An earlier column focused on how a couple of huge entities, AOL and its partners XM Satellite Radio and concert-meister AEG, and Live Nation, the Clear Channel concert spin-off, are trying to make leaving a music concert as eagerly anticipated an experience as going to it is supposed to be. Live Nation hopes to do this with after-show CDs hot off the on-site burners; AOL et al. want to do it with downloads. It's a format battle not dissimilar to ones taking place elsewhere in entertainment technology, most notably between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats for control of the post- DVD high-definition landscape. But these competitions underscore the fact that FOH mixers are going to become the fulcrums of much more than a front-ofhouse mix. Just as televised concerts in the 1970s really laid the groundwork for the art and science of TV music broadcasts, these new digital products and services point the way towards how the FOH engineer of tomorrow (or more likely, later tonight) is going to have to adapt.
A key area is going to be dealing with codecs–certainly audio codecs but also understanding how they interact with video codecs. Another domain will be learning how to anticipate the various distribution channels that a concert may go through not only after the fact but even as it's taking place. Mixing for an iPod will make listening to the 3-dB sum of a tiny mono television look like a walk in the park.
Codecs are a big part of the current domain of on-line music mixing. Greg Thompson mixes live streamed concerts for AOL's music service, including shows for the Donnas, Sara McLachlan, Tears For Fears, Hanson and Three Days Grace. The fact that the concerts originate from acoustically controllable environments such as recording studios doesn't make them any less of a handful. Live is live, and you still only get to do it once.
Sessions can look like TV productions, and that adds to the perception that streaming is simply an extension of broadcast productions. However, Hancock says that one of the biggest mistakes people make in approaching streaming music is to compress the audio similarly to broadcasting. Quite the opposite, he stresses. "Greater dynamics will actually let the algorithms work more efficiently than if you compress it and put too much information through the encoder at one time," he explains. He opts to handle transient peaks by using look-ahead peak limiting instead of broadcast-style compression/normalizing.
Thompson says he pays close attention to the dynamic range of the streamcasts. "It's not like it's going to hit a broadcast limiter downstream, as it would if it were a television broadcast," he says. "I don't want to make anything too quiet that's going to get lost in the computer's noise floor as a result. The good news, though, is that, also unlike TV, the gain structure is not messed with as it is with television. There are very few middlemen in the process of getting the streamed performance to the viewer."
However, as good as the streaming codecs have gotten, they aren't as sensitive to nuance as one might like. "You should be a bit obvious in your mixes and not count on a lot of definition to translate– if a guitarist plays an interesting figure and you want it to cut through in the encoding process, you may have to boost it more than you otherwise," says John Hancock, an independently contracted engineer doing streaming music videos for RollingStone.com. "In general, if you keep the overall mix even and clear, even a bit on the bright-sounding side, you'll be alright."
Hancock and other engineers working in this milieu report that the Sonydeveloped ATRAC codec (the same one used on MiniDisc) has the greatest sensitivity to music encoding. RealNetworks recently licensed ATRAC encoding for its streamcasts. "I'm happy about that," he concludes. "In the past I would try to eliminate low frequencies, because computer speakers didn't replicate them, so I would dump them in order to free up CPU power for the encoder to work more efficiently. I'd also keep things as mono as possible, to eliminate 'flangy' encoding, and apply broadcast limiting techniques to my mix. I now try to have the mixes as close to what you would imagine a CD would sound like. The encoding programs are designed to the Redbook CD audio standard, so that's what you should give them. I don't count on there being a lot of detail or harmonic content in the final product, so being heavy-handed without over compressing is a balance that should be sought after. That said, I'm happy to say gone are the days of thinking about someone's small computer speakers, and a treble-eating encoder."
One of the audio trade shows would do the industry a favor by merging live sound and digital streaming technology tracks. And all the shows would do everyone a favor by emphasizing the fact that the convergence of these technologies is going to be an ongoing proposition.
E-mail Dan at ddaley@fohline.com.