(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Y'all ready to be history? Let's get started. Welcome Hi Hi Hi Hello everyone! to the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional, they're motivated. Thanks to Tribooth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording, and Austrian Audio, making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post, Chicago. Darren Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney.
Tech to the VO Stars. George the Tech Whittam from LA. And me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home studio guy. Line up, man! Here we go! And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite, thanks to Tribooth. Don't forget the code TRIPAP200. That will get you $200 off your Tribooth and Austrian Audio, making passion heard. We have a guest today, Craig Field, who works for the National Archives of Australia, but also was a guy who co-developed with Sony a microphone.
Intriguing. Now, Robbo, you've been chatting with Craig. What's the story? Well, Craig, you might as well tell the story. You used to own a studio here in Sydney called Elkwood before you moved on to the archives, but you got involved with Sony somehow along the way. Tell the story. Look, it's a great story. Sony were very interested in developing a new series of microphones. High resolution audio, particularly in Australia, is not really a big thing. But in Japan, it's quite a thing.
People listen to DSD files and high res PCM files. And throughout Europe, it's always been quite a substantial part of the market over there, actually. And a lot of the larger classical labels have kept it going since pre-CD days. So those formats, although they're not very popular in America or in Australia, they're really quite substantial. So Sony still make high resolution players, like little Walkman players that they sell lots of. And they sound quite amazing.
And I guess the main thing that they really discovered was the main thing missing from the whole high resolution market was the microphones. Because the A to D converters were there, the digital preamps were there, the cable technology and the ability to record in multiple stereo fields was available. But they didn't sort of have the technology for the microphones.
And you guys would probably know the reasons like Neumann's original reasons to do with phase problems above 20k and the development as they develop their microphones. That's why those things were kept at that point in that period of time when microphone development happened.
And so to cut a very long story short, I was pretty much just working in my smaller studio in the Blue Mountains in beautiful Australia, where I had a Steinway Model D concert piano at that time, although I think I may have moved on to the Yamaha. And I was very focused on doing specialist high resolution recordings. And obviously that found its way to Sony and they heard about me. And they sent a man called David Green, who was the product development manager for these microphones.
And he went to a number of different studios in Australia, including some of the really big ones that I won't mention. And they sort of laughed at him saying, what do you need a microphone that goes up to 50k for? And how ludicrous is that? And anyway, he ended up, if I recall correctly, he actually just caught the train up to the Blue Mountains and knocked on my door.
And as you guys would know, rarely do you get someone at your studio, just knock on the door with a bag of microphones saying, hey, hello, here I am from Sony. So that started and I was sent the first beta models. There are a few little problems with those models. I did a lot of recordings and a lot of analysis, which I sent through to the Sydney office and then went to Japan. And we worked together on ironing out a lot of the different issues that occurred in that development.
And then we moved on from that to a performance, which I'll share a video link for, which is on the Sony website, which was in Australia, there's a piano manufacturer called Wayne Stewart. And he's world renowned. He makes pretty much the finest pianos in the world. Steinway will send someone out to take me down for saying that. But Wayne has made some pretty big advancements in the development of the piano.
And one of the pianos that he designed is called the Ballura and it's the largest piano in the world. It's got an additional two octaves on it. And it also is three meters in length. Three meters! Have you seen the one that the guy builds from Latvia or something? He builds it against a wall. It's got to be like, I mean, the low string is a couple of stories tall. It's insane. The Stewart's piano, it's not a kind of an experimental art piece. It's an actual product.
Yeah, it's an incredible thing. And he built it using 1800-year-old Tasmanian sassafras wood that he pulled out of a river in Tasmania. And it's spectacular. And it's down in Ballura. So the whole event, I put together this big production because I'm a bit of a Bach nut and Bach had made a few adventures. We're talking Timber and you're talking Bach. Hey P, I could see where you were going. There was no Bach on the piano though, right?
No, but Bach had made a few organs in his time and he was very much a man ahead of his time. And he had written on a couple of different pieces, suggested ideas, should anyone be able to extend the range of the piano or the organ in that time. And so I knew about that particular piece and I work with a lot of concert pianists. So we went down to Ballura to the inauguration of this giant piano.
And with Sony, we recorded with their new microphones, the first recording of this extended piece of Bach music on the largest piano in the world. So the whole thing took a few years, obviously, and there's a great documentary on the Sony website. It was one of their most popular videos that they did for a thing they called Sony Stories. So we documented the whole thing over a period of years. And yeah, it was a very exciting thing to do as an engineer.
So what's the model of the Sony, that microphone? Did you say it was C-100? Yeah, this is a C-100. And they also brought out a range of pencil microphones that just use the smaller capsule, but they're still linear from sort of 20 to 50k. Who is listening up to 50k? It's not so much the listening, it's a culmination of different perspectives. Firstly, obviously, it's pretty easy to record at 192 these days or at 96k.
And therefore, you can remove some of the Nyquist filtering that's happening in all of our digital recordings. And by extending that Nyquist filter, that filter changes quite drastically as you change it. So for me, working at 32 bit 384 PCM or in DXD, there is no Nyquist filtering. So there's no truncation at any level across any of the frequencies. You just let it alias way up there in the Netherlands of... Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
But the other use for these high frequencies is you can do Foley and you can record ice breaking and then slow it down and still have meaningful information that drops down into the recording, which is just amazing for sound effects, for example. Sure, I see that. That's one of the reasons why people have recorded at 192, for example, was the Foley market.
But in the high resolution market of recording at DSD, for example, the fact that the first DSD recordings and for many, many years, you can't edit a DSD file because it's a one bit file or it used to be. And so you can't cut a bit.
And so for the audio file market and the audio purists and for a lot of the musicians as well, the idea that no one could tamper with that recording, no one can edit that moment in time and that it was captured in full range and full frequency without any intervention has been a really interesting part of the audio world that never really made it to America or Australia or England for that, who developed recording techniques and developed post-production techniques.
So the Europeans went sort of the other way and said, how about we get engineers out of the way? How about we just record and make sure no one can ever tamper with that? So that's a very... What was the distribution method for that? It was discs, like Sony had the dual discs that were CD and DSD smashed together in one. SACD, yeah, SACD, gotcha. And also I have a record label with native DSD and had a label in partnership with Sony during that time to release some of those files.
That Bach recording is available on native DSD. Was it Pyramix? It was the only ones that did a DSD editor, I believe, right? Did anybody else do DSD editing? There were a few different people like Sequoia used to be able to do DSD when it first came out and things like that. So there were a few, but most of them have fallen away and dropped it as a format.
And Pyramix still offers DSD, but there is no real native one-bit recording now because the chips are advanced enough to be able to offer four bits or five bits without any major errors. So there's not really that pure one-bit recording that used to be. So there are some editing options in Pyramix. You can do some editings in DSD and that makes the file a PCM file for that edit and then joins it back together.
Just to bring you guys up to speed, the way one-bit recording works is it's always looking at the next bit and it just says, is the next bit above or below where I was before? It's almost like a delta-sigma converter taken to the extreme. And so it's just floating there. Am I higher or lower than I was before in the sample rate? What's the sample rate of DSD? Like 2.8 megahertz or something? Yeah, 2.8 megahertz. It's so up there that the rise time is instantaneous practically anyway.
So higher, higher, higher, higher. It just, you get practically a straight wall going up. Wow. You also get a digitized pure sine wave. And the way that they first developed it was to sort of trick the computer into thinking it was actually thinking it was recording a time code, but it wasn't. It was recording a pure sine wave because you've got a positive and a negative and that's all you got. You got one bit. You either got a one or a zero.
So ultimately, you're as close to pure analog as you can possibly get. So it's a wonderful format. And it sounds great, guys. If you've never tried it, go and buy an old... Overkill for voiceover probably. But yeah. The only ones I remember were GenX made. I did do a recording and it was a GenX that had some DSD recorders, I believe. Those big boxes that they used to have. Yeah. They did a big hardware recorder. And Tascam made a DSD hardware recorder that's still out there called a DA3000.
And that's how I started in DSD. Just as a proof of purchase, I wanted to hear if it actually had any significance. And it sounded unbelievable. And I had great equipment and was recording at 96 and all of this sort of stuff and doing a lot. And this is going back 12 years and 14 years. And I think it's even 16 years now. But really, it sounded remarkably good. Yeah, right. Going back to the mic. The C100, looking at US prices, is $1 ,200.
Okay. And this is a microphone that, from what I'm understanding, is like, what would you call theoretically perfect? Isn't it $800? Or was I looking at something wrong over here? That was a used price, I found. No, I thought it was that one for... It's a mic that's like theoretically perfect. Is that a kind of a way to describe it to an idiot? No, no. I don't think there is such a microphone. I think what it offers is something... I mean, is this close?
No, no. You wouldn't want to stick this inside a kick drum. No, I don't mean perfect for anything. But I mean accurately accurate from 5 hertz to 50k. Like from the way the DPA would say, here's your measurement microphone. And it's just like flat from here to infinity. Whatever flat is. I'm just trying to conceptualize, understand this mic. Because we're supported by and we use Austrian Audio and they have one called the 818. It's a twin capsule mic where there's two capsules out of phase.
You know, it's front and rear, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but that's a standard sort of cardioid thing. Yeah, same exact price, right? So I'm looking at this mic and going, in a world of microphones that range from $80 to $8,000 to, you know, whatever. The $1,200 price point for what the performance of this microphone is, it seems like it has no peer. I mean, am I right? Uh, well, there are sunken microphones. There's a couple of others. But yeah, it's a really, really good microphone.
One of the things that Sony developed with their Valve microphone, and they recognized this through older microphone development, was they built an anti -vibrational technology within the microphones. And that means that the reverberance in the capsule is very minimized. And that sort of reverberant sound that does happen in large format capsules. And it may be one of the reasons why Austrian Audio have gone with the shape of their microphone as well.
You know, you've got a large drum, you know, and if you're putting it near, you know, noisy sound sources, there's sound and reverberance within that. And it has caused problems. They found that in the initial development of their big Valve microphone, and they developed a really, really substantial means of sort of decoupling and isolating any reverberant sound within the capsule.
And so the Sony to really function well in recording those high resolution sounds, they had to sort of invest and really redeveloped that decoupling and that soundproofing within the microphone. So it's a great, it's a really, really wonderful mic. And the pencil microphones are just, you know, amazing. Like second to none, they're really, really good. So, yeah. Sounds like in terms of decoupling, like there's only one mic stand company I've seen try to like maximize that whole design.
That was the Enhanced Audio Stands. You ever heard of them out of Ireland? Look, I use these guys, try at all. But have you ever seen these? Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I love those. What's the model of the Sony pencil mic? I think it's ECM 100 or ECU 100. They do a cardioid and an omni. Yeah, ECM. Because God, I remember back in the day, I had a pair of ECM 33Ps. There's, what's that? ECM 100U, is that the same? Yeah. Is that it? That's unidirectional. So that'd be the, yep.
And then there's an ECM N, non-directional. Omni. They're tiny. So if I'm looking at the 100, to me, I'm having trouble with scale. But the 100, that smaller diaphragm up there still looks pretty, it's a big, small diaphragm. It's not like, certainly not anything like Earthworks is trying to put out. But that's the same diaphragm that's on those ECM 100s? Yeah, it is.
And look, Earthworks is slightly different because they're trying to elongate the capsule and get the distance between the diaphragm and the preamp within the microphone. And that's a different concept altogether. You know, the extended diaphragm, like a number of different microphone manufacturers have gone with that idea of, you know, and B&K, I think, went that way as well. They wanted that extended microphone, like the diaphragm removed from the preamplifier.
There's a whole lot of reasons why they do that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, they do that for stage reasons so they can put the nice little gooseneck on it too. But I think also Earthworks' idea is that, and they take it more to the nines than even maybe B&K do, but as the diaphragm gets smaller, its weight is smaller, it becomes more accurate, but then the problem is it becomes noisy because it's so small because you're trying to amplify like nothing, essentially. Yeah, that's good there.
I will send you a link, Robbo, so that people can watch the doco that Sony did on the world premiere recording of this giant piano, and we used the mics. I obviously hadn't necessarily recorded with the microphones in a different environment, and I'd never recorded a piano with that much sound and volume and sound range. And my goodness, it was so stressful, guys.
As engineers, can you imagine having six Sony executives fly over with translators and stand behind you while you're setting up and doing your first recording? I'm interested what type of... Like, it must have been in a concert hall or something to have a three-meter piano, surely. Well, I think it's actually... I'll send you the doco and then maybe we can have another podcast about it because you've got to see where it is. It's in a private...
It was in a reclusive billionaire's house who became a composer in his 40s and tucked himself away and was barely seen for the rest of his life and built this enormous pavilion and has sort of left his fortune to fund the arts. And yeah, the Ballora piano is down there in his pavilion, and it's amazing. It's not the piano that's actually shown in the Sony website, sony.net, for the microphone, is it? That is, yeah. Okay, I'm looking at it now. Do you know someone named Hudson Fair?
I know Hudson Fair. Only through social media. We've chatted a fair bit. We use a lot of the same stuff. He's a fair sort of a guy, actually. No, he's the local in Chicago. I shouldn't say local. He's international, but I've worked for him and done a lot of recording. When he needs somebody, he can just go into microphones to no end as well. He's got quite the collection. He has used the Sonys. He likes them. I'm just thinking Robert and Craig locked in a room for a weekend. Wait, yeah.
We should record that. Let's do it. Frequency modulator springs to mind. Oh, come on. We could get exciting. Well, that was fun. Is it over? The Pro Audio Suite. With thanks to Tribus. And Austrian Audio. Recorded using Source Connect. Edited by Andrew Peters. And mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging. With tech support from George the Tech Whittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. So leave a comment, suggest a topic or just say g'day.
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