RTE sound

i57dwun4yb1pt8

christ - how hard can it be ?

i had the misfortune to see Tubridy just now , that band big country were on

1/ the vocal mic didnt get turned on til halfway into the first verse

2/ couldnt hear the bass , the kick ,

only one guitar , a loud vocal and touch of hi hat and snare .

who the PHUCK does RTE sound ? and why arent they being fired ???

its not the first time either - pure 100% SH1T sound every time .

DamagedTrax

it was absolutely shocking, id be ashamed of myself if i was involved and they arent fired cause its heavily unionised to the point of stupidity :mad:

TroutMask

Sound has always been a problem with RTE. It's sad when they insult professional music acts with their carry-on. One of the reasons I gave away my TV years ago (and stopped having to pay the TV licence fee). Just vote with your feet and remove the RTE presence from your home.

patwicklow

Pure Amateurs the lot of them in ZTE

TroutMask

in fairness, i know a couple of RTE engineers and they are really knowledgable and good mixers to boot. Thing is, they are not all good, and there does not seem to be any quality control or procedural standards in RTE. A friend of mine wrote a letter to RTE years ago complaining about their heavy-handed use of compression and the resulting artifacts. Their answer: 'we don't use artifacts'!

madtheory

TroutMask wrote: »

A friend of mine wrote a letter to RTE years ago complaining about their heavy-handed use of compression and the resulting artifacts. Their answer: 'we don't use artifacts'!

Hahaha! Brilliant.

PaulBrewer

In the late 80s , early 90s I had the 'pleasure' of working in there on a 10 episode tv show by a country music 'act' ... It was the guy who was mixing the sound's first full operator show - he'd been there 25 years at that stage.

The 'uncoperation' factor was so bad then that it became the straw that broke my studio camels back and I left the studio scene for years to go touring.
( I wondered had I done the right thing on my second US tour in 6 months later that year while sitting at the pool in a Phoenix, Arizona desert hotel drinking margaritas )

However I was there recently for a live session on the Pat Kenny radio show and was pleasantly surprised - attitudes and cooperation were excellent - and the end result was very good.

There's always a few gobshytes knocking around in most organisations though !

TroutMask

yeh, some of 'em are nice and knowledgeable, some are just plain ornery. A few years ago, I was on a wee tour around Ireland with a showband guy, and RTE showed up to do a live broadcast with a remote truck. Now I was using the same PA every night so it was relatively stable until they came on the scene. They had 4 BSS splitters which had definitely seen better days, and these were not even screwed into the rack - just rattling around in the flightcase. To help 'cushion' them from each other, they had wedged a substantial number of those triangular clear plastic sandwich containers in-and-around the individual splitter units. I'm assuming these had a dual function - also providing some kind of ground isolation between units as well.

Anyway, they inserted their splitters between my inputs and the desk, and the levels went awry. I asked for unity gain on all splits: and the bad 'tude began. After much to-ing and fro-ing they agreed to swap out the splitter on the vocals for a newer unit. They then spent the rest of the soundcheck strolling around the venue bad-mouthing me to anyone who would listen.

I mean, they're a remote truck or OBU, their splitters don't work, they're too lazy to set up their own mics DI's or cables on the stage (this would be the norm for a location recording truck or OBU) - and when I point out the fact that their splits are way off spec, i'm the one with the problem. It was soon after this that I got rid of my TV and, thankfully, stopped having to pay the licence! I've since met nicer RTE lifeforms - so I know they're not all bad, but that day was quite the eye-opener!

krd

DamagedTrax wrote: »

it was absolutely shocking, id be ashamed of myself if i was involved and they arent fired cause its heavily unionised to the point of stupidity :mad:

I wouldn't really blame the unions. The management should be quite capable of negotiating work practices to maximise the production standards. There might be a strong case that the management don't give a **** about production values. The odds are, they're bolloxy men who don't give a damn.

A culture of half-arsed bollocky laziness comes from employing half-arsed lazy bolloxes. If you bring in a hirem-firem culture, it will probably be the people who are trying their best who'll get the sack. Trouble makers, people who upset the apple cart and rock the boat. And you'll find that attitude in private companies with no unions. Bollockiness. They might sack everyone who isn't a bollox.

I haven't watched RTE in years. It's awful. Sunday Indo orange faced bolloxes give me a pain. Though I did notice their production standards were better than they'd been. There was a time where they couldn't make anything look slick or polished. The excuse used to be that we were only a tiny little country with no money. The story I heard from a lot of people is they had the same equipment as every one else, but they were just too lazy to use it properly. I remember being on site and seeing several remote RTE trucks, with an army of marching bolloxes operating them - and then seeing the result on television, and the sound and video looked like it had been done by an amateur with a single domestic grade hand held VHS recorder - replete with the warbly sound.

If you listen to RTE radio,especially Radio 1 , you can hear constant screw ups throughout the day - Every day they're going into the same studios, with the same equipment , and every day it's the same clowning. All the commercial stations have less resources, yet you don't get the same amateurishness. A job in RTE would be better for pay and conditions than any other operator.

DamagedTrax

not the unions fault at all. they have their side to fight for and management have their own. what i meant by the comment is that the unions are much stronger than management to the point that **** gets put out on the airwaves daily with nothing being done about it because theres not much that can be done. demarcation is rife aswell from what i hear.

krd

DamagedTrax wrote: »

not the unions fault at all. they have their side to fight for and management have their own. what i meant by the comment is that the unions are much stronger than management to the point that **** gets put out on the airwaves daily with nothing being done about it because theres not much that can be done. demarcation is rife aswell from what i hear.

I don't know what they're like nowadays. But there used to be an RTE life time contract. They had producers and presenters they couldn't fire, so they'd shove them in a building on the Montrose campus - these people might, occasionally, once in every so many years make a little radio or television program.

I don't know if they do that thing any more of sending three or four people to shoot a 4 second clip of Grafton street for the news. I know they used to send really big crews around the country to film tiny bits of nothing....badly.... and party it up on the expense account. Personal admission: I have partied on an RTE expense account. I think there was an element of taking the piss in this - overtime, allowances for travel etc.

There are other things I could say about their production - which could be libellous.

RTE doesn't mean much to me. There's nothing they'd make I would want to watch - and my skin crawls when I watch anything they do make. The place is just nepotism, mediocrity and awfulness. You know you're in deep trouble if the Joe Duffy show is one of your flag ship programmes.

I read an interview with Louis Walsh the other day - he was bitching about RTE too - about the croneyism and nepotism. And it was and I suppose it still is a joke.

The Irish media, has always been full of bolloxes. There was a producer in RTE who used to come into work blind drunk, and treat the staff working under him very badly. He wasn't going to get fired - he was from a well connected Irish family - a bollox family - why else would a dead drunk bollox be promoted. He didn't get much done, being drunk all the time, apart bawling out staff in drunken rages - but he drew down a large salary and lived in a very nice house. Even got family members "jobs" (I do know of people getting paid by RTE to do sweet f all). I don't really like what Louis Walsh does - but I know at the time they were knocking him, and other talented people back - they were employing worthless drunk bolloxes, who couldn't even make programs about cows arses.


RTE has always been a strange place - Archbishop McQuaid used to have something like a bat phone in RTE - if he was listening to the radio and heard something that clashed with his sensibilities the phone would ring, and a producer would get bawled out.

madtheory

krd wrote: »

All the commercial stations have less resources, yet you don't get the same amateurishness.

Nope. Just listen to Today FM or Newstalk for a random hour, you'll hear plenty of sound mistakes, especially on the news. As you say, the same ones every day- music bed drowning VO, mp3 transcoding, aliasing on phone lines, etc. etc. etc.

Daftendirekt

krd wrote: »

The Irish media, has always been full of bolloxes. There was a producer in RTE who used to come into work blind drunk, and treat the staff working under him very badly. He wasn't going to get fired - he was from a well connected Irish family - a bollox family - why else would a dead drunk bollox be promoted. He didn't get much done, being drunk all the time, apart bawling out staff in drunken rages - but he drew down a large salary and lived in a very nice house. Even got family members "jobs" (I do know of people getting paid by RTE to do sweet f all). I don't really like what Louis Walsh does - but I know at the time they were knocking him, and other talented people back - they were employing worthless drunk bolloxes, who couldn't even make programs about cows arses.

To be fair, there's only so much you can say about cows' arses before you run out of stream.

krd

madtheory wrote: »

Nope. Just listen to Today FM or Newstalk for a random hour, you'll hear plenty of sound mistakes, especially on the news. As you say, the same ones every day- music bed drowning VO, mp3 transcoding, aliasing on phone lines, etc. etc. etc.

RTE 1 is worse. They'll usually have a long segments of dead air - play the wrong jingles. Ads firing off on top of each other. Letting studio guests talk into a dead mic maybe for a few minutes before they realise they're only coming through as a bleed on someone else's mic.

There's no real excuse for making the same mistakes every day. It either comes down to not really giving a **** or being so dumb you really shouldn't be there.

Some of the other stations are amateurish as in they use staff who are not full time professionals. One station sacked half it's production staff a few years back to cut costs (surprisingly none of the stations managers). And there's been stories about bullying at certain stations - I would say the management don't really care about the production - and probably think they're far more important than the actual content.

krd

Daftendirekt wrote: »

To be fair, there's only so much you can say about cows' arses before you run out of stream.

Yep....It was called Glenroe.

The thing that seems to have most people I know really angry about the proposed TV tax, to replace the television licence - in other words to make everyone pay for RTE whether they watch it or not - is Fair City. All over Facebook the day it was proposed "I'm not paying for Fair F***** City"

The only thing I ever really liked on RTE was No Disco. And that was shutdown yonks ago, and they never replaced it with anything.

i57dwun4yb1pt8

krd wrote: »

The only thing I ever really liked on RTE was No Disco. And that was shutdown yonks ago, and they never replaced it with anything.

yes they did , they replaced it with No Music

pistonsvox

...there's a Midas XL8 in the late late's studio... just used for the audience as far as I know....

madtheory

pistonsvox wrote: »

...there's a Midas XL8 in the late late's studio... just used for the audience as far as I know....

There was a big feature in Resolution mag when they got that desk.

So I guess none of you guys have rushed out to get a Saorview box then? I certainly didn't. Quite happy with FTA, I rarely watch RTE any more.

studiorat

DaDumTish wrote: »

christ - how hard can it be ?

i had the misfortune to see Tubridy just now , that band big country were on

1/ the vocal mic didnt get turned on til halfway into the first verse

About two and a half minutes too early if you ask me. :cool:

TroutMask

Man, that is one terrible mix! Yeesh, I've heard trainee mixers get a better balance than that. BC do sound a bit rough - like of a grizzled version of their former selves, but RTE basically insults artists when it butchers them with incompetent mixes. It's pure laziness too - the mic is always on loud-n-proud whenever some 2nd rate hack politician or d-list celebrity comes on the show.