi-mic everything as well, so there’s more... How many tracks will you use for a typical orchestra? Probably 24. Depending on the size of the orchestra, you could end up with a Decca tree, outriggers, and surround mics as well. Plus a close track for each section of the orchestra — each woodwind section, a track or two tracks, depending on solos. Likewise French horns, trumpets and trombones, and certainly a lot of tracks for percussion as well. Most of the people I work with prefer a bit of control. Everyone loves the room, but everyone wants to be able to turn things down as well. Nobody wants to do everything separately, which I understand, because showing a director how it’s going to be, you want everyone playing in the same room, because that gives you the right impression. But you still need an element of control over every instrument you record. Do you always work here? No I’ve been all over the world really. Presumably the job is harder in unfamiliar territory? It is. You rely on the people who work in the studio a lot of the time. I tend to do most things myself, I tend to do the headphones, I tend to ride the click myself — only because you trust yourself. It’s not that I don’t trust somebody else, but if they got it wrong, you’d end up looking at somebody else, whereas I ﬁgure that the buck should stop with me. Do you use Pro Tools plug-ins? All the time when I’m mixing. The favourites tend to be the simple ones, because you know when you move between rigs you can still call them up. If I’m trying to do things quickly, but I know I’m going to go somewhere else and work on the tracks later, I’ll just use the Digirack plug-ins. My favourite thing when mixing is the combination of Pro Tools and desk. Most of the mixing is probably done in Pro Tools now, my basic balances. Because if you’re having 100 tracks, you have to submix, you work the mix as you go — I suppose a lot of people do that nowadays, but I ﬁnd that the best May/June 2005

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craft Do you have much communication with dubbers? If I can — it depends on where it’s being mixed, or if I know the guy. But nine times out of ten it’s ‘48k, 24 bit’, that’s about as much information as you get! More and more now stems are being used — you’re mixing rhythm stems, orchestral stems, keyboard stems, just because they want ultimate ﬂexibility later on. I can understand that, but I don’t particularly like it, because what you want is a representation of what you’ve done. If anything is rhythm or percussion heavy it tends to be requested, just because that’s the thing that’s going to get in the way of A, sound effects, and B, dialogue. Once it’s out of your hands, they are the gods, the dubbing theatre.

Presumably laying stems takes a long time? It does, it’s something that you have to factor into the mixing time of a ﬁlm now. Whereas it used to be, say, three days, it’s now ﬁve days just because of laying stuff down.

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What’s the mix delivery format? Nine times out of ten it’s Pro Tools. We’ll burn a DVD with the files or as a Pro Tools Session. If you have a music editor, he or she would have another rig, and you’d mix to that rig. Otherwise it’s me or my assistant, and you’ll mix into the same Pro Tools Session that you’re working the multitrack in; export those files, or import them into a new reel, and just checkerboard the files so they appear in the right places on the Session for the movie. It’s great, because you know the stuff is sort of in the right place when you put it in.

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So they’ll dynamically ride the stems? Yes, hopefully not too noticeably. We’ll listen in here with dialogue, so hopefully you’ll mix so it will sit or it’s written to sit with dialogue and effects.

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My surround philosophy is sort of, your stereo laws still apply; in a ﬁlm situation it gives you lots of possibilities, I’m not sure you should use them all the time. I’ve watched movies I haven’t worked on, and a guitar will turn up surround-right, and the ﬁrst thing you do is look there, because it’s not something you expect. And for me, music should never detract from something you’re supposed to be looking at. I guess a feeling of surround is what I look to get. I tend to put additional orchestral mics out and feed some of that in, and I’ve used surrounds to move perspectives of instruments. You can’t put anything too transient in the surrounds, purely because when it starts thrashing around in a cinema, you get terrible delay problems when the speakers are maybe 300 feet apart.

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What’s the secret of a successful orchestral session? The whole swan syndrome — it’s maybe all going off and going wrong, but if you make it look as if you’re in control of the situation, even when it’s all hitting the fan, that’s your best trick. It’s like a virus — if it gets round the control room and then into the studio that things aren’t going well, and there’s a lot going wrong, you’ll lose the session. The other biggest trick I know is if you can get people happy with headphones, your life’s a dream. If you can get a band ‘headphone happy’ anything else is easy because they just play, and they don’t get on your case about the sound, or this or that. So presumably you’ve grown to know what people want to hear in the cans? Well hopefully, yeah. This sounds wrong, but I don’t record things in necessarily the best possible way. I’d hate you to write that down, but hopefully when people come into the control room to listen, they go, ‘That sounds fantastic’ — as everything, as a band, or drummer, or whatever. But maybe if you soloed every single thing, not every engineer would do it that way. But you’re trying to give something, for the players to be inspired by what they’re hearing. Whether that’s good or not, I don’t know, but if you can get the required results out of players and if you can get players in a room and they’re happy with everything, it’s just so easy. ■ May/June 2005

ten

Trend-setting mobiles Bringing the facilities to you, mobiles were born for a completely different age than the one we live in now. NIGEL JOPSON selects ten mobiles that benchmarked the era they recorded. THE ROLLING STONES MOBILE — Designed in 1970 by Dick Swettenham to record at Mick Jagger’s country house, Stargroves. The RSM progressed from 8 to 16 to 24 tracks, recording some of the most significant albums of the era: Exile On Main Street, Sticky Fingers, Love You Live, Led Zeppelin III, IV, Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti, Deep Purple’s Machine Head & Burn, Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry ... this entire page could be filled. The linoleum floor covering, department-store lighting and diminutive silver Helios desk with all markings rubbed-off belied the impressive on-tape audio. It sported a drab camouflage livery, applied when recording the orchestral music for Frank Zappa’s film 200 Motels on location. Recently acquired by Canadian museum the Cantos Music Foundation, it held the same complement of equipment (except the quirky Altec 6048G monitoring) as 26 years earlier — a testament to the meticulous and provident care administered by Mick McKenna — and the quality of the only mobile to be immortalised in song (Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water.) ISLAND MOBILE — The 30 into 24 Helios console reflected Swettenham’s experience designing earlier mobiles. Monitoring in the centre section was revolutionary in an era of inputs left, group/monitors right. Designed from the ground up as a 24 track, and for the first time rivalling bricks and mortar studios in outboard, it even had an EMT 240 plate. There was sleeping accommodation for the engineers, and a 12KVA generator trundled behind. FLEETWOOD MOBILE — The first location controlroom, rather than travelling gig recorder. ‘I had used the Stones and Island trucks,’ recalls designer Louis Austin, ‘I hated the fact that you could never get the whole band in for a playback. The interior had a tiered floor, it could seat 6-8 people in really comfortable sofas.’ The truck had heating, running water and a fully fitted kitchen. ‘I would never have built it this way if it was going to do gigs, but this was an era when money was not really a problem, it never had to earn it’s keep in that way ...’ Fleetwood was notable in using a Raindirk mixer and setting a trend — it went on to install desks in 20 European mobiles. May/June 2005

UTILITY MUFFIN RESEARCH KITCHEN MOBILE — Frank Zappa was a pioneer in recording technology, just as he was in music. Frustrated by the logistics of major-label recording, he set up his own well specified studio; keen to record every gig, he purchased and re-equipped the Beachboys’ truck. ‘On the first 3 month tour, we had 946 2-inch master tapes,’ remembers engineer Mark Pinske. The mobile became an essential part of Zappa’s touring equipment — the huge Neve console and 85 noise gates were used to mix the concert sound — the FOH engineer received a premixed selection of stems. THE MANOR MOBILE — The first-call European truck for the 1980s. This articulated reprise of the classic Manor Mobile housed the bulky analogue hardware necessary for the rapidly increasing channel and recording track counts of this era. A huge Raindirk console and patchbay handled input duties, a rear lobby functioned as recording booth, or annexe housing additional digital recorders. The crew was renowned for its technical competence, whether tracking down hums in the miles of multiways, faultfinding recalcitrant early DASH recorders, or bashing huge copper earthing stakes into the ground. LE MOBILE — Guy Charbonneau is a FrenchCanadian who’s been at the top of the risky and competitive US mobile-recording scene for over 25 years. ‘People think I’m a nut about maintenance,’ he admits, ‘but they know that when they hire us, it’s going to be right and sound really good.’ In common with other evergreen remotes, Le Mobile has a faithful and magic console: a 48-channel Neve 8058. There’s a huge selection of classic analogue outboard, a Studer D827MKII 48 track plus two Pro Tools rigs with Apogee convertors and Big Ben Clocks. The JBL L91/2450 acoustic lenses on the main monitors add a retro touch. resolution

RECORD PLANT REMOTE — Originally designed by Wally Heider, the truck has recorded a litany of legends — from Aerosmith to Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor to Woodstock — and become a legend itself. Maybe it’s the 54-input, 48 bus Legacy Plus all discrete API console, or perhaps the attention to detail lavished by its owner, Bob ‘Kooster’ McAllister (a recent Grammy winner for the soundtrack Standing In The Shadows Of Motown). Successful live recordings today require a wide skill-set, not least in the tricky business of lock — not just SMPTE these days but Black, video and multiformats. When megabuck artists are involved there’s no margin for error, it’s the crew as much as the truck that pulls the booking. VOYAGEUR I — Based in Roissy-En-France near Paris, Voyageur run three mobiles, Voyageur I is the ﬂagship. Expanding truck sides deliver a 6m by 4m Live-End-Dead-End control room, a distinctive feature of which is the ear-threateningly well speciﬁed 5.1 TAD/Crown monitoring, sporting four subs and three wooden HF horns across the front wall. There’s an SSL Axiom-MT 96-channel digital console, Sony 3348 and Tascam DA98 recorders and six Apogee AD 8000 convertors.

EFFANEL MUSIC L7 — When the rest of the industry was downsizing in 1996, Randy Ezratty decided to build the ‘biggest, baddest truck in the world.’ Built by Medical Coaches Inc, which specialises in MRI and CAT scan vehicles, the L7 is 46ft long, and has two mirror image, lead-lined side walls that expand to create a 14ft wide control room with 10ft ceilings. The AMS-Neve digital console has 176 input paths, there’s a Pro Tools HD3 72-track system, plus Sony 3348, PCM800 and Tascam DA98 MADI recorders. The natural light in the control room, huge listening area and 5.1 monitoring have paid off with a large proportion of postproduction and mixdown projects coming its way. S H A P L A N D MOBILES — Part of a new generation of smaller, more versatile vehicles. With little requirement for open reel recorders, and ﬁbre optic multicore instead of heavy analogue, both trucks are based on relatively small 7.5 ton Mercedes, but still have the ability to multitrack hundreds of inputs to Pyramix or Pro Tools and mix in stereo or 5.1. Mobile 1 has an SSL C200 with 128 channels, remote mic amps and full surround mixing and monitoring. Mobile 2 is an air-conditioned studio environment into which equipment to suit the job can be installed (see Business article p61). ■ 55

sweet spot

Small active monitor technology The launch of Genelec’s 8000 series monitors led to the creation of a new product category in the company’s already wide range. A need was also identiﬁed for a small-sized monitoring system that could be adopted in a wide range of applications, including broadcast and postproduction studios, distributed audio installations and audio/video workstations. The R&D experience gained in the development of the 8030A, 8040A and 8050A provided technical solutions to create the new 8020A monitor. Genelec’s CHRISTOPHE ANET says the challenge was to combine small physical size and deﬁned outer aesthetics with outstanding technical performance and functionality.

HEN YOU CONSIDER small loudspeaker performance, the first questions that come to mind concern maximum SPL and low frequency reproduction capability. Such limits are set by physical facts, but to establish realistic specifications another question should be asked: how much SPL is really needed for the intended application? It is clear that in many cases the answer would be: not very much, but still, how much is that? Let us look at this question from a very different, non-pro audio and non-rock concert type perspective. The interesting study of Wesley A Bulla and James W Hall [1] revealed that after many years of exposure, sound levels of 85dBA for eight hours per day will produce hearing loss. It has been said that our sensory organs may tolerate greater average levels of music before damage occurs, but at the same time it seems that audio engineers are more prone to exposing themselves to higher levels of music for longer periods of time because they find it much less disturbing than noise. Bulla & Hall conclude that the only option for audio engineers wishing to extend their career as long as possible with customary 10-hour working days, is to monitor audio programme material at conservative and safe sound levels — currently believed to be somewhere between 80 and 85dB SPL. Additionally, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA 2206, 1978) sets the daily 8-hour exposure limit to 75dBA (slow response) for nonoccupational fluctuating noise and 90dBA (slow response) for industrial noise. The established practice in multichannel systems is to calibrate each monitor to produce 85dB SPL at mix position. If properly applied, this is believed to keep the audio engineer’s ears on the safe side [However, if all five speakers produce 85dB SPL simultaneously, the result is 92dB SPL for non-coherent signals. It seems that the calibration level is on the high side]. Defining SPLs at listening positions is very practical because production environments vary a lot in terms of acoustic treatment and listening distance. In larger rooms the distance is longer and vice-versa in smaller rooms. Most current professional monitoring systems can produce sustained levels in excess of 100dB SPL at a few metres distance, so meeting the criteria is basically easy. However, if the SPL meter shows 85dB SPL, it is the RMS figure integrated over a certain time period. As the music crest factor is high, the peak output capability needs to be some 10dB higher than average RMS level. Having this reference SPL figure and small space listening distances in mind, the 8020A maximum short-term sine wave SPL output at 1m on axis in half space, averaged from 100Hz to 3kHz, was set to 95dB. This is more than sufficient for small production spaces such as OB vans or audio/video edit suites where short listening distance is a necessity. Next question is: what is the recommended

listening distance for a typical multichannel set-up and how far does the reference listening area extend? The International Telecommunication Union [2] recommendation speciﬁes listening arrangements for mono, stereo and multichannel audio reproduction, including the ‘minimum preferred listening distances’. For stereo and multichannel reproduction the preferred minimum limit is 2 metres. The maximum preferred limits are 4 and 5 metres for stereo and multichannel systems, respectively. Figure 1 illustrates such a setup with correct relative scale with all other elements in the sketch. It is interesting to note that with 2 metres radius and a typical production desk of 1.2m by 0.6m, the ITU listening area — the hatched area extending to the ‘worst case’ corner listening positions — only covers 1.4m x 2.0m. The conclusion is that only three people can work adequately within the accepted ITU listening area.

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Due to room acoustics the listening position is in the reverberant field, hence doubling the listening distance from 1 to 2m reduces the level less than 6dB. Despite its small size the 8020A with its 4-inch woofer and 3/4-inch metal dome tweeter would still fulfil the 85dB SPL requirement. This is not to say that larger speakers would be unnecessary, but to demonstrate what can be done with a small speaker. Larger speakers are necessary, for example, if you want to have a short and loud ‘impressive’ session of movie effects. So, how is it possible to squeeze such performance out of a small two-way monitor? The physics involved does not depend on enclosure size. Reproducing mid and high frequencies just requires sufficient power but at low frequencies it is always the same play between enclosure volume, cut-off frequency and efficiency. Cut-off frequency can be low if the

May/June 2005

sweet spot

resulting consequences of low efficiency or large enclosure are acceptable. In Genelec’s case the size was given: we were designing a small enclosure. Then there are two variables left, efficiency and cut-off frequency. Here choices have to be made again to either design a system that has wider bandwidth and does not always need a subwoofer, or to design a system that is inherently a satellite for a sub. Our choice was the first, the cut-off was selected to be 65Hz (-3dB), Document1 10:18 AM Page 1 which dictates 12/8/04 the maximum efficiency and hence

the necessary amplifier power. Because the maximum SPL was 95dB SPL, the thermal constraints are of minor importance while excursion and linearity are as important as they are in larger models. Once the choices are made, the next phase is all about optimisation — how to achieve the specified performance with the minimum ‘effort’. Under- and over-engineering is easy but the end result either does not fulfil expectations or wastes resources. As the new 8020A will be widely used in multichannel applications, the addition of a subwoofer

combined with a bass management system was mandatory. The 7050B subwoofer complements the 8020A in providing an LF response extension down to 25Hz (-3dB). Genelec’s chief mechanical engineer Jari Mäkinen provides an insight into the mechanical design of the 8020A: ‘We start the mechanical design process from the drivers selected by our acoustic designers. They also specify cabinet volume and the very speciﬁc shape of the directivity control waveguide (DCW). It is in fact quite challenging to bring such complex DCW

PROfessionals need PROline MU Metal shielding May/June 2005

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www.ultrasone.com 57

sweet spot shapes from the real prototype into the 3D model. Electronic designers give us the largest component sizes and a rough idea of the PCB dimensions. The mechanical designers then put all these parameters together in the 3D model and start to study them. In the case of the 8020A, with such a small enclosure, ﬁnding a place for everything inside was quite a challenge.’ Genelec used 3D software to study the complex acoustical shapes and curved surfaces in the design of the 8000 series monitors. This software can simulate surface appearances but you also need to test your 3D models. ‘We build a lot of prototypes and test them during the design process,’ explains Mäkinen. ‘First DV Resolution OBS 23/2/05 4:37 pm Page we make SLA (stereo lithography) rapid prototypes.

OBS:

A special machine makes a plastic prototype out of our 3D-files. They are already quite accurate. With these plastic prototypes we can test the acoustic behaviour of the tweeter and the performance of the DCW. Unfortunately plastic cabinets are too soft to test low frequency behaviour properly. Additionally, we also need a rapid prototype of the reflex port to test its air flow properties. Other rapid prototypes of specific parts might also be necessary. When we are satisfied with the design and all the parts, we make a rapid prototype of the entire cabinet in aluminium. This prototype can be played loud and all acoustical aspects verified.’ The reasons for die-casting the small monitor 1 enclosures is to have freedom of shape, to reduce

main monitor performance from a nearfield cabinet the outer dimensions and at the same time maximise internal net volume for improved LF efficiency. Aluminium is strong and solid enough even with thin walls, it is also lightweight, stiff and very easy to damp to yield a ‘dead’ enclosure. It provides good EMC shielding and excellent heat dissipation for the power amplifiers as well. Industrial die-casting technology uses very large moulds that can exert several hundred tons of force. The liquid aluminium (at more than 700 degree Celsius) is injected into the mould at high pressure. The aluminium part is held under pressure until it becomes solid and with the proper surface texture and is then removed and cooled in water. The casting process is fully automated but it is followed by a visual inspection of each part. The final stage is CNC machining and, if necessary, further finishing by hand. The finished part is again checked visually and with a 3D measuring device. After industrial washing the parts are powder coated to provide a strong, high quality and robust surface. When the die-cast enclosure parts are delivered to the Genelec factory they are again checked before being assembled with all the other components and electronics. High pressure die-casting can create very accurate parts that fit together easily on the assembly line but the other side of the coin is the complicated design work involved at the beginning and high cost of the moulds. Great care has been taken in the 8020A design to push all physical constraints to their limits and to offer outstanding acoustical performance in a very small enclosure. Once again, our goal has been to exceed expectations and provide better tools for professionals. ■

The new OBS digital monitor combines excellent acoustic design with powerful digital control. A high-pressure tweeter and FAR's symmetric waveguide ensure HF accuracy. The specially treated long excursion cone and sophisticated internal bracing provide deep and defined bass response remarkable in a cabinet of this size. High performance amplifiers are controlled by 24-bit 96kHz circuitry allowing the user to optimise performance in any room, network systems for remote control and save up to five custom setups for different engineers. But we don't expect you to be impressed by the technology... ... only by what you hear.

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1. Daily NoiseLevel Exposures of Professional Music Recording Engineers, Wesley A Bulla, James W Hall, 105th AES Convention, San Fransisco, USA, September 1998, Preprint 4792. 2. Recommendation ITU-R BS.1116-1: Methods for the subjective assessment of small impairments in audio systems including multichannel sound systems, chapters 8.5.3 Two channel stereophonic reproduction, 8.5.4 Multichannel stereophonic reproduction.

May/June 2005

know how

HDTV and the PC In the UK at least, there is no ‘ofﬁcial’ HD broadcasting — yet. Sky has announced a service beginning in 2006 and the terrestrial broadcasters, especially the poor old BBC which was demonstrating HD even before UK satellite broadcasting began, will no doubt follow suit. In time. ROB JAMES considers developments in picture acquisition.

N VERY MANY WAYS, PC video mirrors PC audio. Just as PC audio has progressed from bleeding edge to everyday tool at pocket-money prices, so has PC video. Whether you favour the PC and Windows or the Mac, rudimentary audio and DV video editing is now bundled and it doesn’t cost a fortune to move up to something far more sophisticated, dare I say even ‘professional’. Indeed any mid-priced PC or Mac can now handle the demands of audio or video that passes muster for broadcast. But, just as SACD and DVDA places high demands on audio PCs, so another genie has escaped from the high-end, niche market bottle. High Definition video is coming and will impose a whole new set of requirements on hardware and software alike. In recent months every self-respecting non-linear editing software developer has announced, and in most cases actually released, high definition capable versions of their packages. So far, so simple. But beware, because uncompressed HD pictures generate a massive amount of data they are recorded in a compressed format. The codecs used for recording are generally not well suited to editing. Therefore, the raw files from a recorder are often transcoded May/June 2005

during editing. The data rates used are too high for broadcasting and even for the imminent domestic delivery formats such as HD DVD and Blu-ray, so a further conversion is necessary. High-end HD acquisition formats record at data rates several times the 25Mbps used by DV25 and DVCAM. However, the new kid on the block, HDV, aimed at the consumer, newsgathering and events markets manages to cram HD pictures at up to 1080i into the same 25Mbps. As you might expect, there are a couple of catches. First, the pictures are quite heavily compressed and, more seriously, so is the audio at a ratio of 4:1 using MPEG-1 Layer II audio compression; deﬁnitely a retrograde step. The ﬁrst generally available, and affordable, PAL HDV camcorders are the Sony HDR-FX1E and its semi-pro sibling the HVR-Z1E. I’ve seen the results and, when compared with SD DV they are spectacular. Meanwhile, Panasonic has caused shock waves with the announcement of an affordable new NTSC HD camcorder, the AG-HVX200. A PAL version will no doubt follow. The AG-HVX200 is capable of recording in a number of formats including DVCPRO resolution

HD at 100Mbps. The higher bit rate not only means less picture compression, but four tracks of 16-bit 48kHz audio with no compression. Apart from a built in Mini DV tape drive for SD DV (with realtime downconversion), this camcorder also has two memory slots, which introduce Panasonic’s tapeless P2 concept to a wider audience. P2 uses Flash memory cards in the familiar PCMCIA form factor. Each P2 card contains four SD memory cards in a RAID 0 array for a maximum capacity (this week!) of 8Gb. At the highest resolution and quality this means 8 minutes per card. The price of these cards is currently astronomical, but like all IT derived storage is set to plummet as production volumes increase and capacity will soon grow. The contents of P2 cards can be copied to hard disk via the camera’s built-in USB 2 interface or a standalone copier and the cards are said to be good for 100,000 re-recordings. The AG-HVX200 is a hugely significant announcement, not only because it brings digital cinema origination formats within the budget of independents and students, but also because it formally ushers in the ever-closer convergence of IT with video and audio production. We have already seen the demise of audio tape as an origination format, this development presages the end of video tape. I can foresee a fringe benefit for the beleaguered audio fraternity — 8Gb may not be very generous when recording HD video but it is highly attractive as a removable audio storage medium, even if you bounce the files to DVD-R for delivery. Solid state storage is inherently more reliable than any tape or disk. From the consumers’ point of view, High Definition may seem almost irrelevant to some now but give it a year. The hype machine is already revving up and, providing always that the broadcasters and content providers are not too greedy, from what I’ve already seen, HD will sell itself. Side by side with SD the difference is almost as marked as VHS and DVD. The benefits are far more tangible than those offered by SACD or DVDA and I confidently expect rapid consumer take up of HD screens, Blu-ray and/or HD DVD players and eventually recorders. So, surprise, surprise, just as we were getting used to being able to buy the hardware and software to cope with SD video postproduction at a sensible cost, the goalposts are being moved. Even if you opt to go down the HDV route you will almost certainly need new and costlier hardware. In any case, if you’re serious about sound, HDV means a separate audio recorder on location. Record and playback of the camera encoded data stream is well within the bandwidth of common or garden 7,200rpm SATA and PATA drives. But, once into the editing environment, up go the data rates and fast RAID arrays become at the least desirable and should probably be considered essential for serious work. Equally, it should be obvious that crunching all this extra data is going to place greater demands on processors and RAM. If, as seems entirely likely, Panasonic succeeds in establishing DVCPRO HD as a contender at all levels, then fast computers and sophisticated storage will definitely be required if you want to edit at full resolution. The good news is that Moore’s law is showing no signs of running out of steam in the near future, so we won’t have to wait too long for prices to fall. For the moment, it’s the usual story, format wars are brewing and early adopters will pay the price, not only financially but also in debugging the kit and establishing the working practices. ■ 59

business

Direct to disc Live acts are recording gigs themselves, and selling limited edition live discs to fans after the show. It’s a lucrative new opening for the audio production industry. NIGEL JOPSON looks into the mechanics.

AST YEAR, IN WHAT rapidly became one of the hottest tours on the US concert circuit, the Pixies took a leaf from the bootlegger’s book by using DiscLive’s mobile recording and CD-R burning service to provide fans with CDs of the performance just minutes after each concert ended. DiscLive, founded in 2003, is a pioneer of the fast growing live show recording market. A feed from the FOH mixer, augmented with audience mics and additional splits, was used as the source for live recording. The mobile facility can burn 800 CDs in 20 minutes, with the ﬁrst 200 units available in a target time of 5 minutes after show end. Fans could pre-order a copy for collection after the show or postal delivery, buy on impulse at the show, or order online from the DiscLive web site. Online sales were limited to 500, and often sold out well before the gigs. Concertgoers purchased a voucher for US$25 and then exchanged it at the DiscLive stand for the double CD. Each concert’s album had unique artwork, and the Pixies limited the issue number to 1,000, except for the ﬁnal Coachella Valley Music Festival show where 2,000 CD-Rs were burnt. A total of 22,000 discs were sold on the Spring tour, generating over half a million dollars. ‘Our business plan anticipated a sell through (per concertgoer) of 10%, to date it’s actually been between 17 and 20%,’ said DiscLive/Immediatek CEO Zach Bair.

Clear Channel, the US radio, advertising and venue-owning conglomerate, opened its own Instant Live service with a band called Machinery Hall at a 2003 Boston concert. Jewel, The Black Crowes, Dear Leader, the Allman Brothers, Kiss and George Clinton have all signed up for the Instant Live service. Unlike DiscLive, Clear Channel has not pushed the concept of limited issues. ‘We just burn the discs as people request them. We’ll sell as many as the market wants, we’ve never had that idea as a conscious effort to build in the rarity value,’ I was told by Graham Pullen, MD of Clear Channel Entertainment Events UK. Most Instant Live recordings have involved either mature acts or bands without a major contract. There’s obvious synergy in a deal between venue owner and band, as a facility fee for the recording does not arise. But Clear Channel’s domination of US radio, with ownership of 1,300 stations and 700,000 outdoor advertising displays, has some observers worried. ‘We’re not interested in signing artists to exclusive recording contracts,’ says Steve Simon, an executive vice president in Clear Channel’s US concert promotion unit. But he concedes: ‘There’s a panoply of alliance and bundling opportunities that this product would offer.’ Josh Bernoff, music industry analyst at Forrester Research, worries that Clear Channel’s entry into CD sales could alter the industry’s balance of

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power, and force concert acts to accept unfavourable deals because of CCE’s airwave dominance. James Marsh, broadcast analyst at SG Cowen Securities, has a more pragmatic take on the matter: ‘They would look at it as another trinket to sell to concertgoers when they’re at their venue, whether it’s a T-shirt or an instant bootleg or a hot dog.’ The true test of a successful business idea in the US is a lawsuit, and last year Clear Channel ignited one after purchasing a patent purporting to cover the production of live concert CDs. ‘If you try to provide similar services ... they’re going to sue you for patent infringement or to license their patent,’ says Kufala president Brady Lahr, whose company has produced live concert recordings since 2002. ‘Clear Channel is really using their monopoly in the market to powerfully restrain trade.’ Clear Channel made a show of issuing small bands with US$1 licenses to sell their own concert recordings, but leading players in the nascent business were up in arms. ‘We’d like to see this industry opened up to everybody,’ asserts Erik Stubblebine, founder of Hyburn, a Phoenix company that has sold live-recorded CDs for several concerts, ‘they’re trying to squeeze us.’ Thankfully this issue has now been set aside, but only after DiscLive wheeled out it’s own legal guns. US Patent 6,614,729, issued September 2, 2003 makes interesting reading for Resolution subscribers — it must have crept past while the patent judge was asleep — as it appears to cover most principles of digital recording. DiscLive’s lawyers demonstrated their implementation of off-theshelf Steinberg Wavelab software and commercially available burners did not infringe the strange patent. The two main US companies, Clear Channel’s Instant Live and DiscLive, now have a presence in the UK. Clear Channel has several CDs available from its www.getlive.co.uk website: the Tsunami Relief

May/June 2005

business Scotland show (including Franz Ferdinand and Deacon Blue), Pop Will Eat Itself, Wet Wet Wet, Lloyd Cole and Roxy Saint. Clear Channel has its own mobile unit with a Yamaha PM5D console taking splits from the monitor desk, with mixing duties regularly handled by Jamiroquai engineer Rick Pope. Clear Channel also holds the Guinness World Record for fastest commercially produced DVD with the Pop Will Eat Itself DVD. Currently, the more complex authoring process for DVDs makes it unfeasible to sell instantly, in this case the video disc was sold the following evening. CCE MD Graham Pullen is convinced the visual side of concerts will be important for the future: ‘As long as you have the show captured, what the artistic people you deal with can come up with to do with it afterwards is amazing. When I was looking at all the new mobile phones at MIPCOM, I realised the amount of content these things are going to gobble up is amazing!’ I question Graham about the possible conﬂict of interest due to Clear Channel’s ownership of media assets: ‘I’ve never spoken to one of Clear Channel’s radio stations in my life, that’s not what we do,’ he reminds me. ‘Owning or managing the venue makes the process easier at the concert, but it is all down to the artist. It has to be a partnership, we’d like to have a reputation for quality.’ CCE does not occupy such a dominant position in Europe, and when I speak to other operators there is no criticism of Clear Channel at event level. In fact, staff at the Hammersmith Apollo are singled out for praise for their co-operation and professionalism. DiscLive Europe recently started in conjunction with engineer and producer Andy Scarfe. Having previously worked with the Levellers, Andy covered their 2004 tour doing limited edition CDs of each show: ‘We were able to do 500 in 20 minutes, although we were not as fast as I hoped because the second half of the show was nearly an hour long!’ says Scarfe. ‘The second burn was longer than I’d have liked, but we are now going to expand the burning system.’ Andy used the compact Prism mobile, with the DiscLive burning racks installed. ‘I took individual feeds from the stagebox, and I was making full use of all the onboard dynamics on the Soundtracs console, mastering through some Neve EQs and an SSL compressor,’ Andy notes, ‘the only concession to it being an instant CD was that I used the hardware version of the Waves L2 limiter to keep the volume up.’ Live recording introduces an added dynamic between artist and audience. ‘When the audience arrives at the venue, you’re trying to educate them in the 100 yards between the door and the sales stand, explaining there will be a live recording tonight and if you shout loud enough you will hear yourself on it! It leads to great banter, there were some very lively audiences. The Levellers promote that anyway, they are good at handling it and this made for some very good and individual discs.’ Another new UK-based operation called Live Here Now have recorded Mclusky for the Beggars label, Client, the Throbbing Gristle reunion gig, and the recent Erasure tour. LHN is owned by Mute Records, but runs as a separate operation. Tony Andrews says: ‘We would like to service between 15 and 20% of the venue capacity. With Erasure we were looking to sell 500 on the night, with another 500 CDs available from the website, plus an additional digital download option.’ The operation takes a very professional approach: for the Erasure tour they used mobiles from ex-Manor/Sanctuary man Will Shapland, one of the UK’s most experienced live recording engineers. A full set of splits were mixed by Will on his SSL C200, a May/June 2005

second Shapland truck accommodated burner racks. to the music industry’s main sales channel. Limiting Several hardware CD-R recorders burnt the mix in edition size, and styling CDs as souvenirs with artwork real time, these were then used as masters for the unique to the shows, will be key to more widespread racks of multi-burners. CD-R blanks were pre-printed acceptance. with artwork and ready in the towers for the first half Downloads in compressed formats seem like of the show, making turnaround very fast. ‘We focus an obvious add-on. John Paluska, manager of US our packaging on the band,’ project manager MJ says, jam-band Phish, says the group sold US$1 million ‘if you buy it, it’s an Erasure product. It’s a souvenir concert show downloads in the first 6 months that for Erasure fans rather than a Live Here Now product. www.livephish.com was open. But breaking acts The feedback from the fans has been tremendous.’ doing likewise would run the risk of diluting the Live recordings for sale at shows will not suit every online marketplace, just as promotion departments performer: a certain performance proficiency or a large are gearing up to present new official chart-based amount of sang froid is necessary. One of the most options to the public. Everyone agrees live DVDs popular Instant Live discs is a Wet Wet Wet CD where are an obvious future development but, again, they the band’s hit Love Is All Around went so wrong they won’t suit all markets. Mute Records, for example, had to stop and start the song again. ‘If a band screw up has a commercial release of an Erasure DVD filmed in and start again, and smile and laugh with the audience, Germany. It will be doing this through all territories, and you were there, that’s a positive thing you’ll clearly DVDs at gigs would dilute this offering. The remember about that show. Mind you, telling a band small screen of a mobile phone, where the inevitable that is a very different thing!’ says MJ of Live Here Now. lack of production finesse in live camera work will There are some pragmatic solutions to the issue of artist be less evident, and where storage restrictions would approval: the first gig of the Erasure tour was recorded make it prudent to edit just a couple of key songs, but not sold on the night, so the group could review the may yet prove the most beguiling destination for general sound quality and mixing approach. live visuals. From a business angle, there is clearly a good The concert CD-R concept has come at a good prospect for the future. Even with low edition numbers, moment, just as a new wave of live playing, guitarThe Pixie’s US$500,000 over 22 dates is not to be wielding bands like the Kaiser Chiefs and Franz sniffed at. A whole swathe of middle-merchants are Ferdinand are sweeping the scene. And possibly at an bypassed, the band and recording service can divvy opportune time for the sound recording industry, just the proceeds. DiscLive was probably turning at least when traditional mobile recording seems to be drying double the profit that even the most sophisticated up, and just as a whole new wave of young audio mobile recording studio could hope to earn from each school graduates become available for the labourXR_fire_PAR_ad.qxd 5/10/05 4:23 PM Page 1 show. And budgets are not there any more for grandintensive task of loading those burners! ■ scale live album recording. ‘Very few people now do multiple recordings on tour like they used to — AC/ DC albums I’ve done in the past with the Manor Mobile The Dream ADA-8XR: where we’ve recorded 15 or 20 shows for an album!’ • The XR provides you with observes Will Shapland. the ultimate in Prism ‘That sort of market is disappearing. There are Sound performance. still a few high end oneoff recordings, but mixing • The XR works at sample for live CD-R and live TV rates from 32k - 192k. is really where mobiles are headed, which is why you • The XR supports Firewire, need desks in them that are Pro-tools HD, AES, SPDIF and capable of instant reset and DSD snapshots.’ Selling at-gig recordings Call us NOW! will initially appeal most to mature acts without major See us at AES label contractual re-recording Stand 1005 restrictions. But label investment in, or ownership of, services — as in Live Here Now’s case — will smooth the way for many artists. Record companies will be very keen not to upset the retail sector any more than PRISM MEDIA PRODUCTS LIMITED PRISM MEDIA PRODUCTS INC. UK USA they already have with digital downloads. HMV and Virgin Tel : +44 1223 424 988 Tel : (973) 983 9577 Fax : + 44 1223 425 023 Fax : (973) 983 9588 depend on selling several hundred copies of a band’s http://www.prismsound.com Email: sales@prismsound.com CD when they are playing NOTE: Digidesign, Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, Apple Computer Inc and Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU) do not endorse or support the Prism Sound ADA-8XR unit. Not all Pro-Tools, Nuendo, Cubase, Logic or Digital locally — selling truck loads Performer controls or configurations are supported by the Prism Sound ADA-8XR. Prism Sound reserve the right to amend their own product specifications without notice. Digidesign, Pro-tools I HD are trademarks of Digidesign a division of Avid Technology Inc. Digital Performer is a trademark of Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU), Nuendo and Cubase are trademarks of Steinberg Media technologies GmbH a of live CDs at a gig is not division of Yamaha Corporation, Logic is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc what ‘tour support’ means

NEED A COMPLETE RECORDING SOLUTION?

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katz’s column

The Fear Of All Sums BOB KATZ turns audio investigator with the help of Becky and Fred.

Y NAME IS BOB SPADE, Private Ear. I run a mastering studio but I also do a bit of audio investigation on the side. One of my most mysterious cases began on a dark and stormy afternoon, like most central Florida summer afternoons. My assistant Slim and I were changing some pots in a compressor when the lights flickered in time with a sinister thunderbolt, but there was another noise that I thought I detected, around 2kHz — the attack frequency of a door knock. ‘OK Slim, why don’t you go in the back and work on the master clock — I’ll take care of this visitor,’ I said. The door opened to reveal a rather attractive female figure. ‘Mr. Spade, I presume?’ All I could do was nod my head. ‘I’d like to engage your investigation services.’ At which point I managed to blurt out, ‘Hello, we don’t get many dames around the audio studio.’ ‘I can see why, if you always keep it as messy as this,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to work on that,’ I replied, regaining composure. ‘Take a seat, please,’ I continued, surreptitiously removing some 4-40 nuts from the cushion. ‘What’s your name, what’s on your mind?’ ‘My name is Becky, and I have a digital audio studio, and I seem to have lost the magic in the sound. My mixes sound flat and uninteresting.’ ‘Hmm, that’s a tall order,’ I said, ‘but I’ve seen a lot of that lately, and I do have a number of cures for the blues.’ ‘Oh, that would be fantastic, Mr Spade...’ ‘...Call me Bob, please. When did your problems begin?’ ‘I swear they began when I got rid of my old analogue console, well, actually, I retired it into the basement. Now I’m beginning to think I’ve succumbed to the digital hype.’ ‘Not so fast, sister, what digital hype are you talking about?’ ‘You know, all these manufacturers are telling me that digital summing is defective and the problem can only be solved by an analogue summing bus.’ ‘Well, don’t believe everything a manufacturer tells you. The fact is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with digital summing. In reality, these new analogue summing boxes are being marketed under false pretenses; they aren’t fixing what’s wrong with digital, they’re really “unfixing” what’s right with digital.’ I could see my charm was working on her, because she stammered, ‘What on earth do you mean, Mr Spade, err, I mean Bob?’ ‘This is going to take a lot of explaining, but I need you to trust me explicitly if I’m going to take on this case. You must have patience, Becky. First I want you to resurrect that analogue console for an experiment.’ ‘Well, actually, I have a confession to make, I already did resurrect that analogue console, and I plugged it back in, and I swear things sound better... sort of.’ ‘Hmmm, if you want me to trust you, Becky, you have to tell me the whole truth, all the time. I may not mince words, but I get results. But back to your problem; I’ll bet I already know what you meant by “sort of”. What you need to do is test that console and

all your connections. Hey Slim!’ I shouted to the back room, ‘come on out.’ Slim slinked out with a gleam in his eye and I noticed a bolt of unmistakable Florida electricity pass between the two of them, though I wasn’t sure if it was in positive or negative polarity. ‘Becky, this is Slim. But wait a minute, do you two know each other?’ ‘Yeah, Becky and I know each other from the music conference, only she knows me by my given name, Fred.’ ‘Slim, you spent too much time at that conference for your own good, but let’s get down to business. I want you to pull out the Audio Precision, take it down to Becky’s and analyse her system.’ ‘Pulling out the big guns, eh boss?’ remarked Slim. But I just ignored him and told him a bunch of tests I needed to have done. They were back in a few hours. ‘Just like ya said it would be boss, one percent harmonic distortion in all the modules, and the bass response is down by 3dB. The absolute polarity of the fourth input is reversed, too. How did you know?’ ‘Slim, it’s a 15-year-old console, and the electrolytics had to be dried up by now. Becky is committed to perfection, so I need you to replace all the coupling capacitors with low-ESR types. Slim, write this down. First you fix up her analogue console, then I want you to help Becky do the following. Number one, make an all-digital mix, inside her DAW, and capture that, 24-bit. Call that File #1. Second, take that digital mix, feed it out the stereo bus into two channels of her D-ACs, back into two channels of A-DCs, and capture that to File #2. Third, do the same thing, but add two channels of the analogue console in between, File #3. Fourth and last, using all 24 D-ACs, I want you to do a full-blown analogue mix, but it must be at identical matched gain and panning to what you did in the digital mix. Then, and only then, will we have unbiased data to know what’s going on.’ ‘Wow! But come on, boss, I need to know how you figured I should also check for polarity problems?’ ‘That is, an elementary conclusion,’ I smirked. ‘Slim, the law of averages tells me that you’re going to find one or more reversed wires in those messy resolution

snakes. It’s good preventive maintenance to check polarity anyway, kid.’ I didn’t see much of Slim and Becky for several weeks, but at least I was getting paid as a consultant. ‘All right guys, you got the files?’ I asked as I led them into my mastering room. ‘This is where we do the serious listening, where we compare sounds in an accurate audio environment. First, let me hear your all-digital mix, file #1. That’s nice music, Becky.’ Becky’s all-digital mix did sound flat, it was lacking depth and stereo space, and I told her so. ‘See, I told you, Bob, my digital mixes just don’t have the depth of my old analogue mixes. It has to be the digital summing bus.’ ‘Not so fast, Becky. Let’s listen to the rest of your files.’ The next mix I heard was the same digital mix sent out through a pair of her D-ACs and then back into the console through a pair of A-DCs. The sonic difference was intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. ‘I don’t get it,’ she exclaimed, ‘the sound is worse, it’s closed in, there’s less stereo separation.’ ‘It’s exactly what I expected, Becky, the sound goes downhill when you add a pair of convertors in between. The convertors you are using are not the world’s best, they’re not well clocked, and furthermore, you’re working at 44.1kHz. You will definitely get better performance if you increase sample rate. But even then, even with the world’s best convertors, you will get some objective, and subjective, loss.’ ‘But I know the sound through the analogue console is better than my all-digital mix!’ ‘Is it?’ I replied. ‘We haven’t listened to test number three, where you send the sound through two modules of the console.’ What did test #3 reveal? Disciver the answer in our next installment of The Fear of All Sums. ■

Information Resolution recommends Bob Katz’s book Mastering Audio — The Art and the Science as an essential source of information for every pro audio enthusiast who cares about sound. You can buy it on line at www.digido.com

May/June 2005

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WARM - THE NEW COOL Guy Berryman, member of one of the hottest British bands to emerge for some time, is passionate about what he refers to as ‘real

meet your maker

Ole Brøsted Sørensen

music’. As bass player and co-writer with

The man behind the technology of DPA brand microphones and the individual largely

Coldplay, his innovative and creative musical

responsible for the reawakening of acceptance of the omni in studios talks diaphragm

talents have seriously contributed to the band’s mega success over recent years.

size, the electronics package and the whole quality issue.

ZENON SCHOEPE

“Recording onto ProTools I wanted something that would give a warmer analogue sound” Check out:

www.tlaudio.co.uk/guy

yet, giving theatre engineers mics that were small enough to be mounted almost invisibly onto a performer and rugged enough to withstand the rigours of life on stage without sacriﬁcing sound quality. Unsurprisingly, out of working hours Sørensen’s abiding passion is music. He’s a keen pianist, both as a solo musician and accompanist, and he recently upgraded his sound system at home with the latest B&W speakers. Astronomy is also close to his heart. ‘If you ever need to feel humble, take a look into deep space through a good telescope,’ he advises. ‘It’s worth remembering that many of the molecules that are part of you were created by super novas a long, long time ago!’

Guy Berryman Coldplay TELEPHONE +44 (0)1462 492090 // EMAIL info@tlaudio.co.uk //

LE BRØSTED SØRENSEN cut his teeth on microphone design working for the Danish test and measurement equipment supplier Bruel & Kjaer. B&K had made microphones purely for testing purposes for many years, but until Sørensen became involved with direct-to-disc recording for the cartridge manufacturer Ortofon in the late 1970s, the company had never produced anything speciﬁcally for pro audio. His success on the Ortofon direct-to-disc sessions were the catalyst for the design of B&K’s 4006 and 4007 mics, which were introduced in 1982. In designing them, he hoped to combine the high accuracy and exacting tolerances of B&K’s test and measurement hardware with the sonic characteristics required by sound engineers. His designs were immediately successful, and within a few years the Series 4000 had become an industry standard in professional studios around the world. In 1992, B&K took the decision to spin off its pro audio division. Sales and service of the Series 4000 microphones were outsourced to two former employees, Sørensen and Morten Støve, who formed Danish Pro Audio, now DPA, owning the exclusive rights to the microphones that bear this name. In 1994 DPA released its ﬁrst products designed by Sørensen — a series of compact cardioid and omnidirectional mics that put the sound quality of the original Series 4000 in a lighter and more discreet package. Two years later the 4060 series of miniature mic capsules put DPA quality into its smallest package

What is special about DPA’s approach to microphones? We at DPA have an extensive history of working with measurement microphones, and have long concerned ourselves with the issue of maximum SPL handling with the lowest possible distortion, both harmonic and non-harmonic. However, both my co-director Morten Støve and myself are musicians — we play saxophone and piano respectively — and through working and playing music together we have learnt to use our ears and realised that hearing is believing. The professional user obviously agrees. We also learned that rotational symmetry and a certain shape in the mechanical design, resulting in minimal disturbance of the original sound ﬁeld, is very important for the objective and subjective result.

PASSIONATE ABOUT TUBES

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May/June 2005

meet your maker

What are the common misconceptions about large diaphragm and small diaphragm mics and what are the realities and limitations? The typical misconceptions are that such a tiny microphone will not be able to capture my big voice, and a microphone with such a small diaphragm will not be able to capture or handle the low frequencies. In other words, the general perception is that the larger the diaphragm the better the bass response. This is really a misconception, at least regarding omnidirectional microphones. Imagine a barometer. A microphone is likened to a very fast electronic barometer and it does not matter if the moving or moveable part is big or small. Even a small barometer measures the correct pressure in the air. DPA has been big on the Omni from the beginning but now produces a variety of pattern mics, what are the relative practical and technical advantages of the main polar patterns? The omni microphone is a perfect choice if the acoustic environment is ideal and you want to include that in the recording. The cardioid microphone is a useful tool if you want to reject the acoustic response of the recording room and/or if you want to manipulate it in the mixing process. It is very important that all off-axis responses are smooth so as not to colour the sound picture. If you merely want a mild rejection of the surrounding room, the wide cardioid is the solution.

to comply with the capsule capacity and be able to handle even very high voltage since the polarisation voltage of our mics is between 200 and 400 volts, depending on the type. The preamp is essentially a very sophisticated impedance convertor facing the ultra high impedance on the capsule side and a conveniently low output impedance to match the studio environment.

Miniatures are increasingly visible in the DPA portfolio, what are the technical issues that need to be addressed in producing these and does their use extend beyond the obvious applications? One big issue is to produce to a high quality. The microphones are put through a high number of processes during production and we test them numerous times so the yield can be as high as possible. The environmental durability of the mics is equally as important as the acoustic speciﬁcations.

Some would have us believe the secret is in the diaphragm, what are your thoughts on the inﬂuence of the preamp and the interface to the outside world in the total package? It’s partly true that the secret is in the diaphragm. But of more importance are the constructions just behind the diaphragm, where air motion and airﬂow is vital in order to keep self noise very low and maximum SPL very high. The preamp should be constructed May/June 2005

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meet your maker microphone, the listening test is the ultimate test. Fortunately all our research has shown a very good correlation between supreme speciﬁcations and the highest scores in listening tests. Most microphones sound pretty good on axis, but step back and walk around the mic when you test it. This is when you can ﬁnd out a lot about the mic. The maximum SPL handling and the self-noise let you know if the mic’s dynamic range is suited to the application.

We are very happy with the miniatures and the more we try them in different situations, the more markets we see opening up for them. We have been delighted to discover that musicians are so very constructive and innovative to work with, as previously we thought they would be most reluctant to place microphones directly onto their delicate instruments. On the contrary, they show a surprising eagerness to use instrument microphones. One big market for the miniatures that has opened up outside of music recording is the security and surveillance industry in their search for better sound quality. In Danish bank robberies, for example, a suspect can be convicted if an audio forensic expert can match recordings to the voice of the bank robber.

What is your opinion on the wide range of affordable Chinese mics that are now available in the market? The Chinese competition has to be taken seriously, and they certainly keep us on our toes. Up until now we have not seen any really serious competition according to the speciﬁcations. As long as the users rely on their ears and are able to distinguish quality,

we can survive in the market, but if it came down to cost only, we could be in trouble.

Where are the limitations of current mic technology and what will represent the next technological leap? The achievements of the best microphones are still superior to the electronics further down the audio chain. At DPA we never rest on our achievements, but steadily work on achieving better noise, distortion and level handling speciﬁcations. In the future it seems that silicon microphones will be introduced, especially when the self-noise problem they suffer from is solved. I also predict that we will see some kind of array microphones, representing something new in microphone technology, with a previously-unseen set of speciﬁcations. This is, however, so secret that I would have to... ■

Has the emphasis on cheap large condensers reduced the variety of mics available and has the end-user lost out in terms of choice? Every microphone has its place, but I think that the users have to be careful not to economise too much on mics as this can be expensive in the long run. The time saved in postproduction and mixing can often easily pay for the extra cost of a good mic. Furthermore you have to remember that if any part of the signal is lost at the diaphragm, then you can never regain it. No piece of outboard equipment can recreate what was there if the microphone has not picked it up. If I were a professional musician having spent a lot of money on a good instrument and a lot of time practicing, I would be somewhat disappointed if the engineer put up a cheap, but often beautiful microphone, to capture my instrument. Can an end-user evaluate a mic from its speciﬁcations alone and how can he know if he’s buying a quality product? Although high speciﬁcations reveal a lot about the

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May/June 2005

your business

��

technology

Crafting the signal In some circumstances, a pure, unaltered audio signal might be all that is required. However, some ‘crafting’ of the signal is often required and the signal must travel through another maze of components. ASHLEY STYLES looks at some classics to see

We often need to correct the perceived dynamic range of sounds and it’s well known that compressors and limiters do sound very different. Some units have design aspects that would help to explain this so here are a few examples of valve compressor/limiter designs. ALTEC 436 — A fairly straightforward and very popular design using just three valves. The

what is happening.

ANY UNITS DESIGNED for adjusting the frequency response of an audio signal can generate more problems then they are trying to correct. One of the many problems is that of phase shift in which the area of frequency being modified by boost or cut has a shift in phase from the rest of the signal. This can lead to the harmonic structure of the signal having incorrect phase coherence with the fundamental frequencies of the signal and causing unwanted colouration. The majority of classic valve EQ/tone control units used passive EQ. The audio signal is filtered through inductors and capacitors via suitable variable resistors, then the modified audio signal is amplified to bring it back to the required operating level. Basically, this means that the tonal adjustment of an audio signal is obtained by filtering out what you want to keep and attenuating the rest. Many passive EQ units suffer from incorrect operation if they are loaded incorrectly and not matched to other pieces of equipment in the audio chain. In 1952, a tone control circuit designed by Peter Baxandall was published in Wireless World. This was to change the way in which tone control circuits were to be designed forever. Although the design was primarily intended for hifi use, the design also found its way into recording equipment. Baxandall realised that by using a gain stage after EQ had been applied to the signal, a percentage of the signal could be fedback to the EQ section, improving the way in which the EQ section functioned. Designers could now use linear law potentiometers, offering linear scales on the controls, together with more flexibility in circuit design and reducing the sensitivity of the EQ unit to external loading/mismatch. It is often the case that removing what you don’t want is more satisfying then boosting what appears to be lacking. A certain amount of tweaking of the EQ can offer a sound that would appear to be phase correct, rather then just tonally accurate. It is all down to what the things on the sides of our head find acceptable. Let’s have a look at a few examples of units designed to modify the frequency response of our audio signal. FONOFILM INDUSTRY KF 571 — A single channel unit with a circuit built around a single E80CC double triode valve and designed to operate in conjunction with other external buffer amplifier units. Therefore the connections to the unit are unbalanced. The input signal is taken directly to the bass/LF section of the passive EQ network and then on to the treble/HF section. A choice of -6, 0, 6dB is then applied to the equalised signal via the first section of the valve. The second section of the valve then operates as a cathode follower output. The audio path is DC coupled from the input, right through to the output coupling capacitor at 0.5uF. Providing the output of the EQ is connected to a high impedance input, then the coupling capacitor is large enough in value to not filter out any audible LF response of the system.

ORTOFON KFS 600 SERIES — The controls of the 600 series are basically the same as those found on the KF 571 — 11 steps of rising/roll-off in each section — but it has an additional mode in the treble range for lift/attenuation. It uses a single E80CF valve that has two sections, one being a triode and the other being a pentode. While the circuitry is very much the same as the Fonoﬁlm, the use of a Pentode section offers a different tonal character. PULTEC — For many people, the best example of passive EQ tone control is found in the famous Pultec range of units — whether in the MEQ range for mid frequencies, the EQP range for program equalisation, or the HF range for HF correction. The Pultec design traps the EQ section of the

electronics within a pair of matching transformers. This helps to maintain a constant input/output loading on the EQ network and allows the designer to produce a very accurate EQ section. When compared to many other EQ units, the Pultec offers increased control and flexibility. The Gain stages within the Pultec design are based around a pair of double triode type valves, both working in push-pull fashion. The output of the EQ network is connected to the input of the first stage via a suitable matching transformer. The amplified signal is then capacitively coupled to the output stage, interfacing to the outside world via the output transformer. A percentage of feedback is taken from the output transformer and applied to the cathodes of the first amplification stage. So, feedback is only applied to the buffer amplification stages, not the combined EQ/amplifier stages. The Pultec units are self-powered, using the 6X4 rectifier valve to obtain the rectified HT. Maybe it’s the valve rectifier that also helps to produce the sound quality we find so enjoyable! PECLA 1VV — This must be the original recording channel, but unfortunately is of unknown origin. The signal first passes through the compressor section, being very similar in design to the Altec 436. The PECLA offers additional front-end gain to the Altec, together with an extra control for selection of compression ratio. The signal then enters the EQ stage. The circuitry would suggest that the EQ stage is of Pultec program equaliser design. I rece ived this unit as a gift in non-working order. I have since brought it back to life and all I can say is, whatever its origin, it sounds very good.

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compression is carried out by a single 6BC8 double triode valve with the control voltage being fed to the grid of each half of the valve, via the centre tapped secondary winding of the input transformer and associated pair of input level controls. The rectified audio, used for the control voltage, is extracted from the anodes of the output valve (6CG7 double triode) and then rectified by a 6AL5 double diode. Resistors and capacitors are then used to obtain attack and release times as required. The audio path is push-pull throughout. With such a simple design, there is very little clutter to change the quality of sound passing through the unit. GATES STA-LEVEL — Designed for use in radio stations, the Sta-level has found its way into many recording studios. In design, it is very much the same as the Altec 436, the main difference being the additional 6V6 pentode output stage of amplification. This helps to increase the response time of the DC control voltage used to adjust the bias of the first stage compression valve. The type 6386 valve that the Sta-level uses for compressing is the same used in the Fairchild 660/670, so that could offer a clue to its popularity. CCA LA-1D — A clone of the Gates Sta-level was manufactured by the CCA Company, which was founded by a group of RCA engineers. CCA is better known for its AM/FM transmitters and radio station consoles.

The main difference in the CCA LA-1D is the use of a 12BH7 valve for the output stage. It also offers greater release time flexibility by using two switchable time stages. FAIRCHILD 660/670 — The 660 mono unit is 6U and weighs 41lbs. The 670 stereo version is an awesome 8U and weighs in at some 65lbs. Originally designed for use with disc cutting systems, these are now some of the most sought after units in the world. Alas, there were not many stereo models produced and their secondhand value reflects this. Both these units are just so fast in operation. For those of us who can remember, it’s almost like using the pre-listen head of a tape recorder to adjust the Vari-pitch of a disc cutting lathe. For most engineers a Fairchild quite simply works. One of the prime reasons for its ability to respond so fast is the very high working voltage of the HT supply rail (some 440V) and the use of so many 6386 compression valves wired in parallel. Indeed, the mono 660 uses 4 x 6386 valves in parallel on each half of the balanced audio signal flow through the unit for 8 in total. The May/June 2005

technology 670 stereo unit only uses 4 in total per channel. With the high cost of these now scarce valves, servicing a Fairchild compressor can be a very expensive affair. RCA BA-6A — Another unit designed for broadcast use. A design much like the Gates Sta-level, the RCA unit used pentode valves for the audio path. The compression stage used the 6SK7, a 6J7 valve for the intermediate stage and finally the famous 6V6-GT for the output stage/control voltage amplifier. Therefore, the sound quality of the RCA is quite different to that of the Gates and one that you would associate with medium/large-sized Pentode type valves. TELETRONIX LA-2A (REISSUED AS THE UREI LA-2A POST-1969) — The LA-2a was originally called the LA-2, a product made by the Teletronix engineering company. The method Teletronix used to compress the audio signal is different to that used in the units we have already mentioned. Instead of using a valve for compression (attenuation), an electro-optical attenuator is employed. Based around the famous T4B electrooptical attenuator, the LA-2 is able to offer a gain reduction of some 40dB with very little distortion. The T4B attenuator consists of a photo-conductive cell and an electro-luminescent light source, optically coupled together in a light-proof, plug-in case. The amount of light emitted by an electro-luminescent light source relates directly to the voltage applied to it. The varying resistance of the photo-conductive cell is then used to attenuate the input signal, prior to any amplification. Through the use of such useful components in the T4B attenuator, the unit offers an attack time of 50-100 microseconds from ‘dark’ and just 10 microseconds within the next 30 seconds of use. An additional advantage is the logarithmic release law obtained by using such components — high gain reduction equals long release times and little gain reduction equals faster release times. The audio input signal is applied to a 12AX7A, both halves in parallel, via the input transformer and peak reduction control. Then onto the 6AQ5 ‘Luminescent’ driver amplifier used to supply the required control voltage to the T4B attenuator.

May/June 2005

After attenuation, make up gain is obtained by passing the signal through two halves of a 12AX7 valve and finally through a single-ended push-pull output stage, based around a 12BH7A and output matching transformer. UNIVERSAL AUDIO LIMITING AMPLIFIER TYPE 176 — This is a cross between the Altec 436 and the Gates Sta-level — still using the 6BC8 valve for gain reduction control (as in the Altec 436) but with the extra stage of amplification courtesy of the 12BH7, as in the Gates Sta-level. Therefore this compressor offers more ‘weight’ to drive the compression stage, which shows through in use. The Universal Audio offers ‘limiting’, not seen on the Altec, and together with switchable compression ratios of 2:1 through to 12:1, the unit offers many more options. MISSING LINK VC-931 — A stereo/dual mono unit, designed and built by me, which is based around a circuit that is similar to the Altec 436. With the option of using the sum and difference principle, the VC-931 offers a degree of extra flexibility that is not found on the majority of commercially produced units. In this mode of operation and prior to compression, the left and right

channels can be added together to give the ‘sum’ signal and subtracted to give the ‘difference’ signal. These two signals are then passed through the two channels of the compressor. The amount of compression applied to the ‘separated’ sum and difference signals can give some very interesting/pleasing results. The signals are then decoded to provide the original Left and Right channels. Addition and subtraction of the audio signals is accomplished by the use of transformers, much like that in the Fairchild 670. ■

Contact SATURN SOUND RECORDING SERVICES, UK: Tel: +44 1509 891 491 Email: saturnsound@btopenworld.com

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slaying dragons

Impedence and all that stuff Impedance is one of those words that crops up a lot in audio. But what does it mean and why does it matter? JOHN WATKINSON, AKA jw, thinks that complex is cool.

john watkinson Res_MTvertical_06-04

‘A great deal of audio equipment is concerned with converting energy from one form to another.’

20/4/04

1:37 pm

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‘Mathematicians describe the resistive part as the real part and the reactive part as the imaginary part. I don’t like these terms as they imply something intangible that requires a belief structure when what is happening is actually quite simple and requires no goats to be sacriﬁced.’

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E HAVE TO START somewhere and that place isn’t obvious. Impedance fundamentally affects energy transfer and so it will be found in all aspects of engineering. In audio, we use electrical energy to transmit waveforms either directly or digitally. We also use magnetic energy to record. At some point we use mechanical energy in microphones and loudspeakers. And of course, sound energy has mechanical aspects. A great deal of audio equipment is concerned with converting energy from one form to another in transducers such as heads and voice coils. Without an understanding of impedance, energy transfer in transmission, recording heads and transducers would be hopelessly inefﬁcient to say nothing of suffering from noise. One of the most useful characteristics of impedance is that it can be made frequency dependent. Without it there would be no equalisers, ﬁlters or tone controls. The power delivery into a resistor is easy to calculate using Ohm’s law. The resistance is obtained by dividing the voltage by the current. The power is obtained by multiplying the voltage by the current. If we consider a battery having a certain voltage, the current and the power follow from the total resistance in the circuit. This is the sum of the load resistance and the internal resistance of the battery. It doesn’t take long to work out that the greatest power in the load is obtained when the load resistance equals the resolution

source resistance. This is the basis of matching. If we consider devices such as capacitors and inductors, we come unstuck because the resistance of an ideal capacitor is infinite and the resistance of an ideal inductor is zero. These devices are only useful in systems where the voltage changes. The impedance of a system is obtained by dividing the AC voltage by the AC current as before and the unit is still Ohms. In the capacitor, the impedance is inversely proportional to frequency, whereas in the inductor it is directly proportional. However, the power dissipated in an ideal capacitor or inductor is zero. How can this be when the voltage and current are both finite? The answer is that the voltage and the current have a 90-degree phase relationship. In the capacitor the current leads the voltage and in the inductor it lags. Devices having such a characteristic are described as reactive. The average power is given by the product of the current and voltage, but multiplied by the cosine of the phase angle, which in this case is zero. Instantaneously energy flows in to the device for half a cycle, and then out again. In the mechanical world, a spring behaves like a capacitor, because it resists when you try to squash it, but it doesn’t dissipate the energy. Instead you get the energy back when the spring is released. A mass behaves like an inductor because when you push it to start it moving the energy is stored as kinetic energy. This is returned when you stop it. Everyone knows that a mass on a spring will, like Zebedee, oscillate merrily if excited. An inductor connected to a capacitor will do the same thing as we have made a tuned circuit. The two reactive devices simply exchange energy. A car on its suspension is a mass on a spring, and to prevent Zebedee impersonations we need to put hydraulic dampers in the system. In a tuned circuit we can use a resistor to damp oscillations. These parallels are very powerful because it allows us to model mechanical systems using electrical components. This is how analogue computing started. Mechanical systems have impedance, it’s the ratio of force to velocity. Thus a car jack is an impedance convertor, using the small force the driver can provide to lift a heavy car slowly. A gearbox is also an impedance convertor. Both of these have exactly the same characteristics as a transformer. In a transformer, the ratio of the number of turns determines the voltage ratio. However, for the same power, if the voltage has doubled, the current must halve, so the impedance must go up by a factor of four. Thus a 100-Ohm resistor on the secondary of a 2:1 transformer appears as an impedance of 400ohms at the primary. If we reverse the transformer it looks like 25ohms. This is the principle of reflected impedance. In other words the actual impedance at the end of a system where power is delivered reflects back to the source of energy. Reflected impedance operates in transducers, actuators and motors. Measure the impedance of a loudspeaker in air and then repeat the measurement in a vacuum and there will be a difference because the acoustic impedance presented to the diaphragm is absent in the second case. In an aircraft wing the reflected impedance of the lift creation process is known as induced drag. Impedance can be negative where devices deliver power. An electric train going down hill actually returns power to the network. A glider has negative induced drag to overcome the real drag. A purely reactive component has current at 90 degrees phase to the voltage. The term ‘in quadrature’ May/June 2005

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is often used. That’s easy enough. But what if there is also a resistive component? Well, it’s not much harder. Imagine a resistor in series with a capacitor being supplied with a certain frequency. We can work out the impedance of the capacitor, but we can’t just add it to the resistance. The same current flows through both components, but the voltage across the resistor is in phase with the voltage across the resistor, whereas the voltage across the capacitor must be in quadrature with the current. Thus, to work out the total impedance we need to do a vector sum. That’s as easy as drawing a right-angle triangle. Suppose the resistor is 4kohms and the impedance of the capacitor is 3kohms. We draw a right-angled triangle with orthogonal sides of 3 and 4 units. According to Pythagoras, the hypotenuse will be 5 units long, so the total impedance will be 5kohms. One of the angles in the triangle will be the same as the phase shift between the voltage on the input and the phase of the voltage across the capacitor. We could say the impedance of our network is 4kohms resistive plus 3kohms reactive at 90 degrees phase. That’s a bit of a mouthful. As voltages developed across purely reactive impedances are always in quadrature to the current, we needn’t state it. And instead of spelling out which are the resistive and reactive components we simply put the letter j in front of the reactive one. Thus the impedance is 4 + j3 kohms. Mathematically, 4 + j3 is a complex number. It’s an idiomatic term that means a vector that has components in quadrature, not that it is complicated. Mathematicians describe the resistive part as the real part and the reactive part as the imaginary part. I don’t like these terms as they imply something intangible that requires a belief structure when what is happening is actually quite simple and requires no goats to be sacrificed. In electronics, the resistive and reactive components are preferable terms. Now, a loudspeaker diaphragm is a mass on a spring and so will exhibit a resonance. If the impedance is measured at a range of frequencies it will be found that the magnitude peaks at the resonant frequency. The sharpness of the peak can be quite alarming in this measurement. However, this isn’t what happens when a voltage amplifier drives a loudspeaker. In this case the voice coil sees the output impedance of the amplifier, which, with typical amounts of negative feedback, is substantially zero. Thus the coil is effectively shorted out and if it moves, the EMF generated will produce a current that is determined by the coil resistance. The heat dissipated in the coil resistance has come from the moving system and so there will be damping. Consequently when we connect an audio amplifier to a loudspeaker, we have an output impedance Pro, Con, Extras Text of PROS zero in parallel with a highly variable input impedance. CONS The sum of these is still zero. Thus the concept of impedance matching does not arise here because the goal is damping. Thus every document EXTRAS you read about exotic loudspeaker cables having transmission line properties is useful primarily to put under the cat’s dishes. On the other hand a long AES-EBU cable definitely does have a characteristic impedance and should be treated like a transmission line. Source and load impedances should match the cable and driving two loads with a Y-piece will violate that. In transmission lines, when the load is matched to the cable, all of the incoming energy flows in to the load. Incorrect matching causes signals to reflect and interfere with later signals. Ask Arnold Schwarzenegger. ■ May/June 2005

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dan daley

your business

Identity crisis Producers will find the once clear-cut definitions of what they do — and whom they are — shifting in the sands of the new entertainment model. DAN DALEY says it’s a sign of the times but one that the resourceful can benefit from.

‘Working with a consenting artist, a recording’s elements are grouped into stems... Using the Umixit software users can remix the song.’ ‘I wonder how long before dubs of songs are traded across the Internet like playing cards?’ ‘The fact that you have Pro Tools in your living room and the Umixit buyer has an iPod is immaterial.’

HE RECORD PRODUCER has always been something of an amorphous enigma. The often- and long-used analogy outside the trade press has been to compare the role of the record producer with that of a director of a movie. Thing is, a number of social and technological forces have combined to make the producer even more of an uneasily deﬁned entity. Tabloids and celebrity television shows routinely describe Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs as a ‘record producer.’ My New York sources tell me that Puff Daddy’s actual trench time behind a recording desk is somewhat limited these days, not surprising since Mr Combs is spending more time behind desks at his fashion company and record label. He would be more aptly described lately as an executive producer when it comes to records, overseeing the work of other producers. But the phrase doesn’t have the same cachet as ‘producer’. Hip-hop in general did a lot to muddy the deﬁnition of record producer. Along with digital technology, hip-hop prompted music to be looked at on a digital DNA level — is a ‘beat’ a song? Can it be copyrighted? (This is still being debated by US courts.) Samples — pieces of songs produced by someone else — are legal Trojan Horses inside rap records. It has become a topic discussed over pints in a pub among editors how the credit listings of hiphop producers on databases like alllmusic.com have been rendered virtually meaningless as a result of the sheer volume of credits rap producers accumulate. Rock producers work on a couple of records a year. Country music producers, who developed Nashville into a music factory, used to put their

names on a half-dozen or so LPs a year even while running major record labels (their output diminished only because country records now have to sound like rock records). But even that pales next to the scores of records that producers and production teams like Jermaine Dupri and the Neptunes list as credits annually. After a certain point, it’s apparent that you are less participating in a creative endeavour than you are supervising the operation of an assembly line. Another trend that will further blur the deﬁnitions of producers and mixers are a slew of products coming on the market that confer many of the creative decisions once reserved for the producer on to the casual listener. Magix Ringtone Maker lets users select sections of prerecorded tracks from any source as their personal ringtones, and in the process users of Magix’s product can re-edit the song structure, placing chorus before verse or removing bridges or solos, and so on. Bounce Technology, a UK-based company, recently concluded a deal with EMI subsidiary Positiva Records to provide technology to do just that with songs from the label’s catalogues. Enhanced CDs (ECD) of speciﬁc artists will come with Bounce’s MyTone software embedded on it, allowing users to scramble song parts inside a PC and transfer the result to a cell phone via the Internet. Warner Records made rapper Fabolous’s track Baby available with the Bounce software on it last March. One giant step beyond this is Umixit. Working with a consenting artist, a recording’s elements are grouped into stems — one for guitars, one for drums,

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May/June 2005

your business one for vocals, and so on. Using the Umixit software embedded on the same disc, users can remix the song, changing levels, muting sections altogether, and, via a PC soundcard, recording new instrumental and vocal parts themselves. Lest you think the artist community would sniff at the idea of any yob turning his or her work of art into the aural equivalent of an arcade game, think again: the ﬁrst Umixit track came out in late 2004 on a bonus CD with Aerosmith’s You Gotta Move DVD with Steven Tyler’s enthusiastic blessing. Umixit’s attorney tells me that the next recordings include music from DJ Paul Oakenfold and guitarist Joe Perry. Interestingly, the software was developed in part by the children of Don DeVito, long-time Columbia/Sony Records A&R exec and an accomplished producer (Bob Dylan’s Street Legal) himself. At Umixit’s ‘soft’ launch last year, at music venue Webster Hall in Manhattan (a shareholder in Umixit), I saw no less a producer than Tony Visconti mount the podium to extol the virtues of engaging the public by letting them remix your records on their laptops. All this is quite legal, as long as the re-edited and remixed songs are used only for personal purposes. If the trend catches on — and since mobile ringtones are now a US$4bn industry globally there’s every reason to think it will — I wonder how long before dubs of songs are traded across the Internet like playing cards? There is no DRM scheme that can’t be cracked by a bored and determined 17-year-old. Since Umixit’s tracks are distributed on legitimate CDs, producers will receive their royalties, we’re assured. That’s less certain when it comes to the editing programs — the terms of licensing deals between labels and ringtone aggregators are not usually made public. But more to the point, does it render the role of the producer less relevant? Think of automotive designers. There exists a huge after-market industry in customisation accoutrements for cars, even though the vast majority of us will simply accept the stock version and drive it happily. It’s not like everyone who buys a CD or a download is going to subject it to a PC-based scrambling. On the other hand, what this trend does seem to do is further diminish the notion that music is an art based on inspiration, rather than the outcome of managed planning based on focus groups and market research. The word ‘commodity’ has many implications. However, there is opportunity here, as always. Last month we talked about how the minions that make up META, producers and engineers whose cumulative clientele’s star power can be weighed in mega-watts, are self-exploiting their careers. Producers like Elliot Scheiner and Phil Ramone have found that there is a value to their names that can be lent to products other than music, and that there are also more ways than simply producing it to leverage music. It’s not unfair to assert that Eddie Kramer’s best work was done in the 1960s, with Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. Yet Kramer has managed to build a brand off that, through his photography and live appearances in which he recalls those glory days. Another interesting one I saw lately is engineer/ producer Greg Ladanyi lending talent and name to one of Sony’s series of instrumental loop discs. Drums from the Big Room is a ﬁve-disc loop collection performed by Steve Ferrone and recorded by Ladanyi at O’Henry Sound Studios in Los Angeles. I love this one because everyone wins: Ladanyi produces, engineers and is paid; Ferrone, a drummer and thus once considered May/June 2005

a nearly extinct species, is similarly taken care of; and O’Henry, a facility of a species also lately on the endangered list, gets a paid session and additional publicity. Keep in mind that on this project people have made music and money, though no one has made a ‘record’ per se. In this day and age, two out of three ain’t bad. It’s also worth noting that Sony emphasises the ‘royalty-free’ nature of the drum recordings, an indication that neither artist nor producer can expect any back-end compensation. That’s very much in keeping with what I predicted years ago in this space would become the economic mantra of this industry: up-front monetisation. Waiting around for royalties in the future will produce more cobwebs

than money for most people. And when you think about it, Sony, Ferrone and Ladanyi expect buyers of the loop disc to do little more than Umixit expects of their customers: rearrange the work of professionals to suit their own personal needs. The fact that you have Pro Tools in your living room and the Umixit buyer has an iPod is immaterial. You can rail at the gods for their perﬁdy in undermining your pathway to the stars, but Will Shakespeare’s been there, done that and done it better. You’re best off looking at the situations technology presents us with less in terms of how we can adapt them to what we do now and more to how we can adapt what we do to the new situations. In the end, it still beats working for a living. ■

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headroom LINE ARRAYS AWRY Just read the article (Ribbons, line arrays and hiﬁ) in Resolution March 2005 (V4.2). I’m sorry to say it contains quite a large mistake.

A line source only provides 3dB drop per distance doubling — as long as the length of the line is large compared to both distance and wavelength. Beyond that distance the line source behaves like a point source again and shows a 6dB drop. The critical distance for entering the far field of a line source is: r > (L^2)/(4.lambda), with L = length of line source. So for instance, at 1000Hz and a line array of 3m, the far field starts at 6.5m. Line sources like traffic ways are much longer, so the 3dB drop is valid to reasonable large distances there. In the far field of the traffic way it also behaves like a point source again and because the car noises are not correlated, the Q of the traffic way is 2 (half of a sphere). The real advantage of a loudspeaker line source is that its Q can be much higher. At 0 degrees the phases of all sources are equal and thus add with 6dB per doubling of the amount of drivers. At 90 degrees the phases are not equal (depending on the frequency of course) and therefore the average gain is only 3dB per doubling. By processing the signals to the drivers, frequency dependent lobeing effects can be avoided and by using a lot of units a loudspeaker with very high Q can be built. Eelco Grimm, Grimm Audio, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Greetings Mr Grimm. You are right in your reading of our article and your comment. Please forgive our omission, but it was due to space. My original ‘charge’ was to write an article that would provide a broad overview of ribbon technology and its application to line arrays. I was given a limitation of around 2000 words and the draft alone was 2071 words. Igor and I both wanted to add other comments (and clarifications) to the article, but space was not available. One specific concern was that we did not want to delete graphics to save space. I was very insistent about the graphics being included because of the difficulty understanding such a popular but complex subject. As is, the font size used was quite small just to allow everything to fit on two pages. That being said, it was a privilege to offer this information and I am sure you understand that there was no attempt to mislead any reader. It was simply an issue of too little space for a very complex subject. As you might expect from such astute readers as those following Resolution magazine, I have received a couple of such comments and even two phone calls. All have been appreciated. Likewise, thank you for taking your time to write. R Bob Adams, SLS Loudspeakers, US P.S. After you have an opportunity to listen to our ribbon line arrays, please do write again and tell me what you think of the SLS sound. It is our opinion throughout the company that we have an outstanding product of which we are very proud. I would value your opinion.

getting from readers. Must say that the leader in question has created a lot of response. I seem to have struck a chord with the notion of busy audio professionals making a point of getting out more and meeting up and sharing views. I do believe the temptation to become desk-bound is a strong one though and the opportunities to network are now reduced. Still, there’s always Barcelona. ZS

CRAFT APPEAL Just thought I’d drop you a quick email to say how much I enjoyed reading the latest edition of Resolution (V4.3). The leader was spot on and I very much enjoyed the Craft articles featuring Simon Heyworth and Mike Felton. Well done. Craig Lovell, International Management Services - Asia Paciﬁc, UK You’re welcome Craig. We aim to please and we know we’re hitting the spot with all the feedback we’ve been

resolution

Congratulations to Audio Technica UK’s Denise Turner who became Mrs Burnage in May. After tying the knot, Denise and Andrew celebrated with a medieval banquet in a 14th Century hall. And who said the age of chivalry was dead?

May/June 2005

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