- Waring and Bill making a mess during set-up…
Ready for the masses...
Your beautiful hosts: Dan, Richard, Bill and Waring
All bottles were filled with water. Allegedly.
I don’t want this to turn into an Oscars speech where it’s a credit roll of notables. but I’d like to acknowledge a few people I was delsighted to see there. I had a great chat with Daniel Grubac of DV2 in France who always shames me with his infintely better English than my French will ever be, and some interesting conversations with John Newsham of Funktion One about ambisonics.
As I am sure many of you know, F1 love a bit of boundary pushing as far as the clubbing experience goes, not only by ensuring that clubbers are getting faithful sound, (using the best amps and processing of course, cough cough ;)) but by also exploring more emmersive environments such as multichannel surround sound installations. We talked about using the DC1048 as a centre for the production of 8 channels of surround information derived from a stereo source, with all the various combinations of LL, RR, LR, L-R, L+R being swooshed about (technical term) a circle of speakers.
It was also great to see Nagao san and all our friends from Otaritec in Tokyo – I mention Nagao san in particular as he treated me like visiting royalty when I was over there a few years ago (see the Kate Middleton connection now?) and I’d not seen him since.
Peter Trojkovic (of CMI Australia) turned up for a catch-up from Melbourne on the Thursday I think, and it was good to hear about things progressing down under. We were all limbering up for the Atlantic Audio party that afternoon as crates of beer and other assorted drinks started to arrive after lunchtime.
Spot the difference (apart from Viktor) - that'll be the Becks in the next one.
Delivery number one (it's hard to hide this sort of thing on a stand)...
After a brief soujourn by myself, Richard and Mr. Clarke to the L-Acoustics stand to see Stuart Down (and maybe the promise of some free champagne – that’s what drew Terry over, like a moth to the flame ;)), the Atlantic Audio evening party got underway in some style. As ever, they put on a great event which always attracts a big crowd and is not only a very relaxed and enjoyable affair, but also a great way to meet up and discuss things in a less formal atmosphere. By ”less formal” I obviously mean ”drunken”…
It's like extra gravity - the smell of free food and the mention of free alcohol 🙂
This year I am sad to report we have no animal molestation stories to relate, as DAS Audio were attempting to steal some of the anniversary thunder that was rolling about (Martin Audio were celebrating their 40th year) by staging a party of their own in a venue across town which all of the xta team decamped to early on in the evening (apart from myself, having made arrangements for a meeting – doesn’t that make me sound important?). Reports back from this were of a second-to-none extravaganza featuring Manowar, who incorporated the party into their tour schedule and scared the very vol-au-vents out of peoples’ hands with the volume, apparently 😉
I couldn’t sign off without posting a picture of the most striking bit of kit I saw on my travels to Hall 5.1 – that of all things esoteric recoding and mastering. I would like to tell you exactly what this was, but I can only guess at an EQ of some sort. I was a little scared to approach without applying SPF 50 – but it did look very interesting…
Anyone know who makes this monster? All the staff were wearing SPF 50 during demos...
And finally to this year’s sad comedy moment. I’ll leave you with a picture of Gobo the Clown. Nuff said I think!
Appearing in a town near you soon...
