General Comments

[Geoff Grace]

As most of you know, this year's Winter NAMM Show (http://www.thenammshow.com/) will begin this Thursday and run through Sunday. As always, anticipation of cool product announcements is running high. :cool:

Please post your Winter NAMM 2007 reports here, for forum members who are not fortunate enough to go to the show.

Feel free to discuss NAMM announced gear, events, and performances in this thread.

-

Below are some NAMM related links of note:

• Harmony Central will post regular NAMM gear updates here (http://namm.harmony-central.com/WNAMM07/Index/) throughout all of the days of the show. (In fact, they've already begun posting show coverage at the above link.)

• There will be a forum dinner (http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?/ubb/get_topic/f/18/t/020683.html) during NAMM on Thursday, January 18th, at 7:30 PM.

• Craig Anderton will perform at the PreSonus booth #6330 every NAMM show day at 3:00 PM. Click here for details (http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1477758).

Best,

Geoff

[Phil O'Keefe]

Thanks for starting the thread Geoff! :thu:

I'll be heading to Anaheim tomorrow and should be there every day, and back home at night, so I'll do my best to report in daily with any cool stuff I see. :wave:

[UstadKhanAli]

Thanks, Geoff. If I see anything cool, I'll post it here. I'll probably eventually stick a few photos on my web site, as I did last year for NAMM.

[Gus Lozada]

1) I ate too much today... damned american food

2) I'll be 35 within the next 45 minutes

3) This is going to be a great show. See you all there

:wave:

[Phil O'Keefe]

Happy birthday Gus - looking forward to seeing you mi amigo! :wave:

[alfonso]

1) I ate too much today... damned american food

2) I'll be 35 within the next 45 minutes

3) This is going to be a great show. See you all there

:wave:

1)Mediterranean diet...

2)Happy birthday :)

3)Sadly too far for me.

[UstadKhanAli]

1) I ate too much today... damned american food

2) I'll be 35 within the next 45 minutes

3) This is going to be a great show. See you all there

:wave:

1.) Comida de Japonesa
2.) Feliz Cumpleanos
3.) Vas a ir a la cena de NAMM esta noche?

[Geoff Grace]

The doors are officially now open at the NAMM Show. :)

Best,

Geoff

P.S. Happy birthday, Gustavo! :wave:

[UstadKhanAli]

Saw Craig and Los Lobos perform (not together...), NAMM dinner was great (no Geoff and Ongelique, though :( ). Thank you very much to Keyboard Magazine for picking up the tab on the dinner. Super nice, super generous. I've lucked out the last few dinners - Jeff Klopmeyer picked up this scrumptious sushi dinner a few months ago at AES, and now this. Wow. Talked with Dave the Rave from Keyboard Corner, Gus, GearMike, Phil, Mike Rivers mostly - Dave Bryce was there, of course, Steve Fortner, Ernie Rideout (thanks again for dinner...).

I managed to walk the NAMM floor the entire time without really seeing anything new. That new Neve Portico Stereoizer Thingamajig was stuck in Austin due to snow, so I didn't get a chance to hear that. Groove Tubes is supposed to have a new ribbon mic. See? I didn't really see anything...

[Geoff Grace]

NAMM dinner was great (no Geoff and Ongelique, though :( ).

I'm truly disappointed that I wasn't able to be there!

I'm glad you had fun though.

Best,

Geoff

[UstadKhanAli]

I'm truly disappointed that I wasn't able to be there!

I'm glad you had fun though.

Best,

Geoff

Definitely fun. Sorry you weren't there. Jeff wasn't there either, but we sorta expected that... ;)

[Geoff Grace]

audioMIDI is posting NAMM blogs here (http://community.audiomidi.com/blogs/default.aspx?cpid=2298).

Best,

Geoff

[Geoff Grace]

Best headline of the NAMM Show: :D

BT announces he currently uses all products (http://community.audiomidi.com/blogs/amconnection_blog/archive/2007/01/19/bt-announces-he-currently-uses-all-products.aspx)

Best,

Geoff

[Filch]

http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/6863/1447/1600/800059/boomchik.jpg

Someone posted this on another forum, with no details. I can only assum it's from NAMM. Any sightings or info about a Roger Linn and Dave Smith Instruments drum machine?

I have an evolver and love it to death, so I'm very curious about this thing.

[ViLo]

I'm not the kind of guy to get excited over a portable PA system, but the JBL PRX is very light and sounds good, too.

Looks to big to be portable:confused:

[UstadKhanAli]

Best headline of the NAMM Show: :D

BT announces he currently uses all products (http://community.audiomidi.com/blogs/amconnection_blog/archive/2007/01/19/bt-announces-he-currently-uses-all-products.aspx)


:D That's hysterical!!!

Have you sent him the Rat Shack reverb plug-in yet?

http://www.harmony-central.com/ProductImages/Medium/000001270.jpg

[Anderton]

Craig, do you have any idea what the street price is going to be on the Korg R3, other than "really inexpensive"?

Pricing isn't official yet, but I'm hearing between $200-$300 street.

[Anderton]

Add it to usless control interfaces.
No scribble strips to shwo you what track you're on.
Waste of time and money.

One feature is that you can use a "mute" button where you can rotate controls, see what value is happening in the display, etc. without sending it out. Sort of like a guitar tuner concept where you can tune while the signal is muted.

[BLAblablah]

:D That's hysterical!!!

Have you sent him the Rat Shack reverb plug-in yet?

http://www.harmony-central.com/ProductImages/Medium/000001270.jpg

I once had the actual Hardware version...Boingy Boingy Boingy....... :D
Bear

[percyexpat]

Pricing isn't official yet, but I'm hearing between $200-$300 street.

wow, that IS inexpensive :) Korg are definitely the company with the most interesting new stuff for me. With that little pocket recorder and the mysterious looking new Kaoss pad and this new cheap synth. Korg are great :c)

[Geoff Grace]

I'm back from a busy day at NAMM. I'll try to post about it tomorrow.

Craig, Dave Bryce, and a bass player (whose name I'd like to know) rocked the house.

If you're at the show tomorrow, check 'em out! :cool:

Best,

Geoff

[UstadKhanAli]

I'm back from a busy day at NAMM. I'll try to post about it tomorrow.

Craig, Dave Bryce, and a bass player (whose name I'd like to know) rocked the house.

If you're at the show tomorrow, check 'em out! :cool:


Yes. I caught Craig performing twice. Cool!! Good seeing you, Geoff!

[MikeRivers]

This is about my 20th year going to NAMM and it seems that each year I have less and less to report. I don't see the need to report about the half dozen new tube and solid state ribbon mics, cheaper-than-last-time condenser mics, and I'm just not interested in synths and plug-ins. You can read all you want about those but you won't know if they're what you can use until you get your hands and ears on them personally (or you're willing to take a chance - usually not bad odds these days).

Podcasting is the new Home Studio. Over the past half dozen (or twenty, however you count it) years, home and private recording has blossomed. Products have become more plentiful, less enxpensive, and in general capable of providing sound quality that wouldn't emabarass a professional engineer or producer. But the essential ingredient for successful results has always been some musical or similar creative talent and a certain degree of technical skill.

With the podcasting explosion over the past couple of years, now you don't need any musical talent to show your stuff to the world, and the hardware is coming along to support these recordings, with (and I like this part) software that's more straightforward and hardware that makes sense to someone with a little intuition as to how a recorder should work. So we're seeing a crop of plug-and-play simple mixers - mic plus one or two line level sources (for background music, DJing, or sound effects) and real knobs and buttons.

A recording suitable for podcast can be made with something as simple as a mic with a built-in preamp and USB interface. The first generation USB mics were pretty junky but good-value companies such as Rode, Blue, and MXL have jumped on to the bandwagon and now offer decent quality microphones with a plug-and-play audio interface.

Of particualar interest, and good fallout for the field recordist, are a couple of stereo USB mics - I always thought it was a little funny (and difficult to explain to a beginner) that the first round of USB mics, being mono, only had signal on one channel of the stereo WAV format unless you told your program to record a mono file. A new stereo USB mic from MXL is built from two 604 cardioid capsules in an X-Y configuration, and that's a pretty good combination. Interestingly, the USB stereo version is less expensive than the twofer 604 package that MXL offers. Samson has a few new USB mics, one of which has a stereo element, a mini jack for a line level input, and a built-in mixer and headphone amplifier. So you can produce a voice-and-music program right through the mic. Both the Samson and MXL USB mics have that missing control, a "preamp trim" so you can set the recording level where you're supposed to set it rather than with a control in the recording program. The future is getting a little brighter. Hopefully the talent will come along.

While the subject of mics, here's a darn clever idea from Countryman. The Isomax 4RF is a podium mic with a built-in RFI filter tuned to the cellular phone band to eliminate hash and pops introduced into the sound system when someone steps up to the mic with a cell phone in his pocket. Now if they could only filter out the sound when the speaker's phone rings.

Universal Audio introduced new plug-in life support for laptop users with the UAD-Xpander, an ExpressCard (the new and incompatible PCMCIA-like format) DSP engine that supports the UAD powered plug-ins. It's about $2200 with a bundle of plug-ins.

In the quest for better quality and value in multi-channel A/D and D/A converters, you don't have to look much further than the Lynx Aurora series. Out of the box, they have AES/EBU on the digital side, but two new accessory cards add other interfacing options. The LT-HD card makes the Aurora 8 and 16 recognizable by a ProTools HD system with the standard Digidesign cabling. The LT-FW card adds a Firewire 400 interface to the Aorora interfaces. And what's better than 16 channels of I/O? 32 channels, of course. You have access to both the analog and AES-EBU digital inputs and outptuts via these cards. In other Lynx good news for those living on the bleeding edge, 64-bit drivers for the Lynx TWO, L22, and AES-16 cards will be available later this month. Also on the horizon are PCI Express versions of their I/O cards.


Nostalgia is back! Remember Encore and Master Tracks Pro from Passport Systems? They're being re-introduced under the Gvox name. Thiese programs are from the pre-DAW era but offer sold and well thought out MIDI sequencing.

Metasonicx again has the best-named product of the show, the TM-7 Nutsack. Metasonix makes really awful sounding distortion devices. Since this is a family oriented forum, you'd best check the web site to read how the controls are labeled.

There were a couple of companies exhibiting wiring upgrades for electric guitars which promise great amounts of hum and buzz suppression. I've always wondered why guitars don't buzz more than they do given the way they're wired, and it's nice to see that after 75 years someone's finally put some thought into it. The nicest setup I saw was the :Pro7 from DocHumFree.com. It consists of a flexible printed circuit with large ground planes front and back, a well shielded pickup selector switch and pots, and balanced inputs (two wires plus shield) from the pickups. There are three models, a completely passive version, one with an active filter for hum, and one that's "enhanced" (which DOES change the sound of the guitar, hopefully fo rthe better). It's available now for the Stratocaster, with other models to follow.

There's lots of interest in analog tape simulation these days. You've seen in other reports about a new ProTools plug in and Craig's even admitted to passing tracks through a real recorder occasionally. Now there's one implemented in hardware, and in a very intersting way. AnaMod is a partnership between Greg Gualiteri of Pendulum and Dave Amels of (former) Bomb Factory. The development process seems bassackwards, but apparently a tape deck is too hard to model accurately with straightforward circuitry. The development process was to measure and digitally model a tape deck, then back the digital model out to individual components and implement it in real parts. Plug-in "personality" cards will be available for different tape types and brands of recorders, with up to four being selectable from the front panel. Controls are provided for the critical alignment parameters of bias, EQ, and reference fluxivity, with input and ouptut levels adjustable so you can slam it as hard as you need. Missing (by popular demand) is flutter simulation. What it doesn't model is the randomness, both short and long term, which may contribute to what we like about tape. It will be intersting to hear what folks say about this one when it gets out into the field. It came just in the nick of time, too. On January 18, Quantegy announced that productoin of professional audio tape products would cease in April. My initial tongue-in-cheeky comment about it was that it's a good illustration of why people were happy to get away from analog tape.

In the how-cheap-and-small-can-they-get, Zoom has followed their H4 portable flash memory recorder with the H2, not much bigger than today's cell phones, with built in mics and what appears to be a more logical set of operating controls than the H4 (which seems to be the most-criticized aspect of that recorder). $199.

My vote for the most useful gizmo of the show was actually something I saw at the Summer NAMM show, but it's still at the top of my list. AudioSkin (http://www.audioskin.net) is a system for bundling cables that's quick and easy to use. It looks like spiral wrap from a distance, but it's actually a split jacket. It comes with an applicator that works a bit like a zipper. You clamp it around the cable bundle, open up the jacket just far enough to get it started around the cables, then slide the "zipper" down the bundle and you have an instant snake. Everyone with a spaghetti pile behind the desk needs some of this stuff.

Now, turning you back to your normal mics-and-plug-ins . . . .

[UstadKhanAli]

The air in the convention center extra dry and bothersome this year. The air was really bothering me this year, and several of my friends complained about the same thing. It just felt horrible.

[MikeRivers]

The air in the convention center extra dry and bothersome this year. The air was really bothering me this yearI needed a dose of Chap Stick and hand lotion when I got back to the hotel after the show. But other than that I didn't notice anything particularly bad about the air inside.

One morning before the show opened, I found myself between a rock and a hard place. Bagpipes on stage inside, hundres of people smoking outside. Fortunately I was able to go to the press room and have a donut and some coffee.

[Anderton]

I'm back from a busy day at NAMM. I'll try to post about it tomorrow.

Craig, Dave Bryce, and a bass player (whose name I'd like to know) rocked the house.

If you're at the show tomorrow, check 'em out! :cool:

Best,

Geoff

His name is Roland Guerin, and hey, I'd play with him any time!! Great bass player.

[Lee Knight]

His name is Roland Guerin, and hey, I'd play with him any time!! Great bass player.


I caught Craig's show Sunday at 3. Very cool... and that bassist had a cool thing going on for sure. Plenty of chops, but that's not what made him something special. What a clever groove. He'd just tune into Craig's beats and mixing, all ears. Then BAM... new groove. Solid and fun. Cool set Craig.

My favorite finds.

The CAD Trion 8000 tube multi-pattern mic. What a great sounding mic. Fat but not flabby. Very tight. Cheap and good.:D

Protégé' by the folks who make Notion. It's actually a Notion Lite. Standard notation software with instant playback with samples from the London Symphony Orchestra. It looks cool. I have the demo and I'm looking forward to play pretending I'm Leonard Bernstein for 10 days. :)

The Bass Traps from Studio Panel looked like they might find a spot in my place. Corner mounted hard front panels, mounted internally to springs. 600 bucks each. I'm going to need to gather some absorption coefficients on these as the designer's claims were pretty lofty. But if he's right about only 2 of these taking care of my woes... then I want a couple.

The Redeemer from Creation Audio Labs. What stopped me from walking by was a picture of Michael Wagener with a quote saying, “The best bass tone I’ve ever put to tape.” Hmmmm. Well OK. So I tried a bass fitted with this little domino sized battery powered internally mounted mod. Wow. It works. Very clear sound and punchy. It works by unloading the pickups from the cable capacitance. Nice… and only $99. Check it out.

ADK Hamburg I, the original came back to surprise me. I A/Bed all his mics against a 67 he had setup in his booth and holy smokes… I actually liked the old first addition Hamburg the best. A lot of folks have passed this guy up because of the Vienna. Not me. The Hamburg has that real, solid midrange of a good Neumann.

The Presonus ADL 600 tube pre really is a huge Sounding.

I forget the brand name but there was a electric standup bass set up with a Fender Jazz scale with frets. This thing was a blast to play.

And finally, at the Sony booth there was a guy presenting Oxford plugins. He was French perhaps? I didn’t get his name, but in the course of showing off the very nice Oxford line he deconstructed his lastest R&B Pop mix and in the course of 45 minutes taught more than I’ve picked up in a long time. Clever EQ tricks, bass saturation, headroom management. A great presentation from that guy… anyone know his name? Very tech minded but still very creative. Funny too. Lot's of funny comments regarding his current "loudness war" with the Abelton booth next door.

I crammed a lot in a day.

[Lee Knight]

A couple I forgot...

The API A2D. While I didn't hear it, I know what API's sound like. It was the converter I was interested in. I also knew I wouldn't be able to check this on the floor and really wanted to just speak with a rep. I got a very good feeling from his confidence in the converters quality, in words, "On par with the best. At least an Apogee and some feel better." I'm buying soon.

The Frontier AlphaTrack single fader controller. This thing is great. Very responsive to fader rides and surprisingly easy to get to any track very quickly. The three touch sensitive knobs were cool. Touch sensitive as in, when you touch a knob for band gain in an eq for instance, as soon as it senses your touch (immediate) it shows you the current value. Then you can twist away. Very cool little piece. There's a dedicated eq button to quickly get at those parameters, but any plug-in is just a couple of clicks away. I thought it would be a hassle to navigate. It's not.

[Lee Knight]

And one more...

The HearTechnologies Hear Back Headphone System. I'd seen it many times in ads but never had a chance to actually mess with it. I did yesterday and I've got to say, it's great. Very simple implementation. The base unit, a 19" 1 space takes analog or ADAT input. Then you provide a stereo mix and 6 more things you can mix more off into each individual station. Each station include an independent limiter as well.

The street for 4 stations and the base unit is $1100 and it sounds great.

[Geoff Grace]

I caught Craig performing twice. Cool!! Good seeing you, Geoff!

Thanks, Ken, it was good to see you too. :wave:

Best,

Geoff