President/Editor/Publisher: Kerry J Haps
Vice-President: Michael Kolar
Secretary: Chris Cwiak
Treasurer: Eric Roth

Volume 22 Number 9
September, 2007

EARS meets at Chicago Mastering Service
3052 W. Carrol Ave., Chicago, IL
Tuesday, September 25th 7:30pm

Meeting at Chicago Mastering Service

This month, in fact this Tuesday, EARS meets at Chicago Mastering Service, where Bob Weston and Jason Ward will show off their new mastering room, designed by Bob Alach for extremely accurate and high-resolution stereo and 5.1 monitoring and featuring a Neumann VMS70 lathe, a sonically transparent video projection system which eliminates the usual intrusion of computer monitors in the listening environment, and a custom-built mastering console (by Shea Ako, who’ll also be on-hand to tell us all about it). Check out their website for more info and be sure not to miss their treatise on the loudness war.
The address is 3052 W. Carroll Ave., which is between Kedzie and Sacramento and 2 blocks North of Lake St. If taking the CTA, take the Green Line to the Lake St. stop. If driving, take the Sacramento exit off the Ike (I-290). There’s plenty of street parking available.

Recap/Appreciation File

Last month was our annual BBQ. As usual, those who were there had a great time and of course we missed those who couldn’t make it. Lou Malozzi, along with studio manager Jacob Ross and Mojdeh, an intern (and coincidentally in a band with my stepson) and Lou’s wife, Sandra Binion (a video artist and performer, check out her installation, Seasons, at the Hyde Park Art Center featuring some of Lou’s work) graciously welcomed us back to Experimental Sound Studios, which was just perfect. The food was great and plentiful. The drink was great and plentiful. The conversation was great and plentiful. The turnout was not plentiful, but the leftovers were. Special thanks were very much earned by Harry (MF) Brotman for obtaining, delivering (eventually), and preparing all the food and drink. (He and David Moss were detained by a major traffic incident, leaving us to enjoy watching the police descend on a situation happening next door while our thirst and hunger grew.) The only casualty of the night was my trusty ol' Weber, which cooked its last meal for EARS. I’m sure it would have wanted it that way. For the record… there was one freeloader (non dues-paying member) at the BBQ and I know who you are and will be watching for that dues check to come in. :)

October at Planet10Studios

I’ve been trying to talk him into a meeting for a year but he’s just been too busy. Now finally we’re going to get to see Jim Johnson’s very cool and very booked room in Barrington, Planet10Studios on October 30 (the usual last Tuesday). Jimmy’s never shy about bringing a sample of his latest work to listen to after meetings, now we’ll get to see how he’s getting those great sounds.

Suggestions Welcome!

There are endless good reasons to band together here as EARS. It can be whatever we want it to be. If you have any ideas for the EARdrum, our website, or future meetings, please email me. We have great meetings lining up for the rest of the year, some website plans, and a lot of good fresh energy and hopes for a more vibrant, participatory EARS, so of course we're very interested in your input on everything EARS. Please. :)

Dues!

Thanks to all who support EARS through paying their dues. Just as a reminder, they're due yearly by the October meeting and this is a prerequisite for voting and joining us for the Holiday Party. Dues checks can be made out to EARS and sent to the following address:
Engineering and Recording Society of Chicago
C/O Eric Roth, Treasurer
PO Box 98
Highland Park, IL 60035-0098

Election

It’s also time again to be thinking about my least favorite subject, EARS politics. According to the bylaws, nominations for president of EARS are to be held at the September meeting, so if you’re a dues-paid member and want to nominate someone, Tuesday’s the night. Check out the Bylaws on our website. In many ways, it still feels like we’ve only gotten started running things and we’ve barely had a chance to talk about the plans we have for the future, so of course I’d be happy to have the chance to continue for another year, hoping to make some good things happen.

Membership

Speaking of membership, A few new members joining up made me wonder if there was any trend to be noted, so I looked into it and, sure enough, our numbers are up about 33% over a year ago. I can’t really claim credit for that, but I hope I’m at least doing my part to make people feel welcome and to make EARS interesting enough to want to be a part of it. I think our mailing list, by the way, has actually maintained it’s size, as while I’ve added a lot of new addresses, I’ve also purged the list of most of the expired addresses…

A (few) (more) word(s) from the Prez...

Hey Hey! I hope you kept our usual last Tuesday of the month open because this is going to be a good one. I think I mentioned in a previous EARdrum that at TapeOpCon the first thing everyone said when they noticed I was from Chicago was, “Cool! Bob Weston’s opening up a new mastering room there!” It’s funny how various different mini-worlds of our craft can exist in the same town. I hadn’t even heard about it. Soon, though, I was getting asked about it. “What’s this new mastering room that’s opening up and who’s behind it?”
Speaking of conventions, AES New York is coming in just a couple of weeks. I’ll be there, so drop me a line if you will also. Maybe we’ll get dinner or a drink. Maybe we’ll try to find the storied elevator where the EARS idea was born.

Speaking of the birth of EARS, I’ve been thinking a lot about where EARS is heading. That original idea of just getting a drink once a month here in Chicago instead of only seeing each other out of town at conventions slowly grew into holding meetings at studios and other related facilities, but it also spawned our beloved EARdrum, which has ranged from a basic meeting announcement to a full fledged newsletter that gained national attention and managed not only to push buttons but also to unite people behind some very worthy causes. Timothy Powell and Mike Konopka conceived of it and nurtured it to some fairly respectable success. Others kept it alive and occasionally made good use of it.

As EARS was always a local community of actual working pros who also welcomed those interested in carving out their own young careers, and as the EARdrum represented this effort and the serious work that was happening here in Chicago to those on the mailing list but located outside the Chicago area, it was able to occasionally make a rough stab at uniting something of a community beyond the local scene. Perhaps the relevance of this was diminished by the great leveling and democratizing internet. Now we face questions such as whether or not to take on the project of creating an online forum of our own. This raises the issue, for me at least, not only of whether there should be something for members only or open to “outsiders” but whether or not the world of engineering and recording even needs another online forum. It seems odd to me, already, that there are so many forums, and I think it wise to ask why we would start another. I love hanging out on the forums. I’ve made it clear that Tape Op is one of my favorites. There's much to be learned and much fun to have. Egotistically, I’d love to say I started one of my own and see it succeed. But why?

Perhaps this is a time to ask the question again of what EARS really is. What need does it really fulfill? What is there that isn’t already easily available? I’m thinking that there still is and will always be value in getting together face to face, even if just for a social event. Of course there’s also value in having a chance to see a new studio, or to set up some gear and put it through it’s paces with a group of discriminating pairs of ears there to evaluate. Clearly meetings are still desirable and meet a real need. Also clearly, the EARdrum remains relevant, preferably as more than just a meeting announcement, as a place to voice a finger on the pulse of what’s going on here in Chicago and particularly with our meetings.

But what about a forum? It becomes clear that it’s something we could easily setup and there’s an obvious question with forums popping up all over, “Why don’t WE have one?” but I’d rather somehow see fewer forums than one more. It seems to me a forum is at it’s best when you’re connecting to the widest swath of the world as possible. Members have suggested that it would be great to have a forum so we could post a need for a piece of equipment (or one we’d like to offer) or a technical question but why not just do it on Ebay or Tape Op or Electrical Audio or some other forum? Why would we want to “advertise” to a fraction instead of the whole? 

Are we a private party or the hub of a global conversation? I’m left inclined to think that we still have something special in our meetings, and in some kind of EARdrum that unites us here in Chicago and represents that to the rest of the world, but that we’re better off joining in the greater community’s conversation online. Or perhaps there’s something lacking in those existing forums that we could take a look at and try to do different? 

I was recently contacted by someone who's been watching EARS for years. He wrote me a very nice note saying that he's tried for years to get something like EARS going in his town through AES or NARAS (He's actually a part of the Chicago NARAS chapter) but that he's had no luck under their umbrellas. He noted that it seemed like EARS had been languishing a bit for some time but that it appeared things were coming together again. His observations are that EARS has been and is becoming more and more of a good model for bringing a local audio community together and would actually like to follow our lead. He would even like to use the name EARS and openly associate with us as another branch of EARS. I'm planning to meet with him and talk through this some more when he's in town later this fall. It's an interesting idea. EARS may actually grow beyond it's local friendly confines (as it were), but perhaps in focusing on that face time more so than the virtual community online. 

I would absolutely love to hear any other ideas and thoughts you might have on this. Drop me a line.

Now, I have to throw in, just for the fun of it, that I write this tonight having skipped a concert I really wanted to see. I was scheduled to run monitors for Ladysmith Black Mambazo, but they ended up bringing their own guy to take care of it. Not really having to be there, I had to make the difficult call of getting some other things done. I was actually really looking forward to “having” to do it as I had an ulterior motive (besides a great concert). Back in January of 2002 I was flying back from Moscow. I overnighted in Zurich and the next leg of the flight was to Dallas. As I got on the plane I realized that Ladysmith Black Mambazo was also on the flight, boarding right ahead of me. They were even in coach. Though I recognized them, I just couldn’t corner them on such a long flight, so I actually hoped to not have to sit right next to them, knowing it would be almost impossible not to ask them a world of questions and act like a pathetic fan. (I would also have had to admit that I really knew them mostly through Paul Simon, of course)

A very fun thing happened, though. There were two movies on this long flight. First they showed “Planet of the Apes”, nothing very notable. But then we hit the jackpot of irony. The second flick was “Rock Star”. It was a Marky Mark double feature! A fun thing happened. Rock Star’s basic premise was the lead singer of a tribute band actually being selected to replace the real lead singer of the real band. This was not a great movie by any stretch, but it did afford the opportunity, at each little inside music business joke, for us all to look around the cabin and notice that only a select few of us were actually getting the inside humor. By the time we landed in Dallas, the guys seemed as aware of me as I was of them. Without speaking I think we all knew that we uniquely got the irony of Ladysmith Black Mambazo watching Marky Mark play this 80s metal hairband tribute singer realizing his rock star dream... and in coach, no less. It could only have been better had Paul Simon been riding up front with his manager and lawyer in Business Class. I held my ground and waited until we exited. They were transferring to another flight (to LA, to do one of the talk shows) and they caught my attention as I walked past the line they were standing in. I told them what an honor it was to watch a Marky Mark double feature with them and chatted for a moment before moving on to catch my flight back to Sweet Home Chicago. Well, anyway, if I had been there tonight, I would have been trying to get them to autograph a Rock Star movie poster for me. I guess I’ll just have to wait ‘til next time.

One last "by the way"… If you’ve had any experience with both the Chameleon Labs TS-1 and the Mohave Audio MA-100, drop me a line. I’m in the market… 

At your service,
Kerry J Haps