May 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Howard Massey

Pointing the Way Toward the Future of Broadcast

It's another crisp winter night in L.A. Annie Lennox stands center stage at the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood and Highland, clad in jeans and faux fur and singing “Into the West” from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, as if her very life depended on it. Backstage and in the orchestra pit, dozens of production crew-members bustle about, setting up and adjusting microphones, tending to the needs of the talent and musicians, talking softly but urgently into their RFPLs and cell phones.

Half a block away, Tommy Vicari sits hunched over a Neve VRM console in David Hewitt's Remote Recording truck, fingertips darting from fader to fader as he deftly mixes the 55-piece orchestra accompanying Lennox. Behind him, Hewitt quietly moves between three Neve 961 subcars, putting on and taking off headphones as he makes minute adjustments to the string and woodwind submixes. From a squawkbox off to their left come the musings of an agitated director, alternately cursing out cameramen for missing their shots and cracking bad jokes about the dress sense of selected cast and crew.

In a TV satellite truck parked nearby, legendary broadcast mixer Ed Greene is in the hot seat, though you'd never know it to look at him. Seemingly unflappable, yet deeply focused, he divides his attention between two consoles: an analog Calrec and a digital Mackie D8B, blending the signal from nearly 100 onstage mics and numerous playback machines with Vicari's orchestral mix. Issuing forth from the Meyer Sound, KRK and JBL speakers surrounding Greene is a lush 5.1 spread of the entire melange.

And that's just the rehearsal.

REPORTING FOR DUTY

It's common wisdom that it's big-budget shows like the annual Academy Awards that drive the broadcast industry forward. This year's extravaganza was a major case in point, transmitted simultaneously in both high-definition and standard-def, with two separate audio streams: a discrete Dolby Digital — encoded 5.1 mix and a Dolby Pro Logic II — encoded signal, complete with split surrounds. True, it was last year's Grammy Awards show that first broke the ice in that regard, but the higher-profile Oscars not only boast a longer pedigree, but also command a significantly larger worldwide audience.

Despite the leap forward, much of the production crew's approach taken this year was unchanged, thanks largely to the consistency of personnel. (Hewitt has been doing the show for the past 12 years; Vicari and Greene for the past eight.) “The shift to 5.1 hasn't really affected my job,” says Vicari, “because for me, it's all about the music. I don't worry about the technical details. I just worry about getting the signal from the players cleanly into the console and mixing it so the listener can hear the arrangement — hear all the elements the composer had in mind. Mind you, it does sound glorious in 5.1, having the image wrap around you; it's inspiring to me.”

It's a broadcast trend that all three men see as inevitable. “Surround sound is something that the public has embraced and nobody's going to go back,” Hewitt says. “Actually, the whole surround phenomenon is kind of amusing to me and to most remote mixers, because our goal has always been to re-create what you're hearing in a concert. Trying to do that in stereo was always very difficult, but we always miked in surround, so to speak, to try and get the feel of the live venue. So, essentially, I'm not doing things a whole lot differently.”

Clearly, it's Greene's role that has been the most affected by the brave new world of multichannel audio. “Things are getting very complicated,” he reports. “For this show, we actually generated four separate mixes: a domestic 5.1 for HD, an international 5.1 HD, a domestic SD-encoded and an international SD-encoded, with the international mixes excluding the show announcer and commercial bumpers. That's pretty complicated stuff for a program that's primarily a lectern show. I don't want to minimize it, but there's really just two lecterns and a center mic, plus the orchestra pit and a lot of film cues. The thing is, the Oscars are a very high-profile show.”

Asked if he feels that production requirements are getting too complex, he responds with a laugh: “No, not so far, anyway. But every show now presents a whole new set of requirements. Certainly, the 5.1 mix I put together for this year's Academy Awards was a lot more adventurous than the one I did last year.”

“It's a ratchet,” Hewitt observes. “Every year it goes up one click, and it never goes back.”

Greene's enthusiasm for surround sound is obvious. “It's a great new palette, and I'm convinced it's here to stay. DVDs are driving it, of course; it's delightful to watch movies that way at home. I'm even starting to watch movies off-air in 5.1 or even just SD-decoded. That's quite nice, too, but the biggest issue now is sync between the audio and video signals. Sometimes it's close and sometimes it's not so close — often two or three frames off, sometimes more. The problem is that the video gets processed so many different ways, and nobody really keeps track of where the audio is.

“In fact, I watched a live program not long ago that was two-and-a-half seconds out of sync for about 20 minutes. What happened was, the network took the audio from fiber and the picture from satellite, and then somebody called and complained, so they switched, but they switched both of them!” With a trace of resignation, he adds, “We often have no control over what happens to the signal when it leaves our trucks.”

OPTING FOR DIGITAL GEAR

Another broadcast trend identified by all three mixers is an increased reliance on digital equipment. “I have a Mackie D8B,” Greene reports, “which I also used at the Academy Awards show last year. It's a very good-sounding desk. I used it primarily for the two medleys in this show, and I haven't had a failure with it, but in broadcast, you always have to have a Plan B anyway. The contingency planning here included a stereo FOH mix coming up on the main desk, which I could immediately go to if necessary, and numerous backup microphones already onstage.”

Hewitt notes that a requirement of HDTV is that broadcast audio must ultimately be converted to digital. At this year's show, the conversion occurred at the last possible stage via the Dolby Digital encoding process. But Hewitt foresees an inevitable shift toward having the conversion to digital occur at an earlier stage — eventually. “At the current time, digital equipment simply crashes with more regularity than I'm willing to tolerate,” he says, “and there are a whole bunch of issues that aren't settled yet, things like sampling rate and bit rate, even format: PCM versus DSD, for instance. When the technology gets to the point where it is both standardized and stone-reliable, then I probably will make the move, not just to a digital console, but also to digital mic splitters because it's so much easier to pipe around that way, and it reduces wire size and bulk. It comes down to the same old two-step: reliability and sound. Sure, I'd love to have total resetability and remote control; that's very valuable. At the same time, it can get you into trouble. When you're forced into doing too much just because the equipment can do it, then the quality can suffer.”

Vicari takes a similar view, pointing out that this year, for the first time, all of the show's pre-records were done in the digital domain. His main concern, however, is with ergonomics. “Digital consoles are wonderful devices, and I use them every day in recording studios, but in this kind of situation, I want to be able to look at a fader and be certain that it's showing me where the level is. I don't want to be layers deep; I want to see everything in front of me.” Greene shares that concern. “Many of these manufacturers don't consult with broadcast mixers until after they have built the product,” he explains. “In fact, a lot of them don't understand what we do. A product may have everything you want in it, but unless it's got good ergonomics, it's really not very useful.”

Greene also predicts an increasing reliance on console-based plug-ins, if for no other reason than time constraints. “Come what may, we know that at 5:30 on a Sunday night, we're going on-air; whether it's a full-fledged digital 5.1 mix or a string and a cup, we're going on the air. So you do the best you can with the time and tools available.”

GEARING UP FOR SHOW TIME

Rehearsal time, in fact, is typically so tight for these kinds of shows that all three engineers have developed the practice of recording rehearsals and then spending significant time afterward playing the tapes back to refine their mixes. “It's invaluable being able to do that, because it's expensive having an orchestra here,” Vicari says. “During the few hours that we have them, we'll get a basic balance and echo level and then take a snapshot; that gives us a starting point. Of course, this is a grueling event: The players have to sit in the pit for eight hours at a time, so they don't really give their all until the show, which means that the level settings that I got in the rehearsals don't necessarily mean anything. I try to give myself some headroom, because I know that when the show starts, everybody gets excited and plays harder.”

Like the musicians, everyone responsible for the audio at the Academy Awards plays a sharply defined role. In addition to doing the orchestral mix during the show itself, Vicari was charged with overseeing the pre-records at Capitol Studios in the days leading up to the broadcast. During that time, Hewitt and Vicari's brother, Dan, did the pit setup and cross-patching. Interestingly, the mix generated by the Remote Recording truck was not a full 5.1 channel. Stereo orchestral stems were provided to front-of-house mixer Pat Baltzell, and only left, right and LFE channels were sent to Greene, who then created the center and rear channels and handled all of the onstage mics.

“I certainly was not adding audience or dialog to the LFE channel Tommy sent me,” Greene explains. “I simply added a little bit of bass and other low-frequency instruments, as well as a little bit of the clip playback — whatever seemed appropriate.” Greene opted to use the center channel strictly for dialog and vocals, which were also placed in the front left/right speakers to create both phantom and hard center imaging.

The content placed in the rear channels was a subject of considerable discussion during pre-production planning. “I never felt that music should be coming from the back,” says Vicari. “I was never a fan of that in these kinds of situations, because the audience perspective is that the orchestra is coming from the front, and the listener should feel like a participant in the show.” It's a philosophy that Greene agrees with: “You wouldn't want to have instruments happening in back of you for this particular project, which is really a proscenium show, so I basically just took Tommy and Dave's two-mix and spread it around the sides a little bit.”

Greene's tools of choice for that purpose included more than a dozen strategically placed ambience microphones in the theater and a pair of venerable Lexicon 200 reverbs. “I view broadcast audio as being broken down into different areas,” he explains. “Dialog or vocals are the story of the program; the music and effects are the feeling of the program; and the audience reaction is what connects the artist to the audience. That's the element that puts the listener at the venue.”

However much time and effort is spent creating the 5.1 mix, Greene is a realist, noting that few viewers actually get to hear the show that way. “Especially with a program like this that runs so late, a lot of people are watching on TV sets in their bedrooms, so they're often listening in mono.” As a result, once the basic 5.1 mix is set, he generally monitors in mono at modest levels of 70 to 75 dB SPL, relying mostly on metering (through a Dolby LM100) to keep track of the surround mix. This time around, though, Greene experienced things somewhat differently. “I found that when I was listening in mono or stereo, I wasn't able to hear some of the subtleties that were going out in surround, so for about the last two hours of the show, I listened mostly in 5.1.”

Over in the Remote Recording truck, Vicari and Hewitt had the luxury of switching between monitoring the 3-channel signal that they sent Greene and the pre-encoded 5.1 mix that he was constructing; with the use of their Martinsound controller, they even had the capability to downmix the 5.1 to mono or stereo. In essence, a symbiotic loop was created: As Vicari monitored Greene's surround mix, he was able to make adjustments to the orchestral contribution in real time that, in turn, affected Greene's final decision-making.

Greene is a veteran of both the Academy Awards and the Grammys, and he points out that a key difference between the shows is that the music mix at the Oscars is easier to control because the orchestra pit is stationary; at the Grammys, he has to contend with stage instrumentation that's constantly changing. The Grammy audio production team also takes a different approach to creating the 5.1 mix, routing stems and musical elements to a separate truck dedicated to that purpose.

This time around, there were no significant audio hiccups at the Academy Awards; certainly nothing on the scale of the Celine Dion dead-microphone gaffe at the Grammys. “But that's what happens in live shows,” Greene points out, “and unfortunately, the only thing that really sticks in people's minds. You can pull off the audio feat of the century, and as long as there's nothing that disturbs people at home, they just say, ‘Oh, that's nice.’ However, if one microphone goes out, ‘Oh my God!’ In the broadcast world, audio may still be the stepchild of video — see a dog, hear a dog — and it is true that the better it looks, the better it sounds. But,” he adds with a grin, “it's equally true that the better it sounds, the better it looks.”

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Howard Massey's latest book, Behind the Glass, is a collection of interviews with top record producers and engineers.

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