Talk:Advanced Music Systems

This Article Is Complete Garbage

Every word of this article is written by AMS Neve!

I just removed a false claim about Neve making "one of" (new term added by the Neve shill) the first hard disk recorders/DAW in 1984. This is a reworded copy of a false claim made on the company website, yet it doesn't even make sense; The Neve website claims the AudioFile was THE first hard disk based digital recording, editing and playback system, but this article gives that website as the sole source has backed off to "one of the first" due to this lie having been removed from Wiki many times. AMS Neve didn't make the AudioFile until later years, but exactly when is a moot point because another company had already done it in 1982.

Neve, AMS, and every other company associated with them have a long history of claiming to have been the first to create something when they weren't, and backdating everything they did to prior years.

This bogus advertisement of an article is peppered with countless sources.......which are all the same god damned thing, the AMS Neve website! That website (and the many different versions of it you might find in the internet archive) contains many false claims, the two most annoying to me are the claims of making the first hard disk recorder/DAW in 1984 and the first digital mixing console (the Neve DSP) in 1980.

If you look at each paragraph and the way it begins and ends, you'll see that every bit of it comes verbatim (give or take a few words) from the AMS Neve website, which is a commercial website for advertising purposes only. This is an internet encyclopedia, not the AMS Neve website!

Whoever is doing this repeatedly, please stop uploading the AMS Neve brochure to Wikipedia!

Sounds like someone has an axe to grind above! Disgruntled ex-employee? The Audiofile was released in 1984 (just) and was the first of its type - please see this interview (http://homepage.mac.com/kendallwrightson/cv/oldpubarts/dennis+weinreich.pdf) with Dennis Weinreich of Videosonics who first used the machine (as a customer) in 1984! With that in mind I am adding that one back in. In that context, 'one of' sounds reasonable to me, and it was certainly the first dedicated standalone unit for post production.

In the spirit of making this an accurate encyclopaedia if you have demonstrable proof of previous products why not mention them? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.139.238.249 (talk) 02:12, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Ex-employee? No, just someone who knows a lot more about it than you do.

More on point, who are you to accuse me of being a "disgruntled ex-employee"? You, sir, writing from IP address 212.139.238.249, are a CURRENT employee and therefore much more in line to be a future disgruntled ex-employee than I ever will be.

AMS NEVE Ltd. is on Billington Road, in Burnley, Lancashire, England. Surprise! Your IP address of 212.139.238.249 resolves to Burnley, Lancashire.

You are a shill for the company. You are at least one of the people who have repeatedly copied AMS Neve advertising copy verbatim into Wikipedia. You are the reason that this entire article contains three "sources", all of which are at ams-neve.com.

You should not be editing and posting content here, and even to comment here, you should be identifying yourself as a person with far too much conflict of interest to pretend to be a neutral and objective party on the discussion page about AMS Neve.

I just again removed "In 1984 AMS released the Audiofile, one of the first 16-bit hard disk based recording systems dedicated to Post production.[4]"

It wasn't my intention to strike the existence of this system from all recorded history, it is a great system from a great company, but claiming it was the first or even in 1984 is just stupid.

The Audiofile was not released in 1984, and that is the crux and the context of this claim: "In 1984 AMS released the Audiofile, one of the first 16-bit hard disk based recording systems dedicated to Post production.[4]"

Changing that to merely "AMS released the Audiofile, one of the first 16-bit hard disk based recording systems dedicated to Post production.[4]" makes it a non sequitur, like so what? AMS released a lot of things and so did everyone else, why puff it up? So I struck the whole thing until we can get it placed with correct and honest sources.

I'd trade you two kidneys and three unicorns for proof that "AMS released the Audiofile" "In 1984". It didn't happen then.

You've cited a .pdf scan of an Audio Media article which is an interview of an AMS user. It was just a guy talking into a tape recorder, and an editor got it published. The media outlet isn't taking responsibility for that claim because it is just an interview. He could have said the holocaust didn't happen and they could harmlessly print that, too. The AMS claims weren't researched and verified by Audio Media.

This is a common ploy for sourcing the unsourceable: Someone has tried to sneak around the sourcing rules by stuffing this article with a lot of "sources", but the sources here are garbage, a link to a non-editorial article, which is just an interview. People do this on Wikipedia to make a page they made about themselves quasi-legitimate, by quoting an interview of the subject himself. This is just a guy writing his own bio with another layer stuffed in the middle. I can post a Wiki article about myself, see it get deleted for being unsourced, then get someone to interview me where I say all the same great things about myself, then I can re-post the Wiki article, and citing that interview of myself as the source defends the existence of the article? Nonsense.

My main objection to this new "source" is that it is just wrong, and you could see that if you read it once and tried to a) research the claims/do the fact checking that Audio Media did not and b) make it make sense even within itself.

You've said, "In the spirit of making this an accurate encyclopaedia if you have demonstrable proof of previous products why not mention them?" Well that's the rub, Wiki isn't for writers, and there is no place for what they call "original research". But, they don't have the same rule on the talk page, and you seem to be baiting me and my claims of knowledge with a challenge, so I'll be glad to take a few minutes to slap you down.

What you don't know about early Digital Audio Workstations could fill a warehouse. I have more antique Digital Audio Workstations than anyone who ever stepped on the Earth, and more original factory and third party literature, too. Let me take you to school, son:

For years, AMS Neve has been claiming that the first commercially available hard disk recorder was the AMS Audiofile in 1984.

I assert that this is a false claim, #1 because the first commercially available hard disk recorder was the New England Digital Sample-to-Disk system for the Synclavier II, and #2 because the first commercially available hard disk recorder existed long before 1984, that being the New England Digital Sample-to-Disk system for the Synclavier II 2 which was developed in 1980-81 and commercially sold and shipped in great numbers in early 1982.

The Cars toured the world with a Synclavier II equipped with the Sample-to-Disk option in 1984 in support of the Heartbeat City album. They had recorded the album in England (Battery Studios) without having an NED system yet, but they dubbed the very complex backing tracks of wind, Fairlight sampled vocals, and other stuff that couldn't easily be reproduced live from the original 24-track analog master tapes into the Sample-to-Disk system and stored it on the Winchester drive to play back in sync with the Roland sequencers and LinnDrum in concert. I know, I was there, I heard it, and it can still be seen and heard on the Cars concert home video that was also seen by millions on MTV. At that time, not a single AMS Audiofile had been manufactured and sold.

Further, I have seen no evidence whatsoever that the AMS Audiofile actually did exist as a system that was marketed, manufactured, shipped, and in use in studios in 1984.

I have countless sources for this, including the NED Sample-to-Disk brochure from 1981, the Sample-To-Disk announcement letter/payment request from January 13, 1982, the Sample-To-Disk listing on the NED price list from March 22, 1982, the user manual "A MUSICIAN'S GUIDE TO THE SAMPLE-TO-DISK (tm) SYSTEM", Preliminary Version, Revised September 27, 1982 (There must have been at least one manual version before this, because the single page SFM RELEASE from September 28, 1982 says to throw out and disregard chapter 7 from the previous version.), the Synclavier II Instruction Manual, January 1, 1982 (has notes Synclavier II System Architecture diagram on page 5, all versions mention the Sample-to-Disk system on the left, one version has that mention plus a drawing of the hardware on the right), and my own personal inspection of my own personal Sample-to-Disk hardware with chips dated 1981 and 1982 and absolutely nothing in the board dated later than that. I don't just go on the internet and talk out my ass about these things, I own them, use them, repair them, restore them, build them, and have made my living from my knowledge of these machines for many years and I continue to do so. Conversely, you haven't fed yourself for so much as five minutes with your knowledge in this field.

As of this writing on 7/12/2011 (and when I originally wrote most of this on 9/6/2009), the current AMS Neve page

http://www.ams-neve.com/about-us/History/The80s/80s.aspx

has this false claim:

1984 - AMS releases AudioFile, the world’s first hard disk based digital recording, editing and playback system, and creates completely new methods of working with sound to picture. Early adopters included Videosonics and Chicago Recording Company.

Earlier versions of this false claim can be found in the internet archive wayback machine, where the file history.php.htm says:

In 1984, AMS further helped define the future of audio with the launch of the AudioFile - the world’s first commercial hard disk recording system - an event with an impact comparable to the introduction of multi-track. The speed and flexibility - along with astonishing capabilities that particularly suited video/audio post-production - saw the AudioFile rapidly adopted across the industry and especially in television. To this day, four out of five of Britain’s top TV soaps are edited on the system. AudioFile was awarded an Emmy® for Technical Achievement in 1992 and a Scientific & Engineering Academy Award® in 2004.

If it was so great way back in 1984, why did they wait 8-20 years to give it awards?

If it was used on so many great productions, why is it that the IMDB page

http://www.imdb.com/company/co0067957/

doesn't have anything about it before Young Guns in 1988?

This AES page has an introduction to the Audiofile in 1990:

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=5310

An Introduction to Hard Disk Editing Operations

This short piece is intended as an aid to the demonstration of a hard disk editing system given by John Gluck at the AES Hard Disk Recording Conference in London in May 1990.

Why would the AES call a conference to introduce members to something that any of them could have bought and been using six years earlier?

In 2010, they are claiming to have been the first, but a look at their trade show press releases, advertising, and pseudojournalism ("Echo Times" was a "magazine" that was really a paid advertisement---yes I have the originals) shows that they never made this claim in the 80s. Isn't that odd? Their earliest mentions of their hard disk recording system when the Audiofile was introduced explain why it was better than the present systems from Fairlight, NED, and Lucasfilm (one of those had never been sold and one didn't have hard disk recording yet, only the capability to spot effects from RAM). It would have been a great boast at the time, bringing hard disk recording to the world, but somehow, the world was already very familiar with it! This can be seen in AMS Echo Times in the 9/86 Mix Magazine, pages one and two.

Back to the false claim, "1984 - AMS releases AudioFile, the world’s first hard disk based digital recording, editing and playback system, and...Early adopters included Videosonics and Chicago Recording Company."

Videosonics founder Dennis Weinreich did an interview with Audio Media magazine in August of 1990.

It is ironic that you are using this article to defend the false claims of AMS Neve, because I had already added it to my dossier as further proof that their claims were false!

People have poor memories about what they did in what year. I routinely ask ex-users of various systems about when they got their systems, how much it cost, etc., and often get answers that are not only wrong, but just plain impossible. That doesn't mean that they aren't experts in their field now nor that they weren't then, only that they have a foggy memory of what year they were using a piece of equipment that they haven't even touched their hands to in 15-20 years, and their grasp of the details slips further when you consider the 5 other systems they have purchased, learned, used, discarded, and forgotten since then. Moreover, their expertise is usually as an artist, not as a technician explaining what hardware configuration works with what software and options, and not as a historian who routinely packs 10 hard copy sources for everything they say as I do.

That poorly written article, if true, debunks that story three ways:

1) the AMS Audiofile didn't exist in 1984

2) Videosonics didn't exist in 1984, and

3) the AMS Audiofile that Videosonics first used was hardly a commercial hard disk recording system running on an embedded computer system, but still a perfboard prototype running software on storebought desktop computers in 1985

(A side note for vintage DAW fans, this interview further suggests that the AMS Audiofile didn't have 8-track capability even in 1990, and didn't until the Plus model came out, presumably in 1991.)

Here is an excerpt on the first AMS Audiofile system:

AMS Audio file "We went hard disk very early on - the Audiofile was first shown at the AES in Hamburg 1984.

(Wrong. The 77th AES Convention at Hamburg, Germany was in March 1985.)

It was one of their first units and they brought it to us and said play with it. It didn't look anything like the current model, it was just a couple of Apricot computers stuck together with bits of verboard, but it worked. We did a demo for them on that first prototype machine - a British Airways commercial - and it was on their show reel for years." "Our machines have two hours storage each, and so far we haven't really needed to increase it." With AMS poised to unleash the eight track, transputer based Audiofile Plus I had assumed that Videosonics would be right in there with the first order . . .

Here is an excerpt on the Videosonics name not existing in 1984:

After a series of protracted negotiations, false starts and lucky breaks, Videosonics (initially called Post Production Audio) finally opened just before Christmas '84 and began operating out of Peter Jay's old TV AM office on the top floor of the Hawley Street premises which at the time looked exactly like a 'sixties secondary modern school block.

Post Production Audio opened at the end of 1984 and didn't become Videosonics until later years.

(This is well beyond the scope of the Wiki talk page, but my findings include the following that also debunk the false claims of AMS Neve: The oldest AMS Audiofile manual ever seen is undated, but appears to have been made in late 1989 or 1990. It has diagrams of hardware that is older than the many, many system photos seen on eBay in ten years. Even so, the Audiofile hardware shown in the manual shows ten (10) ports or interfaces for protocols or machines that didn't exist in 1982 (when the New England Digital Sample-to-Disk system was shipping in great numbers), and most of those things probably didn't exist even exist in 1984 (except for MIDI). These ten (10) ports or interfaces for protocols or machines are RS-422/Sony 9-pin control, Sony PCM-1610 CD mastering system, Sony PCM-1630 CD mastering system, Sony PCM-601 F1 recorder, Sony PCM-701 F1 recorder, Sony CDP3000 compact disk player, SCSI, AES/EBU digital I/O, S/PDIF digital I/O, and MIDI. And this is just from a drawing that describes a machine older than any actually seen here! All the ones actually seen have MADI, SDIF-2, and TAXI ATM as well.)

Traditionally, this is the point where you say "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"--208.127.100.156 (talk) 11:11, 12 July 2011 (UTC) --208.127.100.156 (talk) 15:00, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Whoever the user is with an axe to grind against the Audiofile should bear in mind the following points:

1. "Neve" does not exist, "AMS" does not exist. The current company, AMS Neve has very little (if anything) to do with Audiofiles nowadays so has very little to gain from 'shilling' an article on Wikipedia! The Audiofile was a revolutionary product and deserves its place in history. Your continued attempts to wipe it off this article are questionable, when it seems the only thing you are debating is the date of release.

2. Unless YOU provide references for YOUR sources other than "Because I say so", they are no more legitimate than the ones here. If you can be bothered to put in the effort and show some independant sources then your argument will be a lot more convincing than the current self-important bluster.

3. I am going to reinstate the text about the Audiofile, but without the date as a concession to the argument above, but if no verifiable evidence to the contrary is forthcoming I see no reason not to put the claimed date in from the article in future edits. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.251.142.120 (talk) 11:56, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your response, I thought you'd left the chat, as it was silent for 11 months there.

As for your point #1, you've said, "AMS Neve has very little (if anything) to do with Audiofiles nowadays so has very little to gain from 'shilling' an article on Wikipedia!", but I can surmise that they DO gain commercially by promoting their own image as an inventor and innovator (and they didn't invent the hard disk recorder) because 1) they make and re-make that claim on their own AMS Neve website and 2) agents of AMS Neve repeat and broadcast those claims on Wikipedia. Note the simple fact that this entire article and all the comments here but mine were made by agents of AMS Neve. The associated IP addresses have made almost nothing but posts related to AMS Neve, all in promotion of it, and my IP addresses show posts on many, many articles of many topics. So, no matter what they "gain", they are doing it, repeatedly. It is against the Wiki code to write an article for your company and defend it on the talk pages without disclosing that you are a company man himself. That's one thing that made this nasty, because the liar is the company itself, which isn't supposed to be posting here.

You have said "Your continued attempts to wipe it off this article", but that is nonsense, let me quote myself from a year ago:

It wasn't my intention to strike the existence of this system from all recorded history, it is a great system from a great company, but claiming it was the first or even in 1984 is just stupid.

Being the "world's first" and the inventor of something is an AWESOME claim, and it has to be right! It isn't, and that is all I am saying. Anyone refuting that to me is just digging a deeper hole for themselves as I bury them in verifiable sources (much of which is 80s documentation from AMS!).

As for your point #2, you've said, "Unless YOU provide references for YOUR sources other than "Because I say so", they are no more legitimate than the ones here. If you can be bothered to put in the effort and show some independant (sic) sources then your argument will be a lot more convincing than the current self-important bluster." Have you not read this page?!?! I've documented it like a thesis!

Of the many, many sources I have given (original documents), one (mix Magazine) is routinely available for sale on eBay and one (Synclavier II manual) is always for sale on my own commercial website. Of course, I have the originals of all of my sources in my own archives. If you can post an AMS Neve company e-mail address here, I can provide scans of every source, and if anyone is dense enough to doubt the legitimacy of that, I can make the originals available for inspection in L.A. or San Francisco. These are irrefutable. Know that.

As for your point #3, you've said, "I am going to reinstate the text about the Audiofile, but without the date as a concession to the argument above, but if no verifiable evidence to the contrary is forthcoming I see no reason not to put the claimed date in from the article in future edits." To be clear to anyone reading this before/after it may have changed, as I write this, it says, "AMS then released the Audiofile, one of the first 16-bit hard disk based recording systems dedicated to Post production." In my opinion, that is an entirely reasonable claim. Sad though, that there is no date given and no source is available for it. Worse, you are inside the company and haven't come up with anything for us to use (other than the company website that the company changes at will). I mean paper, hard copy. I have the biggest antique DAW library of anybody, and I don't have anything on the release of the AudioFile dated earlier than the 9/86 Mix Magazine, which itself isn't an initial release announcement, so it must have been released before that. Your assertion that it was before that, well, without documentation, it is, to use your own words, "Because I say so" and "self-important bluster".

Can you come up with something? I'd like to help and my resources are available to help, but I deal only in truth and not promotion of your company. You can't just create a Wiki page to claim your company invented something that was invented by someone else.--99.24.216.254 (talk) 03:54, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Update 6/25/2013:

(This refers to the AMS Neve web claim, "1984 - AMS releases AudioFile, the world’s first hard disk based digital recording, editing and playback system, and creates completely new methods of working with sound to picture. Early adopters included Videosonics and Chicago Recording Company.")

In April and June of 2013, the original AMS Audiofile from Chicago Recording was located in their storage, in pieces but still available for inspection. It was inspected and photographed inside and out, showing the insides of the control surface and the date codes on the ICs. Considering the date codes of the ICs (8805 on the WDC chip, SRAM chips dated 809, etc.), it couldn't possibly have been built before spring 1988. One handwritten tag appears to say January 13, 1989, but it is difficult to read. The layout and soldermask style of the board is totally unlike anything from 1984.

This, presumably the first machine in the US, the all-time biggest market for post production equipment, couldn't possibly have been made in 1984, or even in 1986 or 1987. It was most likely delivered in early 1989.

Photos are available for inspection.

Consider these claims about 1984, Videosonics, and the Chicago Recording Company thoroughly debunked.76.254.19.217 (talk) 19:44, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

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