Audio recording of telephone voice

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pmk396

Well-known member
This might have a simple explanation. I'm shooting a short film at the moment and I'm looking to get that sound of the voice through the telephone. On a few occasions I have the voice of a character (off camera) as they are speaking to another character (on camera) on the telephone. I was wondering if there is any programme out there to give standard dialogue audio the sound of a voice through a telephone.

I was going to go with the option of just actually recording the dialogue through my telephone with the actor speaking through it at the other end of the line but I was worried that there might be some electronic feedback disturbance between my mic and the telephone speaker. Any suggestions?
 
The simpliest way is to do exact what you said, record the voice coming out of the phone. It's called worldizing the sound. Very simple and very effective.
 
To add to that, worldizing is done after the fact. There's no benefit in recording the dialog through the phone during the original takes, and trying that also adds some challenges for sound. You can re-record the dialog by playing it back through a phone and recording on the other end.

The other option is to treat the "phone" dialog in post. The complex way is to use parametric EQ to take out all the highs and lows, leaving only a narrow band of mids, and then add some light distortion. Or, you can try a free plug-in from iZotope called "Vinyl" that will make a "low-fi" signal.
 
Absolutely, not done during production. Sorry if my post implied otherwise. Since the "phone" voice is typically not seen, synch is not a problem, but, yea, doing it in post gives much more control. I used to use plug-ins for this kind of stuff but have gotten results often better, and much more fun, by worldizing sounds.

C2V said:
To add to that, worldizing is done after the fact. There's no benefit in recording the dialog through the phone during the original takes, and trying that also adds some challenges for sound. You can re-record the dialog by playing it back through a phone and recording on the other end.

The other option is to treat the "phone" dialog in post. The complex way is to use parametric EQ to take out all the highs and lows, leaving only a narrow band of mids, and then add some light distortion. Or, you can try a free plug-in from iZotope called "Vinyl" that will make a "low-fi" signal.
Click to expand...
 
C2V said:
The complex way is to use parametric EQ to take out all the highs and lows, leaving only a narrow band of mids, and then add some light distortion. Or, you can try a free plug-in from iZotope called "Vinyl" that will make a "low-fi" signal.
Click to expand...

How is that complicated? I do it all the time. Yes, worldizing is best, but how is using EQ's to do it complicated?

Use a high-pass filter with a steep slope set to abut 300 Hz, a low-pass filter with a steep slope set to about 3000 Hz (that's what the phone company does), add a narrow spike in EQ at about 3000 hz for a little resonance, add a little distortion, and compress the snot out of it.

You have to dial around a little to get it to sound the way you want, but not much. I also found that recording the actor with a cheap Radio Shack mic without a windscreen helps. Telephone mics are crap, so using a crap mic helps make it that much more real.
 
Hxd Ped said:
How is that complicated? I do it all the time. Yes, worldizing is best, but how is using EQ's to do it complicated?
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I said complex, not complicated. There's a difference.

Complex = several steps = using a few different plug-ins (EQ and distortion, possibly even compression) to get the desired effect. That's as opposed to a simple solution, which would be a single plug-in with presets, like iZotope Vinyl.

The complex method is better than the simple one, as it gives much more control over shaping the sound. It is, however, easy to do more harm than good if one does not know what s/he is doing with EQ and distortion and compression.
 
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The problem with recording it over the phone line is that it may sound a lot better than you want. People associate the "phone sound" with what phones sounded like when they were using carbon capsules and analog switchers. Many of todays phone systems in the US are digital and going over optical links. They don't do nearly the level of destructive processing they used to.

So for free you can record the phone, or you can get Vinyl which works well or just play with EQ till it sounds the way you want.

For $ there are a number of options. A number of plugins have "telephone" presets. You can get IR of phones for Convolution reverbs or you could go the super duper luxury route with SpeakerPhone from Audioease. It has a lot of sampled phones plus a tone of other things and has modules to add the various distortions that are typical. It's not cheap but it is loads of fun to play with.
 
I don't think anyone was suggesting that the degredation of signal is based on the line, but rather recording the sound coming out of the tiny little speaker.

Noiz2 said:
The problem with recording it over the phone line is that it may sound a lot better than you want. People associate the "phone sound" with what phones sounded like when they were using carbon capsules and analog switchers. Many of todays phone systems in the US are digital and going over optical links. They don't do nearly the level of destructive processing they used to.

So for free you can record the phone, or you can get Vinyl which works well or just play with EQ till it sounds the way you want.

For $ there are a number of options. A number of plugins have "telephone" presets. You can get IR of phones for Convolution reverbs or you could go the super duper luxury route with SpeakerPhone from Audioease. It has a lot of sampled phones plus a tone of other things and has modules to add the various distortions that are typical. It's not cheap but it is loads of fun to play with.
Click to expand...
 
gpforet said:
I don't think anyone was suggesting that the degredation of signal is based on the line, but rather recording the sound coming out of the tiny little speaker.
Click to expand...

Well that has changed a lot also. But the band with limiting is (or was) something that the phone company did to optimize the signal for their equipment.

My point is that a modern phone actually sounds pretty good. But the sound most people want to hear in the movies is much closer to the sound of the old analog lines and the old crappy mic and earpiece elements. Your milage will definitely vary depending on your local phone system and the phones people are using.
 
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