And here we go! The 121st AES would indeed be fun, because we shared a booth with our friends from Wave Distribution, Empirical Labs and Tonelux as well as Chandler Limited, Paul Reed Smith Guitars plus the ever-popular Gearslutz Lounge.

And here comes the Duo Infernale again: Dave Derr from Empirical Labs and Paul Wolff from Tonelux. Please note the adequate outfits: Dave with dark sunglasses, Paul with a Bluetooth headset. In the foreground one of Dave's babies: the Lil FrEQ.

Gil Griffith, president of Wave Distribution, has an obvious reason to smile happily. Just in this very moment he has received the first and for the time being only emergency compressor by elysia, the new official contingency compressor in discrete class-A technology. Gil's first question: "How many of them can you build?" Obvious ;-)

After the Gearslutz dinner at the Cha Am Thai restaurant there was another truly special treat waiting: Tony Espinoza from SF Soundworks had invited the GS members to join a party at his location. The ultimate highlight of this event was Warren Dent from Zen Pro Audio who amazed the audience with his ingenious piano interpretations of various Metallica classics.

We said goodbye to San Francisco enjoying gorgeous weather. Gil took a final snapshot of Ruben and Dominik posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, and then the trip continued on Highway 1 to Los Angeles in order to meet our first demo appointments.

Our first host was Eric Valentine from Barefoot Recording. After an ample test of the alpha compressor his comments were the following: "It really helps to get in definition. The Release really feels invisible, and that's where lots of other compressors fail."

Alan Yoshida from Ocean Way hates patchbays, so he hooked up the alpha compressor directly to his console. The result: "I am more than impressed. Damn! This thing can pass signals like a motherfucker. Especially the amplifiers are amazing. You boys did excellent!"

At the end of our tour we took the plane to New York and visited Phillip Sztenderowicz at Sterling Sound and Andy VanDette at Masterdisk. The picture shows Ruben demonstrating the alpha compressor in mastering action - Andy is obviously impressed.

Finally, a special after-hours 'Danke schön!' to our good friend Larry Hammell of Deep Wave Productions for taking such good care of us Friday night - even if we didn't know the rules, you made us feel right at home.  And no harm done (except for Gil twisting his ankle...)