< maintains heroic silence >
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Pats Gus on back and awards a large gin for heroism
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Acting is performative, I assume, so if it gets no reaction it’s hard to get right.
American comedians working from their attics are having a harder time when they have no audience with reactions to gauge, for instance, and I suppose Archers actors get reactions from the facial expressions of the people they are acting with.
In any case, recording in sessions linking their houses would get rid of that problem, wouldn’t it, because they’d react to each other while they were doing it.
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One does rather wonder what some of those expressions might be 
OK, that is a trifle unfair - there are some very good actors in the cast.
PS: I hope the above doesn’t mean I have to give this gin back
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I have never seen gin imbibed so fast
Respect to a Gus!
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Thank you: I needed that ;- )
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Indeed - that’s just what the videoconference server is good for, not for making a broadcast-quality recording but for letting you get immediate responses from other people. (There are encoding/decoding delays, but these turn out not to be hard to fix - especially if you’re taking more time to edit than I do, and potentially stretching and shrinking people’s silences to get the timing right.)
(edited to add - I’m doing about 2½ hours of audio a week, in my spare time.)
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If brain injured folk and their helpers can manage to bake and have yoga class together on zoom one would hope that actors could manage to act together
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Well well. I was right. "Over 20 of us in the cast got sent a massive box with a big halo shield and a mic stand and a microphone and a very detailed email about how to put it altogether.
“It wasn’t too bad. My 10-year-old son helped me.”
But alas, the BBC tech were not allowed to do as good a job as you do, Hedgers. In spite of all that shiny equipment.
“Some of the cast have been recording themselves and others, like Dowler, have been linked up to a sound engineer and director. There have also been a mix of Zoom rehearsals and individual runthroughs with directors.”
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OK, a microphone and not a recorder - that’s interesting. So they’re relying on people’s individual laptops, and possibly even their (highly, er, variable) sound cards.
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The speakers on my ancient Waptop shriek, & I have to use a headset to be able to listen to, or reply to anything.
Carinthia.xx
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To be fair, if they have any half decent laptop it should use the Intel HD audio chipset - that allows up to 192k sample rate. Well beyond anything you need for speech - CD is only 44.1k and I’ve never used more than 96k. It’s been the de facto standard since around 2007.
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It’s not the chipset, it’s the analogue stage from microphone plug to digitiser where corners are cut and noise sneaks in.
(And fan noise of course.)
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Muted in the case of TA. Curses not loud but deep, mainly.
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…hmmmmm, lemme see now! (…proffers two cocoa-tins plus length of string)
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If it were me, I’d have issued them all with one of these:
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/zoom-h4
We’ve been using one since 2008, with no problems at all. They’re a favourite for location work, so I’m sure the Beeb have a few dozen lying around. As to the quality, try this - just stuck the Zoom on an empty pew at the front of the First Derry Presbyterian Church and pointed it at the piano:
OK - it was professionally mastered for release, but then so were the studio recordings on the same album - and that would also be the case at the BBC. The point is that the raw recording (only intended to be a document of the première) was of a sufficient standard to be usable.
The current model, the H6, uses interchangeable capsules, so is adaptable to a huge range of recording situations. We’ve just never seen the point in upgrading while the old one still works! (And if you’re really concerned with quality, you can plug in any mics you want - it has phantom power
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Yup, my Tascam’s very much the same sort of beast. Gets the job done, no messing about.
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Tascam have always had a good reputation (still have an old cassette 4-track PortaStudio somewhere!)
DR-40 perchance? Not used one, but I’ve heard great reports; truth to tell the innards are probably identical!
Mind you, I still lust after one of these…
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Yup. I’m told it’s still the beast of choice for smuggling into concerts under your jacket…
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Was stopped because of the Zoom once. I was there at the request both the composer and performers, but some little gobshite wanted to try and throw his weight around. I’m not sure he appreciated the organiser telling him to get back to putting out chairs like he was being paid to do.
Talking of jumped-up gobshites:
You’ve replied 3 times to @HedgeSparrow in this particular topic!
A great discussion involves many voices and perspectives. Can you get anybody else involved?
Others are entirely welcome to join in. Just not over-zealous bots. Return to your spaceship* and leave.
*UFO
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