Traditionally, if a producer needed voice over narration for a production, they would coordinate scheduling for themselves, for the voice talent and for a recording studio where the session would occur. The face to face contact between all these entities is a good way of working, allowing collaboration between the parties and getting just the right voice inflection. However, sometimes it's difficult to coordinate producers, facilities and talent, especially if the production schedule is difficult or the voice talent is working out of town or even overseas.

Increasingly, the voice talent you need is just a dial up phone call away. The use of ISDN phone lines and specialized audio equipment allows high quality audio to travel great distances. The flexibility afforded by ISDN audio equipment allows the recording machinery, the producer and the voice talent to be in three different places virtually anywhere in the world

What is ISDN?

ISDN stands for Integrated Services Digital Network. It is essentially a digital telephone/telecommunications network. ISDN is designed to carry data of any type. Here at Henninger Media Services, we use ISDN primarily for digital audio transmission, more specifically for Voice Overs and Narration Recording. ISDN sounds much better than dial up telephone lines due to greater available bandwidth and digital signal encoding, avoiding degradation of audio quality down the line. Audio is compressed or "encoded" at the source and sent down the line as data packets where it is "decoded" at the destination.

ISDN Advantages:

The main advantage of ISDN is the freedom that it allows producers and talent alike. Budget and schedule conflicts often prohibit each party involved in a project from working at the same facility. Many times we conduct VO sessions with only the engineer in the recording suite. The producer is patched via phone from his/her office/location shoot and the voice talent is patched via ISDN from another studio with our capabilities - no matter if that’s down the street or overseas. This freedom allows much more flexibility for scheduling and choice of VO Talent without compromising audio integrity. We even have the ability to simultaneously record 2 talents in different studios as though they are in the same booth with the producer on the other side of the glass.

It's not unusual for high demand voice talent to actually construct a voice over booth in their own home, installing ISDN equipment to connect to producers and recording studios. Although this has dramatically increased the availability of good voice talent while saving time and reducing schedule conflicts, there is a loss of control over some important aspects of voice recording. Room acoustics, microphone type and microphone placement become variables in the recording session. While this may not be an immediate issue, keep in mind that re-voicing parts of a script could become an issue without the strict controls over those items available within the recording studio.

Uses for ISDN:

1. Voice Over/Narration: Voice talent, producer and recording engineer are not necessarily in the same room.
2. Point to Point Delivery: If the source audio material needs to be transported immediately to another location and package carriers or Internet file transfers are not feasible.
3. Timecode sync: Allows for locking to picture for machines in remote locations. Each location would be able to view the same video while the voice talent reads to picture. This step entails extra equipment and setup time.

Henninger ISDN Information for Arlington, VA:

Equipment ISDN Phone # Standard Settings Alternate Coding Telos Zephyr Xstream 1   703.248.9818   Codec: MPEG Layer 2, Mono, 128kbps ISDN Data Rate: 64kbps, 48Khz   MPEG AAC MPEG AAC-LD MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) G.722   703.248.9819     Telos Zephyr Xstream 2   703.248.0256   Codec: MPEG Layer 2, Mono, 128kbps ISDN Data Rate: 64kbps, 48Khz   MPEG AAC MPEG AAC-LD MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) G.722   703.248.0271     APT Milano   703.248.9980   Mono & Stereo 32KHz, 44.1KHz, 48KHz 16, 20 or 24 bit ISDN Data Rate: 64kbps       703.248.9982       703.248.9983   Standard apt-X   703.248.9985   Enhanced apt-X   703.248.9818         703.248.9819

Henninger ISDN Information for Washington, DC:

Equipment ISDN Phone # Standard Settings Alternate Coding Telos Zephyr   202.872.1786   Codec: MPEG Layer 2, Mono, 128kbps ISDN Data Rate: 64kbps, 48Khz   MPEG AAC MPEG AAC-LD MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) G.722   202.872.1787     APT X   202.872.1782   Dual Destination (mono) ISDN Data Rate: 64kbps, 48Khz       202.872.1783       202.872.1784       202.872.1785