Talkback:
"Wizards And Wires"

I enjoyed "Wizards and Wires" especially since I've attended the last four NAB shows in Las Vegas. In fact, I met [Mix editor] George Petersen at the SSL booth and had quite a laugh. See if he remembers:
SSL was doing a pressconference since they had just sold some big consoles to a Hollywood filmstudio, making it the largest SSL facility in the United States. I waswriting for the NAB Daily paper, and even got a call from England confirmingif I was going to be able to attend this little press conference, whichwas pretty impressive. So there we were, about 50 members of the press, enjoying the sushi bar, caviar, and champagne (no fooling).
The director from the studio starts to make his speech, but because of thenoise from all the rest of the conferance, we couldn't hear a thing.The salesmen from SSL tried in vain to hook up and turn on a microphone,but couldn't get anything to work. There we were in the middle of hundreds ofchannels of SSL mic preamps, several 5-way surround systems, and lots ofsales personnel wearing expensive suits, but no one had thought to testa microphone before the conference. I literally had champagne coming outof my nose.
Of course the man standing next to me and heckling the SSL drones was George Petersen. I, of course, maintained my professionaldemeanor, and only hurled phrases like "Crank it Up", and "Turn it up'till it squeals". I did write about it in my daily column, but my editor cut out the good stuff about SSL. Now you know...the rest of the story.
--Mike Sokol, jmsokol@interpid.net