SWEET BABY JAMES IN DOLBY DIGITAL

摘要

Trailers, some with dish antennas, and eighteen-wheelers lined the street behind New York's Beacon Theatre on a warm spring evening last year. There was a perceptible hum, not just from the cooling units and auxiliary generators in the semis but in the air itself. In an hour, singer/songwriter James Taylor was to begin a concert that would be televised live, nationwide, on PBS and simultaneously recorded on a 48-track, 24-bit digital machine and a digital video recorder. Inside the trucks, music producer and engineer Frank Filipetti sat behind a Neve/ AMS Capricorn 24-bit digital console linked to a Sony PCM-3348-HR 48-track, 24-bit recorder; in an adjacent trailer, video director Beth McCarthy prepared to call the shots from the seven-camera setup inside the theater. Eventually, the edited videotape would be combined with a 5.1-channel Dolby Digital (AC-3) audio mix-down—supervised by Filipetti and Taylor himself—for a DVD recording of the concert on the Columbia label.