Philip Perkins

NYC duplex gap question update for NYC sound folks: any advice on this freq zone for the area around Lincoln Center? This is for a couple of G3/G4 type handhelds and the small battery powered receivers (no ext ants), for rehearsal use within about 70ft of range, inside a building. I know it's a dicey idea but I may be forced to go this way. thanks

Great. I hope you have a really on-it, intuitive, attentive boom-op for the non-lead voices who can anticipate and feather-on and feather-off. If so this will sound great.

For the audio aspects, Dugan is your friend--nothing beats it in this kind of situation. For the content: as was said, you give your warnings to the director (while dispelling any fantasies about the fact that the talent is individually lav-miced and on on their own channel making much of a diff when they are sitting close together, esp. in a lively discussion) and hope for the best. Often these sorts of scenes are "led" by one or two people who know the agenda, the time frame and keep order in terms of responses (you see this on TV all the time). A truly free-form discussion with a lot of folks can quickly become uncuttable.

I recall that theatre folks often paint B3s to match hair and wardrobe, I'd search a theatre sound forum re: this. I've used markers too, with only partial success. I'm pretty sure that the analine dye in Sharpies isn't great for the cables used on lavs.

There are some sync issues in PT with using Clear as a "live" plugin, since the latency of the plug is so high. Using it in Audiosuite seems to be preferable.

Downtown (Market St etc) there is just RF everywhere a la NYC. It's really hard to get a totally clean chunk of spectrum due to lots of tech, construction, law enforcement etc activity I guess. The dance co I work for uses a bunch of A1 for teacher headset mics and get away with it mostly since the range needed is so short. But with the TX off their RX show scans of solid crap.

"Something happen"ing is not worth the risk to a pro recordist. Get the correct media for your machine. Rehearse in your mind what you would say to a producer if there was a problem with your recording media on a job?

Just so you know there is no way to continue union health coverage by self paying. The fees have to come from employers.

The SD adapter thing is only for Hail Mary situations. It is far less reliable and failure prone.

And extra strain reliefed!!!

B3s if you want pretty good sound and think you might be able to use them on multiple projects. Otherwise whatever works that's cheap. I explain to producers than in doc work of any kind lav mics are an expendable, like batteries, tape, media etc: they are going to get broken and there is almost never any good way of fixing them in a manner that they are reliable again. The talent won't be even as careful of them as dramatic film actors (which is not very careful), so it is just a matter of time before they get damaged.

I've used my Neumann, A-T and Shure LDCs outdoors many times. You need wind protection for sure, but more for audio (low freq wind bumps) than protection. You don't want them rained on or in a dust storm but you wouldn't want that for any good mic.

$45 freight + $5 customs is indeed a "bone", esp if the unit is under warranty.

If you want TC gear that can be serviced by its manufacturer then go Denecke.

I like the cel phone screen cover as a stopgap. But eventually you'll be working out in the rain....or dust... In the MI electronics world, replacement while under warranty and no help at all after has become the norm, with no fixing type service ever. The Deity stuff seems to come from that part of the manufacturing world.

I gotta say that for a moke like me, who gets steaming piles of very problematic semi-pro-or-newbie-recorded hard-doc verite production sound to work over and make broad-or stream-castable (re: tech eval), Clear is the bomb. Yeah, I know that AI will take over all this sort of work very soon, but until it does.....

Clear is a great plugin, very worth the $ . You get a lot of good re-reverb and denoise really fast with it.

It's worth a shot trying to get them to work yourself if the machines were not abused or run into the ground back in the day. Then you'd at least have the basis of a conversation with a DAT tech if you find one.

The electronics are almost never the issue with DATs. It's their poorly designed and manufactured transports that cause nearly all issues. The transport consists of a great many small parts, motors and sensors and relies very much on the tape being at the correct (high) tension for the thing to work at all. This is one reason that DATs didn't wear very well.

Ironically, it is much harder (if not impossible) to get DATs repaired (especially portable units) than it is to get even a very old Nagra (like III) worked on these days. Nagras give some kind of pleasure to techs working on them, like old cars etc. DATs are just a terrible pain in the ass. If your DATs really were working ok when you stopped using them and were stored under reasonable circumstances then it would be worth trying to gently get the transports running again by cleaning the heads and the guides and then putting some sacrificable tapes in them and trying to get them to lace up and run at play speed. Do the machines run well enough to give you a BLER count? The issues with DATs are almost always the transport and heads (as in clogged) vs the electronics...

Like I said: "Behringered".

The mic in question, 4099 in mounts for double bass and cello and occasionally piano, has worked very well when it works. It's a bit fragile but players like it. (They are also popular for car-dialog rigs too.) But a co. that doesn't service expensive pro gear doesn't get any more biz from me.

I've had no or very slow and non-specific response from DPA re: service for a mic that is out of warranty. I also tried a few audio techs for repair and they had no better luck with DPA than I did. Am done with DPA.

Goyo will go EOL on Dec. 1. It was working well here but I'm working on a doc feature the mix for which will go well beyond Dec 1, so I got "Clear", the paid-for version. It currently doesn't work properly within Reaper without some workarounds, but seemed ok in other DAWs incl. PT. It's pretty helpful, more for DX reverb than BG noise, but its very fast to use. You can push it too hard and make it sound bad, and it follows "Berger's Law" just as much as any other NR plugin or device (works best when you need it the least).

Please leave our little morsel alone....