It's finally come true!

As you are all probably know, we at the Malex Media Network™ put together a lot of audio-related productions. For example, The Malex Minute, Malex Music, and recordings of various conferences.

We've had great success with all of these things so far, but unfortunately, we've been limited to recording only two channels at once. For example, when recording the Malex Minute, Fopsworth and Quartz usually pass back and forth a shared microphone while in the studio. This allows us to keep everybody's dialogue seperate, but it does not lend itself to smooth performances, good timing, or even well-delivered lines.

Now, some of you might ask, "Why not simply give every actor a microphone and mix down the channels before they're recorded?"

To you I say, "Shame! Shame!" See, we tend to do a lot of post-production work on our audio. Editing, sound effects, mastering, the whole works.

Unfortunately, if you've got four people talking, and one of them is fiddling with his microphone or breathing heavily when he should be silent, it's easy to trim out - but only if the tracks have all been recorded seperately. In fact, if the tracks were mixed down before recording, it would be entirely impossible to clean up that sort of goof.

So I hope we've established that we need to avoid premature mixdowns at all costs.

Now a good reader might suggest using more than one stereo device to record multiple channels. After all, if each stereo recorder yields two channels, and you want four people to be recorded, why not simply use two stereo recorders?

It sure sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? In fact, I attempted this strategy on several recent Malex Minute episodes, with varying degrees of success. Ultimately, we ran into the same problem every single time: Synchronization.

Obviously, if you want to synchronize multiple recordings of anything, you need a reference point. IE, something that you can point to as being absolute for all of the recordings. For example, in film outtakes, you often see a clapper board used to mark the beginning of a take. This is convenient because it provides both a reference sound and a reference image that shows the instant the sound was made. So if you can line everything up to that point, everything else will automatically follow.

The problem? Apparently, my cheap stereo recorders all have different ideas of what "second" means. This can cause all kinds of trouble, as I'm sure you can imagine.

So even with a highly accurate reference point in the recording, my nicely lined-up audio would begin to drift away from itself. Ever so slightly, after twenty minutes or so, things would stop lining up. And at that point, bad things would happen.

In fact, when editing the Malex Minute episodes I used to experiment with this idea, I would routinely have to go through and delete a few milliseconds of silence out of the slower track, just to get things sounding better. But no matter what I did, I could never shake the ghastly echos of what people were about to say.

So, the solution? Fostex MR-8HD! (Note: Break into song here.)

That's right, I bought us a digital, HDD-based multitrack recorder!

It's small, portable, capable of recording four channels simultaneously for a whole day without quitting, it can be plugged into my Linux box via USB for me to get the recorded data off at a moment's notice, and has phantom power on all four mic channels.

I played with this thing all evening yesterday, and I can safely say that this device is a new major step up for Malex Media Network™ production. We're going to be using this for everything. I think it could even be used as the cornerstone of a really solid, high-quality audio recording setup for on-location or in-studio filming situations.

(We just need to keep our scenes under ten-ish minutes in length, so the audio and video will stay in sync with one another.)

I have other stuff going on, but I'm going to have to quit for now so I can write tomorrow's Malex Minute. I know it's late, but our new multitrack recorder will step in at the last minute and save the day, right?

ttyl!

--Alex Markley

Of course 90% of all accidents happen within 10 miles of the home! Where else would you spend 90% of your time?

This entry was transmitted from the field by Alex's Palm T|X. Long live Palm!