Philip Perkins

That's a good point--I got bitten by the GH plug thing....

I think they won't. No time, no space to do it and no other audio from the show to compare with avail on location. All that NR stuff will stay in post. The role of the PSM has been greatly de-emphasized by prefade iso recording and advances in post technology. It may be be further reduced by other technologies, but in my experience the greatest danger to the employment of talented, experienced production sound people is the public's (and producer's ) acceptance of crappy audio recordings as being ok.

The problem isn't the headphones, but the ears and brain between the headphones, and their understanding of how what they hear relates to what you hear. No headphones will accurately portray how audio will exactly sound on a dub stage, it's all an informed guess. The better informed, the better the audio. Besides, since we live in the "no location EQ allowed" era, received wisdom is to do the best one can with mic placement, get the shot and leave the rest to post. Sometimes "the best one can" is a lav under a lot of sound-unfriendly clothes.

There's a lot more to successfully recording usable production sound than that. The mix is the easy part, actually.

Well, up until about 10 years ago, we were EXPECTED to EQ, etc on location because all that was going to post was one or at most 2 tracks of audio. By mic placement and what little EQ our mixers had (if it had any) we made a track, and the RRMs did what they could with the totality of that mix, or threw it all out and ADRed. The doctrine of "no EQ on location" only really started when multitrack file recorders with 8+ channels became available, which coincided with big advances (and lowered prices) in DAWs. Many still resist--Glen Trew has spoken eloquently here about the work of the PSM in this regard. The absolute quality and specs of a set of headphones are a lot less important that what the wearer knows about how what they are hearing will translate downstream.

How "deep" the lavs get buried is mostly not up to the PSM. It's down to the specific wardrobe and how it hides or doesn't hide the mic. No one buries their lavs deep on purpose. If you don't like how the buried lavs sound then use the boom track. Oops--no boom track, then fire up your EQ or your Izo "Dialog Match" and make it work. The 7506s are an industry standard of sorts. You can draw what conclusion you will from that.

I'm hoping that a consequence of the success of this app and its wide acceptance (as with RX) might mean that editors and RRMs could more often try to base a scene's "sound" on the boom, instead of immediately going with all-lavs in case there is a shot the boom could not cover. There would be confidence that they could bridge gaps in the boom track (as in very wide shots) with the lav sound and get away with it.

While appreciating that you like the sound and operation of your first RADAR unit, I think you may have discovered one of the pitfalls of trying to run a business with real client deadlines on a bespoke(ish) hybrid system. I've been in the same position a few times, trying to save money and increase performance, and finally had to bail when the issues began taking up a lot of extra time and seemed to be beyond my own abilities to fix, not to mention the reach of my "diplomacy" re: getting the makers of the gear to help me. Basically, no company will help you much on fixing what they perceive to be the problem of another company. If you aren't ready to move on yet, you might try posting this on the Post Production and some other forums over on Gearslutz. Most people on this forum are video location sound mixers and recordists, and so probably have never encountered RADAR.

We record poly because A: it is what is expected these days (around here anyhow) if there is no communication from post to location sound before the job (95% of the jobs), and B: because it is much easier to keep blocks of tracks organized per shot when they are packaged that way. Current NLEs used by my clients have no issues with this, and the editors appreciate not having to pull in all the tracks of a scene one at a time. In audio post, WaveAgent and boom--split tracks. In the live music recording world, yes, mono tracks are what's expected; but while there might be more channels of audio there aren't usually tens of hundreds of "scenes" to keep straight. just a handful.

I did it because I had to and it sucked. Look for a used CL6 somewhere maybe--when I had my 664 that made the 12 channel thing a whole lot easier without adding much to the bulk. You also get nice big illuminated record and stop buttons and more meters.

>>Schoeps "T" power, 416, KMR81, RE50, 414, analog lectrosonics, and sonotrims. <<< Well....T powered Schoeps sound the same as p48....a 416 is as great and bulletproof as it ever was and I don't leave home without one....the KMR81 may be out of fashion but it is still a great sounding mic...RE50s in use everyday, still...do you mean Senn 414 open headphones? I would probably pass on those but if it's an AKG 414 mic I'll take it...non-hybrid Lectro: a little noisy, but the later ones have more or less the same range as what's current...hey I LIKE Sonotrims! Great plant mics....

If these are the recorders that this dude has that are together, does that mean there is an equally large "boneyard" of parts machines and cannibalees?

There was a convention of take naming that was just an ever-ascending run of numbers no matter what was being shot--this was in the film+tape (or film +magfilm) days. Nowadays I think that a deviation from having the file name also be the scene+take name (or, in the case of a doc, the name of the interviewee etc) would need to be worked out with post. So much of what I record goes to very inexperienced editors who do not have much of any background in organizing the assets of a big job, so keeping things straightforward seems to be a good idea. On docs often we are shooting before there is an editor on the job, so it is up to us to decide how to name and organize files and hope the eventual editors will understand what we did.

This reminds me of a thought I had being around episodics shooting in Hollywood around that time: all the gear was very simple and very beat looking. No "chrome-lug-nut" syndrome at all, no one cared what the gear looked like and all the gear was used until it literally fell apart. Most of the location sound guys I'd come across on location in Hollywood were working off an apple box sitting on the ground, or off an old fashioned "AV" type folding cart (nothing mounted permanently), with a Nagra, a far less high-tech mixer than shown here (like Perfectone, if they even had a mixer), and a cardboard box with accs in it. I should say that I figure that basically none of the sound crews I observed were working with gear they owned. Like camera, grip, electric etc, everything was owned by the studio, and what gear the location guys got had been spec'ed by the studio dept. head. But those folks all had such hugely long experience that it all worked out quite well, mostly....along with actors who could memorize a script, speak clearly and loudly, hit marks and do multiple takes that were pretty similar performances...

I don't care what they call it as long as each take or camera+recorder start has a unique identifier. I recently did a job where the the scripty insisted on using a take numbering method that was much more time consuming for me to enter than what works more naturally w/ an SD machine, but I gave up arguing with scripties about 20 years ago unless they are asking for something I have no way of doing at all (this has happened, esp since digital and file names with a small number of characters). I use the notes field but often find that it doesn't get read, so having the file name itself contain as much of the needed data as possible seems to work the best. I agree that anymore about not seeing the need for the file name to include the "PU" or other info (using up precious characters), I always want us to just go to the next take # and everyone can put "PU" or etc in their notes, esp scripty. Jeff's description of what often seems to go down during supposed "pickup" shots matches mine--they SAY it's going to be a pick up, but then they end up doing the whole scene through, and also maybe doubling back a few times maybe after doing a fast camera repo, and so on. Keep it simple, please, and don't make a lot of "homework" for me correcting filenames and notes!