John Hays

Whatever happened to the EQ on Sophie Raworth’s voice live on “Consumer Watchdog” (21 December 2016)? The strangulated voice bore no comparison to the prerecorded material.

Mike Jordan

The “special” “Watchdog” show from Somerset House (December 2016): what on earth was happening on the sound? The presenters’ radio mics all went low level/distorted at various times both in the inside and outside (lots of pre-record?)

I assume this was put on specially for “Watchdog” since there were only ever a few skaters outside so, if it was a public day, the organisers must have been desperate for punters.

I wonder who was trying to do sound? At least Phil Piotrowski (ex-“TFI Friday” for ages when I was working on it at good old Riverside studios – sob sob) was there to get framing etc right.

John Howell

Intrigued, I watched the programme on iPlayer and had a different experience. I didn’t hear distortion in the usual sense of overload destroying the detail of the audio, what I did hear was the complete lack of bass frequencies on the radio mics giving them the appearance of being low level. (the levels were correct on a PPM).  Combine this with the age old problem of  "under-the-chin" sound where sound from the chest conflicts with sound from the mouth and you get the dreadful result we heard.

I wonder if monitoring is the problem, if the speakers (or headphones?) were known to be bass light the level of such frequencies could not be judged. If the monitoring was bass heavy the sound guy could possibly remove too much, either way the sound would end up "thin and nasty" to give it a technical name.

Mike is right, however: it was a dreadful result that was stressful to listen to.

Dave Plowman

I’ve wondered about that too. At one time BBC-designed speakers of a vaguely similar age – like say the LS 5/8 and LS 5/9 and LS 3/5A – had a reasonably similar response – within the possibilities of their vastly different size. Other makers might go for ‘bright’ or bass heavy voicing.  

So I’m wondering what is in use these days? I’m sure proper control rooms use decent speakers – but so much is edited etc in something more akin to an office, possibly on PC speakers designed to sound impressive on pop music.

It also seems to me that there is a fashion today for balancing things ‘top light’. And before anyone starts mentioning degrading hearing, I’m comparing recordings made now against older ones via the same reproducing chain. That’s OK with music being to an extent artistic choice, but with broadcast speech it’s not. There is only one way – the correct one.