What is an ISDN voice over recording?

For us at Uptempo, ISDN recording is an everyday task but we also know that there are lots of people who still don’t know about this way of sound recording. There are two ways to explain what is an ISDN recording: a simple and more colloquial way and a technological way.

Let’s get first to the easy one:

ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network is a recording of high quality audio via a telephone system network between two studios. One studio has the talent and the other receives the audio in real time and in high quality.

One example of our work with ISDN for TV commercials includes basketball star Shaquille O’Neal who visited our studios in Miami to record a spot for Vitamin Water. While he was reading, the audio files were simultaneously received in another studio in New York where the client and creatives where directing the session and listening to Shaq just like he was there.

Two recording studios can even record in sync with a movie. That was the case of our recording with Oscar award winner actor Adrien Brody for his movie "Manolete".

ISDN is not new. Even Frank Sinatra recorded parts of his album “Duets” using ISDN in 1995.

Now the more technologic way:

ISDN is a telephone system network. Prior to the ISDN, the phone system was viewed as a way to transport voice, with some special services available for data. The key feature of the ISDN is that it integrates speech and data on the same lines, adding features that were not available in the classic telephone system.

ISDN is commonly used in radio broadcasting. Since ISDN provides a high quality connection this assists in delivering good quality audio for transmission in radio. Most radio studios are equipped with ISDN lines as their main form of communication with other studios or standard phone lines. Equipment made by companies such as Omnia (the popular Zephyr codec) and others are used regularly by radio broadcasters. Sometimes a dipswitch setting must be changed on one codec to "talk" with another made by a different manufactuer

ISDN is a circuit-switched telephone network system, that also provides access to packet switched networks, designed to allow digital transmission of voice and data over ordinary telephone copper wires, resulting in better voice quality than an analog phone. It offers circuit-switched connections (for either voice or data), and packet-switched connections (for data), in increments of 64 kbit/s.

For more information on our ISDN sessions, please contact us.