From the March 1989 issue of Radio And Production

Tips & Techniques

Advanced Production

Phone Interfaces

by Jerry Vigil

Here's a tip to pass on to your engineering department. If they can do it, the jock/winner dialogue on your winner promos will sound better than ever.

Control rooms that are set up to record phone calls will have an interface of one kind or another. Most interfaces allow the control room mike to be the audio sent down the line to the caller. The audio received from the caller uses a different circuit. Usually, these two signals are combined and sent to your recorder to give you a mono recording of the full conversation, with the jock having mike quality and the caller having the typical phone line quality.

Depending upon the interface used, it may be possible to send the caller's audio to, let's say, the left channel of the recorder and the jock's mike audio to the right channel. An L+R is then done on the output of the recorder before going to the console. This combines the signals for playback on the air, but what you have on tape is a conversation with the jock on one channel and the caller on the other.

If your production studio is a good one, you'll be able to process each channel as you want, then combine them before going to multi-track.

For instance, say you have a 20 x 4 x 2 console with mono inputs and the 2-track reel-to-reel comes up on channels 9 and 10. Use the EQ on channel 9 of the console (left channel with caller) to boost the mids and highs and give the caller a cleaner, less muddy sound. When you're ready to go to multi-track, just assign both channels (9 & 10) to the same bus (or track). Not only will you be able to process each track separately, but you will also have separate level controls for both the caller and the jock. (This is real handy because, as you know, there are a couple of jocks out there who don't pay much attention to levels when recording phone calls; their mike level may be OK, but the caller's level is bending the needle on the VU meter.)

If your production console has stereo inputs and you don't have control of EQ for individual tracks, use your patch bay. Most patch bays will have the output of the reel-to-reel on them. If you have outboard EQ, just patch the left channel of the reel-to-reel (the caller) into the EQ, make your adjustments, and send the EQ output back to the patch bay. You can then adjust the level of the caller with the output level of the equalizer to match that of the jock.
You're probably already thinking ahead. With this kind of separation of caller and jock, you can also send one or the other to any outboard gear you have. If the control room mike has reverb on it, send the caller's track through a reverb unit and add some to the caller. Or if you want to get creative, put a delay with feedback on the jock and leave the caller alone. If the caller's track varies from low level conversation to high level screaming, run the track through a limiter/compressor to control levels.

This setup opens many avenues for enhancing the quality of a recorded phone call. Check with your engineering department and see if it's possible. If your telephone recordings from the control room have the jock with mike quality, chances are it can be done.