John Nottage
First night of the Snape Proms 01 August 2017 – Clare Teal. Great concert.
However, the Snape seats don’t get any more comfortable – you do need to take a lot of cushions. I’ve always been puzzled over those wood & wicker seats. Surely to make the acoustics right you want an empty seat to be acoustically similar to a full seat. That way, the overall sound should be about the same, however full or empty the hall is. Perhaps that’s why the PA last night took a few numbers to get the balance right: the rehearsals would have sounded quite different in an empty hall compared to the completely full hall of the show.
Keith Wicks
The seats in Sydney Opera House were designed so that, acoustically, they were supposed to resemble a seated person. But they had problems when fashions changed with the seasons as the acoustic qualities of a micro-skirted person are completely different to those of someone wearing a long winter dress. Has anyone here performed acoustic tests on bare thighs?
Peter Cook
A bit like the Royal Festival Hall, built in 1951 just 22 years before the Sydney Opera House. Probably more bare flesh in Sydney? RFH also employs Helmholtz resonators, which was also pioneering.
Dave Plowman
I seem to recall being told the seats at the old TVT were designed like that too. Then they threw some quilting over the unused Gods.
Nick Ware
The Snape Maltings was built for a fairly specific purpose, and its timber construction gives it a quality highly regarded by serious classical record companies and audiences alike. I’ve done lots of recording there, and a CBC doco about Curlew River. Acoustically I couldn’t fault it, with or without bums on seats. Not sure what Benjamin Britten would have made of the idea of jazz in there though, but given that it is, I would have thought only the lightest of PA would be needed, though Clare Teal does get pretty quiet at times.
The RFH is universally recognised as one of the ultimate acoustic disasters. Its acoustic designer Hope Bagenal was also responsible for ruining Guildford Cathedral’s acoustics around 1960 with large quantities of plaster containing Asbestos sprayed into the roof vaultings. Over the last few months that’s all been removed, and now scaffolding free, we have an acoustic to rival the likes of Canterbury, York, or King’s. I did the first recordings last week in the ‘new’ acoustic, and love it.
Peter Cook
I have worked both at the Maltings and RFH, but wearing cans either STC black issue or, later, noise cancelling headphones does tend to inhibit one’s appreciation of acoustics! Constant use of headphones has also, I feel sure, contributed to the deafness many of us suffer especially at voice frequency. The likes of Stewart Morris and Ginger Cowgill have a lot to answer for! Pardon?
Nick Ware
It may not be deafness as such. After decades of wearing headphones we become accustomed to hearing everything in a close perspective. For sound recordists, that’s even more pronounced, because we’re used to hearing actors and presenters with our ears effectively stuffed down their shirts (or bras!). When we find ourselves in a more distant situation, and particularly in noisy surroundings such as in a pub or noisy restaurant, our brains are deprived of the presence we’re used to, and the clarity we expect to hear just isn’t there, and even if it is, it’s masked by noise that we’re less used to. The brain learns to hear what it expects to hear, just as it learns at a very early age to see the right way up!
And it’s not just us: almost all TV sound is on personal mics these days, and I’m convinced we’ll pay the price for that too. So, lip reading to the rescue – except that if that’s out of sync, what chance?
Well that’s what I try to convince myself, anyway.
It is a fact though, that there is a generation of earbud users (myself included) who will suffer this more and more in the future.
Peter Cook
Another side effect of listening to talkback for years is the ability to filter most of it out and only hear the bits that are relevant. Unfortunately I’ve found that the same trick doesn’t always work with conversations with my wife!
Mike Giles
I definitely filter the voice I hear most often ~ sometimes to my eventual regret! When I come to think of it, the regret is not so often ‘eventual’ as instant!
Peter Cook
My wife has the ability to filter despite never having worked in TV or having had to listen to headphones. I suppose taking notes as PA to an MD requires similar skills!! But then, without wishing to seem sexist, it may be a gender thing. I find that if I am at a meeting where I am outnumbered by the fairer sex, I find it difficult to get a word in edgewise and even if I succeed it is as if I didn’t speak.
Nick Ware
I’ve always been aware that the vast majority of people don’t care a jot about sound until there’s something wrong with it, but how depressing it is that as far as TV drama sound is concerned, it doesn’t seem to matter how shite it is as long as you can understand enough of the words to make some sense of it.
Dave Plowman
Yup. And not just drama. The average news or current affairs prog etc seem to have personal mics well past their use by date. Or whatever.
As I keep on saying, the same presenter on radio sounds just fine. Isn’t it about time they did on TV too?
John Howell
…and nowadays they don’t care how out of sync it is.
I wonder how bad it will get before the artists complain? Surely they must notice when the subtleties that they have put into their delivery cannot be heard. They are often concerned about where their keylight is, or which is their close-up camera, I can only remember one or two occasions being asked where the mic was!
Albert Barber
I’m not a sound person although I have worked and learnt from many excellent engineers on this tech ops site. Thank you by the way.
One thing that I wonder about is the listening ability of some of the newer engineers.
On an interview recently I noticed the over-use of limiters ( I think that’s what I mean ) in that the speaker’s voice is interspersed with high levels of the general atmosphere. A Newsroom on BBC News Channel interview with an economist in the NBH newsroom landing area at 13:30 today (14th August 2017) resulted in these high rushes of sound in between speech. I realise the background atmos is high but with a radio mike I can see no excuses except that it may be a lone cameraman with a mike on his camera picking up everything.
The person I was with the other day didn’t notice and maybe many won’t either, or care. Sound is often the poor relation to producers and it would be good if someone could make this poor situation better.
Nowadays no one seems to care or indeed listen.
Chris Woolf
You are describing automatic levelling – AGC or one of the modern variants.
This alters the entire signal gain, as opposed to compressor/limiters which only do so above a particular threshold. However, badly implemented, both will produce offensive noise "pumping".
But of course it has nothing to do with "listening" – there aren’t any "engineers", just massively over-burdened "operatives" or "journos" scurrying around grabbing whatever they can with the most basic settings. In most cases there isn’t any form of level control physically present to twiddle, let alone metering.
Barry Bonner
Are you implying that News Dept. don’t care about standards…surely not! For an example of all the below and more watch the London News at six o’clock, they haven’t even sussed that if you switch from the Six O’clock news in HD to London News (Freeview 1) you miss the beginning of their first sentence due to the 3 second or so time delay between HD and SD ‘cos for some reason they don’t have any music at the start of their six o’clock bulletin. On the camera front they don’t seem to like headroom.
Chris Woolf
Actually I think a few individuals probably do care, but lack the training and the technical framework to do anything about it.
The general public has become habituated to abysmal standards. The intelligibility of the digital phone systems in use today would have been failed by most analogue line engineers, and while the resolution of pictures increases geometrically the artistic use of it reduces at the same rate. Only when the general public cannot even understand, let alone enjoy, the latest mumbled drama, and switches off the seasickness-inducing handheld camera and drone doco, does anyone try to improve things – and of course they then realise they don’t know how to.
We don’t now teach or explain skills or standards on a free-at-the-point-of-use basis. Where training costs the individual more than they earn per day there’s little incentive to gain an education. And there is no technical department to counter to inevitable disaster of an accountant’s dream of totally automating every process and removing "the workforce".
Peter Neill
For information, this is the "cameraman" Albert refers to. (That’s me in the monitor taking the photo.)
(Click on the picture below to see larger version:
use your Browser’s BACK button to return to this page)
I’m currently working at BBC Cambridge and last Thursday we did a prerecorded "down the line" interview with a guest sitting in front of this camera. The incoming sound was very high level and distorted. There is a "meeter and greeter" at BH who escorts the guest to the chair and mics them up etc. There is a "set level" button which takes a sample of the voice level and adjusts the gain accordingly. The meeter kept pressing the button but it had no effect. He called the engineering team who, beyond telling him to press that button, were of no help.
On Friday I rang BH and finally after being passed from person to person found someone prepared to look into it. On investigation it appeared that this bit of circuit had gone faulty and, indeed, was behaving as an AGC circuit. As of Friday afternoon they still weren’t sure how to fix it. They said they would notify me when it was sorted but no word yet.
I’m not holding my breath.
Albert Barber
Sorry to award any criticism, but it must be very frustrating having to work in a way that says cost stands above art.
Thank you.
John Cox
In the 1950s we had to make sure that we did not modulate over six and a half on the PPM. One very enthusiastic sound mixer at Wimbledon on a preamble to the afternoon events managed to put Rowridge off the air by his excessive zeal. In those days only a few transmitters had sound limiters at the input. This meant HANDS on the faders at all times. Needless to say P and I D hastily built a limiter for Rowridge on the Isle of Wight. Habits die hard, I still keep my hands on the faders while doing shows here in Devon.
Dave Mundy
There was a well-known SS at TVC called Buster Cole who told me to keep ‘hand on knob at all times’. Rotary faders were on the gram decks and tape machines so I assumed that’s what he was talking about. However… I may be wrong!
[[[[ see Buster Cole in “More Personalities – The Crew – 4” ]]]]
Dave Plowman
On a live prog, can’t see any reason not to have a hard limiter on your own mixer. Better to hear what it might be doing than leave it to somewhere down the chain?
Ian Hillson
And on the other hand, in the early days of BBC local radio certain ones used to make sure they peaked over six and a half to cover the local area! I remember a sign stuck to the Radio Leeds desk when they were based in the Merrion Centre around 1970.
Ian Hillson
"On the camera front they don’t seem to like headroom"
I’ve moaned about this to them before, after a while it goes right for a few weeks then someone reverts to bad habits. Methinks it’s because the someone sets it up on a perfectly underscanned monitor and then goes away and juggles plates while playing the cymbals with their knees until the red light goes off.
They forget that, even modern, home tellies are still often overscanned. Bring back the safe area generator.
Amuses me too that now the Beeb has stopped (?) quarter screening credits so as to be unreadable (ITV still does) they push them to the left during unnecessary presentation ramblings over closing music meaning that the beginning of each line is often clipped off if outside 4:3.
And they often ramble over vocals which was frowned upon in "the good old days" – in fact the pres style guide said it was verboten – I mugged up when I went for my continuity announcers attachment board (yes, really) – but didn’t get it.
Dave Plowman
It does make you wonder why so many large screen tellies are still overscanned?
Understandable with CRTs where the geometry could be difficult to get right – but with a flat screen? My Panasonic luckily gives you the choice of correct or overscan.
Ian Hillson
And small ones too…. I was an engineer and don’t know why, but maybe I’m just hoping to miss out this stage of technology as the next swiftly arrives.
A sound man talking about pictures, and an ex-vision man talking about sound, whatever next?
Continuing that theme, all last week the unmanned (?) London news inserts into GMB on ITV had a low level buzz on sound. They’ve fixed it now, but it took an age to do it – presumably "automatic levelling" doesn’t differentiate between buzz and voice. ‘Twas a female presenter, they’re a few dB quieter than men. There I go again, sound…
