On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:21:39 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
I was recently told that Lyric Opera of Chicago now puts the mikes used
for their broadcasts in the hair or wig of all singers. This is what
Broadway does.

I think that for opera it is a horrible way to mike. The sound is so
unnatural, and much too close. What are they thinking of? I can only
hope that the Met and other theaters do not follow suit.

I still believe the most natural sound I have heard in opera broadcasts
occurred in the 50's and 60's, in the earlier days of FM broadcasting.
The sound was mono, to be sure, but it was gleaned from microphones that
hung from the ceiling over the stage, and one could catch the overtones
of the voices to a very good extent. Once the Met changed to stereo in
1973-4, everything changed for the worse, and seemingly continues to go
downhill year after year. The sonic quality of current broadcasts,
including and perhaps especially Sirius, is terribly compressed compared
to 30 years ago and earlier. There is no longer any way to distinguish
the size of a voice, since all sounds are made to be just as loud as any
other sound. Also, soft notes sound like loud notes, since the
compression system opens up all sounds to about the same level.
Therefore, the softest note of a single soprano is the same volume as
the entire chorus singing ffff!

Microphones in the hair? What is next? Why not just play a recording and
stand on stage and lip sync?

Ed

There are mikes hanging in front of the stage at the CLO, not that that
proves anything one way or another. What's your source about putting
microphones in the singer's hair? It doesn't sound that likely.

We've talked about Sirius here before. They compress the hell out of
their signal and that's not likely to change. Sirius is trying to pack as
many channels as they can into a limited amount of bandwidth.
Unfortunately they painted themselves into a corner by limiting satellite
radios to either the Sirius band or the XM band which made sense at the
time when Sirius and XM were focused on competing with each other. Now
that they've combined they can't take advantage of their combined
bandwidth, all they can do is duplicate the channels on two different
bands. New radios will be able to receive both but that doesn't help them
because they have a large installed base that's stuck with single band
radios. By the time the majority of their customers have upgraded it will
be to late, satellite radio and quality terrestrial broadcast radio will
be dead. The future is internet radio. If you have a smart phone give
Pandora a try and you'll see what I mean. If you connect a set of
headphones to a 3G phone like the Palm Pre you will hear real CD quality
sound not the Edison cylinder quality sound that Sirius broadcasts. The
smart phones support stereo bluetooth. You can buy high quality bluetooth
stereo headphones today and stereo bluetooth car audio systems are
starting to become available. In the next few years stereo bluetooth car
audio systems will be standard and that will be the death of Sirius.
Classical FM stations are already and endangered species (WGBH FM in
Boston is switching to an NPR format leaving WCRB to carry on as the only
classical music station, in other parts of the country there are no
classical FM stations at all).- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:44:54 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
On Nov 1, 4:39 pm, General Schvantzkoph <schvantzk... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:21:39 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
I was recently told that Lyric Opera of Chicago now puts the mikes
used for their broadcasts in the hair or wig of all singers. This is
what Broadway does.

I think that for opera it is a horrible way to mike. The sound is so
unnatural, and much too close. What are they thinking of? I can only
hope that the Met and other theaters do not follow suit.

I still believe the most natural sound I have heard in opera
broadcasts occurred in the 50's and 60's, in the earlier days of FM
broadcasting. The sound was mono, to be sure, but it was gleaned from
microphones that hung from the ceiling over the stage, and one could
catch the overtones of the voices to a very good extent. Once the Met
changed to stereo in 1973-4, everything changed for the worse, and
seemingly continues to go downhill year after year. The sonic quality
of current broadcasts, including and perhaps especially Sirius, is
terribly compressed compared to 30 years ago and earlier. There is no
longer any way to distinguish the size of a voice, since all sounds
are made to be just as loud as any other sound. Also, soft notes
sound like loud notes, since the compression system opens up all
sounds to about the same level. Therefore, the softest note of a
single soprano is the same volume as the entire chorus singing ffff!

Microphones in the hair? What is next? Why not just play a recording
and stand on stage and lip sync?

Ed

There are mikes hanging in front of the stage at the CLO, not that that
proves anything one way or another. What's your source about putting
microphones in the singer's hair? It doesn't sound that likely.

We've talked about Sirius here before. They compress the hell out of
their signal and that's not likely to change. Sirius is trying to pack
as many channels as they can into a limited amount of bandwidth.
Unfortunately they painted themselves into a corner by limiting
satellite radios to either the Sirius band or the XM band which made
sense at the time when Sirius and XM were focused on competing with
each other. Now that they've combined they can't take advantage of
their combined bandwidth, all they can do is duplicate the channels on
two different bands. New radios will be able to receive both but that
doesn't help them because they have a large installed base that's stuck
with single band radios. By the time the majority of their customers
have upgraded it will be to late, satellite radio and quality
terrestrial broadcast radio will be dead. The future is internet radio..
If you have a smart phone give Pandora a try and you'll see what I
mean. If you connect a set of headphones to a 3G phone like the Palm
Pre you will hear real CD quality sound not the Edison cylinder quality
sound that Sirius broadcasts. The smart phones support stereo
bluetooth. You can buy high quality bluetooth stereo headphones today
and stereo bluetooth car audio systems are starting to become
available. In the next few years stereo bluetooth car audio systems
will be standard and that will be the death of Sirius. Classical FM
stations are already and endangered species (WGBH FM in Boston is
switching to an NPR format leaving WCRB to carry on as the only
classical music station, in other parts of the country there are no
classical FM stations at all).- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

My source is a leading singer, whose name I do not think right to
reveal. Perhaps he/she is mistaken, but since this singer is singing a
lead role at Lyric Opera this season, methinks this singer is probably
correct.
The rest is really interesting, but too technical for me! Thanks for the
post and response.

Best,
Ed

Well it sounds like you have a pretty reliable source. I wonder if the
results will be better then we would expect? When I was growing up in the
60s WFMT in Chicago had the reputation of having the best signal in the
country, they were very aggressive about introducing new technology in
the 50s and 60s. But that was 40-50 years ago when audio an FM
engineering were still hard problems, hard problems attract smart people.
Today these are solved problems so the challenge is gone, I really doubt
the same caliber of people are involved in the technical decisions at
WFMT these days.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

On Nov 1, 5:25 pm, General Schvantzkoph <schvantzk... at (no spam) yahoo.com
wrote:





On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:44:54 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
On Nov 1, 4:39 pm, General Schvantzkoph <schvantzk... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:21:39 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
I was recently told that Lyric Opera of Chicago now puts the mikes
used for their broadcasts in the hair or wig of all singers. This is
what Broadway does.

I think that for opera it is a horrible way to mike. The sound is so
unnatural, and much too close. What are they thinking of? I can only
hope that the Met and other theaters do not follow suit.

I still believe the most natural sound I have heard in opera
broadcasts occurred in the 50's and 60's, in the earlier days of FM
broadcasting. The sound was mono, to be sure, but it was gleaned from
microphones that hung from the ceiling over the stage, and one could
catch the overtones of the voices to a very good extent. Once the Met
changed to stereo in 1973-4, everything changed for the worse, and
seemingly continues to go downhill year after year. The sonic quality
of current broadcasts, including and perhaps especially Sirius, is
terribly compressed compared to 30 years ago and earlier. There is no
longer any way to distinguish the size of a voice, since all sounds
are made to be just as loud as any other sound. Also, soft notes
sound like loud notes, since the compression system opens up all
sounds to about the same level. Therefore, the softest note of a
single soprano is the same volume as the entire chorus singing ffff!

Microphones in the hair? What is next? Why not just play a recording
and stand on stage and lip sync?

Ed

There are mikes hanging in front of the stage at the CLO, not that that
proves anything one way or another. What's your source about putting
microphones in the singer's hair? It doesn't sound that likely.

We've talked about Sirius here before. They compress the hell out of
their signal and that's not likely to change. Sirius is trying to pack
as many channels as they can into a limited amount of bandwidth.
Unfortunately they painted themselves into a corner by limiting
satellite radios to either the Sirius band or the XM band which made
sense at the time when Sirius and XM were focused on competing with
each other. Now that they've combined they can't take advantage of
their combined bandwidth, all they can do is duplicate the channels on
two different bands. New radios will be able to receive both but that
doesn't help them because they have a large installed base that's stuck
with single band radios. By the time the majority of their customers
have upgraded it will be to late, satellite radio and quality
terrestrial broadcast radio will be dead. The future is internet radio.
If you have a smart phone give Pandora a try and you'll see what I
mean. If you connect a set of headphones to a 3G phone like the Palm
Pre you will hear real CD quality sound not the Edison cylinder quality
sound that Sirius broadcasts. The smart phones support stereo
bluetooth. You can buy high quality bluetooth stereo headphones today
and stereo bluetooth car audio systems are starting to become
available. In the next few years stereo bluetooth car audio systems
will be standard and that will be the death of Sirius. Classical FM
stations are already and endangered species (WGBH FM in Boston is
switching to an NPR format leaving WCRB to carry on as the only
classical music station, in other parts of the country there are no
classical FM stations at all).- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

My source is a leading singer, whose name I do not think right to
reveal. Perhaps he/she is mistaken, but since this singer is singing a
lead role at Lyric Opera this season, methinks this singer is probably
correct.
The rest is really interesting, but too technical for me! Thanks for the
post and response.

Best,
Ed

Well it sounds like you have a pretty reliable source. I wonder if the
results will be better then we would expect? When I was growing up in the
60s WFMT in Chicago had the reputation of having the best signal in the
country, they were very aggressive about introducing new technology in
the 50s and 60s. But that was 40-50 years ago when audio an FM
engineering were still hard problems, hard problems attract smart people.
Today these are solved problems so the challenge is gone, I really doubt
the same caliber of people are involved in the technical decisions at
WFMT these days.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

So far I have only listened to one Lyric Opera broadcast this season.
It was the Ernani prima, about 6 days ago. I only heard Act 4, and the
voices sounded very close, and Licitra in particular, sounded poor. I
later read that it had been announced that he had some kind of cold.
This was before I was told about the mikes in the hair, and I didn't
honestly notice anything unusual that jumped out at me concerning the
sound quality. As I said, it did sound very close miked.
A friend of mine called WQXR in NY about 5 or 6 years ago, complaining
of the ever increasing compression. He was told that the goal now was
to make everything easily heard for older folks riding in their cars.
So a solo violin would be pumped up, etc., etc. And the rest is
(sadly) history.

Ed- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

On Nov 1, 2:36 pm, "premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com" <edop... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:





On Nov 1, 5:25 pm, General Schvantzkoph <schvantzk... at (no spam) yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:44:54 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
On Nov 1, 4:39 pm, General Schvantzkoph <schvantzk... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:21:39 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
I was recently told that Lyric Opera of Chicago now puts the mikes
used for their broadcasts in the hair or wig of all singers. This is
what Broadway does.

I think that for opera it is a horrible way to mike. The sound is so
unnatural, and much too close. What are they thinking of? I can only
hope that the Met and other theaters do not follow suit.

I still believe the most natural sound I have heard in opera
broadcasts occurred in the 50's and 60's, in the earlier days of FM
broadcasting. The sound was mono, to be sure, but it was gleaned from
microphones that hung from the ceiling over the stage, and one could
catch the overtones of the voices to a very good extent. Once the Met
changed to stereo in 1973-4, everything changed for the worse, and
seemingly continues to go downhill year after year. The sonic quality
of current broadcasts, including and perhaps especially Sirius, is
terribly compressed compared to 30 years ago and earlier. There is no
longer any way to distinguish the size of a voice, since all sounds
are made to be just as loud as any other sound. Also, soft notes
sound like loud notes, since the compression system opens up all
sounds to about the same level. Therefore, the softest note of a
single soprano is the same volume as the entire chorus singing ffff!

Microphones in the hair? What is next? Why not just play a recording
and stand on stage and lip sync?

Ed

There are mikes hanging in front of the stage at the CLO, not that that
proves anything one way or another. What's your source about putting
microphones in the singer's hair? It doesn't sound that likely.

We've talked about Sirius here before. They compress the hell out of
their signal and that's not likely to change. Sirius is trying to pack
as many channels as they can into a limited amount of bandwidth.
Unfortunately they painted themselves into a corner by limiting
satellite radios to either the Sirius band or the XM band which made
sense at the time when Sirius and XM were focused on competing with
each other. Now that they've combined they can't take advantage of
their combined bandwidth, all they can do is duplicate the channels on
two different bands. New radios will be able to receive both but that
doesn't help them because they have a large installed base that's stuck
with single band radios. By the time the majority of their customers
have upgraded it will be to late, satellite radio and quality
terrestrial broadcast radio will be dead. The future is internet radio.
If you have a smart phone give Pandora a try and you'll see what I
mean. If you connect a set of headphones to a 3G phone like the Palm
Pre you will hear real CD quality sound not the Edison cylinder quality
sound that Sirius broadcasts. The smart phones support stereo
bluetooth. You can buy high quality bluetooth stereo headphones today
and stereo bluetooth car audio systems are starting to become
available. In the next few years stereo bluetooth car audio systems
will be standard and that will be the death of Sirius. Classical FM
stations are already and endangered species (WGBH FM in Boston is
switching to an NPR format leaving WCRB to carry on as the only
classical music station, in other parts of the country there are no
classical FM stations at all).- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

My source is a leading singer, whose name I do not think right to
reveal. Perhaps he/she is mistaken, but since this singer is singing a
lead role at Lyric Opera this season, methinks this singer is probably
correct.
The rest is really interesting, but too technical for me! Thanks for the
post and response.

Best,
Ed

Well it sounds like you have a pretty reliable source. I wonder if the
results will be better then we would expect? When I was growing up in the
60s WFMT in Chicago had the reputation of having the best signal in the
country, they were very aggressive about introducing new technology in
the 50s and 60s. But that was 40-50 years ago when audio an FM
engineering were still hard problems, hard problems attract smart people.
Today these are solved problems so the challenge is gone, I really doubt
the same caliber of people are involved in the technical decisions at
WFMT these days.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

So far I have only listened to one Lyric Opera broadcast this season.
It was the Ernani prima, about 6 days ago. I only heard Act 4, and the
voices sounded very close, and Licitra in particular, sounded poor. I
later read that it had been announced that he had some kind of cold.
This was before I was told about the mikes in the hair, and I didn't
honestly notice anything unusual that jumped out at me concerning the
sound quality. As I said, it did sound very close miked.
A friend of mine called WQXR in NY about 5 or 6 years ago, complaining
of the ever increasing compression. He was told that the goal now was
to make everything easily heard for older folks riding in their cars.
So a solo violin would be pumped up, etc., etc. And the rest is
(sadly) history.

Ed- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

It seems to me that the goal of radio broadcasts has been primarily to
bring the experience to listeners who cannot be at the event itself,
and only secondarily to remind listeners who had been there of what
they had already experienced live.  This has little to do with trying
to convey the size of a voice, the ambience of a hall, the balance of
the winds against the horns, or the smell of the conductor's feet.  It
is a representation of the music.  If you really need to experience
how the music and voices and drama play out in a theatre, go buy a
ticket and plunk your butt down in a theatre.  Otherwise, a broadcast
can only be a souvenir of the event and not the event itself.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I was recently told that Lyric Opera of Chicago now puts the mikes used
for their broadcasts in the hair or wig of all singers. This is what
Broadway does.

I think that for opera it is a horrible way to mike. The sound is so
unnatural, and much too close. What are they thinking of? I can only
hope that the Met and other theaters do not follow suit.

I still believe the most natural sound I have heard in opera broadcasts
occurred in the 50's and 60's, in the earlier days of FM broadcasting.
The sound was mono, to be sure, but it was gleaned from microphones that
hung from the ceiling over the stage, and one could catch the overtones
of the voices to a very good extent. Once the Met changed to stereo in
1973-4, everything changed for the worse, and seemingly continues to go
downhill year after year. The sonic quality of current broadcasts,
including and perhaps especially Sirius, is terribly compressed compared
to 30 years ago and earlier. There is no longer any way to distinguish
the size of a voice, since all sounds are made to be just as loud as any
other sound. Also, soft notes sound like loud notes, since the
compression system opens up all sounds to about the same level.
Therefore, the softest note of a single soprano is the same volume as
the entire chorus singing ffff!

Microphones in the hair? What is next? Why not just play a recording and
stand on stage and lip sync?

Ed

On Nov 1, 4:39 pm, General Schvantzkoph <schvantzk... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:21:39 -0800, premiereop... at (no spam) aol.com wrote:
I was recently told that Lyric Opera of Chicago now puts the mikes
used for their broadcasts in the hair or wig of all singers. This is
what Broadway does.

I think that for opera it is a horrible way to mike. The sound is so
unnatural, and much too close. What are they thinking of? I can only
hope that the Met and other theaters do not follow suit.

I still believe the most natural sound I have heard in opera
broadcasts occurred in the 50's and 60's, in the earlier days of FM
broadcasting. The sound was mono, to be sure, but it was gleaned from
microphones that hung from the ceiling over the stage, and one could
catch the overtones of the voices to a very good extent. Once the Met
changed to stereo in 1973-4, everything changed for the worse, and
seemingly continues to go downhill year after year. The sonic quality
of current broadcasts, including and perhaps especially Sirius, is
terribly compressed compared to 30 years ago and earlier. There is no
longer any way to distinguish the size of a voice, since all sounds
are made to be just as loud as any other sound. Also, soft notes
sound like loud notes, since the compression system opens up all
sounds to about the same level. Therefore, the softest note of a
single soprano is the same volume as the entire chorus singing ffff!

Microphones in the hair? What is next? Why not just play a recording
and stand on stage and lip sync?

Ed

There are mikes hanging in front of the stage at the CLO, not that that
proves anything one way or another. What's your source about putting
microphones in the singer's hair? It doesn't sound that likely.

We've talked about Sirius here before. They compress the hell out of
their signal and that's not likely to change. Sirius is trying to pack
as many channels as they can into a limited amount of bandwidth.
Unfortunately they painted themselves into a corner by limiting
satellite radios to either the Sirius band or the XM band which made
sense at the time when Sirius and XM were focused on competing with
each other. Now that they've combined they can't take advantage of
their combined bandwidth, all they can do is duplicate the channels on
two different bands. New radios will be able to receive both but that
doesn't help them because they have a large installed base that's stuck
with single band radios. By the time the majority of their customers
have upgraded it will be to late, satellite radio and quality
terrestrial broadcast radio will be dead. The future is internet radio.
If you have a smart phone give Pandora a try and you'll see what I
mean. If you connect a set of headphones to a 3G phone like the Palm
Pre you will hear real CD quality sound not the Edison cylinder quality
sound that Sirius broadcasts. The smart phones support stereo
bluetooth. You can buy high quality bluetooth stereo headphones today
and stereo bluetooth car audio systems are starting to become
available. In the next few years stereo bluetooth car audio systems
will be standard and that will be the death of Sirius. Classical FM
stations are already and endangered species (WGBH FM in Boston is
switching to an NPR format leaving WCRB to carry on as the only
classical music station, in other parts of the country there are no
classical FM stations at all).- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

My source is a leading singer, whose name I do not think right to
reveal. Perhaps he/she is mistaken, but since this singer is singing a
lead role at Lyric Opera this season, methinks this singer is probably
correct.
The rest is really interesting, but too technical for me! Thanks for the
post and response.

Best,
Ed