Resolution V6.5 July/August 2007 by Resolution

AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

JUlY/aUGUsT 2007 V6.5

Tchad Blake and his unorthodox methods Logic live and in the box Creating rooms for voice recording Investing in a D-Cinema future Meet your maker: Alex Cooper — Midas Ten reasons why your live room sounds rubbish REVIEWS: Focusrite Liquid Mix V2 • Mackie Control Universal Pro CAD Trion 6000 + 8000 Brauner Phanthera • Apple Soundtrack Pro 2

July/august 2007 V6.5 IssN 1477-4216 AUDIO FOR POST, BROADCAST, RECORDING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION

News & Analysis 4

Leader

News

Sales, contracts, appointments and biz bites.

16 65

Products

New introductions and announcements.

Headroom

We’re going green; minor ailment bands.

Craft 40

Tchad Blake

Happy to have renounced analogue organics in favour of a modern-day Icon, he explains how he persuaded Peter Gabriel to ﬁ nish Up.

Broadcast

Eurovision Song Contest — we get to grips with ﬂ oating over ﬁ xed over nul points.

In through the out DAW

It’s a tall order but it can be done — a laptop running Logic at the heart of your live sound and recording.

An album without EQ

How one man’s decision to do a whole project without EQ has led him to a new way of working.

Meet your maker

Alex Cooper — Midas’ director of console development on things that matter and things that matter less.

Rooms for voice recording — our ﬁ ndings and some simple solutions.

Sweet spot

Ten

Reasons why your live room sounds rubbish.

Business 14

Investing in a D-Cinema future

It’s an un-reel experience but wide-screen ﬁ lms are ﬁ nally following music by going digital.

Technology 48

A crash course in all you need to know and understand about cables, their anatomy and their manufacture.

How a record producer set off a culture war that start sinking the downstream revenue model for everyone.

Understanding cables

Your business

Slaying Dragons

Watkinson argues that concern for the environment is just another form of ethics.

Reviews 22

Focusrite Liquid Mix V2

CAD Trion 6000 + 8000

Brauner Phanthera

Fostex FR-2 LE

Apple Soundtrack Pro 2

Roll Music RMS755

Mackie Control Universal Pro

Audient Centro

edITORIal editorial director: Zenon schoepe Tel: +44 1444 410675 email: zen@resolutionmag.com editorial office: PO Box 531, haywards heath Rh16 4Wd, Uk contributors: Rob James, George shilling, Jon Thornton, keith spencer-allen, Neil hillman, Nigel Jopson, andy day, Philip Newell, Bob katz, 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 467579 email: dean@resolutionmag.com

news appointments a M s N e V e h a s a p p o i n t e d F r a n k M a s s a m a s v i c e president of business development. With nearly a decade of experience with the company, Massam originally joined AMS in 1990 as marketing director, and was responsible for merging the international sales, marketing and business development functions of AMS and Neve after the companies were acquired by Siemens AG. In 1993, he was appointed president of AMS Neve in the US, where he led the restructuring of the company. He left the company in 1999 to work as business development director for Incyte Genomics and served most recently as director of strategy and new business development at Agilent Technologies.

R I e d e l c O M M U N I c aT I O N s celebrated the opening of its Chinese Office in Beijing with more than 50 selected guests and speeches by MD Thomas Riedel, Dr Volker Stanzel, German Ambassador in China, and Alexis Iliadis former technical director for Telecommunications at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. The offi ce is located in the Hui Bin Offi ce Building near the new national Olympic Stadium. Riedel introduced Tai-Kwan Chan as the new general manager for the offi ce. s I B e l I U s FOUNdeRs and m u s i c i a n s B e n a n d J o n a t h a n Finn have been awarded OBEs in the UK by the Queen for services to software technology. The twin brothers founded Sibelius Software in 1993 and have established the company as the market leader in music notation software. NeTIa has extended its dealer n e t w o r k t o i n c l u d e G e r m a n y ’s Sendewelt and Turkey’s Avitek Audio & Video Systems.

©2007 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

Eden Studios auction

leader

The concept of choice is fundamental to our notion of freedom. In the great soviet days you had the choice of whether you could be bothered to queue for bread but not in the type of bread you got at the end. however, we’re not terribly good at making choices — to the left or the right away from the charging beast was perhaps what we were designed for; place two sweets in front of a child and you’ll get a result, offer three and you’ll have to wait. This perpetuates with age and is frequently made into a source of pleasure — the obsession with shopping as a national pastime has less to do with increasing levels of disposable income and more to do with exercising the choice glands at length without feeling obliged to close the deal with cash. Yet still the presentation of choice remains a fundamental of a free society, of putting the real decision in the hands of ordinary folk who can make the right choice for themselves — what burger, which beverage, which repayment and refinancing package, and even which hospital and which school. It’s the stuff of everyday lives and it cultivates a feeling that we’re in control, choosing wisely and making a difference. It falls down on the realisation that we are only able to choose from what we are offered and we are not encouraged to ask for what we really want or need. We’re back to the three sweets scenario when actually what you really fancy is an apple. What puzzles me about so much production technology is that unless the operator and the other parties involved are incredibly well disciplined it can so quickly degenerate into an orgy of choice. some would call that creativity; many more would call it distraction and faffing around. One of the keys of productivity is to remember at all times what the goal and destination is. If you keep your head up and listening, rather than down and in the daW screen with the back seat drivers looking over your shoulder, then you have a chance in hell. Otherwise it’ll be like coming home each night exhausted from that shopping trip having bought absolutely nothing but having tried absolutely everything. Zenon schoepe

DPA award for export merit

(l-r) His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, DPA CEO Lars Friis Ostergaard and director of business development Morten Stove. DPA Microphones received the King chosen DPA Microphones this year,’ said Frederik IX’s award at a ceremony in Stove. ‘The company is still quite young, Fredensborg Castle in June in recognition and the growth in our markets in this short of the manufacturer’s contribution to Danish time is fantastic. We are continuing this export. The award was presented by His growth, and by building an additional Royal Highness the Prince Consort to DPA manufacturing plant we are ready to CEO Lars Friis Ostergaard and director of follow up on our success. This award is business development Morten Stove. deﬁ nitely going to help us increase our ‘I am very proud that the committee has export share.’

s2 Publications ltd or the editor can be held responsible for its contents. The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the Publishers. Printed by The Grange Press, Butts Rd, southwick, West sussex, BN42 4eJ.

s2 Publications ltd. Registered in england and Wales. company number: 4375084. Registered office: equity house, 128-136 high street, edgware, Middlesex ha8 7TT.

resolution

Second-hand equipment specialist MJQ is handling the sale of equipment from Eden Studios, Chiswick, London W4 on July 12-14. Sales times each day are 10.00 - 5.00pm and more than 500 lots of pro audio equipment and studio contents will be sold including Pro Tools +G4, Pro Tools +G5, SSL E and G consoles, outboard FX, tube mics, compressors, reverb, six 24-tracks, ½-inch mastering machines, amps, pianos, acoustic panels, doors, and much more. F u l l d e t a i l s a n d c a t a l o g u e a t www.mjq.co.uk and from Malcolm Jackson MJQ Sales: 01923 285 266/0771 281 7533 sales@mjq.co.uk

APRS 60th Anniversary lunch The APRS will host a 60th Anniversary Lunch at The Roof Gardens, Kensington, London W8 on 27 September. The Association’s president, Sir George Martin, will be heading a variety of speakers at the event as the guest of honour, and the Association also promises several surprises during the course of the afternoon. Tickets are available from the APRS and include a three-course lunch and wine. APRS 01803 868600 info@aprs.co.uk

PLASA 2007 Awards for Innovation

PLASA has relaunched its Awards for Innovation, which will be joined this year by the new Gottelier Award, named in memory of designer Tony Gottelier who died in 2006. Designed to reflect excellence in new products in lighting, sound, engineering, AV and staging, the PLASA Awards for Innovation were established in 1992 and have been presented annually during the PLASA Show, which this year runs from 9-12 September at Earls Court, London. The Gottelier Award will recognise the signiﬁ cant contribution made to product innovation by an individual or team over the years.

(l-r)Adele Fletcher, Ben Carr, Peter and Nick Baldock. Peter Baldock received a BAFTA award for his role as sound effects editor and supervising sound editor on 9/11: The Twin Towers, the BBC documentary dealing with the terrorist attacks in 2001.

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July/August 2007

news Otari closes Meerbusch

OTARI Europe GmbH has announced that its operation in Meerbusch, Germany will be closed at the end of July due to organisational changes. The company said that this will not impact on the supply of products, spare parts and service to Otari’s European customers in the pro audio and duplication industries as they will be provided continuously by the mother company Otari Inc. Tokyo, Japan. sales@otari.co.jp

ca Va sounds on ada-8XRs

Vienna AES stats The organisers of the AES Convention in Vienna in May claim that it attracted 5,450 attendees to the exhibition and 800 full programme participants. S o m e 1 5 % o f p a r t i c i p a n t s c a m e from Eastern European countries and approximately 30% of the full-programme visitors were students. Next year’s AES Pro Audio Expo and Convention will be held at the RAI in Amsterdam and run 17-20 May. Daniel Levitin, best-selling author; head of the McGill University Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise; musician; producer; and former stand-up comedian, will deliver the keynote address at the US AES Convention in the Jacob Javits Center, New York 5-8 October.

VIOleT desIGN has appointed For Tune as its distributor i n G e r m a n y a n d n e i g h b o u r i n g counties. For Tune MD Stefan Mayer. haRMaN PRO UK has appointed Darren Clark to the position of sales manager — Install Sound and AV. He will be taking on much of Gareth Collyer’s former role as Gareth moves up to look after the company’s Engineered Sound sales. He joins from AV equipment distributor Maverick Presentation Products, where he was a business manager.

DAVID joins Silex Media group Silex Media and DAVID are uniting under a single roof to build a stronger market position as Silex Media investor SGI Japan Limited has acquired all the shares in DAVID GmbH. Silex Media CEO Stephan Schindler in close cooperation with DAVID CEO Gerhard Möller, has begun to architect the two operations which will continue to operate in parallel. ‘This new collaboration has come at exactly the right time,’ said Schindler. ‘DAVID’s solutions and IT expertise and its many years of experience in radio are the perfect complement to our own offering of products and services. We will be able to deliver a much broader, highly advanced product range through our new partner, while Silex Media focuses on its competency as a systems integrator.’ The company will uphold ongoing partnerships with third-party suppliers and aims to drive growth in this area. The two companies have worked together on a number of projects in the past including an integrated radio and television production environment for Saarländischer Rundfunk and an archive management system for Südwestrundfunk in Germany.

appointments

Glasgow-based ca Va sound studios has invested in five Prism sound ada8XR multichannel convertors, which are being used in conjunction with its new digidesign Pro Tools hd3 system. ‘The ada-8XRs are being used across both of our studios, but primarily in conjunction with our Neve VR legend console and Pro Tools system,’ said Brian Young, founding director of ca Va sound. ‘They offer exceptionally high quality audio and in our opinion are the best convertors on the market.’ ca Va sound underwent an extensive refurbishment programme in 2005 that involved closing studio One and relocating its VR legend to studio 2. It also moved its broadcast studio, TX4, to ground level and equipped it as a comprehensive voiceover and mastering studio. With IsdN and high-speed Broadband capabilities, the studio now provides clients with the ability to link to others worldwide.

Plasa eVeNTs Ltd has expanded its team recently with the appointment of Diana Bandy as sales manager. She joins director of events Nicky Rowland and operations manager Sophie Matthews at PLASA Events’ ofﬁ ces at Earls Court, London. cOlOGNe-Based Music Store has been appointed key dealer for Audient’s range of recording consoles in Germany by distributor SEA.

New management at RTW After 42 years of business Renate a n d R u d o l f Tw e l k e r h a v e handed over the management of RTW to a younger successor. Andreas Tweitmann has now taken on responsibility for the management of the company and has been instated as CEO. Renate and Rudolf Twelker will retire from the company’s management team but will continue to provide support as consultants until the end of 2008. Tweitmann was previously director of sales and marketing at Sennheiser where he was responsible for Neumann products in Germany. ‘We are very happy to have found Mr Tweitmann as our successor,’ said Renate and Rudolf. ‘He is a man who will both ensure continuity and bring innovative energy to the company. In our talks with him it very quickly became clear that we shared

almost identical ideas about the future orientation o f R T W a n d a b o u t g e n e r a l b u s i n e s s a n d market questions — in addition to his outstanding p r o f e s s i o n a l q u a l i f i c a t i o n s f o r h a n d l i n g our product portfolio. We are thus very confident that Andreas Tweitmann is the ideal person to guide RTW and its employees safely into the future.’ ‘My primary objective is going to be to further consolidate and expand the good reputation of the RTW brand, which stands for quality and innovation,’ said Tweitmann. ‘Among other things this is going to include expansion of and an increased emphasis on sales activities in regions like the USA and Asia, in order to make better use of the asyet untapped potential there. In addition to this we are going to continue to expand our product range.’

(l-r) Thomas Hasenauer, Matthias Reinthaler from Eltner; David Wiggins, Midas and Klark Teknik. MIdas aNd klaRk Teknik have appointed Eltner GesmbH as their Austrian distributor. It already distributes Electro-Voice and Dynacord among other brands. T O B I a s k R O N e N W e T T , who joined Lawo’s Product Management Department in 2004, h a s m o v e d t o t h e c o m p a n y ’s S w i s s subsidiary Lawo International GmbH where he will be handling Lawo mc² series products.

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July/August 2007

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news appointments Real sOUNd Lab has appointed industry veteran Ken DeLoria as its worldwide sales and marketing director for all pro audio markets. DeLoria began his career as an engineer in a recording studio and later joined McCune Sound Service in San Francisco, where he provided the first-ever concert style sound system for a Super Bowl event (Super Bowl XVII), and designed and managed numerous large-scale system installations including the Crystal Cathedral, the Oakland Coliseum, the Oakland Arena, and Pepperdine University. Real Sound Lab has also opened an ofﬁ ce and warehouse in the US. sOlId sTaTe Logic has promoted Quinton Nixon in the US from product specialist to partnership manager.

Julian lennon’s studio refurb

When Unity audio’s kevin Walker received a call for a pair of adam s3a monitors from Julian lennon it led eventually to the building of an entire recording studio for the son of the Beatle. ‘The key to successful studio building is to have the right team of specialists to work with,’ said Walker who contacted Munro acoustics who sent chris Walls along on a fact finding mission. The allocated space was above a garage, a standalone building away from the main house, but with fabulous views of the sea. The room contained some equipment but was a plain rectangle and was in need of acoustic design and treatment, which Munro provided. lennon runs a Mac Pro with audio logic, samplers and plug-ins and a Mac G5 for Pro Tools. all the hardware interfacing, a-d/d-a convertors and master clock is apogee and additional outboard includes a chandler TG2, TG channel Mic preamps, Manley Voxbox, Brauner VM1 and a little labs dI. The console is a Yamaha O2R 96. ‘Unity audio, Munro and Yellow Tech made my dream come true. It’s the studio I’ve always wanted!’ said lennon.

(l-r)Eddie Kim, A-Works; Philippe Pelmelle, Innovason; James Lee, A-Works. a-WORks kORea is the name of the distribution company recently set up to represent Innovason in South Korea. Based in Sungnam City, A-Works will also be distributing Camco ampliﬁ ers and Nexo loudspeakers.

Hufker suspends disbelief in EA600

Recording engineer Barry Hufker, who also serves as associate professor of audio production at Webster University in St Louis, recently purchased two Enhanced Audio M600 mic mounts from Las Vegas Pro Audio in the US. ‘When they told me I had to try an Enhanced Audio M600 mic mount, I suspended the cynicism and scepticism that I might have unleashed had the recommendation come from someone else,’ he said. ‘But all the same, it was going to take some hard evidence to convince me that a mic mount could really make a noticeable difference.’ When the mic mounts arrived, Hufker brought them to his class of upper-division audio majors and they hooked up his Brauner VMA tube condenser to its factory mount and recorded spoken word. The VMA sounded great. Then they swapped out the factory mount for the Enhanced Audio M600. ’We were very rigorous — everything was exactly the same,’ he explained. ‘I heard the difference, but it was still hard to believe. With the Enhanced Audio M600 everything sounded crisper, clearer, more detailed. The bass had better deﬁ nition and the high end was cleaner. To be honest, I was startled. The microphone which, moments before had sounded so wonderful, sounded even better!’

NTV’s OB207 gets Vista 8

GMl has appointed UK distributor Sable Marketing to handle its product sales for the UK and Ireland. GML’s founder and CEO George Massenburg is pictured with Gary Ash of Sable Marketing. RØde MIcROPhONes has added several new staff at its HQ in Sydney, Australia. Damien Wilson is the global marketing and sales director and joins with experience as a creative director for agencies specialising in below the line marketing and brand emersion. Peter Moses is director of education and Scott Emerton is communications manager.

The final of mic manufacturer AKG’s 2007 UK unsigned bands competition, Unsigned Heroes, which was held at London venue KOKO, was won by Camden band The Standards. Hertfordshire’s Flamboyant Bella and Merseyside’s The Kashmirs came close behind. ‘I’m not surprised the Standards are a bit astonished — it’s great going to have beaten the other 800 UK and Irish bands that entered the competition,’ said Amanda Chester who as marketing manager at Harman Pro UK, AKG’s UK distributors, played a key role in organising Unsigned Heroes 2007. ‘We all felt for the Kashmirs and Flamboyant Bella, as they played brilliantly on the night, but they don’t go away empty-handed — they both get AKG endorsement deals too.’

resolution

Japanese broadcasting company the Nippon Television Network Corporation (NTV), has commissioned its new OB207 outside broadcast vehicle, which is equipped with a Studer Vista 8. Studer Japan also provided the acoustic design of the control room and full system integration of audio services on the truck. OB207 is an audioonly vehicle, mainly used for sports and general programme duties, in conjunction with NTV’s HD video truck OB105. • In Turkey, the radio division of the national broadcasting operation TRT has placed an order for eight Studer OnAir 3000s.

July/August 2007

news appointments d I G I G R a M h a s announced two new m e m b e r s t o t h e Digigram US team. Eric Richardson joins as director of strategic m a r k e t i n g w h i l e James Ohana takes on the role of solutions integration manager. R i c h a r d s o n h a s extensive experience in developing audio, TV and music technologies, starting in 1989 as an engineer for New England Digital and including Fostex Research and Development, InfoTech, and Dalet. Ohana is also a Dalet veteran, having begun his career in the Paris ofﬁ ce in 1996.

Digigram has appointed Audiopole as its new distributor in France. PRIsM sOUNd has appointed Real Music Ltd as its Ukrainian distributor. sMall T R e e Communications, a leader in networking and storage solutions, has appointed Jeffrey Bipes as director of marketing and sales. He has previously worked at Apple and Autodesk.

More PMcs for Metropolis

The Metropolis Group in london has expanded its surround mastering capabilities by constructing a 40sqm room fitted with PMc surround monitoring. Free standing BB5 XBd actives serve as the front lcR and MB2 XBd actives as the rears, both of which are in the vertical tower configuration. The equipment list includes a new Maselec MTc6 desk, Maselec multiband compressor, Prism ada8s, ad2s, two da2s, dsd-sadIe’s and a collection of sontec eQs. ‘We have decided to capitalise on our position as the leading surround music and mastering facility and adding this resource to our portfolio can only strengthen our position,’ said technology development manager of the facility crispin Murray.

Sweden’s Europa adds System 5-MCs

aVIOM has appointed Michael McGinn as the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. He has previously worked for Shure, Ecolab, and Eastman Kodak. Uk sYsTeM integration specialist Broadcast Networks has appointed Tony Simpson as general manager. Simpson previously ran his own company, Audionics, which handled productions for television, advertising agencies and the audio industry. daYaNG INTeRNaTIONal president and CEO Karlton Burn has tendered his resignation following nearly three years with the company. His reasons for leaving Dayang have not been disclosed but he will remain with Dayang for a mutually agreed period. ThaT has partnered with Mouser Electronics for its US IC distribution.

Europa Sound Production in Sweden has installed a 32-fader Euphonix System 5-MC to control Pro Tools and Nuendo. Europa Sound moved to a new 8,600sqft facility and completed the installation in April. Europa’s console is built into a 12foot frame with two producer desks where editors can assist and control the playback DAWs. Europa Sound also selected a second MC media application controller for TV and DVD production. ‘We chose Euphonix systems because the company offers a unique solution that enables us to work with multiple DAWs and

applications from various manufacturers,’ said Erik Guldager, Europa Sound’s technical manager. ‘Being able to control them all at the same time is of vital importance in major productions, and only Euphonix can make it happen.’ In China, looking to modernise its five studios in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Shandong Television (SDTV) has purchased one 40-fader System 5-MC for its 6,500sqft studio, three 8-fader System 5MC consoles for other studios, one 40-fader System 5-B on-air mixer for an ENG vehicle, and one on-air Max Air for a 400sqft studio.

resolution

Mediagroup opens US subsidiary The Salzbrenner S t a g e t e c Mediagroup has opened a new s u b s i d i a r y i n Atlanta, Georgia to promote its business in the US. The office is managed by Karl Schöning w h o m o s t recently worked for Klotz Digital and has also worked for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. ‘The Mediagroup is one of the top ten audio companies in Europe as well as in Asia and focuses strongly on customer centricity and service,’ he said. ‘It offers high quality solutions and an extensive product range covering all market sectors specialising in customised solutions designed to meet the end user’s requirements. This is the perfect basis for growth in the US — both in the broadcasting market as well as in the live sound and sound reinforcements sectors. These sectors play a crucial role to our expansion and I am looking forward to continue the Mediagroup’s excellent track record in the USA.’

Soundfield double score in cup final The fi nal of the Soccer Champions’ League in May between Liverpool and Milan at the former Olympic stadium in Athens was broadcast to an estimated 1.2 billion viewers worldwide with a little help from two SoundField DSF-2 digital microphone systems. The multicapsule microphone heads for both systems were rigged in the stadium to provide simultaneous phasecoherent 5.1 and stereo stadium ambience and crowd response for the HD and SD transmissions. A single world transmission feed, authorised by UEFA and its exclusive media partner TEAM Audio AG, was used to provide TV companies around the world with their SD and HD pitch coverage. On the night of the match, the world audio feed was mixed by Robert Edwards of UK broadcast sound specialists Video Sound Services, assisted by Frank Mosch, the technical head of sound at Belgian company Outside Broadcast NV, who supplied the outside broadcast vehicle and Lawo desk used to mix the feed. On the night of the fi nal, Sky, which has made the DSF-2 part of its standard-issue equipment for HD sports broadcasts, had its own DSF-2 mic in the stadium, allowing it to add further stadium ambience into its transmission of the fi nal. As Robert Edwards had also specifi ed a DSF-2 for use in the broadcast of the world audio feed, there were two of the mics in the stadium on the night.

July/August 2007

AT4050:

created by one, used by everyone. Before a product becomes so legendary that it is used by everyone, someone has to create it. When Akino-san, an employee of Audio-Technica for many years, spent hundreds of hours on the creation of the AT4050, he was working to obtain the AT4050’s superb quality of sound reproduction. Not only did he succeed in his ambition, but today, the AT4050 is used all over the world in a wide variety of applications, from recording studios to live sound to broadcast. And when he’s not creating legends, Akino-san loves the serenity of fishing. Audio-Technica’s range of studio microphones start from just £100*. To find out more, email info@audio-technica.co.uk or telephone +44 (0) 113 292 0461. *AT2020 suggested retail price

www.audio-technica.com

news Biz Bites

IN The month marking the 40th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s album, British private equity firm Terra Firma seem to have bested US investment firms and Warner Music in the bidding war for ailing music group EMI, writes Nigel Jopson. EMI’s board has recommended their 265p per share offer, valuing EMI at £2.4bn, although the deal still awaits approval by shareholders. Shares have traded around 275p since, 4% above the offer, suggesting investors expected further bids. Terra Firma is headed by Guy Hands, an old hand at private equity asset stripping — oops, I mean ‘tur n around’ — Guy is a former Nomura Capital dealmaker who made his name in the ’90s acquiring train operators and pub chains. Hands ran his slide rule over EMI after losing the fi ght to buy high-street chemist chain Alliance Boots. How many artists signed to EMI realised their company was ‘in play’, and when did this happen? EMI has consistently struggled to make money, the current chairman Eric Nicoli, a former United Biscuits chief, was slated from the moment he succeeded Sir Colin Southgate in 1999. But the ‘biscuit man’ (as my analyst pals nicknamed him) seemed to have made a good decision when he hired Alain Levy as CEO in 2001. Alain, a graduate of École des Mines and Wharton Business School, and former head of CBS France, had turned the pedestrian Polygram into the number one music company in the world. He lost his job when Seagram, led by Edgar Bronfman Jnr (now head of Warner) purchased the company in 1998 (see Resolution V3.2). Why he never succeeded at EMI is shrouded in mystery — Grande École style wrong for the UK? We’ll never know, but he’s carried the can for failure and was fi red with a £4.6m payoff. Watering-hole whispers in London’s square mile have Guy Hands talking to Warners about selling on EMI’s recorded music division, floating the publishing operation separately. You heard it here fi rst. Meanwhile Universal is consolidating a position as the worldwide music leader by turning its attention to the live sector. Other music groups have rushed to establish artist management subsidiaries, Universal is buying in by

MsM broadens appeal with Icon

RSR adopts Mandozzi

Radio Suisse Romande has replaced all its existing digital on-air consoles in its Lausanne and Geneva sites with Mandozzi Serix mixers. There will be at least 33 Serix consoles with 12 to 32 faders plus 15 satellite mixers with 4 faders each. The consoles will be connected via optical ﬁ bres to a redundant central matrix whose two halves will be installed in two separate rooms for increased safety. RSR produces four 24-hour programmes in French with additional channels for news and children planned for the future.

Msm-studios in Munich has installed a digidesign Icon, which will be used for audio, video and dVd production, and complements msm’s existing high-end peripherals, which include a 5.1 control room with hd Video Projection and Pro Tools hd3. ‘With this investment, we have reacted to the demands of today’s market,’ said founder and Md stefan Bock. ‘Being able to offer a comprehensive service of the highest quality is indispensable nowadays.’

E Labs production on the road Sound engineer Daniel Leon from Studio Igloo in Belgium has bought FAR XM 8.D digital active monitors. Leon is the principal teacher of sound techniques at the Brussels National Institute of Arts and is known for his jazz recordings of Toots Thielmans, Steve Houben, Paul Louka, Chet Baker, Philip Catherine, Jacques Pelser, Charles Loos and many others. He is also the sound engineer of Franco Dragone and the sound designer for all Dragone’s worldwide shows (including the ones in Las Vegas).

Bradley’s SE

E Labs Remote Productions in Madison USA, a subsidiary of recording studio E Labs Multimedia, is on the road in a truck with an SSL AWS 900+ and an XLogic X-Rack system with eight mic amp modules. ‘I realised that there’s going to be great demand for content for mobile communications such as telephones and podcasts,’ said E Labs Multimedia chief engineer Jack LeTourneau. ‘Also, the recording and broadcast industries are going high-deﬁ nition; somebody’s got to capture that high-def content. We wanted to move into the next millennium, so to speak, and designed a truck that I can

take on location to do concert support. The truck can also do ﬁ lm support, video support, basically anything. Wind, rain or snow, we’ll record your show!’ In New York, The Oven Studios, the private recording facility of Alicia Keys, has taken delivery of a 48-channel Duality, which joins an AWS 900. ‘It’s a dual-function desk,’ said engineer Ann Mincieli. ‘I love the fact that you get 48 channels of mic preamps and the classic SSL gates and compressors on every channel. You can also connect a mouse and monitor to it and it serves as an interface with Pro Tools. I especially love the 3rd harmonic distortion knob on every channel.’

resolution

S u g a b a b e s p r o d u c e r B o b B r a d l e y re l i e s on SE mics and Reflexion Filters in his productions of Sugababes, Girls Aloud and Natalie Imbruglia. And when he’s not riding the faders in his Leeds studio he’s busy scoring music for the BBC and Discovery channels. ‘I use SE’s Gemini II for pretty much all my vocals and voice recording now,’ he said. ‘In fact, I have it set up here full time, just ready to roll. The combination of that and the Refl exion Filter has made a lot of my other mics redundant. The Refl exion Filter is a great idea that was well overdue –- it’s a fantastic tool, and even in an expensive vocal booth it will still be a great benefi t.’

July/August 2007

news Biz Bites

Moscow’s VGTRk studios rebuilt

Over 25,000 channels in use.

HV-3R Eight Channel Remote-Control Microphone Preamplifier

acquiring the troubled Sanctuary for £44.5m, plus debt of £59m. Let’s not fool around: Sanctuary’s ‘360 degree’ model of integrating everything from publishing through recording studios, producer and artist management, merchandising and live events was pie-in-the-sky. The synergy argument was never properly demonstrated, Sanctuary failed to control its artist management side, and it was naive to expect everything to be done in-house. But management and merchandising are now seen as key elements in new artist contracts. Sanctuary owns marketleading merchandiser Bravado and m a n a g e m e n t s u b s i d i a r i e s include: Trinifold ( R o b e r t P l a n t and The Who), 2 1 s t a r t i s t s ( E l t o n J o h n , J a m e s B l u n t ) , a n d a d o z e n U S m a n a g e r s of mature acts like ZZ Top and Fleetwood Mac.

HV-3D 8 Eight Channel Microphone Preamplifier

HV-3D 4 Four Channel Microphone Preamplifier

The Walters-storyk design Group has completed the redesign and reconstruction of the VGTRk (all-Russia state TV and Radio Broadcasting company) sound Recording studios in Moscow. Originally built in 1938, the entire national radio music archive — more than 300,000 performances — were recorded there yet it had not been updated since 1968 when studio 5 was brought on line. The redesigned complex is dedicated to music recording, live broadcasting for radio drama production, overdubbing and Foley work, and will now be available to independent producers and engineers throughout europe. all VGTRk Room acoustics were developed with the aid of caTT acoustic computer simulation software. Moveable panels at the walls (manual) and the ceiling (motorised) provide the large Recording Room (60m2) with variable acoustics, making it suitable for a wide range of client recording styles. The studio also features four substantial Foley pits. The spacious (25m2) acoustically dead isobooth connected to studio 3 via a sliding glass door houses six additional Foley pits. The console in the 5.1 surround sound production room is an aMs-Neve libra Post with Pyramix daWs. Monitoring is by Quested Q 212 loudspeakers at the front and a modified version of this loudspeaker for the surround channels.

Alchemea post update Joint venture Sony-BMG is planning t o e x p a n d i n t o o t h e r f o r m s o f entertainment t o r e d u c e exposure to t h e m u s i c i n d u s t r y . German CEO Edgar Berber said the German operation has set up www.comedy.de jointly with Microsoft. Sony-BMG has also concluded an exclusive contract with TV producer Brain pool to convert TV comedy series into DVD formats.

HV-3C Stereo Microphone Preamplifier

M-2B Transformerless Class A Vacuum Tube Stereo Microphone Preamplifier

NSEQ-2 Twin Toplogy Stereo Parametric Equalizer

ORIGIN STT-1 Twin Topology Recording Channel

TLC-2 TWIN COM Twin Topology Stereo Compressor / Limiter

showtime BIRTV, Beijing ............ 22-25 August IBC, Amsterdam .....7-11 September PLASA, London.......9-12 September AES US, New York ........ 5-8 October SATIS, Paris ............... 23-25 October Sounddesign, VDT Symposium, Ludwigsburg ..31 October-2 November SBES, Birmingham 14-15 November Interbee, Tokyo ..... 20-22 November

London-based Alchemea College has updated its postproduction training facility with a Digidesign Icon. The room features a D-Control, x-mon, HD3 Accel, Avid Mojo, sync I-O and 192/96 I-O convertors and is a fully specified emulation of a modern dubbing theatre complete with Genelec 5.1 monitoring and a Stewart cinema screen. Alchemea is using the room to deliver Digidesign’s 310i 3-day Advanced ICON Mixing Techniques course. ‘Due to workload pressures there are times when it is difficult for studio managers to book their own facility for training,’ explained Alchemea director and registrar Mike Sinnott. ‘Even when this is possible the distractions of day-to-day operations can get in the way of the learning process. This is where Alchemea comes in.’

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business

Investing in a d-cinema future an un-reel experience awaits NIGel JOPsON in Guildford, as he discovers wide-screen movies are finally following music by going digital.

heN I lIVed in London, I regarded the town of Guildford as hopelessly provincial. Now I live in the middle of a field, I appreciate this conurbation for its coffee shops and large leisure centre: but I still don’t see it as a big city. Its inhabitants, however, fervently wish it was and have applied unsuccessfully for city status several times, presumably on the basis of their hideous 1960’s all-brick cathedral. The Stranglers formed in Guildford, and it’s a fave location for girl singers to have nightclub brawls — Sugababes and Girls Aloud recently — but the ninth best place to live in Britain (according to Channel 4) is hardly a cutting-edge media centre. So when I went to the Odeon cinema, I was surprised to see huge ‘Spiderman 3 in 4K’ posters everywhere. I mentally chastised a distant marketing department for stretching the terminology of DI workflow to the point of sale ... only to realise, as the wobble free and pin sharp classification notice faded up, that something fairly special and digital was going on. The picture was sharp — cutting-edge sharp — the process of projection made the super35mm footage look surreal. There wasn’t an obvious pixel to be seen and the cinematographic result (for better or worse) had nothing analogue about it, the colours exuded that special digital ‘pop’. The Guildford Odeon is, in fact, the very first venue to commercially screen movies in 4K — a resolution of 4096 x 2160 pixels — four times the resolution of HD TV. New 4K Sony SXRD (Silicon X-tal [Crystal] Reflective Display) digital projection systems have been installed in screens 1, 4 and 5. Sony was able to achieve such a high resolution by shrinking the total pixel area by 10%, from 9µm to 8.5µm, while maintaining the inter-pixel spacing of 0.35µm. 8.8 mega pixels were integrated into an area measuring 1.55 inches diagonally. The 300kg projector boasts a massive 4.2kW bulb, light is bounced off mirrors and through a prism to be split into red, green and blue streams. Each of these goes through the 1.55-inch flat-panel SXRD display before being combined and magnified through a lens as wide as your hand. Designed to meet the DCI specification for digital projection in commercial cinemas, the Sony system can project 2K and 4K content on screens up to 20 metres wide. Industry consortium DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) is finalising the certification process so that studios, distribution companies and hardware manufacturers have a common digital game plan.

Fortunately the glacial evolution of digital cinema — it’s nearly nine years since the first digital movie ‘The Last Broadcast’ was released — has allowed standards authorities to play catch-up with technology, unlike the pathetic format war which took place in high quality digital and surround sound, sadly leaving the consumer confused and retail channels unwilling to commit. DCI, working with the SMPTE committee, has published a system specification for digital cinema that has been agreed by all the major studios. This spec calls for picture encoding using the ISO/IEC 15444-1 JPEG2000 (.jp2) standard and use of the CIE XYZ colour space at 12 bits per component, encoded with a 2.6 gamma applied at projection. Audio tracks use 24-bit .wav files at 48kHz or 96kHz, and the whole caboodle is controlled by an XMLformat Composition Playlist, bundled in an MXFcompliant file at a maximum data rate of 250Mbit/s. Details about encryption, key management, and logging are all discussed in the specification as are the minimum requirements for projectors to be used, including the colour gamut, contrast ratio and brightness of the image. The DCI requirement for digital projectors calls for three levels of playback to be supported: 2K (2048 x 1080) at 24fps, 4K (4096 x 2160) at 24fps, and 2K at 48fps. The standard allows forward, as well as backward, compatibility with 2K and 4K resolutions, intended to reassure cinema owners worrying that buying available 2K equipment will leave themselves vulnerable to a further upgrade. Three companies have licensed DLP (Digital Light Processing) from Texas Instruments: Christie (big in the US), Barco (big in Europe and Asia), and newcomer NEC. The DLP technology, invented in 1987 by Dr Larry Hornbeck, uses microscopically small mirrors. Sony’s SXRD resolution

technology is somewhat similar in concept in that it is reﬂective, but uses liquid crystals on silicon (LCOS) instead of miniature mirrors. The idea sounds simple, but several large companies have dropped out of LCOS development because production turns out to be quite tricky, although the rewards for Sony may be great: the projector technology can also be used to manufacture very large screen, high-def TVs at relatively low cost. The current DCI standards (tagged D-Cinema) were framed in the hope of emulating 35mm film’s longevity, which has evolved over the best part of a century but still retains compatibility. Most digitalsourced features thus far have been shot using 1920 x 1080 HD resolution, although newer cameras like the Arriﬂex D20 and Silicon Imaging SI-2 can capture at 2K resolution. Cameras capable of recording 4K RAW, such as the RED One, are still in development. If the crowds around the RED stand at NAB 2007 were anything to go by, there is plenty of interest. Analogue 35mm film stock currently remains the acquisition medium of choice, with frames being scanned and processed at 2K or 4K. Picture data from the scans is converted to a convenient image file format for whichever editing platform is used. When the final cut is ready, the scanned original files are ‘conformed’ to match an EDL created by the editor, colour corrected, and finally this ‘Digital Intermediate’ is then used to either record the finished movie to film or create the DCDM (Digital Cinema Distribution Master). The digital images and audio are then encrypted and packaged to form a DCP (Digital Cinema Package). This file will contain not only the picture and sound media, but also additional soundtracks for international use. When installed on a cinema’s dedicated server, the exhibitor can dial in July/August 2007

business the correct combination of soundtrack and subtitles for the audience. A dedicated link from the server to a central database allows the distributor to monitor how many times a film has been played, and with what soundtracks. Metadata embedded in the stream allow for automated dimming of lights and drawing of screen curtains. Apart from the obvious advantage of offering cinema-goers a visual treat impossible to replicate in their homes, the digitisation of movies has the potential to save shed-loads of money for film distributors. A single print of a movie costs between US$1200-$3000 and weighs around 30kg, so a worldwide release of a movie with 3000 prints (like Spider Man) has already put a $6m plus dent in the budget. Perhaps not serious money for Spider Man’s producers, but a significant barrier for films with smaller budgets. Currently, the enormous expense it takes just to distribute a film tends to favour the broad, bland offerings that have some appeal to everybody but no deep artistic merit. Every major studio release now has a minimum of 1500 prints, and they’re worked to death at local multiplexes: as Reel #2 of Spider Man starts to unspool in Cinema 1, Reel #1 begins playing in Cinema 2. A feature-length digital movie would fit on a 300Gb drive, reusable and costing less than $100, and could run on all screens of a multiplex. The low price of digital media offers a chance for distributors to go for a simultaneous worldwide release. Currently distributors stagger the release in different markets, shipping the movie prints around the world. In markets subsequent to the initial release, cams (pirated copies from home-video cameras operated inside theatres) are often available before the official release. A quick survey of bit-torrent sites will reveal quite a few cams are actually made by projectionists — they’re immediately identifiable by the direct input, higher quality soundtracks only obtainable within the booth. Digital offers studios and distributors a new way to cut down on this revenue-denting piracy. Camcording or copying a movie as it is being shown in a cinema gets riskier, as codes consisting of very small dots within frames are inserted at least every five minutes, listing not only the copy of the movie being pirated but also where and exactly when it was copied. Satellite and broadband have also been employed to distribute D-Cinema movies. Moonnamathoral — a Malayalam movie from VK Prakash — was the first HD movie to be distributed digitally to theatres via satellite. The system was developed by Mumbai-based DG2L Technologies, who have an end-to-end solution comprising film capture, encryption, management and theatre playback. DG2L and United Film Organisers have already broken the 30,000+ show barrier, with over 350 systems installed throughout India. Eighty theatres in the state of Kerala were equipped with digital transponders to receive the film by satellite when the movie was released last August. Delivering digital content to theatres simultaneously cuts out the cam-pirate’s USP, which is distribution in advance of the real thing. Satellite delivery may not be quite as easy as some press releases would have us believe, however: a full KU-band sat transponder running at 45Mbps will take about 20 hours to deliver enough data for a 2K movie, and that’s assuming no breaks in transmission. Where road infrastructure is good, a more pragmatic approach is probably to deliver on hard drive. Physical media can be protected by encryption, with the key to unlock the data being sent to theatres on the day of release. The advantages for studios and distributors are July/August 2007

clear, but the financial load of upgrading to digital hangs heavily on cinema operators. Theatres have, until recently, been fairly reluctant to absorb the cost of around $75,000 per projector. There’s also the worry of obsolescence — a film projector might cost £25,000 and have a service life of 30 years — despite costing four times as much, the server, media store and digital projector are bound to have shorter economic lifetimes. In the US, cost sharing arrangements have gradually been brokered with film distributors: out of a total of 39,000 theatres, there were about 2,500 digitally equipped venues at the start of 2007. Access Integrated Technologies aims to install 4,000 digital systems by this October. In Britain, the UK Film Council has made £12m available to fund a Digital Screen Network. The goal is to provide digital mastering and distribution of specialist UK programming, theatres will receive a financial contribution towards digital equipment, and in return devote a set percentage of playing time to non-mainstream content. In addition to grants for 209 cinemas, a further 83 have been offered the option of buying-in to the services provided by the Network. These cinemas will be able to benefit from services such as training, installation of equipment and maintenance. In Europe licensing and language complications had thus far stalled attempts to broker deals between distributors and cinemas. But on 25 June, Arts Alliance Media (a digital film financing and services company) announced it had arranged a deal with Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Pictures to effectively share the cost of digital equipment via Virtual Print Fee agreements. This will see over 7,000 (out of a total of 30,000) screens in the EU and UK install DCI-compliant projection equipment over the next three years. Howard Kiedaisch, chief executive of AAM, says: ‘These milestone agreements finally offer European exhibitors a viable commercial model to adapt their screens to digital cinema,’ and goes on to disclose AAM is also negotiating with Buena Vista International, Paramount Pictures International and indie film companies. Julian Levin, Vice President Twentieth Century Fox, comments, ‘Fox remains committed to the transition to a digital cinema platform ... the image quality, content, security and distribution efficiencies, including 3D exhibition, offered by digital projection clearly exceeds 35mm film.’ That archaic ‘novelty’ – 3D – is suddenly all the rage with Hollywood movers and shakers, after Disney discovered 10% of its screens (those with 3D projectors) generated more than 25% of the revenue from Chicken Little. ‘I did not believe that 3-D would be as big of a catalyst as it is now,’ said John Fithian, president of the US National Association of Theatre Owners, at the Hollywood Reporter ShoWest roundtable. ‘3-D is becoming a much bigger value add than I originally thought. Chicken Little and Nightmare Before Christmas blew the socks off all our members. When you can take a product that’s been around for a while and bring it out and make $9m, that’s impressive.’ Andrew Stucker, director of Sony’s digital cinema division, confirms that movies shown in 3D are bringing in 30-50% higher box office revenues, and estimated something like 18 major movies would be released in 3D during 2007-2008. ‘Right now, nobody’s making any money from digital cinema,’ admits Curt Behlmer of Technicolor Digital Cinema. ‘The studios still have to print a lot of film, along with the cost of producing digital versions. But when you put digital side by side with film, everyone agrees it’s the future. Right now, everybody is investing in that future.’ ■ resolution

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s version of asP8024

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equipment introductions and announcements.

dPa surround solution

DPA’s D3 Decca Tree — also available as the S5 Surround Kit — is a fl exible and lightweight mounting solution optimised for use with DPA microphones that can also be used with other mics. ‘Given our capability of manufacturing precisely matched microphones, it makes sense to offer a carefully designed mounting accessory that can accommodate between three and fi ve matched microphones, giving a huge range of possibilities when it comes to surround recording,’ said DPA director of sales Morten Stove. A cable management system integrates all cables inside the mount for a clean look, which is especially desirable in fi xed installations. The D3/S5 also incorporates a measuring tool designed by DPA to calculate the precise angles of the microphones. www.dpamicrophones.com

Waves aPI plugs Modelled on API’s late 1960’s legend, the API 550A EQ provides reciprocal equalisation at 15 points in 5 steps of boost divided into three overlapping ranges. The high and low frequency ranges are individually selectable as either peaking or shelving, and a band-pass fi lter can be inserted independently of all other settings. Featuring four overlapped EQ bands, the 550B has 7 switchable fi lter frequencies spanning up to 5 octaves per band. Its ‘Proportional Q’ automatically widens the fi lter bandwidth at minimal settings and narrows it at higher settings. Based on API’s 1967 classic, the 560 10-band graphic equaliser features precision fi ltering and massive headroom. The 560’s curve shaping potential is unmatched, and since boost and cut characteristics are identical, previous actions can be undone. The API 2500 dynamics processor is a dual-channel design. Using auto-makeup gain, you can adjust Threshold or Ratio while automatically maintaining a constant output level. With both ‘feed back’ and ‘feed forward’ compression types, the 2500 boasts a wide range of musical parameters. The API series is available as a separate bundle. The Waves V-Series is now also available as a separate bundle. www.waves.com

To celebrate its 10th anniversary Audient has released a special version of the ASP8024. Badged as the ASP8024 S, the desk offers metallic charcoal trims, black ash armrest, classic Sifam knobs and blue LED Cut buttons. The console also has a custom modification to the mix bus amps, providing a totally discrete ampliﬁ er stage based around the Jensen 990 op amp design. Audient has also announced the packaging of the Black Series rack to provide A-D conversion for the ASP8024. Featuring Audient’s proprietary Low Jitter PLL circuitry, the Black A-DC convertor option is available in 8-channel or 16-channel versions and provides two AES, SPDIF coaxial and SPDIF optical for each channel. The convertor rack also has space to include the optional Black Time Machine, a module that provides a low jitter master Word clock and distributes Word clock to each A-DC via an optimised bus. www.audient.co.uk

se releases SE has replaced the sE3 and sE3 mics with the new sE4. The mic is a remodelled sE3, designed to sound and perform the same but the chassis has been re-engineered to accept two additional interchangeable capsules -- a hypercardioid and an omni. The new capsules will not ﬁ t on the sE3 model. Single and matched pairs of mic and capsule sets will be available, and the packaging has also been updated with black Aluminium, steel reinforced, ﬂ ightcases. All sE4 packages ship with full suspension shockmounts included.

The GM10 guitar mic has been put together to solve the problem of recording acoustic guitars and fi xes the mic to the instrument so the player can move without compromising mic position. The design incorporates a clamp mechanism that holds the mic in place close to the guitar. The capsule is separated from the preamp along an extension arm which allows the user to position the capsule over any area of the body. The capsule has a built-in shockmount and the capsule is claimed to be the world’s smallest gold sputtered Mylar type. Following on from the Refl exion Filter, the Instrument Refl exion Filter is designed to give a degree of acoustic isolation and rejection of room ambience for such things as drum mic separation, where the standard Refl exion Filter is too large. The Z5600a II and Gemini II have had a packaging face lift and gained a 10dB pad, a bass cut switch, and new solid brushed aluminium PSUs. www.seelectronics.com

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The Vertigo Sound Limiter incorporates four discrete 1979 VCAs for two channels. The Vertigo Sound 1979 is a fully discrete handbuilt VCA that colours the signal the more you compress and ‘make up’ the output. Each channel has one VCA in the audio path and another in the sidechain. In stereo mode both sidechains are active (they are not summed together) and the higher signal peak on either channel results in the compression of both (Stereo Mode). The detector of each channel works in such a way that stereo compression can be achieved without stereo linking. This precision is said to make the VSC-2 a good choice for mastering applications and while it was developed as a bus compressor each channel provides the separate controls that make it a ‘must have’ for processing while recording. Threshold is adjustable from -22 to +22dBu with a ‘Zoom In’ between -6dBu and +6dBu to give more sensitive control and resolution in this commonly used area. Selections of ratios are provided while the attack times are fast enough to use the Limiter as an overload protector. Release times include an auto mode and the 1979 VCAs offer +22dBu of make up. The side chain has a switchable low cut ﬁ lter in it. www.vertigosound.com

sporty and Flashman II M a y a h ’s S p o r t y reporter codec can s e n d a n d re c e i v e audio signals over IP/Ethernet network, i n c l u d i n g s u c h Internet access types as ADSL or SDSL, as well as over Wi-Fi/WLAN or UMTS/3G/3.5G. Still being used in many European countries, traditional interface for broadcast industry ISDN is also available, including the Mayah Flashcast technology for automatic recognition and synchronisation with virtually all ISDN Codecs in the world. Support of PSTN is no problem. Using SIP in addition to SDP/RTP and other advanced IP protocols, Sporty automatically establishes IP audio connection to the remote devices and synchronises to the IP Audio Codecs of other manufacturers providing their SIP/ IP implementation is based on EBU draft recommendations on Audio-over-IP, and their audio coding algorithms are standard-conform. Sporty offers MPEG-4 HE AACv2 for high quality sound at lowest possible bitrates and Enhanced Low Delay (ELD) AAC for lower latency at comparatively low bitrates. Flashman II is billed as the world’s ﬁ rst portable recorder and Codec. Retaining the robust design of its predecessor, the storage medium can be SD-card, the combination of recording a n d s i m u l t a n e o u s transmission is supported via PCMCIA and USB cards/sticks. Transport of the contents is possible over IP/Ethernet or Wi-Fi/WLAN or UMTS/3G networks using one of the most advanced audio coding algorithms. MPEG-4 ELD AAC together with MPEG-4 HE AACv2 will be available for Flashman II along with a number of established coding algorithms used in the broadcasting industry. www.mayah.com

July/August 2007

gear charteroak cans Charteroak has entered into a partnership with MB Quart of Germany who will manufacture headphones for Charteroak. The Charteroak Studio Phone I (SP-1) is an acoustically closed headphone for studio use and music production. It features ﬁ vedimensional ‘Cardamatic’ ear cup suspension ensuring a comfortable, individual ﬁ t regardless of head size. Its design also prevents body noise effects from infiltrating the ear cups. Comfortable hygienic ear pads provide insulation from outside noise without affecting wearer comfort. High-quality drivers have ultra-light sandwich diaphragms and copper-plated aluminium voice coils. www.charteroakacoustics.com

dNs2000 for Pro Tools Pc After announcing the upgrade that made the DNS2000 Dialogue N o i s e S u p p r e s s o r compatible with Pro Tools on Intel-based M a c s , C E D A R h a s announced that the D N S 2 0 0 0 i s n o w available for Pro Tools on the PC. All DNS2000s are now shipped with software compatible with all PC (Windows XP) and Mac platforms. The new software also integrates with all Digidesign’s control surfaces. www.cedaraudio.com

Blue sky eXO B l u e S k y ’ s E X O i s d e s c r i b e d a s a ‘complete, full-range s t u d i o m o n i t o r i n g solution’ that consists of an 8-inch powered subwoofer (which also contains the ampliﬁ ers and bass management circuitry for the system), Left and Right 2way satellite speakers with 1-inch soft-dome tweeters, and a desktop remote ‘hub’. The hub allows you to plug in and monitor an assortment of peripherals via the XLR/ TRS, phono and 3.5mm jack inputs. The user can control the gain of the system and dial in the subwoofer level without needing to crawl around under a desk. The hub also incorporates a headphone jack. www.abluesky.com

RME’s DMC-842 is claimed to be the fi rst multichannel interface for digital microphones. Price wise it is comparable with conventional preamp/convertor units such as RME’s Micstasy. In addition to its role as an interface, the DMC-842 also acts as a power supply and control device for digital microphones supporting the AES 42 standard. Supporters of the Mode 1 and Mode 2 operating systems specifi ed in AES 42 include Neumann and Schoeps. Mode 1 permits an asynchronous operating system in which the microphone is supplied with Digital Phantom Power (DPP), but no control data can be transmitted upstream. Working with several Mode 1 microphones requires the use of sample rate convertors, which have already been implemented in the DMC-842. Mode 2 allows microphones to be synchronized and control data for adjusting gain, polar patterns, hi-pass fi lter and compression settings to be sent. Further functions are already specifi ed in the AES 42 standard and their availability depends on the individual microphone. The ability to switch the Digital Phantom Power on or off on individual channels means that the DMC-842 can handle ‘normal’ AES-EBU signals at the same time. The built-in SRCs means these can also be asynchronous. To adjust the various microphone parameters, RME has produced a free Windows-based application that communicates with the DMC-842 via MIDI. As with Micstasy, the DMC-842 also supports the transfer of MIDI data over MADI as well as over AES-EBU signals. All the main microphone parameters are also directly accessible from the unit itself. www.rme-audio.com

solution-d adds capsules T h r e e a d d i t i o n a l Neumann capsules are now available for the digital KM D miniature microphone system. KK 131 is a freeﬁ eld equalised omni, KK 143 is a wide-angle cardioid and KK 145 is a cardioid with high-pass ﬁ lter. There are now six different capsules available for the system. www.neumann.com

July/August 2007

www.manu-katche.com, photo: © Marc Rouvé

RMe digital microphone interface

A classy combination

SCHOEPS Mikrofone Karlsruhe, Germany +49 721 943 200 www.schoeps.de

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gear Tube small condenser

digirator handheld signal generator

Mojave Audio, a company founded by David Royer, has introduced the company’s second microphone -— the MA100 small diaphragm tube condenser. Featuring a design that encompasses interchangeable capsules, a military grade JAN 5840 valve, and Jensen transformer balanced output, the MA-100 is said to be ideal for drums, guitar amps, and strings. It includes cardioid and omni capsules and uses a transformer balanced output of 450ohms. It ships with Projekt1 18/02/07 12:55 Side 1 a rugged carrying case, power supply, mic clip, and cable. www.mojaveaudio.com

sound engineering

NTI’s Digirator DR2 digital audio generator produces all common audio test signals with sampling frequencies up to 192kHz and resolution up to 24-bit. Digirator features a sync-input allowing the instrument to be synchronised t o v i d e o a n d a u d i o s i g n a l s . A comprehensive set of surround signals in the formats Dolby D, D+E, Pro-Logic II, DTS and DTSHR equips the DR2 for coping with multichannel audio applications. Additional functions include transparency and signal latency measurements. DR2 provides a suite of audio test signals at its AES3, SPDIF, Toslink and ADAT outputs. The WAVE-ﬁ le playback transfers customised test signals from PC to the DR2. www.nti-audio.com

auralex smartpaks Auralex has introduced Studiofoam SmartPaks, which are available in several combinations including 2-inch and 4-inch packages consisting of Studiofoam Wedges or Pyramids as well as a pack of LENRD (Low-End Node Reduction Device) Bass Traps.

The 2-inch Studiofoam SmartPak totals 48 square feet with 12 wedge or pyramid 2ft x 2ft panels per pack. The 4inch Studiofoam SmartPak totals 24 square feet with six 2ft x 2ft panels packaged together, and the LENRD SmartPak includes four bass traps. All SmartPak’s are available in charcoal, purple and burgundy. Alternate colours and alternate sizes, such as 1-inch and 3-inch products, are available via special order in standard packaging. The Performance Series of Roominator Kits are also available using SmartPak technology, including the Project 2, the Pro Plus and the Deluxe Plus Kits. Auralex 4-inch Studiofoam Wedges and 4-inch Studiofoam Pyramids are recommended for medium to large areas like concert halls, gymnasiums and churches —- rooms with pronounced low frequency problems or where maximum acoustic absorption is required. The 4-inch acoustic Studiofoam Wedges provide three times the lowend control of 2-inch and claims to be able to tame even the worst sonic anomalies. www.auralex.com

RM8 TUBE MODULES

Tc digital konnekt x32

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TC Electronic’s Digital Konnekt x32 is an all-in-one digital patchbay, format convertor and FireWire audio interface for integrating digital outboard effects units and keyboards with DAW-based studios. As a standalone format convertor and patchbay, Digital Konnekt x32 includes 8 channels of AES-EBU, 8 channels of SPDIF and TOS, 8 channels of ADAT (up to 96kHz SMux) and Word clock I-O. Any input format can be converted into either of the other formats and aligned to any sample rate ranging from 44.1 to 192kHz. It allows sample rate conversion on up to four separate stereo inputs at once. x32 functions as a computer interface with two FireWire connections streaming 16 channels of audio to and from the computer. The audio interface has balanced stereo analogue and headphones outputs for monitoring and is compatible with other TC Electronic audio interfaces. Accessed like a standard VST/AU plug-in from within a DAW, the included Integrator plug-in enables hardware processor effects to be used as an insert or an effect send on any track or on the master output of the host application. Integrator also controls routing, levels and latency compensation of external effects processing equipment attached to Digital Konnekt x32, allowing seamless integration of hardware effects processors. www.tcelectronic.com

July/August 2007

gear dsd enabler gets multichannel update S o n i c S t u d i o â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s n e w release of its audio format c o n v e r t o r, n e x S t a g e AFC24, is a transcoding package for Windows PCs providing adjustable SRC and bidirectional PCM to DSD and DSD to PCM interchange. This new version offers conversion of 24 channels of source ďŹ les. LPCM support includes WAV, AIFF, AIFF-C and BWF ďŹ le formats with PCM sample rate conversion from 44.1kHz up to 2.8224MHz as single ďŹ les or in batches. For SACD authoring, a Compression Ratio Estimator with metering is provided to gauge DST lossless compression encoding gains. AFC24 also multiplexes, de-multiplexes and remodulates DSD data as well as creates DSDIFF EM or Edit Master ďŹ les. Nine distinct Delta Sigma Modulators are available, including the Trellis E algorithm with adjustable path length for high ďŹ delity at the smallest ďŹ le size. www.sonicstudio.com

event active sub

Rslâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cONeQ

The Event S100 active subwoofer offers 100 Watts of power in a ďŹ&#x201A; oorcoupled design with an 8-inch polypropylene LF driver. It features an input sensitivity control, a mono line input on TRS jack, left and right line inputs on phonos, and two pass-through outputs also on phonos. A supplied latching r e m o t e f o o t s w i t c h allows muting. www.sourcedistribution.co.uk

R e a l S o u n d Labâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CONEQ takes highr e s o l u t i o n measurements at hundreds of points in space around a loudspeaker or loudspeaker array within its included radiation pattern in just two minutes. The system then post-processes the data to generate a corrective algorithm of 4096 points of amplitude correction using proprietary software. The result is said to be a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ruler-ďŹ&#x201A; atâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; response curve. CONEQ may be applied to any reproduced audio and can be employed to correct for non-linear transducer characteristics such as phase, distortion, and power compression. www.realsoundlab.com

aeon gets V2.0 and router All Klotz Digital Aeon a u d i o - n e t w o r k i n g c o n s o l e s a re n o w based on the Vadis 2 1 2 r o u t e r a n d control engine. With V 2 . 0 s o f t w a re f o r Aeon, via â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;User Rights Managementâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; the engineer in charge is able to freely create user groups with individually assigned user rights. The user groups are password protected against unauthorised access. Individuals can have the right to change console adjustments according to their level of training. The Aeon Setup Tool has also been improved. Clean feed buses can be changed individually on the console as well as switching of pan/balance and pre/post fader allowing ďŹ&#x201A; exibility in creating return signals. The GPI management has been enhanced by providing a trigger action during system start up to perform macro programmed actions such as routings and GPIs. The monitoring section has also been improved. www.klotzdigital.com

spatial animation

NX Series

Precision monitoring for recording studios and edit suites Full of the latest in speaker technology and designed from the ground up for critical listening in recording facilities where a precise, transparent, professional sound is essential, the NX Series set new standards in sonic accuracy and packaging. Precision monitoring and audio performance of this calibre has never been so affordable. Main Features F Dedicated 60W (LF) + 40W (HF) bi-amplifiers F Hard dome tweeters with magnesium diaphragms to ensure a sound free from harsh metallic characteristics F LF drivers with HR (Hyper Radial) diaphragm ensuring a smooth, natural sound with excellent mid/low frequency reproduction F Time-aligned front baffle design and internal HP Sound reflectors

Orfeusz 206 combines hardware and software to create spatial audio animation for live performance. Orfeusz 206 emulates a user-deďŹ ned acoustic model and continually updates it while sources are moving. The result is said to be similar to what can be achieved with a modern lighting system but translated into the sound domain. The system assists in the positioning of speakers, renders the acoustic atmosphere of any type of environment, smoothly moves sound sources in real time and permits the triggering of prerecorded trajectory sequences. New software includes a trajectory editor, a playlist manager, and improved joystick control. www.waf.com.pl

July/August 2007

NX-6A

20mm tweeter, 160mm woofer, 100 watt bi-amp

NX-5A

20mm tweeter, 130mm woofer, 100 watt bi-amp

XXX GPTUFY KQ Fostex Company, 3-2-35 Musashino, Akishima, Tokyo, Japan 196-0021 Tel: +81 (0)42-546-4974 Fax: +81 (0)42-546-9222 Email: info_sales@fostex.jp

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gear Multiplatform IP system

#21373

Globalstor’s iTrax range of servers are designed for audio recording. Built on the same foundation as the ExtremeStor series of high-end servers, with a 64-bit iSCSI + NAS operating system, iTrax offers multiroom recording facilities a flexible, secure and competitively-priced solution that allows multi-user access to consolidated, centralised and fully searchable data. Using an iSCSI initiator, the iTrax appears as a local disk drive on any computer connected to the LAN or WAN. Windows users can download the free - UAD Ad Resolution 15/2/07 17:09 Page 1 Windows iSCSI initiator offered by Microsoft. Globalstor

solutions can also be used as NAS (Network Attached Storage) servers in conjunction with iSCSI. Once iSCSI initiators are loaded, every host system on the network can see and share all stored data. Engineers on separate workstations can simultaneously edit and mix different sessions stored on any iTrax server. W ith the iTrax, audio professionals have centralised storage and retrieval of multiple sessions at their fingertips. In addition, users can remotely log into sessions from anywhere in the world using any Internet Protocolbased GUI. www.globalstor.com

Firestudio lightPipe The PreSonus FireStudio LightPipe is a 24-bit/96kHz, 32-channel ADAT to FireWire recording system for Mac and Windows. It employs JetPLL jitter elimination technology and a 34 x 34 DSP matrix mixer that permits the creation of two separate zero-latency stereo mixes for monitoring purposes. Additional connections include balanced ¼-inch stereo analogue outputs, Word clock I-O, MIDI I-O, a separate headphone output and LED metering. When partnered with four PreSonus DigiMAX FS 8-channel mic preamps, the FireStudio LightPipe creates a mobile 32-channel Class A recording rig. The HP60 features six high-output headphone ampliﬁ ers and provides two stereo main inputs (A and B), as well as an external input for each channel. This allows the user to balance the levels between Mix A, Mix B and the external input. A stereo output is available on each channel to send line level channel mixes to additional headphone ampliﬁ ers or monitor systems such as the PreSonus HP4. The HP60 also features talkback via an external XLR mic. www.presonus.com

sadie V5.6

UAD POWERED PLUG-INS.

ESSENTIAL AUDIO UPGRADES FOR YOUR DAW. From classic EQ and dynamics through to revered precision mastering tools, UAD brings an unrivalled collection of vintage audio hardware to your DAW, meticulously recreated as Powered Plug-Ins for our unique DSP platform. Accessible and affordable, UAD systems are available in PCI, PCI-e or new laptop-ready ExpressCard configurations. And for more flexibility, there are three Plug-In PAK sizes, so you can choose from a basic suite up to a fully-loaded rack of studio-grade mixing and mastering tools.

SADiE V5.6 software is available for immediate download. V5.6 introduces many editing and recording features that enhance the LRX2 and PCM-H64 and also offer benefi ts across the SADiE Series 5 range of workstations. The new MTR (Multitrack Recorder) user interface has been honed for use in live situations with the LRX2 Location Audio Workstation and PCM-H64 multitrack platforms specifi cally in mind. The software has been designed to require no training and to enable rapid setup and operation of the systems in the style of multitrack recorders. Projects created in MTR may still be opened in the full version of SADiE V5.6 software for editing and post or transported to other platforms. The LRX2 MADI card is now fully supported offering 64 tracks of simultaneous recording. CDs can now be burned to any CD Writer, including laptop CD or DVD writers. V5.6 also allows direct recording of Polyphonic WAV fi les. Additionally, the new Delayed Mirror function allows recordings on the primary drive to be mirrored to slow media, such as DVD-RAM, in the background to provide simultaneous back-up of easily transportable files. Full iXML support is included in V5.6 together with playback of QuickTime Movies in the playlist. www.sadie.com

audio monitoring unit UAD-Xpander - Xpress, Xpert and Xtreme PAKs

UAD-1 - Project, Flexi and Ultra PAKs

UAD-1e - Express, Expert and Extreme PAKs

NEW!

Xpander series for laptops

Extreme PAK with 32 UA Plug-Ins

For more information on the entire range of UAD Plug-Ins, visit www.uaudio.com

UK distribution by Source • Find a dealer at www.sourcedistribution.co.uk/ua • T: 020 8962 5080

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System integration specialist Broadcast Networks has made its debut as an equipment manufacturer with the AMU8HD audio monitoring unit for broadcast audio in the HD environment. The AMU-8HD is an 8-channel bargraph meter with Dolby D/E decoder option, two HD/SD SDI inputs, eight AES input pairs and eight stereo analogue inputs. It also has four AES output pairs, four stereo analogue main outputs (variable), four stereo ﬁ xed outputs and a stereo analogue monitor output. The LCD menu system allows ﬂ exible signal routing to the main outputs, monitor outputs, meters and Dolby decoders as well as displaying all Dolby metadata, I-O calibration, channel trim levels and many other engineering functions. All eight outputs are level-controlled and have independent volume control via the front panel. Inputs can be routed to any output and all settings can be saved for instant recall at a later date. www.bcnet.co.uk

July/August 2007

gear compact ilive

Allen & Heath has introduced a fourth control surface to its iLive family, joining the iLive-122, iLive-144 and iLive-176. The new iLive-80 is the smallest in the range and provides 80 control strips grouped in two sections, each with four banks, there is an LCD display with multi-colour backlight above each fader for labelling, and colour-coding channel information. The channel controls for preamp, ﬁ lter and EQ are laid out across the top of the surface on rotary controls with LED indicators, while a colour LCD touchscreen presents a graphical view of the processing and access to gates, compressors, limiter/de-essers, graphic EQs and effects, as well as the automation and set up screens. Audio at the surface is available on four slots accommodating the 8-channel audio interface cards. Heart of the system is the iDR-10 standalone stagerack, which has 10 slots for 8-channel audio interface cards, comprising analogue and digital variants. The iDR-64 DSP module is part of this rack, processing 64 channels into 32 mixes, which can be assigned as auxes, groups, matrix and main outputs. The iDR-64 is controlled via an Ethernet network and can be connected to a variety of controllers, including the range of iLive control surfaces, Allen & Heath’s PL range of remote units, third party devices, or a PC. www.allen-heath.com

Riedel cans and panels The two new headset series AIR and PRO join Riedel’s classic heavy-duty MAX headset which was specially designed for use in areas with high ambient noise levels. The AIR series, the ultra lightweight headset, employs DuPont Coolmax material for the exchangeable ear cushions and the 270º rotation of the microphone boom allows the microphone to be worn on either left or right side with the noise compensating electret or dynamic mic. The PRO series headsets were designed closely with Beyerdynamic and features a neodymium magnet system. The soft circumaural earcups provide good noise

attenuation and are as comfortable as the fully adjustable padded headband. The headset provides a hypercardioid dynamic mic or a high-quality omni condenser. The 270º rotation of the microphone boom allows the microphone to be worn on the left or right side. The 2100 control panels join Riedel’s 1000 and 2000 series for any Artist intercom infrastructure. Positioned between both panel product lines, the 2100 panels feature 8-digit, high-contrast, full graphic LCD displays, showing label and cross-point level for each talk key. The talk buttons are illuminated with deﬁ nable marker colours to allow instant function identiﬁ cation. The 2100 panels provide features that were formerly only available with Riedel’s premium Artist 1000 LED control panels. The new series features additional analogue line level inputs and outputs and three GPI-Os on the rear side. Like any Artist panel, the series is available in 19-inch rackmount and desktop versions. www.riedel.net

The S3 possesses quite astonishing amounts of headroom, and will quite happily put out peaks approaching +30dBu all day long without sounding the least bit flustered. Jon Thornton, Resolution Magazine

I used the S3 on a drum subgroup and it allowed me to shape the drum space with an amazing amount of control in a way that I never would have been able to do with EQ or full bandwidth compression. Thom Monahan (Engineer), Tape Op Magazine

axia studio control panels Axia Audio has a v a r i e t y o f new rack and turret/furniture m o u n t e d a c c e s s o r y controllers for use with Axia IP-Audio networks. Six new Studio Control panels interface with Element to give on-air hosts, guests and producers remote control of headphone selection, mic channels and more, and three fl exible button panels can be programmed to trigger router salvos, load profi les, switch studios, control audio gear, and provide intercom functions. The Element 2-Fader module combines two fader strips with overbridge alphanumeric displays and Status Symbols with a two-space Monitor/ Options section, all of which fi t into a single four-position module. Element can be ordered with as many as 40 faders, in single-frame or split-frame confi gurations. The Axia IP-Audio system allows broadcasters to build audio networks of any size using standard Switched Ethernet. Axia IP-Audio networks can carry hundreds of digital stereo (or nearly a hundred surround) audio channels over a standard Cat6 cable. Axia products include a family of ‘audio nodes’ that allow easy mixing and matching of digital, analogue and microphone audio, and eliminate PC sound cards. www.axiaaudio.com

July/August 2007

The new Signature Series S3 from

D r a w m e r L t d . • t : + 4 4 ( 0 ) 1 9 2 4 3 7 8 6 6 9 • w w w. d r a w m e r. c o m

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review

Focusrite liquid Mix It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly three years since Focusrite first married the audio alchemy that is sintefex’s dynamic convolution process with its own experience of designing and manufacturing high-end analogue outboard. JON ThORNTON reports on V2.0 of liquid Mix.

he ORIGINal lIQUId Channel has graced many an equipment rack by virtue of its highly accurate emulations of classic preamplifiers and compressors. It’s not at all surprising then that the core technology has filtered down to a much more affordable price-point, and the introduction of Liquid Mix about a year ago was the first indication of this. Now about to be released in version 2.0 form, Liquid Mix has had the benefit of 12 months or so of shakedown time, plus the addition of several new features from existing users’ wish-lists. For those unfamiliar with the unit, it’s best to start off with what it isn’t, namely it’s not a cut down Liquid Channel. Although it uses the same dynamic convolution processing, it does not offer the preamp capabilities of its bigger and more expensive sibling. Instead, as the name implies, it concentrates on mix processing rather than tracking duties, offering emulations of 40 classic compressors and 20 EQ units. These emulations can be accessed by any compatible 22

DAW as plug-ins (VST, AU and VST in RTAS wrappers means that no one is left out in the cold), with the not inconsiderable DSP overhead taken care of by the unit itself. The basic unit can support compression and EQ on up to 32 channels, and connection to the host CPU is by a single FireWire cable. This approach to a sort of ‘annexed’ DSP by serial interface is something that we’ve seen quite a bit of recently — witness SSL’s Duende and the Waves Audio Processing Accelerators. Where Liquid Mix differs is that rather than simply hosting the DSP in an anonymous looking box, it also doubles as a physical control surface for the plug-ins. Installation is straightforward from a DVD, which installs a small application named Liquid Mix Manager, the various plug-in ﬂavours and, of course, the data for the emulations themselves. Liquid Mix now runs happily on both Mac and PC, and for the purposes of this review I installed and ran it on both Intel and PPC Macs, using Logic 7, Pro Tools 7 (TDM), resolution

Garageband 3 and Cubase LE. I should point out here that the version of the software I was running was a late beta of the Version 2.0 release, with some known issues that should be ironed out before general release (They have been and V2.0 is now downloadable. Ed). The hardware unit needs to be connected before installation of the software, and on all of the Macs I used seemed happy to draw its power from the FireWire bus, although an AC adaptor is also included. Once installed, a Liquid Mix instance is selected on your DAW track of choice — only mono or stereo instances are available as options — which then brings up the plug-in window. In this window you then select which compressor and/or EQ emulations you wish to load for that particular plug-in instance from pull-down menus. As with the Liquid Channel these emulations are somewhat cryptically named, one presumes for copyright reasons, although a handy couple of pages in the user manual list the actual devices that each of the emulations is based on. You do start to remember them soon enough, but without the list you’d be hard pushed to realise that ‘Primitive: US Classic Tube 2’ is actually a Manley VariMu. Level metering is comprehensive, both in the plug-in window and duplicated on the hardware, with input level, gain reduction, a mid-point meter (level post compressor and gain-makeup but pre EQ section), and a post EQ output level meter provided. An input trim control allows the signal hitting the plug-in to be boosted or attenuated by 20dB, and an output level control gives the same degree of attenuation or boost post the EQ. This is important as some of the emulations can sound markedly different when run hotter or colder in terms of signal level, and I found that getting the gain structure set up appropriately was easier to do on the Liquid Mix than on the Liquid Channel. The processing order can, incidentally, be ﬂipped to make the compressor post EQ if desired. In this case the mid point meter shows level post the EQ output level, and the main output level is post the gain make-up control. The usual controls appear for the compressor section, although the labelling and step values reﬂect the settings and values available on the original units they are emulating. The aforementioned VariMu emulation, for example, gives the five release settings that you would find on the original unit, and the Teletronix LA-2A emulation simply gives threshold, compress or limit and gain make-up. If this proves a little too limiting (!) then selecting ‘Free’ makes the full range of values for all parameters available. A new feature added in V2 is the ability to assign an EQ in the compressor’s sidechain — the choice here is either a low shelf, a band-pass filter with variable Q, or a high pass filter — all of which are straightforward digital implementations rather than convolved jobs. Hitting the sidechain monitor brings up these options while allowing you to monitor their effect. Moving on to the EQ section, and the same applies with regard to loading the desired emulation — 20 emulations of desirable devices ranging from E and G series SSL desk EQs, to Pultecs, Manleys and other esoterica. The EQ section has seven possible bands for each Liquid Mix instance, each with a potential gain, frequency, Q and shape switch, which might select a peaking or shelving response for example. Clearly not all of the emulations will require all seven bands, or indeed all of the parameters that are available on each band, so loading an emulation only fills in the bands and activates the parameters that are required. There is no equivalent to the ‘free’ function that exists on the compressor section — you get exactly what was on offer on the original unit. What you do get, July/August 2007

Audio

perfection

The current state of technology in the recording and reproduction of sound is at a very high level today thanks to tireless efforts of a handful of pioneers. This relatively small group of researchers and innovators, all of whom were continually striving for sonic perfection included Horst Klein and Walter Hummel. In 1945 they courageously founded a company that is still to this day, exclusively dedicated to the perfect reproduction of sound. www.klein-hummel.co.uk

review however, is the ability to construct hybrid EQ sections by loading as many bands as you want from any of the available emulations up to the maximum of seven bands per instance. So it’s quite feasible to build your own dream EQ channel: the filters from an ISA 115; the low and high mids from an E-Series; the HF shelf from a Manley Massive Passive, for example. And it’s fabulous, and EQ fetishists the world over will rejoice assuming, that is, that it sounds any good, which it does. The underlying Liquid technology is well proven and managed to win over the most hardened cynics with the Liquid Channel. You do have to remember though, that its application to EQ is something new; EQ on the Liquid Channel was a completely ‘traditional’ digital implementation. There is an astonishing sonic variety on offer here in both the EQ and compressors. A quick comparison with some of the emulations and the real things (BSS DPR402, TLA C1, 1073) showed a thoroughly convincing degree of similarity right down to the DPR402’s tendency to readily track around the waveform of low frequencies with quick release settings, with the accompanying nastiness. One thing I did notice was that many of the emulations were very sensitive to signal level, and there’s very little margin when deliberately running things hot before the sound abruptly switches from gentle harmonic distortion to something that sounds grainy and horrible. It’s not a deal breaker, but something that requires care.

So far, I haven’t touched on the hardware user interface at all and this is indicative of the slightly schizophrenic nature of the unit when you first use it. I suspect that most people dive into this unit at first and simply navigate around the plug-in windows on screen. However, the hardware box allows you to perform any function (and I mean any function) on a given instance of Liquid Mix, aided

by 11 rotary encoders, 14 illuminated pushbuttons, 4 LED bargraph meters and a small back-lit LCD screen. I have to admit that at first this just annoyed me, as I found myself faced with a number of plugin windows on the Mac screen and no instinctive knowledge of which instance I would be adjusting with the hardware and that meant that jumping between screen and hardware was so confusing I just ignored it. After a while though, and by discovering some additional features, I grew a lot more comfortable with this. A big help is the ability to give a name to a particular plug-in instance in its window. Once this is done, it is reﬂected on the display of the hardware box. You can then scroll through a list of active instances from the hardware itself to focus on (much easier when it lists things as Bass, Kick, Vox, etc.) and the instance name you are working on is always present on the display. The second feature that helps is the inclusion of an option to set the hardware to follow the currently active (last clicked on) plug-in window on the DAW

and this new feature in V2 means that switching between screen and hardware is a lot more seamless. A knob per function for the compressor side makes operation straightforward, although the EQ setting is more clunky as you have to select the appropriate band before you can adjust frequency, gain, etc. The main drawback of using the controller surface is that the resolution of the encoders is not as fine as that of the plug-in window parameters — they seem to step in increments of around 1dB for gain, and correspondingly large jumps in frequency or time constants. Of course, with some emulations this isn’t a problem as they have stepped values anyway but with others you need to go back to the plug-in window for real fine-tuning. Latency is an issue, of course, although auto delay compensation worked well in TDM Pro Tools systems and Logic. But simply strapping a Liquid Mix instance across all tracks by default would solve the issue in Pro Tools LE systems and as an indication of the value for money here Liquid Mix does handle 32 simultaneous instances of EQ and compression with little or no CPU overhead. However, there is a caveat. Although emulations are provided at sample rates up to 192kHz, running Liquid Mix at anything higher than 48kHz eats into this channel count at an alarming rate. Run at 88.2 or 96kHz and you’re down to 8 simultaneous channels; anything higher than that and you’re left with only two channels. An optional DSP expansion card is available that ups the channel count to 16 channels at 88.2/96kHz or 8 channels at 176.4/192kHz but disappointingly this doesn’t increase the channel count beyond 32 channels at lower sample rates. Liquid Mix performs well and offers an awful lot of bang for the buck (UK £424+VAT). Users of entirely host-based DAWs would benefit hugely from its DSP capacity at lower sample rates. While at first I just wondered why Focusrite didn’t just do away with the hardware user interface and package it as a ‘black box’, the control surface did grow on me, and after a while became quite liberating when working in the box. For what’s on offer it provides astonishing value — the immediate suspicion is that corners have been cut somewhere, particularly when you compare its price point to the Liquid Channel. But when you take into account that it doesn’t have (or need) the mass of analogue interfacing permutations of its big brother, or the requirements for ultra-low latency, these reservations start to fade. And when you listen to it, they are gone for good. ■

PROs

32 channels of compression and eQ with no cPU overhead; should support nearly all major daW systems; emulation quality excellent; physical control surface all part of the package; additional emulations can be downloaded as they become available.

cONs

Physical control surface takes a little getting used to; expansion card needed for any serious work above 48khz.

contact FOcUsRITe, Uk Uk: Website: www.focusrite.com Website:

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July/August 2007

DIGIDESIGN ICON

“With ICON’s automation and complete recall, I have the flexibility to work on one mix then switch to another, picking it up exactly where I left off— something I couldn’t do in any other sy stem. And it’s not just ease of use that does it for me—the plug-ins or its subsidiaries or divisions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

INTEGRATED INTEGRATED CONSOLE CONSOLE

are fantastic and the sound quality is superb—there is absolutely nothing missing in it!” Visit www.digidesign.com/icon to learn more about the ICON integrated console.

Mike Shipley Mix Engineer (Nickelback, Maroon 5, Green Day , Tom Petty , Aerosmith)

For ICON enquiries, email ICONuk@digidesign.com.

Tchad Blake | Mix Engineer

Metropolis

Ray Hedges | Producer

Sheryl Crow, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello

London, United Kingdom

Towers of London, Bryan Adams, Take That

Fully modular, state-of-the-art console control • Pro Tools|HD Accel DSP and I/O resources • 192 kHz sample rate support Industry’s finest plug-in options • Automatic Delay Compensation • Integrated video and delivery • Total session recall

review

Brauner Phanthera a new product from Brauner is always an exciting proposition for microphone cognoscenti. With usual restraint JON ThORNTON believes it to be a bit phanthastic.

T’s NO secReT that I’m a huge fan of Dirk Brauner’s products, in particular those at the more affordable end of the spectrum. Reviewing the original Brauner Phantom was one of those jaw-dropping (and budget-busting) moments that ultimately led to both a Phantom C and the variable pattern Phantom V finding their way permanently into the microphone cupboard. But, like many things in life, the initial thrill is tempered somewhat with familiarity. And although the Phantoms still remain in my top 5 of ‘go-to’ microphones, there are occasions when you find yourself wishing for a little more guts to their sound – that doesn’t mean they are gutless, just a little too smooth sounding and natural for some applications. Stick a perfect vocal in front of either of them and they’ll deliver all day long, but if a voice is a little on the thin side, or needs just that touch more definition in the mid-range, there’s little in the way of colouration to the sound to be had. Enter the Phanthera (UK£950+VAT). I know, a slightly odd choice of name, but we’ll forgive it that for the time being. The accompanying documentation is a little light on technical detail, and a little heavy on some strange prose likening the microphone to a ‘grand wild cat’. The short version is that Brauner has attempted to replicate the sonic character of his highly rated valve microphones in an entirely solidstate design. Sounds just what the doctor ordered… At first glance, the Phanthera looks very similar to the Phantom but putting them side by side reveals quite a few differences. There’s still the same solidly engineered body and accompanying snap to fit shockmount, and the diaphragm assembly looks nearly identical to the Phantom C internally. The head-grille is finished in black rather than silver though, and there’s a curve to the top of it that’s vaguely reminiscent of a U47. The whole thing ships in a compact aluminium case, complete with shockmount and Vovox mic cable. Polar pattern is fixed cardioid and you don’t get any pad or filter options here so it’s plug and play time. There was really only one choice to put the Phanthera up against at first and that was the Phantom C. Both are fixed pattern 26

cardioids and both clearly have some shared DNA so the first order of the day was the bread and butter of large diaphragm condensers — vocals. It’s immediately apparent that the tonal difference

between the two microphones is significant — even starting a good 12-inches away. The Phanthera is immediately a little darker sounding, and this difference is accentuated the closer in you get to the microphone. There’s a definite increase in the chest sound of the voice, and the proximity bump of the Phanthera is every bit as workable as the Phantom, solidifying the sound nicely and progressively without sounding too boomy. In addition to this, worked close — just a little before the proximity lift becomes really obvious — and the Phanthera reveals a tiny bit more gravel in male vocals, and more of the ‘catch’ in a female vocal. It’s a very different effect from the usual midrange presence lift, as it seems to pull definition from a voice without adding that slightly nasal quality. Interestingly, with no EQ dialled in, both vocalists preferred the sound of the Phanthera in their headphone mixes by some margin. Moving on to acoustic guitar, another favourite task for the Phantom, and the differences in tonality were still evident but perhaps not quite as noticeable. The Phanthera retains the phenomenal transient response of the Phantom, which gives a wonderful realism to plucked string sounds and percussion, and there’s still a great sense of HF extension, so that even reasonably close to the guitar there’s a good deal of air and space around the instrument. Maybe the Phanthera sounded a little softer in the very high registers than the Phantom, but this could equally be the slightly more solid sounding low-mids. On paper, both of the microphones appear to have a nearly identical specification in terms of sensitivity (33mV/Pa) and self-noise (11dBA) — a nice high output and quiet enough for all but the most critical applications. So quite how the difference in response has been achieved is something of a mystery — although some email correspondence with the company seemed to suggest that it was largely down to component choice in the electronics rather than any change to the capsule. The Phanthera is billed as sounding like a valve mic but without the thermionics, so does it deliver? In some ways, the sound is reminiscent of many valve designs — certainly in the sense that there’s a texture to the low-mid and mid range harmonics that seems to pull character out of a voice. But in other ways it sounds extremely modern — it doesn’t have the silkiness and the early roll-off in the high frequencies that some of the Soundelux range exhibit, for example, instead opting for a much more detailed, though never unﬂattering sound. I guess the acid test is whether I should be making space in the mic cupboard, and I am slightly tempted. Mainly because the Phanthera seems like the perfect foil for the Phantom — they complement each other well and between them would cover most eventualities. The Phanthera isn’t going to suit every voice though, so as a standalone choice I’d advise some careful auditioning first. ■

PROs

Usual Brauner build quality; quiet; adds a lot of character to some voices; a hint of valve warmth without any mush.

cONs

currently only available as fixed pattern; still can’t quite get used to that name…

contact BRaUNeR, GeRMaNY: Website: www.brauner-microphones.com

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July/August 2007

Character of sound. Clarity of purpose. Black Series redefines the art of creating a classic signal path. The exceptional transparency of David Dearden's audio path design has been married to unique transformer coupled, discrete Class A technology, to provide the ultimate tool for creating and controlling classic character and complexity.

Black Series < The Dark Art > Distributed in the UK by Stirling.Tel. 020 8963 4790 Email info@stirlingtrading.com

www.stirlingtrading.com www.audient.co.uk

Totally Flexible. Sonically Superior. Modular Audio Processing System Five wart hogs gossips, and tickets incinerated two partly schizophrenic Macintoshes. Afghanistan comfortably tickled aardvarks, even though umpteen dwarves ran away. One quite irascible ticket very drunkenly bought the pawnbrokers. Umpteen speedy tickets comfortably tastes two obese subways, however five pawnbrokers annoyingly telephoned the almost speedy elephant. Two mats quite drunkenly auctioned off the sheep.

review

apple soundtrack Pro 2 at NaB apple announced the new version of Final cut studio. Fcs2 is a major upgrade with Final cut Pro getting some new hd features, a new version of Motion 2, compressor 3, a completely new grading package called color, and the long awaited upgrade of soundtrack Pro to Version 2.

aNdY daY

WROTe a ReVIeW of Soundtrack Pro well over a year ago (V4.8) and despite a few shortcomings, I was quite impressed. At that time it was part of FCS, but also available separately at an amazing price. Apple seems to have cottoned on to this and, at the time of writing, it’s only available as part of the FCS2 suite (US$1299). The good news is that this is one hell of an upgrade! The basic user interface is very similar, so getting stuck in is quite easy for existing STP users, but there have been some nice developments with the addition of the lower pane that allows several tabs to be accessed from one window. This means that all the functions of STP can be displayed in one display, plus a layout preset function allows any one area to be focussed on, say for file editing or mixing. File editing has vastly improved, especially using the lower pane display, as you can see the clips position in the timeline and the expanded waveform at the same time. A Spot to Timeline feature allows you to easily return the edited file to anywhere on the timeline. As before all clip-based effects and processing can be removed or even re-ordered at any time. Another clever function for clip-based processing is the ability to ‘lift’ processing from an existing clip and ‘stamp’ it onto any other clips in the timeline simply by clicking with the mouse. Even more useful is the option to ‘lift’ the natural EQ from a clip and ‘stamp’ it to other clips using the same method. Ideal for EQ-matching ADR, which is another major enhancement for STP. Multi-take clips allow multiple loop recordings to be displayed in the form of several sub tracks and then cut into individual lines. You can then switch between each line/take by simply clicking the clips. A comp track is automatically created as you do it with fully adjustable cross-fades between each take. The comp appears in the main timeline as one clip, but can easily be edited again by accessing the Multitake editor. Try doing that with other DAWs. This is the best tool I’ve found for ADR, making it easier for everyone (including the actors!) Spotting effects is vastly improved too by using a new ‘HUD’ that shows the video frame at the in point, the out point and the mouse click point on the effect. This is great for spotting effects that have a sync point between the in/out points, for example a door slam. By clicking on the slam part, displaying the HUD you can see exactly where the door closes, without having to place the effect and nudge it into place. STP also includes thousands of new effects, including some 28

really useful 5.1 atmos fx. Yes, you guessed it; 5.1 is now supported in STP. Although it would appear at first glance to be a bit gimmicky, with some strange looking surround panning displays, it is actually quite powerful. The panners are automatable and easily accessed by right clicking the track pan. You can switch any track to 5.1, record pan moves, and switch back to stereo to make adjustments for a stereo mix, without affecting the 5.1 panning. By having a stereo submix track and a 5.1 submix track you can create multiformat mixes simultaneously. But by far the most interesting feature is the 5.1 version of Space Designer, which is an IR reverb. There are loads of new 5.1 presets for all kinds of natural (and unnatural) spaces, you even have the option to record your own impulses on location, to create your own presets. Other IR-based reverb plug-ins like this cost a fortune, so this makes STP worthwhile on its own. There are several other 5.1 plug-ins included too, such as EQs and Dynamics. When I reviewed the previous version, the big limitation was the lack of import/export — locking you into a FCP workﬂow. This has all changed with OMF/AAF import and AAF export giving Pro Tools/ Avid compatibility. Now you can use STP to tracklay, sounddesign and ADR, then export as AAF into Pro Tools for mixing. Another option is to export files of either tracks or submixes and import into Pro Tools for mixing. For FCP workﬂows, things are even better. If a FCP sequence gets changed after you’ve done your prep and mix in STP then you can resend the new sequence from FCP and use the conform feature in STP to compare the two sequences and create a resolution

new sequence using your original clips and mix where possible. You can audition changes and decide whether to change the audio or not — for example if just cutaway shots are inserted. This is like having an integrated Virtual Katy for FCP workﬂows. I used FCP to digitise some video (a nice added bonus to have the ability to digitise video with FCP) using a DV codec. Because STP uses QuickTime, virtually any QuickTime codec is supported, even MPEG 2, making it ideal for DVD menu design. By dropping the video on the FCP timeline and using the ‘send to soundtrack pro’ command, audio and video are transferred to STP ready for editing. This part of the workﬂow can also be used for projects coming from an Avid if video is exported in

QuickTime format. I then imported an OMF from the Avid and phased up the OMF with the guide. There did seem to be a bug, which meant the imported OMF was shifted on the timeline. The source audio was very poorly recorded, so I used noise reduction on one clip and Lift and Stamp to apply to all the other clips that needed it. After noise reduction and some EQ I replaced some atmos tracks and added a couple of spot effects. Then I got my Mackie MCU to connect to STP using Mackie control, giving me transport, fader and pan control. I could mix this simple project easily with this setup, but for more complex projects I would prefer to export an AAF or files, and import into Pro Tools. I only really scratched the surface of what STP can do with this example, but when you consider that I could create a finished TV mix from a laptop (using PPM metering with the excellent PPMulator plug-in), this is a major step towards cost-effective TV audio postproduction. ■

PROs

amazing value especially with Fcs; useful 5.1 implementation; excellent 5.1 space designer reverb; better integration into avid workﬂows.

cONs

Quite a few bugs in the first release; no support for Rewire (would be ideal for Pro Tools remixes); no plug-in automation.

contact aPPle, Us: Website: www.apple.com

July/August 2007

IBC2007 the world of content creation management delivery

State-of-the-Art...always

Introducing even more added value at IBC2007 See state-of-the-art technology from 1,000 exhibitors. Network with more than 44,000 key players from 130 countries. Take part in the world's best opinion forming conference.

Free entry to the exhibition if you register before 20 August Free access to the IBC Big Screen Experience, including cutting edge demonstrations and feature film presentations Free entry to the Mobile Zone showcasing TV on the move Free entry to the IPTV Zone - New for 2007 Free to the IBC Business Briefings. Your chance to engage with the key players in mobile and IPTV Free training and hands-on experience of the latest products in the IBC Training Zone Free entry to the IBC Added Value Sessions, where experts explore the best of IBC Free entry to the prestigious IBC Awards Ceremony

Conference 6 - 10 September Exhibition 7 - 11 September RAI Amsterdam

www.ibc.org IBC Fifth Floor International Press Centre 76 Shoe Lane London EC4A 3JB United Kingdom Tel: +44 20 7832 4100 Fax: +44 20 7832 4130 Email: show@ibc.org

review

Mackie control Universal Pro It’s a controller that claims universal appeal and pro sensibilities. ROB JaMes revisits a perennial favourite and finds it tweaked and enhanced.

ackIe has a long and illustrious history in designing and producing hardware controllers for audio and video workstations. The original HUI (Human User Interface) also gave its name to the first protocol to establish itself as a real standard. Some measure of its success can be judged by almost universal DAW support for it today. HUI was followed in 2002 by the Logic Control and shortly afterwards by the Mackie Control Universal using the same hardware but an extended protocol, Mackie Control. This was the first controller to provide truly useful control for a wide range of DAWs and NLEs at an attractive price. Size played a part in its success, not too big or too tall with a well-chosen set of controls and a sensible, open layout. It was also extensible with the addition of one or more MCU XT blocks of 8 faders and later with the Mackie Control C4 plug-in and virtual instrument controller for those who needed the extra control or wanted to make more of an impression. The one snag was the MIDI interface. All these units just had standard DIN MIDI ports and no daisy-chaining was allowed. Time for an update. The UK£850 (+VAT) Mackie Control Universal Pro addresses the MIDI limitation and for good measure it has had a face-lift. Following the old adage, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ most of the other changes are cosmetic. It has acquired a more angular, harder

look. Gone are the muted greys, replaced with silver and charcoal. The top surface is now a single sheet of metal and the front now drops away at a sharp angle instead of the Control Universal’s gentle curve. Buttons that used to be round or semi-elliptical are now square or oblong. The jog/shuttle wheel is much taller so you can grip the sides or use ‘finger on top’ mode. The most obvious change in dimensions is increased height. One of the most attractive design features of the MCU was its low profile, just 96mm at the rear. This was achieved by using an ingenious dip just before the display section. MCU Pro has a reduced dip with a small upstand. This increases the overall height to 120mm; meanwhile depth has decreased from 440mm to 429mm. The overall effect is to make the screen and counters easier to view without losing the low profile virtues. Neatly illustrating the detailed improvements experience can bring, the MCU Pro is equipped with VESA mounting pick-up points (yes, the same standards used for mounting screens.) This will make it much easier to mount the unit on a ﬂoating arm in, for example, a picture editing room. By far the most significant change is to be found at the rear. Although you can connect the MCU Pro to a computer using conventional DIN MIDI leads there is a much better option; USB. Since this carries four MIDI connections it enables the three pairs of DIN

The surface

The 8 control strips are identical with a two row by 55-character lcd display spanning all of them in the upstand. each strip has a 100mm P&G touchsensitive motorised fader followed by internally illuminated select key, Mute key and solo key, a small green signal Present led, Rec key and V-Pot with annular ring of red leds to indicate position. a particularly nice touch is the single led at the half-past six position. This indicates the centre zero point otherwise obscured by the knob. The knob is also a switch, which, among other functions, can return the controlled parameter to its default setting, such as the centre when the V-Pot is in pan mode. The signal present led is a real bonus and reacts to both audio and MIdI if the host supports it. The Master Fader can control one of the target application’s Master Faders. Bottom right is a nicely weighted jog wheel, scrub key and cruciform cursor keys with central Zoom key. Main transport controls are chunky and feel positive. assignment of all the other buttons on the surface depends on the target workstation. Power supply is external but in-line rather than the dreaded wall-wart. apart from the UsB socket and three pairs of MIdI dINs there are user switch jack sockets and a further jack for an external control pot intended for functions such as Master volume, depending on the host application. Perhaps a sign of the times, the kensington security slot, more usually found on laptops, should keep the McU Pro from wandering.

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sockets on the MCU Pro to be used to connect MCU Extender Pro or MC C4 Pro units directly. There are three different control modes to suit a wide variety of targets. When the unit is turned on for the first time the display prompts for a choice of Mackie Control, HUI or Logic Control. Outside the transport control and fader strips areas the buttons are programmable to suit the target application. Mackie supplies self-adhesive Lexan overlays for Pro Tools (HUI), Steinberg (Cubase/ Nuendo), MOTU Digital Performer, Mackie’s own Tracktion and Cakewalk Sonar. Further overlays are available for Adobe Audition, Propellerhead Reason, Ableton Live, Sony Vegas, Soundscape and RML Labs Saw Studio. I have no doubt more will be forthcoming if the demand exists. As with all hardware control surfaces the precise functionality you can expect will depend on several factors. For example, how many functions can be remote controlled, how much work the DAW/LNE writers have done on implementing the protocol and whether or not they have included a means of assigning functions to physical buttons. There will usually be a certain amount of fiddling about to do with settings and maybe assignments before you arrive at the optimum level of control. Once this is achieved and some familiarity is gained the value of hardware control should become apparent. It also encourages working in a more disciplined manner that can only lead to increased productivity. Mackie has done a great job of freshening up the Mackie Control concept. The result is neat, handsome and feels very sturdy. If your DAW doesn’t have a dedicated hardware controller, the MCU Pro and Pro extenders should be on your audition list. ■

PROs

MIdI over UsB; upstand makes display easier to see; possibly the most compatible controller available.

cONs

Increased height may not suit everyone; not a lot.

contact MackIe, Us: Website: www.mackie.com

July/August 2007

AWS 900+ - GearBox, UK

Duality - Grabaciones Silvestres, Spain

redefining the music console. again.

Real magic happens outside the box.

X-Rack - SSL SuperAnalogue magic in a rack

Over three decades, SSL E, G, J & K Series analogue consoles have been the first choice of the professional recording industry. With our latest console innovations, Duality and AWS 900+, we deliver SSL analogue magic to your studio DAW system. Record with SuperAnalogue™ mic pre’s (and the new VHD pre), sum your mix to an SSL SuperAnalogue™ mix bus, use legendary E, G, J & K series EQ & Dynamics and recall your mix settings effortlessly with Total Recall™. Installed in 300 locations worldwide, the compact AWS 900+ offers 24 SuperAnalogue™ channels and established new standards in console and DAW integration. The large format Duality, available in 48, 72 & 96 channel frame sizes, adds even deeper DAW control and a highly-evolved feature set including a dual signal path & routing system enabling you to patch SSL analogue channel processing directly into your DAW. To find out more about the new standards in music consoles, visit www.solid-state-logic.com

Oxford +44 (0)1865 842300 New York +1 (1)212 315 1111 Los Angeles +1 (1)323 549 9090 Paris +33 (0)1 48 67 84 85 Milan +39 039 2328 094 Tokyo +81 (0)3 5474 1144

www.solid-state-logic.com

For a more modest budget, X-Rack is a modular system featuring SuperAnalogue™ processing circuitry and Total Recall™. Six modules are now available making it possible to configure X-Rack as a rackmounted mixer & analogue summing system, or as a standalone processor for studio & live applications. • Eight Input Summing Module • Four Channel Input • Master Bus • Mic Amp • Channel EQ • Dynamics Module

review

cad Trion 6000 + 8000 Trion is the family name for the latest range of offerings from cad. some readers may be unfamiliar with the name, but they’ve been in the microphone business since 1988. In common with many brands at these price points, manufacturing takes place in china, although the company is headquartered in Ohio.

JON ThORNTON

he TRION RaNGe currently comprises the 6000, 7000 and 8000 microphones. The 7000 is a dual-ribbon design, which we’ll leave for another time, and instead concentrate on the two large diaphragm condenser offerings. Both the 6000 (UK£235 inc. VAT) and the 8000 (UK£325 inc. VAT) follow the same basic form factor — a retro-inspired ‘lollipop’ look, with the capsule assembly sitting atop a cylindrical base containing the electronics. Both offer switchable polar patterns (omni, fig8 and cardioid), but whereas the 6000 features discrete Class-A solid-state electronics, the 8000 adds a valve into the equation. However, this isn’t simply a case of taking the same capsule and housing and offering two variants of the electronics — the 6000 and 8000 are completely different microphones. The 8000 is physically larger and heavier, and sports a 1.12-inch diaphragm compared to the 6000’s 1-inch affair. Both microphones ship with an aluminium carrying case containing a shockmount and, in the case of the 8000, an external power supply. Gaining access to the internals of both microphones is a simple process and a brief poke around reveals some tidy looking circuit boards in both cases together with transformers on the output stages of both mics. The valve in the 8000 looks easy to access for replacement, although the exact type isn’t one that I’ve come across before. The printing on it would seem to imply that it is of Chinese manufacture — so I’m guessing something broadly equivalent to a 12AX7. Build quality of both microphones seems good although the shockmount looks a little on the cheap side. The published specs show that neither microphone is possessed of the greatest of output levels (13mV/ Pa for the 6000 and 14mV/Pa for the 8000). This in itself isn’t a problem, but when taken together with self-noise figures of 20 and 21dBA, they do sound comparatively noisy when gained up alongside other microphones. Starting with the 6000, male vocals on the cardioid setting delivered a sound with plenty of presence, but quite edgy sounding. Moving slightly off-axis to try and counter this wasn’t terrifically successful — offaxis the microphone loses HF detail very quickly, but 32

but with none of the high-mid harshness of the 6000. Moving closer in and the 8000 really starts to come into its own on vocals. Again, there’s a big proximity bump — even more pronounced than the 6000 — but here it sounds completely dialled in with the overall response, smooth and progressive if potentially a little too extreme on some voices. Moving on to acoustic guitar for both mics told much the same story. Positioning both in this application was a little unwieldy, especially the 8000, which although not in SE Gemini territory, is still a sizeable chunk of hardware. Again, starting with the cardioid pattern, the 6000 revealed plenty of articulation detail on picked pieces, and delivered a nice jangly pop sound on strummed pieces, but really lacked any sense of depth when compared to a C414 in the same position. The 8000 was actually very good; at about 12-inches away there was plenty of bass extension, good HF detail and much more in the way of harmonic definition in the low and high mids. Moving in any closer though and that hefty proximity bump starts to make things sound a little too boomy very quickly. A quick switch to the omni pattern soon sorts this out, but at the expense of ever so slightly less HF detail. For completeness’ sake both microphones were positioned as room mics on a drum kit, with both the omni and fig-8 (null point facing the kit) patterns selected. Admittedly, it wasn’t the most ﬂattering sounding room and on the small side, but even so the 8000 sounded well balanced and reasonably neutral in both omni and fig-8 configurations. In fig-8 mode, the 6000 also performed reasonably well — slightly more high-mid presence than the 8000 which made things sound a little ﬂuttery at times — but its omni response seemed all over the place, sounding brittle and boxy. So, two microphones from the same range and to me they’re like chalk and cheese. There’s a tremendous amount of competition around at the price-points these microphones sit at and while the 6000 is a capable performer it never really seemed the best choice for any of the applications it faced. The 8000 though is a thoroughly versatile performer with plenty of character of its own; it should give the competition a good run for the money. ■

PROs

8000 is smooth sounding and ﬂexible with great lF extension when used close; both good looking in a quirky retro sort of way.

cONs

6000 might be a little too brittle sounding for some tastes; shockmounts don’t seem to match the build quality of the rest of the package; not as quiet as some competitors.

eXTRas

this didn’t seem to get rid of the slightly abrasive quality. The 6000 reminded me most of an SE Z5600, although to my ears the SE sounds smoother. Moving closer onto the mic gives quite a big proximity bump but this sounded somewhat disconnected from the overall tonality of the mic. In comparison, on the same vocal source the 8000 was a completely different story. Again, a sound full of presence — just a little sizzly on the ‘S’ sounds — resolution

The Trion 7000 is a dual-ribbon fig-8 mic that employs two ultra-thin aluminium ribbons.

contact cad, Us: Website: www.cadmics.com Uk, scV london: +44 208 418 1470

July/August 2007

“I was looking for a console that was not only functional, but was inspirational as well.... I found it!” Richard McNamara - Embrace “The desk is in use from 10 till 10 every day and the students can’t get enough of it... [they] are all very impressed with the sound.” Bruce - Head Lecturer - SAE Amsterdam

VTC. ‘INSPIRING’. The TL Audio VTC (Valve Technology Console) is simply without competition. Nothing comes remotely close to providing the flexibility, the features and above all the impeccable sound that only real valves can create. Use the desk clean for a low noise, high quality signal path or drive the valves harder to produce luscious warm tones and rich sounding even harmonic distortion. But don’t just take our word for it, Producers, Artists and Engineers the world over refuse to track and mix on anything else. Read more about the VTC and their comments at : www.tlaudio.co.uk Prices start at just £9995 ex VAT

TELEPHONE +44 (0)1462 492090 // EMAIL info@tlaudio.co.uk // PASSIONATE ABOUT TUBES

“I just fell in love with it - I’ve never achieved a sound as warm and luscious as I’m currently getting, and having this vibe at the early stages of writing and recording is really spurring me on. The VTC is an absolutely inspiring desk to work with!” Kipper - Producer, Sting “When we saw the console we knew instantly that we had to have it. The EQ on the VTC is really detailed, making it easy to pick out what you want… It really is a monster piece of kit.” EMI Music Publishing “The quality of preamps on the VTC really attracted us. We needed the highest quality front end and wanted to keep the signal path as simple as possible with only one A/D stage. The VTC allows us to do that and it gives us that high quality valve sound.” Joe Bennett - Bath Spa University “We were immediately impressed by the quiet noise floor of the VTC - and the sound of the EQ is unreal. I only wish I could take it on tour with us!” Rick Smith - Underworld

www.tlaudio.co.uk

review

Fostex FR-2 le Fostex’s contender for the entry-level cF compact field recorder stakes finds NeIl hIllMaN travellin’ lite and prepared to trade donuts.

T’s haRd TO know whether this current proliferation of newgeneration small CF recorders is actually a good or bad thing. On the one hand, these cheap machines seem to be built to withstand little more than an undemanding domestic life, a situation compounded by their poor hardware driven by inﬂexible consumer software. Yet on the other hand, these devices house 96kHz, 24-bit capabilities that we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss. While professional camera manufacturers have found that a modestly-priced entry level product to their more substantial ‘real’ professional range does no harm at all to their image or market share, do these audio equivalents actually have the right to be considered as serious tools of the trade? Fostex recently launched its FR-2 LE, a baby brother to the bigger, rather more capable FR-2, to meet the low-price competition from Tascam’s HD-P2, Marantz’s PMD 660, Edirol’s RO9, Zoom’s H4 and interestingly, from video editing specialists Avid, the Microtrack 24/96. The Fostex FR2-LE (UK£339+VAT) is a twochannel device that records uncompressed BWF format .WAV’s at 44.1kHz/16, 44.1kHz/24, 48kHz/16, 48kHz/24, 88.2kHz/24, 96kHz/24; and compressed MP3 files at 192kbps. It’s a FAT 32 file arrangement, with maximum file size menu selected between 2Gb or 4Gb, with a total recording time dependent on the Type 2 CompactFlash card fitted and the sample rate chosen: but typically, a 1Gb card will record between 96 minutes at 44.1kHz/16 and 30 minutes at 96kHz/24; a whopping 670 minutes is achieved in 192kbps MP3. The neat Combo XLR/¼-inch jack inputs on the left side of the machine enable mic and line level inputs, with the -10 to +2dBV line inputs on the jacks offering a 10kOhm input impedance. The XLRs offer 6kOhm, a nominal input level between -50 and -10dBu and, encouragingly, 48V phantom power is available. The 34

mic amps are in fact surprisingly crisp, powering my Sennheiser 416 and Pearl MS-8 CL microphones perfectly adequately. A 12V dual concentric DC input and a 3.5mm input socket for the remote transport controller complete this panel. Come to the front face though, and you’re under no misapprehension about the low cost of this device. Tiny, ungraduated, black rotary pots camouﬂage themselves perfectly against a black panel, standing defiantly proud and unprotected from unwitting adjustment. Above them, and the similarly designed Monitor pot, a rattling, fragile ﬂap ascends on beautiful foolish arms to reveal the card slot. Alongside, a 1970’s Dictaphone joke-scale shows mic peaks. Two keys taken straight from the Fostex parts bin hint at the family connection: these ‘Rec STBY’ and ‘Rec’ buttons sit alongside a large dual concentric LR level rotary control, again demonstrating Chameleon-like graduations. The right hand side face has a series B USB 2.0 connector that marries the device to a PC — there’s no Mac option yet — and it’s mounted above the phono monitor-out sockets. The push-and-hold power switch resolution

is above the 3.5mm headphone socket. A 300mWatt built-in speaker has its grille in the bottom face, and is disabled by the insertion of the headphones. This also, frustratingly, disables the monitor phonos so the opportunity to feed another device while listening on headphones is lost. The top face is a busy office, housing the internal left and right microphones and carrying the transport controls Play, Stop, Fast Forward and Rewind, as well as the menu soft-keys for machine set-up and file handling. A cramped but easily readable backlit LCD display carries almost all the information needed: File number; a large Absolute Time/Programme Time/Real Time display; a transport-state symbol: square for stop, circle for record, arrow for play, double arrow for REW or FWD; four set-up ﬂags for ALC: on/off, HPF: on/off, P48: on/off, Source: internal mic highgain/internal mic low-gain/ connectors; file type of the recording; a battery bargraph; the real-time clock and date and the more useable 8-segment horizontal level meters. Above the meters are the current recording file name and the recording time remaining on the card. So, having used the device for stereo wild tracks and podcast interviews, would I buy an FR2-LE? Well try and prise this one out of my ﬂightcase, if you can. Oh alright, maybe there are even more things that I ought to be sniffy about — the fact that there are no digital I-Os, no timecode capability and no MS decoding; but quite frankly that would be inappropriate to the point of simply being silly. The Fostex FR2-LE’s Fisher-Price build quality belies its inherent capability: 10 years ago, we location recordists would have been prepared to miss a month’s worth of coffee and donuts to have had the convenience of a wild-track and backup recorder like this. One that offered the convenience and speed of digital file handling, on cheap, robust media, with mic amps as quiet as these; and all at a price that can be recovered in just over a day’s work. A decade ago DAT was still very much alive on location, and any small back-up machine a recordist carried on to the set was likely to be either an unloved, power-hungry, consumer DAT device, bereft of any semblance of pro-controls or connectors, or a lossy MiniDisc format that never really fulfilled its huge initial promise, leaving the rather more worthy HiMD MiniDisc with too much ground to make up in recovering market-share. So instead here we are — spoilt for choice by these cheap and cheerful, feature-rich, small and light, highly capable, entry-level machines; of which the Fostex FR2-LE is, probably, the pick of the bunch. Just don’t drop it. ■

PROs

high spec for such a low price.

cONs

Questionable build quality and not the cheapest of these budget recorders, even though it feels like it when compared particularly to the Marantz and Tascam models.

contact FOsTeX, JaPaN: Website: www.fostex.com Uk, scV london: +44 208 418 1470

July/August 2007

review

Roll Music RMs755 claiming to squeeze life into your mix rather than out it, this compressor from a relatively unknown Us brand combines old and new appeals. GeORGe shIllING says it’s a super stereo compressor.

INNeaPOlIs-Based ROll MUsIc (which is a different company from Rolls Corp in Utah) claims that the RMS755 is designed to squeeze life into your mix, not out of it. The design takes a straightforward approach; it’s a fairly compact unit with a modest feature set, the emphasis being centred on audio quality, allowing a lower retail price compared with other specialist ‘boutique’ analogue units (UK£1100 + VAT). The brains behind the box belong to recording studio tinkerer Justin Ulysses Morse, a name that conjures up an imaginary figure, but it seems he is a real person! The unit’s styling is something of a mixture of old and new, and that also neatly sums up the philosophy. The front panel is etched with smart labelling and legending — though not always legible (depending on ambient lighting) at least it won’t rub off. The stylish matt grey knobs look like Manley refugees, while the sideways curved-front meter certainly harks back to the 60s. Build seems solid, the side-vented steel case is small and shallow — only about 13.5cm deep, but the unit still feels quite weighty. Around the back, things are conventional; IEC mains socket with fuseholder (voltage selection requiring lid removal), and Neutrik XLR sockets for inputs and outputs, with clear printed legending — easier to read than the front panel etching. On the front, the power switch is different from the website illustration, where it appears to be green neon; the review model’s is a conventional black with white legended rocker. But in compensation… [reviewer adopts Prince-style vocals…] ‘Wow!’ The gorgeous retro-style meter glows purple from its backlight! Gorgeous! Hang on a minute, wasn’t that little purple genius fellah also from Minneapolis? Must be something in the water…(That’ll be from the purple rain. Ed) 36

The Super Stereo is designed primarily as a mix bus compressor — Morse set to work on it when the original commissioning customer of the now wellestablished Folcrom summing mixer requested a mix compressor design. When so many mix engineers are summing ‘outside the box’, slapping on an analogue mix compressor is an opportunity not to be missed. It seems the customer wanted something of the SSL bus mixer cohesion without the clichéd gluey sound of that particular design, and upon closer inspection, the controls are broadly similar, and the unit apparently uses the same VCA. Ratio, Attack and Release are switched knobs, while Threshold and make-up Gain are continuous pots that both feel loose and undamped; there’s a little play, but nothing to worry about. The Ratio selector features four settings: 1.5:1, 2:1, 4:1 and 10:1, and these adequately cover all eventualities. Interestingly, changing this setting automatically changes the Threshold, so comparing Ratios is more meaningful as the total gain reduction remains roughly similar. Hence the uncalibrated Threshold knob. The Gain make-up has an indicated zero position and ranges usefully from -14dB to +20dB. Attack features 10 positions from a super-fast 0.05mS to a leisurely 50mS, this allows for a wide tonal variation and is where the unit demonstrates its ﬂexibility. Release similarly features 10 settings from 0.1 to 2Sec. Fast settings sound really exciting, while the slower settings can hide the effects of compression to some degree. In addition to the fixed Release times, there is a slightly misleadingly-named mode activated on a pushbutton. The legend says ‘Dual’, and I assumed this meant dual-channel as opposed to stereo-linked, but that is not the case. It means dual-release, and is similar in some respects to the workings of an LA-2A. It’s a kind of auto-release mode where fast transients release more quickly than resolution

sustained high level compression. But here, the mode is not entirely independent of the Release setting, so a great degree of variance is possible. Morse implies that he didn’t want to insult audio professionals with a completely automatic setting, and the resulting control therefore results in 20 different possible Release settings. One particularly notable feature is the sidechain high-pass filter. Preset at 150Hz, this siphons off the low frequencies from the compression control circuitry, preventing pumping of the overall mix level due to such things as prominent bass drums. I love this feature, it allows greater overall compression without making things sound daft. A similar function appears on the more expensive and sophisticated API 2500, and forgotten cheapie the MindPrint T-Comp — on all these devices this feature is a winner. It sounds absolutely cooking on the Roll. Although the design is loosely based on the SSL, with all the additional work that Morse has put into designing the side-chain circuitry, this sounds nothing like other SSL derivatives, which seem rather unsubtle by comparison. The refined yet powerful Roll has a more open sound, it’s a little richer, less rubbery and certainly more exciting. Think Drawmer 1968 (Mercenary) or even API 2500. The top and middle jump out and, particularly in Dual mode, the low-end is solid. The claimed figures boast terrific sonic performance with a frequency response of 2Hz to 150kHz, due to the short signal path that Morse describes as ‘benign’. That suggests ‘unexciting’ so let’s say ‘neutral’ instead. In a short-term review situation, I tend to transplant the RMS755 across existing mixes, and this yields excellent results. The ﬂexibility of settings means you’ll easily make it work. But the real joy is building a mix into the compressor and tweaking it as the mix takes shape. The Super Stereo can be refined or exciting, or both. But with the Filter and Dual buttons pressed, it becomes truly Super-Duper, adding a refreshing glow to any mix. The balance of features vs price is spot-on, and the RMS755 gives the professional mixer everything they need in a great mix bus compressor. ■

PROs

Meaty, juicy compression; sidechain high-pass filter; adjustable programmedependent Release time mode; hardwire bypass; fabulous meter backlight!

cONs

None

eXTRas

The RMs216 Folcrum is a passive mixer intended for analogue summing of multichannel digital mixes. each of its 16 input channels has a balanced analogue connection (on 8-channel dB25 connectors) and a pair of pushbutton switches to assign the channel to the left and/or Right output or neither. It uses no active circuitry and provides no gain or level controls.

The output of the Folcrom is on a stereo pair of balanced, 150-ohm signals on XlRs that require approximately 30-40dB of make-up gain.

contact ROll MUsIc, Usa Website: www.rollmusic.com Uk, kMR: +44 208 445 2446

July/August 2007

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review

audient centro as consoles have been replaced by daWs it’s their master sections that have been missed most. ROB JaMes takes a journey to the centre of his studio’s monitoring environment.

T Is OBVIOUs that the workstation is now invading many traditional recording territories and as audio professionals become more adventurous in their DAW activities so the need for a new breed of peripherals has become more urgent. Now along comes the Centro with the aim of providing DAW recordists with the facilities they would find in the centre section of a ‘conventional’ console. Audient is well placed to attempt this feat since it already has an established analogue console, the ASP 8024, and a successful surround monitor controller in the ASP 510. Centro is a two-box device. All the audio connections and power can be found on the 2U rack unit along with +/-12dB trims for the three stereo analogue inputs, the single D-A convertor, Record Out and Foldback Mix. The trims become active when the associated Uncal buttons are lit. Two further buttons allow for selecting the Rec output between the Record Input or the output of the Source selector and determining whether selecting Mono results in Left only or both Left and Right. A small Screw trimmer to adjust the gain of the second Talkback Mic Input completes the panel. On the rear of the neat, low profile remote there is just a 9-pin D-Sub male socket for the mothership connection, a phones jack and two buttons that

determine whether the Alt 2 Output is to be sent to a Sub and if it is to be Mono. Audient supplies a 3m cable but, even in my modestly proportioned studio, this is not really long enough by the time you’ve routed it out of the back of the rack to the operating position. The remote is small but beautifully formed with a curvaceous brushed panel, clear legends and some of the nicest sculpted alloy knobs I’ve seen in a long time. All the buttons are small and oval, positive in action and internally illuminated. Operationally, Audient has followed its earlier designs in that there are three possible button modes. Press is the most commonly used, just a quick press and release, as you would expect. Press and Hold is self-explanatory. This has two uses, first to access set-up functions and second there are times when you hold the button down while you do something else. For example, a quick press on Talkback toggles it on and off while press and hold opens the Talkback only while the button is held down. Double Tap, two presses in quick succession, is used for hiding and recalling Source Selection groups. The remote control surface is divided into

It’s socket science

The rear panel is a busy place. Beginning upper left with the Remote link d-sub 9-pin socket, next up is a ¼-inch jack to connect an extra Talkback switch. The six digital inputs comprise three XlRs for aes-eBU stereo pairs at up to 192khz 24-bit, two coax sPdIF and one TOslink optical. eight more XlRs deal with stereo Record Input, Foldback Mix Input, Mix Input and stereo Input 1. completing the top row are stereo Inputs 2 and 3 on pairs of phonos. Underneath, the row starts with Iec mains and, unusually, a 230V/115V power selector. The rest of the row is XlR: stereo pairs for Main speaker output, alternate speaker 1 Output, alternate speaker 2 Output, Record Output, FoldBack Mix Through, cue 1 Output, cue 2 Output and a final, single Talkback Mic XlR.

functional areas. Thus, on the left the first column of six buttons determines which of the digital inputs is routed to the D-A convertor for monitoring. The following column selects the analogue sources and the next the Record and Foldback outputs (both with a mono option). Then comes the Cue section with send level pots for each of the two Cue feeds. Cue 1 has a button to change its source from Record Out to Source Select Out and Cue 2 has a button to select between Foldback Out and Source Select Out. A further button allows Cue 1 to be routed to Cue 2 and each Cue feed has a Listen button to enable the Cue mix to be checked on the Control room monitors or headphones. The Monitors section has level pots for Alt outputs 1 and 2 and Phones and the main Volume control. There are buttons for Dim, Mute, Left and Right individual Mute, Invert Left phase and Mono with a column of Output select buttons for Main, Alt 1, Alt 2 and headphones plus two indicator LEDs reﬂecting the state of the Alt 2 mode buttons on the rear panel, Mono and Sub. The last section is dedicated to Talkback with a Gain pot, microphone and the Talkback button. Dim is invoked along with Talkback to help prevent howl round. Dim level is set by pressing and holding the Dim key until it ﬂashes and then setting the required level with the main volume knob; another press stores the level setting. There is a considerable difference between intuitive and easily learned. To be described as truly intuitive a device should be operable without recourse to the manual. Centro can sum sources for monitoring and perhaps the least intuitive aspect of it is the manner in which source selection groups are constructed and recalled. To create groups you have to press and hold a source select button then press a second or subsequent button to add a source to the monitor mix. To listen to another individual source you have to double-tap its key. Then, if you want to listen to the group you created you have to double-tap one of its members, a single press just activates that source. It is simpler than the description sounds and in everyday use will be rapidly learned. The same applies to the method of setting the output gain to suit amplifier sensitivity. Although everyone will have their own idea of what should be found in a desk centre section the (£995+VAT) Centro covers a lot of the bases. Desk space is always at a premium and Audient has managed to provide a lot of functionality within a very small footprint without the surface feeling crowded. You can route any digital source to the digital output but since there is no A-D convertor you cannot route an analogue source to the digital output. The User Manual is written in a light, slightly jokey style, with a definite British accent. This style of writing can really help to enhance the immediate ‘feel good factor’ of a new piece of equipment, so full marks to Audient for this one. I’ve been using an Audient 510 as my monitor controller for some six years now, but I use it with a console. With the Centro, for most stereo applications, the console is rendered redundant. ■

PROs

Premium audio performance; good mix of features; very stylish.

cONs

Only one digital input at a time; no digital output from analogue sources; not totally intuitive but easy to learn.

contact aUdIeNT, Uk: Website: www.audient.co.uk

resolution

July/August 2007

Tchad Blake Tchad Blake explains to NIGEL JOPSON why he’s happy to have renounced analogue organics in favour of a modern-day Icon, how he persuaded Peter Gabriel to finish Up, and why Paul Simon’s vocal sounded better through an Indian PA system.

chad Blake has carved himself a reputation using unorthodox methods, his love of binaural recording and techniques involving effect pedals, Asian transducers and home-made mechanical filters has been brought to bear on artists as diverse as Phish, Gomez, Cibo Matto and Travis. Blake started his career assisting at legendary Wally Heider Recording in Hollywood, then as engineer at Sunset Sound Factory, where he met musician/ producer Mitchell Froom while recording Crowded House’s debut album. The two formed a fruitful production partnership lasting several years, working on albums for bands such as The Pretenders, Los Lobos and T-Bone Burnett. Their first big hit was Los Lobos’ La Bamba, the duo also had long associations with Richard Thompson and Suzanne Vega. Blake recorded several albums with Tom Waits, and did memorable work with Soul Coughing, Sheryl Crow and Ron Sexsmith. Tchad moved to the UK six years ago, where his first major gig was mixing Peter Gabriel’s album Up. Becoming something of a regular at Gabriel’s Real World studios, Blake mixed albums for the Dandy Warhols, Sia Fuller and Paul Simon, while still finding time to produce for the likes of Tracy Chapman and Bonnie Raitt. Tchad’s love of adventurous aural tricks and the use of them on mainstream records may have kept his reputation left of centre, but also means he’s name checked and actively sought-out by young musicians today. In the 40

true spirit of first principles, he’s recently forsaken much of the analogue gear he is famous for using, and has installed a Digidesign Icon D-Control at his own Mongrel Music studio.

Some might think of you as the last mixer who would work completely in the box — but here you are now, not just ITB but with the biggest box of all. Although I had seen and liked the Icon, I thought: ‘I can’t go that route, I’ve got to get some sort of analogue.’ But when I couldn’t get a quick response from the manufacturer I was originally thinking of, I gave Digidesign a call. They were so good; I’m very impressed with their customer support, they just hooked me that way. Then when I actually sat down with the Icon, I was pretty blown away with what it could do. Was it quite a learning curve setting up the D-Control for your own style of working? I’m still in the middle of that curve. I did it a little wrong really, because within a week of the desk coming into my room I had to start working on a project I had booked. I just got the basics and started using it in a very rudimentary way. Every week I get the book out and learn something new, so now I can do just about everything I need to with the Icon — although I’m sure there are easier ways, I’m learning them as I go. resolution

Are there workflow advantages to keeping a production entirely within the digital domain? Many artists aren’t so willing to let go as they used to be. Before Pro Tools you’d record, overdub and then combine tracks as you went along. No going back. Now I’m finding a lot of bands won’t often commit, and when you do commit you paint yourself into a corner because a month later they’ll say: ‘Can we separate it all? We’d like that bit we wanted down before louder now!’ With that in mind, having everything in-the-box where it literally takes about 30 seconds to call back your mix — that’s really freeing me up. A worksurface is such a blank canvas, have you set up some templates to provide starting points? I set my session up as an inline desk which has an EQ and compressor on every channel, my go-to EQ is the URS A series. I did a shoot out with my vintage hardware API 550As: I could hear some difference if I switched between them on a soloed vocal, but I couldn’t tell you which I preferred, and in the track I couldn’t tell which was which. Maybe if I spent a long time comparing I could have heard it — but if you have to A-B that much does it matter? Right now I’m using the Massey MT-4 compressor plug-in, it’s a very simple compressor that I put on almost everything. Which plug-in controls do you have assigned to the channel strip encoders? With the URS, the EQ comes up across two pages, so I just have to page up or down one press either way to get to all the frequency bands. I do my panning and EQ on the Icon channels, and then I usually put compression over to the centre section encoders, I haven’t learned to do compression when the controls are assigned to the channel strip yet, that wigs out my brain a little! July/August 2007

craft engineer] and I went through the songs, quickly listening to tracks to decide what we should use. There were over a hundred tracks on each of his songs, and we had to get it down into the seventies. Once the mixing started Peter would listen and was very positive on the direction, but clearing out the arrangements was giving him more ideas — so he would come back the next day with several new tracks to add in! That was something we went head to head on a little bit. We finally whittled stuff down, perhaps not as much as I had, but it was sounding like a great record.

Did it do your career good, or don’t you look at it like that? It was good for me because I learned a lot doing the record — and it was a joy because I’m one of those people whose temperature goes up around Peter, I’ve been listening to him since Nursery Cryme and I went to many early Genesis concerts in the ’70s. Sitting in front of big loudspeakers working on that voice was really something for me, and I think he’s an amazing man. That was the big payoff for me. As for my career, I don’t know. How did the noted perfectionist Paul Simon react to the distorted sounds you added on the Surprise album? He was great. As a kid I loved all the Simon and Garfunkel records but, as a solo artist I was never drawn in mainly because of the sonics. It’s the sounds that attract me first to an artist, if the lyrics are great it’s icing on the cake. But in meeting Paul and talking to him, I became totally enamoured with the man. He’s amazing, one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. When I first heard the songs, I thought the music needed to be roughed up a bit — he and his engineer agreed and both were very open to letting me try things.

Do you feel you’re losing anything sonically by doing all the summing in software? About five years ago, with a pre-HD Pro Tools rig, I remember a big difference in hearing the mix brought up through an analogue desk — no A-Bing needed — there it was, sounding deep again. Later on I did some tests with exactly the same mix running directly out the box and through a summing amp. It wasn’t as dramatic a difference, but the summing amp definitely had something going on that in-the-box didn’t. When I started working at Real World and doing more stuff in Pro Tools, with the new HD rigs, with delay compensation, and especially the new wave of plugins that started appearing about two years ago, I just thought I was getting the results I wanted without going through a desk. Whatever it was that changed digitally during that period was a big leap forward for me. Your main monitors at Mongrel Music are Linn 328As, what persuaded you to make that choice? I didn’t ask for them, they were sent to Real World studio for evaluation. When I first heard them I remember thinking: ‘I feel like I’m in a hospital or something.’ They seemed incredibly clinical sounding and I didn’t really know what to think of them. Loudspeakers are always a struggle for me, I’ve never found a pair where I thought, ‘that’s it, there’s nothing else that’s going to get me off.’ You have two or three systems, they sound OK, you can go between them 42

all and make a decision. But with the Linns, after a few days I started warming to them and by the end of the week (when they were going back) I started to think I’d miss them. I spent a good month trying to convince Linn to sell at a discount, but in the end I had to bite the bullet and pay full price, but I’ve never looked back.

Has it become something of a necessity these days for producers to build their own fully equipped facility? Yes, I think so. My only regret is that I didn’t do it earlier. The kind of music I really love isn’t getting signed to majors anymore, so budgets are very low. People like Los Lobos and Chrissy Hynde — Tom Waits — when I was working with him, was doing a licensing thing and funding the recordings himself. These are great artists who aren’t budgeted to make records. With the last Los Lobos record, all the money went to studio cost, if I’d had my place up and running it wouldn’t have hurt so much! And with the way people want mixes redone nowadays it also makes sense. I’ll get a call a month after I’ve finished a mix saying: ‘By the way, we’ve just done a new background vocal part, can you snap that in?’ How did you ﬁnd the experience of mixing Peter Gabriel’s Up, which had already been in production for ﬁve years when you joined the project? It started out very well, Peter, Dicky [Gabriel’s resolution

It’s very nicely judged, because you didn’t put the whole track through your Indian PA system or anything weird... Well I did have his entire vocal through the Indian PA at one point…he said he just couldn’t go there — but he didn’t mind if it was only on one verse — so I pared it back for him. He was right, it was a bit much for the tune, and it worked very well just coming in on the second verse. One thing I notice is that the vocal always stands in a good place in your mixes. Do you deliberately make space in a track for your vocals by EQ on other instruments? I rarely listen to a song without the vocal in. I’ve seen people do that, they’ll get all the instruments sounding great and then try and fit the vocal in, or I’ve seen people bring up a guitar and a vocal and start from there. I rarely listen to a track without the vocal, it’s got to be there because that’s what you’re framing in pop music. It’s important to make it sound like it’s commanding the track, but not making the track wimpy: I don’t like vocals too loud, where the band is blasting away, but they sound like they’re on the next block. It’s a real important relationship. You’re reputed to be a binaural recording enthusiast, what equipment do you use for that? At Wally Heider’s I just clipped two mics to some headphones, after a few months I figured out I could fit some little mics in my ears and record onto a Nagra. It works really well, only the frequency response in July/August 2007

craft your ears lacks low end, so you need some post-EQ, whereas with the Neumann head I’ve got now it generally sounds good just as it is.

How is the KU100 outdoors, isn’t it a bit dodgy in wind? You need to find yourself a thatched hut that you can go into or a fence that you can stand behind if it’s windy. But I have taken it in the field a couple of times and it worked beautifully. So what did your ﬁeld recording subjects think of the Neumann? One artist from Sierra Leone, S E Rogie, hadn’t seen me put it in front of him, so when he looked up he really screamed out, which gave me a bit of a fright! When I asked him what was wrong he gave a big belly laugh and said: ‘Why, that’s Gongalee — a very friendly spirit from my village.’ Were these recordings released on the Real World Records imprint? Peter Gabriel created a label ‘Document’ to put the field recordings on. Only one release came out because it’s a hard sell and label budgets have dried up a bit, that record was called Document Zimbabwe. I’ve also recorded The Master Musicians of Jajouka with the Neumann head at Real World and an album for Madagascan vali player, Justin Vali. I don’t do much field recording now, but the KU100 is always my kit overhead, I haven’t used a conventional overhead pair in about 15 years.

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Did you use the Neumann head when you recorded The Bad Plus? The Bad Plus is the head for the top kit, and there’s also a binaural head in the piano. The piano was miked very strangely because their drums had such an aggressive sound, and after I beefed up the double bass with a touch of Sans Amp, the piano sounded a bit twee. It’s not something I would recommend, but it seemed to work in this context: it was the head towards the back plus three C451s up by the hammers. How did those albums with Chicago’s singularsounding nu-jazz trio come your way? The drummer Dave King is also a rock drummer with a couple of other bands, and he told his two band mates I was the guy to do the record. The budget was quite low, but they were coming to the UK every year to play festivals, and we were able to work it out for three years running. We had about six days worth of time where they could come to Real World to record. The first album sold pretty well, so the budget kept going up a little and by the third album we actually had 10 days in the studio. Which aspect of your past work is encouraging younger bands to seek you out? If you go by some of the projects that are coming to me these days: I don’t know! I’m getting requests to mix singles…and I have to ask: ‘what brings you to me? Are you OK with distorting the kick drum, and pulling some instruments out?’ I can’t say my sound ever became a big thing in the pop world. I’ve always liked crunchy sounds next to pristine sounds. I don’t like an all garage band sounding record, and I don’t like an all clean sounding one. I like both living together. A really great sounding kit with a distorted vocal sounds good to me…or vice-versa. Hip-hop does that in a big way crunching things up, distorting drums and the like. I think that helped break some ground for me to do it. ■ July/August 2007

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The Great escape Mercifully, the eurovision song contest comes but once a year… in helsinki NIGel JOPsON rolls up his sleeves and gets to grips with some slavic divas, and ponders the advantages of ﬂoating over fixed ... or nul points.

he eUROVIsION sONG Contest is one of the most watched non-sporting events in the world, with more than 300 million viewers tuning in.    Book  of   With an entry in the Guinness Records as the

worst Eurovision contestant ever, having scored ‘nul points’ more often than any other nation, the chances of Finland ever hosting the event seemed a bit thin.   year, the 50th anniversary of the contest, But last

costumed metal band Lordi became the first Finnish act to win, their landslide victory breaking another record as they chalked up a massive 292 points. Lordi became instant national heroes, and when the call went out for volunteers to help at the Helsinki event nearly 100,000 patriotic Fins applied. The recent expansion of the EU has imbued the contest with a new sense of vitality, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Montenegro and Serbia all made their debuts this year, and the landmark 42 countries participating necessitated an additional semi-final show. Truckloads of technology — over 100,000kg of equipment — were brought into Helsinki, and more than 250 technicians worked on preparations for the event. Matti Helkamaa of host broadcaster YLE was in overall charge of audio at the show. Bearing in mind that winning can be something of a poisoned chalice financially — RTÉ almost ended up bankrupt after staging four contests, and five countries have declined to host after winning — I asked him if he had experienced mixed feelings when the surprise win for Lordi was announced in 2006. ‘There was just a very brief discussion about whether we could handle this, that just took a few hours, then the general manager of our company was able to confirm that we could take care of it,’ he told me confidently. ‘There is also a different kind of co-operation, there are some other types of arrangements where you don’t part with money, I can’t give the full detail but there are many different levels within this sort of project.’ Several companies were asked to tender for the job of supplying the audio infrastructure, Audio Broadcast Services (the rental arm of German console manufacturer Lawo) got the gig. ‘In my audio part the technical support and the hardware infrastructure from Lawo is very important,’ confirmed Matti, ‘they were an obvious choice because we have several

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Lawo consoles already at YLE, if we speak about the hardware, then we have some kind of dream team working here. If I had been in an investment situation, I would not have made any other choices: what I wanted was exactly what I got. We have some very trusted long-term partners like Lawo and Sennheiser who really know the way we are thinking.’ Signal distribution was handled by a Lawo Nova73 HD system. A general strategy of duplicated resources maintained signal continuity in the event of failure on the evening. The thousands of tie lines were connected by fibre, with just a couple of shoestring MADI digital cables running into the venue from the main stagebox. The system had been intelligently wired by ABS to keep analogue runs short: the stageboxes for audience mics, for example, were located in the ceiling void of the Hartwall Areena, with a 300metre fibre uplink keeping mic cables to a minimum.

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On stage each artist had their own dedicated radio microphone, with 64 radio channels in use. After the microphone, there was an active splitter, with two feeds going to FOH and two to different stageboxes. Post-microphone, all audio had redundant capacity, with doubled frames and I-O units, and doubled signal paths with automatic switch-over from master cards. The music control room was located within the building, equipped with Lawo’s newest mc290 console. The 5.1 monitoring used Genelec’s DSP 8250A series and a 7271A sub, and the mix engineers reported the Genelec AutoCal self calibration had worked very well (in what looked to be a rather low-end unfriendly room). Although surround transmissions are still at an experimental stage in Finland, Matti told me the EBU mandate was for full 5.1 surround audio. ‘I am in discussions with management and we are still testing, but basically next year there are likely to be regular transmissions in 5.1 format in Finland. The level of knowledge and ability for audio designers is very good in Finland, our music guys are doing it already, they are recording everything in 5.1, and are very enthusiastic.’ There were 43 YLE engineers working on the show, it was explained to me that there were some very strict Eurovision rules concerning vocal levels and playback EQ which they had to adhere to. Despite wide variations in playback production quality, engineers had to find a one-size-fits-all compromise playback EQ setting for the show. It is also a rule that each country may have just one mixer snapshot, with no impromptu adjustments allowed. ‘It’s very hard to fit the vocals in with the base which someone else — not me — has made. That’s the hardest part!’ the YLE mixer at the helm of the mc290 confided. I was intrigued to see a large Pro Tools rig standing just behind the mix position: it had been hired in specially by the YLE music mixers to help out with just this problem. The secret weapon? A Waves Renaissance De-Esser specially adjusted for each singer’s microphone channel. Outside the venue the huge Prisma HD-1 OB truck handled the final mix, taking the 5.1 music and combining it with audio from the hall ambience mics, reaction audio from the performers’ Green Room, commentators and presenters mics, and adding jingles and audio from the video clips that punctuated the show. Two smaller OB vans from YLE, fitted with earlier generation Lawo mc80 and mc280 desks, were also connected to the Nova73 HD. These two operated in parallel to duplicate what was being done inside the HD-1 as a backup, and to mix the FM radio broadcast. The final output uplink was in a portacabin, where YLE engineers had a small Lawo zirkon surface for monitoring and metering; this was the final QC point with the operators having pre-programmed various macros to be executed in case of failure further back in the chain (for example to switch over to a radio mix, in case the 5.1 mix went down). The operators here also had access to over 600 outputs, so if another member of the team requested a particular microphone or line it could be patched from here. The double-expandable, 34-operator, 75-squaremetre Prisma HD-1 was quite a beast to behold. It had only done 8 jobs since being commissioned, and arrived fresh from covering a boxing bout in Russia. The 5.1 mixing room inside it has a 56-fader Lawo mc266, with an audio system capable of accepting 2,000 inputs and outputs, and 12 channels of video record and playback. ‘We looked for an integrated router for the audio system,’ explained Anders, who speced the truck, ‘we came down to three companies who could fulfil our brief. When we looked closer we found that the Lawo system was the most open, July/August 2007

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Matti

Mathias

where as a user you can define what it does for you. With the new floating point calculations, there is an amazing amount of headroom — something crazy like 380dB — you just have to be very careful when you hit an analogue output! We can mix 280-odd channels on the desk.’ Had this complexity been a problem for engineers accustomed to more conventional mixers? ‘We had a lot of thoughts about how the operators could visualise this, the trick is to build up templates for mixers, otherwise you have too many options! But once you have a production going, there is no set up time at all, you can be patched in instantly.’ I wondered if the tectonic plates of digital audio had somehow slid out from under the feet of those of us in music recording. For years it was a given that the sharpest state-of-the-art technology was to be found in music recording studios ... OB vans contained worthy but basic equipment built by specialist broadcast chaps. I stepped from HD-1 feeling that somehow a mantissa and exponent within a Germanmade console might have moved the goal posts slightly. Europe has a long and honourable history of public broadcasting, with many breakthroughs credited to the efforts of its back-room boffins — the BBC’s first ever public demonstration of digital recording in 1971 springs to mind. The European Broadcasting Union, an amazing federation of 74 broadcasters from 55 countries, has played an important role in the promotion of open standards, and the development and standardisation of systems used in radio and television: DAB and DVB, RDS and the digital interface standards for digital audio (EBU) and video (ITU-R). But times are changing, flagship public broadcasters are no longer arms of national governments, research departments have been closed, and public pennies now have to be budgeted and accounted for with a degree of rigour. At the same time, globalisation and real-time satellite broadcasting mean that large sporting and cultural events may be held in practically any corner of the world. Such events can no longer be hosted on a public-pride-at-any-cost basis, the extra infrastructure and — just as importantly — the technical skills, will increasingly have to be brought in from outside. This is where Lawo look to be ahead of the curve for a digital audio manufacturer with the formation of Audio Broadcast Services, a company set up to provide their products on a rental basis. ABS project manager Matthias Paha explained the strategy: ‘Lawo get a lot of requests for equipment to do shows like this. In the past, it was handled in an ad hoc manner. When the request came to do the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Philip [Lawo] asked me if I could see myself leading a rental company. My background before joining Lawo was as a live sound engineer, working for acts like Paul Young and Johnny Logan, so I feel at home in this business.’ ABS was founded in November 2005, and don’t only handle large projects. ‘Many OB vans often find they need additional equipment from time to time, 50% of our business is providing extra resources like DSP cards or extra consoles for single events.’ As we talked, news came in that ABS had won a large and prestigious contract to supply audio infrastructure in Beijing next year. As for the music: much of the intriguing diversity was eliminated in the semifinal by obvious diaspora voting — which has become a feature of the ESC since SMS votes replaced the jury — although perhaps it’s quite encouraging to see small Balkan states, recently so intent on murdering each other, all voting together. The final delivered a surfeit of pouting Slavic divas, with Serbia’s Marija Serifovic relegating tinfoil-wearing Ukranian transsexual Verka Serduchka to second place, leaving Russian Sugababes-clones Serebro in third. It’s easy to mock Eurovision from the confines of an Aeron parked in one of the caves from which our industry’s main output emanates ... but seeing the hordes of particularly happy-looking folk trooping to the arena, with their neatly furled flags and discretely folded banners ready for waving, I’m struck by the thought that hip tunes can perhaps be a little exclusive. The Song Contest gives ordinary Europeans the chance to let a few notes and a bit of a beat touch their lives, if only for a brief evening. Improbable moment? Massed Turkish flags waving madly to the beat as Israel performed at the semi-final. So which little flag was your correspondent waving from the aisle? Well ... having once-upon-a-time turned the dials for some British champions who assumed the name of a Champagne beverage ... my encounter in the lobby of the Hartwall Areena with the rather desperate-looking UK hopefuls Scooch encouraged discretion rather than national pride. I surreptitiously donned the blue and white colours of the host nation as I took my seat. ■ July/August 2007

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technology

Understanding cables They’re everywhere and you use them all the time but just how much do you know about your audio cable? sommer cable’s product manager Pascal MIGUeT gives a crash course in cabling.

O Be QUITe honest about it, when you first look at cables they all look the same. But if you take the time to look more closely at the construction, you will find that there are quite a few differences starting with the jacket mixture, the shielding, the type of insulation, and last but not least the inner conductor made of shiny copper. The installation business almost always requires the use of long cables, and that puts a lot of pressure on the pricing structure, which in turn affects the quality of the cable. PVC-granules and mixtures used in the installation sector are, for financial reasons, almost always diluted with chalk or quarry sand. If you place

this mixture underneath a microscope and examine it, you will immediately notice the rough surface. The disadvantage of this is that chemical products, like plasticisers, do not stay in the cable for very long. This means that the cable gets very porous and cannot stand up to cold temperatures. Sommer Cable uses a specially developed PVC-mixture that is free of chalk and is resistant to cold temperatures down to -30°C. The denser the copper braiding or shielding is, the better are the damping values and the better the insides of the cable are protected from electrical interference and mechanical inﬂuences. But the insulation should not be too fragile, because the edges on a bent braided

shield are as sharp as a knife, and that could adversely affect the inside of the cable. To avoid this Sommer Cable mostly uses double shielding in combination with an AL/PT-foil and metalised ﬂeece. A strongly foamed insulation made of PE provides good electrical values but unfortunately it is also sensitive to pressure, bending, and movement. A good compromise is the best solution for a mixture that provides excellent insulation and simultaneous robustness. Sommer uses a lacquered insulation made of PE and PP (polypropylene) for this purpose. Sommer only uses oxygen-free copper (OFC) with a 99.9999% degree of purity. It does not only have perfect transmission properties, but it is also very smooth, and that increases the number of bending cycles. Digital cables (110Ohm AES-EBU, DMX) can often be used for analogue purposes as well, but analogue cables above a certain length cannot be used as digital cables. However, the tolerance range for a digital cable is calculated very generously (+/-15%), which is the reason why microphone cables are often used as AES-EBU-cables. Sommer observes a tolerance range of +/-3%, which ensures fault-free transmission even

cable production

1. special temperature-resistant granules are used to manufacture the notchresistant s-PVc sleeve. coloured granules are mixed in with the white base granules, the granules melt down in the extruder, are ‘pressed’ by a special tool, and then sprayed onto the stranded wire pairs.

3. during extrusion and stranding several units monitor the tolerances and electrical values for the cable. The smallest deviation in tolerance causes an alarm to sound.

2. a basket stranding machine with up to 28 coils used for torsion-free stranding of the multipair sc-Quantum highﬂex cable. Torsion-free means that the cable looses its own bounce during the production process. The advantage is that such a cable can twist in any direction during application. Over time it will not ‘corkscrew’ or lead to knotting.

4. all cables are thoroughly checked and approved. Before a cable is suitable for marketing it is bent, pulled, and folded for months in machines developed for testing purposes. This usually takes a very long time and is why several units operate simultaneously. The photograph shows cable being made to suffer on a ‘bending change testing unit’ (accord. to Vde 0472/Part 603).

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technology over longer distances. For sophisticated installations only ‘genuine’ or certified digital cables should be used to protect the installer against claims for damages incurred due to transmission problems. For many years cables were only considered as ‘accessories’ and a means to an end, which is the reason why comparatively little is known about their inﬂuence within audio systems. On the other hand, this fact can play tricks with the user’s imagination and many unimportant facts may be overemphasised while important facts may be underestimated. In particular the use of oxygen-free copper is interpreted as a reason for true miracles in sound. At the same time all professionals know that there is no such thing as oxygen-free copper. As a raw material the copper is actually only oxygen-free until after the first pulling cycle. Once it is bent and moved (which already takes place with the first stranding procedure during cable production) the surface of the copper gets porous again and is thus prone to oxygen penetration. But it still makes sense to use oxygen-free copper: high quality copper litz is extremely smooth and can be stranded very tightly. This increases the bending cycles and a better conductivity is attained, which is what the user can ‘hear’ in the end. A non-concentric, oxygen-free copper litz makes no sense or does not offer any advantages when compared to a stranded copper litz with simple copper qualities. Sommer uses a high quality oxygen-free copper, Class 6 (99.9999% pure) and then treats the stranded wires with conductor smoothing in the form of a lacquer or a carbonised PVC (semiconductor) that protects the copper and improves conductivity. ■

contact sOMMeR caBle, GeRMaNY: Website: www.sommercable.com

anatomy of a cable — sc-source MkII highﬂex

1. super fine individual stranding (0.05 mm) made of oxygen free copper guarantees high ﬂexibility and hundreds of thousands of bending cycles. Tight concentric

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aluminised fleece, an al/PT-foil, or a ‘semiconductor’ (conductive PVc with carbon particles). This construction guarantees that even for tough applications there is always 100% optical shielding and that the cable is protected against interference.

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4. The soft PVc jacket is almost free of chalk and is not stretched with sand or other materials, so the cable does not ‘sweat out’ the softener in extreme temperatures.

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July/August 2007

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craft

In through the out daW It’s a tall order but it can be done — taking a laptop running logic Pro and placing it at the heart of your live sound and recording it all too. PaUl GOOdYeaR has done it and discusses the practicalities and the lot of the ‘performance engineer’.

Y aUdIO caReeR started as a guitarist in a punk band, getting spat on as a teenager in the late 1970s. I played in pubs, clubs, prisons and air bases in my twenties. I moved to Germany in the mid 1980s, became an advertising postproduction and jingle engineer, then a Fairlight MFX-3 operator, a sound-designer and a studio manager in the 1990s. In 2003, I was back on stage demonstrating Apple’s Garageband and LogicPro to guitar players all over Europe. I’m not rich and famous but at least I don’t get spat at anymore. During this time I’ve seen the portable studio develop from the simple cassette into the DAW and there seems to be nothing you can’t do with them now. Currently, I play regularly in two bands and both have several things in common: no sound man, a naff sounding mixing desk, a mixture of old and new PA equipment and a good selection of industry standard microphones. We needed a better desk, some EQs for FOH and monitors and I wasn’t happy with the ‘set and leave the desk’ routine at gigs and why it all had to sound so rough, so low-tech. 50

To cut a long story short, I thought I might try using a DAW to solve our live sound and productivity requirements. I wanted to improve the FOH and ﬂoor monitor performance at gigs and rehearsals using LogicPro’s software mixer DSP, optimise the time and effort spent in rehearsals and record everything unobtrusively and, in doing so, turn recording into a more natural and uninhibited process and ultimately produce our own audio content for sale at gigs. It’s an ambitious list and one that really needs an operator too. I was fortunate to have my good friend Jörg Helbig, a live music fan and LogicPro beginner, who caught on enthusiastically to my idea and offered to watch over things, as long as I did the sound check first. We were looking to create a more efficient sonic environment, bringing ﬂexibility and some recallability into the live equation. We envisaged a tight little rack, a FireWire cable and my trusty Macbook Pro, plus we had two bands to experiment on. What led me up to this? Computer processing power and reliability. I’ve been a Mac user for more than 10 years and I adore my Macbook Pro. While working resolution

for Apple and presenting the ‘Guitarist and the Mac’ events across Europe, I’ve had the pleasure of using the newest Apple computers and even a Mac-mini is a mighty powerful tool. Yes, I’ve had to play around the ‘spinning ball of patience’ too but so far using Mac OS X, I have never had to re-boot an Apple computer in front of an audience — Scout’s honour. Then there’s the DAW software. To me, it seemed obvious to replace the feeble analogue console with LogicPro, even if no-one else around me could understand how. I didn’t need click tracks nor did I need to use virtual instruments and amplifiers. No, what I wanted primarily was a total recall digital mixing desk, with recording in the background for later appraisal and mixing. In addition to the plethora of sequencer functions, LogicPro offers virtually infinite I-O possibilities with full dynamics, EQs with reverb and effects anywhere in the virtual signal chain so, as I used to say during my Apple presentations, ‘the last boundaries are in your head.’ Market trends say it’s the age of the download, MySpace is the new A&R, live music is ‘in’. I felt encouraged by the articles in these hallowed pages, about Marillion with their autonomous production, recording, release and sale of live content. I was struck by the underlying sense of it all and thought ‘Hey, I could try something like that too,’ but on a much smaller scale of course. Finally, there’s audio hardware development. Bringing 24 inputs over FireWire into a laptop simply wasn’t possible to do so cheaply until a short time ago. After contacting Synthax Audio AG near Munich, they generously agreed to support our project with an RME Fireface 800 and two Octamic-D 8-channel mic preamps. With that, I had a system consisting of 20 XLR mic inputs plus eight ¼-inch jack balanced inputs and eight ¼-inch jack balanced outputs — and all that over one FireWire 400 cable. OK, the slightly more difficult bit: the LogicPro Environment. Well, it’s not so difficult, it’s just easy to get confused in it — all those grayish, similar looking objects and one tiny little parameter window to alter what an object can do. It took me three days to get it together and no, you can’t just use input objects. In record, a Logic input object looses its ability to route signals other than to its own Audio object. So you have to create a load of Auxiliary objects, which derive their input signal from either input or bus objects, to act as your main mixer. Ultimately a combination of July/August 2007

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Input, Audio, Aux and Bus objects gave me all the functions of a total recall FOH and monitor mixer plus multitracking and (the best bit) with an additional stereo room mic I can record an authentic sounding live mix and sell it straight after the gig ‘Scha-wing...!’ Is it really that easy? Er... yup. Now, I know some of you are thinking ‘latency’, but just relax and take a deep breath. Yes, there is latency: 256 samples of it in LogicPro (probably less if I didn’t record everything though) but don’t forget, I’m talking primarily about the small pub/club situation where latency and loud, early reflections are actually the norm. Practically speaking, nobody has noticed it. I don’t want to sound like it’s not a problem, it’s just not a problem enough to make me stop. It’s bound to get better anyway and the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages, and especially the weight; compare a Macbook Pro and a 3-HE rack bag to the analogue equivalent in outboard racks and flightcases, signal splitting, etc., let alone the power consumption. So with the computer and software controlling the rehearsal and gig live sound, we simultaneously record around 20 tracks of audio to a 250Gb LaCie external drive attached to the USB-2 port. I suppose the next step will be to try FireWire 800 using the card bus slot, but I haven’t got that far yet. Computers and software are not infallible and there are the occasional core audio stoppages in LogicPro and, yes, it has occurred during a live show. But before you faint with shock, remember a short PA drop-out in a small venue does not mean dead silence — we just carry on playing while Jörg re-boots the LogicPro audio driver which takes 15-20 seconds. As you can see, an operator is a must. Anyway, I prefer to have a great sound and run the risk of an occasional hiccup than go back to the uninspiring sound of a cheap desk. And at least one pleasant side effect is that punters regularly come up to compliment on the sound, so we must be doing something right. At gigs, the mix position can be squeezed into the tightest of places, even on your lap. Tuning the PA and monitors to the room is easy with the LogicPro Channel EQ, which possesses a useful analyser function allowing you to accurately zone-in on those problematic feedback spikes. The RME interfaces deliver clean, clear, business-like audio and an SM58 sounds just like it should. As you would expect, some LogicPro compression here and there (well, just about everywhere to be honest) makes a huge difference. The RME outputs go straight to the two power amps for FOH and monitors (together with the very helpful Behringer feedback Destroyer — one day there’ll a feedback eliminator plug-in too. The noise floor is extremely low, no hums, hiss, buzzing or anything. Software level metering is a problem and LogicPro is no exception here, so I hook up an RTW 1120E peak meter to check levels more accurately. The Octamic-D input gain controls are a little over-sensitive — a small tweak makes for a lot July/August 2007

of gain change, but I believe they are working on to capturing relaxed and natural live performances (a that as we speak. Generally, we find it quite easy to recording holy grail to some). get a good balance between the room sound and the We’ve produced our own merchandise on a live instruments with LogicPro, even using the Apple shoestring and in our own time and, regardless track-pad (I expect the addition of a DAW controller of of recording location, it sounds very homogenous. your choice or just a simple block of MIDI faders could Making and selling an authentic live recording may ease things there and I do miss being able to see the not be everyone’s cup of tea but it certainly is possible, master fader at all times). it’s a good promo gimmick and a potentially lucrative We can record for hours very cheaply and having all one. And hey, if some of your audience wants it there the material centrally in LogicPro gives us tremendous and then, why not? production ﬂexibility. The guys can take MP3 files Out of five live engineers I’ve spoken to about home on their USB sticks for reference, I can practice this concept, only one of my singing and guitar parts at home, and Jörg could them could grasp the idea practice FOH mixing without us if necessary. I have fully. The others, having reworked ideas from jam sessions into songs as well little or no computer and as made full-scale recordings in the rehearsal room, software experience, done overdubs at home, and sent it all off to my good couldn’t follow it. If bands friend Mike ‘Spike’ Streefkerk to mix in Munich. The and artist are gearing final mixes sound great to me. their future investments But what about that bit in the middle: selling a live towards equipment for the recording straight after the gig? Technically speaking gig and producing their it’s dead easy — a combination of the FOH signal own content for sale, then and an external stereo room mic bussed together with studios and DAW operators some compression at various places along the way, need to take themselves recorded to a separate stereo track and ‘Hey presto’, and their know-how out instant merchandising and the punters love the to meet them, watch them authenticity of it. After a quick top and tail edit of the and understand their stereo file in LogicPro, the first autographed CD pops workﬂow better. There out of my Macbook Pro 20 minutes after the gig, each could even be a new type subsequent copy takes about 2 minutes. That’s it. It of audio job, let’s call it doesn’t just have to be on CD either; USB sticks and ‘performance engineer’; MP3 players are getting cheaper all the time, aren’t someone using all the soft they? But what about the mistakes? Well, that’s more and hardware tools as his a problem for a musician’s ego than for live music disposal to refine the sound during rehearsals and mix fans. As one German music fan once put it to me ‘It’s it creatively live. By the way, the audience would very the mistakes that let me know it’s for real. If I want much appreciate it too. perfection I can turn on the TV.’ May the Blues be with you. ■ Did I achieve my goals? Well, yes. Using DAW software EQs it is possible to get a good sound out of just about any PA, the routing and dynamics are superior to the large majority of analogue desks out there, not to mention all the effects, delays and reverb at your disposal and the recording functions. The overview is extremely limited compared to a big desk but just imagine what a DAW application and a roadworthy controller designed for live work could do. It is possible to create a familiar sonic environment and record successfully in the rehearsal room and at gigs but you have to be disciplined in how you work. You can end up with hours of recordings that no-one has time to listen to, for example. But even the most stubborn of musical egos can learn very quickly after listening back to their performance. It is a cheap way to preproduce THE ART OF MICROPHONES while you play and helps get www. brauner-microphones. com rid of your recording nerves at the same time. We almost Global Distribution: S.E.A. Distribution & Consulting, Germany · www.sea-distribution.com entirely forget the recording aspect now, opening the way

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an album without eQ sound engineer deNNIs GRell describes the work ﬂow and thinking behind a project he recently completed and how the decision to do the whole project without eQ has led him to a new way of working.

N MaRch 2007 I produced the new Wagner & to use no EQ on the project; just to work with the Falkenhahn album Huit as one of my publishingvolume ratios between the individual sounds. You projects at Peermusic. We booked Peermusiccan call it an old-fashioned approach but I thought studio in Hamburg for exactly one week to record it was the right choice for a project like this. All EQs the two guitarists who gave their all ‘unplugged’ on — especially those in recording desks — have a type eight songs. There was no Pro Tools editing and no of sound-branding and that was exactly what we Copy-Paste, just pure and simple music. For me it didn’t want. We had an Amek Rembrandt, which is a was the fiResolution rst time I’d recorded an album with such 17:36 a very intuitive Q212dn 216x 65 ad 21/6/07 Page 1 desk, but we still didn’t want to colour tight sound concept behind it. I’d also had the idea the sound.

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craft It was clear to me that to create a super-natural picture of the guitar duo the microphone positions would play the most important role in the production. I wanted the listeners to be able to close their eyes and feel as though they were sitting in the middle of it. The guitarists wouldn’t be overdubbed and in the studio they needed to have the feeling that they were playing live. Apart from that the sound of the two musicians had to differ greatly on the LP to show their individual character. To achieve this I built two ‘workstations’ opposite each other and discovered that this is the way that the two of them actually rehearse so they found themselves in a normal situation and therefore could work comfortably. When choosing the microphones, I had the opportunity to draw from a huge mic-pool and I chose a Neumann U47fet for them both. I know this mic well and I’ve used it a lot for various instruments. For Daniel, who can be heard only on the left-pan-side of the album, I used two further Neumann KM184s in X/Y to record the handling noise. Guitarist Eric was given two Beyerdynamic MC530s in X/Y for the same purpose. The MC530 with its fine resolution underlined Eric’s softer playing style. For room microphones we took two Neumann U87s in omni and I needed almost a whole day to find the optimum position for each of the microphones as even changing the position of the mic by a few centimetres changed the sound dramatically. The big recording studio at Peermusic has a relatively neutral but short reverb and I wanted to catch this imitate atmosphere on the album. On one of the songs we had to record cajon and bongos and for this I used a U87, a PM750 and a SM57. I approached the Cajon as a little drum kit and choose the microphones accordingly. I own two PM750s and I’m very happy with them and they are frequently my first choice for vocals, snares and percussion. I experimented with distances but at this stage of the process I was relying on my instinct most of the time. Recording situations and the sound that needs to be produced is different in every job and although rules of thumb help, you have to be able to rely on your ears. In this respect I think I am a bit different to other engineers of my age because I

July/August 2007

had the opportunity early on in my career to work independently in big studios and to gather experience there. I’ve always found ‘tone’ interesting. At the end of the session we recorded vocals for two songs using a tube U47 and a week after we had started we were finished and all of us felt that it had gone really well. Then I had to mix the album and I did this alone as in Germany assistant mixers are really an exception. At the mix our original sound concept really started to work for me and as we listened through we decided to brighten some parts up and make other parts warmer. Again, I used no EQ to achieve this and only changed the relative track volumes to control the frequencies. What started off as just an idea has developed into a new way of recording and mixing for me that sounds super-natural. In our modern music world that is very unusual. ■

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meet your maker What is special about Midas products? Midas has a history of making products that people aspire to use. This is because the consoles have a heart and soul that come from years of experience and a pragmatic approach to every aspect of the design: normal conventions are tolerated but are never allowed to dominate decisions. All decisions are taken with a view to application and what we think is best for a particular situation; most importantly, what sounds best. For example: many of our competitors spend inordinate amounts of time chasing after one more decimal place in a distortion figure or trying to improve mic EIN figures without realising the true impact of what they are doing. At Midas the approach is more practical. What can I hear? Can I hear the extra decimal place in the distortion figure? No. That does not necessarily mean that the better distortion figure is a bad thing. It just means that the customer may not actually receive any audible benefit (and would probably rather not pay any more in order to have it). So if there is a trade-off in performance where better distortion impacts on something else, typically noise in analogue consoles (which we can all hear), then the trade off will be set to reduce noise at the expense of distortion. Equivalent Input Noise is another example of a parameter that is often quoted but which is of little significance because it is always quoted at the console’s maximum gain — about the only place that it will never be used. We pay closer attention to 40dB which is a more typical setting, but more important than that, RF filtering and stability are our paramount concerns in the mic amp design because we can all hear radio break through or oscillations due to instability far more then an extra dB or so of Johnson noise. This approach permeates every aspect of the thinking and results in products that work for customers because by and large we get the things that matter right. This is helped by the fact that many of our staff have musical or sound engineering backgrounds, and we also invite comments/embrace criticism from customers as a means to learn,

alex cooper Midas’ director of console development talks to ZeNON schOePe about working environments, aes50, and things that matter and things that matter less.

leX cOOPeR’s eNTRY into pro audio came in 1979, when he realised that a life of rock ’n’ roll stardom did not await him. Having encountered Klark Teknik DN27 graphic equalisers while on the road with his band, and realising the company was based in his home town of Kidderminster, he approached them for a job. The move led to him becoming a leading designer of signal processing equipment and mixing consoles. Cooper built DN27s and many of KT’s early products while designing and building mixers and speakers for his own small PA company. By the early 80s he had risen to become head of the test department, and in 1985 was tasked with figuring out how to test the newly acquired Midas consoles. The development of the XL3 console in 1990 saw Cooper put in charge of building and debugging the first prototype, which also contained a few of his circuit designs. 54

When the company’s chief engineers — Mick Woodward, Terry Clark, Andrew Grayland and John Austin — left to form XTA, Cooper was put in charge of R&D, and after finishing a few existing projects went on to design the XL4, which has become the industry-standard live sound mixing console. He has also designed, or had a large input in, the KT DN800 stereo crossover, Midas XL250, Heritage 3000, 2000, B2000 and Verona consoles, Klark Teknik Square One Dynamic processor and the Midas XL8 sound and control surface. Alongside all this design activity, Cooper hasn’t quite relinquished his old dream, playing regularly in an R&B band and building guitar amps in his spare time. However, he has now packed up his PA business along with the notion of international fame, because, in his own words ‘I’m too old to be humping gear in and out of a Transit van these days.’ resolution

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meet your maker change and go forward. We even apply the same pragmatic approach to market research. Just because a customer is asking for something does not mean we automatically do exactly as he requests. First we question what the customer is trying to achieve. Once we have that we can think about solutions to their problem. Sometimes the best solution is not what was originally asked for.

What are the speciďŹ c ergonomic considerations essential in a live console? For a sound engineer a live sound console is his working environment. Just like an office or other work place, to promote efficient use the environment must look nice, be clean, uncluttered and yet have everything that is needed close to hand. So, on all our consoles we try and make the working experience a positive one. We try to make everything look nice and be functional, with no unwanted features to clutter or confuse. Style is minimal but not understated because it is important and plays a part in the overall experience. At a more practical level we try to segregate controls by type and place the more important ones where they can be easily identified or used (whichever is the more important). We also try to imply signal ďŹ&#x201A;ow in the layout because this helps generate a mental picture in the userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head that helps them to understand exactly what is happening to the sound. This is historically typical on analogue consoles because of the underlying hardware constraints. One of the big problems on digital control surfaces is the steep learning curve that is required because generally they do not conform to existing implied analogue norms. On XL8 we spent time identifying these norms and stuck to them in the digital control surface implementation. As a result, if you look to the place where you would expect to find the function on, say, an XL4, then you will probably find a similar function on the XL8 there too, whatever you want to do. The exact implementation may be different but at least you have found the controls you need. More than anything we understand that things go wrong in live shows that force urgent operator

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intervention. Thus speed of access is essential and before finalising any design we try to imagine how it would respond in an emergency situation. How easily could you hit the mute while desperately trying to activate a solo, etc.

Why has the live sound sector been slowest to adopt digital desk technology? The choice to go digital is taken by users when, on balance, the benefits outweigh the downsides. In live sound many of the traditional recording benefits of digital do not apply and thus it has taken longer for the scales to tip in favour of digital. For example, one of the major benefits of digital is the ability to store and recall settings instantly. This works well for a rehearsed show but the benefit is turned on its head for an unscripted live show, or for a one-day event where there has been no prior

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rehearsal or where guest engineers are coming and going. In these cases the most important thing is to have a simple console that can be set up and operated quickly from scratch, because there is no scene to recall. This is where analogue consoles excel because their operation conforms to a well-known standard and there is little or no complexity or hidden detail tied up in menus. The list of pros and cons for digital versus analogue is quite an even match at this time and it is likely that people will migrate back and forth between the two mediums for some time to come depending on the type of show they are doing.

Why did Midas opt for the technology it did in the XL8? The XL8 uses a heavily networked approach using AES50 to transport signal and control data. The

meet your maker

entire system is modular, with dual redundant interconnections and a degree of redundancy in the modular boxes themselves. This approach even extends to the control surface, so that any of the five bays can be used to control any part of the system. AES50 was chosen for the interconnections on this system because it has a suitable number of channels

— 24 bi-directional at 96kHz, very low latency — 70uS per hop, it distributes clock signals around the network and it has its own inherent error detection, error warning and error recovery mechanisms. The choice of Linux as an operating system was driven from this same objective of reliability. Because it is open-source, we have access to every line of code that is being run. This means that if we have a bug, we can understand exactly what is happening and fix the root cause. With a commercial operating system you have to guess how the code in the operating system is interacting with your code, which makes it very hard to ensure stability — especially with a system as complex as XL8.

What are the beneﬁts in this over other approaches? This approach provides advantages because

components can be distributed to where they are most useful — mic pres on stage, outputs in, or near, amplifier drive racks, control surface at FOH, etc. The modular construction and n+1 redundancy throughout eliminates any single point of failure that has the capacity to bring the whole system down. The only way to do this with a non-networked and distributed system is to duplicate everything, which is very expensive. The modularity of the system also makes it possible to ensure that the DSP engine is big enough for the task at hand. With a fixed architecture, there is always pressure to cut corners in the processing to squeeze more channels or features into a fixed size array of processing. This can result in poor sound quality — good digital equalisers and dynamics take up more space than mediocre ones. With the XL8 there was always the option to add more processing to the design if needed during development.

How do you protect Midas’ legacy for ‘sound’ in the uncontrollable live environment and with a move to digital? Digital audio can sound good or bad depending on how well it is implemented: just because it’s digital does not mean that sound manipulation programs cannot have character. If engineers strip DSP code to the bare bones to squeeze more into a given chip it will not sound the same as code that has been written with a higher degree of freedom to use hardware as required to polish the sound. Also, there is a section of purists who know the correct engineering formula for an EQ or the correct implementation for compression algorithms and who strive for engineering perfection. If this is the approach used to polish code, then the sound may still be uninspiring. Most of the popular analogue designs from the past have become successful via natural selection — these are the products we all know and remember. The point is that these products were not technically perfect; they were the ones that sounded the best to our non-linear receptors — our ears and brains. Some of the better designers actually know the reasons why their successful products were adopted in the market but for many it was just luck. At Midas our mic pres and EQ impart character on the sound of our analogue products, and by and large we know what they are. However, there are other areas of the designs that are less publicised but which also impart character in ways that, prior to XL8, we were not aware of. A large part of the research phase of XL8 was identifying these less visible mechanisms and (providing they were desirable) ensuring they were incorporated within the XL8 system too. Once again the judgments for this were all based on listening to the sonic results. Our customers tell us, and we also believe, that the XL8 is the best sounding Midas console ever. The sound is unique to Midas and is produced by the XL8 system as a whole: the analogue hardware, convertors, DSP code, dithering and control update rates all play a part in the sound. This protects us because no single section contains the magic that is the Midas sound and thus is difficult to copy. What would facilitate seamless interconnection between equipment types and what are the best bets? I can remember the day pin 2 hot was adopted as a standard on XLRs, heralding the start of connection compatibility for professional analogue systems. Having settled on connector type and sex many years before, the industry also settled on signal operating levels, by and large due to the headroom constraints 56

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meet your maker imposed by the IC manufacturers that everyone uses. Our aim is that digital equipment should become equally easy to connect — for stereo interfaces the AES3 standard has been quite successful, but still there are variations in sample rate, etc. For multichannel applications there is not yet a clear de facto standard, but we believe that AES50 is the first interface that really addresses the needs of live sound with regard to low latency, robustness, and clock distribution. We would hope to see more manufacturers adopting AES50 interfaces to make it easier to put large systems together. Our approach is to promote open standards rather than proprietary ones — we don’t expect every piece of equipment at a large concert to be made by Midas.

Live production is one of the few applications where the console remains at the centre of all activity — in other disciplines it has become marginalised — how do you expect this to change? If it’s a live show there are two sound engineers that take responsibility for the sound, the monitor engineer and the FOH engineer. The ideal work environment for them is a sound system that may incorporate many different sub systems (possibly from different manufacturers), but which can all be controlled from a single control surface (one for each engineer). For the FOH engineer this will not change in the foreseeable future and to this end XL8 contains KVM switching that allows integration of third-party control software. Monitor systems may become more decentralised over time and we have already seen evidence of musicians taking control of their own personal mixes by remixing simple subPage group 7/12/06 feeds obtained from the Resolution Half 17:10 Page 1 FOH console and by other more advanced means. ■

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Room for voice recording despite spending most of his time on studio designs PhIlIP NeWell has been increasingly asked to give his input on voice-over rooms. he discusses his findings and offers some simple solutions.

lThOUGh MUsIc RecORdING and cinema studios are my main areas of work, I do now seem to get asked a lot to design rooms for voice recording, principally for documentaries, advertising and foreign language dialogue replacement. Some of the companies for whom I have designed rooms for cinema postproduction have also been involved in television, and some of their recording and mixing personnel have come to question their television voice-over facilities in contrast to what has been made available to them for the cinema work. After being asked to try to improve some of the TV rooms, I was somewhat shocked by the many misapplications of acoustic materials, leading to rooms that could never be anything other than coloured. Figure 1 shows a room used for dialogue replacement that suffered from colouration in the lower vocal range, although the general sensation inside the room was of being in a relatively dead space. On dismounting the wall panels it was found that they were mounted on wooden battens of about 4cm depth, which were in turn fixed to masonry walls. The space between the battens was filled with 70kg/m3 mineral wool, and the panels themselves were made of a compressed cotton-waste felt. Figure 2 shows a graph taken from the publicity material of the manufacturer of the panels, from which it can be seen that if the distance ‘d’ was zero, which in this case it was, then the absorption would only be truly effective above about 900Hz. It can also be seen from the graph that if the distance ‘d’ could be increased to 300mm then useful absorption could be achieved down to around 100Hz. This could have led to a decent room because there is little in human voices below 100Hz, but suggestions that the panels should be so mounted were ﬂatly rejected

by the studio owners due to the lack of space after the modification. Figure 3 shows the two components of an acoustic wave: the pressure and velocity components. It can be seen that there is a 90 degree phase displacement between them; that is, when either one is at a maximum in either direction the other is at zero. When the pressure is at zero the energy resides in the velocity component, and when the velocity component is at zero — as it must be next to a wall — the pressure component is at a maximum or minimum relative to the static pressure. Fibrous absorbers, such as the wall panels shown in Figure 1, act on the velocity component of an acoustic wave by giving rise to a tortuous route through which the air ‘particles’ must pass, during which they suffer frictional losses and thermal losses. Obviously, if the velocity is zero, there will be no such losses, so these absorbent materials only work in the high velocity regions of the particle motion, in a region either side of a quarter and three-quarter wavelength distance from a wall. The distance from the masonry wall to the face of the panels in Figure 1 was about 10cm, which represents a quarter of a wavelength of 40cm. At 20 degrees Celsius this would correspond to a frequency of about 835Hz, which corresponds well with the plot shown in Figure 2. Here, the panel depth, plus the mineral wool, plus ‘d’ set at zero shows the absorption rolling off below about 900Hz. With ‘d’ at 300mm, this quarter wavelength would be about 40cm (300mm + 100mm of mineral wool and acoustic panel). This would absorb wavelengths of four

Figure 1. a room for dialogue recording in a television post production studio that suffered from unnatural colouration. 58

times 40cm, or 1.60m, corresponding to a frequency of around 200Hz, and this is just about where the ‘d’ = 300mm plot begins to roll off in Figure 2. So, there really is no magic in this. Materials don’t absorb per se — the absorption is dependent upon their application. The frequency down to which a piece of mineral wool will absorb depends on its distance from the wall, so it is totally useless sticking fibrous or cellular materials on wall if the goal is to absorb low frequencies. As stated earlier, close to a wall surface the pressure component is at a maximum, so panel and membrane absorbers are most effective here because they move with the pressure fluctuations, and remove energy from the wave by causing it to do the work of moving the panel and creating frictional losses within the materials. Helmholtz resonators can also work here, but unless they are heavily damped they can ring. Nevertheless, Figure 4 shows such a resonator in the form of a slotted concrete block, and it can be an odd sensation being in a room made from concrete blocks with a remarkably dead acoustic. Indeed these blocks were considered for the treatment of the room shown in Figure 1, but the extra 250 kg/m2 of wall was too heavy for the floor loading of the building (it was not on the ground floor) so another solution had to be found. Figure 5 shows one of the rooms after treatment. A 6cm layer of 80kg/m3 Arkobel (a reconstituted, opencell polyurethane foam) was glued to the masonry walls with contact/impact adhesive. Subsequently, a 3.5cm layer of Celenit was glued to the Arkobel. Celenit is an Italian-made material, but there are others such as Heraklith, from Austria, or Viruter, from Spain. They are all variants of a material first manufactured in the UK in the 1950s, and aptly named Woodcemair, because it was made of wood shavings mixed with cement, and lightly compressed

Figure 2. Plots, taken from the manufacturer’s literature, showing the absorption versus distance from the wall for the absorbent panels used to treat the room shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 3. The relationship between the pressure and velocity components of an acoustic wave.

into boards leaving many air spaces. The manufacture of Woodcemair ceased several years ago because of excessive production costs in Britain, but these are useful materials, being fireproof, insect proof, water resistant and capable of being used in very acoustically absorbent structures. They are also very easy to work with, and are non-irritant. (I only need to look at mineral wool or glass-fibre and half the people around me get skin irritations!) (I’ve started scratching already. Ed) In the rebuilt room the original suspended plasterboard ceiling was retained, and to this was also glued the same combination of Arkobel and Celenit. The window panes were changed to 12mm laminated glass to reduce the window resonances. The suspended plasterboard ceiling acted as a useful low frequency absorber, but no further very low frequency absorbers were used because, as explained earlier, there are no frequencies much below 100Hz in human voices, so there is nothing to excite resonances in that range. The recording personnel, the actors, and the studio management were all very pleased with the result of the modification of the first room, so much that they subsequently ordered the rebuilding of all of their other rooms because they had finally found that they had compatibility between the television rooms and the much more elaborate cinema postproduction rooms. So, how did this treatment work so well? Well, gluing foam to the wall did very little except partially absorb frequencies above about 1.5kHz. In fact, gluing the Celenit to the wall would have done the same, but the absorption would have begun at about 1kHz due to the orientation of the shavings extending the path-length of these pores beyond the 3.5cm thickness. Neither of these things, alone,

would therefore have been any improvement on the original room treatment. However, the Celenit, weighing about 18kg/m2 for 3.5cm thickness, has a considerable mass. When this was glued (i.e. nonrigidly fixed) to the 6cm of 80kg/m3 foam it became part of a mass/spring/mass system in conjunction with the masonry wall. At frequencies much below 1kHz the acoustic impedance of the Celenit begins to preclude the entry of the waves into the pores of the material, so the material acts as a highly damped panel absorber that deals well with the mid-bass frequencies. The combination of these materials on the suspended plasterboard ceiling absorbs down to lower frequencies. Figure 6 shows the decay time verses frequency of the new room. In general, dialogue recording rooms need to be very neutral sounding. In many cases the voice will be matched to the visual ‘reality’ of the television or cinema image, which usually means electronic postprocessing. The cleanest recordings would be made in a room that was almost anechoic, but unlike in music recording studios, the actors involved in voice-overs and dialogue replacement will normally not be using headphones. They will be reading a script and synchronising the voice to the picture, so if the room is too dead they will not be able to judge their tone of voice. One way of alleviating this situation is to use directional microphones, put a high degree of absorption behind the actor, and then place some reflective surfaces in front of the actor. In fact, the screen that the actor is watching, if large enough, is often sufficiently reflective for this purpose. It should be noted that first and second order reflections (i.e. first and second bounce reflections) are not resonances, and in a small room they will disappear very quickly. The problem with resonances is that

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contact Figure 4. a helmholtz resonator in the form of a concrete block, marketed under the name of sonicbloc. July/August 2007

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Figure 5. a room after treatment with arkobel and celenit.

they exist temporally separated from the direct signal, and may hang on well after rapid consonant sounds have decayed to inaudibility. In the room shown in Figure 1 the recording engineers were accustomed to rolling-off the low frequencies to reduce the vocal colouration caused by the room sound, but in reality the room sound was still temporally separated from the direct sound of the voice. That is, the voice stopped but the room continued to ring. Unfortunately, the application of equalisation to the microphone affected both the direct voice pickup and the room sound equally. Removing the low frequencies from the resonant room sound also removed those frequencies from the direct pick-up of the voice. This thinned out the voice, and although the time-separated room resonances were then more naturally balanced, they could not return the depth to the voice in a way that sounded natural, because the voice and room sounds were two different things. This type of application of equalisation is committing the same nonsense as trying to use conventional equalisers on a monitor system to ‘tune’ resonances out of a control room. Therefore, good dialogue rooms need to be appropriately acoustically treated if clean,

natural voice recordings are required, and which also have full-bodied sounds suitable for whatever postprocessing is required. The real shock, for me, has been to find so many supposedly professional dialogue recording rooms with such inappropriate acoustic treatments. As mentioned earlier, it is not the materials themselves that determine the acoustics of the room; it is the way that they are used. The Celenit on the foam does not behave as the sum of its parts — the combination is something else entirely. And incidentally, if the use of so much contact/ impact adhesive is off-putting, there are cement-based alternatives such as Kerakwik (a type of cement, mixed with latex) that have no problems with fumes or fire hazards, but they need more specialised techniques of use and take much more time to grip. Nevertheless, if the neighbours are liable to complain about the use of a few hundred kilos of contact adhesive, then there are alternatives available. A short article is not enough for any definitive discussion on vocal rooms, but hopefully this has been sufficient to highlight some of the common problems, general needs, and at least one practical solution. ■

Figure 6. The decay time versus frequency of the room shown in Figure 5. resolution

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Reasons why your live room sounds rubbish No matter how you position the mic, or what the mic is, what comes out just doesn’t sound good. The problem(s) may be among these. BOXY aNd cOlOURed — Typically the sound of a small room. Nearness of the room boundaries ensures that first reflections will pass the microphone very shortly after the direct sound. With sound travelling at over 330 metres per second the density of such reflections in a small room can easily give the characteristic of boxiness. There may be comb filtering due the closeness in time between the reflected and direct signal. A small room doesn’t allow low frequency energy to develop within the room and so may sound bass light. Such rooms are difficult but partial solutions lie in using absorption to reduce the number of reflective surfaces to a comfortable minimum, or in the ‘larger’ small room decreasing the uniformity of the room such that reflected paths are less likely to pass the microphone so frequently. dUll aNd lIFeless — Possibly due to an unbalanced room sound. Absorption of high frequencies is easy but it becomes increasingly difficult to control reverb time as frequency decreases, either needing large traps for the LF, some serious design incorporated in the acoustic treatment, or a means of letting the low frequency energy vent from the room. There is a need to determine whether there is too much HF absorption or too little mid and low frequency absorption. The HF problem can be solved by removing or covering absorbent surfaces with a reflective surface but a quick temporary solution may be to surround the working microphone with a number of smaller reflecting surfaces that can be moved to adjust the balance between room and these local reflective surfaces. Musicians generally like the sound of a live HF acoustic and will perform better. A LF heavy reverb time may enhance the room sound of LF emitting instruments but it is unlikely to show that on the microphone. FlUTTeR — The direct sound is fine but the ambience sounds like a cheap reverb with not enough tap points. On percussive sounds there may even be distinct repeats audible. Somewhere there are some parallel hard surfaces and the source sound is pingJuly/August 2007

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ponging between them. This is a fault at the design stage -– temporary solutions are to move closer to one wall, add some absorption on one wall; or add some diffusing surface treatment. However, it is quite likely that brass players will love playing in this situation. UNFOcUsed — Even close miking isn’t giving you the sound character you’d expect and it still sounds ‘distant’ and unclear. The room is probably too live for what you want. Generally that would be obvious the minute you walk in but there are degrees of problem. Having had recent experience with a medium-sized room (16ft ceilings), all hard surfaces, no in-room absorption, but with a smooth diffuse reverberation I’d say that working with such a room can produce great results, introducing a small amount of localised sound absorption when needed. However, achieving that very dry upfront character with none of the room audible is close to impossible as reverb tails may not be masked by the direct signal. sMeaRY — The sense that there is something preventing you hearing an accurate signal from the sound source can be due to a number of causes. First look for reflections from something close to the source such as a flat ceiling, a wall or hard floor. While ceilings remain a problem, the wall and floor are easier to solve. Occasionally the problem can be a reflection from further away, a freak bounce focused on that spot that moving a few feet can cure. INVIsIBle eXTRas — The room sounds like you’d expect with acoustic instruments but at higher sound levels there is a different characteristic. When constructing a studio within a large space there is a cost temptation to avoid heavy duty construction and just rely on stud and plasterboard boundary walls particularly where there isn’t an external noise problem. So, outside the visible walls of the recording room there may be large open spaces, stair wells, lift shafts, solid parallel walls that only become audible at higher sound levels. resolution

UNWaNTed eXTRas — You hear the direct sound quite clearly but there is something else there that is ‘confusing’ the response. On louder instruments it may be that certain notes suddenly leap out of the normal dynamics of the instrument. We have a case of resonance that is either a function of a room mode or a forced resonance — look for something in the room that is resonating on those notes. Particularly look out for expanded polystyrene that may have thermal insulation properties but has little acoustic value, and when it’s fixing adhesive dries out may create lots of unwanted audible sound. clINIcal — Your microphone output is good on the direct sound but lacks any sense of the space around it. The reflections from the room are missing, either because it is too dead (absorbent) at all frequencies or it is a very large room and the boundaries are so distant that there is no sense of space around the microphone, which is ironic because there actually is. eVeRYThING eVeRYWheRe — The sound level is high in a small studio and suddenly the outputs of the mics change; spill from louder amplified instruments is now everywhere and there is no sense of dynamics anymore. The room has been driven into compression and the rules that have guided the session until now no longer apply. Instruments have to turn down because it no longer works -– there’s no easy fix except opening windows and doors if possible.

IT JUsT dOesN’T sOUNd lIke IT dId 5 MINUTes aGO — Rare but quite possible with recording spaces in city or industrial areas. The session is going well but the sound on some instruments has changed. You cannot say precisely what but it’s not the same. Consider a low frequency sound source in a connected building being switched on with the LF energy passing through the building structure. You won’t hear it, some might sense it, some instruments may experience low level resonance, some mics may pick it up -– look at their channel meters for movement unconnected to playing. Punching in LF filters will clean up the recording but will have no effect on the sound arriving at the mic. This is difficult to sort as LF energy can pass through buildings for some considerable distance. ■ 61

slaying dragons

The world we live in everyone is affected by environmental damage, and everyone should make some effort to mitigate it. JOhN WaTkINsON argues that concern for the environment is just another form of ethics.

N The aUdIO visual industry we have led a charmed life for a long time. Certainly at one time television was a license to print money and a lot of record companies made a pile of money out of selling records and later CDs. In those charmed days no-one cared about the content of TV programmes, films or records; they were too busy turning the handle. At a superficial level it didn’t matter. Television, cinematography and audio engineering don’t rate highly on the money-where-mouth-is scale compared to civil engineering and aerospace, which presumably is why Boeing doesn’t specify oxygen-free copper. But slowly there have been changes. Increasingly it is being shown that excessive television watching is not a good thing, especially for the young. I have never been comfortable with the paradox that violence in television and films doesn’t inﬂuence viewers whereas the advertising that accompanies the violence is extremely effective at inﬂuencing them, or clients wouldn’t pay for it. The fact of the matter is that television especially has prostituted itself by embracing violence and sensationalism in order to attract viewers, leaving many people with the view that the world is a far more dangerous place than it really is. The road by the local school here is jammed at certain times with mothers in 4 x 4s delivering children. How many of them do so because the media have convinced them that the country is awash with rapists and paedophiles? To add to the mirth, the local politicians are calling for the speed limit to be lowered near the school. Fact is at 4 x 4-time you would be hard put to drive by at all, let alone to break the speed limit. But when the criterion for success in politics is staying in power rather than achieving anything, what else do we expect? Politics is broken and we need a better model based on performance. The educational opportunity that television could have grasped has been lost. Television programmes are simplified out of their minds for the lowest common denominator. There is a school of thought that suggests there are those who don’t want an educated population because they might ask questions and get in the way of turning the handle. Political and religious interference 62

with education is regrettably common. Politicians and religions have realised that television is the way they can put their messages out. But because television must trivialise everything, and express even the most down to earth logical topic as brimming with human emotion, dumbing down is everywhere and we find that political messages are indistinguishable from drama, hence the rise of the spin doctor and the triumph of appearances over actuality. However, television is in the process of selfdestructing. As the number of channels proliferates, the quality goes down. Thus it makes perfect sense to use digital technology to drive the technical quality down as well. But digital also allows the consumer to have non-linear access and once everyone is skipping the commercials then the model for commercial television is broken like politics. Alongside this, audio is self-destructing. I wrote a long time ago that once audio becomes data, it becomes indistinguishable from computation. It has happened. Audio production is almost exclusively done on IT equipment now, at such low cost that everyone can afford a home studio. While Moore’s Law applies to digital devices, it doesn’t apply to microphones and loudspeakers, so people are reluctant to pay more for the transducers than they did for the computer. Thus the quality goes down, although that doesn’t seem to matter either, as the popularity of MP3 attests. I see strong parallels between pharmaceutical companies inventing new conditions so they can supply drugs to treat them, hi-fi journalists inventing sources of sound impairment that require special audiophile equipment to remedy, religions inventing devils for us to be saved from, and politicians inventing weapons of mass destruction to justify wars. These activities have two things in common. First, they are unethical; second, the environment suffers. Another self-defeating problem is political correctness. Because no-one can be offended any more, it is impossible to suggest change. People are afraid of change, and to suggest that they change what they do may cause offence. Unfortunately the only way that the present rate of environmental destruction can be mitigated is if things change. Consequently I will be surprised if this article doesn’t upset at least somebody. But before you write that letter of complaint, make sure it lists the things you did today to benefit the environment. One of the points that should be stressed is that acting ethically doesn’t involve sacrifice or living in poverty. Prevention of waste of any kind is good for businesses and for the individual. Throwing things away got a lot harder when it became clear that away doesn’t exist. Thus take a look around home and work to see what forms of waste can be identified. Waste can obviously occur with energy, water and packaging, but less obvious waste occurs when poor quality equipment fails early and needs replacing. The most logical approach is to start by addressing the worst issues first. This has the advantage that the benefit is seen sooner and the satisfaction of making progress is felt sooner. Worst areas are often to do with heating, hot water, cooling and air conditioning because of the relatively high power required. Lighting and drinking water usage are next in line. The resolution

proportion of food that is thrown away today is a matter of concern. Studios are packed with electrical and electronic equipment, all of which converts electricity to heat. Find out how much power your installation uses and how much it costs a year. Make a plan to reduce it by any reasonable amount, say 10%. Consider buying electricity from a sustainable source. Control rooms are well insulated for sound reasons, but usually end up being thermally insulated as well. Thus for every kiloWatt that goes in, another kiloWatt has to be dissipated to pump it out again using air conditioning. Thus a power saving in an air-conditioned control room may effectively be doubled. Lighting is an obvious candidate. Incandescent bulbs are an environmental disaster and will probably be banned fairly soon. Any modern lighting technology is better. Consider whether a device has to be in the control room. Could it be outside and connected by cables? In that case it could be naturally cooled rather than loading the air-conditioner. What about those Class-A amplifiers simmering in the rack? Class-A amplifiers are the audio equivalent of driving on full throttle and controlling speed with the brakes. With well-engineered circuitry there is no need for Class-A at all. Get rid of them. Switching amplifiers are coming on in leaps and bounds and the future lies with them. List all the battery powered equipment in the place and find out how much is used with dry batteries that are thrown away. Torches having incandescent bulbs and dry batteries are practically criminal and should be replaced with LEDs and rechargeable batteries. A lot of battery chargers are very inefficient, which is easy to spot because they get hot! Solar panels that recharge batteries are readily available and can often be left connected all the time so the batteries are kept topped up. Many air conditioners just dump the heat into external air, however hot it may be. Consider modifying the air conditioning so it heats the water instead. Some types of air conditioner cool external air using water evaporation so the thermal gradient is reduced and less power is needed for the same heat load. Electronic equipment needs to be kept cool for reliability, but in many climates air conditioning or forced cooling isn’t necessary. Bear in mind that heat is a form of energy and that systems designed to get rid of heat can in principle be self-powering. The cooling tower is a good example where convection caused by heat is used to shed heat. Wind towers are a centuries old solution to cooling in the Middle East. The WWII Spitfire had a self-powering cooling system based on the Meredith effect whereby the radiator became a small jet engine that produced enough thrust to overcome its own drag. If you have air conditioning, find out how much it costs to run for a year, and what you could install instead. Avoiding water waste requires a similar approach to avoiding electricity waste. Find out how much you use and make a plan. Dual-ﬂush toilets save water, or get a gadget that reduces the capacity of the cistern. Where practicable, consider a system that collects rain water for ﬂushing the toilets. Just having a water butt to water the garden is a step in the right direction. The approach to waste has to be to minimise it in the first place, then what cannot be eliminated should be recycled wherever possible. I note big differences between suppliers of, for example, electronic components. Some go to the trouble of using recycled packaging, whereas others just put everything in plastic bags and ship huge boxes filled with those horrible plastic snails. You can choose who to deal with or make a point by sending back the packaging. I keep a small stock of packaging that has arrived, and re-use it when I want to send something. ■ July/August 2007

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AUCTION

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500 lots of pro-audio equipment, instruments and studio furnishings will be sold. Protools, Valve Microphones, SSL G series consoles, Outboard FX, Compressors, Reverb, 24 tracks, Furniture, Amps, Pianos, Cables, Soundproofing and much more. Auction catalogue available at www.mjq.co.uk For more information call Malcom Jackson at MJQ Sales on 01923 285 266 or email: sales@mjq.co.uk PROs

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July/August 2007

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your business

Timba! The fall of the copyright (and the royalties that go with it) or the rise of the billionaire pirate? how a record producer set off a culture war that could start sinking the downstream revenue model for everyone.

e Used TO interpret the context of misfortune with the fatalistic aphorism that no good deed ever goes unpunished. Today, we need something a bit more proactive, and a good candidate is that we live in a society that rewards bad behaviour. From Kate Moss to Paris Hilton, boorishness is its own reward as far as your celebrity Q factor goes. Why make the effort to actually produce something useful or artful if all it takes to increase the value of your commercial endorsement is a drink-driving arrest? But producers have gone at it with increasing regularity, as well. A few years ago Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs paid off the fellow he beat the shite out of with a combination of a telephone and a Kristal bottle, but that’s the price of ‘cred’ these days. I don’t think he missed the money. And Phil Spector could very well reset the bar for everyone if he somehow manages to avoid conviction on alleged murder charges in

daN daleY

California. He’s certainly got be worth more than the paltry US$1.2 million that O.J. Simpson was to get for his fictionalised version of another notorious homicide. Timbaland, the producer for at least a track or two on just about every hip-hop record that ever broke the gold mark in the last 10 years (Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Missy Elliott), has not been accused of any physical violence. However, he has ignited a technocultural war that is redolent of irony, arrogance and contradiction. Timbaland (Timothy Moseley) is having a million digital fingers pointed at him by the fairly exotic cohort of ‘demosceners’ — a subculture that produces music and video art on computer chips, often associated with game platforms — for allegedly stealing a chip track composed and recorded for a Commodore 64 video game — and using it, sounds and all, on the song Do It that he produced for Nelly Furtado, as well

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as on a ring tone before that. There’s no doubt in many minds that the elements of Do It are actually those of Acid Jazzed Evening by the Finnish game music composer Janne ‘Tempest’ Suni and of a sanctioned 2002 version of the song done by DJ/mixer GRG. Chris Abbott, a music publisher, label owner and whose website C64.com is a kind of cyberlounge for the chipset-music set, did his own forensics on the Timbaland/Furtado track, including an interleaved overlay of song on song, synched using NTSC as a clock, and found that the characteristics of the two pieces matched perfectly. ‘The original piece has notes missing from various tracks,’ the site reported. ‘This is a common way for musicians knowledgeable about the SID-chip to compensate for the fact that the chip can only play three simultaneous voices. These exact missing notes are also missing in the Timbaland recording, which is a huge statistical improbability.’ Furthermore, C64 determined that Do It contained actual sound samples from GRG’s recording. A few enterprising supporters have also put up similar waveform displays on YouTube comparing the two tracks. But perhaps the most damning piece of evidence — a bloody glove that actually does fit — is a video of Timbaland’s personal studio in which a SIDstation, a pretty obscure piece of hardware used in chipset music creation, can be clearly seen. Timbaland’s response was to go on the offensive, clouding the difference between sampling (a straightforward, clinical, technical process) and theft of intellectual property (not quite so cut and dried, except to RIAA and IFPI attorneys). On a US radio show last February, Timbaland asserted that sampling is not stealing, because, as he put it, ‘Everybody samples from everybody every day.’ (It would be interesting to apply this same complex legal argument to, say, homicide.) Then he also made it personal, publicly belittling his accusers, telling an interviewer on MTV, ‘… the dude [Suni] is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don’t know him from a can of paint. I’m 15 years deep. That’s how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, “You can’t be serious.”’ The story is far from over — litigation in the US, which is going to be an expensive proposition for someone in Suni’s position, is pending. But it already has a great coda. Remember the opening phrase –‘We live in a society that rewards bad behaviour?’ This is so good it’s beyond irony: Rockstar Games, the developer of the best-selling Grand Theft Auto game series, has ventured with Timbaland to create Beaterator, a beats game based on the music of Timbaland. Take a minute to let that sink in. Bling!

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your business I’m not sure which producer has more vapour coming out of his smoking gun, Phil Spector or Timbaland. What Timbaland does have, though, is a viral campaign portraying him as an arrogant thief who is oblivious to the fact that what he’s doing is at the heart of what’s been undermining the music business for the last decade. He’s managed to do something on the scale of George W Bush: ignite a global culture war, this one pitting geeks, of the sort that devote substantial portions of their lives and talents to making art for the technology equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls, against the universe of hip-hop and urban culture in general. In fact, it’s hard to see how any invectives would hurt either side: calling a geek a geek is, if not an outright compliment, then at least an acknowledgement of reality that sits well with the scientific mind; the urban culture, for its part, has been known to lionise those who take what they want when they want it, by force or by guile. It might seem easy to assume the geeks are in the right, at least legally speaking, but do not doubt the depth of emotion this arouses on the other side. Evidence of that feeling is found frothing on Timbaland’s web forum. One posting, with the vernacular intact, reads, ‘like tim said. he didn’t sample the finish [sic] guy. it was a demo from the keyboard or rather module he has (c64). that’s hardly stealing. and i agree with not crediting cause the business kills hip hop and [people] want credit for stuff when they are sampled and the track sounds nothing like their song.’ Another reads, ‘[Timbaland] took a mono loop that wasn’t copyrighted and ﬂipped it into a song. It’s not stealing. The Demosceners are showing their geek stripes by blowing this out of proportion.’

Hip-hop lifestyle magazines echo general support for Timbaland’s response. Rap recording sessions already have more paperwork associated with them than the government, thanks to tracking and clearing what can be hundreds of samples per album. But that’s a protocol grudgingly accepted by most urban record makers, not unlike having to file tax returns. But to be accused of stealing by a techie has all the makings of a street brawl — it’s a crystal-clear themagainst-us situation that, prior to it actually entering a courtroom, is still at the ‘yo’ mama’s so fat…’ stage. Of course, it overlooks the fact that copyright is legally — not to mention morally — implicit from the moment of conception and realisation. Registration of it is a useful formality but not necessarily proof of ownership. But the legal niceties seem too secondary here. I was riding from the airport the other day, catching a lift from an assistant engineer who works at a major studio in Nashville. He was young, under 25, and a graduate of one of the larger audio academies in the States. Timbaland is a musical hero to him. I asked him about the dustup between Mosley and the geeks and while he was a little thin on the details, his loyalties were clear: to him, this ‘copyright crap’ just gets in the way of an artist making music. Far be it from me to suggest that record producers are supposed to be cultural mediators or law professors, for that matter, but they are by nature supposed to be able to form a vision out of often-amorphous elements, from an inﬂection in a vocalist’s voice to a glint in their eye. I don’t necessarily want to use Timbaland as a rag doll to beat up the hip-hop industry, but it’s worth pointing out that it is a culture of pushbuttons and presets, as opposed to one of microphone choice and placement. Hip-hop prizes the vocal and the

attitude above all, and the best hip-hop producers are the ones who can elicit a great performance on short notice and often under chaotic circumstances. The technical end of the hip-hop record-making process is often a secondary concern, a condition that has given rise to a shadowy realm of programmers working behind the scenes and acting as technical interlocutors for the producer. You cannot calibrate a meter for ‘vibe’ — we have people who do that for us. (In fact, on a visit to the Motown Museum in Detroit years ago, I asked the African-American curator why the label’s staff engineers were all white, while the management, producers, musicians and artists were all black. He informed me, very matter-off-factly, that engineering had about the same status as janitorial services. It simply was not part of the culture.) This reduction of the record production process to such a narrow focus on beats, vocals and vibe works to exclude other key ingredients, one of which is respect for other people’s ideas and accomplishments. It’s always been hard to pin down the line between inﬂuence and plagiarism. But if record producers, who are ostensibly the captains (or at least the harbour pilots) of the recording process, begin to look askance at ownership of ideas, there’s no real point in having a line at all. In fact, it undermines what’s left of the economic infrastructure of the music industry –- Timbaland’s label’s tacit approval (his custom label Beat Club Records is distributed by Interscope/Geffen/A&M) of his response to the situation certainly makes the RIAA’s and IFPI’s lawsuits against alleged downloaders seem less valid. How this one shakes out is going to have an effect on how producers approach what they do. It bears watching. ■

headroom akG 60Th Interesting article about 60 years of AKG (V6.4). However, I would just like to point out an error, which could mislead your readers. Re: the paragraph halfway down page 65. ‘This work bore fruit in 1960 with the release of the C60 small diaphragm condenser and in 1962 with C12a, both of which used the new compact RCA valve, the Nuvistor.’ The C60 is designed around the Telefunken AC701k, Miniature wire ended Triode rather than the RCA 7586 Nuvistor as stated. It is the C61 that uses the RCA 7586 Nuvistor, as do the C12a and C12b microphones. Neumann also used the RCA 7586 Nuvistor in their U64 small diaphragm microphone. The 7586 Nuvistor is also found in microphones from Fi-cord and Hammond. Ashley Styles, Loughborough, UK

GReeN ThINGs I usually agree 100% with John in his Slaying Dragons pieces but for the May/June issue I must take issue with one point! John suggested that ‘nuclear energy’ is a good alternative. Maybe it is if it is from a fusion plant, but from the current fission only plants, it is an ethical disaster! This generation should not even consider a mechanism that produces such highly toxic waste that will remain so for so very, very, many future generations. Just hold your horses until fusion plants become available. The current forecast for that is around 2050 for India’s first pilot plant.

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John fails to mention wind power — where I live (Denmark) already 20% of the national electricity supply comes from wind turbines. In 2008 that will be up to 25%. And no, it is not all from huge wind farms that the politicians won’t approve in case they don’t get voted back ‘into POWER’ in the usual two year cycle of putting up new ideas for their highly limited ‘visions’ for the future! When we first moved here from London, we started to use a 10km there and 10km back route a few times a month. There were no wind turbines in sight on the way. Then the first arrived, and yesterday I checked and I can now see ten scattered around. As they are medium sized and setup in ones and twos, they are not unsightly and in the middle of fields well away from neighbours. Tony Batchelor, Odense, Denmark Technically I did fail to mention wind power, if only because of lack of space. As it is sustainable and relatively benign to the environment, I’m all in favour. However, Denmark is a great place for wind turbines, because the wind is unceasing. Not everywhere is like that, and even if it was, there is no hope of providing all electricity by wind power. While fusion as a source of power may or may not work, let me make it quite clear that fusion plants become radioactive in service, because they destroy matter to create energy just as other nuclear energy sources do. There is still a radioactive waste problem. However, if we took precautions to avoid exceeding critical mass and made a pile of all the radioactive waste created in the entire history of nuclear power (and purposefully not including that due to weapons),

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it wouldn’t amount to much compared to the damage done by coal-ﬁ red electricity generation. The latter has caused countless deaths by silicosis, killed ﬁ sh by acid rain, decimated the Black Forest, and covered whole landscapes with spoil heaps, some of which collapsed, killing schoolchildren. Nuclear waste can be disposed of by burying it in subduction zones, where it is re-absorbed into the earth’s molten core. However, I strongly agree with Tony about politicians having limited visions. Allowing politicians to run the world hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work. We need to come up with something better. John Watkinson

slaYING Pro, con, extras Text PROs sUVs I always look forward to John Watkinson’s Slaying cONs Dragons article and read it as usual in the May/June edition so was horrified when he exhorted people to eXTRas ‘openly deride SUV drivers in his Do’s and Don’ts. I have a few points in reply. 1. Most people reading Resolution should be responsible people, however, some people are not and have varying views on what open derision means... from openly pointing and laughing to throwing eggs, tomatoes and generally being anti social — the world’s a pretty anti social place already. 2. SUV is a bit of a catch all covering practical and necessary 4x4s as well as the Chelsea tractors such as Porsche Cayennes and X5s, we need to differentiate to be reasonable. For instance, I drive a Mitsubishi Shogun Sport, God contact knows why they call it ‘sport’, it drives just like its cOMPaNY original L200 NaMe, pickup, Place: just a little more comfortable. It’s Website: www.XXXXXXXX.co.uk

headroom Diesel, does 30mpg, and runs mostly on vegetable oil giving zero carbon emissions although I still have to pay top road tax to DVLA as if I had a gas guzzling Range Rover. I’m quite sure John’s 5-litre V12 has far more carbon emissions... 3. My car takes 5 people, all guitars and the odd amp, goes off road very well — it was designed for that — and very useful at Glastonbury where it is usually very muddy, which is why I don’t use a van that will get stuck and does less mpg with the same carbon emissions. John’s Jag can only take 2 people thus requiring extra vehicles to carry the same amount I do at one time. 4. All these anti 4x4 people are doing a disservice to the Greens as they seem to neglect to mention high powered sports cars that guzzle fuel, belch out carbon emissions and only carry two people at illegal speeds. 5. It’s a fact that the Martian ice cap is melting, one of Neptune’s moons is thawing and Jupiter is getting hotter, this is due to the sun warming up as it does from time to time as, to my knowledge, none of these places have SUVs. Rant over Steve Miller, Penryn, UK

TIckeT TO deRIde I was very impressed with John Watkinson’s wellreasoned arguments about the climate change debate (Slaying Dragons — The Way We Live, May/June issue) right until the very end, when he threw in a totally unreasoned instruction to ‘Openly deride SUV drivers’. Jumping on a ‘popular wisdom’ bandwagon is the mark of a cheap tabloid journalist, and most unlike John (who has a brain cell or two). He might just as well say ‘Avoid all Coles microphones because the 4104 Lip Ribbon is such rubbish in a studio’. It may BE rubbish for a kick drum or backing vocalist, but in a commentary box there’s nothing to beat it. It’s the INAPPROPRIATE use of SUVs that should be derided. For a ‘pop-to-the-shops’, our Citroën C1 is perfect, and environmentally friendly. But there’s no way that I can get even half a filming kit into it. Use a small van? My clients change from day to day, and some need me to be into remote places in all weathers. Not only that, where I live (on the edge of the North York Moors) there are times of the year when 4-wheel-drive is essential even to reach the main road. Admittedly I wince when I see the products of my favourite 4x4 maker being used as posing machines and un-necessary school buses, but I also have to admit ruefully that it’s sales like that that keep the marque viable, so I can buy a suitable vehicle for the mud, snow and boot space of MY world. John, by all means deride SUV drivers within the Circle Line, but don’t encourage people to tar us all with the thoughtless brush. Graeme Aldous, Saltburn, UK The regulations governing the fuel economy and environmental impact of motor vehicles had an unfortunate loophole. Agricultural vehicles were exempted. Thus in order to sell bigger vehicles, which are more proﬁ table, the motor industry invented the SUV to take advantage of the loophole. Legally they are agricultural vehicles, and the engineering in them could also be described as agricultural. However, they are marketed to ordinary motorists who would not dream of going off road. The uneducated purchaser imagines them to be safer because of the size and height, and therefore often drives as if he was invulnerable, to the consternation of other road users.

However, the facts are that we now have a new type of road accident which is a secondary accident due to an SUV driver trying to swerve around a hazard as he would in a car. The high centre of mass, the lousy suspension geometry and the high unsprung weight of these machines make them considerably more prone to losing control and/or turning over than an average saloon in the hands of an average driver. I was a witness to exactly such an event myself. Their drivers are paying more for fuel because they believe they are safer when in fact they are at greater risk. These vehicles need more power because they are heavy and aerodynamically challenged, yet they appear to have fewer economy features than cars. The SUVs I have seen all seem to have the reverse Tardis syndrome. They are huge on the outside and tiny on the inside. A recent review of the Hummer said ‘about enough room for the driver, a banana and a box of Ribena’. My views are based on fact and not popular wisdom. Note that the S in SUV stands for sport. I have no diffi culty whatsoever with utility vehicles being used to reach diffi cult locations whatever the weather. These are not sporting vehicles. Steve Miller questions why his vehicle is labelled ‘Sport’. This simply indicates that it should be driven in green wellies not black ones. While he seems to be well versed in conditions on Neptune, he doesn’t seem to know what derision means, although I approve of his use of vegetable oil as fuel. Yes, I do have a V-12 Jaguar. It’s 29 years old and it should be in a museum. It does a couple of hundred miles a year and so is environmentally irrelevant. What Steve Miller failed to read is that my other, modifi ed, XJ-S does between 33 and 37mpg which makes it as effi cient as a lot of modern cars. I’m not in a band and I don’t need more than two seats, but I once unloaded 400lb of luggage out of it. If what I wrote can be interpreted as incitement to throw tomatoes at someone trying to get band gear across the Glastonbury mud, then interpretation has been re-defi ned. I believe the majority of readers know exactly what I am getting at. John Watkinson

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advertiser Index AES..........................................................................35 Audient ...................................................................27 Alternate Soundings ..............................................63 Audio Technica .......................................................09 Calrec ......................................................................57 CharterOak.............................................................47 Dean Cook Productions ........................................63 DiGiCo ....................................................................03 Digidesign...............................................................25 DPA .........................................................................43 Drawmer/Soundfield .............................................21 Enhanced Audio.....................................................63 Euphonix.................................................................11 Fostex .....................................................................19 Genelec.....................................Outside Back Cover IBC...........................................................................29 Jünger .....................................................................64 KMR .......................................................................63 Lawo........................................................................37 Loud/Mackie............................... Inside Front Cover Lydkraft ...................................................................18 Merging Technology ..............................................41 Midas ......................................................................45 Millennia Media ......................................................13

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MJQ ........................................................................63 Neue Heimat ..........................................................63 Plasa ............................................. Inside Back Cover Prism Sound ...........................................................49 Quested ..................................................................52 Radial ......................................................................39 SBES........................................................................59 Schoeps ..................................................................17 SCV London/Millennia ...........................................12 SCV London/CAD ..................................................46 SEA Vertrieb Brauner ........................................51 Sennheiser K+H .....................................................23 Sommer Cable .......................................................15 Sonic Distrution/Apogee .......................................60 Sonic Distribution/Ghost .......................................56 Sonic Distribution/SE .............................................53 Sonic Distribution/Waves ......................................55 Source/Lynx ............................................................44 Source/Universal Audio .........................................20 SSL ..........................................................................31 Stagetech Media Group ........................................07 TL Audio .................................................................33 TL Commerce .........................................................63

July/August 2007

This year’s PLASA Show will be like no trade show you’ve seen before. Organised by the leading entertainment and installation technology trade body, PLASA07 has a vibrant new design and exciting new features to make it the best show in the world to mix business with pleasure. Between 9-12 September at Earls Court in central London, a new two-hall layout will host hundreds of new product launches, new exhibitors and new networking opportunities. There are new meeting and wi-fi lounges where you can socialise and do business, and the PLASA Bar and Meeting Lounge will stay open until 8pm on the first three nights, as well as host the prestigious PLASA Awards for Innovation ceremony. If you think you’ve seen the PLASA Show before, come to PLASA07 and think again. If you register in advance you can fly in through the new fast track entrance in Earls Court 2. Pre-register for £9 (or pay £18 on the door). Book your ticket now at

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30 years of mixing business with PLASA.

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