toa – Preservation Sound

Just stick a Porsche next to pretty much anything

In Hartley Peavey’s imaginarium, everything is made of Peaveys. Kinda like BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, but with amps.

‘Hey Jim, how about Denim for the background?’ ‘Sounds good Mike.’

Is she intended as *a simile for the speakers? *a metaphor for the musical signal that will ‘exite’ these speakers? *a metonym for the community of all nightclub-speaker users? *a form of ‘impossible representation’ given that she seems quite unlikely to be a purchaser of this product, and the speakers are equally unlikely to be a ‘client’ of hers? Please use the COMMENTS section to offer your own analysis of the precise ‘non-literal meaning’ being used here.

Top to bottom: Toa, Peavey, Mesa-Boogie, Cerwin Vega, all circa 1981.

Sansui six-track cassette format c. 1989

Otari Compact 8-track 1/2″ format c. 1989. Also, SECK mixer.

Toa 8-track cassette format

…and you better bet TASCAM made one too.

Above: some short-lived “more-than-four” home-recording formats that were available between the 4-track cassette and ADAT eras. It’s kind hard to imagine how significant an issue ‘track count’ (IE., the number of available tracks of a particular multi-track recording machine) was just a short while ago. It’s not unusual at all these days for me to make a production for an artist that has 80 or even 100 tracks. And I am not talking about some crazy orchestral or prog-rock epic; I am talking about just a well-produced indie pop song. Modern music means layering. Lots of it. When I, and many other folks started doing this, we dreamed of someday having more than 8 tracks to work with. Well, as it turns out, ‘more’ didn’t mean 16, 24, or even 48: it meant infinite. “Be careful what you wish for…”

What will be the next technological barrier to fall in the world of audio production?

I wouldn’t mind seeing all those goddamn wires go away, for one…

Any other ideas?