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Greg's highlights
of the 2002 AES show in Los Angeles
It's
Wednesday morning 10/9, and I'm on the 8AM flight back to the
east coast. I'm exhausted, so I'll write until I collapse or
the battery on my Powerbook gives out.
Well,
AES in LA ended yesterday, and I can sum up my experience in
one word - amazing! Those of you who have seen me at previous
shows know that I really enjoy doing them. Not the load-in, set-up,
tear-down, etc., but meeting face-to-face with the people I've
spoken with on the phone in the past year. Nothing better than
a room full of like-minded people who are interested in audio
in all its many forms and formats. For those who couldn't make
it, here's what the booth looked like. It was set up for demoing
the mic pre with condenser and ribbon mics, opto and delta-mu
compressors with uncompressed program material, and the Quartet.
This year attendance (at least at my booth) was
much better than AES in LA in 2000. Our location was great, and
in close proximity to most of the other small high-end manufacturers
- folks that are genuinely passionate about what they do - and
a very friendly bunch. I had the pleasure of technical discussions
with old and new friends like Dave Hill of Crane Song, Geoff
Daking, Hutch Hutchison and EveAnna Manley, George Massenburg
(congrats on the TEC award!), David Bock at Soundelux, Michael
Grace, Dave Marquette, Dan Kennedy of Great River, Jon Pedersen
of Tube-Tech, Chuck Gray at Millennia, Dave Amels of Bomb Factory,
Rick, John and Amalia at Royer, Wes Dooley of AEA, David Josephson,
Dale at Vintech, the folks at ADAM across the aisle (great speakers)
and many others that I'm sure I'm leaving out. It's great to
share the trials and tribulations of design and manufacturing
with folks who face many of the same challenges that I do. Not
to mention the opportunity to hang out with some of the people
who sell our stuff, especially Fletcher and Samara of Mercenary
Audio (who are shipping lots of Quartets), and Nathan and Brijitte
of Atlas Pro Audio who I met for the first time this show (thanks
for the coffee and muffins!).
Of
course, there's nothing quite as much fun as the people that
use your gear saying nice things about it. Since the rental houses
in LA carry our compressors, I spoke with a lot of producers
and engineers that I was unaware have used our 6386 and ES-8
Limiters. As always, I had a great discussion with Dave Collins
at Marcussen Mastering (who has a 6386) about opto cells and
circuit design philosophy. Here's a photo if Dave and Brad Blackwood
of Ardent Mastering after looking through the (unvented ) plexi
top cover on the Quartet. I had the unit powered up the entire
show and I'm happy to say the tubes did not melt the plastic.
Always
good to talk with Tim Mulligan and crew who tour and record Neil
Young and CSNY. They have had an OCl-2 on the mix bus for every
live show since receiving it, and use them it in the studio for
vocals and acoustic guitars. Steve Krause, who among other things
is busy working with Mark Isham on scoring dates, has had an
ES-8 since the last LA show. He kept dragging engineers over
to hear the compressor demos. With clients like Steve, I may
never hire a sales and marketing manager!
Thanks
to MIX, Pro Audio Review, Tape-Op, and EQ magazines. Robin Boyce-Trubitt
at MIX (the nicest person you'll ever meet) took me to a great
dinner on Saturday with the folks at Arboretum Software and fetched
me coffee more than once. My friend Mark Frink (sound reinforcement
editor) and I discussed putting out the de-esser in the Quartet
as a separate product. He used the prototype on the Tony Bennett/kd
lang tour. Mark has also used the OCL-2 extensively on the last
Joni Mitchell tour (with full orchestra) and kd lang, both for
vocals and instruments. Paul Dacruz at PAR took me to hear the
LA Philharmonic on Fiday night, which was definitely a high point
of the trip to LA. Imagine that - real people, making music,
at the same time, in the same room. What a strange concept. Larry
and John at Tape-Op hung out to talk about their conference in
Portland next May, (I'll be on the Mic Pre panel and sponsoring)
and to give me the very good news about the upcoming review of
the Quartet that Larry did for the next issue. Here they are
at the booth:
There
were a few funny moments, like the guy from CBS who discussed
using tube mic preamps for broadcast with me for a half hour.
After he left, I looked closely at his business card (with an
'eye' logo and block lettered CBS) and saw in small print "Caribbean
Broadcast Services". Dan Rather in dreadlocks, perhaps?
Then there was the celebrity who showed up at my
booth that absolutely nobody recognized (but me). Here's a hint
- he's influenced the audio/record biz more that anyone else
I saw at the show. He's not a recording artist, producer, engineer,
or record company exec. Can you guess who he is? No, not the
guy on the right...that's me. No cheating now....
That's
right - it's Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster. Without his
trademark hat. I imagine there would've been fireworks if he
and Neil Young's guys were at the booth together. We had a very
interesting discussion about digital delivery of audio and video,
Bill Gates (of course), and fingerprinting files for copyright
protection. I'm sure we'll all read about it soon in the Wall
Street Journal. By the way, he has a ProTools rig (at this point,
who doesn't?) and was looking at analog front end (at this point,
who isn't?).
Well, that's all for now. Thanks again to everyone
I spoke with. See you at the Tape-Op conference Portland in May,
or at AES in New York next fall.
Greg Gualtieri
P.S. I saw Mixerman - the real Mixerman.
And Lance - I think.
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