“Come in here, I want to show you how this works,” yelled Ken from the Studio. I dropped the book I was entering into the computer and ran into the next room. Ken was running some tape through one of the three reel to reelplayers in there. “This is called a pancake,” he said, as he spun tape off the roll without a reel around it. Then he quickly explained what he was doing as he expertly punched buttons, switched levers, and spun reels, leaving me with an even more vague impression of what it’s like to mix audio. He played the tape of the guy he’d interviewed on phone from across the country, stopped it, played the tape of himself asking questions, stopped, spun the reel backwards, and then set it for when the guy said “T…” of the “two” of counting backwards from five. Then he played the two tapes together. The rich sound of his studio recorded voice grated against the metallic sound of his voice over the phone lines as they played out of sync by a nanosecond. “That’s close enough,” announced Ken, quite pleased. He turned down the channels of him and the interviewee on the phone and left the two studio recorded voices playing. “Now I’ll check every five minutes or so to make sure they’re still in sync,” he said, “and adjust it over here if one runs faster than the other.” We listened to the two voices discussing a novel the guy being interviewed had written. “We’ll edit most of this stuff out,” Ken said, “I’m just trying to draw him out.” Near the end, Ken grinned and said, “Sounds like we’re sitting next to each other, doesn’t it? Who’d of thought we were separated by thousands of miles?”