Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/856624
R.A.M.P.S. AND JWSOUND CAS member Jeff Wexler's JWSound is as durable as the Sennheiser 416 (classic shotgun mic pun intended!). Jeff Wexler and I sat down and chatted about all of this recently. War stories that I could listen to for hours, mixed with specifics of how the discussion group has evolved over the years, and the continuation of the "R.A.M.P.S./JWSound" party at NAB in Las Vegas. First, let's examine the birthplace of JWSound. It came out of the exodus from the newsgroup R.A.M.P.S. (Rec. Arts. Movies. Production. Sound.) Before R.A.M.P.S., Jeff remembers: "Way, way before 30 S U M M E R 2 0 1 7 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y INTRO This is not an article about shotgun mics … at least, not all of this article. This is an article about the nature of the World Wide Web of production sound education or the internet discussion groups. This particular question has been asked on various online production sound forums since before I can remember. I grew up reading R.A.M.P.S. and if that acronym sounds vaguely familiar but you have no idea what it stands for, then this article is just for you. There will be more on its historical context later, but it is where trolling was born as far as I could tell. While I certainly don't support public, online berating, I've seen enough of it and it probably stopped me from asking that very question when I first started perusing these early production sound discussion groups. all that … I can't remember the year that R.A.M.P.S. was started, but I know that we were coming off an even older system which was the BBS system [the bulletin board system], because a lot of those sound people obviously were very tech-oriented already . . . I think David Yaffe might have started it, yes. And R.A.M.P.S. was so much better than the bulletin boards, but was still very limited. It served the great purpose of getting those immediate answers to things when people were having problems with something and they really needed a very quick answer. So, you felt like you had your whole community of people, and it wasn't that many people that actually were on R.A.M.P.S. in the beginning. [It] was very beneficial." Before I get to the exodus from R.A.M.P.S. and migration to JWSound, I asked Jeff about what led to that. "R.A.M.P.S. was really, basically, unmoderated because the way newsgroups worked [then], they really couldn't be moderated the same way groups can be or forums can be these days because nothing is stored on one central server. And even though there is an administrator, they had limited ability to do anything and then things got sort of totally out of control and people were getting less and less [from it]. The benefit of R.A.M.P.S. was being diminished because there was so much trouble. I decided to start something else and I actually experimented with a number of different [things]. And we didn't even call it social media because that wasn't even the term that was used." And this is where JWSound was born as most of the conversation was migrating over to JWSound. Jeff remembered: "R.A.M.P.S. pretty much died out in terms of tracking the number of posts, you know, and it's there still to this day. [At press time], the last [relevant] post DID THEY JUST ASK by Devendra Cleary CAS DID THEY JUST ASK 'What Shotgun Mic Should I Buy?'