Keeping Up with Technology

a discussion from Expo99

10 November 1999

See moderator Paul Lehrman's two articles about this discussion in the April and May 2000 issues of MIX Magazine.

Few decisions an audio recording/production facility makes are more critical to its health than deciding when and how to buy new technology. Such decisions help determine a facility's direction, its value to clients, its potential in new markets, its profitability, and even its survival.

Relevant questions include:

Now what do I _really_ need? Which developments are true breakthroughs? Which are phantoms? What new and recent technologies will endure? Which will be short-term? Which ones will make a significant difference to my clients?

Which old equipment is still OK? The advantages of not keeping up. What should I replace? What significant technological improvements have arisen in recent years? Which would give me the most bang for the buck?

Reality vs. appearances -- how to sort it out. What is a useful measure of the hype and marketing efforts of equipment manufacturers, record companies, the computer industry, the TV/video biz, and others who wish to sell us things that we may or may not need?

To what extent do manufacturers, with user input, diligently develop better tools for us, and better listening experiences for consumers? To what extent do they foist technology upon us -- through their marketing, by abandoning development or support of older technnologies, etc., prompted by their need for short-term profit? To what extent do they create needs where none need to exist?
Who does need 24 bits, 96k, or the latest versions of items A-Z?

How to plan; how to make good choices. Manufacturers and dealers as participants in your decisions.

The cutting edge: the perils of adopting too early, or too late (i.e., losing market share, missing upgrade deals, etc.); after-sale support issues -- training, troubleshooting, etc. Whether/when to install the latest software revisions.

Mark Parsons: For some months we have been thinking about a topic for a panel discussion – talking with our customers and so on. We came up with Keeping Up With Technology. The phrase "keeping up" is operative: "Keeping up" implies a certain amount of hassle; a certain amount of contest, struggle – sometimes more, sometimes less. I’m not going to say much about it. I want to leave that to those will who have a lot to say about it tonight. I just want to make a single point – a point of history almost. I was out with my son’s 7th grade class at Walden Pond last week. If you’ve been out there you know that there is a rail line that runs in sight of the pond. It was built in 1841, I think. Henry Thoreau made some remarks about that railroad back when he was spending his two years living in Walden, in his little hut. At that time, of course, there were no cars; there were no paved roads; Concord was somewhat a sleepy village, still a farming town. The coming of the railroad was a radical change – perhaps almost as radical as the coming of multitrack recorders or 96KHz sampling. (laughter) Anyway, one thing he wrote stuck with me as we were standing there looking across the pond. He wrote, "We do not ride upon the railroad. It rides upon us."

You can think about that a long time. Tonight we’ll get at some of what that’s about. I think all of us who deal with technology get a little bit of that feeling: we master the tools we work with, but we feel sometimes that they are master of us. I don’t want to take any further time away from Paul Lehrman and his panel. (mention of Paul’s concert).

Paul Lehrman: Well, this is an interesting topic. How do you keep up with technology is the topic we are going to talk about, and we have a very illustrious panel of people who are trying to do that or are trying desperately not to do that. And I am going to talk for a few minutes on things that I have picked up that address this issue in various ways and then I will introduce the panel, and then we’ll talk about the questions we’re going to have the panel talk about, and then we’ll answer the questions, and then we’ll open up the floor. I want to keep this interactive, so for the people in the back who are feeling reluctant it would be great for you to move forward because we will be arguing with you pretty soon.

All right, I’ll just read some notes I made to my self:

For creative types like producers, engineers and musicians, changing our tools is like changing our instrument in the middle of our career. Throwing out the harpsichord for the piano, or finding out that all available violins now have five strings. and replacement strings are not available. And as product cycles get shorter the situation get worse. I once wrote a column for mix called "The Terminal Man Syndrome", from a Michael Crichton book. In this case, a guy finds himself with a particularly nasty form of epilepsy which causes him to kill people when he is in the throes of a seizure, and so a group of doctors implants under his skin a computerized device which recognizes the brain wave pattern that precedes an attack and when it detects that pattern sends a little jolt of electricity to a pleasure-stimulating site in the brain. And the problem is that when the computer that is monitoring the interface between the man and the machine that is inside of him reports that the jolts of pleasure are starting to come closer and closer together. And the guy’s brain, through biofeedback, is learning to generate seizure patterns with increasing frequency so that it can get the resulting pleasure hits. And the curve described by the events over time is a hyperbole, and it’s an asymptote; the point at which the amount of time between events diminishes to zero is referred to as the "tip over point". And when that occurs in Michael Chrichton’s book Terminal Man all hell breaks loose: there are guns, women in peril, chases through dark airplane hangers, and death. And I wrote about that thinking about how product cycles are becoming so short, in this business we are soon going to reach the "tip over point" where we actually cannot recognize the beginning or end of a product cycle because they all blend together, and that’s one of the things people are dealing with constantly. By the time you have learned something it is already obsolete.

I’m going to read something else. And I am not going to tell you where this is from.


"The personal computer, which is the principal pillar of the new economy, is not living up to expectations. Though faster and more powerful PC’s appear every few months, statistics so far have failed to enhance average worker productivity in significant or sustainable, measurable ways. That means, either (1) we cannot effectively use these faster chips, with larger memory and "more sophisticated" software or (2) these improvements function less well than claimed. Despite that fact that I am working on my fourth PC, for example, I do not find that it works appreciably better than the first one I bought in 1986. I find myself still irritated by breakdowns; the machines are more complex, therefore more fragile. By useless corrections to my operations and the constant expectations of cosmetic re-edits, prettier, but content neutral. The bugs in these species add-ons I believe cancel out most productivity gains and attributes, like computer clock speed. But, I needed each new PC to connect, and to be compatible with, my colleagues. And so we continue to scramble on the treadmill of continuos upgrades. It is in a sense a self-reinforcing scam: you constantly find yourself buying new software and hardware, which operate, improve, and appear suspiciously in close concert."

This was written by Roger Nichols – no, just kidding. This is from "The Nation" magazine, which is a well-known lefty magazine I get talking about the new economy and how it is all going to come crashing down on us pretty soon, which of course is an outgrowth of the new technology.

So, with that really optimistic scenario in mind, let’s talk about how this all applies to the audio industry. Have I bummed you out completely yet? Ok, I’m working on it.

Here we have who’s on the panel. We have Andy Munitz of Sony, product specialist for Sony Professional Audio –

Andy: Northeast Regional Sales Manager


Paul: Close enough, but a guy from Sony. Jim Anderson, who is with Sound Techniques, and what is your title now?

Jim: Vice President.


Paul: Vice President of Sound Techniques and has been there for many, many years. And I knew him when it was just a little closet in Watertown, and now it’s a big closet in Back Bay. And then we have Scott Metcalfe who owns Mind’s Ear Mastering in West Hartford, CT. He does premastering as well as remote classical and other acoustic music recording and is also the Chair of the Music Production and Technology Department at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford. And also teaches in the NYU graduate "Tone Masters" program. Jonathan Wyner is a mastering engineer par excellence, owner of M Works in Cambridge – a wonderful little mastering house. Tom Bates, who is just a legend in these parts. Has been an independent engineer for 32 years, has won a lot of awards, including 8 Grammys, and has worked on "Saturday Night Live" during it’s heyday. Michael Bierylo – what can we say about Michael – owner of Virtual Planet Desktop Audio, a project studio focusing on music and audio for film, video, and multimedia. Among his clients are the John Deere Tractor Museum as well as Smithsonian and Nintendo and Hasbro, and Universal Studios. Also a member of the Bird Songs of the Mesozoic along with Parsons’ own Rick Scott, and is Assistant Professor of Music Synthesis at Berklee. Jeff Largent, who also teaches at Berklee, is an Academy Award-winning sound designer and a founding member of Rumble Strip, the audio division of National Boston Video. And Jeff started back here; I first ran into him when he was in charge of audio at Target Productions in Charlestown, and had the biggest Synclavier system in town.

Jeff : 4 Megs.


Paul: 4 Megs – that was going somewhere, and that was 16 bit too! And Jeff then did his work with Lexicon and headed to the left coast, won an Oscar, a Golden Reel, did not win an Emmy, worked on 36 movies, 400 episodes of television and a slow speed chase with a white Bronco – oh, that wasn’t you! And decided after his seventh earthquake that it was time to come back east, now is back in Boston. And finally Allen Smith, Chief Engineer at Soundtrack in Boston, and when I met you, you were at Studio B I think. Is that right, about 20 years ago?

Allen: Oh, we’ve been here a long time.

Paul: And of course Soundtrack is one of the oldest and most established studios in Boston. So it’s quite a panel, huh? How we’re going to hear from all of you is, we’ll have to jump on each other. Here are the questions. I have four questions. Mark and I sort of sat down and distilled this down into four questions. (Why is this night…?) These four questions, what I’ll do is read all of them, and then I’ll just say one of them again and we’ll just go down the line and see what everyone has to say. If you want to change the subject feel free. Just sort of let it go and when we’ve had enough we’ll just move on to the next question. And when were all done with four, and if anyone is still standing, we’ll go to the audience.

Here’s the four questions as we saw them:

* What technologies really are important and which ones are bogus? 24/96? Surround? 5.1 Surround? DVD? Anything else? Positive, negative experiences or thoughts about any of these new technologies? I mean, MIDI, that’s useless right?
* Number 2: How do you make a decision to buy new stuff? Is it client-driven? Do you want to broaden your competition base? Is it competition driven? Is it forced by the market? Or is it pure paranoia?
* Number 3: What can retailers, and manufacturers do before, during, and after you buy? In terms of product development, in terms of sales, in terms of support and in terms of upgrading, to help you adjust and use new technology.
* And finally, and this is one that I am particularly interested in, is what can the press do? What is the role of the audio press in all this? Or are we simply supposed to sit there and stoke gear envy?

So let’s start with the first one: Which new technologies we’re beginning to deal with now really are important and which aren’t? The floor is open.

Jonathan Wyner: Well I’ve got a question to your question: Important to who? You know, I think what drives a lot of these questions is trying to put the question into some kind of context. Is it important to us as facility owners in terms of being productive, therefore looking at what our clients are asking us for? Clearly the answer has got to be yes. Are these technologies important to us as creative artists? As surround opens up so many new possibilities, therefore in that context the answer has got to be yes. You look at our job as archivists, trying to create something for posterity’s sake, in which case 96/24 is important, and the answer is yes. But if you try and cross patch any of those constituencies to the questions, then there the answer is no. So, I sort of have to throw that back out.

Paul: I’m listening.


Scott Metcalfe: I kind of have to wear two hats, which is an interesting problem and a good thing. I have one hat, which is being an educator, and the other one is being a studio owner. And I find that I get really excited about new technologies, and I look at the education as a way to legitimize exploring those technologies, which may not catch on in the consumer market. With my studio owner hat I have to think pretty seriously about what is a lot of fun to listen to, and what my clients are going to be willing to pay for. One of those things recently is surround sound. I’m convinced that surround sound is really important to the stuff that I’m doing. I do a lot of classical recording and I’ve just done my first two projects in surround, which I’m excited about. And I was really thrilled with the way they sounded, and since I haven’t taken the plunge, so to speak, at my studio in surround, I have at the school. We’ve put in a 5-channel, with Mackie speakers, with an 02R console. And it’s great to be able to explore that with the students. You know, ok, is this really going to take off, everybody’s got these DVD video systems, but yeah, everybody’s got their MP3 players too. Do they really care that we can hear 24/96 or are they just happy with their MP3 player they can just plug into their car? So, did I make a point?

Tom Bates: So how many surround systems are schools buying?


Scott: It seems a lot of the schools are. I don’t know how many exactly. When I was at NYU this summer I know they were planning on converting their studio A down there to a surround set up. And we have ours that we’ve gone for. So I think it’s important enough that we need to pay attention at least as far as educating people on it.

Tom: I hazard a guess that the answer is if it’s not in place within a short period of time, it’s coming soon. I would be pretty sure of that. Because there’s no coming definition of any kind, or competing definition about future delivery systems that does not have 5.1 incorporated as the standard. Everybody’s got to look at it, especially if you’re training the next generation of people to do this work.

If I can jump in on a little bit of the technology thing as an end user. My gut reaction to much of this – and I know there’s a lot of angst built into the questions or whatever – is that most of it is pretty interesting and useful. And I divide in my own head – new technology that we get – into two categories: things that incorporate new functions and features we’ve never had before, and things that embody new ways of doing features we have had before. Digital tape recorders vs. analog – we can argue whether they’re better or worse, but I am just saying it’s just a new way of doing it. And there’s things – Antares Auto-tune – that 10 years ago you would have had to do by hand, but things where you get to do new things. So a lot of that stuff is good stuff, even if the device is something you use once a year to get yourself out of trouble vs. the thing you use everyday.

I think a lot of that technology is good. But not all of the technology out is high technology – that’s one of the things I would encourage you to think about. If you think about the visual media, like television production, all the pizzazz is HDTV, so we all look at digital TV and go "wow", and that’s great innovative stuff, if you look at it, HDTV looks great. If you actually asked me what was the greatest impact over the last few years in television, however, it is photo-fluorescent lighting, making stuff look good. If you ask me the greatest impact over the last 3 years in audio, of new stuff, it’s microphones. There’s a whole slew of really great, new microphones out there. It may make a bigger difference to the recording you’re making today than the new DAT machine you just bought. So, it’s not all high tech innovation that’s of interest.

But basically the interesting part of the question, that I think we get back to is, I would vote most of it’s interesting. Except for, I hate every time I go to the AES convention, going up and down aisles and seeing 800 hundred new little black boxes; I don’t quite grasp what they do, but all do the same thing. And I’m not sure I need to do any of those things. The truth is, it’s all got to be work-driven. I mean there’s no point answering a question nobody has asked, or solving a problem nobody has, and that’s what some of those boxes do.

But in the larger scale what we tend to talk about is the things that either have an incremental improvement or provide a new function. In reverb everybody’s talking about the new Sony sampling reverb and stuff, and if that works well, then that’s a new way for them to model reverb and has different sounds, more acoustic room-oriented than production-oriented. Those sorts of things give us new tools, but you have to have the problem: you have to have the problem in order to solve it.

Then the question that Scott brought up is the critical one. You can say, well you know what I’d really like is a home studio. I think I’ll start with a Sony Oxford. (laughter) Somewhere there has to be justification for the expenditure unless you sold 20 million of your last CD. What is an incremental improvement; what does solve a problem I actually have vs. what can I afford to pay for this and still buy groceries at the end of the day?



Michael Bierylo: I had my surround epiphany this week. I think for me the question is not so much does this belong in schools. I’ve been reading about surround in magazines, seen demos and everything, but I ran into someone in my condo association who’s a guy who likes music. And he said, "Boy, I’ve got this surround system at home and it really sounds great. Are you doing anything with surround?" And all of a sudden it clicked: there’s a man on the street who is aware of this and approaching me. He’s not a professional with information, or trying to push it on somebody; he is coming to me and saying, oh this is great, I’m excited about it. So now I’m interested, because there’s a lot of people like him. And I think that’s really the question, is when the distribution format becomes common and everybody’s on it, then it’s useful and interesting. If it’s just a bunch of insiders listening to great sound, that’s a wonderful thing, but in terms of making a living, that’s where it’s at.

Andy Munitz: I don’t know if you have gone into a hi-fi store recently, but you can’t buy a stereo receiver anymore. You walk in and say my whatever blew up, and you walk out with a full surround receiver and a new set of surround speakers and that’s all that’s available. So it’s definitely down to the user level.

Paul: But how many of those people are putting their surround speakers in the bathroom and the front speakers in the living room? (laughter)

Andy: I would argue that the chance this new equipment is going to evoke some newer and potentially stronger emotional response from people sitting in their homes is perhaps the critical thing. I think the fact that they get excited about the media; the fact that we get excited about getting to work with new tools and get emotionally charged up. I think that’s kind of why we’re all around, just so that you can have fun while you’re on the planet. So these are new tools and it’s fun. You can get charged up, and that’s a great thing. This is a major change that’s sweeping through, and a lot of people are getting to have fun with the stuff that we have been having fun with recently. And now it’s getting out there. It’s exciting.

Jeff Largent: I find that for my business, which is predominantly post-production, we’re constantly driven by what can we sell to the client. So, our first order of business is to determine if this technology is in fact sellable. Can we get a return on it, and can we posture to our clients that, yeah, we do have the best stuff, the newest this, the greatest that, we do the best this. In some respects that’s a bit of a dance for us, because half of what I turn to and what my associates turn to are the older pieces of gear that we know the best. We– myself personally – try and stay as open as I can to what’s a new way to do this and what’s a new way to do that. To try to stay aware. But most of the time I’ve got a job to get done, and I’ve got to get it done fast. So for me, it’s more a question of how much more time am I going to spend learning this new tool, and how many more keystrokes is it going to take, can I get the job done, will the client pay for me to take that extra time.

Allen Smith: Another aspect I think, of dealing with the 5.1…. Our facility does primarily advertising – radio and TV spots. A year, year and a half ago, we had the first client walk in and say we want to mix something in 5.1. And we said, uh, we’re not ready to do that. So we said ok, we need to be prepared to do that. With a great deal of research, we finally put in what we consider a really legitimate, well equipped 5.1 surround room. Now were’re waiting for some client to actually need it. It’s important for us to be able to say, yes we have that. It’s kind of like a sales tool. We have this ability and it’s important for us to say that, yes we have 5.1.

We’re going to have to talk our clients into using it at first, but were used to doing that. We have other technologies that we’ve gone out and gotten – audio codecs that allow us to record a voiceover from Chicago, or California, or London. And we put the technology in, and then we had to have what we called seminars, which were thinly veiled sales pitch sessions to demonstrate it to the clients, and have them come in and say, oh, do I really need this? We get them to use it and eventually they go, how did we live without it? But it isn’t until we go out and kind of push it on them.

So we have a double dance. Number 1 we have to look and say, we think that 5.1 is going to be important because we think that HDTV is coming down the pike here. And that people are actually going to go out and buy high definition TVs and with that they get the 5.1, so the 5.1 rides the coat tails of the TV. Then our clients are going to come in and say gee our Toyota commercial was on last night and the program was in surround but our spot wasn’t. We want to anticipate that, and point it out to them just before it happens. So you know, so you should be letting us mix this in 5.1. But we’re not there yet. We have it; we’re not using it.

Tom: If I can just follow up on your point, because I agree, and in my own way I come from a different perspective on it, and I’m trying to do the same thing. I do a lot of film work and little video work. At the point where I was mixing surround and had clients asking for stereo, I started to volunteer for free to mix 5.1 for them and sell them the idea, just to provoke them into wasting the time for me to do this. Because the one thing I found was that I couldn’t set up a console and let them both run simultaneously. I had to make adjustments. The idea was that they’d have it in the can because it was coming, but the real point of it was to just get them to try it.

Allen: If we go back 20 years, or 30 years, whatever, to the advent of stereo. One of the big questions when you were mixing in stereo was is it going to be mono compatible; what will it sound like coming out of an AM radio in a car? Well, we’re way beyond that, but the same transition is in front of us, and we have all of the same problems. It’s just gone up in scale.

Michael: I hate to admit it, but I have a video producer client who still wants mono mixes.

Allen: They want to know how it’s going to sound.

Jeff: Some of my clients are the same way when we’re mixing for cable especially. Once it gets down past the head ends, it’s just an incredible shame what happens to the audio, but at least if you’re feeding it mono you don’t have any of those phase problems.

Allen: There was one commercial – we didn’t do it, and I’m sure it wasn’t done in the Boston area. It came on and I was sitting in our living room at home and the voiceover was not there. Somebody mixed this for surround, and forgot. And they did something that was very cleaver in 5.1, and the voiceover didn’t survive. That backward compatibility in terms of the program is important; it also applies in terms of the technology. Sony is worried about archiving material in such a way that it will not only be there for us today, but 10 years down the road when we have surpassed the technology – DVD or whatever – that they’ll have a high enough quality saved of the analog tapes that are failing. Worrying about forward compatibility and backward compatibility is a primary issue for all of us.

Jim Anderson: As far as the economics go, my studio is unusual in that we do about equal – from month to month – music recording, music production, and post production. The most recent two pieces of equipment we purchased were a little MP3 card and a UREI LA4 that I bought on Ebay. The question, as it’s posed to me, is what’s important; there’s no easy answer. But everything these folks said about having a market…. It’s not just about the money; it’s having a real usefulness for the clients working at the facility. And you do the best you can offering them all the bells and whistles, but you learn very early on that if they don’t understand its value to them, there’s really no point in trying to get them to buy it from you.

You know, we did the same thing Allen was describing. We set up a real get-go 5.1 room, and I bet we’ve used it less than a dozen times. Lot’s of museum installation, permanent installation work, a couple of neat projects. And great care was taken to make sure these things were by the current standards. And you also come to learn there’s a lot of it being made up as we go along. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. But everyone who is involved in surround and 5.1 is really making up as we go along, which is the way it has to be because the standard is so flexible that I can’t envision a set of cold hard fast rules coming upon the marketplace instantly. So the decision from an economic standpoint, as all three of these fellows have said, is a main concern if you are involved in running a facility that is available to the public.

Paul: Well this is segueing very nicely into the second question, which we have half answered by now, which is what makes the decision for you to invest in new technology? Not to focus too much on 5.1, talking about 24/96, or talking about ProTools rev 5, or any of that sort of stuff. Is it client driven? Is it because the guy down the street is doing it and you’ve got to do it? Do you need to lead the clients or do you need to have clients lead you? How much of it is caused by the buzz – the clients coming in and saying, oh you don’t have such and such and such and such, I’m not going here – even though they have no idea what they’re talking about. Where does that come from?

Andy: I may be different from everybody here because I’m a manufacturer. As such I’m like the pusher and these guys are the users. I consider myself fortunate because I get to play with a lot of great stuff but I don’t have to pay for it. So I get to use it and get excited about it, and even though I introduce myself as a sales guy, I really hate to think of myself as a sales guy. I just really like to turn people on to gear. Other than surround sound, there’s a technological change that’s going on now that I’m smack in the middle of – which I would like to get some input on – is the change from analog consoles to digital consoles. It seems to me there still is a sense that people want to stay with the tried and true analog tools they know, and they’re a little but scared to try something new.

I’ve been using an analogy over the last few weeks that I think a traditional in-line console, analog-based console, is like a manual typewriter; and a digital console is like a word processor. And anybody who types at any part of their job, who wouldn’t say that the three hours a few years ago they spent teaching themselves how a word processor worked wasn’t the best three hours spent. It has just really changed things a lot in terms of workflow. I think digital consoles, as an owner of a facility, offers a different kind of workflow. It allows you to hop back and forth between projects. It allows you to work for a couple hours on one thing and then hop back to another project. Recall when a client comes in and says this didn’t work let’s change that, and boom there’s the snapshot. And if everything on the console resets, and hopefully some of the outboard gear can reset, you’re back in business and you’ve saved a lot of time. But there’s still such a strong resistance to sitting down at a new piece of major technology and giving it a shot.

Allen: You’re talking about people’s resistance to the transitions. We had one of the earliest digital workstations. We had a couple of them: we had the NED Post-pro and Synclavier when it first was able to do any kind of actual editing. We still have the Lexicon Opus, serial number zero; we were their beta test site. One of the things in response to Andy, I think that the evolutionary process of designing the digital consoles, the digital equipment, the workstations, the process has sort of come of age. Because the first workstations were designed by people– and I’ll pick on the people at New England Digital – they sort of started off saying "Well we’re going to build a box to do something and nothing could do this before, so we’re going to throw out everything we know about analog tape recorders and editing and whatever", because they made the assumption that everything they knew about those boxes was based on the limitations of the technology. They failed to recognize that a lot of the reason that the tape recorder has these five big buttons on the front – Stop, Play, Record, etc. – is because the human guy that had to do it has this primary set of functions.

A fellow I work with used the analogy: if the digital computer guys who are designing these workstations were designing a car, then the device you use to steer the car and the device you use to turn the radio up would be of the same priority. You go to turn the radio up and you’d turn the car. (laughter)

What happens, a lot of the people building the equipment early on, they went through this process. If it’s a computer, we’ll make it more powerful and if you hold this key down and you do this and now it does something else. We don’t want this. These five processes are the most important things, and they’ve learned that. The console that Sony is showing now looks very much like a traditional console with the advantages of digital. The pricing on it is amazing. I know it’s going to have the reliability that no analog console ever had. We’re not reluctant about that. We’re client driven. We say, what is it we can sell to our clients, that we can convince them to do, that will give us some kind of an edge over these guys, and those guys? We look to that stuff.

We want the equipment to be something we can learn to use easily, too. But that’s less of an issue than it was 10 years ago when a workstation would come and it was a completely unique box, and you had to sit down and learn how to use that system. They’ve all learned to give us familiar controls in the human interface; it has been recognized as the important aspect.

Jeff: If I could jump in here, I would have to say that’s predominantly true, except for the workstations. I find that more workstations are more confusing as you go one to another than they are similar. They’re all attempting to do the same job, but they all have very different approaches to doing it. Sometimes, as I have seen in a couple of different products – because of what you were speaking about earlier Paul, the turnaround, the time between releases has become so short – that a new way of doing things gets completely lost. It may have been a truly wonderfully new way of trying to approach our jobs, and because it couldn’t get to the market fast enough, or not enough people adapted to it quickly enough – gone. It just disappears, if you happen to be using that piece of equipment and have watched it go obsolete and no longer available, then to no longer supported. It still provides functionality that you use everyday, that no other manufacturer has stepped up and provided replacement for. That can be very frustrating.

In the workstation realm, just simple editing was not enough of a model. I don’t think that enough of the programmers have basic experience doing what we do, to really understand how we come about it – and we all come about it in a different way. I know that I design sounds and edit sounds differently for picture than just about anybody else I know. Even though we use the same tools we come about it a different way – that’s one of the beauties of the workstations. They can be so flexible that they can be anything you want, and sometimes that can be a liability.

Michael: In a lot of ways I wear a little bit of everybody’s hat that’s up here – as a musician, as a sound designer, as a producer. For me I look at a lot of these technologies in two different ways: one as a creative tool, much like a musical instrument, and another as a production tool. I think in these two realms we’re talking about two different things. If you can find a tool you can commit to, great. I’m going to learn the interface. It’s going to become the instrument – that’s an important connection you can make. What Jeff was saying is that it is very frustrating that once you make that connection it’s like you’re a violin player and you’ve spent 20 years making that your instrument and now they don’t make violins anymore, I’m sorry, learn to do that on a keyboard.

To address your point about digital mixers and fear and stuff like that: I still use an analog mixer, and there’s all these wonderful tools out there, why don’t I get one? And the prices are going down. And I’m thinking in my studio, I integrate a lot of different things, I have a ProTools system and that has automation in it. I have plug-ins. I have all these things. I have synthesizers, I have samplers, I have a tape machine and outboard gear. And what I’m finding is that a lot of the digital mixer designs are following an older model of this is a mixing console in a recording studio and this is what it does.

For my uses and for my needs, it really in some ways takes care of part of the job but not the whole thing. Where’s the software/hardware environment that integrates everything? I want to edit my PCM-90, I want a graphical user interface appear on my screen. I want to click a button, boom, there’s my PCM-90, it’s in the rack and I’m editing it graphically. That’s what I want to do, and I want to automate that. I want to have that interface with that piece of gear become seamless. I think that as an industry, those issues have yet to be addressed. I think when you’re looking at older equipment, that model where you have the balanced line, and everything connects together with a balanced line, and it’s one big happy family. But we have so many things we’re interconnecting in so many different ways, it’s difficult to put that together. In terms of technology that’s what I would look for.

Paul: Good, and now we’re jumping to Question Three: What can manufacturers do and what can retailers do to help us adjust to the new technology? Do we need longer product cycles? A gentleman here just handed me a note saying, "Vendor coercion is a motivation for updating: What happens when the manufacturer stops supporting what you’ve got?" What happens when Sonic Solutions announces they’re not going to support NuBus anymore? What happens when Avid says they’re not going to support Macs anymore? What happens when Opcode goes out of business? What happens when that happens? So what can manufacturers do about this, besides go out of business? What do we want to see retailers do? What do we want to see in terms of product development; in terms of sales, support, upgrades?

Jim: So when do we get to play with all this equipment and not have to pay for it?


Jonathan: There’s something to that, though, in that I certainly appreciate when manufacturers are willing to invest in creating a user base in the same sense that we might invest in a piece of equipment to create a client base. They might invest in our studios to some extent in educating us, providing equipment demo, etc. That’s inordinately helpful. If for no other reason than if you’ve made a commitment to go somewhere within the next year, technologically speaking, if you’ve got some experience with it you could put it in place and be productive with it much more quickly once you’ve actually committed to the technology.

There’s another side to that question I think you just asked. I think everyone here would agree that on some level in your business plan, when you commit to a new technology or a new platform, your thinking at this point is well I’m going to amortize this over three years; maybe I’ll be productive with it over 5 years; but I know there’s going to be something new coming. My job as a mastering engineer is to master projects. I’ve got to figure that I will be using new tools to do it all the time. The platform will be evolving and I’ve got to figure on investing in new tools and technologies. So,it’s certainly essential that the manufacturers support the facilities to the greatest extent possible.

Jim: What happened at our facility was that 5 or 6 years ago we made a huge investment, percentage wise, with a very predominant audio manufacturer who for these purposes will remain nameless. We then upped the ante and the investment in their technology based on our experience with their analog side. What became apparent fairly early on after the second investment was that they were quickly abandoning most of this technology that they had touted, for lack of a better word. It seemed very elegant and the interface was the most intuitive we had seen. We were basing our long term investment on assurance that this technology was going to be supported and updated in a timely matter. This was not the case, and it got worse and worse, and upgrades were only offered at a huge expense – and I mean huge!

We eventually had to walk away from that investment, and it was very difficult to do so because most of the rest of the audio world had realized that this was dead end technology. We were fortunate to find a couple of people for whom it was perfect, and their operations were of an entirely different nature and everyone is still happy. But, as a reaction to that, when we were deciding what to replace this technology with, we had to be very careful and we took almost too long to make a decision. Allen, as you know, if you wait to long everyone says it’s a problem.

Allen: Going back to ancient history, in 1978 or 79. I, with a small group of people, had a small recording studio dealing with the local market. I had a fellow from 3M walk in, saying this is what you need – you’re going to be the first digital multitrack facility in New England. We’ve got this 32-track digital tape recorder and this 4-track for you to mix down to. The multitrack was only $164,000; the 4-track only another $40,000; and they would do the financing. We didn’t make the jump that somebody else did. From that moment on it became a question of when is the right moment to make the jump. If you jump early, you buy the technology at it’s highest price, with the most problems that you have to live through and learn how to fix, if it works for you and you survive. Then you establish the reputation of being the being the place that has the new, better technology.

On the other side, at one point after I started at Soundtrack – and this was a long time ago – we went through a period where we were just kind of sitting back and not investing in new technology. We watched some of our competitors across town take some of our work away from us because we were just not keeping up. It’s a critical issue about making the choice when to purchase. Because you’re deciding how much is it going to cost, you’re deciding how long the product has had to evolve, and you’ve had a chance to see it succeed. Or sometimes you watched a product fail before you go out and make the bad investment. On the other side, you watch the guy who did make the leap and survive get the reputation as being they are the place.

It’s a very difficult dance to do. We are driven by how we perceive our clients’ needs, unlike a music facility where the client walks in and says, "Gee, I want to have this piece of equipment. You’ve got to have the Studer. What kind of noise reduction?" They have these key phrases; they play 20 Questions. They know that such and such was recorded this way, and that was a big hit, and they want that. Our clients are not like that. Our clients are walking in expecting us to do that job for them. Commercial producers, they want to know their product is going to sound good, that we’re going to do a good job for them, that we’re are providing them with what they need. It’s our job to sell to them, so it’s a different kind of strategy. We anticipate when is the right time to present it to them, and if we do it too soon and we present them with "you’ve got to do it this way" and it fails, then we have egg on our faces. It’s very difficult, and we make it in little bits and pieces all the time. But we don’t have the client walking in saying I have to have SR, I have to have fill in the blank.

Andy: The question, to go back to what manufacturers do, speaking from that perspective, perhaps waving the Sony banner a little bit. We try not to advertise products and go out and hype them to the nth degree until they are just about ready. Then when they come out, they are useful tools. They may not have every last feature implemented yet, and there’s a few more revs of software, but it’s a solid reliable product. Sometimes other manufacturers start advertising products two years in advance, and I just have to say that from my perspective we’re helping to protect you guys by not getting you out there to get a ton of arrows in the back; by not getting you so overhyped early on.

Yes, sometimes we charge a lot for gear, but it costs a lot to develop stuff and support it and to train people and to market it, and to pay dealers to help push it through, and there’s all those things. I wish we could give it to you all at rock, rock bottom prices, but that’s not the way of the world. To talk about scale as an end user, as a studio owner, I can see that if you make an investment of even $20,000, and it turns out to be the wrong investment, you’re out $20,000 and that’s definitely going to hurt. The other side is to realize that when a manufacturer comes out with a new product there’s no guarantee there, and the amount of investment there could run into the millions. A few years of development into something and it could be catastrophic. You know Sony’s got pretty deep pockets, but if my Pro Audio division kept coming out with dog after dog, there would be no more Pro Audio division within Sony. We’ve come out with some dogs, but we’re coming out with some good things. It’s cyclic.

Jonathan: I think one of the more difficult things has to do with timing of decisions. I think this relates also to the advent of predominantly using DSP in products, that when you buy something early on, you are paying generally more heavily for R&D than if you wait one or two or three years. It’s a tricky equation to try and balance. There have been a number of instances where products have dropped by substantial amounts that Sony has made, sometime after the release of the product. It’s sometimes difficult to predict when that drop is going to take place. That’s a dynamic that can really put a business at risk.

Andy: I’ve seen it happen and I hope that the difference in price, that difference helps pay for what Allen was talking about in terms of establishing your business as the cutting edge guy. You took the risk, you’ve shown yourselves as market leaders, and that translates into attracting clients or whatever. Hopefully the difference helps pay for that a little. You can wait until later on, when it’s cheaper, but then you’re just another me-too studio that bought another one of those things that are pretty cool, but you’re not like the great studio – you’re not branding your facility as the smart guys.

Tom: There’s another side of that coin. Being leading-edge can be part of what you do. I was the guy who bought the 3M’s in ‘78 and ‘79. And what happened from that was that I ended up making virtually every record that Columbia and RCA made on the east coast for a number of years. I happened to be that guy standing on the corner on that day, and it wasn’t really as insightful as it sounds. It was a good move. In some ways it made my career.

I look at Tom Jung. I got to know Tom very early because he was the guy who lived in St. Paul, and so when 3M was making the machine he was the guinea pig. When they came out with the CD player in 1984, and it was hard to even get one here, I had to go to Hong Kong to get a CD player. There was a lot of buzz about it and a lot of people wanted to try it. When there were only 100 CDs available, you bought this player and you wanted to show the neighbors what this player could do. When there were only 100 CDs available, Tom Jung had 4 of them, and he sold a lot of those CDs. In a way he could not sell those same numbers today because they would be lost in the noise out there. So for me in a way I don’t look at the leading edge, about the price you pay, paying to be a beta tester. There’s another side of that where you can position yourself sometimes to make that incorporated that as part of the thing.

Allen: One other aspect of the process: we’ve been going though this for a while, and we have learned you can go and take a look at two consoles that have reputable names on them – at least in terms of previous products. One is a real product; one is a virtual product – they very much want it to be a real product, but they don’t have the software there yet. Last spring – I’ll avoid the specific names; two big names in audio – we went to look at two consoles. They were about the same price point – about $200,000 each – and I got very excited about one of them. My counterpart at Soundtrack in New York, John Kiehl, who was a little smarter about it, began asking some questions: Well, can it do this? And the answer was we’ll have that in two months. That was in March, and we didn’t buy the console because John was smart enough to realize that it wasn’t going to be there yet. In fact, at AES that console still didn’t have what they told us it would have. We’ve learned to be very careful that we’re buying a real product and not a virtual product. The other piece in the software, what they had promised with the software, some of the features they just stopped talking about after a while. Then when software is new…. You want the new software because of the new features and you get that and there are problems. Now, we have learned to be very conservative about installing new software in a major product. We wait until Jim and a few other people do it. And we still get burned by it.

Jim: If I could interject for a second, the issue we haven’t hit on just by default is compatibility. There are two kinds of compatibility we have to face in our facility. A lot of people coming through town on tour will be in the midst of recording an album. Chances are they’ll have half a dozen 2-inch reels with them and they’ll want to do some overdubs or mix a tune or add something. So for us to abandon the 2-inch tape format would be ludicrous. As much as I would love to, because we also have two 3324’s and the tape is cheaper and littler and it takes up less storage space, and damn it sounds good! There’s a situation where we would be silly to abandon the old technology.

On the other side, the post-production side which Jeff was eluding to earlier, there is so little similarity between digital audio workstations, one to the next. I think the features are pretty much the same; they don’t operate the same ways; and they don’t look the same; and they have funny names for them. But one of the things that would help – not addressing Sony specifically, but manufacturers in general – would be less paranoia and more discussion. Much the way Allen and I should be enemies, but we’re not. There’s plenty of room at the bar for everyone to have a stool.

The issue of compatibility with OMF files, for example: you know how important that is; it’s huge. You ask some manufacturers, they will say we’re working on that or we’ll have that. Then there are those manufacturers who are making a concrete effort that they can demonstrate to you. That’s an issue that comes up all the time.

Going back to one of your earlier questions, Paul: what makes you buy one thing and not another? What are the things that make you make decisions about purchasing new technologies? One of them is compatibility based on the needs of our client base. Our clients are very different from Jonathan’s. That’s a real important factor. We’re doing a lot of long format stuff lately; OMF files are very important; our clients can just bring their drive in. This is a big thing for them. They can work right up to the last minute: their session starts at noon; they’ll show up at five minutes to 12 and they’ll have a drive. Other times they’ll have an EDL they know we can read. These are all issues that translate not just to money, not just the economics. They have a deadline and it has to be on the air Tuesday and if it’s not done by the end of today, we’re all in big trouble. So compatibility is a big one.

Jeff: Speaking to Jim’s point about compatibility, more and more it’s just a question of trust. My clients trust me to get their job done. I trust the equipment that I work with to help me get the job done. And to kind of digress back to a previous question, all of these technological advances, at least from where I sit, never mean any more than can I do my job better. Does it make it easier for me to do my job? Does it make it slicker for me to do my job? My clients, like what Allen was talking about, aren’t worried about is this the latest, greatest thing; do they know what this Compellor is; do they know what this piece of gear is? They want to know can I get the job done. Will I be able to produce their product for them in a timely fashion?

But 5.1, is something they are concerned about. It’s a new delivery format. That’s something much more important than the console, the piece of gear in the room. It’s what are they walking away with. That has much more of an impact to them. So that’s something I can deal with to show them from the equipment that I have and the trust they have gained with me. I can show them this new technology and this new equipment.

To jump to the manufacturer’s side of it, again it’s a thing of trust. I look at a piece of gear and I ask myself, OK, if it’s not doing today what I need it to, is it at least able to do what they claim it does? Can I work with that? Can I work without what they tell me is coming? Can I get around it? And can I trust myself with this product in front of the client and not fall on my face?

Michael: I guess for me there’s a couple of issues. One of the big issues with new technologies is development and when do you actually learn something, and how do you learn it and when do you get it in place. At my studio I actually see clients. I know what will work and I know how everything happens when people come in. I don’t have a lot of time for experimentation. I have a PowerBook and I’ll put just about anything on my PowerBook and just sit at the kitchen table and mess with it. I always think in the back of my mind there’s two levels of technology. There’s the A string, or the stuff that I know works that I can use; and there’s always stuff that I’m messing with, there’s always stuff on the side, that I’m playing around with. When that gets to the point when I know it works and it won’t hurt anything on my computer, that’s when it gets called into action. That’s kind of how I divide things, in addressing a lot of these issues.

A lot of what I do is computer-based and software-based, and the one thing I have learned in terms of product support is that you’re screwed. It’s just going to go away; you have a year or two, then it’s gone. You just look at the price and say and I’m going to make my money back in a year, and I’m going to have fun in a year, or I just don’t even think about it.

Allen: So you have to treat it really as disposable technology.


Tom: You look at the cycle time, and your payback had better be shorter than the cycle time.

Jeff: And if I could make one request to the manufacturer: stop losing the recipes. Stop losing the recipes. I mean how many times do you upgrade your software, and all that new stuff works, but they broke four of the old things! It’s like every time.

Andy: You also have to maintain compatibility with old files and old saves. It’s a tricky business.

Tom: It is, it’s tough.

Paul: I want to open up the floor in a minute, but I want you to address for me one question and that is, if you like, what is the role of the press in all this? Speaking for myself, people who cover the audio industry; people from the magazines, the newspapers, whatever, the web sites. Are we more than just promoting gear lust? Should we be criticizing the manufacturers more? Should we be more critical in our reviews? Should we be less accepting of what people tell us? How can we help better than what we’re doing, or are we absolutely perfect? What can we do better to help people use this technology and understand what’s going on in terms of adopting new technology?

Scott: The one thing that I have noticed – and I think it has progressed over the years – is that reviews seem to get kinder and kinder. I discovered a couple of years ago that the European magazines seem to be a little bit crueler. I often like to read a couple of reviews in a couple of magazines, like Studio Sound or Sound on Sound, and I’m like ah ok. I understand it’s difficult for a magazine that makes its money off of the advertisers to say well this guy who just bought a $10,000 ad, we really don’t like what they’re selling. So that puts then in a tough position.

There’s so much stuff coming out. We know what this stuff does, and if it does what they say it does, and if it crashes every few minutes, and is it promotional material that’s coming out from the manufacturer that’s being reprinted as a review. It just seems like more and more it’s explaining what the product says it should do. I’m not sure how much it’s really been used. Could they not just say what it’s supposed to do; say it really didn’t work well in this application?

Paul: First part of the problem is that reviewers have even shorter product cycles than the manufacturers do. And the amount of time – I don’t do very much reviewing anymore, but I used to do a lot of it, and the amount of time you have on a piece of equipment is pretty short. As the equipment gets more and more complicated, you find yourself having to find more and more conditions, and more compatibility issues, it’s becoming harder and harder to do. I remember reviewing some equipment and someone wrote in a terribly nasty letter saying well you never said this, this, and this. And he was right, I didn’t. I had never used that piece of equipment under those circumstances, and wasn’t writing about that. Under those circumstances the thing completely fell apart. And I had no way of knowing that.

Allen: The gear that we tend to be buying, and the way we’re using it, we tend to trust an inside track. I would be more likely to call Jeff or Jim or somebody and say hey you guys have used this, we’re thinking about getting it, did you have some problems? Because the way we use the gear, it’s different from the way a consumer is going to use it. Twelve years ago Lexicon gave us the Opus to be their beta test site, and we beat the box up in a way they never anticipated. Because we’re in the trenches, and I don’t think it’s likely that, as a reviewer, you are going to figure out what those things are that we are going to do. And I’m not sure that the other people are going to be likely to care about it because they are not going to use it that way. So for us we have to figure out for ourselves.

We also have kind of an inside track either by going down to the AES or by talking to our sales reps directly and finding out what’s coming down the pipe, and what it’s going to be able to do. So I’m more inclined to go though that route to find out the information. If I’m reading a review, it allows me to just stay in touch with what else is out there, but I’m not going to make a critical decision based on that because I am not expecting you to use it in the context that I will.

Jonathan: Probably the most valuable the press does in my mind is educate me about other parts of the marketplace. I can read the New York Times arts section and read about what they’re saying to consumers about audio. Or I can read about how a mix engineer is using a piece of equipment in a particular application and find out what is important to mixing engineers and how it relates to my mastering a record. That’s what’s interesting to me, that kind of discussion about particular parts of the industry.

Michael: I think for me wearing a couple hats, being an educator as well, I think the educational component is real strong. With things changing so fast, magazines think of education as punditry. There’s a difference between being an educator and being a pundit. The articles and the reviews that are most useful to me and to my students are ones that kind of put things in a historical context; things that talk about background concepts. Besides just what the gear does, because for a lot of us you guys have been working with this stuff for years and years, but now it’s falling in our laps. There’s a lot of concepts; there’s a lot of things that are appearing on boxes and pieces of software that need explaining, that need discussion. I think that’s a real big mission for magazines.

Andy: One thing I have been getting in tune to recently – you guys open magazines, I open magazines. You flip and you see these gorgeous ads and the whole routine. There’s reviews and there’s highlights of who’s got what and what sessions are going on where, kind of like the PR aspects. And I have a sense that the PR engine is something that most people don’t know. There’s sort of an underbelly of PR firms out there. We’ve been thinking about this since we’re thinking about getting a new PR firm for our Pro Audio group. What you find out is that there are established PR companies that represent manufacturers that have strong relationships with magazines, and they last a very long time, and they get a ton of placements. I think it’s worth mentioning that some people understand that is happening. There are some things that don’t necessarily see the light of day, or get the importance they’re due, because of that.

Paul: I have to answer that, and you’re absolutely right. The successful PR agencies really do find their stories placed not just because of the buddy relationship, but because they know what they are doing. And because they approach the magazine editors with a piece of copy and the magazine editors look at the copy and say, I can use this. As opposed to somebody who says oh god I have to re-write this, and they’re using bad English. There’s a certain professionalism in it too.

Today I got an email from a kid who’s 16 years old in upstate New York, who runs his church’s sound system. He has put in this whole thing himself. It’s an elaborate system that he put in and he’s extremely proud of it and wants someone to write an article about it. So I passed this on to the person who does the New York column, and asked him if he would be interested in writing about him. And he said, "A 16-year-old with heart and moxie? Yes, we’re going to write about him." So if you reach the writers on that kind of a level, where the writers are interested in what you are doing for some unique reason, you don’t need a PR firm.

Jim: Paul, I have to say there are certain magazines, after a while, no one has time to read a magazine cover to cover. It’s something that you alluded to earlier: how the ocean is much fuller than it used to be. I mean the sheer volume of product alone is daunting enough for me to never open another magazine. However you can’t help but be curious who’s on the centerfold this month? (laughter)

One of the things I came to realize after a couple of years is that there are a couple of magazines that do deserve your respect in terms of their opinion. The reviewers in those magazines are to be listened to. And as you pointed out there is no possible way, in the limited amount of time that a reviewer is given for a product, for them to fully appreciate or understand all of it’s qualities and it’s downsides. But there are certainly columnists and reviewers whose work is consistently good enough that you get a sense when you’re reading this individual’s work that he’s at least honest as far as that goes. Rarely will a reviewer claim to have explored every possible aspect of a piece of gear. It’s the ones that gloss over – I agree that the overall content of reviewers has gotten a lot lighter over the past five years or so.

Tom: Just one little note, it I can take the other side of this, or at least put the point that kinder, gentler reviews have a place also. I can think of two reviews in two different magazines, which I won’t mention, that lambasted products, in my view. So much so that in one case, it didn’t threaten the one company, but the other one was a small company and it almost put them out of business, and they made a pretty good product. The company went on to make better versions of the product being reviewed. What we want are choices. To put a company out of business is not a good idea. So there has to be balance. So I think that when you read reviews that are a little kind, I think the reviewers are keeping that in mind – because there’s also dialogue that goes on that’s not in the pages; that goes on between the reviewer and the manufacturer.

But there’s a lot of good stuff that happens. A lot of it is an oriental thing where it’s soft but it’s still there; you read between the lines. And all of us want to know if a feature doesn’t work. But some of the stuff is just more informational. For instance, none of us can read reviews on microphones and decide whether we’re going to buy the microphone based on that because it’s so much taste. But still, I read them all.

I look for features that might not work in big, expensive, complex pieces of gear. Then the problem you pointed out was, one, you don’t have time to press all the buttons, and the other is that a year later after that product has become established and successful everyone will discover even in a way the manufacturer hadn’t thought of that if you push these three buttons at the same time something really fun happens. A lot of stuff is hard to review that way.

But I really do want to make the point that we need choices, and so sometimes it’s easy to say when something’s in front of you that this is the worst sounding piece of –. But the truth is those guys might make some good stuff next year. So you have to find that line. You don’t have to say this is great when it’s not, and get a whole bunch of people to buy into it; you have to find that line of truthfulness and encouragement for good product. I know good reviewers like you guys (indicating Paul and Dave Moulton, who was in the audience) that feel that responsibility. Virtually all of the ones I know – I know a lot of reviewers – all take that responsibility of representing our interests very seriously.

Scott: I had said one negative thing in the beginning and I would like to say one positive thing about the press. That’s that I highly recommend all of my students to get their hands on everything they can on a regular basis. I personally get two copies of MIX and I take one of them and put it in the library and recommend highly that they go read it. It’s one thing to read all the textbooks and talk about the techniques and talk about an analog console. It’s another thing to really start to learn model numbers so they can go off on their internship and the engineer says can you go get me a TLM170 out of the closet, and they look at them like, what’s that? This is one way that, well, they may not get their hands on one, but they at least can see a picture of it.

Allen: I have a question back for you. It seems to me that some time ago, early on in the development of early digital or the workstations…. You had some very basic information to give to us comparing different units: this one has lower distortion; this one does zero to sixty in 5 seconds, you know. We’ve gotten to the point where all the equipment is relatively reliable, and all you really have to tell us about it is really towards subjective taste about how we want to do the job – this flavor of something vs. that. It’s down to some very subjective usage rather than some very basic comparison. It seems to me that it must be more difficult now to write a review because there’s less of that kind of empirical information.

Paul: You’re right, I think you’re right, and I think what Jeff was talking about, I mean that’s what we’re writing on. I don’t do as much reviewing as I use to, but it was like are the buttons big enough and are they in the right place? That’s the kind of thing we’re writing about: what are the user interfaces like, does this thing make sense, does it make more complexity. We were discussing it earlier about Digidesign pulling out easy MIDI programmability into their controls back in version 3 of Pro Tools. A lot of reviewers got really mad about that, including me. Eventually they’re beginning to put it back. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff we have – the stuff basically does work. There’s very little out there that doesn’t work. So a question from my standpoint as a potential reviewer is how useful is the user interface, how much does it do what the manufacturer thinks it does, and what we want it to do.

Allen: I mean an $8000 02R console and a $200,000 whatever sound remarkably similar on a basic level. How do you give us some kind of information to choose between those?

Paul: That’s why I stopped reviewing. I have no idea. Unless I am working at your level, I can’t understand to a point where I can really appreciate why there should be a $200,000 console.

Allen: I mean the difference on how I am going to respond as somebody who was doing this with analog stuff a while ago, and the mindsets that I bring to it and limitations in my ability vs. a 23 year old who just got out of school and he grew up with computers. He’s going to look at something that only has 5 buttons and a knob and say I can do everything with this.

Michael: I think it’s the same problem manufacturers have in marketing these things, because how do you write about what a user interface does? How do you say my product has a better user interface: 9 out of 10 post production users find these features…? (laughter) You can market these things by saying this many tracks, this big, this fast. It’s a very clear way to communicate with your audience. But the thing about the product that really matters to the user the most is the thing you don’t know what to say about.

Andy: I just have one comment, that through the whole discussion tonight very rarely was there any talk about any gear potentially sounding better than another piece of gear. We’re talking about a $20,000 vs. a $200,000 console; does it actually sound better? But I think there is a case to be made that there is some digital gear that sounds better than other digital gear. People are still striving, and should be striving, to make the best sounding product they can.

I was out last week at the Surround 2000 conference and Sony and Phillips are kind of struggling trying to get the Super Audio CD market out there, and direct stream digital. I was fortunate enough to sit in on a mix that Allen Sides was just doing of a new Joni Mitchell with the London Symphony Orchestra recording that he mixed to DSD, and yeah I heard it on a system, a great surround system. I heard this mix and I was reminded why I love this business so much. Because this experience had me humming inside, just buzzing, for 20 minutes after I left the room. It was just so miraculous. It awakened in me not just a sense that it was all about the buttons and the knobs, and what feature and so on and so forth. There are still advances to be made in sound. I think Mark (Parsons) made the point at the Expo last year when he held up the wax cylinder and asked how sound quality is progressing, and suggested that we’ll all look back on today’s technology in 10 years and wonder how we thought it was so good. It’s going to be so much better. So I just wanted to say that we’re still striving for great sound.

Paul: Stephen St. Croix in his column this month made a very interesting point, I think. I don’t think I can entirely agree with it, but I think it definitely worth thinking about – and then I will open the floor – which is that yes there is a difference in digital equipment between the way different things sound; there’s a definite difference. However, it does not correlate with price.

Allen: And it’s no way near as dramatic as we used to have.


Paul: Right, the idea that the most expensive stuff sounds the best is not necessarily true.


Allen: I may have said that too soon, because maybe what you heard out in California is that dramatic of a difference.

Paul: I would like to open up the floor if anyone has any questions.


Conrad White (Harvard Univ.): Three quick things, I just want Sony to know that I am still waiting for the PCM-F1.2 to come out. And for the panelists, aren’t you all starting from zero again now that our government in all its wisdom has said HDTV is real so deal with it? I’m wondering whether or not we can make a plea to Parsons’ web page for a column where you get it fixed. All of us have old equipment that needs to get fixed. Where do you get a 2-inch Ampex machine’s parts; where do you get a good repairman?

Allen: You’re saying are we all going back to –? About the 5.1…


Conrad: I think it’s coming very fast, and perhaps faster than we know, and for all of you who really deal with it, it’s coming into each of your shops so you’re going...

Allen: I’ll speak for myself: it’s not starting. But I’ll defer to other people up here to tell me whether I’m right or wrong. Again, we do commercials. I think what we’re going to do the first time we do a 5.1 mix is the same mix we usually do except we’re going to take an ambience track and pull it into the back channels. And it’s going to be a very safe approach, and we will very cautiously spread out. But it will be a 5.1 mix with the ambience in the back, and if the people with mono TVs don’t hear it, they won’t miss it. We’re going to make sure the message is right up front and center – that’s our job. And we will very cautiously inch our way into that water.

Jeff: I would support exactly what Allen is saying, moreso in broadcast than any of the other disciplines. We still have to content with the lowest common denominator. 5.1 is a great way to listen to anything, but how good is it for Good Morning America on my TV set in the kitchen? That TV set is not going to go away just because it’s hi-def. There’s still going to be a small little monitor that people are going to want to see the news and the weather on. A 5.1 mix for that is totally overkill.

Conrad: I’m just saying it’s coming faster for you than you may know…

Allen: No, it’s coming slower…

Jeff: The buzz is coming faster, but we still don’t have a delivery format. I can make a delivery format for picture; there’s still an intermediate step to produce a master format for the audio. And that isn’t editable, and the only thing that suggests that it can be is Dolby E.

Andy: This is still the first year HDTVs have become available, in many cases just for months. They’re still seven or eight thousand dollars. This Christmas they might get down to the four or five thousand dollar range; next Christmas down to the 1500 to 1800 dollar range; and then you’ll start seeing some real TV.

Spencer Love: Earlier you were asking what the journalists can do, and you talked about the difficulty of how something is better than another. Maybe the journalists need to expand their informal networks to get different kinds of feedback on a product. Maybe it doesn’t matter. And show that one of keyboard let’s us type faster than the one we all use. I developed a test when I needed to decide between a trackpad, another keyboard and a tablet: I played Solitaire, and I could play solitaire 2.5 times faster with the tablet than with any other pointing device. You could pull a lot of different pieces out there and pull them together.

Paul: It’s an interesting thought. It makes me think what if I want to play gin rummy instead of solitaire? (laughter) Would those metrics still work? How do you measure that for everybody, since everyone does things in a different way? I don’t know that those metrics exist.

Andy: Also people tend to be positive about the things they have chosen. They just say yeah I got this, I love it, it’s great, because they want to feel good about the purchase. So as a journalist it must be difficult to pull through that if…

Tom: It really does in terms of people you talk to. Sort of the extension of the Mac vs. the PC religious issue, or the Alesis vs. Tascam; people start to suppress the honesty about the troubles they have.

Paul: And it’s very hard to call up a network of everybody who has bought an Oxford and ask them what they think. They’re not going to say it sucks – it’s not going to happen. But what Andy said is correct: it’s very hard to find someone who is going to find something critical in something they have bought into.

Jeff: There’s a component to that also that has a lot to do with what you learned on. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I came in behind an engineer who had learned to use the system before me and he was blinding fast on it. It was the first workstation he had ever worked on. He knew it; he loved it; he didn’t mind that it took 11 keystrokes to do what I thought should take 2, or less. When I come into it knowing more systems, it was very hard for me to adapt to something that I felt was going backwards. So we threw it out and went with something else.

Audience Member: I think part of this is perspective on what you’re going to do with some of this equipment, for example the Sony Oxford. I know somebody who wouldn’t touch it to work on a high end project because it was a live project and he needed more than one section of faders to do it. There’s certain times when you can’t give up something we have gotten used to, such as having every fader available and having every equalizer available for live broadcast. If I have to go switch to a different page of the console, to go work on some mics down here, and something happens to my announcers and they’re three pages up – I’m dead. Something is on the air now that’s not supposed to be there and I can’t get to it fast enough. If I had that fader I could pull it down and get rid of the problem and continue on.

Allen: I’m sure you’re right. I’ve never done that job, and I would wonder what Jeff was just talking about, the guy who burned on the console where there’s a discrete fader for each one, where you have to slide your chair down eight feet to get to that one, that in the time it took you to slide your chair down you could have turned a few knobs to get to that mic pre quickly – that’s what you learn vs. what he learned.

Audience Member: There has to be a compromise between what you have to have that’s always there and what you’d like to have that you don’t constantly have to have there. I don’t see that happening in the digital consoles.

Allen: Minimal number of page changes or keystrokes.

Audience member: The 02R is a great small console but if you need to change key strokes on five channels, it’s a lot of key strokes to get all five EQ’s up and change them.

Jeff: As wonderful and as powerful as the 02R is, the first time I saw the print out of what it was unvirtual, it was like "When are you making that? I want one." I want the real estate. I want to be able to physically reach for things because I can do more with two hands and ten fingers than I can with one rodent. (laughter)

I had a quick remark for Mark: You wanted to know if we are riding the train or is the train riding us. I don’t care as long as the train isn’t in the ground.

Audience Member: Back to your point of (something) and pressed to do(?) (more stuff, inaudible) A really helpful thing is a follow-up story 6 months later. Give someone a piece of complicated gear for a long time and then write a follow-up article about it in like 6 months, then they can give a better impression about some of the features. And then have a side bar with testimonials from all areas of the industry talking about the equipment.

Paul: Which means the manufacturers have to cut their output in half, so we’ll have the pages to do that. That’s a wonderful idea. I would love to do that, really.

Audience member 1: I just have a couple of quick points. One of the things that scared me through this whole talk to the end was that we want to buy new gear because the consumer is going to realize what they’re getting sounds better to them. I don’t care how much you pay for a console, it’s not your product they take ownership of when they buy that $10 CD. If they’re not happy, no amount of money makes a difference. As far as with the press, I work in a college. Please stop filling my students with silly information. I won’t mention the magazine, but there were two articles that suggested recording a guitar in a steel box; the other suggested using a standard cassette deck in their kitchen. And that somebody has success with an album using this. The students read this stuff, and when a neophyte looks at this it doesn’t make the professional look professional. And now we have to re-teach them back to where we want them to be.

Audience member 2: I do remember reading that article and I believe it was written to read like funky stuff you can do, as opposed to this is the way you record a violin section.

Audience member 1: The same magazine had a wonderful article on outboard gear and compressors, and more of that would be helpful.

Jim: There’s something to keep in mind though. Your first comment was about sound and feeling and the end consumer buying a CD. It’s quite possible that the point of that article was, screw all this technology, you don’t need this stuff, what about the music? Some of the greatest things we’ve heard have been done on shitty equipment. And I’ll be the first to say that some of my favorite things sound awful. A great mix never made a piece of shit a great record, and a lousy mix never hurt a good song. That’s how I feel, and hopefully that’s the point of this article.

Audience member: As a continuation of the gentleman’s point, I think it’s just a matter of context. It’s saying that this particular thing was done in a steel box, and this is the sound that came out of it, and in this context it worked. You can record a guitar in a steel box, and you’ll get a sound. It’s a matter of taking it to the next level, saying what that sound is and how that sound happened, and how it worked within a song.

 

Paul: Using (word: unusual?) conditions, but in a creative way.

Audience member: Exactly. I too work in a college, and I can honestly say that none of my student workers when I got there last month knew what signal flow was, knew how to wrap a cable, knew the difference between an XLR and a TRS connector. And they had been working in the department for three years.

Paul: We won’t ask you what college you’re at…(laughter) but you’ve got a nice gig.

Same AM: They read this stuff too, and I think if there were more articles reinforcing, about how an album was made, well they just synced up two machines, well, how did they sync them up? And when the Beatles did Abbey Road, how did they sync that stuff up? Things like that would be very helpful. As far as digital consoles are concerned, the analog console has the best user interface there is. It’s right there in front of you.

Tom: There are good things and there are bad things.

Same AM: There are good things and there are bad things, but as far as I’m concerned I can touch it; it’s right there; I don’t have to page over to find the EQ. Like the 02R, you can only look at one channel at a time.

Allen: If you were looking at a 96-channel console – and this is an extreme – the producer next to you says, turn down the top end on that guitar. And you know the guitar is on channel 72, so you go down and it’s like, 72 here. As opposed to simply (gestures, punching buttons) 7, 2, EQ.

AM: I’m not saying that one is better than the other… more engineers are used to that.

Allen: I have been on the other side of that where you grab the wrong knob because there’s a sea of knobs, and to find the right one quickly….

AM: The other thing with the digital consoles is that you have to automate…

Allen: You don’t have to. The first time you do automate you won’t want to go back, but you don’t have to.

AM: It seems to me you only have control over x number of channels at any given time.

Allen: They’re only limited by how many things you can do. We’ve mixed records where we did it without automation, and we get up to a certain point and say ok this is the transition point and we memorize where all of our… 5 hands, 6 hands… and everyone says ok that’s good, but one guy is like–. That’s where automation….

Paul: Ok, moving on....

AM: Going back to question 1, I would be interested in hearing the opinion of 24/96.

Jonathan: I guess it is very telling that it did get glossed over. That’s not to say that it’s not important. I think that it probably falls under the category of producing something that sounds better, and therefore that enhances the reputation of the facility, because you’re forward thinking or it sounds better or what have you, and therefore your facility continues to exist into the future. I think that it does not represent as dramatic as a leap in the eyes of the consumer as surround does.

I also think that using resolution as a marketing tool has sort of come and gone. They used to put stickers that said 20 bit on CDs. I don’t know how many CDs it actually sold, but I think that proves not to be the thing that is going to sell another 10 million CDs or so. I do think it’s important in that it 924/96) represents an incremental step in terms of the fidelity we do. I feel it’s incredibly important, and I was glad to hear from you, Andy, earlier, about paying attention to making things sound great. That is an important part of the business plan, and part of choosing new technologies, and it’s an important part of what makes me passionate about the work I do and why I choose equipment and technology. And so I work in 24 bits every single time I do anything at this point. I don’t work in 96 yet for a variety of reasons, but I will when it becomes a relatively simple task and when it becomes affordable.

Tom: The benefit you got from going from 16 to 24, in my opinion is far greater than the benefit of going from 48 to 96.

That was a point I want to make also is that there’s a cost to how you do everything, so you look at how you’re going in bits. Going from 16 to 24 is not many more bits – doubling them gives you an improvement, but not a dramatic improvement, and you pay for that at any moment in time because you can’t use those bits for something else. But on the other hand you say, yeah, by the time I’m done sorting this all out there will be twice as much data… so you’re always chasing that task. But the fact is 24/96 sounds good in 1999. 10 years from now, you were saying…. When you use these leading edge systems, they sound good.

AM: Someone reviewed a whole bunch of software titles and wrote about what incompatibilities when he loaded it and how many calls and emails it took to fix it. It was really….

Paul: It’s beginning to happen where people who write reviews call up customer support, pretending they paid for the stuff, and see what happens – how long do they have to stay on hold, how many layers of voice mail do they have to go through. I think you’re right. I think it’s a very valuable service.

Tom: There are certain things like that, that are great stock questions to say, does it apply to this producer, because not all questions will, but ones I’m always interested in is can you use it out of the box without the manual, and I’d like to know that.

Allen: Just as an aside, one of the things I think is scarier is when you’re on hold at manufacturers who have opted for, "We’re kind of busy now. Leave us a message and we’ll call you back." If you’re sitting with a room down, and you can’t do a job and this is the kind of support you’re getting, this is very difficult. That’s just as bad for us as it is for anyone else.

AM: One last thing that really didn’t come up with new technologies. I work with a lot of engineers in big facilities and they want new toys, and they want them all the time – anything that is coming down the pike they want it.

Allen: An engineer who Jeff and I worked with, I had the most difficult time bringing a box in for him to do a job and "By the way this can cure your ills here", and he doesn’t want to know. Six months later, when he’s really struggling to do that job, I got his attention and say, "You know this can really do this for you, if you give me five minutes I’ll show you how" and maybe he’ll let me show him. He doesn’t want new toys; he wants to do his job in a simple, straightforward way. He doesn’t want to know about toys.

AM: I’ve got all this equipment and my engineers love toys; they like to play with the boxes with the buttons…

Tom: It depends on what hat you’re wearing. I mean I think you’re thinking from a production standpoint, but if you were instead a record producer in certain genres of music where you are attempting to differentiate your sound from everybody else’s, then this gentleman’s point is well taken.

Paul: One of the things that hasn’t come up in this discussion is a glamour component. Maybe because we’re in Boston and not in LA. Do you have to have that to attract a certain clientele? I guess from this particular population we have here on the panel, the answer is no, because you’re not working with those types of clients.

Jim: That’s not the case for my facility. There is certainly a glamour quotient, but it’s not what’s the newest, newest, newest. On the music side, I mean, you guys got an SSL, you guys got a Neve, OK. That’s all they want to know; and they obviously want to see what your microphone collection is like.

Allen: Do you still see someone walk in every once in a while and say I want to record on a U-47?

Jim: Yuh. That happens less and less frequently.

Audience member: I work at Longview Farm – we’re all analog – and I get that all the time. It is a vintage gear oriented clientele that we have; that’s all they care about.

Paul: So it’s vintage gear of the month. (laughter) A U-47 processed through a TB-303, for that 4-bit sound. (laughter)

Tom: The fact is that there are so many profiles of who is in the audio business, and what the task is. You get two guys who are producers – one is heavy metal and the other is chamber music. They use different techniques and have different clients. And it’s a wider range than that. Some of the best-paid guys in audio put the sound on the Saturday morning cartoons. There’s a wide range of audio jobs; they have different requirements, and they would answer all of these questions differently – every one.

Michael: In some of the things I do people have very high expectations. I have clients come in, when I work as a designer, people want a special effect. It might take an hour or half-hour – it takes time to process files, or whatever. They have this thing that I can just push a button and it will happen.

Audience: Someone had brought up about leaving a message (with a manufacturer’s customer support) and having to wait 60 minutes for a callback. To be honest I’d rather leave a message and wait than talk to someone who can’t answer my question in the first place. Manufacturers are not providing enough customer support; aren’t well enough trained.

Paul: I’ve just written two columns about that…about customer support and what’s wrong with it and how to get the most out of it.

Allen: One thing about Sony. They are one of the few companies I deal with, if I have a problem with a piece of Sony pro gear, I’ll get someone on the phone and if he doesn’t know the answer he’ll go and get the manual and go through it with me until we have solved the problem. There are very few of these companies. Sony is one of the exceptions.

Andy: We have service guys in each section of the product. One of these guys is scheduled each day to sit by the phone. So he is a guy who is experienced.

Jim: To make a little plug here for the area. We’re very fortunate to have people like Mark and the people who work for him, and people like Andy, because these are the people, from my perspective, who make the decisions to buy things and sometimes to almost put your business on the line, it’s very comforting to know that you’re gonna be supported by Mark and his people, or the manufacturer in the persona of Andy. It’s like, living in the Northeast we take it for granted that not that many people smoke any more, but if you go to other parts of the country, oh my God! I try not to take it for granted. We’re very fortunate. We would be shocked if we were living in other parts of the country where we wouldn’t have that trust network in place. It’s a very important part of the comfort factor.

Allen: I’d like to second that in terms of the support we get from Parsons. (applause) Even when a manufacturer may not be quite as actively standing behind a product, they do. It makes all the difference in the world to us.

Paul: Now that we’ve plugged our sponsor, I want to thank Mark, and I want to thank the panel. You realize we have been doing this for two hours and fifteen minutes, and I think that’s pretty amazing. So thank you. You all stayed with us. I thought that was great.
 

END

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