I'm a collector, a tinkerer, and a tweaker, like a lot of people, and recording equipment is really easy to fetishize.

As a studio, you have to have a niche. You have to provide a service and there has to be a reason for your being around.

In fact, it's in my interest to love digital recording, and I just spent a ton on a new digital recording system, so I speak from a place of heavy investment in both sides.

To make a live record - something that has a lot of life in it - is difficult. After slaving away for years in the studio, when I hear a No Age record or when I hear Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first EP or when I hear DRI or really early punk stuff, it's just so powerful, so raw - and I know how hard that is to create. It's very deceptive. It's like a Dardenne brothers film - it seems like just a handheld camera following some people around in a trailer park, but it's incredibly difficult to do that.

The funny thing is that even engineers and techs don't know what a tiny telephone connector is - people call them TT connectors. Engineers used to come by all the time and say, "Why are you called Tiny Telephone?"

There's nothing like space and the ability to make unlimited amounts of noise at any time, especially in San Francisco.

The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that's a great thing.