Smashing an old 27″ TV set – how NOT to do it

Ok, so here’s the story of an old 27″ CRT TV set that died in 2010 and I sentenced a year later. The purpose was to record the sound of it, the biting sound of a sledgehammer’s cast-iron colliding with the thick glass that then shatters to a free-falling rain of shiny shards and glitter… This is the story of how I failed.

I took all precautions I could think of so that no one gets hurt during or after the show, and of course I carefully planned the recording of it.

Potential risk/dangers	Precautions
Glass shards	Collect them using fabric sheets carefully layed down on the ground, covering a large enough area in front of the screen (cause you know there’ll be projections…). You don’t want kids running around the house stepping on broken glass. Protect yourself, your hands, your eyes, your mouth/nose, your forearms… you get the picture.
Gas	CRT TV sets are not quite products of nature, you could imagine it being seriously harmful what’s inside there… After the “surgery”, I suggest you make a point of not breathing what might come out of there.

Recording-wise, this was my first time recording that kind of sound, that loud, that messy… I set up my only two mics, my main one being a Røde NT1-A, backed-up by and AT8015. I dressed up the NT1-A for outdoors with Røde’s Dead Kitten. Placed them respectively about 2′ and 3′ from the center of the screen where I’d hit. Setting your preamps gain loudly clapping in your hands is nowhere near as loud as smashing the TV; for each mic I gave myself a 12dB headroom above a loud handclap.

So I’m all set, sound rolling, camera rolling, aaaand… ACTION! …

…

It appears that the inside of the tube is coated with a thin layer of metal, and when the glass broke it released a cloud of metal dust. Try not to breathe until you’ve walked to a safe distance from the action.

As far as the sound’s recording goes, the AT8015 did its job of backing up the NT1-A alright. The NT1-A didn’t do its job of being the main mic of the set: it flipped out. When I’m saying this, I mean it. It recorded a click and that’s it. The rest looks a lot like electronics zeroing back in after a moment of high stress:

The other fail is the TV actually falling back, way off-axis from the mics. Next time I might want to do this face up or at least make sure it maintains its original position.

Rode DeadKitten – More Uses!

I kept complaining that I didn’t have a proper wind protection for my Tascam DR-100. Recently I came across Ric Viers’ tip for the H4n, about how he uses Røde’s DeadKitten on it instead of the stock foamie. Røde only advertise their DeadKitten for use with their Stereo VideoMic or their NT4 microphones. As I was in a rush to get better wind protection for my DR-100 and my NT1-A one day, I decided to get one of the little balls of fur. Although it’s a bit of a pain to fit it on the Tascam, it works!

DeadKitten fitted on an NT1-A

DeadKitten fitted on a DR-100

 

 

 

 

 

 

As far as wind protection goes, I’m afraid I don’t have anything to compare it to, so I’ll merely state that it is definitely an improvement… and it gives your mics a funny looks!

I wanted to get myself a RedHead windscreen that come in crazy colours and would actually be made to fit my Tascam. Maybe one day I’ll get a RedHead zeppelin fur, a red or a green one 🙂

Beyerdynamic DT 770 M – Cable Surgery

I own a pair of DT 770 M headphones that needed fixed and were not covered by the warranty anymore. I wear them for work, at home for drumming, in the transports for protecting my ears from the noisy environment… I need them to operate correctly even though they only act as earplugs half the time. So, I cracked them open, it was the first time I ever ventured physically that deep into a pair of headphones. I guess my confidence was boosted by the fact that I work in a dubbing facility and that the maintenance guys would lend me a hand whenever I’d start crying. What follows is a sort of walkthrough more than a tutorial, I will be telling you what you should expect if you ever decide to open a pair of DT 770 (I imagine the M and the PRO are extremely similar…).

STEP 1. Remove the earpads. If you’re trying to access the cable you will obviously operate on the left earcup, where the cable actually goes…

STEP 2. Pop the dark grey plastic ring that is holding down the foam onto the driver’s block. I always thought the membrane was right behind the layer of foam. I accidentally poked at it a few times and always feared I would break them, but now I know it is protected by a thick plastic grid 🙂

STEP 3. Gently pull out everything. The driver’s block isn’t attached to the shell, it is merely held in place by the ring you just removed. The inside of the shell is padded with pieces of foam. In the left earcup, the headphones cable is soldered to the driver’s pins along with the cable that takes the signal to the second driver in the right earcup. This second cable had a fixed length so don’t pull on it, however you can try to push the main cable inside the ear cup and it should slide in so you can take the driver out from the shell completely and maybe lay it face down on your working surface.

Take a photo or write down the colours associations before you resolder the ground wire in place of the signal wire and get your phase all wrong.

STEP 4. Unsolder. Note that the thin wires of the main cable (they’re not even coated, the insulator seems to be merely twisted around the core) are very difficult to solder back. I had someone help me with those. Another important thing to note is the two copper hairs forming loops under the soldering points. Apparently these are part of the coil, you do not want to temper with them, put solder or get your iron close to them. You merely need to operate on top of the contacts, not under them where these thin wires are.

STEP 5. Cut the cable accordingly (I decided to remove the slider thing and shorten the cable a lot, but that’s what I wanted) and put everything back together. Don’t forget to pass the cable through the hole in the shell before you re-solder and maybe you will need to put something around the cable inside the shell to stop it from sliding out. I used one of the Rilsan things below, and I’ll add a drop of glue later on (didn’t have it around when I operated) to give it a better grip on the cable :

Here you go, I fixed and customized my DT 770 M. The best thing is, I don’t find it affected the response (theoretically it should, considering my poor soldering skills…).

Recording Pigeons – Good Old Tricks that still Work!

Last weekend, another sound guy and I set out to record the bells of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur here in Paris. Once we were done, we thought we’d capture some pigeons, or at least the sound of them. Since they were all camping in the trees around, I decided to gather them all in one spot. Now, “how do you go about organizing a pigeon party?” I hear you say. Well, you have to know what pigeons want and give it to them, in one spot. I know what you’re thinking, but let me stop you right there : pigeons don’t like old ladies. No, they like old ladies with a bag of bread crumbs! We didn’t have an old lady, nor did we have bread crumbs, but this issue I rapidly fixed by walking into a bakery and asking them nicely for a few handfuls of it.

Later we discovered that these guys would sell old ladies to the devil if it could have them bread crumbs! What the heck, it makes for nice recordings after all!

Steam Train – One Time Shot

Last year I had the opportunity to record a steam train passing by. At the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the train track linking two cities in the south-east of France, Brive and Périgueux, a steam train returned twice between the two stations. The train was the 141-TD-740, whose story you can read on the website of the association that now owns it. My parents house happens to be a ten minutes drive from the track, so I went and recorded it on its last journey.

Now I don’t own any fancy gear, so I grabbed my only stereo-recording solution, a Tascam DR-100. I didn’t have any efficient wind protection except from the stock foamie that comes with the recorder. It was OK, I figured the sound from the train would be loud and the weather looked kind enough. I had one shot at capturing the sound so I hopped in the car, recorder in hand, and headphones around the neck.

I found a nice spot along the track where I could stand in a grass field, on the outside of a bend about 50ft from the rails. I moved away about 200ft from a bridge over the train track. I set the gain wheel on my recorder to 6 (on a 0-10 scale), and the mic gain switch to M (from L-M-H positions). I held the recorder over my head like I always do to prevent my body from shadowing as much as I can.

One steam locomotive and four cars later I walked away.