Jan 1, 2002 12:00 PM, BY PAUL D. LEHRMAN

As we turn over the calendar to another New Year, we in the audio industry find ourselves asking the age-old question: Will we still have a job 12 months from now?

Actually, most of us don't usually ask ourselves that question, which is what makes this year so strange. But because we are living in the greatest era of uncertainty in about six decades, no one can really forecast what's going to happen. Let's try to hang on to a positive thought: Even hunkered down in bacteria-proof underground shelters, people are going to need to be entertained, and they will be, even if it means using car batteries to run their brand-new surround DVD systems.

So this month, let's not look at the gloomy side. With the Winter NAMM show right around the corner, let's instead ask ourselves that upbeat question that will be on the lips of everyone gathering in Anaheim: Is hardware dead?

Well, maybe that's not terribly upbeat for a lot of people — like the folks who make hardware — but it certainly seems to be getting a lot of attention. There are legions of people, the majority of them under 25, who think that using hardware for synthesizing, recording, processing and mixing music is so, well, so '90s. They've never known a time when computers weren't fast and reliable enough to produce and manipulate untold numbers of tracks of super-high-fidelity audio in real time. They're looking at us old fogies and our racks of processing gear, and wondering why we need all that iron when they can do everything they can even conceive of on a $700 motherboard with a $200 sound card.

The other day, one of my students was describing his home studio to me, and when I asked him what kind of synths he had, he replied, “Oh, I don't have anything like that. It's all software. And I don't play the piano very well, so I never bothered to get a keyboard. Hardware's dead, anyway.” A friend of mine, who also teaches college-level music courses, gave a lecture recently to a gathering of the local audio community on “Better Living Through Software Synthesis.” “It's viable, it works,” he says. “Do we need a box to do DSP or a special chip to do synthesis? Why bother?” Why indeed?

As much as in any field, computers have become “anything and everything machines” in the audio world. Do you want to do location recording? Get a laptop and a PCM interface card, and put it in a corner of that road case with your mics, preamps and headphones. Do you do film scoring or sound effects? Install a software sampler or two and a virtual rack of soft synths and plug-ins on your desktop machine, link them to timecode and mix it all down right to your hard disk; when you're done, burn it onto a CD-ROM and send it to the Avid house. Is your specialty dance records or club mixes? All you need is a bunch of CDs of grooves and beats, looping software and a vocal mic. How about processing, sweetening, mixing and mastering other artists' recordings? All possible without ever turning away from your monitor.

In many ways, a software-based studio makes a lot of economic sense. After all, could you throw out an entire hardware studio that's only two years old and replace it with the next generation of faster, slicker gear — and end up spending only $1,000? If everything's in software, that's not only easy, it's more or less mandatory. (Of course, the disadvantage is that you then have to reinstall all your software and spend a few sleepless nights fretting over whether or not your old programs will work on the new platform. Can you imagine having to do all that with a couple of racks full of hardware?)

But somehow, there are people out there who aren't getting the message — like the ones who send me those glossy 150-plus-page music and pro audio catalogs every month. Despite my student's pronouncement, lots of areas of the hardware business are still going quite strong, thank you very much.

Roland's disk-based, all-in-one studios have been that company's most successful new product line in years, and now the other usual suspects — Fostex, Yamaha, Tascam and Alesis — have jumped on board. Despite the flood of software synths, the “knobs” craze on hardware synthesizers shows no sign of abating, as musicians rediscover the joys of real-time control and learn that there are better ways to design sounds than tweaking parameters on a crowded LCD, or even on a 20-inch monitor.

DJ gear, of course, is going like gangbusters: CD players that emulate vinyl turntables, groove boxes that emulate the crummy drum machines of the early '80s, and nasty high-Q filters you can operate by waving your hands around in the air are flying out dealers' doors. It's an interesting indicator of how the hardware world is evolving by considering that Alesis, which owned the project studio multitrack tape deck market for the better part of a decade, last year somehow managed to go bankrupt and had to be rescued by Numark, a company that has made its money in the club scene over many years.

Guitars, basses and amps are still big moneymakers, and the market for vintage and pseudovintage axes is as healthy as ever. There are so many different variations on Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, 335s and Twin Reverbs that the mind boggles. (Although I still can't imagine that a $1,500 guitar with some rock god's signature on it actually plays twice as nicely as the $750 version from the same manufacturer.) On the other hand, the sounds of the guitars are becoming less distinguishable from each other, as more manufacturers pick up on the “modeling” idea, so that any combination of guitar and amp can sound like any other combination you want. (I have my doubts about this technology, though, especially for live performance. I was at a demo/concert of one manufacturer's electronic instruments recently, and the guitarist, trying to emulate a stack of Marshalls with a little stage amp, sounded as if he was miles away in a completely different hall from the rest of the band. Maybe it was the mix, or maybe it was a latency problem, but it wasn't in the least convincing.)

For those of us who want to use all of our fingers and other appendages to work with sound, hardware is still rather necessary. What all of the devices I just listed have in common is that they offer familiar physical interfaces: knobs, faders, strings, frets, turntables and so on. As we all have discovered during the past few years, moving a mouse around is a lousy way to create music, or edit or mix audio. And so we've seen the rise of “control surfaces” that hook up to our computer-based workstations through serial or USB connectors and emulate the mixing and editing consoles we are used to.

It's not just a gimmick that these devices present a familiar face. Despite our generally positive attitude toward new technologies, musicians and audio professionals tend to be a fairly entrenched lot, and old habits die hard. We learn to use certain types of systems — in the case of musicians, we spend years practicing them — and develop our working style and rhythm on them, and we aren't that interested in abandoning them overnight, even if there are new ways that are immediately and obviously superior. While we embrace new technology, we want it to work like the old, and manufacturers that try to force us out of old habits are taking a risk.

Examples of this are all over the place. In the film world, the widespread use of digital media at the dubbing stage took an amazingly long time to happen, even though the magnetic-dubbing technology they could replace should have been put out to pasture years before. It wasn't until digital dubbers were designed to closely emulate magnetic ones — to become their “analogues,” as it were — that they were able to gain acceptance.

There's a similar situation in radio: Endless-loop cartridge machines, one of the worst-sounding and most finicky technologies I've ever had the displeasure of working with (I spent a year cleaning and aligning the suckers, so I know!), are still in use in many places — you can often hear the “ka-chunk” of the cart deck when the announcer forgets to mute his mic — despite the fact that digital audio systems and servers can do the job much better, not to mention that they don't need cleaning. Many digital systems, in fact, emulate the old cart machines and have front panel slots for removable disks, even though with today's high-capacity hard disks and high-speed interconnects, they are hardly necessary.

But the role of hardware is not nearly the same as it has been traditionally. Perhaps the major change that computers have wrought, in terms of how hardware is used in the audio world, can be described as a kind of paradigm shift: Form no longer needs to follow function. Thanks to the explosion of computing power in cheap, mass-produced chips and motherboards, and the almost total removal of analog electronics from the signal path, what a device looks like no longer needs to depend on what it does. Barriers between different functions — this box here is supposed to do one thing, while that box there does something else — are no longer necessary, or even desirable. Compressors and equalizers don't have to be in racks. Synthesizers don't have to have keyboards. Dubbers don't have to use tape. And guitars don't have to sound like themselves.

Instead, the physical form of a tool can be anything we want it to be. A tool's form may be defined as a result of its function — a hard disk recorder can still look like a tape deck — or it may be completely independent. Alesis' new airFX and airSynth look like trackballs from the helm of the Starship Enterprise, but you don't touch them — they change their synthesis and DSP parameters based on the relative x, y and z coordinates of your hand. It's a far cry from knobs and keys. Yamaha's WX wind controllers resemble mutant soprano saxophones, but not only can you make any kind of sound you like with them, you can also play them polyphonically — which heretofore only Roland Kirk could do (and he needed two instruments). With new touch-sensitive fabrics such as those developed by Tactex, which are able to generate data in three dimensions, any kind of surface can be turned into any kind of controller.

Familiar tools can also be “extended” — given new tasks to do that are similar to their traditional tasks, but with a wider sonic or functional palette. One of the most interesting new concepts I've heard about involves, believe it or not, turntables. It's a kind of double-reverse: The turntables aren't doing what turntables normally do (in the post-analog era, that is), i.e., play records in weird ways. Instead, they are acting as controllers for a digital system that, well, plays records in weird ways.

You might have read about it in last month's Remix magazine: A couple of clever DJs have figured out a way to have access to hundreds of records without having to carry around heavy crates of vinyl. They show up with only two vinyl discs and a laptop. The discs have nothing but SMPTE timecode recorded on them. They feed the output of the turntables through a converter into the computer, which is loaded up with audio files (.WAV or MP3) and some custom software. They tell the software which files they want to play, and start spinning the platters. The timecode on each turntable tells the computer where to start playing each file, how fast and in which direction. The DJs can skip around, go faster and slower, and backward and forward, just as if they were playing vinyl records — but when they want to change records, instead of having to swap vinyl discs, they simply call up a new file on the computer.

Right now, the system, which is being produced in limited numbers, has a pretty steep price tag: around $3,000. But by the time you read this, Stanton, a turntable and cartridge manufacturer, will have a production version that promises to cost a lot less. After that, who knows — maybe someone will come out with a “virtual” turntable and laser-equipped tone arm that doesn't need any records at all. And then they can put some touch sensors in them so that if you bang on them, they make a sound like a stylus skipping…

As the functions of our tools and the forms they take continue to disengage from each other, we can expect to see some radical new designs in human/machine interfaces. Some of these will be brilliant, some will be awful, and some no doubt will be both. With any luck, the present trend in software front end design, in which every program resembles either the console of a spaceship or a nightmarish oozing primordial Salvador Dali landscape, will abate, and new design aesthetics that are more inspiring and less self-conscious will prevail.

But however technology develops, it's a safe bet that reports of the death of hardware will continue to be, as Mark Twain might have put it, premature. As long as we have hands, fingers and feet, we will need to be able to hold, push, turn, press, squeeze and stomp on our tools if they are going to feel like they're ours. Until, of course, purely synaptic-driven interfaces (with appropriate neural feedback) are perfected. At that point, all bets are off.

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“Insider Audio” columnist and Mix Web editor Paul D. Lehrman knows that next year's model will be different. Just don't ask him how.

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