Posted by Rich Cerny
Our recent success with Trio Video at Tennessee’s
Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival reminds me that August 2009 marks the 15th anniversary of Woodstock ’94, which was the 25th anniversary of the festival that changed the world.
Telecast wasn’t around in 1969, since Corning didn’t invent low loss optical waveguide until the early 1970’s, and Valtec didn’t introduce the first single mode fiber cable until 1976. But in 1994, we were just introducing the
Adder when Polygram Records asked us to create the fiber optic infrastructure for Woodstock II. We jumped at the chance.
What young company wouldn’t want to participate in something like that? We turned it into a working party. Telecast made a company outing out of this, and everyone in the company got weekend backstage passes, sleeping in the RV or tents. By day, we all were supporting the fiber network between North and South stages and to the TV uplink compound. We supplied the Tac-4 cables, which Ace Audiovisual from NYC strung up on poles, and the Adders for Audio and the Vipers for Video (alliterative, aren’t we!).
We printed up multicolored tie dye t-shirts (“Official Lightpipe Gurus” and “2 more days of Love, Peace and Fiber Optics”), which we gave to the crew and dignitaries, including Al Roker and Larry “Bud” Melman (Calvert DeForest). With an audience of 350,000 people, plenty of rain and mud and not much in the way of sanitary facilities, it was clearly a mess, and we were very happy to be backstage. Yet the music was great, the sound was awesome and the event was an artistic and cultural success.
Since Woodstock, Adder audio multiplexers have become the centerpieces of your major sports broadcast productions, and we have continued to serve the pro audio community and keep our product performance keenly honed. They’re also used to broadcast our country’s top leaders and provide audio for many other high profile facilities and customers. Adders provide AV and broadcast audio for the
New Yankee Stadium, as well as sound reinforcement in opera houses and theaters around
the world. They are even used in recording studios. In 2004, Tony Bennett and k.d. lang’s CD, “
A Wonderful World”, won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. It was recorded using a Telecast 64 channel Adder system.
Over the last 15 years since Woodstock ’94,
Adders have evolved. They have greater capacity, more modularity, slicker remote gain and monitoring features and even better sound than ever before.
They’ve been around the block and paid their dues. There are a lot of imitators out there these days, some even trying to name their products like ours, but there is only one authentic Adder family, and it stands apart from all the rest.