Master Tape Questions

[SRIV94]

I was doing a little videotape watching over the holiday weekend and something that I had noticed before came back to me.  I don't know if this is limited to GT shows but it seems to be more prevalent on them than anything else.  There seems to be a lot of echo on the programs (most notably P+, TT7x and even into TTTT9x).  It seems that you can tell when someone's about to guess a word correctly on P+ because you can faintly hear the bells in the background before the contestant has even responded (the closest parallel I can think of to visualize this is near the ending of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love", where Robert Plant's vocalization of "way down" is heard twice--first as an echo, then his actual screeching of the words).  I can't fathom that this would be by design, but I also can't fathom that audio mixing could be that inconsistent by that time (and I seem to recall this happening on the original airings of these shows, not just the reruns on GSN).

I tried to find something about this on Usenet, but didn't see anything.  So am I completely crazy, or just slightly?  

Doug -- soon to celebrate 200 posts

[JayC]

maybe it's just a problem with your tapes?  On an old wheel/J!/Monopoly tape I have, the same thing happens to me once or twice.

[tommycharles]

[quote name=\'SRIV94\' date=\'Dec 1 2003, 12:10 PM\'] I was doing a little videotape watching over the holiday weekend and something that I had noticed before came back to me.  I don't know if this is limited to GT shows but it seems to be more prevalent on them than anything else.  There seems to be a lot of echo on the programs (most notably P+, TT7x and even into TTTT9x).  It seems that you can tell when someone's about to guess a word correctly on P+ because you can faintly hear the bells in the background before the contestant has even responded (the closest parallel I can think of to visualize this is near the ending of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love", where Robert Plant's vocalization of "way down" is heard twice--first as an echo, then his actual screeching of the words).  I can't fathom that this would be by design, but I also can't fathom that audio mixing could be that inconsistent by that time (and I seem to recall this happening on the original airings of these shows, not just the reruns on GSN).

I tried to find something about this on Usenet, but didn't see anything.  So am I completely crazy, or just slightly?  

Doug -- soon to celebrate 200 posts [/quote]
 I haven't noticed this, but if I'm understanding you correctly (no guarantee...), then you would have to be assuming that the audio is added in post, otherwise there is no way that I can think of that a cue would start playing before the event to trigger it occurs.

[SRIV94]

[quote name=\'JayC\' date=\'Dec 1 2003, 11:23 AM\'] maybe it's just a problem with your tapes?  On an old wheel/J!/Monopoly tape I have, the same thing happens to me once or twice. [/quote]
 It's not the tapes--I had also noticed it even on episodes that GSN aired that I didn't tape (back in the days when I could actually WATCH P+ on GSN--yes, that was an editorial comment).

Doug -- soon to celebrate 200 posts

[scully24]

This is a phenomenon known as "audio ghosting."  It can occur with older tapes that have been stored for a while.  You generally find it more with audio tapes but it can happen with the audio portion of a video tape.  What happens is that while a reel of magnetic tape sits on the shelf, the magnetic signal from one layer of the tape can actually imprint itself slightly onto the next layer out on the reel of tape.  When the tape is stored with the program rewound to the beginning, this can result in a strong sound effect being ghosted onto an earlier portion of the tape.  For this reason, many tape vaults prefer to have their tapes stored with the program played out to the end ("tails out").  This would cause the ghosted sound to be more of an echo effect, which is considered less objectionable than having the ghost effect precede the actual sound, which is what you heard on Password+.  The fact that the bell sound was probably a much louder and crisper signal compared to the rest of the audio meant that that was the only sound you heard ghosted.

[scully24]

Just to clarify--the audio ghosting effect referred to above would be present on GSN's master tapes, not your home tapes, although the same thing could happen to your home tapes if you kept an old program on them for years and just stored the tape without playing it much.