View of the Audience at Fadi Hayek's conference.
With freshly recharged batteries after attending the 127th Convention in New York City, the Mexican section hold the monthly conference on 10/26/09 at the Salon Blanco of the Lunario, this time with a double program: First we had Mr. Fadi T. Hayek, from Solid State Logic, who kindly accepted our invitation to give us a very interesting talk about the reality we face every day using professional analog and digital audio.
Then we gathered a panel of the professionals involved at the yearly event "Las Lunas" that is held at Auditorio Nacional, the nation's most important live venue with a seating capacity of over 9000 seats. This event is to award the best shows that were held during the year and the 4 biggest broadcasting companies are involved. Each one covers a different part of the show and later they mix the content and they broadcast on different days the program and parallel activities.
The panelists were:
Tonatiuh Luna | VP Operations | Auditorio Nacional
Raúl González Biestro | Musical Producer | Televisa
Celso Moreno | Backline | Televisa
Antonio Zacarias | Console and speakers | Digico/ Meyer Sound
Manuel Tapia | Microphones | Shure
The World in Between Analogue and Digital
In the words of Mr. Hayek: For most of us the world of our DAW encompasses our audio universe. Over time as professional audio engineers and producers, we come to realize that there is a world beyond the box. That world includes a myriad of virtual Plugins, analogue and digital hardware. This combination comes together to form our unique and individual signature sound.
Bringing these two elements together is not a simple task and requires technologies that are developed with both workflows in mind.
Some of the topics covered were the following:
Summing in the box and outside the box. Understand the science and sound behind this controversial topic.
Transient response and SuperAnalogue ™: How to get the "Big Record" sound out of my DAW.
Core Audio Pipeline and the PCIe standard: Is zero latency possible in a Native DAW?
Hybrid Processing of Plugins; what are the differences between native and hardware driven audio plugins
Mr. Hayek is an audio engineer originally from New York City. In his 20 year career he has worked for several recording studios in the 90's. From there he joined Steinberg Media Technologies where he was part of the sales team as Sales Manager in the US and was involved in product management for Nuendo as we as Cubase. Currently he's the National Sales manager for Workstation Partner Products at Solid State Logic.
We are grateful to Mr. Hayek for sharing with us such interesting and important concepts that everybody should be aware of when trying to make professional audio out of a digital workstation. His presentation was translated by Erika Benton who made a very good job coping with the audio jargon. Thanks to both!
The Production of "Las Lunas of the Auditorio Nacional"
This interesting conference' panel was an important visit for our membership and non members alike. An insight to one of the country's yearly big events and the opportunity to see what is going on "behind the scenes" of the show. Each of the panelists gave a 15 minute talk of their specialty, starting with Mr. Tonatiuh Luna who explained the concept of the whole show and the broadcasting companies' involvement. Then it was the turn of Raúl González Biestro which job as producer for the musical event is to make a link between the production and the engineering of the show, bdcast and live audio. Celso Moreno talked of the complications of the backline changes within the stage and different groups, as they perform one after the other with practically zero time between acts. Toño Zacarias is the manager for Meyer Sound for Mexico and he explained the recently installed Meyer system of the Auditorio. With a total of 60 Milo, 28 700HT, 8 UPA-1P, 3 Galileo 616, and two Digico consoles, Meyer surely shines bright (loud) at this place, being one of the best venues they have in the world. Last but not least it was the turn of Manuel Tapia who talked about the wireless microphones and in-ear monitoring systems and the challenges of so many frequencies playing at the same time and the way they solved all the difficulties.
Auditorio gave the AES 10 tickets for attending the show and they were raffled among the membership. Another reason for the non members to join the AES!
We had 50+ assistants; 1 renewal and 2 new memberships were registered.
We are thankful to the authorities of the Auditorio Nacional, especially to Francisco Serrano, for sharing with us the secrets of the production of their show and for lending their premises to hold our monthly conferences.
