Posts Tagged ‘voiceover recording studio’

ISDN radio session

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I’ve just been providing ISDN radio interview services for Markettiers4DC.  Children’s writer and illustrator Alex T Smith was in the dVoiceBox booth where he was joined by Melanie Goodchild, spokesperson for toy manufacturer Chad Valley.

They were lined up for a dozen radio interviews to talk about new research commissioned by Chad Valley that looked at the time of peak creativity in your life – plus the things that make adults reluctant to read or play with their children.  Apparently peak imaginative creativity is at around age 4!  Also adults are often reluctant to play with children, or even read stories complete with silly voices, because they feel self conscious or worry that they aren’t “doing it right”.

It was an interesting, varied and enjoyable session – with the usual chops and changes – one radio station pulled out at the last minute, another station took the interview live on-air but the presenter sounded woefully under prepared, while others were well prepared, asked good questions and got great interaction with the guests.

This kind of ISDN  radio session often gives me a slight pang of nostalgia – in all my years of working as a radio presenter I did loads of ISDN interviews. Many times in the past I was like the presenters I heard in this session – checking levels, struggling with the weird echo effect you get on ISDN lines, explaining about the pre-recorded or live nature of the interview, asking the questions. Now I find it’s interesting to be at the other end of that process.

However, unlike when I was the radio interviewer, these days I certainly have much more of an appreciation of how hard it is for the interviewees: constantly answering the same questions in each interview while trying to make it sound like they’re saying it for the first time. Both Alex and Melanie did a great job.

New Mixing Console

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We’ve just taken delivery of a new mixing desk at dVoiceBox.  It’s not to replace our Soundcraft Ghost, which continues to do great service in the control room but is for our voice booth.  It’s a 16 Channel Allen and Health Mix Wizard 4 and we’ll be using it for self-op ISDN voiceover sessions in the booth. It will also be available for self-op recording sessions in the booth too.

In addition the new console will also be replacing our trusty but ancient Soundcraft Spirit Folio desk for dmusic PA duties or for event recording activities like the Love in Leamington poet and multi-performer event we recorded earlier this year.

There’s quite a lot to desks to choose from in the 12-16 channel mixer market and it’s fair to say that Allen and Heath aren’t the cheapest manufacturer for this size of desk. However what swung it for me was the superior build quality plus the overall spec for the WZ4 which includes on board effects.

In common with other Allen and Heath desks the MW4 features an individual circuit board dedicated to each channel and bolted to the main panel where others have one single circuit board for the whole desk – mounted parallel to the main panel.  I wanted a good quality desk that would be at home in the studio while rugged enough for live situations and the WZ4 seemed to fit the bill.

It’s installed in our booth and has already been successfully used for a couple of self op recording sessions. We’ve also road tested it with the dmusic PA at a recent Firedaze gig near Leamington. It proved to be easy to use with a clear board layout, long throw faders, plenty of gain on the channels, effective EQ, nice on-board reverb/fxs and enough auxes to feed rather more monitor mixes then we have monitors for!

Looks like it could be quite a dependable workhorse.