Probably, the most posted topic in any technical forum.

It’s really an important question that, unfortunately, is hard to answer objectively. Most of the time, you have to take the decision blindly because is usually hard, if not impossible, to try the gear before buying. 

I am not going to talk about the objective (technical) reasons that should guide a purchase. I leave that to other discussion. I fact you can read more about this angle in the rest of the blog. 

So, what can we trust? We should do like Indy in his third movie, walk over the bridge although we don’t see it. That is, try to add several subjective opinions hoping that, at the end of the process, will emerge some kind of objectivity. The problem can be worst when the buyer can’t tell the difference between products because his/her untrained ear or inexperience.

So we can find two, not very objective, reasons to decide a buy: product popularity and product placement in professional contexts and professionals. They are, respectivelly the quantity and quality reasons.

In the first case, is usual to apply the following logic: if lots of people have it, it should be good. And this, more or less, can be true. But in a capitalist market full of oligopolies this idea can be dangerous. Brands can be very strong and what genuine quality doesn’t achieve, can be achieve with marketing.

This is now even more relevant because the companies are merging and buying each other. We must assume that Neumann is not anymore a company, but a Brand (Sennheiser bought it in 1991). Or KRK which is now far from the genius of the engineer who give the brand its name (Keith Klawitter) since Stanton bought it. 

Surely, this doesn’t means that this products cant’ be great. But in a certain way we are taking the buying decision based on the past quality, which may not be the same now. An this can be even worst. Everyone wants an U87 or an U67 and, for sure, they are great mics, but old schoolers will argue that their vintage models sound way better. So, are we basing our purchase in a prestige and quality that can be, partially, in the past?

Of course, companies are well aware of all this and they will always use the classical brands names. So, the key, resides in how much the company respects the brand legacy. Some times this respect is missing and we can usually find an economical shift form the manufacturing process to the marketing department. 

Another example of this, is Pro Tools dominance. It’s a great software, no doubt about ut, but also Logic, Cubase and many other are very good options. So, is objectively better? In my opinion every DAW does basically the same and the best would be the one you are used to use. Maybe because your own workflow has grown around it.

But Avid (previously Digidesign) knows very well that they are the industry standard and the use this position to keep the prices high, specially in the HD product line. 

The other tool we have to decide a purchase, which is even more relevant, is the quality of the people that uses it. We reads an interview to a respected engineer and we are hoping that they will ask him about what gear he uses. If he mention some of ours, we can’t avoid a little smile. We are fine. This guy with 2 oscars use the same pre-amp that I do. 

Companies take advantage of this and they spend a lot of money in endorsements with the best professionals possible.  

This last quality factor can be a good reference but we should not forget that is very important to know how to use the equipment properly. In my opinion, this can be even more important that the gear’s intrinsic quality. If you know what sound you want to achieve and your tools, I think this is the differentiating factor. Poor man’s consolation? Maybe.

Before going, I want to mention a different case. Line Audio is a small (garage small) company form sweden. Its existence has passed from person to person, almost like a secret. Without advertising or a strong distribution, their sales have gone up to the point that the owner and manufacturer had to stop taking orders last christmas.  

Without talking much about the sound quality (wich I often hear is great) the surprising thing is the prices. The CM3, for example, is a small-diaphragm microphone popular in classical music recording and sound design. Without taxes and shipments it is worth 120€. A equivalent microphone from Neumann or Schoeps would be around 1000€. In this thousand € how much is paying the design, components and fabrication if a guy in a garage makes something similar for the tenth of the price? Is the price so artificially inflated like whan we buy a pair of Nikes? Maybe is a mistake to put the CM3 and a Schoeps in the same ground, specially when I haven’t try the microphone. But, you know, I have two subjective tools. A quantity one and quality one (I and II)

In the daily work in sound post and design we often face this situation: You want to introduce a library or foley sound in a scene and, although, the sound itself works it doen’t fit the scene context, it feels unnatural. 

The problem lies in the acoustic positioning. We often try to fit in the scene a sound which is recorded in a different acoustic plane. In many occasions (and, in fact, this is the ideal situation) the audio we are dealing with is dry and sounds “in the face”. This kind of sound is maybe not the best to give credibility in a determined context. Especially when we want to position it behind the foreground.

If, otherwise, the sound you want to use includes certain reverb or some “perspective” and distance, getting rid of this vibe is quite difficult, maybe impossible. In this case, one option would be to use some reverb removal plugin. This may never work nice but if the case is not very extreme it might save lots of work. I find one of this plugins is especially effective in removing not only reverb but also some “out-of-focus” quality. I’m talking about “Univeil” by the Garman company Zynaptiq. In certain applications the plugin honors the company motto: “Science, not fiction.”

The truth is that making things sound far is tricky and there isn’t a magical formula. Every case is particular and would require specific technics. In indoors scenes it might be a little easier because adding reverb would give us a great head start. But this is usually not enough, if we want the effect (or voice) to really feel coming from the background we must apply different processes carefully. 

Let’s see some of this technics:

Reverberation:
Is kind intuitive. If something is farther it has more reverb. Or being more precise the direct sound/reflected sound ratio is lower. That being said, we must be very careful with the amount of reverb. Too much may sound artificial and over processed, especially in outdoor scenes. 

An interesting strategy would be equalizing the reverb return trying to attenuate the frequencies that can reveal the effect. The mids zone (800 – 2000 Hz) is a good candidate for this. 

On the other hand, convolution reverbs like Altiverb can use outdoor IR’s which can sound quite real and natural. If the plugin allow us to differentiate between direct signal, early reflections and tail we can play around with these values to find what we are looking for. The early reflections can be especially helpful. 

One last tip is inserting an expander before the reverb. We then adjust it so that only the louder events could make it to the reverb. This way we still have the “wet” flavour but in a much cleaner way. 

Stereo Image:
An audio with a stereo nature (like music) would sound almost mono played from a far distance. It doesn’t make sense to perfectly hear and difference the L and R channels if the sound is diegetic and coming from the background. So, closing the stereo image or going straight to mono is going to help a lot if we are introducing in the soundtrack a stereo sound. 

Equalization:
The air (or any other material) absorbs the sound energy proportionally to the frequency. For that reason a LPF would be helpful to create the feel of farness. A daily example of this is when our kind neighbour is listening to music and we hear it from the other side of the wall. That being said we must be careful with this, the air is far less efficient absorbing sound energy as a brick wall is. Use with moderation or it will sound muddy.

If we study the Fletcher and Munson curves we can see that the 1-5 KHz area is the more sensitive for the human ear. Thus, when we are equalizing, enhancing this range could work very good, especially attenuating at the same time the highs. 

On the other hand, the low-mid region is very important to give an out-of-focus or “roomy” feel. This would be the kind of sound that every good boom operator would try to avoid and maybe in this case we are trying to achieve.

Also, we must try to avoid that the lows equalization give the viewer a Proximity Effect feeling which will not help at all.

Compression:
Changing the signal dynamics is another good technic we can use. Far away sounds are less dynamic and they feel flatter. Moreover, we can use a short attack to quit punch to the signal making the effect even better.

Delay:
Sometimes the use of delay works very well but in some other occasions it feels unnatural. We will use the Haas Effect, taking advantage of the way that the brain localize sounds.

I usually use a short delay (20-70 ms) with some feedback (0-40%). This way, we create kind of a controlled reverb that can create the illusion of sound going farther. This technique give me great results introducing in a scene TV or radio sounds.

Edition:
When someone talks to you from a far distance part of the intelligibility is lost. This is because we stop hearing little details like mouth clicks, esses or letters t, k, c, etc. If we edit the speech removing this details we can help the sound a lot in feeling farther. This concept is also applicable in the little noises of, for example, a foley movement. 

Well, I’m contradicting myself. If we use the compressor like I explained before we are going to make these little sounds more audible. So a way to go would be editing first and then applying compression.

Old Style: 
When nothing works we must come back to the old tricks. We can reproduce the sound we are working with in the studio monitors and record it from any place in the room. Playing around with the microphone setup can lead to different timbres and colors. This technique is sometimes very convincing. It has been used a lot in post studios that usually have an echo chamber for this purpose. 

Echo chamber in Abbey Road. Notice the tile wall for more reflection and the columns for diffusion.

These are the technics that I use in the daily work. I hope they are useful for you. If you happen to know others, please leave it in the comments.