June 7, 2010
Jamie Anderson Calibrates For The Common Good At Rational Acoustics
by Kirsten Nelson
QUICK BIO
NAME: Jamie Anderson
TITLE: CEO and Head System Tweak
COMPANY: Rational Acoustics
OVERTIME: Anderson has been teaching
and working in the field of sound
system engineering, measurement, and
alignment for more than 17 years. What
he has learned from his career so far is
that art and practice of system alignment
is as varied and expanding as the
people, equipment, and applications that
encompass the field.
SCN: Your entry into the audio
industry was through an interest
in entertainment lighting technology.
What was it that originally
drew you to the latter?
Jamie Anderson: I was a pretty
hard-core theater geek growing
up, spending most of my spare
time working productions at
school and in the community.
When I got to college, that
theater interest expanded to
include concert and show production
as well.
Yeah, I started as primarily
a lighting guy, but made the
transition to the dark side as
I got involved in sound design
at the Yale School of Drama (YSD).
To be honest, my interest in theater
sound design quickly lead to a strong
necessity for system engineering
chops, which lead me down the path
I’m on now.
|
|
Over the course of his professional career, Jamie Anderson has
taught more than 225 SIM and Smaart classes. Here, he sets up
for a class at the Voorhees Theater at City Tech College in New
York, NY in January 2010.
| |
SCN: Somewhere between your electrical
engineering and optical physics studies
at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI )
and your eventual decision to focus on
sound design in your MFA program at
YSD you were exposed to the world of
audio engineering and measurement at a
Grateful Dead show. How did your system
tour with Don Pearson and Dan Healy
later change the course of your career?
JA: While at WPI in Worcester, MA
we earned extra cash working as
job-in IATSE stagehands over at the
Centrum. During a load-in for the
Dead, my friends convinced Don and
Dan to give us a tour of the
sound system—which ended up
including a glimpse of how they
were tuning their system using
an FFT-based analyzer. At the
time I was more interested in
the lighting rig, but that exposure
did come back to haunt me
a couple years later as I grappled
with the sound systems I was
working with as a sound design
student at YSD. I was realizing
that system design/engineering
wasn’t just about slapping up
some boxes and plugging them
in—maybe those hippies were
on to something . . .
I started digging deeper into
what they had been doing, and
focused my thesis work on system
measurement, and that process led me
from RTAs to dual-channel FFTs to
Broadway system alignments to SIM.
SCN: Following Yale, you moved to
the West coast, and after a brief stint
teaching in the Theater Department
at USC, you became technical support
manager and SIM instructor for Meyer
Sound. Then, after spending some time
on the road touring with k.d. lang and the
Dave Matthews Band among others, in
1999 you joined EAW to manage its then
new acquisition, SIA Software and the
Smaart measurement platform. What did
your field experience and teaching more
than 225 SIM and Smaart classes reveal
about the realities of system tuning?
JA: The period that probably most
defined who I am as an audio engineer
and as an instructor was the initial
years I spent at Meyer working for 6o6
McCarthy and answering technical
support and SIM questions. It wasn’t
so much a time about accumulating
specific knowledge, as it was one that
sharpened my basic engineering process,
of defining problems, gathering
information (data), and developing
specific solutions. I found out that
the important thing wasn’t knowing
the answers, it was just being able to
figure out how to get them.
In the early ’90s, SIM II had just
been released and we had to create
the training programs. It was an
amazing experience to work with
6o6 as he broke down the measurement
concepts that were embodied
in the analyzer and put them into a
format that made them learnable.
It certainly wasn’t always a smooth
process or even a consistently successful
process, but it certainly had progressively clarifying effect—for
both of us, I think. As anyone who
has ever tried to teach a subject
knows, just because you can do something
doesn’t mean you can teach it,
or even that you truly understand
it—and correspondingly, through the
process of breaking concepts down to
teach to others, you learn them more
deeply yourself.
Of course, whenever I started
feeling particularly accomplished or
knowledgeable, I was continually
reminded that you stop listening and
learning from others at your own
peril. Leaving Meyer to tour reinforced
that in spades. To be honest,
I think there are startling parallels
to be drawn between life on the road
and learning to survive and enjoy
kindergarten.
SCN: In 2008, you launched Rational
Acoustics with other Smaart
principals, and a year and a half
later purchased the Smaart brand
product line from EAW. How do you see
measurement instruction and Smaart software itself evolving?
JA: For us, the key element to participating
in the evolutionary process
has been (re)establishing Smaart’s
independence—most importantly,
with securing our ability to make
development, support, and sales/distribution
decisions that make sense
for our geeky niche of the tiny pro
audio market. The tools and practices
that comprise system measurement
and alignment are in a continual state
of growth and refinement, pushed on
both by the relentless expansion of
processing power available in our
laptops and gear, and by the constant
innovations of the engineers that
make up our industry (who can now
affordably get their hands on these
tools).
Education will follow, of course,
both online and in person—our users
are becoming very sophisticated at
getting information. We just need
time to learn from some new and creative
failures!
Our goal with Rational is to be in
a position to participate and respond.
SCN: How would you complete the
following statements?
If you don’t read the manual, you’ll
never…get 100 percent out of your gear.
One element every venue and application
has in common is…they are real.
Smaart Move
In November 2009, Rational Acoustics
completed the purchase of the Smaart
brand product line from Eastern Acoustic
Works (EAW). Four of the five people
on the Rational Acoustics team were
present in 1999 when Smaart became an
EAW product, and together they have big
plans to carry the brand forward into a
new era
This month at InfoComm, Rational
Acoustics will be demonstrating the
first version of Smaart designed and
released solely by Rational Acoustics,
Smaart v.7, which is the culmination
of an intensive two-year development
effort. One of the most powerful aspects
of Smaart v.7 is its object-oriented
program architecture. Effectively, the
program is built of many individual code
modules that are run as independent,
inter-related programs (“objects”).
This means that users can run as
many simultaneous single-channel
(spectrum) and dual-channel (transfer
function) measurement engines as
their PC will allow. This new architecture
also means that Smaart is ready
for expanded application/interaction
beyond the basic program itself.
|