Here’s a question. I’m sure it must be possible to do, and I’m sure it’s a kludgy, nasty way round a problem.
If I’ve got a TV making a noise, and I want to make recordings of that noise using my Zoom H2, which has a Line In hole, is it possible to plug the line in into the TV’s headphone socket, whilst still having the TV making a noise to the people in the room? What’s the minimum amount of kit I would need to do that? headphone splitter, one cable, one set of portable iPod speakers?
I know ideally I want a pre-amp feed (( please stop me if I’m talking nonsense here )) but I think that might be on the complicated side.
I could just sit the recorder in front of the telly and let it tape the sound using its built in mics, but that seems a lossy way of doing it and would have the added disadvantage of including in the recording all the sarcastic remarks of the people present.
Bonus marks available if you can guess the application I’m going to put this knowledge to 🙂
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I’d be very surprised if plugging anything into the TV’s headphone socket doesn’t mute the TV’s own speakers. And you won’t be able to circumvent that without getting into the TV’s internals.
Does the TV have a SCART socket? If so, you should be able to get line level audio from that. Something like this might do the job: http://www.tvcables.co.uk/cgi-bin/tvcables/AD001.html?id=uztS7hgs
Just make sure you don’t get an adapter that is for input to the TV instead of output from it.
Thanks very much Jim, that seems a simple and cheap solution.
I half had you in mind when I wrote this but thought it might be a bit presumptuous to write direct 🙂
I have an over the top solution involving several pre amps, my own sound engineer and a shed load of recording equipment… Let me know if this is of interest!
Heh, it needs to be something portable and simple that even I can get to work!
I should have mentioned a few caveats. TVs vary, a lot. What works on one TV may not work on another. You might only get something coming out on the SCART when the TV is using its internal tuner – you didn’t say what source the TV will be viewing. My current TV is very flexible – I can choose which input is routed to one of its 3 SCART sockets via its menu system – but my previous one wasn’t.
Yeah, it will be a TV on an internal CCTV scheme of some sort. I suppose really what I need to do is make friends with the guy who is actually running the sound board, but I may not get a pass to go there, and the TV in the dressing room will pretty much definitely work.