Hey guys,

Telos (the company that makes communications gear, audio consoles, and pretty much a bit of everything else these days for radio stations) will have a car on the NAB show floor demonstrating what we've done at WZLX in Boston with HDRadio Surround and Penteo. I'm attaching a link to the handout paper; I'd appreciate any feedback you might give.

For those of you who have participated in the energetic threads that we have had on here about how surround should be mixed, I think you'll find a lot of your ideas in this document.

If you get a chance to go to the NAB -- great! Hope to see you there.

The document: http://www.penteosurround.com/pwp.pdf

-John

The paper is a good summary and description of your process (makes me wish I could afford to send you my entire 2 channel collection and have you convert them to option 3).

What is not clear in your paper is the delivery method for your material. Is that to be left to your clients? In other words, whoever commissions you to do a conversion will decide if it is to be transmitted in lossless form (like Dolby TrueHD or LPCM) or lossy form (traditional DD/DTS)? If so, and I understand everything correctly, that means no one would require a "Penteo-format" player.

Good luck.

There will never be a Penteo format player. If Penteo were to release any material, it would be in 448kb Dolby Digital, at least in this decade, which will play on any DVD player. I firmly believe that one of the biggest problem with any surround music format was the need for a special player, compounded by the number of people who got a disc home only to find out that they didn't own the proper player to play it.

Dolby Digital often gets a bad rap, even though motion picture theaters often awe audiences using a lesser quality version (320kb/sec) than the one that DVD and digital broadcast uses (448kb/sec).

For now, though, the marketing is much more toward motion picture and TV show producers, geared mostly toward upconverting legacy material for Blu-Ray and DVD re-release.

Too bad for us music fans (not your fault, of course--the market doesn't seem to want to go that way). Still, good luck.

John , if ZLX/Telos project takes off with more radio stations and HD tuners able to decode 5.1 surround , you will be busy with more music upconverting. With faster processors always coming with computers, does this speed up the processing time? Also, do you ever see the day when you could sell Penteo software to radio stations that the could do real time stereo to Penteo processing?

John , if ZLX/Telos project takes off with more radio stations and HD tuners able to decode 5.1 surround , you will be busy with more music upconverting. With faster processors always coming with computers, does this speed up the processing time? Also, do you ever see the day when you could sell Penteo software to radio stations that the could do real time stereo to Penteo processing?

Of course it speeds up the processing time :-) !!!

Penteo is not intended to be a real-time process -- except for material that has been DIGITALLY MIXED or else analog material that has been digitally stabilized, which is what we spend most of our time doing. That's why it's provided as a remastering service.

Material that was mixed to analog tape (remember that old [A][A][D] code? It's that MIDDLE A!) is too unstable to go through the process without creating a digitally stable intermaster first. If you read the NAB paper, you'll see that it's the very first step. Tape damage, splices, tape saturation at mix time, improperly aligned record decks, failing tubes and capacitors (in Ampex 350's), and pan-pots that are slightly off on the mix console all have to be compensated for and fixed-up by a human before the process can even begin. The actual parsing process takes very little time; fixing up the analog transfer takes a while, depending on how bad it is.

When I first started working with Penteo, I would take a consumer CD and marvel at how good the quality of the old master tape sounded on headphones. Little did I know that once I started doing true waveform analysis on it that I would uncover every little tiny failing in balance, phase, splices, and every other non-linearity you can think of. On some older A&M material (I've been working with a lot of Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 material lately), I would come across this very odd distortion on vocals that would only impact the right channel. I had never heard that sound before -- it was a very odd distortion. I finally realized that it was TUBE saturation -- the point at which the tube could not put out any more. We're so accustomed to hearing squared-off clipping on solid state (transistorized and IC) amplifiers that I had forgotten what true tube saturation -- inside a tape record deck of all things -- sounded like.

What I'm most amazed by is how did the tubes saturate before the tape did???

It's actually amazing to listen to the stereo intermaster that has been stabilized, and compare that to the original analog to digital transfer.

Digitally mixed material doesn't need "fixing", unless the console has pan-pot issues or something. It's digitally stable. It's very similar to why a time-base corrector must be used on old VHS videotapes before they can be broadcast; they're just too unstable.

But someday, 10 years from now, when we've digitally stabilized every analog transfer ever done (!), then yes, Penteo could be a real-time process. Until then, analog material just wobbles too much.

Maybe this has been answered before, but what do you use as sources for your processing? It seems cd's have been mastered louder through the years with more compression and less dynamic range. I was just wondering if you're processing these compressed music cd's or if you use some other source.

Maybe this has been answered before, but what do you use as sources for your processing? It seems cd's have been mastered louder through the years with more compression and less dynamic range. I was just wondering if you're processing these compressed music cd's or if you use some other source.

Boy have we discussed this question to death in another thread! Of course CD's are always louder and louder. The most unfortunate ones are really new stuff, like Green Day's "American Idiot", in which the dynamics have been pumped down to the point that if I isolate the left and right, the center channel is constantly throttling the digital compressing algorithm. Fortunately, at least, it's common in the left and right.

Unless I'm working for a client and they've sent me a digital transfer, I often work off consumer CDs. That's where the real work comes in; correcting a mass-production type mastering job in which it's mostly just press record on one machine and press play on the other -- very little work going into actual microscopic processing -- there's no time.

I spend most of my time correcting those jobs.

John, will u be at NAB? If you are will u be blogging here?