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anyone here think obama might pick Dean as VP?

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 07:44:08 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Well, he could appoint Dean to the V.P. search committee.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 09:09:50 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Highly doubtful.  There's two basic views on the Veep search: Either an elder statesman kind of figure (Richardson, Biden, etc), or an heir kind of figure (Edwards, Kaine, etc).  I go back and forth, mainly because I really like Bill Richardson and Joe Biden, but I generally favor the latter route and agree with others who argue that choosing along the former route amounts to Obama admitting implicitly that he has an experience deficit of any consequence, particularly with regard to foreign policy.

But Obama's the one who's been consistently correct on foreign policy, not McCain, so why pretend he has a problem?

Thus I think the Veep should be someone relatively young who makes sense taking over the operation in 2016.

An interesting pick, the more I think about it (he's been my dark horse for Veep for a while): Russ Feingold.  He's only 54 or 55, and he comes with tons of experience and solid Democratic credentials.  Whole package.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin

by Drew J Jones (myfriends@thisispancakes.com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 09:46:48 AM EST
[ Parent ]
As I've said elsewhere, any President (and VP) are like consciousness - after the fact. Their main role is to sell the messages to the population, the rest of the government and the bureaucracy, that are the result of the bottom up metrics and analysis produced by the bureaucracy (including the military).

Thus their main required talents are those of an actor. Successful US presidents are usually actors who believe in their lines, just as actors on stage or in movies. Or supporting roles in the case of VPs. The movie that is about to be made in the US is called 'Hopefully fair'. Obama and Edwards might play well in that, if the producers at Beltway Blockbusters will cast them. They are not fond of risk.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 10:10:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Well, I hope they have a big special effects budget and plan to invest in some new props: renewables, infrastructure, medical care.  The special effects could be useful to convince people of the bankruptcy of the existing paradigms and policies and shift the discourse to more useful terms.  The biggest danger is for this production to be barely successful and to have a short run, followed by a blockbuster from the other studio.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 03:45:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
great comment, drew.

when i saw him campaign with richardson , there was a 'je ne sais quoi' connection between them, some serious synergy, i guess you'd call it.

biden seems a bit of a shapeshifter, kaine i dunno.

but feingold, wow, yes! he truly stands out as the most liberal choice of all, from what (little) i know.

of course edwards would make a great choice too.

harold ford?

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 11:16:07 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I don't think it will be Feingold.  But on every fundamental besides regional appeal, Feingold makes the most sense to me at this moment.

If I had to guess, I'd guess it'd be Richardson for the reason you mentioned, along with Richardson's regional advantages.  They seem to click (and, yes, that does matter).  And Richardson is, in many ways, the future.  He's half-Latino, and he's from the West, where the future lies.  The Rustbelt and the old Scandinavian-Socialist Northwest are still important, but they're becoming less so.

Not a chance in Hell on Harold Ford.  First of all, nobody likes him.  Second, he's got a pretty sweet gig at MSNBC for some reason I can't figure out (since he's a complete moron).  Third, he brings nothing to the ticket except youth, and on that he probably brings a little too much at the age of thirty eight.  He's basically a half-black Joe Lieberman without the nauseating voice.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin

by Drew J Jones (myfriends@thisispancakes.com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 12:25:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I like Feingold.  That is a problem.  When I was a recording engineer, if I really liked a song, it usually meant that it was not commercial.  That is my fear about Feingold.  Harold Ford is really interesting.  He can be intense, but also funny and he has had to learn to play to a more conservative crowd.  That will be important for having a Democrat succeed an Obama 2nd term.  If Obama is a one termer, we are doomed.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 03:52:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
What desks did you work with?

You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 04:20:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Ones I designed and built, from scratch.  Sort of similar to Neve, before automation, with 1 watt +28dBm output stages, and quality components.  I had three seperate monitor mixes, but they were grouped seperately to the right instead of in line with the input modules.  Then Harrison came out with inline monitor features and crap components.  His console was all the rage and dumb-ass producers with no technical ability couldn't get beyond the difference in the monitor arrangement.  After about 5 years "my" studio replaced my console with a Harrison. It only lasted about 2 years before they had to replace it as it became unmaintainable. They ended up with an older  Neve, which has good quality components and circuits.  People still use my equalilzers.  Two in a row can give 12 or 24 dB/Octave high pass & low pass at intervals of a fifth and provide four octave peak boost/cut filters that can be set to adjacent octaves.  You can really hear the results.  It is all done with analog circuits and op-amps.  I'm an old analog guy, a relict by now. ;-).

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 05:13:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Great! oh our dear Rupert. Kajaani made some Neve type desks. But I finished up with a Helios by Dick Swettenham, - who became a buddy. What I liked most about it was a diode pin matrix instead of a patchbay. You could put pins in the same axis and split the signal simultaneously to anywhere you wanted (within reason). It was also easy to reassign channels so mic coming in on line 34 could be put on a fader right next to another vocal. You could also reassign all the drum tracks to a free single fader for mixdown etc. It was a rough and ready 16 track studio using a Lyrec recorder from Denmark. The control room was modelled on Eastway but much cheaper materials. Main monitors were huge tannoys mounted in 26mm blockboard which was the front of a brick housing of about 2 cu metres.

You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 05:26:58 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Main monitors were huge Tannoys mounted in 26mm blockboard which was the front of a brick housing of about 2 cu metres.
(my bold and my capital)

I put my control room into service with a pair of Tannoy Gold Belveders.  I had an octagonal speaker loft with 8 trapezoidal positions tapering inwards at the top.  When I did the design I did not know which direction sound reproduction was going to take.  Remember quad?  The center position was filled with 3/4" ply covered with a decorative cloth. The Tannoys were in the adjoining spaces. The  spaces on the sides  were finished identically to the center space. The three rear spaces were covered only with cloth, with the loft stuffed with fiberglass.  The mixer sat 7 feet on axis from the center of each Tannoy.  I love the point source clarity of the Tannoy dual concentric design.  I could achieve levels well in excess of 110 dBSpl at the mix position.  With a continuous baffle between and beside each speaker the snare and mid-range instruments sounded real and solid.  A back reflection and cancellation pattern can make them sound hollow.

The console sat on a one foot high platform covered with 3/4" ply over 2x12s  I had a hole pattern drilled in the ply to create a highly adsorptive Helmholz resonator centered on about 125Hz, but we stuffed the spaces between the joists with fiberglass to broaden the Q, covered it with a thick jute pad and plush carpet. The result was an almost totally absorptive floor.  I made the floor disappear, acoustically.

The studio owner had an excellent aesthetic sense and we collaborated on the finish of the room.  He bought a ton of solid 3/4" walnut and we finished everything below the loft with 2" rounded walnut slats on about 2" centers, sculpted all around the room, including doors over storage spaces.  Any parallel surfaces were close to 100% absorptive. The back of the slats was covered with charcoal colored felt with fiberglass behind.

The console was articulated, with the output assigns and Vu Meters above the hinge and with the Echo Return and Monitor sections seperate sections that could be either arranged in a line that continued the line of the input section or could be swung around up to 60 degrees.  The rearmost section of each section could be raised up about 45 degrees for mixing.  In that configuration, the mixer could reach and adjust every control without moving the center of his/her head except in pivot.

The chief problem was the fact that I lost the argument over how wide to make the room.  Too late he realized that I had been right.  It was quite a ride.  At one point he had over $80,000.00 cash money invested in the console and it was all in bags and boxes of parts in my second bedroom "office" in West L.A. One of the more dramatic moments was when I inserted one of 72 10 position Switchcraft push button switch assemblies into one of 72 ~8"x10" double sided printed circuit boards with plated through holes and it fit. There was one such assembly on each side of each of 36 output assign modules.

 

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 07:57:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Ha! Do we go back to pre-API days, or do we start there? Allison VCAs anyone? Lexicon's first digital delay, pre-dating the Eventide Clockworks? MCI 16 tracks or the first 3M 24s, sync'd with EECO units and time code?

Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.

Frank Delaney ~ Ireland

by siegestate (siegestate or beyondwarispeace.com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 05:33:49 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Lovely bit of outboard. Roger Mayer noise gates with keying changed my life ;-)

And I did actually edit 2 inch tape on occasion. The idea of the physical splice in sound, video or movies is long forgotten - though not the small of film cement.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 05:42:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I spent a week once helping to work out and test the line delays on TC around about 3000 sq metres of studios and edit suites.

You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 05:45:58 PM EST
[ Parent ]
music tech-geekery...my favourite porn!

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 07:55:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Recording Engineers of the World, Unite!  I met the guy that designed the Lexicon.  We eventually had Allisons.

We had an MCI 24 track.  I had used an Ampex 440 two track for mixdown.  I loved the isoloop drive of the 3M.  Later, when they were developing the Digital Recorder, I was the project manager for the development of the editor, which synched two machines together with SMPTE time codes and executed up to 32 digital crossfades simultaneously.

The problem was that the technology, which they were given by the BBC, utilized a Hamming code for dropout protection.  You could loose up to .2" of media off of the tape and not loose any sound.  The Hamming code took a 16 bit digital word, waited for approximately 200ms, took another word, added them together and formed a check sum word.  The original could be extracted from any two of these words.  But if you tried to do a razor blade edit, you got a giant pop.

My editor took a word from one track, multiplied it by a coefficient from the start of my cross fade PROM table, pop the result into a TRW TDC1010J which would multiply two words in 110ns and put them into an accumulator, do the same thing for the destination track, except starting from the other end of the PROM, and then step through the PROM in opposite directions.  It could do this 32 times in less than 20 micro seconds.  I spotted the chip from an ad in Electronic Design Magazine, hired an MIT EE to design the logic and three Motorola 6800 programmers to program the four seperate microprocessors which had to work together in my design.  I knew the application.  They could do the work.

Without ever signing away my patent rights, I never-the -less became the not so proud author and assignee of a basic patent in digital assembly editing.  That is another story.  I also ended up in debt, naturally.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Thu Jul 17th, 2008 at 08:27:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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