So, I’m thinking about gear — as I am wont to do — and I start making up a song to the tune of “Food Glorious Food.” The first line comes to me automatically, but then I get stumped, because I use a word that has no apparent rhyme with any word that will make a statement as a final destination for the direction of the first line. By the way, this song is of no great importance other than a bit of brain eruption, but once it got stuck in my head as a half thought it became a puzzle to be solved.
In my quest to resolve the riddle of the rhyme, I turned away from my vocabulary search and tried to take a philosophical approach to unraveling the mystery of my doggerel verse. I reminded myself that a great piece of writing could be defined not only by the words that are used, but by the unused words as well. Anyway, my first line came out like this, “Gear glorious gear… three hot legs, a ground and a neutral,” and therein lays the problem; there is nothing impartial about the word neutral when trying to find its partner in rhyme. Also, even if I could find the perfect word to couple with neutral, how would I manage to find a poetically meaningful way to get to it?
The Conundrum of Gear
Stumped and stymied, I released my vigilant hold upon my stubborn verse and returned my thoughts to decoding the more practical conundrum of gear and, more specifically, which gear to buy and to have. After all, in a perfect world I would buy and have it all. Then again, in a perfect world, I would also have a rhyme for the word “neutral.” Unfortunately, finding “the right gear” for one’s personal and business arsenal is a more temporal proposition than finding the right word to complete a rhyme, as there is no need to change the right word once it’s in place and doing its job. Gear, on the other hand, only lasts so long and is very expensive to buy and maintain. Therefore, when deciphering the demands of the marketplace and taking into consideration personal likes and needs, one must remember that a great sound company is not only defined by the gear that they have, but also by the gear they cannot afford.
I have friends who still swear their undying love for the Clair S-4 cabinet. I have other friends who pine away for the Midas XL-4 and Heritage consoles. Yet while these friends of mine still wax nostalgic about great gear of days gone by, these same confidants are also realists who understand that — for the most part — these iconic audio items are now relegated to a soon-to-be forgotten era. Head-to-head in an A/B test, the older gear may (or may not) sound better than the newer digital consoles and line arrays, which now saturate the marketplace. However, except for the few engineers that could afford to use them as — dare I say — vanity pieces, a sound company would be hard pressed to keep them on their inventory.
Purchasing gear for most companies is (and should be) based upon a company’s finances as well as the market in which the company is competing. While there is a valid point to be made about some of the older gear sounding better than new gear, it is still a moot point. Our ears have adapted to a digital world. And quite frankly, there are some great products on the market, which, due to their size and weight and quality of sound, make one hard-pressed to argue the virtues of the older equipment.
That said, it then becomes a matter of money and company needs that determine which equipment should be purchased. While specific gear is imperative in certain venues, one needs to ask if purchasing said equipment will then enable them to get more work in those venues. If one is purchasing gear as an install for a specific venue, one has to consider the talent that will be using the gear as well as the venue’s dimensions. While having the best state-of-the-art gear is always nice, it’s not always the correct solution for a given venue or company.
Oh, The Shelf Life…
Another thing to take into consideration? The shelf life of any given piece of equipment may not be as long as one would hope it to be. Regardless of how well a piece of gear may perform its job, a new innovation or the capriciousness of the market may knock it out of the running before one gets a chance to recoup that investment. The “must-have” console that everyone was raving about a mere two years ago is now sonically deficient compared to the new flavor of the month, and said console has now fallen from its first-place rider spot to second or third on the list.
How can one keep up?
The PM5D, which was a must-have on every rider, has been replaced, slowly, but surely by the Profile and SC48, and soon perhaps the CL5. The Avid boards have more outputs to accommodate the burgeoning IEM market and provide an easy solution to the live multi-channel recording and playback requirements with Avid’s own Pro Tools. So, we dig deep into our pockets and invest in the new consoles, but we aren’t done yet. People start demanding Wave plug-ins because — as one engineer tells it — one of the Wave apps he uses makes every channel sound like a Neve channel strip. Engineers are raving about the Truverb, the C4 Multiband compressor and the L1 Ultramaximizer (to name a few) and of course, the Gold package becomes a must-have item, but the writing is on the wall.
So, just when we think we have the ultimate console with the Profile, Midas — after a long wait — finally comes out with their digital line of consoles and starts to make a run for it. Top engineers are now raving about how much better the Midas sounds than other consoles. The Midas preamps can be driven hard and saturated like an analog console (i.e., the XL8) and the Midas line of consoles can accept WAV files and Pro Tools as well. Such is the ongoing chatter as Midas tries to wrest the console market out from under Avid’s large footprint. A collective cry to heaven goes up as we look into yet another loan and we wonder, “When will it ever end?”
Please Sir, I Want Some More
Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the business we have chosen for ourselves, and the end is not anywhere near in regard to our spending and audio accessorizing. Although, if we look at the constant merry go round of the equipment market as yet another riddle to be solved, I may have a solution — at least in regard to consoles. Considering that most consoles are now capable of using Wi-Fi to allow an engineer the freedom of mixing from an iPad, I would venture to say that one of the console companies should develop a large touch screen worksurface with a DSP rack. As Waves is capable of modeling great outboard effects and amplifiers (plus the nifty graphics that accompany them) they should develop a modeled plug-in of every board on the market — as well as some popular vintage analog models. Then when someone demands a certain console, they can access the plug-in and a detailed graphic of the worksurface will appear on the large touch screen workstation. The beauty of this plan is that you can also have a Waves plug-in package for your Wave console plug-in. Problem solved.
Oh, and by the way (not that it matters) I could not find a true rhyme that works with the word “neutral.” However, I did find what is called a slant rhyme; sometimes we have to improvise.
“Gear glorious gear,
three hot legs, a ground and a neutral.
For every piece of great gear,
clean electric is crucial.”
After writing this article, Baker Lee hung up his songwriting ambitions, gave away his one-way bus ticket to Nashville and decided to keep the day gig. —ed.
