I was having a pretty good San Francisco audio Monday. The Bay Bridge had reopened, the temps were unseasonably warm, and I had just finished a nice dinner with Michael Romanowski, the Bay Area mastering engineer who will be featured on the December cover. Then I got home, opened my email and learned that Scott Singer had passed away. Damn.

Scott was a true San Francisco character. A studio owner of 24 years, a four-time Emmy winner, a composer, bandleader, opera fan, monster piano player, environmentalist. A big guy with a zest for life and an ever-present smile. A true man about town. He was a longtime friend of Mix, going back to the ‘80s. About a year back I had the pleasure of hanging with him at Singer Productions, where he showed off his Oram console and Oram monitors, took me through all his prized analog gear, and ended up belting out Billy Joel tunes at the baby grand. There’s a whole crew from last year’s AES convention that will remember his Universal Audio party.

Scott lived for music and sound, and he lived life to the fullest. San Francisco is a little quieter today without him. Fare thee well, Scott.

It seems that uncompressed delivery of singles and records is gaining momentum as more titles become available. Just ran into Norman Chesky of HD Tracks, and the company just signed a deal with Universal for content. $15.98 a record, $2.49 a track. Check it out. Not much more for a song as it should be heard.

API threw quite a 40th anniversary bash last night, locking out the Roseland Ballroom and flying in Sonny Landreth as the house band. Great food, monster playing, and this old hippie got to see Bob Weir join the band for “Maggie’s Farm” and “Little Red Rooster.” Brought back some fond memories of Dead tours. And Sonny can play. Smokin’.

Once again, the Recording Academy put on a stellar Grammy Soundtable, their 26th in conjunction with AES. This time around, the topic was Mixing With Attitude, and P&E Wing exec director Maureen Droney matched up three very unique personalities, each at the top of their game, then brought in Nile Rodgers to moderate and keep them in line. Chris Lord-Alge started off by describing his setup, which hasn’t changed in years and has been moved to his new facility, Mix L.A. He’s at an SSL 4000 E Series with 48-track Sony digital tape machine. He’ll keep it up, he says, as long as he can find tape. Chuck Ainlay out of Backstage in Nashville sits at an SSL 9000J and uses Nuendo, sometimes working with Mark Knopfler in London on his Neve 88r or API, with an EMI Red 4 tube desk, which he jokingly called the “most ridiculous bass DI ever!” Then Tony Maserati said he has no real console in his setup, though he makes use of numerous summing sources, including a 16-channel Chandler, Dangerous 2-bus and a Neve sidecar.

But the fun began when they started to describe their styles and played bback some tracks. Chcuck picked LeeAnn Womack’s “Solitary Thinking,” a lonesome track with beautiful vocal and an open room sound that Chuck says comes from great playing in a relatively small, dead room at Soundstage. Chris picked Green Day’s “East Jesus Nowhere,” a slammin’ track that he confessed he mixed “balls to the wall” in the 45 minutes before the band came in. Tony cut in and said, “45 minutes! The track I’m playing took seven days!” Big laughs, but then he went on to explain that the Keri Hilson song featuring Akon came in at 175 tracks, and the producer kept sending more from L.A. over the Internet. His computer, he said, was “chugging and puffing.”

A couple commonalities emerged. All three try not to listen to a rough until they’ve already looked for the magic in a track. All three wanted to own their work, their contributions, and keep copies in their own vaults, for the inevitable call six months later when the label or artist can’t find what they’re looking for. And there was a quite funny moment at the end, when Bob Clearmountain got up to ask the first question: ” Do you guys like working with the treble best, the lows, or just hanging with the mids?” The panelists never really answered the question, instead applauding Clearmountain, whom they each said was one of their biggest influences. A great hour and a half all around.

Just ran into Russ Paul, know as Les Jr. in some circles. He spent yesterday walking the floor and running into old friends…Eddie Kramer, Phil Ramone, heck, everybody here seemed to know Les and want to share a story. Today Russ wanted to see Eveanna Manley, so we made a beeline to her booth and they shared a big hug. This afternoon at the TEC Awards, when the tribute to Les takes place…well, it will be something special.

Yamaha Commercial has pulled a 53-foot trailer into the main hall, representing their latest effort to take training and education to the people where they live. Based out of Nashville and aimed primarily at the house of worship market, the new vehicle is double expansion and quite spacious with five networked stations representing each of the console line, the main attraction when you walk in being the PM5D front and center. An additional roomy space in the rear is set up for clinc-style training. Look for it in a town near you.

API kicked off their second-day press conference with an appearance by Bob Weir (Grateful Dead, Ratdog), who just purchased a Vision console for his home studio. Weir told the crowd that he first encountered the API name nearly 40 years ago, when he and the Dead went into a San Francisco studio to record “American Beauty.” Now he’s back full circle and “pleased as punch,” thinking that”he might buy another.” Weir was followed by the head of the MP&E department at Berklee College of Music, which just purchased three Legacy Plus boards, calling it the “most musical console on Earth, with the definitive tools that students need.” The company was also showing off the 1608, with Grammy-winning engineer Vance Powell doing demos. And they had a new 500 Series compressor on display, the 527. Now it’s on to their 40th-anniversary bash tonight at the Roseland Ballroom. Hottest ticket at the show, with Sonny Landreth as the house band and a scheduled guest appearance by Mr. Weir himself. Should be fun!

We scheduled it, we developed a new type of programming and we even had a couple of large sound companies ready to take the stages. But now we have to cancel MixLive @ LDI this November. It was not an easy decision, and not one that we wanted to make. MixLive, formerly ET Live, provides the one chance for large sound reinforcement companies to strut their stuff on a relatively even playing field, reaching their customers directly from an open-air setup in Orlando. It is the only event of its kind in the industry and has been an important component of LDI over the past decade.

Unfortunately, this year has been tough economically for all involved. Once we realized that we could not host an event at the level we—and our sponsors and audience—expected, we decided to cancel.

MixLive is a separate entity from LDI, the premier lighting, staging and design conference, though both are owned by Penton Media. LDI maintains a robust audio program within the convention center, and the convention is coming off a record year in Las Vegas in 2008. The event will be held November 17-22 in Orlando. For those attending LDI with the intention of seeing large-scale concert sound systems in the parking lot, we offer our regrets. But we will see you next year in Las Vegas.

I might as well be direct in my first post: It’s tough out there, no question about it. The fact that Wall Street was up four (!) straight days last week made front-page news, but it doesn’t change the fact that people are being laid off across all economic sectors and travel and retail are hemorrhaging. Nobody knows this better than we in the media. The Rocky Mountain News closure was soon followed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (now online only). The Washington Post may be up for bid, and the rumors swirl about an employee buyback of my hometown San Francisco Chronicle. Like I said, it’s tough out there…

But I didn’t want to kick off “Things We Hear” with down news. There’s enough of that everywhere you turn. So I asked myself the obvious: Who’s making money?

Console makers, it turns out. Mid- to large-format. While I’m sure there are hundreds of 08-09 success and survival stories out there in the recording industry at large, recent news out of Solid State Logic, Fairlight, Euphonix and API tell us something about the state of console/control and the dynamics of emerging markets.

Phil Wagner, president of SSL, was up in the Bay Area a month or so back. His company was up 12% in 2008 and keeping it up in the first quarter. It wasn’t that long ago that SSL was pretty much a large-format console maker and Wagner was outfitting L.A. and points East with 9000 J and K Series boards. The industry changed (though there always seems to be a market for large consoles; just a shrinking one), and after a couple of years of hard times, Peter Gabriel and David Engelke purchased the company, Piers Plaskitt returned, and Wagner became head of U.S. operations. Since then, the company has entered the video and workflow markets, split off its channel strip, found homes for the C100, 200 and 300, struck dealer deals with Guitar Center Pro, released the popular AWS900 and combined it all in Duality, an analog/digital hybrid that has found a home in schools and top studios. Over breakfast, Phil told me about two new C200s that were about to go into two going into high-def trucks being built at the Sony facility in San Jose. One for the Latter Day Saints (who also purchased two C300s), the other for Mansion Media.

Over the past 25 years, Wagner has probably sold more big consoles to more big music studios than anyone else in the industry. He loves tradition, he loves music, he loves the 9000 at Record Plant. But of late he’s been telling all who will listen that the future of music is tied to picture. He’s even written about it. Not in a music video way, or even a concert DVD way. What’s new this time, he says, is that people are consuming music in different ways—sharing through Facebook, at their computers, straight to their phones . We talked about music piped into movie theaters, houses of worship, large-scale events. The demand is there for music and media, whether on a large scale or a small. Either way, production is tied to picture.



Fairlight has always believed in sound tied to picture, though even they admit that they’ve had to reintroduce themselves to the U.S. market a few too many times and despite real investment in high technology and products that blaze, they’ve never really been able to crack the music market. They’ve done gangbusters in Asia, fueled by a longstanding relationship with leading Japanese broadcaster NHK, and done well in Europe with post and broadcast. Now they’re back in Hollywood and setting up a North America dealer network headed by Audio Agent. Business was up double digits in 2008.

I met up with CEO John Lancken and Xynergi evangelist (and two-time British Academy Award winner) Cliff Jones for a run-through of the new HD3D system, aimed at cinema, broadcast, post, gaming…you get the idea. We have videos up on mixonline.com about the high-def video recorder/player that comes with it, the 3D panner (customizable, but think 7.1 manipulation of sound sources, with top-center and top-rear, to give height), the 280 channels with independent effects. Lancken has long wanted an audio product to match the quantum leaps made in 3D video technology, and by combining the extreme processing speed of FPGA technology with the creative toolset for re-recording mixers, he may now have it. The video alone is worth the price of admission. The no-render-time speed is phenomenal. You’ll be seeing more of this.

Meanwhile, I haven’t had a formal sitdown with Euphonix since the AES show, but the company’s most recent release reported 2008 as their best year in the last 10, along with a move to new corporate HQ in Mountain View, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley. Here’s a company that virtually invented the workstation controller with its hybrid CS3000 (I can remember them showing a CS3000, with a Fairlight MFX3 dropped in the center section; it even made a Mix cover at Waves in L.A.), but the business has never come easy. It appears that the System 5 and its EuCon architecture, a surge in broadcast sales, and the release of the Artist Series of controllers has brought a new dynamism to the company. More later.

And finally, API. A great company, standing at the head of the never-say-die analog contingent that brings life and soul to our little corner of high technology. They’ve put out a channel strip, continued to build large-format Visions (this year: U of Michigan, Middle Tennessee State University, commercial studio in Europe to be announced next week at MusikMesse) and hit a home run with the release of the 1608, certainly affordable to many an independent producer/engineer at $50k. Read our 1608 review.



The company doesn’t generally like to publicize how many 1608s have been sold, though I’m not entirely sure why. I talked briefly with head of sales Dan Zimbelman, me from the office and he at his Maryland restaurant/bar/inn, where he was inventing a new cocktail for the menu (Jameson’s whiskey, a wisp of sweet vermouth and the juice of a blood-red orange; he’s calling it The Pope’s Revenge). He has told me before that the first 20 were sold before manufacturing began, and the next 20 were presold while the first 20 were shipping. Now, he says, with a wink and a nod, they’re “approaching 100” sold. And they were used on recent projects by The Fray, the Killers and Maroon 5.

There’s a lot of reasons that console makers can grow in a rough economy, and conversely have a tough time when the bigger picture is solid. Dan Zimbelman summed it up nicely, saying that “consoles are at the center of everything we do, and when you buy one you want to stick with it. We can’t do upgrades every year; but we can offer them tremendous value for the money.”

Please feel free to comment and send along your success stories!

Spencer Nilsen just dropped by the booth. You may know him from such films as Reanimator 3000…but we know him from heading up Ex’pression College across the bay. Spencer, I hear a lot of manufacturers talking about education these days. What’s going on?

Thank you, Tom! But before I talk about that, I want to say what a fantastic time we had last night at the TEC Awards. You throw one hell of a party and the T-Bone Burnett tribute was legandary…Cheers! But let’s get back to the topic of education.

You’re right, there is a lot of discussion about ed. around the show floor, partly because there are so many advanced technologies pushing the industry to new heights, that require broader, deeper skill-sets. Like you and your readers, I’ve watched the audio industry morph into a new, multi-headed hybrid of media creation. The Ex’pression College graduates from our Sound Arts BA degree program are doing as much work with video as they are with audio, because the studios and production companies that hire them are having to expand their offerings to stay competitive. This is actually great news, because it creates a fertile landscape for thinking and producing outside the box for clients. They can record audio, edit video & titles, create podcasts, launch websites, new products, etc. and work with one small but efficient production company for ALL MEDIA needs. Pretty cool time to be entering the industry!