I had to omit a few items of audio interest from last month's account of the Canby Singers' bout with big-time television so this month's contribution is going to be articulated: Segment One, more TV.
I must say again that I really got a strange feeling at that TV taping as I came up against genuine, all-out, single-channel professional recording of audio for the first time since around 1960! I'm sure most of our pros who are into recording of sound alone would have had the same reaction. ONE master channel! One-channel miking, one-channel cabling, one-channel everything, even a one-channel mixing board (plenty of in puts but the outgo was strictly singular).
Think of the enormous complex of audio problems this avoids! No phasing, no cancellations, no this, no that....It must have been nice in the old days.
The man in charge of our TV audio, whose name I neglected to grab in all that hurrying and scurrying, though he may have lived in a mono world much longer than the rest of us, was not only amiable and cooperative but able to show a few tricks of his own. I was merely a musician, but he was receptive to my suggestions and had already taken care of one urgent request I had relayed in ahead of time--please, for our small chorus, keep the mikes away, no close-up effect, so we can blend together as the music requires.
Vital.
On two disastrous earlier TV occasions in which I had been involved, the mikes were operated exactly like TV cameras--a sort of sonic-zoom close-up technique, magnifying individual voices, arm's length, at the expense of any sort of musical blend. We were nice to look at, but we sounded, just awful. The close-up technique is excellent for the video half of TV, but audio is another medium with utterly different needs. The sync is in time and in content, NOT in technique.
In all of the joint media featuring both sound and picture, we must keep in mind the needs of each of these in its own terms and keep them independent, though tied together. So it always is in the movies, you will note, where experience goes back a full half century. Just watch and listen and you'll see how cleverly it is done there today. TV is younger. They'll learn.
Anyhow, ours was not going to be a multi-mike job, you can be sure. We had just one, single microphone, but it was duly placed well out, overhead, so that the singers did blend correctly, like the strings in a string orchestra.
This choral sound, of course, went on unchanged throughout our "act" while the cameras, a number of them, rightly used the opposite technique, zeroing in on individual faces or close up groups of singers for maximum visual interest. Good sound pickup. But how about that very dead studio? Our first offering, in fact, was a couple of pieces of Spanish cathedral mu sic out of the 16th century, just crying for a vast and stony reverberation. And there we were in a padded box. So I asked my audio friend at the board whether he just might have a delay line or something (on that ancient equipment!) to give us a bit of synthetic church. By golly, he did have just that, no problem. Evidently the old board had been updated after all.
We would need it throughout, I said, but maybe even a bit more strongly for that first cathedral music.
I had no chance to monitor the result (the chorus singing minus conductor out in the studio), not with five other musical acts all trying to get things together at the same time on the various sets around the studio's perimeter. So I left things to the audio man's good judgment, and it wasn't until Christmas morning that I heard the results, as finally broadcast.
Not bad!, as I noted at the end of my first installment last month. The man had the sense not to overwhelm us with synthesized glop-reverb; he added just enough to take us out of the anechoic and into a reasonable studio environment, if not exactly a church. Good compromise. And when you consider that this was mono reverb, 1940 style, he really did it OK. No surround sound, no fancy-phase ambience, not even the inestimable ordinary advantage of conventional stereo space.
Compressed Canby
So I was happy. We had a good mike placement for a fine blend, a reasonable ambience, if synthetic, and we were singing well; everything should have been splendid in spite of the lo-fi broadcast chain. Except for one element I had entirely overlooked--never even thought of it. Compression.
Wow, was there compression.
To be sure, I can't prove it. As I say, my thoughts were quite elsewhere as I listened to our broadcast and began to wonder why it was so disappointing in the sonic effect. We had worked hard, we did well, we should have communicated, in sound as well as sight. We did in the pictures. But our singing was lackluster, monotonous. I couldn't believe it.
Then it hit me what was wrong. We came to a work by the 16th-century Englishman Thomas Tallis, a stately hymn in which the last line of music is repeated as a sort of echo, very beautiful. We ALWAYS sing that echo as it should be, much less loud than the first time; indeed, we do it just as softly as we dare and the effect can be magical.
Now, as I listened to the TV broad cast, I heard us singing that second echo phrase exactly as loudly as the first one. No echo. Just a mechanical repetition. I was disgusted. After all that rehearsal, couldn't we do a bit better than THAT? Then I thought, NO! I was there. I conducted. And we definitely did it the right way. Then, you see, I understood what had happened. Or must have happened. Electronic compression. We definitely did sing that echo phrase softly. But the #**# compression circuit brought it crudely up so there was no echo effect, just a repeat at the same volume. Magic departed.
No wonder the entire performance seemed on the dull side. Everything we sang, apparently, was compressed to a stringent TV "normal" volume, the same monotonous level from start to finish. When we sang louder, we were implacably pulled down; when we sang softly, we were pulled up. Deadly--for our music. So I figure it out.
No, I am not blaming TV-for this is the sort of treatment that TV sound in fact requires, especially on a show that is normally done "live" (on tape) in real time, and thus is full of unexpected peaks and valleys of sound that could distract from the more important visual aspect. Face it, in this TV medium the audio is always going to be subservient, and has to be. Oddly enough, even when the audio-music like ours-is supposedly the main feature. So I am not criticizing, I am merely telling you. Moral: Don't sing Spanish cathedral music on TV if you want people to listen as well as watch.
Some of our audio techniques, for that matter, can actually enhance the impact, or at least favor the effect, of music that was not originally intended for reproduction (almost all classical material). This we should know. Even compression can be helpful, when used WITH CARE as an aid to the "compression" of some enormous musical work like an opera or a symphony to fit into a small living room where it was never supposed to be heard in the first place. All of which, of course, calls for our very best understanding and judgment in our record/broadcast procedures for such music. Right? So if you still think that most LP records are ruined by too much compression, just listen to the Canby Singers on TV. Maybe next Christmas morning?
Four, Three, Two, ... A
P.S. You might be amused as to how the great pitch-pipe controversy ended. You'll remember that in the original real-time recording we were not going to be allowed to blow our pitch pipe (we sing entirely without accompaniment) in order to get ourselves started in the right key, and yet I knew that we HAD to blow it somehow-we do not all have absolute pitch (and we would disagree, even if we did, de pending on whether A is 435 or maybe 445). So I bided my time. There would be a way out-somehow.
When at last (after those four hours of snafu) we shifted from real-time re cording to the new game plan, so much more practical (as we in audio know)-the editing-together of separately recorded segments-I was waiting and my pitch pipe blower, one of the basses, right with me. The instant I heard the producer start a sonic count down for the opening segment of our part of the show, leading to the spoken introduction by the little lady host who stood beside me in front of the chorus, trailing her lavalier cable be hind her-I knew I had it. "Four, Three, Two, ..." intoned the producer over the talkback from inside the control room, omitting "One," and in that second of silence that stood for "One" I hissed in my loudest stage whisper, "Pitch!" and the pipe blew. Nobody flinched, the host began her spiel, and we were ready to sing.
I didn't even bother to consult with the authorities afterwards; here was one area where audio and TV techniques agreed. On the TV air, as I expected, there was no pitch pipe sound, nor any hiss from me. Edited neatly out. So simple.
Switching Made Simple
Now for the articulation. Two brief items, too long postponed, each involving a useful piece of equipment and both of them passive, no plug in the wall, no current drain. Is that rare.
First, after an unconscionable time, the Russound TMS-2, a small switching box framed in good hardwood that could help you keep sane when you get involved in complicated switchings of numerous inputs and outputs in your home equipment. Too often, this sort of thing involves a bewildering number of levers and buttons too far apart to be easily reached, plus cables pulled out and re-inserted, usually into the wrong holes and by blind feel behind the units. It can be agonizing, as you surely know, especially if you are in a hurry. This switcher, like a number of others in the Russound line for different types of switching, is the home equivalent of those elaborate busses and cabled patchboards that used to be standard in much professional audio. (Now we use the new-type boards, to the tune of a few hundred thou per.)
I was in the throes of trying to re connect a new version of my equipment via the usual mass of disconnected cables when I saw the Russound publicity and, in desperation, asked for one of these switchers to see if it might help. Well, my cable spaghetti was too eccentric even for Russound strictly my fault-and the TMS-2 didn't happen to fit my then-current requirements; it was temporarily put aside.
And so, of course, out of mind. But I am now looking straight at the thing in front of me, and indeed it is an ingenious consolidation of a lot of switching functions, for such a small box.
On the back of the TMS-2 are no less than 30 inputs, phono type, in stereo pairs, R and L, lined up neatly against white marking lines for the eye. On the left are three pairs of "add-on jacks," IN-BUSS, COPY-BUSS and OUT-BUSS. Next to these, in the middle, are two more pairs, TAPE MONITOR OUT, and the same for in.
Then, moving on to the right, you will see no less than five pairs of source inputs in a line on top, 1,2,3,4,5, and below them another five pairs of out puts, for the same. Count 'em, 20 more. You can thus plug in up to five of your components, both in and out or either way, for treatment via the switches on the front.
On the front the switches, 10 three way and one two-way, are neatly lined up in stagger formation, the positions connected by five white guide lines, the central one a fat line marked COPY. The top five switches, RECORD, one for each of your com over three upper most white lines, from the top position, IN, to OFF, and then to COPY in three steps. Between each of these are the PLAY switches, staggered two lines downwards so that they move from COPY downwards to OFF and, at the bottom, MONITOR. To one side is a master two-way monitor switch marked COPY and PLAY.
Enough! It sounds awful but the eye can easily take in what the printed word can scarcely describe. In 10 minutes, I expect, you could be operating those switches with no trouble at all and in a half second you could do switching that might take a quarter hour on the original equipment, per haps ending in chaos at that. I assume, though there might be a few bits of signal loss here and there with so much switching, that there is total absence of undesirables like hum--otherwise Russound would hardly have lasted so long in the market. So if you think that this model or maybe one of the others in the line might help you, then contact the outfit. Russound/ FMP Inc., P.O. Box 204, Stratham, N.H.
03885. Or maybe your local dealer.
On The Beam
The other item, on hand since late last year, has the slightly odd title of The Beam Box, which sounds as if it might be a tweeter twin to the dbx super bass Boom Box. It isn't--it's an indoor FM antenna with interesting abilities, a serious and useful device.
It is an antenna inside a square box no bigger than a good tuner, which can replace a cumbersome outdoor monster and a heavyweight rotator with remarkably good results. This box antenna is not only small but it is also directional--and even more remark able, it "rotates" its directionality, though there are no moving parts other than the controls. The box just sits there and you twiddle its knobs.
No power requirement either; only the pair of FM antenna connections.
I'm going to be careful not to get in over my dizzy head, since BIC includes very little information as to how their gadget works, but I do get the general idea and it is good. Those who are into the math of signal propagation will know that you can tune an antenna electronically as well as by shaving off pieces of wire or rod to the right length; also that you can fold an antenna up and still have it work, in a smaller space. This one, if I see it rightly, is a double-folded dipole, a pair of them set at right angles and neatly fit ted inside the box under a transparent top cover. The tuning and switching is entirely electronic. Nothing moves at all. Yet the antenna's directionality revolves all the way around, in 90-degree jumps, the box staying put. Surprising, if you didn't know it could be done.
We quickly found (myself and a knowledgeable hi-fi neighbor) that The Beam Box has a "ribbon" pattern of sensitivity rather than "cardioid." That is, instead of the primarily frontal directionality of the yagi type of antenna with reflectors, like a cardioid mike (you must move that one bodily around to change direction), The Beam Box has equal front and back sensitivity, in opposite directions, while the sides are very noticeably less sensitive--you can read this right off your signal strength meter, as you "revolve" the antenna through its four electronic positions. This type of directionality, to be sure, is not quite as versatile as the cardioid when it comes to reducing interference from unwanted stations, but you can still do a lot by shifting the antenna through its positions, as we immediately found. It fails only when two stations are exactly in opposite directions from your location.
Most won't be.
At my 100-mile range (80 to 120 miles to the stations I most want to hear) The Box did remarkably well, though it could not match my big rooftop yagi, understandably. I got all my favorite distant stations with complete limiting and silence--in mono.
As might be expected, stereo was a bit noisy. Even so ...
I'd recommend The Beam Box for anyone living in the larger fringe, say from 10 to maybe 40 miles out from major FM sources. In this vast area the indoor antenna should be excellent, with both extra sensitivity and adjust able directionality. (In the city a directional antenna isn't much use, with too many steel buildings around, and you really need multipath rejection.) I should mention an excellent extra reason for Beam Box power--the antenna can be electronically fine-tuned to match the frequency of each station. Just peak up the signal on your signal strength meter. All the others merely average things out. A typical bit of thoroughness, and if this adds one more minor chore, it is surely worth turning one more knob for a better sound. These people really get the most out of their design. And so will you.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Jul. 1980)
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