Philip Perkins

Thanks, Mr. Bond, for all your posts, pix and references. I know that talk about a 1/4" tape machine that has been out of common pro use for decades now may seem pretty beside the point to many younger professionals working today, but us oldsters appreciate all you've done here. For soundies of a certain age, getting a Nagra of one's own was a major barrier to entry into the production sound field, and finally having one was a big achievement for many of us. That machine then became our #1 tool and boon companion on the adventures production sound work took us on, in my case all over the world. We don't give that up easily, even though we may only look at our Nagras these days and don't record on them any more.

The cam dept folks always want to be holding them in the crew pix....

I like TC slates, as a visual ref for everyone on set and in post of where we are for that shot TC wise. But if your clients don't care, then you can save your $ for other gear that they do want?

Is Sound Devices still selling CF cards under their own name?

How much range do you need? I've done doco audio for decades with 4 411 RX in a bag on their own whips, so 8 whips total. I'm not doing reality TV etc etc but in general use it works fine if I've been careful about freq coordination. Think carefully before adding a complex system to a run-gun setup. For longer distances, as in cart-recording for drama etc, shared (big) directional antennas with RF distro are the bomb.

Mr. OP: sorry you had a bad day at the office. As you know, it happens to the best of us. Be glad your issue has a workable solution and doesn't involve having to send one of your units back to the factory for a fix--that IS lucky. And let's chill the dissing of backwards compato. A major selling point for Lectro since the beginning, one that helps justify the price of their gear, is that it nearly always can have "life after" in secondary and onward markets, since it is still usable with current equipment to some degree.

All the audiologists usually care about (and get paid by insurance for) is measuring freqs in what we would call the "voice range". In other words, can you understand what is being said to you. They could generally care less about your perception and enjoyment of music and non-speech audio. A few have been willing to discuss this with me over the years, but their equipment and approved procedures are locked into the speech band, period. For several years I had an (elderly) ENT doc whose very analog (hand drawn) charts gave me useful info outside the speech range, but he warned me not to take the accuracy of that info too seriously, re: their test procedures and gear (pretty lo-fi headphones...). The younger docs are all digital.

Being "allowed" to scout locations for recording, whether on my own or with the production entourage, has become a litmus test for me re: whether I want to do that job. For small corporate style "record the air-conditioning" type gigs, or verite doc shoots where the situation is a bit sensitive, I can live without visiting the location. Anything bigger or longer, anymore if I can't get a look ahead of time then I'm not your guy, thanks.

It isn't just a money thing, sorry. A message is being sent: no complaints from you, it is what it is, you have no voice in any of the selections and anyway the audio fixes in post are not the UPM or AD's problem. This sort of attitude and an explicit exclusion from the pre-pro info flow are one of the reasons I scaled back work in this field. In the music and live-show worlds there are plenty of issues (and less money) but none of this no-meeting-invite and no-scout crap.

Um...no.

It has for me, although the results are more clearly audible with conventional music.

Like I said--the downmix should work well if the 5.1 mix was good. If the mix doesn't work in stereo then it probably didn't work in 5.1 either.

I have not heard bad auto downmixes lately--if the 5.1 mix works then the stereo downmix works too. The Nolan thing has been endlessly debated, and we know that those mixes are not the result of mistakes.

Was possible in old analog VHF wireless (we used to carry a scanner around with our freqs programmed into it), with later hybrid and digital, not.

A lot of the confusion with TC and sync is (I think) left over from the analog days, when running TC WAS the sync signal between multiple machines which had the ability to pull playback speed and location data off the timecode and align their own playback with that. In digital audio the only thing that matters for playback speed is the word clock, as was said, the TC here is just a time stamp at the start of the recording. This is why you can change timecode numbers and rates at will on audio files and they will play the same in an audio app. How video cameras treat incoming TC is different: higher end cameras can derive frame rate info from external TC: this is one reason we don't tend to use TC boxes for cameras that output genlock in addition to TC so much any more. Where TC used as a playback speed reference can bite you is in post, if an editing app helpfully decides to pull down or up your audio so its frame rate matches that of an edit. Editors have to be careful about this, and the TC frame rate DOES matter a lot in a picture editing app.