Well it’s that time of month again. The staff is screaming for an editors note, and I would rather have all of my fingernails pulled out with a pair of rusty needle-nose pliers that came from a lampy’s fog juice-soaked tool belt than write one.
I mean, I have been shooting my mouth off in print in this space for more than five years. Is there really anything left to say? Does any of it really matter? OK, way too philosophical. It just gets hard to keep up sometimes with an industry that is changing at the speed of sound.
How’s this? I was shooting the s*#% with my good friend Larry Hall at H.A.S. Productions the other day, and he was telling me that he is looking at getting rid of all of his analog consoles and going totally digital. As he put it, “I only have two or three guys a year who insist on an analog board, and they always insist on a Midas Heritage, which I have to rent anyway.” Actually, he would still have one analog desk in the house. My personal Midas Venice lives there these days so he can rent it for smaller gigs.
But think about the implications here. This is a good-sized soundco with a bunch of inventory and as much work as they can handle in any given week, but they ain’t exactly Clair or Sound Image. This is a regional company looking to do all digital, all the time unless someone insists on “old” technology.
It makes sense on a number of levels, including the ability to dump a couple of comp/gate/FX racks along with the consoles, which would all but pay for the desk he has his eye on. But still, if someone had told me just two years ago that this kind of thing would be happening, I would have thought they were nucking futs. I would have bet Big Mick’s weight in lap dancers that such a shift was at least another decade from taking place.
On another note, I was asked to be part of a panel at AES on digital distribution of audio for live sound folks. I can never figure out why anyone wants me on a panel like this because all I do is talk for a couple of minutes and roll a live hand grenade into the room in the form of a question or subject area that no one really wants to talk about. In this case it was, “Hey, digital distribution would be great if we could all, I don’t know, agree on a freakin’ standard. If the MI world can come up with MIDI so all of their stuff can talk to each other, then how come the rocket scientists in pro audio can’t?” It was really cool to watch all the manufacturer types hem and haw about why they went with a proprietary system and how it was all about performance, not profit.
Only the sole other non-manufacturer on the panel, Dave Shadoan from Sound Image, had the balls to say that it is all about the money. No one wants to adhere to an industry-wide standard that lets the user decide which pieces from which manufacturers to use, if they can roll out a proprie-tary system and make you buy a bunch of THEIR stuff.
Dave also had the best line of the session when he said that two things had to happen before digital transport became common in the live world. “First,” he said, “we need a real standard and second, all of the old guys have to die.” Pretty funny until I remembered that I am one of those old guys.
Hmmmmm…
