A Barking Dog

If Dan Daley kisses Harman Pro’s ass any harder, he’ll likely suck out a turd. After returning from the lastest Euro jaunt, I slept soundly in my own bed and awoke in the morning refreshed, ready to get on with the first day back tasks. Visit the PO box. Cash the checks, pay some bills, run some errands. This season I now also catch up on my pro audio trade rag reading. Last Jan, for the first time in more than five years, I started subscribing to pro audio trade mags again. Trade rags are fine, they serve a purpose but they are anything but objective with regards to the current crop of pro audio gear. They are vehicles for sponsor ads, punctuated by some light commentary, occasional humor and stories of gigs commissioned by advertisers of the gear used at said gigs. I’ve got no problem with that per se, I can take if for what I think it’s worth. I have no axe to grind. I get a fair amount of readers here and have on more than one occasion declined to pen a monthly column for a couple of trade mags. I’m not able to write as I would here and it’s not worth the paltry amount I’d get for the submissions to change what I’m saying.

Daley writes “The Biz” column in FOH Online. In the current issue there is a bit about Harman Pro’s not really so new but rebadged and expanded HiQNet. It’s the latest version of Crown’s more than decade and a half old IQ control protocol, expanded (and updated quite a bit) to include other devices among the Harman Pro brand. Daley goes on to say the HiQNet is “as much a perceptual coup as much as a technical one.”

Well, in a word, no. Audio control networking has been around for quite sometime and has made pretty good inroads in the install side, but for portable apps it’s not yet offering any advantage compared to the price of implementing it. I expect this to change soon, though keep in mind in 1995 I was saying by the year 2k EVERY portable audio system would use some sort of network. I kinda missed the mark on that one…

The HiQnet technology is pretty cool as I saw a bit of it at NAMM and Infocomm this year. It’s transport independent, can wrap Cobranet audio, works with WiFi, supports auto discovery of devices, lot’s of cool stuff. It’s IQ all grown up. The problem is that it ONLY is available for Harman branded gear. That’s locking you into one brand, for everything. How about interfacing my Soundcraft surface with some dbx digital eqs and JBL selfpowered mons? Sounds good except there is no Soundcraft surface (though I remember the Broadway some years back), dbx digital graphic or JBL self powered mon. That’s my point, one brand or family of brands can not provide all the options for every application. There may be other things that work, but restricting the designer or operator to a single brand or badging only serves the shareholders, not the users of the application. Were HiQnet freely licensed and openly available, you would find no greater proponent than myself.

I was going to let Daley’s comment pass attributing it to a columnist perhaps swayed by a nifty demo at some trade show. Then I got to the next mag in my stack. Harman Pro. Hmm, don’t recall ever subscribing to that one. The mailing sticker info has my trade show signup info. At least they didn’t send it to me as a 20MB email attachment. There was a piece regarding HiQnet and as a self proclaimed audio geek, I eagerly checked it out. I was hoping for more technical data. How it works within the ISO layer model, the particulars of the protocol, any available APIs for third party developers. I didn’t get that. What I did get was a fluff piece, proclaiming all sorts of “we’ll save pro audio” BS. So, it’s more or less a brochure, no biggie but then I noticed the name on the byline. None other than Dan Daley.

So Dano is opining in his column in FOH about the product, while being paid for the contribution to what is basically a brochure disguised as a mag. Although I suppose the same could be said for Pro Sound News (producers of the Harman mag), Mix, FOH and Live Sound. Their main purpose is to sell advertising and I’m OK with that. But don’t have some supposed commentary piece fluff something up while the writer is being paid by the manufacturer for marketing propaganda fluff. At least tell me.

Keep it real gang, keep it real…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2005 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Barking Dog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.