[Nate Najar]

Or has it always been dismissed?

I played solo guitar for a few selections on a Christmas special for a local tv morning show. I played my classical guitar and brought a dpa 4061 to mic it. I played the tunes for the taping, said this and went on my way...

So someone texted me telling me it's on tv this morning, I put it on the check it out and man I may as well have given them a pickup signal.... It is sooooooooo compressed every note is a "pop". Like if you crank the channel compressor on an ssl.

Do they not care or just not hear it? Or what?

I am grateful for the exposure, they have me on this show on occasion, but I never see it. I am just surprised how it sounds... I always thought tv folks had a good handle on sound since live stuff is so critical to get right.....

[[email protected]]

http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf

[Frank Stearns]

Nate Najar writes:

Or has it always been dismissed?

I played solo guitar for a few selections on a Christmas special for a local tv

snip

Do they not care or just not hear it? Or what?

Both. Often "the sound" is a necessary annoyance to your typical tv person. I could
recite many, many horror stories. And even if you have Big Bucks and an entire
dedicated and caring audio department to shepherd the signal along the portion of
the path under their control, there are then multiple chances far downstream where
things can go very badly.

The really good folks will try to mix around the crap they know will happen
downstream. For example, while painful from a musical sense, they might try to get
comp THEY control dialed just right to remove peaks that will surely trip the
poorly adjusted comps downstream.

As we all know, ideal comp settings (assuming we need to use comp) will vary
depending on the program and what we're doing. In broadcasting, all they want to do
is not overmodulate (though that might have happened earlier in the stream). MAYBE
someone set the program limiters to do this, but strictly from a go/no go point of
view. The varying *musical* needs of the program material is not a consideration.


see it. I am just surprised how it sounds... I always thought tv folks had a good
handle on sound since live stuff is so critical to get right.....

Whoa! Almost spit out my morning tea on that one! (A few do try, but the deck is
stacked against them.)

Equally infuriating since entering the digital tv era is sync loss between
the audio and video stream. No excuse, but it often happens.

I really don't see a solution. Perhaps one day some unsung team of engineering heros
will devise some sort of artificial intelligence for audio processing. The "can't be
bothered with sound" types can just turn on this system and forget it (just like
they do now), but nimble and appropriate optimizations based on what's coming
through will actively take place.

Not holding my breath, though.

Frank
Mobile Audio
--

[William Sommerwerck]

http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf

If I'm interpreting this document correctly, they're really talking about
speech -- which would be good to have at the same level from station to
station. Clearly, it would make little sense to apply such normalization to
music.

[Scott Dorsey]

William Sommerwerck wrote:
http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf

If I'm interpreting this document correctly, they're really talking about
speech -- which would be good to have at the same level from station to
station. Clearly, it would make little sense to apply such normalization to
music.

The normalization issues come because there are so many different analogue
steps throughout the signal chain at a traditional facility. So you have
someone recording a program which is compressed to tape, then the tape is
played back in the editing process and compressed again. The edited tape
is played on a machine that compresses the output and then master control
compresses it on the way to the transmitter. Then the signal is compressed
at the transmitter site, broadcast to a cable TV headend where it is received,
compressed, sent to a modulator which compresses it again and sends the
signal out to the end TV set.

Why so much compression? Because there is very limited headroom in the
process and it is easier and cheaper to compress or use AVC than to set
the levels on everything in the chain very precisely. In the radio world
it is common to do proof of performance on the audio chain at least when
the system is originally delivered, and make sure all the levels are
lined right up to the mark. This does not happen in the video world.

Now, as facilities move to digital, a lot of these problems go away
to get replaced with new and different transcoding problems.

But the central problem remains: there is no sound operator at master
control listening to what is going out over the air. These days there
may not be anyone at all at master control, just a computer-controlled
switch matrix. If nobody is listening for problems, nobody will hear them
except of course the home viewer.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Mark]

Why so much compression? *Because there is very limited headroom in the
process and it is easier and cheaper to compress or use AVC than to set
the levels on everything in the chain very precisely.

and now the FCC mandates that the commercials not be any louder then
the programs and since the commercials are produced compressed to
He** and back.. the easy way out is to also compress the programs so
they sound just as bad as the commercials,

in the minds of the FCC this is "better" because at least "its all the
same"

Mark

[MG[_4_]]

"Mark" wrote in message
...



Why so much compression? Because there is very limited headroom in the
process and it is easier and cheaper to compress or use AVC than to set
the levels on everything in the chain very precisely.

and now the FCC mandates that the commercials not be any louder then
the programs and since the commercials are produced compressed to
He** and back.. the easy way out is to also compress the programs so
they sound just as bad as the commercials,

in the minds of the FCC this is "better" because at least "its all the
same"

Mark

As one of the token TV guys in here I usually jump in on the "TV doesn't
care" type threads, but in this case I mostly agree. What's happened to
both audio and video in master control (where I started) is a shame. I see
stuff at home that makes me cringe. Working almost exclusively in the
field, we do take more interest in the overall sound of entertainment and
sports, and such issues as levels, compression and lip sync are checked on
an event-by-event basis. I don't know how big a market the OP is in, but as
I travel, it does seem like some of these people just don't care. In the
smaller markets, it seems like they don't know any better.

mg