By George Petersen

YOU DON’T HAVE TO WANDER FARTHER THAN YOUTUBE.COM to notice that video’s making a big impact on the web. Sure, the ‘net is filled with lots of funny clips, animations and occasionally even interesting bits, like the torture test of the Unitron waterproof computer keyboard. But there’s a serious side too…

On the Mix front, we’ve been incorporating video into our site for years, ranging from Seminars on Demand on topics such as Kevin Becka’s excellent series on studio miking techniques or technology previews like Taylor Guitars/Rupert Neve Expression Series or going backstage with the crew on the 2007 Snow Patrol tour. Just go to http://mixonline.com/video/ and you can find all this and more—including video highlights of past trade shows—AES, NAB, NAMM. And with the opening of Pixar’s Ratatouille, we’re going online tomorrow morning with an exclusive chat with the film’s sound designer extraordinaire Randy Thom—neat stuff!

There’s a whole lotta video going on around here with a whole lot more to come. That’s good. The bad part is trying to shop for some fairly simple HD camcorders that we can dole out to our editors for events like tradeshow coverage, where we need something lightweight, easy to use and capable of good quality picture and sound. That’s the ugly part. Picture-wise, there are plenty of low-cost models available that can handle the job, but getting decent audio from a consumer camcorder is like pulling teeth: Real ugly.

Today’s low-cost models tout features like 20x optical zooms (and the all-too-bogus 200x “digital” zoom functions), onboard effects, 720 HD picture quality, and storage to DV tape, hard disk, mini DVD and all manners of removeable media cards (SD, CF, Memory Stick, etc.) Yet at the same time, the attention to audio is deplorable. Here, I’m not even getting into the nuances of digital filter design or sampling rates or the quality of the onboard mics—or an almost total lack of manual controls for audio level. [Besides, there’s something VERY cinema verite about that blast of noise that appears when an AGC circuit pumps up the hiss or background noise during the pauses between sentences of dialog.] But what really kills me are the places where manufacturers locate these onboard mics. For some reason, the favored locations seem to be along the rear of the top panel–didn’t these companies ever consider putting mics on the FRONT of the camera, like maybe under the lens?

One model I looked at had the mics mounted on the back side of the flip-out viewscreen. On first glance, I thought this could be cool–the backside would form a quasi-boundary, giving you a semi-hemispherical pickup. However, it could get real ugly when the user tilts the viewscreen downward for low-angle shooting (pointing the mics at the floor) or when your hand partially covers the mics when holding the camera. Ugly, for sure.

Of course, it’s all fixable with an external mic, but finding a low-cost camcorder that has an external mic input (even 1/8-inch unbalanced) is not easy. But at least if you do, there are options, such as Rode’s VideoMic or Sennheiser’s MKE 300 shotguns or a simple Audio-Technica Pro 24 cardioid X-Y stereo. Yeah, I know there are much higher-end mics, but at least simple solutions like these will put you way ahead of the audio quality game.

And XLR inputs??? Fuggettaboutitt–at least in the sub-$2000 range. Certainly, there are other options, such as the cool XLR-to-minijack adapters from www.beachtek.com or the vintage PASS MD Report Jr. unit I’ve used for years. Heck, you could even go double system, and pack your fave location recorder, mixer, sound cart, booms, fishpoles, radio mics, shotguns and lavaliers. Sure, it’s a little bit of overkill when you’re shooting the kid’s birthday party on a $400 camcorder, but maybe that’s what real sound is all about…

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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What do YOU Think?

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By George Petersen

ONCE UPON A TIME, WAY BACK IN THE 1970s, I was part of the independent filmmaker’s scene. I used to live, breathe and exist for the whole concept of the filmic art, working on my films, crewing on other people’s productions and (at least partially) supporting myself teaching at local schools. At the time, the availability of low-cost 16mm and Super-8 cameras allowed anyone with a vision and a modest budget to cinematically express their feelings. Suddenly, short art films were the rage and campus screenings, film festivals and local cinema societies all offered at least some outlets for independent filmmakers.

Compared to the bulky, low-res video equipment available at the time, film offered a means of generating broadcast quality color images—even using a simple spring-wound 16mm Bolex camera. Meanwhile, better gear, such as Arriflex and Eclair cameras, were available at affordable rental rates in the major markets and many a budget producer did weekend shoots, where a complete camera package could be picked up on Friday night and returned Monday morning—all for a one-day “Saturday” rental fee. The main drawback was that sync sound was a complex process, requiring a team approach—or at least a second person to run the Nagra and hold the fishpole boom.

After the shoot, the independent then had to weave a tangled web of lab work—ordering edit workprints from the original film, resolving the 1/4-inch location audio tapes to sprocketed mag film, editing the separate picture and sound rolls, preparing multiple rolls of mag for the audio mix and finally conforming the original picture footage into checkerboarded A/B (or A/B/C…) reels for release printing. The process wasn’t exactly easy—on the sound or picture side. Compared to those Neolithic days, DAW-based audio post-production is a breeze–you still need talent, but the process is whole lot easier now.

Today, low-cost HD format DV camcorders provide better than broadcast quality video and digital audio recording in easy-to-use, compact packages. Combined with desktop Mac/PC editing software digital video production has transformed the independent video scene in the same way that ADATs and DA-88s revolutionized digital audio 15 years ago.

DV offers a high degree of instant gratification—where a simple point-and-shoot approach can yield a remarkable image. That’s not to say that everything’s easy: Just because an image shows up without lighting doesn’t mean a shot is well-lit and just because sound is picked up doesn’t mean you’ll get a useable track from an on-camera mic that picks up LOTS of room tone. But for those who are willing to take the extra step of learning some of the basics (yeah, I know, that’s the boring part), the DV medium can yield remarkable results–you just have to work at it a little. And if you actually know something about audio, so much the better.

The tools are cheap and plentiful. For a ridiculously small investment, you could have all the tools required to create great looking/sounding projects—shorts or features. You do need a great script, and the world is filled with great stories to tell. Is the revolution really limited to YouTube clips of people riding bicycles into swimming pools or cats that play the piano? Not that there’s anything wrong with funny little snips, but where’s the revolution? Sure, there are people taking advantage of the technology to do serious work, but with all this technology available, the movement should be pandemonium and not a trickle.

BRING ON THE REVOLUTION!

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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What do YOU think?

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By George Petersen

THE WORLD IS FILLED WITH WAY TOO MANY COINCIDENCES and is getting smaller everyday—at least thanks to the Internet.

A couple months ago, I got home late at night and was still wired from doing a session earlier that evening. Doing a little web surfing to wind down, I decided to do a Yahoo search on some names of a couple bandmates I hadn’t seen for decades. Trouble is, if you type in a name like “Tim Walker” (a real name—where are you, Tim?) you’re gonna get a huge response that you’ll never filter through, especially when the last time you saw them was loading gear out of a club at 3:00am back in 1968, in Naples, Italy (my actual hometown).

I figured I’d start with a name less common and typed in “Bob Lewellyn” and “guitar.” Sure enough, there was one obscure reference to Bob playing lead guitar on his younger brother’s Les Lewellyn’s album and said brother has a website (www.preyinglizardmusic.com) he uses to promote his band Dixie Lizard. A quick e-mail to Les verified that was the right brother and he remembers his brother Bob’s band back in Italy: Hey, it was only 39 years ago. Score one for the web!

Going onto Les’ site, I was blown away by what this guy–singlehandedly–is doing to promote indie music. Back in 2005, he started his series of Pirate Radio Shows, with multiple three-hour streams of new, interesting music and new shows each week—a great downloadable fix for your iPod (or mobilized to your cell phone), especially for anyone who remembers what FM radio USED to be like.

Now, Les has expanded with daily and weekly podcast shows, including the Hot Sheet Mon (hard rock); The Chill Pill Show (soft-er rock); InstruMental Madness (instrumental rock); Preying Lizard Music’s Road Rash Blues Show (blues); and No Man’s Land (all-female rock performers). As a bonus, Les also includes cover art, band links and a new online reviews section. To make sure he never sleeps, he also hosts Eclectic Pod, the top-rated music podcast sponsored at www.towerpod.com (an arm of Tower Records, which after downsizing its brick and mortar empire, continues online at www.towerrecords.com).

I might have stumbled on Preying Lizard Music through odd happenstance, buy hey, there’s plenty of great unexplored new music to hear, explore and download. In these days of big-money, corporate radio, here’s somebody who’s doing it right. Check ‘em out, tune in and enjoy. Best of all, it R-O-C-K-S! Thanks, Les! www.preyinglizardmusic.com

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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So what do YOU think?

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By George Petersen

The old analog vs digital argument is some 30 years old and not getting any younger. I’m not going to bring up that old feud. There are good and bad digital systems, and there are good and bad analog systems.

But often one of the reasons that digital sounds bad stems from user error. Many of us spent years honing our analog recording skills, finding out how to work with the (many) eccentricities of putting electrical signals onto magnetic tape. We knew when to hit it hard, when to ease back, when to bias, when to overbias–you name it, someone tried it. And the results were often quite remarkable.

Then that nasty digital demon arrived. Without years of knowing the inside tricks, we tried treating digital like analog. And we all learned the lesson about digital overloads and that awful, nasty noise digital circuits exude when clipped. Fearing the evil digital dragon, many people backed off their levels, avoided the overs and started making recordings that were well below the dreaded 0dB mark. Besides, with no tape hiss, any recording could just be brought up to 0dB later with a little normalization—the tracks were free of overload distortion, so everybody’s happy, right? Well, not quite, because the resulting sound was often lifeless, sterile sounding and lacked the punch we so craved. When you start recording at -4 or -6 or even -10 dB just to avoid overload distortion, your available dynamic range suffers, and that 16-bit system you had starts putting out 12- or 14-bit recordings. To make matters worse, manufacturers started building digital gear with clip lights that kicked in around -4dB, so as users avoided that -4dB point, the situation became even more ridiculous. Fortunately, 20- and 24-bit digital systems arrived just in time for us to make some 16- and 18-bit recordings.

Unfortunately, even today, there still is no industry standard for what constitutes a digital clip. How many consecutive samples have to break that -0dB mark before an overload is indicated–or even heard by the listener? (One? Two? Four? Six?) I’m not implying that your waveforms should resemble square waves or the great mesas and plateaus of the American West, but the effect also depends on what kind of source you’re recording. Everybody knows that digital overloads can sound raspy and harsh, so while tracking, if a snare hit (an instrument that’s supposed to sound raspy anyway) has SOME clipping, is that really a bad thing?

Meters and those flashing clip lights are provided as a guide. Finding out what your system is capable of simply comes down to LISTENING. Take a little time, experiment with your DAW or reverb and determine the limits of your rig. As anyone who bent a few analog VU meter needles can tell you, sometimes rules were meant to be broken.

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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By George Petersen

TODAY’S HALLOWEEN, SO HERE’S A SCARY STORY… A while ago, I wrote about the need for manufacturers to spend a couple extra bucks on better-quality pots, switches, etc. to ensure more longevity in gear. Now i’m bugged by the idea of designs that create a built-in time bomb–just ticking down to destroy the stuff you have. Now whether this manufacturing obsolescence is plannned (shame on them) or unplanned (why didn’t someone think of this first), the effect on the end user is the same.

Last week, I pulled out a pair of JBL L26 speakers that I hadn’t used for years. These are really nice 10″ two-way bookshelves. After giving the oak cabinets a quick dusting, I pulled the grilles off and went to move a bit of dust on the edge of the woofer cone, and the foam surround crumbled when I touched it. I’ve heard of this “foam rot” condition, but this could never happen to ME—these speakers were never exposed to the sun, and were carefully stored in a home, but the malady is widespread, especially to speakers that are more than 10 years old. The sad part is that speakers don’t HAVE to go south with age—I’ve got two ’40s Jensens, two mid-1950s Altec 515Bs and a ’60s JBL D130—that are all in constant use with no ill effects, despite being 60/50/40+ years old. Yeah, I guess that butyl and foam surrounds are more compliant (at least when new) than their all-paper cone cousins—and there’s a fairly healthy business in third-party foam surround kits and re-foaming/reconing companies, but still…

In another example, I have (at least, had) a wonderful vintage Korg PolySix analog synth, that’s been a great studio addition over the past 20+ years, and when the onboard (soldered-in!) memory battery died, I didn’t lose much sleep over it. It couldn’t remember presets, but you could always twiddle a couple knobs and get what you needed, sometimes faster than walking through the presets anyway. But the REAL problem arrived when the aged batteries leaked, and since the main CPU is right next to the battery (another “great” design idea) the leakage trashed all the PCB traces going to the CPU and maybe that as well, so now it’s DOA.

At this rate, I wonder if there will be any legacy stuff left that you could pass to your kids and grandkids when you eventually get that call to track Jimi, Janis and Elvis. It might not be digital hardware, but it could be your Millennias or Massenburgs. It sure won’t be your plug-in library or your collection of music/DAW software unless your heirs still have a working Atari ST or really need a (NuBus) Pro Tools 3.0 rig. We can barely keep up with changing software mores right now with today’s Intel Macs and Windows Vista around the corner, much less having to worry what’s coming a decade from now. Sooooo….

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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Is there too much planned (or unplanned) obsolesence?

Is the concept of legacy audio products still relevant?

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By George Petersen

Our old friend analog recording has been around since 1877. That 130-years represents a lot of time for a technology to mature and improve. Meanwhile, digital recording has been around for about 30 years–not a whole lot of time.

In fact, if you look at the state of analog in 1907 (30 years after its birth), things were pretty grim. The acoustic recording era was the thing, where artists had to scream their performances into a horn with enough volume to make sure the needle cut the groove deeply enough. Bandwidth was about 3.5 kHz. Microphones were not part of the recording process until the mid-1920s.

But what if–and admittedly it’s a BIG what if–digital had come first and was 130 years old? And in that same imaginary world, what if you went to an AES show where analog recording technology was being shown for the first time in 2006? Here’s some user comments you might hear at the upcoming Analog World Expo in that imaginary universe:

ANALOG RECORDER BOOTH: “Sure, that upper frequency response is nice, but it won’t matter on a CD or MP3 anyway. No, what about that wow and flutter or nonlinear LF response due to head bump? The tape setup/alignment takes a lot of time. It’s impossible to clone tracks or make perfect safety backups. And that tape hiss…”

2-TRACK EDITING WORKSHOP: “Let me see… you take my original master tape, chop it up with razor blades, use adhesive tape to put it back together and there aren’t any levels of UNDO?”

PLATE REVERB BOOTH: “Man, that reverb would be great on drums or vocals! What do you mean it operates by vibrating a 7-foot steel sheet with a couple contact mics on it, mounted inside a 400-pound box? And it only does ONE sound? How do I tweak parameters, load new algorithms or store different spatial parameters?”

COPPER WIRE BOOTH: “You expect me to replace my 20-pound, 500-foot, 400-channel fiber-optic snake with eight 56-channel copper firehoses that weigh 1,500 pounds each? You gotta be kidding…”

VINYL LP RECORD DEMO: “Wow! That 12-inch disk is big enough to hold the entire history of the world’s music… What do you mean it only holds 20 minutes max per side, and I’m supposed to flip the disk over in the middle of the album? How am I supposed to play this in my car… or while jogging or flying? And if you bump into the player while it’s operating, the record is scratched and flawed forever? Oh yeah… the major labels are gonna love this one!”

TECHNICAL PAPERS SECTION: “And just how do you expect us to make music WITHOUT drum loops, vocal pitch adjustment, cut-and-paste assembly editing, quantized tempo correction, virtual tracking and pre-packaged sequences???”

Fortunately, it was all just a dream, and clearly there’s room for analog and digital technologies to co-exist. But if digital had come first, would analog have ever existed at all?

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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What do YOU think?

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By George Petersen

You might not immediately recognize the name of Keith Barr. But he founded a couple companies whose names you might have heard of… like MXR and Alesis. Barr, the designer of classic guitar pedals, best-selling digital reverbs and the revolutionary ADAT digital multitrack sold out of both companies years ago—even taking a hiatus to live on a boat off Antigua in the Carribean for a couple years between his stints at MXR and Alesis—but he’s poised to make a return with this new company, Spin Semiconductors.

One of Barr’s passions was designing custom chips—something he did a good deal of during his Alesis days—and Spin Semi’s new product is a chip. The first in a series of affordable processors from Barr, the FV-1 is a true single chip reverb solution. The FV-1 can be readily designed into any variety of products—mixers, guitar amps, recorders, car audio, karaoke systems—most any OEM application seeking a highly integrated, low cost package.

“By integrating the DSP core, memory and the converters into a single 28-pin package, we have created the industry’s only available true single chip reverb solution,” said Barr. “This cost-efficient package lets product designers easily create and run custom programs via an external EEPROM, without an external microcontroller. The degree of integration is so complete that the FV-1 can be treated as an analog part when designed into a product.”

The FV-1 features a DSP core operating at 128xFs, 32K words of delay memory, three potentiometer inputs for real time parameter adjustment and integrated stereo ADCs and DACs. It includes includes eight built-in effects programs along with the ability to load eight custom programs so designers can differentiate their products from others in the marketplace.

An assembler for the chip is available now on Spin Semiconductor’s web site and a complete development board will be available soon. The FS-1 is offered in a 28-pin SOIC package. Pricing is well under $10 in production quantities. Visit wwwspinsemi.com for more details.

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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Between MXRs classic guitar pedals and the first under-$1,000 digital reverb (the 01a) and the Alesis line of ADAT recorders, reverbs, and electronic instruments, both companies offered audio gear at prics anyone could afford. Anyone have any interesting Alesis/MXR tales to share?

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What do YOU think?

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By George Petersen

As pro audio devotees, we love old stuff. And when something new comes along, we tend to hold off for a while and let things settle in before making that leap of faith into new technologies. Along the way, our dear friend analog got a new littermate by the name of digital and we were quick to chastise the new arrival.

Much of this admonishment was well deserved. When the CD first debuted, it was pretty bad, yet companies described it with catch-phrases like “the ultimate in sound” and “audio perfection.” Of course, if revision 1.0 was perfect, then how would one describe revision 2.0, when oversampling technologies brought the format closer to perfection. So which version was perfecter? The answer is none of them, but the reason why is not quite what most people expect.

I’m not gonna rally the flag of those who feel the only true hi-fi format is some esoteric vinyl pressing played on an esoteric turntable driving some equally esoteric phono cartridge attached to an even more esoteric tonearm, routed through liquid nitrogen-cooled cabling to just the right preamp/amp/speakers.

But in the domain of way-less-than-$100,000 playback systems, there is a middle ground of digital systems that could sound pretty good. Unfortunately, in the real world of the everyday playback and production tools we all use, simply silk-screening the word “Professional” onto the front panel doesn’t automatically make it sound better. Many of these digital products, from consoles to reverbs to CD players don’t—and can’t—sound good and big reason for that is not digital at all, but analog.

You might think a megabuck console or effects box would have a world-class analog back-end, but the dirty little secret here is that in order to save money, the analog circuitry that follows that highly-touted, D/A converter chip is often based around the cheapest stereo IC op-amps around. And is not limited to low-end gear—there are very expensive products that cut corners in this area to keep costs down/profits up.

Here, the chip’s low channel separation specs result in a squashed soundstage with poor imaging—hardly the sound you want if you prefer wide stereo mixes or lush thick reverbs. Sure, higher bit resolution, increased sampling rates, improved anti-aliasing filters, etc., are all factors in digital quality, but in too many products, a cheap stereo op-amp on the output becomes the weak link in the chain. If you’re working entirely within the digital domain, you’ll be entering the analog world at some point, and when that happens, it’s nice to know what you’re hearing is your project and not a cheap IC’s rendition of your creation.

We audio types tend to be picky about quality: Many of us have invested in quality front-end peripherals—outboard mic preamps and high-end A/D converters—to insure that what we hear in the control room is faithfully captured. But manufacturers of pro (and consumer) gear should pay attention to that often-ignored other side of the chain. We users might consider investing in a outboard D/A with a decent analog back-end. This won’t suddenly create digital perfection—analog recording wasn’t exactly perfect, either—but in the meantime, it’s a step in the right direction.

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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So what do YOU think?

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By George Petersen

Episode 1: What’s your Problem, Anyway?

Welcome to AudioBites, my weekly rant/rave about all things audio and musical. The idea behind this started out simply as a blog, but we wanted to add an element where the discussion would go farther than the usual editorial slant, so we’ve provided a comment field where you and other readers can toss in your two Euros worth.

The whole idea here is interactivity, but this will be a semi-moderated free-for-all, where slander, obscenities, personal attacks and incoherent ramblings from participants who drool incessantly may be subject to the a simple stroke of that QWERTY key marked “DEL.” But what you should expect from AudioBites may be sometimes provocative, sometimes evocative, but (hopefully) always thought provoking and maybe even entertaining.

One of my pet peeves has to do with affordable technology. No, I’m not getting off on a tired tirade that only $$$ gear is worth using. Today, for the price of a couple months of car payments (depending on what you drive), you can assemble a decent recording setup. No, it won’t be world-class, but that paltry sum is enough to buy some basic tools that could lay down some respectable-sounding demos—even masters. And if you’re in a band and can split the costs among several players, the possibilities for buying even more (and improved) goodies are even better.

Now with all the parts in place, we come to the crux of the situation. Once you have the gear, it’s nice if somebody knows how to use it. And not just how to plug it in and get a meter to move, but having someone who actually took some time to understand something as basic—yet essential as—gain structure and maybe even mic placement.

Once upon a time, even getting a signal down on a pro analog deck required knowledge of machine setup and alignment. And unless one was very careful to optimize levels, tape hiss would quickly destroy the character of a recording. Once digital removed that nasty hissing sound and the alignment chores, EVERYBODY suddenly became an audio engineer.

And with no tape hiss, you could just record signals at -30dB and boost them during the mix with no problems, right? Wrong! As soon as you start chucking that much dynamic range out of your tracks, your pristine 24-bit system (at least it said 24-bit on the outside of the packing box) suddenly outputs 12- or 14-bit recordings. Hey, there’s no tape hiss, and that chic lo-fi sound is “in” these days, so who cares anyway?

And that’s what really bugs me. All this great, affordable high-res digital gear is going for rock-bottom prices, and with a little know-how and applied techno-savvy, the right band could break out of the basement and change the world. So where are these musical masters? I’m not talking about the “gee, we have our own record” types.You’ve heard of the million monkeys typing…So if a gazillion groups are out there (some are very out there) doing self-produced album, by now, there should be a least a dozen certified cases of household-name superstars emerging from those roots. Hell, the Cowboy Junkies broke with a cassette recording made around a campfire. So where are the next breakthroughs?

Certainly, there are valid reasons why latching onto affordable high-res tools don’t instantly turn the user into a George Martin. But the question remains: Where’s the revolution? Click on the comments field below and offer your take on this.

I’ll be back with some more quasi-coherent rambling next week, but until then, consider this…

BONUS TRACK:

DUMB FORMAT OF THE WEEK

This week’s dumb format award has to go to the miniSD (Secure Digital) line of removable media. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for solid-state memory, and the postage-stamp-sized SD format is very cool. But is a data cart that’s two-thirds the size of a postage stamp really a breakthrough? Worse yet, since most people don’t have miniSD card readers, you need to carry around a mini-to-standard SD adapter for compatibility with everything else, making miniSD somewhat less than convenient and kinda defeats the idea of ultra-compact storage.

Somewhere, there must be some kind of ergonomic rules that apply to media that become too small to handle. What will we do when the first 500 Terabyte microdots come out and someone’s entire life’s work gets lost, stuck to the fuzz at the bottom of your pocket and accidentally thrown away? Hmmm…

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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So what do YOU think?

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