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| And so on. Clearly the fellow loved ellipses, and went on like that for literally hundreds of yellow pads. His partially-finished prototypes and circuits were laid out all over the room, and Andrew wanted to know if I thought I was up to it — me finishing building up the breadboards, and taking over from where this previous genius left off. I looked him right in the eye and said, “Yes, I would like that very much.”
Andrew had built a magnificent and very straightforward recording/mixing board in studio A, and these newer designs were to be used in the studio B board. Then the circuitry was to be expanded upon, (for example the equalizer was made to be 6 sections instead of 5 sections) microphone preamps of a completely new design added, a MUCH larger patchbay implemented, and this brand new board was to be the retrofit in studio A. So I started to put in long hours working with Andrew finishing up the Studio B console and also on the refinements for the NEXT studio A board. It was so fascinating and intense that I just threw myself into the project, sometimes working 16+ hours at a stretch, going home, crashing for 9 hours, then coming back into the cave-like building (there were no windows) until I lost all track of time. All in all, whatever stresses it imposed, I had a wonderful time. Andrew decided to do a preliminary article for Recording Engineer/Producer magazine. He really wanted to do a series of articles, each about a particular section of the recording/mixing board, with an eye to possibly generating sales and therefore building multiple consoles, some outboard equipment, and really ramping up a production facility. The studio itself was called Crystal-Sound, and the “laboratory” R&D part was called Crystalab, which you might notice are Andrew Berliner’s initials added. You also might notice that partially in honor of Andrew, I have used the same font for my Soundoctor logo. So here in its entirety is a reprint of the RE/P article of April 1978. Little did we know that the magazine was about to fold a month later… as a typographer I partially attribute it to the fact that the entire magazine was printed in Souvenir font. There are only precious few worse fonts in the world — for example hobo and comic sans1 — and NO ONE will take anything seriously that is presented in these fonts. There is probably much more to it than that, but hey, that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it… So Andrew and I worked on the story, he wanting to write a large book and the editor explaining just about how many column-inches we had to work with. I did a block diagram (that you will see below) in real Leroy technical pen and ink on matte mylar that was nearly four feet wide. It took almost two weeks! I wish I had the drawing to frame on the wall now! So Andrew kept writing and I would tweak and polish, and eventually, with Andrew pacing back and forth and back and forth in the parking lot smoking a cigarette, (anyone that knows him knows he would do this whenever he was really stressed…) the article was finished. You kind of had to be there. We were actually very proud of each other and this mini-masterpiece we had just finished. |
Clarence Sisk 