Natural Rhythm
When the systems tech position on an upcoming k.d. lang tour opened up, Anderson approached lang’s front of house mixer Grant McAree and landed the gig.
For the next three years he hit the road in earnest, working with lang, the Dave Mathews Band and others until deciding to leave the road in 1998 to join EAW in Whitinsville, MA, as product manager of SIA (including the Smaart test and measurement platform).
Ensconced once again in the northeastern U.S., he and Karen flourished. In fact, Karen also joined EAW , working in marketing, and in 2000, they welcomed first child Jessie, followed by Claire in 2004.
“Travel is part of the natural rhythm of how Karen and I interact,” he explains. “It’s great; we get to be individuals and we get to be a couple.”
But as the stints on tour grew lengthier, he adds, travel became destructive. “I basically took the job (with EAW /SIA) to stay married. We hadn’t even thought about kids before we got out here, and then, boom…”
For the next decade, Anderson dedicated himself to refining Smaart and expanding its place in professional audio. As time went by, however, he and other members of the SIA team were also pulled into an increased role with EAW product.
Following the development and release of Smaart version 6.0, support for the platform within the organization began to wane.
“EAW didn’t want to see Smaart die,” he explains, “but it couldn’t be supported as a niche company inside a large manufacturer. A software product is a living beast. It’s in continuous development because you’re never going to get it perfect on release, and people are continually refining what they do with it.”
When EAW restructured in 2008, Anderson and Karen, along with Dayton and Black, departed the company to form Rational Acoustics, an entity squarely focused on audio test and measurement.
That focus includes a considerable educational effort – hosting training classes around the globe – in addition to further development and support of Smaart.
Even as negotiations to purchase the rights to Smart were ongoing, the Rational Acoustics team was laying the groundwork for a dramatic upgrade to the platform. The deal was sealed within a year, and in short order, new Smaart version 7 hit the market.
“We built a new, modernized code base we could continue to build upon for a decade, questioning everything as we rebuilt,” Anderson says. “So there are a lot of things under the hood in version 7 that are more universal, and it can be run in modules instead of as one single-threaded beast.”