By George Petersen

AN AUSSIE HOLIDAY IS LIKE THAT OLD PAUL HOGAN commercial, except they leave out a few things, like the 14-hour plane flight from San Francisco to Sydney (figure about 25 hours flying Sydney to Europe–ouch!). But the land down under is truly a land of wonder. This being my second trip (on the first one, I spent the entire time on an island in the Great Barrier Reef), I wanted to focus on the area mostly around Sydney, especially the rainforest and peaks in the Blue Mountains and the famed Hunter Valley wine district. I’m back now, so in case anyone wonderered where I was the past two weeks, that’s my story–and I’m sticking to it.

But first, a few facts: The seasons are reversed, so mid-late May is the shoulder of fall, although most every day was a perfect 70 degrees. And just to be sure, I did check out sinks, showers and tub drains and no, the water does NOT spiral down in a reverse direction compared to northern hemispheres. And I finally figured out the deal with Kangaroos–they’re exactly like the way we perceive deer. Farmers hate em. Yes, hitting one on a highway or backroad can really trash your car. Aussies generally don’t eat roo meat, although it can be found on places catering to tourists. And no, you won’t see them wandering in big towns, but if you get out in the country, they’re plentiful to see, especially around dusk or early morning. On an 4WD bush tour, I saw herds of wild roos–they’re far from endangered. The country/continent is slightly smaller than the mainland USA, and is pretty spread out, with most of its 20-million people clustered around the (admittedly gorgeous) coastline.

In between sightseeing jaunts, I also dropped in on a couple of Aussie audio manufacturers and had a chance to spend some time with Rode Microphones president Peter Freedman and Fairlight CEO John Lancken. These are usually guys that I only meet during tradeshows or an occasional lunch or dinner, so visiting their home turf was a treat.

At the Rode HQ, in Silverwater, just outside of Sydney, Peter was thrilled to show off this new state-of-the-art production facility that outputs some 10,000 mics a month. Just about everything at Rode (except metalwork on the tube power supply housings) is done in-house. including a large clean-room where workers hand assemble the large-diaphragm capsules. (Click here for your own virtual Rode factory tour.)

The plant combines modern surface-mount systems, a shop doing advanced C&C machining of bodies, inner chassis’ and constant prototyping of ideas from the R&D guys. New ideas is the big emphasis at Rode, and Peter likes doing something that’s really different, whether its their top-selling VideoMic (a mini shotgun that’s designed to improve the sound of consumer DV cams) or its innovative Podcaster mic with USB out and onboard zero-latency headphone monitoring. Speaking of same, the day I was there, Peter had just returned from Melbourne, where Rode won a 2007 Australian Design Award (www.designawards.com.au) for the Podcaster, having beaten out a number of high-end consumer entries, including a Sunbeam coffee grinder, Victa vacuum and the QuickSmart Easy Fold stroller. Congrats!

Later, I headed up to French’s Forest, a north Sydney suburb that’s the home of Fairlight. It didn’t look far from downtown Sydney on the map, but one of those unwritten Aussie rules is that EVERYTHING is farther away that it looks. Anyway, CEO John Lancken gave me a 30-second factory tour, because that’s about as long as it takes. Most of the boards and modules are built in another facility, so much of the factory assembly activity is configuring custom and standard console frames, inserting the required modules and running test and QC routines before shipping. But I’m always impressed when talking to John, who gave me a sneak preview of an absolutely amazing control surface they’ll unveil later in the year. I can’t say more about it, except everyone’s definitely gonna want one. John is also a major evangelist for the FPGA (field programmable gate array) Crystal Core technology used in Fairlight’s Dream II workstation, that puts the capacity for hundreds of I/Os on a PCI card. [For more info, see the October 2006 Mix “Technology Spotlight” article ]. John is also enthused about AMD and Intel’s interest in supporting daughter-card FPGA PC accellerators for motherboards with dual-Opteron chip slots or using Intel’s Geneseo PCIe busing.

Offering opportunities for great wine tasting, breathtaking landscapes, interesting animal encounters and a couple thoroughly entertaining manufacturer visits, my Aussie holiday was splendid. The 14-hour flight back to SF was no picnic, but at least the idea of arriving back in the states three hours before we took off that morning was pretty cool.

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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