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Your humble correspondent here just this moment walked in the door, having bade a fond farewell to the awe-inspiring but road-weary Laura Tyson, not to mention all that gear on display at AES, not to mention several days’ worth of workshops and technical sessions that I’m eager to tell you about. There’s already a lot available about the new products, so your best source for that would be http://www.aesdaily.com for archives of the three daily newspapers produced just for AES. The "products" button will take you to a list of links for manufacturers and their new products, so you don’t have to look through the daily stuff for that. Before I get comfortable and get to work, I’ll take a moment for a few random comments, and a point of order. And of course I want to add my congratulations to Mike Fishell and the Barstool Pigeons on their airplay. For the past few days I’ve gone back and forth and back and forth between the loud, flashy exhibit hall upstairs at the Javits Convention Center and the gray, chilly meeting rooms downstairs. Somewhere on one of those escalator rides, I looked around and realized that I was in the midst of a battle between two powerful opponents. In one corner, we have the music industry, entrenched, powerful, injured and fighting for its life. In the other corner are the manufacturers of the tools the aforementioned industry needs to produce its products. The music industry wants to maintain the status quo (it would prefer to turn back the clock, but that’s not an option). The manufacturers want to sell more of their products, whether to their longstanding customer base in the old music industry or their rapidly expanding customer base outside it. But wait: this is not an NPR report. There are more than two sides. At this match, the crowd is a factor. So who are those folks out there, anyway? The music industry thinks of the crowd as a bunch of rubes, dullards who can’t entertain themselves and so must purchase their entertainment in the form of CDs, shady characters who can’t be trusted, who would steal from anyone given half a chance, fools unable to make their own choices who would be lost zombies without their beneficent (not to mention profitable) guidance. The manufacturers, on the other hand, think of the crowd as intelligent, creative types who might spend their money not on music, but on the tools to make and record and market and distribute that music. More on all that eventually, but first, should I label these dispatches OT or not? They’re not about the VS-880, after all, and it’s going to be a lot of stuff coming at you. Janet Dagley Dagley Bohemian Hillbilly As promised, here’s the first installment: AES Notes: The closer you get, the lower you go (These notes are from a presentation of a technical paper, "A Brief Tutorial on Proximity Effect" by David Josephson at the 107th convention of the Audio Engineering Society in New York City, September, 1999. The paper itself is available from the Audio Engineering Society http://www.aes.org An audio tape of the presentation is available from http://www.confcopy.com Meeting #AU9901, tape SA2) Wait a minute: Why is such a well-known and respected engineer as David Josephson writing a paper on such a basic subject? Why not just let some kid in Audio 101 do it? Because even among trained, experienced engineers, a thorough knowledge of the concept is "uncommon," Josephson said. And even those who do understand proximity effect often ignore it. He thinks it’s time for the industry to establish a systematic way of dealing with it. As JOE CLARKE has explained so well in his missives about proximity effect (see The Guide), the closer you get to a microphone, the more bass response you get from it. And most of us, whether we’re conscious of it or not or whether we understand it or not, take the proximity effect into account when we place our mics just by deciding what sounds best to us. But Josephson points out that "a microphone for any given purpose can be optimized for the desired frequency response AT A CERTAIN DISTANCE. This becomes a problem when you compare two different microphones, because the assumptions about the desired frequency response aren’t known." So when you’re doing an A/B comparison of two microphones, if you test them at an equal distance, you’ll hear which sounds best at that distance, but your test will be less meaningful than comparing the two at their optimized distances. The problem is, the manufacturers don’t usually tell you what that distance is. He suggests that manufacturers (he’s one) start including that information, and that recording engineers begin routinely taking it into account. A microphone takes two measurements: atmospheric pressure and atmospheric pressure plus
that of the sound waves hitting it. Think of the first as what the back of the microphone
picks up, and the second as what’s coming in the front. Josephson says this
pressure-gradient measurement, or the difference between the two, is a vector quantity,
whose magnitude and direction can be measured. "We conveniently assume the pressure gradient is the same for all frequencies," Josephson said. That is not true." He then performed some mathematical acrobatics on the overhead projector which I am incapable of reproducing here because I only got about 60% of it before he went on to the next one. Sorry. He said it was never as simple as the sum of a figure 8 and an omni. "We basically have a problem describing what the proximity effect is for a given microphone. We have no meter. We can say, this is a good mic for close talking, or this is good for distance, but that’s it." Josephson’s recommendations:
3)There is less proximity effect with larger sources because the geometry of the sound source affects the plane waves. Shure SM 57 - optimized for 1 inch to 2 feet. 5 dB boost in 200-100 hz at 1inch EV 666 - designed to reduce proximity effect Neumann KM 84 - flat @ 10 cm. Closer, you get a boost that levels off. The gradient element is reduced at frequencies below 30 hz before the 6 dB dropoff at distances Neumann U87 - the larger diaphragm gives you more bass, period, and the proximity effect curve is flatter (David Josephson’s company, Josephson Electronics, has a web page at http://www.josephson.com/ with some good information about microphones and how to use them - and information about Josephson microphones as well.) Our next chapter is also about microphones: "The Microphone: Between Physics and Emotion" by Jorg Wuttke of Schoep GmbH in Germany. Hold off on your A/B tests until you’ve read that one, too. And when you do those comparisons, don’t listen to either mic for more than 15 seconds at a time. Keep switching back and forth. That’s a tip from Walter Sear of Sear Sound here in New York City, who moderated the "Analog Gear in a Digital World" session. More soon, Janet Dagley Dagley AES Notes 2: Perception vs. Reality (These notes are from a presentation of a technical paper, "The Microphone: Between Physics and Emotion" by Jorg Wuttke at the 107th convention of the Audio Engineering Society in New York City, September, 1999. The paper itself is available from the Audio Engineering Society http://www.aes.org . An audio tape of the presentation is available from http://www.confcopy.com Meeting #AU9901, tape SA2 - this tape also contains the David Josephson presentation on proximity effect mentioned earlier). Imagine: You’re an audio engineer giving a presentation to a group of other audio engineers. This is your big moment behind the overhead projector. You go through the whole thing, playing various examples of compressed and uncompressed music so that they can hear the differences you’re talking about. The whole thing goes over well, and several of the other engineers come up to you afterward and tell you they’ve learned a lot. After they leave, you start turning off the equipment and suddenly realize that you left the bypass switch engaged the whole time. That’s exactly what happened to Jorg Wuttke. But rather than being embarrassed by it, he just incorporated the experience into his research. "There is a fairy tale that should be in every audiophile’s library," he said, " ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ " "The recording engineer must bridge the realm of emotional involvement with rational technique of recording," Wuttke said. "We often find divergencies between perception and proven scientific fact." When considering those differences, Wuttke says that listening tests, however subjective, should always be given more weight than scientific investigations. He also says that when we do A/B comparisons, we often ask the wrong question. "We should ask, ‘Is there a sonic difference, and if so, what is its nature?’ That’s not the same question as, ‘Which one sounds better?’ " Wuttke is clearly annoyed with manufacturers who claim, for example, that their cables are better for jazz or "optimized for classical music." Cables are cables, he says. "Cable manufacturers should be good technologists, but they are good salesman. If a cable is less than a mile long, impedance doesn’t matter. Unless it’s digital, in which case it can matter at lengths greater than 10 meters. One can never ascribe any special merit to a cable on its own." He remembers a power strip that was popular in Europe a few years ago, not a strip but a round unit. It became popular because of the myth that devices plugged into it would produce a "rounder" sound. To make A/B tests more scientific, Wuttke has invented a device he calls "The Auditor." It allows precise level matching and easy switching between up to eight different inputs. Level matching is important, he says, because a difference of half a decibel may not be perceptible as a level difference, but the higher level will generally be judged as sounding better. We spend too much energy on some things that just don’t matter, he said. "Traditionally, stereo microphones have been set up by trial and error. That’s absolutely unnecessary. If we use omnis, the only decision is distance from the source. That determines the ration of direct to indirect sound. If the mics are too close, we approach mono. Too far, and we get that hole-in-the-middle effect." Ideally, he says, omnis in a spaced stereo pair should be just far apart enough for differences to be heard. A 1.5 millisecond delay is necessary for a sound to be perceived as left or right. And when the mics are out of phase, such differences are impossible to perceive. His guideline: "Even multiples of ½ wavelength lead to in-phase signals." Mic choices are often based on feelings rather than science, Wuttke says. "Singers with no technical background will choose big, impressive-looking mics. But the only logical reason for preferring large-diaphragm mics is that they can record low frequencies better. From the view of physics, the large-diaphragm mic has few advantages and many disadvantages." Wuttke works for the German microphone manufacturer Schoeps, which has a web page at http://www.schoeps.de/ The Emperor and his gear turned out to be a recurring theme at the convention, not only in the workshops and technical sessions but on the exhibition floor itself. Everybody wants 96khz sampling and 24-bit words, even though no one I found could emphatically claim to hear a clear difference from 48khz sampling at 24-bits, at least not in that huge glassed-in convention hall. Many of those clamoring for 96/24 couldn’t even explain what the 96 and 24 stand for. Meanwhile, the demand for faster sampling rates and deeper bit depth is paralleled by an equally strong demand for smaller and smaller audio files for Internet distribution and computer applications. It seems we want as much as we can get, crammed into the smallest package possible, we want it cheap, and we want it yesterday. JOE CLARKE made a good point about proximity effect with speakers as well as microphones. Keep that in mind when we get to the "Innovative Acoustics for Recording" workshop, in which architects address the popularity of the home recording studio and the advent of 5.1 surround sound. We’ll get to that eventually, but first: Mark Knopfler introduces Chet Atkins, who receives an honorary membership in the AES for his contributions to the science of audio engineering. Did you know he was the first person ever to mic a bass drum? Janet Dagley Dagley Bohemian Hillbilly Report #3 AES Notes 3: Let’s hear it for Chet Atkins and Kees Immink! If you don’t know who Chet Atkins is, just keep reading. If you do know who Kees Immink is, congratulations, you’ve just replaced me in this job, and at twice the pay. Kees Immink, also known as the "Father of the CD," received a gold medal from the Audio Engineering Society for his contributions to the field, particularly his invention of the CD in 1982. "The digital revolution was very peaceful," he said as he posed with AES president Marina Bosi for what press photographers call the "grip ‘n’ grin" shot, traditional for recipients of awards and checks the size of beach towels. "There was no smoke, no tears, no blood. CDs are now getting cheaper and cheaper - we’re definitely in the wrong business," Immink said. He got more laughs at that than you’d expect for a mild-mannered bespectacled engineer type, but then, this was a crowd of engineer types. "There is now a whole generation that has grown up never hearing the warm distortion of tubes or the scratch of a gramophone needle," Immink said. "As with the French revolution, this one began with street kids throwing stones. I was one of those street kids. We now have new products with better specs than those first CDs, with improvements of such high resolution that only cats, dogs, and bears can detect them. The old image of the RCA dog listening to ‘his master’s voice’ will take on a whole new meaning." Sony chairman Norio Ohga also won a gold medal, but he couldn’t make it to the ceremony. After a colleague accepted the award for him, a warning appeared on the screen behind the stage: "Warning: Attempting to play guitar like Chet Atkins can lead to numbness in fingers, sleeplessness, and feelings of inadequacy." And then a quotation from the man himself: "I told my dad I wanted to be a musician when I grew up, and he said, ‘Son, you can’t do both.’ " A video presentation followed, chronicling Chet’s progress from the hills of East Tennessee (near Knoxville) to the plateau of Middle Tennessee (Nashville) and all over the world along the way. Our friend Les (I wish he were still with us!) might have found it interesting that Chet, who uses the initials c.g.p. after his name (certified guitar player), seemed to be looking at his hands in every clip they showed. To what end, I couldn’t say, since his fingers often moved faster than the eye could follow. The video ended as it had begun, with a screenful of text: "And now, will you please welcome Mark Knopfler." So we did. Knopfler said he understood those feelings of inadequacy very well - he first felt them when he listened to Chet Atkins records as a boy. "It was like guitar playing from another planet," he said. As we know, Knopfler grew up to be quite a guitar player himself, and a few years ago, Atkins called him up in England and asked him to come to Nashville to record with him. Knopfler wasted no time getting to the airport. When he landed in Nashville, Atkins was there to meet him, asking, "Want to go to the Gibson factory?" Eventually, they made it to Atkins’ house, where Knopfler worked up his courage and got out his guitar. "I’m just trying not to shake, you know, and he says to his assistant, ‘Hey Paul. He’s got a thumb about as long as my foot.’ I think that’s what he said. Foot. Yeah, that was it. "All sorts of people in Nashville got into the business through Chet, fed their families through Chet. And in listening to him tell the story of a small boy walking on a dirt road in the winter with no coat because his family didn’t have money for one - he was that boy - I have learned that poverty engenders something: tremendous determination. Chet Atkins picked his way through poverty, picked his way to being the most admired guitar player in the world, and then he became one of the most successful producers in music," Knopfler said. "Radio was probably the thing that fired Chet up most. He built his own radio when he was nine years old. Radio was exciting then." Knopfler was interrupted by applause at that point. When it subsided, he went on. "He gave up on the corporate system when it got to the point when he was having to fill out corporate performance reviews and all that. You know, ‘Is your artist doing A, B, other? Is your artist male, female, other? Has your artist got one testicle....?’ " More applause. Chet Atkins was the first to mic a bass drum, on the song "Oh, Lonesome Me." He was the first to include the pedal steel guitar on a country song (seems like it’s always been there, doesn’t it?). "The records he made himself, he made at home. The record that we made, we made at home," Knopfler said. Then Atkins himself made his way to the stage, slowly. He had helpers on either side as he walked, as well as a cane. We gave him a standing ovation. Knopfler’s admiration and affection for Atkins was clear as he helped the c.g.p. onto a stool behind the podium, then stood at the back of the stage while Atkins talked. Atkins apologized for his condition: "I’ve had a brain tumor and a stroke and I can’t remember a damn thing." He did fairly well, all things considered. At times he seemed to forget what he was talking about, or he’d pause to search for a word. But he’d look at his notes and get back on track, even if he wasn’t at the same place on the track he’d been before. I’ve done my best to reproduce the highlights here. Tapes of the awards ceremony and keynote address are available at http://www.confcopy.com , tape #01 of meeting #AU9901. Ken Totushek was there, too, so Ken, if your recollection differs from this, please speak up. "Is Les Paul here today?" Atkins called out. The spotlight was on him, and the rest of the room was dark. And silent. "Hope he’s not sick. I woulda come to yours, you know. "My first guitar belonged to my brother Jimmy Atkins. Some of y’all might remember him. He came in one day from school, and I was playing with his guitar. I wasn’t even old enough to go to school then, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I put rocks in it and I was dragging it through the dirt and grass. That was in 1929." At one point, Atkins got a little close to the mic and it popped. "Pardon the p," he said. My first engineer that came to Nashville, he wouldn’t let anybody get close to a mic, afraid they’d pop a p, like I just did. "The first radio I build, I got the coil out of a model T Ford. I took a wire from - what do you call that thing? - and I wrapped it around a piece of cedar wood. I put up an antenna and got WNOX in Knoxville. That was in 1935. The earpiece was one of those old-fashioned telephone receivers. Then I got to having asthma so bad, my mother wrote to Dad and told him to come and get me. I was too dumb to know how sick I was. If I hadn’ta been, I mighta died. "That’s a J-O-A-K," he explained. "I built my second radio in 1938 or ‘39, bought the parts from Allied Radio in Chicago. I think that’s now Radio Shack. For the tube I used an RK 43 dual-purpose tube. I saw the schematic in a magazine. We were building a school; it was one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s things. Some of these days I’m going to build another radio, if anybody knows where I could get one of those RK 43 dual-purpose tubes. "I feel kinda strange talking to all you engineers. My interest & knowledge of electronics is pretty weak. "Merle Travis turned me onto fingerpicking. I already played finger-style, but not like I do now. "I built a ham radio during the war, but they wouldn’t let me use it. I went along with them. You don’t want to play around with the government during a war." At his first New York recording session, with Red Foley, "I sat there all day with my guitar in my hands and my amp turned on. And then Red - no, not Red Skelton. But I do have a drawing of a clown he gave me in a guitar case somewhere. I hope I still have it. I hear they’re real valuable now. I sat through two sessions, and they never offered to use me. And finally on the last tune, a song Fred Rose had written, ‘Lonely River Keep on Rolling,’ they asked me, ‘Could you play something along with this?’ And I was just an arrogant kid from East Tennessee, I said, ‘That’s what I’m here for!’ That song with Red was a slight hit, and I really enjoyed popping a dime in the jukebox and hearing myself play." Atkins worked on several radio shows, and got fired several times. "I moved to Nashville in 1951. I was working in Springfield, Missouri, for $75 a week, and being no dummy, I called Fred Rose and asked him if he’d pay me that much. He asked me if I’d come and try to write some songs with Hank Williams. I came down here, and we were sponsored by Martha White Flour." Atkins began singing, not the Martha White theme, but the Powdermilk biscuits theme from A Prairie Home Companion. "Oh, wait. Garrison’s not here," he said. "I got a contract with RCA, so I came up here and recorded for 2 or 3 months. A fellow in Cairo, Illinois, designed an amp and brought it to me. I had been looking all over for echo or something to provide roominess. That was it. And there was some guy at Gretsch who kept after me to play one of their guitars, and finally I just said, ‘I don’t like your guitars.’ And they guy said, ‘Well, how about if you design one of your own?’ I said sure. I wanted to be like Les Paul. So I called up Les and I asked him what royalty I should ask for for that, you know, like 3 percent or 5 percent of retail or wholesale. I don’t know much about money. I never look at it or count it. Anyway, I forget what he told me." Atkins was assigned to work with Elvis Presley in 1955, "and then they put me in charge of the country roster. I’ve always been good in the studio. My dad was a classical musician and my brother was a pop musician, and I – I don’t know what I was. I was better than some of the older musicians, though, because I knew three chords instead of two." Mark Knopfler stepped forward to help his mentor down from the stool and off the stage. We gave him another standing ovation. Next: High-resolution Audio: Where are we now? A panel discussion in which a prominent mastering engineer says, "I’m concerned that if we don’t keep the bottom rung of the ladder as high as we can to prevent people from recording their own stuff at home, we’ll all be out of jobs." And another prominent engineer says, "I’ve got all these people telling me I have to record at 96/24, but what would I record it on? That equipment doesn’t exist yet." Apparently he hadn’t yet explored the offerings on the exhibition floor. Janet Dagley Dagley Bohemian Hillbilly AES notes 4: Hold that ladder high, boys! There were so many workshops and other informative events at AES that I had to pick and choose. I decided on "High-Resolution Audio - Where Are We Now?" because it looked like it would be a good overview. I didn’t realize that the session was an MPGA/MEGA event, or that MPGA stands for Music Producers Guild of America http://www.musicproducer.com/ and MEGA stands for Mastering Engineers Guild of America (couldn’t find an URL for them). Now I’m proud to be a card-carrying member of two unions myself, the National Writers Union http://www.nwu.org (which just won a landmark decision against The New York Times that helps protect the rights of all cyberspace content providers) and the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) http://www.airmedia.org . My husband Michael is a member of the Dramatists Guild http://www.dramaguild.com/ . I believe in unions. I don’t always agree with those who use them to fight technological advances out of stubborn resistance to change. I got there a few minutes late, which means I missed the introductions, so I regret that I can’t tell you exactly who said what here. A set of tapes of the session is available from http://www.confcopy.com, Meeting #AU9901, Session 02. After listening for a bit to the discussion already in progress, I began to feel that I had stepped back in time, to the rust-belt city of Dayton, Ohio, about 20 years ago, when the car and refrigerator factories were laying off and shutting down and I was a reporter for the Dayton Daily News. I wrote story after story about displaced factory workers, some of whom were working hard to learn new skills and keep themselves employable, but many of whom just whined and complained because they had expected to keep those jobs for life without ever learning anything more after high school. They felt like they’d kept up their end of the bargain, only to be betrayed by their employers. I interviewed all kinds of experts who explained that these disruptions are a natural part of the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy. What a different world we live in now. We all have to keep learning to do our jobs over and over to keep up with advancing technology, and the days are long gone when a person can sign on for a steady job at steady wages and then kick back and wait for retirement. So there I was, not in 1979 but 1999, listening to a bunch of guys who’d been doing the same job for awhile - and doing it well, I’m sure - talking about what they must do to save their jobs. They did talk about audio as well, but it didn’t seem to be their main concern. The panel was chaired by Ed Outwater, formerly of Warner Brothers, and featured Chuck Ainlay, Backstage Soundstage Recording Studio, Nashville Ed Cherney, Los Angeles Bernie Grundman, Bernie Grundman Mastering, Hollywood Bob Ludwig, Gateway Mastering, Portland, Maine Denny Purcell, Georgetown Masters, Nashville Elliot Scheiner, Redding, Connecticut Now my own uneducated opinion on this is that the world will still need mastering engineers and music producers of some kind no matter what happens with audio technology. This is not like the railroad firemen, trying to hold onto their useless jobs with legal maneuvering long after there was a need for anyone to shovel coal for Casey Jones. I understand their concern, I feel for them, but I think most of those golden-eared guys and gals will still find work after the paradigm shift in the music industry. But here again, we have a manufacturer of durable goods forced to reinvent itself as a service provider. So how does high-resolution audio fit into that picture? "The only place there is excitement about high-resolution audio is in the future. This 24/96 stuff looks good on paper, and I’m certainly thrilled to be able to produce recordings with higher resolution, but I’m still mixing to analog," one of the panel members said. Before he could say anything else, he was interrupted by a thunderous wave of applause. "How’s this stuff going to hold up?" someone else said. "With analog, I know I’ll be able to play it back a few years from now. I’m not so sure about the sample rate & bit depth du jour." "There’s no excitement for the consumers yet," another guy said. "There’s an almost complete lack of high-resolution recording equipment. There isn’t really anything available yet. I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t seen or heard any of it yet." "The question is, what do you mix down to?" another panelist added. "We don’ t know what high-resolution eventually will be. I intend to get ahold of a 2-inch 8-track and mix to that as well." "Most of what I’m recording now is 16 bit, 48k." "We just installed a six-channel console in our studio in Tokyo." "I usually convert from digital to analog and back several times, and then use the higher-resolution formats in the mixdown." "Every time you increase the resolution of a recording, you give us more to work with as mastering engineers." "ADAT is what started this. It gave music back to the people who make it, lowering the bottom rung of the ladder." The panelists seemed to agree that 24/96 "is an industry buzzword. Already, executives are saying, ‘We want a 24/96 DVD 5.1 system, too. Even if they don’t know what it means." Scheiner said the introduction of 5.1 surround sound "is kind of like the transition from mono to stereo. People are saying, ‘What do we do with all those channels?’ There’s nobody to say, ‘That’s wrong, you can’t do that. Everybody has to feel free to fool around with it." He said he spent three weeks remixing a Steely Dan song (don’t think he said which one) to 5.1, and he really liked it. "There’s so much to cram in, but with that much space I could make room for it all. I got slammed for it, though, by people who said I shouldn’t have changed it." Purcell said he called the legendary Fletcher (of Mercenary Audio in Boston and rec.audio.pro) to ask what he thought of 5.1 surround sound. "I’ll tell you why it’s not going to work," Fletcher told him. "Because of my sister and my brother-in-law. My sister would never allow six speakers in the living room, and even if she did, my brother-in-law would get them all out of phase." I don’t know which of the panelists made this next statement, but he seemed to be speaking for most of the people in the room: "I’m concerned that if we don’t keep the bottom rung of the ladder as high as we can to prevent people from recording their own stuff at home, we’ll all be out of jobs." Meanwhile, upstairs on the exhibition floor, audio technology wasn’t just continuing its march forward into the next millennium: it was having a full-blown parade that could almost be heard even there in the dark, chilly basement of the Javits Convention Center. More soon -- as requested, we’ll take a walk around the exhibition floor and meet Roland’s own Laura Tyson as she tells us about the new VSR-880 and Roland’s new digital mixers. We’ll talk to Apogee about dithering, see the new video version of David Gibson’s "The Art of Mixing," listen to the Neumann "Fritz" binaural stereo microphone that’s shaped like a human head, see the new Wavelab 3.0, which just happens to include the phase scope I’ve been longing for, and, when the reflections from the Javits Center’s glass ceiling get to be too much, we’ll step inside the WhisperRoom isolation booth for a refreshing taste of this city’s rarest commodity: silence. Janet Dagley Dagley Bohemian Hillbilly AES notes 5: Time out on the floor Remember Marshall McLuhan, the pop culture guru of the 60s who coined the phrase "the medium is the message" and subsequently "the medium is the massage" as well as "the global village" ? I had the great good fortune to spend an entire day with McLuhan back in the 70s. As part of the media myself, I had read all his books, even the ones with no pictures, and I listened, fascinated, as he went on and on and on (the guy sure could talk). One of the things he said, that day as well as in his books, was that in a newspaper or magazine, the ads came across as the good news (not in the religious sense, of course) while the articles and photos tended to be the bad news. The articles were about problems. The ads offered solutions - not necessarily to those same problems, sometimes to made-up problems. In the workshops at AES, we learned about some of the problems, real or imagined. But the exhibition floor was full of solutions to every audio-related problem - real or imagined - except, of course, the money to pay for it. For this dispatch, then, in honor of McLuhan, I’ll refer not to my notebook but to the bulging bag of spam and other goodies we brought home from AES. I have to admit the first thing I thought when I finally made it to the exhibition floor that day had nothing to do with audio. I couldn’t believe how fast it had all been set up since I was there not 24 hours before. And I wished it would stay there, a permanent audio wonderland within walking distance of home. I made a beeline, of course, to the Roland booth, where Laura Tyson herself was putting the new VSR-880 through its paces for a curious crowd. We shook & howdied, and I asked her to show me how it worked. Laura is amazing: "Let’s see, you had an 840 but now you have a 1680, right? So you’re not familiar with the 880, exactly." She kept that in mind while showing me that even though the VSR is rack-mountable and has no faders, it does most everything an 880 does, except that you have to tell it in a different way. It takes the same effects card as our 1680 and has MTK thanks to that. Plus it has 24-bit d/a converters and that new R-bus connector that allows it to communicate with its more distant digital cousins such as ADAT and T-DIF. But the highest sampling rate remains 48kHz, leaving Roland behind the pack of new offerings at 96kHz, not to mention the 192kHz available on the new DVD audio-processing systems. The question is, can anybody really hear the difference? The answer seems to be a definite maybe. As the Nyquist theorem tells us, for an accurate digital representation, a sound needs to be sampled at slightly more than twice its frequency. The range of human hearing is from around 15Hz to around 20kHz, so even the conventional CD at 44.1kHz would be enough - if it weren’t for harmonics too high to hear but still part of the sound, and if the sampling always caught each wave at its most extreme peak and trough. The best thing about all the new 24/96 gear, from our perspective, is that it brings down the price on the 48kHz stuff. We’re trying to produce a 16/44.1 CD, and we already have a VS-1680, so we’ll have to save that 96 stuff for later. We were more interested in Roland’s new digital mixers - looks like that might be the best way to add more tracks to our 1680. But the VSR-880 and VS-1680 can also work together. We saw the new VS Logic (or is it Logic VS?) ware on a computer at the Roland booth, also, but we never happened to be there during a demo. We did catch part of the V-Drums demo, which only exacerbated our chronic GAS even though we’re not even drummers. Perhaps I should explain at this point that although I made a quick visit to the Roland booth on Friday to meet Laura as well as Ken Totushek, Victor Paul, and Joe and Barbara Shane, I waited until Michael could go with me on Saturday before I really looked around much. Although we were mostly just window shopping, we were seriously considering a few items, such as a better A/D converter. Anyway, ours was a meandering, not-even-close-to-comprehensive trip around the floor. We stopped by Steinberg’s booth to check out the new Wavelab 3.0 (we have 1.5). Those who read Mrs. DD goes to DC will understand how happy I was to see that 3.0 includes a phase scope, so now we don’t have to buy one since we were planning to upgrade anyway. Since we just bought a new PC from Wasted Potential to use with Wavelab, we took notice of the new Protools offerings (How could we not? Digidesign was everywhere), but we didn’t sit through their seemingly incessant spam for a demo since we’ve already decided not to go that way. If we were Mac users just getting into digital audio, the new Protools 001 might be just the ticket, but Michael and I both have lived under a PC-colored sun and, unlike Superman, we find our powers are diminished rather than enhanced in the Mac realm. We stopped by the Cakewalk booth as well to see 9.0, had a nice chat with the guys there who seemed genuinely grateful when we told them we’d been with them since 3.0. Then we spent some serious shopping time at t.c. electronics and Apogee, checking out their respective A/D converters. We came away preferring the Apogee Rosetta 24/48 converter, not only because of its shaped dithering (we could hardly get the guy to admit it * was * dithering - he insisted that it could only be called dithering if it were flat, which it wasn’t, so it had to be called the UV22 process or something like that) but because of its soft limiter. We liked it so much that I went back the next day to sit through a full demo so as to register to win one. You’d have heard about it by now if we had. Brian G must have eaten all the KM-180 series mints at the Neumann booth by the time we got there (insert smiley of your choice here if necessary), but we didn’t miss them since we didn’t go there to eat anyway. We took turns listening to the mics on display, from the "Fritz" binaural microphone (shaped like a human head with the microphones actually in the ear canals and an XLR connector in its neck - if it were shaped like a female human head, Freden would probably already own one) to an incredible mid-side stereo pair to - OK, we listened to them all and reminded ourselves to buy a lottery ticket in hopes of being able to afford them all. There sure was a lot of "room" in that huge convention center, a good place to look at audio products but not so good for listening to them. Fortunately, there in the middle of the floor was the booth for WhisperRoom, a portable isolation booth made in Morristown, Tennessee. I’ve seen their ads in audio magazines and I think they even gave us a business card, but we can’t seem to find it or their web site. Anyway, if you’ve got a couple grand to spend, these booths are great. They even come with a booth-within-a-booth option for situations where you need extra isolation, with a smaller size for vocals and a larger one big enough to play the guitar inside. Michael stepped inside first, and then I took a turn. As soon as I closed the door, all the sound from outside the booth dropped away to nothing, much like the earth seems to fall away from you when you’re in a hot-air balloon. I came out and told the nice couple who make them that they should try selling them to New Yorkers for recreational purposes, since folks here might well be willing to pay for a little peace and quiet now and then. We bought the book "The Art of Mixing" by David Gibson on the recommendation of a fellow listerine several months ago, and we learned a lot from its graphic depictions (actual visual graphics, guys, not graphic sex or violence) of various mixes. Gibson was at AES with a booth to show off the new "Art of Mixing" video as well as the Virtual Mixer program Gibson has designed to allow control of a mix using those same colorful images. Check out http://www.virtualmixer.com for more info. Let’s dig through the goodie bag here and see what else comes to mind.... Yamaha wins the prize for best canvas bag, a roomy black number with the M2500 mixing console on one side and the DME 32 digital mixing engine on the other - both aimed at the commercial audio market. That’s OK with us; they’ re nice bags. Here’s a Roland DS-90 demo video. Too bad our VCR just broke. A Roland bag with the slogan "Thinking Ahead" - but not to 96kHz sampling, at least. Bags with which we could have picked up some free popcorn from Expression Center for New Media, which sent workers in yellow space-alien suits to pass them out. A card from Brad Zell at Avalon Design, who showed us the Avalon 747sp, and made us feel better when he said he didn’t use EQ much, either. An empty but colorful Neumann bag. A card from Uffe Kjems Hansen, VP Product Management for t.c. electronic, who spent some time showing us the new and old Finalizers. A lanyard from Neutrik - you never know when you might need one of those. A nice little booklet giving the specs for all the Neumann mics ("The choice of those who can hear the difference," it says). Earplug samples, including a pair the woman described as "like having cement in your ears." Michael tried them on the subway and found the claim to be true. Wish I could remember who made them. Brochures for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the folks who bring you the Grammy Awards. After reading them, I decided I’d probably never become a Grammy voter. I just can’t bring myself to join a group that sets up a parallel "Latin Academy" with a separate set of awards. Not my style: "Hey, you with the marimbas! Yeah, that’s right, you, amigo! Get in the back of the bus with those things! Comprende?" How offensive. Had a nice conversation with the expensively coiffed woman at the NARAS booth, though: "Are * you * an engineer?" she asked, looking at my badge. "No. I’m a producer." She seemed impressed, then disappointed when I explained that I’m a * radio * producer. Another handful of stuff: spam for Liquid Audio (including Liquid Player 4.0) and peoplesound.com - more about that in the next episode when we hear from the founder of Liquid Audio himself, as well as the head of new media for Sony. A nice brochure from Roland on digital mixing. My favorite freebie (since we missed out on those Neumann mints) was the Studio Toolkit from Sweetwater, which features a digital audio reference CD with pink noise and tones for calibrating and troubleshooting. That’s enough for now, since Michael and I did hope to get some recording done today. Next, Sony and Liquid Audio, among others, shoot it out at a forum on digital music distribution, and architects turn their attention to the home studio. Janet Dagley Dagley Bohemian Hillbilly AES notes 6: The Final Chapter These notes are from the workshops "Music and the Internet: Latest Developments" and "Innovative Acoustics for Recording" and "Analog Gear in a Digital World" at the AES convention in New York, Sept. 26-27, 1999. Tapes of the workshop are available from http://www.confcopy.com -- meeting #AU9901, tapes W10, W12 and W14. Sorry for the long lapse between reports, folks. Next time I go to AES, I’m going to budget not only the time for the convention (and the price of a trip to Paris, LA or Tokyo) but at least as much time afterward to try to digest it all, not to mention time to recover from all the excitement. Since I didn’t do that in this case, I had to take time off to do some real work before I could finish these dispatches. That gave me a chance to mull over what I learned, which I hope will make this concluding chapter shorter, and possibly easier to read. *********** Once upon a time, all music was interactive. For thousands of years, in every culture, whenever and wherever humans got together, in their homes or in public gatherings, they sang and played music together. Even those who weren’t playing or singing were part of the experience, because the music was live and they could feel it. Then somebody figured out how to record sound. (Patience, Mr. Knepper – the high-end tube preamp didn’t come along until much later, so there’s no need to mention it just yet. Save that for our exciting conclusion, "Analog Gear in a Digital World" OR "I Got Dem G.A.S. an’ I Cain’t Be Satisfied." ) Once sound could be recorded, it started losing its interactivity. The world of music was split, with producers on one side and consumers on the other and middlemen in between – that is, it turned into an industry. Once sound could be recorded, it could also be copied. And those copies could be copied. That led to disagreements that continue to this day over who has the rights to make and sell those copies and who gets how big a piece of whatever action is involved. It also meant that the experience of listening to live music, once an ordinary part of life, became a rare treat. It became so rare that many of the people now trying to record music themselves are unfamiliar with the sound of a live instrument. The technological advances of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations may have led us away from homemade music, but as every home recordist is well aware, the gizmos available these days are bringin’ it all back home – even big-name artists dealing with major labels are choosing to work at home at least some of the time, enough so that architects are addressing the project studio in its own right. But can the march of progress make music interactive again? That’s a silly question to ask here in VSBIGLISTland, but if you’re not sure of the answer, check out any of the fine collaborations and compilations completed or in progress. Music and the Internet In reporting to you, my fellow listerines, I’m acknowledging straight out that while I’m telling you what these experts said, many of the folks on this and related lists already know more about music and the Internet than those who make it their business. I regret that I didn’t catch the last name of Matt, the representative from Liquid Audio. I went to http://www.liquidaudio.com to look for it but had no luck. There I found a RealPlayer video interview with Liquid Audio’s Rick Fleishman that helped put it all in perspective, with Fleishman frequently forced by net congestion to pause in midword, his mouth frozen open there on the tiny screen as if to add the disclaimer "but we’re not there yet." The medium still massages the message. As you may know, Liquid Audio has teamed with Roland to offer its services to VS users. My problem with Liquid Audio’s approach is that they’re charging the content provider $99 for the proprietary software necessary to provide the content (and permission to put up 5 songs for a year). With their system, your songs (or other audio) are sold, and you get 49 percent of the proceeds, if any, much more than the artist’s share of a major-label release. That approach seems a bit behind the times to me. (Remember when they used to charge for Netscape?) Between rebufferings, Fleishman made the point that while http://www.mp3.com and other web-based music sites target the individual artist, Liquid Audio also wants to be an outlet for the mainstream record industry. Anyway, back to the workshops. "To relate us to the existing model, we’re a distributor," Matt explained. K.K. Proffitt of http://www.jamsync.com in Nashville was also on the panel – you may have read some of her articles in Recording and other audio-related magazines, or you may even remember her from the Compuserve midi forum way back in the dark ages of cyberspace. (She’s also on the DAW-Mac list, Davor.) The other panelists were Jonathan Lipp (I assume that’s THE Jonathan Lipp of http://www.fullcompass.com ), Carl Lindemann of http://www.cyberscene.com , and chair Steve Ginensky of Strategic Manufacturers Group of Chicago. The panelists said there’ll be a SDMI-secure Rio player on the market in November, followed by a $199 CD-burner the next month. Cyber-veteran Proffitt said Jamsync does a lot of work online already. "We use track-pack encoding, which is lossless. We download up to 100 megabytes a day. When our ISDN line is down, we’re effectively down for the day." Matt said it seemed music technology is leading us in two directions at once: "There are a lot of guys going off into 24/96, and I even saw 32/192 in one booth up there, and on the other hand, on the Internet we’re trying to make files smaller to deal with bandwidth constraints." But the two aren’t necessarily contradictory: "The higher you go with the data rate, the better it will sound downsampled. The panelists recalled some blind tests done at a previous AES convention, with engineers listening to audio cassettes. "There was no pattern when they tried to identify the tapes. This was not the public, this was us." "People got into CDs because of the convenience, not just the quality of the sound. Remember how careful you used to have to be with records? Disk washing, blowing the dust off? CDs were easier to use," Lindemann said. They talked for a bit about the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) and one panelist declared that the digital watermark doesn’t exist yet. Matt insisted that Liquid Audio has one that can survive analog conversion and even FM transmission. But it’s a mark, not copy-protection. Nobody seemed all that excited about SDMI, nor did they seem to worry about whether copying could be prevented. "The idea of saving a file that is downloaded and doing something with it is a challenge to many users," Lipp said, "Many folks can’t even find their own Excel files." Someone insisted that there must be widespread music piracy going on out there because of all the blank cassette sales. Proffitt disagreed. "A lot of those blank cassettes are bought by people making their own music,"
she said. "The world is going that way. The biggest change is that we now have the
means of producing good quality with relatively cheap equipment. That’s definitely
hurting the major labels. If it doesn’t help the common everyday artist, the people
who are making this revolution happen, then it’s not going to matter." Someone pointed out that a little piracy isn’t necessarily bad for sales. "The cassettes I copied in college are now in the closet – but I buy CDs from those same bands now." Before the recording revolution, Lipp said, "One of the impediments artists have always had is that if they’re out of the mainstream, they have no access to distribution, therefore no access to market. Internet distribution provides access to market for more minority entertainment – music, but also radio drama and other audio. There is now a possibility that a minor artist might make something from their music." "Also, there’s a difference in the speed at which stuff gets out," Matt said. Liquid Audio had demonstrated that right there at AES, with a song on sale online 20 minutes after it was recorded. "And it happened totally without a label." The song was being sold for $1.50, and the artist got 75 cents for each sale. "With 50 percent of the gross retail price, you don’t have to sell as many units. Not only that, but there are no deductions for cutouts, returns, or breakage," Matt said. At that point the panel was interrupted by a member of the audience: David Hughes, head of electronic distribution for Sony. Hughes pointed out that while copying a tape took time, digital copies could be made almost instantly, and that’s a concern to the big labels. "It would be great if we could share 50 percent of the gross with our artists, but if we did, we’d have a big profit & loss problem," he said. "Three percent of artists make money. Everybody else loses. Someone had to A&R 100 percent of those bands. Someone had to produce. That provides jobs. Even with digital distribution, somebody still has to make it." But Internet artists don’t need to make as much money to cover their costs, because they don’t need to pay for a big marketing campaign, the panelists said. "Every time there’s a new technology, there’s a panic about bootlegging," Lipp said. "Most people will pay if the price is reasonable." "The record industry has been a durable-goods manufacturer, and now it’s becoming a service provider. It’s a different kind of business. What was once the product is now its disposable container," Lindemann said. "Labels feel threatened by mp3s, but artists don’t. "The music industry now will become a multi-level industry," Proffitt said. "A bigger pie, divided many different ways." "It’s like what happened to the old Hollywood studio system in movies," Ginensky said. "The cost of the CD is a small percentage of the cost you have to bear to make the system run," Hughes said. "They’re cheaper now than the cost of making LPs, and we’re still waiting for the price to drop," Matt said. "Meanwhile, you can walk out onto the floor of this show and for $5,000, get all you need to make your CD." "The $5 million media buy is where you really take the hit," Hughes said. "All of us are in the business," Ginensky said. "Costs are high because everything doesn’t work the first time we try it. It takes advertising, an organized media push. When they break an artist, it’s like a WAR. ORGANIZED is what distinguishes the majors from the indies."
Innovative Acoustics for Recording Panelists: Peter D’Antonio, RPG Diffusor Systems, Inc., Upper Marlboro, MD, USA Neil Grant, Harris-Grant Associates, Iver, Bucks., UK Bob Hodas, Bob Hodas Acoustic Analysis, Berkeley, CA, USA John Storyk, The Walter-Storyk Design Group, NY, NY, USA These architects seemed at least as excited about the home-recording revolution as we are, and not necessarily because it might mean more business for them. Maybe they’ve gotten bored designing those big pro studios and they enjoy the challenge of designing a space that might be a recording studio one minute and a living room the next. Whatever the reason, they love the idea as much as Randy Newman loved LA. "The proliferation of low-cost high-quality equipment has changed the way people record and mix," D’Antonio began. "That is true for the project studio as well as the professional studio." His own specialty is scattering surfaces, including a new 3rd-generation fractal diffusor only half an inch deep – perfect for even the tiniest home studio. Neil Grant, who has designed studios for Peter Gabriel and Reba McIntyre, among others, said studio designers have to give up some of their old assumptions. "In order to record something, you don’t have to have a console & engineer and glass & artist on the other side of that glass. One of the most staggering things happening in audio, realtime Internet collaboration such as Rocket Network (http://www.resrocket.com/ ) can enfranchise project & home studios. You can work with people all over the world in real time with astonishing results. It’s now working; it’s already a commercial reality. It upends completely the paradigm of the recording studio. I think it’s jolly exciting." Storyk, a five-time Mix magazine award-winner who designed Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady studios, among others, said that while studio architects once tried to eliminate reflections, "Now we take these small rooms and try to keep as much energy in the room as possible. We’re trying to use less absorption." "Most project studios have a shoebox shape, and people typically put the speakers on one of the short walls," Bob Hodas said. "We found that gives you a big dip at 65-70 Hz, and a 15-dB boost in the highs – the sound also becomes discontinued in time. By moving the speakers to the long wall, you get more reflection, but a much more accurate reflection. Most people don’t know what to do with subwoofers. Hodas says that if your subwoofer is one the same plane as the main speakers, it’s useless: it should be about 3 feet in front of the others. And when you add a subwoofer, remember that phase is really important. Analog Gear in a Digital World Panel: Walter Sear of Sear Sound Wes Dooley Russell Hamm Bruce Svedian "If any of you are prone to heart attacks from having your beliefs shaken, leave now," Sear said as he began the workshop. As Svedian explained, "Walter has a keen appreciation of what we now call vintage but what was once known as high-performance equipment." "I’m a big fan of digital," Sear said. "I used to haul around 125-lb tape recorders and 250-lb Neves. I have no desire to do that again. But it’s not, other than in our narrow area, a digital world. Sound is analog, and no matter how much you may process it digitally, what you hear is analog again." One of the panelists said that when he agreed to teach a class of beginners in audio engineering, he insisted that the first class be a field trip to hear the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The students didn’t have much interest in classical music and they whined and complained about the trip – until the music started. By intermission, they got the point. But one trip to a concert hall is not an aural education. All of us should do more listening to plain old-fashioned analog sound. Postscript: Women in Audio Yes, there are a few other women in this world who are interested in recording, and on the final morning of AES, I sat in a circle with about 20 of them (and a few interested men) for a discussion on how to "fix the mix" in this male-dominated field. Since then, we’ve become a standing committee of the AES. Rick, you might want to consider joining – it’d be a great place to pick up women, although you might have to learn some new jokes. Janet Dagley Dagley Bohemian Hillbilly |