[78-L] Carlin Mark Twain award ^

[Michael Biel]

David Lennick wrote:

>
> > Warning: the sound is TERRIBLE. Either that or the Buffalo station hasn't 
> figured how to deal with HD..the entire perspective was reversed, the announcer 
> and the people speaking into mikes were inaudible but the orchestra was at full 
> volume, the ECHO of the comic could be heard but not his original voice. 


Malcolm Rockwell wrote:
> PBS lost a stereo channel? That's odd, they're usually on top of that 
> sort of thing. 

NO.  That is not what happened.  What you heard was typical combined 
out-of-phase.  Center channel is cancelled out.  Do you actually get 
this channel in stereo on your cable system?  I find that on my Dish 
network I get my locals with mono audio, and so I take my PBS off the 
national feed which is still in stereo.   You might be getting it in 
mono, and someone phased reversed one of the channels which doesn't 
cause a real problem unless combined into mono.

> I've come to expect it from Comedy Central, though, 
> especially on episodes of South Park.

I have no problems with Comedy Central on Dish.  Must be your cable system.
>  What's even stranger is that, if 
> you have a stereo TV receiver, the single channel that is broadcast has 
> the same info on both speakers on my receiver. An engineer would have to 
> work to do that!
>   
Not at all.  That IS what broadcasting does.  It does not work like a 
stereo record or tape.  It combines the two channels into the sum 
channel (left-plus-right) and then takes the difference channel 
(left-minus-right) as the subcarrier channel.  Stereo receivers add the 
two for left and subtract the two for right.   If the signal is mono, 
there is no difference signal, so both channels get left-plus-right.

> At first I thought it was my aging ears filtering out the high frequency 
> foreground info to the benefit of the midrange background material. That 
> may be partially true, but not only some of the time. It seems there 
> /are/ broadcast culprits involved.
> Mal
>
>
>   
There are many switching points in the pathway the signal takes to you, 
and there are many ways the demodulators which read the satellite signal 
at the cable sysem's head-end can read the signal.   You have no idea 
how much compression and data reduction is done by the digital 
networking, and by the way, it is highly doubtful that anybody ever 
really is getting a FULL High Def picture  unless you DO use an 
off-the-air antenna.  Horizontal resolution is ALWAYS REDUCED on both 
cable and satellite systems. 

>> On 
>> clips that weren't being played at the Kennedy Centre, like a Stephen Colbert 
>> bit (okay, I still haven't figured why he's on television), the sound was fine. 
>> I'm going to check it at midnight on the Seattle channel and see if the same 
>> problem appears.
>>
>> dl
>>     
Was it in stereo from Seattle?  The Kennedy Center audience makes it 
obvious it was in stereo. 

As for Colbert, his satire on pompous uninformed windbags like Bill 
O'Reilly is brilliant.  His Press Corps dinner presentation which opened 
part 6 of last week's PBS series on comedy was the best political satire 
of the decade.  There is a problem, however, that was highlighted in a 
study just published in the current issue of Journal of Broadcasting 
that shows the satire of Colbert is being missed by the 
dittohead-dunderheads, just like some bigots missed the satire of Archie 
Bunker back in the 70s -- and probably still do.

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com