All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols.
All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not
be reproduced by any method without written permission.
I Have Nothing To Say
by Roger Nichols
I am still recovering from the brain tumor I must have received from the
heavy use of my cellular phone last month. It was nice of them to use the
900 mHz band which just happens to be the resonant frequency of the brain.
Have you ever noticed how your ear gets a little hot when you talk for too
long? Is it coming from the phone getting hot or from your brain getting
hot? Technology can bite back if you are not careful.
When I went to Cuba last month, I was outfitted like the hi-tech road warrior
I have always wanted to be. I think I must have looked like one of those
guys on a street corner in New York City who opens his trench coat to display
stolen kitchenware he wants you to buy. I had my cell-phone, 800 beeper,
Mac laptop with internal modem, cordless razor, HP palmtop for phone numbers,
battery operated color printer, radiation monitor, electric toothbrush,
pocket camera, portable DAT recorder, MiniDisc recorder, scanner, Ham radio,
air band transceiver, altimeter/ depth gauge watch, and portable GPS receiver
with moving map display (I had to see if it included Cuba. It did.) Oh yes,
and one pair of underwear because that is all I had room for. Most of the
toys were not charged up because they have been sitting around waiting for
a good excuse to be used.
I was sort of hoping that the C-5A transport that we traveled on would have
a massive electrical failure, losing all navigation and communication. Then
I could say, "You can borrow my GPS, altimeter watch and air band radio
if you let me drive", but that never happened. Our flight down was
delayed six hours, however, because of a failure of one of the three INS
(Inertial Navigation System) computers. My hopes raised. I performed a radio
check with the airport tower and got the current barometric pressure to
set into my altimeter watch.
It turned out that we were staying on a cruise ship that was docked at Guantanamo
for use by the military for R & R. We checked into our cabins and I
unpacked all of my electrical goodies so that I could charge them up to
prepare for the next possible emergency. A sticker by one of the wall outlets
stated "WARNING 110 VOLTS DC". Your kidding! We were nowhere near
D.C. Foiled again!
I ended up using nothing I took with me, well, except for the electric razor
to shave the hair off my tongue after an all night party with the band and
crew. I think that somehow technology knows you shouldn't be using it and
dares you to accomplish anything. Recently I had a power outage at home
and my wife Connie had a song idea. No studio, no tape recorder (the cassette
batteries weren't charged up), no MIDI sequencer, no synthesizer, nothing.
Later on during the day, I saw her sitting at the acoustic piano (remember
those) and writing here ideas on staff paper with a pencil. I heard an expletive
and walked over to see that she had just written four bars of music on the
wrong ledger line. I said, "Where's your UNDO key?" She looked
up at me, smiled, and proceeded to use the eraser on the other end of the
pencil.
Cool New Stuff To Play With.
Remember Valley Audio? They made the Kepex and Gain Brain. They are back
with a vengeance. They have a new digital domain stereo dynamics processor
called the DynaMap that will blow your socks off. The limiting sounds good,
the gate sounds good, the de-esser soundssssss good. The most impressive
part of the package is that the chassis is made of Stainless Steel. It looks
like a rack mount DeLorean. I had to run out and buy some new gear to fill
up my rack so I would have to let the DynaMap sit on top out in the open.
Coffee cup rings wipe right off!
The DynaMap has some pretty cool modes including the "Enhanced Compressor"
that lets you mix back some of the original signal into the compressor output
so that you can compress the main part of the sound while letting the peaks
stick through untouched. Doing things like that on the console was always
hard to do and almost impossible to repeat for remixes. It is much easier
when all of the parameters are internal and self contained.
The basic unit is digital in and out only. 20 bit analog converters are
optional. If you have them, you can use the analog input as the key input.
You can also mix the analog and digital inputs together if you want to.
I will be doing a full review, but I wanted to let you know so you could
check it out at the AES show.
Speaking Of The AES Show
Like that segue? At the AES show I will be busy as a one armed paper hanger.
I will be spilling my guts about archiving old tapes on one of the AES panels,
doing some demos in the Yamaha room (the 02R and free food made me say yes),
presenting a Tech Award with Donald Fagen Friday night, and handing out
blurbs about my new company, Digital Atomics, and reviewing this year's
hot dogs in the AES lunch area.
Digital Atomics strives to be 5ms ahead of its time, which is pretty easy
now that they have broken the time barrier. Because of our Gear Slut tendencies,
we will be showing the ultimate Gear Slut device known to Man, the Digital
Atomics Rubidium Clock. This Master Clock will supply 44100.000000 Hz and
48000.000000 Hz to an accuracy of one minute in 10,000 years with a jitter
figure in the single digit picosecond range. (For those of you from LA,
Pico runs parallel to Olympic). This unit is being made for Digital Atomics
by Music Sciences Inc. with the Rubidium parts supplied by a spy satellite
company. I could tell you the spy satellite company's name, but then I would
have to kill you.
I have strived for over a Decade to get studios to use house sync for all
video and digital operations. I have personally been tortured by trying
to synchronize digital audio that has been recorded in different studios,
on different days, and at different sample rates. If you used one frequency
to derive all of your word sync signals, and derived them from a highly
accurate time base, everything would always be able to lock to everything.
Even 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz. So check it out. It definitely has the Gear Sluts
Stamp of Approval, and as the Marx Brothers once said, "Rubidium up-up-up."
(I don't get it)
Archive This
The archiving business is doing great. Digital Atomics has come up with
a 24/48 track 20 bit optical disc recorder for archiving old multitrack
tapes. The MO disks are guaranteed to 99% data retention at 300 years. Watch
for my column in the September, 2295 issue of EQ to find out how it went.
Archiving two track stuff to MO or CD-R has been happening for awhile now,
but until fast high density MO drives became available, there was no way
to archive multitrack tapes without doing it two tracks at a time. Watch
the horizon, I bet Sony will show a 24/48 track optical recorder sooner
than you think.
That's All Folks
I am still trying to get ProTools 3.1 running on the Turbo 601 board. No
Luck. I'll keep trying. I have been cutting tons of CDs using Toast CD-DA
with the Revelations CDR-100 with not so much as a hiccup. I have been transferring
old Sony PCM-F1 tapes digitally using the Sony PCM-601 box (digital out)
through the Roland SRC-2 to remove emphasis and DC, then through the Z-Systems
SRC-1 to sample rate convert from 44.056 kHz to 44.1 kHz. Works like a charm.
I am going to cut this off now, I have to go and play with my new Vacuum
Desiccater and some liquid Nitrogen. You haven't seen my cat around here
recently, have you?
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