It’s the way we used to send clients their commercials to keep on file.. (Bottom draw of the managers office along with the half bottle of scotch).
Tape had a way of sending you, as an audio producer, totally NUTS!..
On the best take of the day you’d get a drop out. Your manager would never give you enough money in your budget (if you even had a budget!) to buy tape so you could splice edits. He’d say you want how much more money?!?! use that old tape those Maccas ads came on last year. Tape gets old and worn, dusty and just crap..remember the sound quality of your copy of ‘Thriller’ before threw it in the bin and bought the CD?
That is the sound were talking about here, scratchy, no depth, hissy and plops that are very random. These would not be good enough to go onto the sales reps iPod, but they continually try to get us to play them on our radio stations. They hand over the clients TV commercial , compressed for easy email transmission and expect us to grab the audio from the TV ad to use on the radio. That quality, the audition copy emailed to the client, the version that is 2.2 mg, when you preview it the screen pops up at about 200 x 200 pixels (would even look bad on your iPod’s screen and sound bad too). and THAT is what is supposed to go to air?
As the masters of the Sound of the stations, we know what sounds good and what doesn’t. For those poor clients who are being hit by the “we will only use .wav files for digital radio” well it could get very interesting. I guess the same should apply for TV who are neck long into the HD production of their material, surely it shouldn’t take many seconds to rip the should off for Radio in full .wav format, (voiceover fees aside) even if they supply the voiceover only.
In the wash-up we have the client to answer to, and the almighty dollar, so we put the ads to air or the revenue stream stalls a little. What’s needed is for all content makers to stick together and keep the quality of our product as high as it can be. If you are unsure.. think, if it looks like sh*t and sounds the same in your laptop speakers, it will sound like it out of your radio. Internet radio can sound like this, we can do better.
