An audio engineer explains NPR’s signature sound

http://current.org/2015/06/a-top-audio-engineer-explains-nprs-signature-sound/

by adamnemecek • 10 years ago

392 237 10 years ago

ourmandave• 10 years ago

... because most of our consumers were listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered in the automobile to and from work.

Yet they still occasionally have a story with a siren in the background, so I start checking my mirrors and pulling over.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 10 years ago

This is already illegal in the UK, but sadly I think it will take a high profile court case where someone sues the radio station or an advertisement company for causing an accident to enact this kind of change in the US.

revelation• 10 years ago

And the first person to be charged is the driver. If you cause an "accident" because you were listening to radio, you are driving reckless.

matthewmcg• 10 years ago

Just don't include emergency broadcast system[1] tones in your message[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System

[2] https://www.fcc.gov/document/enforcement-advisory-misuse-eas...

mcguire2• 10 years ago

Pardon me, but...

Holy shit, NPR's fascination with sound effects. Yes, I want to listen to 15 fucking seconds of someone chewing loudly between paragraphs. Sirens, crowd noises, people talking about something undoubtedly unrelated in Urdu.

Dear god, NPR's signature sounds are why I don't listen to it.

larrymcp• 10 years ago

This, times a million!

Oh, and the weird music. I'm not sure I need 15 seconds of annoying jazz improvisation at full volume between segments either. But that is indeed part of the "signature sound" :)

jff• 10 years ago

The shows with the constant sound effects also usually have what seems like a relatively new format: they try to make it sound like the hosts (it's always two hosts) are a couple of friends, interested laymen, having a talk at their house about the topic. So they stop to interject ("right?!" "No!"), they talk over each other but only occasionally so as not to annoy the listener, they basically feel like your two friends who've read the same Wikipedia page and are discussing it at a party.

And it's during this "conversation" that they play the sound clips:

HOST 1: "So there's this interesting thing they've just discovered, Host 2"

HOST 2: "What's that?"

HOST 1: "Scientists have discovered that when you eat..."

chomping and chewing noises

HOST 1: "... you're actually oppressing black people."

prison cell door slams

HOST 2: "What, seriously?"

danielvf• 10 years ago

Yow! The microphone they are using is $3,600 a piece.

I guess that's not as bad as it sounds, given a twenty year life and daily use.

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/U87SetZ

batbomb• 10 years ago

That's not as bad as it sounds because the console, preamps, compressors, etc... all cost a ton of money too.

_asummers• 10 years ago

Even the headphones themselves are probably at least a grand and they've got way more of those laying around. $3600 is a lot, but audio equipment gets REAL expensive pretty quickly.

Edit: Fair enough, I'm entirely incorrect as far as the headphone price point.

baldfat4• 10 years ago

preamps will cost a good couple thousand but compressors, etc... have now moved into digital computers. An expensive set of plug ins will cost $2,000 but you could get by with $200 easily as a professional vocal shop.

cnvogel3• 10 years ago

Preamps and compressors will be integrated in the "console" (even though typically the user-interface will be separate from I/O and DSP, the latter being housed in a 19" rack).

This is radio, not some boutique studio with a ton of outboard gear.

semi-extrinsic3• 10 years ago

So let's say they have one mic per five employees. Those employees cost (I'm guessing) at least $300 000 per year, and most of what they produce of value for NPR goes through that mic. Doesn't look very expensive now?

And I haven't factored in cost/rent for the studio, music licensing, and a whole lot of other OPEX. Since there are quite a few local radio stations around, I'd say the CAPEX is not a big deal.

jsmthrowaway4• 10 years ago

Talent for NPR might pull $300k (I have doubts) but if you're including everybody else when you say "employees" you're shooting astronomically high.

Radio pays notoriously bad. Local TV is just as bad, and they can't even afford photographers any more so reporters do their own shooting; I was laid off as a photographer when that change was made at a former haunt and newscast quality plummeted. (It's popular and spun positively now: Google "backpack journalism.")

Particularly local, you have to really love the craft to be in it. National/international is better, but to an extent. On-air talent soaks up the salary budget at pretty much every shop, universally, and to use a local example like KTVU or KRON I wouldn't be surprised if on-air talent was making $500k or less. You can do better at Google. The producer running the newscast is probably struggling to make rent. The camera operator certainly is, if they haven't yet been replaced with automatic, motorized cues driven by an overworked TD, who is just as worried about their own rent.

Ad-based business models suck, particularly when owners hate spending money. All media owners do. We got punished for the millions that had to be invested for the HDTV transition with 15% pay cuts at one station in the middle of nowhere.

pfortuny• 10 years ago

On a differen note, it is a dollar a day for 10 years; not so much, is it? For the added value it gives.

rwc• 10 years ago

Am I misunderstanding, or do you seriously think NPR on-air talent is making in excess of $300,000/yr?

superuser22• 10 years ago

I'd be stunned if the console it's connected to were any less than $20k. More likely in the $50-100k range.

Audio is a very expensive game to play well.

ygra2• 10 years ago

Considering things like gold-plated speaker cables and crystal sound purifiers, audio is also a very expensive game to play stupidly ;-)

ArkyBeagle7• 10 years ago

It's not that hard to get very good audio these days. Truly incredible audio will always be expensive. But the mid-range MI gear is arguably good enough to use.

baldfat4• 10 years ago

I use a AKG C-414 ($900 +) with the bass roll and you are pretty much there.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

All mics colour the sound in different ways. For some reason the U87 adds a colouration that's perceived as expensive, larger than life, and authoritative.

Other mics - including cheaper Neumanns - don't have quite the same effect.

It's not about capturing the sound perfectly accurately, but about creating an impression with sound. That's why some pro audio gear is so insanely expensive.

It's very hard to create the same impression digitally because this kind of subtle analog distortion is complex, non-linear, and not very well understood.

BorisEm• 10 years ago

The Neuman U87 is a very popular microphone in the audio world in general (TV, radio, post-production and even music), especially for voices[1].

Going a little further, the mixing console you can see on the picture is a Lawo Sapphire[2], which NPR seems to have installed in 2012. According to this gearslutz post[3], a 12 faders + central section was starting at 20,000€ back in 2010. You can see on the picture that NPR has a 24 faders version.

The audio monitor on top on the console is an RTW[4]. It's kind of hard to tell which model it really is, but the TM9 for example starts at $4,200[5].

[1]https://www.gearslutz.com/board/low-end-theory/618100-mic-vo...

[2]https://www.lawo.com/products/radio-consoles/sapphire.html

[3]https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/864209-what-...

[4]https://www.rtw.com/en/products/audio-monitors.html

[5]http://www.rspeaudio.com/RTW-TouchMonitor-TM9-p/rtw-tm9.htm

jsprogrammer6• 10 years ago

It is curious that NPR contrasts itself with commercial radio, despite the native advertising, regular name drops, and references to listeners as their consumers (does active tuning decrease the availability of the signal for others?).

mikeweiss• 10 years ago

Umm, because commercial radio is 100% driven by advertisements where as NPR is less than 20% and is very selective about what sponsors it takes on?

salmon30salmon• 10 years ago

I have often wondered if NPR or public radio in general is motivated to pander to a demographic. By this I mean, consider the leaders of the organization have demographic data on who is most likely to pledge support during their quarterly pledge drives. Would it not make sense to ensure that the sort of stories that this demographic enjoys and (more worryingly) agrees with?

This is not to say that its a bad thing, people are paying into a cooperative because they enjoy it, and they should continue to enjoy it. But public radio, though avoiding corporate advertising, still may have to pander, just on a lesser scale and to in a more democratic manner.

jsprogrammer6• 10 years ago

Where are you pulling your numbers from?

This[0] NPR page shows that only about 30% of NPR income is non-commercial. Also note the Nestle advertisement on the page (at least it was omnipresent when viewing on a mobile browser).

[0] http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

peterkshultz• 10 years ago

NPR is a non-profit organization. Although they need to play the advertising game to keep the lights on, they certainly aren't there to try and make big profits on their listeners.

Commercial radio is not like this.

xufi• 10 years ago

Good point, that is one thing I always admired about them. They atleast play bearable ads but I know that they have great content and news analysis stories coming on later.

justinph• 10 years ago

NPR (and their member stations) do not have advertising per se. Rather, they call it underwriting and there are very specific rules about what format the underwriting can take. Here are the guidelines: http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2015/03/11/392355447/n...

I used to work at one of the largest NPR affiliate stations. Listener support is hugely important, most of the money we made came from listeners. IMHO, NPR is pretty successful in that they have built a model that supports quality journalism, at a decent scale, without a lot of annoyances for the user. Newspapers and other media orgs could stand to learn a lot.

sukilot3• 10 years ago

Non-profit simply means that excess revenue is paid in salary instead of to shareholders.

bramen4• 10 years ago

Love the superglue/epoxy trick! As the author said, hilarious. That ultra bassy sound always rubs me the wrong way -- I'm glad to hear someone's been going against the grain.

And it's nice that they appreciate the different destinations for their signals, and take steps to prevent them from getting squashed into mush through multiple compression stages.

Thoughtful people.

pistle2• 10 years ago

I'd rather they actually mod it so the switch is removed and the circuit hardwired. I imagine someone beating up the "stuck" switch and breaking the circuit/mic altogether.

bramen4• 10 years ago

That's a good idea. Just bypass it internally and let the switch move freely, doing nothing. They'll learn to leave it alone pretty quickly.

PepeGomez• 10 years ago

I wonder why some people like compression so much. It almost always makes the sound much worse.

JChase2• 10 years ago

Mostly because you can get it louder, and usually louder can trick you into thinking it sounds clearer or "better". Plus there's the history with the whole loudness wars.

honkhonkpants4• 10 years ago

All broadcast radio is highly compressed. Without it, it would be inaudible in most practical listening conditions (car, walking on the street, in your kitchen cooking).

robotresearcher• 10 years ago

There's also a psychoacoustic effect: compressed audio sounds louder, even if at the same objective SPL. Probably because very loud sounds are naturally compressed by the mechanics of the ear system saturating at high SPLs, so artificially compressed signals are recognized as 'loud sounding'.

jws2• 10 years ago

I'm fairly certain he is speaking of data compression in the article, rather than dynamic volume compression.

The problem with sending compressed signals is that they will probably be recompressed before making it to someone's ear and the chain of codecs may introduce strange artifacts.

uxp100• 10 years ago

No, I don't think so. They specifically talk about adding compression only into their newscast unit. Why would they data compress only one segment?

Also, Compression sounds good. Too much, or badly configured compression sounds bad, obviously. But don't throw it all away. (Not that producers are at any risk of doing so.)

OliverJones• 10 years ago

No way he's talking about data compression, with respect. He's talking about frequency response adjustment and range compression (sometimes called "companding").

A while ago NPR used to use 2B ISDN (112Kbps in the US) for remote locations. I believe they used G.722 codecs for low-latency applications (conversations) and MPEG layer II for higher quality stuff. That was data compression.

But the NPR distribution system isn't so bandwidth limited as to require crushing the data.

chiph2• 10 years ago

No, he's talking about audio (sound) compression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

This is one reason why I've stopped buying "Remastered" CDs - they almost always sound worse. Shop at Discogs.com where you can specify the release date, or buy from a quality-oriented label like mofi.com

eternauta3k• 10 years ago

It helps when you're listening in a noisy environment and the audio has large dynamic range.

burfog• 10 years ago

Mozart requires running the audio through compression multiple times. Without that, half of it is inaudible and you'll be constantly adjusting the volume knob.

(at least with modern performances -- perhaps Mozart intended differently, and is now spinning in his grave due to excessive dynamics)

jdietrich• 10 years ago

As mentioned in the article, a large proportion of radio listening is done while driving. A car travelling at highway speeds has 60-70dB of background noise. Dynamic range compression prevents the station from becoming inaudibly quiet or uncomfortably loud in such a noisy environment.

BBC Radio 3 (a national classical music station in the UK) uses heavy dynamic range compression during the drivetime peak, but far less compression during the day. This compromise provides a better experience for both hi-fi and in-car listeners.

Very heavy dynamic range compression was historically useful for AM broadcasters, because it maximised signal strength.

fencepost• 10 years ago

One of the linked articles at the bottom of the original (at least for me) was about the relatively huge differences in levels between different shows, which noted that even a 6 DB change causes people to reach for the volume and higher levels end up with many turning the radio off.

A radio that's off has no listeners.

ssalazar• 10 years ago

Don't conflate compression in general with the aggressive mastering-phase compression of the loudness wars. Some degree of compression is essential to pretty much any type of audio engineering. Tasteful use of compression is a real art and is an integral part of some of the best studio albums in any genre (except perhaps classical). Compression is essential for vocals except for people who somehow never move their head ever while talking or singing. Compression also makes drums sound amazing--hard, big boomy, Led Zeppelin-style drums don't just naturally sound that way, thats a compressor working its magic.

riprowan17• 10 years ago

You're probably confusing audio compression with data compression.

These days every note of music you listen to on every modern album has a compressor in it somewhere, even if you don't think you can hear it, it's there.

Bromskloss2• 10 years ago

Surely, bass roll-off could be done, with greater flexibility, later in the signal path, and applied to any microphone, right?

gaur2• 10 years ago

Rolling off before the microphone amplifier means that bass frequencies can't saturate the amplifier as easily.

Bromskloss2• 10 years ago

I get your point, but I thought we had plenty of dynamic range available these days. Judging from the text, they seem to use it rather like an equaliser anyway.

bramen4• 10 years ago

You're right, though sometimes simplicity beats flexibility. It's a lot easier to set it as a standard right at the beginning of the signal chain and frees all the engineers down the line from having to make decisions about it, and ensures consistency in the process.

tacos8• 10 years ago

There is bass rolloff in the mic even when set flat. This is the proximity filter designed to correct for the way the mic responds when it is close to a source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_effect_(audio)

pklausler• 10 years ago

NPR's "signature sound", sadly, is being overrun with hideous vocal fries.

gaur2• 10 years ago

Is this a misophonia thing? I really couldn't care less about vocal fry.

sukilot3• 10 years ago

It is a prejudice against people who sound a certain way, especially women.

sago• 10 years ago

It comes around and around. Vocal fashions of teenage girls cause consternation. Remember the handwringing over uptalk (HRT)?

In fact, I think there's a lot of the anti-HRT sentiment at work in vocal-fry. Girl's being told that high rising tonation is bad, so no wonder they ground out at the bottom of their range.

Women can't win. Not too high, don't push low, don't use like. And so on.

Men also fry, btw, you'd just be hard pressed to find a handwringing article decrying that.

baldfat4• 10 years ago

AS a former audio engineer THIS is so important for clear vocals.

We are fans of being close-miked, and P-pops come into play there. But we make sure that we are within a foot of the microphone and usually a lot closer — close to six inches — in working with any of our on-air talent. That’s another element that goes into it.

pepijndevos• 10 years ago

The NPR sound has so many tentacles. If we’re just focusing on the studio side, which was actually the easiest thing.

They didn't go into any of the other things.

keane• 10 years ago

From an earlier submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546087) another factor that gives NPR programs a different feel than your average live radio interview is a large amount of careful editing, described by On the Media’s John Soloman: http://nprfreshair.tumblr.com/post/5449544068/lk-on-the-medi...

dredmorbius8• 10 years ago

As NPR falls increasingly under the spell of "it must be live" -- even the hourly news summaries now start with "Live, from NPR News in Washington", rather than the former "From NPR News in Washington", a gratuitous change that grates -- the segments are far more frequently not edited.

Among the problems this presents is what I call "the chase", which are the final 30 seconds or so of an interview in which the host or interviewer is quite clearly trying to wrap up with a guest, who either isn't aware of, or doesn't want, to meet that time schedule. It is always awkward, and occurs at the end of EVERY live interview.

(The BBC also exhibits this, the worse when it's over some long-distance line.)

A pre-recorded, edited interview can go for full feel and length, and then be cut to fit the timeslot. One thing I recall (and miss) from those was a far more gracious interview wrap. I'm sure that far less of what had been said hit the air, but what there was was better for it.

drivers99• 10 years ago

It was really awkward when an official in the UK was trying to give some condolences about Orlando and the NPR host had to cut them off in the middle of their statement.

billforsternz2• 10 years ago

It always puzzles me when experienced media pros don't recognise that they are going to be shut down abruptly by an approaching hour boundary. Sometimes this happens every week on a regularly scheduled gig! Surely it can't be that difficult to wear a watch and keep it accurate.

cJ0th• 10 years ago

Another thing for engineers or anybody at a station to do is to go into the studio, turn the microphone on, crank it to 11. Don’t talk — so you don’t blow your ears out — and listen to the sounds of all the fans that you have in the room. This is one challenge that we’ve had for decades here. You’re never going to get it to zero. You’re never going to get it completely silent. Nor do you really want to, because in order to get it silent you’ve got to move a lot of equipment out, and there’s a lot of cost with that.

Makes me wonder why they don't record the sound of the fans and then invert that audio track and mix it with the mic channel before broadcasting the master channel so that the relatively periodic noise of the fan cancels itself out.

meowface• 10 years ago

Tools like iZotope RX can do a pretty great job at removing that kind of noise.

doctorshady3• 10 years ago

True, but a lot of the tools within RX are meant to be very manual labor-intensive, very CPU intensive, and not particularly realtime.

At the end of the day, the cleaner the source material, the easier it is to process in any fashion you want later on in the airchain. A lot of stations will have noise gates on their microphones, or even wideband gating before material hits the transmitter in some cases. With the right settings, it should be more than plenty.

dri_ft• 10 years ago

Because it's not really periodic enough. I don't think any natural sound source short of a musical instrument (and even for them, it's doubtful) is so perfectly periodic that an out of phase version would stay in opposition (i.e. in the inverted/opposite phase of the cycle) for long enough for this to be of any use. But there are (FFT-based?) noise removal tools that can work for this sort of thing.

edit: also, the weird phasing artefacts this would introduce would be much more prominent and noticeable, even if it succeeded in reducing the overall volume. So much so that doing basically this ('flanging') is a standard musical effect for making parts sound psychedelic.

x1798DE• 10 years ago

Follow-up question, what if you put a separate microphone further away from the speaker to get a synchronized sample of the background noise to subtract away?

I suspect the logical end to that sort of thing is to use multiple microphones to add "depth" to your sound recording, then filter out sounds coming from sufficiently far away.

CamperBob22• 10 years ago

Fan noise isn't even remotely periodic, because most of it is due to moving air rather than moving blades.

However, you can take advantage of that because the sounds you want to keep generally are periodic at short timescales. You can use DSP filters to remove components of the sound that don't show significant autocorrelation. The same idea lets you remove white noise and random static from radio signals.

quadrature• 10 years ago

Probably be better to get some of the highest frequency components and then filter those out.

haberman• 10 years ago

That would be like trying to silence a fan by buying the exact same model and putting it on the opposite side of the room. It will just sound like twice as many fans.

Getting two sounds to perfectly interfere is basically impossible. Real world sounds are way too complex for that.

Keyframe2• 10 years ago

Or why not use a shotgun microphone? That's what we (well, audio guys) generally tend to use on film and TV sets.

hammock2• 10 years ago

Does not eliminate room noise. If you have worked sound on a film or TV set I'm sure you are familiar with capturing room noise on a quiet set to mix in during post.

combatentropy• 10 years ago

Studios normally use microphones with larger diaphragms, because they sound fuller. But they're too fragile for field recording. Hence small-diaphragm condenser microphones, like your shotgun.

riprowan17• 10 years ago

Shotgun mics have a pinched sound quality - the whole point of using U87s is the way they sound.

They can switch to SM7s or RE20s and achieve much better S/N with respect to air handling systems, but they want the "U87 sound" (they can keep it, too, IMO - it's painfully neutral) and that just entails a much higher "room noise to signal" ratio.

ArkyBeagle7• 10 years ago

So in all audio, there is "error". Error which is correlated with the signal is called distortion. Error which is not correlated with the signal is called noise.

Amplifiers use negative feedback to cancel distortion out ( because it's correlated ). Some folks, like at Pass Labs, tend to avoid neg. feedback for philosophical reasons, and people like their amps. They use part selection and careful design instead.

Adding two uncorrelated signals together, you end up with a louder, uncorrelated signal.

There is "single-ended noise reduction" ( the version I use is from CoolEdit 96 and CoolEdit 2000 ) but it leaves artifacts. It's still wonderful for things like single-coil hum, things with a limited spectrum.

JabrZer0• 10 years ago

This particular technique has its problems, as has been mentioned by other people. I would think inverting and cancelling is much more useful in situations where you can isolate the background noise in real time. For example, I do a little hobby music production, and I've heard of this being used to isolate vocals:

Because the vocals are sometimes the only thing that's perfectly in the middle of the mix (balanced left/right), you can invert the left channel of a mix and then recombine it with the right to cancel out only the balanced tracks (so you're left with essentially an instrumental). Subtracting the instrumental track you've just created from the full song (again, by inverting and recombining), you should get the vocal track by itself. Fun stuff, right?

I'm not sure how well this works, as I've never done it myself, but it would seem like having the exact signal is important. As people have said, the fan noise isn't predictable enough to cancel using that technique. On the other hand...

I recently read about a machine learning application using K-means clustering in which you feed the algorithm sound from two microphones set up in the same room and it's able to separate the audio by who is speaking. I'm not sure how well such an algorithm would work when one sound is significantly louder than the other (such as quiet fans and people talking), but it certainly points to that being a possibility.

frank_jaeger• 10 years ago

As a part time MC, I can attest that inverting and recombining channels of a song can occasionally lead to a decent instrumental. That being said, with little talent or background, and using freeware, it will not be perfect. It will be much better than using the original track, but it will certainly be noticeable that you are not using the instrumental. Great for practice though.

dharma13• 10 years ago

NMF and ICA can also be used for blind source separation, but there are artifacts. Good for some applications like speech recognition, but for music you really want no audible artifacts

matchagaucho2• 10 years ago

Most modern recording studios store all equipment in sound-proof closets.

The challenge is keeping those closets cool with ventilation that does not leak sound.

timc32• 10 years ago

Well away from leaking sounds in to the room that the recording is done in. Even desks can have fans in though and they need to be in the same room as the operator.

dharma13• 10 years ago

All the noise reduction algorithms I've heard so far introduce fairly audible phasing artifacts. I think better noise reduction for a known/trainable source like fan noise could be done with machine learning - it's something a few folks are looking at

dredmorbius8• 10 years ago

TL;DR: It's all about that bass roll-off.

Studio construction, baffling, and noise exclusion also matter.

What I didn't see addressed were some other factors I've noticed and/or been aware of over the years.

NPR's announcers, reporters, and hosts tend to speak conversationally. Rather than shooting for fill-the-room, highly-inflected (a/k/a Commercial Broadcast) voice, it's the tone you'd expect to hear from someone having a conversation with you in a room (though perhaps a larger room, and with less mumbling). That's a huge difference for me, and unfortunatly I'm hearing far more commercial broadcast inflection from the recent crop of announcers, to the point it's quite annoying. Steve Inskeep most particularly.

("Recent", for this old fart, means the past decade or so.)

The other element, and it's one I'm raging against, is that NPR has increasingly moved to live and unedited audio, to its tremendous loss.

When the network was small and it couldn't field reporters in many locations, sound often arrived after hours, or days, at headquarters where it was edited for broadcast. Even the flagship news programs were largely (and in cases entirely) pre-produced, with all news segments, interviews, etc., edited before they went on the air.

Yes, it meant that what you got from NPR was often slightly stale relative to other news outlets, for the latest breaking news (though hourly headlines broadcasts were generally current). But the result was polished and digested. In terms of a program which informed rather than merely screamed, it was, I'd argue, a better product.

NPR has been falling victim to currency bias since the late 1990s and I really don't care for it.

AstroJetson• 10 years ago

You made two key points. One is that the NPR voices sound like they are next to me in the car. There is good, thoughtful discussion and presentation. And as an NPR supporter I really appreciate that. They know they have my (some) of my attention in the car, they are not trying to wrest my focus from the Honda about to cut me off. The low key nature works.

I listen to NPR to get the slightly stale event that someone has taken the time to gather more than one fact and is trying to make a 1 min segment out of it. I can't recall a time where an NPR story got walked back (looking at you FOX) for shoddy reporting.

Posts above have whined about how much NPR talent make. You should find out about your local morning zoo team and the Ken and Barbie team on your Action news. Those guys don't even get out of bed for 300K a year. Plus the people listed above also write and edit their material, vs Ken & Barbie.

At a variety of levels, NPR and their shows are worth every penny. In a few weeks listen to them talk about the RNC / DNC conventions vs the others.

dredmorbius8• 10 years ago

I have no issues with NPR talent being well-compensated. Really, they deserve what they can get, and they can certainly get more elsewhere.

I do have issues with how several NPR reporters and anchors have been terminated, most particularly Bob Edwards and (though she wasn't even a reporter or anchor at the time) Lisa Simeone (one of the most awesome voices on radio, BTW). Juan Williams, OTOH, should never have been hired in the first place.

Ericson231410• 10 years ago

This is a really good interview, in that the interviewer has knowledge comparable to the interviewee. Obviously that can't be achieved for when a single interviewer interviews people with widely ranging skills (e.g. many radio shows themselves) but is nice to have with something niche like this.

On a different note, why is that (as far as non-expert me knows) that nice mics often have eq settings? Is this not a blatant layer violation?

k0ngo• 10 years ago

On a different note, why is that (as far as non-expert me knows) that nice mics often have eq settings? Is this not a blatant layer violation?

The low-frequency/subsonic content that this switch will remove often consists of wind noise, pops from talking too close, vibrations from the floor/mic stand, etc. Even if these low frequency noises may be more or less inaudible, they'll contribute to a large signal swing that will decrease the headroom in the following amplifiers. In other words, you won't be able to turn up the gain in the microphone amplifier/mixer as much as you'd want, because the low-frequency but high-amplitude content will make the amplifier clip and distort the sound. Filtering the signal after the mic preamp won't solve the problem, because the preamp (which can provide in the order of 60 dB gain) will be the component that clips. By including a low-cut filter in the head amplifier circuit inside the microphone (the amplifier serves only as a buffer, and usually with unity gain), the disturbing low-frequency noises can be removed before entering the high-gain microphone preamp. You can find the low-cut switch next to the capsule in the U87 schematic [0]. It seems to me that they increase the capsule bias voltage, thus changing the low frequency response by electrostatically tensioning the membrane.

[0] http://recordinghacks.com/images/mic_extras/neumann/U87-sche...

edit: tweaked some things. meta: i'm not very good at commit messages.

tacos8• 10 years ago

For a vocal/voiceover mic loud sounds are not a concern. (The U87 has a pad switch for those cases separate from the proximity/EQ switch.)

The things you mention (vibrations, LF rumble) are typically handled by the highpass on the mic preamp and are in the 75 or 80Hz range. In musical terms, that's 4+ octaves below the 1k proximity rolloff on the mic itself.

Ericson231410• 10 years ago

Ah needs to be with the mic preamp, ok. Granted there's a lot of inertia in connectors, but has anybody tried to run extra wires in the mic cable to control these things from the both?

tacos8• 10 years ago

Actually it's a terrible interview because the interviewer won't shut up and is far less knowledgable than the person he's interviewing.

The "EQ settings" on the mic are actually to compensate for proximity effect. On the U87 it starts cutting at 1k -- way above what the interview states.

http://www.coutant.org/u87ai/u87.pdf

Another mic commonly seen in broadcast (and top podcasts) is the Shure SM7. Has similar switches, and even comes with a plate you can screw over the top of them so people don't futz with the settings.

Ericson231410• 10 years ago

Sobering what a non-expert like me can miss then reading this.

geerlingguy2• 10 years ago

Mic choice is a lot more nuanced than is indicated in the review. Heil, EV, Neumann, Shure, and other manufacturers have a variety of mics for a variety of situations, and I bet there are some other reasons besides cost why the RE20 is such a popular studio mic across the US.

Also, rooms, talent, and equipment are often much more influential than mic selection in making a 'signature' sound. But mics are to audio engineers as languages are to programmers... Everyone has a favorite, and opinions border on the religious.

Source: worked in radio engineering for 4 years before starting programming, live audio engineering 4 years after that, and have worked with dozens of mics and varying degrees of on air talent in many environments.

gerbilly• 10 years ago

Actually it's a terrible interview because the interviewer won't shut up and is far less knowledgable than the person he's interviewing.

I agree. The number one rule of good journalism is not to put yourself in the story.

Step back, way, back, and let your subject tell their story.

girvo• 10 years ago

The SM7s are by far my favourite mic, and what we had in my tiny little community radio studio!

ukyrgf• 10 years ago

I didn't even understand his follow up to the engineer saying it rolls off at 250MHz:

Current: Yes, but if you’re at a station and kind of frustrated with the bassy, boomy sound you get on your studio mic, and you can’t get the engineering staff to do anything about it for you, one thing that you could do yourself is to look on the mic and see if there is a bass roll-off switch, and turn it on.

Is the interviewer just tossing out "life pro tips" in the middle of an interview? Why does it start "Yes, but" when it's not a counterpoint to _anything_?

mcguire2• 10 years ago

Layer violation?

The goal is to get good sound out of your recording equipment, not to get ISO approval. :-)

Ericson231410• 10 years ago

My aesthetic pleasure in engineering is more the means than the ends; nobody pays me to go on HN, so the latter is what I focus on :).

Every recording studio or both for a live venue I've seen always seems to have 'round 1/4 equipment always in use, 1/4 rarely but sometimes used, 1/2 equipment never used :P. I really do respect the science and art that goes into audio engineering, but damn that's a lot of clutter.

Now the flip side is it's a lot easier to trim the fat administering a bunch of a computers (and the clutter isn't a huge sunk cost like some once highly valuable piece of equipment one might be loath to chuck), and yet this ideal is also far from realized most the time. Boxes in closet are just a lot more obvious than files in a directory.

drewcrawford• 10 years ago

Is this not a blatant layer violation?

This is the one of the areas a recording engineer's problems are different than a software engineer's intuition.

In software, we have a lot of problems that can ultimately be traced back to not having good "visibility" into the software or its state. This has various far-reaching consequences, from specialized tools to examine software (such as debuggers) to cultural values ("one job per component") that help us reason about complex systems we cannot see.

But in the case of audio, we have a multiple sensory organs to directly perceive sound. A bad audio engineer would be able to push a few buttons to move his headphones around in the signal chain and know in seconds where the EQ is occurring. A good one would simply know the U87 rolloff "by sound" and would not have to conduct any investigation at all.

There are some cases where more detailed analysis is done with fancy tools–mastering song recordings, for example. But in live sound, an audio engineer's primary concern is UX, because good UX is the difference between solving a problem quickly and annoying pops or worse. One button that engages a good EQ is much, much better than something like this: http://adn.harmanpro.com/product_attachments/product_attachm.... And epoxying the single button to the correct position is even better still!

Ericson231410• 10 years ago

Isn't controls on mics the worst UX because the wrong people are always messing with them?

You raise a good point about (even in the bad case) moving headphones around the signal chain---and damn as an (especially functional) programmer I'd like that to be able to tap arbitrary locations in data flow like that. Enough all these control-flow-based debugging tools!

One button that engages a good EQ is much, much better than something like this

Well there's always overkill, but would one of those be worse than one of those and then, next in the signal chain, a 1-button EQ whose functionality is completely subsumed?

ArkyBeagle7• 10 years ago

Not (a layer violation) so much. Audio gear has evolved serendipitously anyway. Times were, when you wanted an EQ that wasn't just a "tone control" , you got out the soldering iron. Pultec wasn't even a thing until 1953.

Ericson231410• 10 years ago

Mm, I think serendipitous evolution may explain but does not justify layer violations. In this case, it's not just engineering aesthetics but a real practical pain: buttons in lay people's hands == more problems. [People getting angry at tech and then mic is off at live events is practically a trope!]

Arguably compression wars and other such things are also a layer violation: sound engineers can guess at but not be sure of listeners' equipment. With computer and audio (or anywhere engineering, business, and less educated users meet), optimizing against presumptions is a common source of layer violations.

scarecrowbob2• 10 years ago

Honestly, the less stuff I have to do in post (or in a mixer doing live sound) the easier the world is for me. The closer to the source that you can fix issues the better.

riprowan17• 10 years ago

Is this not a blatant layer violation?

No, you want to apply cuts as early as possible in the signal chain if you're trying to prevent overloads later in the chain. The "EQs" that you see on mics are almost always bass cuts designed to reduce proximity effects. This gives you much better dynamic range at the preamp because bass frequencies are energy-intensive, so cutting them early allows the amplifier to not have to do all the work amplifying (and distorting) them, just to cut them later.

beat4• 10 years ago

Microphones need tremendous amplification to even get them to "line level" signals to interface with other audio equipment - 60db is not uncommon. Bass signals require a great deal more power (watts, or in this case milliwatts) to amplify accurately than midrange/treble signals, so they're a lot more likely to cause distortion. Rolling bass off as early as possible - preferably at the capsule, before the microphone's internal circuitry - reduces distortion.

Beyond that, with a few exceptions, most of the signal rolled off by the switch is stuff you don't want to hear anyways - "plosive" pops, rumble from low-frequency buildup in rooms, vibration, etc. Much of it can't even be reproduced by most speakers (speakers don't do low bass because, as said before, it's a hard problem and not actually audible in most cases).

As an aside, when mixing records, I'll often roll off guitars at 200 or 300hz, losing a couple of octaves of low-frequency information. In theory, this is awful. And if you listen to the solo guitar tracks, it's awful. But in an actual mix, it's great! It gets the low end of the guitars out of the way of real low-frequency instruments like bass and kick drums, making the bass sound tighter and cleaner. The guitars sound clearer too, because they aren't getting muddied by competing bass instruments.

heuermh• 10 years ago

This is one of the reasons I find recording guitar so unsatisfying; I want the recordings to sound like what my guitar amps pushing air in the room feels like. If I succeed, the mix turns to mush.

Severian• 10 years ago

The flat sound really emphasises the sibilants, and for me, excessive "mouth noise". I hear a lot of nose whistle and saliva sounds. Maybe I suffer from some misophonia, but it drives me crazy sometimes.

tacos8• 10 years ago

That's due to the person being close to the mic. A flat microphone, by definition, emphasizes nothing. Moreover it's other aspects of the signal chain (compression, distortion, broadcast filters) that accentuate sibilance.

riprowan17• 10 years ago

I couldn't agree more. I think that's actually the U87s you're hearing. They are very neutral, quite sensitive condenser mics - very unforgiving, not "flattering" just "realistic."

Dynamic mics like most stations use (SM7, RE20) hide a lot of sibilance by exaggerating the fundamentals.

zargay01• 10 years ago

250Hz, not 250kHz

riprowan17• 10 years ago

We use a simple Neumann U87 microphone as the house-standard microphone at all of our facilities. They’re expensive, but that’s what we’ve used for years.

That simple U87 costs about 5x what the other broadcasters use (typically an SM7 or RE20) and is much more fragile and difficult to maintain. As I recall NPR bought hundreds of U87s...

lucb1e2• 10 years ago

I don't know NPR but from reading about half the article, it seems to be a radio station in America that flipped a switch on their microphones. Am I missing some insight, or is that all?

lucb1e2• 10 years ago

Five downvotes, but no comments. What am I missing then?

Gracana• 10 years ago

Maybe admitting to not reading the whole article, making a glib comment, and asking for someone else to do your thinking for you just wasn't received well.

mikejanssen• 10 years ago

I'm Current's editor, and loving the traffic spike we're getting from this... thanks everyone! Serious follow-up question for you -- are there other public media/technology articles you'd be interested in reading that we should pursue? We don't cover tech exclusively, but this post has proven to be hugely popular (not just here but on reddit twice). Would be great to hear your thoughts.

retrogradeorbit• 10 years ago

Anyone know what polar pattern they have the u87s on? Cardioid?

An audio engineer explains NPR’s signature sound

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