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.

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.

We get a lot of odd items in the mail at our offices here, but the other day we were intrigued by the arrival of a rather strange parcel. Within the ordinary-looking outer packaging was an unmarked black box (somewhat reminiscent of the black monolith from Kubrick’s 2001—A Space Odyssey) and within that was a Mackie Onyx 820i analog mixer with FireWire interfacing, a copy of Pro Tools M-Powered software, a DVD marked “Insert Me” and a page of instructions printed using ransom note–style cut-out letters. The outside of the mixer’s box touts a large notice saying it’s compatible with Pro Tools M-Powered in large letters with the words “and Logic, SONAR, Cubase, etc.” listed beneath in smaller type.

In true Mackoid tradition, the DVD had a short video clip of a Mackie employee with an altered voice and wearing a stocking over his face to conceal his identity. The mystery spokesperson explains a few people were chosen to receive this “top-secret” parcel and then goes to play part of a Pro Tools session through the 820i. More mysterious perhaps was the other file on the DVD—an installer for the Mackie Universal Driver Version 1 that would let Mackie products act as an audio interface/front end for Pro Tools M-Powered software. If so, it’s a lot of impact for a relatively few lines of code.

Assuming this isn’t simply a case of reverse-engineering on Mackie’s part, this development is significant for several reasons. Up until this point, Digidesign has been exceedingly protective about its hardware, with the only sanctioned deal being sister company M-Audio gear working with the specially branded Pro Tools M-Powered. So this is either the first step (admittedly, a small step and not a leap) toward easing Digidesign’s “software curtain” on Pro Tools hardware, or simply opening the market somewhat on the M-Powered side to bring more users into the Pro Tools fold. And once there, some of these users would, in theory, eventually upgrade to Pro Tools LE or a full-bore Pro Tools HD system, making it a win on Digidesign’s part.

Yet so far, other than a mysterious note, a new FireWire-enabled mixer and a driver with a lot of potential, there are many questions and few answers. However, more information should surely come on September 9—Mackie’s “official” launch date for the 820i. But one thing is for sure: This story ain’t over yet.

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!

In Things We Hear, Mix editorial director Tom Kenny reports weekly from

inside the professional audio industry—in-studio, from the concert floor, on

the dub stage. The changes taking place in technology, production and

distribution are happening at a dizzying pace, and in Things We Hear, we’ll

provide the context that charts those changes and brings the news back

home. Stay tuned!