AMD64 Captures Lightning In A Bottle During Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival; Crossroads Double DVD Available Now From Warner Strategic Marketing

10-Nov-04

AMD today announced that Warner Strategic Marketing's new double DVD chronicling Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival was recorded in high-resolution 5.1 surround audio using AMD64 technology-based digital audio workstations (DAWs). The Crossroads Guitar Festival DVD was recorded over three days last June in Dallas, Texas, and is available in U.S. retail outlets beginning today. The DVD features live performances by legendary guitar players including Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Carlos Santana, James Taylor, ZZ Top, Vince Gill, Joe Walsh, Buddy Guy, Robert Randolph, John Mayer, Jimmie Vaughan, Steve Vai, Robert Cray and many more artists. The audio portion of the Crossroads Guitar Festival DVD was engineered by recording industry heavyweights Elliot Scheiner, an AMD64 Masters Group member and five-time Grammy Award winner, and Ed Cherney, a two-time Grammy Award winner whose engineering credits include the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne, among others. A special broadcast of the Crossroads Guitar Festival also utilizing audio captured on the AMD64 workstations will air in the United States on PBS on December 1, 2004. ""The AMD64 technology-based DAWs performed flawlessly under extreme conditions -- live recording of many great artists in high-resolution audio with minimal sound check opportunities, multiple stages, and outdoors in the Texas heat. The performances were incredible and so were the recordings,"" said Scheiner, a 5.1 surround sound pioneer who also re-mixes classic albums on AMD64. ""Performance, reliability and sound quality are everything under these conditions. I didn't hesitate to use the AMD64 DAW, which is also my main rig in my home studio. I would not have chosen any other digital audio system."" AMD's contribution of equipment and expertise towards the recording of the musical performances for the DVD helped raise funds and awareness for the Crossroads Centre, Antigua, the treatment and education center founded by Eric Clapton in 1997. ""We designed AMD64 technology to meet the needs of the most discriminating professionals in extremely demanding environments like recording Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival,"" said Charlie Boswell, director of Digital Media & Entertainment for AMD. ""The Direct Connect Architecture of AMD64 enables an ideal balance between performance and production power, which is already making an impact inside the professional recording studio and now in mission-critical live recording."" Consumers who want to enjoy music or record their own on home PCs can use the same AMD64 technology that recorded Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival with AMD64 processor-based PCs from hundreds of retailers and system builders. The three-day Crossroads event was recorded on 48 channels in 24-bit audio mode at a 96kHz sample rate for high-resolution, DVD-A audio. The Verari Systems DAW64 based on dual AMD Opteronô processors running WindowsÆ XP Pro in 32-bit mode and Steinberg's Nuendo 2.0 software provided the digital backbone of the recording effort. AMD64 processor-based systems are designed to experience a significant performance increase as more and more software becomes optimized for 64-bit computing.

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