Technology at NAMM 2018

Oscar Wilde once said that when business people get together they talk about art and when artists get together, they talk about business. So what happens when business people and artists get together? They talk about technology. 

Jackson Browne was presented with the Les Paul Innovation Award at the NAMM TEC Awards in January. When he accepted it, he talked about the first tape recorder he ever bought and how they took to the road to record "Running on Empty" in buses and live venues. Then he took the stage with Lee Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Danny Kortchmar, and Craig Doerge (the Section) and played a couple of songs. It was a magical night.

That wasn't the only opportunity to talk or learn about technology. There were a number of newly added sessions having to do with live event production. I couldn't attend them all, as much as I would have loved to, but I either participated in or attended several, including Mike Wood's "LED Technology: From Diode to Light," "Sustainability and Cost Savings in Event Lighting" presented by Mike Wood and myself, "Video Production: LEDs, Fluorescents, Automated Lighting; and Lighting Design for Video Production in the Age of LEDs" presented by Matt Ardine, Kieran Illes, David Kane, Mike Wood, and myself, "Electrical Safety for Stage and Set" presented by Alan Rowe and myself, "Video Production: Power on a Shoestring" presented by Kieran Illes and Alan Rowe, "Console Programming Workflow" presented by myself, "Media Server Programming and Pixel Mapping" presented by Matt Ardine and David Kane, and "Advanced Ethernet Networking" presented by Scott Blair, John Huntington, Kevin Loewen.

My favorite session was "Advanced Ethernet Networking" presented by Scott Blair, John Huntington, Kevin Loewen. These guys are the industry gurus when it comes to networking. Some of the notes I took during the session include...

• John Huntington said that terminating Cat6A is a "pain in the ass." He said you can use Cat5E for gigabit networks and it works fine.
• An auto IP is a way of automatically assigning an IP address to a device if it does not receive one from a DHCP server. Scott Blair said that auto IP works with sACN because, as long as the device has IGMP snooping, the IP address doesn't matter. Auto IP addresses are in the range 169.254.x.y.
• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a protocol that allows you to monitor a network. According to the panel, there are several SNMP applications but I think I missed their favorites. I'll be researching that next.
• John Huntington recommended the Byte Brothers Real World Certifier for testing LAN hardware and cabling. I found this link on his web site with information and specs.

There is still lots to unpack from NAMM but this is a start.