The Birds are out and about.

[muffett.2008]

Working on this one, will take time.

Information

Warning: This is a relatively older thread This discussion is older than 360 days. Some information contained in it may no longer be current.

[CINDERS]

Looking forward to the pics Muffett

[Surpmil]

I wonder if any recordings exist of a thousand bomber raid under way? Probably the technology of the time (or this time?) couldn't do justice to it?

[Bob Womack]

I wonder if any recordings exist of a thousand bomber raid under way? Probably the technology of the time (or this time?) couldn't do justice to it?

You are touching on my field of expertise here. I'm a professional recording engineer and a recording archivist.

The Germans had pretty well-developed tape recording going on including bias compensation to flatten the response. They were using it to record and playback radio shows and news broadcasts and their product sounded far better than ours. Right after the war, Bing Crosby sent some of his associates over to Germany to steal the m blind of the technology. They brought back German recorders and tape and formed the Ampex Corporation ,who led professional recording for the next twenty years and innovated some of the very best recording techology ever. At the time of the war, tape recorders weren't very portable, but a German radio station might have been able to stick a mic out a window. Of course, to acknowledge any Allied incursion was politically verboten. The Nazis enforced their bans with death. To top it off, the populations centers were virtually ransacked in the last months of the war.

Up until that point the Allied technology was limited to cutting lacquer disks, recording to the optical stripe of film, or wire recorders that recorded to the surface of wire that was loaded in spools. None of those were either very high-fi nor durable. I've actually got a classical album and a Bing Crosy album that were recorded to film optical stripe. They are horrendouns. The classical album actually touts its recording format because it was a step up from lacquer master disks of the time. None of these formats could record and appreciable bass.

Heck, as late as 1968, the Battle of Britain movie used fairly lo-fi magnetic recording techniques to record all those classic Spitfires, Hurricanes, and the license-built Messerschmidts and Heinkels. There's no bass on aircraft in that movie either. If youve ever been on a field when either a Rolls-Royce powered fighter or a radially-powered bomber took off or did a power pass, you'll know that it shakes your guts immericifully. Glorious. I've only heard one movie soundtrack with a really good pass of a prop plane, and that was at the end of The Great Raid. when the Lockheed Loadstar flies overhead.

The recent Midway movie made the 1200hp radial powered Dauntlesses sound like silly WWI kites, or sewing machines.

I love the final words of Harry Crosby's book, Wing and a Prayer, where he speaks of a little child in Holland being scared by the droning of a 1000 plane raid. The father comforted the child, saying, "Oh no, Honey. That is the sound of angels" who are coming to liberate them. Having been the Group Bombardier for the 100th Bomb Group and flown all their key missions, beginning to end, Crosby finishes his work with questions over the efficacy of strategic bombing but concludes, nostalgically, that he had indeed heard the "angels."

Bob

[browningautorifle]

The recent Midway movie

When it came out in '76, they used giant speakers in "Sensurround" to try and give you that sound of power. I remember them hanging in the theater here...

[Flying10uk]

I wonder if any recordings exist of a thousand bomber raid under way?

Maybe not a thousand bomber raid but there is this:

Richard Dimbleby flew a number of missions over occupied territory as a war reporter during WW2 and, in my opinion, was a very brave man.

[Surpmil]

Very interesting Bob. I recall a documentary where the German person being interviewed described how some sort of warning system would monitor by radar the assembling bomber stream, with periodic updates on the numbers involved, and how nerve-wracking it was hearing the numbers increase and increase and then the wondering begin over who was to be the target. I suppose nothing could capture the resonances of those engines that are felt as much as heard, though we could probably produce a fair simulation in theatrical sound system?

[Bob Womack]

I suppose nothing could capture the resonances of those engines that are felt as much as heard, though we could probably produce a fair simulation in theatrical sound system?

For many years theater sound systems simply couldn't reproduce those lows. Now, as THX has promulgated and the rest of the industry has tried to compete, there really isn't a reason not to capture the sound except for possibly the director aesthetically not wanting to devote a whole bunch of his movie's soundtrack energy to it. We've got the mics and recording systems to capture it and the playback systems to reproduce it at this point. In the case of Midway (2019), the action scenes were all CGI. There are only about five Dauntless bomber left in flying condition in the U.S. so I wonder if the movie staff even got out and experienced one before they did the sound design?

To your question, It would all begin with one of those regular fly-ins where the big boys, B-17s, B-24s, and the two flying B-29s, get together. You'd want to get a gaggle together and do some fly-bys with proper recording gear in a quiet field.a Once you had three or four recordings of, say, five or six aircraft going by in formation, you could use various techniques to simulate more. The sound was quite complex: the formation leaders were flying at a constant throttle position but everyone else was riding the throttles back and forth to stay in formation at all times. So you'd have this constant, random modulation of the various engine's frequencies changing and beating on each other as their pitches went up and down.

By the way, my main job is sound design for video and film. One of the best sound design movies out there is Master and Commander, the Far Side of the World. That sound team did it right and their work was written up in the trade magazines. They cruised on the ship in question for three days with the recorders going. They went out and shot cannons in the desert with mic arrays set along a quarter-mile range to get the sound of the cannons, the passing of the shot, and the impact. They even recorded "chain shot," two balls linked by chain used to destroy ship's rigging. As they flew from the cannon, they spun and made an interesting whoosh as the went by. They had to record them fresh because there were no recorded examples.

Bob

[muffett.2008]

Still working on this.....only 100 pic's to go. Lost a few with a crashed computer....that's life.
Getting ready for the next big Airshow and opening of the new Air Museum Hanger, just a sneak word, a MIG 17 will be there along with the latest Spitfire rebuild that is now in the air(working on a two seater next)

[22SqnRAE]

Still working on this.....only 100 pic's to go. Lost a few with a crashed computer....that's life.
Attachment 124162

Muff,

Time to rely on the Cloud for your storage. Microsoft and Apple give you heaps of options to get connected! Saves much stress!