1950s radio effect

[orangel]

Is that 1.3? My Audacity eq doesn't look like that :

And how would I add a heterodyne whistle? Tone at a certain pitch?

[kozikowski]

<<<Although I'm not quite sure how AM radio cross-over works into this topic.>>>

From the first line of the first post...

<<<So I've read all those thing about old radio/walkie talkie/PA effects on audacity, but I'm trying to get an effect that makes it sound like an old radio set from the 1940-1950s.>>>

<<<this is the equalization I used ...>>>

Nothing with vacuum tubes in it ever came out that clean and sharp. I'd probably round off the corners a bit and make the curve gentle. And I'd still go down further on the left. There was no restriction to the low end on AM radio transmitters. They used to do big band shows from hotels and there was nothing wrong with the bass line.

The hetrodyne whistle in the US is always 10KHz because of the radio channel spacing. Other countries it could be 8 KHz.

<<<Audacity's own compressor unfortunately tends to add.>>>

Which is one of the many reasons to use Chris's Compressor. Trouble free volume leveling.

<<<Btw, what I'm trying to do is create a narration spiel for this WWII training video.>>>

On film? OK, skip the heterodyne whistle. Film doesn't have that. Film does have those funny muffled optical track pops as dirt and film splices go through the projector. And they're out of sync. Sound on Film is 16 frames behind, so you see a crack or splice in the film and it's about a second later you hear the pop.

I don't know how I would simulate optical film dirt in the track. I never tried. But optical film sound didn't have any better fidelity than AM radio.

Maybe a brief blast of white noise and then muffle it with the equalizer.

Any serious sound production should be done in Audacity 1.3.x. Audacity 1.2 tools and filters are really simple and many of them don't work particularly well.

Koz

[Trebor]

Is that 1.3? My Audacity

Yep

And how would I add a heterodyne whistle? Tone at a certain pitch?

Its' not a constant tone. The whistle is a sine wave which changes in pitch approximately
3000Hz-5000Hz-3000Hz etc, in a sinusoidal fashion with a period of about 20 seconds.

If you look at the Freesound link I gave you'll probably find the real McCoy rather than having to syntheise it.

[ Some quite good radio noise here ... http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=61386 ]


PS throw in some mains hum (50Hz Europe 60Hz USA) valve radios had plenty of that.

[orangel]

I still like the whistle for effect, as it will make people think it's still 1940s-ish (mix up radio and film).

Thanks for those sound links, too. I'll use those instead of laboring to try to make my own.

[kozikowski]

I wish they had posted a little explanation with those radio samples. Three of them are an AM radio being tuned rapidly up and down the dial, one of them is a radio left just off center of correct tuning (which makes my teeth hurt), and the last one is an actual microphone sound capture of a thunderstorm, not the storm as it appears on AM radio.

None of them sound like what happens if if you listen to a half-hour radio show. One of the samples was from a small table radio and that accounts for the boxy sound with no bass.

And no, heterodyne doesn't constantly change pitch. Sometimes on the short wave bands it can do that, but not broadcast. I thought I heard some radio teletype sounds in one of those samples, so goodness knows where they came from.

http://www.freesound.org/searchText.php

What was the search term you used for your sample? I'm interested in the warbling heterodyne.

Koz

[Trebor]

What was the search term you used for your sample? I'm interested in the warbling heterodyne.

The warble I was thinking of was due to the tuning drifting slightly causing the heterodyne whistle to slowly change pitch in a cyclical fashion over 10s of seconds.

I've had a quick look on Freesound but can't find one yet, (The Freesound search engine is unreliable).

[Trebor]

I've found a synthesised version of the heterodyne whistle I was on about above...
http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=19939