Lodestone Blog

Welcome to the Lodestone Catalog blog. This is John Weber, president. I am a fan, and occasional producer of audio theater.

In early to mid 2004, I purchased the Lodestone Catalog from Richard Fish, who founded the company in the mid nineties. He had hit upon some bad times, and was unable to keep up the company in a manner which served the community of audio theater fans. I have tried to re-grow the company, and have succeeded in growing its variety of offerings beyond what it originally had.

I also placed a new empahsis on customer service. We aim to fill all orders within two business days of when it was placed. In fact, we manage to fill nearly all orders arriving before noon on the same business day, and nearly all order arriving late in the day or after closing on the next business day. We pledge to communicate about any problems promptly. We show online if we ever run out of stock on a product.

I hope to communiicate here about new products, about new news, and about topics relevent to fans and producers of audio theater. As always, I want to hear back from you, about your thoughts or suggestions. Feel free to contact me, or comment in this blog.

Earlier this year, Lodestone discussed with XM Radio the possibility of running an ad on XM Sonic Theater. At the time, they declared themselves willing to waive the standard minimum monthly purchase (equal to a significant percentage of Lodestone’s annual sales) for a trial run of ads.

After completing the ad, and necessary site improvements, we contacted them again, but they were no longer willing to air the ad.

Its a good ad, and I thought someone ought to be able to hear it.

So, here it is.

Enjoy.

We have new lodestone banners. View them here.

I’ve been looking forward some articles by the former proprietor of The Lodestone Catalog, Richard Fish. Richard is a long-term fan and promoter of the medium of audio theater. I tend to think of him as an “audio theater evangelist”. The first is a brief history of the medium, including its origins before radio. The second is a paper promoting the medium to the audio publishing industry. They are well researched, if, perhaps, a little biased toward the medium of audio theater. That can be forgiven.

The medium started on recordings in the late 1800’s, way before radio, flourished in the radio age, faltered in the television age, but always found a way to re-surface.

Now, in the internet age, in the time since Richard’s papers were written, it is finding new life in the hands of amateurs (though this is not the best term, as it carries the weight of implying amateurish-ness, which is not necessarily true) through easy to use and readily available computer-based tools which have come along in the last few years. They take the form of original productions, or as an audio version of “fan fiction,” and, as with anything, the quality varies from alwful to great. We are seeing the “long tail” of audio theater.

These are exciting times in audio theater!

The BBC, stalwart of audio drama (as well as many other forms), announced today a restructuring of how it classifies its services. Instead of “Radio” and “Television”, it is now “Vision”, “Audio and Music” and “Journalism”.

I posted recently about Richard Fish’s papers, which speak to the history of the audio theater medium which extends way before radio. Both the BBC announcement and the history of the medium speak to the fact that Audio Theater is a artform independent of the medium on which it is delivered. Broadcast, cassettes, CDs, downloads, streams… the artform is the same.

The problem has always been how to get it to the ears of the listeners, and how to let listeners know it is there. The catalog currently focuses on CDs — but like all devivery media to date, its will not be around forever.

But Audio Theater will.

That’s the point.

Eric Simonson’s wonderful documentary on Norman Corwin A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin airs tonight (Thursday, July 27) on Cinemax. This is a remarkable view of the man, his accomplishments, and his triumphal V-E day broadcast.

(Cinemax/HBO page on the documentary)

Hot Damn!

(Pardon my French.)

I opened my new copy of Audiofile Magazine today to find an ad announcing the return of the Rabbit Ears Radio productions on CD.

If you are not familiar with Rabbit Ears Radio, it was an anthology series of well-known children’s stories in the nineties. And although they were single voice performances, they were some of the best audio theater around.

They managed to get stars such as Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, Max von Sydow, Holly Hunter, Kathleen Turner, Ben Kingsley, Sissy Spacek, Jodie Foster, Nicolas Cage, Anjelica Huston, Garrison Keillor, and a host of others. Each one was custom scored by musicians such as Mickey Hart, UB40, Tangerine Dream, Ravi Shankar, BeauSoleil, Van Dyke Parks, Mark O’Connor, Leo Kottke, et cetera, et cetera, et…

Unlike what you sometimes get when you bring in a name tallent, these shows were lovingly crafted, and well performed. Sometimes when you have and actor used to other media doing a voice performance, they can’t get used to acting only for the voice, and the performance is stilted. That is not the case here.

These, quite simply, are some of the best audio theater for kids I’ve heard.

They won two Grammy awards, and were carried on 285 public radio stations, according to one article. They were second only to A Prairie Home Companion in popularity among PRI programs.
For years they were unavailable. Apparently the production company was having trouble, and the productions were expensive to produce. They got sold to a CD-ROM company, which appears to have subsequently gone out of business. From there the trail goes cold.

Needless to say, they are already on pre-order.

I have had a strong desire to offer great children’s audio theater. We have some fantastic things such as Otherworld’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz production. But there has never been enough of it to satisfy me.  Its a cliche’, but its true, that audio drama activates and exercises the imagination.  Many great productions are out of print. And there are many great audio productions which are not audio theater, and thus would not fit. I’m still working on finding other things, but the Radio Ears titles are a wonderful and welcome addition.

I’m twittering with glee.

I tuned into XM Radio’s Sonic Theater recently, and had to turn it off.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the channel. A national channel of contemporary audio theater? This is an amazing accomplishment for a medium they used to call dead. And many of the productions they air are wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, that many of them are also in the catalog.

The reason I turned it off was because of the sound — namely the compression.

Two kinds of compression.

The first is compression of dynamics. Sound has both loud bits and quiet bits. This occurs both in the long term — someone shouts, then whispers, or somone bangs a drum, then a bandmate plays the flute. And it is also in the short term, a snare hit, then the quieter bit of guitar, and a beat later another snare hit. This kind of compression makes the loud bits not so loud. Use it some, it can cure a lot of sonic ills, use it too much, you often end up with mushy sound.

So why use a lot of it?

Well, once upon a time, you could make things louder by recording it louder on you magnetic tape. When you push the maximum volume on magnetic tape, it pushes back. But not too hard. Magnetic tape overloads relatively gently, and sounds, actually, rather nice with a little bit of overload.

Then along came digital. Digital recording and digital transmission. With a finite number of digits, when you hit the maximum, that’s the maximum. When you push digital, it stops you like an NFL defensive front line stopping a junior high school quarterback.

Somewhere along the line people got the idea that it was good to be loud. And they got the idea that it was good to be louder than your neighbor. His song is loud. Mine must be louder. His station is loud. My station is louder. But how to do that in a digital world?

That’s right, compress it.

You see, if you make the loud bits less loud, you can turn the whole thing up, and the whole thing is louder. The only thing you lose is dynamics.

And thus began the loudness wars.

And that has made the whole recorded world sound like mush. And it is so pervasive, nobody seems to question it any more.

The second kind of compression is bandwidth compression.

In digital, bandwidth is the ammount of bits you must store, or process, or transmit to get your information across. You can reduce the number of bits by a factor of 10 or more, if you do this, but only if you do what is called “lossy” compression. Lossy compression is where you throw out bits of the sound you don’t think the listener will miss. MP3 is lossy compression. And it sounds pretty good, if done right. Most people don’t hear the difference.

But some do.

And the more you compress it, the more you lose. And to squeeze more and more channels out of a satellite, you compress it more.

And you lose more.

And now everyone can hear the difference.

And often, if you’re transmitting voice rather than music, you compress it even more.

After all, its only spoken word, right?

Now everyone really hears the difference.
So, I turned it off.

Good thing I’ve got a big room full of gloriously uncompressed CDs.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0608/S00120.htm

… And I thought the last NATF performance was ambitious…

72 Hours to Full Stop the End

A gutsy plot, a cliff hanger conclusion and an ocean sized serving of deceit and innocence are the ingredients for a 72 hour radio drama project to be staged in Nelson next week.

“It is deadline time for the New Zealand Radio Drama Competition (NZRDC) so we decided to stage an act of dramatic empathy to show what can be done under pressure,” said NZRDC Executive Producer Kim Merry.

“Tuesday morning 15 August at 10am we start recording the play called Big Balls, which has two substantial challenges.

“A large number of the parts will be performed by volunteer actors recorded where they are standing, it will be lines off the cuff and entirely original. Secondly the studio actors will not see the scripts until they arrive half an hour prior to recording.

“Big Balls will be a test of talent under pressure with the finished product, a piece of great entertainment,” said Mr. Merry.

The Nelson Arts Council is co-funding Big Balls with Fresh FM, which is this year’s principal NZRDC sponsor.

Online broadcast deadline is 10am Friday 18 August with the first radio airing of “Big Balls” in the “Fresh FM Drama and Story Showcase” Wednesday 23 August at 3.10pm.

Entry forms and a selection of locally produced radio dramas are now available on line, at www.freshfm.net.

Update: I’ve been had!

The way the first article was written, it looked like a 72-hour long radio drama. But this new article makes it clear that its a half hour radio drama, written and produced in 72 hours.

NATF’ers could do that in their sleep. (and they frequently do)

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0608/S00162.htm

Now Only 36 Plus Hours Plus to Full Stop the End

The pressure, to finish writing, recording, and producing a thirty minute radio drama within a 72 hour deadline using scripted and unscripted dialogue, has been turned up a notch.

“Last night we completed the bulk of our scripted dialogue for the play Big Balls, but our young star who delivers the solution to the dilemma facing the lead character, was unable to join the cast as he was recovering from flu,” said New Zealand Radio Drama Competition Executive Producer Kim Merry. (NZRDC)

“Later today we will be heading to Nelson Central School with the lead character and sound engineer to record the final scenes, while Sam who plays the character Pluto is on lunch break.

“Yesterday we hit the streets to record the impromptu off the cuff scenes with unrehearsed talent, the result of which took the plot to a new level. New Zealand has a lot of natural actors who are only too willing to spare some of their talent, you just have to ask them.
Big Balls is being produced with co-funding from The Nelson Arts Council and Fresh FM, which is this year’s principal NZRDC sponsor.

Online broadcast deadline is 10am Friday 18 August with the first radio airing of “Big Balls” in the “Fresh FM Drama and Story Showcase” Tuesday 22 August at 3.10pm.

The Big Balls Production Blog, entry forms and a selection of locally produced radio dramas are now available on line, at www.freshfm.net.

ENDS

Another update…

well, here it is  http://www.freshfm.net/downloads/bigballsthewriterscut.mp3   I’ll refrain from comment.

The Rabbit Ears CDs that I wrote about recently arrived yesterday, and are available now. They are as good as I remembered.