Technique: TV Monitoring
Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 1:31 am
If you wanna really hear what goes on under picture, get your eyes off the picture! It's good advice when you're mixing and it's great advice when listening to television cues and commercials. I'm typing this from a laptop on a coffee table in front of a large high-res screen, hooked up to a a stereo hi-fi system with 12" woofers and ample wattage.
I've been hooking my TVs up to full-range speakers ever since VHS went hi-fi; the stability required to reproduce the video signal produced way less wow and flutter than any other two channel recorder you could obtain, back then, so lots of us mastered our four-track Tascam mixes to Hi-Fi VHS. This was shortly before Alesis built a digital tape deck that did eight digital tracks on a VHS cassette, a format that survives today, even without the cassette.
Curently, my main screen is a Samsung Ultra HD, a 4k smart TV that's networked, so it can play Netflix, Roku, AppleTV and Youtube from any similarly networked device. A DVD drive feeds the same system, so I can audition files from other sources/systems over the same living room speakers. After the next upgrade, the living room speakers will be stands for the old studio speakers, with built-in passive radiators.
But the point of all this is to listen to TV without necessarily watching it, and I find that internetting with the TV on is kinda like driving while texting; you might think you can do two things at once, but you can't. A chef can, but it's more like spinning plates than real multitasking. Anywho, this is a case where dividing your attention can pay real dividends, and even more so, if you record the program and watch it with picture, later.
I've been hooking my TVs up to full-range speakers ever since VHS went hi-fi; the stability required to reproduce the video signal produced way less wow and flutter than any other two channel recorder you could obtain, back then, so lots of us mastered our four-track Tascam mixes to Hi-Fi VHS. This was shortly before Alesis built a digital tape deck that did eight digital tracks on a VHS cassette, a format that survives today, even without the cassette.
Curently, my main screen is a Samsung Ultra HD, a 4k smart TV that's networked, so it can play Netflix, Roku, AppleTV and Youtube from any similarly networked device. A DVD drive feeds the same system, so I can audition files from other sources/systems over the same living room speakers. After the next upgrade, the living room speakers will be stands for the old studio speakers, with built-in passive radiators.
But the point of all this is to listen to TV without necessarily watching it, and I find that internetting with the TV on is kinda like driving while texting; you might think you can do two things at once, but you can't. A chef can, but it's more like spinning plates than real multitasking. Anywho, this is a case where dividing your attention can pay real dividends, and even more so, if you record the program and watch it with picture, later.