This appeared in New Scientist

I wrote this shortly after I was made redundant from TVS and thrown into the freelance market again. I was full of bile and I think that this shows through. The piece was heavily sub edited and that is to blame for any infelicities. The layout is a bit odd because I haven't figured out a way to make this blog accept the illustrations that were a part of this essay as published.

new     scientist

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Never mind the sound, see the pictures Nick Flowers is concerned about some unsound practices A

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' Television sound, like sound in films, has always been an area ignored by the media moguls'

new developments in televi­sion technology. The media and industry regularly debate the merits and demerits of different systems of high-definition TV and specialists explore ways of using digital technology to transmit pictures. Televi­sion companies are already shooting wide-screen pro­grammes and broadcasters are extending NICAM digital stereo sound across Britain. And digital processing has revolutionised the graphics that we now see daily on our screens.

But with all these great improvements in handling and transmitting the signal, it is ironic that at the sharp end, where real life gets turned into electronic impulses by the camera, there has been a major degradation in recent years in the quality of the television programmes that we receive.

Television sound, like sound in films, has always been an area ignored by the media moguls. They seem to take the extraordi­nary attitude that the pictures are the all important part, and that sound can be relegated to the position of a poor relation, a tiresome hanger-on. Yet if the sound breaks down during a programme, pictures alone will not usually suffice to convey what is going on adequately. But if sound remains and the picture goes, you can eas­ily keep up with the plot. Radio is still with us; silent movies went out years ago.

Despite this, the television companies decided a few years back to phase out the sound recordist on the majority of news-gathering operations. Instead of there being a skilled technician operating sensitive and sophisticated equipment, all the while monitoring the quality of sound on head­phones, it now became the job of the reporter to hold a primitive, robust micro­phone, while the recording of the audio signal onto the tape was done automati­cally within the camera, with no one to check that all was well.

The results were immediately obvious— and irritating, especially to those who had bought NICAM television sets in the hope of enjoying improved sound. NICAM will demonstrate the flaws in a soundtrack just as faithfully as the perfection. If the reporter uses his or her microphone inex­pertly, the voice of the interviewee is dis­tant or distorted. Lapel microphones are so mispositioned that the speaker's voice appears muffled. But the chief fault is the sound of wind in the background.

A microphone will respond to a moving current of air, as opposed to pressure waves in still air, by producing a rumbling sound which becomes worse as the velocity of the

air increases. The recordist can improve matters by putting a properly designed foam protector over the microphone, and by filtering out some of the low frequencies in which the rumbling lies, but this works only in light winds.

As soon as the speed of the air current increases to more than 20 kilometres an hour, what is needed is a windgag: a cylin­der made of a plastic mesh and covered by a thin fabric, within which the microphone is placed. The moving cur­rent   of  air   is   diverted smoothly around the sur­face of the fabric, leaving still air surrounding the microphone.   The   larger the windgag, the smoother is the airflow over its sur­face and thus the less is the turbulence. The effect is improved even more by a jacket  of long  fibres, which   is   known   as   a Dougal after the shaggy character   in   The   Magic Roundabout. This absorbs the energy in the windflow along the sur­face of the windgag.

A windgag with a Dougal works remark­ably well, even in gale-force winds, although if it becomes wet, other problems begin to appear, such as loss of the higher frequencies. But its effectiveness is related to its size, and reporters or camera opera­tor just cannot cope with such a bulky object as well as discharging their other duties. So viewers see, and hear, a com­promise; a microphone with a little bit of foam on top, or a small windgag. Everyone hopes that the wind will not blow too strongly, but it does and viewers hear it. And because it is "only" sound which is suffering, that is considered acceptable by those who make the decisions.

It will not surprise the more cynical among us to see that the rot is now spread­ing further. Having convinced themselves

that it is all right to save money by not em­ploying sound technicians, the Great and the Good are looking for other ways to make savings and have come up with an answer: the use of amateur video cameras. Although manufacturers have greatly improved amateur video in recent times, there is still an obvious difference between the picture quality of such equipment and that of professional cameras. This has not stopped news editors using amateur video on news stories where a dramatic event was cap­tured by a passer-by, and that is, of course, fine. But in some recent pro­grammes on holiday and consumer matters, pro­ducers have given jour­nalists an amateur camcorder and sent them off to record an item. Perhaps the producers think that the result has a raw punchiness that bites through to the viewer; more likely they rub their hands over the money saved in not using a professional crew. Whatever the reason, we see wobbly, burnt-out pictures and hear distant, broken sound.

News organisations make no secret of
their intention to issue their journalists with
camcorders, so we can look forward to a
proliferation of programmes with the qual­
ity of a home-movie on our TV sets. But TV
sets today are designed, and priced, around
a constantly improving transmission tech­
nology. Unthinkably large sums of money
are being spent to develop methods of
bringing the output of the TV stations
increasingly faithfully to our homes. What
a pity then that more thought and money
are not being expended in halting the
decline of technical standards further back
along the chain.                                          n

Nick Flowers is a sound recordist

8 May 1993

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