Again, my name's Deston Bennett.

I'm with the Grammy producers and engineers wing.

The Grammy Awards, as many of you may know, are the only

music awards that are peer determined, meaning it's not

the public that votes.

Those who vote are members of the Recording Academy, and who

are hands-on music creators--

artists, songwriters, musicians,

producers, and engineers.

From the very beginning at our founding in 1956, the basis

for the Grammy Awards process has been a commitment to

excellence.

The Recording Academy's original credo clearly states

that the awards are not about sales, and they're not about

popularity.

Musical excellence in all areas is the only criteria

Grammy voters are charged with to determine who gets

nominated, and what will win.

Knowing that little bit of information should help you

whenever there's some controversy about the Grammys,

as there sometimes can be.

For example, the year jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding won

the Best New Artist category against fellow nominees Drake,

Florence and the Machine, Mumford and

Sons, and Justin Bieber.

She won because the majority of the Grammy voters were

familiar with Esperanza and her work, and they saw her as

a stand-out that year.

It's pretty cool when you think about it.

Many of you who are musicians or audio producers or

engineers may be eligible to be members of the Academy.

And I'm happy to speak to you about that after this is over

if you like.

You can also get some more information or join by

visiting Grammy365.com.

Today specifically, we're here to talk about excellence in

sound, something that's key to great recordings.

The P&E wing has partnered with the Consumer Electronics

Association and others on an initiative we call Quality

Sound Matters.

We represent people who truly understand the difference good

sound makes, and we want to share their enthusiasm and

excitement about quality with everybody.

Today, we have a very cool presentation from

Grammy-winning engineer that we think you'll enjoy.

And I want to give a big thank you to Neil Annala and Joe

Rosenberg for bringing us here today.

We'd also like to thank JBL and Prism Sound for this

amazing sound system you're going to hear today, too.

The speakers in particular, they encompass some very new,

exciting technology that you're amongst

the first to hear.

And to top it off, I really want to introduce an amazing

engineer producer who's worked with artists including

Metallica, Lincoln Park, Green Day, and U2,

along with last week's--

well, not last week, but a recent number one album, the

Black Sabbath project.

He's a two-time Grammy winner for his work on the Red Hot

Chili Peppers' "Stadium Arcadium" project, as well as

Adele's "21" album.

He has another interesting honor.

In 2012, he was named the International Engineer of the

Year by England's Music Producers Guild.

Please welcome Andrew Scheps.

[APPLAUSE]

ANDREW SCHEPS: First of all, thanks for coming.

This is as full a house as we could have in here, I think.

So thank you so much, and thanks again to Neil and Joe

for putting this together.

This is awesome.

So later on, we're going to listen to a bunch of stuff,

which is the point of what I do.

And the Recording Academy has been really great about

sponsoring me to do this talk all over the country.

The idea of the talk, it was originally put together for

what the Recording Academy called their Grammy Future Now

conference, which was sort a mini, one-day TED conference

for producers and engineers, for people who make music in

Los Angeles.

And since then, I've gone around the country, and most

the time I give this presentation to

producers and engineers.

And it's because there's a lot of information in the

presentation that, as people who make records, we sort of

kind of know, but we don't actually know.

And so I'm trying to put numbers and facts behind the

things we think we know so that when we listen, you can

actually compare things and you know what it is you're

listening to, and why there might be differences and

things like that.

So I'll start the way I usually start by asking how

many people in this room are artists and make records, or

have ever released a record.

So still good number of you.

So if you've released a record, how many of you have

then gone and bought your record to make sure that what

comes off the services sounds like what you sent them?

So that's about normal.

About a third of the hands, maybe less.

And that's exactly the same with people who do that as

their day job-- or night job, depending on

the hours your keep.

It's not something people really think about.

They finish their record, they master it, like oh, it's done.

Send it off, and you're done.

And of course, now with all the digital services--

and we'll get into lots of them specifically--

and there are a few that happen to be housed in this

building or down in San Bruno--

there are lots and lots of different ways that music gets

out into the world.

And so, the idea is to give some context to know, what are

all these possibilities?

How do they compare?

And do they actually impact the consumer's experience when

they listen to your music?

So that's the idea.

Now along the way, I can usually get away with a lot of

sort of vagaries, because I'm talking to

producers and engineers.

All right, this is the question just for you guys.

How many people in this room know more about digital audio

theory than me?

There's going to be-- come on.

It's everybody in the room.

But seriously, how many people work directly with digital

audio in the room?

OK, I'm going to be vague.

I'm going to be slightly inaccurate, and I would

welcome corrections along the way.

So I've done the presentation, I think, 12 times now.

11 of those times were for producers and engineers, and

once was a few weeks ago, which is when Neil came and

saw me at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley.

And that was for a room full of people from the tech

community, including people from Google and YouTube and

Google Play music, as well as SoundCloud and Apple and

Rhapsody and Arteo, and a few other companies, and

Fraunhofer, who developed the MP3 and ADC codecs.

And I got my butt kicked.

And I'm fine with that.

I would love to get my butt kicked, because every time I

give this presentation, I know more, and I can kick butt back

a little bit, which is the point.

And I think what happens is people get into their little

rabbit holes on what they work on.

So I make records, and I want to make great sounding

records, but I don't want to follow it through the food

chain down to the consumer, because that's not what I do.

Now two years ago, I started my own record label, so now

that became part of what I do.

And I used to think, I'm going to start a label because the

labels suck.

They don't know what they're doing.

It turns out I don't know what I'm doing, and it's really,

really difficult, and there's a lot to it.

So every part of this process of getting music into the

hands of people who listen to it is unbelievably difficult,

incredibly technical, and fraught with peril for the

audio along the way.

So we'll talk about some of the specifics.

So what I want to do first, though, is put recording into

perspective, OK?

So for thousands and thousands of years-- and now we start my

very fine PowerPoint--

there has been music.

OK, for who knows how many?

Let's say 10,000?

Is that a good number?

This is where I get vague, and everybody in the

room backs me up.

So we're going to say 10,000 years, there's been music in

the form of songs that have been written by somebody.

And then, they would perform their song for somebody in

their village or something like that.

And the only way music could propagate would be either they

would go to the next village, or they would teach their song

to somebody and then they would go to the next village,

or people from the next village would come hear them

and go back.

Right?

So there's your music industry for the first 9,900 years.

Fair enough?

OK, about 100 years ago-- a little bit more-- but

basically, about 100 years ago, there started to be

consumer recordings of audio.

And there were a few things before this, but let's say the

wax cylinder was the first viable format.

So you have the Edison cylinder where people would

come into a room.

They would make lots of noise.

That noise gets collected by a horn.

It would get scratched on to this disc

that's spinning around.

And then, you could take that disc, and go

play it back elsewhere.

So all of a sudden, you have created

what is called recording.

Recording, especially back then, was technically just at

a delay process, right?

So you perform the music, and then you capture it for a

second, and then you can carry it around.

And then later on at any point, you can play it back.

So now, you can get rid of some of the space and time

constraints of everybody come to your concert.

Now you can record your concert and send it out.

Now this caused a huge uproar.

And in researching this for this presentation, and also I

teach a recording class where I try to give a little bit of

a history, there's some amazing quotes from John

Philip Sousa and people like that about how recording was

going to destroy not music, but society.

Destroy it.

You have to be in the room with the musician.

So I think we've all kind of gotten over that.

I mean, I would hope everybody here enjoys going to concerts

and things like that.

But we've gotten over the fact that we're going to completely

destroy society.

Music isn't the only thing that's destroyed.

And it's just one of many things.

OK, so that's 100 years.

That's it.

Then about 50 years ago, mainly with technology out of

Germany in the '40s, and then also some techniques developed

bouncing from one tape machine to another tape machine, you

started to be able to not just capture a live performance,

but you had what we call overdubs, which is basically,

you make a recording, and then you record some more stuff to

go with it.

So now, you can record at different times, and all of

those things up to make a recording.

A lot of the early Beatles recordings

were examples of bouncing.

They would record the band, then they would play the band

back while recording something else, combine those together.

So that was a technique.

The German tape machines allowed you to actually have

multiple tracks that side by side.

So you record on a couple of tracks, then you record on

another track.

So things we're sort of familiar with.