BILL PASCHICK: We have our flagship offering, which is our Element computer. It’s a tower chassis that is convertible to rack mount. I think we’re one of the few, if not only companies that have a convertible chassis that can be bought as a tower or as a rack and that chassis is the same looking. In the rack version, it’s a five-space rack. The front does stick out a little bit more than other rack-mount computers but most people love how it looks in their rack, so they have no problem putting it prominently right in front of their mixing board, and one of reasons they can do that is because it’s silent. You can record with one of your most sensitive condenser tube microphones and you’re more likely to hear the bleed from, a bleed-through from your headphones that you will from any fan or mechanical noise from our element, and this opens up a new world for a lot of the guys in project studios and even some major studios because they don’t have to pay those thousands of dollars and all those headaches, and one of them being running down to the hall to where the computer his to put the computer a hundred, 200, 300, 400, 500 feet away from the engineering room. It’s right there. I mean it’s nice to be able to say, “Hey. Could you burn me a copy of that?” and the computer that you have the master tracks on is right there. And with the Rain Recording Element, you can put that.

The chassis is entirely aluminum. I mean entirely. The outside, the panels, the internal frame, the motherboard tray, the back plane, the drive bays, they’re all made out of aluminum. The reason we chose to do this was threefold. Weight, silence, and heat dissipation. We claim that our computers are virtually silent and they are. They run at anywhere from 25- to 20-dB depending on their usage. The average studio noise floor is about 26 dB, so we’re well under it.

The way we achieve this, we have Zalman cooling technology for our CPUs and our power supplies. They make a fantastic product, and that’s pretty much all they do for a living, and they do it really, really well. They work very closely with us, so we deploy the best product that will silently cool our systems but not make it so they will fail with that low cooling. But I guess the biggest contributor to our cooling and silencing is the chassis itself. The chassis is the heat sink. It -- Because it’s all aluminum and because it’s five spaces or in the tower configuration, it’s about 18 inches high. It has plenty of room for it to be convection cooled. So, the fans, the CPU fan, the back plate fan that only comes on if it overheats, and the power supply fans all can run at very low RPM. As a matter of fact, our CPU fan runs at 900 RPM, which is virtually inaudible. The reason we can do this is because there is -- we’re working with physics. We’re working with mother nature. The heat is just oozing out of the machine, not only through the vents but also through the metal itself.

Many of our competitors make machines out of this black metal. We call them CPU captivators. They are heat captivators if you will. Steel, especially black steel, will reflect the heat back in. It won’t let it through the chassis so these computers, those fans need to run at high speeds or be overcooled because of the chassis, not to mention that many of these metal chassis weigh 20 pounds more than the Element, which is an issue if you’re going to put your Element rack mounted into a very roadworthy shock mount case, but 20 pounds is certainly a lot less than -- Well, our systems weigh about 30 pounds fully loaded, and some of our competitor rack mount machines weigh as much as 50.

But all in all, the Element, as our flagship offering is what we call the universal donor computer. Whether you are a multitrack recorder person, engineer, or an electronic musician or a virtual instrument sample guy with Gigastudio, the Element will do it all. It comes standard with a fast CPU, 2 GB of fast RAM, 667 RAM, a dual-core CPU, two hard drives that are serial ATA running at 7200 RPM , 16-MB buffer. Excuse me, I meant to say serial ATA 2.

There’s another aspect to the Element and Rain Recording technology. We do take some time to deploy our technology. We don’t want our customers to fall of the cutting edge. We need our -- We require that the technology be somewhat matured before we deploy because again we’re guaranteeing you or the delivery on our promise of stability, reliability, consistency, and balance.

So, in order to do that, one of the aspects is to not have the technology out to early before it’s fully baked, as some of us say. But the -- There are some technologies recently that have come into that level of maturity where we can deploy them in our products, and one of them is serial ATA 2 hard drives.

Right now, the serial ATA 2 hard drive has a 16-MB buffer and will do a throughput, a data throughput of up to 300 megabits standalone. This a year ago. Our Element, had a serial ATA 1 drive which was 150 megabit with 8-MB buffer. A year or two before that, we had 8-MB buffer drives that were 100 megabit ATA. What we have at this point is a tripling and quadrupling of speed and throughput and buffer size. Now, a computer at any point of the data flow not only needs the processor to be fast, the CPU, the hard-drive processor, the FireWire card processor, and the video processor be fast, but it also needs the ability to have fast storage.

When those processors are thinking, sometimes they get a little overloaded, and they have to put some of the data aside while they think about something else. That’s called cache memory usually. The billet or buffer memory and hard drive, so the higher the buffer memory, the faster that buffer memory, and the better the hard drive is at getting data in and out of that buffer memory. The more throughput it can put through, in the least amount of time reliably without failure. And we use Seagate soft sonic hard drives, serial ATA 2 with 16-MB buffer, 300-megabit throughput, and those drives, they put -- If you have a data drive, a serial ATA 2 as your OS drive, and then the second drive is a serial ATA 2 as your audio drive, and you stream back and forth from that separate audio drive.

You could have -- We’ve done tests where we’ve had 70 tracks at 48/24 each with three plugins and about 10 instruments running. This was in Sonar 5, and the CPU utilization was getting up there. I mean you still have to have your studio hygiene. You know, you can’t just keep piling everything on. I mean some guys want to pile stuff till audio engine failure, and say, “Oh great. Didn’t fail until we had 100 tracks.

Let’s talk about real-world use here, which is doing 16, 24, 32, 48, even upwards of 70 track mixdowns. With the serial ATA 2 technology, and the ability for the data to come on well enough out of those hard drives so fast, so efficiently without error, we can get those high track counts without any audio issue and without any audio dropout