BILL PASCHICK: My name is Bill Paschick. I’m the President of Rain Recording. We manufacture computers specifically designed for digital audio workstation use on the XP platform.

We have been manufacturing systems for a little over four years at this point. Our mission is to deploy stable, reliable, balanced and consistent technology, something what we saw in the marketplace that was missing and still is somewhat missing today, is the commitment of a computer manufacturer to make sure that all the parts inside are well-balanced, well-matched so that all that data, all that audio information that you guys are recording can get through in a stable and balanced manner and not have audio dropouts and blue screens of death and a lot of those things that some of you may have experienced. At Rain Recording, we have found a way to do this and that’s just by doing the right thing really which is choosing components made by reputable manufacturers and then once they’re chosen, stick to that, don’t change your configuration right in the middle of the show.

We have done some major installations. One was at, recently, at Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, for the Beatles Love show. Fan -- fascinating, fascinating show. They took original Beatles master tracks, Sir George Martin and his son Giles, and they transferred them over in Pro Tools at 96k into the computer and played them back and re-mixed some of them, and then transferred them all into GigaStudio, creating upwards of 32 tracks of Beatle music being played back through GigaStudio, fired off his samples. We were called then, a few weeks after the show had opened, because the computers they had failed. They were, they’re creating delays, exactly 0.7 millisecond delay that couldn’t be solved for 7 minutes. I’m sorry, 4 minutes which left the dancers on the stage dancing to a -- some delay. We got a call the next morning as one of the three companies that are certified, officially certified by TASCAM to run GigaStudio. We had a call from Gavin Whitely who is the engineer that runs the systems at Cirque du Soleil, and asked that we come down as soon as possible with tuning machines, which we did. It was a wonderful opportunity for Rain Recording, certainly a fantastic experience for me. I mean what better thing to come full circle in my life being a computer guy and audio guy and getting to listen to Beatles master tracks over and over and over again to make sure our systems could fit the bill. And I’m happy to say we passed the audition.

In audio production, electronic musical performance, the computer is the foundation of everything. But often, it is looked at as the last thing or the thing that people will spend the least money on or concern themselves the least with what the quality level is because there is this assumption, which was created, in our opinion, by a lot of the computer guys that a computer’s a computer or you can build it yourself, and that’s fine for them. There’s a lot of men and women out there who are very capable and very good at building machines and staying up all night with their flash light and their screwdrivers, putting their machines together and making sure that they work or maybe they are hot-rodded to the nth degree. And that’s what they have fun with. But there’s, I think, at Rain Recording, we believe this, that the majority of people just want to hit Record, and they want to be able to have a computer, piece of software and audio interface that will allow them to very smoothly and seamlessly, transparently if you will, do their creativity without having the technology getting in the way. And of all the pieces of audio equipment I have ever dealt with, a computer has the most potential for getting in the way of creativity. And at Rain Recording, we feel we have prevented that by adhering to these principles of creating a piece of equipment much like a fine guitar if you will. As a matter of fact, Craig Anderton, in our review -- his review of the Live Book said that we were like a fine crafted musical instrument. I was just thrilled to hear that, that interpretation from him because that’s what we were after. That’s the attitude we took, that every little piece, every little chip, every little speed of the chips and the bus speeds and the memory speeds and the CPU speeds, the video memory, all of that has to be balanced just so. It’s not a matter of how fast one component is and the other -- there are just plenty of machines out there that have these huge fast processors and then you’ll find, if you look deeper into the specs, that their memory is slower, like 400 MHz and the CPU bus speed is 800 MHz. You got a bottleneck there. Now, there are many reasons to do things like that and deploy technology like that for a computer manufacturer and I won’t get into that now. But for any audio application, that is an accident that was designed to happen. And at Rain Recording we design our systems to prevent those accidents merely by not building into our systems the possibility.

And at Rain Recording Computer, the motherboard that we choose, the memory chips that we choose, their speeds, the hard drives that we choose, the buffer sizes that are written into those hard drives, the spindle speeds that are -- that those hard drives run at, the noise level of those hard drives and the reliability factors of those hard drives are all taken into consideration.

At Rain Recording, we are exclusively, at this point anyway, Intel-based. We use genuine Intel motherboards and Intel Pentium-D Dual Core and now Duo Core 2 CPUs. People ask us often why we made this decision. It’s not to say that AMD processors have any major issue and certainly they’re great, a great CPU. But there’s three main reasons that we don’t use AMD at this time. The first one is I wish AMD made a motherboard because like at Intel we can use their processor and their motherboard. And that guarantee that delivery on their promise of stability, reliability from Intel is deliverable for us because well, we are using their motherboard and their CPU and they’re very, very good at supporting Rain Recording, with helping us choose the right product tested, get samples, months and months ahead of time. They’ve just been very, very good to us. Whereas with the AMD, we have tested their processors but we’re kind of left to the wolves, if you will, to seek out what we would call third-party motherboards. And it is not to say that there’s not plenty of third party good motherboards out there. But once again, as I said earlier, unless you’re one of those guys or gals who likes to sit up all night with your screwdriver and your flash light, building your own PC, that the consistency of those motherboards is questionable because every month, there’s a slight change. And some of these third-party manufacturers of motherboards for the AMD processors, they may make a slight change in their specifications, sub-level specification that they don’t think is going to affect the average computer user but will give the audio user of a computer a blue screen. At Rain Recording, again as I said earlier, we prevent that because we chose motherboards and CPU combinations that takes away that mystery.

So let me get back to the components of the computer. We, we balanced all of them. And there are speeds in the hard drive, the CPU, the front side bus speeds at the CPU, the second-level cache sizes of the CPU, and the speeds of those cache sizes and whether or not a Dual Core actually has two separate L2 caches or one is a dead end. There are all these considerations that many people are surprised to hear of. But once they hear of all these details, they are interested to know that they can make a difference in the performance of the machine and it’s not all about speed. It’s about throughput. It’s about how much data can I get from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time without failure. That is -- we go to our chalkboard or our eraser board at Rain Recording headquarters, that is it. We have point A, point B, how do we get there, the least amount of time, with the most amount of data, with the least amount of errors. And we have accomplished that with our -- with our product line. And I’ll tell you what that is now.