Stereo synthesis/expansion/effects/processing on talent voice microphones..?

[spinjector]

Hi all,

I writing to ask for advice from any of you that have used, or tried, stereo effects processing to fatten up the vocals of your main talent microphones in situations such as mid-days and morning shows. Our talent sounds so dull compared to the sparkly & holographic effects processing in music nowadays, despite having our mic processors tweaked up a bit. When they talk over the intro & outro of a song, they just sound buried.

Do you remember in the movie "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" when they get through the energy barrier and the alien entity that calls itself "god" starts to speak, and "his" voice fills the theater like an entire ocean magically squeezed into a swimming pool? That's what I want. Not quite as thick & juicy, but similar.

Oh, yea...and I need it cheap. =-)

Thanks.

 

[WNTIRadio]

All you're going to do is invite multipath problems with "fake stereo". Add to that most of your audience is listening in a degree of mono blend in their cars or mono table/clock radios. Right away half of the listeners won't notice anything except that now the talent sounds LOWER in mono, because you're adding all that fake stereo information to the signal they can't hear.

When people speak to you, they come from one point in space, their mouths. We don't hear them in stereo. A band is spread across a stage and you hear stereo, plus the reflections off any surfaces in the venue. So stereo music isn't a stretch, plus a lot of instruments aren't naturally occurring, such as a Moog, other synth, drum kits etc.

You're much better off processing the mics to fatten them up, add a bit of sparkle to the top end and bring the average level up to sit with the music. Trying to make them fake stereo is a bad idea all around and will only cause more problems.

 

[WNTIRadio]

Quick question I forgot to ask... what mic processors are you currently using and what mics paired with them?

 

[spinjector]

All our rigs are pretty basic - Symetrix 528 processors + RE20 mics.

I'm not sure what you mean by RF multipath problems. You seem to be emphasizing "fake stereo", perhaps I used the wrong terminology? What I was thinking of is a small room reverb with a chorusing effect. If stereophonic sounds were a problem, how could radio stations play music? There's all kinds of stereo content, both natural and synthetic. If synthesized stereo was an issue, wouldn't techno music with all it's electronic keyboards and spacious stereo effects cause problems?

I do agree with you that many types of sounds & effects will combine rather badly in mono. Simply having a phase reversal on a balanced pair will wreck the audio in mono. Poof, there go all your vocals - unless they've got some reverb or other effects, or just natural room sounds if it's a live gig with PA echo in the background, but even then all you hear is the wet audio, not the dry.

Yes, a voice does come from one point in space, but we hear it in stereo. If not, how would we know what direction the voice is coming from? There are focused and diffuse reflections of the voice coming from all directions in three dimensions, with a varying degree of delay, phase differences, and doppler shift if the voice or the ear are moving. You'd have be carrying on a conversation in an anechoic chamber and be deaf in one ear to actually hear the voice physically in mono. =-)

 

[WNTIRadio]

When the music is loud and processed, it masks a lot of multipath issues. When it is solo voice, you're inviting trouble.

A chorus on the mics would sound weird, like they were in a small stairway. In mono the effect wouldn't be heard because most chorus settings on processors have some phase shifting going on.

A subtle amount of reverb will fatten up a mic signal. What are your settings on the 528E? You should be able to create a punchy mic presence with that. What is your main audio processor? Every piece of equipment in the audio chain works as a system and the mic punch problem could be somewhere in a setting on your processor.

Don't go sticking more things in the signal path before you figure out what the root cause of the problem is.

We do locate people by using both ears, but it's unnatural to listen to for a long period of time on the radio. Are you suggesting panning the mics for the different hosts in the room?

My first radio station I worked for had stereo mics for the jock. Two 421 Sennheiser mics. The phasing issues between them made sure it never sounded as good as it should have on paper. Switched to one mic and the punch and clarity was much better.

 

[SFM-Ptgal]

A brand new studio with tiled floor and naked walls. I once worked in a studio almost like that... Than I bought rockwool pannels and placed it on the walls to fade the reverberation. It worked...

 

[jesseg]

Sans having an auto-ducker for the music, when someone's actually talking into a mic (which works INCREDIBLE when tweaked for the processing)... You might consider just mixing the vocals in about 6-9dB hotter than sounds good on the unprocessed mix. This will, in effect, duck the music with the voice via your audio processing's AGC. You won't get a technical, controlled, and "fast" sound to it like you get with a really good ducking expander (i've tried everything from Drawmer to ART, and Aphex's ducker wins for me)... but it should push the program out of the way a bit more.

You'll probably also want to get something to do studio processing for the cans & control room then.