Fletcher: What do you think the odds of people hearing in their homes what you intended the mix to capture?

George: Who fucking cares? WAIT - I didn't mean to say that. Actually, the odds of them hearing EXACTLY what I did are very small, but they're going to hear something, and it's going to be different, and quite possibly bigger than what they're used to.

Hey, you wanna know what Hillbilly 5.1 is? That's when poppa gets one of them new systems from Best Buy and brings it home to the double-wide, and puts one speaker in every room and the sub in the shitter.

Fletcher: Ahhh... the quintessential Chuck Ainlay line.

LooneyTunez: What's your take on today's music being mixed/mastered to be as loud as possible?

George: I think it's in decline. I've done a pile of records in the last year that didn't have the CLA "pack as much sausage in the skin as possible" sound. I think that mode has withdrawn slightly. We STILL have to make loud records, because LOUD will ALWAYS win, no matter how refined the mix. Give it 2dB more and THERE IS NO QUESTION which will be chosen.

Fletcher: George, you had mentioned before we started that you wanted to ask some questions of the congregation... Still feel like it?

George: Sure, (Except that Rail can't answer this one.) We're (NARAS & AES ) working on a Multi-Channel Delivery document. It's taken a lot of people about a year to sort out where to go with it. It’s VERY political, everybody has an opinion, and everybody (that we know of) has been heard. We think it's really important to preserve the masters of today for playback not only in 2 or 5 years, but in 30 to 50 years as well (if at all possible).

I'd like to know if you guys think that it's important enough to invest in, because the main thing I've heard is a lot of whining about how much it's going to cost (answer: not much) or that record companies aren't going to pay for it. (Incorrect, they are.)

LooneyTunez: Of course!

fadeout: YES!

George: But to preserve YOUR work, wouldn't you invest a couple of grand to do a solid format?

JayCrouch: Archive is always a great thing.

George: So, what do you all know about LTO?

Dan Kennedy: It's either that or have a real collection of dinosaur equipment in your basement.

George: The thing I like about LTO is that it's manufacturer-independent.

Harvey Gerst: Yup, but you better store a machine it was done on with a second unit (for parts), along with the masters.

George: It's expensive right now, but it looks like that right thing from a couple of angles.

Fletcher: What is LTO?

George: Linear Tape (something). It’s HP/IBM et al, a consortium of IT manufacturers that want to get archiving right. As they say, "you can look it up" - do a Google search on it. It's expensive right now, but it promises to come down, and the most important thing is that it's supported by the Enterprise Technology sector; as you know, our...uh...little business is about the size of the hair on the balls of a gnat on the elephant of commercial IT. I'd say we should kinda go where they go.

Fletcher: I know I said no "Rail"... but this is a damn good question.

Rail: LTO looks like the future - however - what about all the archives already prepared? Do we leave them as they are or convert them to LTO?

George: Well, the digital library of the future has a path that "migrates" data to new technologies as they become available. I think we should look at what it takes to insert our software into the orbit of the modern digital library. The big companies (UMG, Sony & etc) all have big libraries in place, or are implementing them.

I’m going to DC to see the new National Digital Archive in Culpepper in September. It's pretty huge and the guys doing it are intensely careful to get it right.

Dan Kennedy: Tape medium being considered more robust than opticals promise?

George: No, actually optical is probably more robust, but there's no optical solution out there right now. Not Genex, not really. It's neither popular (here - it's more popular in Europe) or reliable. We're waiting to see BluRay devices at a nominal cost., which should be next year. We've been hearing about them for, oh, about 15 years now. It's about time.

alphajerk: Do you think the digital platform will settle on a "standard" that will transfer to any workstation or digital environment without the need for translators (including automation, plug-ins, et al)?

George: Not as long as there are different manufacturers vying for a market. It is not in the manufacturers' best interest for you to move files around. Our best interest, YES, but, hey, YOU ask Digi to please not encrypt your project file...

Andrew: Do you think native DAW's will be able to compete quality wise with Digidesign in the near future?

George: That's a great question. In the near future, no, but in the more distant future, yes. You’ve got to look at how sorryful Motorola has been in keeping up with chips. I mean, they OWN the market, and the best they can do is 100 MIPS? C'mon. With a G4 with Altivec you can get a pretty dependable 600 - 800 MIPS of fast, low-latency floating point math.

Right now, it's not extensible. By that I mean as fast as a G4 is (and as cheap as it is), it's far from fast enough to do a big job (like a 256 input console) all by itself. You'd need to array them, and they're not all that suitable for an array architecture. But maybe we could think about the architecture differently, because the new PT HD (with 9 processors per card) and the ability to tie, what, four or five or six cards together? Also has power to spare. It's just very fucking expensive, but if we could figure out how to get 10 or 20 G5's on a bus - look out.

Fletcher: Two more and you can have the rest of the night off.

George: Cool.

JayCrouch: Have you taken effort to compare the mixing sounds of floating point DAWs such as DP3 and Nuendo in relation to Alishad?

George: This is such a big question, I fear I won't do justice to it here. The very best architectures are a mix of floating point and fixed point. The important thing is not to get lazy with coding, which floating point programmers INVARIABLY do (get lazy).

You have to remember that floating point doesn't necessarily always buy you enough precision. Currently we're working with 48bit (56bit actually) math to do the EQ. It is 7 times - SEVEN TIMES - less efficient than 24bit math. This is why either the Oxford plug-in or our plug-in takes 1/2 chip per 5-band EQ at 96k.

Have I compared it to Nuendo? No, the Nuendo folks have never approached me (although they've snared a few of my friends). Oh, I also use DP3. It sounds OK, but I haven't done any critical listening.

Harvey Gerst: Name three new pieces of gear you're looking forward to trying.

George: Ahhh… there’s a motorized surfboard in the new Wired… Actually, these new B&O speakers are definitely going to blow my skirt up, and shit, I can't think of anything I haven't tried or don't own. Let me come back to that later, Harv.

Fletcher: Well, I think that concludes the evening’s festivities. Thanks for participating, and tell Cookie I said "HI".

George: My very best to everyone out there. Thanks for your patience and time.

chat.boy: On behalf of PSW, I'd like to thank George for sharing his time and knowledge.

George: Rail, I’ll talk to you later.

chat.boy: Tonight's chat was moderated by Mercenary's own Fletcher. Well done, brother!

chat.boy: Join us for after chat in the PSW Recording Chat Room, and stay tuned to PSW for the next live chat event. Good night folks!

Fletcher moderates a PSW Rec Pit forum, one of the most popular on-line destinations in the recording world. Click here to get to his forum.