Podcasts about Ampex

American company that pioneered the use of videotape

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Best podcasts about Ampex

Latest podcast episodes about Ampex

Rarified Heir Podcast
Episode #: 228: Michael Rivers (Johnny Rivers)

Rarified Heir Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2025 106:59


Today on the Rarified Heir Podcast, we are talking to Michael Rivers, son of rock n' roll icon Johnny “Secret Agent Man” Rivers. Retired and in great health at age 82, Johnny Rivers has lived many lives as one of the groundbreaking musicians in the LA music scene since the early sixties. From session man to Sunset Strip headliner to #1 recording artist to the Monterey Pop Festival, record label owner and publishing mogul and beyond, Johnny Rivers has met and worked with everybody. From Alan Freed to Elvis Presley, from Roger Miller to PF Sloan, from Rickey Nelson to John Phillips, Johnny Rivers knew everyone. Michael was kind enough to join us as a guest today to give us a first-hand look into his father as both a dad and a celebrity. From having a charge account at the flagship Sunset Strip Tower Records to falling asleep in a booth at the ultra-exclusive On The Rox club above the famed Roxy nightclub on the Strip, Michael went with his dad everywhere. From recording sessions on Hollywood Blvd. to dinners at the Strip's most iconic vegetarian restaurant The Source, Michael was taken everywhere with his divorced dad, even places kids couldn't usually go. Not many of us remember the smell of the AMPEX tape machine at United Western Recorders in Hollywood like it was yesterday, but Michael can. We discuss how Johnny Rivers biggest hit, the theme song to the aforementioned “Secret Agent Man” came about to what it was like touring with his dad as first a tour manager and then a drummer in the 80s on Summer break. We also hear about how Johnny was a prudent businessman who bought property in Beverly Hills and Big Sur in the 1960s which he still owns to this day. If Gazzari's on the Sunset Strip, The Whisky A Go-Go and an unmade sequel to Easy Rider are up your alley, hang on, this episode is just around the corner. This is the Rarified Heir Podcast and everyone has a story.  

VINTAGE PEOPLE PODCAST
ME AND MY BIG IDEAS - Intervista a LEE FELSENSTEIN

VINTAGE PEOPLE PODCAST

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2025 113:13


Lee Felsenstein è un pioniere nell'ambito della tecnologia informatica, noto per il suo contributo alla creazione di uno dei primi computer, il SOL 20, e per la sua influenza sul movimento hacker degli anni '70 e '80. Oltre a essere un innovatore nel campo delle tecnologie è anche un pensatore e un attivista che ha promosso l'idea che la tecnologia debba essere al servizio delle persone, democratizzandola e rendendola accessibile. Il suo libro, Me and My Big Ideas, offre uno sguardo approfondito sulle sue esperienze e riflessioni. È una combinazione di memorie personali, aneddoti e concetti che hanno definito il suo approccio unico alla tecnologia e al cambiamento sociale. #leefelsenstein #meandmybigideas #interview #intervista DOVE ACQUISTARE IL LIBRO: https://felsensigns.com/books/ https://amzn.eu/d/8t5c8Sw CONTATTA IL MUSEO DEL CALCOLATORE DI PRATO: https://www.museodelcalcolatore.it/ LINK RAPIDI: 00:00 - Cold Open 01:38 - Presentazione Lee Felsenstein 02:20 - Perché il suo libro è importante 04:48 - Berkeley e il Free Speech Movement 26:03 - La nascita di Community Memory 52:40 - Ampex e Steve Jobs 1:15:27 - Homebrew Computer Club 1:28:35 - Qual'è l'eredità che l' Homebrew Computer Club ha lasciato all'industria 1:45:15 - Chiusura e ringraziamenti La LIVE dei Vintage People va in onda una volta al mese o anche di più, dipende da quanto ce la sentiamo calda. La sigla è stata concessa da Stefano Gargiulo: https://www.youtube.com/c/StefanoGargiulo_Compositore Seguiteci sui nostri podcast, tiktok, instagram. TELEGRAM: https://t.me/VNTGPPLNTWRK TWITCH: / https://www.twitch.tv/vintagepeoplenetwork INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/simone_atariteca/ https://www.instagram.com/mike_arcade/ https://www.instagram.com/quantigiga/ https://www.instagram.com/elderbarabba/ https://www.instagram.com/crazyjimmy3720/ FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/sim.guidi/ https://www.facebook.com/michele.colucci.733 https://www.facebook.com/piermarco.rosa THREADS: https://www.threads.net/@mikearcade.it SITI: https://www.ataritecapodcast.it https://mikearcade.it/ https://elderbarabba.blogspot.com https://www.museodelcalcolatore.it/ #VintagePeople #VP

Recording Studio Rockstars
RSR491 - Will Kennedy - Mixing Atmos with Matt Wallace at Studio Delux Immersive

Recording Studio Rockstars

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 31, 2025 122:13


Taking care of oneself enhances professional interactions! Will discussed his journey from a small town to the music industry, emphasizing the importance of mental health and self-care within the field. He addressed the balance between technology and artistry and explored adapting to evolving production landscapes, such as Atmos mixing. Will also shared his insights on career transitions, the impact of music budgets, and recording techniques. Get access to FREE mixing mini-course: https://MixMasterBundle.com My guest today is Will Kennedy, a platinum-selling producer, mixer, and recording engineer whose credits include U2 on Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence, O.A.R. on Live From Madison Square Garden, and OneRepublic's Oh My My. He's also known for his work on The 88's “At Least It Was Here,” the theme from the hit TV series Community. In 2021, Will teamed up with longtime collaborator Matt Wallace to create Studio Delux Immersive, a cutting-edge mixing studio at the legendary Sound City Center in Los Angeles. Together, they've mixed over 200 songs in Dolby Atmos and other immersive formats, bringing new depth to classics by Jason Mraz, Black Sabbath, The B-52s, and Selena Gomez, as well as enhancing new releases from Dave Matthews Band, Tank and the Bangas, Ondara, and Grouplove. Will's expertise in immersive audio and multi-genre mixing has established him as a pioneer in the field, and he continues to inspire a new generation of engineers with his innovative approach and technical skill. His personal studio in Los Angeles (Studio P) features an incredible array of modern digital equipment (Avid, Universal Audio, Waves, Soundtoys, Arturia, Korg), custom-built analog processing by JCF Audio, and vintage analog gear including a 1963 Vox AC 30 guitar amplifier, and restored 1973 Ampex 440-B reel-to-reel tape machine available for all mixing projects. Will was also one of the originators of the popular “Mix Notes From Hell” podcast, and was the music producer for the East African singing contest show “Maisha Superstar.” Thanks to Matt Boudreau at Working Class Audio for making our introduction! THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS! http://UltimateMixingMasterclass.com https://www.adam-audio.com https://www.native-instruments.com Use code ROCK10 to get 10% off! https://www.izotope.com Use code ROCK10 to get 10% off! https://roswellproaudio.com/ https://www.makebelievestudio.com/mbsi Get your MBSI plugin here! https://RecordingStudioRockstars.com/Academy  https://www.thetoyboxstudio.com/ Listen to this guest's discography on Apple Music and Spotify: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/immersive-mixes-by-matt-and-will/pl.u-Z6ppTR0zgV https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Gf5jNX58nyRQADahlZzOe?si=ef7c3bf4611e4707 If you love the podcast, then please leave a review: https://RSRockstars.com/Review CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE SHOW NOTES AT: https://RSRockstars.com/491

Press Play > Dedicated to All Things Reel-to-Reel
Press Play - The Podcast from Reel Resilience - Ep 26: In Conversation With Dan Labrie of Myriad Magnetic - Part 2

Press Play > Dedicated to All Things Reel-to-Reel

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Feb 16, 2024 22:21


In part 2 of this two-part podcast we talk to Dan Labrie owner of  Myriad Magnetic.Dan has been involved in professional analogue recording technology since 2010. He began his career replacing switches and capacitors on an Amek console at a recording studio in Detroit. As a result of  working for analogue tape pioneer Mike Spitz, who owned ATR Services and the tape manufacturer ATR Magnetics, he has gained valuable experience in, not just the machines, but also  in the tape they record and play.Support the show

Milk Crates and Turntables. A Music Discussion Podcast
Ep. 124 - Exploring Rock "Did You Know's", 80's Classic Movies Trivia and Name That Lyric!

Milk Crates and Turntables. A Music Discussion Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 17, 2023 124:36 Transcription Available


Who knew that a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony could be so captivating? Buckle up and join us in our latest episode as we look back at these remarkable moments and more.We've got a treat for all you music lovers out there! Let's dive into the captivating world of legendary bands - Rush and the Beatles. Hear our musings on Eddie Lee's autobiography and our thoughts on a possible reunion with Alex, minus Neil. And that's not all! We'll be exploring the Beatles' recent single and an intriguing discussion on the technology behind its creation. Plus, we'll uncover the profound impact of Paul McCartney's song 'All You Did Was Yesterday'.This journey doesn't stop here! Prepare yourself for a rollercoaster ride of emotions as we traverse from the joy of birthday songs to the dark humor of the show Trailer Park Boys. We'll share the joy of recording music with friends, the history of Ampex, and the evolution of cassette tapes. We'll even share a personal tale of my brother's visit while I was stationed at Mathery F West base in Sacramento. So, do not miss out on this intriguing conversation, filled with humor, nostalgia, and plenty of music trivia.

Bubbles Mushrooms Podcast
Ep091: The Day of Weird Fake Boners

Bubbles Mushrooms Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2023 59:22


BM. Episode 91. Our number 1 fan Brian is back so we'll totally understand if you shut the episode off right now. Luke and Brian finally hash out why he uses Edward's Iomega Jaz drive disc to transfer analog data to Ampex reel tape to listen to our program live in his 3D printer studio. Thankfully he's finally been bullied into joining a premium streaming service so he can throw that ancient USB stick right into the trash and join us all here in the new millennium! We actually have TWO viewer emails to read this week which is awesome. The first one is from Jeff asking about pubic hair. The second is from Renee asking about dead people. Thank you both - viewer emails make our Sundays fun! On the way over to BM Studios, passing by the most romantic place in the universe, Brian wonders if the show could possibly bond together in holy matrimony but it turns out none of us want to do that. We're all pretty happy with our current matrimony. While Jenn didn't even bring cookies or anything, Katie is dressed up head-to-toe in her TMNT Raphael costume, we go ahead and double check the Future Calendar and find out that it's not Christmas and Brian brought gifts for us anyway! This is why Brian is our NUMBER ONE FAN! Seriously though, it's Halloween and were about to get spooky as crap.. with some FMK's. Would you marry Zuul or Medusa? Have you ever had 'special thoughts' about Anne Ramsey? Edward likes the gigantic lady from Resident Evil, Brian likes the gigantic man from Type O Negative, Katie and Luke like a gigantic mythical creature that lives in Loch Ness and Jenn likes Steven Kings! Follow the show on Instagram or TikTok @bubbmush and email us at bubbmush@gmail.com - thanks to all of our listeners!

1001 Album Club
597 Butthole Surfers - Locust Abortion Technician

1001 Album Club

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 23, 2023 32:57


In the year 1987 Butthole Surfers released their third studio album. Sick and tired of being on the road and broke, the band opted to purchase an Ampex 8 track tape machine, two microphones, and recorded the entire album themselves in a two bedroom apartment they were renting in Winterville, GA. The limitations of the technology mixed with the freedom to record whenever they felt like (in between bong rips and massive doses of hallucinogens) made for one of the most influential and disturbing albums of the 80s. Lets talk Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technician!

Clovis Connections Podcast
Welcome back, the analog studio build is underway!

Clovis Connections Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2023 57:54


Created August 17, 2023Jay and Amy return after a protracted interval to explain and reveal some of the inner workings of building an analog recording studio with vintage vacuum tube equipment. Studio electronic noise issues explained and corrected, as well as mismatched impedance, loading by various amplifiers and interactions explained. How analog photography is similar to analog audio and sound recording. Debugging multi-track recording is underway. Overview of the podcast and rebuilding of the recording studio equipment. Vocal balance and audio compression is described. Rebuild complete of the mastering recorder, the Ampex 351 reel to reel, considered by many to be a “holy grail” of vacuum tube recording. Calibration test magnetic tape alignment and adjustments were made. Location and use of this mastering recorder is revealed. Debugging, testing, and arrangement of the multi-track capabilities of the Scully 280 eight track recorder has started. Discovered several Canadian musical groups that had recorded on the Scully, and master tapes were left with the recorder. Groups “The Happy Feeling” and possibly “The Guess Who” masters were found. Passive mixing of multi-tracks, track mixing, effects addition are explained. Discovery and rebuilding of a Langevin AL-4A mixer is detailed.Further information, photos, and history of the project is available at www.jayfisher.com Clovis/Curry County Chamber of Commerce (and the Clovis Sounds Studio): www.clovisnm.org Engineered by Amy Fisher

New Books in History
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

New Books in History

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2023 20:30


California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage. In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation. Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

New Books in Technology
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

New Books in Technology

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2023 20:30


California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage. In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation. Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

New Books in Economic and Business History
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

New Books in Economic and Business History

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2023 20:30


California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage. In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation. Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2023 20:30


California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage. In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation. Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

New Books in American Studies
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

New Books in American Studies

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2023 20:30


California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage. In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation. Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

New Books in the American West
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

New Books in the American West

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2023 20:30


California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage. In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation. Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west

ParaPower Mapping
Rosicrucian Road Trip: A Comparative Paranoid Analysis of "The Crying of Lot 49" & "Lodge 49" (Pt. I)

ParaPower Mapping

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2023 178:25


Welcome back to ParaPower Mapping. 2 EPs in 1 week? That's goddamn right! And it's the super-hefty first part of our comparative paranoid analysis of alchemical, Rosicrucian, & Pynchonian themes in Lodge 49 and The Crying of Lot 49. Support the show at: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping ... so I can cont. to churn out the many "paragnostic" parsings of beloved cult-ural classics planned for future episodes. And gain access to the Boston Brahmin Watch Premium Feed! In today's episode, we discuss: Further evidence that AMORC founder H. Spencer Lewis was a German asset or agent during WWI; we examine R. Swinburne Clymer's pamphlet Not Under the Rose Cross, the expose that accuses Lewis of being aligned with "Baphomet" & "Antichrist" Aleister Crowley, AMORC's authority of being derived from the OTO, & Lewis of plagiarizing such New Thought weirdos as Koresh Reed Teed, Crowley, theosophists like Dr. Franz Hartmann, etc.; we talk Lewis's status as a Wandering Bishop & his "radio church" the Pristine Church of the Rose Cross, reading some liturgy from one of his broadcast services; we talk San Francisco's KPO, which hosted Lewis & was founded by a Navy comms man + department store; Pat Robertson mentions; a comparison to Perry Mason & Aimee Simple McPherson; various AMORC newspaper story odds & ends—the possibility one of Thelemite Jack Parsons's relatives joined AMORC; WWII prophecies, AMORC trips to Tibet, etc.; the modern day Alchemy Museum at Rosicrucian Park; the curator's connections to Arizona U. Center for Consciousness Studies; AMORC alchemy lab graduate Frater Albertus, which connects to... the Whole Earth Catalog; we talk sus Stewart Brand; we explore the Catalog's origins in MK-Ultra-adjacent LSD research studies; Myron J. Stolaroff; Ampex; Ram Dass; Merry Pranksters; mass cultural programming; Whole Earth Truck Store; the Whole Earth Festival on UC Davis campus; Brand's involvement in booking venues for the "Acid Tests"; Trips Fest 1966; Buckminster Fuller; Dymaxion houses; callbacks to the French occultism EPs; Fuller's frequent gov't contracts; geodesic domes; his elite Boston brahmin ancestry (Margaret Fuller); Whole Earth Festival as Age of Aquarius Happening; LSD dealing; Int'l Foundation for Advanced Study; Stanford Research Institute; very sus fact that Wavy Gravy was yearly MC... From there, we dive into CoL49 & Lodge 49; a brief history of alchemy; Hellenistic, Arabic, & Medieval periods;early alchemist Bolos of Mendes, his invocation of his dead master, & "arcanum" scrolls in secret rooms; Raff's Jung & the Alchemical Imagination; "reliquum corpus" (NOT MUMMIES) in Lodge 49; Sovereign Protector = Masonic Grand Master; "Magnum Opus" / Great Work; crypto as alchemy; the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx's founder Harwood Fritz Merrill, a Christian Rosenkreutz-esque figure; the processes of the Great Work; running out of gas & dying batteries as divine intervention;... Plot structure & thematic symmetries b/w CoL49 & L49; alchemical pyramid fydration schemes; Hollander's heuristic & narrative structure device for Pynchon Notes; CoL49's allusions to the JFK assassination; Pierce Inverarity as spook?; comparisons b/w Inverarity & "Captain"; LSD subjectivity, gnosis, & paranoia; Dr. Hilarius; Orbis = Yoyodyne; Pierce's investment in aerospace; hints of Bohemian Grove & organized sexual transgression in Chapter 2 at Echo Courts; Book of the Dead; the Scope evoking Acid Tests; Mafia; Fangoso Lagoons & human skeleton black markets; a possible reference to the Hellfire Clubs in The Courier's Tragedy; the inner mysteries of L49; abyss; L. Marvin Metz = Metzger; working class pathos; WWI + WWII = Vietnam & Crimea in L49; subterranean rites in the Ancient Mysteries; death & rebirth underground; Hollow Earth; etc. MUSIC: | Lodge 49 - Theme | | Santana - Soul Sacrifice (Live at Woodstock) | | Ronnie Foster - Mystic Brew | | The Greg Foat Group - Dark is the Sun (Harpsichord Waltz | | The Shields - Nature Boy |

Let Me Know - Kiss Army Sweden Podcast
Turn on the Night: Stockholm 1988

Let Me Know - Kiss Army Sweden Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2023 110:53


Kiss i Sverige: Thomas Munter, Stockholm 1988 Vår tidsresa fortsätter med 1988, Stockholm. Thomas Munter berättar om sin första konsertupplevelse med Kiss, en resa han gjorde tillsammans med sina vänner till Stockholm. Nästan vid frontlinjen var han och upplevde en konsert med sina hjältar, trångt, svettigt och högljutt. Upplevelsen tog honom med storm, nu visste han att bandet kommer vara med honom livet ut. Såklart vart det en scarf med bandet, det var ju ett måste på 80-talet. Som vanligt blir det samtal om annat Kiss relaterat under färden... nu börjar resan!   Välkommen till tolfte avsnittet i vår serie ”Kiss i Sverige”, en resa som slutar i Dalhalla 2023. Detta har vi pratat om: Eric Carr, sacketter, Västerås, Alex Bergdahl, Crazy Nights, I'd had Enough (into the Fire), Creatures of the Night, Boppers, Noice, Okej, Hans Hatwig, Alive II, I Stole Your Love, småpyromaner, Lick It Up, Creatures of the Night, Keep Me Comin', sminkade KISS, Dance All Over Your Face, Animalize, Burn Bitch Burn, Heavens on Fire (live), LP skivor eller CD, Revenge (CD), Asylum, King of the Mountain, Paul och Genes låtar, Genes filmkarriär, Genes frisyr, Asylum turnén, KISS i Polar-studion, Crazy Crazy Nights, Gun's'Roses, Metallica, Monster, Whitesnake, Turn on the Night, axelvaddar, fluffhår, Eric Carr, radioaktivitet, Ampex band, Bruce Kulick, Kings of the Sun, Sven Hallberg, Jesse Wallin, Velvet, Yngwie Malmsteen, Love Gun, Rumpa, Fits Like A Glove, Heavens on Fire, Cold Gin, Black Diamond, Bang Bang You, No no no, Firehouse, I Was Made For Lovin' You, Tears are Falling, Reason to Live, ingen KISS logga, Albany 1990, I Love It Loud, Lick it Up, Love Hun, Detroit Rock City”, Merch, Scarfs, Paul T-shirt (official), T-Shirt 700 kr på Madison Square Garden, Gene plektrum, Reggae Kiss, bunkra Bootlegs LP, Kiss rum, Gene Simmons Gröna Lund, Do You Love Me?, Psycho Circus turné 1998, Dalhalla 2022, Thorsten Flink.

Il était une fois l'entrepreneur
Larry Ellison - Oracle: l'histoire d'un flambeur qui voulait dépasser Bill Gates

Il était une fois l'entrepreneur

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2023 14:35


Larry Ellison nait à New York le 17 août 1944. Il a été abandonné par ses parents et adopté. Son père adoptif est violent et le déteste. Heureusement, Larry a l'école. L'école où Larry se révèle brillant mais insolent. Il intègre l'Université de l'Illinois qu'il interrompt après la mort de sa mère adoptive. De ses années à l'université, Larry apprend à programmer et devient alors programmeur dans la Silicon Valley. Il enchaine les entreprises dont IBM et gagne de gros salaires. Grande maison, voiture de sport, voilier. Larry est un flambeur et les femmes ne restent pas longtemps. Il intègre dans les années 70, le fabricant d'électronique Ampex où il bosse sur un projet de base de données pour la CIA: Oracle. Il rencontre sur ce projet ses futurs partenaires, Bob Miner et Ed Oates. Larry tombe alors sur un article sur les bases de données et avec ses 2 nouveaux partenaires, il lance Software Development Laboratories. Il récupère la CIA sur le projet Oracle puis il rebaptise la société Oracle en 1982. Oracle devient un gros succès avec une entrée fulgurante en bourse en 1986. Larry est désormais riche mais son entrée en bourse est éclipsée par celle de Bill Gates qui devient son pire « ennemi » . En 1990, Oracle est en grave difficulté et Larry doit tout changer. Il tente de lancer un ordinateur mais c'est aussi un échec. La décennie suivante consacre Larry Ellison comme un des plus grand entrepreneur de la Silicon Valley avec des achats (Sun Microsystems) et un développement d'Oracle monstrueux. Désormais, 9e fortune mondiale, il se consacre à sa nouvelle passion: la conquête de l'océan. Chez Inspire Média, nous aidons les entreprises à lancer leur podcast: ==> https://inspire-media.fr/lancer-son-podcast-b2b/ Pour retrouver toutes les notes: ==> https://inspire-media.fr/larry-ellison-oracle-lhistoire-dun-flambeur-qui-voulait-depasser-bill-gates/

Subliminal Jihad
*PREVIEW* [#147] SUS PSYCHEDELICS INC, PART FOUR: American Eggception

Subliminal Jihad

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2023 13:47


For access to the full Sus Psychedelics, Inc. series and other premium episodes, subscribe to the Al-Wara' Frequency at patreon.com/subliminaljihad. PHASE FOUR: THE CLINICAL FINISH LINE Dr. Roland Griffiths and the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Study, using psychedelics to lower the fear response and confront death, the incredibly revealing 1979 “A Conversation on LSD” reunion video featuring Tim Leary, Humphrey Osmond, Oscar Janiger, Al Hubbard, Willis Harmon, Myron Stolaroff, and Laura Huxley, talking about Allen “indefatigable Zionist for drugs” Ginsberg, the necessity of “shaking things up” a bit, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate” by John Marks… The Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Crockers, Michael Pollan's “How To Change Your Mind” turning on the soccer moms, Leary's writings on Egg Intelligence and the Termite Queen Gaia Religion of the future, influencing the influencers… The Temple of the People in Halcyon, CA, Master Hilarion and the Theosophical roots of Silicon Valley, Steiner's warnings about Ahrimanic transhumanism, the Halcyon-raised Varian Brothers and Lytton Industries, moving into klystron & microwave tube production for the Pentagon, the rise of semiconductor manufacturing in the Valley, the evolutionary element known as Timothy Leary imagining himself as the reincarnation of G.I. Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley… Leo Zeff biographer/LSD pioneer Myron Stolaroff's substantial engineering career in Silicon Valley, getting mentored by Fred Terman at Stanford, Lewis Terman's psychedelic protege Betty Eisner, the International Foundation for Advanced Study, the revolutionary Ampex Model 300 tape recorder that took Hollywood by storm, Bing Crosby, the staggeringly innovative output of Ampex alumni including Atari, Pixar, Dreamworks, Apple, Dolby Surround Sound, Larry Ellison and the CIA-contracted Project Oracle, sus microdosing advocate Jim Fadiman's work at IFAS, SRI-ARC, and Esalen, taking shrooms with dirtbag groomer Ram Dass in Paris, Fadiman's gifted child cousin William James Siddis, the “not upsetting, but kind of opening” nudist romps at the Esalen baths, mycologist heir Alan Rockefeller, Col. James Ketchum's work at the Edgewood Arsenal and Haight Ashbury Free Clinic… The ayahuasca murder/lynching saga of Sebastian Woodruff, the LSD/ketamine-fueled, con artist guru-assisted death of Malibu eye surgeon Mark Sarwusch, and a brief look at shaman to the stars Mike “Zappy” Zapolin, who says ketamine is an evolutionary technology that will help us make contact with alien intelligences.

Press Play > Dedicated to All Things Reel-to-Reel
Press Play - The Podcast from Reel Resilience - Ep 24: In Conversation With Dan Labrie of Myriad Magnetic - Part 1

Press Play > Dedicated to All Things Reel-to-Reel

Play Episode Play 23 sec Highlight Listen Later Apr 29, 2023 22:38


In part 1 of this two-part podcast we talk to Dan Labrie owner of  Myriad Magnetic.Dan has been involved in professional analogue recording technology since 2010. He began his career replacing switches and capacitors on an Amek console at a recording studio in Detroit. As a result of  working for analogue tape pioneer Mike Spitz, who owned ATR Services and the tape manufacturer ATR Magnetics, he has gained valuable experience in, not just the machines, but also  in the tape they record and play.Support the show

The Holmes Archive of Electronic Music

Episode 85 Rain Music   Playlist Dean Evenson, “Thunder Intro” from Forest Rain (1993 Soundings of the Planet). 0:28 Ulrich Schnauss, “Molfsee” from Far Away Trains Passing By (2002 City Centre Offices). Written and produced by German artists Ulrich Schnauss. Schnauss is also a current member of Tangerine Dream, joining in 2014 and working with a renewed lineup since the death of original TG member Edgar Frose in 2015. 8:07 Ana Roxanne, “It's A Rainy Day On The Cosmic Shore” from ~ ~ ~ (2019 Leaving Records). Limited edition cassette release. Ana Roxanne is an intersex Southeast Asian musician born and raised in the Bay area. Some low-fi and hi-fi rain sounds and synthesis. 5:03 Paul Beaver and Bernard Krause, “Ragnarök” from Ragnarök (1969 Limelight). The duo's first album of electronic music following the release of their Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music (1968). They feature the Moog Modular synthesizer throughout and use it to synthesize the sounds of rain and thunder on this track. 3:22 Dean Evenson, “Thunder Streams” from Forest Rain (1993 Soundings of the Planet). Everson has been producing soothing electronic and flute sounds for many years, this example is from 1993 and includes rain and thunder effects. Native and silver flutes, keyboards, Dean Evenson; harp, Dudley Evenson; cello, Jonathan Kramer; guitar, Tim McHugh; percussion, Stuart Glasser. 6:20 Mystic Moods Orchestra, introductory sounds of the storm and the sea from One Stormy Night (1966 Phillips). 0:52 Steve Birchall, “Summer Memories” from Reality Gates (1973 Poseidon Electronic Music Studio). An obscure and interesting album of privately produced electronic music from the early 1970s. Billed as "electronic meditations by Steve Birchall." Equipment used was a potpourri of systems, effects, and an EMS VCS-3 synthesizer: Ampex mm 1000 16 track recorder; DBX noise reduction; Spectrasonics console; Studer A-80 recorder; Eventide Clockworks Instant Phaser; Cooper Time Cube; EMT reverb; Neumann VMS 70-SX68 computerized lathe; EMS VCS-3 (Putney) synthesizer. 10:49 Agostino Nirodh Fortini (Nirodh), “Aquatic Round” from Suoni Immaginari (2020 Black Sweat Records). Italian artist and release. Composed, recorded, and produced by Agostino Nirodh Fortini. 2:52 Mystic Moods Orchestra, “A Dream" from One Stormy Night (1966 Phillips). In the mid-sixties, recording engineer and sound recordist Brad Miller had the brilliant idea of combining the recorded sounds of nature with sweeping, orchestral renditions of popular music. This was a series of albums intended as background mood music for couples. The subtitle on the cover of One Stormy Night is “Whoever you are, you hold in your heart the memory of…One Stormy Night.” On the back cover, it says, “A spectacular thunderstorm, the sound of rain and romantic music combine to create One Stormy Night. The Mystic Moods Orchestra has many releases in to the early 1970s, at least two of which utilized the Moog Modular synthesizer. This album, however, is pure field recordings creatively combined with music. 4:16 Sanford Ponder, “Frontier” from Etosha - Private Music In The Land Of Dry Water (1985 Private Music). Arranged, produced, written, Fairlight CMI Synthesizer, Yamaha DX-7 Synthesizer, Roland GR-707 Synthesizer, Sanford Ponder; piano, Clyde Criner. 9:37 D. Emmanuel, “Rain Forest Music” from Rain Forest Music (1981 North Star Productions). Private recording of electronic and acoustical music with field recording sound effects. Composed, arranged, performed, recorded by, Yairi Acoustical Guitar, Effects, 3 Sequential Circuits Pro-One Synthesizers, Crumar organ, J. D. Emmanuel. Recorded at Emmanuel's studio in Houston. Tropical birds were recorded at Houston Zoo Tropical Bird Aviary. “Rain and surf, gifts from Mother Nature. This music can be used for deep relaxation, meditation and as background for massage and counseling.” 22:00 Thom Holmes, thunder record skip from a Mystic Moods Orchestra album. 0:55 Hans-Joachim Roedelius, “Regenmacher” from Durch Die Wüste (Through the Desert) (1978 Sky Records). Percussion, Bass, Keyboards, Hans-Joachim Roedelius; Synthesizer (Synthesizermelodie), Möbius; EMS Synthi, Percussion, Konrad Plank. Recorded and mixed with Konrad Plank in his studio in May 1976, small changes made in January 1978 prior to release. A German electronic composer and member of Cluster in this first solo album transitions to a period of acoustic music, but there are synths being used on this track. 6:36 Thom Holmes, rolling, distant thunder, field recording. 0:59 Yavomag, Rubikdice & Chilx, “Tokyo Rain” from The Ronin EP (2022 Yavomag, Rubikdice & Chilx). House music with a rainy vibe. 2:23 Thom Holmes, crack of thunder field recording.0:52 Dean Elliott And His Orchestra, “Rain” from Zounds! What Sounds! (1962 Capitol). A funny relic from the days when mixing sounds effects into music was a fresh idea. Very cleverly edited by Phil Kaye; Producer, John Palladino. 2:49 Thom Holmes, “Rain Drone” an alternate version and test for a track I later released called Requiem for the Rain (2016 not released). In this piece, I started with the sound of rainfall that I recorded and then processed it using the synthesizer component of MetaSynth to transform the raindrops and downpour into drones and harmonic points. All of the sounds in this work are derived from processing the sound of rain. 12:29 Thom Holmes, thunder, field recording. 1:15 Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, “Rain” from Blade Runner 2049 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)(2017 Epic). Cello, Simone Vitucci, Vocals, Tristan Schulze; Guitar, Owen Gurry; exotic instruments, Chas Smith; Musical Assistance, Cynthia Park; Soundtrack Album Produced By, Ashley Culp, Kayla Morrison, Michael Hodges; Synth Programming, Hans Zimmer; Sampling Team, Raul Vega; Digital Instruments Design, Mark Wherry; Synth Design, Howard Scarr; Vocals, Avi Kaplan. 2:26 Opening and closing messages voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. See my blog for the Bob Moog Foundation. For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.

Clovis Connections Podcast
Ampex 350 rebuild, locating and replacing an Ampex 3741 R2 power supply, death capacitor safety concern, new magnetic tape from ATR, studio musicians and testing, studio mains power supply

Clovis Connections Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 22, 2022 54:26


Amy and Jay Fisher discuss the restoration and operation of a 1950s-1960s high fidelity analog recording studio. 70 pieces of vintage electronic equipment need care and use to prevent degradation. Rebuilding the tape transport system of an Ampex 350 is detailed, including bearings, retaining pins, the use of heat in assembly and repair. Missing power supplies are identified, with online auctions, and online scams. Building a replica of an Ampex 3741R2 power supply is indicated. Nearby earthquake was experienced. The “death capacitor” purpose, operation, failure, replacement, and repair is described. Modern ATR magnetic tape technical details are shared. Requests for studio musicians and input are presented. Input mains power supply and conditioning is described as it relates to vacuum tube operation, with remedies being built with variable autotransformers and a master safety studio supply system.  Further information, photos, and history of the project is available at https://www.jayfisher.com/Fisher-Audio-Science.htmClovis/Curry County Chamber of Commerce (and the Clovis Sounds Studio): www.clovisnm.org  Engineered by Amy Fisher

The History of Computing
St Jude, Felsenstein, and Community Memory

The History of Computing

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2022 11:38


Lee Felsenstein went to the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s. He worked at the tape manufacturer Ampex, where Oracle was born out of before going back to Berkeley to finish his degree. He was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club, and as with so many inspired by the Altair S-100 bus, designed the Sol-20, arguably the first microcomputer that came with a built-in keyboard that could be hooked up to a television in 1976. The Apple II was introduced the following year. Adam Osborne was another of the Homebrew Computer Club regulars who wrote An Introduction to Microcomputers and sold his publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979. Flush with cash, he enlisted Felsenstein to help create another computer, which became the Osborne 1. The first commercial portable computer, although given that it weighed almost 25 pounds, is more appropriate to call a luggable computer. Before Felsensten built computers, though, he worked with a few others on a community computing project they called Community Memory.  Judith Milhon was an activist in the 1960s Civil Rights movement who helped organize marches and rallies and went to jail for civil disobedience. She moved to Ohio, where she met Efrem Lipkin, and as with many in what we might think of as the counterculture now, they moved to San Francisco in 1968. St Jude, as she became called learned to program in 1967 and ended up at the Berkeley Computer Company after the work on the Berkeley timesharing projects was commercialized. There, she met Pam Hardt at Project One.  Project One was a technological community built around an alternative high school founded by Ralph Scott. They brought together a number of non-profits to train people in various skills and as one might expect in the San Francisco area counterculture they had a mix of artists, craftspeople, filmmakers, and people with deep roots in technology. So much so that it became a bit of a technological commune. They had a warehouse and did day care, engineering, film processing, documentaries, and many participated in anti-Vietnam war protests. They had all this space and Hardt called around to find the computer. She got an SDS-940 mainframe donated by TransAmerica in 1971. Xerox had gotten out of the computing business and TransAmerica's needs were better suited for other computers at the time. They had this idea to create a bulletin board system for the community and created a project at Project One they called Resource One. Plenty thought computers were evil at the time, given their rapid advancements during the Cold War era, and yet many also thought there was incredible promise to democratize everything.  Peter Deutsch then donated time and an operating system he'd written a few years before. She then published a request for help in the People's Computer Computer magazine and got a lot of people who just made their own things. An early precursor to maybe micro-services, where various people tinkered with data and programs. They were able to do so because of the people who could turn that SDS into a timesharing system.  St Jude's partner Lipkin took on the software part of the project. Chris Macie wrote a program that digitized information on social services offered in the area that was maintained by Mary Janowitz, Sherry Reson, and Mya Shone. That was eventually taken over by the United Way until the 1990s.  Felsenstein helped with the hardware. They used teletype terminals to connect a video terminal and keyboard built into a wooden cabinet so real humans could access the system. The project then evolved into what was referred to as Community Memory. Community Memory Community Memory became the first public computerized bulletin board system established in 1973 in Berkeley, California. The first Community Memory terminal was located at Leopard's Record in Berkeley. This was the first opportunity for people who were not studying the scientific subject to be able to use computers. It became very popular but soon was shut down by the founders because they face hurdles to replicate the equipment and languages being used. They were unable to expand the project.  This allowed them to expand the timesharing system into the community and became a free online community-based resource used to share knowledge, organize, and grow. The initial stage of Community Memory from 1973 to 1975, was an experiment to see how people would react to using computers to share information.  Operating from 1973 to 1992, it went from minicomputers to microcomputers as those became more prevelant. Before Resource One and Community Memory, computers weren't necessarily used for people. They were used for business, scientific research, and military purposes. After Community Memory,  Felsenstein and others in the area and around the world helped make computers personal. Commun tty Memory was one aspect of that process but there were others that unfolded in the UK, France, Germany and even the Soviet Union - although those were typically impacted by embargoes and a lack of the central government's buy-in for computing in general.  After the initial work was done, many of the core instigators went in their own directions. For example, Felsenstein went on to create the SOL and pursue his other projects in personal computing. Many had families or moved out of the area after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. The economy still wasn't great, but the technical skills made them more employable.  Some of the developers and a new era of contributors regrouped and created a new non-profit in 1977. They started from scratch and developed their own software, database, and communication packages. It was very noisy so they encased it in a card box. It had a transparent plastic top so they could see what was being printed out. This program ran from 1984 to 1989.  After more research, a new terminal was released in 1989 in Berkeley. By then it had evolved into a pre-web social network.  The modified keyboard had brief instructions mounted on it, which showed the steps to send a message, how to attach keywords to messages, and how to search those keywords to find messages from others.  Ultimately, the design underwent three generations, ending in a network of text-based browsers running on basic IBM PCs accessing a Unix server. It was never connected to the Internet, and closed in 1992. By then, it was large, unpowered, and uneconomical to run in an era where servers and graphical interfaces were available. A booming economy also ironically meant a shortage of funding. The job market exploded for programmers in the decade that led up to the dot com bubble and with inconsistent marketing and outreach, Community Memory shut down in 1992. Many of the people involved with Resource One and Community memory went on to have careers in computing. St Jude helped found the cypherpunks and created Mondo 2000 magazine, a magazine dedicated to that space where computers meet culture. She also worked with Efrem Lipkin on CoDesign, and he was a CTO for many of the dot coms in the late 1990s. Chris Neustrup became a programmer for Agilent. The whole operation had been funded by various grants and donations and while there haven't been any studies on the economic impact due to how hard it is to attribute inspiration rather than direct influence, the payoff was nonetheless considerable.

Classic Radio Theater
The Bing Crosby Show Ep. #42

Classic Radio Theater

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2022 65:25 Transcription Available


Enjoy two free musical/variety episodes of The Bing Crosby Show A) 3/21/54 w/ Bing Crosby and guest, Frank Sinatra B) 12/11/52 w/ Bing Crosby and guests, Rosemary Clooney and Joe Venuti Bing Crosby was “discovered” in June of 1931 by William S. Paley, president of CBS, who was on a ship crossing the Atlantic. After listening to the crooner's rich chords on record, Paley negotiated a deal for regular radio broadcasts before the voyage was over. Sponsors began expressing an interest and Crosby would soon become one of the hottest commodities at CBS. Until his semi-retirement in 1958, Bing Crosby worked steadily on radio and had a sizeable number of chart singles over two consecutive decades. Among the most popular was The Kraft Music Hall, starring Al Jolson and the Paul Whiteman orchestra. Crosby soon replaced the long-standing Jolson as the weekly host and the crooner was given a free hand with the content. The show was jam-packed with entertainment: Crosby sung a song or two, participated in verbal banter with celebrity guests, and joined in on the fun with a comedy sketch. Crosby's radio success led Paramount Pictures to make The Big Broadcast (1932) and the studio quickly offered him a long-term contract. By one estimate, his movies were the most profitable in the studio's history throughout the 1940s. In a number of Road pictures, Crosby and fellow radio star Bob Hope took potshots at one another – a successful comic device that carried over into their radio broadcasts. In 1946, at the height of his career, the Oscar-winning Crosby demanded that his sponsor, Kraft, allow him to pre-record multiple radio broadcasts in a single day, rather than broadcasting “live” and on schedule week after week. Through shrewd investments, Crosby had become very wealthy, but made just $6 per radio broadcast after taxes. Kraft duly released Crosby from his contract and the singer invested his own money into a new recording system on Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorders. The entertainment industry quickly saw its potential and radio broadcasting forever changed. Now, free to record shows around his schedule, he starred in The Bing Crosby Show for sponsor General Electric. Although his movie appearances began to decline, Crosby appeared on radio for the Ford Motor Company in 1956 and then joined forces with Rosemary Clooney, staying on the air until 1962.

Music And Ideas
#41 - The First Multimedia Star: Bing Crosby & His Glittering Career

Music And Ideas

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2021 141:25


Nowadays he's the American Father Christmas, the singer of nearly all the classic Christmas songs, but for several decades he was also the biggest pop star in the world. From his early days singing in The Rhythm Boys with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra (a major band in it's own right in the 1920's), to his breakout solo career in the 1930's, and well into the 1950's with classic movies such as White Christmas -- Bing Crosby is probably the most important singer in American musical history.   With his silky smooth baritone voice and effortless delivery, Bing guided America through the depths of the Great Depression, delivered hope and spirit through World War II, and voiced the exuberant postwar 1950's. He has reportedly sold over a billion records, with 43 number one hits and nearly 400 charting singles between 1931 and 1965. He ushered in the crooner genre, paving the way for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and many others. Bing was an early film star, winning four Academy Awards  for Best Song, and hosted a long-running radio show with over 4,000 recordings.   A visionary and astute businessman, Bing invested in Ampex, a small California company which produced the first commercial magnetic tape recorder (originally discovered and prototyped by Jack Mullin). The tape machine proved to be a boon for Bing's demanding radio sessions, which until then had to be performed live in studio. With the tape machine, shows could be pre-recorded in high fidelity, and edited to fit the producer's tight airtime schedules. This allowed Bing to record multiple shows in one session, and experiment with multiple takes, while giving him more time to relax on the golf course afterward.   Bing was everywhere for decades, a true titan of a new era of multimedia, and the voice of multiple generations. While young people today may only know him for his Christmas music, his legacy has influenced every pop star in the twentieth century and beyond.

RADIO Then
SERENADE IN BLUE - USAF Transcription

RADIO Then

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 14, 2021 14:57


"Men who wear the Air Force blue bring you A Serenade in Blue. To encourage civilians to join the Air Force. The US Air Force created this well-done musical program. Each Serenade in Blue program was written, produced, performed by men in blue. It featured three top-notch Air Force bands: The Air Force Strings, Symphony in Blue, and the big band sound of Airmen of Note (which was originally started by Glenn Miller during WWII). Earlier 1950s - 1960s programs include The Air Force Symphony Orchestra and The Singing Sergeants, Col George S. Howard commander. (Photo). This program was recorded around 1963 at the USAF Band radio recording unit at Bolling Air Force Base where wild tracks were recorded featuring components of the USAF Band. Wild tracks of music, production themes and announcer voice track were loaded on individual AMPEX 350 tape decks and mixed down to create a fifteen minute audio recording which was sent to USAF recruiting in New York City for duplication on 12 inch vinyl record transcriptions which were mailed to practically every radio station in the country. --- Notes by R A Campbell, this podcast/blog editor and former USAF Band radio unit producer/announcer.

4Front® The Podcast
The Pioneers

4Front® The Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2021 114:12


The Pioneers Dick Kirsche and Chris LammersRichard (Dick) KirscheDick is a retired Electrical Engineer after more than 60 years in the profession.  That career provided him with opportunities to work with several emerging technologies.Dick graduated from Lehigh University in 1960 with a degree in electrical engineering.  He began his career at ITT Laboratories working on radar systems and satellite earth station terminals that provided the ground communication link for the early communication satellites.  (Telstar, Relay, Syncom, etc.)Dick transitioned to a position at RCA Astro-electronics after an IT&T reduction in force.  Astro was designing and building several early satellite systems.  Dick's concentration was the design and qualification for launch of the command receivers that supported ground control commands.  He continued in the aerospace industry until the mid-1960's when he joined a startup company designing custom power supplies and a UHF television exciter for a startup transmitter manufacturer. (Townsend Associates)  Dick joined Townsend to head up their transmitter design and production engineering.  Townsend was acquired by Ampex Corporation which expanded their presence in the Broadcast Industry.  When Ampex suffered some financial setbacks related to their music recording business.  The Broadcast transmitter division was shuttered to improve their bottom line.  In 1972 Dick was part of a group from the closing Ampex transmitter operation that started Spectrum Cable, a company that was seeking cable system franchises in the Western Massachusetts area.  Spectrum was awarded franchises in 3 communities in the suburbs of Springfield, MA.  At that time Cable television was, essentially, a reception service which made operation in city TV markets like Springfield challenging.  Spectrum's offering to that market was superior reception in addition to 2 channels from the Boston, MA market that provided coverage of major hockey and basketball teams.  Spectrum employed a unique network of cylindrical steel towers, with headend electronics at the top and distant signals shared by microwave.  Shortly after Spectrum began operation Home Box Office was added via regional microwave.   Spectrum was acquired by Colony Communications in 1975.  Spectrum's cable systems were combined with 4 cable franchises in the same region operated by Colony.  Dick was hired to head up engineering for that group of cable franchises.  Over time, Dick's responsibilities expanded to head of engineering for all of Colony's cable and MDS microwave systems.  Cable system technology was advancing rapidly during that period.  Channels, received from satellites became common.  Dick worked with the Colony engineering team to install the 2nd 10-meter dia. earth station in the Northeast.  Expansion of cable service channels, from satellite, sparked a rapid growth in public interest in cable TV service.  Colony aggressively supported that expansion of service offerings on their cable systems.  Dick also supported the franchise acquisition team seeking additional cable television communities for Colony.  Dick left Colony at the end of 1981, joining Greater Media Cable at the start of 1982 as Vice President of Engineering.  Greater Media had a strong presence in New England which was expanded through franchising and acquisitions.  That expansion also included one-fourth of the City of Philadelphia and a complex of systems located in the suburbs of Detroit, MI.  Cable television technology was advancing rapidly during that period as operators continued to improve their service offerings and reliability.   During his employment with Greater Media, that operator became a founding member of CableLabs, deployed a 60 channel AML microwave system for the large Worcester complex of towns, began offering DOCSIS data over cable service, began using fiber optic cable for video distribution, and expanded their local video origination service to a full-time live news service.  Dick was active on SCTE, CableLabs, and NCTA Industry committees for Greater Media.  The Greater Media cable operations were sold in 1999.  In 2000 Dick joined RCN, a system operator that competed in the Cable space by building their own facilities in parallel with the incumbent cable television provider, as Director of Video technology.  RCN deployed Video on Demand technology and developed a unique set-top box technology designed to give RCN a competitive advantage in the Chicago cable market.   Dick joined Comcast Cable as a Director in 2005.  Initially, he was part of the team creating a specification for a set-top box design unique to Comcast.  His work continued as part of a small engineering team testing and certifying set-top boxes for deployment to subscribers by Comcast.  His duties also expanded to supporting Comcast's work to improve the energy efficiency of Comcast devices in subscriber's homes.  This included active participation in the DOE's Energy Star program and Cable industry initiatives to address government energy efficiency requirements.  Mr. Kirsche left Comcast in 2010 and opened Kirsche Consulting LLC.  Kirsche Consulting supported Cable Operators' set-top and energy efficiency reporting efforts.  That work included considerable recordkeeping and analysis work for Comcast which led to significant energy savings for Comcast subscribers.Dick officially retired in 2018 but continues to support SCTE standards work as a volunteer.   Christopher J Lammers, COO Emeritus and Senior Executive Advisor, CableLabs® Chris is currently coo emeritus and senior executive advisor for CableLabs leading special projects and initiatives, including the integration of SCTE as a key part of CableLabs, together with supporting relationships across industry associations including ACA Connects, The Cable Center, CCSA, the Emma Bowen Foundation, NCTA, NCTC and WICT. Prior to this, Chris served as senior vice president and chief operating officer at CableLabs directing accounting and finance, IT, facilities and membership development. He remains committed to relationships with mid-sized and smaller MSOs, as well as with international cable operators in Asia, Europe and Latin America, key communities he built at CableLabs. Chris currently serves as a member of the board of directors of The Cable Center and the Emma Bowen Foundation and is actively involved in committees and/or support for several national and international industry trade associations.  He is a member of the Cable TV Pioneers (Class of 2021). Prior to joining CableLabs in 1997, Chris was president and CEO of Western Communications, a mid-sized multiple system operator with cable systems located in the Western United States. Before that, Chris was a partner with the San Francisco law firm of Cooper, White & Cooper. Chris received a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago School of Law and a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction from Stanford University.AcknowledgmentsA special thank you to Benjamin Monlezun for the use of his original song, Downpoor.The views expressed in this episode are solely those of the podcast host and guests and do not necessarily represent the position, strategy, or opinions of CableLabs.

Classic 45's Jukebox
Double Barrel by Dave and Ansil Collins

Classic 45's Jukebox

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2021


Label: Big Tree 115Year: 1971Condition: MPrice: $14.00From a warehouse find, this is a new, unplayed stock copy, in its original Ampex factory sleeve. When this one came out, most radio programmers approached it as a novelty tune... which it was, of course... novel, that is. Today it's obviously just an incredibly great reggae track. The flip is an instrumental version of the song. Note: This beautiful 45 record has "Oldie" inked on the A side label (see scan) and on the sleeve (other side). Aside from that flaw, this copy is pristine Mint.

TWiRT - This Week in Radio Tech - Podcast
TWiRT 563 - Analog Radio Automation with Todd Edwards

TWiRT - This Week in Radio Tech - Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2021


Most of us in radio wax nostalgic about how radio was early in our careers. Todd Edwards waxes poetic about the analog radio automation systems he worked with at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Names like SMC, Scully, Ampex, Otari, ITC, and Drake-Chenault are peppered throughout our conversation and tour on this week's episode. Todd recalls his first bloody automation injury and describes using a station's automation system as his excuse to go on the air live. Show Notes:Online web station, TRIK FMOnline web station, Frontier Country OnlineOtari ARS 1000 (information brochure)SMC Carousel (brochure)Drake-Chenault (information web site)Auditronics 210 audio console (BGS catalog page)Todd’s YouTube Channel Guest:Todd Edwards - Analog Enthusiast Host:Kirk Harnack, The Telos Alliance, Delta Radio, Star94.3, & South Seas BroadcastingFollow TWiRT on Twitter and on FacebookTWiRT is brought to you by:Nautel and the continuing informative live webinars. Sign up for free!Broadcasters General Store, with outstanding service, saving, and support. Online at BGS.cc. Broadcast Bionics - making radio smarter with Bionic Studio, visual radio, and social media tools at Bionic.radio.Angry Audio - with StudioHub cables and adapters. Audio problems disappear when you get Angry at AngryAudio.com. And MaxxKonnectWireless - Prioritized High Speed Internet Service designed for Transmitter Sites and Remote Broadcasts. Look for in-depth radio engineering articles in Radio-Guide magazine.Subscribe to Audio:iTunesRSSStitcherTuneInSubscribe to Video:iTunesRSSYouTube

This Week in Radio Tech HD
TWiRT Ep. 563 - Analog Radio Automation with Todd Edwards

This Week in Radio Tech HD

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2021 72:15


Most of us in radio wax nostalgic about how radio was early in our careers. Todd Edwards waxes poetic about the analog radio automation systems he worked with at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Names like SMC, Scully, Ampex, Otari, ITC, and Drake-Chenault are peppered throughout our conversation and tour on this week's episode. Todd recalls his first bloody automation injury and describes using a station's automation system as his excuse to go on the air live.

This Week In Radio Tech (TWiRT)
TWiRT Ep. 563 - Analog Radio Automation with Todd Edwards

This Week In Radio Tech (TWiRT)

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2021 72:15


Most of us in radio wax nostalgic about how radio was early in our careers. Todd Edwards waxes poetic about the analog radio automation systems he worked with at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Names like SMC, Scully, Ampex, Otari, ITC, and Drake-Chenault are peppered throughout our conversation and tour on this week's episode. Todd recalls his first bloody automation injury and describes using a station's automation system as his excuse to go on the air live.

4Front® The Podcast
Dick Kirsche

4Front® The Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2021 59:38


Richard (Dick) KirscheDick is a retired Electrical Engineer after more than 60 years in the profession.  That career provided him with opportunities to work with several emerging technologies.Dick graduated from Lehigh University in 1960 with a degree in electrical engineering.  He began his career at ITT Laboratories working on radar systems and satellite earth station terminals that provided the ground communication link for the early communication satellites.  (Telstar, Relay, Syncom, etc.)Dick transitioned to a position at RCA Astro-electronics after an IT&T reduction in force.  Astro was designing and building several early satellite systems.  Dick's concentration was the design and qualification for launch of the command receivers that supported ground control commands.  He continued in the aerospace industry until the mid 1960's when he joined a startup company designing custom power supplies and a UHF television exciter for a startup transmitter manufacturer. (Townsend Associates)  Dick joined Townsend to head up their transmitter design and production engineering.  Townsend was acquired by Ampex Corporation which expanded their presence in the Broadcast Industry.  When Ampex suffered some financial setbacks related to their music recording business.  The Broadcast transmitter division was shuttered to improve their bottom line.  In 1972 Dick was part of a group from the closing Ampex transmitter operation that started Spectrum Cable, a company that was seeking cable system franchises in the Western Massachusetts area.  Spectrum was awarded franchises in 3 communities in the suburbs of Springfield, MA.  At that time Cable television was, essentially, a reception service which made operation in city TV markets like Springfield challenging.  Spectrum's offering to that market was superior reception in addition to 2 channels from the Boston, MA market that provided coverage of major hockey and basketball teams.  Spectrum employed a unique network of cylindrical steel towers, with headend electronics at the top and distant signals shared by microwave.  Shortly after Spectrum began operation Home Box Office was added via regional microwave.   Spectrum was acquired by Colony Communications in 1975.  Spectrum's cable systems were combined with 4 cable franchises in the same region operated by Colony.  Dick was hired to head up engineering for that group of cable franchises.  Over time, Dick's responsibilities expanded to head of engineering for all of Colony's cable and MDS microwave systems.  Cable system technology was advancing rapidly during that period.  Channels, received from satellites became common.  Dick worked with the Colony engineering team to install the 2nd 10-meter dia. earth station in the Northeast.  Expansion of cable service channels, from satellite, sparked a rapid growth in public interest in cable TV service.  Colony aggressively supported that expansion of service offerings on their cable systems.  Dick also supported the franchise acquisition team seeking additional cable television communities for Colony.  Dick left Colony at the end of 1981, joining Greater Media Cable at the start of 1982 as Vice President of Engineering.  Greater Media had a strong presence in New England which was expanded through franchising and acquisitions.  That expansion also included one-fourth of the City of Philadelphia and a complex of systems located in the suburbs of Detroit, MI.  Cable television technology was advancing rapidly during that period as operators continued to improve their service offerings and reliability.   During his employment with Greater Media, that operator became a founding member of CableLabs, deployed a 60 channel AML microwave system for the large Worcester complex of towns, began offering DOCSIS data over cable service, began using fiber optic cable for video distribution, and expanded their local video origination service to a full-time live news service.  Dick was active on SCTE, CableLabs, and NCTA Industry committees for Greater Media.  The Greater Media cable operations were sold in 1999.  In 2000 Dick joined RCN, a system operator that competed in the Cable space by building their own facilities in parallel with the incumbent cable television provider, as Director of Video technology.  RCN deployed Video on Demand technology and developed a unique set-top box technology designed to give RCN a competitive advantage in the Chicago cable market.   Dick joined Comcast Cable as a Director in 2005.  Initially, he was part of the team creating a specification for a set-top box design unique to Comcast.  His work continued as part of a small engineering team testing and certifying set-top boxes for deployment to subscribers by Comcast.  His duties also expanded to supporting Comcast's work to improve the energy efficiency of Comcast devices in subscriber's homes.  This included active participation in the DOE's Energy Star program and Cable industry initiatives to address government energy efficiency requirements.  Mr. Kirsche left Comcast in 2010 and opened Kirsche Consulting LLC.  Kirsche Consulting supported Cable Operators' set-top and energy efficiency reporting efforts.  That work included considerable recordkeeping and analysis work for Comcast which led to significant energy savings for Comcast subscribers.Dick officially retired in 2018 but continues to support SCTE standards work as a volunteer.   AcknowledgmentsA special thank you to Benjamin Monlezun for the use of his original song, Downpoor.The views expressed in this episode are solely those of the podcast host and guests and do not necessarily represent the position, strategy, or opinions of CableLabs.

PRISM
How the Roots of California's Bay Area Design Movement Still Shape Society with Barry Katz

PRISM

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2021 85:29


California's Bay Area is one of the world's epicenters of design, but this is a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the 1980s, you had to travel to Paris, London, Milan, and New York to find good design. Suddenly, this region entered a golden design era marked by innovative collaborations, technology booms, and the emergence of a vernacular around design thinking. Now, nearly 40 years later, we have more design professionals in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the world. In this episode, Dan Harden examines the rise of design in the Bay Area with Author and Design Professor Barry Katz, including how design thinking changed the landscape of the Bay. Looking ahead, Dan and Barry speculate on how Bay Area design can continue to set the tone for the rest of the world. GuestBarry Katz, professor of Industrial and Interaction Design, California College of the Arts, and adjunct professor, Design Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University Episode TranscriptDan Harden 0:07Hello, and welcome to Prism. Prism is a design-oriented podcast hosted by me Dan Harden. Like a glass, Prism that reveals the color hidden inside white light, t his podcast will reveal the inside story behind innovation, especially the people that make it happen. My aim is to uncover each guest's unique point of view, their insights, their methods, or their own secret motivator, perhaps that fuels their creative genius. Today, I have the pleasure of being with a good friend of mine, Barry Katz . Barry is the professor of Industrial Design and Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts, an adjunct professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering Design Group at Stanford University, Barry was also well, Barry has been working with the idea for the last 20 years as a fellow and general advisor, we're going to hear a little bit about his experience there. He's also the author of seven books, including most recently “Make It New, the History of Silicon Valley design” published in 2017, by MIT Press, and Barry's also working on a great new book called “Structure and Symbol for the Age of Data” which is about architecture and the Silicon Valley. Barry, thanks so much for coming on Prism. Glad to be here. I always love talking to you. You are a gem of a human. Or the the you know, you pretty much blew me away when you were one of the keynote speakers at a conference that I chaired back in 2002, as you remember, well. So this is a really great experience. So you know, you wrote this book that I read, because, well, I'm living in Silicon Valley, I've been a designer in Silicon Valley since 1989, and had experience working here even prior to that. So I was really fascinated by your perspectives on the history of design in the Bay Area. Maybe we could start by you giving us a general context, because my first exposure to the Bay Area was when I was seeing this extraordinary work being done, I would say in the early 80s. And I actually interned at HP, which is my first exposure around that time. But what was happening before that, how did we get to that point of inflection where design started to become relevant to technology. If we can start unpacking a little bit of that, that kind of historical perspective, because it sets the framework so well for what actually happened and how design flourished.Barry Katz 2:52So let's begin a little bit with what got me interested in taking a long historical look at how people like you ended up doing what people like you are now doing. In 2021, I was struck by a small gift sent to me by a mutual friend of ours I'm sure you know, Gerard Furbershaw are one of the cofounders of Lunar, one of the distinguished consultancies of the area. Gerard sent me a clipping from a 1979 Palo Alto telephone book, the Yellow Pages. And I apologize to readers, or viewers or listeners who have no idea what the yellow pages are business directory for these things that we used to call telephones. And this was a page from the business directory that listed every design consultancy in Northern California 1979. There were, if I remember correctly, nine of them and they were squeezed between detective agencies and diaper services. And of the nine, only one of them still exists, although not under the same name. In other words, design was absolutely not on the map as any significant part of what was important about this region. And the reason that that was interesting to me is today, I think I'd be prepared to argue that there are probably more design professionals working within 50 miles of where you and I are sitting right now than anywhere else in the world. So I got interested in the question, How did that happen? How did that happen in an extraordinarily, you know, basically in a generation. If you had asked almost anybody in that period, the late 70s, the early 80s. What are the important world centres of design? I think that there would have been a pretty easy consensus and you know, Dan, you could you could say a to Milan for furniture Paris for fashion. New York for graphics London probably for product design, you got to be Tokyo for electronics, LA for whatever they do down there, I have no idea. And if you would set the Bay Area, I think you would have been met with a blank stare, right? One of the older folks that I interviewed in my book who migrated out here for romantic reasons, I think he had to get away from a second wife or something like that, and tried to set up shop in San Francisco as an industrial designer in the late 60s, I think. And he said, anybody who would try to do that then should have his head examined. There was no client base, there were no colleagues, there was no system of suppliers and partners. It was an island, and now it's it's become the center. So I wanted to figure out how that happened. And I started scratching around the early 80s, when the big consultancies began to form, IDEO Lunar Frog where you, you and I first met, and I scratched a little bit further, and I found some activity in the decade prior to that, and I scratched a little bit further, and I found a few big companies that had an industrial designer on staff. And I kept scratching until I got back to I think it was August 7, 1951, when Hewlett Packard hired his first quote, unquote, industrial designer, and they gave him the assignment that I, I heard from any number of people that I spoke to, it was essentially “Can you stuff five pounds of shit into a 10 pound box,” that's a phrase that kept coming up. Or maybe it was 10 pounds into forgotten. So there were, there was some early stirring of activity in the post World War Two period. This is the time when Silicon Valley was just beginning to emerge as an important Tech Center, in electronics, in aviation and in defense, and a few companies Hewlett Packard, Lockheed, interestingly enough. And a company that is now almost defunct Ampex, which was, at one time the pioneer in audio recording, they essentially invented magnetic tape recording. They had small design groups, and that was about it.Their primary role of designers then was to package technology to put the work of engineers into a suitable enclosure that wouldn't offend anybody. And that wouldn't get into the in the way of having the things function. And then gradually, what I described is an expanding perimeter around the areas that designers could involve themselves in. And I think that I would say that the crucial moment in time, kind of metaphorically speaking, is when computing started to get small enough, cheap enough and fast enough, that it began to move from the back rooms of large organizations, onto the desktops of ordinary consumers. And that's where design is really in a position to add major value.Dan Harden 8:41Because people were used to consuming well designed products and other parts of their life. And maybe they didn't have an identity yet, right? I mean,Barry Katz 8:52No, I mean, the computer was this inscrutable refrigerator sized machine in the backroom of a bank or an airline or an insurance company or the Defense Department.Dan Harden 9:04There was one guy, you might remember Elliot Noise on the East Coast, as he designed those giant IBM computers. That was the first exposure that I saw to computers being designed. And then I was also seeing around that same timeframe, some amazing work done by Mario Bellini and Ettore Sottsass, as well as designing like, pre computers for all of it, you know, these were type machines and adding machines really cool stuff. I mean, they were giving true art and form to these devices that otherwise had no kind of functional bearing on anything we would understand unlike say, a mixer or a fan where there were required components, mechanical components, whereas these devices, even those early tech devices, they you know, they were early transistor based products, and you know, why should they look like what should they key look like? Given that you press a button on, you know, in a series of keys, should it look like a typewriter? Probably? Yeah, yeah. Those were an interesting transitional day.Barry Katz 10:10I'm really glad that you said that in that you put it in the way that you did, Dan, because everybody knows what a mixer does. Everybody knows what a hairdryer does. Everybody knows what a desk lamp does. Nobody in this period and again, you know, to the 1970s, nobody really knew what a computer was and what it was for. And as you look at the the proliferation of small companies that were exploring this terra incognita of personal computing, the big debate was, what is the machine? Is it a really, really fast typewriter? Is it a really, really powerful adding machine? Is it some kind of a communications device, and it was really uncertain. And, you know, now is familiar to practically everybody. And we use it for all of those things, and probably also has a hairdryer and a mixer and a desk lamp. But it was a technology in search of a definition of the category. So what I think is really crucial here is that when Elliott Noyes and some of the folks that you mentioned were designing, and I say designing sort of cautiously, they're doing the industrial design of large scale Business Machines. I don't want to put it too crudely. But engineers are not that concerned with the experience of the devices that you're working on. Okay, I say this with no disrespect, you know, in a way they have higher aspirations. But when a technology moves from the business world into the consumer market, functionality tends to be displaced by experience. I know that's a little bit of a cliche, but you're less concerned with the inner workings and how the thing works. And more concerned, not simply with superficial aesthetics, but with the experience that you're having in using the device, so the product or the software. And that is the points where design really comes into the picture is something more than what you're so familiar with the Henry Dreyfus or the Elliot Noyes model, of form and function of using industrial design to make something more attractive and accessible.Dan Harden 12:39I think part of that is the consumers have an expectation that whatever purpose, this new product that has been proposed for them to purchase, whatever that purpose is, you want to deliver to you quickly, we have impatient minds, right? We want that designed to deliver and so it's got to stimulate me in the way that it looks that has to communicate to me in an intuitive manner, and then it has to deliver on its functionality. Scientists or researchers that were using those giant computers back then they didn't have that expectation. It was purely functional, although, remarkably, even companies like IBM realized, wait a minute, there's, there's a culture in this technology, we need to represent it not. I don't think they were necessarily trying to sell more computers with design, you know, back then, I think they were proud of what they were doing. And they they were they wanted to kind of show off they're like, “Hey, you know what, these are remarkable machines,” Let's let's do this, right? Let's build some culture and maybe even a sense of art and what they were building.Barry Katz 13:48I'm also really glad that you, you mentioned some of the European companies that were kind of pioneering the sort of thinking you know, Olivetti created a machine called the Performa, which some people have argued, is really the first desktop computer and had a comprehensive corporate wide design strategy, as did Philips, a small number of other European companies. And if I am not mistaken, they had a tremendous influence on your generation of American designers. So at exactly the moment that we were trying to figure out what is this new thing that we're dealing with, and we're still trying to figure that out, you know, 40 years into the story of computing. People were, to a large extent taking their cues from some of the radical solutions being proposed in Europe and gradually incorporating them into their thinking. Apple's the clear example, that's how Apple really got started.Dan Harden 15:00Do you know but before we talk about Apple because um, you know, they're the monolith here, right? So in, in the space of design and technology, when I was when I was in school, I remember it's so well, like the very top,the paragon of like design for me was the work that was being done by Olivetti. There was something about those expressions. I felt that they were, they were beyond product to me, they weren't they were something truly extraordinary. They touched the Abyss in some way that just made me think as a designer, “Wow, I can do anything as a designer” because there really, prior to the existence of this early technology. There was no reference, there was no vernacular for what technology should look like. Right. So unlike if you're designing a chair, you know, how many 1000s of years that we need to go back to, to see the vernacular of a chair. So that compelled me to push myself and I was designing even in school, it's hilarious. I was doing like Olivetti esque kind of things. I was just so influenced by that I really loved. Yeah, that technology. And that's what led me to want to even work for HP back then. You'll find this interesting because you teach at Stanford. I went to this Stanford design conference, and the speaker was this young man, that was the CEO and founder of this new computer company called Apple and they had just gone public. And there was Steve Jobs up on stage pontificating about technology, and he was using the word design. I was like, in the, you know, the back of the audience and designed did he just say design. You know, as I was super excited about that at lunchtime, I'll never forget this. We all got our cafeteria trays. During this conference, Steve Jobs came out, we're all sitting outside, he looked around the lawn, and I guess he selected the youngest group or something I was sitting among like, eight of my peers at HP. l came in he chose us to sit down next to he sat down, took his shoes off, of course, right. He was famous for being barefoot all the time in his younger days. And he just, I wish I could say we had a discussion, but no, he pretty much continue to talk at us about technology and design, the importance of design, I realized I had a sense, although I didn't have the knowledge or the foresight necessarily to know where this was all gonna go. But I believed that he truly felt a sense about the importance of design especially and its incorporation into product. And yeah, it I think it catapulted me even further, in my own personal thinking about like, Man, I've got to, I have to do some killer work here at HP. And I'm really intrigued by this notion of technology and design. Years later, I worked with him. But that to me was kind of the turning point. You mentioned a turning point in the Bay Area. His emergence as Apple's emergence as a force, especially when he hired Frog Design, during that time period in the early 80s, that, to me was the seminal moment. Let's talk about that. Because everything you know, when you mentioned a few of the companies that were considering in hiring one or two designers in the Bay Area at that time. Here's a company a new technology companies, young, exciting, brash company, Apple, that reaches out to design firms in the worlds he finds this company in Germany, and in the Black Forest. Althengstett right it was super cute little tiny village in the Black Forest. Now, how he actually found them. I've heard stories about it, you know, when I was there, but that is an extraordinary time period. I remember one other point and I wanted your perspective on this. Right after my internship, at HP, I ended up graduating and going to Europe with a portfolio on my back. And one of the companies that I went down to have an informational interview was Frog Design. And the founder of Frog Design, Hartmut Esslinger interviewed me and at the time, he said, this is like 1982 he said,“Dan, we just met this crazy guy in the Silicon Valley named Steve Jobs. Do you heard about him? Do you know much about him?” Like oh, well, I just I just heard him at this this Standford design conference. So yeah, I know him you know, quote unquote, and I'll never forget that moment because he said, we're thinking about doing some work with him, and what what do you think? And you know, would you eventually like to come help on this we really like your portfolio. Could you come help us in California? I thought, wow, this is this firm in this in the Black Forest is willing to make this leap across continents to go design for this crazy guy named Steve Jobs.Barry Katz 20:28And I hope you told Hartmut to make sure that he got paid in advance.Dan Harden 20:34I don't think you have a problem getting paid by Apple at that time, you know, that became legendary how much of a retainer they got, you know, to design these products at that time. But there were all kinds of things happening not only, you know, Apple with with frog, but another gentleman named Bill Moggridge comes over. Tell us about that, and your perspective on this the shift, the big shift was this, in my opinion, was kind of that this euro invasion into the Silicon Valley when a lot of industrial designers from Europe keyed on to the fact that there's something interesting going on here in technology in the Silicon Valley. And they wanted to be a part of it.Barry Katz 21:18Yeah, I think it really has to be understood as a global phenomenon as part of a global wave, and we're still in it. And the wave is now moving back and forth across the Pacific just as 40 years ago, it was moving back and forth across the Atlantic, mostly forth, I would say. Apple is a key player in the story. I don't want to romanticize it. But I would never want to minimize it either. I mean, I will often say would you have bought a computer from a company founded on April Fool's Day and named after a piece of fruit. And when I said, you know, make sure you should have told her to make sure we got paid in advance. I personally know and i think you know, a couple of these folks to Dan. But I personally know three people that were approached by Steve Jobs in the late 70s, and turned him down. Here's another guy, another one of these guys, in jeans and barefoot or, you know, his Birkenstocks. With his vision of something, rather. And if I'll just do the work on spec, the gold will come pouring into my checking account. And I'm not joking here or exaggerating, I literally know three people who throw them out. They are not happyabout that.But Apple, I think has to be, I'll get to Moggridge in a moment, but Apple has to be understood as being in the right place at the right time led by the right person, as difficult as that right person was. in other respects, I don't think we can take anything away from him. To put that in a little bit of perspective, in that period, '76 '77 '78, I can think of about a dozen companies that were competing to bring a personal computer to the market to the consumer market, you have never heard of 11 of those 12. And the 12th is now a trillion dollar company. And at any given week, the most valuable company in the world. So when a company has a profile of that stature, and defines itself as being designed driven, and every other company in the world is going to take notice at their or ignore it at their peril. So the importance of Apple, not just in creating, you know, new generations of innovative products and all of that, which is a cliche, the importance of Apple for giving priority to design at the executive level. That's pretty new in American corporate history, not entirely unprecedented. But at that scale, it was just a new phenomenon. What I would say about Apple in terms of its importance for the story that you are trying to get down is once it became clear that a high quality experience was going to be essential to making this new generation of tech products successful. Steve began to explore design talent around the world. And there were plenty of American designers who are a bit miffed by this, but he conducted his search in the UK, in Germany as you said frog, the company that became frog, the star designers and Italy and in Paris. And he narrowed it down through a competition that became known as the Snow White competition to design a personal computer Snow White, and seven peripherals, the Seven Dwarfs. That competition was ultimately won by the small firm that you referred to. And that used to work for Esslinger design in the Federal Republic of Germany F-R-O-G. And the condition that jobs imposed upon it was that they moved to Silicon Valley, and at least establish an outpost here. So Hartmut Esslinger, moved Esslinger Design to Silicon Valley became frog Design. And the larger importance of that, I think, is that it was really Apple that began to engage this small community of tech oriented design professionals, who are starting to spill out of Stanford arriving from London and Germany and a few other places. And that would ultimately give rise, excuse me, to the major consultancies, which became the defining identity of Silicon Valley design. And they're the ones that, you know, the company that became IDEO, the company that became frog, Lunar, and now less than a second and a third, and now a fourth generation of companies that are at this point, almost beyond counting.Dan Harden 26:39I, you know, I find this to be so fascinating, that whole the evolution of the whole design industry in the Bay Area, and in that regard, starting at that moment, that transcendent moment in the early 80s, where it just came alive Suddenly, I remember prior to joining frog, so you know, even though I talked to Hartmut about about him meeting jobs, and being a part of this Snow White program, I was aware of it. I had gone to Dreyfus in New York City in the meantime. And when I was there, I saw the first Snow White examples coming out, of course, and I saw on the back page of it magazine. Yeah, Apple to see it was that particular design that made me think something is going on here. I really should be a part of this. Yep. And that's when I reached back out to Hartmut. And he basically said, “Hey, man, where have you been? Come on, let's come out to California right away.”Barry Katz 27:42If I could, if I could jump in and just add one more gloss onto this whole thing. And that is there's an old story of companies, hiring designers to improve their products. That's sort of the the history of design and in this country, and it's a great history. What happens very rarely is designers being the opportunity to keep being given the opportunity to design not just a new product, but a new product category, and to create a language for it, and to figure out what is this thing all about. So if you were asked to improve last year's toaster, and you know, give us next year's toaster, you look back at last year and the year before and the year before that there is a language of toasters, and you run with it. But if you are asked to design a mouse, the patent for the mouse was called the x y position indicator. So somebody walks in and asks you to design an X Y position indicator for him. Where do you start? You don't look at last year's model, because there was no last year's model, or a modem or even like a digital answering machine or something like that. They are entirely new product categories. And the opportunity to do that does not come very often. And what really defined the design profession, I think, in Silicon Valley, argue with me, if you like, is this ongoing challenge to designers of giving form and language to entirely new product categories?Dan Harden 29:22Yes. In addition, giving an identity and a personality to something that otherwise is purely represented by the software that you might see on the screen.Barry Katz 29:36Yeah, yeah.Dan Harden 29:37So it's really it's true conception, if you will, you know, it's like, Okay, well, it's blue sky design, you have to you know, you're you sit there sometime to scratch your head, like, well, how can I record and I do I do this now, you know, like, how can I represent this very unusual, abstract technology that you know, it takes even my design team, it might take months to figure out even how some of this stuff works. I mean, we're doing like CRISPR technologies. And, yeah, human genome sequencing. And I think that that's another thing about the Bay Area, you get exposed as a designer to some remarkable innovation. And you're asked to give it a face, give it give it an identity and make that identity by the way, approachable, friendly, sometimes warm, almost always intuitive. And make it exciting enough that it makes an impact on demand for the product. at its best design does that. But yeah, you're right. I mean, especially, you know, using Apple again, is that example, and even other companies picked up on that, you know, the car companies saw what Apple did with a line of products, whereby each individual product was making a suggestion about its values, and that other siblings in the product line also had those values, yes, which builds trust, because you will automatically assume if the quality is imbued in the product that I currently have in my hand, or sitting on the desk in front of me, I make the assumption that the company that is offering me that is also making other fine products. And that notion hadn't really been expressed in a manner that was so clear, as far as like, especially sibling likenesses and languages, you know, car companies were making an individual, you'd see a Camaro. And then you'd see a Mustang, they were all very, very different. Even companies, you know, looking at, you know, Ford, all of their cars look very, very different. There was no such thing as a design language. So yeah, I would say that one of the roots of Bay Area design was just that giving a broader expression of what a complex system might look like and how it should work.Barry Katz 32:11Yep.Dan Harden 32:12What else was it about what designers were doing, in your opinion, around that time, and even up into the 90s. And even now, that makes Silicon Valley special?Barry Katz 32:30I think the key thing, Dan is, in the kind of popular imagination, Silicon Valley is a whole lot of tech companies. So as you read about, you know, the war between Washington and Silicon Valley now, where Europe and Silicon Valley over issues of privacy and data, sequestering and all of that, the kind of unspoken assumptions that Silicon Valley is a vast agglomeration of high tech companies. In fact, I think it is much more accurate and meaningful to understand it as an extremely complex ecosystem. In some I know, that's a sort of a cliche term, but it's something like the biological sense, in which an ecosystem operates as a series of inter interdependent components, each of which influences the other. And the interest that I have. And I think you have here is how design became an integral part of that ecosystem. So when I think ecosystem, I think, sure, the tech companies Apple, Facebook, Hewlett, Packard, Lockheed, and video, and all of the others that are household names. But we also need to think about the venture capital industry that feeds money into it's about half of the VC investment in the United States in any given quarter is invested in this little piece of real estate where we have the either good luck or misfortune to live with depending on whether you own your house or not. A legal infrastructure, so firms began to develop an expertise in an aspect of corporate law that had to do with funding and setting up startup companies. On the basis of you might have heard the phrase opium addicts, an addiction to other people's money. So IP law protection, early stage corporate law, the universities, so we have Stanford, Berkeley, and then approved as the major research institutions, but then places like San Jose State, which is not sufficiently recognized as a factor but the mission of the state universities in California is to serve the local population, local companies and to provide educational opportunities for Local people, which is not what Berkeley or Stanford are about, right, by definition. So San Jose State and a few others, began to contribute talent into the tech community design talent as well as engineering talent. And then you know, places like CCA where I teach in art school, and half a dozen other specialized artists institutions in the region. So you've got the tech companies, academia, legal infrastructure, the financial infrastructure, and then the piece that was missing in all of that is design. And when Apple in particular, and then a growing number of other companies began to make serious investments into building design into their operations, hiring. This gaggle of Stanford graduates that became IDEO hiring, this agglomeration of European designers showing up at frog hiring these peculiar mix of engineers and designers at lunar, we begin to see the formation of a professional design consultancy world that became an integral piece of the silicon; and I would say, a defining piece of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. And that is, I think of inestimable importance in understanding how Silicon Valley worked. Because it's not, it's not simply about laboratory science or bench engineering. It's about making products that are accessible, interesting, affordable, and exciting. And that, again, is where design has specific value to add.Dan Harden 36:54Why is it that the public doesn't seem to really understand that? When you think about Silicon Valley, you think about technology, think about software, you think about invention, and innovation by companies like Facebook, Google, of course, apple, and many, many others, all these different startups. But it's often design that is, is the vehicle, it's carrying these messages forward, the values, the experience that is making this a wonderful, whether you're looking at the UX of a Google product, or even products, you know, like, Oh, my gosh, almost any medical device, scientific equipment, fitness equipment, computing, you know, the list goes on and on.Barry Katz 37:41Yeah, we are more commonly aware of design when it fails, when it's bad, when something doesn't work the way you want it to, whether it's the chair that you're sitting on, or the microphone that you're speaking into. But yeah, I mean, most people, including the person you're talking to right now, as very little idea of how computer works. You know, I've read books about and we sort of don't care. And I mean that in actually pretty serious way. People love to compare their phones, but more often, you know, they're actually people will spend more time choosing the case of their mobile phone and then deciding between, you know, models. And I don't mean that in a trivial sense, what I'm trying to get at is the idea that we are coming to understand that the technology is now pretty dependable. It's extraordinary. I mean, I have a little Miata, okay, the Mazda sports car. The idea that, and I drove it for 18 years, and in 18 years, I repaired the I replace the radiator, that was the only significant repair I ever did on that car. And the idea some generation before that, that your sports car would not spend half of its adult life from the shop. I'm thinking so the technology, the point I'm making the technologies are very dependable now. And they're also inscrutable. And we kind of don't want to know what's under the hood or behind the screen or beneath the keyboard. We want to know what it's doing that is relevant to the task that I am now trying to perform.Dan Harden 39:36That's one reason why design has become a household name is because maybe in the past, we talked about design, so much history of technology, the introduction of the technology, the absorption and the issues that we all had with technology as that became a little bit more resolved and design became more well revolutionary and revolutionary at the same time. It's now something that we we can relate to. And therefore we talk about, because everything else is the technology is working.Barry Katz 40:10And it should be emphasized, no disrespect is intended toward engineers, hardware or software engineers. Quite to the contrary, if they hadn't done such a damn good job of building reliable, efficient and ever faster, cheaper and smaller products, then we wouldn't be focusing on this experiential level on the human level. So it's their credit, to their credit that designers have moved into a position of increasing prominence. And this is pretty new, and it's still happening, it is a work in progress. But, you know, when I started teaching, I would hear from my students from alumni of my courses, who went to work in tech companies, again, and again, and again, the engineers won't listen to us, they won't take us seriously, they won't give us the time of day, they'll hand us something, once all of the key decisions have been made. And you know, that phrase that you probably heard way back when make it pretty, put it in the box, and all that, yeah. And that's just no longer really the case. There's still a lot of uncertainty about what designers do and how they do it, and why they make the decisions they make. But I remember a conversation with Doreen Lorenzo, who was the CEO of frog after Hartmut Esslinger stepped down, in which she said, “a design strategy is now as important as a business plan.” And most companies, whether it's because Apple hit the trillion dollar mark, or for whatever reason, most companies now recognize that designers need a seat at the table earlier on in the process, then, you know, at the end of the day, if I can use an image that really appeals to me, I had a conversation with the chief designer at Tesla, Franz von Holzhausen. And I asked him what was different about being a designer at Tesla, the chief designer, Chief Product officer, in fact, and in his previous jobs, he worked at Chrysler before that, and but what he said to me is that the typical pattern in the auto industry had been that design was a link in a chain and important link. And you know, a chain doesn't work if one link is broken. But it was a link in a chain that connected r&d to engineering, to design style, to marketing figure out how to sell it. And what he told me was at Tesla, we are not a link and a chain, it's more like the hub of a wheel. We are present at the beginning of any discussion about at the highest level of the product definition. And it's really our job like the hub of a wheel, think of the spokes connecting the aeronautical engineers who are concerned about the airflow over the hood, the mechanical engineers who are working on drive train the electrical engineers that are working on the Panasonic battery pack, marketing, and it's actually designed that is connecting all of those parts from the beginning of the the development process to the end of it. And that is something that is pretty new in the auto industry and has had an impact because of the extraordinary success of Tesla, throughout the industry. And it's also a pattern that I think you can see in other industries as well.Dan Harden 44:01You know, I from as a consultant, I've seen this pattern evolving and taking shape over the last, especially the last 10 years, you know, where designers have are sitting right up there with, you know, the CEO, the operations, marketing, engineering, of course, I think because they realize that, because design is kind of the the binding element between all of these departments, you know, because design just infiltrates your marketing, your messaging, certainly the engineering and the production and all the way right down to supply chain management. We're, I think the enlightened companies had figured this out. And part of that is because they realize that, that the consumer is actually making decisions based on what's right for them. What they can identify with. How is addressing my particular problem and design has has just become, it's the communication tool for the company to bring forth those messages to beliefs that they actually build into their products, hopefully, it's good to hear that the car companies are coming around, they've been a little bit slower at this, partly because the timeframe to develop a car so it, you know, would typically go from r&d and safety concerns to engineering and then ultimately, the styling department and then tooling, it just takes a long time toBarry Katz 45:33five years minimum.Dan Harden 45:34Yeah, yeah. But when you're designing and developing these consumer electronics, or computing products, or even scientific goods, like we do, it's the consumption pattern. It's very fast.Barry Katz 45:49Yep.Dan Harden 45:49So design, really, I think it has to have a seat at the table early on for the whole process to work.Barry Katz 45:59Which raises an interesting question that will be very relevant to you, and your line of work. And that is the relation between the internal design groups within companies, which are having growing prominence, and external consultants, such as Whipsaw. And there has been some speculation in the pages of Fast Company and a few other magazines, that the consultancies may be a victim of their own success in making the case that design is important. So companies, healthcare, automotive, consumer, electronics, food and beverage, everything, have heard the message and are building their own internal design teams.Dan Harden 46:45You know, I keep hearing about this. And, you know, people have asked me, is this a threat? or something, you know, to the existence of, you know, it becomes like, an existential question. I think it's all nonsense. You know, rising tide raises all the ships, and, you know, great corporations are hiring more designers, they're also hiring more consultants. We are seeing a lot of consulting firms, especially in the Bay Area being bought out.Barry Katz 47:11Yeah.Dan Harden 47:12And yeah, and, you know, we're one of the remaining private ones. Sometimes these firms lose their identity or their Verve, their passion. I'm not sure what it is. What happens when you get absorbed in a big corporation like that? No. But individuals that have a vision that that want to be independent, there's still room for for those kinds of consultants to I mean, we were showing a increase in business, not a decrease.Barry Katz 47:43Yeah.Dan Harden 47:44I just love the fact that almost every company that even the startups, some of the first people that they hire are designers.Barry Katz 47:52Yeah.Dan Harden 47:53UX ID, graphic design, identity branding. It's so essential. And it's if you don't, it's just a huge missed opportunity. Like, why wouldn't you if it if it will more likely make you successful? Why in the world, wouldn't you?Barry Katz 48:11Yeah, when I started working on my book on “Silicon Valley Design, Make It New,” I began with an approach that any responsible author would take, okay, this is a book about Silicon Valley design, defined Silicon Valley and defined design. And I couldn't do it. You know, Silicon Valley is a state of mind that extends from Lucas Ranch, north of the Golden Gate Bridge to the Santa Cruz Mountains, and design. I mean, there are designers that work on intricate internal mechanisms of surgical robots, and their designers that work on the aspirational lifestyle experience of preteens, yeah, and everything in between. So I made the decision in that work to stop trying to define it in advance and then fill in the pieces, but rather simply look at what people are doing. And allow a definition both of the region and of the professional practice to emerge out of that, that that is intended to endorse what you just said about the consultancies versus the internal corporate groups versus the one person studio when the boutique group. It's an extraordinary range. And the other piece of that that I'm finding breathtakingly interesting is not just the proliferation of different ways of being a designer, you use the term existential there I like it, but also an expanding perimeter around the types of problems that designers are being called upon, or demanding or right to participate in the these the famous wicked problems Which are no longer?Dan Harden 50:02No, that brings me, sorry to interrupt, but it brings me to the whole trend of design thinking and the fact that so much of that started in the Silicon Valley, and that will most certainly be one of the legacies of our time. Right. And, you know, I think that I do really push that forward, even though I get I think most designers like myself would even say, Well, what do you mean design thinking that to me, when I started hearing about design thinking theory, I was like, Well, wait a minute. We've been doing this for a long time. Yeah. So what's your perspective on that? And is that one of the legacies of the Silicon Valley design thinking?Barry Katz 50:42Yeah, I think it absolutely is. Another book that I worked on with Tim Brown, who is the former CEO of IDEO is called “Changed by Design.” And it, I have to say, it really introduced the idea of design thinking to the business community, in a big way about 10 or 12 years ago. We just did a 10th anniversary edition of it. Design Thinking is widely maligned, it is widely misunderstood. And it is the fault for that lies mostly with its own practitioners, I think more than with is slander from the outside, Do tell. So if you look up design thinking, I sometimes do this little exercise in workshops of asking people to do a google image search for design thinking. And what you'll see is this blaze of little diagrams with hexagons, or circles or recursive loops or triangles, it's much more complicated than any electrical engineering drawing of a circuit. And it's very unfortunate, because they tend to try to reduce it to a methodology. As I say, it's something like Alcoholics Anonymous, it's an 11 step process. And at the end of it, you're clean, you know, you turn the crank, you do some prototyping, some brainstorming, some user observations, and whatever, you turn the crank five times and-Dan Harden 52:09Our clients that asked for it, expect something to pop out on the other end, is somebody an extrusion process, and, and boom, there's your solution. And it will be successful. Because we use this design thinking process.Barry Katz 52:23Somebody at IDEO told me that a client walked in and said, I want you to give me the iPod of meat. So the way I prefer to think about design thinking is not as a methodology, but as a philosophy as a way of thinking about problems. And I will often reduce it to two pretty simple formulations. The first is that there is no problem that cannot be thought about as a design problem. And I mean that quite seriously, you know, you're having problems with your kids, how we could design or think about this problem, because at the end of it, or behind it. There are strategic decisions being made that you might not even be aware that you're making. And perhaps you should revisit those in a way that a designer might revisit why your product is not successful in the market, or why it's not functioning the way everybody expected to, or why people are using it in completely different ways than was intended. So my you know, when my 90 year old mother used to wrap a dish towel around the handle of her refrigerator, because it was a lot easier for her to pull the dish towel than to get her arthritic fingers behind this beautifully designed chromium plated to our handle that some jerk at, you know, wherever thought looked cool. That's an unintended use. And it causes it will hopefully provoke a designer into rethinking why something is not used correctly. Whatever correct means. The other piece of it if piece number one is there's no problem that cannot be approached as a design problem.Dan Harden 54:11By the way to interject, I think that design because it's you know, at the fundamental level design is about solving a problem. Yeah, and one could even say that life is basically a string of problems that need to be solved. We go about this every single day, almost every move you make you're trying to solve a little micro problem, you might not even consider it to be a problem. But if you step back and look at things quite openly the way you just described, yeah, almost anything can be can be solved. Well, you might not get to a solution, but you can use a process to help you get closer to a solution.Barry Katz 54:46And it's a big mess because there is almost if it's a serious problem, a problem really worth spending your time on. There is not going to be one right answer to it. There will be multiple possibilities and there will be unanticipated impacts. I often demand of my students that they learn to think in an anticipatory way to solve not just the problem that's in front of you, but solve the problem that will be created by your solution. That's so Henry Ford solve the problem of internal combustion. I think he also should have solved the problem of traffic jams and parking tickets. What would it have looked like if he had thought beyond the problem in front of him to the problems that would be created by his solution. And right now, the stakes of a mistake are so catastrophicly high, I mean, we are changing the climate of planet Earth, think about that. The stakes are simply too high not to be thinking that way.Dan Harden 55:44Yeah.Barry Katz 55:45And that leads me if I may, to the second piece of my reformulation of design thinking, if the first pieces of it is there's no problem, we can't be addressed as a design problem. The second is, you don't have to be a designer to think like one. And that does not take one bit away from the mastery, that professional designers such as yourself, have acquired in the trenches. And with the battle scars to prove it. It's simply means that well, not simply, but it means a number of things, one of which is you as a lawyer, as a physician, as a primary school teacher can learn to practice some of those skills and learn when to hire a professional, and to work with that professional in ways that might not previously have been possible or even imaginable. So that's really what I think is at stake in design thinking,Dan Harden 56:45yeah, I liked it, it has really kind of opened up the minds of a lot of, especially like marketing teams, within corporations and clients of ours. Sometimes, that it's almost like a little too much awareness that they have acquired, where they're like, wait a minute, we can do what you do, too. Now, I'm hearing a lot of that, like, Oh, I took a design thinking course. So we want to come in and brainstorm with you and our ideas are as good as yours.Barry Katz 57:11Yeah.Dan Harden 57:12Rarely is that the case. But you know, we're always open. It's, it should be a process whereby there's lots of collaboration and respect and all that. But there's a massive lack of knowledge, you know, in most cases. So how can we reconcile that? How can we have these, these highly aware, thoughtful clients, but still giving them the type of advice and consulting and education that they so desperately need? Well, it'sBarry Katz 57:43a big question, obviously. I mean, look, I brush my teeth twice a day, and I still go to the dentist, when I need to go to the dentist. And I would not think of putting a crown on a wisdom tooth by myself, or a root canal, crazy. But that does not mean that I should not take some responsibility for my own dental hygiene. And if I were a corporate executive, take some responsibility for my design hygiene. That does not mean I have to be one, it means I have to know what they do. Designers how to work with them, how to smooth out tensions among various business units functional or geographical or whatever. So that designers are working effectively with marketing teams, with engineering teams, with product teams. And all of the rest of that is part of I never really thought of using the term design hygiene before but it popped into my mind.Dan Harden 58:48I think it works. The key is it puts the onus back on the designer to help guide that process.Barry Katz 58:56Yeah, I think that's fair to sayDan Harden 58:58because with as this new awareness about design thinking, I can tell you once a week, I have to tell a client but the drill down, step away from the chair. We got this.Barry Katz 59:13Yeah.Dan Harden 59:17This is a new trend, or clients suddenly know how to design their own products. Of course, they usually don't. And that's okay. But I like the fact that they at least are trying these soon realize because they have an interest in it. And they're they're now attuned to it. That they can see that sometimes the pains that we have to go through to solve a problem. This is not easy. It's designed as a difficult profession. What you have to go through to find your solution to test it to evaluate it to to be brave enough to say you know what all the assumptions that we made in the last two or three months are wrong You have to start over. It takes guts,Barry Katz 1:00:03yep. time, money and all of the rest. And the way to do it is, you know, it's not, you know, take a three day design thinking workshop, learn the methodology, and then allocate a space full of whiteboards and Sharpies to your new crop of design educated employees. Because I have so often gone back to companies that have done this, and, you know, they're sitting around in this allocated dedicated space and scratching their heads is like, Can somebody remind us what we're supposed to be doing? We have,Dan Harden 1:00:39Right. I'm interested in in it is a slog. And, but I'm really interested in how we're going to evolve this thing called design thinking. And I like the fact that we have opened it up, the whole process has become much more collaborative, your client feels like they are part of a process now. But I think we need to, we need to flesh it out more, we need to give it more body, we need to give it more means of expression. And to it needs to be jolted out of these stereotypes about what design thinking is. One technique that I've been using with clients is, I'll say, let's talk about design seeing, and that kind of stops them in their tracks right away. And I realized that seeing is so far beyond what looking at something, it's about observation, it's about perception, it's about adopting a new way of thinking and feeling about something, I find that we're able to get to the heart of the matter even a little faster when you again, introduce this a new concept about how to solve a problem. And whatever your method is, as a designer or a team. That's really what the objective is, is to take some time to a new level, a new place, explore. And I mean, that to me was is a real definition of innovation, where you're going somewhere new, it's just, you know, a new frontier, it's hard to get to it, there's no secret methodology, we're all a little bit different, I think, to be able to recognize it as a team, when you were on the cusp of something. That's when the real joy of this whole design process to me becomes just yeah, so much more exposed.Barry Katz 1:01:54That's really nice. George Nelson, who is one of as you know, one of the real pioneers of American design, and is at the helm of the Herman Miller company, one of the great design driven companies in the US.Dan Harden 1:02:41I know it well. I worked with George,Barry Katz 1:02:43yeah. He wrote a book, I forgotten the exact title, but design is seeing or design as a way of seeing or how to see like a designer or something like this. And he was very much interested as he was in that period decades ago. In the visual, you know, what a designer sees when he or she walks down the street or enters into a grocery store. And I think that what you're getting at now is that it's more than simply the optic nerve being stimulated. But seeing possibilities, and that's just seeing forms, it's seeing opportunities, seeing, really seeing beyond the present. And I would like to think that companies that hire designers are hiring. sure they're hiring a set of skills, they're hiring a body of experience, but they're also hiring somebody who will think differently than than they do. I think beyond the the status quo in which they're operating, and it involves a risk. I mean, it's a money risk, it's a time risk.Dan Harden 1:03:52It's a personal risk that comes to the heart of what consulting is all about. To be able to go to an outside source to get a different perspective, a new way of seeing something. And that oftentimes just shakes one's reality in a way that makes them think, okay, there is a different possibility. So, absolutely moving beyond design thinking and even introducing other forms of how you go through this very difficult process of taking something from nothing to something. Let's talk about like, what, how have designers added value in this whole Silicon Valley story? I mean, in a way, I kind of feel like the Silicon Valley, we're living in a Renaissance period, right technology, the birth of different technologies, and in giving technology, the expression, I think one could say that's one of the legacies of designers, you know, in the Silicon Valley. But where do you see like, Where, where have we made these biggest contributions and Is it? Yeah? Is it humanizing the technology? Is it giving it the kind of warmth and the friendliness that everyone seems to crave.Barry Katz 1:05:09And I remember when our mutual friend the late Stephen Holt used to tell us it's the Renaissance, and they're handing up the marble. Get in line.Dan Harden 1:05:22Yeah.Barry Katz 1:05:25I think that what's happening is, again, it's part of the historical process. And I don't want to get too deep into into history, which is more interesting to me that it is to most other humans. But what has been happening, of course, in the world of technology pioneered in Silicon Valley, let's face it, it's Moore's law in action. Products have been getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Processing speeds have become faster and faster and faster. The idea that you could be sitting with a computer on your desktop was unimaginable in 1980, that you could be holding it in your hand or resting it on your lap, in 1990, that you could be wearing on your wrist in 2000, that you could be having computer processing power worn in the form factor of a wedding ring, or the next stage, I'm pretty sure it's going to be implantable. As a consumer product. What does all this mean? You and I are both old enough to remember when email was introduced, right? So the first generation of email, it was horrible. And it was wonderful. It was wonderful because I could communicate with my friends in Israel or China or Brazil, at any hour of the day or night to leave them, you know, to respond whenever it was convenient to them, and so on and so forth. It was horrible. Because you dialed it up on a screeching modem. It crashed. And I mean, the experience was thoroughly unpleasant. But you know, we we didn't care because it was so new and so exciting. But then as it became increasingly pervasive, oh, one other thing, how often do we check our email in that first generation, for me, it was twice a day, once in the morning, when I got up once in the evening, before I went to bed. And now you know, according to Google Analytics, I think it's something like 50 times a day, unless you're in China, in which case, it's 24 hours seamless. And when an experience is, becomes closer and closer to your physical body, because it's so small and light, and cheap, and it's integrated into the rhythm of your day, not when you wake up and when you go to bed. But both of those and everything in between. and maybe as in the sense of my new Google Home monitor, even while I'm sleeping, that's monitoring my sleep patterns to help me sleep better. When something is as close to the body and as, as deeply integrated into the rhythms of your everyday life, the designed experience becomes absolutely the key defining factor. And so with all the technology in the world, the Kindle, the home monitors that we're seeing from Amazon and Apple will be autonomous vehicle, they would not have any future whatsoever. If we didn't have the the experience of delight of confidence of security of all of those emotional states that design can bring to a product. And I think that that is the trajectory that we are seeing coming out of Silicon Valley. And I need to emphasize obviously, there are important design centers throughout the world. We are not alone. But I don't think we've seen the cluster and the ecosystem that I described earlier, anywhere else.Dan Harden 1:09:21And I find on this particular matter that we are at being asked to design the end users emotional state, exactly what you were just talking about. And when you realize that you you have the capability of doing that if you're able to manipulate software factors, manipulate form factors, presenting levels of functionality and performance at just the right time in the in the experience and the consumption of that experience. And that at the end of the day is what good design does. I think it makes you more empathic. more responsible, definitely more compassionate to the end users state of mind, you start to consider things like feelings. And it's not it's not the old definition of design anymore where was like, you know, form and function and give it making products beautiful. I mean, sure, beauty has a lot to do with invoking these, and provoking even emotions. But it's so much more than that now. And I do think that that is probably the lasting legacy of this time period is Renaissance that we're in in the Bay Area. And I think that's what Silicon Valley designers not only here, you know, but you know, in a lot of parts of the world, especially in the areas where they're, they're incorporating software and hardware and and development smarts has lots of great work being done in Asia, in this in this area.Barry Katz 1:10:56The other thing that is a piece of what you're saying, Dan, is that I think is is relatively new is you guys, by which I mean designers have begun to acquire a degree of humility, which is somewhat unfamiliar in what has been a very ego driven kind of a macho design world. And we we used to have the stars of design and you know, we can name them. And they are Henry Dreyfus and Raymond Loewy and Teague and Bell ganz. And those those heroes and then all the way forward. And I think we are increasingly recognizing that the designer is not the last word, the last stage in the story. It's me as the user. So I think about, you know, the iconic example of your mobile phone is handed to me by Sir Johnny, I've, Barry, I've just designed this cool, cool thing. But I'm really the one that completes the design, because as soon as I get it, I begin to configure it. And within a day, within an hour, within a minute, my phone is unlike any other phone in the world. Because of the way I've organized, you know, apps on the screen and settings and you know, 1000 other a million other variables. So you are handing over to me not a finished product any longer, you are handing over to me, a world of possibilities that recombined to realize, and that's can be a little bit of a shocker. I mean, I still often hear my design students responding in a crit by saying, No, that's not what I intended. Well, I don't want to say I don't care what you intend. But that's not the whole picture anymore. You have to learn to step back from your intention, and understand that it's not for you,Dan Harden 1:12:58you know, stepping back from your intention, as a designer, I think, especially working with a lot of young designers that I hire, that's something that they learned because I don't know why they ended design school, I think, Well, you'd compose this thing. And then it's going to be just manufactured like that, it's going to turn out and be on the shelves just like that. But there are so many unforeseen things and other contributors and stakeholders that come in to, to add definition to it, and hopefully, goodness, throughout the building process. But that's not always the case. And we have all learned humility as well. And if you are awake and listening and looking around in this world, you realize that, you know, designers are part of the problem, too.Barry Katz 1:13:47Oh, sure.Dan Harden 1:13:49You know, sustainability values have taken a long, long time in this profession to take hold. We often do not consider the long chain of events and ramifications of our decisions in regards to the consumption of energy that your product will require years from now even after it is consumed. And that humility hits you pretty hard when you like, see your products in the dump. Yeah, I have I have seen products that I have designed in a dump in a dumpster in a recycling center. I've seen this several times. Yeah. I saw an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art down in San Jose. And they everyone brought in all of the products that they have discarded and found in their garage and made a giant pile. And I'm looking through this pile. And I was like, Oh my god, there's a Sun Microsystems computer that I designed in 1994.Barry Katz 1:14:50You should march your employees through that. Exactly. Right behind you will be me and my students.Dan Harden 1:14:57Yeah, I found a Motorola phone. That I designed, I found a toaster that I designed for Sunbeam. And talk about humility. You know, it really does make you think. And I coming back to the Bay Area, I think that humility has exposed itself. And one very special way. And this is the this a newer understanding about what does it really take to offer you a product that is providing some kind of value to you? Doesn't have to be some big clunky thing with all these different features. Sometimes No, oftentimes, Now give me one or two features. That's all I need. So you're starting to see well, you know, several years ago, minimalism is suddenly reemerging. You know, of course, this was done in the Bauhaus A long time ago. And young designers think, Oh, this is all new as minimalism, but this general belief that reductionism is good. Yeah, is is actually helping the sustainability cause, you know, less material, more performance from fewer functions. Yeah. And I think it's kind of it seems to me, like a lot of those values have been born here in the Bay Area, not not exclusively, for sure. But it's definitely a value.Do you see that?Barry Katz 1:16:27Yeah. And as I say, this new product categories emerge. Fitness monitors is a good example, which has a deeply rooted history in the Bay Area. I am, as you may know, a long distance runner, and I went crazy. Last time, I tried to buy a watch. Fitness watch, because I wanted to watch that would do four things. It would tell me what time it is of SM running, how far I'm running, and at what pace I'm running. And, but it gave you 40 4400. You know, it says, You know, I didn't want a heart monitor. I didn't need it. You know, if I have a heart attack, I will know I'm having a heart attack. Thank you. I didn't want a garage door opener. I didn't want something that would fend off my enemies with the shriek or amaze spray or something, I want for function, impossible to find something that you know, because of the magic of programmable chips that they wouldn't do everything for me. And so most of us are now walking around with products. My watch is an example my camera's an example, that do so much more than I will ever even know about, much less be able to deal with. Can I share a little story with you that your listeners may find them useless. years ago, close to the beginning of my teaching career, I was teaching a design seminar that was very much it was theory and history. So the students were from every design discipline in the college. And somehow it came up a student told the story in class, she was a graphic design student. And she said that she had the habit when she came home from the

Restaurant Business Magazine
Can a franchisee be a successful brand operator?

Restaurant Business Magazine

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2021 26:35


Can a franchisee succeed as a franchisor? This week's episode of the Restaurant Business podcast “A Deeper Dive” features Tabbassum Mumtaz, CEO of Ampex Brands, and Ericka Garza, brand president for its latest acquisition, Au Bon Pain. The two talk about what it takes for an operator to take over operations for an entire brand. A lot of franchisees have been buying up brands lately, taking advantage of favorable market conditions to add entire concepts to their collections. Ampex operates hundreds of Yum Brands and 7-11 locations and recently acquired Au Bon Pain from Panera Bread. Mumtaz talks about the experience of owning a brand after years operating restaurants for other brands. Garza, meanwhile, talks about the priorities for the brand itself and what it will take for the concept to succeed. Garza is a former franchising executive with Pizza Hut.

Smart Business Dealmakers
Eric Easton, CFO of Ampex Brands, and Jayne Juvan, M&A Chair at Tucker Ellis

Smart Business Dealmakers

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2021 30:32


Ampex Brands recently acquired bakery-café chain Au Bon Pain from Panera Bread, becoming a franchisor for the first time in its 16-year history and expanding its footprint internationally. Ampex Brands CFO Eric Easton and Jayne Juvan, M&A Chair at Ampex's law firm Tucker Ellis, discuss how it all went down.

Biz Bites N' More
Episode 112! DiDi's Ride-Hailing Value, Lime Unveils E-Mopeds, and Ampex buys Au Bon PAIN

Biz Bites N' More

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2021 40:51


Episode 112! The Biz Bites N' More Podcast covers the recent Chinese based ride hailing company as DiDi just IPO'd at a massive valuation. Lime unveils a Electric Moped and you know.... what could go wrong? Finally Ampex buys struggling bakery-café chain Au Bon Pain to try and revive this sucker. $YUM $DIDI #Comedy #Business Blog: bizbitesnmore.com Twitter: @bizbitesnmore Facebook: @bizbitesnmore YouTube: Biz Bites N' More Leave a voice message on anchor or leave a five star review on Apple and we will read it aloud/listen to it on the pod! VM: https://anchor.fm/biz-bites-n-more/message --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/biz-bites-n-more/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/biz-bites-n-more/support

Very Nearly an Armful - A Tony Hancock Podcast
S1 E6 - Very Nearly an Armful - There's An Airfield At the Bottom of the Garden

Very Nearly an Armful - A Tony Hancock Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2021 72:49


In this final episode of the first series, Martin, Tim and Jon talk about Tony's infamous live episode There's An Airfield At The Bottom of the Garden where the set didn't quite perform as expected! The four fans discuss how the issues with the set led to changes to how Hancock's Half Hour was broadcast with the gradual move to recorded episodes, consider in detail how the BBC used Ampex quadruplex 2 inch tape and take it in turns to test drive Sid's motor torpedo boat. They also attempt to answer questions sent in by listeners on edited versions of radio shows, briefly consider BBC Transcription Services and, rather surprisingly, issue an appeal for a morse code expert! Don't forget to rate us and subscribe to the podcast. And if you haven't done so already, why not join the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society - full details on how to join are at tonyhancock.org.uk. We'll be back in the Autumn with Series 2; the team of four will have six more opportunities to get sidetracked whilst they are discussing their favourite topic of Hancock's Half Hour. Hope to see you then!

The Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons

Episode 72 of the Truth About Vintage Amps, where amp tech Skip reminisces about cheap regional beers, smooth trailin' and Brazilian cocktails. As always, he also fields your questions on all-things-tube-amp. So keep the questions coming...  This week's episode is sponsored by Amplified Parts and Grez Guitars.  Some of the topics discussed this week:  2:46 Sam Plecker from Pulga  4:51 Skip's music recommendations: Jim Hall & Paul Desmond; Chuck Wayne; Kenny Burrell; Luiz Bonfa; Phil Baugh; Pat Martino 8:24 Skip's Red Foley Guitar, a Vox book giveaway 16:06 Analog Outfitters, redux 17:11 Funky tremolo on a 6SL7 Ampeg Rocket 23:44 Vingtor amps, Part Fire (that's "four" in Norweigan); East German PAs 27:45 What does the cathode follower do? 31:20 Magnatone 480 reverb fix , NPN transistors (thanks Chris at guitaramptech.com.au) 34:40 Premier 100R; Vega and Ampex amps 37:12 RIP Ned Beatty, Fat (not Short) Monroe 37:38 The magic of Kalamazoo Model 2's, Fender-style inputs 41:37 A 1970 Traynor YGM-3 with howling reverb 47:01 Why the plus in B+ voltages 50:35 Recommended reading: Allen Furst's Night Soldiers 51:50 Skip needs an horologist 53:20 WD-40, again; moisture on a Mesa Boogie PCB board 1:00:39 The Oroville McDonalds 1:03:11 A Yamaha EM-100 mixer (free), a Remington Model Five, California Typewriter 1:07:08 An in-person taping of TAVA? Jason heads to California; the Crumb Brothers from Reno 1:10:21 Booze talk: Leblon Cachaca from Brazil; caipirinhas 1:13:17 Recommended replacements for Astron caps; Mallory 150s; regional cheap beers 1:17:23 Josh Yenne's extended family? Co-hosted by the Fretboard Journal's Jason Verlinde. Support the show as a TAVA Patreon patron (yes, Skip does get the money) and get bonus episodes, in-depth articles on amp circuitry and other surprises. Email or send us a voice memo to: podcast@fretboardjournal.com or leave us a voicemail or text at 509-557-0848. And don't forget to share the show with friends. 

CiTR -- Bepi Crespan Presents
NOISE UNIT, AKSAK MABOUL, ROBERT DAYTON.

CiTR -- Bepi Crespan Presents

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 12, 2021 182:23


CITR's 24 Hours of Radio Art in a snack sized format. Dark Ambient. Drone. Field Recordings. Noise. Sound Art. Or something.This evening's broadcast features new music by Aksak Maboul (Belgium), Ancient Relic (Toronto), Catenary Wires (UK), Null Command (Victoria), Robert Dayton (Vancouver), Space Queen (Vancouver), '60s Colombian garage rawk from The Ampex, '70s Lebanese theatre music by Ziad Rahbani, OG punk from The Stimulators, plus Black Jazz Records' Chester Thompson and Doug Carn reissues.

Garvan Acoustic
Ray Dolby in 50 s

Garvan Acoustic

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2021 0:52


Ray Dolby l'uomo che ha dato al mondo un altro suono e meno rumore.Chi è nato negli anni 80 o prima ha sicuramente usato un riproduttore di cassette (lo chiamavo mangianastri o piastra) e quelle più performanti avevano il sistema di riduzione rumore Dolby B e C inventato da lui.Ha contribuito a sviluppare il videoregistratore mentre lavorava alla Ampex.Quasi tutti i cinema del mondo hanno il marchio Dolby in riferimento alle tecnologie surround da lui sviluppate.Ingegnere Americano nato nel 1933 e purtroppo deceduto il 12 settembre 2013È proprio da Ray Dolby che voglio iniziare una rubrica in pillole su alcune delle tecnologie sviluppate dalla Dolby.

Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show
Interview - Dave Hillis Pearl Jam Ten Engineer

Cobras & Fire: Comedy / Rock Talk Show

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2021 66:16


Some bonus coverage. Bakko talks with the engineer of Pearl Jam Ten, Dave Hillis. Dave has plenty of amazing anecdotes from the making of one of the biggest records in Grunge and Rock music in general. Dave Hillis started his career as a 17 year old guitarist for the legendary thrash metal band "MACE." In the mid 80's, they released two LP's on Enigma Records in the US and Blackdragon Records in Europe. They were featured on Metalblade Records, "Metal Massacre V"and recognized in the "Thrash-Metal Encyclopedia" and fanzines around the world, as a pioneering force in heavy metal. To this day, there is still a huge following of this pioneering band. Led by Dave's furious guitar work, they charted in the UK and Japan. Mace later toured with Slayer, Anthrax, Raven, Death Angel, and Testament. Dave spent ten years as Chief Engineer, along side legendary producer Rick Parashar, at Seattle's famed London Bridge Studios, during the birth of the Grunge Era. Dave worked as the Engineer on Pearl Jam's debut album "Ten" , Assistant Engineer on the Self Titled "Mother Love Bone" album, the movie soundtrack for "Singles", Alice in Chains, Blind Melon, The Seattle Symphony, Love On Ice, and many others. As the years went by, developed his own producing and engineering skills and continued to work with multiple major label artists. During this time he co-produced, with Greg Dulli, The Afghan Whigs' standout farewell single "66" , on the "1965 " LP and the Twilight Singers "She Loves You" record. Dave also continued to create and record his own music. Dave founded the alternative rock group, "Sybil Vane" , and was the guitarist and song writer. Sybil Vane was signed with both Polydor Records and Island Records. Their song "Sorry" was featured in the movie "Empire Records" , starring actress Liv Tyler. In 2005, Dave founded, produced, mixed and engineered the Shoegaze group "Thee Heavenly Music Association" (Rehash Records US, Fierce Panda Records UK) , to much critical acclaim, where he also served as the group's guitarist and songwriter. During this time, Dave also co-produced the Kevin Martin (Candlebox) solo record "The Possibility Of Being" on Gold Circle Entertainment and worked with comedian, Denis Leary on his live album. Dave continued playing and was hired as a live guitarist for Duff McKagen's (Guns and Roses) band "Loaded". While living in London, Dave worked with multi platinum artist James Blunt, on his writing demos for his hugely successful "Back to Bedlam" album, which included "You're Beautiful" and, "Good Bye My Lover". Dave is also credited with working on Britpop star, Chris Gentry's (Menswear) solo recordings. In 2011, Dave opened Starlodge Studios in the SODO neighborhood of Seattle; a private mix and overdub room featuring vintage and modern recording tools and his beloved AMPEX 1/2" tape Machine for analog magic. Most recently, Dave has crossed over to house and electronic music, with his alter-ego Lo-Rez. Lo-Rez has received critical acclaim and has been featured on major motion film soundtracks. The album "Infinity", has been remastered and re-released in 2019. Dave currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife and daughter. He is currently working on new music, engineering, producing, participating in public speaking engagements and workshops.

People & Music Industry
50 Years Of Eventide

People & Music Industry

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2021 28:36


Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:27 - 50 Years Of Eventide01:04 - The Early Days02:52 - Introducing Digital Technology To The Studio04:20 - H910 Harmonizer07:49 - The Birth Of The Effects Unit09:23 - Eventide Everywhere!10:58 - The Strangest Use For A Harmonizer11:33 - Auto-Tune Before Auto-Tune12:50 - SP2016 Array Processor15:21 - Eventide's Weirdest Product16:51 - Rare Items / The S1066 Effects Unit18:52 - Adapting Algorithms22:35 - Physion / Structural Effects24:21 - The Use Of Software In All Tech26:12 - Audio Networking27:30 - EndingEventide BiogEventide have spent the past 50 years creating technical solutions for various industries. Richard Factor initially founded the business in 1971 to create custom-made solutions for studio engineers. The first product was a tape search unit for the Ampex MM1000, built for New York Producer Steve Katz to assist his workflow in the studio. This led to Ampex themselves requesting units and a range of small electronic projects followed. One of those projects became the 1745 Digital Delay Line with the introduction of RAM and later, pitch change. In 1972 Tony Agnello joined the company and developed the H910 Harmonizer® which became a huge success and was followed by the H949 with ‘deglitch' feature, allowing for cleaner pitch control. At this time they started to develop products for the broadcast market, including the Monstermat and the Mono Stereo Matrix unit. This led on to them developing HP compatible RAM boards, HPIB buffers and ethernet cards. In the 80s they returned to their original idea of developing a general purpose digital audio processor utilising DSP and the Eventide SP2016 was created. Following a move to larger premises, Eventide became involved in developing moving maps for aviation use. They also solved another problem for the broadcast and customer service industry by creating the Logging Recorder, a DVD-RAM storage media. Today their tech is used extensively within the broadcast, music, aviation and customer service industries.https://www.eventideaudio.com/Sam Inglis BiogEditor In Chief Sam Inglis has been with Sound On Sound for more than 20 years. He is a recording engineer, producer, songwriter and folk musician who studies the traditional songs of England and Scotland, and the author of Neil Young's Harvest (Bloomsbury, 2003) and Teach Yourself Songwriting (Hodder, 2006).https://www.soundonsound.com

Sound Opinions
#796 Best Band Lineup Changes, Opinions on Arlo Parks & slowthai

Sound Opinions

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2021 50:39


Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk about their favorite bands that have improved significantly after lineup changes. They also review new albums by British rapper Slowthai and British singer songwriter Arlo Parks. Become a member on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/36zIhZK Record a Voice Memo: https://www.micdropp.com/studio/5febf006eba45/ Featured Songs:Arlo Parks, "Green Eyes," Collapsed in Sunbeams, Transgressive, 2021Arlo Parks, "Too Good," Collapsed in Sunbeams, Transgressive, 2021Arlo Parks, "Hope," Collapsed in Sunbeams, Transgressive, 2021Arlo Parks, "Porta 400," Collapsed in Sunbeams, Transgressive, 2021Slowthai, "Play with Fire," Tyron, Method, 2021Slowthai, "Feel Away," Tyron, Method, 2021Slowthai, "adhd," Tyron, Method, 2021Fleetwood Mac, "Albatross," Albatross (Single), Blue Horizon, 1968Fleetwood Mac, "Bermuda Triangle," Heroes Are Hard to Find, Reprise, 1974Fleetwood Mac, "World Turning," Fleetwood Mac, Reprise, 1975Genesis, "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Charisma, 1974Genesis, "Squonk," A Trick of the Tail, Charisma, 1976James Brown, "I Got the Feelin'," I Got the Feelin', King, 1968James Brown, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine," Sex Machine, King, 1970Buzzcocks, "Boredom," Spiral Scratch, New Hormones, 1977Buzzcocks, "Autonomy," Another Music in a Different Kitchen, United Artists, 1978The Temptations, "My Girl," The Temptations Sing Smokey, Gordy, 1965The Temptations, "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)," The Sky's the Limit, Gordy, 1971Black Flag, "Louie Louie," Louie Louie (Single), Posh Boy, 1981Black Flag, "Best One Yet," Loose Nut, SST, 1985Rush, "Working Man," Rush, Moon, 1974Rush, "By-Tor and the Snow Dog," Fly By Night, Mercury, 1975Nirvana, "Love Buzz," Bleach, Sub Pop, 1989Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Nevermind, DGC, 1991XTC, "This is Pop?," White Music, Virgin, 1978XTC, "Life Begins at the Hop," Life Begins at the Hop (Single), Virgin, 1979Todd Rundgren, "We Gotta Get You a Woman," Runt, Ampex, 1970Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Wait Until Tomorrow," Axis: Bold As Love, Track, 1967Lightnin' Hopkins, "Long Gone Like a Turkey Through The Corn," Country Blues, Tradition, 1959

Secret Sonics
Secret Sonics 070 - Noam Levinberg

Secret Sonics

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2020 70:54


Noam Levinberg is a mixing and mastering engineer based out of Tel Aviv, Israel, and currently working as the head of audio at Artlist.io! You can find out more about Noam at https://www.noamlevinberg.com/You can find Noam on Social MediaIG: https://www.instagram.com/noamlevinberg/FB: https://www.facebook.com/noam.levinbergSpotify (where you can find more of his work): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5B4FZQKa9wDjgmOuoJmcs5?si=LPVJX0NzSr6w1DZQ6kgt3wYou can learn more about Artlist.io here: https://artlist.io/You can listen to (and watch!) the track that we discussed in the "Sauce" segment in its entirety here: "Woodhouse 12" by Dan Mayo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rMpuQ3UddE&ab_channel=DanMayoAs I mentioned in a previous episode, I've started a Whatsapp group community. If you're interested in joining, please email me at Secretsonics@gmail.com Please include your phone # and tell me a bit about what you do production-wise.ReferencesTatran: https://www.tatranmusic.com/Udi Koomran: https://www.facebook.com/udi.koomranPluto Studios: https://www.plutostudios.com/english/Earthsync label in India: https://www.earthsync.com/Neve VR console: https://vintageking.com/neve-vr72-20009-k-usedTatran Desert Session: https://youtu.be/0_o7ZPmMCLcMidas XR-18: https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/XR18--behringer-by-air-xr18-tablet-controlled-digital-mixerSplice: https://splice.com/Billy Decker (interview): https://www.workingclassaudio.com/wca-167-with-billy-decker/Manley Nu-Mu: https://www.manley.com/pro/mnumuZulu: https://www.handsomeaudio.com/4-track Ampex: https://reverb.com/item/1345183-ampex-ag440-4-track-1-2-analog-reel-to-reel-recorderProac monitors: http://www.proac-loudspeakers.com/html_files/Speakers.php?Range=Studio&Speaker=Studio100Focal Shape 40: https://www.focal.com/en/pro-audio/monitoring-speakers/shape/monitoring-speakers/shape-40Dan Mayo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_MayoYehezkal Raz: https://yehezkelraz.com/Vulf Compressor: https://goodhertz.co/vulf-comp/Vulfpeck LAX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzxW8nxgENA&ab_channel=VulfTube Screamer: https://amzn.to/2GfSMXNAD-9: https://amzn.to/34LzgftThe long tail of the internet: https://seths.blog/2008/07/the-long-tail-t/Yossi Fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yossi_FineThanks for listening to this episode of Secret Sonics! I hope you enjoyed this episode :) Look out for new episodes weekly. Consider rating and reviewing our show on Apple Podcasts and sharing this or any of your favorite episodes with a friend or two.Thank you to Zvi Rodan, Mendy Portnoy, and Yakir Hyman for contributing to the new podcast theme music!You can find out more about Secret Sonics and subscribe on your favorite podcast app by visiting www.secretsonics.co***If you want the show to continue to improve, feel free to fill out a listener survey here: https://forms.gle/BWKmS4YmESYid5rh8 ***Follow along via social media here:Facebook: www.facebook.com/SecretSonicsPodInstagram: www.instagram.com/secretsonics/Feel free to email me at secretsonics@gmail.com with any questions and feedback you might have. I'm open to learning about what topics you'd like to hear about and which people you'd like to hear from. In pursuit of making this podcast truly helpful to anybody looking to improve at music production, all suggestions are truly welcome! Have a great week, stay safe, and dig in!-Ben

ROCK ANGELS RADIO SHOW
Rock Angels Radio Show Temporada 20/21 Programa 5

ROCK ANGELS RADIO SHOW

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2020 126:40


Si en la variedad está el gusto, THE ROCK ANGELS SHOW no titubea en analizar todas las novedades dentro del Rock/Metal para que encuentres tu espacio y descubras nuevos momentos para disfrutar a través de nuestra ausencia de etiquetas. Corren días oscuros y tan solo queremos acompañarte para que el peso resulte más liviano, entra, estás en tu casa: 1.- DEVILFIRE – Gimme Shelter (ROLLING STONES cover) 2.- THUNDERMOTHER – Back In ´76 3.- VOODOO MOONSHINE – Bring It Down 4.- DIAMOND DOGS – Hurt You Twice As Much 5.- AMPEX – Leztze Chance 6.- VOLSTER – Revolution 7.- EVERY MOTHER´S NIGHTMARE – Getaway 8.- SOEN – Antagonist 9.- SEVENDUST – Dying To Live 10.- ARMORED SAINT – Do Wrong To None 11.- GODSNAKE – Sound Of The Broken 12.- BENEDICTION – Stormcrow 13.- MORS PRINCIPIUM EST – The Everlong Night 14.- NIGHTMARE – Black September 15.- GLACIER -Into The Night 16.- VHÄLDEMAR – Straight To Hell 17.- BLACK SUN – Terror Zone (feat HENNING BASSE) 18.- HITTMAN – Code Of Honour 19.- DGM – Land Of Sorrow 20.- DEFECTO – Paradigm Of Deceit 21.- STARDUST – The River Is Rollin´ 22.- BOYS FROM HEAVEN – Burning Like A Flame 23.- BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN – The Power Of Prayer 24.- JAKKO JAKSZYK – The Trouble With Angels Dirigido por Jesús Alijo LUX ¡QUE NADIE SE TE ADELANTE! NO DUDES EN REGISTRARTE, DISFRUTAR, COMENTAR, SEGUIRNOS Y COMPARTIR, GRACIAS.

World Trivia
Russian Inventions

World Trivia

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2020 6:10


In this episode of Inventions Around the World, we will talk about some amazing Russian inventions. So let’s get started. We all must have heard about the radio. Radio is a device for wireless communication. This concept was first introduced by Alexander Popov, as a Russian Physicist in 1885. He was the first man to make the radio set but unfortunately, he could not publish his work. After two years, an Italian man Guglielmo Marconi worked on the same idea and successfully demonstrated the first radio, and a lot of people gave him the credit for its invention. But even today, after so many years, the debate on the real inventor of the radio is still on. Who do you think should get its credit? Moving to the next invention, let’s talk about Television which was invented by Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian engineer in 1923. He applied for his patent in the United States and he did not just stop just at that. After years he also invented Kinescope, a type of film recorder, and then went on to invent Iconoscope. The next invention we are going to talk about is the Videotape recorder. It was invented by Alexander Poniatoff in the 1950s under his own company named Ampex. Even other companies had to use the patent of Poniatoff to develop their version of videotape recorders. Let's shift to something completely different to the food segment now. So the next invention we will talk about is Yogurt. 1910 a Russian scientist proved that fermented milk is very useful for our body and its metabolism. It was first made in Bulgaria and today it is found in abundance all over the world. Similarly, another unique invention from Russia is Synthetic Rubber, which was invented by Sergei Lebedev in the year 1910. The man-made version of rubbers are used in making tires for cars, cycles, and aircraft but synthetic rubbers have a specific use in producing rocket propellants. So hope you enjoy this podcast. We will bring the inventions from another country in our next episode. www.chimesradio.comFB: https://www.facebook.com/chimesradio/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vrchimesradio/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChimesRadio Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/chimesradioSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Marketing Rescue Podcast
EP26: The Cycle That Constantly Replays

The Marketing Rescue Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2020 28:02


Usually, on the Marketing Rescue podcast, we tell the stories of brands - brands who made it and brands who didn't. But on today's episode, we're going to talk a bit about technologies, and how business decisions (including marketing) shape the technologies we end up using.  If you're old enough, cast your mind back to the mid-to-late 1970s when if you wanted to watch a show, you watched it when it came on. Once.  At the same time as everyone else. If you missed it… you missed it. But right at the end of the 1970s, something happened that changed all of that. In fact, changed how we watched TV And movies - fundamentally.  The invention of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) For the first time, families could set the VCR to record a favorite show, and watch it when they wanted. They could rent a movie at the local grocery store or video store, and watch it (again) when they wanted.The VCR was a huge change in the entire media landscape. It's helpful to remember (or learn for the first time) that the way VCRs came to market, and the VHS format, in particular, was far from pre-ordained.  The story of bringing video to home viewing is an instructional tale for anyone interested in bringing new products, or new technologies, to market. The story started in the 1950s, in Japan when Dr. Sawazaki developed a prototype videotape recorder. This invention started a race to see who could bring this technology to market first. In 1956, Ampex (the company known mostly for making recording media like video and audiotape) released the world's first commercially available video recorder - the Ampex VRX-1000.  At the time, there were six major firms fighting for who would get a consumer product to market that was truly successful. Of those six - the two that emerged as the leaders were the electronics giants, JVC and Sony. They were working on two different formats, or standards.  JVC had their money on a standard they called “VHS” which stands for Video Home System. At the same time, engineers at Sony were working on multiple formats, one of these was called Betamax. Betamax had a great picture and sound quality - the best of the consumer-friendly models. Unfortunately, it was expensive compared to VHS and it could only record up to an hour on tape. This becomes the focal point in the battle for a consumer standard - the balance between quality, recording length, and achieving that balance at price consumers would pay. Both JVC and Sony were working on this balance: JVC had longer record time, but lower quality while Sony had higher quality, but shorter record time. These two formats: VHS and Betamax quickly emerged as the front-runners in the battle for home video, even while they were still in prototype. JVC (and eventually other companies) started making VHS machines and Sony went with the Betamax machines.  The two approaches could not have been more different. Building consensus, and making friends Here are some of the key differences in how JVC and Sony took their tech to market: JVC worked harder with the industry to build up support. Sony didn't. When Japan tried to make an industry standard they got Sony's former partners like Matsushita to side with them It is possible that JVC may have ended up adopting the Betamax standard had Sony been a bit more open. Sony, on the other hand, refused the advice of others, including companies they'd previously partnered with like Matsushita. They preferred “better” licensing deals over customer-accessibility. Betamax opted for high-quality proprietary formats (ex: Minidisc, MSX, Video Game cartridges, and PlayStation).By 1980, JVC's VHS format controlled 60% of the North American videocassette market. As a result of their proprietary format - Sony got sued by motion picture companies for encouraging the recording of copyrighted material.  Sony eventually won the lawsuit but by the time it was over, and they fully entered the market in video stores,

SpirituallyRAW
Ep 392 Utsava ACCURATE New CURRENCY PREDICTIONS, August 6, 2020

SpirituallyRAW

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 10, 2020 56:34


SpirituallyRAW Ep 392 Utsava-ACCURATE, New CURRENCY PREDICTION Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, Iraqi Dinar, Vietnam Dong, RV, Gold Standard, Trump, Tesla Healing Towers, Clean Vaccine, Natural Cures, MMS, Q&A, and More! “I heard from a credible source that the 5G towers that are going up everywhere will be used to distribute free energy and "internet connectivity will be transmitted via Elon Musk's satellite”. 3. Have America’s 5G Towers have been converted to 432Hz Tesla Healing Towers buy Trump and his team ? 4. What about the Mexican wall is also a Tesla Healing wall? 5. CoVFeFe magnets which make 5G safe. (alloy of Cobalt, Vanadium, and Iron creating a magnetic material that will also facilitate many innovative technological advances for our future including space travel. CoVFeFe essentially cleanses the impurities from the 5G, and works on an ionic level to keep Oxygen from being depleted, rendering the signal harmless) 6. “Why are they not giving out the cure, like HCQ for the virus instead of making everyone wear masks?” 7. “Can you ask Utsava if their will be a cure for DIABETES?” 8. “Can you please ask Utsava if she thinks if we bought silver through an online dealer (ie:JM bullion, Ampex etc) if she think it will eventually be confiscated from those who bought online rather than privately cash at a local coin shop etc?” 10. “When you see Utsava again can you please ask her when she will see international travel recommencing I am missing my Fiance.” 11. “Is Amazon going to be broken down and dismantled? Will it cease to exist? What happens to the stock if the government acquires the business?”

Focusrite Pro Podcast
Shaping the Audio Industry as We Know it with Frank Wells - Pt.2

Focusrite Pro Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2020 41:40


On this episode, Dan and Ted are once again joined by Frank Wells who has a tremendous history in radio, recording studios, and with AES.  We discuss shifting from a technical studio career to an editorial career, joining and engaging with AES, the evolution of the Audio Engineering Society, supporting the future of the audio industry, $3m recording studios being bulldozed to build condos, and a whole lot more! Learn more about joining AES: www.aes.org/membershipTo learn more about the ‘World-First’ Cross-Border Interactive Performance that we discussed, click here. 

Focusrite Pro Podcast
Shaping the Audio Industry as We Know it with Frank Wells - Pt.1

Focusrite Pro Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2020 28:34


On this episode, Dan and Ted are joined by Frank Wells who has a tremendous history in radio, recording studios, and with AES.  We discuss being at the cutting edge of both analog and digital technologies, Frank’s first experience with dither, tracking sound signatures of Russian submarines in the Atlantic Ocean, using an SSL console as the world’s largest and most expensive mouse, and a whole lot more! Learn more about The Audio Engineering Society and become a member: http://www.aes.org/Learn how Focusrite RedNet products Enabled ‘World-First’ Cross-Border Interactive Performance: click here 

Tales of Silicon Valley
Atari's Nolan Bushnell "I started tinkering in third grade and never stopped"

Tales of Silicon Valley

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2020 50:18


In an additional bonus episode to Tales From Silicon Valley, The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, for the full interview that was featured in episode 1 of Tales Of Silicon Valley. He talks about growing up in Utah (0:45), setting up his first business at age 10 (3:00), managing the games department (4:20), coming to Silicon Valley (7:10), working at Ampex (8:30), playing Space War (9:30), starting a gaming company with $500 (12:30), creating Pong (16:20), running on a shoestring (19:15), selling to Warner (23:30), the Atari culture (24:40), hiring Steve Jobs (27:00), making more than all of Hollywood combined (32:00), turning down an offer to be the first investor in Apple (34:40), his worst day of work (38:15), why the tech industry took root in Silicon Valley (39:00), why he’s excited about tech in 2019 (41:00), his other ventures (45:20), what Steve Jobs got right (48:25). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Press Play > Dedicated to All Things Reel-to-Reel
Press Play - The Podcast from Reel Resilience - Ep 6: A Visit To Sound Mastering - Part 2

Press Play > Dedicated to All Things Reel-to-Reel

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 13, 2020 22:13


A Visit to Sound Mastering - Part 2. In this podcast I continue my chat with Nick Robbins, Senior Mastering Engineer at Sound Mastering and his colleague Graham Sharpe. We talk special Studers, Ampex, recording formats prior to tape and Bing Crosby. Support the show (https://www.reelresilience.co.uk/newsletter)

The History of Computing
In The Beginning... There Was Pong

The History of Computing

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2019 12:55


Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at Pong. In the beginning there was Pong. And it was glorious! Just think of the bell bottoms at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California on November 29th 1972. The first Pong they built was just a $75 black and white tv from a Walgreens and some cheap parts. The cabinet wasn't even that fancy. And after that night, the gaming industry was born. It started with people starting to show up and play the game. They ended up waiting for the joint to open, not drinking, and just gaming the whole time. The bartender had never seen anything like it. I mean, just a dot being knocked around a screen. But it was social. You had to have two players. There was no machine learning to play the other side yet. Pretty much the same thing as real ping pong. And so Pong was released by Atari in 1972. It reminded me of air hockey the first time I saw it. You bounced a ball off a wall and tried to get it past the opponent using paddles. It never gets old. Ever. That's probably why of all the Atari games at the arcade, more quarters got put into it than any. The machines were sold for three times the cost to produce them; unheard of at the time. The game got popular, that within a year, the company had sold 2,500 , which they tripled in 1974. I wasn't born yet. But I remember my dad telling me that they didn't have a color tv yet in 72. They'd manufactured the games in an old skate rink. And they were cheap because with the game needing so few resources they pulled it off without a CPU. But what about the code? It was written by Al Alcorn as a training exercise that Nolan Bushnell gave him after he was hired at Atari. He was a pretty good hire. It was supposed to be so easy a kid could play it. I mean, it was so easy a kid could play it. Bushnell would go down as the co-creator of Pong. Although maybe Ralph Baer should have as well, given that Bushnell tested his table tennis game at a trade show the same year he had Alcorn write Pong. Baer had gotten the idea of building video games while working on military systems at a few different electronics companies in the 50s and even patented a device called the Brown Box in 1973, which was filed in 1971 prior to licensing it to Magnavox to become the Odyssey. Tennis for Two had been made available in 1958. Spacewar! had popped up in 1962 , thanks to MIT's Steven “Slug” Russel's being teased until he finished it. It was initially written on the TX-0 and was ported to the PDP, slowly making its way across the world as the PDP was shipping. Alan Kotok had whipped up some sweet controllers, but it could be played with just the keyboard as well. No revolution seemed in sight yet as it was really just shipping to academic institutions. And to very large companies. The video game revolution was itching to get out. People were obsessed with space at the time. Space was all over science fiction, there was a space race being won by the United States, and so Spacewar gave way to Computer Space, the first arcade game to ship, in 1971, modeled after Spacewar!. But as an early coin operated video game it was a bit too complicated. As was Galaxy Game, whipped up in 1971 by Bushnell and cofounder Ted Dabney, who's worked together at Ampex. They initially called their company Syzygy Engineering but as can happen, there was a conflict on that trademark and they changed the name to Atari. Atari had programmed Galaxy Game, but it was built and distributed by Nutting Associates. It was complex and needed a fair amount of instructions to get used to it. Pong on the other hand needed no instructions. A dot bounced from you to a friend and you tried to get it past the other player. Air hockey. Ping pong. Ice hockey. Football. It just kinda' made sense. You bounced the dot off a paddle. The center of each returned your dot at a regular 90 degree angle and the further out you got, the smaller that angle. The ball got faster the longer the game went on. I mean, you wanna' make more quarters, right?!?! Actually that was a bug, but one you like. They added sound effects. They spent three months. It was glorious and while Al Alcorn has done plenty of great stuff in his time in the industry I doubt many have been filled with the raw creativity he got to display during those months. It was a runaway success. There were clones of Pong. Coleco released Telestar and Nintendo came out with Color TV Game 6. In fact, General Instruments just straight up cloned the chip. Something else happened in 1972. The Magnavox Odyssey shipped and was the first console with interchangeable dice. After Pong, Atari had pumped out Gotcha, Rebound, and Space Race. They were finding success in the market. Then Sears called. They wanted to sell Pong in the home. Atari agreed. They actually outsold the Odyssey when they finally made the single-game console. Magnavox sued, claiming the concept had been stolen. They settled for $700k. Why would they settle? Well, they could actual prove that they'd written the game first and make a connection for where Atari got the idea from them. The good, the bad, and the ugly of intellectual property is that the laws exist for a reason. Baer beat Atari to the punch, but he'd go on to co-develop Simon says. All of his prototypes now live at the Smithsonian. But back to Pong. The home version of pong was released in 1974 and started showing up in homes in 1975, especially after the Christmas buying season in 1975. It was a hit, well on its way to becoming iconic. Two years later, Atari released the iconic Atari 2600, which had initially been called the VCS. This thing was $200 and came with a couple of joysticks, a couple of paddles, and a game called Combat. Suddenly games were showing up in homes all over the world. They needed more money to make money and Bushnell sold the company. Apple would become one of the fastest growing companies in US History with their release of the Apple II, making Steve Jobs a quarter of a billion dollars in 1970s money. But Atari ended up selling of units and becoming THE fastest growing company in US history at the time. There were sequels to Pong but by the time Breakout and other games came along, you really didn't need them. I mean, pin-pong? Pong Doubles was fine but , Super Pong, Ultra Pong, and Quadrapong, never should have happened. That's cool though. Other games definitely needed to happen. Pac Man became popular and given it wasn't just a dot but a dot with a slice taken out for a mouth, it ended up on the cover of Time in 1982. A lot of other companies were trying to build stuff, but Atari seemed to rule the world. These things have a pretty limited life-span. The video game crash of 1983 caused Atari to lose half a billion dollars. The stock price fell. At an important time in computers and gaming, they took too long to release the next model, the 5200. It was a disaster. Then the Nintendo arrived in some parts of the world in 1983 and took the US by storm in 1985. Atari went into a long decline that was an almost unstoppable downward spiral in a way. That was sad to watch. I'm sure it was sadder to be a part of. it was even sadder when I studied corporate mergers in college. I'm sure that was even sadder to be a part of as well. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, the founders of Atari, wanted a hit coin operated game. They got it. But they got way more than they bargained for. They were able to parlay Pong into a short lived empire. Here's the thing. Pong wasn't the best game ever made. It wasn't an original Bushnell idea. It wasn't even IP they could keep anyone else from cloning. But It was the first successful video game and helped fund the development of the VCS, or 2600, that would bring home video game consoles into the mainstream, including my house. And the video game industry would later eclipse the movie industry. But the most important thing pong did was to show regular humans that microchips were for more than… computing. Ironically the game didn't even need real microchips. The developers would all go on to do fun things. Bushnell founded Chuck E. Cheese with some of his cresis-mode cash. Once it was clear that the Atari consoles were done you could get iterations of Pong for the Sega Genesis, the Playstation, and even the Nintendo DS. It's floated around the computer world in various forms for a long, long time. The game is simple. The game is loved. Every time I see it I can't help but think about bell bottoms. It launched industries. And we're lucky to have had it. Just like I'm lucky to have had you as a listener today. Thank you so much for choosing to spend some time with us. We're so lucky to have you.

Danny In The Valley
Atari's Nolan Bushnell: "I started tinkering in third grade and never stopped"

Danny In The Valley

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2019 51:36


The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, to talk about growing up in Utah (0:45), setting up his first business at age 10 (3:00), managing the games department (4:20), coming to Silicon Valley (7:10), working at Ampex (8:30), playing Space War (9:30), starting a gaming company with $500 (12:30), creating Pong (16:20), running on a shoestring (19:15), selling to Warner (23:30), the Atari culture (24:40), hiring Steve Jobs (27:00), making more than all of Hollywood combined (32:00), turning down an offer to be the first investor in Apple (34:40), his worst day of work (38:15), why the tech industry took root in Silicon Valley (39:00), why he’s excited about tech in 2019 (41:00), his other ventures (45:20), what Steve Jobs got right (48:25). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

QSO Today - The oral histories of amateur radio
Episode 271 Richard Factor WA2IKL

QSO Today - The oral histories of amateur radio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2019 64:02


Richard Factor, WA2IKL, joined the amateur radio ranks 60 years ago, and was inspired by the technology dreams of the popular science fiction writers of that era.  His interest in radio, electronics, and science led WA2IKL to establish his own technology business, now fifty years old. WA2IKL tells his ham radio story and how he uses is Toyota Prius as a backup power supply for his house. 

The Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons
Ep. 18: "Walk the Dog Backwards"

The Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2019 105:05


Twice a month, guitar amp guru Skip Simmons fields your questions on vintage tube amp buying, restoration and repair. Co-hosted by the Fretboard Journal’s Jason Verlinde. Submit your guitar amp questions to Skip here: podcast@fretboardjournal.com or by leaving us a voicemail or text at 509-557-0848. Some of the topics discussed on this episode: 2:40 Jason brings home a Marshall Mercury 13:40 Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere & the Raiders 17:47 A request for a deeper dive into the Fender Champ schematic 24:34 Skip sells his Fender Tremolux head; an Ampex 960 reel-to-reel for free 27:45 Pat Boone’s recording console 30:45 Putting a VU meter in a Champ? 34:10 Truth About Vintage Amps shirts update: Shipped!  34:34 This week’s sponsor: Grez Guitars 37:20 More soldering advice 38:42 Scratchy pot tips (spoiler alert: WD-40) 41:43 An '80s Fender Concert 47:08 A Vibroluxe Reverb versus Deluxe Reverb and the sonic difference between 10" and 12" speakers 57:25 Ray Massie's The Vibe amp 59:30 18-watt Marshalls and a listener’s clone attempt using a Rauland PA amp platform 1:06:34 A 1955 Tweed Bassman with nearly all-new parts 1:10:32 When to replace drifted resistors 1:12:30 Converting a Fender PA-100 into a guitar amp 1:14:16 How many watts from a 6L6? 1:17:40 The Vingtor amp from Norway (and fixing a tremolo) 1:23:53 More Champ kit tips (wiring tube sockets) 1:25:22 A proposed Skip certification program 1:26:52 Coffee advice (Amazon link for the lazy) 1:29:40 Soap advice (Amazon link for the lazy) 1:31:50 Getting a 1965 Fender Princeton Reverb reissue rewired by Alessandro 1:37:45 Bad solder joints and troubleshooting a DIY 5F1 that stopped behaving

@ percussion podcast
181 - Robert McCormick

@ percussion podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2019


Robert McCormick is currently Professor of Music and director of the percussion program at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He served as principal percussionist/assistant timpanist with the Florida Orchestra for 20 seasons. He is a former member of the Harry Partch Ensemble and often performs with high profile artists of all genres. In 2010, he conducted the premiere performance of Chan Hae Lee’s Korean folk opera Simcheongga at the National Center of Performing Arts in Seoul. In March 2014 Robert performed the world premiere of Baljinder Sekhon’s Double Percussion Concerto at Carnegie Hall with percussionist Lee Hinkle. His myriad recordings with the McCormick Percussion Group, McCormick Duo and others continually receive the highest critical acclaim from composers and scholars. Robert is the host of the annual McCormick Marimba Festival which attracts major university marimba ensembles and performers from around the world. Robert was the 2006 recipient of the Florida Music Educator of the Year Award; the 2007 Grand Prize in the Keystone Percussion Composition Award, the 2010 University Distinguished Teacher Award and the 2015 Percussive Arts Society Lifetime Achievement in Education Award. He has also received several Global Music Awards for his CD recordings, many published on the Ravello label and distributed by Naxos. Bob is most proud of the many highly successful students he has had the opportunity to work with over the years.0:00 Intro and Hello 3:30 Summer practice, projects, and time management 7:40 With your free time? 11:10 Influential composers? What makes a new piece valuable to you as an artist? 14:22 Harry Partch? 19:40 McCormick Percussion Group? 25:30 Casey: Varese, Poème électronique, Ampex tape machines 39:35 Keeping cool in rehearsal? 42:25 Pieces for flute and percussion? 43:50 McCormick Marimba Festival? 49:10 Working with Anthony Cirone in the 70's? 52:00 Zack Browning's "Profit Beater"? 53:30 Snare drum technique and Forrest Clark? 54:47 Advocating new works? 56:12 The university teacher's role in guiding a student's repertoire choice? 58:40 Future shifts in music? Jobs and competition.   Watch here. Listen below.If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element

Recording Studio Rockstars
RSR190 - Dave Hillis - Recording Mace, Pearl Jam, and Alice In Chains During The Seattle Grunge Era

Recording Studio Rockstars

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2019 120:13


My guest today is Dave Hillis who started his career as a 17 year old guitarist for the legendary thrash metal band "MACE." Dave also spent ten years alongside legendary producer Rick Parashar, at Seattle's famed  London Bridge Studios, during the birth of the Grunge era where he worked as the engineer on Pearl Jam's debut album  "Ten" , "Mother Love Bone", the movie soundtrack for "Singles", Alice in Chains, Blind Melon, The Seattle Symphony, Love On Ice, and many others. Dave’s producing and engineering credits include The Afghan Whigs', The Twilight Singers, Kevin Martin of Candlebox, and he has even worked with comedian, Denis Leary among many others. In 2011,  Dave opened Starlodge Studios in Seattle; a private mix and overdub room featuring vintage and modern recording tools and his beloved AMPEX 1/2" tape Machine for analog magic. And he now lives in Pittsburgh PA where he recently works from a new multi purpose performance hall recording studio called The Sanctuary at Mr Smalls. Thanks to our sponsors! OWC - Other World Computing: https://www.OWC.com Boz Digital Labs - https://www.bozdigitallabs.com Use the coupon: RSRSasquatch2 when you checkout to get $70 off. JZ Microphones - https://usashop.jzmic.com/ use coupon: ROCKSTAR at checkout for 50% off JZ BH1S and BH2 Mics RSR Academy: http://RSRockstars.com/Academy Want to learn more about mixing? Get Free mix training with Lij at: http://MixMasterBundle.com Hear more on Youtube If you love the podcast then please Leave a review on iTunes here CLICK HERE FOR SHOW NOTES AT: http://RSRockstars.com/190  

Decoder with Nilay Patel
Michael Pollan: LSD and other psychedelics inspired some of Silicon Valley’s greatest inventions

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2018 63:23


Journalist and author Michael Pollan talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his new book, “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.” Pollan, perhaps best known for his books about food, like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” says the new book traces his learning process as he tried to understand why almost every human society has experimented with mind-altering substances. Silicon Valley is certainly no exception: Pollan says that tech pioneer Ampex was ground zero of the tech scene’s experimentation with LSD, starting in the 1950s; engineers discovered that dropping acid helped them design the first computer chips, and shared this finding with Doug Engelbart, who would go to invent the mouse, the graphical user interface and key components of the internet. Pollan also talks about the broader medical, political and social implications of using psychedelics, and how they might one day become legal and more socially acceptable in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Red Robinson's Legends
Dave McCormick & Red Robinson on C-FUN, 1962

Red Robinson's Legends

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 30, 2017 20:01


In 1959 "Big Daddy" Dave McCormick was hosting the Hi Fi Club, a syndicated radio show, on C-FUN. The producers would send the package but the local deejay would run the contests, read the commercials and follow the scripts supplied. Dave's show became so popular station management suggested he take over programming, and Dave took C-FUN to its very first Top 40 format. Dave was creative and went up against established CKWX and won the ratings battle. He was inventive, promotion minded and saw the future. He knew what the kids wanted and delivered with great deejays and music. Dave hired Frosty Forst, Jerry Landa, Brian Lord, Andy Laughland and Al Jordan and called them the Good Guys. He was the first in North America to use this phrase. When I returned from working in the US in 1961, I returned to CKWX but times had changed and C-FUN was now King of the Hill. When Dave quit C-FUN in 1962 to take a job in California radio, we worked together on the transition. We both announced the C-FUN top 50 songs of the week on a 4 hour radio show. Dave returned in later years to CFMI with his new show and a feature he called Discumentary. Dave McCormick passed away yesterday and the radio people who knew him loved him as listeners over the decades will long remember his gifts to Vancouver radio. We all will miss him. Rest in Peace old friend. Back in December 2009 I wrote about this painting on redrobinson.com. "The timing couldn't be better for the genius of Bruce Stewart to strike again with this brand new “fantasy” painting of Dave McCormick and the original C-FUN deejays. Bruce has the ability to capture the essence of an era. This period at C-FUN was the first fling at Top 40 that was totally driven by Dave. He left in early 1962 and that is when I joined the illustrious group. Brian “Baby Blue” Lord left at the same time. For more on C-FUN, visit Jim Bower's FUN-tastic site Vancouver Top 40 Radio http://www.vancouvertop40radio.com/. Jim was kind enough to pass along Bruce's note: 'Late evening – summer of 1961. I, as a boy of almost fifteen, in hospital for a small procedure, but bed-bound for almost two weeks. Nothing to do but count the holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles, over and over — and listen to C-FUN, when Roy the Boy was ‘Crying', and Paul Anka was ‘Kissing on the Phone'… all I could think of was the hot days and how they were passing me by, outside my window. And that imaginary summer view inside another window: the ‘Control Room' and the board, where mischief was afoot, with Big Daddy at the controls, the Good Guys providing backup, awaiting their turn at the mike, taking requests, spinning the disks and weaving the magic! A fantasy image of what the listener (me) imagined just what the DJ board at C-FUN might look like amid the chaos of a Summer Soundathon week — if radio had pictures! Only in the mind's eye of a listener, out there, everywhere around a place called Funland! In the late 60s, when I was working summers at UBC, I did an illustration for a dual Ampex tape deck module (reel to reel) commissioned by Stan Davis, whose company Broadcast Technical Services produced the module. Long after, I learned that Stan (now sadly passed) designed and built the technical end of C-FUN in the early 60s. I guess he was my inspiration for this piece, although a lot of my ‘technical' input was made up — part of my ‘imagining' concept. It IS a change from the other illustrations on the Vancouver Top 40 site, however! I kept adding more and more ‘stuff', until it became a bit of a MAD magazine piece with subplots abounding... cats keeping the mice population down, and Frosty passing a chipped 45 to a harried and overworked Dave!'”

The Organist
Episode 72: Baptism of Solitude: Paul Bowles's Morocco Tapes

The Organist

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2017 29:35


The novelist and countercultural icon Paul Bowles -- author of The Sheltering Sky, friend to William Burroughs, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams, and husband of the brilliant writer Jane Bowles -- lived in Tangier from 1947 until his death fifty-two years later. In 1959, he received a grant from the Library of Congress to “preserve†the music of Morocco. He set off in a VW bug (with his two driving companions, a Moroccan and a Canadian), laden with a massive Ampex tape recorder, bottles of hot Pepsi, and a pound of hashish. These remarkable recordings have long been unavailable, but last year, the label Dust-to-Digital released them as a deluxe box set. The Organist asked the writer Brian Edwards to listen to the tapes, and to tell Bowles’s remarkable story. Brian went through hours of recordings dozens of times, and sent back this report, which raises important questions about the problems— artistic, technical, and of course ethical — of recording a music you love in a country that’s not your own. Produced by Myke Dodge Weiskopf Written by Brian T. Edwards   Bowles Marakesh — Credit: Courtesy Allen Ginsberg Estate / Dust-to-Digital Bowles-older — Credit: Courtesy Irene Herrmann / Dust-to-Digital Paul Bowles on street-Tangier, June 1955 — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital Line of singers w Qraqab cymbals 1 drum — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress Double horn group by building — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress Musicians in front-men with guns behind — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress Foothills-figure by fortress — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress  VW bug along mtn road with small group — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress Bowles squatting by wall Loc-Map — hand-drawn map by Paul Bowles, showing his itinerary through Morocco in 1959, aboard a VW Beetle, filled with recording equipment, supplies, and recording team — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital / Library of Congress Bowles against tapestry — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital Tangier Group (burroughs, bowles, ginsberg) — Credit: Courtesy Allen Ginsberg Estate / Dust-to-Digital Sand village and palm trees — Credit: Courtesy Dust-to-Digital Music in this episode is from Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959.  The Organist’s theme music is by Barry London of Oneida.

SONIC TALK Podcasts
Sonic TALK 457 - Wonderfully Pointless Onde Magnetique

SONIC TALK Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2016 67:42


We start with an homage to Ampex 456 tape and the general process of working with analog tape, then the Waves Scheps Parallel Particles plugin, the news that boffins are working on a cure for hearing loss with cilia regeneration drugs, Onde Magnetique - the wonderful cassette based instrument, mixing in the heat, repair or fix/warrantees.

pointless ampex sonic talk
SONIC TALK Podcasts
Sonic TALK 457 - Wonderfully Pointless Onde Magnetique

SONIC TALK Podcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2016 77:52


We start with an homage to Ampex 456 tape and the general process of working with analog tape, then the Waves Scheps Parallel Particles plugin, the news that boffins are working on a cure for hearing loss with cilia regeneration drugs, Onde Magnetique - the wonderful cassette based instrument, mixing in the heat, repair or fix/warrantees.

Dr. Frankenstine
Ampex Cassette - 1983 New York City WRKS

Dr. Frankenstine

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2014 90:52


98.7 WRKS - Kiss FM New York City Broadcast Recording - Shep Pettibone +

From The Other Side Of The Glass

Former Audiobrien employee Andrew Host gives us a quick history lesson on magnetic recording tape.

Spectrum
KALX Engineers

Spectrum

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2012 30:00


Past Engineers of KALX talk about the development of the station and its challenges. Features Sam Wood, Ron Quan, David Josephson, and Susan Calico. Also, past Music Director and Station Manager Doc Pelzel provides his insights.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley. We have a special show this week to highlight the [00:00:30] 50th anniversary of calyx and the kick off of the fundraiser. We look back over the 50 years by talking with past engineers of Calyx, those key people who made it possible for radio to happen. Our guests, our previous engineers, Sam Wood, Ron Kwon, David Josephson, Susan Calico, and to pass station manager Dr Pell Cell. We wanted to give you an idea of how Calex struggled and evolved into its current form through the eyes of the engineers that made it happen on with the show. Rick and I [00:01:00] are here with doc pell, Zelle and doc. What was it like early on in the 60s here at Calex? Yeah, I started it. Yeah. Speaker 3: [inaudible] about six months after it became an FM station and about um, oh six and a half years after it was an am station as usually a case with a college radio station. A bunch of engineers get together and decide, hey, let's do a radio station. And they put Patti page records in the library and they want you to play [00:01:30] music to study by. Okay. And then they go and fiddle with the wires, everything and get the stuff going. And then the, uh, then the firies come in and uh, and radicalize everything musically and, and make the engineers all nervous and depressed and then start building an audience. So Speaker 1: we have a phone interview with one of those early engineers from Calex Sam wood, let's go do that. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 5: Sam Wood, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about the early days of Calex. Speaker 4: Well thank you for having me. Speaker 5: And [00:02:00] what years were you at cal? Speaker 4: I was actually there from the fall of 1963 through the spring of 1968. Speaker 5: And how did you get interested in radio at cal? Speaker 4: Well, actually I lived in the unit one residence hall, which was actually called Putnam Hall. Down the hall from me were two double e's who basically a hung out with for a while. And they took me over and introduced me to the founders of radio cow. Speaker 5: [00:02:30] And what did you find there? You know, what was on the ground engineering wise?Speaker 4: Well, at that point the station actually had a small studio and a little control room and a shop area. This was all in the basement of unit two residence hall. The actual original work that was done by Marshall and Jim started in 1961 everyone talks about 62 well that's about the time that they finally got some of the equipment working, [00:03:00] but they actually put this together in 1961 Speaker 5: and what were the engineering challenges for you back then? Speaker 4: Well, the challenges were that we had no time and very little money, so we ended up having to build much of what we had. We got some surplus gear from some of the commercial stations and we'd modify some of that, but we ended up building most of the stuff on our own. In fact, the transmitters that we [00:03:30] had for the carrier current station were actually built out of food service trays for the chassis. And then surplus scrap wood for the frame. The transformers came out of the physics department and the tubes came out of, I think it was the chem department, so really this is literally built up from scraps. We spent a lot of time and very little money Speaker 5: and that carrier system that you talked about, describe that a bit. Speaker 4: That was basically an a m transmitter. [00:04:00] It operated in the am radio band and it coupled into the power lines of the residence halls and it started out in unit two and then they expanded it to unit one and eventually into unit three and students who wanted to listen to the station could tune it in on an am radio. Speaker 5: And who were some of the key people that were in the engineering group back then? You've mentioned a few names. Do you want to sorta run down? Who was who? Speaker 4: Sure. John grilly worked with me. [00:04:30] He became chief engineer a later on, another guy, Bob Tasjan, who was an engineer and he helped out also Lee fells and Stein who later became one of the homebrew computer network people. John Connors, Scott Loftus, us, mark Tendus, Charlie Bedard. These were all engineering people who helped out in various ways. Speaker 5: How much time and impact did this have on your studies? Speaker 4: Oh, it was, it was interesting shoehorning [00:05:00] everything together because it, I spent far more time than I probably should have down there. I did all right, but mainly because once I got into upper division, the double e part of it, I had a natural ability to be able to work through the problems. And I think some of my experience at radio cow actually helped me in some of my w classes. Speaker 5: Do you want to tell some stories about uh, pulling cables? Speaker 4: Oh, the cables? Yes. We were in a very interesting situation with the university. [00:05:30] We got friendly with some of the top people at the university and were able to therefore have a general attitude toward us of, we don't care how the cable gets into the conduit, but once it's there, you can use it. So we ended up having little wire pulling campaigns, typically about two or three in the morning where we'd pull cable and we called it midnight wire and cable. And we wired up. Much of the, one of our biggest accomplishments was [00:06:00] the studios in the basement of Dwinelle Hall that we built up. Didn't have any real connection with the telephone network or any of the other university cable networks that we needed to be connected to. So we, uh, ended up pulling approximately 200 feet of 75 pair cable all the way from the grounds and buildings part of Darnell all the way to the studios. Speaker 4: And we figured out a really neat little trick using a vacuum cleaner [00:06:30] and a sponge and some fishing line so we could get a pole wire into a conduit that normally you couldn't. So we pulled this cable in that gave us our connectivity into the network at one l hall. One of the things also, I hadn't mentioned, we needed a lot of wire and cable to build the station. So the way we got that was, Marshall talked his way into getting access to the Republican convention at the Cow Palace. This is a 1964 [00:07:00] Republican convention, so we went over as the convention was winding up and we sqround miles and miles of cable off the ground that people didn't want. So we were able to get enough cable to wire much of our requirements for the station. So some of these outside activities were really quite exciting. Speaker 5: What sort of impacted all your work at cal radio and then Cadillacs have on your personal and professional life? Speaker 4: Well, [00:07:30] it gave me a different dimension because I had pretty much just focused on engineering and I like building things and that's why I went into engineering. The radio cow experience gave me a taste of what else you have to be able to do. You know, not that I have a good aptitude for it, but at least I have an appreciation for issues regarding organization and how to be able to put something together and get it through the system. [00:08:00] We really had to have an organization that we've built from the ground up to make this viable to do something like this in an environment where there's basically nothing available to you unless you know how to go and get it. It taught me how to go and get it, which was really useful. I consider that the experience that I got at radio cow far more important than the courses that I took. I mean I took a lot of interest in courses but the station gave me experience. You can't [00:08:30] get any other way. And that helped me and startups and it helped me in understanding how to make things work, not just from the technical end but from the other end too. Speaker 5: Any reflections on uh, what the station meant to the university community? Speaker 4: When we actually built the station, people really liked it and got involved and things were going unfortunately later, uh, into the 70s, there turned out to [00:09:00] be a number of problems. The station basically it shifted from being run by the engineering people to being run by others in the university who had different agendas. The stations really had its ups and downs and it's come back really well and with a lot more community efforts now than it had originally. So it is really important that you have a continuing set of goals and a continuing purpose and someone to build the structure into [00:09:30] running the station. Initially when it was starting from scratch, it was ad hoc, so clearly by definition there was no embedded structure that was suitable. Now that the station especially has got structuring, it's important to maintain the functionality and maintain that the way it operates and everything from one class to the next. Because by definition students come and students go and that doesn't lend itself for the kind of structure you need for an ongoing activity. The station [00:10:00] has had a long growth cycle here and I'm glad to see it's still around. Speaker 1: Sam would, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking with us about the early days of Calex. Speaker 4: Well, thank you for having me. Speaker 1: You're listening to the spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our topic this week is the 50th anniversary of Kelex. We're talking to engineers about how Calex got started. It's also fundraiser week. Call us in the five and dime. That's six, four, two five, two five, nine. We're back now with [00:10:30] duck pell sal and doc. Next up is Ron Kwan. What are your insights into him? Speaker 3: Uh, Ron Kwan came in later on and he, he really did a, an amazing job with nothing. I mean we were still in a s ASU c funded club, which was a budget of few blue chip stamps was how much they gave us each year. And uh, so the fact that we were even able to, to function at all was truly amazing. But yeah, to Ron, Ron knew his stuff. In fact, he's, um, he's even still doing that macgyver kind of thing [00:11:00] of building like a lie detector with a, with an old cigarette butt and a rubber band. Speaker 1: Ron Quan, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you. How did you get interested in radio? Speaker 6: Well, in radio I build crystal radios when I was like nine or 10 years old through my brother. Getting into broadcast was actually kind of a fluke. What had happened was one of my friends got his FCC license, he had his third class license [00:11:30] and he was trying to get a second class license. Back in those days you would have your third, your second and your first class. And nowadays I think it's only like third class in general. So what happens is he's kind of like almost daring me to do it as well. And he had taken the test, the second class [inaudible] about two or three and had failed. And how he would do is he would take these questions and answer booklets and just try to memorize [00:12:00] the answers. So I did it the hard way. I, I got this book called Electronic Communication by, by Robert Schrader, who, who taught at Laney College back here in the East Bay. Speaker 6: And it's a thick book. It's almost like half of a telephone book. So I spent 150 hours and six weeks studying it. Between the time I enter cow and after I just graduated from high school and I passed the tests, but just barely I thing. But I got [00:12:30] it. And then when I entered cau back in 72 I heard that there was a radio station here. And so I said, where is this place in this as well? It's a, I think 500 Eshleman hall. So I went there I think during my second quarter. So that would be like the winter of, yeah, 73 and ran into a few people and one of them was Henry Chu who was the station manager and they said, yeah, we [00:13:00] have somebody outside getting the transmitter, a room ready to work, but we, we always can need help in the studio and elsewhere. Speaker 6: So for about three or four months I worked with this outside engineer and then I think by the time I had finished my first year, then I became the chief engineer, which then I found out was a very strange job in itself because you get called a lot [00:13:30] sometimes I'd 11 o'clock in the evening like, Hey, a, the photo preempt went out. And I say, well, what did you do? Uh, well everything was working just fine. Instead, I picked you, kicked the switch underneath it based back in those days we were so poor, we didn't even mount the damn thing. We stuck this funnel pre-amp deer off to the corner, but it was on the floor. Instead of this jockey would be moving his or her feet around it and kicked the switch off. And so I would have to come back [00:14:00] and deal with that. Speaker 6: So it was a very good job though. I lasted for about roughly a year. Uh, some of the crazy things that, that we did were that we did remote broadcasts and one of them was the famous UCLA cow game. Uh, when Bill Walton and John Wooden came to town, Dick was broadcast at the Oakland Coliseum or someplace like that. And so I had to whip up some kind of like a conso and a backup [00:14:30] in case of, you know, everything else failed in. Fortunately all that worked. And the backup amplifier was this heath kit Hi-fi amplifier that I found at a, I think in Norton Hall where the, all the equipment was, was being stashed at the time. And so, so it worked out fine. And I was, you know, actually sitting on top of instrument hall that night, uh, listening to the game, making sure everything was okay. So the radio part was sort of like, I just kind of fell into this thing. I didn't really [00:15:00] intend to work in radio, but it turned out to be a very good experience. So, so I took a nosedive in my grades and then I came back during my junior and senior year. Speaker 3: Did you learn anything from [inaudible] that helped you with your career? Speaker 6: The coolest thing about working at cow ax and also in broadcast, I got to see how people actually work the equipment and people don't always read the manual. People will use whatever [00:15:30] they have to get the job done and nobody really cares, you know? Well we have to use specific headphone or a specific something to this. You know, you have to design a thing to be idiot proof. And so that was the biggest lesson. I learned a work in broadcasting. And it was actually a great advantage because, uh, most people who work for an Ampex or a Sony when they get out of college, they have absolutely no practical knowledge of how [00:16:00] the users use their equipment and, and how they might configure it. So, so that, that, that part was good. Great. Ryan Quan, thanks very much for coming on. Spectrum. Thank you. Speaker 3: It's fundraiser week call (510) 642-5259 to pledge. We are back with doc pell cell and doc the 70s were a turbulent time. What was it like here at Cadillacs during that upheaval there was a lot of different factions at the stations that were sort of vying [00:16:30] for either control of it. And as a result, whoever won didn't really do anything except their own particular little fiefdom of area they wanted to work in and everything else sort of fell apart. So the station fell off the air a few times in the 73 74 period. Uh, there was a time in the early seventies when, um, the station studio equipment was stolen. There was no chief engineer. Our license was up for renewal. [00:17:00] The student government had had a war with the politics of the station, so we had no budget, so we had literally like nothing left. We were off the air for a period of time. Speaker 3: It looked pretty bleak. Then it's about in the 73 and four period tell a person named Andy Reimer who was, had been a student at UC Irvine, transferred up here for his last few years and he showed the university that their lack of oversight might cause them to lose their license and he outlined a program for [00:17:30] how he would build a station in a management team and have some accountability, but how the university would have to pump some money and some oversight into it. He pretty much pull the station out of the ashes and sort of Phoenix like it was resurrected and came back and began what is probably on its current path to where it is. David Josephson Speaker 7: was the chief engineer at that time and we just happened to have David Josephson in here. Excellent. Thanks for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to come back and visit Berkeley. [00:18:00] How did you get started in radio? Well, I had the good fortune of landing in Berkeley at age, about nine or 10 when, uh, all sorts of experiments were happening. My mother was involved with KPFA and I was an electronic tinkerer experiment or I had a pirate radio station and the under the stairs in our house and she was doing some promotion work for KPFA. And I said, well, Gee, maybe I can get involved with a real radio here. They were very, uh, open [00:18:30] to that idea. So I started immediately then learning about production recording program, uh, editing and so on. So I got my, uh, third class license when I was 10 and read board shifts at Kpmj, but we moved away from Berkeley, uh, right after some of the worst of the people's park riots up to more rural northern California. Speaker 7: And, uh, finished high school there and decided that I really wanted [00:19:00] to stay involved in radio and electronics and audio broadcasting, uh, design and stuff like that. So came back to Berkeley and uh, was intent on being an engineering student when there was a, a note on the chalkboard of the Amateur Radio Club that the radio station was looking for an engineer as far as I knew the station was off the air and gone, which it was at that point, but I was part of the crew then that, uh, resurrected it. What was the time period? You were a chief engineer? [00:19:30] I was chief engineer from 75 through 79 I was here the four years. What were the main technical issues at the time? Just the resurrecting of cal. Yeah, building the station from scratch. The challenge was to build something that we could put on the air, making it work, making it illegal. Speaker 7: I started in the spring quarter of 75 and I think we started working on it toward the end of spring. I think we [00:20:00] were working on it for most of the summer. I was here all summer and I think we went on the air before school started again in the fall. What's important is that there was a crew of people who came together at that time who most of whom had a background in radio. The general manager, Andy Reimer, uh, had been manager of the UC Irvine Station when he was there for a couple of years. The other cluster of people were mostly involved in a record business. [00:20:30] You know Tim divine who went on to be out of an art at a and m I guess doc Pelz l of course. It was kind of keeping the continuity of things from the older time and running the music department. So we had a couple of months to figure out what could be patched together. A of my friends from KPFA helped staff and technicians from the w department provided test equipment, parts access to bits and pieces. So we just kind of pulled it together from that. [00:21:00] The next step was to be some thing a little bit more accessible and reliable than this closet up on the the roof of Dwinelle and that's when Andy got to doing the political thing and got us space in Lawrence Hall of Science. We moved the studios up there first Speaker 1: and you moved the transmitter up on the hill? That was next? That was stage two. So the first two, yeah. I think first phase was to get the studio to Lawrence Hall because we were being booted out of to know [00:21:30] and then the transmitter followed. How long after that? That was a year, more than a year after that because there was a lot of construction that was secondary to the studio operations. Back in the early days of Calex, a lot of the engineers were students at the time. Speaker 7: All of the engineers were students or former students or part time students. That was actually fairly common in college radio around [00:22:00] the country. There were more radio engineers out there because of the small radio stations around everywhere needed more engineers. The equipment was less reliable, transmitters needed work all the time. There were a lot more people who, as teenagers were working in radio and so they were a lot more engineers and there were a lot more people who were familiar with the technical requirements of, of an audio chain and a transmitter and studio transmitter, [00:22:30] links and antennas and things like that. So, uh, yeah, I was a student part time during that time. I, I think I got it about two years during my four years here, I said I graduated from colleagues. Most of the other engineers were also students or community people. There weren't any staff engineers while I was there except me. I mean, if they finally got a kind of a stipend salary for the chief engineer. Speaker 1: How did your time at Calyx influence your career? Speaker 7: [00:23:00] Most of the people I know who had solid college radio experiences when they were in school refer to them throughout their lives as a defining experience in enabling experience. That was, I mean, I don't know how many of them consider that they learned more from the radio station than they did from classes like I do, but I'm sure it's a significant fraction. The real challenge that drove what I was able to [00:23:30] feel confident in doing in later years was dealing with something that had to work all the time with limited resources and patching together things to make a system work and that that whole discipline of able to see a system come together and allocating limited resources to fitting that all together. That's the engineering challenge of doing the engineering of a radio station. At least it was then when things were not reliable, not stable, [00:24:00] not dependable, and things were being fixed all the time. And that applies to any technology that's in kind of development, I think. [inaudible] Speaker 1: David Josephson, thanks very much for coming on spectrum talking with us. Very welcome. Thanks for inviting me. K, a l ex Berkeley doc pell sal. Thanks very much for your help getting the context of the sixties and seventies squared away and it's fundraiser week here at Calyx fundraiser. So give us a call. [00:24:30] We need your donations. (510) 642-5259 back to spectrum. We're going to talk with Susan Calico, who took over in the 80s as chief engineer. Susan Kaliko. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about Calex. Speaker 8: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's nice to be back at the station and see how nice it looks. Speaker 1: I wanted to find out from you how you got interested in radio in the first place. Speaker 8: Well, I have to go back much further than my time at Calex. I [00:25:00] got out of school and I was very interested in writing and got involved at the daily cow. So I was a journalist for a little while and then I became a copy editor and somehow that wasn't enough. So I went down to KPFA, which is also in Berkeley and volunteered there. I got involved in first in women's news and then during that time, which was in the mid to late seventies, there were almost no women who knew anything technical at that station. So, [00:25:30] um, when I was at KPFA, I took advantage of the fact that you could do pretty much anything kind of like here I got my third class license, which was required to actually run the board on the air and learned how to do that. And again, was always teaching people. And I was there for probably about 10 years, everything overlapped with everything else and I had just studied for and gotten my first class radio license, which was in those days required to be the responsible [00:26:00] engineer at a station and the job of Calyx came up. So I applied for that and got in and well the work began. Speaker 1: What were the years you were a chief engineer at Calex? Speaker 8: Oh, I was engineer at Calex starting in 1981, I believe in the late, late in the year through uh, early 1995. So it was about 13 years altogether. Speaker 1: While you were the engineer, there [00:26:30] was a move from Lawrence Hall of science down to bondage. What was that like? Speaker 8: As I recall, we managed to get the honors studio down and settled and on the air and the newsroom was about to move from over in the student union and I got pneumonia, so I was at home in bed for two weeks with a fever. Well, the engineering volunteers basically put in the new studio. So it's, you know, as usual there's, there's never enough money to [00:27:00] do what you need to do, so you just have to do what you can with what you've got. And we were lucky enough to have some good volunteers who could really take care of business. Speaker 1: The next big technical challenge you had was increasing the power from 10 watts to 500 watts. How did that go? Speaker 8: We had to get a new transmitter, which was huge compared to our one that we had. And so we had to sort of rearrange things up at the transmitter shad and I'll patch all the leaks because I mean, when you get new [00:27:30] equipment, you want it to be good. Uh, we had to have a new cable running up the transmitter tower, which I think it's, it's not quite a hundred feet. I think it's something like 80 or 85 or something like that. I do remember, um, being up on the tower with the surveyors down below, because in such a crowded market, as Calex is in, in the bay area here, there are many FM stations. You have to be careful not to step on anybody else's frequency. So we had to have a very directional [00:28:00] and oddly shaped signal, the antennas crafted so that it directs the signal in the way that you want. Speaker 8: But if your antenna isn't pointed exactly where you want it, you're going to not be, you know, I mean, the FCC is not gonna like you being out of line there. So I went up on the tower, loosen the bolts on the, uh, on the antenna and the surveyors down below, going all over this way, you know, and I'm like whackwhackwhack no, no, no, a little, little bit back. But those [00:28:30] were expenses we couldn't avoid because it had to be certified. But eventually it all got done and in our case it was 500 watts, which isn't a whole lot. That transmitter could have done a lot more, but that was what we were allowed to do, so we had to keep it pretty close. Speaker 1: What was the culture like at Calex during your years? Speaker 8: I learned that no matter how weird people looked, most of them or really good people, they were sweet people. They, you know, a lot of our djs [00:29:00] were just really nice people. They were pretty easy to work with. They were considerate and I wouldn't always be able to tell by looking at them Speaker 1: Cadillacs. How did it affect you professionally? Speaker 8: I spent 13 years here and I really, really learned a lot more electronics and a lot more transmitter information and so I really understood why everything worked. Speaker 1: [00:29:30] Susan Calico, thanks very much for coming in and talking with us. Speaker 8: Well, it's been a pleasure to see that the station is still here and that the equipment still works. Speaker 1: The card during the show. It was by law, Stan and David for these help on folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license. 3.0 attribution. Please do donate to the calyx fundraiser and we'll see you in two weeks with another edition of spectrum at the same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Spectrum
KALX Engineers

Spectrum

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2012 30:00


Past Engineers of KALX talk about the development of the station and its challenges. Features Sam Wood, Ron Quan, David Josephson, and Susan Calico. Also, past Music Director and Station Manager Doc Pelzel provides his insights.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley. We have a special show this week to highlight the [00:00:30] 50th anniversary of calyx and the kick off of the fundraiser. We look back over the 50 years by talking with past engineers of Calyx, those key people who made it possible for radio to happen. Our guests, our previous engineers, Sam Wood, Ron Kwon, David Josephson, Susan Calico, and to pass station manager Dr Pell Cell. We wanted to give you an idea of how Calex struggled and evolved into its current form through the eyes of the engineers that made it happen on with the show. Rick and I [00:01:00] are here with doc pell, Zelle and doc. What was it like early on in the 60s here at Calex? Yeah, I started it. Yeah. Speaker 3: [inaudible] about six months after it became an FM station and about um, oh six and a half years after it was an am station as usually a case with a college radio station. A bunch of engineers get together and decide, hey, let's do a radio station. And they put Patti page records in the library and they want you to play [00:01:30] music to study by. Okay. And then they go and fiddle with the wires, everything and get the stuff going. And then the, uh, then the firies come in and uh, and radicalize everything musically and, and make the engineers all nervous and depressed and then start building an audience. So Speaker 1: we have a phone interview with one of those early engineers from Calex Sam wood, let's go do that. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 5: Sam Wood, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about the early days of Calex. Speaker 4: Well thank you for having me. Speaker 5: And [00:02:00] what years were you at cal? Speaker 4: I was actually there from the fall of 1963 through the spring of 1968. Speaker 5: And how did you get interested in radio at cal? Speaker 4: Well, actually I lived in the unit one residence hall, which was actually called Putnam Hall. Down the hall from me were two double e's who basically a hung out with for a while. And they took me over and introduced me to the founders of radio cow. Speaker 5: [00:02:30] And what did you find there? You know, what was on the ground engineering wise?Speaker 4: Well, at that point the station actually had a small studio and a little control room and a shop area. This was all in the basement of unit two residence hall. The actual original work that was done by Marshall and Jim started in 1961 everyone talks about 62 well that's about the time that they finally got some of the equipment working, [00:03:00] but they actually put this together in 1961 Speaker 5: and what were the engineering challenges for you back then? Speaker 4: Well, the challenges were that we had no time and very little money, so we ended up having to build much of what we had. We got some surplus gear from some of the commercial stations and we'd modify some of that, but we ended up building most of the stuff on our own. In fact, the transmitters that we [00:03:30] had for the carrier current station were actually built out of food service trays for the chassis. And then surplus scrap wood for the frame. The transformers came out of the physics department and the tubes came out of, I think it was the chem department, so really this is literally built up from scraps. We spent a lot of time and very little money Speaker 5: and that carrier system that you talked about, describe that a bit. Speaker 4: That was basically an a m transmitter. [00:04:00] It operated in the am radio band and it coupled into the power lines of the residence halls and it started out in unit two and then they expanded it to unit one and eventually into unit three and students who wanted to listen to the station could tune it in on an am radio. Speaker 5: And who were some of the key people that were in the engineering group back then? You've mentioned a few names. Do you want to sorta run down? Who was who? Speaker 4: Sure. John grilly worked with me. [00:04:30] He became chief engineer a later on, another guy, Bob Tasjan, who was an engineer and he helped out also Lee fells and Stein who later became one of the homebrew computer network people. John Connors, Scott Loftus, us, mark Tendus, Charlie Bedard. These were all engineering people who helped out in various ways. Speaker 5: How much time and impact did this have on your studies? Speaker 4: Oh, it was, it was interesting shoehorning [00:05:00] everything together because it, I spent far more time than I probably should have down there. I did all right, but mainly because once I got into upper division, the double e part of it, I had a natural ability to be able to work through the problems. And I think some of my experience at radio cow actually helped me in some of my w classes. Speaker 5: Do you want to tell some stories about uh, pulling cables? Speaker 4: Oh, the cables? Yes. We were in a very interesting situation with the university. [00:05:30] We got friendly with some of the top people at the university and were able to therefore have a general attitude toward us of, we don't care how the cable gets into the conduit, but once it's there, you can use it. So we ended up having little wire pulling campaigns, typically about two or three in the morning where we'd pull cable and we called it midnight wire and cable. And we wired up. Much of the, one of our biggest accomplishments was [00:06:00] the studios in the basement of Dwinelle Hall that we built up. Didn't have any real connection with the telephone network or any of the other university cable networks that we needed to be connected to. So we, uh, ended up pulling approximately 200 feet of 75 pair cable all the way from the grounds and buildings part of Darnell all the way to the studios. Speaker 4: And we figured out a really neat little trick using a vacuum cleaner [00:06:30] and a sponge and some fishing line so we could get a pole wire into a conduit that normally you couldn't. So we pulled this cable in that gave us our connectivity into the network at one l hall. One of the things also, I hadn't mentioned, we needed a lot of wire and cable to build the station. So the way we got that was, Marshall talked his way into getting access to the Republican convention at the Cow Palace. This is a 1964 [00:07:00] Republican convention, so we went over as the convention was winding up and we sqround miles and miles of cable off the ground that people didn't want. So we were able to get enough cable to wire much of our requirements for the station. So some of these outside activities were really quite exciting. Speaker 5: What sort of impacted all your work at cal radio and then Cadillacs have on your personal and professional life? Speaker 4: Well, [00:07:30] it gave me a different dimension because I had pretty much just focused on engineering and I like building things and that's why I went into engineering. The radio cow experience gave me a taste of what else you have to be able to do. You know, not that I have a good aptitude for it, but at least I have an appreciation for issues regarding organization and how to be able to put something together and get it through the system. [00:08:00] We really had to have an organization that we've built from the ground up to make this viable to do something like this in an environment where there's basically nothing available to you unless you know how to go and get it. It taught me how to go and get it, which was really useful. I consider that the experience that I got at radio cow far more important than the courses that I took. I mean I took a lot of interest in courses but the station gave me experience. You can't [00:08:30] get any other way. And that helped me and startups and it helped me in understanding how to make things work, not just from the technical end but from the other end too. Speaker 5: Any reflections on uh, what the station meant to the university community? Speaker 4: When we actually built the station, people really liked it and got involved and things were going unfortunately later, uh, into the 70s, there turned out to [00:09:00] be a number of problems. The station basically it shifted from being run by the engineering people to being run by others in the university who had different agendas. The stations really had its ups and downs and it's come back really well and with a lot more community efforts now than it had originally. So it is really important that you have a continuing set of goals and a continuing purpose and someone to build the structure into [00:09:30] running the station. Initially when it was starting from scratch, it was ad hoc, so clearly by definition there was no embedded structure that was suitable. Now that the station especially has got structuring, it's important to maintain the functionality and maintain that the way it operates and everything from one class to the next. Because by definition students come and students go and that doesn't lend itself for the kind of structure you need for an ongoing activity. The station [00:10:00] has had a long growth cycle here and I'm glad to see it's still around. Speaker 1: Sam would, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking with us about the early days of Calex. Speaker 4: Well, thank you for having me. Speaker 1: You're listening to the spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our topic this week is the 50th anniversary of Kelex. We're talking to engineers about how Calex got started. It's also fundraiser week. Call us in the five and dime. That's six, four, two five, two five, nine. We're back now with [00:10:30] duck pell sal and doc. Next up is Ron Kwan. What are your insights into him? Speaker 3: Uh, Ron Kwan came in later on and he, he really did a, an amazing job with nothing. I mean we were still in a s ASU c funded club, which was a budget of few blue chip stamps was how much they gave us each year. And uh, so the fact that we were even able to, to function at all was truly amazing. But yeah, to Ron, Ron knew his stuff. In fact, he's, um, he's even still doing that macgyver kind of thing [00:11:00] of building like a lie detector with a, with an old cigarette butt and a rubber band. Speaker 1: Ron Quan, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you. How did you get interested in radio? Speaker 6: Well, in radio I build crystal radios when I was like nine or 10 years old through my brother. Getting into broadcast was actually kind of a fluke. What had happened was one of my friends got his FCC license, he had his third class license [00:11:30] and he was trying to get a second class license. Back in those days you would have your third, your second and your first class. And nowadays I think it's only like third class in general. So what happens is he's kind of like almost daring me to do it as well. And he had taken the test, the second class [inaudible] about two or three and had failed. And how he would do is he would take these questions and answer booklets and just try to memorize [00:12:00] the answers. So I did it the hard way. I, I got this book called Electronic Communication by, by Robert Schrader, who, who taught at Laney College back here in the East Bay. Speaker 6: And it's a thick book. It's almost like half of a telephone book. So I spent 150 hours and six weeks studying it. Between the time I enter cow and after I just graduated from high school and I passed the tests, but just barely I thing. But I got [00:12:30] it. And then when I entered cau back in 72 I heard that there was a radio station here. And so I said, where is this place in this as well? It's a, I think 500 Eshleman hall. So I went there I think during my second quarter. So that would be like the winter of, yeah, 73 and ran into a few people and one of them was Henry Chu who was the station manager and they said, yeah, we [00:13:00] have somebody outside getting the transmitter, a room ready to work, but we, we always can need help in the studio and elsewhere. Speaker 6: So for about three or four months I worked with this outside engineer and then I think by the time I had finished my first year, then I became the chief engineer, which then I found out was a very strange job in itself because you get called a lot [00:13:30] sometimes I'd 11 o'clock in the evening like, Hey, a, the photo preempt went out. And I say, well, what did you do? Uh, well everything was working just fine. Instead, I picked you, kicked the switch underneath it based back in those days we were so poor, we didn't even mount the damn thing. We stuck this funnel pre-amp deer off to the corner, but it was on the floor. Instead of this jockey would be moving his or her feet around it and kicked the switch off. And so I would have to come back [00:14:00] and deal with that. Speaker 6: So it was a very good job though. I lasted for about roughly a year. Uh, some of the crazy things that, that we did were that we did remote broadcasts and one of them was the famous UCLA cow game. Uh, when Bill Walton and John Wooden came to town, Dick was broadcast at the Oakland Coliseum or someplace like that. And so I had to whip up some kind of like a conso and a backup [00:14:30] in case of, you know, everything else failed in. Fortunately all that worked. And the backup amplifier was this heath kit Hi-fi amplifier that I found at a, I think in Norton Hall where the, all the equipment was, was being stashed at the time. And so, so it worked out fine. And I was, you know, actually sitting on top of instrument hall that night, uh, listening to the game, making sure everything was okay. So the radio part was sort of like, I just kind of fell into this thing. I didn't really [00:15:00] intend to work in radio, but it turned out to be a very good experience. So, so I took a nosedive in my grades and then I came back during my junior and senior year. Speaker 3: Did you learn anything from [inaudible] that helped you with your career? Speaker 6: The coolest thing about working at cow ax and also in broadcast, I got to see how people actually work the equipment and people don't always read the manual. People will use whatever [00:15:30] they have to get the job done and nobody really cares, you know? Well we have to use specific headphone or a specific something to this. You know, you have to design a thing to be idiot proof. And so that was the biggest lesson. I learned a work in broadcasting. And it was actually a great advantage because, uh, most people who work for an Ampex or a Sony when they get out of college, they have absolutely no practical knowledge of how [00:16:00] the users use their equipment and, and how they might configure it. So, so that, that, that part was good. Great. Ryan Quan, thanks very much for coming on. Spectrum. Thank you. Speaker 3: It's fundraiser week call (510) 642-5259 to pledge. We are back with doc pell cell and doc the 70s were a turbulent time. What was it like here at Cadillacs during that upheaval there was a lot of different factions at the stations that were sort of vying [00:16:30] for either control of it. And as a result, whoever won didn't really do anything except their own particular little fiefdom of area they wanted to work in and everything else sort of fell apart. So the station fell off the air a few times in the 73 74 period. Uh, there was a time in the early seventies when, um, the station studio equipment was stolen. There was no chief engineer. Our license was up for renewal. [00:17:00] The student government had had a war with the politics of the station, so we had no budget, so we had literally like nothing left. We were off the air for a period of time. Speaker 3: It looked pretty bleak. Then it's about in the 73 and four period tell a person named Andy Reimer who was, had been a student at UC Irvine, transferred up here for his last few years and he showed the university that their lack of oversight might cause them to lose their license and he outlined a program for [00:17:30] how he would build a station in a management team and have some accountability, but how the university would have to pump some money and some oversight into it. He pretty much pull the station out of the ashes and sort of Phoenix like it was resurrected and came back and began what is probably on its current path to where it is. David Josephson Speaker 7: was the chief engineer at that time and we just happened to have David Josephson in here. Excellent. Thanks for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to come back and visit Berkeley. [00:18:00] How did you get started in radio? Well, I had the good fortune of landing in Berkeley at age, about nine or 10 when, uh, all sorts of experiments were happening. My mother was involved with KPFA and I was an electronic tinkerer experiment or I had a pirate radio station and the under the stairs in our house and she was doing some promotion work for KPFA. And I said, well, Gee, maybe I can get involved with a real radio here. They were very, uh, open [00:18:30] to that idea. So I started immediately then learning about production recording program, uh, editing and so on. So I got my, uh, third class license when I was 10 and read board shifts at Kpmj, but we moved away from Berkeley, uh, right after some of the worst of the people's park riots up to more rural northern California. Speaker 7: And, uh, finished high school there and decided that I really wanted [00:19:00] to stay involved in radio and electronics and audio broadcasting, uh, design and stuff like that. So came back to Berkeley and uh, was intent on being an engineering student when there was a, a note on the chalkboard of the Amateur Radio Club that the radio station was looking for an engineer as far as I knew the station was off the air and gone, which it was at that point, but I was part of the crew then that, uh, resurrected it. What was the time period? You were a chief engineer? [00:19:30] I was chief engineer from 75 through 79 I was here the four years. What were the main technical issues at the time? Just the resurrecting of cal. Yeah, building the station from scratch. The challenge was to build something that we could put on the air, making it work, making it illegal. Speaker 7: I started in the spring quarter of 75 and I think we started working on it toward the end of spring. I think we [00:20:00] were working on it for most of the summer. I was here all summer and I think we went on the air before school started again in the fall. What's important is that there was a crew of people who came together at that time who most of whom had a background in radio. The general manager, Andy Reimer, uh, had been manager of the UC Irvine Station when he was there for a couple of years. The other cluster of people were mostly involved in a record business. [00:20:30] You know Tim divine who went on to be out of an art at a and m I guess doc Pelz l of course. It was kind of keeping the continuity of things from the older time and running the music department. So we had a couple of months to figure out what could be patched together. A of my friends from KPFA helped staff and technicians from the w department provided test equipment, parts access to bits and pieces. So we just kind of pulled it together from that. [00:21:00] The next step was to be some thing a little bit more accessible and reliable than this closet up on the the roof of Dwinelle and that's when Andy got to doing the political thing and got us space in Lawrence Hall of Science. We moved the studios up there first Speaker 1: and you moved the transmitter up on the hill? That was next? That was stage two. So the first two, yeah. I think first phase was to get the studio to Lawrence Hall because we were being booted out of to know [00:21:30] and then the transmitter followed. How long after that? That was a year, more than a year after that because there was a lot of construction that was secondary to the studio operations. Back in the early days of Calex, a lot of the engineers were students at the time. Speaker 7: All of the engineers were students or former students or part time students. That was actually fairly common in college radio around [00:22:00] the country. There were more radio engineers out there because of the small radio stations around everywhere needed more engineers. The equipment was less reliable, transmitters needed work all the time. There were a lot more people who, as teenagers were working in radio and so they were a lot more engineers and there were a lot more people who were familiar with the technical requirements of, of an audio chain and a transmitter and studio transmitter, [00:22:30] links and antennas and things like that. So, uh, yeah, I was a student part time during that time. I, I think I got it about two years during my four years here, I said I graduated from colleagues. Most of the other engineers were also students or community people. There weren't any staff engineers while I was there except me. I mean, if they finally got a kind of a stipend salary for the chief engineer. Speaker 1: How did your time at Calyx influence your career? Speaker 7: [00:23:00] Most of the people I know who had solid college radio experiences when they were in school refer to them throughout their lives as a defining experience in enabling experience. That was, I mean, I don't know how many of them consider that they learned more from the radio station than they did from classes like I do, but I'm sure it's a significant fraction. The real challenge that drove what I was able to [00:23:30] feel confident in doing in later years was dealing with something that had to work all the time with limited resources and patching together things to make a system work and that that whole discipline of able to see a system come together and allocating limited resources to fitting that all together. That's the engineering challenge of doing the engineering of a radio station. At least it was then when things were not reliable, not stable, [00:24:00] not dependable, and things were being fixed all the time. And that applies to any technology that's in kind of development, I think. [inaudible] Speaker 1: David Josephson, thanks very much for coming on spectrum talking with us. Very welcome. Thanks for inviting me. K, a l ex Berkeley doc pell sal. Thanks very much for your help getting the context of the sixties and seventies squared away and it's fundraiser week here at Calyx fundraiser. So give us a call. [00:24:30] We need your donations. (510) 642-5259 back to spectrum. We're going to talk with Susan Calico, who took over in the 80s as chief engineer. Susan Kaliko. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about Calex. Speaker 8: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's nice to be back at the station and see how nice it looks. Speaker 1: I wanted to find out from you how you got interested in radio in the first place. Speaker 8: Well, I have to go back much further than my time at Calex. I [00:25:00] got out of school and I was very interested in writing and got involved at the daily cow. So I was a journalist for a little while and then I became a copy editor and somehow that wasn't enough. So I went down to KPFA, which is also in Berkeley and volunteered there. I got involved in first in women's news and then during that time, which was in the mid to late seventies, there were almost no women who knew anything technical at that station. So, [00:25:30] um, when I was at KPFA, I took advantage of the fact that you could do pretty much anything kind of like here I got my third class license, which was required to actually run the board on the air and learned how to do that. And again, was always teaching people. And I was there for probably about 10 years, everything overlapped with everything else and I had just studied for and gotten my first class radio license, which was in those days required to be the responsible [00:26:00] engineer at a station and the job of Calyx came up. So I applied for that and got in and well the work began. Speaker 1: What were the years you were a chief engineer at Calex? Speaker 8: Oh, I was engineer at Calex starting in 1981, I believe in the late, late in the year through uh, early 1995. So it was about 13 years altogether. Speaker 1: While you were the engineer, there [00:26:30] was a move from Lawrence Hall of science down to bondage. What was that like? Speaker 8: As I recall, we managed to get the honors studio down and settled and on the air and the newsroom was about to move from over in the student union and I got pneumonia, so I was at home in bed for two weeks with a fever. Well, the engineering volunteers basically put in the new studio. So it's, you know, as usual there's, there's never enough money to [00:27:00] do what you need to do, so you just have to do what you can with what you've got. And we were lucky enough to have some good volunteers who could really take care of business. Speaker 1: The next big technical challenge you had was increasing the power from 10 watts to 500 watts. How did that go? Speaker 8: We had to get a new transmitter, which was huge compared to our one that we had. And so we had to sort of rearrange things up at the transmitter shad and I'll patch all the leaks because I mean, when you get new [00:27:30] equipment, you want it to be good. Uh, we had to have a new cable running up the transmitter tower, which I think it's, it's not quite a hundred feet. I think it's something like 80 or 85 or something like that. I do remember, um, being up on the tower with the surveyors down below, because in such a crowded market, as Calex is in, in the bay area here, there are many FM stations. You have to be careful not to step on anybody else's frequency. So we had to have a very directional [00:28:00] and oddly shaped signal, the antennas crafted so that it directs the signal in the way that you want. Speaker 8: But if your antenna isn't pointed exactly where you want it, you're going to not be, you know, I mean, the FCC is not gonna like you being out of line there. So I went up on the tower, loosen the bolts on the, uh, on the antenna and the surveyors down below, going all over this way, you know, and I'm like whackwhackwhack no, no, no, a little, little bit back. But those [00:28:30] were expenses we couldn't avoid because it had to be certified. But eventually it all got done and in our case it was 500 watts, which isn't a whole lot. That transmitter could have done a lot more, but that was what we were allowed to do, so we had to keep it pretty close. Speaker 1: What was the culture like at Calex during your years? Speaker 8: I learned that no matter how weird people looked, most of them or really good people, they were sweet people. They, you know, a lot of our djs [00:29:00] were just really nice people. They were pretty easy to work with. They were considerate and I wouldn't always be able to tell by looking at them Speaker 1: Cadillacs. How did it affect you professionally? Speaker 8: I spent 13 years here and I really, really learned a lot more electronics and a lot more transmitter information and so I really understood why everything worked. Speaker 1: [00:29:30] Susan Calico, thanks very much for coming in and talking with us. Speaker 8: Well, it's been a pleasure to see that the station is still here and that the equipment still works. Speaker 1: The card during the show. It was by law, Stan and David for these help on folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license. 3.0 attribution. Please do donate to the calyx fundraiser and we'll see you in two weeks with another edition of spectrum at the same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Baby Boomer Radio, TV, Movies, Magazines, Music, Comics, Fads, Toys, Fun, and More Show!

On this episode of Galaxy Moonbeam Night Site, we talk all about early methods of recording television programs. Mike, Smitty, and Ian are joined once again by their good friend and frequent contributor, Mike Z. Mike takes us through the history of video recording, from early film kinescope recordings, to the dawn of electronic recording on videotape. We recall the early efforts of Bing Crosby, Ampex, and others such as RCA, who worked on the development of video tape for broadcast TV stations, which ultimately led to lighter and portable machines, and eventually home VCRs. Smitty recalls some of the early color television programs which still exist on early color video tape. These tapes are unique, because so much has been lost and erased over the years. Ian Rose remembers Samuel Clemons, better known as Mark Twain, the famous American literary great. Twain Passed away a little over 100 years ago, in 1910, at the same time that Halley's Comet returned. Our Retro-Commercial is a nostalgic Kentucky Fried Chicken spot with the one and only Colonel Sanders. Join us on this edition of Galaxy Moonbeam Nigh

Easytown Radio
Episode TWENTY THREE - Rush the Middle Years

Easytown Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 16, 2007


It's an Easytown Radio salute to the middle years of RUSH! Featured guests: Ham It Up Guy, from the pork store! Drunkle Joe, fresh from the bar! Trisha Apple Bumblebee, foreign exchange student! Written by: Tim Easy Greg Frisina Engineered by: Mike Sin Recorded at: Easytown Loft Songs: A Passage To Bangkok Freewill Closer To The Heart Bastille Day The Trees Listener Mail: Johnny Styne Matt Kelly Alan Semerdjian Easybox: McCartney Jayne Weiss Sooperdooper Shout-Out: Balls Deep Special Thanks: Terry Brown Ricky Woods Russ Rogers Kevin Pritchard Greg Frisina Dee JurgensJohnny StyneMatt KellyAlan SemerdjianMcCartney JayneWings Over Farmingdale (best chicken wings on Long Island) Produced by: Tim Easy Mike Sin "American Pirate" notes: Ricky Woods, as the voices of Captain Plank and Elvis PresleyRuss Rogers, as the voices of Captain Clambeard and Swab The DeckKevin Pritchard, as the voices of The Tooth, and Johnnie LovesChachiRodriguezBalls Deep, as the voices of One Eyed Peter, and FredMike Sin, as the voice of Captain AaarrrdanlongTim Easy, as the voices of Captain Bent Gently, and Ivan The< < > >Drink-OffDrunkle Joe challenged Slappy Nads to a Drink-Off! There's been no word, if Slappy has accepted the challenge yet. We remain hopeful that this Clash Of The Beer Titans will truly come to passHerbie Goes EasytownFans of jazz legend Herbie Hancock are in for a treat! That's right, episode 25 will be another fabulous foray, and we're spinning essential Herbie Hancock grooves. And, ...wait, what about episode 24?Episode 24 PreviewWe've got music from The Doors, recorded live in the summer of '69, at the Aquarius Theater in Hollywood CA! These live cuts were recorded onto four 3M M56 solid state 1" 8 tracks and Ampex model 351 tube 2 track Analog recorders. The console was a Langevin 18 X 8. Tickets were $2 dollars. Scalpers were selling them for as much as $5 dollars. The concerts were sold out. Jim Morrison was 25 years young, on top of his game, and swinging Tarzan-style from a rope across the stage (it's true, just ask Robbie)

Project Studio Network Recording Podcast
[Show #67] Lane Sumner & Bryan Daste of the Magic Closet

Project Studio Network Recording Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2007 62:22


News, Crosstalk, a Celebrity Interview, we tweak The Stupid Knob and a Feature Story! News: TriTone Digital Releases AngelTone for Windows Geffen Wants Your Song! Tonntrack Releases EZplayer Free Berklee's New BIRN Online Radio Network Digidesign Ships Reel Tape Suite Don Ho Is Dead At 76 Celebrity Interview: Finally! You've heard him at the top and end of the show for over a year now. This week, Mike sat down with Lane Sumner, the the composer and performer of the PSN theme called Road Trip. He's a fantastic guitar player, a project studio owner, and a teacher. Listen in as Mike visits Lane at his studio. Lane Sumner's Web Site Lane's Studio: The Stupid Knob: Keith is at it again! Derek K. Miller from Inside Home Recording sent us this Nickelback comparison: Click here to listen Feature Story: This is a great story from Brian Daste of The Magic Closet recording studio in Portland, Oregon. It's a fascinating project bringing young and old artsits together. Bryan graduated from the University of Miami with a baccalaureate in Audio Engineering. Since then he has worked in some very well respected post-production studios on the East and West coasts (Outpost in Miami and Bongo Post + Music in Sacramento) - as well as independently working for musical artists in both regions. DeepRoots.com ScotlandBarr.com TheMagicCloset.net Answer To Last Week's Trivia Question: Q: What was the first classical album to go platinum, and who was the artist? A: Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos (then Walter Carlos) was the first classical album to go platinum in 1968. Her Bach transcriptions for the Moog synthesizer brought electronic sounds into the mainstream. She's been credited with starting the synth revolution. Before this album, synths were mainly perceived as educational tools and not part of mainstream music. She painstakingly performed Bach using a MOOG modular and an Ampex 8 track tape recorder. Remember, the MOOG modular did not have any presets, was monophonic and you had to use patch chords to manually connect components to come up with a new sound. The album came out and rocked the music industry. It�s fascinating to think a Bach album started it all. This week's winner is David Melfi. Congratulations David, you're taking home a copy of Guitar and Drum Trainer courtesy of Ryan Smith over at GuitarAndDrumTrainer.com. Honorable Mention goes out to Nate Thoreson, Jeremy North and Bill Camarata. Way to go guys! See you next week! Tags: music recording studio home studio project studio mixing protools plugin digidesign frappr creative commons digidesign mix it like a record tritone digital angeltone colortone geffen bratz toontrack ezplayer ezdrummer berklee dirn reel tape suite don ho honeys dukes lane sumner derek k miller inside home recording the magic closet deep roots scotlandbarr wendy carlos walter carlos switched-on bach moog ampex

BackAlleyBlues
Jack Falk Project- Tribute to Santana

BackAlleyBlues

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2006 3:39


Being an independent artist. This move started out by having a few labels tell you they love you and your the best etc........ but they are not taking risk on this kind of music. Its not the 1970's anymore. Holding on to what I loved I continued on without any financial support from labels etc. Everything I did was on my own. This was now the late 90's and in investing my own money I started buying and selling analog multitrack recorders. There was a huge second hand market for these recorders as the turn of the independent musician and a home studio revolution was just starting to take place. I had Tascams, Otaris, MCI's, Ampex you name it they all came through my door. With all this going on I successfully got enough recording gear to do my own thing and not pay for studio time for recording. I was now ready for the next generation of music MP3's. MP3 sites were popping up all over the web. Only one was the real deal. The original MP3.com site. It no longer exists just a shell make shift version created by download.com. I do not have my music anywhere on that site. I decided back in 1999 to place some of my recordings on the MP3.com site. Just a few Flying Without Wings, Homesick Blues and Cruising The Rainforest. These songs were from my massive collection of reel to reel tapes I recorded in my home studio. I checked back in a few days and noticed my songs were topping the charts. I was like is this real or what. The formula at mp3 was to have CD's for sale and make money off each CD. MP3 would burn CD's one sale at a time if need be and the artist collected a few dollars from each one sold. In my accounting over the years 1999-2001 I had sold over 250,000 CD's and had over 1 1/2 million downloads. This equaled out to big money. I mean enough to buy a new house, new cars, and all new furniture. Kinda like the rappers of today you know MTV cribs LOL!! This was my payoff for all the hard years trying to make it happen. I earned this and I waited a long time for this moment in time. Man I paid big bucks in taxes those years! Did I learn my lesson from the past NO............ I spent all the money but I have the rewards to show for it. Sure enough the easy street ride came to a sudden halt in 2001. MP3 got sued and Universal took over and piece by piece shut down the site. The financial good times once again were over except this time I got to ride it out and reap the rewards. Funny thing MP3 would never release the names of who bought the CD's from me so I never really knew who did, just where they were located. Even with these crazy off the charts sales figures I once again have a grammy award winning producer who believed in me represent me once again to the labels with all my sales results and guess what... Once again they passed on me. They said I was an amazing artist but they did not handle what I was doing musically. As if I didn't expect this. The producer thought for sure it would be a sure deal but no go. I was not surprised. OK so where to now you say...... http://jackfalk.wolfnetradio.com/MP3Music.htm. http://www.uncleshag.com thanks uncle shag for love of the music and desire to share jack falk music. Thanks for all you do