Episode: 762
Title: HPR0762: THEATER OF THE IMAGINATION: 04
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0762/hpr0762.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:03:29

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Hello, this is Lost in Bronx.
Welcome to part four of Theatre of the Imagination,
my rambling HPR series on dramatic audio media past and present.
It's also a narrative about my own exploration and creation of this
artistic medium, or I should say media, since there are many forms of this
stuff ranging from full-blown audio plays to widely popular
audio books.
You know, I never intended to turn this thing into a series,
and as such I never thought in terms of any kind of structure for it.
That's changing with this episode.
Here are my proposed episode sections.
First, an intro like this one, giving updates and news on the series if there are any.
Next, a segment on the technical aspect of my own endeavors,
wherein I'll go over the hardware, the software, and my evolving methodology.
This will also include an ongoing overview of resources available on the
interwebs and elsewhere.
Next, a segment covering a particular show from the great old-time radio days
that I believe is worth a look-see, including my opinion of it,
and where exactly you can find it on the internet for your own dancing and dining pleasure.
Now, keep in mind that this whole show is more or less for educational purposes,
and as such, some of the OTR mentions will be examples of what not to do.
Remember, like any great era of anything, they produced far more cractoring
the OTR days than they did gold.
We can learn from those shows too.
Next, a segment on a modern show or content producer of note.
This will get the same treatment as the OTR stuff, though I'll focus more on the good stuff
unless there's a particular lesson to learn.
Finally, I'll do an outro that will essentially be a personal opinion piece or rant.
You know, a small place where I can bitch in moan or shake the tambourine or whatever.
If I get any feedback worth sharing, I'll cover that there as well.
And that's it.
The new format.
Actually, the first format, since the other episodes, while scripted, were streams of consciousness.
I don't know, I guess that makes them the first format after all. Anyway, on with the show.
Okay, I want to go over what I used to make my first piece of dramatic fiction.
My equipment list has changed a bit since then, but that'll be fodder for another episode.
My initial foray into this world was a science fiction drama called Blue Heaven.
Essentially, in format, it is or was a short story with music and sound effects added.
This episode, I'm going to talk about the microphone I used.
Now, for audio casts in the past, I used a cheap little thrift store microphone with a quarter inch jack on it,
which I plugged directly into my computer.
If you go back and listen to my older HDR episodes, you'll hear the difference.
For dramatic audio, though, I knew that wouldn't be enough.
As I said in the last episode of this series, audio quality does matter in the dramatic audio arena.
Thusly, I used a CAD brand that's CAD microphone, which is a cheaper knockoff of a doubtlessly better one from years past.
This is an XLR microphone, meaning it uses one of those fat black cables with the three prongs on the end.
It says on the box, it's a condenser mic, meaning that as I understand it, I could shout into the thing,
and it would automatically reduce my voice volume down to an acceptable level for that shout only.
Now, I'm not yet knowledgeable enough about this stuff to know if it only does this magical thing in conjunction with some sort of hardware compressor device hooked into the line,
somewhere, or if it's supposed to do it on its own.
All I can tell you is that, at least as far as it stands, it most certainly doesn't do this on its own.
Maybe somebody listening can write in and tell me why that is, and if so, I'll relate it to all of you, my gentle listeners.
Right now, all I can figure is that because it's a cheap copycat design, I likely got what I paid for.
What it does do well, though, is capture my voice.
I'm using it right now for this thing. Not too bad, right?
Better than most USB mics out there, or those little quarter inch jack mics that plug directly into the computer, which, as I said, is what I've used in the past.
I paid about, I don't know, 70, 80 bucks, something like that for this thing on eBay, and it took forever to get here, but I think I saved, I don't know, maybe $50 or so over an equivalent one made by perhaps a bigger company, or something like that.
Don't quote me on the price, it's been a while, but look into it, CADCAD.
Okay, this is a kind of microphone, which requires something called phantom power, in this case, 48 volts.
I didn't understand what that meant when I bought it.
What that means is that this microphone requires a separate power supply, independent of the computer, or sound card it's plugged into, in order to function.
This voltage, though, comes to it through that same XLR cable that the sound is also going through.
I didn't know about phantom power, though, when I bought this thing, and so it didn't work.
No sound whatsoever.
And I knew that it was either broken out of the box, or I just didn't know what I was doing.
And in matters that are unfamiliar, the latter has, historically, been the most likely scenario to be true.
Enter here that pillar of free and open source software advocacy,
that bastion of community support, that star of August and festival, Clad 2!
No, he's not actually a guest today, but he deserves an intro like that in any story, I think.
He also has an extensive multimedia background, and a quick conversation with him,
revealed to me the depths of my ignorance, as well as my next logical step, namely picking up a phantom power supply.
In my particular case, I bought a weeny little metal box with an even weeny or power adapter that plugs into it.
The power adapter then plugs into the wall socket, see?
On top of the not as weeny box are two sockets for XLR cables in and out.
They do make much bigger phantom power supplies, some that can handle a whole bunch of XLR inputs and outputs at once.
But it's just me here, just my voice, with no other simultaneous music or voices or anything.
I had no reason not to go the cheap route for this thing.
I think I spent about 30 or 35 bucks with shipping for this phantom power supply of mine.
I will have links in the show notes to the exact models that I have if I can find them somewhere,
probably on their main sites or the manufacturer sites, not necessarily where I pick them up.
You could do some research and probably find either those exact items yourself or something very similar.
Now, cheap as it is, this microphone came with a few cool things, a nearly incomprehensible instruction book,
a sweet little fake leather zipper bag for the mic, and one of those funky shock mounts designed to absorb small bumps and vibrations and such.
You've seen these things before, if only in the movies, a couple of metal rings with wires and springs on them in a complicated fashion.
If you had a really skinny wrist, you could put it on and you'd look like a supervillain with cool zappy powers.
The world is mine!
Anyway, this thing is designed to screw on to a microphone stand.
I don't have a mic stand, though, and I don't want to spring for one because I'm a cheap skate.
So what I did was put a bunch of metal L brackets and screws together and built a very crude but effective clamp for the edge of my desk,
which I can put on and take off easily for recording work.
The mic then sits in the shock mount with this makeshift clamp thingy attached and there you have it.
It's on the edge of my desk usually and that's where I work.
Now, sitting in front of the mic, I have a pop filter.
This is a screen made of mesh or cloth designed to stop a certain kind of sound that comes from everyone's mouth when they speak from hitting the microphone.
In keeping with my miserly nature, the one I have is homemade and I put it together from a pair of trimmed pantyhose and a small wooden needle point ring clamped around them.
People also use coat hangers and other things.
Just do a search for homemade pop filter and you'll get more info than you need.
And speaking of need, you absolutely need a pop filter.
Let me give you an example.
With the filter in place, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
And without the filter, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Same distance from the mic, same direction of my mouth and same emphasis in both cases.
I think the difference there is obvious.
Now, there's a certain school of thought about these things to the effect that if you train yourself to speak across the mic in a certain fashion, you can avoid making all those poppy sounding consonants into the microphone to begin with.
Those sounds are called plosives in linguistic circles, by the way.
Now, I think that's an imperfect skillet best and most applicable to those situations where a pop filter is unavailable to you.
Maybe if you can hang your microphone so that it comes down from above you and you aren't breathing at it at all when you speak those plosives, then you very likely don't need one.
Everyone else buy or make a pop filter and use it.
Next episode, I'll cover the external sound card I used on Blue Heaven and exactly why it was needed.
From Hollywood, it's time now for Johnny Dollar.
In January of 1949, an otherwise unexceptional detective show aired on CBS Radio, a show which would go on to some rather distinguished heights in the 811 episodes that followed.
All told, yours truly Johnny Dollar ran for 12 years, survived no less than 5 different actors as leading man, survived changes in production and writing staff, changes in the physical location of the recording studios, changes in the episodic format it used, and changes in recording and radio technology.
What it couldn't survive though were the changes in the times.
By the end of the show, in September of 1962, television was king and old time radio was a thing of memory.
Ah, but what a memory.
Johnny Dollar has the distinction of being one of two regularly broadcast American radio dramas that ushered out the OTR era, the other being the anthology thriller show Suspense, and both shows aired their final episodes upon the same night.
During its run, Johnny Dollar made use of some of the finest talent in the industry at that time, who collectively had the accumulated benefit of decades of professional research and experience in this art form.
Obviously, Johnny Dollar deserves far more time and attention than I'm devoting to it here.
For many, myself included, the best Johnny was an actor by the name of Bob Bailey, and the best episodes of his run fell into a daily 15 minute format.
Broadcast in this fashion, Monday through Friday, the artistic success of this format was lost on many listeners since trying to follow the ins and outs of a mystery plot in such tiny bites doubtlessly proved a little frustrating.
I mean, speaking for myself, it would have been impossible to follow like that.
Listening to them now, however, with all the episodes for a particular plot line running back to back, the same 15 minute installments making up a single 75 minute story are some of the best old time radio ever recorded.
They are available now at the internet archive, and I'll have a link to that page in the show notes.
If you really get into it, there are enough freely available episodes of this show to keep you entertained in the evenings for the next several months, and anyone looking to create dramatic audio of any kind should consider it a requirement to check out yours truly, Johnny Dollar.
A more modern and quite honestly more original show is HMS Lydia, which was a dramatic audio production of a couple years back.
Really, it was a series of dramatized stories like Blue Heaven as opposed to a full cast show like Johnny Dollar.
Lydia, distributed on the internet via RSS like any other podcast, ran for 20 episodes and portrayed the alien encounters of a British swoop during the Napoleonic Wars.
Yes, aliens from outer space in the early 1800s, and it works very, very well.
HMS Lydia has that elusive quality, which seemed to come so naturally to the people and makers of the media of another era, namely Charm.
Do not underestimate that quality. It is in short supply and getting rarer all the time. In fact, go ahead and point to a modern example of Charm.
Okay, now point to another. It's harder, right? In 100 years it will be all but impossible.
And if what I'm referring to here is already a little mysterious to you, then I hardly recommend that you check out the link that I'll have in the show notes for the immensely charming sword and sale science fiction on the high seas dramatized story series HMS Lydia.
You'll find the site a real pain to navigate, but trust your old buddy, Ellen B, it's worth the effort.
Let me ask you a question. What's your favorite kind of story? What kind of movies do you like? What kind of television shows? What kind of books?
Okay, that's four questions. Let's do this one. What are you into?
Dramatic audio can be anything you want it to be. I mean anything. A touching romance, a swashbuckling space opera, new renditions of classical drama, Shakespeare and the like.
Anything you can see in your head can be recorded and placed into someone else's.
Not exactly as you saw it. No, this is better. Other people see it how they want to see it, how they automatically and spontaneously create it to look in their minds.
In this fashion, dramatic audio media are far more like the various print media. I mean you read a great book and it just comes to life for you. You see it in your head.
Then you watch a movie or television show based on it and you spend half the time comparing notes with yourself about how this or that is the same or different as what you envisioned when you read this story.
I mean film and television drama are passive media. They are showing you what they want you to see and you accept it. You have to. That's the only way it works.
Audio is different though. They tell you what's happening but then you see whatever you want to see. Good production values, good acting and writing. These things have an influence but they don't dictate.
You still see something cool in your head, something you made up. In this sense, it is interactive fiction at its finest. Not because you can choose what happens but because you can choose how it looks.
To you, to your imagination, the scope of it, the textures, the colors, the beauty or ugliness of the people involved, even the smells all through the element of sound.
What story do you want to tell? Do you want to do something set in your favorite fictional world, Star Wars or Doctor Who or something? That's fan fiction and quite popular. You'll find a ready audience for stuff like that.
Do you want to write and record your autobiography and release it to the world? You can. You probably should. We all probably should. The autobiographies of non celebrities are usually the most compelling and honest.
Do you have a novel in mind or better yet on paper? If so, I think you ought to seriously consider recording it as a patio book or even adapting it to audio drama.
You say you're a poor speaker. You have a weak voice. Okay? Well, there are other people who aren't and who don't. And they'd be happy to record your work for you. It takes a little digging, perhaps, but they're out there.
What I'm saying here is consider your story. You have one. Everyone has one. And people want to hear it. They want something to listen to when they're driving or jogging or doing the dishes.
Or any one of a million other things up to and including sitting on the couch, staring into space, seeing a different world other than the one around them.
A world you drew, but that they colored in. This is the power of audio.
You have been listening to theater of the imagination part four. You can find links to the things I spoke of in this episode as well as the credits for the music and sound effects used in the show notes, which can be found at hackerpublicradio.org.
I encourage you to leave any comments or corrections there so that others can enjoy them too. You can also contact me though at Austin Bronx at gmail.com. That's L-O-S-T-N-B-R-O-N-X at gmail.
And you can check out my site at info-underground.net-l-n-b.
This has been Lost in Bronx. Thank you for listening. Take care.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio. For more information on the show and how to contribute your own shows, visit hackerpublicradio.org.
Thanks for watching.