by Edward Tatnall Canby
Recording At 15 ips on Batteries
I'M WALKING on air. I have just recorded the Canby Singers on flashlight batteries.
Don't misunderstand me. This was no flashy bit of humor. I meant serious business. The Canby Singers have two LP records on the market, old but still selling. We intend to make more. To do so, we must get down on tape our yearly production--before we move on to new music. At stake this year was a whole program of a cappella choral music, painstakingly prepared over many months and now ripe for harvest. Now or never. Get it down fast-or the music will die.
Next autumn, new singers, new repertory, and on we go.
But a recording date for a nonprofit chorus of some 20 singers isn't easy to swing. For several years I have been forced to let our current musical crop die on the vine, for lack of the right opportunity to get the singers, the music, the recording equipment and a suitable acoustic environment together at one time. Our last session, some years back, had produced a batch of fat 10-inch reels of tape, all Dolby A, via a large station wagon full of equipment in the normal professional manner. Since then-nothing.
You can imagine my mental clockwork when one day last spring a young man named Arthur Grudko called me: Would I like to look at the new Nagra S? He was on his way downtown to see me. Phew! A stereo Nagra? I had thought that this famed miniature pro machine came only in mono. Not any more. The Nagra S is here, all 11 pounds of it minus batteries (one dozen D cells) and it'll cost you about the same arm & leg as a new Super Beetle with sunroof and white wall tires all around. Quicker than you can think, I thought I'd have me one, to take down our music this year. In stereo. (Next year: four-channel.) But a serious recording session on flashlight batteries? Zany idea. Nevertheless, in no time at all, that is exactly what we did. And it worked, even though I worked myself up into a dozen quite needless states of high anxiety before we were done. I had a lot to lose, you understand, if the idea didn't pan out.
I have always believed in involvement, as the very best way for someone like myself to gather knowledge with which to write this column, or department, ETC. If my own personal interests are tied up in a venture, I am more, than likely to become quite passionate in my investigations--and so write better, convey more. Flies in the face of objectivity, I know.
But then, I'm not after objectivity. I prefer a subjective, involved evaluation, because that is exactly what happens to every purchaser of audio equipment. I'm merely joining the crowd of our readers, a bit ahead of time. We have EQUIPMENT PROFILES in the objective test category, and I read them avidly, please note. A marvelous check against my own experiences with the same equipment.
Involvement is risky. It's also challenging, and I like a good challenge. If I play my game rightly, pick my equipment on the assumption that it will not let me down, I'm likely to do OK, and that is a kind of triumph I really enjoy. So I called the local Nagra office and asked for a loan.
What a loan! The Nagra people signed out to me, at my own deliberate risk, several thousands of dollars of brand-new stuff, including pairs of Sennheiser 405s and AKG omnis, and two of us, Grudko and I, set off to walk the streets of New York, down into the subway and out again, and 10 or 12 blocks more home to my apartment. No cabs, thank you! This was going to be an all-portable recording session from the word go. I confess that I shook with fear when various eyes in the crowded downtown express looked speculatively at the black leatherish case I carried and the black leather with shoulder strap that was slung over Arthur Grudko's shoulders. Frankly, I did not dare go alone-I was a bit too much involved, at that point. But Arthur had been on the Nagra sales force for eight weeks, carrying the stuff around everywhere with him, and he was utterly blasé. Nuttin' to it.
And so we drove some 50 miles out into New Jersey where we had located an acoustic surrounding absolutely superb for our music in the form of a modem church, part school gymnasium. Its identity shall be nameless. You go look for it. Downpour of rain-would my singers ever make it? Half hour lost, stalled behind a jackknifed trailer. Horrid thoughts hit me right and left. Would the rain roar on the roof and ruin our ratio of S/N? Could happen! And those batteries. The nearer we got, the more shaky I felt as to their life span.
Boldly, we had made no provision at all for a.c. line power (though the Nagra may be powered via a $57 attachment). As I say, I like a challenge, at least before my feet begin to grow cold. I was going to do this job on batteries, or else. But now I began to quake in earnest. Idiot me, to get myself into such a corner! Well, I'll tell you. First, we arrived and walked in out of the downpour--into utter silence. Wow! I should have guessed that this modern building would be well insulated, even though of modest construction, the walls of plain concrete block and the peaked roof of wood paneling. During a whole day of downpour, only a few plopping drip sounds from an overloaded gutter got into our mics.
Second--the pay-off. We got to work at 10:30 in the morning, late. We finished, exhausted, at around six that evening. The entire session was done on the one set of D cells-and at the end, those batteries still registered at 55 percent of their useful life. Unbelievable.
About half way through, I got so jittery, every time I looked at those reels turning away at 15 ips on batteries, that I finally turned chicken.
Sent somebody out to a drug store to buy a dozen more D cells, just in case. We never touched them. But just to look at them made me feel a lot better.
Our session didn't run continuously all that time, of course. But it did include a lot of rewinding and play back, in order to check our musical results. To my nervous eye, the sight of 1800 feet of thin tape being rewound by battery power, again and again, was almost unbearable. I shouldn't have worried.
Playback was easy. We set up a compact audio system, brought along under the hood of my VW, in a school office next to the auditorium. Wall-to-wall carpeting and pictures all around, just like a good living room.
You cannot judge recorded sound as played back in the same hall, unless you are one of those ultra-experienced freaks who can do it by intuition.
For playback, we simply unhooked the tiny Nagra, carried it into the office and plugged it in-presto, we had sound. (Yes, I could have used another machine, powered via a.c., to spare those batteries, but that would have spoiled the game. The batteries were going to have to do all the physical and electronic labor involved in the recording itself.)
There were some minor hassles along the way. We had on hand a batch of Memorex tape, whereas the Nagra was set up for Scotch. Proper procedure would have been a laboratory recalibration of bias--which can be done to perfection on the Nagra via a combination of voltage settings (5) and trimmers for exact response. I decided to spare the company this task since time was short--we'd take a risk on compatibility. In the end, the Memorex came out on the brilliant side but not enough so to bother me. And in the subsequent treatment, would not a slight roll-off enhance our signal to noise? I figured so.
Playback connections? Luckily, I remembered in time. Nagra uses a Continental stereo plug, seven pins if I remember rightly. They sell a conversion cable, to RCA plugs. We borrowed one. Then there was the question of recording curve. Nagra is totally pro and therefore offers several including a special Nagramaster curve of inventor Kudelski's own devising, which claims a fantastically good S/N when used for mastering from the tape. I very nearly went for it, I tell you. If I had owned the Nagra, I would have used this curve without the slightest hesitation. Of course, you must play back your tapes on the Nagra itself in the process of mastering--to come out with an easy match for a full Dolby A tape, plus Dolby in addition if you wish. But for this, I would have had to borrow the Nagra once again, and my nerves didn't think they would be up to it.
So we cut tape to NAB on Memorex. And at 15 ips, in that astonishingly silent, big, live auditorium, we have a fabulously good result.
The 1800 feet? Another challenge. It isn't conventional to use 1 mil tape for making professional master recordings. In older days, there was danger of serious stretching, and the machinery could play havoc with this more delicate thickness of base material; moreover, print through was more likely, as were such post-operative failures as cupping, creasing and so on.
But today, 1 mil tape is enormously improved-I decided it was another challenge, and I would take a risk on it. We'd have the full 1800 feet on seven-inch reels, to accommodate our longest musical works, movement by movement, a big musical advantage. I might add that it also is not conventional to use seven-inch reels for master recording.
Nagra can't quite manage the big 10-inch monsters-after all, it's hardly bigger than just one of those reels, not to mention two of them.
I figured that with the Nagra's capabilities and today's remarkable new thinner tape, I was justified in using the 1 mil thickness for this rather special and slightly abnormal session. And so I did. But, ha ha, I'll tell you a secret. For those conservatives who may disapprove, I have a remedy up my sleeve. If need be, I can copy off my Nagra tapes onto ten-inch reels, with Dolby! I am quite certain that nobody will guess the difference. In fact, we may do this as a matter of course, in order to match up our new tapes to those we have made via Dolby in former sessions and thus allow free intermixing of musical items to choice.
Nice to know we can manage it.
The incongruities of this battery powered recording session had me laughing more than once. Picture Arthur Grudko, a strapping lad with long legs, sitting flat on his fanny in the middle of the church's main aisle, the little Nagra in between! Some studio. Tail wags dog. And guess what was really the biggest encumbrance to our sessions, the bulkiest, heaviest, clumsiest item? No-not the playback gear. The mic stands.
Why, I tell you, the pair of "baby booms" with their big round-bottom discs weighed as much as the whole recording gear put together and more.
Elephant like. It was those which I had to carry, while Arthur shouldered all the rest, at a couple of points in our travels; and I cursed them roundly. But, after all, you can't elevate pairs of four-hundred-buck mics into the air without something to hold them there. Short of ceiling cables, which were not in our books and aren't too often practicable, we hefted the booms, and the mics were returned intact.
We recorded a small group of ten singers, another of a few more, the full group of more than 20 and, at the end, a double chorus, spread out in the resonant space for a perfectly enormous sound. I chose cardioid treatment for the secular music (Monteverdi) and the more intimate English church anthems on our menu.
For a Spanish cathedral sound, we strung up the omnis-and we were in Spain with trimmings. The double chorus was a problem, a big work by Brahms which demands musical separation of the two groups for its proper impact. Our earlier tries at double chorus had erred conservatively-not enough separation. This time, I overdid it, as I found out later.
Not seriously; but I know now what I could have done for an even better effect. We put the two groups some 30 feet or so apart and aimed mics towards them diagonally from the center aisle. This gave us superb separation, but a sort of quadrature phasing in the accompanying reverb, at almost 90 degrees, mic to mic.
It's effective, but I'm the artistic perfectionist . . . a straight-ahead mic placement would have produced a smoother, more homogenized re verb background, I suspect. Next time, maybe.
On the mic note, I should add that for unaccompanied choral music of almost any sort one does not use accent mics. Those useful extras in standard classic and semi-classic recording are primarily for individual sounds, for single players or for groups of instruments such as brass, each playing a different line. A chorus, like a string section, blends multiple voices for each line of music and anything that tends to un-blend those lines is bad for the musical sense.
The only good reason for any accent mic, or anything at all beyond the basic pair of mics one to a channel, is the presence of a solo voice, or group of solos, within the larger chorus.
Then, perhaps you can touch up. We didn't need to. And as a matter of fact, for most choral music a judicious placement of solo singers or groups in the space array will do a much better job than any extra mic involvement. 'Nuff said.
Four channel? It won't be much different.
I have written this piece in backwards format, working from the outside in. You may infer, so far, a great deal about the Nagra S stereo portable merely from my account of our proceedings. It is indeed an astonishing little machine, its tiny surfaces covered with the most amazing array of fine-grain controls, its inside crammed with micro-specifics beyond belief. The Nagra facilities are in fact so abundant and so complex that I'm going to beg off right now, except to say that Nagra's only practical compromises of any sort that I can think of, in return for batteries and tiny size, are the seven-inch reels and the battery rewind, which goes merely fast-not very fast.
The biggest features of all Nagras are three. First is the astonishing audio quality, second to virtually no other machine, of any size, which this mite sized midget offers us at the pro speed of 15 ips and, correspondingly, at the slower speeds. Second is the utter assurance of its battery drive and the remarkably long life of its D cells in actual service. Clearly, a Swiss-watch mechanism is a primary element for maximum electrical/ mechanical efficiency, but even more important is the fail-safe drive system.
You can read the exact state of your batteries, for one thing, at any point in the recording. And the speed maintains near-absolute accuracy straight down to a point very near the end of the battery life, in spite of gradually reduced voltage. You see, I can say this from first-hand experience.
Finally, there is the Nagra versatility, which has offered a special perfection in respect to sync operations. And here is an odd factor.
Over the years, the mono Nagra has become the standard machine for professional sound film recording and is now neatly fitted to that function.
Also to a variety of laboratory instrumentations which are aided by its extraordinary facilities. But, note well, this is all in mono. Films are still made in mono, unless they are something like Cinerama. Who needs stereo? Evidently a lot of film people are buying up the S model and using the "extra" track merely for sync signals. Anathema to a good art recording engineer! On the other hand, most highly professionalized recording jobs are now done, in the art and entertainment field, via massive studio-located equipment, running from ordinary big four-track half-inchers all the way up to the 16-track monsters. These people, I would guess, are much too busy with their mammoth installations to take time out for a look at little Nagra, the recorder as big as a thimble.
Well, they're wrong, I am here to say. What one must experience to believe are the performance specs available from this machine using new modern tape. Keep the cassette in mind. If we can do what we now do with cassette tape, then how about quarter-inch tape at much higher speeds? For its useful portability and flexibility, the Nagra does not have to sacrifice audio. Not these days.
And so I suggest that a lot of recording people who have the wherewithal (which I don't) will want to shop Nagra and see/hear what two channels can do where there used to be one. The Nagra S.
Ah, yes, mustn't forget a last word on my tapes. No, at this writing they have not yet been snapped up by a recording company (I've barely finished making them). If one of you enterprising small outfits wants some challenge, I'm interested. Our music is admittedly not pops and won't run to a million pressings overnight. But it makes plenty nice listening, even so. That's the Canby Singers, conducted by the old audio crab himself, on Nagra recorded tape.
(Audio magazine, Aug. 1972; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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