audio technica and the olympics

huub · 29th August 2008

Hi all,

Just came back from the olympics in beijing, great fun and all, but I think every audio guy I spoke to was annoyed by the at mics we had to use

The chief audio has some kind of deal with at, and so we could only, and exclusively, use the at mics provided by the host broadcasting organisation..
AT mics are no crap mics by any means, but in some situations other mics are just better.. The stereo shotguns that were specced for handheld cams and rf moto cams.. man, they're just utterly unusable for that.. The only sound you get is wind and crackling and what not, completely unusable, also the stereo you get isn't like clear left/right, it's some kind of fantasy stereo that makes your stereo correlation meter go wild.. They also can't cope with rain very well..
We secretly put ye olde 416's on the motos

like I said, AT mics aren't crap, they make some good stuff, but the 416 is still unrivalled for many applications..

The olympics were cool though, the first olympics that were in surround all the way!

cheers,
huub

LX3 · 31st August 2008

That's a bit sad. Some of the AT shotguns are great (4073, 4071), as are lots of their other mics (although sadly some of my favourite AT mics are now discontinued because of RoHS regulations).

Sounds like they just spec-ed the wrong mics for the application. I guess someone was trying to show off some of AT's newer inventions when all you really wanted was the right mic for the job.

Anyhow, working the Olympics must have been fascinating. Always interested in any more details of what you got up to.

huub · 31st August 2008

Hi,

Well, we had 2 trucks at the olympics for the worldfeed, our sports (marathon and racewalks) weren't super interesting soundwise.
Basically, the chief sound of the olympics makes a microphone plan, and you kind of have to stick to that (of course noone actually checks the mics on site), at the International Broadcast Center there's a surround control room where the sound is being monitored and a quality log is made..
Surroundwise, only the general ambience was in surround, and we had two vehicles, cars with wireless cameras and superslomos on board that were equiped with 4 shotguns for surround.
No surround mics were being used,(well, AT has none) and the spec was to not use the center channel at all. sub was to be used for any mics that had some special low frequncy information, and for the slomo 'swoosh.
No dolby E encoding was used, discrete audio channels embedded in the video signal were used for transmission (16 channels embedded for surround, stereo, radio mix and a cue line)..

So that..

29th August 2008	#1
huub Lives for gear Joined: Apr 2005 Location: amsterdam Posts: 1,208 Thread Starter	audio technica and the olympics Hi all, Just came back from the olympics in beijing, great fun and all, but I think every audio guy I spoke to was annoyed by the at mics we had to use The chief audio has some kind of deal with at, and so we could only, and exclusively, use the at mics provided by the host broadcasting organisation.. AT mics are no crap mics by any means, but in some situations other mics are just better.. The stereo shotguns that were specced for handheld cams and rf moto cams.. man, they're just utterly unusable for that.. The only sound you get is wind and crackling and what not, completely unusable, also the stereo you get isn't like clear left/right, it's some kind of fantasy stereo that makes your stereo correlation meter go wild.. They also can't cope with rain very well.. We secretly put ye olde 416's on the motos like I said, AT mics aren't crap, they make some good stuff, but the 416 is still unrivalled for many applications.. The olympics were cool though, the first olympics that were in surround all the way! cheers, huub

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31st August 2008	#2
LX3 Lives for gear Joined: Aug 2005 Location: London, UK Posts: 1,033	That's a bit sad. Some of the AT shotguns are great (4073, 4071), as are lots of their other mics (although sadly some of my favourite AT mics are now discontinued because of RoHS regulations). Sounds like they just spec-ed the wrong mics for the application. I guess someone was trying to show off some of AT's newer inventions when all you really wanted was the right mic for the job. Anyhow, working the Olympics must have been fascinating. Always interested in any more details of what you got up to.