Thursday was a good day to blog. I had an idea and a collection of notes – I wanted to take a look at the rise of the tablet PC with a nod to its uptake and use in various aspects of pro audio. The launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire, the prominence of the iPad and Steve Jobs’ recent retirement from Apple made it especially timely.
Then came news that Jobs had died…
‘I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do: I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it ― you’ve got to go sometime.’
When you do, people will want to know, but delivering the news is unlikely to be easy. The role may fall to any one of a large number of people.
It may even fall to the pro audio press…
Visit enough trade shows and it is easy to become blasé about close encounters with truly impressive and groundbreaking kit. Like a good number of you reading this, I have.
And as a journalist, my show goals are fundamentally different from those of a manufacturer or potential buyer. The truth is, a troubled trade show can make much better reading than a happy one. Both ways, a wake-up call is a sound thing.
It’s a little-discussed fact that the tempo of classical music compositions slowed in direct response to the ability to build larger performance spaces. As building techniques allowed larger halls to be constructed, their reverberation times forced composers to downshift tempo in order to retain musical intelligibility.
We have learned much about acoustics since, but we are in danger of losing this and other lessons...
I’d come to talk audio but, right now, I’m getting a lesson in cinema projection. I’d expected to be discussing cinema mixing, surround sound and room acoustics but audio is not alone in its level problems.
Between sound and vision, cinema is looking anything but the high-gloss, high-value experience promised by high-grossing Hollywood blockbusters. It’s not looking – or sounding – good…
If you still regard games consoles as child’s play and their sound requirements as trivial, it is time to think again. And if you are involved in the composing, recording or postproduction markets, it is past time to think again.
Games are not only growing in their sound sophistication, they represent a growing and challenging opportunity, where new frontiers are being pioneered.
‘Is the cloud mature? It’s been around for so long – way before people started calling it the cloud. I, personally, can’t wait for people to stop calling it the cloud.’
And there we were, ready to get excited about yet another 21st century technical revolution. So much for this ‘cloud’ thing that’s all lined up to change the way we work and play…
I used to drink in a pub in Cambridge called the Free Press. I liked it.
In trade publishing, an ‘ad rich’ environment equates to a more free editorial agenda than an impoverished one. When ads are scarce, magazines may be afraid to publish critical or conflicting stories – from editorial comment and product reviews to advertisers’ competitors’ press releases – for fear of losing essential revenue. The question here is: who needs who the most?
‘It was one of the greatest experiences of my life – we’d throw little vocal challenges at each other, and this game of one-upmanship resulted in some beautiful vocal renditions. We are really proud of the results. I wish people could see how much fun we had.’
You couldn’t ask for a better commendation for live studio recording. But how many of today’s recording studios are able to support a live session?
Hired by Lord Doberman, the richest man in the world, Anode Enzyme moves into Mollusc Hall as resident genius. Here he discovers the formula for worldly success – mediocrity.
If it was meant to be an entertaining contention when cartoonist John Glashan penned it in his Genius cartoon strip in the late 1970s, it has become a truism for the majority of today’s music charts.
I owe a debt to conversations I have had with recording studio designers.
Their work requires them to be expert in an unusually wide number of fields – from the obvious areas of acoustics and equipment, to interior design and psychology. Add music biz anecdotes, and many would make great after-dinner speakers. It was a studio designer who put me wise to the problem of a ‘good enough’ audio chain.
It was all so good... then suddenly it became a first class, impedence matched, wi-fi enabled, 192kHz nightmare.
I was on the verge of the idea that would become the talk of my generation. Then the shadowy figure of the Health N Safety Sheriff busted in and ruined everything. It’s all going horribly wrong (I think Jeremy Clarkson is in here somewhere) then an alarm rings...
Mixing anecdote with hard-won wisdom is something Robbie McGrath does as effortlessly as mixing the biggest bands of the past 40 years.
Today his audience is a group of students that he is encouraging to become the next generation of live sound engineers. But where McGrath is upfront about getting into the business by being in the right place at the right time, they don't yet realise how lucky they are...
A recent Facebook discussion on the state of popular music making threw out an interesting benchmark – the ratio between ‘shit’ and ‘the shit’. Let’s call it S/TS. If that’s reminiscent of signal-to-noise (S/N), it’s no accident.
Much of the blame for the swing towards the ‘S’ end of the scale was assigned to major record labels. The rest came technology’s way.
When did you first meet Kevlar? Think carefully, your answer may betray a lot about your past.
If it was sometime around 1976, you were either enjoying the finer points of cutting-edge reference loudspeaker performance or reading spec sheets in the hope that you soon would be. If you were five years ahead of the audio boys, you were more likely risking your life for country or cash.
Look up! Clouds are gathering over the internet. Some may have silver linings. Others are most certainly storm clouds.
These clouds are computing clouds – cloud computing. If it’s a new term to you now, it won’t be for long. These clouds will change the way you use your computer and the way you use your music, video and photo libraries. Forever.