In article ,
Graeme Wall wrote:
On 12/04/2018 00:14, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
tony sayer wrote:
Apart, rather obviously, with the 3/5a which you describe as junk.
Whose designers should be shot. Without being able to give an example
of speaker designed at the same time which was better.

Don't think many loudspeaker manufacturers had an "on the tap" live
radio studio to help develop them..

Interesting point. I've never worked in radio, and dunno if the designers
made use of any of the facilities there. Apart from getting high quality
recordings of whatever they wanted, of course. The departments who
designed these speakers were both based well away from the studio centres.
I don't remember any prototype speakers doing the rounds in TV.

But then, to the best of my knowledge, the 3/5a wasn't used at TC for
monitoring. More an OB speaker. It may have been in some small edit
facilities, but not something I know about.

Do have a little story about them at TC, though.

TC3 was modernised in the early 70s. Went from an elderly BBC type B
desk to a large Neve. And at the same time had an all singing and
dancing BBC designed talkback system installed. And instead of the
usual poor bandwidth mics and amps etc, was designed to full broadcast
quality. Talkback mics were AKG 451, and the talkback speakers in
sound control LS3/5a. For all of a couple of weeks. Why? The quality
was simply too good. Just as good if not better than speech being
broadcast, which could used the same mics. And rather better if
personal mics were in use.

The 3/5a were changed for single cone RS PA quality speakers. With the
typical colouration of a small cheap speaker.

Some said we told you so. Waste of money having excellent quality
talkback. But degrading it at the last moment at the speaker meant you
didn't have the usual noise and distortion etc of a badly designed
system.


Don't know whether it is true or not but I was told (by Dickie
Chamberlain) that the change of speaker was to make it easy to
distinguish between talkback and programme material.

Exactly so. Perhaps I didn't explain it well. You'd normally expect speech
coming from the prog speaker to be the highest quality and talkback
obvious by being less so.

When TC3 was initially refurbished, the monitoring speakers were BBC LS
5/1, and the 3/5a reproduced the human voice (at realistic levels) rather
better than it. The ubiquitous LS 5/8 was still some way off.

Richard was a superb sound mixer. The way he copied the commercial sound
of a pop record in the early 'live' days of TOTP with virtually no time to
rehearse was truly magical. Do you remember his supercharged Morris
Minor? ;-)

--
*Can fat people go skinny-dipping?

Dave Plowman London SW
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