DSF-2 Microphone Reaches Largest Ever Audience in USARespected US Broadcast Mix Engineer Jonathan Freed Turns To SoundField.
Jonathan Freed is an experienced US-based mix engineer with over 40 years of audio engineering behind him, 25 of which have been spent mixing audio for broadcast. Today Jonathan divides up his year working on TV coverage of high-profile US sports events for the major broadcast networks, including the Winter Olympics every four years, NBA Basketball when in season, and the seminal fixed point of every American Football fans week, the weekly networked Monday night TV coverage of big games for the American National Football League (NFL).
Broadcast Mix Engineer Jonathan Freed
Another production mix engineer handles all of the audio from the programme announcers, playbacks, music and other studio-derived audio, but Freed is responsible for capturing and sub-mixing all of the pitch-side audio on the Monday night games (including that from the camera and crowd mics, and all the field effects), and has been miking for 5.1 surround since he first began working on NFL's weekly coverage three seasons ago. Recently he was introduced to SoundFields DSF-2 microphone and DSF-3 digital surround processor by the companys US distributor Wohler, and began using it alongside his existing mic arrays. "Ive been a student of how to get the best possible surround ambient bed for a long time now," comments Freed. "My existing mic arrays get great results, but with the SoundField DSF-2 layered into that, I have been able to eliminate one of my surround arrays."
When Michael Descoteau of Wohler introduced Freed to the DSF-2 and DSF-3, he had already been aware of SoundField products for many years, but it was the first time he had used them in practice. "Ive known about SoundField's microphones since they were invented," explains Freed. "I was a recording studio owner and audio engineer then, and have always wanted to experiment with one. However, until Mike Descoteau mentioned it to me, I was never able to find one in the US to audition it. And a product like this should be heard by as many people as possible. The SoundField capsules have an extraordinarily smooth and wide response, at least equal to the very best microphones I have heard in 40 years of mixing.
"To my ears, the SoundField DSF-2 has a distinct sonic fingerprint it sounds extremely realistic and spacious, with a tremendous sense of detail, and the sonic illusion of being located inside the stadium. The front side pickup provides a heightened sense of size and place, while the rear channels pick up a natural and convincing sense of being surrounded by the excited fans in the stands."
One of SoundFields central design tenets is that their multi-capsule microphones capture audio as though from a point source, ensuring that all of the audio picked up by the microphone is completely phase-coherent. This is an advantage in 5.1 audio capture, where audio is often folded down to two channels for stereo broadcast; the surround ambience captured by SoundField mics can be collapsed to stereo or even mono without introducing any phase artefacts. "Audio from the SoundField DSF-2 always folds down well," affirms Freed. "I am a fan of coherence where possible, and always arrange my arrays so that my audio will fold down well to mono, stereo, or LtRt. SoundField fits right into that philosophy."
The DSF-2 also wins plaudits from Freed for its ability to be reorientated once rigged, by simply adjusting controls on the units control box. "I find that aspect of the DSF-2 very useful in a live sports environment. If you get an unexpectedly loud section of the crowd in, say the right rear of the soundstage, you can tip the microphone away from that area electronically, and make it less sensitive to that area. Before I had the DSF-2, to achieve the same effect, I had to shut off one mic array, or one of the lobes of an array, to achieve the same thing, which could unbalance the sound."
Although he was happy with the broadcast results he was getting from his multi-mic arrays, Freed admits that the SoundField DSF-2 has added a quality he would not now want to lose. "I heartily recommend that any serious surround audio engineer audition this unique system to hear just how much of a difference it can make even in an already well-defined surround mic plan. It provides an added depth and realism to my ambient soundscape that I have been striving for, and provides it with plug-and-play ease. And Ive seen some very favourable reviews of the sound of the ambient bed on the NFL's Monday night games on-line since I began working with the DSF-2. My favourite comment on the web was, I thought somebody had come into the room behind me and was cheering his team on!
