sonnenstudio

Hello everyone, thank you for your generosity, there's a lot of golden info in your answers wish you all a nice end of the week!

Dear soundies, I wanted to ask if you use any tricks to estimate the field of view of respective lenses in order to quickly estimate how close the boom & the body of the operator can come to the frame? I assume it comes intuitively with years of experience but I was wondering if anyone has any tips. I've been booming for about a year and a half now and getting better at estimating how close I can get but still need a lot of practise to become more precise & quick at it. I'm doing mostly TV and doco work in which the framing is rarely pre-determined and in which sound dept is only 1 person. On that note : does it ever happen in doco's that the boom operator uses a (small) camera monitor mounted on the bag? Thanks in advance! koen

Thanks a lot Olle & Mungo for the advice. I tried cleaning it out with contact spray. Unfortunately, the demon is still roaming around in that little box...

Dear Soundies, Bought a used sony PCM-M10 as an additional backup recorder. Unfortunately, the thing has major problems, seems as if its operating system has gone haywire. When turning it on screen flickers between verious menu's, it randomly increases/decreases volume, runs through menu pages... Knobs either don't react or get "pressed" without me touching them. video's here : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nmq9TuorVXqwCiAOnfGJ6VKhtC5mCXzP?usp=sharing I managed to re-format the internal disk, but this did not help Any ideas what the problem could be? thanks in advance for any suggestions

Hey guys, thanks a lot for the tips! Will look into new antennas. wish you both a nice weekend! k

Hi guys, I bought a pair of old Audio RMS 2000 Rx-Tx. I'm experiencing noise bursts/dropouts (see sound example) as soon as I move 3-4 meters away from the transmitter. Any ideas what might be causing this? The frequency range is 507.125/507.625 The antennas look pretty battered, do you think it would help to replace them? Thanks in advance for any tips! bests, Koen soundcloud link RMS2000 test_1.WAV

Dear all, I recently watched "Barton Fink" (Coen Brothers-1991), pretty much by accident : I found a box of old DVD's on the street a few months ago and I'm watching them one by one without looking up what they're about beforehand. 2 min into the film I smiled a broad smile and thought "wow, this is why I love sound in film". Not very surprisingly, the sound supervisor was none other than Skip Lievsay. I thought of the following : I would like to start a thread which compiles a list of great-sounding films/series/can even be specific scenes. This could be for whatever reason : technical, artistic, because the dialog sounds so perfect, because of the witty sound design, etc... Which films have inspired you? Which film have taught you new things? Which films showed you things in sound which you previously thought were impossible, not allowed or nonexistent? Which films have shown you the power of sound in storytelling and how did they do so? Which movies remind you why you love working in sound for film? It would be great if you specify why you chose those films : this could be very general ("very original sound design") to more specific ("Ambiences sound great") to hyper specific ("Scene 5 in this film shows how beautifully one can play with perspective in dialog mixing" or "the wind sounds greatly enhance the emotional complexity of this character") Also, considering learning is as much about knowing what to do as is knowing what to do, it'd be great to also include films which, in your opinion, show how not to do things (e.g. the controversial dialog mix in Tenet 😉) and why you think so. I think this could be a great database for those wishing to learn more about sound in film, or simply those looking for inspiration. Thanks in advance to those who wish to contribute!

Dear all, To power my mixpre-6 I am using Samsung NPF-960 batteries. Since a few weeks it seems the batteries aren't charging properly : - after a night of charging the battery indicator on the mixpre6 isn't all the way into the green, and the indicator jumps around sometimes between half-full and three-quarters-full. As if the Mixpre can't figure out how much power is left in the NPF - on the charger itself, while charging, the % indicator continually goes up & back down when I insert a battery : 60%-70%-80-90-60-70-80-90-.... Do you think this problem is due to the battery itself being worn out or due to the charger being faulty? I bought the NPF's about 2 years ago and have used them quite a lot, though far from as much as I reckon a pro location sound recordist would (i.e. almost daily). I use it for field recording trips, usually about 1 week long, once every 3 months. This is the NPF+ charger I am using : https://www.shop-ftt.de/de/starterpack-kortwich-np-f thanks in advance for any advice! bests

Hi guys, some great insights in this discussion! @The Immoral Mr Teas , if I may ask, could you elaborate on what you said about MS not sitting nicely with multichannel encoding? I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts about this. Personally, I've always found the stereo image of M/S recordings (especially of ambiences) a bit "weird" or "unnatural", for reasons I can't really grasp. I often have this feeling that there's a clear center image, combined with a L-R stereo field that sounds as if it's "behind" my ears, rather than in front, and that (even when reducing the S part of the M/S) the stereo part of the sound is somewhat disconnected from the center part - an issue I never experience with ORTF or XY. When listening on headphones this effect becomes even more pronounced. Does anyone else experience this? The attractive part of M/S is that it's so much more compact than an ortf setup, and you have a real center, as opposed ot a phantom center.... you win some, you lose some...

Dear Doug, thanks for your thoughts! Here is the full batch on dl link in WAV format : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xL_yxC6Dmko0eO_0jRVue15t9YYauzqC/view?usp=sharing Here is the full batch of tests on soundcloud in mp3: cello test https://soundcloud.com/koen-drop/sets/ms-mic-comparison-cello-neumann-vs-sennheiser-vs-mbo city park ambience any remarks more than welcome! I'm having a hard time choosing between the sennheiser mkh30 and the neumann ka120... They're both great, and in an MS setup with the Sennheiser 8040 as Mid-mic the difference is actually pretty small I have the impression. It seems like the Neumann create more spatiality in the low/mid region, and is very narrow in the high freq region, whereas the mkh30 does exactly the opposite. The mkh30 has that super-detailed sennheiser top-end, which is sometimes great, but at time can sound a bit sizzly when comparing to the neumann kma120.

Dear all, I would like to share with you a comparison I made between 2 M/S setups : 1) Sennheiser 8040 (M) + Senn MKH 30 (S) 2) Sennheiser 8040 (M) + Neumann KMA 20 (S) A noisy afternoon in a city park - recording was made yesterday. I used a mixpre-6 to record, low cut at 80. Format is 96k, 24b Since the Sennheiser mkh30 has more output than the Neumann (about 3-4db), I adjusted the gain of the mkh30 in post. mp3 and FLAC files here :https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aWROVVwZsagyaB8oTKPbR0cod5WA7-MT?usp=sharing I have more test recordings which I still have to decode. Once ready I will upload these as well. Any remarks/thoughts are more than welcome! Bests!

Dear all, thanks for all your help and insight! Thanks ramallo for sharing your opinion on the Rode, that's very helpful. Thanks to Cristian, henrimic and Mr. teas for pointing out the noise floor of some of the less expensive fig8 options : since I record very quiet ambiences or sounds quite often, it would be unfortunate to end up compromising the noise levels just to gain the added surround channels. @ Cristian - I'm afraid a double ortf schoeps setup is way out of my means though As an alternative to DMS I have been toying with the idea of adding another km184 to my arsenal (I have one already and they're not very expensive second hand) to use the Neumann's as a back pair in a double ortf setup, with some Bubblebee Windkillers. The obvious disatvantage of double ortf is obviously the reduced portability... My plan now is to rent an mkh30 and a KM184 for a few days and do some tests. Will report back once I've done my tests! Best regards to all of you and thanks again for your help, Koenraad

Dear JWsoundgroup, first of all, this forum has been an amazing source of information for me in the past months - really the best forum I know on the web, so thanks to all members for that first time posting here so bear with me I'm checking options for a portable/sturdy surround/multichannel recording setup. I have an ORTF Sennheiser mkh8040 setup with a rycote, and 2 DPA 4060's that I have been using until now as a guerilla/far-from-perfect quad setup, in which the 8040 pair is the front pair, and a spaced array of the 4060's as the back pair using a thin metal bar that's screwed to the boom pole. I've had some decent results with this setup, but it's a cumbersome setup to carry around and not exatcly according to the book... As I see it now, there are two options to attain a portable surround recording setup which I can afford : either purchase a Rode's SF-1 soundfield microphone, or add a small figure-8 mic (like the kortwich figure 8 mic) to the 8040's that would fit into the rycote to create a double M/S setup. It's important that the whole array can fit in a single windshield. Now I have two questions : 1)what are your experiences with Ambisonics vs Double M/S? Both in terms of specific gear /setups/protability/sturdiness and in terms of its sound quality & flexibility of the recordings in post. The advantage of the Rode SF-1 is that it is very flexible in terms of mixdown formats and practical/small to carry around. However, I'm a bit concerned though that it would be a large step backwards in terms of sound quality compared to a stereo 8040 pair... I don't work in VR, my field recordings are mostly used for my own work, art installations, or for no-budget films, so I am not obliged to go down the ambisonics route. The advantage of the double M/S setup is that I keep a setup based on the 8040's, but I am a bit concerned with phase issues and I am unsure how to intergrate a figure-8 mic into the windshield (also: which figure-8 mic to use for this purpose?). I've done some stereo M/S recording in the past and I've had the impression one has to be so precise to make it work (mic distance etc.) that I am unsure about how reliable it is for field recording? 2) While doing research online, I found one review on thomann.de where the user described experiencing serious hum using the SF-1 in damp weather. This is something I have read also on this website (https://jwsoundgroup.net/index.php?/topic/31493-abisonic-microphones/&page=3) Has any of you experienced similar issues? I've done some field recording both in very cold, and very damp/tropical environments, so i can't risk bringing a mic that can't handle such weather conditions. Thank you in advance for any thoughts andf help Best regards, Sonnenstudio