ZOOM MEETING 6:00PM PDT (UTC -7)

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Presented by

Bill Hanley and John Chester

and

The Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society

Note that this meeting starts at 6:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, which is UTC -7. There are many countries in the world where that is the middle of normal sleep time, so if you intend to sleep normally that day you may want to watch the video when it comes out rather than signing up here and not showing up.

That said, it’s free to sign up, so do whatever makes you happy.

This will be a Zoom meeting.

Based on the run-through we’ve had, the presentation will last about 3 hours (it’s In-Depth!!), and will be preceded by our Section’s election and followed by self-introductions of all still present, because we like to meet and get to know you, with general discussion after that.

Nobody’s obligated to stay for any length of time beyond their enjoyment.

Presentation Description:

Woodstock Music and Art Fair, commonly referred to simply as Woodstock, was a music festival held August 15-18, 1969, on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 40 miles (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. Billed as “an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music” and alternatively referred to as the Woodstock Rock Festival, it attracted an audience of more than 400,000. Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite sporadic rain.

The event was unprecedented, especially given the timeframe, nobody had attempted an event of this magnitude or scale. The promoters expected a crowd, perhaps 50,000 persons, but (of course) they had wildly underestimated what would happen. The site was wholly undeveloped, without infrastructure of any sort aside from what dairy cattle required: grass and dirt.

Everything needed to be put into place: water, sanitation, first aid, staging, lights, sound, etc. This is 1969, and rock-and-roll staging was in its infancy. You couldn’t just order what you needed; instead you designed and built it. Concert sound systems could not be purchased off-the-shelf; you designed, you selected components, you built. It would be several years before mixing consoles comparable to those found in recording studios would become part of the live sound industry. Everything was being invented, in real time.

This is the story of just one part of the behind-the-scenes commotion that resulted in what is now commonly called: Woodstock. Of all the systems that had to function during the festival, the sound system was the lynchpin. Attendees could hear clearly both the speech AND the music, and when other systems were failing (and they all did, to one degree or another), the sound system was the glue that held everything together.

At our June meeting, PNW committee member Dan Mortensen will discuss, with Bill and John, the different portions of a concert sound system; how and why they came to be.

footnote: Wikipedia entry for Woodstock

Topics To Be Covered

Microphones

Mic Stands

Mic Cables

Mic Subsnakes/Stage Boxes

Mic Snake to FOH

Mic Split to monitors?

Mic Split to Recording

Snake to recording

Recording Location

Recording mixer

Recorders

Recording processing and monitoring

Recording staffing

Handling and storage of recorded tapes

Post processing of recordings

FOH Location

FOH Mixer and processing

FOH staffing

Break music playback

Mix feed to amplifiers

Signal distribution to amplifiers

Amplifiers – brand-quantity-purposes-spares-location

Speaker cables and connectors

Speakers: boxes and components

Speaker location and coverage

Scaffold parameters

Monitor Mix Source

Monitor type and location

Comms & Locations

Weather protection for all locations:

––FOH

––Recording

––Amplifier world

––Speakers of all kinds

Transportation for gear

Transportation for crew

Additional information can be found at

Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society Website.

Go here to get on our emailing list.

THIS EVENT IS FREE, OPEN TO ALL, AND AES MEMBERSHIP IS NOT REQUIRED

About The Presenters

Bill Hanley

Bill was born on March 4th, 1937, in Medford Massachusetts. He is now 85. Bill and his brother Terry (b1946) showed an interest in electronics at an early age, this led to building crystal radios, and then amplifiers, and then tube radios and then bigger amplifiers. Both brothers had amateur radio licenses. This was quite common in the 1940’s and later, as most ham radio operators built their own gear.

While growing up, Bill came to recognize just how poor public address systems really were, and by 1957 he started his sound company. His familiarity with the audio equipment of the era, and his electronics knowledge helped him understand what was happening, and paved the way to figuring out how to solve it.

Bill Hanley is widely considered to be “The Father of Concert Sound,” due to his innovations in both gear utilization and his creation of a new way of doing concert sound that both sounded great and kept on sounding great in the face of adverse conditions of many kinds.

John Chester

–Live sound engineer (Chief Sound Engineer, Fillmore East, 1969-1971)

–Analog circuit designer and equipment manufacturer (Chaos Audio, 1971-1990; Modulation Sciences, Vice President R&D, 1980-1992).

–Independent consultant for A/V, video conferencing, network and telecommunications, 1992-2002.

In 2002 John began repairing and upgrading tape machines. After refreshing his memory of magnetic recording theory, he then started on all the theory he’d never learned. John then learned how to use modern digital tools to improve the performance of vintage machines.

In 2007 he met Jamie Howarth, learned about Plangent technology, and began the design and construction of the next generation of Plangent hardware. He began doing Plangent transfers in his studio. For formats larger than 1/2″, he set up Plangent equipment in a studio that had the appropriate tape machine and then supervised the transfer (e.g. Grateful Dead Europe 72 multitrack, done at Sonicraft).

John is an AES Life Fellow.

PNW AES Zoom Meetings

We started holding our meetings via Zoom beginning with the April 2020 meeting. Zoom has dramatically increased our reach, well beyond our Section’s geographic area. Since doing this, we’ve regularly had attendees from:

-most Provinces in Canada;

– most countries in:

–Europe,

–Central and South America;

-Japan,

-India,

-Indonesia,

-Malaysia,

-Australia,

-and more. It’s been unbelievable how many cool audio people we’ve met.

Zoom gives the ability to record videos of our meetings, and those recordings are individually posted in our past meetings Archive. For now, the collected videos from our Zoom meetings can be found (mostly) at Dan Mortensen’s DansoundSeattle YouTube channel.

We use EventBrite to manage our free tickets to meetings. You are in the right place to RSVP for your ticket for this event.

The Zoom URL and physical meeting location (if this is a hybrid meeting) will be sent in three reminders: two days, the morning of, and two hours before the event starts.

When you register at EventBrite and when you enter the Zoom meeting, please use your real first and last names so we can get to know each other. You do NOT need to create an EventBrite account to register.

Please Note

In order to maintain decorum and avoid interruptions, even unintended ones, we have established a few ground rules for meeting attendees:

1. We want to see your full name on display in Zoom at the meeting.

2. The presenter(s) will determine if they can accept questions during the presentation, or wait until specific Q&A times, and that will be announced at the beginning of the meeting. (We often use the “chat” feature to allow attendees to ask questions when they think of them, with moderators passing them on to the presenter at the appropriate time.)

3. Please mute your microphone when not talking (a moderator may mute you if you haven’t muted yourself; if they do, Zoom won’t let you un-mute until a moderator clears you again.)

4. Based on our experience with no-shows, we reserve the right to issue more tickets than available slots. We don’t want to turn people away based on inaccurate estimates of attendance, but we do have budgetary limits to the number of slots we can make available. If we reach capacity before you log in, we regret that we may have no way to expand capacity at the last minute.

5. Some presenters are distracted when confronted by a sea of video faces or other images, so for some meetings we may ask that you turn your camera/images off during the presentation. If you forget, one of our moderators may do it for you, and you may or may not get a private chat note informing you.

6. During the meeting, there is the matter of your camera. We’re going to leave that up to the presenter; whether they want to see their audience while they present or not. If they want to see who they’re talking to, then you can leave your camera live or not, as you prefer, however if the presenter doesn’t want to see the audience, then we’ll ask you to turn your video off.

7. Moderators have the ability to globally turn everyone’s video off, however turning it back on is troublesome; we are forced to turn cameras back on manually, one by one. There is no way for you to override that. You’ll need your camera live later in the meeting for the self-introductions.

8. Best is that if we ask for cameras to be on or off, that you do this individually on your own.

9. It would be good if you watched the chat stream during the meeting. Not only is it a way to submit questions to the presenters, but it’s also a way for others to contact you personally. You have the option there to direct your comment to anyone who is part of the meeting as well as to one person in particular.

Finally, in the rare instance of behavior by an attendee that moderators believe is disruptive, we reserve the right to immediately eject such attendees.