Watching "Earthly Pleasures" by Jill Fraser being Mastered

Not only has Jill Fraser finished her album, Earthly Pleasures, but she has signed a record deal with Drag City.  A record deal!  Could an international tour be far behind?  Drag City wanted to create a vinyl version of her work and so Jill went off to watch her album being inscribed on a lathe.  I tagged along because I have always wanted to see how they did this.

The comeback of vinyl as a distribution medium is one of two examples I know of where our society, or remnants of our society, pushes back against the forces of mediocrity and digitization.  The other example for those who care is the rebirth of large format film for art photography (e.g. 4x5, 8x10, etc).

The event took place at Golden Mastering in Newbury Park.  The mastering engineer and owner of the facility is JJ, and he is a second generation mastering engineer.  Their web page is www.goldenmastering.com.

In the following, the terminology I use is probably all wrong.  

The process as I understood it to be:

1. JJ listens to the music and evaluates whether any preprocessing is necessary to make it appropriate for the medium.  He explained what the types of problems are that he looks for but I dont remember too much about what he said.  I think it has to do with issues involving the high and low frequencies in combination that might knock the needle off the record when it is played back.  This could be all wrong.

2. He does some processing on those sections of the audio and reviews it with the artist to see if sounds acceptable.  Then a section of any problematic but now processed audio is engraved onto a test lacquer to see how it sounds.  This takes just a few minutes.  In our case it was done the first time but the process is fast enough that one could imagine being able to do this with many sections of an album iteratively until it was technically and aesthetically acceptable.  As far as I know, this processing is done digitally but one could imagine that in the past it was done in the analog domain.

3. The engineer runs through a check list to prepare the lathe and the blank lacquer for mastering.  Each side of an album gets its own blank lacquer and the lathe is checked again before each side.

4. In a few hours, the entire album, in this case 4 sides, is mastered and just needs to be packed up and sent to the next phase of the process where the various intermediates are created and a test pressing of the album is made.  This next part of the process apparently takes months and months depending on how busy the pressing plant is and where one stands in the hierarchy.

Some trivia: 1. The process of making the interpositive and internegative (not the terms they use) is very much a legacy electrochemical process and involves such techniques as electroplating the various intermediates.  2. No one makes this lathe anymore.  This particular one was refurbished by someone who had worked in this business decades ago and kept it in his garage.  3. The stylus that creates the grooves is an expendable and they are available on eBay and very expensive.  4. The whole process reminded me of the earlier days of visual effects where there would be one guy or a small team of machinists or optical printer operators or model makers.  A very small operation and generally not very social or glamourous.

Here is an article on disk-cutting lathes courtesy of Tom McMahon.

https://pspatialaudio.com/lathes.htm

Receding Media Technology

draft

Emerging technology media is so boring.  Lets embrace receding technology media.

At the Arlington theatre in Santa Barbara during SBIFF.

The Need for Reciprocity When Insulting Someone With Social Media

One of the great aspects of Social Media is the ability to offend people at a deeper level and with more oomph than mere email or online forums. In the past, using receding media technology, such as writing on paper or the printed word, one needed a little time for the insult to become clear. But now with the bold new technology of Social Media and the power of the Internet we can mortally offend someone with the click of a mouse.

And we do, we do insult people, we insult people all the time with Facebook.

But since this is a totally new approach, some mechanisms may need refinement until it settles down into a truly democratic method of punching someone in the ego.

Such refinement is probably necessary in the case of the Facebook method of blocking and unblocking. As it stands now, one can block someone without their knowledge, but also unblock them without their knowledge as well. Blocking keeps either party from seeing anything about each other, even to know that the other person exists on Facebook. So far so good.

But there are issues.  The first problem is that the blocked individual has to find out on their own nickle that they have been blocked, which is always a demeaning thing to have to do. One wonders what happened to the other person, one searches, one does not find, then one discovers that one has been blocked. I have noticed that by the time this happens that the feeling is usually, but not always, mutual. In my case, the two times I have been blocked it is because I tried to build bridges to someone who I have damaged relationships with. In both cases their blocking me is a rebuff.

But you see, having been rebuffed in my effort to open communications, that is pretty much the end of the matter from my point of view. But Facebook does not give me the ability to implement that. The other party can unblock me and see what I am doing whenever they want, and I don't want that. I want any unblocking to be mutual, they have to ask, and I have to agree.

Because, frankly, I really don't want to see or hear from them again.

Economist Essay on the Future of Books

The Economist is still one of my favorite magazines. It is literate, it is functional, it has good analysis, and it is not as stupidly right wing as the Wall Street Journal has become. It is what we might call, intelligent middle of the road. The magazine is not about business alone, it is also perhaps about the world at large, but as seen through the eyes of an economist, hence its title.

But I am mentioning it today because it has an entertaining essay on the past and future of the “book”. And it has done so in a way that is cute: retaining the stains and other weirdnesses of the classic book.

Read the essay yourself at:

http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21623373-which-something-old-and-powerful-encountered-vault

Simulation of Classic Solari / Split Flap Sign Technology

[Update: 2/4/2013 The Solari company is online, one just needed to know their correct name.  "Solari di Udine".]

As we slam headlong into the chaos of our future, and embrace whatever stupid idea someone has for new media or a smart phone, we also have the opportunity to recall some pretty wonderful "old media", or "receding media technology".

One of my favorites of old media, was something called a "Solari sign", or a (don't blame me) split-flap sign, so named because the letters were on metal plates that were split down the middle. The sign would use an actuator to pick which letter was visible, and as it moved through the different letters, it made a very distinctive "chattering" sound.

The sign at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, PA

You would see these signs in about 100 places in the world, mostly train stations in places like Paris, New York, Milan, London, Frankfurt and so forth. The signs were made by an Italian company called "Solari". Solari has no presence on the Internet.   Stop the presses, we have found them.  Ok, so this will be more interesting.

See http://www.solari.it/.

The Wikipedia page on "split flap" displays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

The Museum of Modern Art in NYC on "Hacking the Solari"
http://wp.moma.org/talk_to_me/2011/09/hacking-the-solari/

A Youtube video of a real Solari sign (for Amtrak) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1SAjGfYPI0

And finally, my simulation of the Solari sign, written without any documentation or operating guide of the sign itself.  Clearly my simulation has a ways to go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLjdEeGq8HA

I am trying to find someone to use this simulation (suitably art directed) for some public sign, maybe a render farm queue display or something.

Farsi.  

English.

The zither music is just for atmosphere and was ripped from the sountrack of The Third Man (1949).