REVIEWS: Dolby Atmos • Antelope Orion Studio HD • Bel Flanger • Lauten LT-386 • Vanguard V13 • McDSP 6034 • Sonnox

Dynamic EQ • Tascam SS-R250N

AUDIO FOR BROADCAST,

POST, RECORDING AND
MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION
V16.6 SEPTEMBER 2017 • £5

supplement • NEP’s Dolby Atmos OB trucks • National Film & TV School launches £20m facilities
Orange Tree Studios
Peter Morris — Voiceover Soho Vote now in the Resolution Awards!
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2017
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V16.6 SEPTEMBER 2017 • ISSN 1477-4216

News & Analysis Supplement

4 Leader 38 Audio releases & updates
Our guide to everything audio at IBC.
4 News
Conventions, installs, appointments and biz bites. 46 From location to post
10 Products production
Mixer Mike Aiton explains the set-to-mix
New introductions and announcements.
workflow, discusses his techniques, and has
some sound suggestions for location recordists
62 Broadcast aside to consider.
Dennis Baxter reflects on the importance of
comms in broadcast. 52 National Film & TV School
We examine the newly-opened ambitious
Craft £20m expansion scheme at the UK’s
pre-eminent training centre.
26 Orange Tree Studios
An Neve VR-equipped studio in a quiet Norfolk
56 Climbing the glass ladder
village — guitar amps galore — also famous as Women are woefully under-represented within
TheAmpFactory in the Kemper community. the audio industry in non-craft roles.

29 Peter Morris & Voiceover Soho 58 Live Broadcast on the move

Live video and audio over cellular — we look
A state-of-the-art recording facility with close
at the mobile benefits.
links to a talent agency. Peter explains his 360
business model.
Reviews
32 NEP — broadcasting 14 Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite
to the world
Paul Fournier, Head of Sound for NEP UK, 16 Antelope Orion Studio HD
gives us a tour of their new UHD-capable fleet
of OB vehicles, and explains the logistics of
18 Bel BF20-500 flanger
broadcasting international events. 20 Lauten LT-386 mic
36 Vote now in the 21 Vanguard V13 mic
Resolution Awards 2017! 22 Schertler Stat-C contact mic
23 McDSP 6034 Ultimate
Business Multi-band
61 Your business 24 Sonnox Dynamic EQ
Americana: Like America itself, Dan Daley explains
this new genre is whatever you want it to be. 25 Tascam SS-R250N

EDITORIAL ADVERTISEMENT SALES Home of the

Editor: Nigel Jopson
Email: nigel@resolutionmag.com
CONTRIBUTORS
George Shilling, Jon Thornton, Dan Daley,
Dennis Baxter, Gijs Friesen, Russell Cottier,
Jory Mackay, Philip Newell, Keith Holland,
Simon Clark, Bill Lacey, Rob James,
David Kennedy, Andrew Levine
Publisher: Dave Robinson
Tel: +44 20 8694 2979
Email: info@resolutionmag.com
Editorial office: PO Box 71523,
London, SE10 1DT, UK
Resolution Awards and Line Up
EUROPE: Jo Gilbert, tel: +44 1293 871961
Email: jogilbert@resolutionmag.com
US and INTERNATIONAL:
Jeff Turner, tel: +1 415 455 8301
Email: jeff@resolutionmag.com AWARDS
PRODUCTION AND LAYOUT
Dean Cook,
The Magazine Production Company
Tel: +44 1273 467579
Email: dean@resolutionmag.com
 NEWS

SVG Remote Appointments

Production Forum
Resolution has
Leader Equipment — the smallest detail of
an onscreen menu or a faulty detent
on a dial becomes a part of the production pro’s life —
Roger Lynch, the founder of
Sling TV, has been appointed
joined forces with it’s what our magazine is about. We call it workflow, Pandora CEO and president
sports broadcast but it’s really our life-flow, because the specifics affect star ting Sept 18. Lynch
technology association SVG Europe to how we feel about our creativity. Being able to set replaces Naveen Chopra, who
support the Remote Production Audio Forum. automated parameters, quickly preview changes and served as Pandora’s interim CEO following the
The one-hour event — which will take place send for client approval, easily output multiple formats departure of founder Tim Westergren in June.
at the DeLaMar theatre in Amsterdam on and conform with other media ... all this makes a difference to how we feel about ourselves Lynch launched Sling TV in 2015, and formerly
14 September — will assess the potential of and what we do. served as evp of Advanced Technologies, for
remote production for streamlining broadcast Who owns this gear? In recorded music, we may dip in and out of artist facilities or concert DISH Network and EchoStar Corporations.
audio workflows, reducing costs, and freeing halls, but it’s mainly us who own the gear. I can remember engineering sessions when every He also served as chairman and CEO of Video
up OB truck and flyaway space. Sponsoring digital reverb I used came at extra cost — the idea seems ridiculous today. Clients want a price, Networks International Ltd, a UK based IPTV
the Forum is Calrec, and we match it, whether at Abbey Road or in the back room on a laptop. Increasingly, this provider. ‘Roger brings a stellar leadership
which will introduce is the direction TV post is moving: if you book Mike Aiton, you also get the Mikerophonics reputation, a wealth of consumer experience
a newly-written studio. In Resolution V16.3, David Kennedy documented acoustic treatment and monitor and a lifelong passion for music to Pandora
White Paper about calibration for his new room where he mixes TV documentaries. — all of which are critical ingredients in the
remote production. The freelancers sitting in big OB trucks or mixing from Flypack studios don’t own the gear continued evolution of our company,’ said
Joining moderator they work on but, most of the time, neither do the commissioning networks. My recent visit Pandora’s chairman, Roger Faxon. Once the
and S VG Europ e to NEP UK demonstrated what economy of scale a big broadcast services company brings. top music streaming service in the world,
Editor David Davies Speed of change as well: if you want miles of fibre, linking Atmos-capable galleries and Pandora’s user base has stopped growing
will be sp eakers stadiums, they will deliver. as consumers flocked to new listening
including: Henr y Location sound: in the UK and Europe there’s a group of sound people who own their alternatives Spotify and Apple Music.
Goodman, Calrec, equipment, and who’ve built businesses around the concept of charging productions for it
Peter Walker
Director of Product item by item. Here, there’s some tension between newcomers — who see offering inclusive Paul Rosenberg,  Eminem’s
Development; Peter Walker, Calrec, Product prices as a means of getting crew work in a competitive market — and traditional operators manager, business partner
Manager; Larissa Görner, Net Insight, Product who would like to earn more than just labour. and president of Shady
Management. Media partner for the Forum is The broadcast equipment market is expected to grow 4.87% annually from $4.38bn in Records, has been appointed
Resolution Magazine. Publisher Dave Robinson 2017 to $5.82bn by 2023. We’ll be here to highlight all the trends and issues, as a radical the new CEO of Def Jam
comments: ‘The media focuses so much on change in media distribution triggers a major shift of products from hardware-oriented to Recordings. Def Jam is a subsidiary of
video, but — lest we forget — the A in AV software and open architecture devices. Bring it on. Universal Music Group. Rosenberg will report
stands for: And… we need some high-fidelity Nigel Jopson to the company’s CEO and chairman, Lucian
sound for this…’. Grainge, who said: ‘Paul brings with him not
Contact david@sportsvideo.org. only a remarkable record of success in hip-
IBC 2017 hop, but an entrepreneurial drive and a deep
Stage Tec update passion for artist development that will build
upon Rick and Russell’s enduring legacy.’
TopVision Rosenberg will succeed Def Jam CEO Steve
Bartels, the latest of several key executive to
leave Def Jam. 

Leader Electronics Corporation

TopVision, the Berlin TV outside broadcast
specialist, has upgraded two OB trucks with a
powerful Stage Tec audio DSP unit. Broadcast
trucks Ü2 and Ü5 have each been equipped
with seven DSP boards from the RMDQ range.
The OB trucks work on demanding productions
— from Champions League football to
athletics and the skiing world championships
— requiring multi-channel audio for HDTV
formats. With the new DSP boards all the
necessary configurations can be handled —
with up to 800 audio channels and 128 sum
buses, depending on distribution. The AURUS
consoles, which have been installed in both
OB trucks, can now exploit new features such
as Stage Tec’s Automixer. Loudness metering
according to EBU R 128 is now also available in
the sum and group channels.
The IBC Exhibition covers 15 halls across
the R AI Amsterdam, and hosts over
1,700 exhibitors spanning the creation,
management and delivery of electronic and
media entertainment. The Conference will
run 14-18 September, and the exhibition 15-19
September. A number of specially curated
“Feature Areas” and events are hosted
throughout the IBC Exhibition and tie into the
Conference. Designed to IBC’s specifications
and featuring the very latest in technology, the
IBC Big Screen Auditorium is a centrepiece this
year. Housed in the large RAI Auditorium with a
state-of-the-art cinema projection and sound
installation, the four-day conference examines
and demonstrates the hot topics and insights
surrounding the art and business of cinema.
IBC Events this year include: Leaders’
Summit — on Thursday 14th, hosted behind
closed doors for invited C-level executives to
strategize future policy. Content Everywhere
— combines a dedicated high quality
exhibition with features designed to help
visitors quickly expand their knowledge and
understanding of the latest strategies and
developments in broadcast. Startup Forum
— a new addition to IBC this year, connecting
investors and media houses seeking high
quality, innovative solutions with the startups
and who create them. Cyber Security — on
15 September 2017, is an exclusive invitation
only event, focusing on cyber security. C-Tech
Forum 5G on Saturday 16 – the programme will
address how, when and what needs to be done
to make 5G a success and how 5G will drive
progress in the broadcasting industry.
announced the appointment
of Kozo Nagao as President.
Nagao joined Japan’s Ministry
of International Trade &
Industry in 1997, progressing in 2001 to Booz
Allen Hamilton, Inc. In January 2002 he joined
Corporate Directions, Inc. which he continues
to serve as a partner. He has served as an
advisor to Leader Electronics Corporation since
July 2014, joining the board in June 2015. ‘Since
the company’s establishment in 1954, Leader
has contributed innovative measurement
technology for sectors of industry such as
home appliances, television broadcasting and
mobile telephones,’ Kozo Nagao comments.
‘Progressing with measurement technology
as the basis of our business, Leader has evolved
its products and supporting services to meet
the demands of each era and will continue to
pursue various forms of value provision into
the future.’

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4 resolution September 2017

 NEWS

Star Wars lectures at AES

API AXS to Virginia Beach – and Japan

Grammy-winning producer/engineer Leslie

LOUD Technologies Inc. announced the
addition of two industry veterans, CJ Lewis
and Parker Bradley, to its sales team. Lewis is
LOUD Retail Group’s new Western Regional
Sales Manager, while Bradley takes over as
LOUD Retail Group’s new Central Regional
Sales Manager.
A 24-year industry veteran, CJ Lewis
recently served as principal and partner
of the Marshank Group Rockies, where he
represented the Mackie and Ampeg brands.
Prior to that, he logged a decade as principal
and President of Digital Revolution Marketing.
Parker Bradley comes to LOUD from
microphone and headphone manufacturer
Beyerdynamic, where he ser ved as
National Sales Manager. The Austin, Texas-
based Bradley also brings extensive retail
experience, including positions as Guitar
Center Sales Manager, Store Manager, and
District Sales Manager.
Lawo, the German
manufacturer of audio and
video broadcast equipment,
has appointed Joffrey Heyraud
to drive sales growth in the
French market. With 15 years’ experience in
IP-centric radio and TV applications, Heyraud
has a wide-ranging knowledge of both
broadcast and IT industries. Prior to this move,
he was employed by Digigram to develop
business in Asia.
Ann Jones of Skywalker Sound will deliver the
Heyser Memorial Lecture at the upcoming
AES New York Convention, October 18 to 21
at the Javits Center. The Heyser Memorial
lecture (open to all convention attendees)
will take place on the opening evening of
the convention, October 18, from 6:00pm to
7:30pm. Jones will also be featured during
API has recently installed a 32 channel AXS console at Producer Michael Marquart’s private the 143rd International AES Convention in the
recording facility in Virginia Beach. Michael is well-known for his band A Bad Think and his special event presentation ‘Bearing Witness:
tenure drumming for the band A Flock of Seagulls. Marquart touts an extensive list of production The Music of Star Wars — Archiving Art and
credits, and he will continue to work with artists on his AXS console. ‘I have always been a big Technology,’ on day two.
fan of API’s mic pres and the 550A EQs,’ says Marquart. ‘Now I get all that and a lot more in a Jones has received four Grammy Awards
large format desk.’ and has been nominated multiple times
Meanwhile in Japan an API Legacy AXS has been installed in a new studio, Tanta, located in (in categories including Best Engineered
the Shibuya area of Tokyo. The Tanta studio has been in planning and construction for over three Recording, Non-Classical; and Best Surround
years. The facility is seven stories high, with spaces for rehearsal and performance, high end Sound Album). Additionally, she is a past Chair
dining and parking, among others. The studio is close to Japan’s National public broadcasting of The Recording Academy’s Board of Trustees.
organization NHK. Studio A will house a 48 channel fully-fitted Legacy AXS console – the very She serves on the Advisory Boards of Institute
first Legacy AXS for Japan – and studio B will house a 32 channel automated 1608 console. Both for Musical Arts, Ex’pression College for Digital
the Legacy AXS and 1608 console will be delivered in early 2018, with an opening shortly after. Arts, G.A.N.G. (Game Audio Network Guild) and
is an Artistic Advisor to the new Technology and
Applied Composition degree program at the
PLASA returns to Olympia San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Sound City LA re-opens

DiGiGrid has appointed

Mediaspec as its first Scottish
reseller to drive sales of its
complete family of desktop
and rackmount solutions.
‘Mediaspec is one of the UK’s foremost
resellers of Avid products and we’re
excited about the range of possibilities and
freedom to connect multiple DAWs and
hardware devices that DiGiGrid products
provide.’ Explains Eric Joseph, Managing
Director, Medispec. ‘It was Mediaspec’s
e x p e r tis e w ithin th e in dus tr y an d
commitment to customers that attracted
u s t o t h e co m p a ny. We ’r e s e e i n g
tremendous growth in the UK market and
Mediaspec were an obvious choice of partner
to help continue this,’ said Dan Page, Brand
Manager, DiGiGrid.
2017 is PLASA’s 40th anniversary, and a wide-
ranging selection of audio seminars has been
announced. Sunday has a Pro Audio Panel of
20 members investigating 3D audio, focusing
on 360-immersive experiences from theme
parks to art galleries. In the afternoon, theatre
sound designers Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin
discuss their incredible work on the sound
design for “Encounter”. The field recording
and post which went into this multi award-
winning theatrical production was revealed
in detail when we interviewed Gareth in
Resolution V15.4 (June 2016, “Dummy Heads
and Mosquitos in the Amazon”).
On Monday morning John Willet presents
a session on microphones, in the afternoon
the Audio & AV Theatre hosts an examination
of the relationship between audio and
architecture, and later in the day Shure’s
Tuomo Tolonen explores the implications for
our industry of Ofcom’s decision to re-allocate
UHF frequencies 694-790MHz (the 700MHz
band) to the mobile sector, and how to prepare
for on-going RF challenges.
The final day’s seminars include Zoe Milton
and Alison Dale discussing how to fit radio mics
to performers, and some interesting business-
oriented Fast Track Sessions.
After being closed to the public for more than
a decade, the studio is back, thanks to Olivier
Chastan, founder of entertainment intellectual
property fund Iconoclast, and Sandy Skeeter,
President of the studios and daughter of Sound
City’s founder Tom Skeeter (1932-2014). Many
of music’s biggest artists recorded there,
including Fleetwood Mac, Johnny Cash, Nine
Inch Nails, Nirvana, Tom Petty, Neil Young,
Metallica, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Santana and
the Grateful Dead. The studio history is told
in Dave Grohl’s 2013 documentary, Sound
City Grohl bought the famed Sound City Neve).
The studio now features two Helios Type
69 consoles.  Some Resolution readers
may recognise The 1969 Helios Type 69 20
channel mixer in Sound City’s B room was the
original Helios desk at Island Studios in Basing
Street, London.

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September 2017 resolution 5
 NEWS
MPG Members scoop
Mercury shortlist
This year, Music Producers Guild Full Members
are involved in 8 out of the 12 shortlisted
nominees for the 2017 Mercury Prize, which will
be awarded on September 14 at the Eventim
Apollo in West London.
ALT-J ‘RELAXER’: Producer: Charlie Andrew
(MPG Award winner 2016).
BLOSSOMS ‘BLOSSOMS’: Producer: Rich
Turvey. Mixer: David Wrench  (MPG Award
winner 2016).
E D SHE E HAN ‘÷’: Mixer: Mark ‘Spike’
Stent (MPG Award winner 2011, 2014, 2015).
GLASS ANIMALS ‘HOW TO BE A HUMAN
BEING’: Mixer: David Wrench (MPG Award
winner 2016).
STORMZY ‘GANGS SIGNS AND PRAYER’:
Executive Producer: Fraser T Smith. Engineer:
Manon Grandjean (MPG Award winner 2017).
THE BIG MOON ‘LOVE IN THE FOURTH
DIMENSION’: Producer: Catherine Marks (MPG
Award winner 2016).
THE XX ‘I SEE YOU’: Mixer: David Wrench (MPG
Award winner 2016).
S A M P H A ‘ P R O C E S S ’: M i x e r : D a v i d
Wrench (MPG Award winner 2016).
PMC laser loudspeakers
PMC has invested
in advanced laser
measuring equipment
for its research
and development
department, to help
facilitate a more
holis tic appro ach
to future drive
unit and cabinet
designs for improved
low frequency
performance.
Using the recently
installed advanced laser measurement
system, manufactured by Klippel in Germany,
the development engineers can measure the
mechanical parameters of the loudspeaker
drive units with far greater accuracy than
was previously possible. This permits
the development of new drive units, the
performance of which can be tailored to exactly
suit the application in which they will be used.
In addition to more accurately determining the
drive unit’s electromechanical performance,
known as the Thiel/Small Parameters, the
company can also measure the interaction
with the ATL (Advanced Transmission Line).
By mounting a prototype drive unit in the
prototype ATL and using the laser to measure
the mechanical movement of the drive unit
in situ, the R&D team can make adjustments
to both elements in tandem to obtain the
optimum performance.
6 resolution September 2017
Biz bites
Midco modernises with Merlin, the global digital music rights agency
Calrec RP1 & Brio
for 20,000 indie labels and distributors from 53
countries, has announced $1bn in distributions
since launching in May of 2008 writes Nigel
Jopson. Payments to its 700-plus members for
audio streaming hit $353m for the 12 months
ending March 2017, a 52% increase on 2016.
The numbers reflect the streaming bonanza
shaping the music business.
In the US, the Transparency In Music
Licensing & Ownership Act has been proposed
by Republicans Jim Sensenbrenner, Blake
Farenthold and Steve Chabot together with
Calrec has signed Midco Sports Network (MidcoSN) as its first North American customer for Democrat Suzan DelBene, an Act which
the new RP1 remote audio production system. Working in tandem with a brand-new Brio would oblige the US Copyright Office to
audio console, this configuration will bring the cost savings and efficiencies of Centralized build a publicly accessible database of music
Production (CP) to MidcoSN, a regional broadcaster covering high school and college sports rights ownership information. Backing the
across the Midwest. proposals, the MIC Coalition, who had lobbied
‘Like many sports broadcasters, we’re moving to the centralized production model to for such a database, stated: ‘All stakeholders in
reduce our costs and expand our scope of coverage,’ said Craig DeWit, production technology the music marketplace benefit when current
manager. ‘This new Calrec equipment will enable us to centralize key audio production tasks and accurate information about copyright
at our main studio. Our skilled A1 engineers can mix the shows from the studio rather than ownership and licensing is easily accessible.’
having to travel to the venues, and with those cost savings we’ll be able to cover a greater Sony/ATV Music Publishing  launched
number of sports events throughout our region.’ an app version of their SCORE royalty
MidcoSN worked with Calrec and its local reseller, AVI Systems, to install the RP1 and Brio portal, allowing songwriters to access real-
system for a go-live date at the end of July — just in time for the fall football season. Installed time data about their earnings on iOS and
in the network’s brand-new Ford Transit 350 van, the RP1 box will provide on-scene DSP for Android. The app offers constantly-updated
generating monitor mixes and IFBs with no latency. earnings information that can be searched
The network is sending all raw camera and audio feeds back to the studio over its IP-based and organized by song title, income source,
fibre backbone. time period and territory. BMG has also made
its royalties portal MyBMG available as an iOS
and Android app. The app was engineered by
CAS Career Award for Anna Behlmer BMG’s technology team in consultation with a
team of songwriter clients including Grammy-
nominated songwriter Jenn Decilveo (Rise
Up), Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart, and
Broadway composer Maury Yeston.
Meanwhile, Sony Music
Entertainment has become
the first major label to allow
its music to be monetized through unofficial
mixes, thanks to a deal with rights clearance
startup Dubset. Sony’s master recordings will
be indexed by Dubset, and rights holders will
be compensated if a small sample from their
tune is used in a DJ set or remix. Dubset can
also help artists and labels claim monetization
from unofficially uploaded music.
For Music Producers & DJs, it gets round the
problem of employing “sample clearance”
experts. More importantly, remixes and DJ
sets can be legally uploaded & hosted on top
streaming services instead of being barred or
Photo : Natasha Lee removed for copyright infringement.
Ten-time Oscar nominated re-recording mixer Anna Behlmer will receive the Cinema Audio Licensing platform
Society’s Career Achievement Award at the 54th CAS Awards, to be held 24th February, 2018. Songtradr (representing
In 1996, Behlmer became the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award in the the music of over 100,000 creators) has been
sound mixing category for Braveheart. She went on to earn additional nominations for Evita, growing fast with a new business model:
L.A. Confidential, The Thin Red Line, Moulin Rouge!, Seabiscuit, The Last Samurai, War of the instead of taking a publishing/ownership
Worlds, Blood Diamond and Star Trek. Additionally, Behlmer has received three BAFTAS (from six stake, Songtradr charge a commission of
nominations). In 2012 a new opportunity came her way, to be involved with the new Technicolor 15%-30% when a tune is licensed — more
facility at Paramount. She now works about 50 feet from the place where she had her first call generous than a standard music industry sync
on Laverne and Shirley and Happy Days. deal. The firm has licensed songs to companies
‘Anna is a world-renowned rerecording mixer with a huge portfolio of iconic credits,’ said CAS including Netflix, NBC Universal, Microsoft
president Mark Ulano. ‘Her longtime collaborations with filmmakers and her work on over 150 and Disney. Songtradr recently announced a
projects is a testament to her excellence and creativity.’ new partnership with Mood Media, a provider
Purity Transformed
AT5047 Premier Studio Condenser Microphone
Building on the AT5040’s breathtaking purity of sound, the
new AT5047 combines the four-part rectangular element of its
predecessor with a transformer-coupled output to create a mic
with exceptionally wide dynamic range and remarkable
versatility. This is purity transformed. audio-technica.com
 NEWS
Mic to Monitor tours USA
Prism Sound’s Mic to
Monitor seminars aim
to s we ep aside the
jargon and the plain
nonsense that is too often peddled as fact in
the wonderful recording industry. Prism Sound
brings in key partners to deliver technical
seminars on a wide range of subjects under
the broad heading of music recording and
production. Prism Sound announced a five-city
US Mic To Monitor 2017 free-to-attend seminar
series, from October 16 through October 25.
October 16, 2017, 6 PM — Drexel University,
Philadelphia and October 20, 2017, 6 PM —
CCNY, New York, Guest Speaker: Oscar and
Grammy-winning Producer/Engineer Robert
L. Smith.
October 23, 2017, 6 PM — Futura Studio:
Boston Guest Speaker: Grammy-nominated
Mastering Engineer Jonathan Wyner.
October 24, 2017, 6 PM — Lyndon State
University: Lyndonville Guest Speaker:
Recording Engineer Vanessa Parr (T Bone
Burnett, Lucinda Williams, John Mayer).
October 25, 2017, 6 PM — Musitechnic:
Montreal Guest Speaker: Recording Artist/
JUNO Award Nominated Producer John-Angus
MacDonald.
DJ duo W&W install EVE
SC407 & TS110
After completing successful projects for well-
known artists such as LNY TNZ, Deetox and Bass
Modulators, Q82 Acoustics have completed a
sleek new studio design for international DJ
duo W&W.
Q82 Acoustics used the available space to
fit custom furniture, ergonomic chairs, high-
gloss white laminate floor and a DJ desk – all
of which utilises LED lighting to great effect.
The main monitoring is provided by EVE Audio
SC3010 monitor speakers together with a TS110
subwoofer — all custom wrapped in white to
match the surroundings, thus ensuring that the
studio is one of a kind!
The Eve Audio SC3010 is a three-way active
main monitor with 10” woofer and 5” midrange,
using a powerful amplification system with a
customised PWM amplifier per driver built to
deliver the lowest distortion possible, high
sound pressure levels and optimised directivity.
With 250W each for the Tweeter and mid-
range driver, and an impressive 800W for the
bass woofer alone, the SC3010 is capable of
providing maximum SPL of 114dB.
W & W: ‘We’ve known Quintin Beekman from
Q82 Acoustics for quite a while already and we
were impressed by the studios he had already
done. We gave him all the freedom to create a
studio that would look sick and sound great,
and we’re super happy with the result!’
8 resolution September 2017
Visit SoundPro 2017 FREE! of in-store music to retail chains globally,
including McDonald’s, Ikea, Wendy’s and
Primark. The new deal promises to significantly
grow the network of those licensing music
from the platform.
The BBC has announced
a brand new six-part live
music TV series. It will be
broadcast on BBC One
this autumn, with each 30-minute show
including live music performances, sketches
and interviews. The shows, heralded by
some as ‘Top of the Pops-style’ will be made
by the production company Fulwell 73,
whose five partners include James Corden
and Ben Winston, the executive producer of
Corden’s US chat show The Late Late Show.
Bob Shennan, Director of BBC Radio and
Music, said: ‘The BBC is the biggest music
broadcaster in the UK and we are always
looking for new ways to bring music to our
audiences. This series will be a fantastic
Our one-day event for sound professionals will opportunity to showcase the biggest and best
be bigger and better than ever this year: more UK and international bands and artists and
networking, more exhibitors, informative and we’re looking forward to working with one of
exciting seminars. Register online now! Some the world’s most innovative and creative TV
comments from previous visitors: ‘To mix with people and talk to professionals and suppliers production companies.’
is great, and to have talks from people who have done that scope of work at such a high level Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival,
has been fantastic’ ... ‘I’m fascinated by audio in film. Fantastic range of topics. The speakers Amazon Studios boss Roy Price said: ‘I think
were triple-A standard and really open and giving, with lots of tips and info to the industry.’ pilots are going to have to play probably less
Soundpro returns to Ealing Town Hall on Saturday 7th of October 2017, from 11:00 to
17:00. Just 6 minutes walk from Ealing Broadway train and underground stations, with
of a role going forward because the reality is
that they sort of slow you down.’ He explained
plenty of parking nearby. An informal exhibition with manufacturers, distributors, dealers it could take three years to get a TV series on
and service providers. screen if it had piloted first, rather than the
Come and meet representatives of leading broadcast technology companies. Confirmed traditional 12-18 months if commissioned
exhibitors (with more to follow) include: Ambient Recording, Audio Developments, Audio straight to series. Price said the cost of normal
Limited, Audio Wireless, Avington, BECTU, Calrec, Cedar Audio, Everything Audio, GiantSound show for Amazon stood at between $4m to
(Aaton), Glensound, Hawk-Woods, IPS, PMC, Raycom, Richmond Film Services, Rycote, $6m an hour, although some programmes will
Sennheiser UK, Soundcart.audio, Sound Directions, SoundKit, Sound Link Audio, Sound have twice the budget. Game of Thrones has
Network, Ursa Straps, Zoom UK.. changed the playing field, he said.
Visit www.soundpro2017.eventbrite.co.uk and sign up for free.
Showtime
GUITAR SUMMIT
DiGiCo SD10 failsafe control for FINA Mannheim....................... 8-10 September
IBC EXHIBITION
Amsterdam...................15-19 September
PLASA
London..........................17-19 September
SOUNDPRO
London....................................... 7 October
MUSIC CHINA
Shanghai............................ 11-14 October
BROADCASTINDIA
Mumbai.............................. 12-14 October
PROLIGHT + SOUND MIDDLE EAST
Dubai.................................. 17-19 October
AES (+NAB)
New York............................. 18-21 October
AUDIOVISUAL
Helsinki...........................21-23 November
CABSAT
July saw the FINA (Fédération Internationale ‘In the unlikely, worst case scenario of Dubai.........................14-16 January 2018
de Natation) World Championships for aquatic multiple faults in the main mixer, still having NAMM
sports take place at the Danube Arena in the control over audio via the SD-RE is a brilliant Los Angeles.........................25-28 January
Hungarian capital of Budapest. Chromasound feature. Because this was such a sophisticated ISE
provided a complete audio system for the system, the only right decision for the stage Amsterdam........................... 6-9 February
games and its subsequent events, with a DiGiCo racks was the SD-Rack. We supplied four of SOUND & VISION
Bristol.................................23-25 February
SD10 chosen to provide audio control. For the them, each with 40 analogue inputs, 24
BVE
main venue, Chromasound’s Imre Makkay analogue outs and eight ins and outs, via both
London....................27 February-1 March
chose the SD10 because he wanted to supply a AES/EBU and (HD-)SDI. The latter was used
DSE
console that did not compromise on capacity as a convenient connection from and to the Las Vegas................................28-29 March
and had the added benefit of the ability to OB van. We also had an Orange Box for Dante NAB
connect it to an SD-RE redundant engine. integration.’ Las Vegas.....................................7-12 April
 STUDIO MONITOR KH 80 DSP

The new KH 80 DSP – Small. Clever. Neutral.

 GEAR
Products
Equipment introductions and announcements.
Presonus Quantum interface
PreSonus  is shipping its new top-of-the-line Quantum
Thunderbolt 2 interface. The 26x32-channel Quantum is the
company’s fastest audio interface, taking advantage of the high-
speed Thunderbolt 2 bus and a no-frills, direct-to-DAW signal
path to achieve extremely low latency. 24-bit, 192kHz converters
with 120dB of dynamic range and PreSonus’ recallable XMAX
microphone preamps combine to deliver flagship audio quality.
For more I/O channels, stack up to 4 Quantum interfaces via
Thunderbolt to create a 96x96 system.  version 12.8, now with native 7.1.2
The Quantum offers two combo mic/instrument/line inputs
and six combo mic/line inputs, each with a digitally controlled
XMAX preamp and +48V phantom power. You also get two
¼” TRS main outputs, eight ¼” TRS line outputs, and two
independent headphone outs with dedicated volume controls.
With ADAT Optical I/O and S/PDIF stereo digital I/O, you can
have up to 18 additional digital inputs and outputs for a total
of 26 in and 32 out. BNC word clock I/O ensures Quantum and
other digital audio devices operate in sync, and it’s great to see
Presonus have included MIDI I/O as well. 
Designed to be the central hub for any recording studio, the
Quantum offers two main and eight auxiliary balanced line-level
outputs for monitor mixing. An onboard talkback mic can be
routed to any mix, and you can listen to any mix from either of two
headphone amps. You also get Mute/Dim and Mono controls. 
The included PreSonus Studio One Artist DAW integrates full
preamp control functions into your recording environment.
Most of the Quantum’s features can also be controlled in
PreSonus’ free UC Surface control software, so even if you use
third-party recording software, you can remotely access the
features. Quantum owners get the bundled Studio Magic Plug-
in Suite free: offering seven useful plug-ins in VST, AU, and AAX
format. The Quantum interface is available at a MAP/street price
of $999.95.
www.presonus.com
Radial Studio-Q
The Studio-Q is a compact
studio talkback controller
with a centrally located
talkback switch that
ac ti v ates th e b uilt- in
microphone, illuminating
a bright LED to indicate
that the talkback channel
to the artist is active. This
is supplemented with an
external mic input for a
dy namic microphone,
allowing a stand-mounted
mic to function as the main talkback source, or act as an additional
talkback mic for a producer. Both the internal and external
microphone levels are set via individual trim controls along with
a master mic volume. A Radial JR1 remote footswitch can be
connected for hands-free activation of one or both talkback
mic’s. When the Studio-Q talkback is active, the signal is routed
to the studio headphone system while it automatically dims
the program to the desired level. A separate program level
control allows instant access to the playback volume feeding
the headphone mix. The $300 Studio-Q is powered by a 15VDC
supply which may be locked in place using a cable clamp.
www.radialeng.com
10
Spotlight: Nugen 3D Immersive Upmix
The new 3D Immersive Extension
builds on the well-regarded Halo
9.1 Extension, adding further
options beyond the existing Dolby
Atmos bed track capability. The 3D
Immersive Extension now provides
Ambisonic compatible output as
an alternative to channel-based
output for VR, game and other
immersive applications. This makes
it possible to upmix, re-purpose or
convert channel-based audio for
an Ambisonic workflow.
In addition, the Halo 3D
Immersive Extension makes Halo
the first upmixer to fully support
Avid’s newly announced Pro Tools
stems for Dolby Atmos mixing. The
combination of Pro Tools 12.8 and
Halo 3D Immersive Extension will
provide a more fluid workflow for audio post professionals handling multi-channel and object-based audio formats.
Halo Upmix is available immediately at a list price of $499 for both OS X and Windows, with support for Avid AAX, AudioSuite,
VST2, VST3 and AU formats. The new 3D Immersive Extension replaces the Halo 9.1 Extension and can now be purchased for
$199. Owners of the existing Halo 9.1 Extension can upgrade to the Halo 3D Immersive Extension for no additional cost. Support
for native 7.1.2 stems in Avid Pro Tools 12.8 is available on launch.
www.nugenaudio.com
Studer Micro Series JBL Intonato 24
JBL’s Intonato 24 Monitor Management Tuning System is
a comprehensive solution for easy set up, precise automated
calibration, and complete control of monitoring systems in stereo,
surround, and immersive audio production rooms. Intonato 24 can
calibrate and control systems of up to 24 speakers with customised
recallable routing of up to 24 sources selected from 24 dedicated
The Studer Micro Series is a compact and flexible broadcast analogue, 24 digital and 256 networked audio sources. Included
solution that is ideal for a variety of applications, from radio and software and an optional Desktop Controller (due later in 2017) put
TV broadcast to production studios and ENG/DSNG. the system’s powerful monitoring features at your fingertips, and
Comprised of the Micro Core unit and optional Fader Controller take control room monitoring to the next level. 
surface, the Studer Micro Series combines renowned Studer Intonato 24 includes a calibration microphone and an
quality with intuitive features, such as AoIP, Lexicon effects Automated Speaker Calibration process that “tunes” each speaker
processing and proprietary VoiceMix automatic mixing for to compensate for placement and room acoustics, delivering
unprecedented value and versatility. neutral response to the mix position – even in less-than-ideal
The Core unit is a rugged 3RU, fan-less, rack-mountable work spaces.
chassis that houses the control system, DSP and integrated I/O, With the power to manage monitoring systems of up to 24
including AoIP via eight channels of DANTE I/O. The LAN port speakers–including up to four subwoofers that can be assigned
and internal Wi-Fi router enable easy connection with computers as “Bass Management” subs with selectable crossover settings–
and tablets. Every function of the core unit can be controlled via Intonato 24 is compatible with all monitoring formats including
the intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). Users simply connect stereo, 5.1, 7.1 and makes immersive monitoring possible in any
using an HTML5-capable web browser on computer or tablet, no control room. JBL’s new system has the ability to patch, route, and
additional software required. selectively monitor any combination of 24 analogue, 24 digital
For broadcasters who want tactile control, the optional fader and 256 networked sources including DANTE via an optional
module is a highly simplified 6-fader Micro Fader Controller interface.
surface that provides streamlined controls for quick level An intuitive graphical user interface allows control from Mac,
adjustments and multitasking during live operation. Two Windows, and a range of tablets. Complete configurations,
controllers can be attached for a maximum of 12 faders. including speaker setup parameters, EQ, subwoofer settings,
The Studer Micro DSP Core is priced at £2299 + VAT, the Studer input source patching, and down-mix preferences can be
Micro Fader Controller is £929 + VAT.  Both are available now from stored as “profiles” and “scenes” and instantly. The optional
Sound Technology Ltd. Intonato Desktop Controller puts monitor system control at
www.soundtech.co.uk/professional-audio your fingertips, providing control of system volume, recall of
www.studer.ch user-configured scenes, activation of speaker mutes and solos,
resolution September 2017
 GEAR

and other frequently used features.
Intonato 24 pairs with JBL 7 Series and JBL M2 Master Reference
studio monitors to create the first complete monitoring system
designed for immersive audio production in control rooms
of any size. In addition, HARMAN BLU link network protocol
allows Intonato 24 to be digitally networked with Crown power
amplifiers and an assortment of system components.  countless hit records”. The WA-14 utilizes
www.soundtech.co.uk/professional-audio
www.jblpro.com
Schertler new modules
PSP spring reverb plug-in
Nexcellence is a rich-sounding, spring emulation inspired by
and modelled after “Necklace-type” reverb units. It provides
two different spring set processors and can use one or both of
its processing engines simultaneously. The algorithm aims to
improve on the original hardware by providing a handy set of
parameters to let you control inherent aspects of the spring
reverb. The $149 plugin requires macOS 10.8 or later and an AU,
VST, AAX, or RTAS plugin host.
www.pspaudioware.com
Warm Audio WA-14
The  WA-14 Large Diaphragm Brass
Capsule Condenser Microphone, which is
based on a “classic condenser microphone
from the 70’s  that has been used on
fully discrete classic circuit topology,
including an all-brass CK12 style capsule.
and a custom premium CineMag USA
transformer. The WA-14 can be used on an
array of sources, which includes: punchy
and warm intimate lead vocals, aggressive
guitars and heavy percussion. The WA-14
provides a realism and thickness that aims
to be true to the vintage sonics, but at a
more affordable price of $499.
www.warmaudio.com

Schertler Group has released 3 new modules for ARTHUR, its

Format 48 modular mixer that users can configure and build
themselves (reviewed Resolution V15.7). The new Multiple In,
Subgroup and Spring reverb modules have been designed for
integration into the existing range of input and output units.
The Multiple In is a Class A input module that can receive 4 line
signals (or two stereo lines). Mainly intended for use with audio
devices that generate a 0 dbV line signal, it is designed to enable
simple routing of line signals to ARTHUR’s L/R Master. Although
the unit has more limited features (i.e. no Gain, filters or Aux
routing), its inputs can accommodate effect units, CD players,
tape or digital recorders, preamps of any kind and electronic
instruments such as keyboards and Midi devices.
The ARTHUR Subgroup is a high-end, Class-A summing amp. blue is the new blue
It functions as an additional unit for configuring a group of input
modules that are to be controlled via a single pair of faders.
ARTHUR’s new Spring reverb can be used both as a mixer
module and as a stand-alone unit. Equipped with six springs,
the unit is designed to deliver a rich reverb effect that also has a the new MiniCMIT
time-adjustable analogue decay. A digital delay provides a simple
and efficient solution for delay lines that retard or echo the signal
before being sent to the spring. When used as a stand-alone unit,
the Spring can provide reverb for a signal from another mixer, or
a guitar pedal, for example.
The new modules can be ordered online as part of a new mixer
configuration.
www.schertler.com

Sphere Fab 500

Sphere Recording Consoles,
the manufacturer who came to
prominence in the 1970s with studio
consoles that were used on iconic
recordings by the Rolling Stones,
Boston, and many others, has had a
rebirth with new owner Duncan Rowe
at the helm.
The Fab 500 is a single channel
microphone preamplifier compatible
with the 500 Series format. It offers
56.6dB of total gain, with a frequency
response of 12Hz to 56kHz. It features
two attenuation pads at -15dB and
-30dB, making it useful for even high SPL sources. The Fab 500
also includes switchable +48V phantom power and a phase switch.
The Fab Four and Fab 500 Series are exact replicas of the
SCHOEPS GmbH www.schoeps.de
original Sphere mic pres (including the same input and output
transformers, and proprietary op amp). Featuring a big, open Spitalstr. 20 facebook.com/SchoepsMics
sound with tons of headroom, these preamplifiers can be a go-to D-76227 Karlsruhe info@schoeps.de
choice for drums, bass, vocals, amplifier cabinets, and much more.
www.spereconsoles.com

ResolutionMiniCMIT241116.indd 1 24.11.16 15:23

September 2017 resolution 11
 GEAR
Point Source Audio new mics
with built–in backup
Point Source Audio (PSA),
an innovator in miniature
microphone technology, has
announced it is now shipping
the ground-breaking dual
element microphones
with “built-in backup”. The
CO2- 8WL Dual L avalier
Microphone and the EO-8WR
Dual Earmount Microphone are the world’s first fully redundant
microphones with dual factory-matched elements bringing a small
footprint solution to the common need for redundant mic-ing.
With a MSRP of $825 for the CO2-8WL Dual Lavalier, and
$926 for the EO-8WR Dual Earmount, the versatile mics have
omnidirectional pickup patterns, and offer 136dB max SPL and
IP 57 waterproof rating. The dual matched elements lead to
hardwired terminations for use with Shure, Sennheiser and
Lectrosonics wireless transmitters. Available in beige, brown or
black, the CO2-8WL and EO-8WR also accept theatrical colour
markings for camouflaging.
The 6-foot mic cable splits approximately nine inches above
connection to the body-pack to allow ample separation
between the two transmitters. A proprietary slim line SLIDER
clip, traditional alligator clip, and a colour-matched windscreen
come standard.
www.point-sourceaudio.com
AuviTran Audio ToolBox
ToolBox is a modular audio platform giving access to a large
variety of professional audio networked configurations.
With 3 or 7 slots, AVBx3 and AVBx7 can convert microphone,
line in, line out, AES EBU, ADAT, MADI, EtherSound or CobraNet
to DANTE.
An unbeatable combination of the highest quality converters, transparent mic preamps, extraordinary connectivity
and RAVENNA/AES67 makes the Merging Networked Audio family the first choice for Pro Tools or any DAW of your
choice. Full Pro Tools HDX™ integration with the new PT64 option card.
216x125mm HAPI Resolution ad_IBC.indd 1
12
bx_console E enables users to — on a per-channel basis — swap
the original console’s EQ revisions, substitute the compressor’s
VCA (Voltage Controlled Amplifier) with that from the later-
released “British G Series” console, and use contemporary
Brainworx mods that greatly expand the functionality of the
plug-in way beyond the original.
The brainworx development team have added additional,
modern functions to their models of the E Series’ vintage
circuitry: a convenient MIX (dry/wet) control creates parallel
compression effects; an optional secondary release time (REL2)
control prevents the compressor from pumping on delicate
acoustic tracks, while an adjustable HPF (High Pass Filter) for the
The AVBx3 and AVBx7 can be mounted in Installation or Touring compressor’s sidechain increases low-end power and punch
mode for front or rear panel connectors. AVBx7 embed a built in on individual tracks, buses, and mixes; a continuously-variable
1024x1024 digital routing matrix. THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) control adds colorful saturation
Accessories such as redundant power supplies, Switch card with and density to any plugin channel; two alternative THRESHOLD
Fibre connectors, 128 channels Sample Rate Converter or GPIOs ranges for the expander and gate cover a huge 70 dB range; an
can be added to extend the ToolBox Solution. expander invert function facilitates only hearing the portion of
www.auvitran.com the signal that will be expanded or gated, (aiding setting the
threshold); the gate’s HYST (Hysteresis) control sets a dedicated
Brainworx bx_console E closed threshold up to 25 dB lower than the open threshold,
Bx_console E is a flagship preventing sustained guitar notes and ringing cymbals from
plugin that pairs a 72-channel making the gate stutter; the original E Series’ HPF and LPF
emulation of the high-end, hit- (Low Pass filter) frequency ranges can be shifted by a factor of
making “British E Series console” three, allowing for the creation of midrange bandpass filters; a
complete with comprehensive continuously-variable V GAIN (Virtual Gain) knob adds simulated
CO M P R E S S (c o m p r e s s o r/ analogue noise to any or all plugin channels for additional vintage
limiter), full-featured EXPAND vibe; comprehensive monitoring and metering sections include
(expander/ gate), powerful four- solos for mid and side channels; finally, EUCON (Extended User
band parametric EQ, and wide- Control) parameter mapping is provided for Avid controllers,
ranging (high pass and low pass) including the flagship S6 control surface.
FILTERS, together with flexible signal routing (intended to be just bx_console E is available as an AAX Native & DSP AU VST2
like the original console). and VST3 plugin for Mac OS X (10.8 through 10.12), Windows (7
bx_console E uses “TMT” (Tolerance Modeling Technology) through 10), and Pro Tools 10.3.10 (or higher) — exclusively from
to simulate the channel-to-channel variances of the E Series’ Plugin Alliance for $299.00.
electronic components on each and every instance of the plugin. www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/bx_console.html
HORUS
15/08/2016 11:05
resolution September 2017
 SOME MERELY COMPRESS...

WE CRUSH IT.

NEW! COMPRESSOR
BIG SOUND & OUTSTANDING CONTROL

©2017 Mäag Audio, LLC www.maagaudio.com

 REVIEW
Dolby Atmos
Mastering Suite
The next generation of immersive audio mixing tools: JOHN JOHNSON,
HHB’s CTO, describes the new Atmos Mastering Suite and Atmos for the Home.
M
any of you will have heard of Dolby’s
Object Based Immersive Audio Format
— Dolby Atmos. Some may well have
listened to content or even mixed in
Dolby Atmos, but until recently there were several
post production workflow hurdles, some of which
we could easily work around, and others less so.
Avid and Dolby have recently launched a number
of new, and updated tools, which have completely
revolutionized the way in which we structure our mix
sessions and generate our deliverables.
Previous workflows allowed for pre-mixing in Pro
Tools through a set of Dolby plug-ins communicating
with a Local Renderer, Dolby software running in
the background of your PT Mac. This gave us the
ability to pre-place our objects in a 3D space, and
monitor a render to a small speaker configuration,
from Stereo through 9.1.6. This pan metadata would
then translate through into the final mix stage, and
eventually into the cinema.
Atmos for the Home — I think that we are past
questioning if Atmos will be the dominant standard
for Cinema sound, but clever technology is nothing
without great content. Last year a whopping 26 of
the 30 top grossing movies were mixed in Dolby
Atmos, and with the global adoption now at 2700+
Screens and 150+ Mixing Facilities in over 75
Countries worldwide, it’s no surprise that there have
been more than 650 Atmos titles to date. The big
question now is how Dolby Atmos makes the leap
into our homes.
Through its Object-based approach, taking up to
118 simultaneous sounds, each accompanied with
unique 3D positional information in the form of
Metadata, Dolby Atmos can produce fantastically
detailed down-mixes to more traditional 7.1, 5.1 and
even Stereo formats, but the technology is capable of
14
passing Atmos content right the way through to our
living rooms. Home Entertainment Atmos audio is
packaged in either a Dolby TrueHD or Dolby Digital
Plus bitstream, both of which can be authored to Blu-
Ray and played back on any standard player. In fact,
there are well over 100 titles already available.
DD+ is also the audio transport stream commonly
used for on-demand services, and in June, Netflix
announced the addition of Dolby Atmos support,
with five initial titles outlined for 2017 which will
also be available in 4K and HDR. In the UK, BT
Sport have been broadcasting select Premier League
and Champions League games in Dolby Atmos since
January, and Sky have rolled out Dolby Atmos for the
2017-18 Premier League season (see the NEP OB
article in this issue) via Sky Q. Live broadcast audio
goes through a very different encode process, but the
technology and possibilities are comparable, and the
result is a thoroughly immersive soundscape.
Sound Bars & Up-firing Speakers — The
biggest hurdle for most consumers is usually the
additional Height Channel Speakers. For many Home
Theatre enthusiasts, the additional Ceiling Speakers
and new AV Receiver will not deter them, but that is
just a small portion of the population. For everyone
else, Dolby Atmos is actually surprisingly easy to
achieve. Dolby have worked closely with a number
of loudspeaker manufacturers to produce up-firing
speaker technology, normally badged as Dolby Atmos
Enabled, and they are actually recommended over
discreet ceiling mounted speakers for environments
where the ceiling height is lower than ~8ft. They
exist as both floor-standing speakers with up-firing
elements, or as separate add-on units, which are
placed on top of your existing speakers, though you
would still require a Dolby Atmos capable AVR to
Decode and Amplify the content.
resolution September 2017
Another quite remarkable
and very accessible option is the
range of Sound Bars currently on
the market, as well as new TV’s with
Up-firing speakers and beamforming
technology. I was incredibly sceptical
of the entire concept, and I was not the
only one, but at a recent event at Dolby’s
London HQ, Dolby employees, and film
mixers alike were blown away by the level of
detail from above (or deflected off the ceiling).
Cinema RMU — When final mixing and mastering
for Cinema in Dolby Atmos, you require a Dolby
Rendering and Mastering Unit, a hardware box
provided under license by Dolby through their Motion
Picture Service Agreement to Dolby Certified Studios.
In order to gain this certification, a number of criteria
have to be met, one of which is the target Sound
Pressure Level of 85dB (+20dB Headroom). Gaining
Dolby Certification requires a fair amount of planning,
physical space, and attention to detail, however the
finished rooms sound fantastic. The RMU is fed audio
via MADI, Timecode via LTC, and Metadata via IP,
generally from Pro Tools, or a large format Mixing
Console, such as the AMS Neve DFC 3D, Euphonix
System5, or Harrison MPC5 or Trion.
Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite — Dolby are in
the process of creating a new certification level for
Home Entertainment, which is lower than that of the
full theatrical license in a few ways. The minimum
room size is smaller, the target SPL is lower, at 79dB
(+20db), a projector is no longer mandatory, and
it revolves around a Home Theatre RMU, a bit of
software known as the Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite.
DAMS is a package of software designed to run
on dedicated, approved PC Server hardware, offering
128 channels of MADI I/O (co-axial and optical), LTC
and Word clock for synchronisation, and which can
render up to 22 speaker channels for monitoring. Like
the Cinema RMU, it is controlled through a web GUI,
with pages for configuration of Monitoring, Mastering
and I/O, as well some metering and status feedback.
The biggest difference between the HT-RMU and the
Cinema RMU is in some of the algorithms it is capable
of running.
Spatial Audio Coding — When a full Cinema
mix is re-mixed “near-field” for Home Theatre, it is
important to emulate the encode/decode process,
much like when delivering TV mixes via Dolby E, only
less dangerous. The encoding of this content utilises a
technology called Spatial Audio Coding, which takes
into account the position, size, and level of all objects.
Nearby objects are dynamically grouped together
as aggregate elements, in order to be encoded more

efficiently. The number of Spatial Coding
Elements used by the algorithm can be
adjusted to match the encoder settings,
generally 12 for DD+ streams and 16 for
TrueHD.
One of these Elements is always
reserved for LFE, however you can fix
other channels using the Output Beds
control. Traditional bed channels are
by default treated as Spatial Elements,
though this can lead to objects pulling the
image from your static channels. The best
example of this would be the undesirable
potential for groups of objects close to the
centre channel to partially drag the centre
away from centre! In this instance, setting
the Output Beds to ‘C+LFE’ would resolve
this issue, dedicating one of the channels to the Centre
channel, by sacrificing an aggregate element.
The RMU can also emulate the Home Theatre
Limiter, which is applied during the encode process,
and attenuates all channels except the LFE, and
exists due to the potential signal build-up of multiple
objects when rendered to smaller systems. There is
a separate control for the Subwoofer Limiter, and
Dolby recommend leaving both of these on, as it
more accurately reproduces the expected result to
the consumer via the processing chain in their AVR.
Controls also exist to configure Bass Management,
which can be bypassed, or set from 45Hz to 200Hz in
fixed increments. You can also choose between Speaker
Channel, or Object oriented Bass Management, where
the low frequencies are extracted prior to the render,
reducing possible object-bass build-up.
Re-Renders & Deliverables — When mixing in
Atmos, it is still very likely that a variety of deliverables
will be required. This is more complicated than in a
traditional mix, as the objects are combined with the
bed in the Dolby RMU, so our separate Stems, M&E etc.
need to be derived configured in the RMU. By default,
our 128 channels sent to the RMU consist of a 7.1.2
Bed and 118 Objects, however we can sacrifice Objects
to create additional Beds. We can then tag these Beds,
as well as the remaining Objects into Groups which
we define. For example, we could create a group for
Dialogue, another For Effects, Music, etc. These Groups
can then be selected when we configure our Re-Render
Outputs. DAMS allows for up to 10 Re-Renders from
Stereo through 7.1.2, and up to 64 channels in total,
allowing us to produce 5.1/7.1 splits, M&E, etc.
Dolby Atmos Monitor — In order to visually monitor
objects, and some of the I/O in real time, we use the
Dolby Atmos Monitor app (Mac & PC). This connects
to the RMU via it’s hostname or IP address, and
provides feedback of all 128 channels of input, your
Monitoring Render Output with Speaker Solos and
Mutes, Transport Controls, and a 3D representation of
the room with objects overlaid, represented as yellow
spheres. Any objects currently writing metadata are
indicated in blue, which helps a lot when automating
through a 3rd party hardware Panner.
Room Configuration — The RMU needs to
be configured to match the physical loudspeaker
configuration. The Maximum configuration available
is a 11.1.10, which includes 5 Screen Channels,
2 surround speakers and one rear per side, with 5
rows of L & R overheads. One of the most common
configurations would be a 7.1.4, which is a relatively
straightforward retrofit of four overhead channels to
a pre-existing 7.1 environment. In longer rooms, a
9.1.4 or 9.1.6 works well, as this adds more detail to
the pans when moving from the Screen Channels to
the Side Surrounds by adding a Front Wide pair. Each
speaker channel also has an EQ section and Delay,
September 2017 resolution
which can be user configured, or aligned by Dolby.
Dedicated Hardware — Much like with other
processing systems, NLEs or DAWs, Dolby have
a locked down configuration of hardware which is
supported for use with DAMS. In this case, it’s a very
specific build of Dell Precision Server, and a series
of RME MADI & Timecode I/O boards. Due to this,
Dolby’s network of resellers are generally offering
DAMS as a turnkey solution of all parts, configured,
licensed, and installed. The server is available as either
a workstation tower, or 2U rack (nearly 76cms deep).
With all the processing going on, I/O Latency is
still very manageable, at 44ms (slightly more than
one video frame) for the Standard buffer. in high load
situations with a number of simultaneous objects,
dynamic pan metadata, and multiple Re-Renders, it
maybe be necessary to run at the large buffer size,
which increases the overall latency to 129ms.
Pro Tools 12.8 — A huge influence to the wider
adoption of Atmos is the ease of use, and an important
cog in this production wheel is Pro Tools 12.8, which
is one of the most significant release to date for Film
Mixing, with key features including 7.1.2 Tracks
& Busses; Dolby Metadata Connection; Native 3D
Panning; Re-Recording Workflows, and Automated
Routing. In earlier versions, we were limited to 7.1 track
& bus widths, which made smooth pan transitions to
the overhead portion of the bed rather tricky. The next
hurdle was that you could not easily automate a track
to move from being routed to the bed, to becoming a
discreet object, so we ended up with increasingly large
sessions. In Pro Tools 12.8, we can now assign a track
to both a traditional bed or stem route, as well as an
object assignment. It is then very simple to toggle from
one to another, utilising the native 3D pan architecture
built directly into the mixer. The 3D Panner also maps
beautifully onto the Avid S6 Console.
Dolby Atmos Production Suite — Included with
DAMS are three copies of the Dolby Atmos Production
REVIEW
Suite. This is roughly equivalent to the
previous Local Renderer suite of tools,
although it is much more fully featured,
offering the same <22 channel monitoring,
Speaker Delay and Equalization, 64x10
Re-Renders of the HT-RMU. On top of
this, it also offers the addition of a Binaural
Output, Offline Re-Rendering, and a VR
Rendering Mode for Virtual Reality or 360
Video Production. These require separate
VR Panner plug-ins within Pro Tools for
either Spherical or XYZ pan modes, which
aren’t currently as well integrated as the
Atmos Panner, though I’m sure that this
will evolve over time.
For the moment, these tools are
exclusive to Pro Tools and Mac. DAPS
transports audio through Send and Receive AAX
plug-ins. Unfortunately, the architecture of the Avid
Audio Engine means that these plug-ins are effectively
bypassing the Delay Compensation Engine, and
therefore there is the potential for tracks in your
timeline to become out of sync when running multiple
3rd party plug-ins and routing as objects. This is one
of the major reasons why you would choose to run
a dedicated machine for DAMS over the Production
Suite. DAPS is brilliant for pre-mixing workflows, but
is also really useful for QC, due to it’s ability to import
and play back a variety of Atmos formats.
ADM BWAVs & Conversion Tools — When
creating a master file in the HT-RMU, it will generate a
.atmos file, which contains all 128 channels of audio,
as well as all attributed pan and group metadata for
both the beds and objects. This can be imported into
the Dolby Media Producer Suite to be encoded for Blu-
Ray or Streaming.
It can also be imported into the Dolby Atmos
Conversion Tool, included with DAMS and DAPS.
This is capable of a number of tasks, including Frame
Rate Adaption, as well as conversion between various
formats, including: .rpl .mxf .atmos .damf and .wav.
Also included is the Dolby VR Transcoder, which can
produce a DD+ or B-Format (FuMa or AmbiX) render.
When converted to a .wav, this is actually an Audio
Definition Model BWAV, containing all 128 channels,
pan metadata, and group assignment. These can later
be imported into Pro Tools or other applications.
DAPS is exclusive to Mac, AAX DSP & Native, and
currently available through the Avid Marketplace for
$299.
DAMS requires Dolby Approved Hardware and
includes 3x copies of DAPS.
Conclusion — DAMS and DAPS are quite
remarkable. The accessibility of Dolby Atmos
to Consumers and Content Creators alike is really
impressive, particularly now that Pro Tools 12.8 is so
well integrated into the 3D world of Audio. I’m sure
that there are many more sceptics out there, so I would
encourage you all to audition a Dolby Atmos Sound
bar, Beamforming TV, or Up-Firing system and hear it
for yourselves. I think you’ll be genuinely impressed. n
PROS A huge improvement over the Local
Renderer suite of tools. The VR Rendering
Mode and offline re-render will improve
workflow when producing immersive audio
for games and VR. Producing Atmos audio
with Pro Tools just got easier.
EXTRAS None.
Contact
DOLBY LABORATORIES, USA
Website: www.dolby.com • www.hhb.co.uk
15
 REVIEW
Antelope
Orion Studio HD
Simultaneous Pro Tools HDX & USB3 connections — RUSSELL COTTIER examines
a new interface packed with features.
T
hose who have been following Antelope
Audio’s product releases over the past year or
so will be aware that HDX compatible versions
of these high-end studio interfaces are now
available. These forgo Thunderbolt connectivity for a
Pro Tools HDX port that can be run simultaneously
along with the USB 3.0 connection, even to different
computers. Well Antelope has done it again and packed
more than you thought possible into a new 1U rack
audio interface, the Orion Studio HD is essentially the
HDX compatible version of the Orion Studio Rev.2017,
so if you do prefer a Thunderbolt connection then the
option is available.
The Orion Studio HD offers 12 mic pres/line inputs
on XLR/TRS combi-sockets with the four front-
mounted inputs also offering High Impedance mode
for instruments. These instrument inputs have plenty
of headroom and even give low output passive guitars
a nice tight, punchy sound. Antelope has really hit
the nail on the head with the two front panel reamp
outputs. Most modern smaller studios will love the
idea of tracking guitar direct from the control room and
reamping either live or later. The reamp outputs could
be a little hotter but the trim control allows amps to be
driven harder on the input stage.
The front panel has a handy encoder wheel, OLED
screen, talkback button (with a recessed mic) as well
as an A/B monitor button. So the rack can effectively
function as a monitor controller. The rotary encoder
controls all main input and output levels along with
data entry. The unit is simple to use in this manner but
the control software offers the complete routing and
mix controls. The talkback mic, whilst a little noisy,
is definitely a welcome addition to the average non-
console tracking studio.
There are a couple of headphone outputs on the
front panel that can be assigned individual mixes
or can even receive two mono sources each, so
totalling four cue mixes, perhaps for a mobile rig. The
headphone outputs are powerful and clear and coped
well even when tracking drums.
The remaining eight microphone preamp inputs can
be found on the back panel, there are 16 analogue
outputs on DB25 sockets and a pair of TRS insert
points. There are also Word Clock, ADAT and SPDIF
connections plus outputs for Monitor pairs A and B.
Unlike some of the larger units in the range the Orion
Studio HD employs an external power supply, but it
does have a rather heavy duty locking barrel connector.
There is some registration required when first
booting up, and the option of upgrading to the
latest firmware may be available, remember firmware
16
updates include the latest AFX effects. The Orion
Control Panel software allows almost infinitely
flexible routing options to be implemented. Despite
not being a networked audio system, the unit allows
control from other devices connected to the same
network. There is even a smartphone app for Android
and iOS, ideal for tweaking gains from the live room
for example.
I/O ports can be connected with a simple drag
and drop interface or a matrix. Complex routing
configurations are a breeze, internal digital effects and
external hardware processing are simple to patch,
and each I/O port point can be labelled by the user.
Out of the box there is some customisation required
in terms of routing your physical I/O to the USB or
HDX record and playback ports. Whilst this is a little
tedious, routing can be completed fairly swiftly using
the matrix window and presets for each session (or
global presets) can be saved and shared between other
Antelope products.
The four internal mixers are ideal for either super low
latency cue mixes, using hardware input monitoring
on your DAW or even creating on the fly rough
mixes. You could even, at a pinch, perhaps output a
live stream from the unit for podcasting or live video
productions. The mixers offer Level and Pan controls
and Mixer 1 has an aux send for Antelope’s Auraverb
reverb. As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews this is
an incredible sounding reverb with a nice balance of
flexibility and simplicity. There are some great presets
that can be printed or just used for cue mixes whilst
tracking. It’s even possible to route a send from your
DAW to the Auraverb.
The AFX section offers hardware based digital
effects, Antelope has chosen to use Field Programmable
Gate Array (FPGA) chips for the processing rather
than conventional DSP. This is an interesting choice
and they say it offers more flexibility and power. We
have 16 channels of AFX processing to play with,
resolution September 2017
each occupying up to 8 processors. However, you are
limited to 32 compressors and 40 EQs at once. Possible
uses include mixing inserts and processing on the way
into your DAW, you can even route parallel chains. For
example, you may want to track a vocal using a FET-
A76 compressor and a BAE 1084 EQ model, as well
as taking a clean backup print of the vocal.
Antelope has been continually expanding the range
of vintage modelled effects — and it’s all free for
registered Antelope users. Along with the generic EQ
and compression there are licensed digital models
of BAE and Gyraf Audio products. Antelope has
also recently released a set of six new vintage-style
compressors. The dbx-inspired VCA160 sounds great
on bass, the x903 tames vocals and guitars nicely and
there is even an Altec-style compressor, the ALT-436c
which I reached for almost every day. The officially
licensed Gyraf Gyratec X is a lovely characterful
compressor and the Tube176 and Stay-Levin models
definitely invoke the classic sounds of the original
hardware tools.
Overall the selection of AFX models is more than
satisfactory. Some of the EQs can get a little sharp if
cranked, but in general the sounds are pretty close to
the hardware. The A-76 FET compressor really adds
that spank that you are used to from an 1176 on a
snare, the 4K EQs come in black, brown, orange and
pink and each offer a solid workhorse EQ with a clear
punchy flavour. There are even classic Neumann, API
and Pultec style EQs that do exactly what you would
expect of them. I found myself using the VEQ-HA32
(inspired by the Harrison 32c) and BAE 1073 style
EQs most often, but the options are almost certainly
there for your individual preference.
Antelope and Overloud (maker of TH3 amp sim
software) have teamed up to supply guitar amp and
speaker cabinet models that run in the AFX rack. These
proved rather useful for live tracking without amp spill
to the drums. Also they were useful for tracking then
comping guitar parts at a reasonable volume before
reamping through a cranked head and 4x12. Having
near latency-free guitar processing certainly will be a
welcome feature to many producers and studios —
however the cabinet modelling is not quite in same
league as some contemporary plug-ins — yet.
Overall the studio HD was a pleasure to use offering
low-noise, smooth and clear I/O. The front panel
control room functionality is excellent and the FPGA
effects make the unit an incredible workhorse worthy
of any professional studio. Granted the unit is by no
means at the low end of the market in price (retailing
at £3,155) but it certainly packs a lot of functionality
into a small box and the conversion sounds excellent.
We can undoubtedly expect more models of vintage
processors (and hopefully guitar amplifiers) to come
along in further updates, so the future looks — and
sounds — bright for Antelope users. If you are looking
for a new front end for your HDX system, or you just
want a native interface that can hook up to your local
studio more easily, the Orion Studio HD might just
have what you need. n
PROS Extensive internal mixing and routing
options. Excellent FPGA effects (all free).
Reamp output is very useful.
CONS Guitar Cabinet models lack some realism.
Talkback is a little noisy and no option for
a remote TB mic. Sacrifice of Thunderbolt
connection for HDX.
Contact
ANTELOPE AUDIO, BULGARIA
Website: www.antelopeaudio.com
 Remote Controlled Microphone Preamplifier / ADC

This is simply the finest sounding, most capable mic preamplifier we have ever “It was no surprise that the m108 sounded
created. With 8 channels of beautifully transparent, musical preamplifier and A/D phenomenal, as that is what we have come to
conversion, it delivers unrivaled sonic performance with amazing flexibility. expect from Grace Design. This being my first
experience with the company’s A/D converters, I
Ethernet connectivity allows for remote control with our standalone computer was optimistic, but they may have surpassed my
app, or built-in web browser control from any computer or mobile device. MIDI expectations. The imaging was so accurate, it was
and serial ports provide control from Protools™ or existing m802 hardware remotes. eerie. With the amount of gain available, coupled
Front panel control is made simple by the bright OLED display GUI combined with with the detail and clarity, this has to be one of
dedicated hardware switches and rotary encoders. the finest preamps on the market today.”
—Brandon Hickey, MIX
With incredible reliability and stunning audio performance, the m108 is the ulti-
mate input solution for any modern recording setup. “It has a beautifully airy and detailed top
end, complemented by a solid, extended low
end, and it all sounds completely effortless and
• 8 channel remote controlled microphone preamplifier • 192kHz ADC outputs via AES, transparent. Stereo pairs delivered a very spacious
ADAT and USB • Balanced analog out via DB25 • 8x2 USB I/O interface • Ribbon mic and stable image and the superb analogue
mode • Optional interface module • Reference DAC and headphone amplifier headroom margin combined with high-
for low-latency monitoring • Optional Control Room stereo balanced out • 10 channel resolution converters really delivered the goods.”
digital mixer • Front panel HI-Z inputs • 5 year transferrable warranty • Built in the USA —Hugh Robjohns, SOS

for complete information, visit www.gracedesign.com

 REVIEW
Bel Flanger BF 20-500
It’s back to the future for GEORGE SHILLING, with this homage
to a 1970s flanger, made by the original manufacturer.
B
el is latterly Bel Digital Audio, a Milton Keynes-
based pro audio company specialising in
broadcast products such as Dante and MADI
utilities (format converters, breakout boxes,
source selectors), rack-mount audio monitoring units
and audio delays for synchronisation with video. All
quite dull stuff to a music producer. But in the late
1970s and 1980s Bel’s best known products were
the groovy BD80 bucket-brigade delay and sampler,
a contemporary junior rival to the mighty AMS DMX-
1580, and the 2U rack mounted BF20 Flanger. The
original BF20 was designed by the founder of Bel,
who started the company in 1975. Mick Barnard was
formerly — briefly — the guitarist in Genesis before
being replaced by Steve Hackett. Users of the original
BF20 units (which first appeared in the late 1970s)
included Yes, Phil Collins and the Rolling Stones,
and many major studios owned them including AIR,
Townhouse and RAK. The BF20 also had its rivals
like the Eventide and MXR Flangers, but the Bel
had its own unique character — and was stereo. We
had an Eventide and both the Bel and MXR models
in the control rooms at Livingston Studios when I
started there in the mid-1980s. The American MXR
units were cool and sounded great, convincingly
tape phaser-like when set slow, but mono-only. So
the Bels got plenty of use for those wide, swishy
sweeping effects. Bel later updated the BF20, putting
it into a 1RU case.
And now, nearly 40 years after its conception, the
BF20 has been recreated and further “compacted”,
thanks to some egging-on by Bel Digital’s US
distributor, the Wimberley, Texas based Fingerprint
Audio (founded by Josh Thomas who also started
Rupert Neve Designs), and is badged with a modern
Bel logo as Bel Heritage Designs. Using NOS SAD512
bucket brigade delay chips for authenticity and built
by the same people who built the originals, the
updated circuit design has been crammed into a
double-width 500 Series metal enclosure.
The faceplate is coloured to match the original
2U blue version (rather than the later grey update)
but obviously the control layout is rather different. I
plumbed it into a Radial Workhorse and was quickly
swooshing around. There was no instruction manual
in the box of the review model (which was from an
initial demo production run), but I was emailed an
excellent PDF one.
18
Top-left on the front are separate Left and Right
channel clip lights. This thing has plenty of headroom,
probably more than the originals, and I am also sure
it’s hugely quieter than the old ones.
The Mono button (with yellow LED) sums the
inputs together before feeding both channels, and
then a hot signal can sometimes light up the Clip
LEDs, although I never heard anything nasty. BYP
is a bypass button (green LED) which disables the
effect. No signal will pass if your rack is powered
down. Top right are the Mode buttons and indicators.
There are three modes, Manual, Auto and Envelope,
with latching buttons for the latter two, and red LEDs
for all three modes. Manual is default when the other
buttons are released. There is also a REV button with
blue LED which reverses the sweep on channel 2,
i.e. when delay is increasing on channel 1, it will be
decreasing on channel 2. Working down the left side
there is a Mix knob to blend between Dry and Delay
signal; for the most dramatically flangey sounds this
needs to be near the mid-point. Next is the REG knob
(labelled from Min to Max) which is regeneration
or feedback, operating in all modes. Below this are
a pair of Red LEDs which flash or glow to show
delay as it modulates. The top one glows brightest
resolution September 2017
at minimum delay, fades as delay increases towards
half the maximum, then the bottom one starts to
glow just past half the maximum delay, and glows
brightest at maximum delay. Below this is a jack
input for External CV or External Envelope (indicated
with an LED) depending on jumper settings. Working
down the right side are the knobs for the different
modes. There is a Manual delay setting, Envelope
mode Threshold (Min-Max) and Decay (Slow-Fast),
and for Auto mode a knob for Rate (Slow-Fast) and
Depth (Min-Max).
The first thing I did was to set a slow Auto
sweep for pseudo tape phasing — and the Bel
doesn’t disappoint, with some fabulous rich and deep
swooshing on a pair of acoustic guitars. Bringing up
the REG introduces rich metallic overtones. And it’s
like 1985.
Feeding the same signal through both channels
and hard panning them left and right creates some
lovely stereo-fication(?) and widening, especially
at the lower end of the sweep (i.e., longer delay
time). I often wondered about this, but now with
DAW recording, phase flipping, a mono button and
good headphones, it’s easy to compare and analyse
exactly what is happening. The unit’s Mono button
sums the input signals, but there is still that slight
widening effect at the output, with the two channels
just slightly differing enough to create a bit of stereo
interest. If you set the Mix knob fully to Delay and
press the Rev button in Auto mode, you can get
a pseudo-autopan effect when feeding in a mono
signal and setting to Mono mode. It’s not entirely
convincing, and of course the pitch is wobbling up
and down depending on how much the Depth knob
is turned up, but it’s entertaining and occasionally
useful if you want a bit of stereo wandering.
The front panel External Envelope jack requires a
TRS insert cable, as the input is on the Ring — the
internal envelope is on the Tip. This is fun to play
with, and I modulated guitars with a drum track for
some robotic rhythmic flanging shenanigans, using
plenty of Regen. The Envelope mode controls exert
influence here and need careful setup as things can
change dramatically depending on levels and the
speed of the decay. If the jumpers are set to CV mode
the Tip and Ring become separate CV inputs for
channels 1 and 2 respectively.
A good trick is to set the unit’s Mix knob fully
to Delay then blend the dry signal on a desk or
elsewhere, then you can pan the delay and dry
signals differently or otherwise vary them. Of course
if you’re doing this with a DAW then latency can
scupper things if you’re not careful.
The Manual mode lets you sweep things yourself
— handy if you’ve a particular length of tom-tom
fill that needs swooshing in an exact timed sweep.
All the knobs are pleasantly damped and although
smaller than the original, are ideally suited to
twizzling and tweaking.
This re-creation is all of the fun that was the original
BF20, but with audio performance suitable for the
current era. The BF20-500 sounds rich and inspiring,
whether used subtly or more extremely, so don’t be
lazy, get some genuine analogue nourishment! n
PROS Authentic re-creation of a classic, sounds
rich, very low noise, plenty of different
modes for all kinds of fun.
EXTRAS None.
Contact
BEL DIGITAL AUDIO, UK
Website: www.belheritagedesigns.co.uk
 Orion Studio HD
Where speed meets versatility
Orion Studio HD is the newest star in
an already established line of top audio
interfaces. Now with HDX connectivity
it’s a preferred choice for the higher
level Pro Tools setups. With extended
analog I/O, 12 Class A Mic Pres and
enhanced conversion, Orion Studio
HD can fit any DAW workflow and
recording and producing environment
thanks to a fast speed USB 3.0 port.
www.AntelopeAudio.com
Antelope Audio’s latest audio interface
comes fully equipped with our full
library of Real-Time FPGA FX. Not only
is that vast array of EQs, compressors,
guitar amps and cabinets plus AuraVerb
reverb coming to you for free, but also
features authentic models of legendary
units from BAE, Grove Hill, Gyraf Audio,
Lang and more are yet to come.
 REVIEW

Lauten Audio
it does sound at least that quiet in use — very
impressive for a tube design.
Connection to the supplied compact power supply

Eden-LT386
is via a 5-pin XLR (remembering that the pattern
switching is done on the mic, so not the usual 7-pin
connection). The manual recommends a 30 minute
warm up time — but after leaving things to settle
down for five minutes impatience set in, and I didn’t
The new flagship tube microphone makes music for JON THORNTON. notice any significant changes in either tonality or

L
noise as the session progressed.
auten Audio have been in the microphone Adding to the heft is the supplied shock-mount, An initial walk around the microphone with
business for some eight years now. They which is unusual by virtue of being semi-permanently spoken voice on the cardioid pattern, with voicing
entered the fray at a time attached to the mic (the supplied hard set to Neutral gives a sound that’s quite weighty
when, in their own case has a cut-out that accepts and dense at the low end, but not muffled at all,
words, a new brand or model of the microphone mated to the with plenty of mid-range detail that sounds natural
microphone seemed to launch mount). Lauten do mean semi- rather than hard. Off-axis response is very balanced
every week or so. A significant permanent — it will come off, up to the 45º point, and proximity effect comes in
proportion of this flurry of but releasing and attaching it gradually and adds weight rather than bloom to the
new microphones seemed to involves the use of a small sound. Switching to the Gentle voicing softens out
major on emulating classic hex screwdriver to slacken the mid range ever so slightly, whilst the Forward
or vintage designs in either or tighten a couple of small setting opens up the top end significantly, but doesn’t
looks, sound or sometimes bolts. Finished in the same add harshness or exaggerate sibilance at all.
both — but Lauten founder very shiny nickel plating as Sung (female) vocals sound very “pretty” indeed
Brian Loudenslager decided the basket, it underscores the with this microphone — and it does a great job of
on a different approach. With overall feeling of sturdiness and thickening up a slightly thin sounding voice — it’s
a small team, he set out to tank-like build quality. There the mid-range detail that’s really working here, but
produce a high quality, versatile are some nice touches here the low end always sounds controlled. Comparing
and original sounding studio too. The front of the mount is two very different sounding female vocalists —
microphone from a blank sheet open, making close positioning one with much more of a “belt” than the other
of paper. The result was the to sources easy, and a flip-flop — was a good test for the voicing permutations on
(no longer available) Horizon tab on the locking nut for the offer. There’s actually more at play here than just
microphone. swivel joint makes it easy to the multi-voicing switch, as combinations of this,
Eight years down the line, tighten securely whatever the the HPF and the polar pattern all seem to work
and the range has expanded position. very collaboratively together to give a broad and
and moved on — both in Returning to the microphone useful variation to the tonal pallet. Some of the
looks that are more “classic” itself there are three, three- changes are very nuanced, but others more startling
when compared with the position slide switches arrayed — although this is very dependent on the source.
Horizon, and in the range of in a triangular distribution below On acoustic guitar, for example (a Taylor GS Mini
models and price points. Broadly the basket area — two accessible that a colleague was keen to try out), switching
speaking the family is split from the front of the microphone to Gentle on the Omni setting with the HPF off
into two ranges, the more and one from the rear. The gave a scale to the sound that belied the size of
affordable Series first of these, the instrument. With female vocals, changing from
Black and unusually for Neutral to Gentle was a very nuanced change, but
the premium a modern tube Forward with the HPF at its second stop was almost
Signature microphone like auditioning a different microphone.
Series. The Eden but harkening Whilst Lauten maintain that their designs
LT-386 is a recent back to some are “clean sheet” and not intended to emulate
addition, and the classic designs, is any existing designs, comparisons are of course
flagship of the the polar pattern inevitable. That’s actually quite hard to do, given
Signature Series selector, with the surprisingly varied tonal possibilities on offer
(MSRP: $3,999). omni, fig-8 and here. At its core (and perhaps unsurprisingly given
Despite the cardioid patterns the basic ingredients) a 251 springs most readily to
“blank sheet” offered. The mind. But, depending on the source, this can morph
philosophy, second slide more towards a C12 or, say, an M149 — it really
the key switch is is that flexible. In the last few months I’ve had
ingredients effectively a the chance to evaluate a number of microphones
here are familiar ones. two stage HPF — although with similar tonal flexibility, albeit achieved in
The Eden is a large Lauten refer to the different very different ways. And whilst they all have their
diaphragm, multi-pattern selections as “Kick-Shaper” unique strengths, to my ears the Eden LT-386 does
tube condenser design. Centre and “Vocal-Shaper”. The final it in the most organic, musical way of the bunch.
stage is a 31.25mm edge- switch, located at the rear of the My first experience with the brand definitely won’t
terminated dual diaphragm microphone is something of a be my last. n
capsule, tuned specifically for Lauten signature — the multi-
this particular microphone. A voicing switch. This selects one of PROS Fabulous build and finish; quiet and clean
modern (JJ Electronic) EF806S tube three voices (each with independent but not clinical sounding; flexible and
sits at the heart of the electronic side of signal paths internally) for the microphone — musical tonal palette; never sounds harsh or
things, coupled to a custom-wound output Neutral, Gentle or Forward. strained.
transformer. Externally, the Eden is a hefty The inclusion of this option, and the
beast, with a chassis that is both wide and tall, references to the HPF settings as Shapers are CONS Semi-permanent shock mount not quick to
remove if necessary.
topped by a very shiny nickel-plated basket. both clues that the brief for the Eden is very
The main body is finished in a muted grey/green, much based on designing a microphone for its
utilising a modern ceramic coating process to provide musical character rather than perfect tech specs. Not Contact
a finish that succeeds in looking both classic and that in many ways these aren’t wholly respectable. LAUTEN AUDIO, USA
Web: www.lautenaudio.com
modern at the same time. Self noise, for instance, is quoted at <20dBA and

20 resolution September 2017


Vanguard V13
A new tube mic which JON THORNTON reckons can cope with any type of audio you serve it with.
I
t’s obvious that a key part of Vanguard’s ethos
and mission is achieving the best balance of price
and performance. This can be a tricky exercise in
an era of ever cheaper microphones and efficient
manufacturing, when even the lowest price points
can turn out reasonable results. And of course, there’s
the perennial issue of diminishing returns in pro-audio
— how much more do you spend on components and
processes, and where are the (sometimes marginal)
gains best had?
There’s no easy answer here, and sometimes
the best approach is simply one of constant
experimentation and evaluation, with a degree of
trial and error. The V13 is the result of some 2 years
of such an effort. Despite their winged logo being
vaguely reminiscent of a number of classic British
September 2017 resolution
sports car companies, Vanguard Audio Labs hail
from sunny California. The mic is the first product
to ship from this apparent newcomer to the world
of microphone manufacturers — although the team
behind the mic are far from newbies. Despite the
deliberate air of mystery surrounding the designer on
their web-site, a little detective work shows that many
of the key staff were formerly associated with Avant/
Avantone, including Ken Avant and the late Glenn
Heffner — and you can see this DNA in the look and
feel of the product.
Unpacking the V13 from the supplied hard case
shows that there’s a degree of pride in how that price/
performance is manifested in the microphone’s looks
as well as its sound. A relatively compact package,
the brass body is finished in a glossy wine colour —
the company calls it Pinot Noir, and it certainly looks
distinctive. A stylised design cut out in the rear of the
body gives a view of the tube’s heater glowing gently,
and also aids with cooling. Sitting atop the body is a
basket with a fairly open mesh, within which sits a
34mm edge terminated dual capsule assembly. Colour
aside, there’s more than a nod to the Telefunken
design cues at play here. Build quality seems good
from both the outside and when inspecting the
internal circuit board, with the tube mounted securely
with a degree of elastic suspension for longevity.
There’s no indication as to what specific tube is
employed here, as it’s been printed with the Vanguard
name and logo — but there’s a clue in the manual,
which suggests that experimenters can swap this out
for 12AX7, 12AT7 and 12AY7 or pin-compatible
equivalents. If this is your thing there’s even a cut-out
in the case to carry an extra tube.
A heavy-duty shock-mount
is supplied with the kit, and
this too seems solidly built. It
features an open front allowing
close instrument positioning or
optimal placement of a pop-
shield for vocals, and
utilises aerospace grade
suspension O rings to
link the inner cradle to the
outer frame. These are guaranteed not to
stretch, sag or crack over time — but spares are
nevertheless provided in case of loss. The mount
screws into the base of the microphone, and an
added bonus is that it will fit any microphone
with M22x1 threading. Toggle switches on the
microphone enable the selection of a -10dB
pad and a HPF (125 Hz, 6dB/octave), but polar
pattern selection is made via a switched control
on the accompanying power supply. This is a
reasonably chunky affair, finished in the same
gloss Pinot Noir colour, and connects to the
microphone with a supplied 7-pin XLR cable.
The three main polar patterns have intermediate
steps, giving a total of nine potential patterns to
choose from.
Vanguard’s own literature describes the sound
of the V13 as having the high-end of an
ELAM251, the mid-range detail of a C800G
and the low-end warmth of a vintage U47.
So, not a lot to live up to then! Testing initially
with spoken voice, and it’s the mid-range that
grabs your attention first. There’s detail and
clarity here, and the very slightest hint of ‘edge’
REVIEW
to consonants that’s immediately quite appealing.
Despite this, it never seems to tend towards harshness
or hardness — in fact the top end sounds relatively
restrained and open. On the cardioid setting there’s
also plenty of thickness to the low end– with more
on tap via a fairly hefty proximity bump when
working close up. Rear rejection is very strong on
the cardioid setting too — although moving the polar
pattern a notch or two towards omni seems to help
steer the low end from being too overbearing with
close voices, at the expense of less rear rejection.
With sung (female) vocals, again, there’s something
immediately very arresting about the sound — it’s
forward without sounding hyped in the highs, but
never sounds closed-in as a result — a characteristic
that I find many cheaper tube designs struggle with.
Moving to acoustic guitar, and again there’s
something quite punchy about the sound — a very
defined edge to both picked and strummed playing,
but maintaining a solidity and warmth to the sound.
Again, there’s a fair amount of subtle adjustment to
be had when playing around with polar patterns at
both close and distant mic positions. Moving further
away from the guitar on an omni pattern gives a very
balanced sound — not quite as full sounding as close
up, but moving the pattern slightly towards cardioid
helps balance the direct and room sounds nicely.
Tellingly, even at distances of a meter or more, that
immediacy to the mid-range is maintained — always
a sign, to my mind, of a well-sorted microphone.
And I think that this is likely to be the major
appeal of this mic, a characteristic that will make it
extremely flexible for both vocal and instrument mic-
ing, and very source tolerant — this isn’t a diva of
a vocal mic. In all, it’s an attractive package — with
only one thing marring the picture slightly. Vanguard
make great claims about the noise floor of this
microphone, claiming around 13dBA — and I have
to say that this isn’t the impression I got at all, as the
mic seemed quite noisy even at
relatively moderate gain settings.
I’m almost convinced, though,
that this is an isolated issue with
either the mic or PSU supplied for
review, especially as the noise was
a little sporadic in nature at times.
Putting that aside — what
about that price/performance
question? Vanguard appear to have
chosen wisely in just where to put the
money — component choice and capsule
clearly aren’t of the bargain basement variety, and
it shows. But then again, neither is the price. At
a suggested price of £950 including VAT, it isn’t
aiming to be the cheapest tube microphone out there.
Sonically, though, it sounds in completely different
league to those cheaper designs, and would give
more established (and expensive) models a real run
for their money. n
PROS Solidly built; good balance of price to
performance; forward sounding without
being hyped or harsh; versatile in
application.
CONS Review model seemed noisier than
published specs; mid-range “edge” might
be just a little too forward for some
instrument sources.
Contact
VANGUARD AUDIO LABS, USA
Web: www.vanguardaudiolabs.com
UK, Emerging Ltd: www.emerginguk.com
21
 REVIEW
Schertler Stat-C Road
Producer, engineer — and cellist — GEORGE SHILLING tests an innovative contact microphone.
W
e looked at the ground-breaking Schertler
Arthur modular mixer in Resolution
V15.7 October 2016, but the Swiss
company’s reputation was originally
built on Stephan Schertler’s quest in the early 1980s to
improve on the typically nasal-sounding piezo pickups
used for amplifying stringed instruments. Schertler is
a double bass player so the motivation was obvious.
He developed the STAT Series of contact microphones.
There are variants of these for different instruments:
double bass, cello, violin/viola and gypsy guitar. And
these are available in bundles with different preamps.
Requiring 10V “phantom” power supplied on an
unbalanced cable, there are three possible options:
the basic STAT Pre powered by 9V battery, the two
channel YELLOW Single, and the one supplied in this
package, the three channel YELLOW Blender.
The bundle comes in a fabric zipped holdall. Inside
are two sections: in the larger part is the YELLOW
(blue coloured) “Acoustic Class A Blender” — the
preamp unit. In the smaller sections is a PSU for that,
the contact microphone with a short cable to the clip
and phono socket. Also in the larger section is a cable
to run to the preamp, the paperwork, and a nice blue
retractable ballpoint pen labelled with the Schertler
website link and the motto “this colour is YELLOW”.
I bought an electric Yamaha Silent Cello for live use on
noisy stages in order to hear myself without feedback,
so was interested to try this with my acoustic cello. The
first job is to grind the cork “stopper” mounted onto
the contact mic to the correct curve to fit in the near-
circular gap in the bridge underneath the top (A) string
of the cello. There are all kinds of shapes of blanks for
bridges, which are then fettled to taste by a luthier for
a particular cello. My two cellos have vastly different
sized holes in their bridges, so naturally I shaped this to
fit the larger hole which happened to be on the better
cello. However, for gigging I might be more tempted to
take the slightly more battered instrument! I squidged
it in and left it as a fairly tight fit — you wouldn’t want
it to fall out mid-gig, but it’s tricky to judge how much
pressure you should force on mic cork or bridge. Having
said that, this is all vastly quicker, simpler and less
potentially problematic on a valuable instrument than
22
any pickups that mount under the bridge feet. The gold
plated phono is attached to a half-moon shaped sprung
clip designed to attach to the tailpiece — this fitted well
to my cello. Inserting the (also gold-plated) plug on the
fancy braided lead is a bit tricky as it is a tight fit, but
again, you don’t want things pinging off mid-set, and
a quarter-inch jack plug/socket arrangement would be
bulkier. At the other end of the cable, an angled jack
plug goes into the YELLOW Acoustic Class A Blender
II. This is the top-end luxury preamp option, with a Mic
channel, Instrument channel, a Send on both channels
and a third Return input. About the size of a VHS
tape (if you remember those) the Mic XLR, Instrument
jack and Return jack inputs, Send and minijack
headphone outputs are mounted at one end, with
PSU input (a little blue LED comes on adjacent when
power is fed in), DI (-20dB) and Master Balanced XLR
and Unbalanced jack outputs at the other end. With
four rubber feet this can be placed anywhere convenient.
The PSU is a transformer plug (an annoying 2-pin
Euro shaver type) with flying lead to a fairly large
DC barrel plug. To use the pickup, you need to press
the +10V button which sends phantom power to
activate the contact mic. Next to this button is a Warm
button which is a low pass filter, and a -12dB pad.
There is a Gain knob, and four fixed-frequency sweep
EQ bands. A high pass filter is also provided (120Hz),
and there is a Send knob and a Volume fader, before the
signal joins the Mic channel and Return at the Master
Volume knob.
Plugging the balanced output into my audio interface
I found that with Gain and Volume on the channel and
the Master Volume output all to be cranked up fairly
high, there was impressively enough level for a Line
input rather than Mic. But there was a fairly high
level of background noise coming from the mic. Not
intolerable, but louder than I expected. Turning up my
monitors, the sound was big and warm, if a tiny bit
fuzzy. After consulting with Schertler, it seemed that
my installation was incorrect as the mic was touching
the bridge wing and needed rotating. On doing this,
things improved with more signal to noise and a
better defined high end. However, I discovered that
rotating it too far away from the wing things went
resolution September 2017
thinner and quieter. So it seems positioning is super-
critical, and experimentation is required. Edging the
monitor level higher, I was astonished at the lack of
any hint of feedback. At maximum volume, the A
string would start to vibrate and feed back, but this
was soon stopped by touching it, and I simply couldn’t
get anything nasty, howling or boomy to happen.
With a touch of reverb, the sound was inspiring, and
it’s exciting to think I could use my main instrument
onstage without fear of feedback. The Warm filter
might be handy for mellower tones. And some useful
shaping could be achieved with the EQ. The high pass
filter seemed a touch too drastic up at 120Hz and
might have been better at say 75Hz, but the Low EQ
band is a 60Hz shelf so you can roll off some very low
end there. The other frequencies are nicely chosen —
300Hz peaking for body, 1.3kHz peak for nasal or mid
punch, and 12kHz shelf for some sheen.
Plumbing in my Yamaha Silent Cello for
comparison, the dedicated electric instrument’s output
was generally more nasal and somewhat bass-light. I
find that rolling off the high end and boosting the low
end of the Yamaha’s output helps me hear my tuning
better when using in-ear monitors. The STAT contact
mic’s warmth and rounded yet open tone is certainly
more desirable.
The Return is a useful extra input, handy for
injecting an effect or any line source back in. I was
slightly disappointed it was mono (balanced), because
stereo would have been better for use as an auxiliary
onstage monitor input to balance other sources with
the cello.
Overall this is probably the best solution on the
market for live cello amplification, and I’m sure the
same goes for the Schertler’s instrument versions of
the STAT. If you’re on a budget and want to be free of
mains hook-up, I’m sure the STAT Pre will serve you
well, but the YELLOW preamp is superb. n
PROS Incredible lack of feedback, much warmer
and more natural sound compared to piezo
pickups, great preamp with useful EQ.
CONS Installation position critical, some
background noise, Euro shaver plug, mono
Return input.
Contact
SCHERTLER GROUP, SWITZERLAND
Web: www.schertler.com

McDSP 6034
Ultimate Multi-Band
Can a die-hard hardware-man be happy with software? NIGEL JOPSON gets a pleasant surprise.
T
he 6034 is a dynamics processor which
includes the compression, expansion, and
gating modules from the McDSP 6050
Ultimate Channel Strip (reviewed Resolution
V15.4), with a four band crossover network. The user
interface continues the metaphor of a “500 series”
look, with modules swappable on the fly for quick
auditioning whilst retaining relative settings. The
crossover filter slopes can be configured as 6, 12, or
24 dB/Oct.
Within just a few minutes of instantiating the
6034 on the stereo bus, I knew I’d found “my” 2-bus
compressor. This was quite a revelation, because I
have never liked software compressors on the master
bus. I’m from a generation of engineers who grew up
on analogue, learnt to mix with a compressor on the
master, and have never really been happy mixing
that way in-the-box. Apocryphal stories from young
gear-nerds explain that, back in the day, old guys like
me used to “spank” or “crush” the mix. We didn’t.
We were pros: if you had walked to my compressor/
limiters in the ‘80s and bypassed them, the peak level
would have stayed exactly the same. But the VUs
would have drooped quite a few dB, and so would
the tone of my mix. Most of us used the master chain
to pile on moderate ratio, slow attack compression,
and either used a limiter with a higher threshold to
follow, or trusted Ampex 456 to mellow transients.
Software developers claim to “model” hardware units,
September 2017 resolution
but it’s proved much harder to
effectively do this with dynamics
than with EQ.
The 6034 offers 10
compressors, the flavour of
which run roughly mellow-to-
tough from top to bottom. The
C671 has some tube character;
the MT2 is clearly a Variable-
Mu emulation, and brings a
useful suggestion of this design
to the sound; iC2 suggests an
“integrated circuit” — I loved
the sound — but the release time
was a bit too slow for my taste
and is not adjustable; OPTO-C2
is a stand-out emulation of an
LA-2A, with a very well-chosen
release curve and a nice smooth
sound; OPTO-L2 is like C2 with a
limiter vibe — unwise to use too
much on a bus — more useful for
individual instruments; BC-22
(from it’s colour) is possibly
intended to resemble a Neve,
but release time is sadly not
comparably fast; OVER EZ2 is
a magnificent dbx 160 homage
— it’s a masterpiece emulation
— I even liked it better than the
hardware because it has variable
attack and release; SST ‘77 is
an 1176-style unit, I loved the
fast release, but this is no “all
buttons in” emulation, it’s at its
most effective between 3:1-6:1; FRG 445 is a McDSP
special, and probably my favourite, as it reminded me
a little of the punch I can get from an Audio & Design;
D358 — is this intended to sound like a Distressor? —
it’s great, the hip-hop guys will love this one with the
crush control.
For me, the standouts are the OVER EZ2, the FRG
445 and the D358 — there are sufficient flavours of
compressor for any audio pro to construct their own
favourite device. Apart from selecting dynamics from
the buttons on the left, there’s quick-choice access
by clicking the module model number. The key 6034
feature is the facility to add in your own characterful
dynamics without destroying the sound. A hardware
Distressor passes full range audio, yet adds a gritty
edge — it’s a flexible tool — whereas most software
emulations are OTT. With the 6034 it’s possible to
select a range — say, 1.5kHz to 4.5kHz — and apply
a gritty D358 tone just in this region. Indeed, it’s
possible to select “no module” for frequency bands if
they don’t require treatment.
These qualities make the 6034 an equally good
choice on individual instruments, and this is where
the expander/gates come into play. There’s an
obvious “clean up” role to play on instrument amps,
attenuating hiss or hum automatically when the
musician is not playing, but the gates can also be
used creatively to shape audio. There are 3 modules:
the blue iX, which I found quite easy to set up as
REVIEW
a “EDM-style” triggering effect on high frequencies
from synths; the FRGX which has a negative-to-
positive range control — very handy for bringing
out percussive elements of muffled playing; the EZG
which can be effectively used for the opposite effect,
for example to mitigate clatter from over-enthusiastic
slap bass playing. The EZG has a HOLD control,
which can be used to force the gate to remain open
for up to 2 seconds. The up-to-200ms attack time on
these gates means the initial pluck or strike tones of a
note can be “faded in” — particularly effective when
applied to the HF part of a signal.
McDSP have given us input and output bargraph
meters with peak hold to the right of the interface, and
with the 4 meters next to each other, it’s easy to see
if you’re fooling yourself there’s an “improvement” in
sound merely by adding gain. Importantly, the input
meters are post input trim (which offer +/-24dB). Far
too many plug-in UIs encourage operators to work
in a simplistic “Teletronix” manner: more input gain,
more compression. This was fine with old hardware
that could still pass quality audio while being run
over with a tank, but the poor results of bad digital
gain structure are all too evident on many modern
mixes. The MSTR button on the right hand side of
each 6034 module allows any module’s controls
to trim all modules. This is achieved in the same
manner as a VCA subgroup on a mixer: the modules
retain all control positions already set, the master
just adds or subtracts an offset when turned. So
this is the best way to adjust “amount” of all four-
bands of compression: first set individual bands,
checking tonality and unity gain in solo; then adjust
overall compression threshold and make-up gain by
designating 1 module as a master.
Overall, the 6034 is a snap to tweak. Like
George Shilling in his review of the 6050 McDSP
channel strip, I initially found the lack of an “undo”
command a bit disconcerting — hitting Command Z
un-instantiated the entire native plug-in! The lack of a
Source/Compressed “Mix” control will be complained
about by some, but I don’t think this is really the point
of the 6034. Parallel compression is a very specific
technique for a particular effect — unfortunately it is
now being used as a sort of quick fix by people who
don’t really understand what they are doing with
audio — punch in a preset and dial it back by blending
in the original. This is not controlling audio dynamics,
and it’s not what the 6034 is all about.
With the McDSP 6034, I felt I had a tool to
construct a software compressor that fitted in with
my way of sculpting audio; a plug-in where I could
selectively introduce a flavour of hardware units I love
without being faced with a take-it-or-leave-it result.
The range of modules available, and fine control,
means that audio pros will reap the benefits from time
spent constructing their own presets. The McDSP
multi-band is actually the only software compressor
which I would consider using as an overall stereo
compressor, and, coming from an un-reconstructed
hardware guy, I guess that is saying something. n
PROS The ability to assemble custom multi-band
dynamics with some classic hardware
flavour. Fast setup. Sensible metering.
Fantastic sound for a software 2-bus
compressor.
CONS No undo (but so easy to set up it doesn’t
really matter)
Contact
MCDSP, USA
Web: www.mcdsp.com
23
 REVIEW
Sonnox Oxford
Dynamic EQ
NIGEL JOPSON mixes smarter with a new problem-solving EQ.
L
et’s start this review by considering
“metaphors” in audio production. We have a
row of faders on-screen in our DAWS which
represent volume levels for individual tracks.
They might as well be boxes with data values in but,
as humans, we prefer faders. The visual representation
is a metaphor for an idea of loudness. If we want, we
can move the fader by mouse or control surface, but if
you look at the data this generates, it’s easy to see this
is not the most precise way of working. If you have
a clear idea of the level changes required, it’s more
accurate to draw the data smoothly with a cursor,
joining keyframe points, and most DAWs offer this
alternative. We can see audio graphically represented
as a waveform, so we can map our gain data to that.
It’s also more efficient, because we don’t need to do
it in real time.
But what about EQ and dynamics? Here, I feel the
vintage metaphor is driving the modern flowchart —
when really it shouldn’t. If I buttoned the EQ in on
my Harrison console in 1987, it was maybe because
the hi-hat sounded a bit aggressive and splashy when
the drummer went to the open setting in the chorus. I
didn’t really want to EQ every single hi-hat hit, but I
had no choice. Why have our DAWs copied this signal
flow? Yes we have automation — for a simple EQ
change here or there — but if the drummer is on and
off closed and open hi-hat every other beat, there’s
no way to automate a conventional EQ plugin. This is
what the Oxford Dynamic EQ is for.
By way of illustration of how the Dynamic EQ
operates, here is a problem elegantly solved by the
Sonnox. I have a groovy stereo drum loop of a full kit
playing a beat, but there are two problems with it: the
kick has been over EQed when recorded (big thump),
but if I use a conventional plugin to EQ it away, I will
lose the cool low-end room ambience from the kick.
On the same pre-mixed loop, the hi-hat is far too
loud, but if we use a conventional plugin to EQ its
aggressive frequencies, the snare will lose all its snap.
24
The first thing to understand about the Sonnox is
that there are TWO EQ devices for each of the five
frequency bands. The Offset Gain (a small downward-
facing white chevron) determines the resting, or
static gain of each equaliser section. If you want,
you can use this plug-in entirely as a conventional
5-band EQ, by only using the Offset Gains. The Target
Gain (five coloured circles with numbers) determines
the gain which the EQ band will attempt to reach
dynamically. Looking at the “Low EQ” screenshot, I
have set a shelving target at 165Hz of -12dB, which
will attenuate the over-EQed recorded kick every time
it hits. I have an Offset gain target to boost +5.75dB
at exactly the same frequency. I have adjusted the
Threshold control so that, when the kick drum hits,
the EQ will dynamically attenuate with the fast attack
I have set, then release towards the static Offset Gain
boost target. The effect will be to attenuate the bass
on initial hits, rapidly boosting the bass in the decay
period to bring up low end ambience. The “Dynamics”
control operates like a wet/dry mix control. All the way
to the right is maximum (dynamic EQ only) effect, all
the way to the left is off. The Offset gain setting is not
affected. Each EQ section has an in/out button, next
to which is a headphone-symbol button — this allows
solo listening for the particular frequency band.
There is an SC (sidechain) button underneath
the band in/out button. When this is activated, a
horizontal yellow slider appears above the Attack/
Release section (see High EQ screenshot). The
original input signal is copied and filtered to focus on
a narrow frequency range. This filtered signal is fed
into the band’s dynamics processor, which controls
the EQ gain applied by that band. By default the side
chain filter matches the EQ band, using the same
type, frequency and Q. However, the sidechain centre
frequency can be slid up or down the frequency band,
and the Q widened or narrowed by grab-and-dragging
the ends of the slider. A very versatile arrangement.
Additionally, the sidechain can be set to external,
resolution September 2017
allowing a completely different
signal to control this band’s side
chain path. A useful application
would be to insert the Sonnox
Dynamic EQ on an audio subgroup
of guitars and keyboards, and
then route the lead vocal to the
SC input via your DAW. The vocal
presence frequencies could then be
automatically “ducked” from the
instrument groups every time the
vocalist let rip. The result would
be to generate a feeling of space
within the track dynamically,
rather than having to EQ
instruments radically to keep them
out of the way of the vocal.
Looking at the high mid EQ
screenshot, we can see I’ve done
the opposite of the low shelf.
There’s a static Offset cut of
-6.32dB, with a dynamic Target
Gain of +6.35 dB, but only on
the Side component (the small
“S” symbol next to the number 4 in a circle) of the
M/S signal. The box next to the Bell/Shelf selector
can be used to select Stereo/Left/Right/Mid/Side to EQ
the signal. In my case, I found selecting Side for the
dynamic boost had the desired effect of increasing the
feeling of power on snare beats, without making it
too obvious there was a 12.5dB gain swing occurring
on every hit.
I also had a small fixed cut of -5.15dB at 781Hz,
on a narrow Q of 7.3, just to take a little “boxiness”
out of the overall sound ... and to prove how versatile
the Oxford Dynamic EQ is!
The Oxford Dynamic follows the lead of Sonnox’s
Envolution plug-in, moving away from the fixed
audio treatments of the past towards a “smarter”
style of audio sculpting. The end result can only be
good, as it will encourage production pros to work in
a more clever, musically relevant manner with raw
audio, rather than brutalising individual sounds to fit
in with the desired final mix. The Oxford offers many
of the same functions as the Waves F6 Floating-Band
Dynamic EQ, but the addition of the Offset, or static,
gain function is a masterstroke from Sonnox. It gives
a huge amount of extra flexibility, in providing a
tuneable fixed target for the dynamic EQ effect to
“return” to. Additionally, for £200 you are actually
buying an extra conventional Oxford EQ plug-in, as
the Offset gain boost or cut can be used independently
from the dynamic section. It’s a testament to the
high quality and usefulness of Sonnox’s products
that their flagship standard Oxford EQ — whose
algorithms can be traced back to the ‘90s and the
Sony OXF-R3 digital console — is still a go-to EQ for
many producers today. A new plug-in from Sonnox
is always something of an event — the Dynamic EQ
is a fantastic tool — and points the way to a smarter
audio future. n
PROS A smarter way of working with the “Oxford”
sound. The provision of Offset Gain is a
masterstroke of design.
CONS Operationally, none. No HDX yet. Sonnox
have a “working culture of a defined work/
life balance” — their support desk is only
operational 9:00 to 17:30 (GMT). 
Contact
SONNOX, UK
Web: www.sonnox.co.uk

Tascam SS-R250N
Is there still room in broadcast for a rack-mount 2 track?
NIGEL JOPSON checks out a new solid state recorder.
T
he SS-R250N is a networkable solid-state
recorder/player with a variety of remote
control options. It records in WAV and MP3
format to SD/SDHC/SDXC and USB flash
memory. Since the recorder is able to connect to an
FTP server via a network, it can upload recordings
automatically after a recording has been finished, or
download files for playback. Time synchronisation via
SNTP is also possible, or automatic recording when
an input signal exceeds a user-defined level. The
unit we tested was fitted with the optional IF-DA2
($299/£263)Dante interface card.
When a piece of hardware arrives with five
98-page manuals in different languages, you know
you’ve just acquired a bit of kit built with the
broadcast/studio sensibilities of yore. The Tascam is
extremely well built with classic Japanese attention-
to-detail: the controls are beautifully fitted, the multi-
jog wheel has a positive detent-ed feel, and there are
illuminated transport controls worthy of an analogue
2 track. Audio may be recorded to USB Flash drive, or
to 2 SD card slots: USB drives up to 64GB and SDXC
cards up to 128GB are supported. The 2 SD card slots
have a cover which can be fastened with a security
screw. A lock function can be set
to prevent the unit being controlled
by front panel or remote control.
The 2 SD cards can also be used
together, recording a backup MP3 file
in parallel to one, or in what Tascam
terms “Relay” recording, where
recordings can span cards to allow
continuous recording, the SS-R250
switching to the second card as soon
as the first card runs out of memory.
Both of these optional functions only
work with 44.1kHz or 48kHz sample
rate recording. There’s an “Automatic
file closing” feature, and when tested,
the recorder succeeded in saving the audio
being recorded to a file when AC power
was removed.
I have history with Tascam broadcast
recorders: I used a previous model
extensively, the HS-20 Compact Flash
recorder. The SS-R250 has several similar
features, with extended functionality. The
HS-20 had some potentially very useful
network features, in particular the ability
to upload and download audio files via
FTP. The applications are clear: the unit
September 2017 resolution
could function as a server, and recordings made
locally could be recovered remotely. Alternatively,
audio files could be sent in the other direction,
downloaded automatically to the local Tascam
memory cards — for example — a chain of clubs
could all have their playlists updated overnight.
Unfortunately, the HS-20 was a frustrating nuisance
to configure, so it was a very pleasant surprise to find
the SS-R250N recognising the Ethernet connection,
and automatically setting an IP address for the DNS
server. If you have a static IP, it can be manually set.
I was soon downloading and uploading files over
the internet to the Tascam, using CuteFTP Mac as a
client. I tried downloading files to the Tascam named
with unusual characters, and with a diverse range of
sample rates, but nevertheless the Tascam recognised
the data and was capable of playing the audio.
From a recording point of view, the SS-R250N
has generous options. Both balanced and unbalanced
line ins, and mic inputs with switchable phantom
power. On “Rec page 2” there’s a series of options
which can be engaged: an AGC, a low cut filter
(40Hz, 80Hz, 120Hz, 180Hz, 220Hz) a limiter
and “soft” or “hard” compression. Bearing in mind
the potential for unattended
operation, I tested the
dynamics, and found the
soft compression lived up
to its name (although the
release time was a little
slow), and I tested the
limiter by setting a healthy
mic input peak of -4 on the
meter, and then exceeding
it by +18dB. The limiter
was certainly audible,
but there was not much
obvious distortion, and the
audio was usable in a sort
of documenting-the-event manner.
S/PDIF and AES/EBU ins and outs
are also provided, and there’s a real-
time sample rate converter supporting
rates from 32kHz-192kHz which can
be activated to process incoming
digital audio. The highest analogue
recording sample rate is 96kHz.
The feature I was most keen to
try was the Dante connectivity.
Connecting the dedicated Dante port
to a network, I was initially frustrated
REVIEW
to receive a Yamaha-QX1-style message ‘DIN error
Digital input is illegal’. On examining the Tascam LCD
closer, I also noticed ‘(Fs unmatch)’, giving me a clue
that the Audinate Dante Controller was configured to
a different sample rate to that which the SS-R250N
was set to record on. When this was corrected, I soon
had the Tascam recording and playing back over
the network. To me, this is the killer feature on the
Tascam. Is there really still a place in the equipment
rack for a 2-track recorder, even one as well-specified
as the SS-R250? Most broadcasters would opt for a
more flexible multi-channel solution, but the addition
of Dante connectivity offers the option to archive
audio from hundreds of production sources over AoIP,
making the Tascam a far more useful proposition.
There is also a dedicated app available for iOS and
Android devices that can control transport operations
and various settings, or you can integrate the recorder
into existing environments using serial or parallel
control. In fact, there are so many options: fader start,
footswitch operation, a “ducking” function based on
playback or input signal exceeding a threshold level ...
sometimes one gets the impression a Tascam engineer
in Tokyo has spent many months considering how
to cram as many possible functions into this stereo
recorder! Some are genuinely useful — for example,
the ability to start and pause recording when audio
exceeds a preset threshold level (Sync Rec) — and
some a little obscure (Telnet connection).
With the SS-R250N, Tascam have taken all the
options for stereo recording in a rack-mount device to
the max. Fortunately, the addition of a fast operating
multi-jog dial makes zipping through the hundreds of
menu options a breeze. The push-to-select dial makes
entering sub menus and selecting options fast, and
(by default) pushing the dial during recording writes
a marker point; during playback, turning the dial one
click locates to markers. Although most broadcast
recording and playback these days has moved to
touch-screen based operation, there’s always going
to be a place for a hardware device to make archive
recordings. The addition of Dante connectivity brings
the Tascam recorder right up to date, and the Dante
option means it could also be used as a well-specified
stereo ADC/DAC together with a DAW running
Audinate’s VSC. Overall, a super piece of kit with
every option imaginable for stereo recording. n
PROS 1u solid state stereo recorder with every
option imaginable (£938 list, around £700
street price). Remote upload/download over
internet (FTP). Dante connectivity.
CONS The concept is a little dated, but fulfils a
requirement.
EXTRAS Wireless remote (standard). IF-DA2 Dante card
(supplied for review). RC-SS20
remote. RC-3F footswitch. There is
a companion model SS-CDR250N,
incorporating a CD drive.
Contact
TEAC CORPORATION, JAPAN
Web: www.tascam.com
25
 FACILITY

try to fit as much into the space

as we could while keeping it under
a particular size [to avoid certain
commercial penalties]. Likewise with
the height. Building a studio, height
is important — if you don’t have
height it’s not worth it. We couldn’t
go anything above 5m. So the control
room is 4.2m high, for instance.’
The live room is big enough for
a small orchestra: ‘It’s great for
overheads and room mic-ing, which
can really make the difference to a
record.’ A mixture of wall fabrics and
hard wood surfaces create a somewhat
brighter sound in one part of the room,
a more subdued one in the other —
but nowhere sounds dead, affirms
Hodgson. ‘The way the room was
built, you can put a mic anywhere and
it will sound great.’
A permanent Drum Workshop kit
forms live room’s centrepiece, but
Hodgson always advises bands to
bring their own gear. Behind the kit,
illuminated strips catch the eye: ‘That’s

Orange Tree
an idea stolen from the Park Plaza hotel in London!’ laughs Hodgson. Look
closely and you’ll see a line of bulbs wedged into a foam slot. ‘At night-time, this
room has a completely different atmosphere: it can be as ambient as you like, or

Studios
Andy Hodgson found success digitally reproducing the sound
of guitar amps. DAVE ROBINSON discovers how he aims to get
back to full-scale recording in his brand new studio.
it can be very bright. The idea there is that people are inspired by different things.’
While the Hammond organ is popular with blues players, an upright piano
delivers a satisfying and surprisingly defined sound for those that require it...
Wait — an upright, not a grand? ‘No, but you wouldn’t believe it’s just an
upright: it’s got tremendous bass resonance to it, and if you open the top to give
it more air and use a couple of good overheads, it really comes to life. It was
originally the piano from our house, it was never intended to come in here!’
While the control room is fully air-conditioned, it has the aroma of bated

O
electronics on the day Resolution drops in. ‘The Neve VR Legend, it’s an
range Tree Studios, located in a pretty village just west of Norwich, is amazing console,’ begins Hodgson. It was built and customised by Weybridge
now fully open for business. Created and owned by Andy Hodgson, console restoration specialist AES Pro Audio. ‘Because I deal with a lot of classic
whose work with TheAmpFactory will be known to many guitarists, rock, blues and jazz, it was obvious the Neve was better suited for me.’ Look
the facility offers a wealth of possibilities — and plenty of space to carefully, and you’ll notice not one but two DFA channels. ‘You’ve gotta have
realise them in — for anyone willing to venture up the A11. a DFA,’ laughs Hodgson. ‘I’m surprised how many musicians don’t know what
Orange Tree was designed, for the most part (all except the timber frame outer it means. It’s labelled on the scribble strip too, which makes everyone laugh!’
structure) by Howard Turner of Studio Wizard. Turner also designed, installed Monitors are from the Focal SM6 line: ‘Stefan [Pope] at KMR suggested
manufactured, and commissioned all the wiring. The construction was led by Jeff these. I believe there is a pair of speakers that suits an individual room anywhere
Pank (‘He did amazing things with the ceiling!’ says Hodgson). around the world. I buy everything based
Building work began in April of 2016, with the first recording on ear, not price. These work for me: I
and mixing undertaken with a “soft launch” earlier this year. understand it’s subjective, the next person
After a pause for a few weeks might hate them. It’s musical Marmite!
to complete the “green room” They just work with the gear that I’ve got.’
amenities (kitchen, TV area Hodgson earned his stripes through
and proverbial gaming table), a typical “bedroom studio” set-up in St
Orange Tree really bore its first Albans: a small mixing desk, Pro Tools and
fruits in July. plug-ins. But as more work rolled in, ‘I just
‘The dimensions of the had to improve my A game. What’s the
rooms were problematic,’ difference between me and a professional?
recalls Hodgson. ‘We had to Quite often, it’s just the gear you go
through to get that analogue sound. So out
came the cheque book...’

Building Orange Tree from the ground-up.

26 resolution September 2017

 FACILITY

Hodgson tracks and mixes everything

through his VR, but, he says, increasingly he’s
‘mixing on the way in ... I’m tweaking a little EQ
to taste, rather than having to go in and sculpt
the sound afterwards. Get the source right, that’s
my philosophy.’
Let’s rewind: part of what propelled Hodgson
and family into the countryside outside
Norwich — apart from the high cost of living
in the Home Counties — was the success of his
entrepreneurism.
‘Many years ago I bought this “green box
amplifier”, the Kemper Profiler, thinking it was
just trash-talk advertising,’ he begins. ‘I profiled
my six amps through it... and was absolutely
shocked. I gave the profiles away for free on a
forum, and everyone went crazy for them. ‘I did
that a few times, and suddenly I found people
were emailing me: “Send us your PayPal adress,
we’ll send you something for these!” They were
literally throwing money at me. That’s how TheAmpFactory started. I thought I Let’s be clear: the Kemper is not a modelling amplifier, like those made by
should be doing this properly, so I did. I mailed all my contacts, got a room full Line 6 (POD) or Fractal (Axe-Fx II). It doesn’t emulate the amps, it IS the sound
of amps, and went through profiling each one. Now, up to this day, I’ve done of the amp: the Kemper takes a static snapshot of the characteristics of the
[around] 350 amplifiers!’ amplifier and imprints it on your playing, as would a normal guitar amp.

Andy Hodgson on the voodoo of ‘Profiling’
Kemper Profiling is a dark art, between real amplifier sound
and digital technology, where analogue meets the digital
domain via an absolutely authentic sound. How to create
a “Profile”? You set up your guitar amp in the live room and
get it sounding just as you want it, by placing your favourite
mic choices as you wish – one or two mics in front of the cab;
or a close and far mic; even rear-miking if that is your preference – remembering that with all
recording, getting it right at source is important, while being careful with phase alignment is key
to a good sound, and digital doesn’t fix bad engineering... 
 This in turn then feeds back to the desk where you sum this to a mono signal that returns back
to the Kemper. This is the sound that will be profiled. The output of the Kemper then connects
to the amp itself, allowing it to accurately capture the tone-stack/power-amp/pre-amp of that
amp whilst the return captures the mic/room. When you have everything sounding the way you
wish in the control room you’re ready to profile, Kemper will send Pulse signals through the amp
– similar to that of capturing an “Impulse Response”. Once profiled, its saves it as a “snapshot” to
the Kemper, where you can further refine it and, most importantly do an A/B comparison: 99%
of the time it’s authentic in every way and will most likely fool anyone. In some cases the profile
has actually sounded better than the original amp: and that I find quite bizarre.

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September 2017 resolution 27

 FACILITY
Kemper endorsed Hodgson’s exploits right from the start. ‘The head guy, you get a sound for me?” So I would customise profiles for them, for their set
Christoph Kemper, who made his money from the Access Virus synth, we used lists: sometimes they would end up coming to me, or we’d do it remotely. A
to speak on the phone. I was in all their publications and so on. I fully supported
great example of that is Mitch Malloy — he’s ex- Van Halen, lives in Nashville
them and they fully supported me. It was a great partnership in that respect. I
— he’s doing a solo album but really struggled for guitar and bass, he contacted
had a lot of calls from a lot of people who were going on tour and said, “Can
me for help, he said, “This is what I want, I’ll send you the mix, see if you can
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28 resolution September 2017
come up with a guitar sound that suits it.” That was
my first gig for doing something bespoke, I remember
thinking, this is absolutely amazing, because you
can physically record guitars remotely. I ended up
doing quite a lot for people: Hoobastank, Bryan
Adams, Bad Company, Steve Stevens…’
That initial burst of activity that began in 2011
has subsided: ‘Now, everyone’s got all the amplifiers
[they need] and really there are only five or six
genuine amplifiers... if you you’ve got a Vox amp,
why do you need the profile of a Jackson amp
that emulates the Vox amp? So I haven’t done
anything with the Kemper for a while, just because
there’s nothing else left for me to profile!’ It’s a
bit like programming a synth: if the preset factory
patches are brilliant, why would you waste time
programming something that’s only a fraction as
good? ‘You’ve nailed it,’ says Hodgson. ‘People did
try recording profiles at home, mic-ing up their amp
with an SM58 in their bedroom or whatever, and it
sounded like crap! My good name has kept me at the
top of the pile and I’m very grateful for that and I’ve
met a lot of fantastic people along the way.’
With Orange Tree, Hodgson can pursue a top-
end studio venture while supporting the existing
AmpFactory client base. ‘As a result of the Kemper,
people are interested in my capabilities.’
Because of that reputation, do people come to
Orange Tree, expecting to see dozens of guitar amps
and cabs? (Resolution did: but in fact he only owns
about 15 now.) ‘I don’t know... But I’ve had some
amps here which I’ve been terrified to turn on...’
He elucidates: ‘I’ve had Jimi Hendrix’s JMP; I’ve had
Dave Gilmour’s custom Hiwatt head he used on Dark
Side of the Moon; a 50-grand Eric Clapton amplifier.
I’ve been sitting there thinking, if something goes
wrong here...!’
After the temporary shutdown for the green
room expansion, Hodgson is ready to sharpen his
producing and mixing skills once more.
‘We had [upcoming female rockers] Joanovarc
here, a lot of the business I’ve had from over the
years has been word of mouth. Professional in,
professional out, that’s the way I see it!’ As for future
clients, Hodgson is happy to welcome anyone that
comes through the door, as long as he can appreciate
the artist and their music: ‘Otherwise I’m not going
to do a good job recording it or mixing it. I’m not
like one of those “template studios” that takes
whatever comes in. I want to be the best at what I
do to be able to enable them to be the best at what
THEY do.’’ n
Contact
ORANGE TREE STUDIOS, UK
Website: www.orangetreestudios.com • www.theampfactory.com

Peter Morris &
Voiceover Soho
Recording the future: NIGEL JOPSON reports on a voiceover
operation with an integrated business model.
W
ith 5 studios in the heart of London’s West End — Soho and
Fitzrovia — Voiceover Soho provides audio post-production for
TV, radio, online and cinema. A new studio at 33 Tottenham Street
has recently been equipped with the Dolby Atmos Mastering
System (reviewed on page 14 in this issue) and Genelec 8351-based Atmos
monitoring. Resolution went along to talk to owner Peter Morris and engineer
Jai Williams.
Peter, how did you first get into the voice business and studio
ownership?
PM: I had been a recording artist, I was signed to Warners and we had a small
studio in Berwick Street. I started to compose music for film — then for TV —
then for commercials. With commercials came voiceover, and because of our
position and the work we had, we started recording more VO. Before we knew
it, we had started Voiceover Soho, then a year after that I found many of our
productions were asking us for artists as well. So we worked backwards: from
running a studio to becoming an agency. That was when I set up Soho Voices,
and it really took off. The nice thing is that the agency and the studio cross-
fertilise each other. You bring something in for the studio and they will often say:
‘have you got an artist?’
How would you characterise VO work today?
PM: It is a very immediate business and there is a quick turnover. Quite often,
you have a whole production that may have hundreds of thousands invested,
and at the very end they decide they need a new voice artist for it. It could mean
“the good and the great”, or it could be whoever is just right for the job. There is
often a rush to get it in, and that can be ‘can we get 6 people in tomorrow?’ or
‘we need to get people in this afternoon’. Online is the new arena. Our star has
risen with the advent of platforms like YouTube. Now online is actually leading
what is happening in the rest of the industry.
September 2017 resolution
CRAFT
How has online media affected voiceover production?
PM: Even if a production is not going to TV or radio, it is going online 99
times out of 100. The client may decide they don’t want to spend hundreds of
thousands buying TV airtime, and find that doing it online and in social media —
maybe some cinema ads — might work better. Conventional media is not going
to vanish, but it is changing with the intervention of big technology companies,
the subscription giants. Between Amazon and Netflix, the budget for this year is
around $10.5bn for new content. That illustrates the amount of creative input
and new material available on subscription. If you watch Game of Thrones or
Breaking Bad you invest a lot in those characters. You watch maybe 5 series:
that’s 50-70 hours of those characters, not just 1.5 hours as in a conventional
movie! Viewers are investing a lot of time in those characters. More and more
people have a home cinema — or at least a big TV with a soundbar — and are
getting into watching subscription TV with the production values of a movie
(as in Game of Thrones). The writing quality and depth is innovative. It does
things that conventional TV would not allow producers to do — it may be
sexier — or it may be more violent. If it was ITV, the advertisers would not like
it, but the Tech giants are going beyond what Channel 4 would ever have done.
Now, in subscription TV there is a new model: producing thousands of hours of
new content. There is currently a very constructive fight to the top (this is not
Channel 5!) because everyone is trying to bring out new, exciting content. If
Microsoft bring out a new platform, if Google develop theirs — who knows —
maybe Facebook will introduce an entertainment channel! The History Channel
financed 5 series of Vikings — which has great production values, writing and
cast — and all of these productions are now being mixed in Dolby Atmos. Black
Sails is a series for Amazon Prime that was mixed originally in Dolby Atmos, as
was Game of Thrones. Production values are high.
29
 CRAFT

what I love about

recording in this new
studio: utilising the
DAD and the S6, I
have everything at
the touch of a button
and I can bring
anyone I need in via
Skype or ISDN. We
have the dropdown
screen, so we never
have to leave this
room, which is
unprecedented. Even
Is this the reason you recently De Lane Lea and
installed the Dolby Atmos those type of facilities have separate suites, whereas we have
Mastering System? it all-in-one, which is most important. One of the things we
PM: We are one of the first hadn’t been able to do previously was have a big enough
companies in Britain to go for space so we could do crowd ADR: with the screen here, we
the new Dolby licence, which is can just pull some furnishings forward and do crowd ADR in
geared to exactly the market we are an open space with our floating floor and triple glazing.
talking about: Netflix and Amazon
Prime. Our suppliers HHB have Could you give an example, from a project point of
been instrumental in helping to view, of your ability to bring different sources in?
implement the technology. HHB’s JW: Tomorrow we have several people in different countries
knowledge is phenomenal — we recording ADR in America and France, and both working on
can’t fault them — they have been ADR for a feature and game at the same time. We do a lot
there for us all the way. They can of track laying downstairs — we are working on a big job
be here in 5 minutes, and we have for a stage show for The Vikings for example — which is a
had so many sessions with them on implementing our Avid and Dolby systems, big screen show outdoors, with thousands watching: actors and dancers and
and the Atmos speaker positioning. HHB and Genelec produced speaker plans lightshows, telling the history of the Vikings. It will be visiting Iceland, Sweden,
for us. We moved the position of doors and windows in the new studio around Norway, Denmark, France, Spain and Ireland over 3 years. This is a movie-style
the speaker plan before we did the acoustic treatment, so everything was in the production with lots of different dialogue, music tracks and sound design. In this
optimum position. respect it is comparable with a movie.
When we have talent in a lot of different locations, the talkback is handled via
Jai — would it be true to say TV viewers have got so used to the DAD, and that goes via Pro Tools outputs straight through to the ISDN unit,
accepting movie ADR as the “norm” — and a lot of dialogue for or a Dante sound card connected by the AX32 to Skype and Source-Connect.
commissioned TV work is now extremely close mic-ed?
JW: If you listen to a 1980’s TV drama, for example something like The Like a music recording facility you have a central, shared
Sweeney and then you compare it with CSI and listen to the way they’ve machine room.
recorded it, 90% of what we have today is a whisper, by comparison! They JW: My primary desire was to keep both studio 1 and 2 free from noisy
demand a good sound, comparable to a movie, as they’re going to produce a equipment and to allow all areas to be interconnected (if necessary) via
Blu-ray at the end of it. analogue patch-bays. Apart from the CAT 6 patch-bays, we have 25 pin D-sub
to 1/4” jack for audio to all studios. We had studio 2 installed first, with the Mac
Tell me something about your workflow: are the artists in the Pro HDX and the Avid Omni, plus an AJA converter box for the screen. We have
booth, or somewhere else? a 100MB fibre optic link along with ISDN. So having this kit all together means
JW: This room has been open for roughly a month and in that time we have had every studio is capable of running an ISDN session by patching into the Telos
guest engineers fly in from Iceland to come and join us to do their ADR ... we transceiver unit — or indeed any other kit that may be required at a later date
have had artists on ISDN or Skype, or right there in front of us in the booth. That’s by a client. More recently another Mac Pro with 2 Avid HDX cards has gone in

30 resolution September 2017

 CRAFT

for studio 1, along with another AJA video box and the DAD AX32. The DAD for Apps is a whole new
feeds the Avid S6 and the Genelecs via AES and CAT 6 — a connection scheme area, and there’s a massive
which allows the Genelec Monitor System to balance the speakers — and what growing market. The way
a difference it made. When the first SAM alignment sweep was done ... it sounds we will be using mobile
so clear. technology in the future
The preamps on the DAD AX32 do a great job and make working with the — moving money around,
S6 easy, whether recording vocals or sending foldback to headphones. We had distributing photographs,
a Audinate Sound Board and Virtual Sound Card added to this system, which sharing information — will
gives us the capability (on the Avid S6) to bring directors & clients on Skype be increasingly controlled
directly into the session. It supplies a feed to the voice artist’s headphones in by voice. We’ve also
the booth’s, and sends the client a feed direct from the mic or Pro Tools outputs. produced a lot of content on how to administer medicines, international
Along with the Dolby kit we’ve also installed Avid Sync and MADI boxes to pharmaceutical companies have bigger GDPs than many countries now!
feed the Dolby RMU. I think there has been a revolution in the use of voice, people talk about
it in terms of the “humanisation of the web”. In the last 10 years the likes of
Has producing for digital changed the way you work with an artist YouTube have become ubiquitous. Now everything in our lives — whether it is
in the booth? music, information, commercial products or gaming — our entire life is online.
JW: Technology sometimes creates a discussion that can go on and on, and For all of that content we need to have a voice to talk you through and show
people have expectations that are a lot higher — ‘can we take this syllable out you how it is done. n
of that word and put it somewhere else?’ ... and so
on. We do take parts of sentences and chop them
up to create a performance. We don’t often do time
stretching — only where you are syncing to video Ultra-Compact 64-Track Audio Recorder/Player
and it’s a little bit tight. More often than not with
ADR, we will go until we get the take. If the take
we’ve got that doesn’t fit is better than the one we
have that does fit, we might do a very small amount
of tweaking. The loop record ADR auto playlists
in Pro Tools have been a big game-changer. You Keep the moments
can give the artist as many takes as they need and Back up memorable recordings – with Tascam‘s DA-6400.
after the last 3 or 4 they generally have it spot on.
However, we don’t want to exhaust the artist, they
can get a bit lost with unlimited takes. If they know
where they are they can save energy, rather than a
scatter gun effect of getting a whole load of takes,
actors need direction.

Peter, is that part of Voiceover Soho’s role?

Not only to record voices and represent the
talent, but to direct it as well? TA S C A M

PM: Actors have the talent, but context is everything SSD

and the context can change everything. Films don’t
get made without directors, and VO is just the same.
One great idea at Voiceover Soho is that we get our
young recording engineers to do script sessions with
new talent represented by our sister company Soho
Voices. Artists want to make show reels, whether
they are seasoned professionals or brand new to the
business. So we do script sessions, which means
both the artists and the engineers are learning. The
engineers learn to direct a voice and it’s their job to
make realistic commercials, which we then put onto
TECHNOLOGY
Every live concert is a unique event, so you want to be absolutely
MADI optical
and coaxial sure that nothing goes wrong. A Tascam DA-6400 will give you that extra
safety, offering a hardware-based stand-alone solution with a real-time
MADI coaxial operating system, robust SSD media recording and a redundant power supply
(DA-6400dp). Capture up to 64 channels at 48 kHz simultaneously –
recording in sync to an existing DAW system, for example. Thanks to
Dante via
Ethernet
various connections, like Dante, MADI and other I/O options, the recorder
integrates easily into any modern audio environment. For file transfer
and remote control, it is equipped with an Ethernet connection, in
…

the Soho Voices website for potential agencies to book
the artist. It’s proper training for engineers, which I
have not seen anywhere else. One of the ways we
grew as a studio was by helping artists make voice
reels, and that became the basis of our agency.
Do you think your USP is that you come
with an overall view of the production,
whereas in the past VO has just been about
recording words?
PM: In 2008, when I first came into the industry, I
tried to provide a 360 service — providing an artist,
a recording, a mix for cinema — and I gave one price
addition to parallel and RS-422 connectors.
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start recording or playback t Gigabit LAN connection for file transfer and remote
t Capable of backup recording with operation synchro- operation
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code synchronization master device
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t AC power redundancy built in (DA-6400dp only)

with the usage of the voice included. That was at t Up to two audio interface cards for full flexibility
the beginning of some new tech startups ... which
are now taking over the media world. A lot of those ce th e e a rl y 1970 s
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like Apple, who we work with a lot, and increasingly, Sales Office Tel: +44 (0) 1483 440150 | E-mail: peter@tascam.co.uk | www.tascam.co.uk
telecom companies. We did about 100 videos for © 2016 TEAC Corporation. All rights reserved. All specifications are subject to change without notice.

BT, on how to use smartphones. Producing voices

September 2017 resolution 31

 CRAFT
NEP – broadcasting
to the world
UHD OB trucks are ready to roll. PAUL FOURNIER, Head of Sound for NEP UK,
N
EP Group is a US-owned international production company, providing
outsourced broadcast services for major events throughout the world.
Their 3,000 employees, including 1,650 broadcast engineers and 145
OBs worldwide, bring us some of our favourite televisual experiences.
From the Super Bowl in the US, to Wimbledon, Big Brother, the Champions
League Final and the Tour de France in Europe, to The Voice — Australia and
The Ashes Cricket.
NEP UK and Ireland has recently transformed its OB fleet. The construction of
four large-scale, UHD-capable trucks, followed the loss of much of the company’s
kit in a catastrophic fire at its main base in Bracknell in November 2015. Less
than six months later, the first of four new trucks was commissioned. Its 4K
trucks Pacific, Aurora, Caspian and Sargasso are now all out on the road, built
to a similar template and costing around £10m each. Equipment includes Sony
HDC-4300s with Canon and Fujinon lenses, EVS XT3s and SAM Kahuna 9600
6ME 4K vision mixers. Each truck can fit 30 camera channels and 12 EVS
positions. Audio infrastructure is based around Calrec Apollo consoles, Genelec
8351 monitors and Telex intercoms. The new trucks have the ability to work
standalone or linked together in any combination. They are able to interconnect
with each other via a CWDM fibre system, the configuration allowing 200
shared 3GB signals to be sent between trucks.
A new warehouse accommodates kit being stored, serviced and assembled
for flypacks. Even to those of us accustomed to large broadcast infrastructure,
the sheer quantity of gear and scope of projects is impressive. There are 400
Sennheiser MKH 416 Shotgun mics available. I saw massive trollies filled with
Genelec loudspeakers. Row upon row of 19” rack equipment is bar-coded in
and out. NEP buy fibre optic cable by the kilometre, and have their own fibre
jointing station. When NEP provided the infrastructure to broadcast the recent
IAAF Athletics World Championships in London, they lit 1,400 metres of fibre,
servicing 87 international broadcasters. Flypack studios are built and tested for
customers by NEP before being carefully labelled and loaded into containers.
Sections of the warehouse floor are marked out in container-sized shapes so
that packing regimes can be tested before equipment is sent around the world.
There may be hundreds of cables hanging our and thousands of digital tests
being run but, come what may, the setup will be working by tomorrow when
the customer needs it.
32 resolution September 2017
explains how immersive audio for 4K fits in.
What are the benefits of working for a multi-national operation
like NEP?
One of the beauties of being part of a much larger organisation is that we can
easily obtain equipment from the nearest point anywhere in the world. We have
an inter-company system where we can check the availability of equipment
from any of our subsidiaries. For example, we’ve just sent a large comms
system to the US when they were looking for some extra gear to do the US
Open coverage.
What is the focus of your operations here at the moment?
We’re mainly OB, we handle all Premiere League football in the UK, which
occupies around seven trucks every week at this time of year, we also do a lot
of horse racing coverage for ITV, for which we built a brand new truck earlier
this year. Of course we also do a lot of work for the BBC, including Wimbledon
(Resolution V15.6, Andy Groves). We not only do the host coverage for all
the Wimbledon courts, we also handle ESPN’s operation, which is almost as
comprehensive as the BBC’s coverage. We also provide a lot of “fixed rigs”:
reality-TV style shows such as Big Brother and the Educating series for Channel
4. We also do a lot of flypacks — for example, the IAAF Athletics World
Championships are currently operated from a large flypack we put together for
the host broadcaster. We have seven production galleries at the Queen Elizabeth
Olympic Park, plus we handle all the distribution to foreign broadcasters who
produce their own presentations. We’re servicing the BBC out of trucks, and
there are around twenty other facilities local to the stadium, for which we’ve
built a distribution area about a mile from the main site. Everything is sent
from the Olympic Park via fibre and re-distributed to whatever the clients have
paid for.
What are the differences between conventional OB work and
fixed rigs?
Fixed rigs are mainly done with remote cameras, there is a live mix, but actually
these shows tend to become big post-production operations, so all the audio
is multi-tracked at the same time as the operators are doing between two and
three live mixes. Everything is isolated, so the audio can be re-mixed later in
post if needed.

How many mics would you typically deploy on a
reality show?
On some of the reality shows you’ll have up to 70 mics, plus radio
mics on top of that. We have several JoeCo recorders, which we
connect via MADI to record feeds individually.
With our flypacks, we do all our analogue conversion with
DirectOut, we also have many of their MADI multi-channel routers,
which allow us to condense feeds from multiple consoles and distribute — for
example at the IAAF Championships — where we need to connect several
different broadcasters. At Wimbledon we have two 16 channel DirectOut
ANDIAMO MADI routers, bringing everything in, all the odd EFX mics — the
microphone on Murray Mound (formerly Henman Hill), for example, or the mics
on the walkways — they can be re-ordered for various customers.
How did losing equipment in the 2015 fire affect the audio
department?
We lost six trucks, unfortunately the newer ones, so we had to re-build really
quickly. We had fantastic support from the whole audio industry, with companies
lending equipment to assist us in completing contracts. In the period after the fire
we also re-built all our flypack kit, because we unfortunately lost all of that, bar
two consoles. We took the opportunity to take a big leap in technology: from an
audio standpoint, we delved into network audio. All of our new comms systems
from Telex are OMNEO — embedded Dante — and we had a lot of our special
Untitled-1 1
September 2017 resolution
CRAFT
custom-made equipment re-built to include Dante networking. We use a company
called CTP Systems, a small bespoke audio manufacturer, so they built us Dante
versions of all the audio interface units we specified, and TSL had fortunately just
produced Dante versions of their monitoring products, which we installed. We
have a very clever IT guy in our sound department here, who designed our Juniper
Ethernet switches to configure all our networked equipment.
What have been the major changes in OB audio over the last decade?
Apart from a few small PA-type desks, we don’t own any analogue mixers at
all. We’re an all-Calrec company for our digital mixers. We have a very good
relationship with Calrec. Their mixers have a “freelance-friendly” surface,
and we get fantastic after-sales service from them: with some of the older
equipment, when we’ve suffered an on-site failure we’ve had service personnel
from Calrec there within two hours! We needed consistency of consoles across
the fleet, and the Calrec training is great: a very important aspect when new
technology is introduced.
11/08/2017 14:22
33
 CRAFT

With OB, you get the constant issue

of ‘I can’t hear the so-and-so’ — often
because of an operational oversight in
the heat of the moment — now it’s easy
All the communications systems from Telex to respond: ‘I’ll just turn it up for you.’
are digital as well — we actually spend almost as Consoles and comms systems are
much on comms equipment as production audio interconnected via MADI to reduce the
equipment — comms are hugely important in OB. amount of wiring. All our consoles talk
For example: at Wimbledon there’s only parking to our routing systems via MADI, we use
space for three vehicles, everything else is a de-rig, external DirectOut converters if we want
in the basement. There are six production galleries, it to come back to analogue or AES.
and another additional area that only does audio,
so it’s vital to have top quality comms links. How did you arrive at the choice of
Genelec 8351 for the new trucks?
Has the change to AoIP on the comms side We installed Genelec 1031s in our first
reduced assembly time for flypacks and simplified construction HD truck — excellent loudspeaker — but probably a little big for the space, so
of trucks? we went to 1030s after that. We had them in all our trucks, everybody knew
It has hugely reduced the amount of cabling required on the external comms what they sounded like, so we had consistency. We also had a huge quantity
side. With every comms panel only requiring a Cat5 cable, there’s a big reduction of Genelecs which we used for flyaways, unfortunately most were destroyed
in wiring. It makes it so much easier outside the truck: you can send signal to in our fire. We were certain we wanted to standardise on the brand, but we
a remote location on fibre, put a switch on it and manage the system remotely. weren’t sure which model to install in the new UHD trucks. I went with a

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34 resolution September 2017

 CRAFT

have multiple console outputs using

delays in the embedding side to
bring everything in sync; we’re not
only producing a 4K output, but all
the other output formats required,
including real time for live talent,
so we’re simultaneously working in
around four time planes within the
consoles! We’ve also done some live-
casting to cinemas in 4K: in 2014 we
provided the equipment for the first
live 4K workflow from stage to screen,
younger colleague (who’s ears are a bit more when NT Live (National Theatre Live)
sensitive in the higher frequencies!) to HHB/ broadcast War Horse live from the
Scrub’s Genelec Experience Centre in London, we New London Theatre to cinemas
took audio material we were familiar with and across the world.
switched between around eight different setups. It’s extremely useful to be We’re a facility provider, so if our clients ask for a particular output format,
able to sit and rapidly audition several different models. When we switched to it’s our mission to deliver it. n
the new 8351 point-source monitor our immediate
reaction was — Yes! It’s fantastic for an OB truck.
You’re quite often not sat in the sweet spot, you’re
moving up and down the console and spend half
Meet the

VIDEOMIC
the day standing up. No matter where you sit the

PRO+
imaging with the Genelec 8351 is great and — let’s
face it — the acoustics in OB trucks are never ideal.
Because they’re such full-range loudspeakers, we
don’t have to bass-manage them at all. We only put
LFE through our Genelec sub. The sound is very
natural, and not tiring to listen to all day long. We
went for three of those across the front, with smaller
Genelecs for the rear channels. The Ultimate On-Camera
When the trucks were being constructed, we still Shotgun Microphone
hadn’t worked out how we were going to mount the
rear speakers: with the pop-out sliding sides to the
trucks it can be very challenging. As a temporary WHY?
measure, we had the rear Genelecs placed on
The VMP+ is the FIRST on-camera microphone to
stands, and I realised if we built the trucks with a feature an Auto Power function. Turn your camera
screw-hole in the sliding floor, we could insert the on or off, the RØDE VMP+ follows suit.
stands after the pop-out sides had been deployed, The firsts don’t stop there.
and the surround rear speakers would then be at Try Digital Switching to access the 2-stage
head height. High Pass Filter, level control and the -10dB
safety track.
How have you dealt with the immersive Or the Built-in Battery Door, detachable
audio aspect of UHD? 3.5mm TRS cable and improved windshield.
I’ve just spent last week installing Dolby Atmos in And multiple power options, including
AA batteries and the all-new RØDE LB-1
all our major football trucks. We did suspect this Rechargeable Battery (which ships in the box).
might be a requirement, so when we had our UHD-
Crammed with world-firsts and backed by
capable trucks constructed we placed speakers in the RØDE’s 10-Year Warranty, the RØDE VideoMic
ceiling to give us the height element. We spent quite Pro+ is, well, the best there is.
a while deliberating on the best solution — we only For more information, visit www.rode.com
had 100mm to mount the height speakers in the
movable ceiling! I suddenly remembered PMC have
a “Wafer” range of wall mounting loudspeakers
— fortunately exactly 100mm deep! Calrec have
done a modification on their console so we can
take the Dolby authoring tool back into the master
console section for monitoring. We’ve installed the
Dolby Authoring Tool DP590, and every UHD or
4k truck will have two Dolby Broadcast Processor
DP591 (one in reserve). We’ve installed an extra
3 Calrec MADI i/o modules to feed them. We’re
using Soundfield microphones, we’ve had them
for several years, and we’ve now purchased new
decoders to provide height information required for
immersive audio.

How do you deal with Dolby Atmos when

linking OB trucks together?
We have a truck capable of dealing with two
incoming football matches from remote sites, which
Exclusively distributed in the UK & Ireland by Source • www.sourcedistribution.co.uk/rode • T: 020 8962 5080
can be decoded, brought through the console to
manipulate the presentation side of the show, facebook.com/sourcedistribution twitter.com/sourcedist
re-encoded and sent out for transmission. So with
that truck we have four DP591 decoders. We
VMP+_full-page-ad-APPROVED- source EDIT- Junior.indd 1 22/08/2017 14:54:42
September 2017 resolution 35
 RESOLUTION AWARDS

AWA R D S
• 2017 •

Vote NOW in the

Resolution Awards!

T 2
he nominations for the Resolution Awards have been
drawn from an exceptional panel of industry experts and
practitioners. Nominated products are presented in specific
product category types while Nominations in the Creative
Awards are categorised to recognise the achievements of individuals
in music recording, broadcast, film and post production.
Only registered Resolution readers are eligible to vote in the
Resolution Awards. Voting is online only. To vote, readers should
take their Reader code and Postcode (as printed on their magazine’s
address label), navigate to www.resolutionmag.com, and click
on the “My Subscription” menu item. Enter the subscription
Type, Reader Code, Postcode and log in. (Please contact info@
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After a successful log-in, the My Subscription Details page is
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Each reader can use the voting form once only! Please complete all
the categories you intend to vote for, before clicking the “Submit
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once per reader.
Voting will close at the end of September, and the winners will be
announced in a special Winners Supplement in the October 2017
issue of Resolution.

36 resolution September 2017

 RESOLUTION AWARDS

AWA R D S 2017
• NOMINATED •
REWARDING QUALITY AND INNOVATION

Product Awards
DAW Interface (ADC/DAC ) Plug-in
Tracktion Waveform Antelope Orion 32+ HD McDSP EC300
Harrison Mixbus version 4 Tracktion Copper Reference Audioease Indoor
Avid Pro Tools 12.8 HD DPA d:vice iZotope Neutron
iZotope RX6 postproduction suite RME Fireface UFX+ Liquidsonics 7th Heaven 

Analogue-mixer/controller Microphone Preamp

AMS BCM-10/2 Mk2 Audio-Technica AT5047 Grace Design m108
A-Designs Mix Factory Bock 5ZERO7 AEA RPQ2
Schertler Arthur Sennheiser Digital 6000 Chameleon Labs 7603
SSL Nucleus2 Schoeps MiniCMIT Kahayan 12K72

EQ Monitoring Processor
Elysia xfilter Genelec “The Ones” 8331 CEDAR Cambridge v11
Kush Audio Clariphonic MS PMC BB6 Bricasti M12 Monitor Controller
SPL PQ Mastering Equalizer Neumann KH80 DSP Riedel Bolero
Model 1540/1544 Hedd Type 20 DirectOut MADI.9648
Thermionic Culture The Swift

Dynamics processor Digital mixer/controller Recorder

Maag Magnum K Calrec Brio 36 JoeCo Bluebox BBWR24B
Rockruepel limit.one Lawo mc²96 Lectrosonics PDR
Warm Audio WA-2A PreSonus CS18 AI Tascam DR-100 MKIII
Gyraf Gyratec XXIV: G24 DiGiCo SD12 Aaton Digital CantarMini

CREATIVE AWARDS 2017

• NOMINATED •
REWARDING AUDIO CREATIVITY

Creative Awards
Broadcast Sound Mixer Music Production Production Sound Mixer
Andy Groves
Producer/Engineer Tim Fraser
Tudor Davies Fraser T Smith Simon Hayes
Keron Steele Joe Barresi Brian Milliken
Colin Hassell Greg Kurstin Simon Bysshe
Two Inch Punch (Ben Ash)
Film/Post Sound Mixer Audio Facility
Mike Prestwood Smith Goldcrest, London
Juan Peralta Abbey Road Mix Stage, London
Greg Gettens Decoy Studios, Suffolk
Peter Gates Dream Asylum Studios, Miami

September 2017 resolution 37

 GEAR
Products
Our guide to audio equipment at IBC 2017.
Genelec 8.D61
At IBC 2017, Genelec will be showcasing “The Ones” ultimate
point source monitors. Comprising the 8351, and the recently
introduced 8341 and 8331 models, The Ones’ compact three-way
coaxial design delivers precision, uncoloured imaging, a large
sweet spot and reduced listener fatigue. Monitor “Point source”
and off-axis linearity are increasing dramatically in importance as
recording studios, broadcasters — and even OB trucks (see NEP
article in this issue) — have a growing mandate to produce Dolby
Atmos or immersive audio content.
The Ones are joined at IBC by two other members of the
Genelec SAM family: the 8430, the world’s first AES67 studio
monitor, while the 1032C two-way monitor is the latest upgrade
of the classic 1032: which now offers full SAM functionality, a
digital input and even higher SPL. Also on demonstration is the
newest version of the GLM (Genelec Loudspeaker Management)
software application for calibrating monitoring systems, from
stereo to immersive. Building on decades of user experience,
GLM allows Genelec SAM monitors to be calibrated after
placement to ensure reference listening, loudness compliance
and excellent translation between rooms.
www.genelec.com
DPA 8.D70
Celebrating 25 years in the industry, DPA’s new d:vice MMA-A
Digital Audio Interface (reviewed in Resolution V16.5) will be
on show at IBC 2017, giving European broadcasters their first
opportunity to experience the audio quality offered by this
preamp. Aimed at content makers such as live and mobile
journalists, the d:vice MMA Digital Audio Interface works with
any iOS device, Mac or PC computer, making it easier than ever to
broadcast or recording anywhere in the world. Journalists already
use smartphones to capture the news and to a large extend
this works well because today’s phones can take high-quality
pictures and videos. However, until now the missing component
was high-quality audio — vital for news broadcasts where audio
quality must match or exceed the video for the message to be
understood. This is exactly the challenge that the d:vice solves.
38
When used with a DPA microphone, it can capture or stream
audio in quality previously only available in the studio. When it’s
not possible to have an experienced sound engineer on site, the
d:vice can act as a ‘mini sound engineer in your pocket’.
www.dpamicrophones.com
Sennheiser & Neumann 8.D50
Sennheiser and Neumann will be presenting audio solutions
for all levels of media production. ‘Good audio technology is
the basis for a successful production. This is true whether it’s
being created on a computer in a home studio or at a mixing
console in a professional sound studio, and equally true whether
a smartphone or a broadcast camera is being used,’ explains
Achim Gleissner, Commercial Manager Broadcast & Media at
Sennheiser. For that reason, Sennheiser has chosen the motto
“We serve any camera” for its presence at IBC.
Differently themed areas of the stand reflect the bandwidth
of today’s media production. Alongside the MKE 2 elements
— the first waterproof microphone for the GoPro HERO4
which paired with the action cam creates spectacular YouTube
videos — the highlights on show range from interview
microphones for mobile journalism, such as the HANDMIC
DIGITAL and the wireless AVX (reviewed Resolution V14.6),
to the fully professional EK 6042 two-channel receiver for
broadcast cameras.  RP1. RP1 consists of a 2U core that contains integrated FPGA-
The MK 4 digital (reviewed in Resolution V16.3) — styled as the
microphone of choice for dubbing and podcast applications —
while the ClipMic digital and MKE 2 digital clip-on microphones
for iPhones und iPads ensure great sound for self-produced
videos. The portfolio of products on display is rounded off by
shotgun microphones from the MKH series for film production,
as well as wireless microphones from the Digital 9000, Digital
6000 (Resolution Award 2017 nominated), 2000 and evolution
wireless series, which are used for ENG and broadcasting.  EQ, expander and gate facilities, compressor and sidechain EQ
Look out for two brand new products Sennheiser will be
unveiling at IBC: the U87 “Rhodium Edition” and the smart
FOCUSMIC Digital for the iPhone. An eye-catching highlight
at the booth will be footage from the Mercedes-Benz Kitesurf
World Cup, demonstrating use of the MKE2 elements for the
GoPro HERO4.
The field of 3D audio is an innovative media format that is
growing in importance. It is the key to immersing listeners into
new audio worlds and to completing the perfect illusion in
virtual reality applications. When it comes to 3D productions,
the talents of the AMBEO VR Mic from Sennheiser and the
binaural KU 100 dummy head from Neumann truly shine. Visitors
to the IBC Future Zone have an additional opportunity to try
out the AMBEO VR Mic, which will feature in workshops on the
subject of virtual reality recordings and post-production.
  The Neumann range of studio monitors was recently
expanded with the launch of the KH 80 DSP. It’s the ideal
product for smaller studios that do not want to miss out on
great Neumann sound and visitors will be able to experience
the impressive sound of this new model as well as a wide range
of other Neumann monitors.  systems for post, live broadcast, re-mastering, archiving and
www.sennheiser.com
Calrec Audio 8.C61
Calrec’s Artemis Ray digital audio console will make its European
debut at IBC2017. Artemis Ray has 456 fully featured input
channels — making it more powerful than Artemis Beam. Further,
Artemis Ray can handle up to 72 faders, the same as the larger
Artemis Shine model.
Via a brand-new fader/monitor panel, Artemis Ray sports a
new surface layout that allows more faders in a reduced surface
area. The panel — also available on Artemis Light, Beam, and
Shine models — is the same width as a standard Artemis fader
panel and includes eight full-size faders to give operators even
resolution September 2017
more control and a higher fader density in a smaller footprint.
This configuration saves around 200mm when compared with
similar control surfaces.
Artemis Ray provides the same functionality as previous
Artemis models, but with more channels and faders in the same
footprint. In situations where space is at a premium, like in OB
trucks, a high fader density is not only desirable, but essential.
With the new chassis and fader/monitor panel, Artemis Ray’s
72-fader layout fits into a mere 2.37m (93.39 inches) of space,
delivering more power than ever in such a small footprint.
Calrec’s RP1 remote production unit is a unique live-broadcast
product that directly addresses an increasingly prevalent
requirement for high-quality content from remote locations.
Remote production offers the ability to capture a broader
range of live events, such as sports, news, or regional music
festivals. Broadcasters cannot always justify the time or expense
of sending a dedicated outside broadcast truck and a team of
skilled on-site operators for these niche events, but they must
always ensure that the same high broadcast standards are met.
At IBC2017, Calrec will introduce a suite of new features on the
based DSP, enabling a console surface at another facility to
control all mixing functionality. The RP1 core manages all of
the processing for IFB routing and remote monitor mixes, and
it does so locally with no latency. This level of integration and
remote control makes it simple for any remote mix engineer to
set up IFB mixes and eradicates any delay for remote listeners
or presenters.
The new features on the RP1 include a 2-band filter and 4-band
facilities, direct output for all remote faders (up to 5.1 wide), and
remote auxes via Calrec Assist.
New software also provides VCA master control from the host
console and pairing of transmission and remote faders so that
any fader/cut changes are applied to both TX and IFB paths on
to remote faders and remote auxes. A new “blocking” mode
prevents the RP1 unit from affecting the paired transmission
faders, while the “independent” mode ensures the RP1 can
operate independently of the host when required.
www.calrec.com
CEDAR 8.D98
Cedar Audio is
the only audio
company dedicated
exclusively to
the research,
development and
implementation of
noise suppression
audio forensics. The recently introduced DNS 2 noise suppressor
is gaining a good reputation as an effective 2-channel noise
suppressor on the sets of major movies and TV productions,
as well as in the field for live broadcast. Simple to operate, it
can be used to clean audio ‘there and then’, or for confidence
checking that all will be well in post. Alongside this, CEDAR will
be demonstrating the DNS 8 Live noise suppressor, which is a
standard for newsrooms, sports studios and live sound, together
with the latest Cedar Studio suite of plug-ins that eliminates the
problems encountered in film and TV post. CEDAR will also be
showing the flagship Cedar Cambridge workstation, the tool of
choice for the most demanding audio restoration requirements.
www.cedar-audio.com

DirectOut 8.E85
Networked Audio is the Focus for DirectOut at IBC: MADI specialist
DirectOut is extending its traditional portfolio to include several
networked audio standards and formats at IBC.
SoundGrid is an uncompressed, multi-channel, low-latency
digital audio Layer2 Ethernet protocol from Waves for audio
networking and real-time audio processing for live, broadcast
and music production facilities. Visitors to stand 8.E85 will see
SG.MADI, a SoundGrid to MADI converter that, for example, links
SoundGrid processing to any MADI system or router.
For RAVENNA/AES67 users, a firmware update to DirectOut’s
MONTONE.42 MADI/Audio-over-IP bridge delivers more
responsive and informative control. The HTML5 user interface
has been completely revised with a new menu structure that
provides a full routing matrix between all MADI and AES67
channels and quick access to all relevant system and streaming
information. Detailed adjustments can be made in the
Advanced Settings area ensuring that MONTONE.42 can be used
in demanding and complex network infrastructures where the
ability to adjust parameters, such as QoS and PTP values, are key.
Using a native RAVENNA implementation, MONTONE.42
already supports the coming SMPTE ST2110-30 standard. This
facility includes the ability to synchronize to Grandmasters
running the SMPTE ST2059-2 PTP profile.
In addition to RAVENNA and SoundGrid a third networked
audio format product will be announced at IBC 2017.
www.directout.eu
Yamaha
Will be showing their Nuage fader unit, with integrated channel
strip control for DAW operation. 16 touch-sensitive 100mm
faders, 32 touch-sensitive multi-function knobs, touch slider
strip, high resolution LCD for channel names with colour coding,
Roger Earpiece: Extend the magic!
Roger Repeater, being fully wireless, mobile and portable, extends the range of the Roger Earpiece
allowing full coverage wherever you are.
www.roger-studio.com
September 2017 resolution
organized utility section plus a keyboard tray under palm rest.
Combined with a Master Unit, efficient Nuendo control surface
operation and editing is within easy reach. The master unit has a
responsive touch-screen display,8 touch-sensitive multi-function
knobs, direct control of EQ, dynamics, plug-ins etc., precision
machined high resolution jog wheel, user assignable section
with customizable controls, and can be integrated with up to
3 fader units.
Yamaha will also have their Rivage PM10 flagship digital
console on display.
Additionally, Yamaha will be showing an exciting new studio
product at this years IBC.
www.yamahaproaudio.com
JoeCo 8.E-97
At IBC 2017, JoeCo will celebrate its tenth anniversary, as well as its
recent nomination in the Resolution Awards. Visitors are invited to
join in on booth 8.E-97, and discover why the UK manufacturer’s
GEAR
BLACKBOX and BLUEBOX recorders are the trusted choice of
today’s leading broadcasters. From Later… With Jools Holland
and The Great British Bake Off to international sports coverage and
BBC drama, JoeCo technology is the standard for the simple but
safe capture of audio for many of television’s most enduring shows.
JoeCo founder Joe Bull will be on the booth at IBC 2017,
showcasing the full BLACKBOX range, including 64-channel
Dante and Madi recorders, the 24 channel analogue BBR1B
and the BBR1MP, incorporating 24 high quality mic preamps.
All BLACKBOX models feature the same compact but rugged
construction and rock solid reliability, ensuring all source audio
is recorded to external media via USB 2.0/3.0 in Broadcast WAV
format.
 In addition, visitors will find out why the BLUEBOX BBWR24B
has been nominated in the Recorder category of the 2017
Resolution Awards. Available with free JoeCo Control software
for Mac and PC, BLUEBOX offers a unique combination of a
high-end interface for your DAW, a standalone field recorder
and a back-up solution that means no source audio is ever lost,
even if the power fails. 
www.joeco.co.uk
Jünger Audio 10.A49
Tecom Group, a leading software developer in broadcasting
and telecommunications, and Junger Audio have become
technology partners and announced the release of two advanced
products for loudness control and normalization — LA Playout
and LA Production.
LA Playout features the integration of Jünger audio Level
Magic processors with Tecom Group’s Loudness Analyzer
software. Loudness values are logged and transferred to
a special light version of J*AM Loudness Logger. LA Playout
receives data from J*AM, relates it to a broadcast schedule
and carries out a comparative analysis of the loudness level.
Visit us
IBC
8.A48
39
 GEAR
This allows for quick and easy detection of on-air loudness
deviations. All the measurement data is delivered over the
network and requires no additional hardware.
LA Production is an application for file-based loudness
measurement and normalisation. Its latest version utilises
the original adaptive Level Magic algorithm which allows
broadcasters to comply with all current international loudness
standards while preserving a high audio quality.
Peter Poers, New Business Manager for Jünger Audio says:
‘Our partnership will enable Tecom customers to comply
with loudness regulations and it will also give Jünger Audio
customers access to an expanded solutions portfolio.’.
www.junger-audio.com
Stage Tec 8.C80
IBC will see the latest in a long line of mixing consoles from
German mixer and router manufacturer Stage Tec on stand:
AVATUS is an IP-based console that communicates via IP networks
allowing the mixer to be controlled remotely using a PC or Mac
connected via LAN or Wi-Fi. This is particularly useful in broadcast
where the possibilities for this new way of working are legion; e.g.
the sound supervisor can work on the mix in the truck while an
assistant plugs up the microphones and sets the routing to the
correct mixer channel. Scene automation can be run remotely
and snapshots called up and stored.
Alternatively, the IP remote working can allow console
surfaces to access centralised core processing and routing or
deliver effective resilience strategies. AVATUS offers over 800
input channels and 128 sum buses in formats ranging from
mono to 7.1. Each section of the desk may be colour coded to
the user’s preference for speedy and intuitive performance and
the screens are touch displays.
Also on the stand will be the flagship AURUS Platinum,
CRESCENDO Platinum, ON AIR flex and the renowned routing
system NEXUS.
www.stagetec.com
Lawo 8.B50
At IBC2017, Lawo will present their complete product range,
including the mc²96 Grand Production Console, specifically
designed to provide optimal performance in IP video production
environments through native support for all relevant standards
— SMPTE 2110, AES67, RAVENNA and DANTE. Further innovations
on show: Lawo’s ruby Visual Radio Console, SOUL Seamless
Orchestration and Unification Layer, and new Virtual Multiviewer
Modules for the V__matrix Software-defined IP-Routing &
Processing Platform.
40
Lawo’s R LAY Virtual Radio Mixer software has recently been
upgraded with the ability to use SIP streams as on-the-air audio
sources, as well as several other enhancements and updates. R
LAY is radio software that enables broadcasters to build “virtual
broadcast studios” using today’s inexpensive and powerful
desktop and laptop PCs. The R LAY line includes VRX8 8-fader
and VRX4 4-fader Virtual Radio Mixer software, VPB Virtual
Patch Bay software, and VSC Virtual Sound Card software.
All are AES67 compliant for use with standard AoIP
networks. The AES67 networking standard specifies SIP
(Session Initiation Protocol) as its connection management for
unicast streams, and R LAY v3.0.0.136 gives users the ability
to use SIP streams as direct audio sources. Other additions
to this software version include upgraded ASIO audio client
handling, enhanced program logging features, and improved
integration of the open-source Ember+ protocol for control of
studio peripherals.
www.lawo.com
NUGEN Audio 8.D56
NUGEN Audio will demonstrate a new update for its award-
winning Halo Upmix at IBC 2017. The new 3D Immersive Extension
builds on the industry-leading Halo 9.1 Extension, adding further
options beyond the existing Dolby Atmos bed track capability.
Also, on display will be the Halo Downmix, a new downmixing
technology for creating the best possible stereo mixes from
original surround audio sources.
www.nugenaudio.com
Riedel 10.A31
Riedel will be discussing its work with European provider,
Broadcast Solutions  GmbH, which has installed Riedel’s
MediorNet media network on board Alphaline A12, a new HD
outside broadcast (OB) van commissioned by Slovakian television
network, Televízia Markíza. Working in tandem with Riedel’s
Artist digital matrix intercom solution, MediorNet provides a
decentralised and redundant communications and signal
routing backbone for Televízia Markíza’s line up of live sports and
entertainment broadcasts. Riedel is talking about the installation
at IBC this year.
‘MediorNet’s decentralised routing approach is perfect
for live broadcasting. Not only does it reduce the single
points of failure, but it also makes things simpler and more
efficient by placing physical I/O closer to where it’s needed
while also reducing copper,’ said Rainer Kampe, Broadcast
Solutions CTO.
Alphaline A12 is capable of supporting 14-plus cameras in
productions such as Televízia Markíza’s popular Let’s Dance
reality show, and also provides critical backup support for the
network’s studio programming. Broadcast Solutions worked
with Slovakian systems integrator Elektronika to design and
install the van’s MediorNet network, consisting of a MetroN
core router, 16 MicroN high-density media distribution network
devices, and four MediorNet Compact stage boxes. An Artist
128 intercom system with 14 keypanels provides flexible high
quality communications.
www.riedel.net
resolution September 2017
Merging Technologies 8.E96
In addition to the highly
successful Horus and Hapi
interfaces, ANEMAN offers
an op en so lution to th e
management and control of AoIP
networks for any manufacturer
supporting the community.
This technology combined with Virtual Audio Device drivers for
Windows, Mac OS and Linux offers practical tools to assist OEM
partners get practical benefits from networked audio solutions.
Additionally, the ZMan RAVENNA/AES67 I/O card offers a
powerful and compact solution to get networked products to
market in a fraction of the time and expense. Merging’s award
winning software offerings have just been updated to Pyramix
11 and Ovation 7. All versions are Win 10 compatible and further
improvements have been made to stability and the ability to
handle 3D audio in broadcast and live situations. If quality audio
is your priority, this is the stand that should be at the top of the list.
Merging is participating in the IP Showcase (Room E106)
interoperability demonstration which was such a success at
NAB. This features over 50 vendors with over 120 different
devices demonstrating the real-world possibilities unleashed
by the adoption of SMPTE ST2110 draft standards and the AMWA
NMOS specifications. This major event has the support of many
industry bodies such as AES, AIMS, EBU, IABM, MNA and VSF
and will be supported by a full programme of presentations
and education sessions running throughout IBC. The Merging
Hapi acts as a 72 channel ST2110 gateway taking inputs from
SDI streams. The outputs are being fed to consoles from SSL
and Lawo which are in turn, outputting the audio via Ward-Beck
Systems loudspeakers.
www.merging.com
Lectrosonics 8.C73
With a continued focus on quality
and innovation since 1971,
Lectrosonics is well respected
within the f ilm, broadcast,
music, and theatre technical
communities. Located in the city
of Rio Rancho in the heart of New
Mexico, the US company has a
strong history of delivering robust, quality wireless technology
with excellent customer support and service. Lectrosonics
wireless microphone systems and audio processing products
are used daily in mission-critical applications by audio engineers
worldwide, particularly in location sound, TV, movie and
theatrical production environments.
If you visit their stand you’ll see why their PDR (personal digital
recorder) was nominated in the Resolution Product Awards
2017. For situations in which the distance is extreme or where
using a wireless microphone is not practical, the PDR recorder
can travel with your subject and capture professional quality
audio, synchronized with timecode. The tiny size and rounded
shape make the PDR unobtrusive and easy to place in garments
and costumes, and easy to conceal when used as a “plant”
microphone to capture environmental or location sound.
www.lectrosonics.com
NTP 8.B52
NTP Technology (www.ntp.dk) produces high-reliability audio
routing and signal distribution systems for radio and TV broadcast
applications, and the DAD branded (www.digitalaudio.dk) audio
 GEAR
converters interfaces for Pro Audio studio applications. NTP is
part of the Danmon Group, one of Europe’s leading suppliers of
audio, video, products and digital media solutions. The Penta
720 is a modular audio router and audio distribution interface
for routing and interfacing analogue and digital audio signals via
AES/EBU, MADI or SDI SD/HD/3G-embedded audio as well as IP
Gigabit Ethernet using Dante/AES67 and optical-fibre networks
incorporating a 1400x1400 multiplexer. The DAD AX32 is an
ultimate A/D or D/A converter, monitor controller and digital
format converter for recording and post-production applications
where 8 to 48 channels of analogue inputs or outputs are
needed. The monitor controller unit can work with a stand-alone
controller and is additionally Eucon enabled for interfacing to the
Avid S6 control surface.
www.ntp.dk
Phonak
Roger Repeater, Phonak’s
n e w r a n g e e x t e n d e r,
increases the functionality
and flexibility of the
successful Roger Earpiece
launched in 2016. Roger
Repeater allows for full
coverage wherever you are,
including across multiple rooms, such as from green room to
main stage, as well as being fully wireless, mobile, portable,
adaptable and easy to use.
The Roger technology uses the latest digital standard and
operates on the license-free 2.4 GHz band. The wireless Roger
communication system includes the tiny, virtually invisible
Roger Earpiece comfortably hidden in the listener’s ear and
different types of transmitter-repeater. Roger systems are ideal
for people working in broadcasting and show business, who
rely on seamless communication with directors, producers, and
sound technicians. They are utterly discreet, easy to use and
install, and offer unrivalled intelligibility.
www.phonak.com
HHB 8.D56
HHB shares their stand with co-exhibitors Mogami, NUGEN
Audio, Rode, Wohler and Zoom UK. Demand for Dolby Atmos
audio production in TV and the adoption of AoIP networks
across broadcast and post is increasing. HHB supply systems to
meet these requirements utilising the latest technology from
Avid, Dolby, Genelec and others including intelligent IHSE IP
KVM and optical fibre infrastructure when required. HHB also
work extensively in radio, education and music production
environments and with system integrators around the globe.
For 10 years, the professional’s choice
BLACKBOX Recorders are the go-to multitrack recording solution for broadcasts including...
The Great British Bake-Off, Later With Jools Holland, FIFA World Cup Brazil, The Grammy Awards, The Sochi
Olympics, Formula One, National Football League, Inside the Actors Studio, The Mormon Tabernacle
Choir, NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly, ITV Studios, Sky Sports, award-winning BBC Drama...
8.E97
If your broadcast relies on high quality audio,
you’d better choose the most reliable solution.
Resolution advert v2.indd 1
42
Key manufacturing partners include Avid, BSS, BroaMan, Cedar,
Crown, DAD, DiGiCo, Dolby, Focusrite, Genelec, IDS, IHSE, JBL,
Mogami, NTP, NUGEN Audio, Optocore, Punchlight, RedNet,
RME, RODE, Rosendahl, RTW, Sonifex, Soundfield, Studer, Studio
Technologies, Vicoustic, Wohler, Yellowtec and Zoom.
www.hhb.co.uk
Focusrite
Focusrite will be present at IBC with a full compliment of units
from their RedNet & Red ranges, with select models from their
ISA range. RedNet is designed for use in multiple audio situations,
providing solutions for post-production environments, broadcast
or live applications and anything in-between. Fundamentally
RedNet is an extremely scalable, near zero latency audio
distribution system utilising the Dante audio networking system.  MDU15 provides x12 Universal Locking IEC power outlets. This
Focusrite will also be showing two new products, one each
for their RedNet & Red ranges, both of these products will be
making their public debut at the show.
www.focusrite.com
Zoom 8.A25
F-Control is a mixing
control surface that
gives f ilmmakers
more control and
flexibility when
recording in the field.
It works alongside
the Zoom F8 and F4
to create a complete and professional on-location audio rig.
BLACKBOX & BLUEBOX
resolution September 2017
F-Control makes recording and mixing easy with nine 60 mm
faders (eight + Master) and hands-on input/output control for
trim, pan, and track arming. Monitoring channel and output
levels is simple with 12-segment LED meters, three user-
programmable buttons, and a dedicated time code button.
You can also organise recordings using the Track Scene edit
buttons for metadata entry. F-Control gives you the option to
connect an external USB keyboard so you can enter information
for “Track Name”, “Scene Increment”, “Scene Name”, “Notes”,
and “False Take.”
www.zoom.co.uk
Canford 11.D01
Canford will offer clients a unique “touch and feel” rig, which will
allow comparisons between all the 9.2mm SMPTE fibre cables
that Canford stocks and uses in its camera cables assembly unit
— Furukawa, Draka, Belden and OCC. Visitors to the Canford
stand will also have an opportunity to review the company’s latest
production prototypes.
The Canford 4-way SMPTE 311 Breakout Enclosure can be wall
or ceiling mounted, and will be manufactured to accept either 2,
4 or 6 incoming SMPTE 311M cables. These units are designed to
enable the respective fibre and electrical core to be broken out
to LC (or SC) bulkheads and 6 pin Mate-N-Lok panel connectors.
In conjunction with the new ranges of SMPTE field termination
boxes, Canford will for the first time be demonstrating a true
“Plug and Play” solution which effectively eliminates any
requirement to terminate fibre on site.
The recently introduced Canford MDU 15 will make its
exhibition debut too. Designed and manufactured by Canford,
mains distribution unit is intended for applications prone to
vibration or where equipment is regularly re-positioned, such
as in outside broadcast, touring, hire and fly-away systems.
The Canford stand will also feature distributed brand, BEL
Digital Audio with demonstrations of several products, to
include the new BEL BM-A1-64DANTE confidence monitor. The
BM-A1-64DANTE AoIP monitor is designed to provide audible
monitoring as well as visual signal strength indication and audio
breakouts.
BEL’s AoIP monitor is suitable for a wide range of applications
in the broadcast, fixed installation and live sound markets. It
provides a significant advantage for simultaneously monitoring
both AES67 and Dante streams. The team will display AES67
monitoring over REVENNA and Dante audio networks. In
addition, a selection of BEL audio and video/audio in-rack
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monitors, audio synchronisation delays and multi-format
converters will be available.
www.canford.co.uk
www.beldigital.com
RTW 8.D89
RTW will showcase its
latest updates at IBC
2017. As part of its new
offerings, the company
has introduced the first
rollout of new firmware
for its TouchMonitor
TM7 and TM9 series.
‘We listen to our customers’ feedback and support their
changing needs with our regular firmware updates,’ says Ulrike
Lauterbach, director of sales & marketing, RTW. ‘We have really
put an emphasis on taking these products to the next-level of
operation for our customers.’
The current TM7/9 firmware update allows simultaneous
monitoring of transmission streams with the ability to see up
to four parallel instances of the stereo vectorscope at once.
The RTA (Real Time Analyzer) feature set offers an even more
refined graduated frequency distribution analysis with the
addition of a 12th octave filter bank. Extra security measures
can be activated with the utilization of the newly offered custom
selected password, which will also protect the user against
unauthorized adjustment changes. This firmware also supports
four-channel operation of a TouchMonitor, even without a
multi-channel license, which allows attractive combinations in
operation with RTW’s TMR7.
Also on display at RTW’s booth will be a range of its popular
software and hardware products, including the company’s
Continuous Loudness Control (CLC), MasterClass plugins:
Loudness Tools and Mastering Tools, SurroundControl 31900
and 31960 series, as well as the full range of TouchMonitors.
www.rtw.com
September 2017 resolution
Wisycom 8.D78
Wisycom will be presenting its brand-new options for
broadcasters and live production engineers, giving its users
the ability to widen their wireless reach in a cost-effective,
efficient manner. On display will be its MAT244 Programmable
RF Combiner along with two new antennas, the LBN2/LNN2
UHF Wideband Antenna and the LBP/LNP Wideband Antenna
with Amplifier. Says Massimo Polo, Sales & Marketing Director,
Wisycom: ‘Wisycom’s products can be utilized in  various
configurations for a range of applications across the globe, no
matter how large or small. The new MAT244 RF matrix combiner
gives users Wisycom’s famous RF distribution technology in
a condensed package, suitable for any type of broadcasts or
productions.’
 The MAT244, based on the company’s larger MAT288, is
designed to combine RF from four separate locations on the
fly, thanks to a matrix of solid-state switches. It operates on
a wide bandwidth from 150-840MHz and can be managed
remotely via Ethernet, which gives its user an unparalleled
freedom of movement. Each input sports programmable
attenuators and antenna boosters can be supplied on every
input independently. The MAT244 features unrivalled reliability
and runs on a redundant power supply (AC/DC). The combiner
provides excellent flexibility and gives users the freedom to
deploy his/her own wireless audio infrastructure.
www.wisycom.com
Aaton Digital 12F30
Aaton-Digital will demonstrate the new CantarMini location
sound recorder and the new Cantaress mixing surface, while
co-exhibitors Transvideo will present their new Stargate high
specification monitor and the new CineMonitorHD.
The Cantaress is an innovative mixing surface offers an
GEAR
extraordinary feel and high, compatible with both the
CantarX3 and the CantarMini recorders. With its extra-wide
foldable display, perfectly aligned to the VU meters of the 12
assignable channel strips, the Cantaress provides for each
channel an instant view of the setup of analogue Input gain,
solo functionalities, mix gain and equalization. In addition to the
main display, 2 intuitive screens are available on the right of the
faders to show custom options, setup or shortcuts.
The new Record & Play facility (by a free firmware update on
Aaton recorders) allows clone, remix and solo music operation
but is also invaluable for the film industry to remix some tracks
or to add more sound tracks to existing ones. This unique feature
on a field recorder makes the Cantar able to play and record files
simultaneously without any latency.
New features include — ability to add a new track to an
already recorded file (sound on sound no latency) — to clone
your last take (all your ISO tracks) and redo your mix down
track(s) say you did a perfect mix down except that you cut one
track a little too early, you re-record without losing your mix
down and remix just that channel — To re-record a dialogue
that cannot be saved from production tracks (ADR or looping)
— During a live recording, to play and eventually re-record
sounds stored in the cantarX3. i.e. telephone call, background
music, wild sounds.
www.aaton.com
43
 GEAR

DK Technologies 8.E60
As Dolby Atmos inches closer to streaming media like Netflix and
YouTube and even live broadcasting, DK-Technologies introduces
a unique way of measuring loudness from all directions with
DK T7++. Combine Dolby Atmos with Waveform Monitor in the
DK T7++ and you have an all-in-one metre that has your studio
completely covered. Other new features include support for
MADI and Ravenna protocols and for better integration into
mixing consoles, switching to portrait mode and controlling
the metre directly from the console with Ember+ have been
implemented. A camera setup together with a smartphone
app will showcase the possibilities of detecting if audio and
video are out-of-sync with LipSync for DK T7++. Introducing the
latest flagship among the DK T7 range, the brand new PT0T7-LS
— 19” 3U rackmount table version of DK T7 series added with
loudspeakers.
www.dk-technologies.com
Sonifex 8.E61
The Sonifex AVN-PXH12 is a monitor-mixer primarily designed
for monitoring Audio Over IP audio channels in a compact 1U
format rack. Any AES67 audio channels on your network can
be assigned to input channels on the unit and mixed down to
analogue outputs, a headphone output and built-in speaker.  At IBC2017, Digigram will introduce AUDIOWAY BRIDGE. Serving
It is a stereo monitoring device that allows you to monitor up
to 12 audio sources, from an input total of 24, at any one time.
The 24 audio sources can be selected from 4 discrete stereo
analogue audio inputs (1 x front panel 3.5mm jack socket, 2
x rear panel 3.5mm jack sockets and 1 x rear panel stereo XLR
input pair) or from any RAVENNA, AES67 or AES67-enabled
Dante AoIP connected streams.  alongside newer IP-based systems in both on-air broadcasting
These stereo signals are routed to the 12 x control channels on
the front panel, each of which have a ‘Normal’ and an ‘Alternate’
input selection. Each channel has three buttons: one for input
selection, another to Mute the channel and the third to select
whether the channel input is routed to the left, right or stereo
output legs.
The unit also sends to the network, as AoIP AES67 streams,
the 8 channels of the 4 physical stereo inputs, together with
a stereo mix of the speaker output. The unit can act as a PTP
masterclock or slave clock and supports IEEE1588-2008 PTPv2
media and default profiles.
www.sonifex.co.uk
BBC Research & Development 8.G10
At IBC2017 BBC R&D will demonstrate their work on other aspects
of the New Broadcasting System: IP production in the cloud;
protocols for creating Object-Based content at scale; live end-to-
end Object-Based Audio broadcasting; prototypes for atomising
content into smaller, reusable pieces of information; speech-
to-text transcription within the BBC newsroom. The R&D unit
will also show the BBC’s latest Virtual and Augmented Reality
projects, bringing these flavours of Object-Based to life through
an AR prototype, BBC Taster VR app and activity to establish open
standards for web VR production.
www.bbc.co.uk/rd
Digigram 8.C51
as a gateway between legacy and IP audio equipment in the
studio, or in multiple studios connected by a managed network,
AUDIOWAY BRIDGE allows users to input MADI, AES67, RAVENNA,
Dante/AES67, or AES/EBU and route audio to output in any one
of these formats.
By facilitating use of familiar legacy audio equipment
and production, AUDIOWAY BRIDGE reduces the cost and
complexity of migrating to IP. Occupying just one rack unit, the
all-in-one gateway not only bridges audio-over-IP (AoIP) streams
and legacy signals, but also ensures clock synchronization and
generation between the two systems.
www.digigram.com
Wohler 8.A54
Wohler will have its full range of products at the show, including
the iAM Series of IP-based audio and video monitors as well as
several of its advanced audio monitoring solutions. This positions
the company and its products as a one-stop-shop for top-of-
the-line monitoring, metering and IP offerings that cater to the
industry’s latest signal requirements.
The iAM Series monitors, including iAM-AUDIO, iAM-MIX and
iAM-VIDEO, incorporate high-quality hardware with powerful
upgradable software components combined with an on-board
Web server. This allows multiple units on the same network to
be monitored, controlled and updated via a browser-based user
interface and via API calls from 3rd party connected devices.
The iAM Series uses small form-factor pluggable (SFP) slots to
enable simple adaptation of interfaces and a wide selection
of signal I/O. The overall variety of audio and video metering
options supported includes analog, AES3 and MADI inputs, and
options for Video over IP formats (MPEG2 TS and SMPTE 2022),
AoIP formats (Dante, Ravenna, AES67), 3G/HD/SD-SDI as well as
a growing range of additional I/O options via its SFP interface.
www.wohler.com
Sonnet 7.F07
Sonnet will
demonstrate
Thunderbolt
3 editions
of its three-
slot  Echo
Express III-D (desktop) and Echo Express III-R (2U rackmount)
Thunderbolt-to-PCIe expansion systems, as well as the all-new,
compact three-slot Echo Express SE III. The compact SEL and
SE I chassis enable data transfers up to 2,750 MB/s, supporting
a wide variety of high-performance PCIe cards. Both systems
enable users of computers with 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C)
ports, such as the new MacBook Pro and iMac to take advantage
of Thunderbolt 3’s 2,750 MB/s of PCIe bandwidth.

AWA R D S 2017
• NOMINATED •
REWARDING QUALITY AND INNOVATION
Resolution Awards 2017 Collection.indd 5 10/07/2017 15:25

BCM10/2 MK2
New Class A Legend

www.ams-neve.com

ThirdPg_Horiz_BCM10ad_NOMINEE.indd 1 18/08/2017 10:37

44 resolution September 2017
NETWORK. AUDIO. VIDEO. CONTROL.

Grand Production Console

Enjoy the new

mc2 96 video.
mc 96 2

Read more @ tinyurl.com/lawo-mc2-96

Join us @ IBC: #8.B50

 CRAFT
From location
to post
Post production mixer MIKE AITON explains the set-to-mix
workflow, discusses his mix techniques, and has some sound
suggestions for location recordists to consider.
T
he aim of this article is to “open the dialogue”, spread a little post
production perspective, and to get location/studio sound talking to their
sound post brethren to find better ways of working together. I am a post
production sound mixer/editor, but I was weaned at the BBC TV Studios
in the 80s, where I spent as much of my time in film/location sound, outside
broadcasts and post production as was humanly possible — I am a game keeper
turned poacher!
LOCATION TEAM
The location sound team in drama (which I shall predominantly be discussing)
is often a Sound Recordist, a Boom Op and a Sound Assistant. Often the
production hires a Data Wrangler these days too, but that tends to be for video
media only as the sound department tend to look after their own rushes/logs.
THE POST PRODUCTION TEAM
The post production team is led into battle by the Post Supervisor, but is split into
two distinct camps. The picture team usually has an Edit Assistant to organise
and ingest media, and a Video/Picture Editor to cut the film. There may be a
whole raft of Visual Effects teams to augment the edit depending on the size
and complexity.
The editorial sound team is initially led by a Supervising Sound Editor, who
then usually splits the work into three distinct camps. The dialogues/sync sound
are cut by the Dialogue Editor who will often be working with an ADR Recordist,
and on high budget work, a specialist ADR Editor to fit the lines of ADR.
The sound effects are managed by the SFX Editor, who will sometimes have
distinct ‘food group’ SFX Sub-Editors (i.e. a different person for guns, for horses
and carriages, for doors etc.) to assist him, due to the high volume of work on
large projects.
The foley recording team, who record and prepare soundtracks for embellishing
the production sound and for the international foreign version M&E mix, are led
by the Foley Editor. He will work closely with the Foley Recordist in deciding
what and how to record.
Lastly in the process come the Dubbing Mixers/Re-Recording Mixers who
deal with the morass of tracks and options, and weave it all together to tell the
46 resolution September 2017
story in the best possible way, according to the
whims of the Director.
The team is large, so communication is vital.
We all have common goals. Ideally we would work
on great shows with talented people, and earn a
decent living in the process. We should always aim
to have fun, to collect awards together, and to be
back in time for last orders!
WHAT WE HAVE TO DO IN POST
— AND WHY
We should never loose sight of the fact that we are
there to tell a story. I do this as a mixer by blending the elements, often from
very disparate sources. The skill in this is as much about deciding what to leave
out, as much as what to add in, as there are often many options presented.
The number one priority is to make the dialogue intelligible, smooth and not
jarring. We do this with judicious use of EQ & filtering, noise reduction, dynamic
control, the use of perspective (or not) and the relevant reverb/delay.
So for the average scene that can be a minimum of several adjusters on
a de-reverb plugin, 5 bands of EQ, 2 bands of filters, 7 bands of Cedar noise
reduction, attack & release & threshold & ratio dynamics controls, several
de-ess controls, reverb send level, and all the reverb parameters for a plug-in on
one of the reverbs. Oh and don’t forget level control on the fader! And in one
scene you may have a boom or two, a collection of fizzy buried radio mics and
some pristine ADR to futz (down-grade to match the sync sound) that all need
balancing and blending, and all this across several angles within a scene.
Whilst achieving this we need to meet technical delivery standards i.e
loudness, true digital peak levels, and sometimes short term average levels as
well. Whilst mixing for your primary medium, the modern post mixer will have
to make mixes work for a variety of delivery purposes i.e TV, Film & Internet/
Online. This means making simultaneous down-mixes from surround formats
to 2.0 or even mono, which must be constantly checked for panning, levels and
phase/balance issues as well as differing loudness criteria to the original mix.
Whilst juggling all these balls, the post sound team has to fight the directorial
cry of ‘more music and fx’, due to the over familiarity with the film’s dialogue
and the desire to make it sound ‘more exciting’. Script conformation bias. It is
hard to do this and work as a team, as everyone needs to put their egos away
(iZotope de-ego anyone?). I often hear the platitude that it is not “our mix”,
but the directors’, but I feel that it is also the viewer’s mix, and we have a
responsibility not to cause distress there too! A real balancing act.

POST HAS CHANGED DRAMATICALLY IN THE LAST TEN YEARS
The average drama/smaller film these days has around 200 audio tracks with
foley, fx and atmos tracks. Don’t forget to include the stem down-mixing
and stem re-recording tracks in 5.1 and 2.0 (which number about 50 tracks
as a minimum, even for a documentary). To do this we require high power
computing (often with additional expensive DSP cards) and frame accurate
gen-locked simultaneous HD video playback. The modern post team has to
have competency with data wrangling and familiarity with both conforming
from audio rushes via EDLs, and working with field track workflow and the
corresponding multi-track sound files.
International sales requirement means multiple stem generations. Just the
stem records for a 50min doc in 5.1 and 2.0 will be gigabytes of audio. The post
industry has seen a “cottage-ization” in the last decade with many sound editors
working remotely at home. This requires very fast Internet to download GBs of
audio rushes or large embedded AAF files from the edit.
Some FX or films are pre-mixed (in the UK) in smaller offline mix rooms
before being assembled at the stage for fine premix and or final mix. Working at
home at this level takes both skill and discipline, and can be very lonely. Keeping
up with technology and advances can take up much of your time. It is important
to keep up the dialogue with your peers and colleagues to have those “water
cooler moments”, this takes time and effort and won’t happen by accident, as
it does at a real facility.
You can RX that can’t you? Production teams are becoming aware of the
power of software and can “over rely” on using it as a backstop. Shrinking
budgets are a massive problem for our industry today. Champagne taste and
beer income is a far too common cry. Occasionally productions need reminding
of the post production paradigm, good, fast or cheap — pick two.
Picture Lock? Well that’s a relative term these days. A post team has to
learn to re-conform its’ work according to constantly changing picture cuts
— or die. Agility is the key word here. The cuts are constantly changing. The
most common post production deadline these days is for yesterday please,
and with no increase in staff or budget to accommodate this. Long hours and
knowing if and when and how to cut any corners comes only with a great deal
of experience.
On smaller dramas or small films, the dubbing mixer can represent the entire
sound team at the mix, making it harder to argue the case with the director. On
larger mixes when there are editorial teams with you, it’s great to have other
September 2017 resolution
CRAFT
ideas and other voices present. In my humble opinion better mixes come from
collaboration. I personally do not subscribe to the “a camel is a horse built by
committee” theory when applied to post sound.
SOME THINGS FOR SOUND RECORDISTS TO CONSIDER: THE
M WORD (METADATA)
Talk to your post supervisor, cutting room and/or dubbing editor about the
workflow. Film and TV workflows are relatively well established these days
and when people try to go off-piste, often to “save money”, the wheels rapidly
fall off and in the long run things get more time consuming and therefore more
expensive. Do some tests and get the workflow established, preferably before the
shoot, so that no one is in for any nasty surprises down the line.
If you are second unit (or a pick up crew) on a shoot, then please adopt the
same metadata format as the primary unit, otherwise we can get autoconform
problems, as the rushes have different formats.
Log sheets are vital and save us hours in post and can help if the metadata
soup fails (it does sometimes despite best intensions, please believe me). Make
sure your post sound supervisor and the sound department get them.
Notes, notes, notes ... The more notes we have on the takes the better. If we
are searching for a clean alternative take and you have made a note of rustle
over a line, or an aeroplane in the background, then we would pass on that
take and attempt to find another solution first. Otherwise, think of the number
of takes and the number of scenes we may have to listen to first, and then do
the maths — it soon adds up!
“Please, pretty please” improve the consistency of who is on which track of
a polywav/multitrack file as best as you can. When this changes it becomes a
nightmare to find things, especially if the naming and or the metadata has gone
awry. It really doesn’t matter if you have to record blank tracks to do so, data is
cheap to store these days.
If the metadata is good, audio conforms (from the rushes) are a complete
breeze. If not, they can be a total nightmare, and we can loose days tying to find
things, and we will often end up with total garbage.
Scene/Shot/Take: please adopt the American system of Scene (a location),
Shot (description of shot size and angle i.e MCU George) and Take (the number
of takes of the same scene and shot) — it just works. Please talk to your script
supervisor, post supervisor, 1st AD, your clapper loader and even the tea lady
(if it will make a difference). It can’t be that hard can it?
47
 CRAFT
SCENE CUT TRACKS — WHAT ARE THEY AND WHY DO “WE”
USE THEM?
A scene cut track is a track (or tracks) that have regions marking the exact
length of a scene from start to finish. This is incredibly useful in post and allows
quick setting or selection of an entire scene for setting reverbs, SFX durations
etc, or even just playback of a scene within Pro Tools. Some mixers even have
picture cut tracks that also show the cut between each shot within a scene (for
perspective changes etc).
We make these tracks from a picure EDL, either using Sounds In Sync’s
Ediload, or with Cargo Cult’s Conformalizer software. The poor man’s method to
achieve this is manually, by inching through the picture track frame by frame
and making cuts at the scene changes (a big waste of time).
If good practice has been observed with scene/shot/take metadata and good
EDL preparation, then looking for alternative takes is effortless. Sorry but slate
numbers never cut the mustard instead of scene/shot/take.
MIX TRACKS VS ISO RECORDINGS
Please understand that in drama, a mix track is rarely (if ever) used apart from
in the video cutting room, where it is totally essential, picture editors hate having
to manipulate wide audio track counts. In the days of the Nagra, a mix was all
we ever got, but now that multi-tracking is available, it’s a no brainer to get ISO
recordings to build the mix from.
No one is (or ever should be) judging your ability to mix. We fully understand
that a recordist has many balls to juggle, and a mix is a “real time best” that you
can achieve on the fly. Please also note that there is no ‘more integrity to the
soundtrack’ just because the mix was done on set.
48 resolution September 2017
WHY IS THE MIX CREATED IN POST?
As a recordist, you will have no idea of the cut of the film and what the scene is
to be played back-to-back with. What works as a standalone mix item will often
not cut together with another perspective or another scene.
A dubbing editor will go through every track component of iso recordings
with a fine-tooth comb and remove dolly squeaks, footsteps, bad overlaps and
substitute other takes and/or ADR (to a syllable level) before a mix is even
attempted.
A recordist will have no idea of the SFX or crashing timpani or any other
frequency or dynamic of sound that will be played in the scene at any particular
time, therefore can make no value judgments as to level and/or dynamics. The
dubbing mixer can have separate EQ, compression and noise reduction for each
actor and angle of shot, and use the whole gamut of tools at our disposal on the
separate tracks. The dubbing mixer can rewind and have hundreds of goes at
attempting to get the balance right, and can write frame accurate automation to
help him achieve this.
Phase, phase, phase. In a MIX track, mixing radios and booms may work
well on a single shot (in your headphones), but when cut together against other
shots, where the phase is wildly different or indeed changing as the booms move
around relative to static radio mics, it can lead to a total mis-match of phase. If
at all possible, when making mix tracks, try keeping booms and radios separate.
This really helps in the picture edit too.
When you record a mix track, please don’t pointlessly over dupe. Its one more
thing for us to assess and to listen to. We don’t need a mono mix track L & R
for example — usually if in mono, just one mix track is fine.
BOOMS VS RADIO MICS
We love booms as they have a natural aural perspective, unlike a buried
omni-directional mic on someone’s chest or in their hair. The sound & visual
perspective of boom will match, whereas the perspective of radio mics has to be
artificially created with reverb and delays, which adds a considerable strain on
the time and budget, and often this can come at the expense of believability of
the dialogue.
Booms record much more than dialogue, often picking up nice clothing
movements and/or footsteps of approaching cast. It is very rare for footsteps or
movement to be useful from a personal mic, as any movement is indeed often
an unwanted artefact of the recoding, rather than something useful. Booms
have a much higher consistency of sound quality between actors — making the
mix easier and more natural.
Edits between shot angles with booms are much more consistent and
therefore give more flexibility to the dialogue editor to move the edit point. We
like personal mics so much less as they do not record a natural aural perspective.
De-chesting and taking out excessive resonance will also loose some richness
of the voice. Personal mic rustle is a perpetual issue for us in post. We have
de-crackle and de-click tools, but de-rustle is in its infancy.
Top end sheen added to buried mics to make them match clear booms is
hard to sound convincing and often sounds forced. You have to use unusual
EQ bends to mimic natural sound as it is restorative gaining not remedially
subtractive, which is usually less notable. Unusual sibilance can be a problem
too, especially after noise reduction.
Personal mics record large sounding breaths relative to the dialogue due to the
chest resonance. To make these mics sound more natural it is often necessary to
reduce the level of each and every breath to match the boom. “Clean” sounding
personal mics need room acoustic and Foley added — which must be perfect to
be natural. There is never usable P-FX (production sound effects that are clear
of dialogue) on radios that can be of any use in the M&E international mix,
meaning that the M&E mix can take longer.
Once you use personal mics, the work factor goes up exponentially. So if
you can get a second boom op or use plant mics or do anything to avoid JUST
personal mics, we will love you forever!
However, sometimes the corollary can be true. Sometimes even if you cover
the scene with a boom it can benefit from close radio coverage too: in-car
recordings are the perfect example of this. It adds to the sense of claustrophobia
and tends to record less car noise. If you have to use personal mics, then please
tame your wardrobe departments. Make them your best friends and get the best
mic placement possible. It is sadly very common for us to get recordings that
sound as if they were in someone’s pants! Please avoid this as it’s very hard to
mix when the sound is that bad or that rustly!
ON SET ADR
Please try this if you can — it can be so much more helpful than ADR recorded
 CRAFT

HPF before HPF after at 60Hz

lines in the wrong room. If you think a line is potentially compromised, play it
back to the actor and get a wild recording on set. The acoustic will be absolutely
perfect and it will acoustically match better than the ADR studio even with an
Impulse response of the original room for reverb. It will also have the same mic
and mic amp etc.
The actor is more likely to have the same energy as the shot performance
(especially if you can play back the original line to them first).
DO NOT be tempted to let them read the line from the script as it changes the
performance (becoming more like a voice over) and may change from the words
actually used on camera. Try and get them to make similar movements, as then
the clothing movement recorded will be similar to the original performance and
it will match-in better. We can use tools like Synchro Arts Revoice-Pro to fit
wild lines. This can stretch timing, pitch & even correct intonation. It can help
massively, but even in the best hands, it is not a miracle tool!
HPF — IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE BASS
In a post mix it is commonplace to filter out production dialogue below 100Hz
with a minimum of an 18dB/Oct HPF. There is little usable audio value there
and often just problematic energy that may be inaudible on set, but problematic
when using multi-band dynamics. Consider filtration at source.

CONNECTING VENUES ! EXBOX.MD - Dante / AES67

IBC I 8.E85 MONTONE.42 - RAVENNA / AES67
SG.MADI - SoundGrid

in the UK from: www.aspen-media.com www.directout.eu

September 2017
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resolution 49
23.08.17 10:04
 CRAFT

LEVELS: “ORANGE IS THE NEW RED” DE-REVERB & DE-NOISE MYTHS

Please don’t distort recordings — it’s easier for to apply digital gain than to try
to remove distortion. Treat orange as the new red. Noise floors even on 16 bit
recordings are so low relative to mic amps.
LIMITERS/COMPRESSORS & NOISE REDUCTION
Recorded dynamics are very hard to undo and often can ruin a take, so please
avoid unless unavoidable. It can be better done in post. Most post mixers/editors
I have spoken with are not a fan of the Schoeps noise reduction mic for drama. If
you have to, then please record clean alternatives free of processing if you can.
For “one take/shoot or bust documentaries”, I think they may have their place,
as something is better than nothing (or an unusable something).
The same applies for the CEDAR DNS 2. If you want to use it for the mix track,
then fine. I can see that argument and the benefit of a clean mix track, but not at
the expense of the split track records please. I can have hundreds of DNS One plug-
ins on my mixer to deal with noise, and automate them to perfection with frame
#41934 - Amended
accuracy Mogami
using fantastic Ad_Layout
monitoring in 1a very
26/08/2015
controlled13:33 Page 1 It’s best done
environment.
there really! I can also back it off a little if its done in post and I get it wrong.
De-Noise tools are split into two camps, the ones that run live and the render
workflow ones. The disadvantage of the render workflow i.e. iZotope RX is that
it is harder to alter in mix without very careful storage of time-coded snapshot-
ed presets. The advantage of the live workflow e.g. Cedar DNS One or Waves
C4/C6 in expansion mode, is that it is far easier to alter in mix.
In my opinion RX is the king of the castle for when there is “Noise to
Signal ratio” and you need audio salvage. The Cedar is king for when you
have reasonable Signal-to-Noise ratios as it affects dialogue less than EQ &/or
Expansion (like Waves C4/C6) and gives better results.
The biggest problem with de-noising is that we all tend to over process
when listening in isolation. Experience will dictate how little the dialogue needs
de-noising once the music, atmos and foley effects are added. Please take note.
De-Hums can get rid of mains/electrical issues and their harmonics. De-Crackle
and De-Clip can get rid of clicks, and some scratches, but not broadband rustle!
iZotope have facilitated some absolute miracles with their spectral repair module,
but it is very time consuming to achieve the magic.
De-reverb plugins have some limited success as a process. They work well
on well recorded subjects, where the “dialogue to
problem” ratio is high. But please be aware that
distant mics won’t suddenly become close mics!
Nothing is that clever! Successful De-Rustle is still
the (so far) relatively unobtainable holy grail of noise
reduction.

ON SET: WHAT, NO DIALOGUE?

Please note that no dialogue for a scene does not
mean “no sound”! We need all the breaths and
efforts and footsteps and movements. Breathing is
communication and therefore “an emotion”. It can
save an ADR session!
THE CABLE THAT MAKES “PLEASE, PLEASE ME” — HOW TO
THE DIFFERENCE MAKE FRIENDS DOWN THE CHAIN
Never ever “record mute” even if the wind machine
of doom is flailing around. Something, even if only a
Manufactured in Nagano, Japan with meticulous guide for ADR, can always be salvaged to a degree
attention to detail and a single-minded commitment from most disaster recordings.
to quality, Mogami cable makes all the difference in Please be very aware that ADR recording with no
applications where strength, reliability and signal guide audio at all is virtually impossible!
integrity cannot be compromised. Please try to adapt your surroundings to help.
Please put down mats on the floor, felt on actors’
Find out more and buy online at mogami.co.uk shoes, or rugs to dampen “over live” acoustics. It can
really help. Try to get supporting artists to remove
noisy shoes if not in shot please. Please if the lighting
generator/choke is very close to the set, have a word
with the Gaffer and the Sparks, to see if anything
can be done.
Above all else, remember that signal-to-noise,
or dialogue-to-noise is the key: “dialogue, dialogue,
dialogue”. In poor acoustics which are reverberant,
ED CABLES the counter intuitive works best. As a trainee at
SH BBC Ealing Studios I remember reaching for a 416
AN
FINI

in a swimming pool location, only to be knowingly

D

advised by the sound recordist that an omni mic

would be far more suitable. Spill is better if it is on axis.
BUL

E
BL

REE A WILD TRACKS & IMPULSE RESPONSES

L S AVA IL
K

For years now it has been possible to record sweep

responses on set to “grab the location reverb” and
allow us to import that into Altiverb for the mix to
add reverb for fx or for ADR. Proper sweep impulse
responses for rooms can really help. The most helpful
ones are stately home large spaces, or nasty spaces,
or very unusual spaces. The vanilla stuff is fairly
well covered. If you can’t record a sweep response
with a speaker, then a clapperboard clap or at worst
a hand clap can help too. Often something is better
BUY ONLINE AT than nothing.
Please don’t give up on wild tracks, contrary to
mogami.co.uk popular belief we often use them. Please label them
well, so they have a chance of finding their way
through the chain. Going overboard is unnecessary
as the ambiences are often replaced by the fx editor

50 resolution September 2017

 CRAFT

Livemachine!

IBC Amsterdam • booth 8.C80

with ones that tell a story rather than tell a reality. It is vital to get the ones
that are unique to the location. If a background noise starts up, record a
Wildtrack immediately, as it may not be there at the end of the shooting of
that scene!
Any crowd should be recorded under direction and ideally with the
camera on them as this will get a sensible performance rather than a “one
for sound” performance! The most difficult things to get as SFX are small ...and a real team player!
groups of people talking, such as a table of pub chat in the right ambience
just background chatting. This will be invaluable — as most library chats are
Stage Tec mixing consoles are real workhorses when you‘re
large groups, and often the wrong sex or age group or even accent.
talking live events. Reliable, fast and with redundancy.
ADR MYTH-BUSTING Take the AURUS platinum for example, which is currently
Please don’t feel ADR is a sign of location recording failure! It is often not just touring with the ‚Pop-Oratorium Luther‘ and ensuring the
for a chair squeak (i.e a technical) but is often for performance reasons e.g.
a director ‘DFI’ (Different ****** Idea), or for added additional script reasons highest audio quality.
to help the story flow. ADR costs are often approximately £160-180 p/h for Rapid set up, with perfect ergonomics as impressive as its
the studio, the ADR Supervisor’s rate for the session to direct/run the session, technical features:
and then sometimes an ADR Editor to fine fit/edit the takes on a day rate.
As a rough rule of thumb, you can expect to record 10 lines per hour More than 800 input channels (at 48 kHz), 128 Buses at
(recording rate). This is coming down now with new techniques and both 48 kHz and 96 kHz, with fully integrated Stage Tec
workflows such as using Video Slave 3, the new genlockable video solution auto mixer, loudness metering directly in the console
for Pro Tools, with its ADR workflow that has sophisticated streamers and
sum channels and group channels, freely configurable,
line countdown timer, as well as control of Pro Tools and its monitoring and
playback and record. extensive dynamics, scene automation...
Please bear in mind that one recorded line can become 3 recorded lines
(think handles) when the preceding and following lines may need to be Basically, just a real team player you can count on!
recorded to enable the mixer to get across to the line in the mix.
Clean pristine ADR can be very hard to mix against location sound: the
reverb must be matched precisely, the recording must be downgraded to
match the sync, and the supporting foley must be spot on too. A big ask!
ADR is 99.9% performance, which is another whole subject in itself — so www.stagetec.com
let’s help the other 0.1% by using the right mics and the right acoustic.

SPEAK UP DON’T SHUT UP

If a take is not very good, speak up and don’t pass problems down the line. I
fully appreciate how hard this is as I have been on set in tricky locations for
drama. I appreciate how tight shooting deadlines are now too. I have boom
operated on EastEnders, and had to run from set up to set up on tight days!
If you speak up about problems you will be at one with your post team as
well your director. You will become known as the one who records good
sound and doesn’t record a rats nest of issues. I am very quick to phone up
people who do a great job and thank them and I always pass this gratitude
along the chain too.
If there is ever an opportunity to do so, try to get to the dub and speak with
the dialogue editor and dubbing mixer. I encourage every sound recordist to A U D I O E X C E L L E N C E
come to the mix. We are all part of the same team! And the award for the
best sound goes to ... us! n

September 2017 resolution 51

 FACILITY
National Film
& TV School
In July a £20m expansion scheme at the UK’s pre-eminent training centre
was officially opened, SIMON CLARK explains the project.
I
n the late 1960’s the landscape of education in Film and TV was very
different to today. If you wanted to work in feature film, pretty much your
only way in was through knowing somebody who already worked in the
sector, writing endless begging letters to studios and production companies
or, best of all, having a relative in the industry. Once in, you learnt on the job
and, if you had the drive and ability, worked your way with all the speed and
urgency of Continental Drift through the ranks. If documentary filmmaking was
your ambition things were even more restricted. In TV the BBC was still the
dominant player both in broadcasting and training, independent TV networks
having only begun in this country in 1955.
Cut/mix/dissolve to 1967 and in a rare show of solidarity, the Department of
Education & Science and the British film industry worked together on plans for
a national institution to provide training for young people hoping for a career
in film. In 1969 limited funding was provided and a director of the suggested
“National Film School” (TV was not in the name or remit until the early 1980’s)
was appointed. A progressive documentary maker and teacher, Colin Young
was then working at UCLA and was tempted back to the UK by the prospect
of setting up a brand new facility. In 1971 the old Beaconsfield Film Studios
(Established in 1922 by George Clark) was purchased and the school has been
at this site ever since.
I should state my interest in this subject; I joined the staff of NFTS as Head of
Location Sound recording in 2016. I started my career in 1976 and am guilty of
“access via relative”. My father (another George Clark), being a film editor, was
able to get me a job at a dubbing facility. My subsequent career path has been
defined by repeatedly stepping up a level without knowing what I was doing,
but getting away with the appalling mistakes I made. Luckily for you this article
has a strict word count which prohibits me from listing the disasters I caused and
apologising to the various companies I worked for. I relied on my own ability
to bluster and the extraordinary generosity with their knowledge of many of
my senior colleagues. I believe it is this experience that has made me such a
passionate advocate for education in our industry. I don’t want my students to
go through the stress of feeling constantly out of their depth in today’s highly
pressured world and I don’t want productions to have to suffer the consequences
of costly mistakes made by untrained individuals.
52 resolution September 2017
1927
Over the years
since the 70’s the
ethos, curriculum and
teaching style of the
school has evolved
continuously. At the
beginning, the accent
was almost entirely
on the aesthetics of
filmmaking. In Colin
Young’s own words
‘Everybody did a bit Colin Young 1971 on left with unknown gov minister
of everything. I guess
without knowing it we were training filmmakers. I seem to remember that
although I was teaching editing I spent a lot of time talking to people about their
projects. During the time I was there my colleagues started what they called the
project system, which was instead of having specialised instruction, the work
was entirely project-based’. With his background in documentary Young tried to
engender new ways of looking at making “factual” films.
‘The first project that I asked them to do at the film school in 1971 was to
make a film about some aspect of Beaconsfield. Now that varied enormously
— on one side you had Nick Broomfield making the film that became Proud
to be British, that started off with the local MP Ronald Bell waffling on about
how wonderful it was to be British — at the other end there was a kind of
take-off of an American TV programme called Candid Camera, where students
built an imitation sentry box on the outskirts of Beaconsfield. They stopped
everybody coming in and filmed their reactions. The exercise produced a range
of observations which were so acute and entertaining that it suddenly gave a
way of saying: That’s one way of telling a story.’ To this day the good burghers
of Beaconsfield often find themselves the focus of the lenses and microphones
of our students. This approach continued for over a decade with, as Young put
it: ‘open curriculum favouring learning-based rather than a teaching-based
approach in which the needs of students had to drive the educational process’.
Whilst this philosophy is still recognisable in parts of the teaching structure
in the school, as time moved on so did the needs of the industry who, with the
abolition of the Eady Levy (a tax on box office receipts in the UK, intended to
support the British film industry, which ended in 1985) were increasingly a
source of funds. In 1982 the word Television was added to the school’s name
as that medium refused stubbornly to go away. Later that decade one of the
Eady Levy’s final bequests was used to establish a Short Course Unit which,
much enlarged, is still a part of NFTS. In the early 1990’s, the school dropped
the original idea of all students being on the same course studying general
filmmaking and developed separate courses covering 10 different specialisms
i.e. Cinematography, Sound, Directing, Producing, Writing, Animation, Editing,
Design, Composing. This is the model used today and the number of
 FACILITY

Although a course in any discipline

from the NFTS has always been
recognised by the wider industry in
general, it was not until the beginning
of this century (I bet that phrase
made you feel old didn’t it?) that
students were awarded a formal
qualification. This was largely to do
with the increased administration and
cost of providing an MA or Diploma.
Staffing had to be increased and the
curriculum and teaching methods
subject to external assessment.
However, the demand for formal
1970 academic qualifications in the world
of Film, TV and Media wasn’t there in
the late 1900’s and, like the industry
itself, NFTS exists largely to fulfil
demand. NFTS today is designated as
a Higher Education Institution by the Department for Education and
is widely regarded as one of the best of its kind in the world.
My own course (Location Sound Recording for Film & TV) was
established in 2002 by the school’s third director Stephen Bayly. It
was the first Diploma Course to be established and was set up to solve
the problem that the BBC were the only establishment in the country
providing specific training in location sound recording. Fifteen
years later, we are the only full-time course exclusively dedicated
to our craft, a fact I find difficult to believe. Being the “only game

NFTS Students in TV Studio Gallery 70s style

specialisms increases apace. Practical and technical grades have been added to
the core aesthetic curriculum with courses in Assistant Directing, Continuity,
Camera Assisting/Focus Pulling, Accounting for Media amongst them, whilst
more specialist creative courses have been established such as Directing for
Commercials, Games Design, Directing & Producing for Natural history and
Visual FX Design. New courses are planned for constantly as industry needs NFTS new building
are identified.

September 2017 resolution 53

 FACILITY

NFTS Students in new 4K TV Studio Gallery

in town” is a heavy responsibility, and I strive to

give our students the very best possible education,
training and experience. Since 2002 we have been
joined by 13 other Diploma courses with more in
the pipeline. Along with the Diplomas, Certificate
courses varying in duration between 2 and 5
months were introduced.
As the school expanded it was recognised that
the Beaconsfield site was struggling to keep up
with the increased student population and that
technical facilities were overdue an upgrade. Our
TV studio control rooms were state of the art in the
1990’s but then again so was an analogue mobile
phone, Gwen Stefani and the DVD. Many buildings
from the original studio complex had been bodged
to turn them into classrooms, and some prefabs
were well past their sell-by dates. In 2014, hot on
the heels of an announcement by Sky TV that it
was offering contracts to six out of nine students
on a Broadcast Production diploma course, then-
Chancellor Greorge Osborne  announced in his
autumn statement that the government: ‘will invest
£5m in the NFTS’s Digital Village to expand and
upgrade its existing facility into a world-class
training centre to provide a sustainable supply of
UK talent for the digital and creative industries.’
Together with £2.1m funding from Creative Skillset, TV Sound control gallery 2017 style
this enabled Phase II of major redevelopment to start
at the end of 2014. In 2016, Channel 4 announced plans to donate £1.5m: £1m and rather lovely Harbeth monitors in a surround configuration. A second 4K
to fund further expansion and a further £500,000 to fund a Channel 4 bursary capable cinema, with a massive JBL full surround speaker system was built in
scheme at the school to run over five years. The bursary is aimed at increasing one new block whilst in the other a new dubbing theatre has been installed,
social mobility within the creative industries, enabling 20 students a year from taking the number on site to 3. This latter also uses JBL speakers, is fully 5.1
socially disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly in the Nations and Regions, capable and runs Pro Tools HD controlled from a System 5 surface from Avid
to study at the world famous school. ‘I’m extremely proud that Channel 4’s (you may remember these when they were Euphonix). Munro Acoustics were
investment means the school will be able to support more students from diverse consultants on the design of the cinema and mixing room.
and socially disadvantaged backgrounds,’ said David Abraham, Chief Executive The overall technical infrastructure has been radically overhauled. The site
of Channel 4, ‘which will help increase social mobility within the creative and is now covered by a fibre “ring circuit” which allows media to be stored on a
media industries.’ central server system (thank you for your generosity, Avid) and accessed from
The £20 million development of the school comprises a 4K Digital Content any of our 8 new 5.1 Pro Tools HD equipped sound design rooms, editing suites,
Studio (from 1997 to 2017 faster than Dr Who) and two teaching buildings all 3 dubbing theatres or either digital cinema. It also means I can watch and
covering over 20,000 square feet in total. The sound control room for the TV listen to my students’ rushes from the comfort of my spacious (OK it’s a 7ft x
studio has been kitted out with a Studer Vista desk, Sennheiser radio mics 12ft cupboard but it’s mine and I love it) office.

54 resolution September 2017

 FACILITY

On location

Resolution being aimed at members of the pro audio community I have concentrated on the spec of our
sound installations but it must be said that the standard of equipment in the other disciplines is of the very
highest order. Our major projects are shot on current professional cameras from Arri, such as the Alexa,
and Alexa Mini, and edited on fully specified workstations running Avid software. Very impressive Visual
FX are created and rendered on industry standard packages. One of the things the school prides itself on
is that, once a student has paid their course fee there should be little or no further expense no matter how 1971 2017
many projects they work on. This is achieved partly by having a huge inventory of professional camera,
sound and lighting equipment in our technical stores. Think of a miniaturised version of Richmond Film STUDENTS 25 400+
Services and Take 2 Rental under one roof. My cohort of 8 Diploma students are taught using our own
Sound Devices Series 6 record/mixers, CL12 control surfaces and Audio Developments analogue mixers, COURSES 1 8 MA
Sennheiser MKH mics, Audio Ltd 2040 and 1010 digital radio mics and sundry accessories. 14 Diploma
NFTS bears a distinct resemblance to a huge production company. Whilst there is classroom learning, 4 Certificates
especially at the start of courses, we use the making of film drama, documentary, comedy, animation and 30+ Short Courses
multi camera TV pieces as our main method of teaching. A project will be conceived, written, developed,
STUDIOS 2 4
planned, story boarded, crewed, co-ordinated, shot and post produced all within the school. None of my
colleagues could put an accurate number on the yearly number of productions, but we are certain it is NFTS has more Student Academy Awards (Foreign Category)
in treble figures when taking into account all the workshops and short duration exercises as well as the than any other film school. NFTS students and graduates
current crop of 32 major graduation projects (a number which is set to increase as more MAs in various also regularly win BAFTAs and have won the short animation
category for the last four years. Other prestigious accolades
genres come online). It would not be possible fully to replicate a commercial environment, nor would it
include the Grierson Award for Best Student Documentary,
be desirable in an educational context but the Beaconsfield campus comes close in a lot of respects. On a which NFTS students have won for the last three years as
walk across the site you may come across a group sitting in the canteen discussing story development, well as multiple Royal Television Society student awards and
another sitting in the cinema watching rushes, production co-ordinators on their phones negotiating access Annecy Animation Awards. NFTS graduates have gone on
to locations, camera and sound teams checking equipment, design teams building sets and many more to win seven Oscars and 100 BAFTAs with alumni including
sights familiar to our world. cinematographer, Roger Deakins (12 times Oscar nominee);
With the increasingly competitive Film, TV and Media industries recognised as crucially important to the BAFTA winning director, David Yates, (best known for directing
UK economy it is essential that we provide future generations with the knowledge, skills and experience the Harry Potter films); Oscar winning animator Nick Park
(creator of Wallace & Gromit) and Oscar winning composer
to hit the ground running. As those industries evolve so must NFTS ... please remember that if we come
Dario Marianelli among others.
around with the begging bowl for our next expansion! n

September 2017 resolution 55

 CRAFT

Nicky Fisher

Sadie Groom
Wesley Smith

Climbing the
glass ladder
With the UK Music taskforce finding women make up only 30% of senior
execs, and broadcasting facing a backlash after the BBC revealed only a
third of top-earners are women, SADIE GROOM says it’s time we looked
Mandy Parnell
behind the glass in our own industry.

F
or a few years now I have been promoting and pushing the idea of gender
diversity into the sectors that I work in which is namely technologies and
services for media and entertainment. Whilst some people have really
got behind what I have been trying to do, I have also been accused of
doing it for my own business gain and been told that it isn’t an issue that needs
raising — I have also been told that I must have burnt all my bras by now and I
won’t tell you about my reaction to that person — he is still alive, just!
Following on from some successful events at NAMM, ISE and NAB — note
I couldn’t find any at ProLight+Sound - I thought long and hard about why I
should carry on promoting this issue and what was needed to make it be taken
more seriously. So, “why” first. Well it is an issue for a number of reasons.
Firstly some friends and I did a count up at NAB of all the female CEOs that we
could think of in our industry — the most we got to was 20 out of around 1700
companies, based on NAB exhibitors and then service companies — that is a
shocking 1.18%. Secondly, the reason that this is important is: what does it say
to younger women wanting to get into the sector with aspirations to get to the
Prism-TITAN-LaRoux-ad-Resolution-May17.qxp_Layout
top? For me, it says it’s hard to reach those roles, and1it 22/05/2017 17:25lonely
might be mighty Page 1
up there with only a few of you. Thirdly, we need to work with manufactures
to promote that there are women users of their equipment (actually it should be
all diversities) so that anyone working in it gets used to seeing dubbing mixers,
and heads of operations, sales, or manufacturing who are women. Lastly, and
there are some well-recognised statistics from McKinsey & Company and the
World Economic Forum on this, that companies where there is a balanced male/
female management team perform better.
The next step for me was to create a survey that meant I could have some
valuable data to take to the industry associations, tradeshows and manufacturers
to support what I and some other people are trying to achieve. With just over
100 responses, here are some of the results — I do feel that there is a need for
more research, however this is a good start.
• There is a definite need for a group that represents women in non-craft roles
in the broadcast and film technology and services sector — job titles for this
we are saying — engineering, sales, marketing, PR, operations, C-level,
Managing Director, operations — so a diverse mix and for Resolution readers
this definitely includes you. So, moving forward, we are going to create a

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56 resolution September 2017

 CRAFT

Darcy Proper

Kate Davis

• Have you been subjected to comments or actions in your workplace that

Heidi Blackmer-Robichaud Olga Fitzroy
new group with a new name — still a matter of debate — so watch this
space. We will be working with other women’s groups as well, to see how
we can collaborate.
• This group aims for three main things: quarterly networking events, talks and
a mentoring scheme. We are going to combine the networking and talks and
host one event before the end of 2017, and work on the rest in 2018.
• This group attends all of the main tradeshows, which makes me ask the
question: do the show organisers and exhibitors take note of this? We will
also be looking at this to organise events around these times — especially as
the group won’t be specific to the UK.
• 70% of respondents said that their company’s working practices could
be improved for women — main issues include career path progression,
childcare provisions and flexible working
you would see as non-supportive of you being female? Over half of the
respondents said yes to this question, with some tales of not being taken
seriously in meetings, to one male respondent saying he witnesses them
being ‘silently elbowed-out’.
• Amount of females in the business. 69% of respondents said that there were
25% or less females in their business.
• Females in senior management team. 15% of respondents had half or more
females in their senior management team. 25% of respondents have between
25-50% of females in their management team. 60% of respondents had a
minority and in most cases no women on their senior management team
In conclusion other key findings for me have been: A need for an inclusive
group: things will only be changed when both sexes are involved in promoting
the issue. We don’t have a group of complaining women here — what we have
is women that want to see other women strive and create an environment where
they can learn and be supportive to each other.
If you would like to get involved in a group for women in non-craft roles
in broadcast (including film, sports, media) please get in touch with Sadie:
sadieg@bubbleagency.com. n
Sadie Groom is founder and managing director of PR, Marketing and Events agency Bubble
Communications, and a board member of Women in Film and Television UK.

The Wing Family

A REAL GAME CHANGER IN ROOM ACOUSTICS

SMT-Diffusor TPH 0917.indd 1 23/08/2017 15:20

September 2017 resolution 57
 TECHNOLOGY
Live broadcast
on the move
Live video and audio over cellular:
ED LISTER sings the praises of a new paradigm.
B
ack in September 2011 I was asked to join a really interesting project
and faced with a challenge: my role was to film a team of cyclists drawn
from the ranks of the broadcast TV industry, riding 24 hours-straight
from the IBC offices in London to the IBC show at the RAI Exhibition
Centre in Amsterdam. To keep the hype going and the event sponsors up-to-date
with progress, the production team wanted to live stream the cycle ride.
I was to follow the cyclists on the back of a motorbike, filming the tour as it
unfolded. Cruising through the traffic-engulfed streets of London down to Dover
... ferry across the channel and then getting lost through the numerous tiny and
beautiful French, Belgian and Dutch small towns ... soaking up all the visual
culture the trip could throw at us before arriving at the IBC show — after the 300
mile adventure was completed with IBC TV greeting us at the finish line along
with some well earned local ice cold beers!
Let’s take this back: live HQ streaming? From a motorbike? In the middle
of nowhere, mid journey? Surprisingly, yes! The way to make all this possible
was the involvement of LiveU’s ground-breaking cellular up-link technology:
transmitting video and audio signals from out in the field, at any location,
worldwide from a lightweight backpack. If you haven’t already heard of LiveU,
in a nutshell it works via a number of 3G/4G SIM cards located in the unit, or
via WiFi. All I had to do was plug the camera in via the SDI cable, power up,
connect and shoot. At the other end, a server in the studio decoded the signal
which the mobile unit was pointed towards.
I was then, and still am, amazed at how good this technology is. We navigated
some truly off-the-grid routes, via unprecedented Sat Nav choices, which left us
struggling with foreign street signs. Yet the LiveU prevailed — hardly any signal
dropout occurred whatsoever. I felt the future of live broadcasting had been
revealed to me!
Six years on, and the backpacks have got even smaller — and more
ubiquitous — they are now a common sight at major sports events. Recently
I visited the guys at Garland Partners (who distribute LiveU and deal with all
the support and technical aspects within the UK). It’s amazing how far the
technology has developed. Taking a look at the range of units available now,
compared to back then: they are so much more compact, mobile and pack way
more of a punch. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the LU200, which is
absolutely tiny in comparison to the earlier days of the LU60! The point being
that, at the time, the LU60 was an unbelievable game changer: things are only
getting better in this world of portable live streaming technology.
From the operator’s point of view it’s a relatively simple procedure to work
with, which is really great for those run-and-gun moments, or for the self-
shooters out there. Each LiveU unit will first be set up to point to a particular
pre-determined server IP address at the receiving studio. The unit is powered
up by the operator on location and it will begin to gather all the available
bandwidth it can find at that time, letting you know via your small, yet
reassuring, display screen how healthy your signal is at your current time and
location. The camera plugs in via the SDI port and you will see your information
or image pop up on the larger models. All the sound and picture data is now
shared out between the installed data transmission cards, to achieve the
required clean, crisp HD Delivery.
58 resolution September 2017
You simply click the button to start streaming, sending your transmission,
and the video is then received by the server based at the other end, with the
LiveU software reassembling the HQ image from the individual streams it has
been split over. Talkback can come via a headphone output, with a radio mic
feed to the cameraman and another to the reporter or interviewee. When filming
in areas where there is very poor or no mobile coverage, the operator can also
connect via WiFi — and now even MiFi from another mobile phone! LiveU also
has a feature called “store and forward”, where you can capture your content,
then when you get to a location with better network coverage you can send on
your shot content to the studio or client. This could be done from somewhere
like a hotel or a coffee shop with good WiFi. No need to go park up the satellite
truck somewhere quiet — limitations are low! This, in turn, obviously costs a
fraction of the more traditional live feed methods that we are well acquainted
with, and as long as you’re somewhere mobile phone signals exist, then you’re
pretty much good to go.
LiveU comes in a range of units: the LU200, 500, 600 and the Solo. The
Liveu200 is the smallest of the group — as far as portability goes this unit is
phenomenal — it’s absolutely tiny, weighing just over 500 grams and available
in a pouch or camera-mount configuration. Small enough to fit on your belt or
clipped to your camera bag, it keeps weight right down for ease of use. It has 2
SIMS and a lower battery life than the larger models, but if you’re on a budget this
is a sterling bit of kit! The LiveU 500 offers up to 13 network links including 6-8
internal bonded connections, so achieving higher speeds with less delay. You also
get a larger touch screen monitor which helps out a lot. In addition to direct camera
connectivity, the LU500 also supports inputs from a variety of field editing and
switching devices, enabling multi-camera production and real-time field editing.
LiveU 600 is the newest kid on the block, it’s a similar unit in size and shape to the
LU500 but offers the highest bitrate of 100Mbps, also the lowest delay (500ms)
with better WiFi connectivity. You’re also future proofing yourself with the 600
big time, allowing for the latest standard in forthcoming codecs such as H265/4k
compatibility by upgrading to its new HEVC video card.
Finally the Solo: even more affordable ($1,499), the Solo offers connectivity
to any camera system going, aimed at communicating with social platforms such
as Facebook live and YouTube, giving professional Vloggers and individuals a
much higher quality live video stream online than other platforms available.
Packaged in a neat cold shoe-mounting box, it contains two cellular modems
which can be bonded together with Wi-Fi and/or a LAN to create a single fat
connection.
LiveU opens a lot of doors bringing a vast number of benefits to the table and
solving a lot of production problems, especially within the ENG world. I spoke to
Raj Bhadresa at ITV about this — Raj works with LiveU on a daily basis creating

Daytime TV content. He told me that a major benefit
of LiveU is the fact we can now access locations
that were previously difficult for SNG trucks, due to
parking and accessing the satellite. Imagine covering
a story outside a building, then something breaking
happens indoors or around the corner — the camera operator can simply go
mobile — complete freedom to follow the action wherever it goes!
‘The LiveU units make it easy for us to get into places without a lot of
intrusive, heavy equipment,’ adds Tim Guilder, Technology Manager for Daytime
TV at ITV. ‘The key for us is the flexibility the LiveU units provide, because we
can never be certain about exactly where the story will be next. Having a unit
that will work on the 4G networks and roam across the EU is a tremendous
benefit to ensure we get content out to viewers quickly and with high quality.’
Sky News used LiveU to provide some of their wide-ranging live coverage of
the UK General Election, with Garland Partners overseeing the project. Richard
Pattison, Manager of News Technology at Sky News, said: ‘Our live declaration
coverage won huge plaudits and audience appreciation, a Guinness World
Record for Most Concurrent Live Web Streams for an Event, and The TVB
Europe Best Live Broadcast Award 2015. The technology allowed us to bring
results to the nation as they happened, and this editorial advantage was made
possible by our partnership with LiveU. It simply wouldn’t have been achievable
using traditional news gathering methods, and we expanded our live coverage
for 2017 to make the night even more alive for our viewers.’ Sky News used
an IP set-up in a specially built studio — including a huge video wall for all the
incoming feeds — then taking selected live feeds for broadcast via its Network
Operations Centre. All live feeds were available online, via YouTube Live.
At IBC 2017, LiveU will demonstrate the LU600 portable with the HEVC Pro
card. Integrating the LU600 with the new 4K HEVC/H.265 hardware-based
encoder allows professional broadcasters and content creators to benefit from
mobile video performance with bandwidth efficiency. LiveU’s IBC studio set will
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September 2017 resolution
TECHNOLOGY
consist of three cameras to capture live interviews, with special guests talking
about the latest technology “disrupting” the broadcast industry, and how this
impacts their business. In addition, there will be two roaming cameras at IBC
2017 where hosts will interview exhibitors and showcase their products. Each of
these five cameras will be connected to LiveU’s LU600 HEVC units. The live feeds
will transmit back to the BeTerrific production studio in New Jersey where they
will control the production remotely, switching between feeds, and producing a
show in real-time. LiveU will also feature original programming streamed straight
to Facebook Live, including a daily interactive show. One segment will be all
about how the show is being produced and behind the scenes information.
As far as workflow problems that may arise with using LiveU, the fact is, the
units are heavily reliant on public network coverage — which can be contended
by other public users at the time. In areas with limited cellular coverage, if
you really want to push the boat out you can add a KA dish to your vehicle.
Obviously this comes at an extra cost, but at a fraction of the price of traditional
satellite. The dish creates a boosted signal and much more reliable transmission
from the vehicle.
The Portability of this technology is becoming ever more impressive: as
amazed as I was, holding onto the back of the motorbike with the LU60 over
my shoulder, the TINY LU200 would have fit on my belt! This tech is perfect
for self shooters or mini report teams out in the field keeping costs down and
crews to a minimum. The content gathering is far less intrusive, and ambitious
stories further out in the field, which may not have been possible before, can
be produced live. In a nutshell, you can now be gathering the required breaking
news right in the heart of the action in the heat of the moment, regardless of
how difficult an area is to navigate or how crowded it may be — hospitals, high
rise buildings, war zones, inside moving vehicles or public transport — there are
pretty much no limitations! n
Ed Lister is a self shooting video content producer & freelance broadcast cameraman based in
Manchester, recently shooting content for: This Morning, Good Morning Britain, ITV news, BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra, RED digital cinema & Adobe. Ed is also the owner of www.flagtimefilms.
com — which has produced content for clients such as Calrec Audio, Warner music and Atlantic
records, plus showcases work yearly at BVE and IBC shows.
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59
 YOUR BUSINESS
Americana
Like America itself, DAN DALEY explains this
new genre is whatever you want it to be.
T
he notion of music genres used to
be such a relatively simple thing.
Your idiom was rock, or blues, or
jazz, or whatever. By the 1970s,
overlap between genres was common,
with one fusing itself to another with
the prolificacy of the rampant sexual
adventurism of that era. The idea of the
hyphenated music genre remained deeply
implanted in music culture into the next
century. It offered a useful shorthand to
explain the left turns within what had
been more clearly defined idioms before.
For instance, country music’s various
passages into and out of pop music’s
terrain over the last 40 years has seen
it branded as anything from country-
rock (the Eagles) to cowpunk (Lone
Justice) to psychobilly (Mojo Nixon) to
country rap (Cowboy Troy — and a
seemingly endless stream of backwards-
baseball-cap-wearing “Bro-country”
caucasian tractor jockeys who make me
embarrassed to be white) and alternative
country (insert favourite du jour band
here). The editorial convolutions that music undergoes have become more
complicated even as they’ve become more necessary, as music went from a
thick bowl of culture to a thin, spilled mess that covers the table from end to end.
Fused genres are the verbal GPS of any moment, helping us figure our where we
are on the fractured map of musical culture and business.
60 resolution September 2017
WANNA AMERICANA?
Which makes the Americana rubric all the more interesting. For starters, it has
resisted hyphenation — there are no Americana-jazz or klezmer-Americana
groups and records. That’s because Americana itself is huge pot that everyone
seems to toss stuff into. Kind of like America itself, for better or for worse,
depending upon which side of Donald Trump’s many red lines you are. In fact,
Americana has become the tab you reach for when a) you reach a certain age,
usually 40-plus, 50-plus if you’re a country artist; b) the music industry does
not know how to categorise you but is not yet completely ready to give up on
you; c) are a Millennial but with little or no pop-R&B accreditation; d) are given
to plaid shirts, Doc Martens and play off-brand acoustic guitars.
This hodge-podge genre has rescued any number of classic rock artists, from
John Fogarty to John Mellancamp, translating the existential threat of advancing
age into a desirable authenticity, even as it’s given some younger bands a
short step up from obscurity. It has, to be fair, also created some legitimate and
authentic Americana artists, most notably the striking young singer-songwriter
Jason Isbell, the atavistic Chris Stapleton and the truculent Sturgill Simpson.
But for every one of them there are a couple dozen others drawn from existing
baskets: artists like Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, country hitmakers
that country radio, the Darth Vader of that genre, no longer has any use for; or
like Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle, insightful and penetrating artists of the
sort, like Tom Waits, that in better days major labels kept on their rosters as
artistic pearls but are today just drags on the P&L sheets; or Bob Dylan or Willie
Nelson, who still sell tickets and bring with them a survivor-hipster penumbra;
or Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and, to some curators, even Elvis Presley,
because they bring all of the benefits of the previous category and furthermore
are dead, so they can’t argue about it. Then there’s the cohort of artists who
move in and out of the Americana taxonomy, as needed and as they please.
That would include such as Jack White, Lana del Rey, John Mayer and Miranda
Lambert, all still able to sell respectable numbers of records and tickets but
remaining at career levels — purposely or accidentally — that let them decided
when genre lines are to be crossed.
IT IS ITS OWN UNIVERSE
Those are just a few of Americana’s most luminous names, and they’re just the
tip of a surprisingly large iceberg. Yet we’ve had no need of hyphens in the last
lengthy paragraph. The category does have its own organisation, the prosaically
named Americana Music Association, which will have its annual awards event in
September, in Nashville, the de facto capital of Americana. But while they pick the
winners, the also-rans are a decidedly self-elected bunch. Declaring oneself to be
an Americana artist confers a kind of immunity from immediate judgment, a long
pause during which entire career strategies are often reworked, and in the age of
digital distribution, long enough for entire new catalogues to be put up online.
And there’s a substantial music-production infrastructure out there to back
them up, no matter where they are. Studios from Austin to Brooklyn to Boston
have artists and producers putatively from the genre knocking on their doors.
Further afield, John Webber at Air Studios mastering in London and mixer
François Michaud’s Paris studio all come up on online when searching with
“Americana” key words.
There is also an Americana Music Association UK, whose heroes include
Billy Bragg, Danny and the Champions of The World, Bear’s Den, Robert
Vincent and Cale Tyson. I’d like to think this in some way makes up for artists
like Led Zeppelin, John Mayall and Eric Clapton turning American blues into a
nicely wrapped product and very profitably shipping it back to us 50 years ago.
Except that like many of those original blues artists, Eric, Jimmy and John are
themselves all very eligible to join the ranks of Americana artists, if they haven’t
already. (Robert Plant is definitely squarely Americana these days. Allison
Krause saw to that.)
And there is a huge live-music infrastructure that’s been built underneath
Americana, a kind of chitlin’ circuit for the largely affluent white audiences that
its artists attract. These are sit-down clubs, like the City Winery group in New
York or Sonoma, or the Cutting Room in Manhattan, that are more like informal
dinner theatres where you can get a $45 filet mignon and a $125 bottle of Stag’s
Leap cabernet (2012) to go with it, after you’ve paid $50 to listen to someone
playing on stage who looks suspiciously like Bruce Springsteen, but isn’t — at
least yet.
AMERICANA PRODUCERS
But all of those artists have something else: producers. And that’s an area
where market forces have been a bit pickier — you don’t just proclaim yourself.
The king of that particular hill at the moment is Dave Cobb, whose portfolio
includes the aforementioned Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton, as well as
Sturgill Simpson’s first two records. When I asked Cobb about Americana as a
genre earlier this year, he was understandably politic about it — Americana is
 YOUR BUSINESS

closer to country than, say, punk, that. I think that’s happening in Americana now, too.’
in that it does not often bite the The list of authentic (there’s that word again) Americana record
hand that feeds it. ‘Americana to producers is far shorter than the passenger manifest of its artists.
me, means honest,’ he told me, They’re mostly much better known, as well. Producers like Buddy
sitting in Nashville’s RCA Studio A, Miller, who created the sonic signature for the television show
where he was recently installed as Nashville; T-Bone Burnett, who almost singlehandedly synched
producer-in-residence by the forces Americana to picture in O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Lloyd Maines,
that collectively saved the studio the father of Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, and who built a musical
from a condo developer’s wrecking world in Texas that’s the Americana Mordor; Pete Anderson, who
ball last year. ‘Instead of being a figured out that Buddy Holly would have been reincarnated as
format, if somebody really wants Dwight Yoakum; and a host of others including Ry Cooder, Daniel
to make an honest record and not Lanois, John Leventhal
worry about where the chips fall, I and Rick Rubin, for his
think Americana is a perfect route. work with Johnny Cash.
I think it’s people telling the truth Miranda Lambert The real benefit of
on record. I love it for that. It’s a Photo courtesy Country Music Association Americana is that it’s
really beautiful shelter still a nascent genre but
and community, and one with substantial
I feel like it’s a huge infrastructure, for live
growing community, music (which let’s face
as well. They have it is where most of the
this Americana Music money comes from
Festival every year now) and in terms of
here, and it feels like Chris Stapleton
a cohesive culture. In
South by Southwest did fact, Americana’s very
in the ‘90s, where there ambiguity makes it porous enough so that anyone can declare themselves to
was a merging and be a part of it, and so far the keepers of the kingdom seem disinclined to call
things were exciting, anyone out on that. While much of the genre’s performer population are already
and new artists were pensioners, it’s still in nation-building mode and happy to accommodate all. It’s
popping out. There was an opportunity for many, including those who produce records, in an industry
such a support system where opportunism is as often considered a positive attribute as a negative one.
back in the ‘90s for Jason Isbell And the ground floor is always the best place to start. n

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September 2017 resolution 61

 BROADCAST ASIDE
I can’t hear you!
A chance remark about comms equipment prompts
DENNIS BAXTER to recall a moment from his early
career — before he won all those Emmy Awards.
I
got an email from our editor Nigel, discussing an observation he made
on one of his field trips: ‘it’s interesting to see that Outside Broadcast Van
suppliers and designers spend nearly as much on comms equipment as audio
production equipment’. Comms is the intercom system or communication
system that the production and technical crew talk over during a production.
As I have often said — you can mix the best sounding show of your career
— but if the producer’s headset is mucking up, what is the producer going to
remember about your show? Intercoms have been
the demise of more than one audio technician ...
including yours truly.
I was audio supervisor for a car race where
the commentator booth was 2 km away from
the OB Van, and I had to do all the audio — the
intercoms and microphones — on unshielded
telephone wire. I hope everyone reading this
column understands that there is a reason for
shielding audio cables, and trying to minimize
cross-talk is at the top of the list.
I did not detect any problems for a couple of days
because the cars were always running and the
engine noise masked the problem. But on Sunday
morning, when there were no cars running, going
to air you could hear the producer’s voice cross-
talking into the commentators microphone, and
going out over the air. The next four hours of
broadcast was the most painful experience of my
professional life, because the producer could not
talk on his communications channel while the
program was on air. He just sat there and stared
at me — I did not work for that network again!
Intercom Systems have gotten bigger and more complex as well as more
flexible, and clearly the performance standards have radically improved.
Without intercoms live broadcast production would not be possible ... so how did
we get here?
Analogue Intercoms in the US were founded on principles that the telephone
company developed and deployed. By definition there are two-wire intercoms and
four-wire intercoms. Two wire intercoms used a single wire to talk and listen on,
which can be problematic for crosstalk. A four-wire intercom used a wire to talk
on and a separate wire to listen on, which provided an intercom with high clarity
and intelligibility. Thank you BBC.
62 resolution September 2017
Two wire intercoms were what I learned on, and since my gig was automobile
sports and golf I worked on unshielded 25 pair telephone cable for decades. Two
wire intercom systems were like your old analogue telephone, and used voltage
to power the circuit and multiplex the audio, so you could talk and listen at the
same time.
It worked — but you learned tricks like organizing your communications cables
by different users, to have similar conversations on the same wires to mask
crosstalk. What I learned painfully was that you keep microphones on separate
cables — away from intercoms.
Fast forward 35 years and you find that intercoms are still generally connected
by unshielded copper wire (CAT5 and fibre optics) but current systems do not
carry audio in the same way as before — point-to-point communications are
digital between the communication stations. Of course the benefits are fidelity,
flexibility and fast setup.
The fidelity of the communications circuit is significant for long distance
communication connections, and was not a strong benefit of two wire
communications systems. Digital data is not
susceptible to electromagnetic interference, and
current systems can use common telephone
carriers to talk between great distances. Most
systems I have used allow flexible and powerful
controls from a computer interface, creating user
friendly, scalable intercom systems. It seems that
broadcast productions are only getting bigger and
bigger, with incredibly complex communications
requirements.
As communication requirements get
more demanding the need for an “Intercom
Specialist” has been on the increase. This is
a job opportunity for the audio-minded, but it
seems I encounter mainly IT-based practitioners. A
good, well-rounded audio person is probably more
beneficial to an Outside Broadcast production than
programmers plugging in Cat5. Intercom Specialist
is clearly a job skill with plenty of opportunity in
the future.
Comms are the backbone of any studio facility,
and the lifeline between master control and the
Outside Broadcast van. Accordingly, communications will be a major concern of
the director, producer and engineers working on the production. Some attention
and time from the audio supervisor or lead audio on the communications needs
of an event is time well spent. Remember: most directors and producers are not
technically savvy, but they can sure tell you who they need to talk to and who
needs to listen to them! When you don’t get it right — they will sure give you an
earful — sometimes even when you do get it right.
There is nothing like mixing a great-sounding show and receiving all the
accolades after. However, in the comms world you won’t hear many accolades
from the director about how great their headset worked, but you can collect a good
pay cheque, and not pull your hair out like I did. Did you hear that? n
 Institute of Professional Sound

Date: 11am-5pm, Saturday 7th October 2017

Venue: Ealing Town Hall, New Broadway, London W5 2BY

A must attend event for all sound professionals

• Informal exhibition area with manufacturers,
distributors, dealers and service providers
• Practical presentation sessions by the
Institute of Professional Sound, plus guest speakers
• Get your hands on the sound gear from IBC
• For all freelancers, location recordists, production
sound operators, sound mixers and anyone with an
interest in broadcast, film, TV, post and games
• FREE to visitors
• The perfect opportunity to socialise and network!

TABLE-TOP SALES: JO GILBERT EVENT INFORMATION

email: jogilbert@resolutionmag.com email: info@resolutionmag.com
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