Mass Matters: Booth Design Lessons from NAB | The Pro Audio Suite

You are any history story. Welcome Hi. The Pro Audio Suite. Those guys a professional and motivated with text. The vido stars George Whittam, founder of Source Element, Robert Marshall, International audio Engineer Darren, Robbo Roberts, and Global Voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Tribooth, Austrian Audio Making Passion Herd, Source Elements, George the Tech Wisdom and Robbo and AP's international demo. To find out more about us, check the pro AudioSuite dot com. And welcome to another pro audio suite thanks to try Booth. Don't forget the code tri PAP two hundred to get two hundred dollars off your try booth. And it's the portable booth you can stand up in when you're traveling, which is kind of convenient. And also Austrian Audio Making Passion Herd. Lots of people are making their passion Herd at NAB, and we have two people at NAB in Vegas. We're not physically at ANYB right now. The show's closed for the day and it would be too dark noisy there. However, I did see a really serious, serious isobooth just around the corner from the Source Element. Oh the mecham the toca the car. It looks like the word mech art. They didn't see that. One have to go see that. Oh my goodness, gracious in MC is that what you're saying, mech m E C A R T. But it's from Quebec, so it's Meca without the T. Quebec. Yeah, from Quebec, from from the land where it's gonna cost how much an imports to bring it in. They also fabricate them in Greenville, South. Carolina, America. Right, that's right, Greville, South Carolina, which is where BMW's are assembled, but. From parts brought in from attack. Yeah, that's right. We're not talking about the T word or the work or the T words. No T words. Yeah, anything starts with the watch watch. The George Acousta Block. I've seen the demo. He's showing me a video. There's a product called Acousta Block. They show up at all the trade shows. I've seen them. I've seen them at a lot of the trade shows. And I thought they were bullshit. Well I kind of thought they're bullshit too. They have a very good demo, which what they do is they make a tiny iso booth out of their material. They have a speaker playing a considerable good volume, not a full range. It doesn't the speakers not putting out. Anything below probably one hundred hertz. Let's feed yeah, yeah, yeah, pesky little frequencies out of there. Yeah, but you put the liddle, put the lid on it, and it kills the You don't hear the shit. It's like yeah, And but the construction of it seems to be very lightweight compared to drywall because the way they sell it, each one of those layers is the same as a piece of drywall. Yeah, so okay, So in order for mass loaded vinyl to do what it does, it has to be extremely dense, right like drywall, And most mass loaded vinyl is about one pound per square foot, or it can be up to two pounds square foot. So let's say you have a sheet of Sorry for all the europe people, let's speak metric, but we'll. Just go to the difference because you take, we're using the right. You take the material that's one. To three hundred millimeters centimeters is a foot. Thirty thirty centimeters square that weighs Let's say, for just for this discussion. I have a kilogram. Okay, So multiply that by the area of a single sheet of gypsum or drywall, which in the US is about forty eight inches by ninety six inches, which is that is this similar standard there? Yeah, yeah, and so that would be the weight. You take that and multiply that by let's see that's four by eight. That's forty four times eight is thirty two thirty two times a half a kilogram, So it would be about sixteen seventy for a. Sheet, which is like eight pounds. No, it's like thirty two thirty two pounds Jesus. Yeah, so it's more than a piece of drywall. It's up there with a piece of drywall, So I guess. One drywalls thirty pounds it. Yeah, it's very heavy. So what it takes to stop sound is mass mass, whether it's rigid or not. The thing about acoustic block is it's a limp mass. Yes, and a limp mass. Is even better at controlling lower frequencies because. It gives it will, Yeah, it gives. So when a low frequency sound passes through, it will. Actually that's some of that's one of their selling that's one of their selling points. So like the way they construct their wall is. Imagine you've got two by fours or wall studs, so you pin this acoustic block between them, but you keep it loose and it. Doesn't it's not taut. And then you put the dry wall in front of it, and now you have two different masses that catch different frequencies and you get a broader band of noise reduction. It does work, It absolutely does work. I did a studio five six years ago where we did I like to call it the belt and suspenders approach, you know, redundancy. So we have isolation. We have vibration isolation because the drywall is floating on rubber isolators. We have double stud so the studs are separated between the two room. Staggered studs. Yes, and we have MLV mass loaded vinyl or acousta block. This is the that's acoustic. Block is a trademarked name, right draped behind the drywall, but not it can't. Yeah, it can't be sandwiched in between the drywall. Now people do mistake. Yeah, they'll like put it between two layers. Of drywall and that doesn't want you want the gap. Yeah, So it's an unbelievable amount of isolation between these rooms. I mean, the walls are about a foot thick when you measure from wall to wall. But man, it's really incredible how much sound that stuff blocked. So that guy's right. Here, you're right across the way from our booth. They're an interesting part of the hall source. So I looked at that and I think there's a serious booth that can be made highly more portable than anything. Well, the isovox. Actually not the box. You already know what it is. You've seen it, vocal booth, will booth to go. Yeah, they're isolator booth at source. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, but that thing is both and you remember how heavy. It crazy, I'm picturing something slightly different. I don't want to give the full product away, but I think that like they did too much work trying to put all these ringlets, and they kind of screwed the air tightness of it. The reason why this demo works is because it's all air tight, yes, and that's what's necessary. It's the combination of mass and an air tight seal exactly. So anyway, I saw this Macart booth, which is also you have to check it out. It's not far from you, guys, and it's it's one of those extremely high quality triple seal door. You know, the door has three sets of seals, you know, yeah, like the bank vault. Oh yeah it has that. Is this like one of the thirty thousand dollars booths? Yeah? Yeah, I see, it's like untouchable. Shit. They're very, very expensive. But you know they're at an AB because they're looking for broadcasters. Yeah, yeah, big time. But I have a few clients that would probably buy one jot. The problem with those are, like we had a an IAC booth. Can't move them? You can't sell them, well, you can't, so we had an ice but they're so heavy, right. Yeah, and granted like almost better than the booth you can build, yeah, and then it's perfect. And first of all, you will never want to build it again because the amount of physical labor it is to move those four hundred pound walls into places. It's backbreaking, right. And then you build this thing and one day you're like, one day I'll have to take it down. You're like, but this thing's worth twenty thirty thousand dollars. So you do it, and you take it down, and then you move it to storage because you don't have a buyer right away, and you start out and you're like, I will sell this thirty thousand dollars thing for ten thousand dollars, and by the end you will be happy to get someone to buy it for three or four thousand dollars because you're beating storage on it. There's not a lot of buyers audiologists, so they'll go at an audiology center, you know, and they'll have three or four or five of them, and then you'll see them show up online. And they'll be like, please take them before we have to throw them away. I have a good story. So there's a place in New York. There's a really good studio in New York called Voxpod, and their model is they have a room with I think it's like fifteen or at least ten of. These megabooths Chicago now in New York, Oh, New York. Okay, it's just they got one engineer. Like, if you're a voice talent in Manhattan and you are trying to do voice work, you might be better off not bothering trying to make your closet work, because you're never going to get your closet to be proof of all the sirens and everything else that's downtown Manhattan. You could get probably twenty or fifty bookings there for the amount of money you'd spend building an actual booth in your place. You're gonna have one engineer who is roaming the place managing all the booths. Each one can have one connection, or they got the whole thing Dante together, So you could be a remote studio and you can hire all the booths together in one massive ensemble with pure isolation between everybody. It's a really flexible place. Is building one of those in La right now? Same idea, but not that Dante. I don't think he's gone that far. Okay, but check out how voxpot gets their deal. There's a post house that has a whole bunch of these and they end their lease and they can't get rid of these things, and it's going to cost you like tens and tens of thousands of dollars to get these things physically happening. So he bought them all of them for a dollar. I believe if you would just get them. Out of there. Yep. I mean you're talking about like ten booths technically worth theoretically thirty thousand dollars each. He got three hundred thousand dollars of booths for a dollar because they were so desperate to get them out of that building. Oh my god. And they just would have had like landfill charges. Can you imagine the because when you throw stuff away, it's by white. Yeah, they were like they made a good deal. He made a good deal. Well let's see what else? What else? So, Robert, you didn't get to escape the booth that much. Which I went to Adobe, was talking to them about Adobe Premiere, trying to get actually Nexus kind of working there. Okay, conversation with them. You know, we had a lot of vendor to vendor stuff. It's been good. We've had broadcasters and it's been it's been a good show. The twentieth twenty fricking years. Twenty years of but twenty years about twenty years of NAB. I haven't done. I don't think I've done twenty NAB's, but I've done easily fifteen. Wow, Like, I know this place and. It's twenty years of sols elements. What's what's the crowning? What's the crowning achievement? Do you reckon? What's the one? I mean? You know, so it was great? Is that the crown in the jewel, you reckon. I'll speak from my perspective. I So in two thousand and five and six I helped build a company, or I did the engineering side of a company called out of Here. My friend Steve Napschin wanted to be able to make kits for his actor clients who worked at Wood Holly and then Davis Click. These were studios in Hollywood. They did a lot of recording of promo right. A lot of promo works, all kinds of voice of work, a lot of whole times. But so Steve had the dream of like making kits that they could take, that he could rent out to talent who are going on vacation and be able to continue connecting at I stand clients from wherever they went. So we came up with v I called them VEO to Go kits featuring source Connect, and. The name of the company was out of Here. It was out of here, out of here, and so that was really a big part of house. Source connected, I mean source connect was the key for this thing to work. And I built kits with little MacBook. No, they were PowerBook G four or G three. With like M boxes or something. Yeah, M boxes I had. I had sound devices m M one mic pre amps which were really nice quality pre amps. And then for sixteens what he won six of course a cannon ink jet printer in the bottom really their copy. Yeah, and these kids are like like what four or five hundred dollars a week? What did you put all these in a suitcase? Repelican case? It was a rolling pelican which is like that hard shell plastic case one. Yeah, you know, And I would pick and pluck the foam to fit all the gear, and. Then he would provide you the ID in lines to die to Source connect into, and your clients would dial in on the ID inside because back then it was mostly all IDN. I mean I I remember he wasn't too happy with me when I did ICDN bridge. No, I know, my friend he created this business model and then Source Elements decided to do a bridge, which they had. Love is a bridge apparently, Well, I'll be honest. One of the reasons why is because we were trying to get source connect more promoted, and the bridges were just kind of expensive, and so people weren't bridging. Because of like kinds of slash difficult. To Yeah, the cost of the bridges, and so we were just trying to drive down the cost of bridging so that talent were more likely to pick up source Connect and say I can get to my clients who are still in those days a lot on ISDN. Right. So it was it was just like it was a little bit one of those things where we were just trying to lost leader kind of. It was kind of funny you when source Connect came out though, because in this country there were no really no home studios for voice talent. So the ICDN thing was studio to studio, you know, at broad cost or whatever. Well you had ic end at your house, right, Andrew. Yeah, I did for a while. But I remember I was stumbled across Sauce Connect. That was two thousand and seven. I forgotten what year it was, but I looked at my license brilliant and second. And I went to a studio to do a job and the guy who owned the studio, Mike Slater, he's really techy, and I said, oh, there's something you should check out, this thing called source Connect, and he moved aside, and I looked at the screen of his laptop and he was looking at source Connect, and he said, yeah, it looks really interesting. Are you thinking about getting it? Not that I had any reason to get it, but I said, yeah, I'm curious, this could be really interesting. So he said, well, if you buy it, I'll buy it and then we can test it. So we both bought it and then we started testing source connect and that was two thousand and seven. Yeah, oh baby, that would have been sourced three point zero three. Had no that would have possibly been like two point five ye like really early. It might have been before Restorable Place was even made. I know another another person who reached out to us super early on it was Joseph Riano. He was like, free me of this cage. Oh yeah, I want that was that kind of the golden handcuff. Yeah, was like we were trying to get people liberated from that. Yeah. So that that's how That's how out of Here really became a big source connect user. And you know, hey, George, just a quick question, George, a quick one. Out of here did they spelled he at h Yeah yeah clever clever. It's like like dollars with here and there right yeah. Yeah. So Joe Sip like talk about ICM bridging again like two thousand and eight, two thousand and seven, really early on. He's on a cruise ship with like thirty dollars an hour Internet because it's up to the satellite internet down over to wherever he bridged from. I'm not sure he might have. He might have bridged from his house. He might have self bridged. I'm not even sure. Oh yeah, he did try doing that and then into. His is SDN box and off to the clients and on that ship. I mean it was like three seconds of latency Hughes Satury, Yeah, exactly, but it was like in the middle of the Mediterranean, I SDN bridged source connect like and he's also done like he was one of the first ones to do three G at the time, sell connections on the side of a road. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's been really amazing to see source connect like it started as a way to liberate a lot of clients from being connected. We didn't we didn't see that though, you know, it's funny, like like we made it was from my perspective, well, this was a whole market. Like, it's funny how we've made things that we didn't see the market for initially. Yeah, we we we made it. We saw it as just like studio to studio connections. But we're just trying to drive the cost down of DN because ICDN was so painfully expensive. It was like two thousand dollars a month or more by the time you're done with usage and everything. So we're just like, hey, studios need to have a better way to connect. But then these DN talent, a lot of them who were like, you know, they were kind of doing it. They were making like the six figures plus I don't even know, and they're like, I am chained to my house and I have a great job, but I got to get free. So they're the first ones that are like, I'm willing to spend six hundred, eight hundred dollars on something that's gonna actually back then, source connect three point standard was only three ninety five. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I built a kit just for Donald Fontaine. He had his own kit. I built one for him, and uh, and I'll never forget it because the laptop was in the lid of the kit, and unfortunately I didn't tell him that he should flip the laptop upside down so the screen is on the inside. And he went on a cruise ship and that thing got crushed under the weight of the luggage on the cruise ship and cracked the screen. He pulled his laptop out in England after the cruise and the screen was cracked. He had to go to a store in London and buy a laptop a MacBook on the Yeah, and we got it back and wow, but I learned a real lesson. But yeah, there's so many stories around source connect. Oh my god. Well I discovered source connect when I first started podcasting. My first podcast was a show called the Mojo Radio Show. And I was here in Sydney and the guy I was doing the show, which was up over the Blue Mountains three hundred and fifty kilometers away, and we wanted to do it like this, and that's how I discovered Ques. How long have we been doing the Proordiu Suite for eight years? This is series eight? Yea, this is eight years. Yeah, this is. I can't believe it either, but hell wow, yeah that was a Christmas well maybe eight years two thousand and It. Starts like you just inviting because you you two are doing a podcast, like, hey, be a guest. I'm like, okay, let's be a guest. And George is there and it's like it just turned to that like chemistry. But well then we decided we do the Christmas episode and said, who, let's get a couple of guests back, and we decided on YouTube, and all of a sudden, there was this chemistry. It was like, hell, this. Works, It's crazy. How Yeah. I mean, I mean I had spoken to you, Robert, and you and Rebecca actually with. You forever, but before the podcast, I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't know Rob before the podcast, to be honest, I don't think no, yeah, yeah, but we had spoken like kunt of what we were talking about. You something we're talking about. I think, I think you and the guy from New York. I think at Lotus we're wanting specific stuff from source connect and how can we connect talent, And there was like lots of like casting possibilities, and there's always like discussions, and I thought, I always just remember you being like super engaged and like full of ideas and. Your typical voice actor. Well, Andrew is like like geeky, techy. We like wanted to be more techy than he is. But I love it because it's like, no, it's something ill Andrew for trying exactly. Yeah, well, not intimidated, but I'm not saying things like oh, I don't know, I'm amish. Appreciate the quality and wants. To know more, and yeah inquisitive. Yeah. Yeah. It was funny actually because one of the first trip I made to the States for real time casting, I went to LA and met with SBV and after a meeting I didn't think of her name now, she said I know someone you should meet and I said, okay. She said a guy called, do you know Joe Cipriano, And I said, no, I don't. She said, I'll arrange a meeting. Give me a call tomorrow. So I called him the next day and then went out to see Joedy's place in Belia and that was and I saw your studio, George, the one you built. Which is probably one of your best buildouts. Wasn't the best, Yeah, that was earliest. It's still like so beautiful, just like fish Tank. Years ago, not really long, but that is the one people remember because Joe was such an outgoing person. He loved to share his studio. He had parties at that house that. Vaulted ceiling with the fish tank studio in the middle of it, and it just looked awesome. That was a cool space. It was. It was so sad that he had to demo demo when he demoed oh yeah, yeah, that was a heartbreaker. I came in and took all the gear out and sold everything that I could sell for him, and that was the end of that. Wow, I have another funny one really quick. So things we made that we didn't see the use exactly, Like we didn't see the talent would want source connect as their own thing instead of Studio studio. But also we made this thing called source zip a long time ago. Yeah, and it was made just to like, you know, like the first use was, hey, we have an ad R session and we just need to get you the scratch audio really quick. This was been uploading and downloading files took forever, so we're going to compress it all and get it too quick because it's just for a reference. And then all of a sudden, it's like we are getting craploads of downloads and purchases from like Egypt and UAE and all over the Middle East, and. We don't know why. It's just like this thing took off a little bit in the Middle East. And it turns out basically like those Internet connections there. When you buy internet, you're basically charged by how much you use it. So they want to metered, and they wanted to exchange files, but it's like I didn't want to give you all seven gigs of it. Yeah, so here be able to send the most the minimum set the minimum set of data that they kids have no idea about. Well, i'll tell you. It's another interesting thing with source connect, going back to the beginning, when you were building it for studio to studio and even up until probably fifteen twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, you would never have thought that one day all the voice out of talent agents would say to their clients, you must get source Connect, not the free one. Yeah, that's the really poorly named one. Is that your biggest regret. It's one of the dumbest. Things we did was to name our Chrome offering source connect now because back then, now is like a way. It was sort of like eye this and I that, and now was sort of like a tag that was used for various products. And I was like, now is our free version, and that's right. When a like that's like basically Google puts out this Google Skype zeiphing dot org. They all get together. They put out this codec called Opus. We had spent we had spent. Like more than a house licensing this codec, like and then it was like a freak out. And within a year or less, all of a sudden, all this stuff starts popping out on Chrome, right and and I'm not gonna name names, and we're. Just like we got to answer it. And so and Rebecca basically like literally just disappears for a month and it comes out a month later source connect now. And we're like and and we were just gonna like like once you get into it had so many flaws with how we're just like, so it's gonna bet so much better. It treats the audio properly, like these just communications. And we didn't know how to charge for it. And there's like a feeling like you can't really charge for this because it's just this thing that's in chrome, and like how do we best use this as a foil against all this other stuff? And we thought, oh, we'll make it free. Making mistake it was, Yes, it's true. Because because what happens is everyone with that's free. I don't know about it. I'll just pay for the other stuff too, and it just made it confusing and it could never technically connect to Source Connect because there's just like completely different things and it just good. Many many many years later, you had to make amends come out Exus. We moved it over to Nexus because we had so many products. Yeah, so we were like, okay, we're going to be a two product company. Just sort of well speaks speaking of Nexus. I don't know whether this is a compliment or not, but if there's one one product that has changed my workflow dramatically that I've come across in thirty six years, it's Source Nexus. It has changed the way I work on a day to day basis since the moment I had it. I love it for me. I like, obviously no I use and love Source Connect, But if I had to rank my favorite source Element product, Nexus would be the top of the list for sure. Yeah. It's a it's a real Swiss army for engineers like Boy's talent don't need it as much some some could, but yeah, it's it just like breaks. It just consolidates all this hardware that you can just now do inside the computer, and it makes your computer and all the apps and sides your computer cohesive into a setup. It's funny how it comes up too. I'm just doing my job at sworst idea, and it's like, why can't you just do this? Like why do I have to sit with this room full of like phone patches and this and this. I can just wrap this inside the computer. And well, the thing for me, the thing for me that there was the killer for me, and the thing that changed my life was when I had sessions with more than one Source Connect connection in the days before Source Connect four obviously, but then I had clients and creatives on zoom yep right, I mean, how the fuck you would do that without Nexus? I thank god I never had to try it. It's a really funny thing about Nexus also, which was a great product, I agree, but it also highly enabled our competition to the point that you would find like you would find like x y Z Chrome Browser solution, and then in their PDFs the instructions are, go, get Nexus to do the part that we don't do, which is the plug in. It's like source Nexus is. Now letting the Chrome things do a little bit what Source Connect did, and we were like, well that's good. You know, we're getting a like, it's just a useful thing, and I think that you just put useful stuff out and like let the market and the use figure itself out. And I needed it, so I wanted it. And that's a lot of a lot of how it goes. Great ideas stop exactly. Well, that's how the passport came to be. And then and then it kind of gets ripped off, you know, like like at the end of the pandemic, like one of the Dow makers rips it off. Yeah. Yeah. But then we're like, okay, so what is it used for? And like you said, like I want to hook zoom up, I want to hook hook up. It's like, all right, well let's do let's complete that whole story. If they're going to like try to hijack the the simple thing that it did, let's complete the whole thing and do all of it better. And so it kind of evolved into a whole new suite of play. I mean. The other thing. The other thing that I've noticed I've seen some radio stations and I know Sideshow at Triple M here is a great example. He's got it because he would have jocks come to it and go, oh, there's this interview from such and such on you know whatever, can you get me a grab of it? Right? So before NeXT's days you would have to dump it out to you know, a two track recorder on a laptop or something, and then play it back into pro tools or whatever. Whereas now it's just as you know, it's going to YouTube, click blang bang bang done straight into protols. I mean, the thing that I would do is I would have like, oh, I need to do this and that, and it's all this application and that would have like a sixteen channel interface and pro tools, and then I'd have two or three USB audio interfaces and I'd go out XOLR one interface, your other one, and I'm like, why can't I just do this in said the computer? And that's where maxus comes from. I'm like, why can't I just have a plugin that faces a driver instead of a piece of hardware that faces. It went back to out of here? Out of here was a rack of zephyrs. It was a Mac pro or whatever we're dig two it was at first it was a dig O two. Then we think we had some kind of an m audio. Eight and eight our I was out our analog. Everything was patched analog. We had a we had a mixing console that had every single output of the patch bay running into it, so we could patch. In and listen to anybody. Yeah, well if we wanted to check in on a session to make sure it sounded good. And this was originally in Steve's garage or in Steve's garage. Yeah, And then we had so we could we could do quality control. We could also patch in from the bridge and say, hey, we're at the bridge, just leant me to let you know the client or whoever the Let's just say it was Joe. Joe's going to be right there with you guys, just to hang tight, you know, But actually it was George. Del Hoyo probably more than anybody. I had the same thing with my bridge, except I would source connect into it, and my mixer was the MO two, like the same thing as the Apollo mixer, but like MO two's version of it, and then from that all the oxygens I could like source connecting and be like, Okay, guys, is there a problem we're gonna help you with? And I'd be like, I remember times the hotel rooms, and just like, what's going on? How can I help with? Yeah? Well, well, Steve, Well so, Steve, I know there's so many stories about out of here too. Going back, Steve, after we got it built and working, Steve was like, can I remote control this thing more? Because I still have my day job at Davis Click. I think he did it from Hawaii too. Yeah, and he did it from Hawaii for a while, but he'd had his day job at Davis Click and he'd be like, I still want to run it. So I had not only remote, a way for him to obviously zoom not zoom in. Actually, in his case, viewer Team Viewer Team Viewer took control the computer source connect to talk to talent or clients whoever was on the connection. And then we had connect now for him to patch in and listen. Think it was source connect now for listening in and then and then I had a power switch that was IP controlled. Yeah, so we had to shut off of Zephyr remote or he started a z ephyort. He could do all that hour from the studio on his laptop. Yeah, so he was running sessions bridges while sitting in the studio recording promo or whatever. That IP controlled power. Eventually, Rebecca and Service Elements takes over the iced N bridge, I think. And that was a menu item in the web interface. Oh yeah, like reboot the yeah, reboot the Zephyr. Yeah, yeah, that was all part of the deal. We had to remote control everything. Oh it was great. But how did he remote control the mixer to be able to tap in or not? He couldn't. He would have to. That's why I did the mo. Too, because that was a software control mixer. Yeah, you know, we could have obviously, there were so many ways we could have made it more sophisticated, but it was. It did everything he needed at that time, and it got the job done. And we had to move that whole rack to his sister's house when they sold their home in LA And I remember. For a while I was thinking about because he had all the contracts on those ICD in lines and we're in Chicago and ic DN in California is still like one hundred bucks a line, and she was like eight hundred dollars. No, it was. It depended on the service. If you don't a Horizon network, you might front jet it for yeah, forty fifty bucks a month. Frontier was like one hundred at and T would be like eight hundred dollars crazy, And it's all monopolies in the areas, right, Like if you wanted ISD in a certain area, there was only one carrier who could give it to you in that particular area. You own the copper with DN. The companies that provided the service owned the copper, even the wire on the pole. I remember stories of people in La. They live across the street from each other. One side of the street is Frontier, the other start as Verizon, and one guy is charging like two hundred dollars and the other guy's gonna get for like sixty dollars. It's like, like, how about we just throw over the street. Oh my god, I know. I remember the first DN gig idead and I was stupid because I actually called them, oh gosh, and. You paid through the nose. Oh yeah, I have a funny one. I bought a used is SDN box and they left it programmed to auto redial, and so I do I do a bridge? Yeah, the thing goes oh lots of connections. So I did a bridge through it. And then the thing when they did when they finished the bridge, that god damn Maya recalled the peaceful back left that thing on for like eight hours and I got like a three hundred dollars bill. Oh yeah, because they didn't know they was their box answered it. They weren't in there. Like, yeah, I'll tell you what I happened to too, Andrew. That happened to. Miguel Ferrer. Is that name ring a Belle mcguir Ferrer. Oh yeah, he did a lot of a lot of promo and I think he got an eight hundred dollars invoice because he had dialed up and never hung up the dollars. Yeah, it was a bit of a contention, is who was going to pay that bill? It was I remember there are Yeah, Att will go after you for that too. Yeah, he was not happy. I'll give you another really bad one. By the way, Miguel. We made v is SDN towards the end, which was like we figured out how to electronically jump instead of like bridging with analog cables, had to electronically jump the call from IP to ISDN. That's a big trick. It had this external hardware box. We're using these like deep telephony switches. It's like three in the morning, My buddy and I are just working on this switch that trying to make it work and we finally get it to work. I'm like, oh good, let's leave it. Let's go in the middle of the night freaking. Some assholes find this thing on the internet and they pump thirteen thousand dollars worth of phone calls through it to Cuba, to every high rate place there is to call. And we got and the phone company stuck us with the bill. They're like, get out a contract. They're like, you are responsible for that I and I was like, man, these hackers found that box in eight hours. Unbelievable. I mean we're talking about like five dollars a minute. I want to hear what Andrew's story was, because we cut him off. But Andrew, what were you? What were you saying? Was I just did it first, your first I d N session and I dialed in, And of course the amount of money I got paid for that job was less than what I paid to the tail code for that gosh, oh my god, this must have been one expensive This must have been why. Nictate handed me his ISD and Zephyr Express one day and she said, I'm never using this again. Do you want to have it? Well, I mean the rates on d YOUNG calls towards the in the middle of it. If you were shopping right, you could sometimes find them for like twenty thirty cents a minute. But at the same time, especially if you didn't have a contract with a minimum amount of usage, easily a dollar a minute. The right wrong country to call to, or we're talking about like the South Korea's in the world than any of like the more oppressive countries five dollars ten dollars a minute, and. Rememb're dialing those long distance codes ten tens. Yes, exactly. But then the craziest ones were the ISDN lines that would go up to satellite. Oh yeah, because okay, so like you're you're a reporter in Iraq, in the desert of Iraq. Just remember we started this conversational about ab go ahead. Yeah, so your report in the middle of the desert store Iraq. Reporting here with that really long latency is a box that's wireless satellite ISDN actually up to the satellite, down from the satellite to another place that continues that DN call over to the station. Yeah, that's like a twelve dollars a minute times two. Two line call. You're being Paige Droppert, Am I really, this is Rebecca saying let me know when you're on your way. He's being summoned to a very special event party. Yeah. Yeah, but we're talking about the twentieth here. On a podcast. Yeah, and we're on a podcast and we're talking about what they want us to talk about. Well, actually, what you should do is you should put I'm on my dot dot dot and send that and then send podcast. My films in here somewhere. My watch is showing me that. But yeah, well it's been fun. I have one for full more one more full day at NAB, which I'll be spending mostly in the North Hall this time, which. Is where a lot of the pro audio dealers are. So I definitely plan on showing the passport around to a few companies. I've already shown it to a couple of people today, but I hope to get in front of the right people I get some more interest in it because the broadcasting world needs to see it. Yeah. I've shown it to about two broadcasters that cam up. They were kind of we're radio, and about three voice talent usually come were like I just want to thank you, and you know, but I've been like, check this out. The ones that would normally buy a bunch of com rex box you know those portable com rees access or the timeline thigh line those things, you know those those those codec Yeah, there's there's. Three four thousand dollars. Yeah, absolutely, passport video and a cell phone, a cell phone. Yeah, you're done. Absolutely, Yeah, connect and probably more audio routing capabilities and like the two mics in and. A way more flexible. Yeah. So that's that's what we're looking. At talking about phones. Yours is Ringing Robert and getting lived up the audio Sweet and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peaches and mixed by Robot. Go to your own audio issues. Just ask dot com tech support. From George the Tech Window. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggests a topic, or just say good a drop us a note at our website audio site dot com