Verbal anachronisms in period movies

[LizzieMaine]

Radio announcers in general were instructed to leave their accents at the door, but a few let theirs slip out. Milton Cross, the suave host of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, was raised in Hell's Kitchen, and you'd occasionally hear him slip and refer to "this woik of the great composer." Bill Hay, the long-time announcer for "Amos 'n' Andy" came from Scotland, and he would roll his r's with impunity. And of course, Red Barber, the great baseball broadcaster, perplexed a generation of Brooklyn listeners with his patented Quaint Southernisms.

Barber's successor Vin Scully never wholly lost his native New York accent, even after spending sixty years marinating in the California sunshine. It was a delightful thing to hear him do a commercial for Farmer John's "broawnschwiegeh."

 

[MikeKardec]

Think big bass voice, orotund pronunciation, forced and exaggerated enthusiasm. Or Ted Baxter on the "Mary Tyler Moore" TV show. That was the stereotypical top-40 radio newscaster in the 1960s.

At some point in my youth that big bass exaggerated voice thing went crazy. I later found that a lot of it was the particular proximity effect of a particular Sony microphone. Announcers just loved to listen to themselves through than damn thing. Of course the fidelity of the whole chain from broadcast studio to playback had to evolve to withstand that ... I have always wondered if many vocal affectations in radio weren't reactions to the qualities of the equipment.

Few modern-day screenwriters or directors are going to know anything about any of this. That's why they need to be using technical consultants who do.

The biggest problem with consultants is that too often they come on too late in the process. They should be working with the writers but instead they are only employed once the production budget is released (no surprise there) and some things can not be changed ... or are changing so fast the consultants can't keep up with it. Far too many writers don't know what they don't know.

They also feel completely free to make up fantasy details about guns and cars that they would never dream of fudging if the subject was computers or something. If it had to be fixed at the last minute on the set someone could just ask one of the teamsters, they all have muscle cars or hot rods and every truck cab has an old copy of Shotgun News or Hemmings Motor News in it ... but then most writers and directors have never sat in a truck cab with a teamster!

 

[LizzieMaine]

You'll get that same bassy proximity effect with an RCA 44, which is why actual broadcasters usually worked about two feet away from the mic unless they were moving in close for a specific vocal effect. That's how Freeman Gosden was able to sound high and thin when he was playing Amos, and rich and bassy when he was playing the Kingfish -- he leaned back to play the former role, and leaned in close to play the latter. When you see a radio newscaster in a movie working right on top of an RCA 44 or similar ribbon mic, you know the director of that scene has never set foot in an actual radio studio where such equipment was in use.

 

[BlueTrain]

I have read that in the recording studio, sometimes a band (that is, the band leader) would spend time moving instruments to different places in the room to get the desired sound. I have no idea how they knew what difference it would make, though. There are some contemporary Youtube videos of recording being made in a studio and they can be very interesting themselves on top of the actual music. One I'm thinking of, which happens to be Slovenian, is of three girls doing something. They laugh and joke before hand and once it starts, with the recording engineer (I guess) setting the tempo, he actually stops it a few bars into the set, saying something that sounds like "wait a minute" in English (they are not speaking or singing in English in the number). Funny thing is, they look like American girls, the way they look and dress, complete with braces, only Americans rarely play harmonicas (button box). Don't laugh, the First (third, actually) Lady is Slovenian.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Radio engineering handbooks of the Era include very detailed diagrams for how the studio is to be laid out for specific kinds of broadcasts. Most of the big-time shows included a live orchestra right up on the stage with the actors, and that orchestra had to be very carefully arranged on stage and very carefully miked to avoid distortion. Today a lot of that is done at the mixing console, but in the Era a sizable part was done by careful arrangement of the stage.

Radio in the Era also had a far wider dynamic range than radio from the 1960s onward. Extreme compression of the audio is a rock-era affectation -- the radio broadcasts of the 1930s and 1940s offered a much warmer sound, with the program gain controlled *manually* to sound full and rich on a good-sized living room loudspeaker. Squeezing and squashing the sound into the harsh, quacking din of the 1960s onward was designed for maximum audibility on a cheap three-inch car radio speaker or a squawky plastic pocket transistor set.

This leads into another anachronism -- the idea that radio always sounded "radio-y," with a harsh, filtered raspy sound full of noise, hiss, and static. A quality 1930s radio tuned to a strong local station produced a remarkably full, rich sound -- and while network broadcasts received far down the network line might sound constricted in the low end, there was nothing like the paper-cup-and-string sound that moviemakers often use to represent "radio." I have my home transmitters set up to approximate the processing used in the pre-WWII era, and using clean recordings as a program source, you can really hear the difference between what radio really sounded like and what people think it must've sounded like.

 

[BlueTrain]

A key word that almost jumps off the page there is "strong local station." I don't know how strong the station was but there was a local station in my home town. It's still in business, too, thought with new call letters and now, a "format." It didn't used to have a format. But I don't know anything else about it. We didn't have a good-sized living room loudspeaker, either, so whatever fidelity the radio had that I listened to, it wasn't all that high.

The interesting thing about that station to me was the way they played all sorts of music. Late at night was given over to big band and easy listening. Pop music had moved on by then but they didn't play what might have been called rock and roll, much less jazz or anything like that. No classical (long hair) stuff, either. I do remember the late night program was called "Smoke Rings," and that probably conveys the mood pretty well. I can barely remember network radio programs (drama and westerns) but only barely.

I had cousins who were radio buffs. They had ham licenses and built everything themselves. Other than trading cards with other ham operators around the country and around the world, they were really only interested in radio as a technology and hardly at all in programming content.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Most people in the Era, at least in the East, West, and Midwest, lived well within reach of a strong local station -- even a 250 watt station could come into your home with meaty volume if it was in your town. And at night, the big 50,000 watt regional stations could boom in like locals -- even more so then than now, given the comparative lack of overcrowding on the band and less electrical interference. In the mid-1930s, WLW in Cincinnati ran at 500,000 watts -- the most power of any station in North America -- and blanketed much of the US like a local.

There were "DX" bugs in the Era, who were more interested in pulling in obscure and distant signals, but the big living room radios were not optimized for this type of listening. Their circuitry was specifically designed, and their audio characteristics specifically constructed, for family listening. My Philco console, built in early 1937, is typical of the type of "family" set that was popular in the Era -- it has an 11-inch speaker rated at 5 watts undistorted output, and uses the cabinet itself as a baffle to improve bass response. The set is powerful enough to pull in the New York 50kw stations at full local volume at night, and can be comfortably used to listen as far west as Detroit and Cincinnati when conditions are right. But most listeners in the Era would have used such a radio to listen to stations within their own market -- and would have enjoyed extremely high-quality sound in doing so.

There were also special "high fidelity" stations in the 1930s, assigned to frequencies on the high end of the broadcast band -- these were designed to be heard on the top-line high-fidelity radios which were equipped with special frequency-expanding circuitry and elaborate speaker arrays for a genuine high-fidelity audio experience. Some of these sets were quite successful -- the Philco 37-116 was the most popular Philco model that year, and is still very commonly found today. When restored and set up properly, the quality of the sound is breathtaking.

 

[MikeKardec]

You'll get that same bassy proximity effect with an RCA 44,

When you see a radio newscaster in a movie working right on top of an RCA 44 or similar ribbon mic, you know the director of that scene has never set foot in an actual radio studio where such equipment was in use.

Thankfully, I'm still young enough to say the RCA 44 was already a vintage mic when I was born! The more contemporary mics (including that early Sony I can't remember the number of) were/are worked in the way Lizzie describes, very correctly, as being the WRONG way to use an older ribbon mic, with the announcer tight up on the mic, lips almost brushing it. Here in So Cal we had constant ads for various racetracks from the '60s to the '90s that specialized in that over hyped, super articulated, mega bass, proximity effect sound. We called it the Drag Race or Monster Truck sound. They were hysterical but they really did get your attention. A guy more into the history of local announcers than myself could tell you the names of the men responsible for creating it.

In the work I've done the two best mics were the Sennheiser MKH series and the Schoeps colette. The Schopes has NO noticeable proximity (bass boost) effect and are very dry and scientific, and thus superb for motion picture dialog and SFX work as well as the Audio Dramas I was doing. But they were fragile and expensive, a bad combination. The Sennheisers had a slight exaggeration of the low end when set VERY close to the source (within a couple of inches) but you could drive nails with them. I have always used Sennheisers and found it convenient to use their limited proximity effect at times. I don't like anything that can change the quality of a recording if the talent moves too close ... so we never get within 6 to 8 inches of our mics.

I have read that in the recording studio, sometimes a band (that is, the band leader) would spend time moving instruments to different places in the room to get the desired sound. I have no idea how they knew what difference it would make, though.

Compared to Lizzie I know relatively little about the technical aspects of radio broadcast and only a touch more than that about the recording techniques in the Era ... I'll leave the historical stuff to her. But in recording studio work different spots in the "studio" (the recording space as opposed to the control room) can have very different sounds. You can walk around speaking and listening and get a sense of it. We do a lot of testing when we start to use a new studio, listening to our mics through headphones to identify the best exact locations to set our mic stands. There are some photos of us doing this in the photo stream you can follow from this link -- http://www.thediamondofjeruaudio.com/gallery/index.html#SU001-IMG_0021.JPG

In music, isolating different instruments is done using distance, occasionally barriers, and then by placing instruments that can be allowed to bleed into one another's mic closer together. This is also an art that requires a good deal of preparation. Obviously, splitting certain instruments out and recording them in a separate pass is very common in a modern studio. These days it's hard to get all the musicians to show up on the same day anyway.

In the time Lizzie is talking about recording onto multiple tracks was extremely rare (before the '50s it was mostly done in Hollywood) and anything beyond the most basic multi channel recording console was also mostly a film industry sort of thing. Prior to having the sort of control those devices give you the placement of everything and getting it all adjusted in relationship to the mic was high art ... and the studios were considerably bigger, creating a lovely sense of space.

As multi track machines and consoles came into wider and wider use (1960s) and over dubbing was used more and more, the studios tended to soften up the walls and work the mics closer to the instruments/talent for better isolation. This gave greater control but unleashed a tumult of problems; soft walls suck up some frequencies more than others requiring EQ, they also suck up volume requiring amplifiers or playing even closer to the mics. The beautiful "live" sounding rooms of the pre rock era gave way to these over-damped disasters which, thank god, have been redesigned over time to return to a more balanced "semi live" sound. It's a constant evolution.

There was a similar "arms race to the bottom and back" when it came to playback equipment. I briefly owned a 1942 Altec Lancing Iconic, possibly the only really good speaker built before the 1950s. It was manufactured for movie studios, recording studios and science labs. On a Harmon Kardon Citation II amp (probably the most advanced tube amp of the 1960s) it was seriously competitive with the set up in my recording studio, the playback system in which was designed by the guy who built the mastering rooms for DTS (a high end film sound release format). Old isn't necessarily good but the geniuses of the era were, well ... geniuses.*



* If you want to read about a REAL genius google Alan Bulmlein who was just this year awarded a Grammy for the work he did on stereo and stereo mics 80 years ago. Better technique is still being derived from his ground breaking research.

 

[BlueTrain]

I took my comment about moving instruments around the recording studio from a biography of Bob Wills, the Western Swing bandleader. At least I think that's where I read it. His band had a very successful run doing radio broadcasts (every day, too, for a while), live appearances at dances (dances, not concerts), recordings and even appearing in motion pictures. The size of his band varied quite a bit over the years and I think was at its largest around 1940 or 1941. While there are still orchestras and all sorts of bands, nobody does the variety of things they were doing now, as far as I know. In fact, who goes out for an evening of dancing at the local hotel ballroom these days? That's one thing that has disappeared, along with "dance halls," live broadcasts (I think), daily TV music programs and the like.

 

[MikeKardec]

who goes out for an evening of dancing at the local hotel ballroom these days? That's one thing that has disappeared, along with "dance halls," live broadcasts (I think), daily TV music programs and the like.

Where I live no one seems to go out at all after age 30, everyone is too stunned by the traffic to venture forth. I hope that's not the case in more mid-sized communities.

Love Bob Wills. A lot of "mixing" in those days was the positioning of instruments around a single mic ... or the over-all acoustic design of a studio. My favorite studios for doing Audio Dramas were the last of the big band rooms (built in the late '50s and used more for Film and TV scoring) and a few designed (interestingly by the same men) in the early disco era. The thinking was the same, to make a reasonably sized orchestra sound good using a minimum of microphones, as opposed to the "everyone gets an isolated, possibly multi mic, set up" late rock era approach. Capitol Records Studio A (recently redone and fancier than ever) is sort of like the late big band era rooms I was describing but it was always too expensive for us.

 

[BlueTrain]

Is that studio you mention in the Capitol Records building in L.A.? While I've seen the building, I've never been inside, nor inside any other recording studio. The closest I've come was watching a concert from inside the sound control booth at a college concert hall when I was in school. My roommate was acting as the sound engineer for the concert and impressed everyone with what he was doing. It was one of the old PDQ Bach concerts and I got to meet Peter Schickele. Anyway, there seem to be recording studios all over the place.

Something that existed when I was little and apparently had ever since radio started in the 1920s was local musical groups, usually country and western, who had their own programs on both radio and later on television. Some like Bob Wills, were everyday, others weekly. They were all short and usually live. They continued, I believe, into the 1970s at least. A few better known musicians like Porter Wagoner had programs like that on television. Although that was hardly a local program, there was a time when local TV station produced more of their own programming.

 

[vitanola]

Thankfully, I'm still young enough to say the RCA 44 was already a vintage mic when I was born! The more contemporary mics (including that early Sony I can't remember the number of) were/are worked in the way Lizzie describes, very correctly, as being the WRONG way to use an older ribbon mic, with the announcer tight up on the mic, lips almost brushing it. Here in So Cal we had constant ads for various racetracks from the '60s to the '90s that specialized in that over hyped, super articulated, mega bass, proximity effect sound. We called it the Drag Race or Monster Truck sound. They were hysterical but they really did get your attention. A guy more into the history of local announcers than myself could tell you the names of the men responsible for creating it.

In the work I've done the two best mics were the Sennheiser MKH series and the Schoeps colette. The Schopes has NO noticeable proximity (bass boost) effect and are very dry and scientific, and thus superb for motion picture dialog and SFX work as well as the Audio Dramas I was doing. But they were fragile and expensive, a bad combination. The Sennheisers had a slight exaggeration of the low end when set VERY close to the source (within a couple of inches) but you could drive nails with them. I have always used Sennheisers and found it convenient to use their limited proximity effect at times. I don't like anything that can change the quality of a recording if the talent moves too close ... so we never get within 6 to 8 inches of our mics.



Compared to Lizzie I know relatively little about the technical aspects of radio broadcast and only a touch more than that about the recording techniques in the Era ... I'll leave the historical stuff to her. But in recording studio work different spots in the "studio" (the recording space as opposed to the control room) can have very different sounds. You can walk around speaking and listening and get a sense of it. We do a lot of testing when we start to use a new studio, listening to our mics through headphones to identify the best exact locations to set our mic stands. There are some photos of us doing this in the photo stream you can follow from this link -- http://www.thediamondofjeruaudio.com/gallery/index.html#SU001-IMG_0021.JPG

In music, isolating different instruments is done using distance, occasionally barriers, and then by placing instruments that can be allowed to bleed into one another's mic closer together. This is also an art that requires a good deal of preparation. Obviously, splitting certain instruments out and recording them in a separate pass is very common in a modern studio. These days it's hard to get all the musicians to show up on the same day anyway.

In the time Lizzie is talking about recording onto multiple tracks was extremely rare (before the '50s it was mostly done in Hollywood) and anything beyond the most basic multi channel recording console was also mostly a film industry sort of thing. Prior to having the sort of control those devices give you the placement of everything and getting it all adjusted in relationship to the mic was high art ... and the studios were considerably bigger, creating a lovely sense of space.

As multi track machines and consoles came into wider and wider use (1960s) and over dubbing was used more and more, the studios tended to soften up the walls and work the mics closer to the instruments/talent for better isolation. This gave greater control but unleashed a tumult of problems; soft walls suck up some frequencies more than others requiring EQ, they also suck up volume requiring amplifiers or playing even closer to the mics. The beautiful "live" sounding rooms of the pre rock era gave way to these over-damped disasters which, thank god, have been redesigned over time to return to a more balanced "semi live" sound. It's a constant evolution.

There was a similar "arms race to the bottom and back" when it came to playback equipment. I briefly owned a 1942 Altec Lancing Iconic, possibly the only really good speaker built before the 1950s. It was manufactured for movie studios, recording studios and science labs. On a Harmon Kardon Citation II amp (probably the most advanced tube amp of the 1960s) it was seriously competitive with the set up in my recording studio, the playback system in which was designed by the guy who built the mastering rooms for DTS (a high end film sound release format). Old isn't necessarily good but the geniuses of the era were, well ... geniuses.*

View attachment 67762

* If you want to read about a REAL genius google Alan Bulmlein who was just this year awarded a Grammy for the work he did on stereo and stereo mics 80 years ago. Better technique is still being derived from his ground breaking research.

I've always loved the HK Citation I/II sound, but have found the Altec-Lansing speakers to be a bit "plummy". The RCA Victor LS-1, a similar Bass-Reflex/Horn contemporary to the Iconic seemed to sound better to my ears. I always used a recording of a heavy car door slamming as a quick test of lower range resonance, and, at least on my system, which at the time used a Western Electric 92-A amplifier, which did not offer particularly good damping. With a more advanced amplifier (particularly one with inverse feedback) the very slightly "plummy" aspect of the Altec speaker would probably be nonexistent.

These days my program material is so antique that I generally use either an Orthophonic Victrola (a properly restored example of which is capable of astounding realism) and a "Higher Fidelity" RCA Victor Electrola of 1936, a unit which offers substantially flat reproduction of shellac phonograph records between 80 and 7000 cps. For modern work the Better Half keeps the Citation I/II/III setup and a couple of Kipschorns, though a pair of EPI 100's and an old H. H. Scott can give them a run for the money on medeocre material.

 

[vitanola]

I took my comment about moving instruments around the recording studio from a biography of Bob Wills, the Western Swing bandleader. At least I think that's where I read it. His band had a very successful run doing radio broadcasts (every day, too, for a while), live appearances at dances (dances, not concerts), recordings and even appearing in motion pictures. The size of his band varied quite a bit over the years and I think was at its largest around 1940 or 1941. While there are still orchestras and all sorts of bands, nobody does the variety of things they were doing now, as far as I know. In fact, who goes out for an evening of dancing at the local hotel ballroom these days? That's one thing that has disappeared, along with "dance halls," live broadcasts (I think), daily TV music programs and the like.

Moving instruments about for balance long predates radio. It was the only way of achieving any semblance to reality in the pre-electric days before 1925. This is a photograph of a small orchestra (The Victor Salon Orchestra) arranged for a 1924 recording session:

This is a recording which may well have been taken at the session pictured in the above photograph:

Here is the same orchestra recording in the same studio, in the spring of 1925 with the use of a microphone ( a Western Electric 394A Condenser Transmitter, actually):

and THIS is what the pictured recording session would sound like:

I have always maintained that there is more essential (that is artistic) difference between an 1924 acoustic recording played upon the best available machine of 1924 vintage and a 1925 electric recording played upon an Orthophonic Victrola in proper order than there is between the Orthphonic reproduction and that of the best modern equipment



Here is a film of a re-created acoustic recording session, played for comedy. The movements are but slightly exaggerated, though. I can speak from experience, having recorded pretty extensively using acoustic era cylinder equipment back in my youth.

 

[BlueTrain]

Pray tell, what is the man in the dark suit, closest to the camera, in the first photo playing?

 

[MikeKardec]

Is that studio you mention in the Capitol Records building in L.A.? While I've seen the building, I've never been inside, nor inside any other recording studio.

Yes. I was in it in an intermediate stage; the old Cap A is the classic old "Frank Sinatra" room you often see pictures of, and the new Cap A is astounding but much more modern looking. The old studios in Hollywood are dying like flies now that the record companies have become "democratized" nearly out of existence. I'm not a fan of record companies so I support the disruption but losing the classic studio infrastructure is a nightmare. Every studio I have used in LA and most of them in NYC are out of business and have been converted to something else, restaurants and the like.

I've always loved the HK Citation I/II sound, but have found the Altec-Lansing speakers to be a bit "plummy". The RCA Victor LS-1, a similar Bass-Reflex/Horn contemporary to the Iconic seemed to sound better to my ears.

I've never heard an LS-1, though you've now got me interested. The only reason I briefly owned the Iconic was that I found it in a half demolished room while a part of Meredith Willson's (the writer composer of Music Man) house was being remodeled. The owner didn't know what it was, the construction guys had tipped it on its side and were using it as a table, and gave it to me if I promised to cart it off. The electro-magnet unit (it was before there were permanent magnets big enough to run a really good speaker) was missing but I found a guy who had remanufactured a couple. I then realized that I could either look for another so I could have stereo, which I'd never find at any price I could talk myself into paying, or I could sell it. I sold it for $14,000 but I did hook it up an run it for a little bit. The longer I ran it the better it sounded. Amazing!

I can speak from experience, having recorded pretty extensively using acoustic era cylinder equipment back in my youth.

Very cool!

 

[vitanola]

I've been buying and selling antique phonographs, early radios, and audio and PA equipment for a living for about fifteen years now. I came into a group of LS-1 speakers when the former NBC building in a Midwestern hub was being gutted and remodeled. My own taste ran to single driver stuff from the late 1920's, things like the Western Electric 15A horn. Basically I am only interested in making my preferred audio source material (commercial recordings of the 1905-1940 period) sound as good as possible. This generally requires equipment with quite specific limitations, and so the really good wide-range stuff is only stock to me.

We still have an early 1970's system laying about. A couple of early production JBL L300's driven by a Phase Linear 700 and a Phase linear 4000 preamp. I personally find the system extremely tedious for sustained listening, and find the preamp to be a bit noisy, but the "autocorrelator" noise reduction in the preamp does a better job at eliminating tape hiss when playing early acetate and paper tapes than any other device I've known.

 

[vitanola]

Pray tell, what is the man in the dark suit, closest to the camera, in the first photo playing?

A "Stroh Violin", a violin which uses a diaphragm and horn in the place of the resonator body. Stroh violins produce a loud and concentrated sound, necessary to the insensitive early recording equipment. Their tone leaves a bit to be desired, but when used in a group with a couple of regular violins close to the recording horn the effect can be pretty good.

 

[MikeKardec]

My own taste ran to single driver stuff from the late 1920's, things like the Western Electric 15A horn. Basically I am only interested in making my preferred audio source material (commercial recordings of the 1905-1940 period) sound as good as possible. This generally requires equipment with quite specific limitations

As is probably obvious from the comments above, I've always been fascinated by how the technology and practices on one side of the mic/speaker divide informed what went on on the other. I'm not much of a historian in that respect but it does interest me whenever I can learn something about it.

Do you have a retail business?