I just went to the Electric Daisy Carnival 2007 with caustik, dj warpt, and fry (flickr is starting to register some interesting photos from the event). I’m glad I made the time to go despite my overloaded schedule–it was simply fantastic. The venue (the LA olympic stadium) was breath-taking; it was quite a sight to walk over the threshold of the steps and gaze onto an olympic field swarming with ravers, swinging their lights around like clusters of frenetic technicolor fireflies. The stages were amazing, the soundsystems top-notch, and most importantly, the DJ lineup was fantastic…my favorite set was John “007” Fleming’s Psy-trance segue into Infected Mushroom’s set. The weather was also perfect for an outdoor event, a cool night with a full moon overhead, and it was also great people-watching too.

Dancing with a throng of thousands of people in front of 120,000 watts of speakers makes you feel a true visceral connection with the technology behind it. I marvel at and appreciate the technology behind the whole thing–from the four-quadrant laser servo system in the CD head to the crystalline perfection of the fractionally distillated and Czochralski-pulled silicon to the elegance of the noise shaping filters in the sigma delta DACs to the poles and zeros dancing across each other as the DJ swivels the knobs on the mixer to the quantum subtlety of bandgap tuning III-V materials to emit those seductively saturated hues to the cleverness of the ballasting on the bank of beefy transistors driving the speakers, preventing any device from pulling ahead of the heard and melting down thus disrupting the euphoric dance music experience…all of this coming together as the final calculus of technology and the teeming swarm of synchronized humanity before it.

Makes you proud to be an electrical engineer.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 5:32 am and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.