Years ago before I really got to know him, a friend named Jim expressed interest in a gadget I had, an iPod. He had heard of the device, but never listened to what it could do. I told him it was really nifty; it could hold a music file in a very compressed form and still sound wonderful. He stuck the earbuds in his ears and listened intently. “It’s got pretty good bass,” he remarked. “Pretty good?” I responded. “I think it’s pretty phenomenal!”
He demurred, “Well…”
Later on I discovered that Jim, the regular guy up there at the Florence Lake Store, avid hiker, looking like any ordinary human being who likes to spend a lot of time hiking up and down the Muir Trail (over 20 times, in his case) was one of the creators of DTS, Digital Theater Sound, the system that powers the incredible sound in nearly all Hollywood movies!
When I was connecting my laptop computer into the sound system at Adeline Smith’s memorial service we held in Fresno last year, Jim showed up and helped me. Thanks Jim, even if you do still think iPods are lacking in the purity that you and only a few other people on Earth can discern. He told me that he had thousands of hours of live concert recordings he made of the Grateful Dead. He gave Karla one of the ultra magnificent European-made microphones he used for that, and she loves it. We used it to record “Cam’s Letter,” one of the slide shows we did for the memorial. (At the memorial Jim told me he wished he still had that sweet little mike, but wasn’t going to pursue it.)
Who knows what this man hears beyond us mere mortals? He lives in Montana now, where it’s really really quiet. And the sky is big, just like Jim’s heart.
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