[Frank Stearns]

I'm doing a live Messiah recording for a new, major client, and was also asked, "by
the way, can you live-feed the tv people?"

Well, yeah, a monitor mix from a toy console under adverse conditions...

The local tv production folks assure me they "don't do anything" to the audio, but
who knows what "auto" settings are switched in on their gear and worse, what happens
when it leaves their hands and heads into the cable system. Shudder.

I am running a KM183 pair (with diffraction spheres) in AB stereo with 50 cm
separation. This is a departure from my usual MS config, but given that I can't
perfectly check the mechanical & electrical alignment "live" this should work well.
(In various tests here, and with a friendly competiter's D183s, I've been pleased
how this sounds -- mis-aligned MS, on the other hand, can be awful.)

Also running two solos, four spots in a rather large orchestra, and two choir
outriggers. The main pair should do most of the work, perhaps all -- depends on how
the room shapes up when it's full of people.

But here's the quest for wisdom... Should I pre-compress my feed to the TV folks in
the hopes that AGCs and other downstream manglers will be less inclined to trip? All
I have is a DBX 1066 that I've not yet modified. It's fairly clean (more so than the
RNC I used to have), but it's still a bit of a polluter.

Or, should I just get as uber-hi-fi as possible (such as schlepping out the bigger,
tweaked Soundcraft console - hate to move it), and let the downstream processing
take out chinks here and there as it will, and hope there's "enough left over" so
that it still sounds good in a typical mid-fi TV sound system, or is even passible
in a 3" speaker.

I told them the best way to do this is a post mix for TV, but there isn't time or
money for that. Sigh.

Any thoughts/experiences appreciated.

Frank Stearns
Mobile Audio
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