This isn’t a technical question, but it nonetheless involves a problem in my studio. It seems whenever I buy gear these days, there are lots of extras—manuals in non standard formats, a sheet of paper with some kind of authorization

I was engineering an album for an overbearing producer. He must have blown out his ears at one point, because he kept asking for insane amounts of treble; and also, he was never, ever wrong. I tried to explain as diplomatically as I could that it wasn’t a good idea to produce music that caused physical pain, al