Are you an engineer who can’t stand the noose of a shirt and tie when you’re at the board? Are you a studio owner afraid of looking ridiculous in a white lab coat, although you’ve been trying to institute a strict dress code of work uniforms for your staff? Are you an indie-alt producer who thinks the Silicon Valley style is not just for iPhone coders?
Are you a sound guy who needs to be clothed in something slightly blacker than black?
Well then, Nic Pope, an engineer at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco, may have a product for you. He calls it the Audio Engineer’s Hoodie, and it’s pretty silly, as you might expect. It also ain’t cheap. It does take into account, however, plenty of needs that engineers have on a daily basis:
The hoodie’s features include an acoustically transparent hood (made of speaker cloth) for mixing and listening on the go when it’s a bit chilly, a bunch of tool pockets, a wiring diagram sewed to the inside, and more. It’s also made of an “inconspicuous, slightly darker black” material, so that if you’re a roadie or sound guy running around onstage checking SM57 placement and taping down set lists, you are slightly less visible to the audience. The only thing it’s missing is a built-in headlamp.
I wonder whether Nic’s heard about the newly discovered “super black” that absorbs .035% of visual light. Then we can have our sound guys clothed in something thats really black.
Call me old fashioned, but I’ve got manufactured nostalgia for the 30s and 40s, when engineers dressed like they worked in hospitals. Although in those days, they tended to have real engineering skills, and not just the ability to automate in both ProTools and Logic. The real question is, why hasn’t someone designed a line of lab coats for the modern-day recording engineer? Or for that matter, jumpsuits?
