Section Chair Van Browne opened the meeting by asking for nominations for next year's section officers. Tom Stiles was nominated for Chair, Rick Smargiassi for Vice-Chair, Gary Louie for Secretary, Terry Denbrook for Treasurer, and Bob Moses, David Scheirman and Bill Ford were nominated for new committee positions. Next, suggestions for meetings were solicited. Then, Van introduced Laurel Cash Jones, the AES Western Region Vice President. Laurel greeted the attendees, and spoke about the upcoming fall AES Convention in San Francisco.

The evening's speaker was Fred Jones, recording industry expert, former studio owner and Firesign Theatre engineer. He began on DATs, noting their consumer origins and shell construction problems. Reliability and robustness of a medium versus track and format size was debated. It was explained that certified data DATs were taken from the center 1 foot of a 3 foot wide web of tape, and that it must pass a mysterious burst error test. The same thickness of DAT tape was used in all lengths, but data DATs can have different thicknesses.

Next came CD-R, compact disc - recordable. It should be an interim technology, until CD-E (erasable) is widely available. Longevity, handling and labeling on CD-Rs was also discussed.

Analog tape? Essentially, it will die. Optical storage is what's coming. When blue lasers become available,we will have 17 hours of audio on a standard size CD. Fred believes that Mini Disc is failing in the audio marketplace due to sound quality, but that it should be viable as a data storage medium, allowing 128 MB on a $14 Mini Disc.

At this point, a lively discussion on the poor sound of digital data compression schemes ensued, and then Fred continued with M-O (magneto optical) discs. These are popular for computer data storage, and should be popular for digital audio storage when access times come down.

To cap the evening, Fred was urged to recount several stories about the Firesign Theatre comedy group. Section officers met with Laurel Cash Jones afterwards for a discussion of Section business.