Jim,

welcome everybody.

It's a

Happy Thursday. Weather is quite good. Where I am in Niagara Falls. I'm Jim Norris. I'm the president of entertainment spotlight and entertainment marketer,

welcome today. Before we go any further,

I just like to find out a bit. Let me just

turn on my camera. There. There we go. I just want to find out a bit more about

all you guys.

So first thing I'd like to know is where you live,

so that one only requires one answer to each so you can just fill that out and

Okay, you can see,

most voted is Ontario.

Rate of across Canada, some for United States and foreign

and what you do this one is multiple choice, since I know many of you being in the pro ad industry, industry, probably do a few different things. So you can check off on there what your prime things are.

For audio professionals, mostly, which isn't too much of a surprise.

Some broadcasters, musicians snuck in here.

Educators, obviously,

okay, so why? Why are we doing this webinar today? The

inspiration for this came from the Toronto AES

Expo, which took place a few months ago in Toronto. It's organized by Earl McCluskey, who is here today,

and at that event, the keynote speaker was Michael Noonan, and it was about what's after next was the theme of that so we, I talked to Michael, and we decided this is a great topic for a webinar to get it out to as many people as possible around the world.

You do have a chat function at the bottom there, if you want to say hello to anybody, if you have questions, there's a little question mark at the bottom, Q and A. You can put those in any time I'm going to have Michael answer the questions at the end in the last 10 or 15 minutes, but you can put in questions anytime this is being recorded, so it will be available afterwards to all of you that did attend, and anybody that could make it.

And you'll get an email letting you know where that is. It'll be posted on YouTube. So one little piece of advice. All of us here, for sure, do a lot of learning. We go to on the ground, events, webinars, we read magazines, books, go to websites, do all kinds of things to get more information into our brain. And that's all good. But even more important than that is what you do with it, and that's very important that you have a plan. And what I would suggest is, is that if you're taking notes of any kind, rather than trying to write down all the content, because the content coming out of Michael's brain is going to be considerable, try and write down what you're going to do about it, if you can come up with a to do list of five things but put that together tomorrow morning, things that you're going to do differently in the future, and that, I can't stress how important that is with any learning that you do. So we're extremely fortunate today to have Michael Noonan with us, and any of you who have

written read his biography, or gone through his LinkedIn, you can get some concept of all the different things that he's done. And I'm going to have him tell us that story. I just have to

find him here. Here he is.

You okay? Michael should appear any second.

There he is. Hey,

how are you doing?

We're not hearing you

there. There is great.

Hi, Jim. It's good to have audio when you're talking about pro audio, I would say so. First off, I want you to think back

years to when you first started and had an interest in Pro Audio, and how you got started, your education in your first positions, many years ago.

Sure,

like many others in the community, I consider myself a member of the frustrated musicians society. Like many people who went into

I thought I was pursuing audio engineering decades have dissuaded me from using that word if you're not possessed of an iron ring on your finger. But

I was a classically trained I am a classically trained musician. I decided that that's what I was going to do with my life, and started to having, started to have panic attacks about what that was actually going to look like, you know, as I was finishing up high school,

and happily, one of my the guys who went on to be one of my first mentors, Garrick filewad, known to many in the community, was a next door neighbor of mine growing up in Guelph, Ontario, and he was a long Time professor at

Sheridan College, which is my alma mater. And so I figured that, well, since I was interested in technology and already had a fairly advanced exposure to

music technology, particularly even in high school, that maybe it was okay I didn't have to pursue music. Maybe I could pursue this thing called audio engineering that would let me stay close to the music and yet get a training in something that

might threaten to get me a day job and get my mom off my back.

So that's what I did. I went off to Sheridan College with the intent of majoring in audio production. And it was at Sheridan that I was introduced, really, to the whole idea of sound for picture, be that film multi image, as it was called back then, television.

And I fell in love instantly with this idea of what happens when one and one can equal three,

where the the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that was really the beginning. Leaving college, my first job was for a now long defunct production company in Toronto called Electric images. Some of you may remember they had both a traditional post production operation. They had an animation division, a computer animation division, which was unusual in the early 90s, and a couple of trucks and some studios. And I, you know, I was, I was in, I was hook, line and sinker. I was all in, and I was determined very early on, to learn as much as I could, not just about audio, but about everything in the this, this thing called television, in the ecosystem, and in a broadly that's sort of has continued throughout my career. I was only ultimately at electric images. A few years I went to

Labatt communications, back when the brewery was still in Canadian hands, and owned TSN.

A bunch of corporate takeovers and purchases and mergers over the years meant that, you know, while I started working for a company called the bat. I finished my career with them when we were called Bell. That was just a couple of years ago, after almost 28 years with them and and I'm now since December of 2023

with Everts here in Burlington, which is where I'm speaking to you now at our headquarters, where I have the great privilege of working in research and development. And the reason why that's particularly interesting is that, of course, Everts is now the home of Studer, and being a long time devotee of Studer, all the way back to their take.

Machine days and you know, and laterally, with their large format consoles called Vista, which we used a bunch of at CTV and TSN and Bell. So it's lovely to be here and to have an opportunity to collaborate with all of these great folks on what Studer becomes in the future now as a as a Canadian brand,

excellent. Just going back a question, when you got your very first position,

how did that come about? And

obviously the job market nowadays is different. But any advice for people that are looking for that first position?

Well, look and we're going to say the word, I'm going to probably say the word TV a lot.

I fully recognize that television as a medium, and particularly as a business model, is disappearing, but I'm going to keep saying that word.

My first position, like many, came as a direct result of an internship, an unpaid internship that I'd done during college that was a requirement of the program. One of the reasons why I loved Sheridan is that that placement or that internship was a full semester. It wasn't just a few weeks, like many programs today have, and in a full semester, you've got a lot of time to show someone why they should want to keep you around. And on the last day of my internship, and everybody there knew, by the way, that I fancied being an audio guy,

but on my last day of my internship, I was walking out of the building on the last day, and my boss called me into his office and he said, I'd like to offer you a full time job. I said, Oh my gosh, that's incredible. Sure. Like mixing what he said, No, I'd like you to be our staff Chiron operator. And I said, I'll take it. What's a Chiron

and so my first staff job was doing electronic graphics, which is a neat trick, since I don't have a visual bone in my body, or I didn't then,

you know, the fact that I wasn't fired nine times in the first six months was a testament to their

desperation, more than my skill as an electronic graphics operator, I think. But that's where I started, Jim

and and those internships, so those still available today. If somebody's a student, somebody going to school, still a good route to go, they are, and they're absolutely and utterly crucial. Still,

it is still the case that too few organizations will hire an unknown, especially for an entry level position. It's one thing to rock up to a company with a very comprehensive CV and a long list of skills and experiences and and ask to be, you know, given a you know, try to win a job posting, it's quite another thing to show up right out of school or maybe still in school with a great passion and energy to doing it, but with no ability to demonstrate skill or no record of experience. And so those internships and are

still absolutely crucial to give someone

a risk free ability to see what you're made of, to get a sense of what your work ethic is,

and to understand that with a little bit of tutelage and a little bit of shaping, that you would be a great tool to have in the drawer,

excellent and in your current at your current company, aside from Studer, what other products do they handle?

Well, everything else in the in fact, Studer is the lone brand name that isn't ever it's

and we maintain that, because of the notoriety and the the fame of the name Studer, everything else in the company is manufactured and sold under the auspices of the Everts brand. And most people, I mean, Evert is not a young company, but most people understand Everts as being a company that creates core technology, things like routing switchers and distribution amplifiers, things like that, converters and as a result, in many places, broadcast centers, Media Centers, trucks,

the things that have been badged ever it's traditionally have been thought of as being the domain of engineers, because there are things that we depend on but don't necessarily have to interact with. You know, aside from maybe a router panel,

but laterally, but long before I joined the company.

We've started to produce product, both hardware and, you know, software that really deals with the edge. So for instance, something like slow motion replay, which is sort of the beating heart of sports production. Lots and lots of people know the name dream catcher. That's one of our products with the primary competitor to somebody like EVs out of Belgium.

So, yeah, we, with the addition of Studer,

we join a very small number of broadcast and media manufacturing companies that are nearly vertically integrated. I mean, we don't make microphones and cameras and loudspeakers, but we make almost everything else in the

in the production and engineering chain.

So how has your long and varied experience contributed to the position that you have now, I guess getting the position, but also what you do in an average day?

Well, it's a really good question, and I think it's about perspective. I think I mean very early on someone, and I wish I could remember who it was told me, but

the comment was basically about young kids coming out of schools who, when you ask them what they want to do with their life, they say, Well, I want to produce and direct. And you say, well, that's that's a laudable goal. What is it that you plan to do on your way to becoming a producer or director? And of course, the the answer is, oh, produce and direct.

And so this early mentor of mine, I think it may have been Jim said That's like saying you want to manage a McDonald's restaurant, but never learn how to make French fries. And if that's the case, then it's a question of if, it's a question of when not, if you get held hostage by some teenage part time employee who tells you it's going to take another 15 minutes for more fries, because really, he just wants that extra 10 Minute smoke break. But you can't call bullshit on him, because you've never made french fries, and that sort of landed with me, and that's the reason why, I mean, my first job was as a graphics operator. It was several years before I landed an actual audio job,

but in the intervening time, I, you know, the only thing I've never done professionally, like been paid for is pointing a camera, but at one point or another, I've sat in or occupied almost every other conceivable crew position. A because the answer to do you want to gig is yes? Secondly, because

perspective is everything, and the only way I know that I'm doing the right thing is if I have some innate sense of how people upstream of me are doing their jobs, and how an act of omission or commission on their part might influence or impact me, and similarly, how I do my job is going to have a downstream effect on the people

farther down the stream, and so only by, in my case, having direct personal experience of as many roles as I can gave me a sense always and with every production I do and every discussion I have here that I'm it's never enough to just talk about what's right for audio. You have to think about and be able to measure what's right for audio against everyone else in the ecosystem, all of whom think they're equally or more important than we

So yeah, that's a wordy way of answering that. Okay, that's great. So

to talk about what's after next, because that's what this is all about,

sort of two areas, one being the technology, and second being the the industry. And as we all know, in both those areas,

there's been massive changes in in the last 20 years, let's say, and continues to go that way. So if we could just talk about the technology first and get your

predictions on what's after next,

sure. Well, I mean to talk about what's after next, you have to think just briefly about where we are now, because that sort of implicates the next. And I,

you know, at the very while I was still in school, and certainly at the start of my career, one of the buzz words.

Back then, in the late 80s, early 90s, was convergence,

and it was a good story, but it was a few decades too early. So so I think if the way you could broadly describe audio and media technology today is

nearly magical,

because things that only a few years ago were utter science fiction are now achievable, but maybe costly or slightly complicated, whereas all of the things that used to be our bread and butter and were really tough to do are now so simple that they and easy to do, that they escape notice

that trend line is not slowing down. And certainly the advent of AI in all of its various guises is going to cause that to heterodyne and the biggest part of my job right now daily, the biggest individual time penalty on any given day is attempting to stay current with everything that's happening, not just in our business, but in a whole fleet of connected

but adjacent businesses and industries. So the trend line is increasing. It's getting easier to do everything. Okay. Well, where does that lend end this up and, and I think that's where the after next,

you know, sort of enters into it. And. And the answer is,

we're going to reach a point where we can't make the old jobs any easier. They might actually be fully automatic. And by that, I mean, what does it take to create a piece of content that today we would qualify as a professional or a top tier piece of content that's a flat picture

accompanied by some manner of audio, maybe up to and including something glorious like 7.1 dot for Atmos. But what does it take to create that? Well, it's going to become so trivial to produce that, and everyone will be able to do it. That's the downward pressure we've been feeling on the industry and unemployment over the last number of years. What comes after that is, how do these technologies empower new kinds of content, and what does it take to create those new kinds of content? Because I assure you, the cost and complexity of very, very top tier production is not going to diminish much. What happens is those get bigger and badder and harder to do.

So the exemplar, the thing that everybody is shooting for is going to start moving away from us, and it hasn't yet. We're still making TV. We might be distributing it on Apple TV and Hulu and YouTube, but we're still fundamentally making TV, stroke, cinema style product. It might be IMAX in glorious 70 mil, or 125

mil, or it might be 4k or 8k but it's still

very much an incremental improvement on all of the things that have come before. And at some moment in the near or middle distance, we're going to have a break, and what's going to emerge is new forms of content that require new tooling, that require new workflows, that require people with broader than traditional media exclusive skill sets and experiences, and most importantly, they're going to require new creative and the folks who are going to be the screenwriters and the directors and the producers and the real the creative thrust to these next generation formats, they may still be in middle school or maybe high School. They're certainly not working in the industry today, but they're growing up in this soup of video games and interactivity and on demand everything.

And what's going to come out of that is something that none of us can imagine, but it will be technologically dependent, and it will be built on the framework of tools that we're imagining today.

Excellent. So as far as the industry,

what do you see happening there as a result of all this?

And with all the other changes that are going on in the various industries that you're involved in,

well, I mean, I think it's part of the same story.

We the business model for broadcasting is under, you know, extreme duress. Let's be glib and say it's dying, but it's been dying for a long time. So it's not clear, I think, to anybody you know, how long it's going to be on life support for, but it is obvious that, at least here in the Western world, that as individuals and households become possessed of enough internet bandwidth that they can afford to they are either cutting back on or entirely cutting the cord to the traditional broadcast ecosystem.

That's going to continue. But that doesn't mean that the kinds of content that the traditional broadcaster has made is going to go away. It's just that it's going to be replaced by a new business model that I don't think has asserted itself yet.

So in other words, the demand for the content, the demand to be entertained, educated, informed, amused, distracted, that's inelastic. People still want to come home and flop down on the couch at the end of a long day. Now, what device they pick up in their hand in order to tell the universe that they want to be entertained or informed or amused? I don't know that's maybe going to change. The vehicle is going to change. Certainly, the kinds of content they're consuming is going to change,

but who they're paying for it, and therefore the person who is going to employ people like us to help validate that experience and create the content and get it out into the world as marketable and monetizable stuff that I don't think anyone has an answer for. So let's answer the questions we do have, and that is, what are the kinds of technologies that are likely to be implicated, and are we well served by at least spending a little bit of time learning about them so that we're not surprised when suddenly someone rocks up to your audio room or to your Front of House Mix position and asks you a question about a tool, a process, a technique, a piece of technology or a use case that you're completely flabbergasted by, like you have you've never heard it before, like I have no idea what you're talking about.

Yeah, I think right now, unfortunately, I'm sorry to say, the best advice I can give anyone is

learn every as much as you can, at all times, everywhere, and by all means, learn outside of our silo and and that's that's particularly challenging to do because so much of our market, particularly the broadcast market, Is continues to be fueled by people who are effectively self employed. They're freelancers,

and it's often challenging to suggest to a freelancer that they should invest in their own learning

rather than take another gig doing a job they already know how to do, but a gig for whom it is very obvious that the number of those gigs in the future is going to diminish, the easy thing to do is to take the job today, because it's available, and I know I can do it, but that's one last day I've got to spend trying to Learn something new or different, so that I can pivot as the market pivots.

Excellent. As far as your your own future,

what do you have planned there? I guess, in addition to the work you're doing at Evers,

yeah, I mean, it seems clear to me, Jim, that

I must necessarily spend the rest of my career, at least in part, working as an educator, whether that's here, whether that's in a context like this, or an AES presentation, Whether it's actual teaching. I was a part time faculty at Seneca College here in Toronto for almost 16 years. Covid put an end to that. But variously, I've taught at places like OI art and London Ontario, Banff in Alberta, and even laterally, at Toronto Metropolitan University, the old Ryerson.

I think those of us who have the luxury of

of this perspective on the industry,

particularly with emerging tech,

half of every day has got to be learning, and The Other Half the day has got to be teaching. Now along that way, I guess, to the to the actual meat and potatoes of your question. I'm working on a book.

I've been threatening it for a long time. Anybody on the on the bridge here, who knows me has probably heard me threatened to write a book at one point or another.

I'm finally doing it. It's, it's virtually finished. And certainly my, my, I'm gonna just out. I'm gonna just gonna, I'm just gonna put down the marker now, because maybe it'll help me achieve the goal. My goal is to have it ready to publish in the very early new year, January, February timeframe.

That'll be a big step for me, because it will actually commit some of these concepts and ideas about what I think about the future to a forum that more people than can crowd into an entertainment spotlight webinar can maybe read and enjoy excellent and what about

events that you plan to Go to, such as conferences or trade shows, live events. Can you name any that you find particularly valuable?

Well, the most valuable for me, and frankly has been for the last number of

years, is the TED conference.

Everybody's I'm sure, seen a TED talk from time to time for the last or I'm in my ninth year now of serving in a freelance capacity as the as the audio lead for TED conferences. And so I do one or two of those a year, including the their main conference, which is in Vancouver every April.

That is my number one with a bullet a because I'm getting to do what I love. And, you know, I don't wear a suit when I'm working a show. But also I mean it effectively means I get to listen to all of these TED Talks and and contribute to their execution, where I'm learning a whole lot about stuff that's way out on the periphery of many different disciplines.

So that's my, my, my, you know, my, that's my number one with a bullet beyond that, the IBC, the International broadcast Conference, which just finished a couple weeks ago in Amsterdam. That's a particularly

exciting conference every year, not because of the trade show. I mean, the trade shows, trade shows are fine. It's always fun to see the new toys, but particularly not just their conference track, but the the innovators program that they run every year. And every year, they sort of set a marker for multiple innovation projects that they're going to run over the course of the year. And the folks who power those efforts are the who's who of broadcasters in Europe and manufacturers from around the world. And those innovation projects, which are all real proof of concepts, they're, they're they're very actionable.

Those are the those are the kinds of places and the kinds of objectives that are really pushing the boundary of what media and media technology and production technology really means, and in a way that's open and accessible to everyone by design. There's a huge amount of development and innovation and research going on, but mostly it's siloed. It's socketed into buildings like ours, where I'm simply not at liberty to tell you, you know, some of the things we're planning. But when the when these big standards bodies or industry organizations like IBC mount these sorts of innovation challenges and sort of sandbox efforts that's super excited, exciting because that's everybody in the pool deciding that it's much more valuable to contribute to that sort of rising tide lifts All boats, kind of effort, rather than piling all of the effort in secret into one manufacturer's advantage,

excellent. And for people, either just getting started, or some of the people that are attending here that might be looking at their future or a change, what what do you think are the major opportunities over the next five years, in in in the various industries that I guess, and specifically for audio?

Well, I.

Okay,

I'll just the first two things that jump to mind. Jim. One is,

I, I can't prove this, but I know it's true.

The future of a lot of media production is going to be attendant on what are today, called game engines. So namely, Unreal and Unity as the two big ones. And I don't mean to suggest that, I think that our content is going to all become gamified, but it is very clear to me, particularly with the sudden and incredible rise of so called virtual production,

this being putting talent in front of green screens and inserting them into virtual worlds or extended reality productions, much as you see in a lot of sports broadcasts where the giant LED volumes think the way Mandalorian is produced

or 1899 something like that,

today and up until now, the game engines have really been exploited as an alternative to traditional Video compositing and visual construction concepts. But

compute is getting faster. In the audio industry, we're getting better quickly, but still early days at learning how to leverage GPU for compute, rather than CPU or FPGAs and other sorts of traditional DSP and and I think physics simulation is going to be the next big emergent tool in our drawer, in all manner of audio production, because I I'm convinced that in the very, very near term, it is going to be possible to in real time and with sufficient resolution and fidelity

perfectly simulate the physics of sound in a real space,

such that it might be the case in a few years that you never need to buy another reverb processor.

To the extent that that's true, I think that as the more you know about game engines and how they work, and particularly some of the language around how game engines think about content and how it's assembled, not on demand, but I mean the content, think about it, a video game is literally created on demand. It's not that it's being served out to you on demand, like the episode of Seinfeld you watched last night on some streaming platform. No, it's actually being created in real time in response to you, the user saying, I want to do X.

I think creation on demand is maybe some element of what is after next for us in the media business. So game engines would be number one. And the second one, which is sort of related, is beyond to the rectangular video, flat video.

It's very obvious to me also that while flat video is never going to go away,

it will at some point, maybe not be the only and it is, functionally today for most people, the only way you can consume video content that stereoscopic content up to and including something like 3d 360 so you might think of that as VR, where the audience member has either three or six degrees of freedom to look around or move around a space

as as stereoscopic or plus depth. Video imagery becomes more and more the norm as audio people, we have to think about, how do we respond to that picture as a sound for picture professional? It doesn't matter what I can do with the console.

It matters that the thing that I do with the console creates a sound that properly answers the picture that's on the wall. I'm beholden to the picture. It's the old exit sign effect that we learned in film school. If I put a sound in the left surround loudspeaker that and there's no reason that the audience could understand why a sound might be coming from back there, the audience will turn to look at that sound. Well, as soon as I make the audience take their eyes off the picture, I've lost. Okay, now map that onto a world where the audience can turn their head because the video is all around them. I would suggest that that will ultimately be the death of two channel audio for picture.

Not two channel consumption. Many people will continue always to consume the content with things on or in their ears, but that's okay. That's how we hear the world as human animals. So don't ever let anyone tell you that. Why do you need more so many loudspeakers? You only got two ears. That's nonsense. The

number of loudspeakers you should have in a surround system is asymptotic. It's unlimited. It's you'll never reach the number that you should have to correctly and exactly replicate what it's like to be in a place as a human animal.

My point is, as the video guys start getting

extra dimensional video and much bigger rasters, where the audience has some agency, well as audio people, we need to be able to respond to that picture with something that is at least as powerful as the picture.

And that's going to necessitate, at some level, that everybody,

especially those people who are super uncomfortable with it, kind of hold their nose and learn what immersive audio means today, get a sense of what the trend line is around immersivity. And ultimately develop some skills, or at least an understanding of how you take your present day audio skills and map them onto this sort of

new ecosystem that those, those are the two big things I think I would, I would point out excellent and earlier, we referred to

action plan to do list, if you to write one for

an up and comer or somebody looking at a career change, what would be the three or four things that would be on the list?

Do I would say, while you're busy trying to

learn everything you can about everything,

understand that what I'm I'm not asking or expecting anybody to become truly a master of all.

You know, not even a jack of all trades, but you need to know enough about things so that you have and pardon my language, but you need to develop better bullshit filters about things that are outside of your expertise. I'm not suggesting that anyone go and learn how to write code.

That's kind of a speculative effort with AI being what it is today anyways, but it's a really good idea to know enough about it that when you encounter a real world requirement for it and a subject matter expert in coding tells you about the problems, or about how long it's going to take, or why they can't do what you're asking them to it's super helpful to know enough about their world that you can start to get a little inkling about whether or not there's a Pong of I'd rather not do this, so I'm just going to make something up, because I know you can't call me on it, because you're an audio guy and I'm a software specialist, that's what I that's what I think. Don't be

worried about developing mastery in all of these other things, but you've got to know more about them. So learn everything. For young people coming into this join the AAS go every month.

Go, especially on months where it appears that the meeting topic doesn't mean anything to you, or it's got to do with a part of the business that you don't find interesting, or can't imagine why you'd ever want it. If you're really an audio specialist and you really want to live in audio, then it's got to start at home. Join the AES. Go to every single meeting. Go to the conferences when you can go to AES, New York. New York is at least cheap enough that you can probably get there.

But by all means, go to the conferences and don't just go to look at the flashing lights in the trade show, go and sit in paper presentations, in master classes, in panel discussions.

The amount of learning you can pack into three or four days at an AES show is astonishing. Don't plan to go on a bender each night in New York. Plan on going back to the hotel room after after dinner and making your notes about the day.

And that seems boring, because, hey, we're in New York. But you know what? You're there because of a passion, because of an interest, because you.

Because it's work,

and, oh, by the way,

particularly if you want to work in media, get used to the fact that at least for a good portion of the early stages of your career, you're going to be working while everyone else is off.

And if you're not comfortable with that, and you don't have a magic wand that you can wave to earn yourself a salary, despite that fact, recognize that when most people are off work, that's when they're flopping down on the couch wanting to be entertained, informed, or, you know, distracted, and that means you're going to spend a lot of time working nights and weekends. It just, it kind of is,

yeah, so that in a, in, in a scattered, sort of short way, that's, that's what my advice would be, excellent. So

if you have any questions currently, put them in the Q and A box which is at the bottom of your screen.

The first one is asking if this will be available, and it will. We're recording all of this. You'll all get an email, and the the video presentation will be available on YouTube. What we'll also do, which we haven't done before, is that we'll make a transcript of all of this available as well. So if you're comfortable reading text, it's pretty easy to do. So I'll make that available, and you can download that also. Second question I have here,

will CDs and DVDs be replaced with new recording tools? So, Michael, you can, I guess, I guess, be replaced with other physical media. I suppose

they may do. I don't, I don't think that's predictable, just right at the moment. I mean art look, arguably the payload that is carried by a red book, CD or a traditional DVD has already been replaced or supplanted.

I don't know too many people who are clamoring to get more 44 1k, 16 bit digital audio, not when there are better ways to do it.

I'll admit, though, that data storage and data portability

is something that is a problem that has been masked by the advent of mobile data. Cellular data, very, very high capacity, you know, smartphones,

and yet there are still lots of people who would prefer to actually own the thing, and I completely understand that. It's not clear to me, except to say that it will be dependent on materials science that doesn't exist yet, every so often you read something about someone who's figured out how to do, you know, holographic data storage on, you know, cheap salt crystals. And you can hold the Library of Congress in something the size of a sugar cube that requires no power and will last forever, or at least longer than, you know, cockroaches.

Sure. Yes, you can never guess

the unexpected, and it is entirely possible that we get some material science that allows us to store enormous amounts of data in a way that's cheap and cheerful and transportable

and still directly compatible with streaming data ecosystems. And if that's the case, then sure I can totally see where someone's going to want to try and market a new

physical copy of media in a way that's, you know, beyond what we can do with blue rays today, for instance, right? Yeah. I mean, it was predicted years ago that

CDs would disappear, and that hasn't happened.

And even vinyl has made a fairly huge comeback. So there's lots of options to say the least. There's no accounting for taste. Jim, that that's true. That's true.

The next question is, are domestic sales of component stereo systems enough to keep traditional manufacturing brands in business?

Well, yeah, I'm you, I'm now, I'm just guessing.

It's an educated guess. Yeah, the answer is yes. I mean, the demand for loudspeakers, particularly and AVR style components, is on the rise, despite the increase of the number of people who are.

Are consuming almost all of their content from something that otherwise looks like a computer, up to and including a smart device. I think it's fair to say, you know, we going back to your what's after next thing, or my what's after next thing. I think it's the case that in fairly short order, no one will consume any kind of content except via compute,

meaning you will require some measurable amount of compute at the edge to take whatever the essence is, whatever form the data takes, and

decode it, render it, prepare it for presentation in your environment, where you are, when you are with the equipment you have, where the equipment is, etc, etc. That's the very beginnings of personalization, and it's certainly something that we're all experiencing now via Atmos. So look, even if the component you're talking about is a sound bar style system that attempts to use psychoacoustic trickery to make it sound like you've got loud speakers all over the living room, even if it's just that, yeah, the market for those is going up and up and up and up and up and up. And if it's not that, then it's, you know, it's, it's headphone listening, but assisted headphone listening that either uses head tracking or some other kind of, you know, convolution or processing, so you've got a binaural expression.

Yeah, I think the demand, I think loudspeaker manufacturers must just be giddy, frankly, with the emergence of of Dolby Atmos And sure, lots and lots of households never had five one. So why would we imagine they'd necessarily have Atmos?

But on the other hand, since

everything in the media ecosystem now speaks this high level format. So I mean, from video games to podcasts to talking books or audio books to broadcast television to streaming movies, and all of those formats and genres have the ability to exploit these next generation, high order surround systems. My guess is that the future for loudspeaker manufacturers is very bright indeed.

Excellent. One question here this person's son is is

studying and is looking for some

in theater and media production is looking for some kind of placement or internship. I guess. Do you have any suggestions on how they'd go about finding such a thing?

Yeah, cold calls. Yeah. Do it the whole do it the old fashioned way. I know that's unpalatable or to some,

but yeah, there's, I don't think there's any, I don't think there's any, I mean, sure, start by searching on the web and find big organizations. Certainly enterprise level organizations

have official internship programs

that have, you know, official intake, and they accept CVS, and, you know, there's a process to do that. Elsewise,

it's a business of relationships,

and especially when you're young and just starting out,

it's not all about

being able to, you know, push button, get job, or

it is a business of relationships. And so, yeah, I would put yourself in a position where you're going to

have to talk to someone face to face and make your case and say, Hey, let me. Let me come and work for free for you. For a little while, I'm convinced I can give you a reason to keep me around. It's, it's kind of that simple. I think that's a really good point. A lot of I used to teach at metalworks, and a lot of the students at the end of the course would just sit there and fire out resumes,

and it just didn't do anything. And you really have to make the calls and, you know, schedule appointments and get out there. Obviously, events like the as events are a good networking event where you can meet

the employers, because they're they're there.

One last question here is AI, which, of course, is everywhere nowadays. This person just asking in your work now, how much do you use AI, and what do you see for the future?

Yeah.

Well, I don't think you can escape it.

Look,

you could make a principled objection to AI and

restrain yourself from entering that ecosystem, or you leveraging those tools. And I'm not necessarily fond of this answer, but I still think it's true that people who make that principled exclusion are eventually going to be on their back foot, pretty significantly.

Now that said, here's the good news.

Chat. GPT is a large language model. It's super easy to train a large language model because there's an epic amount of language in the world. You can train these things on all of the written words that have ever been written. Great. Okay, so now we make audio, and we make television and media and films and things like that. Here's the thing, there's not so much language about how we do what we do and when we do it, which is to say that, generally speaking, there does not exist a corpus of data

on which you could train a neural network, a large media model. I don't even know what the hell it would be called. It certainly won't be an LLM, but the great good news story at the moment is that for now and for the predictable future, individual pieces of our effort may be

greatly assisted or otherwise entirely taken over by the AIS that we can train, whether those are large image models, whether those are rags or llms, there's a whole bunch of them.

But we have actually no idea what an AI designed to fully make a television show would even look like, and it is not at all clear what you would train that thing on in order for it to come into existence?

The best way to answer that question is my singular focus every day is to make sure that everything we're doing is keeping a human in the loop.

I don't want a machine making my TV or mixing my record. I want the machine to be doing the stuff that I don't have the interest appetite or energy for. I want it effectively to do the dishes and mow the lawn so that I can write more books.

I want it to clean my dialog, not edit the film,

sort of thing. So yeah, suffice it to say that my main interest is in

maintaining the importance of the creative human mind who is agile and nimble and and learned and possessed of a point of view and an editorial objective, or an artistic or creative objective, some thing that they want to get across to the audience. Now the tools we use to get that there, yeah, there's maybe going to be fewer humans in total in the mix, but so long as there are humans in the mix, and there are humans who are responsible for and have the agency to make these sorts of critical and crucial decisions. So long as that remains true, I think we're okay.

Well, this is a great place to leave it. I think now I want to thank Michael Noonan for his time, and as I said, You'll all get an email with a recording of this, and you can look forward in a few months to grabbing a couple of copy of Michael's book, and all of you have a great day. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, everybody. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai