Jonas produced the first Lithuanian pop CD " Gali Skambeti Keistai" during the spring of 1991 at CCS studio Warsaw with singer/ songwriter
Andrius Mamantovas. Jonas pre-mastered the album
on an Atari ST
using Soundesigner. The unusual part of the equation
was the use of a rewritable optical drive that he was beta testing from Eltekon Technologies. He was able to edit the album "Gali Skambeti Keistai"
and compile the tracks in masterlist diretly from the optical drive. He then took the drive in
to a pressing plant in Detroit
for glass mastering. They had no problem transferring the data via SCSI to
the glass master. The album was released and sold to the American-Lithuanian
community in the USA with
the proceeds going to Andrius to support his USA
tour. Afterwards the album was released in Lithuania on vinyl. In Lithuania no credit
was given for production - only engineering, nor was there any compensation
for production costs or royalties.
In spring of
'92 Jonas came back from the Frankfurt Music Messe
with an obsure trade called Audio Media. On the
inside back cover was a ISA cardset
from Studio A/V of Cambridge,
England. In
April of '92, he met Nobuki Hirai from Mitsui Petro Checmicals at the Detroit Airport regarding an Eltekon Technoligies
SCSI Ram Drive. Nobuki
mentioned their Media divison was searching for a
hard disk editor that would run on a PC platfrom. He
informed Nobuki he found hardware that was capable of
being a powerful disk editor. Studio A/V was offering the cardset
to third party software developers. He suspected that it was only natural for
the company with the principals previous history to
develop software for its XS & X-ACT card sets. Jonas contacted Joe Bull SAV
(SADiE) by fax in early May '92. Jonas arranged to
visit Cambridge
that summer. He arrived at Stretham for demonstration
of the SADiE Disk editor pre version 1.0 from Joe
Bull and Mike Kemp. While there he faxed Nobuki in Japan, and
Mitsui purchased 10 SADiE Disk editors with X-ACT
& X-S cardsets. Jonas formed A.R.A.S to
distribute SADiE in the US with his partner Paulius Jurgutis. They presented SADiE at the AES San Francisco in the Fall
of '92 selling the first Disk editor to Glenn Meadows. Glenn drove the
development of the system to fit the mastering market doing valuable analysis
of the audio data and sending feedback to England to the consternation of
David Mortimer. Jonas provided extensive customer support to Glenn, who became
one of his mastering mentors.
The
opportunity to show the advantages of the SADiE disk
editor through the creation of a distribution network in North
America brought Jonas to top mastering engineers. Ted Jensen, Bob
Ludwig, and Ted Marshall, Mike Bishop, Danny Leake
were a few of the engineers he was able to mentor with as he pushed the
development of the editor in the mastering sector. His love of audio and
engineering drove him to start mastering himself.
Below is a
delivery confirmation for the first two cardsets sent
to the US as imported by A.R.A.S, before Jonas founded SADiE
Inc. in the US.
*note software versions.
The story
continues...