Jay Rose

1,000,000,000 McDonald Burgers!

Was anybody else thrown off seeing this headline in today's NYTimes? Have questionable credits really reached scandalous proportions?

...which made it so painful when Sony decks were shipped with -20 dBFS nominal, matching +4 dBu on their analog jacks, so -12 dBFS (+16 dBu analog) became the peak level most US broadcasters would accept. Video CEs would argue with me that "yes, sending us DATs with -16 dBFS nominal or even -1 dBFS peak would be a cleaner track... but our guys would have to knock it down before they could lay it back on the DigiBeta master. So the net would be even worse, because of the additional math the playback deck would be adding. We've got better ways to measure loudness now, and deeper bit rates. But the old standard is still hanging on in ways... just like the deliberately slowed down QWERTY keyboard is still with us.

As a rough guide you can check this table of S/N ratios for different bit depths. The problem is when people use "signal to noise ratio" and have been trained in analog. Typically, analog s/n is specified to nominal, and headroom is on top of that. So a Nagra IV with 66 dB published s/n at 7.5 actually could record 70 dB cleanly, and maybe with 76 dB with acceptable distortion. The chart's "digital s/n" of 96 dB for 16 bits doesn't include any headroom. Depending on the device, one more dB will either give you horrible distortion, or be squashed. I've always used the convention of calling the digital measurement "dynamic range" rather than s/n, to avoid this confusion. (Of course the chart also doesn't consider electronic noise in the preamp or ADC. I can't think of any 24 bit recorder in common use today that actually gives you 144 dB dynamic range from the mic inputs.)

You mean they didn't mean these?

Wilhelm (+1) at ~2:01:

For me, the breakthrough in the JH deck design was the snubber-less constant tension. Compute torque based on the reel rotation, which of course reflects the changing size of the tape pack. Brilliant!

I bought one of the first JH110s in New England. 4-track half inch, with accessory head stacks and guide rollers for 2-track and full track 1/4" (I modded the speed switch to give me 15/30 ips for the 1/8" high tracks, and 15 ips for the ful track). For the first three years after buying it from Audiotechniques, I got handmade Christmas cards from Jeep. From an operator's point of view -- particularly an operator whose previous big decks had been Ampex and Scully, and one who really rolled the tape around building up 4-track masters for broadcast -- the deck and electronics were brilliant! I installed it one afternoon, lined it up for house stock, and was doing a PBS animation track on it that night. My fingers naturally landed on the right buttons, punch-in and out were so seamless I could roll in music edits, and the thing moved almost as fast as I could think of what I wanted it to do. It was also easier to maintain than my "big iron" decks.

You're right. I say, "Yearrghhhh!"

Fascinating NYTimes story about a city that's been built to support location and studio filmmaking. Even more so than anything in dear old LA. Lots of pictures. Even if you don't have time to read the article, glance at the lead photo.

Maybe it's becoming the new Wilhelma Scream?

Noiz2, thanks for resurrecting this topic. So I can say, "Jim, thanks for the shout-out". The book (www.greatsound.info) is a couple of years old but still doing very well. It's been adopted at a lot of schools, and I still get 1k or so hits a month on the password-protected tutorial files. (They're free if you've got either the hardcopy version or the e-book.) A few pieces of fast-changing info are missing (hey, you try to write a book that keeps up with changes in wireless mic regs and politics)... but basic workflow and operation haven't changed, and a lot of our techniques have been evolving for decades. The software and equipment sections were deliberately written to be long-lasting, and with the exception of the explosion of new Neural Network software -- which I could only hint at -- it's all still valid. If you can't afford the $50 Amazon charges for the print version, there are now plenty of copies in the used textbook stream. I don't get a royalty on used books, of course, but I'm glad to see the book being used.

Thanks for explaining that you meant dBFS. I was also scared when I though your were talking about 0 dB on a VU meter. I'd still worry a bit about going to 0 dBFS even with a limiter. Look-ahead limiters, which are common in post, can catch even a single sample that tries to go over... but you can give them 10 ms or even 20 ms latency -- plenty of time for a gentle attack -- and the host software can compensate when you use it. General query: is anybody using a look-ahead with a significant delay in production? Does the recorder compensate so the track still agrees with timecode?

Many of my cats* have loved licking supermarket plastic bags. Other plastic bags? "Meh" (or "meowh"). Turns out to be the thin coating of oil added at the factory so the bags would separate easily... apparently, it's got some marine components. Could a similar oil have been used to waterproof the Rainman? (* - Disclaimer: no more than two cats resident at any one time. But I've seen this over multiple kitty populations.)

Fascinating NYT article this morning, https://nyti.ms/2yVqUS8 Researchers put beat-boxers into an MRI, and recorded the motions while they were making full drum-kit sounds vocally. Amazing mouth movements, some of which are like speech... and others, which don't seem to appear in any human language! Lessons for anyone interested in how the human instrument actually works. Which, after all, is what we spend most of our time documenting. ...the researchers apparently were looking for the same kind of information, to help develop language-independent speech recognition and synthesis.

I'm kind of disappointed that he didn't discuss choice of wireless. I prefer this one. But you can avoid the link entirely, if you place the camera mic where he recommends. That's why all the really good cameras have a built-in zoom mic. Added advantage: the camera won't see the mic at all!

It's payback time! Instead of the DP telling the director 'don't worry about the traffic/airplanes/gennies, I have a friend who can totally get rid of the noise in post'... Now you can tell the director 'don't worry about booms... I have a friend with a plug-in that can remove them either by making them invisible, or by zooming the shot with no loss of resoution!'

Do you have enough channels (or budget) to iso each lav? If not, let the director know now that they won't have Altman-style editing flexibility. We can do a lot in post to fix stepped-on lines. But it often depends on having a similar clean reading somewhere, which might not happen with improv. While boom coverage might be nice, I wouldn't worry too much if it's not practical. This is a comedy (we hope), not an engrossing drama.

Tomorrow's Times has a 32 minute selection of fascinating sfx bgs from around the world (like, rats singing harmonies on NYC streets). It talks over -- a lot -- but there are also some very well recorded stereo tracks where the reporter and experts shut up. If you click "I don't have print version", the piece is broken down to shorter clips with images. If you click "I have print" you get the same sounds and dialog, but as a long file with location slider.

Back in the early days, we were showing a new production-centric DAW at NAB. Unlike the hard-disk versions then on the market, which required visual zooming and then shuttling, it kept current audio in RAM so you could turn a weighted scrubwheel and mark edits as smoothly as tape without zooming, and with precision down to a few samples. Much faster, and saved a lot of mousing and undoing. One visitor acknowledged how fast it was, but said "Sure... but by zooming in with my ProTools, I can edit things you can't even hear!" We asked why he'd ever want to.

6 Advanced introduced neural network processing for dialog isolate and de-rustle, a big advance over even the best algorithmic processors. In fact, a lot of times I use dialog isolate instead of conventional noise reduction -- even izotope's -- because it actually eliminates some of the noise instead of just letting it hide under the spectrum of the desired sound. I suspect 7 will not only add more NN functions, but also tighten up the training on the two existing NN modules. [I'm sure most of us on this forum understand the terms I've been throwing around. If not, here's an article on NN I wrote for CAS Quarterly. There's plenty of info on multiband expansion for noise reduction, which is how almost all the conventional "lern the noise first" plugins work, in my books and other places. ]

TwistedWave doesn't let you record a mono signal to two different channels at different levels. But in a phone environment, I don't think you want to do your "dynamic range extension" in software... because that's after the (usually 16-bit) ADC, which is where any noise or clipping would originate. If you're using a mono input (like on many phones), it wouldn't buy you anything at all: what comes out of the ADC is as good as it gets. Why just not just make an adapter that sends the mono signal to both tip and ring of an external digitizer's stereo input, with a simple voltage divider on one channel? If your mic has an XLR, you could put the resistors into the XLR-F connector. I even did that in a QKT adapter I had to throw together for recording phone interviews on a Tascam pocket recorder, so I wouldn't have to worry about sorting local and distant levels in post.

I use the Motiv app and mic together. But for all my other mics -- through a Focusrite iTrack -- I use TwistedWave. TW IOS records up to 96 kHz, can be set for 32 bit internal files if you're doing any processing, will record from a Bluetooth source, has decent editing and internal effects, lets you edit metadata... (TW Mac became my go-to desktop editor when I'm not in the studio, after Bias Peak died. So when I needed an app for my phone, it was my first look. Worth investigating.)

I've never had the visual skills to be a good pix editor. But boy, after a few years on CASS, I was fast and flexible on a 3400... it's just that someone else had to tell me -where- to cut ; )

1988 I was cutting sound digitally... well, it was analog sound under digital control. In 1986, we became an early site for the CMX CASS system. We put it in one of the 24-track rooms, specifically to speed up cutting and mixing TV tracks. Remember, East Coast-style video TV productions didn't use dubbers, but built their shows up on a multitrack. (We had one dubber for FXR, which we'd sync our multitrack to when a client brought in multiple units.) CASS was an IBM XT computer controlling a bank of Adams-Smith synchronizers for the tape decks, a bunch of VCAs in the MCI console for mixing, and a Mac where I'd hacked the mouse button to a GPI for digital effects and sequencer start*. User interface was almost identical to a CMX 3400, with the addition of mix automation. [* - Sequencer spoke to a K250 for music and rackmount Akai sampler for selected effects. So we had some digital audio.] It was awesome for laying in effects or VO precisely, or doing 3-point edits where a hit point lined up with a frame of pix, and the in- and out- happened automatically. Usually its one-frame resolution was sufficient... but when we wanted to do fractional-frame bumps, we could advance the source a full frame and route through a DDL. More adjustable, and faster, than moving film one perf at a time. [When I wanted really tight VO editing, I'd cut on 1/4" first, then stripe the result to lay in via CMX.] A lot of what I'd learned on CASS got used when I was helping develop the AKG/Orban broadcast-specific DSE7000 and Audicy workstations.