Dave in LA

photo taken by Mark Blevis

I’ve been in Montreal for the past day and I’m having a great time. I took the red-eye on Thursday night and arrived here Friday morning. We spent a couple hours working on Friday afternoon and had an amazing dinner followed by another hour of work after that. I’m here with some other Harman folks to setup a JBL Professional line array in a loudspeaker shootout at the Bell Center. The Bell Center is looking to replace their aging PA system and they’ve contacted 6 speaker companies (JBL Professional included) to come in and setup a system. Once they’re all setup, there will be a speaker shootout where they choose which one sounds the best. The winner gets the contract to setup the new sound system for the whole arena.

I’m here to help the JBL Professional speaker tuner use the software I helped write to setup this system. Its been a slightly stressful experience since our software has never been used in a setup like this and there were definitely plenty of opportunities for disaster in the past day. All in all the software performed flawlessly and the only problem was that I forgot an important cable for one of our measurement/tuning sessions (which was a pretty big problem) We had already done a first pass at tuning the system, so the cable forgetfullness wasn’t the end of the world, but I missed a golden opportunity to do some verification of our software and help convince others in our company of the usefulness of our software.

Hopefully everything turns out alright and JBL Pro gets this contract. I listened to some of the other systems up against ours last night and I feel like we were in pretty good shape. If we get this contract I’ll feel relieved, if not I’ll feel like I could’ve helped out a lot more by not forgetting that cable.