Vista finally gets invited to sit with the cool kids.

It looks like the recording industry has finally come to terms with the inevitable and is embracing the Vista OS. They were slow to get on the wagon as always when there is a major Windows OS change. The calculated and cautious moves exhibited by both hardware and software manufacturers are with good reason. It is no secret that multi-track audio recording running multiple plug-ins is an extremely processor intensive and memory hungry task that can bring a PC to its’ knees.

The choice of DAW’s available today is vast and wide ranging from the bedroom hobbyists to full-blown professional quality suites. All the major players have joined the game including the likes of Steinberg; both Cubase and Nuendo, Ableton, Cakewalk, Sony and many others. However the benchmark for which most DAW’s are measured against is not Vista compatible and that’s Digidesign’s Pro Tools. You could endlessly speculate why this is. Without having any “behind the scenes” information I feel confident that there is no hidden agenda. We all know that Digidesign plays on a whole other level and even though Pro Tools has become accessible to the public in a number of entry and mid level platforms it prides itself in being the standard digital choice for professional and commercial facilities.

Ultimately what effect will this have on the recording industry? Well on the retail market front encompassing home studios to professional studios it should be huge. Seeing how all PC’s that this writer is aware of are shipping with Vista, recording enthusiasts have been caught in a very awkward transition period for the past couple of years. I personally purchased hardware as recent as fall of ‘07 that didn’t offer vista drivers until just two months ago. The pro-audio/commercial industry both live and installation seem to remain in denial that they are going to have to learn to play nice with Vista. Hopefully this will be their wake up call.

On the other end of the spectrum this shouldn’t change much in the pro/commercial recording studios. You would be hard pressed to find a commercial facility that is willing to risk their productivity much less stake their reputation on a PC platform. Yes folks Apple just does it better and I would say it’s pretty safe to say that Macs will continue to be comfortably nestled under workstations around the world. But Macs are so expensive right! Well when you’re spending $2,500-5,000 for reference quality mics and six figures on consoles a Mac is hardly a blip on the screen.

This may not be a reality that the majority of us will ever realize but, that’s what MIX magazine is for so we can live the dream vicariously through others.

Peter D’Antonio

Peter D’Antonio (Founder of RPG Diffusor Systems)

Peter D’Antonio was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941. He received his B.S. degree from St. John’s University in 1963 and his Ph.D. from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, in 1967. Dr. D’Antonio has specialized in a wide variety of scientific disciplines including spectroscopy, x-ray and electron diffraction, electron microscopy, software development, and architectural acoustics. In 1996, Dr. D’Antonio retired after 29 years of research in diffraction physics at the Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC. During his scientific career, Dr. D’Antonio published widely and

Harvey Fletcher & Wilden Munson

HARVEY FLETCHER & WILDEN MUNSON, BELL LABS
FLETCHER-MUNSON LOUDNESS CURVES (1933)

Nearly 75 years ago, Harvey C. Fletcher and Wilden A. Munson—two Bell Labs engineers studying various aspects of subjective loudness—changed the way in which the world understands the hearing process. Their research asked a large number of subjects to compare the relative volume of two tones to a standard 1kHz tone at a set level. Averaging the results collected from the group, Fletcher and Munson defined of human hearing awareness at various frequencies.

Richard Heyser

RICHARD HEYSER
TIME DELAY SPECTROMETRY (1967)

Sometimes, even the greatest ideas take a while to come to fruition. In 1967, Richard C. Heyser, a research engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology published a landmark paper in the AES Journal. Titled “Acoustical Measurements by Time Delay Spectrometry,” the article described a technique whereby loudspeakers and other electro-acoustical systems could be measured in a reverberant, real-world spaces—without requiring an anechoic chamber. Others saw additional applications for TDS, such as measuring room acoustics. Unfortunately, the horsepower

Manfred R. Schroeder

Manfred Schroeder studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany. In his thesis he investigated the distribution of resonances in concert halls using microwave cavities as models. The chaotic distribution he found is now recognized as characteristic for complex (non-integrable) dynamical systems.

In 1954 Schroeder joined the research department of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From 1958 to 1969 he directed research at Bell on speech compression, synthesis, and recognition. Since 1969 he has also served as a Professor of Physics at