Your auditory system, ears, brain, as well as your inner child, revel in when the sounds unfold in an immersive space, in 360° that is. The experience becomes active and fun. Your senses partner, play and love to discover atmospheres, harmonies, effects, melodies, intense or discrete, short or involved, majestic, extraordinary.

Superdiff is 360° audio. This delicate sound experience offers the opportunity to explore harmoniously the connections between sensations, sound, music and space. Everything sound becomes exciting as a multitude of subtle sensations reveal their origins and you become the actor of your Superdiff experience. As with any human activity on earth, there are ways of doing things that are more productive than others. Superdiff is a set of best practice for creating a beautiful immersive/specialised/augmented/360° sound system.  More on SuperDiff

The British Broadcasting Corporation. Affectionately named (the) Beeb. BBC has been the home of great human inventions such as XLR connections, audio faders, mixing desks, electronic music on tape, Monty Python, Russel Brand, H2G2 the Hitchicker’s guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams and Ambisonics.

The strange guys from the basement, looking after your computer and after the company’s network and security… Even though no one has ever spoken to nor understood one of them.

> Fun thing to try: Make a “loop” by connecting two ports of your local Ethernet Switch with one standard Ethernet cable, then time how fast the IT team makes it to the offending switch. Anything beyond 2 minutes would no be deemed acceptable…

Invented by the BBC, in the 50s probably, XLR standard is the ubiquitous high quality audio connection that nears perfection. Since it is an analog connection by design, recently XLR is being supplemented by ethernet connection in recent audio, networked, systems. It makes sense.

Fun fact:  XLR is a balanced connection for audio, made with 3 cables. It means you can pull your cable over long distances and still have a decent signal to work with at the other end. Since BBC invented XLR and since BBC is very English by design, they started with pin 3 positive, not the rest of the world. Thus XLR also became an excellent source of potential polarity reversal issues.

Mixing desk started modestly, invented by the BBC too. Like a few knobs and eight faders thingies that were used to make the Beatles albums. Soon after it got deified somehow, then they’ve started to inflate impressively. In the 80s buying one of those behemoth meant you had to mortgage your house as well as probably your parent’s and grandparent’s. The weaéthier musicians in the world started to spend a lot more time in the studio possibly due to the sheer size of the things, I am not sure it did anything good to improve their sound or the record made.

Fun fact 1: since Faders & mixing desk were invented by the BBC too in the 50s, and since in those days sound engineers were working in suits, faders were working upside down, with the off position being up. This was so to prevent a fader accidentally pushed too far up, thus too loud, inadvertently by a loose sleeve.

Fun fact 2: Once the centrepiece of any studio or live set, nowadays mixing desks tend to disappear altogether. First because digital advance and laptop computers already offer valid replacements and foremost because of the current move from traditional stereo bus mixing to more appropriate object base based 360° mixing. (See Superdiff)

Audio network Ethernet based standards trying matching the ubiquity of traditional analog XLR audio wiring, albeit in a lot more practical, performant, safer and smaller package. A single Ethernet cable can convey 512 or more audio channels over 100 meters or more. Doing so with XLR analog snakes would require most of the loading capacity of a rather large truck.

Fun fact: Dante competitors seem keen on making extensive references to Dante’s Italian origin by coming up with product names hinting at Dante’s death town: Ravenna. Or simply hinting at Northern Italy: Milan. The fun of this seem to have altogether escaped the humour of our good friends from the AES Organisation though…

The best guitars in the world, essentially a flat piece of wood with a flat neck. They make amps too.

Best guitars in the world too, a bit more expensive… Typically a nicely carved piece of wood with angled neck and headstock. Angled neck will break in two at the slightest of a fall.

Fun fact: You can find branded Gibsons (or Fenders btw) at absolutely any price point, from crappy Chinese axe, to a US Custom Shop model. Not to mention the real vintage stuff reaching 5 figures or more at auctions. Today, Fenders and Gibsons are mostly marketed at lawyers, accountants and architects, or kids, while working musicians are aiming at brands they can afford & play. Possibly they one fine day made theirs some sort of limiting beliefs about financial abundance, but that is altogether another story.

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