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61: David Thiel Audio Party
PodcastAnalysis updated 3d ago1 hr 6 min listen
Its been a long time in the works and I'm super excited to have one of pinball's most celebrated sound/music designers David Thiel join the show! We talk all things pinball audio from the evolution...
Highlights
- David Thiel's first video game audio work was Reactor in 1981 for Tim Skelly, writing six guitar riffs using a synthesized nasty guitar and bass drum sound.
- When Thiel restarted pinball work in 2006, Stern had a monopoly on pinball audio work: 'they were the only pinball client that you could have.'
- Approximately 60-75% of a Stern SAM system's ROM image is dedicated to sound because of CPU and memory constraints, with only mono audio, compressed.
- Jersey Jack Pinball provides dramatically more audio freedom and resources compared to Stern ('you get the world is your oyster').
- Stern's AC/DC (Premium) represented a turning point in speaker design quality, prompted by customer complaints about poor sound, leading to improvements in speaker mounting.
- Almost all Williams pinball games, even DCS-era machines, were mono because Williams didn't believe stereo was worth the effort and data requirements.
- Thiel has worked on approximately 30 pinball machines since 2006.
- Stern's 12-inch Avatar speaker upgrade was a poor decision because Stern bought guitar speakers without consulting audio experts and didn't upgrade the 7-watt amplifier.
Notable quotes
“I do what I call spade work, right. I get a contract, I know it's going to be this theme and that means I'm going to do some research because maybe I know how to write that kind of orchestral stuff or that kind of daft punk stuff or that kind of whatever thing I need to cover.”
“Particularly Star Trek. It's a knife in my heart. Oh, shit. Okay. So good to know.”
“Every one of these things, I work on them for typically like a year, you know, and I get very involved emotionally with these because I'm trying to produce an emotional response and so you can't be casual.”
“You can't be creative if you're spending half your time with the mechanics of actually getting it into the computer.”
“I stopped being passive about the sound systems. And as soon as I get a new client like Jersey Jack Pinball or whoever, when I get the new system in my studio, I don't make any sound for it. I start throwing pink noise at it and measuring the response.”
“If you try to do anything that's stereo for a pin and actually, you know, make it noticeable in the chaos: arcade, which is pinball audio: it has to be slammed hard left and hard right. Right. No subtle mixing.”
“The only thing that matters is what comes out of the speaker.”
“It's a pure, well, it's both a CPU and a memory issue...60 to, you know, 75% of the bits on a SAM system is audio, mono, it's compressed.”
Entities
- Alvin Gottlieb· company
- Flippino Pinball· company
- Incredible Technologies· company
- Jersey Jack Pinball· company
- Microsoft Research· company
- Stern Pinball· company
- Iron Man· game
- Pirates of the Caribbean· game
- Qbert· game
- Reactor· game
- Star Trek· game
- The Hobbit· game
- Tron Legacy· game
- Wizard of Oz· game
- Chris Granner· person
- David Thiel· person
- Jason· person
- John Borg· person
- Lyman· person
- Pat Lawlor· person
- Ramin Djawadi· person
- Steve Ritchie· person
- Tim Skelly· person
- Daft Punk· person/group
- Cakewalk· product
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