"Steve King" wrote in message
...
"MG" wrote in message
...
"Marc Wielage" wrote in message
.com...
On Sun, 26 Feb 2012 20:31:42 -0800, Mxsmanic wrote
(in article ):
I see people in cyberspace commenting that the sound quality of the
Oscar
broadcast is terrible.
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I think Roy Rising elsewhere is correct, and it was a downmix problem,
exacerbated by slight acoustic feedback.
You know it's bad when even MSN is covering it:
"What's up with the Oscar microphone feedback?"
http://todayentertainment.today.msnb...0513860-whats-
up-with-the-oscar-microphone-feedback
A lot of the live reality contest shows use combinations of directional
mikes, feedback eliminators, careful EQ, feedback eliminators, and the
ubiquitous iZotope RX box in the rack, plus tons of rehearsals and set
up.
The Kodak theater has got a very weird design -- 3 balconies, lots of
vertical speakers in a vast indoor area -- I don't envy anybody who has
to
mix in an environment like that.
--MFW
Long ago I worked in Master Control and QC was one of our primary tasks.
I see so much bad stuff on the air now that I wonder whether there are
humans in the chain anymore. I just find it mind-boggling that this
could happen on such a highly watched show.
Don't you think the problem lies in the fact that there are so many more
'nodes' in the supply chain. When I was chief engineer of both AM and FM
radio stations, the only signal processing equipment (level controlling
amplifiers/limiters) were between the control rooms and the transmitter.
In much larger stations studios fed their signals to master control and
then to the transmitter. In that case there are, typically, three people
between the microphones and the transmitter. I can't imagine how many
opportunities to screw up the signal there are beween the Oscar show and
my flat screen. I know that a few years ago I had a chance to visit the
local cable operation's down-link and distribution center. I think there
were processors on the audio of every cable channel. Could be wrong about
that, but I do remember being surprised that there should be any local
processing.
Steve King
There are a myriad of devices in between, lots of ways to do it, and all
kinds of places for things to go wrong, but the reality is that live TV
events get distributed every day without these issues, so it's puzzling, at
least to me, how this could have been left unresolved. This was a very
high-profile event, and I'm sure they had been in place for several days.