[Scott Dorsey]

Frank Stearns wrote:
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.

I always do. I tend to use an Aphex 108, but I have used the RNC as well.
The key is just to do some slow grainriding so that the AGC systems don't
go berserk.

The 1066 will be fine... you don't want to do so much compression that you
actually notice it. Also do a light high pass.

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.

The high pass will prevent the AGC stuff from going berserk, and the TV
guys will high pass everything more many times by the time it gets to that
3" speaker. You could add a little presence peak to make intelligibility
on a TV speaker a little bit better, but I don't normally bother.

Doing a super-hi-fi mix is probably not a good idea... if anything you
might want to do an extra-close-in mix that is less accurate than the
feed you have.

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.

TV is bad.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."