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.