The Winter NAMM Show is all about guitars, drums and Spandex, right? At its core it is a musical instrument trade show — MI, in the parlance of that trade — but over the last few years its pro audio aspect has grown considerably. That component was up 4.4 percent over last year, NAMM’s Scott Robertson estimated, in a conversation in the show’s crowded press room, halfway through the show. And this year, much of that can be attributed to a considerably larger footprint for live sound.
Not Just Spandex
The NAMM Show has always had its array of live-sound products. Much of that category in recent years has focused on processing — stomp-box types of systems that act as force multipliers for solo troubadours: three-part harmony algorithms and chord-changing keyboards that have gotten progressively smarter about handling modalities and that might, ironically, be putting as many back-up musicians and singers out of work as the number of lounge singles they’re empowering. And we’ve watched as the microphone category has expanded massively at the entry-level end of the market; pretty much any brand out there with four-figure products for studios also has a $99 entry into the other end of the spectrum.
But what this year’s Winter NAMM Show witnessed was the next step in this evolution: more and more intuitive sound reinforcement systems are being introduced at NAMM and into the MI sales and distribution channel. In part, that’s a function of the growing industry influence of live music as the dominant revenue generator in the music industry, particularly at the huge indie-musician level, whose constituents make the vast majority of their money from live gigs. The appearance of Line 6 into this market at the show, with the guitar-amp maker’s first PA and live-sound mixer system, really underscores this. The touch-screen interface on the new Stage-Scape M20d allows for X-Y-axis-type multi-parameter control, and color-coded avatars representing musicians on stage take the idea of graphical iconography to the masses (more on this in a minute).
Pro Audio Intros
There were plenty of other new PA and live-sound products introduced at the show, but these debuts were not limited to the MI sphere. Most notably, JBL announced its next flagship SR system at NAMM: the VTX line array, and they showed the first product in the line, the top-of-the-line 3-way V25 line array element. But as important was the fact that JBL also used the NAMM Show as the venue to introduce its new D2 Dual-Diaphragm Dual-Voice-Coil Compression Drivers mounted on a third generation waveguide, and RBI Radiation Boundary Integrator assembly, that form the core technologies of the company’s stated next-generation high-end line array system.
I’ve left it to Mark Frink and my other colleagues to fully explain the VTX from a technical perspective (See “Tech Preview,” FRONT of HOUSE, Jan. 2012, page 30). What I found revolutionary is that the new line array and its underlying technology were debuted at NAMM. Paul Bauman, JBL’s senior manager, tour sound, initially seemed equivocal, portraying the timing of the VTX announcement as a matter of circumstances — the D2’s technology was delivered as a white paper at the AES Show the previous November, but the VTX itself wasn’t ready to be shown there; and the Frankfurt Musikmesse show in March is too close to the start of the spring concert touring season to give buyers ample time to evaluate it for this year’s tours. But in the end, Bauman seemed to be won over by NAMM as a valid high-end live-sound new-product introduction venue.
“I don’t normally come to NAMM; it’s not really a live-sound show, more of a portable PA show, in my opinion,” Bauman told me in a conversation in the back of the Harman show suite. “But I’m sensing a change when I look at all the live sound equipment being shown here.” He said that JBL might expand what it showcases at NAMM in the future.
That would be a good idea for any number of reasons. The presence of JBL and the other large-system manufacturers (such as Martin, EAW and Meyer, which did not exhibit at the show) will help offset the potential for oversimplification of functionality and operation that’s inevitable when what was once a highly technical proposition enters the relative mass market of MI. When you’re at a show that features products like a $300 electric guitar that tunes itself at the press of a button no matter how drunk you are (Peavey, by way of integrated Antares’ Auto-Tune software), everything is on a somewhat more slippery slope, professionally speaking. The fact that a knowledgeable user can drill down deeper into StageScape and find all the manual parameter control he or she wants doesn’t change the fact that the mixer’s auto-sensing mic and line inputs and outputs can detect a connection and automatically configure the channel gain, EQ, effects and routing. Line 6’s very slick demo session, which could easily be worked into an off-Strip lounge act in Las Vegas in a pinch (even without the very cool one-song appearance of Colbie Caillat that they had in Anaheim), more than hinted at the notion that live-sound engineers might just be occasionally superfluous in the future.
The DIY Generation
The fact of the matter is, live sound is starting down the same path that music recording did a generation ago, when DIY became the norm: more systems are being introduced that allow musicians to be their own technicians, putatively without distracting from their creative side. I’m not suggesting that this should make live sound engineers nervous; unlike the sea shift from large conventional recording studios to personal and “project” studios, propelled by the indie music surge and the decline in budget funding by major record labels, concerts and touring will always require a certain level of physical scale and technical expertise. And on the positive side, this proliferation of affordable live sound products will bring live music into spaces that weren’t accessible to it before — there was a tiny stage and Bose PA system set up in the foyer of the W Hotel across the street from the old World Trade Center last summer. That can only be good for the industry. But what does have to be scrutinized is how the new DIY generation of live-sound products affects the perception of the business. It’s arguable that personal recording devalued recorded music to an extent by making it so broadly accessible. It’ll be interesting to see where live sound is at after five years of Moore’s Law is being applied to it.
