David, your posts in this thread continue to be brilliant!
> With tape recording, overload distortion is more
> acceptable as the last few dBs get "compressed"
> in the tape head recording process
Indeed, I was ignoring other analogue recording media, likely because I sta=
rted late in the day (late 70s) when tape was dominant. In the rock world i=
t was common to red-line the meters in order to "hit the tape hard" and get=
that saturated sound. Now, people simply buy a plugin -- and some of them =
sound quite good too!
> I have a major gripe with dubbed bangs as,
> even on news and hard documentary material,
> bangs and gunshots are all brought into sync
> with the picture whatever the distance.
The person to read on this is Michel Chion, who coined the term "synchresis=
" to describe the linking of synchronous sound and image into an atomic eve=
nt, especially when these do not have the same temporal relationship in rea=
lity. It is part of a rich vocabulary he built to describe the completely a=
rtificial world of film sound.
> With thunder, they even remove the pre-strike
> static crackle before the main strike which makes
> close thunder exciting.
Thankfully this gives us, as sound artists, something productive to do! We =
can work against the domination of sound by the grammar of film, and restor=
e a sonic vocabulary that is exciting in its own right. Your example is a p=
erfect case in point!
-- Robin Parmar
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