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Using Receivers as Speakers for Theater Production

Started by Christine, September 13, 2016, 01:12:20 PM

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Christine

I work with a theater company in Portland, Oregon, and we are looking at using some of my old telephones (four or five WE 302s, but also potentially some other phones)  in a future production. The idea is that we would have a number of phones with the receivers off the hook. We would like to have recorded voices/music coming from these receivers.

I'm just not sure where to start with this. We have a sound guy who can figure things out on the computer side, but I thought it would be good if I had a better sense of how things might work on the phone side. I also want to avoid doing any damage to the receivers.

I know this is an odd question, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Christine

dsk

Hi, and welcome to this forum.

Please correct me if I am not right.

You want to let the audience hear (in the normal loudspeakers) what the artist "hears in the phone" and the quality of sound should be as true old telephone as possible.

If yes it is important to get the natural noise from the old system, mainly from the relatively limited sound quality of an old microphone (transmitter capsule) 

If he make a recording by just hooking up to a (more or less real) telephone line, and the sound is sent via an old telephone, he will get it pretty well, by electronic filtering he may cut out all frequencies under  300, and over 3400 hz, it will be recognizable as telephone sound.   If he want to make a difference between local and long distance calls, he may add some grey noise to the long distance sound.

We may come back with more info about circuitry.

dsk

Christine

Thanks, dsk!

Yes, it should sound as if on an old phone.
And if we need to amplify, I guess we could do that externally with a lav mike or something, but overall I think it would be best to try it without.

Christine

TelePlay

Quote from: Christine on September 13, 2016, 01:12:20 PM
The idea is that we would have a number of phones with the receivers off the hook. We would like to have recorded voices/music coming from these receivers.

Given the size of a receiver in a telephone handset, the sound produced by one would be lost before reaching the front row, unless you had dozens of phones but that is most likely a lot less than the "number of phones" you are planning to use. And, multiple phones cranked to max, just under distortion, would still be hard to understand by the front row.

I tried to hook up a phone system directly into a board for On Golden Pond and that failed. Used an adapter something like this

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VEC-TRX-20-3-5MM-Direct-Connect-Telephone-Record-Device-ADAPTER-ONLY-/122133097245

which worked well to attach a recorder to a TT phone but did not work well feeding the signal into a digital sound board. Was also using a TelTone 4 simulator to make the phones work. Seems modern digital boards are very touchy and sensitive to what is generated by two old phones running on a POTS simulator. There is probably a way to match and filter such a hook up but we didn't have time to get that done. There are much more expensive adapters on eBay but I guess that doesn't mean they would not produce the same problems as the cheaper ones. It might have been something as simple as the RF generated by all the wiring needed to run the stage lights was being picked up by the "intended phone system" and feed into the board. Or a combinations of the two.

We ended up putting a directional mic on a stand near the off stage phone so that side of the conversation was picked up by the mic. That feed was clipped and fuzzed to match a the sound spectrum of a typical old phone. Using the mic allowed the audience to hear the off stage part of the call. A special speaker was placed under the on-stage phone table to produce the unseen actors voice from the point of the on stage actors location. That gave us board control over the volume and it was set loud enough to be heard by the first 10 rows and to be picked up by the stage mics to be fed into the mains for the rest of the house.

There are a couple of ways to do what you want to do, place a hidden mic near the phones receiver and amplify that through the board to either stage monitor or special speakers (to create a directional source on stage) or through house speakers for better but general sound. Easiest way is to put special speakers near the phones and drive them through the sound system by feeding clipped and fuzzed up sounds through the board to those speakers. That would eliminate the phone handset receivers. That seems like the easiest way to do that, but then, from what you posted, I'm not quite sure of what you want to do.

But since you are planning to use recorded sound effects, that makes it even easier than putting a mic on a live actor.

Hopefully, this will give you some ideas, many of which you may have already thought of.

All smoke and mirrors most of the time, right?


dsk

Before we are making any suggestions of how the signal should be sent to the amplifier, it is important to know if you are going to generate ringing current to get the real telephone ringing or not.   The use of the rotary dial is another issue.

dsk

Christine

They do have a beautiful ring, but I think we would just be doing voice. And I'm not sure the voices will even have to be intelligible other than the tone of the voice. I'm imagining something along the lines of the adult voices in Charlie Brown, if that rings a bell.

dsk

To get all the natural noise, echo and whatever a true telephone line have, the enclosed circuit will be one of the simplest solutions doing just that.

No dial tone, no ringing, but when both telephones goes off hook you get a voice path between the phones. What you record is what you will hear listening on the line.  The few components will work for most systems, but may be changed as needed.  Ring signals, dial tones and the sound of dialing may be downloaded or just recorded with a regular microphone.

dsk

Christine

#8
Thanks again That seems like a simple solution. I can't wait to try it out.

Christine