POST 207
and TC Electronic System 6000 as well as
a Rosendahl NanosyncHD, SSL AlphaLink,
Optocore DD2FE and DD32FX, an RTW TM-7
loudness meter, and one M-52D.
Given that ACR 7 is new, beyond the
recent season of The Beaverton, there is
little else consumers have seen that’s come
out of that room, Baggley says. “But it’s
going to become busier with more arts
and entertainment-style productions and
sports production.”
As for Post 207, being CTV’s largest mix
room, it does pretty much everything rang-
ing from documentaries to news, music, and
sports. “Basically, anything that requires wide
shoulders and a comfy couch for clients to
sit on,” Nunan says. “It’s our general, do every-
thing room.”
Now, given many people don’t appreci-
ate the hoops – technological, budget-wise,
and so on – that marquee content providers
like CTV have to jump through to provide
the stuff we see on a day-to-day basis and
take for granted, some discussion of the
elephant in the room – the fact that, in-
creasingly, there’s more content vying for
eyeballs that’s created, shall we say, using
far more low-fi, democratic means than CTV
uses – is warranted.
For his part, Nunan isn’t particularly
concerned about how people consume the
product CTV creates. “Excellent loudspeakers
and processing and an honest, well-calibrat-
ed, believable, truthful listening environment
are absolutely crucial. We do our job right
when creating content. Part of that is to en-
sure the survivability of that content across
the entire media distribution ecosystem
and that’s going to get much gnarlier in the
future. It is still the case that we have a ‘one
mix to rule them all’ environment. It doesn’t
matter how it sounds in 5.1; it only matters
how it sounds folded down to two channels,
or mono, should that happen. So we need to
have our loudness averages and range and
our spectral range well-managed to ensure
that we don’t create an off-normal experi-
ence for someone should they be listening
in a substantially sub-par environment, but
that’s the same as it ever was. And I bristle
mightily at any insinuation that, because
people are watching the content on their
iPads, that somehow we should be content
with using iPads to make that content.”
As commercial audio becomes more
complex, you’d think people would under-
stand that it requires a certain level of tech-
nology and expertise to create what we see
on a network like CTV every day, but, gener-
ally, Nunan says, they don’t. “I think there’s an
irreducible extent to which people are never
going to get it.”
That said, he adds: “There are not too
many picture people who are laboring un-
der the impression that because people are
watching on their iPads, they should shoot
everything on an iPad; they’re working with
Red Epics and Arri Alexas and shooting at
eye-bleedingly high frame rates and spatial
resolutions knowing that they’re going to
get a better product once the degradation
in the digital distribution environment takes
hold and someone’s looking at it on a tablet
or phone.
“My argument would be that we’re on
the part of the map where it says, ‘Here Be
Dragons,’” Nunan offers. “We’re in undiscov-
ered territory here. How do we continue to
insist that we should be identified as profes-
sionals and be remunerated accordingly in
a world where anybody can shoot a movie
on their iPhone or blast out a podcast on
GarageBand? Look, for people who are just
entering the industry now or, god forbid, are
students aiming to get into the industry, if
you’re not properly terrified about what the
future holds, you’re not paying attention,
because the truth of the matter is that it’s not
clear to any of us, ‘What makes me a profes-
sional?’ If you ask a hundred people, you’re
going to get a hundred different answers.”
For now, they’re holding the line
against the encroachment of these conve-
nience-over-quality consumer technologies
and still standing to guarantee that the con-
tent they produce day in and day out, regard-
less of circumstance, is going to be delivered
in the best possible form.
That’s partly why the continual evolu-
tion of spaces like Post 207 and ACR 7 and
any other Bell Media sees fit to work on will
be an ongoing process. As Nunan mentioned
earlier, the process is indeed like painting the
Golden Gate Bridge: lengthy, largely thank-
less, but necessary for one of the country’s
top content producers.
Take ACR 7: “Until some fairly substantial
production requirement comes along that
we’re not able to fulfill with what’s in there, we
built that room to be so enormously wide that
we don’t envision [a time] when we need to
throw anything more at that room.”
In other words, even though it may seem
like the case, nothing is ever really finalized.
Kevin Young is a Toronto-based musician and
freelance writer.
PROFESSIONAL SOUND • 29