| Meetings and other Notices |
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| The November In-Person Only Meeting |
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Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2024, 6:30 PM EDT
Location: HOMEWOOD SUITES BY HILTON, NEEDHAM BOSTON
200 1ST AVENUE NEEDHAM, MA 02494
Featured Guests: John F. Allen
Topic/Activity: CELEBRATING THE 40th ANNIVERSARY OF INTRODUCING DIGITAL SOUND IN CINEMAS
EVENT: As we all know, motion picture film has been replaced by digital technology. This transition was long predicted and took place over several years. Some may be surprised to learn that the transition actually began 40 years ago when Boston native John F Allen teamed up with PLITT THEATERS as well as the Walt Disney Studios and presented Walt Disney's classic film FANTASIA with a new digital soundtrack in a commercial theater for the first time ever. Our speaker is JOHN F. ALLEN who will tell us how this was done some ten years before it was expected to happen and the immediate effect it had on Cinema exhibition.
PRESENTER: (Biography Link) A History of the HPS-4000® Sound System (hps4000.com)
John F. Allen is a native of Newton, Massachusetts. He is a 1973 graduate of Northeastern University, where he attended both the engineering and business colleges. In 1976, Mr. Allen designed and built a new sound system for the Hatch Memorial Shell, located on Boston’s Esplanade. The installation was one of the largest stereo systems ever built in New England. On the Fourth of July,1976, he was responsible for the sound at the Boston Pops concert in honor of America’s bicentennial. The live audience of over 400,000 was listed in the “Guiness Book of Records” as the largest in concert music history. Mr. Allen also provided sound feeds that were broadcast around the world via satellite and was awarded a special commendation by the President of the United States.
John Allen has been most active in the motion picture industry. He founded HIGH PERFORMANCE STEREO™ in 1980, developing the HPS-4000 motion picture sound system, the first major improvement in theatre playback systems in decades. Two of Mr. Allen’s digital sound installations in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. made cinema history when they were selected to present Walt Disney’s classic masterpiece FANTASIA in full Digital Stereo. He is the author of numerous articles and invited papers on the subjects of antenna systems as well as both concert and motion picture sound. In 1981 Mr. Allen began what became the industry’s longest running series of articles on the subject of sound in BOXOFFICE MAGAZINE. He is a frequent lecturer at motion picture industry technical seminars as well as local colleges. A member of the Boston Audio Society, a lifetime member of the Audio Engineering Society and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Mr. Allen is a former Chairman of the Boston Section of the AES.
RSVP required: pbeck@fcatv.org
Hope to see you then.
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This meeting will not be Zoomed.
You must be present to attend the meeting.
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THE BAS MESSAGE
November 2024 |
Miscellaneous News
1. The BAS is looking for a new webmaster. The current webmaster will train you and hand it over to you, and provide support as necessary. The website is written in simple HTML. You will need a computer and a high speed internet connection (you will need to download a 6GB backup in a reasonable amount of time). $300 is the annual payment. You may be asked to support admin of the BAS Facebook pages as well.
2. The BAS is looking for a new president. The past president will assist in the transition. Elections will happen soon.
3. Bankruptcy Took Redbox. Who Will Take the Machines? --- Company is defunct, sticking merchants with 24,000 DVD-dispensing kiosks
The owner of an Alabama moving company is hired to extract the DVD-dispensing machines that are taking up space and sapping the resources and patience of store owners across the country. The machines, owned by now-defunct Redbox, weigh as much as 890 pounds, can be environmental hazards and sometimes require an electrician to disconnect.
And that might be the easy part.
The next steps are figuring out what to do with the big red machines and all the DVDs that in the era of streaming have been rendered largely obsolete.
Redbox's parent filed for bankruptcy in the summer, saying it lacked the cash to buy the rights to many new releases, and the kiosk operator subsequently went out of business. It left 24,000 movie vending machines still in the field. Some of the nation's biggest retailers were stuck holding the logistical bag.
But a small percentage could be salvaged and find homes, either with collectors looking to preserve a piece of video history or with enterprising sorts with other ideas about how to put the machines to use.
North Carolina resident Jacob Helton, 19, said he got a machine when, by pure luck, a contractor's truck and trailer pulled up at a local drugstore to haul it off. "I struck up a conversation with them and made a deal," he said. Helton said he plans to keep the look of the kiosk's exterior but will repurpose the interior to store his games and discs.
"I wanted a Redbox machine because I felt like Redbox is important in the history of American media," he said. "Its collapse marks the end of the video rental era."
Also in limbo are the movies that never made it inside a machine. DVD maker Vantiva said in a court filing that it is stuck with 386,000 discs that now-defunct Redbox had ordered but never took. Vantiva has looked into selling the films, which include "Karate Dog" and "The 12 Dogs of Christmas," but the best offer it said it has received amounts to little more than a penny apiece.
[I used this service and it worked well. I noticed that the “DVD extras” such as commentary were not on the Redbox version—DBH]
WSJ Oct 11, 2024
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Below, other meetings and notices which
may be of interest to BAS members |
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JUST RELEASED !
A fantastic historical video!
Ken Berger and Kenton Forsythe are the founders of EAW (Eastern Acoustics Works) and they discuss, with terrific overlaid graphics, the history of, well, pretty much every audio thing Boston from the early 70's.
18 minutes and right here: https://youtu.be/fPfQEK0b0mI
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A Boston issue - As MIX magazine reports:
Sound Museum owners cry foul as their tenants likely secure new spaces without them
While the headline sounds like someone has sour grapes, the complete story of how the closure of this crucial Boston rehearsal studio is being handled is far more nuanced and complicated -- particularly since it brings up issues of gentrification, government support of the arts, non-profits' ethics and more. Full Story HERE (WBUR-FM Boston (1/11/23)
And here's an update:
www.wbur.org/news/2023/01/25/charlestown-rehearsal-studios-musicians-boston
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MAHLER 3
In the recent (April 2022) performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony at Boston's Symphony Hall by Ben Zander and his Boston Philharmonic, the recording was done with the three main spaced omnis with two more farther back. No accent mikes or chorus microphones were used nor, it turns out, were they needed. Remarkably, this produced a recording that is as close to the Symphony Hall experience as may be possible.
The info is here: www.bostonphil.org/concerts/2021-2022/bpo4-mahler3
Here is the recording in its entirety as a single .WAV file; 44k / 16 bit; 1hr 47 min
Mahler Sym 3 CD.wav 1.1GB
(For those of you with editing software note that the .wav file HAS markers to denote the movements.)
Here is the exact same Symphony 3 with the movements separated as FLAC files, 48k / 24 bit as a ZIPped file: Mahler 3 Zander as FLAC.zip 1GB
IF you'd like further Gustav Mahler info... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler
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Shop Talk
Shop Talk was a WBUR program about Hi Fidelity, music, speakers, tape recorders, etc. Enjoyed by many during the 1970s, the program's format was ‘talk’ and interviewing major audio luminaries. It was a forerunner of the popular program Car Talk!
Peter Mitchell and Dr. Richard Goldwater were the original hosts. They were later joined by Brad Meyer. Here, John Allen interviews Scott Kent:
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on SPEAKERS.mp3 (81Mb 1:27)
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on TAPE RECORDERS.mp3 (79Mb 1:26)
There is also an episode track on the BAS CD and here is that Description:
Track 12. "Shop Talk", WHRB-FM, November 5, 1984.
Peter Mitchell (on the left), Richard Goldwater, MD (center) and E. Brad Meyer (right) introduce the show with a 1932 stereo recording and prepare to talk with guests Mark Davis and David Moran, both then of dbx corporation.
Shop Talk, which through most of its ten-year life on WBUR featured just Mitchell and Goldwater, was the precursor of Tom and Ray Magliozzi's "Car Talk". As we finished our 9:00-10:30 stint every Saturday morning, Tom and Ray would take our places and begin joking with each other. Eventually the station manager figured out that they were funnier than we were, and that more people drove cars than owned hi-fi equipment, and fired us. Until then, the show publicized the Boston Audio Society, vastly increasing attendance at our monthly meetings. The show came back for a time during the '80's on the Harvard station WHRB, where we appeared once a month as guests of HRB stalwart David Elliott. [EBM]
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| BAS MICROPHONE CLINIC REPORT ! |
| In September 2009 the B A S held a microphone clinic, testing 37 different microphone models. The ambitious nature of the clinic effort, the extent of data collection, the number of individuals involved in microphone testing and in writing various sections of the report, and the complexity in determining how to construct the clinic report and make it available to members resulted it not being published until now. The dataset is extensive.
Representative samples were included in the abbreviated report in "The B A S Speaker"
(Fall 2015; v37n3)
Go to the MICROPHONE CLINIC PAGE for more...
...and don't forget, here is the master list of microphones in the world
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When collecting and plotting "noisy" data it is often useful to have Microsoft Excel plot a Trend Line through it. If that data is to be used for further work, it may be necessary to have an X-Y table of the Trend Line. That is not easy to get and this paper will show how to do it.
Joseph DeMarinis has an article here: Extracting Numerical Data from an Excel Trend Line
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Foster's Test Bench !
by Alvin Foster ! Click the logo: —> |
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The rapidly-becoming-famous BAS Headphone Test Article is now available in the BASS VOLUME 25, ISSUE 4, on Page 17, available HERE  PDF 3mb |
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Visit our PODCAST PAGE for:
The LIVE video podcast of our meetings,
Archived video of past meetings (only one so far!),
and Audio Podcast interviews by Alvin Foster |
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There is a supplemental and further explanation addendum paper to the E. Brad Meyer / David Moran paper published in the September, 2007 issue of the AES Journal. That page, which documents the experimental protocol and audio systems/source material is here:
www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm |
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| There is a Power Point Presentation of the lecture given by Dr. Barry Blesser at the March 2007 Meeting. The Meeting page synopsis is HERE; the Power Point Presentation (as a web page) is HERE |
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Some earlier BASS issues, previously available only directly by mail, are now available online, on the BAS SPEAKER page, HERE
Show your appreciation for the immense amount of dedicated work that went into both the original writing, gathering, editing and printing, PLUS the more recent scanning and conversion to PDF format, by joining the Society, HERE !
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A L L O F F S I T E L I N K S O P E N I N T O A N E W T A B O R W I N D O W
- AND FOR CONVENIENCE -
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