collection and synthesis

I started ProRec in 1998 because I was passionate about the new generation of recording tech that I could foresee coming, and because at that time there was basically no information at all on the internet about recording tech. Nothing. We forget that in the early days most established business thought the internet was a likely fad, and print pubs didn’t have an online presence.

Back then there was no WordPress or any other sort of prerolled software for content management, so I rolled my own multi-user CMS, complete with discussion boards, reverse auction system (like eBay), and advertising engine, all using Lotus Domino. I hosted the site myself on a pair of servers I coloed at Dallas’s Infomart. It was truly a labor of love.

I rounded up a gang of ne’er-do-well audio nerds, including Dallas’s Bruce Richardson, Ethan Winer (of RealTraps fame), Bill Park, Lionel Dumond, Ted Perlman, and many others. We reviewed hardware and software, and published how-to’s including Pete Leoni’s famous “Roll Your Own” series where we taught people how to build high-performance overclocked DAWs capable of handling native disk-based audio recording, at a time when the only real alternatives were specialty systems costing tens of thousands of dollars. ProRec became famous for teaching the coming generation of audio engineers important skills and for our extremely cheeky, no-holds-barred reviews and how-tos.

Around that time was when I bought the latest album from one of my favorite bands and couldn’t believe how awful it sounded. I wrote an article called “Over the Limit” that explored the trend at that time of making CDs louder and louder through aggressive limiting. The article went hugely viral, and became the talk of the pro-audio internet. In doing so I exposed the Loudness War (as it was called) to a wider audience and even inspired the current Wikipedia article on the subject. I also correctly predicted that in the future, digital delivery would mean the end of the Loudness Wars. This was a decade before Spotify and Apple did exactly that. For years the article was even part of the curriculum at recording schools, and I became a tiny cult hero. How do I know this? Because years later, at an Audio Engineering Society (AES) conference, a handful of young twentysomethings came to me and asked if I was “the” Rip Rowan, and explained that Over the Limit and a few other articles were required reading in their college courses. I was flattered.

Over the years the site became very successful, at one point (pre dotcom crash) earning me a nice income and allowing me to pay my writers competitively. At one point I was turning down nice six-figure offers for the site. Unfortunately it also attracted hackers, and finally one day, a group of skilled Turkish hackers penetrated my systems and destroyed everything. Daily off-site backup was financially out of my reach, so when the site was wrecked, years of work was permanently lost. I was crushed. By that time the dotcom crash had happened and advertising revenue had been cut 10-fold, so financially it was also a disaster that I couldn’t just spend my way out of.

By that time modern CMS software was available, and Lotus had been bought by IBM and effectively burned to the ground through astonishing levels of mismanagement, so I decided to replatform the site and recover what I could. But revenue never returned and the site never again justified the huge amounts of work needed to keep the site going.

In the meantime I was working a full time consulting gig as well as trying to get my second studio (a partnership with @salimnourallah) off the ground, and ProRec was left adrift in the deep space of Internet wreckage. I finally decided to let go of day to day involvement and handed the management over to Brent Randall. Brent ran the site for many more years but like myself was unable to maintain the huge amounts of energy required to keep the site going in the face of dwindling revenue. A couple of years ago I finally sold the domain to Talal Khan, who has been working hard to make a comeback. I wish him all the best.

A friend forwarded me this press release from Yahoo! today. I found it strangely fitting that it was found on Yahoo!, another mostly-forgotten internet site that was fundamental and formative in the primal days of the internet, back before any of us could really see what it would one day become. Reading the article filled me with nostalgia. It was a heady time I will never forget, with weeks of all-nighters and a feeling of creating something much greater than myself, a feeling I doubt I’ll ever experience again.