TJW

I am currently sending my mix to 3 Alexas so that the end of day iPads rushes that the DoP and director get have guide sound. I am not a fan of sending to camera and I initially resisted. With the G2 / G3 30mW kit that I am using, the cameras sometimes go out of range but generally we are OK. Production seem happy. I had the kit in the van and they are paying extra for it. We had to make up output cables with right angle 5 pin XLRs for the Alexas and we have to battery up the receivers each morning - but all in all not too much hassle. Tim

I was much influenced by the Ulano set-up and used the Roland system for 2 years very effectively - see attached article I wrote for the AMPS Journal. I have moved back to wireless receivers in the main cart and active shark fin antennae - with 40m of cable always on the side of the cart - the loss of the 40m balanced by the gain at the antennae so I can deploy the antennae closer very easily. What I gain is having access to the wireless settings on the receivers but the loss is the boom op transmitters being further from the action and sometimes at the edge of range. Horses for courses.... Tim Roland Snake.pdf

Not entirely the case: the Cantar was envisaged and produced as a 6 into 2 configuration 10+ years ago when assumptions had to be made as to how we would use the available tracks based on how we used the preceding 2 track DAT and Nagra (and 4 track in the case of the Nagra D and Deva 2) recorders, generally splitting the sound over 2 tracks. Over the years with more cameras, hence more wireless and more iso tracks being employed, there is a preference for a single mix track, backed up by isos of all mics. A couple of years back - could be more - Aaton introduced a few work arounds that enable 7 isos and a mix track without using a mixer which can work effectively when you need the extra iso track. These are on P28 of the current manual (2.44r15) and are in the T7T8 In-grids settings. Settings 1 and 2 are effectively 2 track mix on or off and all the other settings enable the routing of an input directly to either 7 or 8 with the plus settings also routing to the mix track. Ten years plus down the line now that rushes track practices have been established, the upcoming X3 will have total flexibility as to the split of mix and iso tracks as well as of course more tracks. Tim Tim

What about the PSC six pack when it becomes available? It has a power option for active antennae. Tim

You are right in what has to be done to change the existing leads to line / headphone level leads. Getting the rental house to make minimal changes which can be switched on return is a good way of going about it. Remember that the line inputs on the Cantar are on 5 pin XLRs so if you are sticking with the existing 3 pin plugs, you will also need some Y cords. Good luck Tim

You can common power 2040s and input to the Cantar. I did it successfully for 5 years. Tim

Hi Simon, Just add a mic to the cans of your choice. There are so many mics available and for comms you are not looking for DPA quality. At the bottom end of the market and a ready made solution are Skype type headphones: just change the connectors. I will drop you a pic of my mic-added monitoring headphones from the set later on. Tim

The booster 12 is purely a passive transformer device - I actually had the transformers fitted within my first Cantar when it was made. They will not boost a mic input to line input as this is a 60dB increase - they were never intended for this purpose. I used to run 2040s into my Cantar using the headphone out and as you say, it is phase uncorrected as it is intended as a headphone out (and would be listened to in isolation). They work really well and I would not consider messing about with external amplifiers as line is clearly available at the 2040 outputs. I would suggest making up a set of cables. Very simple: 4 x Lemo 6, 2 x 5 pin XLR and a hirose / 4 pin XLR if you are powering the receivers externally. The output being a headphone output is unbalanced (so you cannot phase correct at the input stage). Lemo plugs do not have to be expensive if you buy direct, soldering them up is really simple and you will end up with the best solution. You then phase reverse all the mic inputs and it all lines up well. It certainly worked well for me for 5 years. Tim

Did the laundry yesterday:

A shameless plug but nothing to be ashamed about. I have a more power hungry set-up than Simon in that I use a Sonosax STDR and a VR Field - both thirstier than Simon's Deva Mix-12 / Audio Ltd RK6 combo. My Easy Life is just so impressive: I could run 8 hours without any concessions to power saving and can easily do a day without power if I power save and use the Cantar from its own batteries. When I used a 44ah lead gel, I fitted a DC DC converter to be sure that Sonosax always had 12v. The LifePo rarely dips below 12v so all my kit now runs direct. You cannot say that about a lead gel and certainly not in the winter - but I have to admit that they are cheap. If you could choose a single piece of gear to be a stress reducer, this is it. A really impressive piece of kit. Tim

Hey Vin, You beat me to it - I knew there must be an advantage of being in an earlier timezone! JP's emails over the weekend were upbeat so much so that he confirmed our X3 / X+ brain storm in Grenoble when I am en-route from Budapest back to London. When the news initially broke and I had thoughts that there might not be another Cantar, I thought just how good has been and still is working with my original Cantar, now 5 years old. I have recently added another X2 and have the luxury of a cart and a bag Cantar or one to record additional isos on. Although the Cantar is essentially the same recorder JP showed me in London 10 years ago, the CF caddy, SSD, the Tarkan Mac / PC interface among a host of other firmware upgrades have kept the Cantar fresh and it is still a pleasure to use. On my current job where 7 iso tracks are generally enough - although I can double up with the silent track arming on the Sonosax - there is little to want for. The X2 will be a hard act for the X3 / X+ to follow but the original thinking that is coming out of Grenoble makes me think the new Cantar will be quite special and a worthy successor to X1 / X2. Heres to the future Aaton. Tim

JP and Stefan Kudelski

Clearly not the best of news but I understand that Cantar X3 and a smaller camera will be future projects. I have e-mails from JP today and I hope to post something from him later - when he is sure that the translation cannot be misread. Meanwhile my Cantars are doing an excellent job here in Hungary. One on the cart and one in the bag. Tim

If you want a lot of inputs on XLRs, you are going to need a big recorder for all those sockets and a lot of XLRs will be a lot of weight. Cloud Wang mentions Dante. I also see this as a method of connectivity in the future. See my posting If Zax and other recorder manufacturers follow Sound Devices (with the Pix 260) using Dante, it should not be long until Lectro (who are already Dante partners) and other forward thinking radio mic manufacturers such as Wisy, Sennheiser and Audio Ltd come up with receiver racks with Dante outputs. Then a single Cat5 would be a very attractive alternative to hectares of XLR sockets. Tim

Loads of good advice. If the Sennheiser does not work over that short range, as well as frequency scans it would be good to substitute your G3 system with another G3 system, set up the same to establish if your system is faulty. Sennheiser QC is pretty good but I did have a new G3 IEM receiver that constantly under performed. Turned out that the antenna was not internally connected: when it eventually fell out, there was no sign that it had ever been soldered to the board. A similar fault would certainly explain poor range. I should add that I have 12 G3 IEM receivers in use all the time, my boom op feeds are G2 / G3 and on this job I am sending a mix to three Alexas on G2 / G3 links so that the director has sync iPad rushes just after wrap. All of this gear has a great range to € ratio. Here in Budapest - good for 60 to 80 metres. Tim

I forgot the Filmtech. When I said in a previous post that the AD261 was head and shoulders ahead of the competition when it came out, that should have read head and shoulders ahead of the competition except the Filmtech LS4 which already had iso outputs. Be aware that these mixers are big by modern standards and also quite old now so component failure could be an issue - particularly capacitors. I also have an old 4:1 Filmtech mono mixer (no meter, made to use with a Nagra 4.2) but is unusable due to popped capacitors. Before buying it could be worth dropping an email to Martyn Richards who designed and built Filmtech. He now runs soundkit.co.uk, a pro audio supplier in Wales. martyn@soundkit.co.uk. I still reckon that the SD442, plenty available and inexpensive, are worth considering. Tim

Call / email AD. They are really helpful. Iso outs are not standard - this mixer whilst head and shoulders ahead of the competition when it first appeared was designed way before the multitrack revolution. I still have an old 261. Must be over 17 years old and has done well - although it has barely seen the light of day for 5 years since I have had the Cantars. When I used to use a pair of Portadats for Imax 4 track work, AD did some mods so that my 261 had direct unbalanced outs on a single 6 pin Hirose. You could have it done but with the SD 442 - a much later and more capable piece of equipment - available used for so little, I would be inclined to shed the 261 and get a piece of equipment designed to do what you require. Tim

I’m on a stunts day so I have a chance to write between the explosions. Seems that NAB didn’t bring any announcements of new gear from Lectro. That got me thinking about my wish list of improvements to radio mic systems - regardless of manufacturer. When I started in this industry 30 years ago I used Micron VHF radio mics which were fixed frequency. Later models had three switchable frequencies. I became used to what we now call frequency agile wireless about fifteen years ago with the Audio Ltd 2020, later the 2040 range and now use Lectro. A lot of the equipment we use is tuneable over perhaps 30mHz but Wisycom now have a tuning range of 230mHz and new to the market Audio Wireless have a 120mHz tuning range. With multi camera we now use far more wireless and at crowded studio complexes or big events we cannot always stick to the blocks that we have in our kit so that we have to rent in alternative equipment – inconvenient and we loose the rental on the kit we own. I assume that what Wisycom and Audio Wireless have started will be picked up by other manufacturers. In particular, now that Lectro have tracking receiver modules and wide band Venue and Field frames, it seems to me that the next step is freeing receiver modules from individual blocks and like Wisycom designing wide band receivers and a similar tuning range on transmitters. I am not suggesting that this will be anything but a challenge for the RF engineers but for me, the user, a system that would tune from 520 to 640mHz (Audio Wireless tuning range) or even better from 470 to 700mHz (Wisycom tuning range) would be a really significant improvement. The Sound Devices Pix 260 has a Dante connection that inputs 24 channels of 24 bit audio via a single Cat 5 cable with minimal latency. I have no doubt that Dante - already adopted by many audio manufacturers http://www.audinate.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=343 - will be incorporated into new recorders from other manufacturers. As the track count increases, a system such as Dante frees up a lot of socket real estate on both the recorder and potentially the wireless receiver. So imagine a bigger receiver rack such as the Venue with Dante – Lectro have already made their own Dante boards and break out for the for their Aspen system - perhaps with space for 12 wide tuning range VRT receivers in a deeper 1U enclosure - able to tune across different blocks with one set of receiver modules and a single Cat5 connection to the recorder. That would be space saving both on the receiver and the recorder and money saving because you wouldn’t have to rent in alternative blocks if some or all of the kit you own is not usable in a particular location. It will come at a price just as VRT is more expensive than VRS but the versatility and convenience as well as the cost saving on rental would make it a very good incentive to upgrade. Is anyone like minded? Tim

Not entirely true: while that is the range of the shared frequencies exclusive to PMSE (programme makers and special events) users on a yearly or two yearly licence, much of the 500 - 790mHz range is available to license. For instance if you have block 606 Lectros, in north London you could ask your production to license channel 40 (622 - 630 mHz) for the duration of a project (as channel 39 (614 - 622 mHz) may catch TV transmission). I recently worked as one of two sound mixers at a studio complex on a project which was wireless heavy. We coordinated it so that we each used parts of channel 38 as we both had ch 38 / block 606 gear of our own. I rented in and licensed a rack of block 26 Lectros and my colleague a rack of channel 41 (630 - 638mHz) Audio Ltds and the production licensed them for the duration. Radio spectrum that we were able to use unnoticed in the past is now a valuable commodity as 4G takes the 800mHz range and in 2018 5G will take over the 700mHz range. Productions are going to have to budget for the cost of licensing and we will have to be more frequency agile. I suppose that is what you call progress. Tim

Makes some clear air around the mic. DPA will sell you some foam pods http://www.pro-sound.com/LA/SDPA0010.html but make-up sponge is cheaper. Tim

Ultrasound probe sheaths are unlubricated and work well: http://www.wms.co.uk/Family_Planning/Probe_Covers_And_HRT/Ultrasound_Probe_Covers Tim

If your Cantar still has a traditional hard drive set it so it spins down quicker and think about dimming the meter illumination - you will draw less current. Upgrade to an SSD: there is a Transcend PATA SSD 128gb for under $150 which will draw less power and you will not have to buy a SATA bridge board. LiIon and NiMH battery capacities are temperature dependant but nothing like as much as lead acid or lead gel. You almost never get the rated capacity of a lead gel and below freezing, budget for half (they also charge badly when really cold). If you are worried about temperature with your NiMH or LiIon it is probably because they are past their best (over two years old). When the batteries were new on my Cantar a pair would power it for up to 21 hours - less now as they near 5 years old. If your Cantar batteries are causing concern then re-cell them - it is not expensive. Your NiMH Cantar batteries must be old as Aaton changed to LiIon some years ago. I would get your oldest batteries, the NiMH re-celled with LiIon. Hawk Woods do them in the UK for £120 including a control board - certainly convenient if you are in Europe. Globalmediapro 70ah NP1s are £63. Don't leave your batteries in the van overnight if it is freezing. If runtime is a problem, you probably have a collection of older reduced capacity batteries and the cold weather is confirming that for you. Tim

When you are hiding mics it is sometimes seeing the cable through light material of clothes that is the problem. A camouflaged cable (one that matches its surroundings - not one in military colours) can often help.

Or use the unbalanced out which is on the 6 pin Hirose. Tim

I see a lot of sound mixers / sound recordists admiring their wide tuning range but have yet to see them adopted as a main system in the UK. They are expensive - a single Wisycom channel is double the price of an SM transmitter and a VRT receive module so perhaps two channels on separate blocs are proving preferable to a single Wisycom? Tim