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December 06th, 2018

6/12/2018

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​SURROUND SOUND VS BINAURAL SOUND

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I’ve recently been mixing a project in surround sound and this got me thinking about the similarities and differences of surround sound and binaural sound. The physical differences between the two are obvious when we break them down a surround system runs from 5.1 or 7.1 in typical systems up to crazy big systems with 22.2 (the .1 or .2 of the systems refer to the sub driver) binaural sound requires 2 monitors best listened to with headphones.

Both of these systems create a sound field around the viewer to immerse them in a more realistic viewing environment, with the viewer in the centre point of these fields.The next difference with surround sound is that it is a mixing technique primarily instead of a recording technique. We take mono or stereo audio and place and move it within a surround field using a DAW.  




​Binaural on the other hand needs to be recorded using a stereo microphone, You can do this at home with 2 cardioid microphones placed approximately the same distance apart as your head and have the polar patterns opposite facing once you have your recording pan both tracks left and right depending how you orientate your mics and sound source and you have a makeshift binaural recording, there are purpose built microphones to do this with. In a short and butchered explanation a binaural microphone is an omnidirectional microphone that gives excellent depth of field to immerse a viewer. These microphones can be picked up for around $100 (aud) which isn’t to bad but going to the high end of the market they tend to be closer to 2K.
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​I made a quick demonstration of how this type of home binaural set up can sound like here;
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GcZJ98p2BjWJBQsRhKBZJVZbXuL-cP4g

So what does this all give us as a comparison? Binaural is a 3D sound field that gives us excellent depth of field to locate sound sources and immerse the viewer but that is it its realistically only to be viewed by one person at a time. Surround sound creates a 3D sound field that gives us depth of field and helps us to distinguish sound sources and can be viewed by multiple users at the same time and has a sub. 
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December 04th, 2018

4/12/2018

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​ESPORTS IN PERTH

Esports is a growing industry. More and more people tune in to watch teams compete at professional levels with huge cash prizes available for the winners. Not surprisingly Perth doesn't host these tournaments, Australia in general got it’s first domestic Esports series in March from Gfinity. This is a good start and will only get bigger and gain a larger audience from here. However this achievement is still overshadowed by the North american league and RLCS world championship that took place in November with the Canadian team Cloud 9 taking home the prize.
Why am I giving you all this information with no context? Well I was a part of an independent crew that hosted, promoted and produced a small 2v2 Rocket league tournament. It began with a friend of mine asking if I would be willing to help set up and run the audio desk while they filmed and streamed the tournament. This was a good few months ago around mid August, I had a small place in my heart for Rocket league It was one of the first games I took seriously and on the flip side it was one of the first games that could make me want to smash a controller into a desk. I agreed to help out and then went about my day to day life. The crew then organised days to hold the tournament we worked with everyone's schedule and got all the boring not fun stuff out the way.
The practice run was upon us. 2nd of November the casters were to sit at the back of the room while the participants faced each other. I had my mic choices the classic Electro voice Re20 a great sounding mic for broadcast, I had set up a protools session to run the audio to the post control room. Everything was in its place ready for the rehearsal on the 3rd, it all seemed to easy.
I couldn't attend the rehearsal run due to a schedule conflict which I was working at a battle of the bands. The assistant engineer ran the desk and audio for that day, I came back the next friday for the set-up to prepare for the first broadcast. The casters were not a fan of my microphones and they wanted more control so when needing to cough they could mute themselves and become autonomous from myself. I wasn't super pleased with this as it created a lot more work for myself but the producer wanted an aesthetic to showcase our ability as a production team, So I developed a system involving a sub mixer for the casters that gave them the ability to hear themselves, hear game play audio, hear the communications from the control room and myself from the Audio control room and we could still record each microphone headset individually. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances the initial broadcast was not as smooth as we planned. During the first half I had tweaked all the setting to make the small broadcast headsets sound ideal for well broadcast. We had also created a system that allowed the audio control room to view the broadcast in real time to trigger transition samples and music, It all seemed to easy. Then the desk crashed The Avid S6 is an amazing desk but unfortunately this one has been having some issues we were still sending audio during the broadcast but we had no control everything had froze. We alerted the producers and Post control that we needed to reboot the system during break. We waited the longest 10 minutes I’d sat in a control room with nothing I could do. The system got restarted but my altered settings had not saved and I was back to square one, the broadcast did not sound as I had it. It wasn’t the worst outcome after the crash but not the best, the post crew were having a just as annoying time with the equipment on their end.
The following weeks we came up with solutions for the broadcast issues we had, we bypassed the Avid S6 desk to avoid that crashing and causing issues again the casters were sounding beautiful on the stream,we moved from broadcasting off a mac and brought in a more powerful PC so there was no ungodly compression from the OBS software that caused random clicks and pops and distortion beyond belief. We had done it, after 2 weeks of hard work bending over backwards and just riffing on the fly about how to solve problems we were there. The broadcast was amazing the casters sounded great, transitions were smooth, music was pumping and the coffee was hot we were in business.

I cant expand to much on the rest of the broadcast everything else was a cake walk compared to the first two broadcasts, The final broadcast was a LAN event that brought the competitors in to the studio to compete and the energy that having the people there was awesome it felt more natural than having two casters commentate on games being held on the internet. The team I worked with on this were awesome it didn't feel like work, It was just fun when everything worked right.
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    Liam Fretwell is the owner and sole trader of lost and found audio here you can find his thoughts and experiences working in the industry.

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