Audioseminar 2001

Seminar 2003

Seminar 1

Seminar 2

Registration

Seminar 2002

Seminar 2001

Road map

Imprint

SALZBRENNER
STAGETEC
MEDIAGROUP

Digital Audio in a Monastery

The annual Stage Tec seminars at the Training Center of the Banz monastery (Germany) have all but become an event you simply cannot afford to miss. The motto for this year's (2001) event was »New Concepts in Professional Audio Technology« with presentations centered on broadcast-specific applications and various Surround Sound aspects. With internationally renowned and respected speakers, such as Dr. Günther Theile, Gerhard Steinke, Prof. Dr. Jörg Sennheiser, and Dr. Helmut Jahne, the 2001 seminar was the most successful to date. More than 100 visitors attended the two sessions – a lot more than at previous seminars.
Given the exceptionally high turnout (40%) from abroad, with visitors from Belgium, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the Slovak Republic, and Spain, for whom simultaneous interpretation into French and English had been arranged, and the overwhelmingly positive response to this year's event, it is safe to say that the Banz seminars have become a significant European convention.

One element that helped cement this reputation was the duration of this year's presentations: with 60 minutes – rather than the 30 minutes usually allotted at other conferences – the speakers had indeed the opportunity to talk about their subjects in greater depth than is usually the case.

As always, the presentation program was complemented with a small-scale trade exhibition and workshops. All companies present – Klein + Hummel, MPC/Mefisto, Salzbrenner, Sennheiser, SRT, and Stage Tec – had done their utmost to provide the attendants with a good impression of their latest achievements, with Mefisto's brand-new TV OB van, the »MPC Ü-2000«, parked in the monastery's yard as show-stopper. Via an optical link, the van was connected to the Cantus daughter console and Nexus audio router in the conference hall and used for streaming video pictures. The demonstrations involving Surround Sound audio material were played back on a multi-channel K+H PA system, while a portable interpretation system by Sennheiser facilitated international communication during the workshops, the guided tour through the OB van, and the visit of the Banz monastery prope.

These Banz seminars have a long-standing tradition: the first, originally intended as a clinic, was indeed organized by Salzbrenner GmbH in 1993 – even before the inception of Stage Tec. And given that Banz proved just the right location, all subsequent seminars were staged in this former monastery. About three years ago, Stage Tec decided to exploit this tradition by organizing seminars centered on hot topics of the digital audio sector. The success of this year's event was such that Stage Tec is now seriously considering staging similar seminars in other European countries.

The two sessions of the two-day seminar were held on February 12th/13th and 14th/15th at the Banz monastery near Bamberg (Bavaria, Germany).

Presentations (in alphabetical order)

The free-lance sound engineer Wolfgang Ellers discussed the scalability of DVD productions. He started his presentation with an overview of the various DVD formats, their audio options and specific characteristics. By means of several listening examples, he then demonstrated not only the differences between the various audio formats, but also the various aesthetic considerations for multi-channel recording. Based on an organ project to be released on DVD Video and 24/96-format DVD Audio, he talked about the various stages of such a project: recording the audio, shooting the video, preparing the graphic elements and text content, and authoring the DVD.

In his presentation about technical parameters and their effects on real life, Dr. Helmut Jahne, Managing Director and head of Stage Tec Development in Berlin, came up with a rather puzzling statement: provided you use intelligently designed input and output stages, digital technology does not require the use of shielded cables for analog signals, because such cables have no effect on the signal quality. In certain cases, working with unshielded cables may even lead to a better crosstalk attenuation! Given a far-reaching absence of the ground signal, the terms »symmetrical inputs« and »symmetrical outputs« have become obsolete.
To prove this, Dr. Jahne showed the wiring of the ground-free input and output stages used in the Nexus audio router, whose symmetrical damping can hardly be measured anymore because of a total absence of the ground signal. Jahne went on to show curves of measurements conducted with shielded and unshielded cables to provide further evidence. For those still not convinced, a setup involving a 300m-long unshielded cable and a dynamic microphone (with a relatively low-level signal) was set up to verify Jahne's claim.

Reiner Othmer, the Planning Engineer at Hessischer Rundfunk, presented the new »main switching room« of this German radio station. Hessischer Rundfunk had indeed decided to switch the entire broadcast complex from a traditional system to digital network technology. To this end, the station had to devise completely new concepts, because the system was not only to duplicate all existing structures in the digital domain, but also to allow for combining new approaches and technologies with time-tested concepts. This is why the planning stage was mainly centered on rethinking the on-site signal distribution, because computer networks render certain traditional signal distribution tasks obsolete. Audio, for one, is transmitted inside the waveforms or, in part, via exchanging waveform files, rather than via audio lines.
On the other hand, there were also new routing paths to take into account. The current »radio switching room« provides 1,506 inputs and 2,564 outputs and is controlled via four systems.

Thomas Sandmann, sound engineer and owner of »ths master mix« studios presented the ideal system for monitoring Surround Sound productions. Whether a you are commissioned a discrete 5.1 mix, a video production in Dolby Prologic, or Dolby Digital EX cinema sound with synchronous light-sound track in Dolby Stereo SR, you need to be able to monitor various multi-channel formats and to check their backward compatibility during the mixing stage. That is why all signals, including the encoder/decoder routings, must be selectively patchable into the monitoring system, while you should also be able to make comparisons. Moreover, a variety of signal sources outputting various signal formats should be connected to the matrix and be available as and when needed. Moreover, monitoring systems for Surround projects should include a flexible patching system for various Encoder/Decoder systems. The flexibility of such a configuration is not only required because of the sheer number of different formats around, but also for checking Prologic signal sources both via a Dolby SEU/SDU system and a passive consumer decoder. Only then can the engineer predict what will happen to the sound when it is played back on such a (passive) system. Combined with the availability of all possible signal sources and the possibility to select »erroneous« combinations and speaker setups (for checking the stereo compatibility of Prologic material as well as the Prologic compatibility of stereo signal sources), such a monitoring system poses a vast array of new questions.

Bernhard Schullan, Project Engineer at »Systemhaus Salzbrenner«, talked about multi-level utilization of the Nexus audio router in broadcasting, congress installation and theatre environments. By »multi-level utilization«, Schullan means that various services, such as public address, talkback, paging, fire alarm, and cueing run via the same system platform, which can also be used for independent events scattered about various locations – simultaneously. Thanks to its multi-level functionality, such a system can be used to its full potential, while guaranteeing a clearly defined service hierarchy. The latter becomes important in the event of a fire, when the alarm should take precedence over all other services. Though complex at first sight, such a system also provides the possibility to work with configuration templates for discrete, simultaneously available, public address applications that even include sophisticated delay settings for optimum sound localization. The advantage of working with templates is that even untrained users can activate and defeat such configurations.

In his presentation about large-scale audio networks in theatres, Dr. Klaus-Peter Scholz, Managing Director of the Stage Tec Development Company, talked about new trends in stage technology. To this end, he first defined the technical requirements with respect to the audio parameters, their modular nature, the user interface, their access privileges, maintenance and stability. Based on several examples, such as the installation at Deutsche Oper Berlin, he looked into the modularity and flexibility provided by fiber-optic links in modern audio networks. An important component of such audio networks, the mixing consoles need to be operational in various locations.
Such consoles can either be used in isolation or linked to other consoles for parallel or serial operation. These kinds of configurations are, of course, also required in other domains, such as live telecasts of large-scale events (the San Remo festival, for example). As far as theatre applications are concerned, the system's resources are such that the cueing, paging and talk back systems can also be included, thus doing away with the need for additional equipment.

Prof. Dr. Jörg Sennheiser, Sennheiser's President, talked about today's technologies for the development of tomorrow's microphones. He started his presentation with a brief overview of the foundations of human perception and electro-acoustic transducers, before presenting the latest and future concepts in microphone and speaker technology. More specifically, he mentioned the optical microphone, the micro flown as well as ultrasound speakers.

Gerhard Steinke, the master of ceremonies, had set out to answer the question: »How many channels does a human being need?« Based on the general goals of multi-channel sound, Steinke discussed the basic requirements for convincing multi-channel reproduction systems, their possibilities and limitations, and pointed out the usefulness and feasibility of the 3/2 standard with respect to speaker setups for reproducing audio in this format. The basic 3/2 hierarchy prompted him to suggest certain changes to the system with a view to optimize the sonic experience. He also discussed various suggestions that are currently being tried out in the industry. His recommendation was: for audio-only recordings on DVD, radio or TV, the 5.1 format – used for cinema applications – is unnecessary: you don't need the LFE channel. It would therefore be wiser to use the 3/2 format.

Dr. Günther Theile, head of the Audio System Department of the IRT (German radio technology institute), talked about the theory and practice of multi-channel stereophony. His presentation was mainly about improving the listening experience for music using the 3/2 format. Based on psycho-acoustic principles, he analyzed the pros and cons of this new stereo format. The 3/2 stereo format allows the sound engineer to convey a far more accurate impression of spatial depth, room characteristics, and ambience, while providing a higher degree of envelopment than is possible with a two-channel speaker system. The better the recording engineer or artist understands the psycho-acoustic phenomena at work, the better he or she will be able to use these new »tools« for multi-channel stereo, and the more successful and convincing the reproduction will be. This is especially true of conveying optimum »authenticity« of the stereo sound image. That is why Theile extensively discussed various multi-channel approaches and their specificities from a psycho-acoustic point of view. It soon became clear that the center channel can lead to a dramatic improvement of the stereo image quality, sound localization and directional stability, while lateral imaging allows for a high degree of authenticity with respect to the spatial characteristics. Theile also emphasized the diversity of aesthetic objectives and the need for choosing the right stereophonic tools in order to achieve the desired effect. More specifically, he showed that auxiliary microphones are useful in certain cases, while in others they tend to blur the sound field. See also Dr. Theile's article, »Multichannel Natural Music Recording Based on Psychoacoustic Principles« for details. This article can be downloaded from the following site: http://www.irt.de/IRT/indexorgani.htm