SLR'd WRDS

Note: this is a repost of a review I did on an older blog about the sE Reflexion Filter. It came up while I was responding to a thread on the JWSound forum and I thought it was still somewhat pertinent and would be worth adding here. It’s originally from March 2010. 

The strikes:

• Small
• Portable

The gutters:

• Not as effective as other options
• Complicated assembly
• Doesn’t feel too solid
• Doesn’t work with all microphones

I already have a RealTraps portable vocal booth. I like it. It works when it needs to and it has come in handy recording in several locations with less than ideal acoustics. Recently, I have been working in a space where the room treatment process isn’t complete; until then I was looking for a quick and dirty fix for some voice over recording.

I began to think that perhaps a better setup would be an sE Reflexion Filter in front of the talent with the larger Portable Vocal Booth behind. Unfortunately, compared to the RealTraps product the sE Reflexion Filter fell short, cutting far less of any given room’s ambience whether the Portable Vocal Booth was behind the talent or not. I tried 3 rooms, a 90 square foot room we use for video editing, a 300 square foot post-production room that also doubles for recording, and a large 1500 square foot open loft space. More… »

I’ve always found it hard to convince clients that good location sound is essential to setting the tone of any piece that requires “sound.” Often, clients and/or producers (who lack experience with these things) try to cut costs on sound until it’s too late. The sad part is that recovering bad sound in post, like most “fix it in post” decisions, can be a shock to the wallet and will never compare to “doing it right” (or, at the very least “doing it well.”)

I was quite happy with the location sound on this project even though I occasionally offered my hand at the B-Camera (all while wearing my 552 with talent on wireless).

A few quick thoughts for why it was worth the (kinda small) extra expense:

• The sound of people’s voices can really draw viewers in and letting them focus on that can be a powerful benefit in getting any message across. Recording these properly makes all the difference.
• The amount of post work required to “get it right” was shockingly minimal. No noise reduction, only a few EQ tweaks and an HPF or two (since I stay conservative with my sweepable HPF on location). When you consider how much time and money was saved at this point in the process it makes it clear why the investment of a location sound recordist is worthwhile.
• We had quality B-Roll sound coverage when we needed it, and in a few scenes where other productions might have said “we don’t need that” (only to want it later), these folks were keen to have the sound done right.

You “hear” a lot of complaints on forums like the Cow and DVXuser about Premiere not having enough transitions. I’ve never used many transitions in the cases where the material was good enough to be used without anything more than a fade and/or cross-disolve, but I have to agree that Premiere (compared to FCP) ships with a set of video transitions one might describe as “sparse.”

A fellow Creative Cow user, suggest the Film Impact transitions; which at the time were only limited to a few “free” offerings. But they were good, really good. We used them in our small shop for a number of projects big and small for about 6 months. Almost nothing went out the door for a while that didn’t have one stuck in there somewhere, not because we could but because they were good and filled a need that had genuinely been missing with Premiere Pro.

Film Impact recently began selling their transitions as part of a larger set. The original set are still free but others are part of a paid package. The paid package runs for $40 and includes ten very useable transitions. At the time of this writing they were running a special to get the set for $20. I like support indie developers; especially ones who work hard to constantly improve their product.

The transitions aren’t currently CUDA-enabled, but I don’t think Adobe has properly opened up that ability to any 3rd party (shame.) However, they are quick to render so it’s not a big drag on time compared to say, Red Giant’s Colorista II or something like that.

In the end we ended up buying a copy of the Film Impact plugins for thee three seats of Premiere at our shop. Enough said.

This addition, in my series on headphones I’ve used, was actually the one that started it all. I was working on a post for DVXUser, but as often happens, it got lengthy and out-of-focus and I decided to work on it here. So, despite being the second to go live, here is the one that got me thinking about my relationships with headphones I’ve used.

I used to use 7509s, I never liked the 7506 pads, but that’s a preference thing only. Regarding both, I never really cared for their sound. (I didn’t ad 7506s to my list because I never owned a pair.)

Now I carry ATH-M50s and some Shure IEMs with me.

While I really like wearing IEMs, taking them in and pulling them out can be a real pain and the slate mic on my mixer isn’t really good enough for me to use that as an in-line listening device for those around me.

Do I like the ATH-M50s? They’re a solid “meh.” I got them early on when Audio Technica were selling them much cheaper (I paid about $105 for them from an authorized dealer) to gain a foothold in the market. They’re probably still competitive today, but with the fire-sale on 7506s I’d be hard pressed to pass them up if I needed cans even with my personal presence being what it is.

While I was never particularly impressed with the sound of the ATH-M50s either, they’ve taken a remarkable beating and continue to tick. The isolation isn’t fantastic, but no better or worse than 7509s and certainly better than the much-more-fragile AKG K550s which I would never take out into the field.

They fold up nicely too.

When it comes to location sound, I need to adjust volumes, assess rejection, reflection, standing waves, cancellation, phase issues and I’m pretty sure most of the above models and many others will work. I just want something that will last and is adequate enough to do the job at hand reliably.

I certainly encourage location soundies to try a good many cans before taking internet-opinion into consideration. How they feel and how they last, in the field, is as important as how they sound.

NB: This post is all opinion. Feel free to disagree/challenge or share your own; but let’s be civil ok?

Here’s the low-down: low-end monitors are, sadly, like a lot of other commodity gear: faddish. People are constantly buying and upgrading within the same low-price range to search for that magic bullet.

What’s hot one minute (because some person claimed brand “X” budget-monitors sounds like a pair of Barefoots or Griffons or ATCs or PMCs or whatever) is often trashed as pure junk 6 months from now for the next consumable item – I realize this is nothing new. Bare with me – there is a point or two in here somewhere.

One point is that most (but not all!) manufacturers are actually trying their hardest to get you the best they can at those price points. If they don’t, someone else gets the dollars they want for their product. It doesn’t mean every budget product avoids being complete garbage, there is a lot of super-cheap (and often knock-off) gear trying to take advantage of hapless consumers, but you’ll also find tools we couldn’t have at these price points even ten years ago.

So, where does that leave us? The conscientious consumer lost in a sea of plastic and marketing rhetoric? Actually, no.

Because if this constant buying and selling  you can find some pretty amazing deals from people trying to sell perfectly good equipment in order stay in-tune with the latest fads. The net result is that with a little searching, you get your hands on some nearly new product that will far exceed current needs and be much better than you could have hoped for buying new.

Remember that monitors are just one piece of the puzzle and worrying too much about any one single piece forgoes the bigger picture. Save some money, visit your favourite used-gear classifieds (Craigslist, Gearslutz, your favourite forum) and find something remarkable on the cheap; then blow the balance of your budget on room treatment or microphones or whatever else you might need (monitor controller) to get the most of our your loudspeakers.

Yes, there are occasions where only new will do, but they are few an far between when it comes to near and midfield monitors.

Quick case study 

I purchased a set of mid-field (or large near fields) monitors for about 1/4 of their price new. To be fair, they were well used and had also been discontinued, but they were also well maintained.

Four years later one of the monitors suffered a catastrophic power amp failure. Indeed, the magic blue smoke was released. It cost nearly $700 to get the monitor repaired. It was a worst case scenario. The amp was no longer being supplied and so the specialist had to rebuild the whole unit.

The decision was relatively easy, after four or five years, even a brand new monitor could blow. Sure, it wouldn’t cost anywhere near that much to fix (one would hope) but even after the repair, and some extra investment in insuring the sister monitor was also fine (it was checked and parts were re-soldered as well) – the money ensured I had a working set of monitors for (hopefully) many more years and was still at a monetary figure that was dramatically less than the cost of a single monitor of equivalent value!

So you want to create a bonded ethernet port to get 2Gb out of your Mac Pro? No problem. Here (more or less) is how.

NB: I should clarify that while the Mac Pro can send out up to 2Gb/sec, individual connections will be limited to the single-physical-link limits. So this works well if you want to use a Mac Pro to serve files to several edit stations, but the improvement in sending to a single station will not be as dramatic, if at all noticeable.

I was 19 or 20. A young lad, looking to buy some top quality cans.

DT770s looked like they were out of the 70s, AKGs looked fantastic except Shaun Fanning wore some on the cover of Time or Newsweek or some other magazine I only saw the cover of (Wired too.) Those same AKGs took a helluva headphone amp to drive though and, despite dual drivers in some models they were incredibly bass-shy.

So, after a few listening sessions using I-don’t-know-what as a reference disc (probably some Bob Marley or Massive Attack or Finley Quaye), I picked the 7509s.

They were comfortable, the bass extension was beyond deep, and they could handle some volume.

I would probably not buy Sony headphones for myself again.

I blew the drivers once. I don’t know how. Despite their ability to go-loud, I never did. The driver replacement was on Sony. They’re finally going again after some use as cans for musician playback monitoring, but this second round, well, it’s still happening; you have to really crank it to tell.

The connector stopped working. I replaced the fancy-looking but ultimately unreliable 1/8″ TRS with a proper 1/4″ TRS for all my audio gear.

Now, 12 years later, I give them to talent, musicians or clients. They came with a big “Professional” sticker on them. They still have it.

But were they worth it? I believe at the time I forked over $250. Absolutely. As noted above, 12 years later, they’re still kicking out the tunes.