[HN Gopher] A top audio engineer explains NPR's signature sound ...
___________________________________________________________________
A top audio engineer explains NPR's signature sound (2015)
Author : paulpauper
Score : 219 points
Date : 2021-04-16 11:39 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (current.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (current.org)
| madengr wrote:
| Too bad NPR can't have decent programming. Nothing objective,
| just feverish, leftist diatribe. I'd play a game with the kids on
| the way to school in the morning; turn on NPR and count the
| seconds until they say "Trump".
| sangnoir wrote:
| Shout-out to the audio/mixing engineers who handle NPR Tiny Desk
| concerts. Every single concert I've ever listened to sounds
| phenomenal: well-mixed with a surprising clarity and very little
| noise, considering the venue and how crowded it gets "on stage"
| with larger ensembles.
| droptablemain wrote:
| TLDR: high-pass filter and a legendary microphone.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Speaking of signature sounds -- many local radio stations
| (including my local NPR station, KUT) seem to be using some new
| technology. I frequently hear audio artifacts which sound like a
| ~1.0-1.5s 'skip-back'. It's like what you imagine something might
| do if it were streaming the audio and hit a gap/buffer underrun.
|
| This all started in the last 1-2 years. It's not extremely
| infrequent, I hear these during prime driving times and probably
| around once/week. I know for sure I have heard it on at least one
| non-NPR FM station. I wonder anyone else has noticed the same in
| other markets?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| If you have a digital radio receiver in your car, this could be
| the radio switching between digital and analog.
| pipe2devnull wrote:
| I have had that happen but I think it was due to switching
| between the HD and not HD radio signal.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Oh, of course! Yes, that's a great explanation. In that case
| I wonder if there's latency in the signal -- like the
| embedded HD content is out of phase with the analog content?
|
| So maybe the problem is really just a defect of my car's
| radio when toggling.
| pipe2devnull wrote:
| I think there is a little bit. In my car the difference in
| audio quality is really noticeable but if you don't notice
| an improvement then you can usually turn the HD part off so
| you don't have to deal with the frequent switching if it is
| an issue.
| jdofaz wrote:
| The digital version is delayed, the station is supposed to
| delay the analog feed an equal amount so that the
| transition isn't noticeable. In the early HD radios it was
| common for it to be way out of sync, but I haven't noticed
| it much in a long while.
| tshaddox wrote:
| That was my immediate guess as well. I almost always
| encounter this with music radio stations when I leave my
| parking garage and the signal flips to HD. With music it's
| very easy to hear the quality improvement at the same time as
| the "skip," and in my car there's a little "HD" icon
| somewhere on the radio interface.
| sp332 wrote:
| I heard this with Maine Public Radio a couple of years ago, but
| actually I have not noticed it lately.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" 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."_
|
| Was curious. ~$3600 for the mic set.
| busterarm wrote:
| That's about normal at the high end...There's some $10-12k
| microphones out there...
| Wistar wrote:
| The Telefunken ELA M 251, and the C12 and U47 tube mics come
| to mind. As does the Brauner VM1S.
|
| And then there are the used vintage mics which can go for
| $15k+.
|
| At the cheap but well-regarded end of things is the Stellar
| X2 from TZ TechZone.
| sharklazer wrote:
| Sony C800, anyone? With parts for manufacture being hard to
| source for Sony, I've seen these for nearly 20k, list price
| (not sure if they actually get that much), second-hand.
|
| But then, professional equipment never had economies of
| scale.
| busterarm wrote:
| The C800G is exactly what I was thinking of, but it's been
| $11k for years. Although yes, it's rarely in stock.
| sharklazer wrote:
| From Sony, but check Reverb... Sony has been out of stock
| for over a year now. The diaphragms are hard to
| produce/source, so second hand just keeps going up
| without Sony putting new units out.
| wuliwong wrote:
| Almost nobody uses mics like C800gs for podcasting and
| radio, though. The Sony c800g is one of the best vocal mics
| in the world, generally it will be found in high end
| studios. A U87 _is_ very expensive for the purpose of radio
| /podcasting. The RE20 and the Sure SM7B are very popular
| for podcasting/radio and are around $400. NPR certainly
| aren't the only people that use U87s for radio/podcasting
| but they are in the minority. U87s are probably the most
| popular studio mic in the world for professional studios
| recording vocals but for this application it is accurate to
| call a U87 expensive.
| bndw wrote:
| No surprise - in my experience the U87 is _the_ go-to choice
| for a large diaphragm condenser in professional recording
| environments.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Do you need expensive microphones to make a quality recording?
|
| This week's video shows a side by side comparison between 3
| popular consumer and boutique microphones.
|
| Neumann U87, Rode NT1-A, and Fifine K670.
|
| Are they worth the price difference?? Let's find out!
|
| https://learnaudioengineering.com/u87-vs-nt1a/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That was great!
|
| I'd say the $250 mic was the best value, but that German mic
| was niiiice. If you can afford it, then it's probably the one
| you want.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Drastic differences between the three! The Rode is certainly
| acceptable for most circumstances, but the Fifine sounds like
| absolute crap in my opinion.
| hajile wrote:
| Thriller (and tons of music before and after) was recorded on
| the Shure SM7. You can buy that mic for $400. In fact, you've
| seen this mic used by podcasters everywhere.
|
| The mic cost is almost irrelevant though. A good mic will
| last decades unless abused. Let's say you want a variety of
| sounds. You buy a bunch of instrument mics (probably $100
| each) and a few matched pairs of all the most popular vocal
| mics (most of those will run 1-2k per pair). You'll probably
| not spend over 20k in total. Over 20 years, that's only
| $1,000 per year or less than $100 per month. In that same 20
| years, you will have upgraded your digital equipment several
| times at an expense far greater than $1,000 per year
| (upgrading your $3,500 macbook every 4 years is the same
| amount of money).
|
| If you make your money with those mics, that cost is hardly
| worth mentioning. It's like people complaining that ergonomic
| keyboards cost $300. The keyboard will easily last a decade
| or more (only $1-2 per month to save a lot of future pain).
| In that same time, you'll probably spend 10k+ on other
| equipment. Same thing with monitors where $1000 will far
| outlast that same amount of money put into the computer
| itself.
| swyx wrote:
| what are your thoughts on the Blue Yeti? I dont really like
| it but it seems SUPER popular...
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| It's ok but absolutely overhyped.
| fumar wrote:
| I have a yeti and XLR mics and lavalier mics. For ease of
| use without hassle the Yeti is good but you must use the
| right setting and account for gain. It picks up a decent
| amount of ambient sound. That extra noise will muddy your
| vocals. I've gone the route of a simple lavalier setup for
| most of my video calls and presentations.
| [deleted]
| CPLX wrote:
| It's fucking junk, sounds awful.
|
| For what it's worth I'm an audio engineering expert,
| produced albums, broadcast stuff, and used to review
| professional studio audio equipment for a living for a
| national magazine.
|
| People like it because it's simple and it looks cool.
|
| If you want something that has the same basic usability, ie
| plugs directly into USB and is really easy to use with
| computer audio, buy the Apogee Mic Plus.
|
| I recently experimented with pretty much everything in this
| category and was very happy with this model, bought a dozen
| of them for use in a virtual conference series, where I
| wanted something I could send to non-technical people who'd
| never be able to navigate a pro audio interface. I've been
| very happy with it so far.
| hajile wrote:
| I own a yeti (and a yeti pro) among quite a few other mics.
|
| It's actively _bad_ for most people for one reason:
| capacitive mics pick up everything.
|
| If your room isn't soundproofed, it will be very hard to
| keep noise out of your recording. Dynamic mics are much
| less sensitive in this regard.
|
| I would instead recommend a Samson 2Qu or Audio Technica
| ATR2100-USB on the low end ($70-100) or the Shure MV7
| ($250) on the high end for plug-n-play mics.
|
| If you want to move into a cheap audio interface (eg,
| Focusrite Scarlett Solo + cloudlifter), I'd recommend
| either the Shure SM7b or the ElectroVoice re20 on the
| higher end and the Shure sm57 on the cheaper end (good
| enough for the president to use for the last 40-ish years).
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _It 's actively bad for most people for one reason:
| capacitive mics pick up everything._
|
| This is a myth that's popular with podcasters. If you get
| as close to a condenser mic as you _must_ with a less-
| sensitive dynamic mic* and crank down the gain
| accordingly, you 'll find that condenser mics don't
| magically capture more ambient noise than than dynamic
| mics.
|
| * Using a fist as a measure, your mouth should be between
| 1-2 fists away from the mic.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| eropple wrote:
| The Yeti is popular because it's a USB microphone and it
| got in early. It's not a bad microphone (at all, somebody
| telling you it is wants to sell you something) but it's
| generally misapplied in most settings where it finds
| itself.
|
| For simple spoken-word stuff like conferences or streams or
| whatever, something like a Samson Q2U or an
| AT2005USB/ATR2100 are less sensitive to unwanted noise and
| easier for an untrained user to get a good sound out of,
| while moving into the XLR space gets you access to better
| dynamic microphones and also some pretty reasonably priced
| condensers that do quite well (though there's some up-front
| investment in the audio hardware, of course).
| mrob wrote:
| I don't recommend listening to this comparison because the
| U87 is high-pass filtered and the other two are not. It makes
| the U87 sound very bad IMO.
| auiya wrote:
| The problem isn't the mic though, it's that in the earlier days
| of radio there was a trend towards boosting the bass
| artificially in the microphones to make the host sound more
| authoritative. Howard Stern is BIG time guilty of this. NPR
| doesn't do this, and cuts the bass picked up by the full-range
| mics using a channel EQ (or mic built-in) to eliminate plosives
| rather than employ lots of pop screens and boosting the bass.
| Using a full-range mic for vocals means ultra low-end is
| preserved, and that's not always desired for replicating the
| human voice accurately. This is also how most vocals in music
| are treated, there's no reason for all that low-end mud, so
| they're high-pass filtered heavily as a matter of course before
| the rest of the vocal effects chain is applied. Pop vocals in
| particular are way thinner than people realize.
|
| As far as mics go, if you don't want to pay thousands for a
| Neumann, the Austrian Audio OC18 is a fantastic mic with a
| similarly flat response and has a 3-way switch for different
| levels of high-pass filtering before the signal even leaves the
| mic. It's fast becoming my favorite mic to use in the studio.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _boosting the bass artificially_
|
| To clarify a bit, I think that, by "artificial", you mean the
| boost does not correspond to how the human voice actually
| sounds, which is true.
|
| But in another sense, it's not artificial. It's a natural
| side effect of the physics of how microphones work. In
| building microphones to be directional (favor sounds from,
| say, in front), they've also made it where the amount of bass
| picked up is heightened when the mic is very close.
|
| So NPR is _artificially_ (with a high-pass filter) removing a
| _natural_ side-effect (of directional mics) to avoid getting
| _artificial_ -sounding boomy bass.
|
| Also, this is one of those accidental invention things where
| what was originally a side effect has turned into a valued,
| essential feature. Like guitar amp distortion is part of the
| electric guitar sound. Or like how resonator guitars (Dobro,
| National) were invented to be louder but now people like the
| tone.
| laurent92 wrote:
| There could also be a cultural aspect of this. In English,
| the lower you speak, the more respectable you are. It is
| borderline ridiculous when you listen as a foreigner (when
| voices are cutting off or rattling), until I learnt how to
| use it myself ;) Anyway, I speak with much higher pitch in
| French, and perhaps the bass mic is important for English
| speakers, but wouldn't have had such an effect on European
| radios, where, maybe in Spanish, high frequencies would be
| important because the faster you speak, the more
| interesting you are? Consonants are much more important in
| latin languages.
| sh1mmer wrote:
| > So NPR is artificially (with a high-pass filter) removing
| a natural side-effect (of directional mics) to avoid
| getting artificial-sounding boomy bass.
|
| He says later on in the article that they try and get
| people in the studio to not talk directly into the mic but
| across it. So in some ways they are trying to correct for
| the issues caused by strong directionality before they get
| to artificial things like signal filters.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That (talking across) was what clicked for me. They are
| in a controlled reverbance room and that's worth a lot
| too.
|
| It is so clear that getting a clean analog signal up
| front is worth a lot.
| CPLX wrote:
| You can also just go for the similar Neumann's that are lower
| down in their line. I have a TLM 103 and recommend it highly,
| although it doesn't have the high-pass switch so you'd want
| to do that via software or preamp.
| david422 wrote:
| Any reason why this isn't just done in software rather than
| hardware? Is it just more setup when it's easier if it's a
| hardware switch.
|
| The article just said it's not left up to the studio.
| kitotik wrote:
| Latency is still a problem with audio software.
| spoonjim wrote:
| You can boost your gain a lot higher if you throw out the
| bass early in the signal chain and preserve a much higher
| S/N ratio.
| iamsomewalrus wrote:
| Flippantly, because hardware is cool!
|
| Plugins - software for audio programs - are available but
| audio engineers are famously persnickety.
| bryzaguy wrote:
| Low frequencies carry an awful lot of energy and you will
| get maximum dynamic range out of a mic by close-micing but
| HPF'ing off the lows early in the chain. Many condensers
| have little preamps inside them, and the HPF may be placed
| before this pre giving it effectively a lot more headroom.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Software?
|
| Software pipelines only began to get into radio some 20/25
| years ago. NPR started in 71
|
| Also software can't do magic (and you aren't processing
| each microphone digitally), you want to be your signal to
| be as best as it can as close to the source as you can make
| it to be.
| auiya wrote:
| Reliability. Purpose-built hardware switches don't crash,
| ever.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Tell that to a roadie. Hardware fails all the time.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Old Steven king book. On a group traveling to a rain
| forest.
|
| They gave all the equipment to a pack of monkeys for the
| night. Anything still working in the morning was
| certified as reliable.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I may be wrong (its been a long time since I read it, and
| it may be just something that fits really well
| thematically with the book but wasn't actually in it),
| but I think that was Michael Crichton's _Congo_ , not a
| Steven King book.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The original chaos monkeys?
| [deleted]
| jancsika wrote:
| > Pop vocals in particular are way thinner than people
| realize.
|
| Thanks to near constant use of auto-tune I think most people
| realize pop vocals are thin.
|
| Edit: clarification to remove accidental contradiction. I
| initially ended with "... I think most people realize that,"
| which would have essentially translated to, "Most people
| realize that pop vocals are thinner than most people
| realize."
| auiya wrote:
| Pitch correction doesn't thin vocals when used correctly.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I read this in T-pain's voice. Auto tune does get abused,
| doesn't it?
| swyx wrote:
| for what its worth T-pain has pretty conclusively proved
| that he didn't need autotune, he just used it as a
| gimmick to stand out:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc
| ehnto wrote:
| Quite relevantly, his NPR tiny desk concert was a
| fantastic example of his musical range and his vocal
| talent. He is an excellent musician.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Autotune and melodyne are just standard now. Good usage
| is not really detectable. What people forget to note is
| that you still need to know how to sing in the first
| place. Autotune plugins can only do so much...
|
| These plugins really exist to save time for large
| studios, not make bad musicians better. Time is money for
| studios, so they don't want to waste it on multiple
| retakes when someone can be close enough to make small
| fixes with melodyne. For session work, market effects
| still pressure people to, well, not make mistakes like
| that. A great singer is still going to be in higher
| demand than a decent one, because then the studios don't
| have to spend much time at all fixing their vocals.
|
| Also, -noticeable- autotune can be desired. It's a
| musical choice. In that sense it's no different than
| using a vocoder, etc. I personally do not like it but
| that's the beauty of music; there's something for
| everyone.
| ddingus wrote:
| It is totally detectable, unless it truly is a one off
| tweak. But that is almost never what happens. Maybe a
| great vocal will get a tweak to save otherwise great
| take, and that is fine. Good thing.
|
| But then the whole production sees similar things all
| over the place and it gets cleaned right up technically.
| Time, levels, the works right?
|
| And the energy is diminished, could be lost.
|
| Like fashion, this will all cycle in and out. Young
| people hear the humanity in music made prior to these and
| other tools and it appeals.
|
| Little things, like a change in tempo, small vocal
| errors, inconsistency, all add up in a track.
|
| I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade,
| maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle.
|
| Like you say, there is nothing technically wrong with any
| of this tech. And it could all be used very differently
| from how it is today too.
|
| Recently, I have been going back through great live
| shows. Fantastic! And I still get that tingle from the
| realization someone delivered it live, to a crowd. And
| yeah, not so perfect, but oh so very human too.
| andrewzah wrote:
| "It is totally detectable."
|
| Good application of it is not, no. When we hear obvious
| autotune vocals, it's a deliberate aesthetic choice.
|
| I believe what you're talking about is how modern
| production is about producing "perfect" song recordings,
| and mapping everything to a click track/beat grid. Now
| that is totally noticeable compared to music made a few
| decades ago. I do agree that it makes music sound
| sterile. This is separate to autotune/melodyne being
| used.
|
| "I bet some time from now, could be as little as a
| decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and
| chuckle."
|
| Maybe the main industry studios will, but music in
| general isn't determined by what those folks are doing.
| There are more indie publishers than ever, and so on.
| ddingus wrote:
| I made an edit, because I do agree with you.
|
| And yes! The indies are all over the place. Love it.
| MAGZine wrote:
| I used to not like autotune at all in music, but then I
| think I heard an interview with Grimes (?) who basically
| said (paraphrasing) "oh, I love autotune. Yes it's
| artificial and detectable, BUT it brings the vocals even
| closer to the music, which makes a more powerful
| impression.
|
| Ever since then, it's not bothered me nearly so much when
| the vocals are tuned. The track hits harder. Yes: it's
| true the voice loses some of it's natural beauty, but in
| turn, you get music and voice that follow perfectly.
| xxpor wrote:
| I think the big difference there is trying to use it to
| just hide imperfections vs. consciously making it a
| conspicuous part of the music. For someone like Grimes,
| adding in blatantly artificial manipulation fits in
| perfectly with the rest of her aesthetic.
| bwanab wrote:
| A short, but hopefully relevant anecdote: I play the sax. A
| musician friend called me last summer to get me to do a part on
| a new song he'd produced. Since it was during the summer surge
| I said I'd do it at home and send him the part, but he
| mentioned he had a Neumann mic for me to record with. I was
| curious, so I packed up and went to his place which he'd set up
| largely outside. I played my parts, then went home. When he
| sent me the result I was floored! I've never sounded so good -
| seriously. I asked him what plugins he'd used and he'd just
| added a touch of reverb, but nothing else. It was all me and
| the Neumann mic. Those things really do have a magic quality
| about them. There's a reason people are willing to pay more
| than the cost of my sax for one.
| snypher wrote:
| Does anyone know what the cage-like section on the bottom of
| the U87 is for? Neumann themselves state that the U87 'looks
| like a studio mic'.
| scolby33 wrote:
| It's a shock mount (probably [1]), meant to reduce noise
| transmitted from the table or the boom arm or whatever the
| microphone is attached to.
|
| [1] https://en-de.neumann.com/ea-87
| chuchurocka wrote:
| It's a shock mount system. Suspends the mic from any external
| vibrations
| Centigonal wrote:
| Do you mean the shock mount?
|
| It's designed to hold the mic and avoid transmitting
| vibrations from the mic stand (caused by moving or jostling
| the stand) to the mic.
|
| https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/dwEAAOSwg0deXHFG/s-l640.jpg
| tiniuclx wrote:
| That's a shock mount - it prevents vibration on the mic stand
| from being picked up by the microphone.
| kazinator wrote:
| there are mic designs that reduce proximity effect, like the
| classic Shure SM-54.
|
| http://www.coutant.org/shursm54/index.html
| tootie wrote:
| Pet peeve, but here's a great segment on what is and isn't
| actually NPR:
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/not-npr
|
| I should say, the shows mentioned in this article are actually
| produced by NPR but most of what you hear on a given public radio
| station isn't. And also, NPR doesn't control the broadcast.
| jmd509 wrote:
| My notes (tl;dr) from the article below.
|
| For anyone even vaguely familiar with audio engineering and
| recording, these tactics are not profound. Not a bad thing
| because in the end, less is more.
|
| Worth mentioning that a good mic is arguably the 20% input that
| contributes to 80%+ of the output/audio quality, as supported by
| the article.
|
| #6 is really the only non-obvious point. Apparently this is a
| major subject of debate.
|
| 1.) If you can afford it, use the Neumann U87 mic (~$3.5k)
|
| 2.) High pass filter (~250hz) on the vocal chain
|
| 3.) To avoid plosives, don't speak head-on into the mic. Speak
| off the side, on a diagonal. Use a pop filter.
|
| 4.) Design your studio to minimize reverberation. Make sure the
| recording space is isolated and there "aren't a lot of solid
| walls." Absorb sound with baffles, sound panels, etc.
| Counterintuitively, a larger room with more diffusion is better
| than the opposite.
|
| 5.) Minimize ambient sound. Your mic will pick up everything from
| fans to CPUs to electronic interference off computer screens.
| This noise will muddy up the recording.
|
| 6.) Minimize processing or compression of the signal before
| streaming, or in the case of radio, sending to the satellite.
|
| Edit: for clarity
| archontes wrote:
| That'd be a high pass filter, right?
| jmd509 wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out - have edited. Wrote a bit
| too hastily there!
| maroonblazer wrote:
| 250Hz high pass seems too high for male voices in the baritone
| or bass range. And depending on whether the female in question
| is more of an alto vs soprano 250Hz might still be too high.
| andrewzah wrote:
| It depends on how close the speaker is. Getting that close
| creates a large proximity effect. The rolloff filter starts
| at 1k actually but is around -10db at 150hz [0]. I wouldn't
| use it unless one is close to eating the microphone.
|
| [0]: (Page 4)
| https://media.sweetwater.com/store/media/u87ai_u87.pdf
| KozmoNau7 wrote:
| The cheap Behringer mixer I use for voice chat, karaoke and
| so on has a selectable 80Hz high-pass filter, I can't
| remember ever switching it off on the vocal channels, except
| to parody that Howard Stern-esque huge bottom end with heavy
| compression radio host thing.
|
| Using a decent microphone (AKG D5 in my case) and a little
| bit of tweaking (just a low cut and some compression is a
| good start) instantly puts your sound quality in voice chats
| so far above everyone else using cheap headsets or their
| laptops' built-in mics.
|
| Anecdotally I've found that sounding more authoritative makes
| people listen a lot more to what you say, instead of zoning
| out.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Worth mentioning that a good mic is arguably the 20% factor
| that contributes to 80%+ of the audio quality, as supported by
| the article.
|
| I'm suspicious when percentages that don't have to add up to
| 100% add up to 100%.
| jontutcher wrote:
| For reference, most/all BBC radio stations use AKG C414s (https
| ://www.akg.com/Microphones/Condenser%20Microphones/C414...) of
| various vintages. They sound fantastic and cost ~$700, rather
| than $3.5k.
|
| BBC Radio 3 uses no dynamic range compression, so might be most
| comparable to NPR (although it's likely that each local station
| applies a ton of compression before the signal hits the air).
|
| Most (other) radio stations apply copious amounts of multiband
| dynamic range compression on their output - with the nickname
| of "sausage-making", since the process turns waveforms that
| look like music into waveforms that look like sausages. In the
| FM days, louder sounding stations were associated with better
| signals, so got bigger market share...
| jcims wrote:
| NPR's Tiny Desk concerts (when they were actually at NPR)
| regularly blow me away with the production quality. They are so
| good at it despite all the wonky setups that come through. If you
| dig around in the comments you'll see my handle in there fawning
| over them regularly lol.
| polytely wrote:
| The dude in charge of the Tiny Desk Recording is Josh Rogosin,
| he made a couple of videos about the process.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e07bI5rz6FY
|
| Edit: this is one of my favourite tiny desk concerts, it sounds
| so good on headphones
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47XlUL6sRow
| jcims wrote:
| Couple more sweet mixes:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB4oFu4BtQ8 (Roots. The brass
| mix gives me goosebumps lol)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFycqnOpifQ (Nickel Creek. If
| there really is only one mic someone has sold their soul. The
| sound stage is perfect.)
| polytely wrote:
| Chris Thile is such a genius, Goat Rodeo (Chris Thile,
| Edgar Meyer, Stuart Duncan, Yo-Yo Ma) is one of my
| favourite things in the world https://youtu.be/O7EcT5YzKhQ
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Not exactly Tiny Desk Concert, but close enough, my fave was
| an appearance by Steven Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields).
| This NPR series was called "Project Song"-- the challenge was
| to write and produce a song in two days.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2007/11/04/15859351/stephin-merritt-
| two-...
| tmountain wrote:
| Thanks for that, here's one of my favorites.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7My5IpEzVM&ab_channel=NPRMu.
| ..
| tecleandor wrote:
| Wow, the comment section is quite a trip.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Can't tell if it's performance art or not
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| People talk about how bad reddit comments are...
|
| But the average comment section of a news article or blog is so
| much worse. It has the insanity of 4chan, but with better
| grammar.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| You're not kidding. Those people are insane.
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| Audiophiles are a different breed.
| markjgx wrote:
| The article is coincidentally written by Adam Regusa, my favorite
| food Youtuber.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Adam Ragusea also did all the music and interstitials for one
| of my favorite (very silly) podcasts:
|
| https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/greatest-generation/
|
| So far, the hosts have done a complete re-watch of TNG and DS9.
| Just started Voyager recently.
| newsbinator wrote:
| I love the podcast. I have Pocket Casts set to skip the first
| 7 minutes or so, while they're opening trading cards they
| bought on eBay and talking about non-Star Trek things.
|
| Then when they start talking about the episode it's fun and
| nostalgic, and they make astute observations that I haven't
| heard elsewhere.
| sxates wrote:
| Those intros are where a lot of the recurring inside jokes
| originate, don't skip them!
| 1915cb1f wrote:
| Huh, I never knew that he was also a writer/journalist. Come to
| think of it, that explains why he includes so many interview
| segments in his video. Thanks for pointing that out!
| calmoo wrote:
| Yeah it definitely shines in his videos - he was a Professor
| of Journalism before switching to YT full time.
| zwog wrote:
| If bass roll-off is so important, couldn't it just be implemented
| further down the signal chain?
|
| I mean, after all it's a low-cut filter, isn't it?
| radiowave wrote:
| Yes, it can be. The reason it's built in to the mic is to
| protect the mic's output transformer from distorting when
| recording louder sounds. Most newer/cheaper designs of
| condenser mic use solid state outputs (unless they're
| deliberately apeing a classic design) which typically are less
| easily saturated by loud bass sounds.
|
| I'd guess NPR's view is along the lines that, well, the
| filter's already there, and we like the way it sounds, so we
| keep using it.
| myself248 wrote:
| It could, but the results might not be what you expect.
|
| Maybe you want to preserve the bass of interstitial music or
| program audio jingles or environmental effects or something.
| Doing the processing after the mixing means it affects the
| whole mix. Doing it at the input means you can tailor each
| element.
|
| Worse, because bass has an outsize effect on the total energy
| in an audio signal, if there's any sort of dynamic range
| compression while the bass is still included, the presence of
| the bass triggers that compression to happen. Later on when the
| bass is removed, the remaining audio has inexplicable
| fluctuations in its volume, which can sound super
| uncomfortable.
|
| This "program level bouncing around in response to a signal
| which is not part of the program audio" effect can also come
| from side-chain compression, and arguably filtering after
| compressing may be a form thereof. Once in a while it's done to
| great artistic effect in music, but in talk settings it's
| almost always horrible and disorienting.
| jefurii wrote:
| Running or splashing water has a particular sound in NPR on-
| location segments. I wish they'd talk about how they did that.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I keep wondering why no-one has trained a CNN to turn low quality
| audio into crisp NPR sounding audio (say). Surely it's even
| fairly easy to create test data for such things?
| andrewzah wrote:
| Not everything is magically fixable. That would involve
| creating elements that didn't exist at recording time or were
| removed by an encoder.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| With enough training data I'm sure it can be done... I've
| seen CNNs that fill in 3D scenes and animate them from two
| images. I would _guess_ this was a simpler problem?
| andrewzah wrote:
| Well, one thing to note is that humans spend more time
| processing audio than video. Bad audio is immediately
| noticeable and aggravating, compared to spotty video with
| clear audio.
|
| I -guess- CNNs can look at e.g. reduced frequency range
| recordings (like phone calls), and attempt to reconstruct
| them. However this seems like an arduous mountain to climb,
| as people's voices are unique. So are their environments
| and signal chains. I really doubt that something that
| generalized would work very well at reconstructing a
| specific person's voice and recording.
|
| This also gets into the problem that it would be
| constructing a new reality, not recreating it.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Yes, you're probably right - I hadn't thought that the
| voice + noise is going to be one thing, extracting just
| the noise will be difficult, unique and maybe not
| trainable at all.
|
| I have thought about the constructing a new reality thing
| - I wouldn't be surprised if models ended up being
| trained to misspeak words which could get confusing...
| notagoodidea wrote:
| I think the first step would be to be able to convert a lossy
| format as MP3 or ogg to a lossless format as FLAC or Wav. Being
| able to retrieve close in off lost data from lossy compression
| would be impressive.
| andrewzah wrote:
| MP3s generally have a shelf around 16-18khz. The rest of the
| audible spectrum data is impossible to retrieve if it doesn't
| exist. This is why transcoding from a lossy->lossless format
| is a bad idea.
| notagoodidea wrote:
| Yes, I know and that's what would be more impressive for me
| to see a ML/Algo that could recreate close enough data
| distribution from lossy to lossless. Not exact
| reconstruction but close enough in the possible area (so <
| 16-18kHz). It may or may not be possible but it is more
| akin to take the inverse of the model of degradation of MP3
| (it could be totally impossible).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Sounds like you're describing DLSS [0], but for audio.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sam
| pling
| k2enemy wrote:
| I know some people love the NPR sound and find it intimate and
| comforting, but I often have to turn it off because the mouth and
| saliva noises drive me crazy. Misophonia is not fun!
| Applejinx wrote:
| It's a lot worse with tiny headset mics. Large diaphragm
| condensers like the Neumann will give you that level of detail,
| but some of the tiny headset mics HYPE that level of detail
| unbearably. The Neumanns will at least fail to exaggerate what
| is already unbearable for you :)
| whitehouse3 wrote:
| This became worse during COVID as many of the presenters work
| from home and aren't as savvy with their momentary mute. Lots
| of swallowing, coughing, and nose whistling. Particularly
| during Morning Edition.
| justaman wrote:
| I don't know who it is, but one person in particular seems to
| have a retainer and it is unbearable. Every time they talk
| about "tthiss" or "thsat".
| jhpankow wrote:
| If it is a female my misophonia suggests it is Mary Louise
| Kelly. I've gotten used to it. There is also a male voice on
| one of the weekend shows that might be who you're describing.
|
| I wrote in to a cable TV show a decade ago to call out the
| nose hair whistling and mouth sounds. They never replied to
| me, but they rolled off the highs for the remainder of the
| shows.
| cainxinth wrote:
| There was one NPR broadcaster who used to read the news on
| weekend mornings for my local station (WHYY), I forget her
| name, and I haven't heard her in a while thankfully, but
| she literally whispered the news.
|
| It was like someone I don't know, whispering sweet,
| unsolicited nothings in my ear. Felt uncomfortably intimate
| in a way I hated. I was always like, "Lady, I don't know
| you like that, so cut it out."
| jhpankow wrote:
| Years ago when I moved for my first job out of school I
| decided to set my clock radio to the local NPR station
| (KERA Dallas) to wake up to the news. I had to switch to
| a hard rock station because I'd fall back asleep to their
| soft voices.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The amount of vocal fry on NPR has become as bad as Mary
| Louise Kelly's dry mouth clicking. And once you hear it,
| you can't unhear it.
| dannyw wrote:
| Reminds me of ASMR.
| whitehouse3 wrote:
| This is especially notable with Peter Overby. Excellent
| journalist and presenter, though.
| ericcholis wrote:
| I was always impressed with how crisp remote guests or hosts
| often sound. Rather than sounding like they've called in, they
| sound like they're in-studio. Not terribly difficult to achieve,
| the remote person likely has a good audio setup and sends that
| recording to the engineer to mix together. Still, a nice touch.
| dylan604 wrote:
| A lot of times, the remote guest visits an NPR station near
| them rather than visiting the location the show is being
| recorded.
| whitehouse3 wrote:
| In my experience the hardest part of this is syncing the remote
| audio files. For T>30 minutes the drift can be substantial.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Huh, I've consciously thought in the past of this as an
| outsider and concluded that by now it's a common enough task
| so of course they must've had an algorithm for doing it
| automatically.
|
| Is there really nothing coming close to that?
| andrewzah wrote:
| As someone who worked as an audio engineer, solving
| problems before they can occur saves so much time and
| headache. There's no reason to faff about with software or
| complexity-inducing algorithms when the whole problem can
| be fixed by toggling one switch.
|
| Technically you could accomplish the same thing by applying
| a parametric eq to the master buss, but then you're no
| longer software agnostic.
|
| It's like photography; sure one can post-process photos in
| photoshop. But getting everything right before taking the
| picture, at a hardware level, simplifies things for
| everyone involved.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| There are plugins for different scenarios, but it turns
| into one of those problems where hearing and correcting
| issues is much easier for humans than computers. The tools
| available make it easier to fix problems, but it still
| takes a recording engineer to spot-check.
| surement wrote:
| unless they used a different sample rate, why would there be
| a drift?
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| The clock drifts. Something needs to count those seconds.
| Even when the drift is small, phasing distortions become
| pretty obvious on lengthy recordings.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Sample rates in audio hardware aren't like programming
| constants, where they're the same for everybody. Over 30
| minutes, a 0.05% sample rate error gets you 1s of drift
| over the recording. As a reference, USB 2.0 has a 0.25%
| frequency tolerance (and is used to clock many audio
| devices).
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Cheap quartz clocks in computers and some USB ADCs
| especially are prone to slightly changing their rates
| depending on temperature. So the sample rates can differ
| relative to each other.
| bscphil wrote:
| And even if they had, there should not be any trouble
| resampling them into the correct rate for the project.
| ralmeida wrote:
| Maybe actual clock differences? Not sure if that's the
| case, but in audio engineering, a separate clock may be
| used to keep all devices involved in-sync (many pro-level
| audio devices have a "clock" input for this very reason).
| moftz wrote:
| In RF engineering, it's typical to have all of your
| equipment referencing the same 10MHz clock (or a 1 pulse
| per second or IRIG-B). If I don't have a GPS receiver or
| a rubidium source, then I'll just pick the newest, most
| expensive piece of equipment with a built-in reference
| clock and fan it out to the rest of the equipment on the
| bench. Some portable spectrum analyzers have built-in GPS
| receivers so even out in the field you know you have a
| good reference.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I've wondered about this in long-form talk podcasts I listen
| to. I always just assumed there were audio file formats that
| included timecode.
| FiatLuxDave wrote:
| Do you have any insights you can offer on how best to do
| this? I have to deal with drift issues on signal processing
| of .wav files, and I have always used a marker pulse every so
| often.
|
| Is there a better way?
| bogomipz wrote:
| Interestingly one of the most enduring shows on NPR is Fresh
| Air with Terry Gross and she traditionally has not had her
| guests in the studio with her over her 40 plus years hosting
| the show. She has even spoken about how she's been able to use
| this to her advantage. This following is quick read on this:
|
| https://www.inquirer.com/philly/entertainment/WHYY-NPR-Terry...
| myself248 wrote:
| ISDN.
|
| This is one of the last, best uses of ISDN. Guaranteed latency,
| ultra low jitter, and plenty of high-quality hardware purpose-
| built for getting the best possible studio audio over 2 bearer
| channels worth of capacity.
| bogomipz wrote:
| Indeed, this was also the original use case of ISDN before
| the internet.
| [deleted]
| user3939382 wrote:
| I chuckled at the headline because NPR's audio is a long-running
| inside joke in my family, particularly that you can so often hear
| what we call the "mouth noises" of the host (lip smacking, etc).
| bane wrote:
| The bass roll-off is an important factor. If you listen to your
| other top-40 radio stations, the DJs sound like they are
| pronouncing the hits from the top of Mount Olympus, with thundery
| basses and reverb designed to shake you awake and make you pay
| attention. It's frankly exhausting to listen to, and NPR's
| attention to this small thing makes it possible to listen to
| people talking for hours on end.
| golergka wrote:
| Top-40 audio engineers are not wrong. Just as you wouldn't
| format long walls of text and single short phrases the same way
| in typography, you wouldn't mix these two the same way.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Just as you wouldn 't format long walls of text and single
| short phrases the same way in typography_
|
| Topic drift: I hammer on my students that contracts are
| _much_ more readable if done in short, _single-subject_
| paragraphs _without_ long wall-of-words passages.
| golergka wrote:
| I always thought that legal language looks like C code that
| heavily relies on macros after it has been through a
| preprocessor.
|
| Don't lawyers have effective ways to include and reference
| things, create standard definitions and procedures without
| pasting the same stuff everywhere?
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Don 't lawyers have effective ways to include and
| reference things, create standard definitions and
| procedures without pasting the same stuff everywhere?_
|
| In some fields, yes -- but as a class, lawyers: (A)
| notoriously prefer reinventing the wheel, and (B)
| sometimes could be suspected of hoping that the MEGO
| Factor -- Mine Eyes Glaze Over -- will cause the other
| side's contract-draft reviewer to overlook something that
| the drafter buried in a long, wall-of-words provision. I
| see that happen pretty regularly.
|
| (In the 1990s I initiated and headed up a project for the
| American Bar Association Section of IP Law to try to
| standardize the _wording_ of various building-block
| clauses for software license agreements. [0] The chief IP
| counsel of a Fortune X company [X being a very-low
| number], whom I knew pretty well from the Section, said
| he was opposed to having any kind of standardized
| language because, he said (paraphrasing), "I want to be
| free to be an asshole.")
|
| [0] https://www.oncontracts.com/docs/Rutgers-MSLP-
| Precursor-to-G...
| xxpor wrote:
| >Don't lawyers have effective ways to include and
| reference things, create standard definitions and
| procedures without pasting the same stuff everywhere?
|
| That could actually turn out to be worse. Take a look at
| a lot of federal bills. They're written like:
|
| 'In 8 USC 552(b)(ii) strike the word "foo" and insert
| "bar baz"'
|
| You then have to go cross reference everything for every
| line. It's a nightmare. If the bill was written in a
| computer readable diff format instead, that could be
| better.
| ruairidhwm wrote:
| You wouldn't believe the lack of efficiency in law firms
| (much of the cost of which is passed to clients). When I
| tried selling SAAS to law firms, there was a degree of
| resistance because efficiency threatens the charge by the
| unit model.
|
| I no longer work in law ;)
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Aren't some contracts designed to not be readable with long
| drawn out passages?
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Aren 't some contracts designed to not be readable
| with long drawn out passages?_
|
| From the oleaginous Francis Urquhart in the wonderful
| original (British) version of House of Cards: " _You_
| might think that. _I_ couldn 't possibly comment." [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJFiByfiRTA
| swivelmaster wrote:
| It's also the extremely heavy compression that radio stations
| use in order to KEEP EVERYTHING SOUNDING AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE
| ALL OF THE TIME
| jaywalk wrote:
| The DJ's voice has to match with what they're talking over.
| NPR's sound would be ridiculous talking over the intro of a Top
| 40 song.
| namdnay wrote:
| "Welcome to K-Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies weekend"
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