A couple of thoughts

Actually, the first one’s more of a moan than anything constructive. I never heard back from BT about the possibility of having ISDN installed. My “webform” seems to have disappeared into the ether, despite the confirmation emails I received. Upon calling them, I found myself directed to a third-party supplier who have some kind of deal with BT to supply to SMEs. They informed me that they needed to create an account for me with BT before they did anything, and sent me a form to fill in and fax back (how last century!) That was three days ago. And still I wait. Let’s hear it for bureaucracy…

In the meantime I’ve been investigating the feasibility of a silent – or “near-silent”, as this will doubtless turn into a hair-splitting exercise before long – PC for my booth. The recent upgrades in acoustic treatment (did I mention that I spent most of last Friday with a can of spray adhesive and a box of acoustic tiles?), plus a new mic preamp and the like, have made me realise that the fan in my MacBook is running a little louder than is ideal. No one’s said anything yet – and I always manage to minimise it in post-production – but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time, especially when I start doing live sessions.

There are a couple of companies in the UK that supply this type of machine, and a mate of mine who builds PCs as a hobby is also primed to have a look into it when he returns from China at the end of the month. The biggest issue I face in there seems to be space, as there isn’t any. A few people have suggested putting the PC outside the booth, but that would encroach on the bedroom, and – having taken over half the walk-in wardrobe already – I feel this may be a step too far for my other half.

Finally, as this is a voiceover blog, I’m toying with the idea of recording the posts in audio as well as in text. It would be another way to demonstrate my skill, if nothing else, though I might stop short of calling it a “Podcast”. I’m not fully committed to this yet, as the facility to dash off a few lines at will is more immediate than having to commit to recording proper audio every time, but it’s a thought!

Accent-uating the positive?

The Daily Telegraph reports today that “cockney voices are the UK’s most hated regional accents”. This came as a bit of surprise to someone who grew up in Wolverhampton and who spent most of his formative years (and a fair chunk of those since) trying to lose his own regional “twang”.

Granted, I grew up on the edge of what my parents used to refer to as “The Connurbation”. We were a short cycle ride away from where the bleak, seemingly never-ending industrial sprawl that takes in Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall, Birmingham et al gives way to rolling fields and the countryside of Shropshire and Staffordshire. To be sure, my immediate family never sounded as “broad Black Country” as some of the kids I went to school with, either. And yet, despite the fact that I was encouraged to talk “properly” (as my Mum would put it whenever I came out with some dialect word or other, or ran my consonants together too lazily), I was acutely aware, from the age of about eight or nine, that no one on the radio or television sounded either like me, nor like anyone else I knew.

That’s right – in the West Midlands, with the notable exception of one or two “local characters” like Tony Butler (an ex-colleague for whom I have a few choice descriptions of my own to add), no one in the local media sounded like they came from the area!

And so it was that, as I grew up developing a keen interest in the media, and taking the view that radio and television were things to “be on” rather than to listen to or watch, I gradually slipped out of my West Midlands accent (don’t ever call it “Brummie” – that’s something else entirely…) and into a more neutral gear. Fair enough, people are always asking me where I’m from, but that’s mostly because they can’t place me anymore. They will, of course, agree that they could tell all along once I’ve pointed out my roots, but they’d never guess on their own. In fact, the most regular question I get asked nowadays is whether I’m Australian – but I guess that’s one of the hazards of living with a Tasmaniac.

It has puzzled and perplexed me, in recent times, that even the least desirable accents, such as those I grew up surrounded by, are now seemingly coming into vogue. Adrian Chiles would never, I imagine, have got his own show on national television a few years back, sounding, as he does like a broad Brummie – he’d have been relegated to the role of “comic relief” on something like That’s Life. And yet there he is at 7pm on BBC One. Well done that man!

For my own part, I’ve always tried to resist attempts to pull me back to the Black Country way of speaking, despite suggestions that it might help me to carve my niche and break through into areas of work which are crying out for regional accents. In my own case, I think it’s because I just don’t like the way that accent sounds. Not only that, but to do Black Country properly, there’s a big chunk of dialect in there too. I’m still not sure that the British public at large is ready for “Owm yer gooin’ arr kid? Am yow alroit?” And something in my upbringing, rightly or wrongly, made me think that “talkin’ loik that” would make people think I was a bit “stoopid”.

Then, last week, along came a script for me to audition for, for a local radio station in Birmingham. It called for a West Midlands accent, and I decided to have a go. It felt very weird to be putting the accent on after all this time. And when I’d finished I really wasn’t sure I’d pulled it off, so I had to play my clip down the phone to my parents to check whether it was authentic enough. I was relieved, in some ways to hear that it was, indeed, authentic, but more so that it sounded like a “high end West Midlands accent”. Phew, not Lower Gornal then after all…

Estuary accents, my voice coach tells me, develop for a very sound reason (no pun intended). Those who live near the sea are constantly blighted by the chill winds and salty air coming off the coast. The natural defence is for the body to drop the soft pallate at the back of the mouth, to reduce the amount of dry, salty air reaching the throat. The result? Nasal resonance is invoked and the Estuary sound is born. This seems to apply from London to New York and wherever there’s a prevailing sea breeze.

Biting the bullet

OK, today I started the process of putting my money where my mouth is. I can’t just go ahead and put my money there because BT need to do a site survey before telling me whether they’re prepared to install my line. Mo Dutta, vendor of AudioTX, tells me I require ISDN 2e “in a point-to-multipoint configuration”, so I’ve quoted this on my online enquiry form. I was pleased to learn that my online enquiry is important to BT and, as such, they hope to respond within 48 hours. Watch this space…

One bit of money I’ve managed to masticate on successfully today has been spent on some acoustic foam panels for my booth. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been recording in my walk-in wardrobe for the last year-and-a-half and no one’s noticed. I’m nestled away among the coats, shirts and sleeping bags, in the style of something from C S Lewis (cue jokes about coming out of the closet, etc. Thank you and goodnight!) and to help it out a bit I invested in a Reflexion Filter from SE Electronics.

This all sounded pretty fine to my ears, until about a month ago when I upped the ante on a mic preamp and stuck in a Focusrite Voicemaster Pro. This is either a) a much better preamp than the one I was using or b) has a much better headphone amp that reveals more of the background noise – or c) both of the above.

Either way, the combination of the new preamp and the cull of our out-of-season collection from aforesaid wardrobe has markedly altered the acoustics in there. So, it’s acoustic panels for me from now on to keep things on an even keel. All things being equal, they should be here by the weekend.

ISDN – the Race to Replace (it)

It’s been a week or so since I blogged about my dilemma over ISDN, so I thought it was time to share some more with the group as part of the recovery process.

As I was saying, ISDN, despite being a technology from the 1980s, remains the de facto standard for establishing point-to-point audio between voiceovers and producers. This is still the case both here in the UK and in the States, and ISDN’s ability to maintain a constant bitrate connection between two places is a major factor in this. There are two main reasons why the ADSL broadband internet which so many of us now have can’t match it. The first is that ADSL is optimised (or skewed, depending on your perspective) to favour downloads over uploads. That’s why it’s an “Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line”, rather than a “synchronous” one, where the data flow would be the same each way. If you’re on a slowish ADSL line, where your quoted bandwidth is only 1 or 2 Mbps, then your “up” channel probably isn’t going to cope too well with you trying to stream audio to a third party. A trip to any of the online broadband speed testing applications will be enough to witness the way things are stacked in favour of downloads over uploads.

The second reason why ISDN wins the battle is that the internet is organised differently to a point-to-point connection. Internet Protocol (IP) is specifically designed to route “packets” of data via whatever route is necessary to get them to the other end. When you send an email or download a web page, it’s possible that the components that make it up have reached you via a variety of travel routes. The internet was originally a military installation, and was built around the idea of being able to cope with any one server being taken down unexpectedly.

When you’re reading your favourite website, the fact that it might take some of the bits a little longer to arrive than others isn’t so much of a problem. Even when you’re listening to music or watching TV over the internet, a certain amount of latency is acceptable, and the various playback methods constantly “buffer” enough data to try and cope. Most of the time it works pretty well for data coming in one direction, to you at your PC.

But with a voiceover session, we’re talking about two “quality” lines going in different directions. The studio at the far end needs to hear the voiceover, and they need to be able to talk back to the voiceover in real time, without delays or holdups due to buffering when one bit of the network starts to run slowly.

So, with all this in mind, I – like so many in the industry – have been paying very close attention to the search for the Holy Grail: ISDN performance over IP. At time of writing there are principally two computer programs which aim to replace the need for an ISDN line and allow you to use your broadband line in its place. They are called “Source Connect” and “AudioTX Communicator”.

“Source Connect” is a plugin which works with ProTools and with any program which supports VST or Audio Units. The idea is that, as long as both parties have the relevant software plugins and a reasonable speed connection, the voiceover appears as a channel on the application’s mixer, complete with talkback buttons and so on. Neat, eh?

“AudioTX”, on the other hand, doesn’t require any special software other than AudioTX at either end, so you can use it with whatever equipment and recording software you like. Again, it will do quality audio over IP with talkback. But it already holds a trump card in the nascent battle to replace ISDN. And that is that it can “do” ISDN connections too. As long as your PC has an ISDN card in it (and the only drawback here for me is that it does have to be a PC, rather than a Mac) then AudioTX will happily circumvent the need for a hardware ISDN codec. (For an encore it will doubtless calculate Pi to a million decimal places and make you a pot of tea to drink while you check the figures.)

If all this is getting a bit jargon-heavy, I apologise, but we’re kind of in that territory, whether we like it or not. A “hardware ISDN codec”, at its most basic, is a box with flashing lights that plugs into your ISDN line at one end, plugs into your mixer or soundcard at the other end and has a telephone keypad to let you dial people up for sessions. Sounds simple, but simplicity comes at a price, and that price is currently about £3,000 to £4,000 for something from Sonifex’s Prima range, which seem to be ones to go for.
So, someone like me seems to have three options at this point in time:

Option 1: Buy a hardware ISDN codec, at a cost of £3,500 or so (or pick one up secondhand).

Option 2: Obtain a copy of ProTools or similar and get “Source Connect”, the “pucker” version of which costs £1137 (cheaper versions are available without resilience for those internet dropouts). This allows you to do point-to-point sessions over IP, but only with those who are running Source Connect at the other end.

Option 3: Get AudioTX, which can do both ISDN sessions and those over IP. This would involve me buying a PC (grrr…) fitting it with an ISDN card (roughly £50) and installing AudioTX, which costs, wait for it… £550.

Hang on, that can’t be right, can it? The hardware box costs three grand and just does ISDN, which may be a dead duck within a few years, but the cheaper of the two software solutions can do exactly the same job over ISDN for now, as well as being able to waltz onto the IP dancefloor when the time is right. OK, buying a PC is a factor, but even so…

I think I’m beginning to reach a conclusion about all this, and I think you can probably see where I’m heading.

 

A bad day at work?

Let’s be honest: we all have our “off-days”, don’t we?

When reading the news, I’m prone to slips of the tongue as much as the next announcer (talking about the “presidential erection” and a certain country’s “gash-rich regions” are but two of my more hapless examples), but a couple of things have caught my eyes and ears this past week that have reminded me that, as bad as some of my days sometimes seem, someone else is probably having a complete ‘mare.

Thing number one arrived via email last weekend and provoked a heated debate among my radio colleagues, as well as on the internet at large. It’s an interview between Hardeep Singh Kohli, who Wikipedia describes as “a Sikh writer, presenter, broadcaster and reporter of Indian descent from Scotland”, and Les Ross, a Birmingham-based local radio presenter who the BBC likes to describe as “a West Midlands radio legend”.

I have to say, I’ve been a bit of a fan of Les since my teenage years, at which point Les was well into his second decade of presenting the breakfast show on BRMB. His quick, slightly camp and irreverent way of getting effortlessly from 6 to 9am was a joy to anyone who was listening. And listen they did! Of late, whenever I’ve had occasion to listen across his afternoon show via the ‘net, I’ve begun to wonder if the magic is wearing off. And this little piece of car crash radio has, I’m afraid, done little to reassure me.

OK, the Alan Partridge caption may be being a little unfair to someone whose career has survived thirty-odd years pretty much unscathed until now, but you can kind of see their point. Whoever’s to blame (and the debate on that one will run and run), it’s truly local radio of the worst kind, and cringe-making in the extreme.

Even Les, though, must thank his lucky stars that his day never got this bad… It’s like “Carry On Up The Bulletin”. My favourite bit is when the other guy rushes in and you can hear the newsreader “sssssshhh”-ing, and saying – I’m assuming, as it’s all Greek to me – something like “Keep the noise down! Can’t you see I’m On Air!?” Having this week had my own studio door flung open just in time for me to turn around at the end of the bulletin and spit the words “…BBC News!” at the offender (who scampered like a startled rabbit back into the newsroom), I do sympathise. There but for the grace of God, and all that…

And finally, I’m very glad that I missed this particular combination of end-of-story words by an hour, the dubious honour falling to my colleague, Jerry Smit. For those who know the BBC term, I could make a joke about a “Hard Post” here…

Listening last week to Angus Deayton’s Radio 4 tribute to his friend and collaborator, Geoffrey Perkins, reminded me of one of my all-time radio favourites, which certainly deserves a mention here. Radio Active, anyone?

“ISDN, Sir? Surely you’re mistaken?”

Talk to anyone these days about ISDN and you’re likely to get a blank look – even more so if the person you’re talking to is from BT, it seems. It’s an interesting marker of the rate of progress that the technology they were trying so hard to sell us less than a decade ago has now been consigned largely to the annals of history. Long before “Home Highway” ever became mainstream, it was superseded by ADSL: broadband as we know it today.

Back in 1998, after the break-up of a relationship and upon finding myself largely homeless, I fell upon the kindness of two friends – both technology geeks – whom I lodged with for some months. They had ISDN in their house. They were also very proud of their “Structured Wiring”, which meant that all of our computers, once fitted with 10-Base-100 Ethernet cards, could be networked together and could share the (then-blisteringly fast) 128 kilobits per second connection. 

How things change… within two years my first ever broadband package from BT offered me 512kbps (half a megabit!) broadband; within a year it had doubled to a megabit per second; and the machine I’m now using is connected via ADSL2+ with a theoretical top limit of 24 megabits per second (I say theoretical, because I “only” get about 18…) and all via the same twisted copper pair whose only previous claim to “multimedia” was the occasional foray into Post Office Dial-a-Disc. In other words, my internet connection today is almost 150 times faster than what was on offer with ISDN. Not only that, but in the meantime we’ve all gone Wi-Fi mad and Structured Wiring is another anachronism – for home networking at least.

One of the few areas where ISDN took off outside of the business environment was with the voiceover industry. It caused a not-so-quiet revolution, in fact, and meant that the decades-old system of jobbing VOs hiking around the country for their regular sessions in local radio Com Prod departments largely came to an end. Suddenly it was possible to set up a studio in your wardrobe, stay at home, be available (literally) at the end of a phone line and do the jobs as they cropped up. More choice for producers, less spent on petrol for the voiceovers. And so it’s been for a good few years now, despite the threat from ADSL.

What ISDN provided, and still does, is a dependable, constant bitrate link between two points over a standard phone line, and that makes it perfect for audio. Granted, the bitrate of 128Kbps isn’t that great for music – any illegal MP3 downloader will tell you that – but when optimised for voice with some decent data compression, it’s pretty damned good. ADSL, on the other hand, is optimised for downloading web pages and short bursts of data from a server, and not for uploading constant bitrate audio in the other direction. So, despite the fact that it’s a comparatively old technology, this is one battle where ISDN wins.

The problem, at this point in time, is how long this advantage will last. Telecoms firms across the world are keen to retire ISDN at the earliest opportunity. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, like rolling out broadband at decent speeds to suburban and rural areas, and they’d rather be doing that than supporting what they see as an expensive and outdated legacy system that virtually no one wants.

Having laid the foundations for the argument, in my next post I’ll move on to what this means for someone like me, who doesn’t have ISDN, but is feeling the need to connect. There are some alternatives starting to surface, but picking your way through the minefield isn’t easy…