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In this episode of Sound Design Live I’m joined by applications engineer and head of education with Adamson Systems, Jeremiah Karni. We discuss Adamson speakers, the new CS series, and working with Broken Social Scene.
I ask:
- I’m a big fan of Broken Social Scene. Do you have a story you could share about working with them?
- What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to Adamson speakers?
- Live Sound Summit intro to Blueprint AV
- Information below 60Hz is approximate in Blueprint
- What is Y weighting?
- Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
- From twitter
- Aaron Argo: Which power amp company does he prefer for his products?
- Khandaker Ashif Iqbal (Dew): Please ask him about their AVB based amplification system of CS series ! (Some detail overview)
- What’s in your work bag?
We have so many tools now that guesswork is educated guesswork. I refer to Blueprint as the argument solver.
Jeremiah Karni
Notes
- All music in this episode by Zenman.
- Jeremiah’s presentation at Live Sound Summit
- workbag: Dell XPS15 laptop, Roland Octacapture, Earthworks M23
- Books: Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook
- Podcast: Pooch and Rabold, Creative Technologies Hillsong Instagram
- Quotes
- I’ve tried to get out of live sound. It’s been pretty difficult.
- I met the guy who Indian Jones is based on.
- I got really good at mixing behind the speakers.
- I saw an ad on the careers page, but I didn’t have some of the qualifications so I went and made a conscious decisions to learn some of the skills listed on the qualifications.
- If there’s something that you want to do then you’re the only thing in the way of doing that.
- It’s not so much the gear, it’s what kind of atmosphere you can create on stage for the band.
- If someone suggests something I know isn’t going to work I’ll definitely detail an experience where it didn’t work.
- We’re all trying ensure interoperability between brands carrying that Milan logo.
Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated. Please let me know if you discover any errors.
I’m Nathan Lively and today I’m joined by applications engineer at Adamson’s Systems, Jeremiah Karni. Jeremiah. Welcome to Sound Design Live.
Thanks for having me.
All right. So you have a new set up that you’re testing out on us today. So tell us what that is, because it’s kind of interesting.
Yeah. So I have decided that I’m going to use my iPad pro. I’m using Zoom and I’m using a twisted wave to record. And our good friends at Shaw have given me and M.V. eighty eight plus and I’m using that. It’s just a micro USB to USB, AC and it seems to be working quite well. I actually use this for all sorts of field recordings, for sound design and interviews and stuff like that. So.
And are you holding that in your hand or you have it on a table?
Have one of those little gorilla stands just in front of me, but typically I have it on our little nightstand.
So, Jeremiah, definitely want to talk to you about atoms and speakers. The next series working with Broken Social Scene. But before I do that, after you get a sound system set up, what’s one of your favorite pieces of music to play to get familiar with it? I’m just sort of curious, like, what’s your taste of test track?
Anything that isn’t Steely Dan great, which is the alienated half the audience.
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of classics that we use. There is. I’m terrible with the song names too, which is also great because they’re all just saved in a playlist on my computer. There’s the one with the toto, with the drum track. And I always use that for the low Tom, because you can kind of hear the difference between the low end of the phone and the subs or the top to some ratio, especially when you kind of play just that 15 second intro with and without subs a couple of times just to hear the low balance.
This is awesome Chris Jones track that we played at our Infocom demo last year in twenty nineteen, which is just him and an acoustic guitar. Beautiful slide pieces in it. But when you listen to it on and we were listening to it on the 10 days or the ten point six loud speakers which have quite a lot of bottom and for dual points, those when you listen to that, the low notes, these drums on the acoustic guitar, there’s just so much body and air in it.
So they kind of my go to. And then there’s all the classics. I also have one track that I use of Wiggs record two weeks.
Wolf Blitzer makes the case both of the big.
I use that as a really nice low sub drop, so it’s not one track, there’s a whole bunch of things. MAPP Ghost Train is also another classic and the rain washed away everything.
But again, these are all of these songs that I’ve just learned to know and know again, because I’m always testing mainly our speakers and referencing everything to ask, because these are things that I know what sound like, what our speakers reproduce really well. So it’s comparative listening and testing that muscle memory. Right. So it’s not just so much I just like this song, half the songs I detest, but I just adore you, Will after you hear him a thousand times.
Exactly.
So, Jeremiah, how did you get your first job in audio? Like what was your first paying gig in Australia?
My first paying gig was not actually some money. It was actually paid in full. OK, so I straight out of high school, I went to a university just south of Brisbane called Southern Cross University. And for me at the time, that was the quickest way to get my foot in the door of the industry. I wanted to study music but didn’t quite have the musical chops, so I ended up doing their music production course, which was mainly studio related.
But then I quickly fell in love with the idea of doing live sound and was working with the. Actually, I made really good friends with a guy called Troy who was the facilities manager, I guess, for the music department, and he ran a little sound system for the university bar. And then one thing led to another. I was like, Hey man, do you ever need help?
And he’s like, Yeah, I can’t pay though.
And I was like, that’s OK. I want the experience. So I went down and worked with him, setting up his little points. So, you know, turbo sound rig, Aussie monitus amps and things like that. You know, the first time I have a mix was him being like, Hey man, I just need to go to the bathroom.
And I quickly jumped up and like, he set that mix up.
My hands on the fight is for 15 seconds and I’m sure for a minute or two until he got back. And that was my first mics. And from there it kind of grew. And then a little acoustic acts playing on the deck around lunchtime and late afternoon. Some people go off after class. And so they started throwing me those gigs, you know, just a pair. Macchi points those boxes with a little Macchi Velzy mixer or whatever it was at the time.
And I got really good at learning to mix from behind the speakers.
Huh. So that’s actually a pretty good skill to have. You know, I’d say that I did that a lot in my first ten years of my career. Yeah, I mean, I it more than I care to admit.
I mean, I, I still do. That is funny.
We were demoing some then you see a 70 monitor speakers here and then we got some ten pops up and the first thing I do is always go behind the speaker to listen to it. I mean first off, you’re listening. It affects rejection. But I mean, you get used to the sound of what it sounds like behind it. Yeah.
It’s just one of those silly little skills that you pick up when you adapt to your environment. And then they started paying me in credits to get food from their university bar. So I was like, oh, cool. You know, poor student. I get to eat once a week and from there then they started paying me a little bit more cash to to do it. And then when I left, I just kind of fell into doing this. I’m trying to get out of life and that’s been pretty difficult.
Oh, man, my story has so many similarities to yours. But the one I’ll point out is just that, yes, I often refer to myself as a recovering sound engineer because several times I’ve just like been really fed up with it and tried to get out and do something completely different and then just end up getting back into it.
Yeah, I just see people up. Oh, really? I tried to go and do locations down and then it ended up working out and ended up getting back into doing live sound, doing monitors for a production company. They’re like, oh, we need a monitor engineer.
So I’m sure a lot of things have happened since then. You’ve traveled all over the place and now you live in Canada. But I wondered if you could take us to some point in your life when you felt like you made a decision that you were going to do something different. And I know that you’ve had you were talking about these ups and downs of trying to do something different than coming back to live sound. But is there anything that felt like a pivot that was really a change for the good in your career?
Like like what was the decision that you made to get more of the work that you really love?
Well, I think the biggest step forward for me was moving over here to Adams because I’d fallen into lots of different jobs, mainly corporate AV and things like that between the fun gigs and then kind of ended up in a gig. That was it was interesting in the sense that it was the I was I was working as a technical director at the museum here in Toronto as a sound engineer and and helping with production. And some of the gigs are really interesting.
I met some really amazing people. I met the guy who Indiana Jones is based on.
And so, yeah, and he did a talk for like five hundred VIP members of the museum. And, you know, it was. Really interesting. Really, you had to spend a lot of time working on the sound of one microphone and terrible acoustic environment, and I got very bored of that very quickly and went on a bit of a quest to start learning some new things and wanted to learn a bit more about prediction software and started doing some quick Internet searches and downloading different prediction softwares and stuff like that, which led me to the careers page at Adams and trying to find a copy of Chuda at the time to download.
And at that point, Sound Design Live you had to have a USB dongle. Deborah Calc wasn’t really commonly known or used at the time, and chuda, it was well known. I knew about it being in Canada and all sorts of friends having used it. But you had to email to get a copy. I remember sending an email and getting a bounce back and then nothing. And then I saw an ad on the careers page. I was like, Oh, that’s really interesting.
But I didn’t have some of the qualifications. So I went and I made a conscious decision that I was going to learn some of the skill sets that was listed on that application, which was things like CAD drawing and stuff like that, things that I always had an interest in but never had a chance to do. So I did a couple of quick levels of CAD training and then applied for the job. And I got it on the spot because I guess and not a lot of people here want to move that country because we’re kind of located in the middle of cornfields and work as an applications engineer, because a lot of people in the industry don’t necessarily know or didn’t at that time know what applications engineers were or what they did.
Now, now, I don’t know what it is. Well, I mean, basically, we’re we’re technical support for people who use that brand of product, whether it’s you know, and I was thinking about this. I was talking to a friend of mine who works at Gerry Harvey, and they call it autist relations because they’re definitely artists facing support people. So they’re talking to the artists as far as doing molds and then the engineers as far as getting everything working.
But when you’re talking about loudspeakers, I mean, we talk to the people behind the scenes. So it’s not necessarily at that time. We’re talking about six, eight years ago at that time, people didn’t necessarily, at least here in Toronto when someone set up an Adamson’s system, there wasn’t always an Adams in person. Now, if you set up a Vidor’s Greg, that was very, very unlikely at that time that there would be someone from acoustics or from the distributor there to assist or support.
So I didn’t really know what it was at the time. And then very quickly found out when someone said, hey, you need to jump on a plane and go here and do a demo or set up the speaker or go in to this. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is a range of stuff that I never even thought of.
And so that was a pivotal moment for me of kind of stepping into this role and and seeing that you kind of end up in this space between the customer and engineering and making sure that the customer expectations and engineering’s idea of what the product is going to do, kind of meet in the middle and you’re there to support that.
OK, well, one thing I love about your story is sort of the agency that you took with the path. I feel like so much of us just sort of fall into this career or fall into a job or something happens or we meet somewhere in a bar which which did happen to you. And we’re going to talk about it a little bit. But like there’s all these things that just sort of seem to happen by random and we just sort of feel like our career happens by luck.
I guess I’m lucky. And so for you to obviously a lot of it was luck and that will always happen. But for you to look at a thing and say, hey, I need to up skill in this way, so I’m going to do that and then come back and sort of get into this and not just feel like, oh, you know, I can’t do that. So I guess I’ll not try.
Yeah, I mean I mean, the thing is, I don’t know. I just feel like for anyone listening, like like that is a thing you could replicate. Like you can look at a job description and see like, oh, I don’t want experience in A, B and C and so I can go out and get that experience.
Yeah. I mean that’s the thing. It’s a positive manifestation. So if you you know, I’ve been reading about this a lot and my mother was a schoolteacher and taught me this from a very young age. If there’s something that you want to do, then you’re the only thing in the way of doing that. And then also that that path is going to wind, you know, no matter which way you look at it. So if if there’s something that you want to do, if you positively manifest that, then you will stop making the right steps towards doing it.
So you think, oh, you know, I want to be an architect or an architect needs to have all of these drawing skills. OK, cool. So I’m going to go and practice my drawing and get better at that or even in our example, like a musician, you’re not born with an abundance of talent. Some people have more. Some people have less. But it’s how you utilize it, right? So some musicians are born with an abundance of talent and they burn out quickly, but.
They can play like nothing else, but all they have to do is play, and that’s them positively manifesting, becoming a good musician, whether they feel it or whether they sat down for hours and just practice one scale for a week at a time. And I went to music school. So I saw a lot of range of people that were manifesting their careers in music, whether it was something that took them on to be a professional musician in the spotlight or whether it was just someone who is learning to be a teacher and being able to craft this skill, to be able to guide other people to becoming a better whatever they wanted to be.
So for me, from a very young age, I decided that I wanted to be a sound engineer. I didn’t really know what the job description was, and that was part of that manifestation. I think at about 12, I decided that I wanted to be in music, but I’d been playing music since I was a little kid. And I mean, not professionally, like, you know, a little bit of piano school, but it of always around music.
And I was like, I want this to be my career. And at the age 12 or 14, I was like, I want to own a studio. And then when you start looking into it and my parents found little courses and stuff like that that I could do to try and work towards that. I had a very supportive music teacher in high school and a very tiny little school. And, you know, the people around you see what you want to do and try and help you.
And you are always open to it at the time. But then you kind of look back and go, wow, that person really did kind of step above and beyond and mentor me in ways that I couldn’t go back and replicate even if I wanted to.
Sure. So then threw out that path.
You kind of go, well, I want to do this, and then you might shoot for something really high up, but then not get it. And then it’s about not letting it get you down or letting it get you down and understanding that that that’s a process that you have to go through to find the next best thing. And sometimes the next best thing isn’t the thing that you wanted, but it’s the thing that was actually better to begin with.
So I wanted to go and go to a big fancy audio recording school, and I ended up going to a local university, which at the time I was like, it’s not necessarily what I wanted to do, but the experiences that I learned there and the people that I met along the way definitely shaped who I am now. I wish back. We didn’t have the most fancy recording gear in the studios and all that kind of stuff, but we learned how to adapt.
And the skills that you learn from an adaptation is sometimes far outweighs being able to play with the fancy cell consoles and stuff like that. So and, you know, that’s that process is gone through my career. You know, I worked as a freelancer for many years. And, you know, I didn’t always get the front of house mixing gigs that I wanted or necessarily get put on as a one or even a two in some of the gigs that I want to.
But maybe I was a stagehand or in a three or something lower down the chain. But I worked my ass off to make sure that I helped the people around me look good. And and when people needed help, I was always there because I love what I do. I think we all love what we do, which is why we do it. Like you said, we try and get out of it when when the times get tough like now.
But hopefully when everything comes back online because we love it so much are going to be rushing out to do it. I think that’s a positive manifestation. Is everything right? It’s what you’re doing, right? You positively manifested doing a podcast like this and has become successful. So it’s well, it’s the hard work isn’t is never forgotten or overlooked. It’s always. But the hard work is paying off. Right.
Right. And I think it can be tough if you don’t know exactly where you’re going. And yet there could have been another path where you took those you did that CAD training and then you didn’t get that job. But then that could have led you to do something else. And now now you have that skill. Or I think what’s most important is that you learned you can train in this thing and you can basically do whatever you want. Like that’s sort of like the general statement here.
And I’ll just throw in one more thing to kind of wrap the subject up for people who are interested in kind of a guide and how to do this. The best book I’ve read is called Ultra Learning, and I go back to it still now whenever I need to learn something new. So like earlier this year, I wanted to learn more about filter design and synthesizing filters and like applying them to things. And I was able to create this plan by going back to this book, Ultra Learning.
And yeah, to make a long story short, the author has like, taught himself many, many skills and many languages and he like, you know, got a graduate degree at MIT for free in six months just by, like, looking at their syllabus. And so he has like this step by step plan there for like kind of teaching yourself any skill that you would want to know really quickly, which can be important if it’s like, hey, I’m getting this new job and I need the skill or I need to learn the skill to get this job, you know, very soon.
So if you feel some urgency around it, I feel like that can be a great mode of. Later for learning, and this book is a really good guide for that subject.
Yeah, there’s a lot of good, good reading material on that. But again, I mean, the thing is, is we we as humans are so adaptable. And if we want to learn something, we’ll put our minds to it and be able to do it. Not everything comes naturally.
OK, Jeremi, let’s talk about broken social scene. So I love this band. You love this band. I read about them in your bio. And I know that you have kind of an interesting story for how you came to work with them. So I was wondering if you could share that with us.
Yeah. And it kind of ties into the last comment because it is a little bit of that positive manifestation gone. Right. Although there were times when I didn’t think it was going right. So it kind of happened over years, right? It happened over a very long time. And it was only really when I stepped back and kind of looked at it go, wow, I thought about this happening. And it actually did. And I couldn’t really believe it, but I guess it happened.
So, yeah, I was living in Australia in 05, 06, and a friend of ours came back from tour and came to stay with us. And he brought a whole stack of CDs. And this is in the days of CDs and MySpace and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, he brought the stack of CDs and kind of left it with this as he was sleeping on the couch. And I went through them and found this broken social scene.
You forgot it in people record and couldn’t stop listening to it. And just over and over and over again. And then my girlfriend at the time and I were looking at going, traveling and found out that we could get visas to come live and work in Canada. And that was around about the same time. And I was like, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I could go to Canada and I could work one of these Canadian bands? Because at the time, pretty much all the music I listen to is coming out of Toronto or Montreal.
And so we moved to Vancouver and I plan on being a a broadcast or location sound engineer and came over. And after a few months of realizing that that wasn’t going to pan out, ended up falling back into production work. And then after a while, I moved to Toronto because that’s where all of the work is or was at that time.
And that’s pretty far across the country. So, yeah, we just geographically, Vancouver’s all the way on the west. Toronto’s like pretty far to the east. Yeah.
I mean, pretty broke at the time and bought a car, drove across the country, worked as a stagehand pretty much the minute I landed in Toronto and everyone actually thought I was a lighting tech because we’re going to be stagehands and all of these gigs and kind of work my way up the industry very quickly here in Toronto, from stagehand to, you know, working as a AV and stagehands for audio companies and stuff like that. And then people were like, what do you actually do?
You take the sound check. I was like, I actually I’m you know, I’ve been doing audio for ten years. Really? Why are you working stage? I it’s like, well, I’m trying to find out where I fit in this in this industry. So then I started to get more audio gigs and I was really only working for a production company. So I kind of skipped the whole doing the venue thing here in Toronto. And then through a friend of a friend got a phone call one day or an email, I guess at that point about filling in as a back line tech for Benko Los campesinos who were playing at the Opera House here in Toronto.
And I was like, yeah, I can do Becklin a musician. I can I can fill that gig.
And so I went and did that.
It was kind of fun. And then just kind of get this random drunk dude who knew the band and he’s a bit obnoxious.
And we went. Yeah, well, during the show and then after the show, we went out for drinks because he was working there. No, he was a he was actually he was just hanging out. He was just a guest of the band that day. OK, and just a random drunk. OK, and we kind of laugh about this now because he’s he’s a sound engineer and the in the touring scene these days. But at that point he was back clean tech.
He didn’t really tell me who you work for. He’s a little bit drunk and obnoxious, but yeah, like a couple weeks later, maybe even a month later, I get an email from Arts and Crafts Records saying, hey, we’re looking for a monitor engineer for Broken Social Scene. And I thought it was a joke. Oh, yeah. And then I remembered I gave this guy my number because he’s he decided he wanted me but my best friend that day.
And yeah. And so I quoted on it and they came back to me and said, oh, you know what, that’s a little bit too high. Could you do it for this much? And I was like, you know what, I really want the opportunity. So yeah, yeah, I’ll do it for that much money.
Wow. So the dream came true.
Yeah, well, that’s what I thought, OK, it was a little bit less than I wanted, but it was the experience. So I wanted to get and it’s funny how dreams can become nightmares because it was quite a difficult tool, but that’s kind of fast forwarding down the down the road. But the first show I ever did was this movie is Broken, which was the live recording which became a DVD of Broken. And social scene at the Harbourfront, and it was supposed to be on the island, but there was a garbage strike in Toronto.
I mean, these are all like these political events that happened here. So they did this show at Harbourfront Center and there was so many people on stage. I mean, everything you read about broken social scene, it’s true. Pretty much every person in Toronto is somehow a member of this band sometimes.
So, I mean, I knew a couple of people on stage. I knew who they were. And I remember showing up and being like, I am here to do monitors. And the union guys are super grumpy with me that day and trying to navigate between meeting one hundred people, being able to figure out what they wanted on stage. And of course, when you ask people what they want in the monitors, they just say everything and they start counting the inputs and all of a sudden you’re forty eight inputs and five horn players walk on stage.
It’s like, oh my gosh, what am I doing here?
Wait, so you mentioned that you knew a couple of people, but the implication here is that you only knew two people’s names.
Yeah, I mean, I knew Brendan Canning was and I knew who Kevin Drew was.
And this is a problem for a monitor engineer.
Yeah. I mean, I have a guy. So your board was just labeled with all of these, like, emojis or something. I mean, I went with the typical mock, the placement of where the microphones are and hope that the microphones. Well, I was wrong, but I mean, especially when when you start to see the band move around on stage, you can’t really label a microphone with someone’s name because you know, one song, it’s Kevin singing.
And at the next minute it’s like four horn players crowding around it and blowing their heart out. But I mean, that was an eventful day. Apart from having 20 odd people on stage, there was also gear issues I had to console, drop a Senate panel on me and I had an insert dye on for Leslie’s any monitors during the show. I think if you watch the movie, you’ll see Kevin yell at me once and you see Leslie wince as I put the inside out and and you can see it pop in her eyes and I kind of tweeks.
I was like, now it’s like they’re never going to hire me again. But I did Blues Fest in Ottawa a couple of days later with him and it was fine. And then they told me that they were releasing a record and I did pretty much all of 2010 on the road with them. So they took me through Europe a couple of times around the US a couple of times. Well, it’s amazing. So wait, so the part of the story that we’re missing is did you ever get to talk to them later?
And did they ever say, hey, what happened? Why did this show suck? Did you ever get to have a conversation with them about all of the things that were, you know, going wrong?
Yes and no. I mean, that was so that was late 2009. And I think we had those discussions continuously right through till I started 2011 when I decided to part ways as I was moving to the UK at the time. But some days it didn’t matter. Some days it did. We never carried production for the entire year and a bit of touring together. The only thing I carried was one. I’m fifty eight and that was really so Kevin did get sick and a couple of nine fours for the Thom’s.
So Justin the drummer. Oh that’s right. I was back on the drums too. So the drummer always had the same sounding tone microphones in his ears and. But yeah it’s funny because the nights that I get all the gear I wanted, they had a bad show and the nights that I got none of the gear I wanted, they had a good show.
And, you know, the more you look back at it now is that it’s not so much the gear, it’s what kind of atmosphere you can create on the on stage for the band to for them to be able to unleash that creative process. And for them, it was chaos. Not not all artists thrive from chaos, but that particular group of people do in that environment of people.
But, well, they seem to be sort of promoting that. Yeah. Like we, you know, a little bit to control. How can we have more chaos here? Let’s put a bunch more people on stage. Yeah, let’s see. Let’s see how much we can confuse Jeremiah.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think my my last big show with him was the Toronto show and I think I counted twenty four people on stage with twenty open mixes.
So that was probably like ten weg mixes and another ten years or something like that. It was ridiculous. It was we maxed out the profile and we had to add sidecars and bits and pieces on and it was crazy.
I don’t know if you have an answer for this, but I’m just now in the middle of taking a course on I mixing with Stefaniuk. And one of the things that I’m learning is that sort of the erm earphones all have a little bit different frequency response, just like speakers I guess, and learning from learning. Bohanon that, that there are some that are good for women and some that are good for men in some general ways. And so one of the questions that have been coming up in this course and then the other people that have been taking the course with me is kind of this idea of how to, like, hear what the artist is hearing.
And so if you know a little bit about their hearing and you know about, like, the frequency response. Of the IEM, then you can sort of either imagine how it’s going to be different or you could potentially create corrective IQ snapshots that would make the your whatever earphones you’re listening to sound a little bit more like theirs. Is that a thing that you did? This is the first time I’m hearing of this. So maybe this is a thing that, like professional engineers do all the time.
It’s this crazy.
So, I mean, with broken social scene, we’re pretty much all wages. And the few people that we’re using is we’re really just they needed just a little bit extra of being able to hear their voice among the chaos, and particularly Leslie Feist, rather, and Emily and Lisa, the girls that were singing in the band, who just drowned out by the fact that is five open microphones through five open mixes with five guitars behind them.
And then and then a drum drummer or two that were really heavy hitters. I mean, on the 2010 to it, we had just a pair of playing drums and then John McIntire from Tortas playing the Russian. And I remember a couple of times during the set, John, and get on Justin’s kit and play drums on a track. And I had to change the whole snare afterwards because he believed the Whelton.
So, I mean, I’m sorry.
I just want to take a moment to say that I have had one opportunity to mix John MacIntire, and I made a big mistake of putting using the wrong mike on the vocal. And it just picked up so much drums because he’s so loud, but he’s so good. But he it was just like it was it ended up being a mess because of that choice.
The guy the guy hits like a tree trunk. You know, it’s like I remember the first time he played with us in front, so I had to get up. And I remember Justin getting on the kit and kind of looking over me, Moniteau being like, what the heck, dude? And I had to get up and grab this snake is John. It left it like a two inch welt in the middle of the snare drum.
So when we when we toured together because the sea and cake and broken social scene, that’s funny. I mix the sea and cake. But is that a tiny place? And you weren’t there. Yeah. Yeah.
So we actually John had to bring his own snare if he was going to play the kid. But anyway, so back to the Iame comment. I mean, in that scenario we were using a lot of bad practices because the girls were really using it just so they could kind of pitch better. So often cases only using one ear just so they could hear themselves. And again, it’s just purely monitoring above the chaos. And then Justin on drums had a set because it just meant that there was less of less chaos coming through the drum mikes.
So we’re able to stop some of the bleed through the drum mikes, obviously stop the bleed of drums through the vocal mikes, but placement of microphones and people on stage try to accommodate from that. So I never had chance of doing a proper stereo. I am mics. I’ve always been much more of a speaker guy and dealing with making sure things don’t feedback. I like I like the chaos and the challenge is stressful, but, you know.
Well, no, that’s good that you like that. I mean, one of the biggest challenges for me getting into live sound was how much chaos there is and just kind of getting used to that because like every gig I would get into, I’d be like a thousand things need to change here for this to actually work. And that’s not how live song goes. You know, you just kind of have to you just roll with it and you have to be always OK with a certain amount of chaos.
Yeah. And it’s the it’s not so much the chaos. I find that stressful, but it’s the enjoying the troubleshooting and fixing the problem. And it’s not necessarily opening something up and smoldering wires back together. But, you know, there’s some people management behind that. There is some creative thinking of, oh hey, why does this not work properly? Maybe it’s my placement. Maybe it’s changed the drum, maybe it’s changed. There’s so many different things that you could do to improve the situation.
And sometimes you there’s more happening in hindsight than actual in the moment. But, you know, planning for the next gig, learning from experience, you’re having a laugh about it when it goes wrong or trying to. Yeah.
All right, Jeremy. Well, let’s let’s get into some more technical subjects. So your applications support application engineer for Adamson. And I’m sure you have seen so many things, people doing things you consider right, wrong, good, bad. You’ve seen a lot of results. And so I want to see if I can tap into that a little bit. And I don’t know really how to ask the right specific question to elicit some some good memories from you.
But basically, I would love it if you had a few tips are just like trends, you see, because I’m sure you get a lot of emails and calls and you go out to help people and you’re like, oh, people are always turning the speaker upside down and that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it. Or people are always so often doing these things. So I’m curious if you could share with us some of maybe the most common mistakes you see people making who are maybe new to some speakers or just doing the doing.
A lot of the same mistakes out in the field.
There’s no such thing as the right or wrong way of doing things. This is some pretty silly things that we do. I guarantee if it’s silly or wrong or dumb, I’ve probably done it more than once again. It comes down to that problem solving like, you know, that’s in a very open question.
So I know I always say I would try to find something that you’ve written about it or something, but I don’t always find that. So in my mind, for example, I’m getting kind of a few emails a day of people saying, like, can you look at my design? Like, do you think this is right or wrong? So I don’t know. I’m I don’t know how to make it more specific, except, like, are people putting all of their subs under the stage and you don’t like that or something like that?
Well, I mean, I have one particular client or had one particular client who insisted on ground stacking everything because they didn’t want to have to bug the rig is to fly anything. And this is actually someone that I worked for. And when they took delivery of the new system from us, they were like, oh, yeah, we’ve got this gig, it’s here. And it’s actually a Maple Leaf Gardens. And yeah, we’re going to do a full groundstrokes because you don’t want to get in the way video, but they have to be low.
So we’re going to do more. Why would you ground stack? Well, we don’t really have the weight capacity. That’s weird. Don’t have the capacity, but you’re hanging like hundreds of feet of truss and cable and video screens and atoms and speakers are not notoriously heavy. Yeah, I mean, it was any 12 system and it’s not that heavy. And I was like, can I see your production design? And then like, yeah, OK.
I was like, look, you know, I just wanna optimize it. Just make sure, you know, you’re getting the best of best of free money for your new system. And they sent it to me. And thankfully, they see the lighting guy who is a friend, I guess someone that I guess in the long run has mentored me a little bit indirectly because I was on a gig with him once. And you kind of hit my asked me on a few things and I was like, how’s the lighting guy telling the audio guy what to do?
But years of experience often outweigh just any kind of technical ability. But anyway, so I look at it and I call him and be like, hey, so I’m looking at this production design. And I saw that you’re your name’s on the drawing. Just curious, like, do you know the rigging capacity of the roof or like is there any extra capacity to hang speakers?
And he’s like, man, I told the audio guys it was totally fine. Really, that’s not what I heard. So this is that bit of a people management problem solving, right?
Densher So I was like, OK, I’m going to take the same amount of inventory that they were going to ground stack and I’m going to put it in a flowing system and I’m going to use all of my cadging skills to mock up exactly what I think it’s going to look like so I can solve the argument. And I actually did All in Blueprint, which is a prediction software, and I went and put video screens in. But some of the trussing in staging because it wasn’t a corporate because no one had done this yet because they just said I was going to be ground stacked so they didn’t know what it would look like.
OK, got it.
Yeah.
So then I was like, wait a second. They haven’t used prediction software enough to know that it’s going to be just fine if they do this.
So they’re sort of guessing and using. OK, go ahead. So, you know, like they had all the EAW dB speakers at the time, which didn’t necessarily have a wealth of prediction software and tools that went behind planning. They would always just go with the well, I guess we’ll do it this way. And I am always a planner. So I sat down and did all of these drawings and we’re going to do this. And I went down there and help them rig it.
And it all worked out fine. And since then, I spent a lot of time. I’m actually my role here isn’t actually just applications engineer anymore. I’m also head of education. So I’m writing all these education courses and every single piece of education course I’ve written has been usually correctives of someone’s mistakes because I think that’s a bit harsh to call them mistakes. But helping someone problem solve something in the field has made me realize maybe how something needs to be communicated better.
So since then, I’ve sat down and done several days of training prediction software with that particular customer, but also lots of others, and written a standardized course for how we train all of our users on the prediction software. And I think that we’re going to take your course right now.
It’s it’s a bit limited. We had been doing some webinar based stuff, but it’s a little bit difficult to certify people when you don’t necessarily have that touchpoint. So we really have to do it. And so so this is, of course, that you normally do in-person, OK?
Yeah. Yeah. So we were doing the applied certification and advanced certification training courses, which are two two day courses that we do not just a day of working and prediction software, but also a day of rigging and tuning and just getting people generally comfortable with the environment of speakers and amplifiers and control software. But yeah, I guess going and doing a lot of these on site. Events with people in those one particular tour that I got sent out to go in support and came because the engineer and I became good friends and he’s like, yeah, I guess I’d like to take your system out for tour.
And then they’re like, oh, we’re doing preproduction. And then the company is like, we’re sending out an engineer who doesn’t know how to use the speakers. Can the company send someone to help them happily go down to ten days and rock Lititz and hang out? And I think supporting that to the first tour I really did working for Adams and the amount of information that I kind of accumulated to myself of how to show someone who is very new to our set of tools how to use them, kind of really sculpted how I wrote a lot of the training materials and simplifying it, because, I mean, there’s a lot of complex stuff in what we do, but there’s also a very simple approach to it that can free up our mind to work on all of the complex stuff.
So simplifying how we draw a room in a 3D drawing program like Blueprint and being able to quickly come up with the simulation and showing people the quickest way of using that tool rather than this tool does everything rather than talking about the simplest ways of using a software. Let’s talk about all of the complex coding and simulation and all this stuff. Well, then people get confused. So simplifying and demystifying a lot of the complex complexities of a piece of software and just breaking it down to simple functions and tasks makes it a little easier for you when you’re training someone.
I’m sure you found this. You kind of have to find that middle ground between the most advanced people in your class and the people who need the most help. And that’s why I kind of limit a lot of the training classes to small groups of people rather than just doing a big online course and then submitting work and all that kind of stuff. Because we’ve looked at that model, being able to really spend time with people and training our staff of how to connect with people has been a big part of how we’re able to grow and develop and really mentor people, our customers, our users, how to use the system properly and then that kind of seeds, because then if someone knows how to use it, then they show someone else how to use it in the simplest ways and then they show someone else.
And it’s kind of like word of mouth, hand to mouth kind of stuff. And then you get reports back of people. Yeah, I use the system. It sounded fantastic. It was this guy. Oh, yeah. I remember training that guy or that guy came to the other guy’s training course or she really loved using the speakers at this event. So we spent some time talking about it. And I showed in 50 minutes how to do this and that.
Yeah, it’s very personal way of kind of attacking, training and learning.
I really appreciate what you’re saying because it sounds like if you presented in the wrong way for the wrong person or in a way that is maybe too complex at the time, then that person’s takeaway might just be that this is too complex for me. And then they’re going to transmit that message to the next person that this is too complex and Adamson’s systems are too complex and their education is too complex. Instead of this message that you would rather than transmit, which is here’s a simple way to get started.
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, and that’s when I started there wasn’t any regimented training. And I mean, I hate to say regimented because it’s not like it’s super strict. But I remember when I was so going back to the story of I was looking for prediction software to further my learning skills when I came across the job posting for Adams. And when I started Blueprint wasn’t released yet and I was given an advance copy the week that I signed my NDA to come work here.
And I remember, I think, for a good part of six months. So I started about six months after I signed the agreement and for eight months, six to eight months, I had this piece of software that I did not know how to use, and that was no documentation because it was still being written and the code was still being worked on. Sure.
And, you know, I’d spoken to my colleague Brian, who is now heading up R&D, and he was the other applications engineer here at the time. And I remember calling him a couple of times and him just rushing me through things because he was busy. You know, they hired me because they needed someone else to to help him. And he didn’t necessarily have the time or capacity over the phone to really train me. And then when I came here, previous R&D had he English wasn’t his first language.
So the bits of information that I got out of him were small, direct, but not necessarily all of the steps. So the training course really comes out of making all the mistakes in a controlled environment, whether it be demos or just sitting in a classroom or in the office here.
So I took this piece of software that was released and try to find the simplest way of using it. I think a lot of the training courses come out of all the mistakes that I’ve made sure because it wasn’t a dog. It was. We’re learning a lot.
Exactly, exactly, because if something again, if something is too complex, you’re right, people tend to shy away from it, with the exception of a select few group of people who want to dig in and really share your early adopters.
Yeah, I mean, there’s some early adopters that did find it very difficult. And I remember watching the first training course of the software before I took it over and walking away at the end of it going I understood maybe a tenth of that. So what can we do to make this better and always improving on on things like that to make it better for the next time you do it? And then the next time, you know, I have one customer.
I’ve done three different three training courses year after year after year. And each year I’m presenting them basically the same material, just slightly modified each year to be more streamlined and more improved. And each year they come away going, wow, that was even better than last year.
I was like, the coursework is still the same as software hasn’t changed. I mean, definitely small improvements to make it better. And those improvements come from training courses and that direct communication with people. But being able to present something over and over again find the simplest approach and then going with repetition. So it really sticks in people’s mind.
And just to wrap up the story, where you started was you had this client who just did this because did ground systems, because that’s just what they always did. And so part of the problem solving there was oh, you’ve never seen, you know, what some models can do in this production environment. And so then you can ask the question of, you know, is the ground stack better or is this other design better? And you don’t have to just always kind of guess or go with what you’ve done in the past.
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. We have so many tools now that guesswork is educated guesswork. I refer to Blueprint as the argument solver. You know, like, you know, someone says it doesn’t work. Well, I can now give you models as to why it does or doesn’t work. And, you know, people ask me I mean, I think my favorite question is what’s the optimal place for the speakers to go? And every question I get asked is answered by a question of where can I put them chair?
There is there is no optimal place. It’s it’s a perfect series of compromises as to what what the end result is. But the key thing, I think the key key learning point there was realizing that in the past, the tools that they had to come up with that weren’t as accessible and then the education wasn’t as accessible. So, yeah, I think that’s a big thing.
Well, let’s talk a little bit more about Blueprint AV, because this year’s Live Sound Summit, you gave an intro to Blueprint AV. And if people want to watch that, they can do that at live Sound Design Live 20 20. That’s Sound Design Live Dotcom. But just want to ask you a couple of questions that I found very interesting about your presentation. So one of the things you said is that information in Blueprint AV below 60 hertz is approximate.
And this is really common for all of the predictions that we use. And so I just wanted to ask if you could comment on why this is so common, why is it so hard to do prediction of low frequency in these models that we have?
I mean, I think with all of these models and all of these modeling softwares, it doesn’t really matter which manufacturer it’s coming from. It’s really hard to simulate low frequency energy just due to the fact that it’s direct sound. So I mean, everything’s approximate, but when you factor in, I might have a 20 by 20 meter space that I’m putting to subwoofers in and I can see how in blueprint I can see how they’re going to interact with each other using the interference button in the simulation tools in flat weighting.
But that’s not necessarily going to tell me what the end result is, because if I have a left right spaced pair and I get that something in the middle, because maybe it’s a narrow room. And but what I’m not taking into consideration is the fact that it’s a box and that box is going to add an extra three dB of energy of just a low, low frequency energy bouncing off the walls and and refracting and duplicating in the room. So I think that makes it difficult to really kind of pinpoint exactly what the subs are going to do.
But we get pretty close, close enough to be able to make a very informed decision about what you want to do. But again, at the end of the day, it’s it’s the difference between direct sound and what’s actually happening in the room. It’s a bit hard to simulate because even when you look at softwares like that, you can add when you can close a model and look like look at the entire room, you still can’t account for surface reflections and stuff like that fully.
I think that’s might have been where I was going with that particular comment. Sure.
What is why? Waiting.
Waiting.
So a lot of manufacture. Was used something very similar, I know in one particular software, they have to frequency curve where you try and get the line in between where you might look at 2K versus I think it’s like eight hundred. Why? Waiting is kind of like an awaiting curve, but is a bit more narrow. Band and the Wii comes from Y-axis, which was the Y 10 y 18 line source, which was one of the first North American made Linus’s in the world.
And it came from a lot of development with Colini drive sources and stuff like that. And looking at how, you know, because those days people are using a lot of Excel calculators to predict angles of the line. So it was very new. And Adamson and some of our partners came together with the idea of coming up with a prediction software and when they were testing and measuring the lines, also noticing that there was a lot of different interactions, like a lot of changes were happening.
When you change the angles of the P.A. around kind of where the waveguide couple, which ends up being that two to a range, which is also key, the vocal range, and you’re listening to voice, whether it being singing, spoken or even just the announcements and stuff like that. If that area of frequency coverage is clear, then a lot of the other musicality or tonality will hopefully follow because again, we’re listening to a podcast. You’re listening to my voice.
It’s pretty kneisel. It’s very has a funny accent, but it’s a lot of the information that you’re processing and using to listen to the words that I’m saying is in that to date range. So when you think about that in a large content environment and I think this is why a lot of houses of worship like using Adamson’s speakers, because there’s a spoken message in a lot of cases over music. So to be able to carry that spoken range is extremely important.
I mean, we’re a communicative species. So being able to have that to take range hood everywhere is a big thing. So when you look at the difference between a weighted simulation and weighted simulation in blueprint, when you start adding the awaited simulation of more frequencies in the low, low end, you start to offset the reality of what’s happening when you start to change splay angles of a line source. So why waiting really came for the steering of line sources to make sure that we weren’t getting dips.
When you splay the angles too much in the way of guides kind of start to get outside of not outside of their operating limits, but to a point where maybe there’s a dip by three or six dB, which is something you want to avoid. So it just became one of those tools just by narrowing the frequency bandwidth to be able to kind of get a more accurate response. And then we kind of teach people to do the due diligence of using weighted as your starting point.
But then always check your your weighted and then your flat range and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it’s just it’s kind of like using a telescope versus a pair of binoculars to look at something that, you know, is change. Changing the scope just a little bit.
Yeah, it kind of makes me think of being able to use Band Limited Pink Noise through a system as your signal generator, right?
Yes. Essentially that cool or it’s kind of like that in some ways.
Jeremiah, you have done so many cool things. Tell us about maybe something uncool that you have done or maybe not uncool. But what what is something that happened to you that you considered to be a painful experience or a mistake and something that happened on the job story you could share with us and then what happened after that? And you already used up one of them. I’m not sure if that first monitor gig was broken. Social scene was your most painful experience on the job, but maybe there’s another one.
I think one of the most painful experiences has to be sometimes you have to go out. And I mean, I go on support a lot of customers in the field. But when someone insists that they know better than you when they’re making a mistake and you want to correct them, but it’s just politically difficult. But they’re relying on you to show them what’s right. And it’s harder than giving it away too much. And and thankfully, it hasn’t happened in a little while.
But there was one customer who insisted on having me help him design a system and then design a system and then hand it off to them. And then, you know, you always get whenever you hand off a system designed someone, there’s always the value engineered version of that system design, which is understandable, like customers work hard to come up with the money to invest in a system from any other brand. And I’ve spoken to a lot of other support techs who work from other companies and they have the same same similar experiences.
But then again. On site and then having to, you know, maybe they haven’t put it where you’ve wanted to put it and then having to, like, negotiate your way out of having to fix mistakes that may be being pinned on you that they have made on their own. And I don’t know, that’s always a really uncomfortable experience for me.
I see. So you’re you know that at the end you’re going to be they’re going to blame you or you’re going to have some responsibility for the result. And so, like, how do you you can’t change other people’s behavior, but how do you like how do you want to turn out? Well, and you can and you can’t really tell their customers that they’re wrong. Right. So because I mean, that’s the thing. Like a lot of our customers aren’t the end user, you know?
So I’m I’m supporting like a dealer or distributor. And then you have to go out and interface with their customer and then you kind of end up being this, you know, middle person between, you know, what they maybe did, what you designed, what they wanted. And it’s just gets it gets a little bit awkward if it’s not going how you suggested it. And you don’t if you don’t really ever want to turn around and say, I told you so, but that’s usually my nature to want to do that.
Yeah. I mean, those are uncomfortable experiences that there’s been a few of those where I’ve had to go in and kind of just walk away and go, you know what it is, what it is, and I’ll just live with that. And, you know, sometimes it keeps you awake at night, sometimes it doesn’t.
What have you learned from that? So to avoid that, are there ways of getting started at the beginning where you sort of share that with people and say, hey, this is how I’ve seen this go in the past? If you want to have really great results, you know, try to really adhere to this design or something like that, or is there just no way of getting out of that kind of situation?
I mean, I always if someone suggests something that I know isn’t going to work, I will definitely detail and experience where it didn’t work and say, well, you know what? I had an experience in the past and these are the reasons why and and giving detailed reasons. If there’s something that I don’t think is going to work, I will spend nights, evenings, days, weekends doing drawings to show why something does or doesn’t work. So outside of outside of learning how to use blueprint as well as I can.
I also use a lot of other drawing tools to be able to show, you know, if you can present the idea that you have to someone visually, then it kind of can remove some of the misconception of what the end result should be. And then they can come back to you and go, well, you know, that’s not going to work because of these reasons. But then you get the reasons why. So it’s not like you end up with, well, that’s not going to work.
And that’s the end of the conversation. You want you want the reasons why something is not going to work so you can fix it. Walking away from something when when you’re unable to fix something is extremely unsatisfying. And that’s probably happened to all of us. And for some of us, walking away from something is extremely difficult. So, yeah, I mean, if you love what you do and have a lot of pride in your work, it’s really difficult sometimes in those situations to be able to walk away from something that wasn’t necessarily what your idea of perfect was, especially if you feel like it might carry our name to it at some point in the future.
So, Jim, I want to share something and we’ll see whether or not it gets cut. We’ll see what Noah thinks about this. But I just want to share a quick story that I think is applicable because I’m reading this really great book right now about how people work in teams. And one of the stories is from this Italian sociologist. I think, anyway, the important thing is the story, which is he developed this really interesting test where he gives you some various materials and they’re like, you know, some spaghetti, spaghetti and some marshmallows and a few of the things.
And the goal is to like use all of those things to build a tower as tall as possible and something like 10 minutes. And so he’s run I think he’s run like hundreds of these tests where he always uses a group of kindergartners versus a group of business school graduate students, something like that. And the surprising result is that ten out of ten times the kindergartners always build a taller tower than the business school students. And the reason that he has decided that this happens is that the business school students, their communication is always based on positioning.
So all of the things that they say are designed to keep their position and sort of like the group tribal hierarchy. Yeah. And so they’re always worried about like, what is Jeremiah going to think about this? How does this affect our relationship, that kind of stuff, and the kid kindergartner’s less about that stuff. So they stand really close together. They talk on top of each other. They just start grabbing things and doing things. And it leads to a better result.
And maybe they don’t care so much that maybe they’re strangers or something like that. So there’s this key element of like trust and being able to say things and make mistakes. That I think is kind of what we’re getting at here when you’re like working with a client and. And they’re a client of somebody else, and it’s sort of these complex social relationships where you’re like you’re getting into it and really there’s a lot of fear around, like losing your, you know, social place in whatever it is with all these people who you have.
Like, you don’t even maybe even know that.
Well, yes. I mean, I’ve got two children who are four and six, and I definitely watch that uninhibited ability to just go and do anything without without, you know, this fears. But they’re different for sure. But yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. It’s like being able to speak your mind and feeling like you’re within your place to do so is definitely a difficult situation, which is kind of what I was explaining just a minute ago.
But then also it can be quite freeing when you finally decide what you maybe want to bleep this out. But fuck it, I’m going to do it now. Screw it. I’m going to do it and speak your mind in it or, you know, put put the unpopular opinion on the table and see if that changes everyone’s perspective. And I mean, we’re all terrified of doing it. And some people are better at it than others. Some people it’s not care factor.
It’s actually it’s not a less less scare factor. It’s more of a fear factor to be able to put all of the blemishes on out in the open and figure out the solution as best possible. You know, the unpopular opinion is is never one that we want, but often one that we need to be able to really, you know, take a long, hard look at ourselves, especially when you talk about people who have done a lot of formal schooling.
And again, you take someone who’s done a lot of formal schooling as opposed to someone who has figured it out on their own. I’ve done a lot of formal schooling. I’ve got a bachelor degree, which really at the end of the day doesn’t mean that much for what I do now. But I work with a lot of people and I work for someone who doesn’t have much more than a high school diploma. And it’s freed them up to be able to push innovation and be able to sit at the table and tell you that you’re wrong and and tell you why and admit when they’re wrong and figure out the best solution to a problem.
And again, they’re not bound by this so-called social structure to have to adhere to a set of rules. I always say rules are meant to be broken. I mean, obviously, don’t start breaking laws and stuff like that. But I mean, when you talk about, you know, there are certain rules that engineers would adhere to to be able to create something like a basic circuit. And again, you’re totally right that the creating a tower out of dried spaghetti and toilet rolls and stuff like that, you know, an engineer would look at it, go, well, I have to put heavy stuff at the base and I have to put the lightest stuff on top so I can get this tower.
But then the uneducated person and I’m not saying uneducated, like doesn’t know anything, but someone who is not doesn’t have an education in that particular set of skills, I come to and go, well, why don’t we try this? And the engineer looks at it goes because I’ve been taught not to.
And it’s not about, you know, I say this during training and I kind of want to shy away from the term education or and call it more training because, you know, in a learning environment, you want to make as many mistakes as possible because learning more about learning the mistakes and learning from your mistakes, because that’s how we learn as people rather than learning a set of rules. So, you know, people ask me, what’s the target?
What’s the magic target? And there’s no it’s this it’s not a uniform answer. It has to be this because it’s more than just that one answer, because there’s so many different factors at play. In any given scenario, you have to ask the questions of what else is going on in this situation. So this is this is where the is walk in and they don’t care about what happened before because they’re approaching it from the first time. Right. Whereas people who have done a lot of formal schooling and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s definitely a good thing because they bring a totally different skill set.
But it’s about managing that team, working together. I work in an environment or I’ve chosen to work in an environment here at Adams and where I’m around such a wide range of skills, everything from, you know, I make a point of talking to a cleaner every day. And all of the software program is a job, programmers and stuff like that, and understanding little bits of what they do. You know, I don’t need to know every detail about what their job is, but I work in a creative part of the company where I get to think about things and how we want to illustrate what the engineering team has taken and made work because of the set of constructs that they’re working on and show how that works creatively in the realm of what the customer needs from because they are looking at it from a completely different perspective.
So, yeah, I mean, being able to free your mind from. Saying, no, that’s that’s not how you do it. I mean, we all get into those modes from time to time, but sometimes it’s good to step out of that comfort zone and look at it from an objective perspective.
So what you’re saying is ask a kindergartner?
Yeah, totally. It’s always good to stand around and it’s always good to stand around and throw ideas at the table. Sometimes it generates too many ideas. Sometimes it generates good ideas. Communication and collaboration is probably the most fun part about what we do.
So I have a couple of questions for you from Twitter hour. Aagot says, What power AMP company does he prefer for his products?
We are using for E series, A series, M series and point source. We’re using OLAP Groupon with like processing. This is a long standing agreement that we’ve had with between the two companies as far as unifying our amplified solution. And then recently this year, we released the series, which is an upgradable option for any of our series uses, which is a atomism designed and built power amplifier that is made here at our factory in Canada. Well, congratulations.
Yeah. And it uses all of our own proprietary application secretary and also all of our own software and control that we’ve been developing for the better part of a decade.
Wow. OK, yeah, it’s nice to see it coming together.
There is a fun video on the Adamson website where that I guess goes along with the launch of the series where you can watch Jeremiah in real time, you know, take a back of the speaker and put a new amp in the speaker.
Yeah, that was definitely fun to do. I think I can do it quicker.
We’re going to make it the Olympics.
Yeah, it was kind of funny to watch because you are sort of like making excuses, like, sorry if you’re watching this in real time and you’re, you know, your co-host, the head of marketing is standing there the entire time very patiently.
Yeah. My favorite was at some point in the life span of the product, we changed from a talks to a hex and I didn’t check the check. What type of screw was on the old cabinet when I changed it. So I had a handful of brand new talks, heads. And of course, all of the cabinet screws are all hecks. I didn’t have the right tools, so I had to run out live on live on the Internet, had to run out and find the right tool.
And of course, our studio is a bit of a mess right now. So, yeah, it was fun.
Question from Kantako, also known as Do please ask him about their AV based amplification system of C series exclamation mark, some detailed overview. So so yeah. Do you want to say something about that.
There is more presentation material to come on the series. We released it and there’s few bits and pieces and details that still being clarified. The C series is a combination of, as I mentioned, a decade’s worth of research and development for a powered loudspeaker with built in DSP. It’s all controlled by a single piece of software called C Software, which is basically you take the design elements of Blueprint and then you add in all sorts of different control and metering and diagnostics in a single software that could be used on a dual screen.
It’s actually pretty cool and it’s so the way it works is that we wanted to look at it from an open architecture point of view in the sense that there are so many different protocols out there on the market. We wanted to find something that was future proofed. So the control aspect and audio transport all happen over networked end point. So an endpoint is any basically DSP chip, whether it be in the Atoms and Gateway, which is essentially a 16 by 16 DSP matrix miksa or any of the DSP boards, it needs loudspeakers so they all network together in a quasi star topology that basically it can be multiple branches, basically like any other network work, and all of the control happens over standard network protocol that happens over using OCR or a 70, I believe.
So all of the speakers talk directly to the software you can monitor right down to drive a temperature from software. So a speaker that can be mean with copper or fiber or other you can have a speaker kilometers away from you. So we have to monitor it from one single source or multiple different computers on the same network. And then all of the audio transport can happen over AV be the reason why we chose Abus. That was at the time when we started talking about AV B, which is probably about ten or so years ago.
Distributer told me a story recently how they came to the factory about ten years ago and Broch set them down, had this long conversation about how AV was going to change all this networked audio problems. And this is at a time when people were just starting to adopt Dontae and people had forgotten all of the nightmares of the sound and all those other networked audio. So at that time, it only really been used in automotive and. Other industrial applications, but now we’re starting to see come into the protea world, we’re seeing so much worse.
First off, we’re starting to see adoption of this finally, which is good. But there’s so much potential that is even on tap now that it’s actually future that for decades to come.
So sorry to interrupt that, but I’m so glad to hear that because I was at an Infocom panel a year and a half ago where someone said that they were basically treating AV like it was a thing of the past and that now there’s even a new standard that they’re working on that that is going to take this over. So that’s really good to hear that it’s still going strong and manufacturers are still looking at it for the future.
So the interesting thing about AV is that AV is kind of like Wi-Fi and then within that there is certain standards and this is new. So this is standard of AV be called Milan. The Milan protocol is basically a grouping together of multiple auto manufacturers Adamson, Dimpy, Luminex, Acoustics, Miah avid persona’s and more being announced every couple of months. We’re all getting together and trying to find a way of ensuring interoperability between any and all brands carrying that Millán logo.
And Milan is a subset of AV B and that guarantees that interoperability. It’s not the only kind of AV. And the reason this came about because all these manufacturers started coming to the table and saying, we have a product that’s AV being able, we have a product so avid released an AV be product. Miah started talking about it. dB got on board acoustics have a dB backbone in there, the systems. And then when we all started to go, what if our customers start having multiples of these AV being able products?
What have what happens for them? So we did it with the customer in mind and we sat down. We need we need to create a group, a working group that starts to check all the interoperability. So with the C series, we’re going to have Milan and Milan certification in the coming months. So it means that any Atomism product carrying the Milan logo or Milan certification will be able to talk to any other product in the world that carries Milan logo.
And you’re going to be able to patch and connect them together, have control over the same network infrastructure, audio transport over the same infrastructure. And then in the future, hopefully we’ll start to see video communications happening as well.
And so I’m wondering is, is Dante sort of not considered future proof because just because it’s proprietary and so that your company could go out of business and then no one would be able to use that the technology in the future?
I mean, that’s definitely a fear as a manufacturer, when you’re looking at third party products and supplies implementing something like that in your product, do you have to look at the life span beyond what you think the product is going to be and make sure that it’s going to work in a decade from now? I mean, over 30 years? Yeah, exactly. I don’t think in any way Dontae is going to disappear. I think Dontae will definitely adapt to work on the same network infrastructure.
The reason why AV, AV and OCA are good protocols to use is because they’re not necessarily IP based. I think they’re a three protocol layer to this is where my networking terminology gets a bit a bit limp. But now, rather than having to look at endpoints on IP based networking, now you’re talking about they connect via Mac addresses and that’s the communicating on a completely different layer. So it means that you need to be less of an I.T. specialist to connect AV products than you would be if you were to getting Dontae to talk to each other.
Got it. Jeremiah, what’s in your work bag? Like, what do you take when you go out to these service gigs? I know you have probably have a few things, but is there anything kind of unique or interesting that you can share with us?
Nothing unique, I have I have a workhorse toolbag, I have a Dell 15 laptop, which has been fantastic. I have a Roland OCTA captured that has been destroyed several times and our electronics department have put it back together.
What happened? I mean, what doesn’t happen to it? I mean, it sits in a backpack because it goes on a plane with me or in the back of a car or anywhere. I have a go bag that literally I can walk out the door and be ready to go. I have three earthworks and 20 threes and just enough cabling to make it all work and then a phone. And honestly, with the amount of work that I do or the amount of the type of work that I’m doing in the field, that is more than enough that I actually need.
OK, Jeremi, is there a book that you could share with us? What is a book that’s been helpful to you?
I mean, I haven’t read a book in a really long time, but the the one thing that helped set it over the book. Yeah, Yamaha Reinforcement of Sound was one of the first books someone gave me that really changed how I looked at things. And it’s also been really good at propping up wedges.
Other than that, I mean, everything’s on. I mean, Googling, listening to podcasts, listening to quickly searching something. I probably read user manuals more than I read books.
Right. Right.
I do. You listen to any podcasts?
I, I find it difficult to find time to be brutally honest. You don’t have to. I just asked you that before I ask you what podcast you listen to.
I’ve been watching a little bit of hooch and Ribot’s podcasts. Sure. Those are good.
And also the one with titer as well.
Those those were fun. I find that now, just due to timing, I’m watching more and more of the snippets of things I really like what the hell some guys have done with the creative technologies, Hillsong Instagram channel. And they have these great little bite sized bits of information on the audio video lighting systems that they’re using both at conference and their campuses. Different productions, I find it productions quite immensely detailed. So, yeah, they’ve been fun. I like to watch things in little snippets rather than sit down and listen to something from beginning to end.
I have very short attention span, extremely short.
Jeremiah, where’s the best place for people to follow your work?
To follow our work would be any of our social media channels, the Adams and Instagram Facebook page. We’re constantly sharing work that we’re doing around the world as far as installations and events when they’re happening, we’re definitely promoting any event that’s happening using our products at the moment in the sense of we’ve got a couple of shows here, use driving shows using speakers and stuff like that. So we’re trying to get share as much of that positive news as possible and also any of the bits of information that we’re releasing on all of the products that we’re working on.
Cool.
Yeah. All right.
Well, Jeremiah, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.
Thanks so much for having me.
