Click here to check out our Day 1 Podcast from NAB 2007 with interviews from NARAS, Google, Korg, Holophone, Aphex and The Village’s Jeff Greenberg

Yesterday Apple announced huge Final Cut Pro Suite upgrades, including Soundtrack Pro 2. The new Final Cut Studio 2 production bundle includes Final Cut Pro 6, which introduces Apple’s ProRes 422 format for uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes; Motion 3’s intuitive 3D environment; Compressor 3 batch encoding; DVD Studio Pro 4.2 for SD/HD DVD authoring; and Soundtrack Pro 2 with new tools for multitrack editing, surround mixing and conforming sound to picture. Final Cut Studio 2 also introduces “Color,” a pro color grading and finishing application.

But you want to know about audio, right?… the Final Cut Studio 2 audio editing/mixing/processing app is now equipped with powerful new multitrack editing and recording tools and a streamlined interface. It also debuts a very cool spotting display that lets editors precisely align effects and dialog with picture. Advanced take management tools enable editors to quickly combine pieces of the best takes to craft seamless performances, and a new Conform tool lets users synchronize and track changes between picture and sound editorial.

Stereo and surround mixing tools enable users to create 5.1 and stereo mixes in the same project. The bundle also comes with a royalty-free library of more than 5,000 Foley and sound effects, and 1,000 surround SFX and multichannel music tracks. Soundtrack Pro 2 has more than 50 audio effect plug-ins-many in true surround, including the Space Designer convolution reverb. Among its other ther surround enhancements are: discrete 5.1 mixing, busing, routing and an innovative surround panner for dynamically moving sounds within the surround field.

Just got back from visiting the ultra-swanky Studio at the Palms. I came down here to get the scoop for a cover story last year, right as they were putting the finishing touches on the room, and it was great to see the studio up and running. But the big news is, the Pearl is finally open. This super-sweet 80-million dollar 2,500-seat concert venue is designed by SIA Acoustics, features 60 JBL VerTec Series loudspeakers and Digidesign VENUE Series digital mixing consoles with 96-channel capacity, scene recall and automation. Additionally, the room is hard-wired to The Studio, so artists to create a live album without additional venue set-up. (What a killer one-stop shop! We got the scoop on one pop star who’s coming in for three days to do a big live album-let’s just say he’s “Idol-ized” by many…) So far, Evanescence and Wolfmother have played shows here; Tom Kenny will be at the Gwen Stefani show this Sat, “researching” our upcoming cover story. (Soooo jealous!) The Palms also inked an exclusive deal with iTunes-look for “Live from Las Vegas” concert series popping up on iTunes during the coming weeks-keep your eye out…

Jonathan and Michael Godfrey from Holophone have an RV in their booth! Not just any RV (painted black with their logos all over it), but an RV wired for surround inside. The back of the rig was set up with a Final Cut Pro editing station and full surround audio playback making it a fully immersive vacation experience. After the show, the whole setup will be cruising around North America evangalizing their products to the masses hungry for surround recording gear. In other news, they just announced that their H4 SuperMini camera mountable surround mic will now encode using the Dolby Pro Logic II (DLP II) format.

Will Eggleston over at the Genelec booth in the South hall had great news today. Their speaker management software is now avaialble for Mac and PC. The software lets you run their AutoCal room correction and control up to 25 8200 speakers and 5 7200 series subs via standard Cat5.

Sony bowed the ECM-680S Stereo shotgun microphone at the show today. It is both a stereo or traditional mono mic. What’s cool is that if one side of the stereo feed goes out, the mic adjusts and sends the output as plain mono making for worry free recording. It is feather light and comes with a clip, foam for the clip and dedicated cable. Sony was also showing their Digital Wireless Mic system that will be available by year’s end. The system delivers 48k/24-bit audio with no compander so quality is vastly improved. It can also fit more channels into the picture than a traditional analog wireless rig.

They may not be a household name in the wireless world, but Avlex (U.S. distributor of Mipro) has a hot digital system out and shipping, the ACT-81 single-channel and ACT-82 dual-channel. At roughly $3500 a channel, the system is ceratinly competitively priced, and its feature set is astounding. The range is 20 to 20k Hz, 24-bit, mic modeling, 100-bank frequency scans, and secure encryption with no change in audio quality. The security feature is hot right now, we’re told. Oh, and the Li-polymer battery is extremely lightweight and said to operate up to nine hours. That should be enough for just about any set…

Sunday was an interesting day at the show, even though the floor wasn’t officially open. At an Avid press event, Digidesign unveiled their latest products; two high-end speakers designed in collaboration with PMC. The RM1 is a 5.5-inch two-way ($1249 each) amped at 80w/50w while the RM2 is a 6.7-inch two-way ($1749 each) amped at 100w/50w. Both monitors feature PMC‘s Advanced Transmission Line technology tailoring the response through cabinet design and onboard DSP taking care of crossover duties, speaker positioning EQ settings, trim level, and bass port emulation. I/O is either balanced analog (XLR), AES (44.1, 48, 88.2, 96 kHz), AES (RJ-45) and AES digital THRU (RJ-45). The RM1s are surprisingly small looking like a desktop speaker while the RM2s are what you‘d expect on a console as a nearfield. They are shipping now and Mix will have a review asap.