Office Hours | Wednesday | October 14, 2026

0:01 Good morning. Hey, welcome to Office Hours. We have an exciting show today, a bunch of fun questions. A little later, I'm going to make a big announcement, and I hope you all choose to take advantage of that. I do want to say that there's this QR code, which is one way that you can ask a question of us live. We will get into more of that later.

0:22 And I think our first question came in through a whole new way that we take questions. So, Alexander, why don't you read the first question? First question is coming in this morning from Mike Edwards in New York. Morning, everyone. Can an Ethernet filter system really improve audio quality via stream? Speaking of the Muon 2 Precision Network, and there's a link there. Ronnie, what's this thing do?

0:49 Well, it's almost like my first thought was this is snake oil. oil, but actually there is some features of this concept that is actually going to work if your equipment is really sensitive for noise. In the normal audio world, we have something called ground lifter and that intend to kind of remove the electrical circuits going between different types of equipment. equipment. And what this filter is actually doing, so the ones and zeros are arriving at

1:26 your equipment just as they are expected with timing and everything. But on all cables, there are some noise that get in there by electromagnetics or power cables that are close by, et cetera. So it will introduce noise to those cables. And even if Ethernet itself is working perfectly between devices, the noise added to that connection can impact your hi-fi equipment. So to some extent it can filter out if your equipment is really sensitive and does not

2:02 actually apply good measures of protecting itself against noise. So I would say kind of in a gnarly way. If your equipment is not good enough, maybe this really expensive filter will almost get it good enough. So I would just suggest that you really do some really deep digging into the features and the ways this is working, just to be sure that you're not buying snake oil.

2:32 Jason, what do you think of this thing? $7,600 United States dollars. Every moment of like, and again, I'm not calling you a fool, Mike. Bullet dodged. Please don't spend money on this. My friend in college used to call ground lifters ungrounders. Mickey, what is this thing?

3:20 Yeah, this thing is, I would bet, most likely a box filled with epoxy. That's about it. Filled with your money. A bunch of Ethernet covers. But it's monster epoxy. Some Ethernet cable in there just to send it in and out and just epoxy giving it weight. A lot of people have debunked this by purchasing one of these things, opening them up and literally just seeing some epoxy in there.

3:51 Oh, really? So I would say, hey, what's the name of this scam company? Network Acoustics. Hey, Network Acoustics, send one to Courtney. Have Courtney actually give a Courtney official honest review, as Courtney is known to do. And if there is really a positive effect on the digital Ethernet connection in there, I'll buy two. And here's the other thing. A Courtney review usually lasts about 10 or 15 minutes.

4:30 So you're going to get 15 minutes of air time of Courtney talking about your product. What do you think of this, Courtney? Do you want to do this review? You'd have to get an x-ray machine to examine it, I think, if it's just a blob of epoxy. But, yeah, I don't think – this goes right up there with the green colors to put on your CD,

4:49 the green marker to color the edge of your CD to improve the sound. They're trying to take the throne away from monster cable for overpriced cables and filters and things, I think. You know, digital signal is a digital signal. It's either a one or a zero. Now, as Ronnie said, there can be packet law. You know, there can be enough noise. If you live right below an electrical substation in the basement of an electrical substation or a giant electrical generator at Hoover Dam.

5:22 nuclear warheads. It might help you out, you know, if you're living. Giant radium deposit. Inside the electrical field of a four kilowatt generator, then, you know, it could probably get your sound cleaned up for you a little bit. Or if you live at the base of an AM transmitter, you know, that can be a problem too. But other than that, yeah, save your money.

5:46 And Mickey, last word. word. Yeah, I just want to point out to anyone who actually understands this, read the description of this Muon 2 Ethernet filter. Some of the LLMs do not hallucinate as bad as this. Just read this. If you're aware of how common mode rejection works and how Ethernet cables work, just read it. It's It's a fun read for the whole family.

6:21 So just a final comment that I'd like to make is a couple of things. One, we will gladly review your product. These are just opinions of the individuals here and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Office Hours.Global. You know, my mom, in her home office on the shelf behind her, she had this little box. And the little box had a button.

6:47 And next to the button was the LED. And it was labeled, somewhere I have a picture of this, as an ion reducing something or rather. And it had a little power cord with a wall wart. and in and of itself, you know, it was probably fine, but it was serial number like 00008. And I was like, mom, what are you spending your money on?

7:22 This is ridiculous. She goes, oh no, I really like that thing. She was also notorious for buying a lot of stuff off QVC. Anyway, Alexander, let's go to the next question. All right. This next question, by the way, that previous question was submitted by Showhub or in Showhub. This is Paul Vahos in Austin, Texas. YouTube normalizes to negative 14 luffs, Spotify to negative 14, podcasts often negative 16 to 19.

7:48 What target does the panel actually hit and do you master per platform? Let's talk about this. Ronnie, you go first. Yeah. So there are a few aspects of this. So, of course, every platform has some kind of most fitting number. As you said, YouTube is minus 14. I would say what is more important is that you master your loves or master output to the genre you are doing.

8:22 So if this is a podcast, of course, you could have more dynamics in it, thus having a bigger number. So more minus. Here in Office Hours, we tend to hit minus 24. And the reason for that is we are a kind of a high quality podcast where we always can have enough headroom so that Chris Fenwick can have his outbursts. That guy is intolerable.

8:49 And in YouTube, you normally have less headroom or less kind of dynamics. And of course, if you listen to EDM music, which I'm kind of known of doing sometimes in the weekends, there's even less dynamics, typically minus six or up to minus three dB LUFS. And the number is is very complex and I'm pretty sure some of my co-panelists will take some time and explain

9:21 the inner details of that, but that is the general idea. And of course, as an answer to your question, yes, I am mastering to the different platforms needs and leave it up to me to decide the dynamics, not the platform to re-encode or do stuff with my signal. So I try to optimize to what they ask for. for. Alexander? There's a lot of subjectivity with this stuff because yes, you're right. First of all,

9:51 I just want to point out that podcasts don't actually have a ratified standard. So there are, there is a standards body that determines loudness, recommended integrated program loudness, depending on whether or not you're in the European Union or in the United States or wherever you are in the world there are different standards so negative 16 has kind of been an unofficial agreed upon target for distribution of stereo audio for podcasts and negative 19 for mono

10:23 because there's the center pan law so there's about a 3db difference there so i also wanted to point out too that these platforms don't actually reprocess your audio I believe there's last time I looked at Apple Music it doesn't do there's something called sound check in Apple Music Which will loudness normalize, but you have to turn it on and I don't know if Spotify does that

10:44 But I'm pretty sure these platforms don't reprocess it because I've actually Had a look at music that was distributed on these platforms And I've for example like you typically modern pop rock and metal music is Mixed very very loudly and I've seen music on these platforms hit negative 9 l UFS Like I've actually measured the audio, the overall program audio, and I've seen it be very, very loud.

11:08 So I don't think they actually reprocess that audio unless they've changed that in the last couple of years. It is optional. It is a user preference. You can turn on in Spotify and Apple Music to loudness normalize. So you need to decide what you want to do. Now, there's obviously a lot of bad audio that is distributed on these platforms, too. I've measured stuff where it's not just the so the LUFS measurement is one thing

11:32 Paul which is typically we're talking integrated loudness was it which is a measurement over the entire program material because that gives you a better idea perceptually how human hearing is but there's also other factors too like like are you actually measuring inter sample peaks so sometimes I've seen audio that meets the loudness target but then but then they actually have clip clipped audio above zero dBFS. So that's also a problem. So you also need to really,

12:01 really pay attention to how you're mastering your audio. And I tend to not master my audio differently for different platforms because it's more work. And unless that platform that I have to distribute to explicitly states we will reject your audio unless you, and you have to prove it, this is basically only becomes an issue on typically movie and tv show distribution platforms not podcasts or or youtube that kind of thing or music streaming so for example like

12:33 if you submit a movie to netflix and you don't uh you don't provide evidence uh that you've hit you usually have to export your files uh and provide the files they'll measure your audio too and if it doesn't hit negative 27 and meet all the other overall criteria then they're just gonna send it back to you and they're gonna say you've got to

12:54 fix this Mickey what's your thoughts on this yeah first off Netflix doesn't doesn't have a spec that's based on what do you call this a long-term integrated loudness, their spec sheet is based off of dial norm. So that's quite different from how most other digital platforms measure. Dial norm is only a measurement of dialogue so that dialogue is consistent and everything else is mixed and wrapped around the dialogue.

13:29 Your music can be as loud or as quiet as you want. Your sound effects could be as loud or as quiet as you want as long as the dialogue is hitting their spec of negative 27 dial norm. That's why an explosion in a movie or something will rattle the windows when you were just listening to people talk. Yeah, if the creators intend for the mix to sound that way, absolutely.

13:56 And just over measuring the integrated loudness of a program means that a film or a TV show that's mostly like dialogue driven, you know, your Sorkin, Aaron Sorkin kind of stuff, overall will have dialogue that's way louder than a film that's all music. If you measure just the full integrated loudness of the full mix. And that's why Netflix decided to go with a dial norm spec.

14:24 So that dialogue is just maintained and everything wraps around the dialogue. Now, going back to Paul's question, YouTube only normalizes if the content is louder than negative 14 LKFS or LUFS, or if a function in the YouTube players called stable volume is enabled. If stable volume is not enabled and the mix is quieter than negative 14 LUFS, then YouTube does not actually raise the playback level.

14:59 With Spotify and other similar podcast platforms, it is often a default automatic setting in the different players that can be defeated in terms of whether it does apply any dynamic range changes or dynamic range processing in the playback of it. And for the very last question of Paul, yes, we master for every single platform differently based on each platform's spec sheet. And I'm not only talking about the podcast here, digital distribution platforms.

15:36 I'm talking about TV stations, different distribution, film distributors. everyone has their own spec ask for the spec sheet mix for that spec every single additional deliverable is another of course another line item in your in your code to remaster for that specific deliverable the with regards to all the different deliverables most of the say TV shows that we deliver we're delivering about

16:12 about anywhere from 30 to 50 deliverables because all of these different requirements from the client in terms of what specs need to be delivered, full mix, M&E, dialogue only, SFX only, music only. There's a whole laundry list of things we need to deliver. Awesome. And Bill, I know you've dealt with this for years, delivering stuff. What's your thoughts? Yeah, and I agree with every single thing that Mickey said because he works at that level where it's very important to do things precisely.

16:47 I mean there's lots of money riding on the work that he produces and sends through and touches. For most of us, there's not. And so my practical day-to-day world when I was delivering to a lot of different outlets was I would do two masters, one at negative 16 and one at negative 24. I started doing the negative 24 because the NBC affiliates network demanded that.

17:12 And I got a kickback to me a couple of times because I didn't hit the spec. So I switched and I put together a spec. And then all my broadcast stuff was sent out that way. And it never came back to me with problems anymore. And then the negative 16 is when digital started going crazy and people needed their sound for websites.

17:29 And that was the same kind of thing. I had a lot of little problems until I just said, all right, I'm going to make it brickwalled at negative 16 and send those out. And those stopped coming back. That is a simple recipe that worked for me with all the people that I had to distribute to. And it was probably 15 or 20.

17:52 So I'd make those two mixes and I would give them one or the other depending on whether they were a broadcast or a digital outlet. And it worked for me. Those weren't the same kind of clients. I mean, they're going to run the spot regardless because nobody gets paid up and down the chain unless the spot runs. So if you make a mistake, they will tell you about it very quickly because people are losing

18:12 money up and down the chain and nobody can stand that. So when I got a call, it was because there was a problem. So don't go crazy and try to do it for everybody unless it turns out that you're getting a lot of pushback. Mickey and his practice will get a lot of pushback from people who know it's not right right, because they've got real engineers there. Most of the time these days, nobody has real

18:32 engineers there. They're just going to take the file, put it in this playout system, and it's going to go in. Unless somebody complains, they'll never reach out again. Yeah. And the last thing I'll mention is, yes, we do every morning when we log on, we do check and we do have meters that we And the thing I don't understand is how Judge Judy became part of our meter system.

18:58 And I don't know where that came from, but I've never noticed it until this morning. She judges on the Scheinman scale. She's judging us. That's what it is. Exactly. Just to add to that, we do mic check ourselves individually going into the system at negative 24 LUFS. But bear in mind that is just the very, very first gain stage in the office hours contribution ingestion.

19:28 We have a lot more going on down the pipeline and at the broadcast side of things. We are actually ending up more or less negative 18 LUFS at YouTube. YouTube. With I should say that that might check into negative 24 loves. If you're, you're actually doing a broadcast, that's quite loud for your first date stage, you would not set your head amp to

19:52 measure a negative 24 love sets are super loud. So listen, if you're just watching this show, live, or not live, if you're just sitting at YouTube and watching this, you're literally missing half the show. So I want to encourage you to go to officehours.global.com and by doing so, you can get access to a whole host of back-end features, not the least of which is, we mentioned,

20:18 Alexander mentioned earlier, the Show Hub. And that's kind of a new tool that we're using so that we know who is logging on every morning and participating here on camera. And so that is is yet another way that you can get involved in office hours. And I'm also going to take, very briefly, I do want to mention one thing that is coming up for our community next year.

20:47 And here is the big announcement that I mentioned. We have decided that we are going to have, I'm calling it a celebration of flight, kind of like a celebration of life. and we are going to honor our friend John Pretto, who passed away last year, and we are going to have a reunion of sorts, but it's not just for the people that were involved in the rocket launch.

21:13 Anybody who wants to make the journey to the dry lake bed, the Jean Dry Lake bed where John's rocket launched, we are inviting you to come. Now the reason we're doing it on this date is there is another big rocket event that weekend end. Obviously, we're not launching anything because we don't have a John with us. But if you want to participate, if you want to come, you're more than welcome. There are some of us

21:40 that are going to be camping on the dry lake bed the night before and maybe the next night. Also, our friend Vienna Tran, she is going to come up from Australia. Not just for that, but but she is planning a trip through that area. She's going to join us. She was one of the hosts of the show. So once again, Saturday, May 25th, 2027,

22:03 on the Gene Dry Lake bed, which is outside of Las Vegas. They tell me there's a lot of hotels in Vegas, so you can stay there if you don't want to camp with us. But we'll grill up some burgers and have some coolers full of drinks, and we'll watch other people launch substantially less impressive rockets than John launched. But I want to invite everybody.

22:26 It is an open invitation, and we'll try and do something on the Discord, but I'll be mentioning this more later. So, Alexander, can you please go to the next question? All right, from the Show Hub question submission, this is one of my questions, which I submitted in advance days early. What does everyone think of Sennheiser Spectera? It looks like a good value considering you get a single 1U 32 in, 32 out, bidirectional transceiver with wide bandwidth for wireless mics and in-ear monitors.

23:00 It appears that Spectera antennas also connect via EtherCon. That's pretty cool. And I'm sorry, I'm looking at the wrong screen. And I apologize to the back-end crew. Courtney, can you take a stab at this? Yeah, I just took a look at it. It's an interesting concept. This is a wideband FM digital, which uses a single transmitter for bidirectional in-ear monitors and wireless mic transmission.

23:28 And so one receiver can handle 64 channels. That's 32 in and 32 out. And it has Dante connection on it and optional MADI connection. I'm looking at the prices here, though. So that's one thing. You have to have fairly deep pockets. A whole system is going to cost you about $30,000, $32,000, including a receiver and multiple transmitters. They're about $2,000 per pop on the transmitter or transceiver, let's call them,

24:00 because they have inner monitors built into them. And then they also have a handheld here for around the same price, $2,000. And the receiver, I don't know if they unlock all 32 channels for that price. It would be interesting whether they actually have to pay, you know, you buy it with different price ranges for different unlocked number of channels. One thing I can worry about in something like this that transmits in-ear monitors and your wireless mic channel over a single body pack is I worry about things like, you know, breaking the antenna so that you lose both the microphone and the ability to tell the person that their microphone is broken.

24:42 over their in-air monitors at the same time. So if they're – and this does involve software that monitors the state of the transmitter so you know what the battery level is, you know what the levels are, you can change the levels. All that on the remote control software that comes with it. It works in the 6 to 8 – the 5 and 6 megahertz band, bandwidth.

25:05 And the antenna, just the antenna – what does the antenna cost? The antenna costs $1,600 just for the antenna. Here it is at Sweetwater, $1,600 for the DAD, bidirectional digital antenna on UHF. So typically those shark fins are quite a bit cheaper than that, but this is an active antenna, I assume, designed. And you might even handle up to four of these antennas

25:34 off of a single transceiver so that you can place them across a stage if you're doing a big Broadway production so that you don't have very much multi-path or interference that is going to cause dropouts and things like that. So at 5 megahertz, you know, your line of sight is important. So let's just say that's what's good. Good idea to have multiple antennas out there.

26:00 It does have error correction and it does, you know, have diversity, like 30-way diversity, more than just two-way diversity. So it does offer a lot of the ability to handle multipath, although you do have to probably maintain some type of line of sight. I'm still laughing at Judge Judy judging us. Ronnie? Yeah, so I was demoing this system when they launched it back in a few years back,

26:32 a lot of time back at IBC in Amsterdam. them. And what we saw there was this is just not a kind of a microphone in the air system. It's basically data links. So I expect Sennheiser to be providing a lot of other meta information going forth and back. So what Courtney said, you can entirely remote control and read every settings and change every settings on the devices that are connected. This is a high quality two-way link.

27:01 And even if on the six megahertz TV channel, so this device is actually taking one entire TV channel and it just pops up all these micro bursts of transmissions inside that band or the channel, TV channel, and creates all these individual kind of data links that it managed entirely. So if you have some external noise coming in on parts of this TV channel, it just redirects you to the next and inform all receivers or body packs or whatever that is connected to use the other channel.

27:38 channel, and they have kind of the one that Courtney said was 30x diversity in the United States is because of the 6 megahertz in Europe. And I think also Asia has 8 megahertz. So we have basically 40x diversity, which is incredible. And the stability of these links are like next to nothing. And this is because of the WMAS system where it takes this entire TV channel and utilizes

28:06 all the bits and bytes that are possible to be transferred forth and back. And it's basically 32 incoming channels for microphones, high quality. And the latency is as low as, I think it's as low as 0.7 microseconds, which is basically around 30 samples, or the same as 10 inches away from your speaker. So that is the latency they actually managed to get.

28:33 So that is really important for in-ears. If the musician or singer is going to rely on this as a high quality in-ear, the latency needs to be really low. And yeah, it's just basically a powerhouse in one rack unit. And regarding the question from Alexander, if this is a good value value for money. Yeah, if you need a lot of channels and you don't have the space for

29:02 it, this is an amazing unit and everything is managed kind of inside the same system. So you don't have to, for instance, do channel scans anymore. It's automatically managed. You just tell them what belt packs you have connected to the system. And it's more like a data system. It's more like an IT-based infrastructure instead of thinking of it as as a microphone and in their channel, kind of in the old way of thinking.

29:33 And Miki? Miki Nitschel, Yeah. Um, regarding the, the value, I, I, there's a, of course a much, much higher, um, uh, initial investment to get into the system compared to more traditional, uh, uh, lower channel count, uh, receivers. Um, I think Sennheiser calls them base stations. But if you do populate it with a full complement of 32 channels, yes, just the base station is a, along with the antenna systems, you can connect up to four antennas, would be a relatively good value.

30:11 you as opposed to buying say on a single channel or two channel basis where in your paying three four or five thousand per channel plus the the cost of the microphone or the capsule on the on a handheld transmitter we've more and more I'm seeing Spectaro being used here Sennheiser certainly pushing it heavily heavily in the market here. I've been able to use it, I think, now like three times in

30:43 productions and I'm often not speccing the RF systems that are used in events here because I'm mostly handling either the recording or the broadcast side of things. So it's whoever's handling front of house and or monitor world that would spec out the RF system and I'm I'm just taking a patch from them. But yeah, seeing more and more spec there are being used here.

31:06 I should say that while the antennas connect over twisted pair, RJ45, CAT5, CAT5E or higher, they actually do not work off. You are not able to run them through network switches. switches. While they do communicate over IP, the explanation from Sennheiser is that the latency variable when doing multiple hops or even just a single hop on a network switch is too high for RF capture. So they want you to run a single cable up to 100 meters over

31:46 over copper and longer over fiber. But yeah, in terms of value, if you fully populate a good value, we haven't actually run into a situation where we utilize the functionality of WMAS to a good extent because I think WMAS is really more a need in North America or in the USA say where the RF environment there is really like a mess. Here it's not nowhere near as bad from

32:23 everything I've heard and read. So we don't need WMAS here, but it's handy, number one for me to be able to have a body pack that not only takes in a lavalier or a headset microphone, but can can also provide IFB within a single pack. And also the ease of not having to run, you know, really, really thick and heavy coax cable for antennas.

32:55 And Alexander? Yeah, I agree. And honestly, for the price too, for 10 grand, and yes, I know the body packs are two grand each, but I think for the money, it's not just the money too, like just when I saw this thing and what it could do and the capabilities i just thought the rack say is it like the rack space saving alone is going to

33:15 be absolutely huge and i think especially for bands that are touring that are worldwide you know having something with such wide bandwidth where you don't have to worry about okay if i have a qlx or some cheaper wireless system is it going to work if i you know if i do say though that um you need to purchase licenses to unlock more bands sure and you do it a lot of the in the

33:37 And actually, that brings up my next point, because I was actually going to mention and ask you, Mickey, if you've compared this to some of the newer Axion in-ears. And they actually have a new product that sort of seems like similar to Spectera. It's like 16 channels of wireless, and you have to purchase licensing. So it seems like it's kind of similar to that.

33:55 I don't know if you've seen that in the wild, anyone actually using that, or if you've compared it. But it looks also like a very interesting product. but it's it's kind of a really cool time to live in that we can pack this kind of density in a single one u system so anyways i thought it was a cool product mickey anything you want to add to that yeah i haven't tried any of the the recent the short

34:17 ones that have been released in the past year um but uh i've had very extensive extensive experience with the sound devices um systems but which um aren't exactly uh wms they they're just like full-on wideband solutions and they're excellent. I wish they had more options in terms of different types of transmitters as well as hopefully eventually IEMs or wireless RF IEM systems. There's also WisiCom which is one of the original when it comes to

34:54 wide or wider band RF microphone systems, but they're still, don't get me wrong, they sound amazing. And I have a couple of channels of WysiCom, but they're analog systems. But I assume eventually they gain more in terms of functionality and move over to digital soon. Let's go to the next question, Alexander. All right. All right. Next up from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. Does Nugent audio's dialogue check give a

35:28 usefully objective measure of speech intelligibility or is a human listener still the only meter that matters? Bill Davis. So it's all eventually going to come down to human ears. But I wish I could say that that was a single standard, but it certainly in my experience over the course of my career has not been. Let me just say this. I have worked in my career predominantly in two areas,

35:52 and they're at the two far ends of intelligibility as an idea. Commercials, which I did in my early life, intelligibility is everything. You are in the position where you are trying to get a commercial message of 30 seconds out into a world where people had background noise, they were in in cars driving around. They were on little transistor radios in the early days of my career.

36:18 So pumping up the clarity parts of a signal so that intelligibility survives all that background junk was everything. And we used to do all sorts of tricks to make things as clear and punchy as possible. Here later in my career, I find myself working in audio books where you can expect somebody working at an assembly line to be listening for 10 hours a day to somebody talk

36:46 in their head. And that same profile of intelligibility might exhaust them and make them not want to continue to listen. So it's not that there is an objective intelligibility standard. There are standards, certainly. And Mickey and others can speak to how to make things not muddy or indistinct such that the person listening has to struggle to hear what someone's saying you also have people that have unusual speech patterns

37:16 and sometimes extra boosts in certain frequencies can help that person's voice cut through and be distinct but what I'm describing is it's never as simple as if If you see this on anyone's meter and it says it's good, that means it's always good for everything. That takes out the human variability that is always going to be a part of this. And we just have to deal with that if you're dealing with audio.

37:43 At the end of things, you really do need somebody who understands what they're listening for and can judge this file at this time to make sure its quality is the best it can be so that you reach the most people with the message you're trying to get out. I'm sorry, I forgot who's next. Alexander, is it? It's me. All right, so I'm going to limit what I say here because I don't work in the post industry.

38:07 Although I have some very little experience mixing in terms of, like, you know, I've done some, like, audio book style stuff, radio dramas, that type of stuff where there's a lot of sound beds and effects and you've got dialogue and stuff like that. So I've used other Nugent tools, not specifically DialogCheck, but I agree with Bill, still going to come down to a human being.

38:31 But I think we do have the data now that at least can show you because we can now measure, you know, we've previously on the show just this morning, we talked about, you know, program integrated loudness. There are other aspects, too, of this, like short term loudness, short term max, momentary, momentary max. there's also PLR peak to loudness which is the measurement the difference between the peak

38:54 the peak and the integrated loudness I think it's sometimes referred to as crest factor too but there's there's all sorts of other data so this is important data to have as a dialogue mixer because it can unearth other information about what what is going on in your mix and even Nugent says now this particular dialogue check application it has some other technology to do with psychoacoustics

39:17 I haven't really done a deep dive on that too, but you know, it may unearth some things about like Problems with the dialogue to like not just the mix but like does your dialogue need more cleanup? Do you need more noise reduction? Does it do you need ADR? Do you actually need to record it was it properly recorded in the first place and like Bill said to there are also issues too

39:37 sometimes with the actors because people don't enunciate clearly enough and sometimes there's you know, There's more manipulation needed with processing to try to squeeze out as much intelligibility as possible. And if you're doing processing, again, you still need to measure this stuff. There is actual science. It is an exact science because you need to measure it. You can't just do it by ear.

40:05 Mickey. Mickey's next. Yeah. What's this? Dialogue check by Inusion. It's based off of a new standard, I think, created or standard study. I don't know exactly. Created by, I believe, Fran Haufer or some smart people made that study. There's a lot of discussion within the post sound community, whether platforms or distributors or platforms say like Netflix should create an intelligibility standard that needs to be met

40:47 or a spec that needs to be met. The measurement is called LE, listening effort or something like that. I myself don't use it. And I feel quite confident that if one is mixing properly, listening for intelligibility, the ADR and what needs to be ADR'd, clearing out the mud on dialogue that needs to be cleaned up that one would pass these intelligibility scores or specs with no issues.

41:20 I think the contention comes where in there may be situations where a creative or a director or someone purposefully wants something to sound intelligible or dialogue to sound intelligible for creative effect. I think that's when, similar to loudness specs actually, that's when one may have to contest these specs with these platforms that put out the spec sheets that have to be met.

41:53 But all in all, generally speaking, if one is actually mixing and listening and aiming for intelligible dialogue, then it's zero issues. And Courtney? Yeah, I think what they're trying to go for is an objective measurement. And the problem is with listening tests, they're subjective. They're subject. You know, it's up to Mickey's old, it depends. It depends on what system, the brand of speakers you're listening to it on.

42:24 Are you 7.1, 5.1, 9.6, 1.7 point at most? What is it you're listening to it on? How good are the speakers, you know? So there are so many variables involved in this, an objective way of measurement based on the Freunhefer IDMT, which they conducted listening tests for analyzing hearing aids and things like that over the years. So maybe they can put a score on it so at least some people will – they will have a standard that they can try and achieve regardless of the hearing of the listener, the quality of the playback devices, the acoustics of the room you're listening to it in.

43:08 All those things play an important part in the intelligibility of dialogue. And I think we should all take up a collection and buy Christopher Nolan this $400 plug-in. You know, I remember having discussions 30 years ago, literally 30 years ago, about the postmodern era and how there was an aversion toward polish. Like people wanted things to be a bit more real. And I think that when we lean too hard on letting the computer do it for us or letting some AI create a flyer for John Predo's event on the, I mean, of course I use the AI for that because I made it this morning.

43:56 But we let go of a little bit of humanity. It's okay to be real. It's okay to be imperfect. And I want to celebrate humans doing things for humans. Let's go to the next question, Alexander. Next up is from Roscoe Jones in Madison, Indiana. But do it very humanly, okay? Do it like a human. Go for it. What are the pros and cons of using a bag mixer over a sound card?

44:24 You missed the mark. I was, oh, whoops. I was, I slipped into my robot. I was reading a post where producers are preferring bag mixers these days. Is this true? Is this a good trend? What's the deal, Jason? Okay. Bag mixers are much more portable unless, of course, you walk into Alex Lindsay's hotel room and he fits you with a full body harness and 100 pounds of gear.

44:50 Done that. um and then goes hey you can carry the scorpion and the transmitter on your back um all right let's go uh other than the rolling stones beast of burden song yeah no kidding no i'll let mickey answer it for real yeah mickey go ahead yeah uh as jason mentioned the you know uh strapping a bag allows you to be more portable, also allows you to swing a pole at the same time.

45:23 Not that you can't swing a pole when you have a cart, but it's much better to have your mixer slash recorder on you as you swing the pole so that you can make adjustments as you go. So in situations where, say, it's unscripted programming or like a documentary or a run-and-gun shoot or even a narrative where you have to be very low profile.

45:47 Say like I've shot narratives, full-length features on top of mountains where it's not very feasible to carry a cart all the way up. Then you may want to build a bag system instead. Although with some of those features, somehow they're able to get movie birds and techno cranes up there, but they can't carry a small sound cart. anyway um but yeah you uh you are able to be more nimble in terms of your movement with a uh

46:17 when when you're mixing off a bag of course that comes at the cost of functionality um with compared to like say my sound card like my sound cards have full uh Dante systems in them uh we can certainly run way more channels on them we can bring in say you know music playback if there's music playback that can easily be integrated in with a card system or a system with multiple

46:41 cards in it um but if you're uh you're in a bag that's that's more tricky you'll um certainly very very quickly run out of uh space uh for a lot for major functionality you want to add in the system so it's really a um a a a toss-up between uh being nimble being able to move fast beyond the go versus having more functionality more channel count in a cart based system

47:14 and courtney yeah i see more and more sound mixtures these days that work off of a cart have a bag system put together so that they can jump into a car to do a mobile shot something like that. You know, for reality shows where they've got, you know, four guys walking around with bags following each camera around, that's a lot of useful.

47:34 But, you know, you're limited, like Mickey said, in the number of channels of wireless you can support. You're not going to plug in that Sennheiser Spectera system into a bag. It just won't fit. And plus you've got to drag an extension cord around, plug it into your bag. So, you know, that could be a problem and an Ethernet cable. So that's also a problem.

47:54 Yeah, so you're limited. And I think, you know, it's become less of a problem with 32-bit float recording. But, you know, wielding a boom and trying to mix four channels of wireless at the same time and bring people up and bring people down as they come in and exit the set, that's highly problematic for one person to do and concentrate on while trying to point the microphone in the right direction, keep it out in front of the person.

48:19 and handle the mixing and wireless reception and context for the in-ear monitors for the producer, director, and all of their family and friends that happen to show up on the set and want to hear the dialogue. Yeah, it's just working exclusively off a bag is probably a bad idea unless you're just doing a reality show or news coverage. And, Alexander, let's go to the next question.

48:45 Next question is from Funsak Dorji in Dharamshala. Greetings, panelists. Which mic, Rode NT1 or SM58 is best to use for cultural dance performance on a stage? I saw two Shure SM58 and two Rode NT1s in front of the stage. Would it help if we hung the SM58 on top of the dancers? Please advise. What's your thoughts, Mickey? Mickey's grabbing gear. This is the farthest Mickey has ever had to move.

49:10 That was like eight feet. He moved out of frame to grab gear. Yeah, I was about to. to, I forgot I have an NT1 there. I was going to pull both a 58 and an NT1. Um, it really depends, uh, uh, Funsuk on what you are trying to capture here. Um, you mentioned dancers. So like, are you trying to capture, um, you know, feet movement on, are these tap

49:35 dancers, you want to capture that sort of sound, um, are they, are they, these cultural dancers are perhaps also singing. If you need to capture their voice somehow, I would only use a 58 if they actually either walk up to the microphone or hold the microphone and put that 58 right to their mouths. Apart from that, you won't really get much from a 58.

50:00 You won't get anything from it if you hang 58s above the stage. if you're just trying to get like a like some some sort of Atmos or FX or NAT sound you might be able to get away with an NT1 but that's not really the right tool for the job I'd probably go with shotgun mics perhaps or super cardioids but I wouldn't consider the NT1 for that that's my first

50:33 option. Courtney? Yeah, like he says, it depends on what. And also, he didn't mention whether this is for like broadcasters is for sound reinforcement. Will there be open speakers? If so, it's not going to do you any good because to get a signal hung overhead, you're going to have to crank them up to a level where they'll be feeding back. So that's going to be a problem if there's

50:57 sound reinforcement going on. Perhaps boundary microphones might be a solution if they're cloggers or tap dancers so you can get those foot sounds uh put them at the base of the stage they're unobtrusive easy to put in and uh you know like the crowns uh that's a possible solution uh but yeah i would go with the more directional uh sennheiser's shotgun microphones uh hung overhead

51:21 and out in front uh for singers and to capture the everything else and it depends like i said on whether or not you have to deal with sound reinforcement, you know, speakers or not. So the last thing I want to say, next thing I want to say is that if you want to help, if you want to get involved, if you want to help put on this show,

51:42 go to officehours.global slash volunteer. There's a myriad of ways that you can help with the back end. You can come hang out, watch how it's all put together, see the sausage being made. But if you want to help and you don't really have that kind of time, just remember officehours.global is a 501c3 and if you go to officehours.global slash donate at least in the States here that may end up helping you out

52:08 with your with your taxes let's go the next question Alexander Jack Cannon Phoenix is asking what is your go-to product to grab house signal for video source when you don't get a tech check for an event I'm just responsible for video uh mickey yeah i'm uh wondering uh jack are you um or do you just need like a guide track that you can cut to and then someone will provide a mix afterwards for you

52:36 um or are you solely responsible for the recording in general for the video product um if uh for For myself, if I do a lot of just like broadcast recording stuff, I typically have a desk that I do a relatively good or decent broadcast mix on even for recording like live to tape recording. But apart from that, if I'm just multi-tracking, my first go-to if available is the sound devices

53:09 as PIX970s. Absolutely solid recorder, 64 channels of Dante. It also has a whole load of AES-3, analog I.O., MADI as well. They've been discontinued for a long time, so the few houses that do have them for rent, they're often out. So if they're not available, then I'd go with with the Joko Black Box. Again, hardware recorder, they have all sorts of versions with Dante,

53:44 MADI, Analog IO. They are also rock solid. They've been known for decades for recorders. Over the past two years, I've also been using a lot of this software a lot. It's called WildTracks. Full disclosure, I'm part of the alpha team for WildTracks. WildTracks and by the way they recently announced the beta version of WildTracks 2027 which I have been testing for the past couple weeks or month and a half or

54:13 something like that really good software produced made by a fellow sound recordist so they know what's needed I absolutely trust Halter Technical and DocJustice and WildTracks. Really good product. If I just need a quick stereo patch, again, just as a guide track, and I'm not actually going to be mixing it, someone else will be providing a mix. A really quick solution is to throw one of these, Electrosonics SPDR stereo recorder. It can take

54:49 line level in, also mic level in if you want. Two channels of audio can jam sync to your time code generator which i know jack uses time code in his workflows rock solid made by electrosonics hard to go wrong with it um and of course they're the traditional field the recorders you know sound devices stuff and and zaxcom and whatnot you can you can trust those those names um

55:19 And if the camera is close enough or if a camera is close enough, I would take a split and also feed audio to the camera again, just as a reference and possibly a backup if worse comes to worse. But yeah, it really depends what you need to capture, just something as a guide or if you need to actually multi-track record these events.

55:46 events. And let's see. Bill Davis. Yeah, I'm just concerned that we, that Mickey gave a superb answer on the audio side of things, but it just says, I'm just responsible for video. So I'm wondering if he's just looking to record the video signal for this. If so, there are a number of digital video recorders, and we talk about them a lot here, that'll capture that. You probably

56:12 want some sort of active split or something like that to make sure that the signal doesn't get chopped up into too many things and sent too many places but if you're trying to record the video different different solution here so Alexander let's go the next question Vic Hernandez in Springfield Missouri is asking at live events using in-ear monitors how do you keep the artists

56:35 from feeling isolated from the audience while providing them the necessary necessary monitor mix of musicians and vocalists? Let's make these answers pretty quick. We're getting towards the top of the hour. Ronny? I'm speaking as a video producer. So what we have in the venue is sometimes something called a room tone microphone or ambient sound microphone, which we're using to kind of sitting below everything and kind

57:02 of keeping it together and not have these entirely silent breaks. breaks. And those microphones can be typically positioned up on the trusses above the stage and pointed towards the audience. And we use some of that feed to feed back into the IFP and that is how the artist is using. That is, of course, if they are using 100% like these ACS custom molded in-ears that blocks out almost everything coming from the outside.

57:35 side. Some of the artists are using leaky earplugs, which is actually leaking audio in, and then also have the in-ear in their ears. So it's depending on the artist's choice, but yeah, use microphones to get the room tone. Alexander? Yeah, I'm going to mention three things, and then we'll talk about the mixing very quickly. But for me, non-negotiable with with in-ear monitor mixes as I've done this for bands

58:03 is one, stereo mix for spatial reasons. Number two would be crowd mics like Ronnie was talking about. Number three, then there's the processing part of it. So adding reverb to taste to give a better sense of that. So like for me with stereo mixes, usually what I will do is, first of all, if you do stereo, that allows you to spatially create some separation

58:30 between instruments. So typically like a vocal is going to be right smack dab in the middle, right? And each artist will have different requirements too. But, you know, with stereo allows you a lot more freedom to do things like have like I often have stereo guitars, stereo keys, that kind of thing. And I will not necessarily hard pan left, right. But I just move them out from the middle to provide more space for the vocal to be right in the center.

58:56 And that combined with reverb, that combined with the crowd noise being mixed into will be a much better experience because typically, you know, in-ears, you stick them in, you get about 25 to 30 dB of isolation. So that's, you know, without doing any processing or having crowd mics, it's going to sound really dry. And Mickey, briefly? Yeah, definitely crowd mics. I'm not the monitor engineer, but I cosplay as one and shows that are low budget and need someone to step in to mix ears.

59:30 But absolutely, you need crowd mics for in-ears to give them a sense of the room, the sense of the energy of the crowd that they can then react to. As someone who does mostly more on the broadcast and also recording side of things for these events, I bring way more crowd mics or room mics. I usually bring 8, 10, 12 room mics spread across the entire room, which monitor engineers tend to appreciate when I say, hey, you want to get a patch from my room mics?

1:00:00 You know, a little brownie point there, maybe get a free beverage at the end of the day sometimes. Room mics definitely help. Another thing that may help musicians in terms of how they feel the room is every musician, everyone wants their own mix. Everyone has their own preferences. But when it gets to panning, some musicians prefer that the monitor engineer follow the panning of the other instruments, the other musicians, based on their position on stage.

1:00:37 So as a monitor engineer, you have to chase them around. If they run to the left, much of the other instruments get panned to the right of their ears so that they have spatial awareness based on where they're standing. It's, of course, a lot more work for an engineer, but that's part of the job. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of another episode of the show here.

1:00:59 I almost said the name of the other show. I want to thank everybody for being here. Thanks to the crew. Thanks for all the people on stage here. I just want to say if we had gotten into the office hours bus, we would have traveled 25,000 miles or 40,000 kilometers. So clearly doing this on Zoom was easier. It's banana colored. And it would have taken us 199 SM58s that are roughly the size of Jason's banana.

1:01:32 So anyway, thanks for being here. Sorry we went long. We'll fix that next time. Bye-bye. My banana is exactly standard, okay? Is your banana the same length as a 58? Believe so. 57 or 58. There's a couple extra millimeters for the windscreen on a 58. Mickey cosplaying. That was adorable. You like my bus? I love the idea of going back. I missed the first rocket launch.

1:02:06 though isn't it oh yeah please come to the rocket launch so so like you know can't be yours chris because it doesn't have a bolt-on grill behind it yeah no minute i realized i should not have like decided i'm gonna you know i'm gonna man the studio for this oh well well it's we're gonna do it we're not gonna we're not gonna broadcast anything we uh we are gonna reach out gonna go

1:02:33 Go get dusty for two days. Free dust masks available for everyone. Yeah, sorry we were late.