ITV 4 sound quality

Watching "The Professionals" last night on ITV4,I noticed the sound
kept going quiet, during the, umm, quiet bits. Hard to explain, but
during lulls in the top quality dialogue between Bodie and Doyle,
with minimal background noise, even the distant traffic noises and
other rumblings would stop. Did anyone else notice this? I'm guessing
it's some kind of transmission artefact or bandwidth saving thing.




Tim

"Tim Hall" wrote in message
...
Watching "The Professionals" last night on ITV4,I noticed the sound
kept going quiet, during the, umm, quiet bits. Hard to explain, but
during lulls in the top quality dialogue between Bodie and Doyle,
with minimal background noise, even the distant traffic noises and
other rumblings would stop. Did anyone else notice this? I'm guessing
it's some kind of transmission artefact or bandwidth saving thing.

Was this on Cable, Sky or Freeview?

In article ,
Tim Hall wrote:
Watching "The Professionals" last night on ITV4,I noticed the sound
kept going quiet, during the, umm, quiet bits. Hard to explain, but
during lulls in the top quality dialogue between Bodie and Doyle,
with minimal background noise, even the distant traffic noises and
other rumblings would stop. Did anyone else notice this? I'm guessing
it's some kind of transmission artefact or bandwidth saving thing.

The original dubbing on these cheap and cheerful progs sometimes left a
fair bit to be desired - you can often hear edits go through. This ain't
a criticism of those involved - they did they best they could in the
time allotted.

One possibility is that it was transferred from Beta or 1" somewhere
down the line and the Dolbys were mistracking.

--
*Real men don't waste their hormones growing hair

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Tim Hall" wrote in message

Watching "The Professionals" last night on ITV4,I noticed the sound
kept going quiet, during the, umm, quiet bits. Hard to explain, but
during lulls in the top quality dialogue between Bodie and Doyle,
with minimal background noise, even the distant traffic noises and
other rumblings would stop. Did anyone else notice this? I'm guessing
it's some kind of transmission artefact or bandwidth saving thing.

I've noticed that, possibly on The Professionals. I wouldn't have thought it
would save much bandwidth. It could be some kind of "dynamic noise
reduction" where the hiss in the quiet bits is reduced to silence. Sometimes
scratchy old films have that effect in which case the scratches appear under
the dialogue.

--
Max Demian

Yes, and it sounds dreadful, in my opinion. Lots of stuff from the 80s and
90s sounds like this. Presumably the sound track has degraded and generates
too much hiss.

As Max says, the broadcaster uses 'noise gating' to reduce the apparent
noise. The sound is simply cut off until it reaches a certain level, at
which point the gate opens and lets the sound through.

It removes the background hiss from the quiet moments, but I find the
'clipping' effect it has on speech (at the start and end of each utterance)
really objectionable.

When it's really bad you can hear distinct 'noise pumping', where the
background hiss is 'pumped' by the dialogue and is clearly audible above it.
Some of the Inspector Morse programmes are like this now.

Hideous. Thank goodness we're recording new stuff digitally. At least it
won't degrade like that.

Thack

In article ,
Max Demian wrote:
Watching "The Professionals" last night on ITV4,I noticed the sound
kept going quiet, during the, umm, quiet bits. Hard to explain, but
during lulls in the top quality dialogue between Bodie and Doyle,
with minimal background noise, even the distant traffic noises and
other rumblings would stop. Did anyone else notice this? I'm guessing
it's some kind of transmission artefact or bandwidth saving thing.

I've noticed that, possibly on The Professionals. I wouldn't have
thought it would save much bandwidth. It could be some kind of "dynamic
noise reduction" where the hiss in the quiet bits is reduced to
silence. Sometimes scratchy old films have that effect in which case
the scratches appear under the dialogue.

The soundtrack on the Professionals wouldn't be optical, though, unless
all they could find was a copy made for overseas sales. But I can't
imagine LWT being so careless as to loose a master - unlike the BBC.

--
*i souport publik edekashun.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Max Demian wrote:
Watching "The Professionals" last night on ITV4,I noticed the sound
kept going quiet, during the, umm, quiet bits. Hard to explain, but
during lulls in the top quality dialogue between Bodie and Doyle,
with minimal background noise, even the distant traffic noises and
other rumblings would stop. Did anyone else notice this? I'm guessing
it's some kind of transmission artefact or bandwidth saving thing.


Just like most radio stations and T.V. sound today the signal is shoved
through compressors & noise gates.
If any broadcasters are reading this - Please, Please, Please throw away
those compressors and give us back our dynamic range like we had years ago!!

Stefan

In all fairness, though, for a lot of the TV programmes I've noticed it on -
Inspector Morse, Sherlock Holmes, etc - the noise gating is obviously there
to try to recover a badly degraded sound track. They've been doing this
technique for years, long before we were using lossy compression in
broadcast TV.

In article ,
Steve Thackery wrote:
In all fairness, though, for a lot of the TV programmes I've noticed it
on - Inspector Morse, Sherlock Holmes, etc - the noise gating is
obviously there to try to recover a badly degraded sound track.
They've been doing this technique for years, long before we were using
lossy compression in broadcast TV.

The sound tracks on these really shouldn't be badly degraded - any more
than the pictures. Morse, however, used radio mics extensively so had a
pretty appalling dialogue track to start with. And sadly Lewis has
followed this lead.

There's no doubt however that some standards have improved these days
sound wise for this sort of drama. Compare The Bill to The Sweeny - both
made by the same company - to see just how far things have moved on.

--
*Where there's a will, I want to be in it.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Steve Thackery wrote:
In all fairness, though, for a lot of the TV programmes I've noticed it
on - Inspector Morse, Sherlock Holmes, etc - the noise gating is
obviously there to try to recover a badly degraded sound track.
They've been doing this technique for years, long before we were using
lossy compression in broadcast TV.

The sound tracks on these really shouldn't be badly degraded - any more
than the pictures. Morse, however, used radio mics extensively so had a
pretty appalling dialogue track to start with. And sadly Lewis has
followed this lead.

There's no doubt however that some standards have improved these days
sound wise for this sort of drama. Compare The Bill to The Sweeny - both
made by the same company - to see just how far things have moved on.

--
*Where there's a will, I want to be in it.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

I haven't heard this particular programme, but I do remember the effect from
some Morse repeats. I wonder if it is actually not Dolby mistracking, but
Dolby in the wrong mode. Analogue Beta machines, and I think C format, use
Dolby which can be switched on or off, and when these machines first became
general there were different policies adapted as to its use. As a result
these are tapes of both types from the period both with and without Dolby
encoding - LWT at least in house always encoded, whereas some other
companies did not - leading to random replay errors on external clips. I
can't speak for other ITV companies - I'm sure others will know more.

Most film dramas of the period got transfered to tape for TX, and the effect
would be as described if the tape was not Dolby encoded, but had been
decoded on playback. I recall phoning the duty officer about an early repeat
series of Morses which I knew hadn't been as bad on first TX as I was now
hearing it, and getting an initial blank wall, with an eventual agreement on
the problem, having had to be quite persistent.

I think that the problem is now that when this error exists it can be some
time in the past, with the current tape now usually being Digibeta. To
rectify it would mean going back a step to the Beta/C format tape, which
will now probably be at outside storage and not readily available - with
extra costs and hassle for the broadcaster. Hence the initial "you are the
only one to complain" reply, in the hope that you will go away.

If its really bad, and you think this reason might be the case - keep
phoning!

Finally, having had the pleasure in the past of occasionally dubbing "The
Bill," I can confirm that the programmes original sound tracks were recorded
with a great deal of care, and were indeed to a different standard.

Charles F