Deva

Let me tell you about the Deva. When I started looking outside of college for professional audio gear, my Google search stumbled upon a blog by Glen Trew. His Memoirs of a Sound Mixer spoke of working on Jersey Girl, a Kevin Smith movie. I like Kevin Smith movies. Cool. Hey, he's working with Vilmos Zsigmond! Vilmos was one of the only 2 cinematographers that visited my school when I was there. So this is what it's like on a "real" set. Glen included some pictures of his equipment, too. It was my first time seeing a cart. I studied his labelled jpeg with boyish wonder, soaking in all the components. I'd never seen a mixing board outdoors before, and my, how boxy it looks. How cool is that? He's got little monitors on his cart, and a surface for taking notes! It all seemed so logical. Of course this is how a sound department should be. Why could I have never imagined it? Boy, I felt like I had just ducked underwater and seen the rest of the iceberg. Names like Sanken, Countryman, Lectrosonics and Zaxcom, names that are industry standards, I had never heard of before. At this point, I pretty much only knew the name Sennheiser, what a Fostex FR-2 and a Nagra was, and my Sony MDR-7506 headphones. I had know idea that the sound department handed out headphones for others to listen, using Comtek transmitters and receivers. Hey, I remember the cans I wore on the ESPN Racing said Comtek on the cups. Curiously, I had never seen a DAT recorder, because its time had come and gone, replaced by solid state recorders. Glen's main recorder was capable of 4 tracks! My first glimpse of a multitrack recorder was Zaxcom's Deva. Today, the Deva is up to 10 tracks, writes to an internal hard drive and to compact flash cards, instead of DVD-RAM. Many of the production sound mixers at Jeff Wexler's forum use one. Phillip Palmer, the first production sound blogger I found and the inspiration of this blog, has gone through about three versions of the Deva. I have been following the mythical machine for over a year now through the lens of the internet telescope. Last weekend, I finally got to try one out.