Recording: Then and Now - Part IV

So I'm in the U.S. Air Force, and suddenly discovering that the world of voiceover is literally everywhere, even in the military! I'm once again in a real studio, this time in the base "radio station"--not really broadcasting at that point in time, but still great for recording. The mics were Old Reliables--standard issue Shures--that had probably been in there since Elvis was in Germany. So we spent some time recording those narrations, planning ahead for the time when we'd have our digital solution figured out.

Sadly, I'd never get the chance to finish that particular project. As is the case with many things military, those plans changed. In fact, plans changed so much that I found myself having to make the decision to leave the Air Force and return to civilian life. I have no idea whether those briefings were ever automated, but somehow I doubt it--it was good training for junior officers to have to memorize all that info!

So I was then back in civilian life, and through an interesting set of circumstances I found myself working at The White House. Yes, that White House. The Executive Office of the President of the United States. Now, don't get too excited. You have to understand that there are many hundreds of people who work in support of the EOP, and the vast majority of them never get a chance to meet The Man Himself. I was working as an IT (although we called it IRM--Information Resources Management--then) support guy in the Financial Management Division. Yep, I was the beancounters' bit-pusher. Woohoo! Surely THIS place was as far from the world of VO as I was going to get.

Wrong again, kemo sabe.

One of the jobs of the Financial Management Division was to prepare briefings on the status of various organizations' budgets and financial management (surprise, surprise!). Now keep in mind that this was a world without PowerPoint, or even Windows (which was still in the non-usable version 2.something-or-other). So we had a Macintosh IIx as our desktop publishing system.

Naturally, with its superior "multi-media" capabilities, the Mac became the target of our presentation desires. It had 8-BIT STEREO audio output!! Unbelievable!!! Well, OK, we were easily impressed back then. But a little program called HyperCard was rocking the world in those days, and it allowed such amazing things as - gasp - playing SOUNDS while displaying IMAGES!! We were ready to head down the path of digital information presentation.

Sort of.

The problem with the Mac II was that, despite its wonderful (!) 8-bit stereo sound output capability, it had NO sound input capability. That's right. No mic. No line in. No nothing.
What were we supposed to do? Well, the big feature of the Mac II series was its modular architecture. It actually had an expansion bus that would allow the installation of circuit cards to add new capabilities to the machine. So that was our plan--find a sound card for the Mac.

How did we do? Stay tuned...