Miking the Royal Albert hall

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billshurv
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Miking the Royal Albert hall

Post by billshurv »

Listening to the last night of the proms tonight and found this interesting article on how the BBC mic up the hall for the season

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/bbc-proms

I found it interesting that that have different mix vans for TV and radio.
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JR.
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Re: Miking the Royal Albert hall

Post by JR. »

'Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.'

JR
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mediatechnology
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Re: Miking the Royal Albert hall

Post by mediatechnology »

Great article.

I noticed that the radio and TV trucks also use different mic arrays.

Radio provides a true 4.0 surround mix + stereo fold down and TV provides 5.1 + stereo fold down.

They give a lot of technical reasons for two trucks which make great sense but the one they didn't mention and just jumped off the page is the work-load on a single board op managing double the mics and four different feeds all of which need confidence monitoring.
Managing all of those sources, feeds, hitting cues and monitoring comms from the crew would seem like a lot of work for one board op even with an assistant.
billshurv
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Re: Miking the Royal Albert hall

Post by billshurv »

You are right the workload needs lots of extra hands. I had always wondered why there were so many microphones up there when I have been to concerts and good to know they are not just spot miking to death. In recent years they also have been doing some experimental binaural recordings. Last years were not convincing to me as just sounded like you were hovvering in the air above the orchestra. The one I tried this year was better, but a lot of binaural recordings fail for me, at least with my in-ear etymotics.

I hadn't realised the radio feed was 4.0. I need to check what is needed to decode that as might be run to try. Back in the old days I watched the TV broadcasts in preference to the radio feed as someone was cranking the optimod* too hard whereas the digital sound on the TV (this was analog tv digial sound days) wasn't. Now there is an internet feed of the radio at decent bitrate I generally go for that.

*As has been pointed out to me when I have mentioned BBC radio and optimods, Bob Orban is a very good engineer, just his products can if misused squash music completely flat. The debate has raged for years on whether 7:30 PM is still drive time and if the feed should be squashed for in car listeners.
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mediatechnology
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Re: Miking the Royal Albert hall

Post by mediatechnology »

The 4.0 "radio" feed was streamed so I think all you'd need are Front and Rear outputs from your soundcard.
They didn't give a web address though.
emrr
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Re: Miking the Royal Albert hall

Post by emrr »

mediatechnology wrote: Sat Sep 14, 2019 6:12 pm Great article.

I noticed that the radio and TV trucks also use different mic arrays.

Radio provides a true 4.0 surround mix + stereo fold down and TV provides 5.1 + stereo fold down.

Managing all of those sources, feeds, hitting cues and monitoring comms from the crew would seem like a lot of work for one board op even with an assistant.
Nice to see this.

You've probably seen an A1 in a truck at an American football/basketball game; it's amazing they can hear their work at all, given the number of non-stop distractions and communications.
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