Making great remote sound without a truck
BOSTON
Sometimes bigger isn't better. Sometimes going smaller is the only way to go.
That was the reality faced by the Boston Pops Orchestra, which opened its 40-plus holiday series of concerts in December with a tough constraint.
Previously the holiday program ran on the A&E Network. Now the program was to air on PBS, after being produced by WBZ in Boston, and the change shrunk the production budget.
The Pops solicited the help of Soundmirror, the Boston-based recording and post-production studio, to orchestrate a live recording of the Pops' Holiday Series at Boston's Symphony Hall, and to do it all within budget.
"After initiating contact with Steve Colby, the audio engineer for the project, I discovered that the budget simply did not allow for an audio truck to be brought in," said John Newton, president of Soundmirror.
PBS needed to find a cost-effective alternative to the large mobile audio recording truck that was previously used to record the audio portion of the concert.
For Newton, the solution was to use the Sony DMX R100 digital audio console and SIU-100 system interface unit.
The Boston Pops holiday recording was special in part because it was the first time the SIU had been used as a sound box, Newton said. The model used for the performance is loaded with 48 channels-including a new remotely controlled microphone preamplifier/converter-and two R-100 consoles slaved together.
In addition to providing a stereo audio feed for the TV truck, Newton and Colby recorded the audio on a pair of 24-track Tascam machines and recorded stereo with timecode on a Sony PCM-9000 MO recorder and DAT machine.
Picture and music were recorded on a DVD recorder, and CDRs were made with a Sony CDR-W 66. Soundmirror provided a pair of black-and-white 801 monitor speakers as well as the majority of microphones that were used for the TV recording. The mobile video truck was the Intrepid, provided by Game Creek Video.
AUDIO TRUCK QUALITY
According to some of those involved, the quality of the subsequent audio recording was equal to that of a dedicated mobile truck at approximately one-third of the cost.
For Newton "the real savings is in the flexibility and the ease of which all of the technology can be linked together," he said.
Newton and team set up their mobile audio gear in the dedicated Symphony Hall audio control room, which is fully wired for recording purposes, but not equipped with speakers, console or outboard gear. "But given that we had a better listening room environment than you find in a production truck, we were able to do a better live mix than would be possible in a truck," he said.
The production went off without many glitches, he said. The live location recording will be used on a future Boston Pops audio CD as well as for the television feed, which will air during the holiday season in 2004.
"One of the primary challenges [with a scenario like this] is simply convincing people who are used to working in trucks that you can actually set up in-house in a timely manner and do a better job," Newton said.
Newton and the Soundmirror team are now focused on testing the SIU in other environments. "This combo has wide-ranging uses for all kinds of large audio television productions," he said.
"All in all the equipment worked very well. The number of glitches or issues was very small, and as a result everybody went away smiling."
