I am Patrick Perdue! I am bad for you!

People do the strangest things, then go off and tell other people to do even stranger ones. Why? No idea! Welcome to human nature, I suppose.

Due to the events of last week, causing a temporary scale-back of TBRN services until the start of the month, which has resulted in adding preventive measures to ensure stupid things like that don't happen again, I decided to move FX Radio completely in-house, since I have enough bandwidth to support the couple of users that exist at a time, without wasting TBRN's resources.
So, that's exactly what I did, using two internal icecast servers in a master/slave relay configuration, homing on both the residential and business class gateways, and a round robbin DNS for fake load balancing (as if I'm really going to saturate anything locally with FX Radio).
The end result: you probably won't notice much of a difference. FX Radio can still be found at http://fx.pdaudio.net:8888/fx.m3u as always, with the same great content and SHOUT-Box, just that you may get one of two internal basement servers instead of a real one in New Jersey. Oh well, New Jersey is a bad idea, anyway, even if it does have some fast Linode boxes.

Speaking of bad ideas, a few people suggested, for some unknown reason, that I should stream my Omnicron TCC-14 talking clock, which just sits in the studio and announces the time all day. It's available on TBRN's PBX, and you can theoretically sip to time@pbx.tbrn.net from the outside to reach it as well.
Now, as if looking at your watch or clock wasn't standard and efficient enough for you, you can inefficiently get the time via an Icecast stream, too, all be it a slightly delayed one. Yep, that's right, I was sad enough to set it up, because everything I needed was already available without much extra effort on my part. So now, as a result, radio time, all time, all the time exists for your enjoyment. Note: this streams at AAC+ 24kbps, which is probably a bit much, but with all the natural aliasing provided by the clock, I figured I'd give myself some headroom to play with. Please feel free to say "Oh, wow, that's totally useless, pointless, dumb, etc." and I will agree, but remember, I wouldn't have bothered had I not been asked to do so by not just one, but several people. I only do what I'm told, you know? Sorry if it's abnormal or otherwise socially unacceptable, but that's just the way it is.

In other news, my vintage JBL 4311 reference monitors arrived from Fort Worth yesterday, all 107 lbs of them, and I just got them into the studio this morning. I think this particular set was made in 1974, given what I know about the serial numbers. These things are very, very different from the monitor 1's, obviously, as they are three way, and contain 12-inch drivers. Power? Yeah! Efficiency? Lots of it! Loud? Oh yeah, definitely! I'll have to get used to them, but so far, I love them! They have a very tite and beautiful stereo image, and sound so punchy you'd think you're being knocked over by accident. They do need some cosmetic work, some new fome rings around both tweeters, and a couple of other superficial touch-ups, but they sound and work great. I'm not sure if all the drivers are original, or if any of them have ever been replaced, but unlike dgl1984's pair of jbl 4311's, my set actually has two sets of fully working drivers. His right mid and tweeter drivers are dead, or maybe the crossover is bad. I don't know, but they've been that way for as long as he's had them in late 1997. There are many, many parts on Ebay, and Derek is a bad person for not having them fixed, in my opinion. I've heard Derek's set many times, and even with no highs on one side, I thought they were great. Having them on monitor stands rather than the floor, the way Derek's are positioned, I've come to realize very quickly that those presence controls for the mid (1.5k) and tweeters (6k and up) are really quite a good thing to have, because full on, when you're sitting between them and the mids and tweeters, which are on the bottom, are facing you, it can get pretty intense. So, rolling the output back on those is a really good idea.
Now, to figure out what to do with my Alesis Monitor 1's. At the moment, I'll keep them in the closet, and probably find something interesting to do with them at some point, as I still like them.

Oh, and on a side-note, freakyfwoof and his wife, Kirsten, had a big ol' baby boy on Monday morning at 6:58 AM BST. His name is Jacob Peter Louis (although I think J. P. Louis sounds very important, kind of like J. P. Morgan, but not), and tipped the scales at 10.6 lbs. Pretty big for starters, ya think?
Things should be pretty interesting after this point, and I, personally, am looking forward to the likely madness that will occur as a result.

Now, I will internally debate with myself as to the merits of staying awake, or not. I will most likely lose that battle with myself, as winning would just be too boring, now wouldn't it?

To say "that took long enough" would be kind of an understatement.
First of all, I'd like to actually congratulate Canada Post on being pretty fast about getting the microphone from Winnipeg to my local post office (shipped last Thursday, arrived at the PO on Monday). This is not typical for stuff coming from Canada.
I, however, would like to not congratulate my local post office on good service.

As this package came from Canada, it required a signature for proof of delivery. I, being the boring person I am, was home all day on Monday when they attempted to deliver the microphone. The doorbell is broken at the moment, and they didn't bother knocking. The dog made no indication that someone was at the door, worthless Dexter that he is. Thus, I had no idea they were there until someone notified me that there was a sticky note on the door, indicating that the next delivery attempt would occur on Tuesday the 11th.
That was never even attempted, apparently.

"No problem," said my deer ol' Dad. "We can just pick it up from the post office. They're open until 5:00 PM, according to this here card, so I can just swing by and pick it up after work."
There's this problem, however... Closing time was changed last month to 4:00 PM, and dad leaves work at around 4:00 PM. Oh, yeah, the cards were supposed to have been updated, but weren't. Thanks for the misinformation, people!

Anyway, I now finally have the mic in my possession, and have yet to really do anything with it other than plugging it in, making a short test recording, and going "hmm, this sounds pretty good."
It's a very strange looking microphone. It reminds me a bit of the Cad M179, except it's longer and even more rounded, and has no controls. Also, instead of having a ring that goes around the bottomm which sits in the shockmount to keep it secure, the Kel actually threads directly into it, with no additional pieces required. It's a large shockmount, very much like that of the M179, and seems to work quite well. We'll see how that actually goes with real usage.
It's a very dark microphone, which is the intent, as it's supposed to sound like a large diaphragm dynamic. It's certainly much darker than the Cad M179, which, in turn, is more so than the Cad GXL-2200's I used for much of 2005 and 2006. It would probably not be my prefered vocal mic for projects where the voice really needs to cut through the mix, but that's hnot what I bought it for, really.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was to throw this short, non-scientific mic comparison at you, using the Kel Audio HM2D, the Cad M179, and the Heil PR20, the other primary mics that see the most use in my studio. What do you think?

As I'll mostly be using the HM2D for broadcasting and perhaps voiceover work (should I ever do that stuff again), with the Cad condensers for special applications like singing (not me hopefully), guitar miking, or on the Jecklin disk, with the PR20 on the snare drum in place of the Behringer XM-8500 that's there now, I recorded this very short thing to provide a general idea of how these mics sound at the same distance and at the same volume, with my particular voice. Of course, if other voices should show up in the studio, they will react differently to different microphones. I personally think Rainee, my sister-in-law, would be very well suited to the Kel Audio mic, given how her voice shoots through rooms.

I'll be using the HM2D as the mic for this Saturday's Things and Stuff in place of the normal PR20. Let's see if I like it enough to keep it around past the 21-day return period.

You all surely know by now that if I have a single vice in the world, it's studio equipment. I particularly enjoy playing with different types of microphones, though I haven't really figured out why: it's just a hobby of mine, I guess, although I don't do much of use with any of the stuff I have. Maybe one day...

Over the last few years, I've acquired several different mics ranging from the $17 Behringer XM-8500 (which sounds much nicer than it should for the price), to the Cad M179 multi-pattern condenser, with lots of oddities in the middle of the spectrum, such as the old, strange Grundig W1 stereo dynamic set which I haven't used much due to one of the mics having a slight issue that I haven't yet fixed, a mystery mic from probably the 1950's that everyone seems to think is from Electrovoice and has a talk-back quality to it, the 48-volt phantom power carbon mic I built using components from a broken Cad GXL-2200 condenser, a cheap project box, and an element from a Western Electric telephone, and others.
Of course, we have the obligatory standards, like the MXL-603 pencil mics for acoustic guitar, drum overheads or whatever, including a stereo bar, the Audix drum mics (although I want something better for toms), and more stuff not worth mentioning. Oh yeah, can't forget the Heil PR20, which I originally bought for vocals, although I really like the sound of it on the snare drum. All this stuff, and I don't have a single Shure SM57 or 58 beta, although I do have an SM85 from the early 80's. Oh no, what's a studio to do without a 58 beta, or even a 57? Yeah, whatever...

Now, I've gone and purchased yet another microphone, this being the Kel Audio HM2D, brought to my attention by nick6489. This is an interesting approach on a large diaphragm condenser. It's built to sound like a large diaphragm moving coil dynamic, like the Shure SM7B. I've liked the sound and off-axis rejection of the SM7B as long as I've known about it, but, like most mics in it's class, such as the Heil PR40 (which I don't really like all that much, personally), the EV RE20 (which the PR40 wants to be), etc. it costs about $350, and requires a pretty nice preamp, as these mics aren't very hot. That having been said, I'd bet the PR40 would make a good kick drum mic. The RE20 has been used as such for a while, although I don't really like either on vocals, though their side-rejection is great.
Anyway, back to the HM2D: I've heard samples of the mic provided by the people who make it, as well as other users not directly offiliated with the company, and I'm pretty impressed with the sound this mic puts out. It's not your typical bright, sharp like a knife sound, which is very apparent with cheap Chinese condensers such as the Cad GXL2200/2400, MXL 990, or the Behringer B-2 Pro I used to have. It seems to be warm and fat, which is what I like in a good dynamic microphone, and why I like the Cad M177 and M179 so much. They're not cold and clinical like some of the cheaper, standard-issue condensers. There are even some recordings available where the HM2D is used as a kick drum mic, and, surprisingly, it didn't do bad things like you'd expect with a condenser at such close proximity to that kind of source.
Kel Audio even links to other competing microphones, with the idea being "if our mics don't work for you, here's something that might." You don't see that every day. Welcome to small companies?

Although I haven't received mine yet, it having just shipped from Canada yesterday (Yeah, they're conceived and tested in Canada and made in China), given what I've heard of it, I'm thinking the axis on this mic will be pretty defined. It's a supercardioid mic, which would be perfect for stuff like broadcasting, voiceover, etc. without picking up extraneous reflections off to the sides and behind the microphone. I currently don't have a supercardioid mic, although the Shure SM85 pretends to be one, though it calls itself a cardioid. I bought the Heil PR20 for the same reason, but even it's pick-up pattern is a lot wider than I thought it would be, though I do like the sound of it, especially when the bass is rolled off just a little to compensate for proximity effect, and, as I said earlier, it's great on the snare. At the moment, I'm using a Behringer XM-8500 on the snare, which, to me, sounds better than the Audix snare mic from the fusion drum pack. If this Kel Audio mic doesn't suck, I want to put it in place of the PR20, and move that mic to snare permanently, keeping both Behringers around as throw-around mics for guests, or whatever application requires something that doesn't suck too much or require a lot of effort to set up. Kel Audio has a 21-day return policy on all their microphones, so that's a good thing, especially considering the HM2d is $199, which is actually more than I've ever paid for a mic. Even the Cad M179's were a bit cheaper at $169 a piece, and the Heil PR20 was around $130. Yeah, I know, I'm just not a true high-end person, since I don't have at least one Nueman, not even a Sennheiser MD421, or even a Rode NT1A, and certainly nothing with tubes in it, but, for a little person such as myself, dropping $200 on a mic is a pretty big deal. To those who already have such better stuff, not so much. That return policy may come in handy. Who knows?

So far, the only thing I'm not sure about regarding the Kel Audio is the fact that the self-noise (14dBa) is a bit higher than my Cad M179's (11dBa). Both the Cad M179 and HM2D are considerably noisier than the Rode NT1A, just for the reference, although in the case of the Cad, it matches the noise of my preamp pretty well, so it's not very noticeable, though both mics are great for the price-to-noise ratio, especially the NT1A.
If the output is hot enough, this won't be a big deal, but it might become a problem otherwise. That's my biggest gripe with the old Shure SM85. It's output is almost that of your typical dynamic, but it comes with noise that you wouldn't get from a dynamic as well. So, to compensate for output, you introduce more noise into the system.
Of course, you get no self-noise with a moving coil dynamic, just preamp noise. If you have an ultra-nice preamp, you can get away with having less noise with a dynamic mic than with all but the quietest condensers around. However, on most mixers (unless you've got an Avalon, Neve, Allen & Heath or something nice like that), getting the mic as hot and non-noisy as possible before channel gain is a good thing to do. The Heil PR20 I've been using for broadcast stuff over the last year isn't such a hot mic, but fortunately, the preamp on my board isn't terrible, so I can get away with it. The same mic on my Presonus Bluetube or Rob Sizemore's old Peavey board, though... well, let's just say "ffffffffffffffff" and be done with it. I'd hate to see what things would have sounded like with my old Alesis 1622, the first "professional" console I had. Quite nasty in all respects, except for the fact that it had six aux sends.

OK, that's all for my geeky rambling for now. I'd write about my life and be standard, but that's terribly uninteresting. Actually, so was the stuff you just read, so maybe I will. Let's see... I slept some, I woke up, I did things, and I'll do more stuff later. Yeah, that didn't take long. Back to your life.

Well, what do ya know? I'm actually writing in the blog again, properly this time, rather than in the guise of a delayed, semi-automated RSS feed. How's that for something?
Not impressed? Oh well, it's all good. I'm not either.

As you've probably noticed, no archive was posted for last week's show, which, by the way, did actually exist. While some fun things did happen, I wasn't really happy with the over-all result. At the time, I was being plagued by a migraine from hell. I did manage to do a few fun things, such as putting a well-known and quite horrible song through a midi controlled Granulab, which was rather amusing (at least to me), showed the last couple of minutes of one of the local TV station's analog feed as it went off the air forever, and complained about various things.
For some inexplicable reason, I extended the show for almost an entire hour just to talk to Alexander Nelson about keyboards and pointless things, and to play around a bit with the Ensoniq TS-12.
Yeah, it's all quite boring. Maybe I'll post a highly edited version of that archive at some point, but I really just wasn't in the mood to deal with it after the show, nor did I feel like it this week either, apparently.

Speaking of not feeling like doing things this week, that's the position I found myself in yesterday. Since Derek was busy, Arfy was... er... somewhere, and the Clower brothers were away visiting relatives, I decided that being the only live person on a Saturday was quite boring. Besides, it was really hot down there, as it hit 99 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, and I didn't have fans or air conditioning running in the studio all day. These combined issues yielded the end result of my staying upstairs and being lazy. Pretty sad when you don't even feel like doing a self-appointed task from which enjoyment is usually gleamed, isn't it? But, such is life. Oh well.
Derek and I have both agreed to do our respective missed shows at some point on Wednesday, so stay tuned for that. I don't think I've ever done Things and Stuff on a Wednesday. I'm usually pretty inflexible about my time slot, since I like it just the way it is. I don't want three hours, or different hours, thanks for asking. On this TBRN fake station thingy, the only exceptions have been when I've missed shows completely due either to laziness or special events, or stupid things like the broadcastathons.

Enough of that... I know you're probably about as bored reading all this internal whining as I am of writing it, so no further effort will be exerted on my behalf, at least on that topic.

Now, for some stupid news about my recent life, or lack thereof:

I won third place in the NokiaMailtone contest for my entry made with sign and triangle waves and Sound Forge's tone generator, all without getting out of bed. Apparently, the third place prise is a new Nokia E63, which is a lot like the E71 I have. It's stripped in some ways, I.E. no internal GPS or HSDPA (although it's still 3g), the camera isn't as good (2.0 vs. 3.2 MP I think), and it's plastic instead of metal, which, ironically, makes it less resistant to fingerprints, although it might not look as shiny at first. However, it does have a real 3.5mm headphone jack instead of the 2.5mm of the E71, which is really one of my very few complaints about that particular phone. While I have converters and adapters for everything, I don't like putting extra weight on the jack, which is done a bit even if using a 2.5mm to 3.5mm jumper cable. Now that I'm actually starting to use it for downloading and listening to podcasts, reading books in text format, etc. it would be nice to have a real native jack.
So, I guess they'll send that to me at some point.
I haven't actually gotten a firm confirmation on that, so yeah, in either case, it's something to do.
freakyfwoof also submitted an entry, but sadly was not even put into the top five. Shame, really, because I honestly thought his submission was better than mine.

I also managed to break my Iriver H320's hard drive by dropping the player while it was recording, and the drive was caching from memory. I could easily get a new drive and a new battery, since it needs both, and I probably will still do that at some point, or more likely attempt to revive one of these busted H120's, but for now, I bought a used Iriver H10 on Ebay. No line-in recording, but I really just wanted a good solid player for the trip to Orlando. I rockboxed it, copied things to it, and played around with it a bit. Seems to be all right so far.
In place of the up/down buttons found on all the previous Iriver units I've owned, there is a touch strip, kind of like a really narrow rectangular laptop touchpad with only two contact points, one on either end, corresponding, of course, to up and down. Honestly, I like it better than the buttons, which I realize shouldn't be the case, but I do, so there. The only real issue I have at the moment is that the current Rockbox daily build seems to have issues with the H10's fm radio, mainly being that it doesn't actually turn the thing on. You can fake scan for presets, and go up and down the fake spectrum, but it doesn't really do much. Oh, I think I got it to go "click" a couple of times, but that's about it. Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but the radios in either my 120 or 320 never did these things when controlled by Rockbox. Oh well, it's not really important anyway. It's just terrestrial commercial badness, though it's still good to have around sometimes.

In other news, I bought a mystery microphone on Ebay for $5 the other day. It's a dynamic mic of some kind, and the guy who sold it doesn't know what it is, since the switch plate containing the make and model has gone missing. It's rather vintage looking, and could be something from Electro Voice, which generally doesn't suck, although nobody seems to really know what it is. So, it could be good, or a pile of crap. In either case, it was $5, and I'm always looking for different microphones for different situations. I still wouldn't mind another Heil PR20, so I can use one on the snare drum in place of the Behringer XM8500 I have there now, which is still better than the Audix snare mic I was using originally. On the other hand, perhaps I could acquire a super cardioid dynamic. I currently don't have any of those, just standard cardioids, and the nice, old, slightly noisy Shure SM85 from 1983, which is an electret condenser that takes phantom power. It's probably got the narrowest axis of any of the mics I have, which makes it incredibly useful for stuff like singing while at the drum kit, or, in my case, being stupid while banging badly on drums. I want something with that kind of directionality, but not a condenser, and with maybe a bit more on the bottom end of the spectrum. It probably won't happen though. Even the Heil PR20's pick-up pattern is a bit wider than the SM85. I may have to eventually get something like a Shure SM7b, EV RE20, or god forbid... a pr40? Nah, wait, scrap those last two mics, and probably the first one as well. I've yet to spend $350 on a microphone, though I've come almost close, and I'm not really doing enough to warrant the expense. Oh well, hasn't stopped me before.

Sleep, however, has stopped me from doing many things, like continuing to type in this virtual box of issues. It is, in fact, telling me to do so now, so who am I to refuse? A sleepy person, that's who!

After a couple of weeks of total existence failure, FX Radio is now back, and even more pointless than ever, thanks to a bit of boredom on my part.
You still get the same *great* content you can only expect from FX Radio's random rotation of far too many sound effects stacked on top of each other (somewhere around 43,000 files at last check), but now, you, the listener, can be heard atop all the madness... if you're loud enough, that is.

As per usual, you can tune in to FX Radio. Now, you can also call +1(360)526-6240 for the FX Radio SHOUT-Box, for your free 90 seconds of fame. You can also sip directly if you have a sip capable device or softphone by using the address sip:fxradio@test.pdaudio.net.
If multiple users are on the system at once, a temporary conference will exist. After 90 seconds, you will be unceremoneously dumped from the box. I haven't found a way to kill a session and be nice about it, so for now, it just drops. I hope to change this in future.

Feel free to do or say whatever you like for the 90 seconds of time you get. This is the internet, which is all about freedom... Right? Yeah, thought so.

Hi, and welcome to a hotel in Shepherd's Bush, where seather12 and myself will be staying until early Tuesday morning, at which point we will shove off to Canada and the United States, respectively.
Yeah, great way to start off a post, informing the reader that we will soon be leaving, isn't it? Right, I thought so!

The last few days have been an absolute blast. Naturally, I have audio to show for it, though not as much as I would have liked. As events go, some of the most interesting things never get recorded. As dgl1984 pointed out, to insure a really boring vacation, be sure to record everything at all times, and nothing fun will happen to you. Don't record anything, and you'll have a great time.
I've managed a bit of a compromise, and, for the most part, except for a few stupid things, it's worked out rather well.
So, let's get to the audio then, shall we?

Before anything happens, we must first get to the United Kingdom. So, get on that plane and shove off! This file was recorded between Monday and Tuesday afternoon, and takes you from the trip to Greensboro, to Philadelphia (where I meet up with brandon), to Gatwick, to the Gatwick Express train to Victoria station, to a taxy that takes us to Andre's flat, all in about 80 minutes. It's amazing how fast things go when they're edited, don't ya know?
This file includes heavily abridged versions of both of my flights, including take-off, landing, announcements, etc. and announcements from the Gatwick Express and Victoria station itself. Unfortunately, I broke something, and you don't get to hear the first interactions between myself, Brandon, and Andre. Sorry 'bout that, but there are things to make up for it.

On Wednesday, we met up with Pam and David, two of Andre's long-time friends from Charlotte, originally from Chicago. In this recording, Andre is the odd one out, being surrounded by people from two other countries, with no fellow brits to back him up, all in his own home.
Apparently, Pam used to work with Andre when he was a very small person.
Later the same day, Brandon, Andre and myself were just hanging around and being stupid with microphones on. This file includes a very dumb Fender Rhodes duet with Andre and myself near the end, as well as other dumb and random things.

Thursday was a really lazy day, and thus, I didn't record anything.

On Friday, Brandon got his Nokia n82, which was ordered from a UK Ebay seller. Just for the fun of it, Andre and Brandon recorded with both of their phones on opposite sides of the room, and I patched it together in Sound Forge, with Andre's phone on the left, and Brandon's on the right. For whatever reason, the mics on these phones sound quite different, and the audio on Andre's end had some drop-outs, which I fixed (sort of). Now, for your enjoyment, have a fake stereo recording done with two Nokia n82 video cameras. It's rather short and to the point, as well as being rather pointless. Hmm, is that a contradiction? Maybe!

On Friday night, Brandon and I checked in to this here hotel. That was recorded, but relatively boring, so it won't be posted. For a while, we didn't think there was wireless access, as they seem to be using a residential BT home hub with WPA encryption. Yeah, residential stuff in a hotel, how cheap! Anyway, Brandon got the nice hotel staff to give us a password, as it is a free connection, and from that point, we were good.
This room is pretty small, but not bad otherwise.

Now, for the big event -- the Louis wedding itself, which occured yesterday. This was streamed live on TBRN with some issues, since the network we were using wasn't exactly optimal. In fact, it broke up and died just before Andre and Kirsten were to give their vows (yeah, only the most critical point of the whole thing). However, there is an unbroken archive of the entire ceremony, including lots of ambients, a late start, the incredibly quiet PA system, babies, and loud cameras, all brought to you by my Cad M179's and a Jecklin disk on a table. Enjoy the end of TBRN... except not.
Now, let's all watch things change... or something.

After the wedding, everyone, except the couple, walked to Kirsten's parents house for the reception. Brandon and I went with Duane, Andre's incredibly cool half-brother. That place is massive! I met lots of people, including several drunk brits, and James Bowden, who is even more subtly scary in person than on the phone. "Yeah, I wanted some samples from my Roland Phantom X, so I just de-compiled the samples from rom, shoved it all onto a compact flash card, and wrote a program to convert them to something useful. Easy!" Yeah... Sure, whatever, man.
I don't have much audio from the reception itself, unfortunately. I would have particularly liked to have had the speeches several of us made. Brandon has them on his phone in a decent quality mono, but I think that's it.
I did, however, manage to get a few minutes of the mini-concert held outside by Andre's father on steal pan, a drummer who's name I can't remember, and Danny, a bass guitar player, until my h4 batteries died. This also includes conversation between myself an Andre's grandparents from Barbados. It's all quite interesting, really, and is available here.

So, that's all I have for proper audio at the moment... No, we're not done yet. I still have toilets!
In fact, there are three varients of Andre's toilet. First, a half flush, obtained by holding the handle down for too long.
Now, a long flush, where the handle was held down for a bit less time. This, for some reason, makes things go really slowly.
Last, but not least, we have the full flush as it was meant to be.
The first two recordings were made with the Cad M179's, the last with the Audio Technica AT822, after I realized I did it wrong, and couldn't be bothered to drag the Cads back in there again.

Of course, I had to record the toilet from the Abbey Hotel as well, because it's just something to do.
First, I recorded from the bowl as normal. However, after listening to that, I decided it might be interesting to pop the tank lid off, and record from the tank perspective as well, since it sounds incredibly different from your standard American toilet. I am amused by stuff like this for some unknown reason.
Looking at the pipelines behind these things, I am convinced you could shove a small child through the plumming system pretty easily, until it comes to a turn. They use lots more water at a time than ours do (I think it's something like 5 gallons to a flush).
Just to be different, I also recorded the full fill-up and drain of the sink in our room, since it's incredibly fast both ways. Where'd all the water go, anyway? I wish the Perdue family sink would do that!

OK, that's it for now. Time to enjoy the rest of my stay here, as there are now less than 48 hours of it left. Tomorrow, we'll be headed back to Andre's to say goodbye and hang out for a bit, then we're off to Gatwick again at some stupidly early time on Tuesday morning. The flight leaves at 9:20 (or is it 9_50) local time, but due to check-in things, we probabl should be there by 6:00 AM or so at the latest. That should be fun.
Enjoy all the randomness that is the universe at large.

Due to some incredibly crappy performance from TBRN's machine, as well as the ever so helpful staff at midphase... er not... TBRN has moved. The network is now hosted by a few linode servers in different datacenters, each with specific tasks for the sake of redundancy.
This means a huge downsize in terms of locally stored content, and available bandwidth per month.
However, it also means a striking increase in reliability, and more fun things to come in the future.

Most critical services are operational, but currently are accessible through a different address, until DNS hosting is moved and migrated to reflect the new changes.
Until said issues are resolved, you can listen to TBRN's live programming by visiting http://tbrn.andrelouis.com:8888/tbrn.ogg. Sorry, no automation at this time, though this will change as soon as some other issues are addressed.

All archives will be hosted off-site by Bluehost, conveniently provided by seather12, and links to past shows on this blog may or may not work until the entries are manually edited. At this point, I don't know, and, to be honest, I really don't want to manually go through and edit each "Things and Stuff" link to connect to something that works if it can be helped, but... well... whatever.
I have some time on my hands if it comes down to it, as I know some people find my show, and thus, TBRN, through this strange and odd misshapen thing that appears to be a blog of some sort.

Also, due to the server move, FX Radio has a new address. It can now be found at http://fx.pdaudio.net:8888/fx. The link for FX Radio has also been updated on PDAudio's semi-broken website as well.
Same great... um... great? content??? you're all used to. Only the address has been changed to protect the innocent.

Now, before I go to bed, I'd like to bring the following interesting application to your attention: Fideliphone.
This is a high quality p2p, full duplex audio app, similar in concept, at least to some extent, to AudioTX. Differences:

• It doesn't cost $800


• It uses the open-source Celt Codec for it's audio via UDP, rather than mp2, mp3 or pcm wav


• It plays nicer with points that are not connected via VPN

and much, much more... Well, eventually, anyway.
It works sort of like Speak Freely without a reflector, in that you and your remote party must be connected to each other. There is currently no way to send a connect request or anything fun, so that bit must be done very manually.
It just works when both machines have established a connection.

It's still very much in development, but so far, this promises to be a rather cool tool for things like net radio remote co-hosting, or just chatting with very high quality, stereo audio, which I've done quite a lot over the last day, including a three-hour Fidelicall with Jim Snowbarger, with stereo miking on both sides. that was fun!
In fact, there is currently no way to use this program in mono (though this will be implemented soon, I've been told). The idea was to get a stable stereo application working first, then implement other things on top.

Celt, which is a compromise between the quality of Ogg Vorbis and the latency of Speex, allows mono and stereo encoding at either 44,100 or 48,000 hz, and fixed bitrates from 32 to 500 kbps, or quality managed bitrate.
The quality of the Celt codec is adjustable within the program, although the default quality is right on the edge for users who have 256/384 kbps upstream.
In fact, due to a stupid issue with one of Charter's routers, I can't seem to send to Derek at anything higher than about 20 KBPS without errors, while I can send Andre, in london, much further away, a solid 100+ KBPS stream from this program with no break-up at all, with Andre sending a slightly smaller stream, somewhere around 90/93 KBPS to accommodate his upstream... and the quality is amazing at such a bitrate!
If you didn't notice, we're measuring in kilobites, not kilobits, so it can get pretty intensive at the upper end of the quality scale for some users. Still other people were not able to make good connections, despite having available bandwidth... Maybe some bad routing? Well, one of them was in New Zealand, another was onMCHSI which has lots of bad old AT&T routes, so it wouldn't be too surprising, or anything...

I'm very excited about the potential of Fideliphone, as I've been looking for an alternative to the highly expensive AudioTX for some time now, and it looks like this could very well do it.

I, however, have not been looking for bed replacements in a while, although I've decided to make use of the one I've already got. They're convenient, these bed devices. I like'em.

P.S. I bought a Samson C com mono optical compressor for $29, for use with my mic upstairs. It should be here tomorrow. Just thought you'd all like to know.

A bit over three years ago, I got a mic from nick6489 via ck1012 while in New York, this being the Marshall Electronics MXL-603 pencil condenser mic, mainly used for instrument micing.
This is a 20mm small diaphragm condenser, quite useful for things like drum overheads, or recording acoustic guitar.
I almost immediately noticed that the capsule could be taken off of the microphone, and wondered what other options were available, but never really bothered investigating.

Last week, while looking for something on Ebay, I ran across a seller who sold omni-directional capsules compatible with the MXL-603, 603s, 604, and a few other non-MXL small diaphragm condensers, and bought a set of these caps, plus a second MXL-603, since I only had one. The 603's are no longer made, having been replaced by the 604, but I really didn't feel like buying a new set of mics when I already had one perfectly good one that I could still match with something else.

Since I sold my Naiant MSH-2 condensers back in June, which I originally bought to use on it's included stereo bar, then switched to using my fake home-made Jecklin disk, I figured I'd try using this pair of mics on the disk, since they seem pretty clean, and are a lot smaller than my large diaphragm Cad M179's, which I've also used on the disk, because they are lovely and large. Plus, assuming I ever do any real field recording and something gets damaged, I'd really rather not break my best studio condenser microphones, if you don't mind very much.

So, I've done just that, and made a fake voicepost all about it, including some recordings of things happening around here last night and this morning. It's actually not very exciting, but it will give you an idea of what these mics do in a situation they were never meant for. Plus, it's got lots of dings in it, among other things.
Skip this if you don't feel like wasting 35 minutes and 9 seconds of your life. Otherwise, have this thing, and enjoy this rather non-technical, anti-scientific experiment. Perhaps more interesting things will be recorded with this setup, but there just wasn't anything interesting going on, and I wanted to play with my new toy, so I did, despite the obvious lack of fun things to do.

The Heil PR20 dynamic mic comes tomorrow, and the new motherboard for the production box, which still hasn't seen the light of day after over a month, shows up on Thursday. Perhaps I can finally turn the Dell into a PBX box and make it get out of my studio environment. I don't like it much, after all, but it should run Linux ok.

After nearly six years of use, my Behringer Autocom pro MDX 4400 is dying. Sure, most of you probably won't care, and, To be honest, I don't either. I have much nicer stuff now.

For the past two months or so, I've been using the Behringer compressor up here in the bedroom for misc/aux applications, as it is no longer needed in the studio. However, as of a few days ago, each of the individual channels now emits it's very own 120hz hum that dings along with the dynamics in your book. You will know it is time to turn the page, when you hear the buzz, like this... Oh, wait, old things and stuff reference... We can't have that!
As long as the channels are bypassed, everything is nice, but when compression/limiting is active, you get this cute, underlying, non-constant 120hz hum. If I didn't have the Phonic, Ultramizer, and the neat little DBX 2-channel deal, I would be a lot more annoyed than I am now.
Oh well. It was my entry into dynamic compression, and, for what it was, did it's job. But now, it's been superseded several times over, and, as far as I'm concerned, can go shove off if it really wants to. Byebye!

That's all I have to say for now, other than the fact that I don't like being sick. I also don't like sponsoring 102.1, the Borris, also known as my body temperature as of Monday afternoon, or the body with a beat... pounding headache... whatever you want to call it. Right now, it's pounding out a happy hardcore beat behind my right eye, and I don't like it much.

I want an 8-channel compressor/limiter/gate for the drum kit. There are only a couple of problems:

My prefered store, Full Compass, only sells a couple of dedicated 8-channel units, which says a lot given the wide variety of things they carry.
The cheapest of these units is the Presonus ACP88 for only $899.95.
The next up in price is the Klark Teknik 8-channel dynamics processor, for the amazingly trivial $1,798.50. So, the final answer... Nah, I doubt it.

I would even consider grabbing a couple of Samson S-Com-4 four-channel compressor/gate deals, but I don't like the gates on them... A bit too binary for my taste, although the compressor itself isn't bad, certainly nicer than the Behringer AutoCom four-channel boxes.
I don't particularly like the way the S-Com-4's linking function works compared to every other compressor I've seen, but for this particular application, that wouldn't be an issue.
I'd much prefer something closer to my cute little DBX 166XL 2-channel compressor/gate, which none of you except <lj user="dgl1984>" have heard. Beautiful compression, and a rather silky gate. However, DBX's cheapest 4-channel offering is about half the price of the afore-mentioned Presonus unit, so buying two of those wouldn't be cost-effective, though it might sound nice. So, I guess I'll just use all software compression as DX inserts in Sonar for the drums, and take great care not to overload the channel strips. Oh well. Can't have everything, I guess. It's actually more convenient in some ways, but... I'm a gear slut! I want more knobs to turn and things that flash, and stuff that I don't need in the slightest! In other news, Mom has just purchased a 2001 Ford Mustang. It's yello, has a pretty nice stock stereo system, and a working air conditioner. Coming from a 1987 Plymouth Voyager, then a 1992 Subaru Legacy, back to the Voyager, then the Mustang, it's quite a difference. Plus, it has the Kelly Michaels Ford Sexplorer horn, and thus, the Sexplorer panic alarm. When Dad first hit the button on the keychain, I had Nashville flashbacks... Scary times indeed! No news so far on the return of my Phonic board, so I'm going to call Phonic later today and see what's up. I have all these ideas for productions that pretty much require it's use, but I'm sure they'll all have been forgotten by the time I get it back. OH well, that's always the way, isn't it? I do remember how to sleep, so that's what I'm going to do next. Have fun?

As most readers of this blog will know, I use Miranda-IM as my multi-protocol messenger of choice. I've been using it for over three years, and, while it's quirky and strange, it is also quite fun and configurable. For people like me, who have way more time than they should ever be allowed to have, endless configuration is fun, and sometimes scary.
There are lots of plugins for Miranda, including additional protocols, extensions for handling of status and event notification, and random crap that no messenger has any business having.
Many plugins for this interesting little application are quite useful, while others... Why?

One of the almost useful plugins was re-brought to my attention a bit over a week ago by arfy8820 and freakyfwoof. It's called MirandaComm, and it allows voice chats to occur between two or more Miranda users. Like the bad old days of using SpeakFreely without a reflector, each person has to be connected to every other person in the fake conference, as there is no client/server infrastructure. Oh well, there are better apps for that anyway.

I saw this plugin on the Miranda add-ons site a long time ago, but at the time, I didn't know many people who actually used Miranda, so I didn't bother to look too closely at this plugin. Times have changed, however.

The plugin uses existing instant messaging protocols to get the IP address of the remote host, and to initiate the voice chat, sending a request and personal key to the intended user. For anyone who cares, the client sends something like this to the recipient upon a voice chat request:
@@@@mc2_okok!(Lbcttw==
This is a personal key. I know this, as before I had the plugin installed, Andre sent that to me. I had no clue what it did, so I pasted it back at him... and he ended up in an audio conference with himself. Cute, huh?
Of course, with MirandaComm installed, you don't see these messages in your chat log, since it correctly interprets them as a voice request.

Now, for the potentially cool application of this plugin:
By default, MirandaComm uses a built-in version of Speex, a free, open-source codec for speech transmission. This codec is also used in many online voice chat applications, like TeamTalk, and optionally Ventrilo. Remember that clunky thing? Oh, yeah, I forgot it existed!
While Speex can support up to 32khz sampling rate, the version built into MirandaComm is limited to 16khz, and has a non-configurable low-end rolloff. As a result, it sounds like Skype, only better... sort of. It certainly has the same rolloff on the low end of the spectrum, or something very similar.

Don't like the built-in Speex codec? No problem! You can use any existing DirectShow/ACM codec that Windows can find, provided the person on the other end has a way to demux it... theoretically... No, it doesn't actually work this way, which is highly annoying.

When a few of us started playing with this plugin, we noticed that the latency was incredibly low, due to it's use of the UDP transport for audio data, rather than clunky TCP with it's error correction and other things slowing it down, like Ventrilo seems to enjoy. In fact, by default, it is under-buffered, so it breaks up quite badly. Turning a buffer slider down fixes this problem quite nicely, and doesn't sacrifice much for latency at all.
When we found that, theoretically, this plugin supports any installed ACM codec, we immediately thought "Oh, look! A free, open-source application for high-quality remotes and/or co-hosts for internet radio shows."
As there are ACM versions of the Lame mp3 encoder, as well as a now quite dated ACM Ogg encoder, obtaining non-sucky, stereo audio at a reasonably low bitrate should be possible using this interface.
However, after much testing, we discovered that the only ACM codecs that actually work, although all others are listed, are GSM, CCIT Ulaw and Alaw (from 8000-44,100hz, 8-bit mono or stereo), and PCM (all bitrates and sampling rates, mono or stereo). Yes, that's right... If you have the upstream, and your ping time is low enough, you can actually send uncompressed PCM data in realtime using MirandaComm, though the conditions have to be quite good in order for this to work. Obviously, my boring Southern American residential bandwidth can't handle the strain, although I did successfully send to Andre (3500 miles away and 120ms ping) at 11,025hz, 16-bit mono, and even 8000hz, 16-bit stereo, with no break-ups. Anything higher did lots of bad stuff on my 384k upstream connection, which always has a constant 64k stream, bringing my usable upstream closer to 320kbps. However, if you have a solid 2mb upstream to play with, the remote host is close enough to you, and no fat people are sitting on the pipes, you could, theoretically, send a nice, clean un-compressed 44,100hz, 16-bit stereo stream out to one person, with a bit of overhead. That would even be a bit of a stretch for a t1.
However, if you don't have quite that much bandwidth, you can either collapse to mono and change to a lower sampling rate like 22,050hz if you are only sending voice, or you could get away with using Ulaw or Alaw, which are both a quarter the size of linear PCM. Even though these formats are technically 8-bit, they both have a 13-bit dynamic range, and the quantization occurs at a different part of the scale than you'd see with linear PCM. So, basically, you won't get that nasty grainy obvious 8-bit effect, unless you do some really strange things to make it happen.
This is the same well-known industry standard format (g.711) most commonly associated with VOIP, the difference being that you can stream at up to 44,100hz, in either mono or stereo.
Even with my relatively puney bandwidth, I was able to send a 44,100hz mono Ulaw stream to London, and it was quite stable. Andre tried sending to me at this bitrate, but something broke... hard... even though his upstream is better than mine. Oh well, most are these days.

Oh, yeah, that's another nice thing about MirandaComm. It isn't necessary for all parties to use the same voice codec.
This might be handy if you decided to do something live where the remote host has a lot more upstream than you, when the important thing is to keep the remote's sending audio as clean as possible. The return won't need to be at such a high priority as long as the latency is good, because that won't go to the public.
So, for example, if someone with Optimum Online, one of the nicer Time Warner Cable teers, or a lovely Verizon FiOs connection wanted to co-host a show with me, I could send to that person at a stupid boring bitrate in order to conserve my own bandwidth, like Speex or GSM, and they could give me a beautiful un-compressed stereo stream, which would then go to the fake airwaves.

As far as I know, there are very few programs available that will let you stream in multiple formats, bitrates and/or sampling rates over the UDP transport. The most well-known, and probably the most expensive offering out there, is AudioTX communicator. Nice program, but horribly expensive. It's meant as a hardware ISDN codec replacement, with the added benefit of also working over a TCP/IP connection, with provisions for testing audio latency and such.
They even make dedicated hardware units that do the same thing, but are even more expensive.

MirandaComm almost does it, but falls short when it comes to connecting to third-party ACM codecs. It's an open-source project, so if someone who knows or cares about that sort of thing wants, it could probably be fixed. I am completely clueless about such things, or I'd do it myself.
I wrote to the developre of the plugin last week, but haven't heard anything back.
Oh well... Another nice concept that almost, but not quite, works.
Why do things like this always have to find a way to suck, after looking so nice on the surface?

Does anyone know of a robust, high quality audio via UDP transport that is free, or at least a lot cheaper than AudioTX?

While cruising around on the net, looking up specifications for a few things, I ran across this page, which makes reference to stereo recording using a pair of Audio Technica AT3032 small diaphragm omni-directional condenser microphones. The sample recordings here are beautiful, especially the last three on the page, which were made using an improved technique over the previous ones. I think the mics were fed into the preamps on a Sound Devices 722 or 744, can't remember which.

The description of this thing makes it seem not very portable on a moment's notice, but I'd love to know what, exactly, is being done here. It certainly looks interesting, and rather non-conventional. It sometimes sucks not being able to see photographs, although most of the time, it probably doesn't matter too much. Whatever it is, I wanna play with it, Mommy! Not that I actually do anything fun worth archiving in such great detail most of the time, as I'm usually quite boring... but that's not really the point, now is it?

Yep, it's another one of these things, which will end up being slightly boring, a little bit dull, and just a tad on the blah side, but that's me on a summary page. So, what else is new?

Yesterday, my Sennheiser HD-280 headphones, which I like, and use upstairs all the time, finally decided to crap out on one side.
Being a slightly broke individual, I thought I'd purchase a pair of AKG K 44 headphones to use instead, as they are the best pair of headphones you could possibly get for $19.99 at Musician's Friend, Guitar Center, Full Compass, etc. And, of course, we have a local guitar center, so I thought I'd be able to pick them up locally.
Well... no! The AKG K 44 headphones have been discontinued as of January 2008, apparently.
The closest current closed-back headphones AKG now has in price are the M 70's, which are $29.99 at most places.
Of course, our lovely little Greensboro guitar center didn't have those.
I tried some Audio Technicas in the same pricerange... Definite suck. Really, they don't get decent until you get into the ATHM30 and ATHM40 headphones. I still say that I'd rather mix with my Audio Technica ATHM40's than the Sennheiser HD-280's, although admittedly, I did prefer the Sennheisers for non-critical listening over the Audio Technicas.

After trying a pair of Sony MDR7506's, deciding that they sound great but are a bit much for what I want, as well as a few other demo sets, I ended up buying a pair of Sennheiser HD-212's, which were $50 at Guitar Center. However, I don't think I like them all that much.
They're light weight and comfortable to wear, more so than the HD-280's, and they don't have the annoying coil-cord, which I never really liked all that much anyway, as it was so heavy.
However, the cable is not single-entry, and these headphones look like something slightly better than what you might find at Radio Shack.

Over all, the upper end of the spectrum is a bit flatter than the HD-280's, which is all right, but they have this upper bass presence peak which kind of annoys me a bit.
The upper end of the peak sort of exists around the average frequency of my voice, so listening to myself on these cans is a bit annoying.
If it wasn't for that one peak, these headphones would be nice and flat, and really quite good, but that alone makes me not like them so much.
Blind note: Eloquence, if you have the misfortune of using that thing as your primary speech synthesizer, really! sucks coming through these headphones!

It's yet another case of "Damn, I didn't notice that on the demo board in the store!" only to find out later, after plunking down the cash... Yeah, you know how it is. Things either sound a lot better or a lot worse when used on other setups that aren't yours.

So, I'll probably return these headphones, and get... what? I dunno. Maybe I'll order a pair of these AKG M70's from Full Compass and see how they are, since I need to buy some cables anyway. The thing that worries me about these headphones, however, is that they don't list a frequency response for them -- it simply says "terbo bass." Usually, that means they'll sound a bit like these Sennheiser HD-212's I'm using now.
The K66's ($39) are still in production, but I don't like those headphones. They are semi-open, meaning they look like closed-back headphones, but there is a big ol' grid on the outside of each driver, which does two main things:
First, it makes you look like you're wearing a pair of cheap creative labs sound blaster speakers on your head, and second, it leaks lots of sound both in and out. So, while they have roughly the same acoustic properties of the much nicer, cheaper, and of course, now discontinued K 44's, the dumb grid breaks it. As a result, reviews on those headphones aren't so good, and, after using a pair a couple of years ago, I can really understand why.

I can still find K 44's on ebay, but that's not really the point. Although, maybe I'll just buy a few pairs of them, and keep 5 or 10 pairs in a safety deposit box somewhere... er, maybe not?

However, in the mean time, as it's now 2:24 AM, I think I will start my day. Great time to wake up, isn't it?

I never thought I would buy a Shure microphone. Well, I just did.
In this case, it's a Shure SM85 hand-held condenser.
"What prompted this," you might ask? Well, this is a rather valid question, given that I already have quite a number of microphones around here. The answer is simple. My Marshall V63M large diaphragm, which I mainly use up here in the bedroom for misc applications such as TeamTalk, or recording voiceovers when I'm too lazy to go downstairs, is having some issues and being loud about it, rather like what eventually happened to both of my Cad GXL-2200's, and I decided I'd rather have a hand-held, non-dynamic to play with in here anyway.
I thought of buying another set of Cad C195's, and I still might. I like those mics, and I was stupid to make mine go away, but it was for a good, selfish cause at the time.
However, when looking around on ebay, I ran across a Shure SM85 (not to be confused with the SM58) for $15. I got people to look at pictures, and it looks all right, and the guy has 100% positive feedback. This is a discontinued mic, although I can't seem to find out when it was made, or when they chucked it out the window. It was definitely around in 1983, though.
The specs would make it appear rather similar to the C195, though it may not be as flat in the upper end. Guess I'll find out, because I'm just bored enough to do that sort of thing.

In other news, I finally have a desktop that works in here, at least until I can permanantly do something about it. Yep, folks, I've taken a great big step (plunge?) down in performance, and am currently using my brother's old Dell Dimension 8200, complete with a 2.0GHZ Willamette Pentium 4 (256kb l2), 512MB of nasty rdram, and an 80GB Exelstor hard drive. I took the cranky original old 100GB Western Digital drive out. Ryan still has it, and can keep it. Really, I don't mind.
It is, however, a socket 478 chip, so I might be able to convince this thing to run a Northwood processor, which would make it actually quite nice for what it is. Will I bother? Probably not, but it's an idea.
It's certainly not what I'm used to, but it will do for a few weeks. It does at least have a Turtle Beach SantaCruise sound card, which, for being an unbalanced consumer-grade card, is damn clean about it, on both input and output.

Now, for the following unrelated news:

1. I am not related to Frank Perdue, founder of Perdue Farms.


2. I am also not related to Bev Perdue, who is running for North Carolina governor


3. Lots of people seem to think I am related to one or both of these people, but I have no money to show for it.


4. I have a huge headache.


5. I'm sleepy.

All this having been successfully conveyed, I shall now find some nighty night pills, and temporarily shove off for a while, and forget that the world does, indeed, exist.

Apparently, my Sennheiser HD-280 headphones, which I rather like, are dying. Both of the ear pads are falling apart, and the cable wants to shove off as well.
Although the cable and earpads are field replaceable, the cost for buying a cable and two replacement pads will just about equal what I payed for these headphones, which is quite boring. Plus, I can't find a store in the United States that actually stocks these parts, though they are all over the place in the UK, Germany and Australia.

I've mostly been using the Sennheiser HD--280's in the bedroom for non-critical apps, and they're awesome for that. I prefer mixing on my Audio Technica ATHm40's for the most part still yet, but the Sennheisers have better isolation by a bit.
I will say that I do prefer the cable of the Audio Technicas over the Sennheisers (straight vs. coiled, and the same length with a nicer plug). I never have liked coiled cables on headphones all that much.

So, while I could get yet another cheap pair of AKG K44's, which are the coolest thing for $19.99, I've really gotten used to these HD-280's over time. I'd rather not keep buying pairs only for them to die after a few months, though.

As a result of being annoyed, I've been researching alternatives to the Sennheisers.
Some reviews claim that the Equation Audio RP21's are a step-up from the HD-280's, and the price is about the same. I can get the RP21's from Full Compass for $79, which is still a bit cheaper than you can find the HD-280's for in most places.
I would, of course, like to demo them, but none of the music place things around here sell those particular cans. Surprised? I'm not! Welcome to North Carolina!

Others have recommended the Sony MDR-V6 as a comparable HD-280 replacement. These are also a bit cheaper than the Sennheisers. However, most reviewers seem to think that, while they are pretty close, the HD-280's are just that little bit nicer.

So, while I can certainly drag my Audio Technicas between here and the studio, I like the highs of the Sennheisers more for casual listening, even for boring things like synthesized speech and voice chatting. Totally figures, given that the first couple of times I used those particular phones, I really didn't like them much.

Thus, while this may be a rather long shot in the dark, as it goes, does anyone know if the Equation Audio RP21 or Sony MDR-V6 headphones are any good? Comparison to the hd-280's would be nice, but I'm already asking for so much.
Not that I can actually afford to buy anything at the moment, given that I still need to build a new desktop, and I've got bills to pay and such. Boring!

Time to continue work on building another system that is not my own.

Hello, and welcome to St. Patrick's Day (that would be me, of course). OK, maybe not, but it's an excuse to write in this thing after two week's of complete and total silence.

IT was on this day in 1989 that my father's truck was stolen by a drunk person called Geoff, and driven to Chatham County. I remember waking up, and Dad getting ready for work, as per usual, walking outside, and then saying "Hey, has anyone seen my truck?" after which, all hell broke loose. But, that's not what I came here to write about.

As many will doubtless know by now, the trip to Nashville went as planned, and many fun/scary things occurred during the course of the vacation, which, for me, lasted ten days, from March 2 to March 12.
It would be just about impossible to properly relate things, given that I was a semi-social person and didn't take notes on the trip. Besides, that reminds me too much of school, and we can't have that.
So, I'll briefly summarize a few highlights. Yes, there are some recordings, as well as the archive for a stream that we did on March 6 from Kevin's place, ironically, without Kevin, since he had to work, which has yet to be uploaded. That will be fixed soon.

( Lots of other stuff happened, too. )


So, that was the trip, with a bunch of missing details. It was fun, and they're already planning another one for June in Virginia Beach. Since Kelly and Derek have to pass right through Greensboro to get there, I'm sure I'll have no choice but to go, whether I want to or not. At least, this seems to be the vibe I'm getting from people like Kelly and Randy G.

However, when you're on vacation, and you need a vacation from some of the people you are vacationing with... um, yeah. Enough said?

Having said all that, I've pretty much emptied my reservoir of things to say, as nothing much has gone on lately worth mentioning, other than the trip to Nashville.
Well, I did get two more broken Irivers. Bec had another broken Iriver IHP120, which seems to be even more broken than the one I already have, as it won't power up on either AC or battery. We think the Iriver was powered up with the wrong polarity, and something fried on the mainboard.
I also now have an Iriver IHP320, which has a dead hard drive. I Think that's all that's wrong with this one, although I haven't replaced the drive yet to find out.
One thing I can say, just by looking at the 320, is that I already like the 120 better, just because it looks cooler. But, if I can get the 320 working with parts I already have, and it plays things and runs Rockbox, then, well, that's really all I need, theoretically. We'll see how that goes.

Now, as lovely as this new Mac keyboard is to type on, and it really is, I've decided not to type in this particular window anymore, in favor of doing other things. Therefore, I'll spare you all from more senseless rambling and do just that. Here we go, byebye!

After playing around a bit with the Audix FF-15 overhead mic, I've decided that I now want a hyper-cardioid condensor or dynamic for vocals, not just a standard cardioid.
This is due to the fact that, although it's not designed for this at all, the FF-15 picks up way less noise from my room, including the annoying board fan, than my Cad M179. This is due to it's very small diaphragm, and the fact that it is highly directional.
The FF-15 has a rolloff at 100 hz as it is an overhead mic, and I'm sure fits into the mix with the other mics in the pack rather nicely because of this, though we'll see when I get the rest of the clips. So, it's not what I would call a full-range mic.
With no compression, you are nearly dead at three inches to either side, with a normal speaking voice.
I really like that for applications where I won't be moving much, I.E. vocals and broadcasting. So now I'm looking at the R0de NT-3, Oktava MK012 with hyper-cardioid capsule, or one of the large diaphragm dynamics, like the Heil Sound PR-30 or Shure SM7B.
Even when I get rid of this board and it's annoying fan noise (which I will do before the year is up, no doubt), it will still be nice to have something flat and narow.
You just can't have too many microphones, you know!

The drum mics, snake, patch bay and various cables arrived today. Only then did I find out that the actual mounting hardware for the mics, well... doesn't come with them. I was under the impression that it did, but I read the info wrong. The Audix DVice clips only come with the Audix D-series mic pack, not the fusions. So, now I have all these nice mics that I can't practically use. Oh well, another purchase for next month, I guess. I need five clips, and they're about $20 each. So yeah.

Also, this morning, I broke my old spring reverb box that I've had since 1998, and which has existed since 1974.
For a rather long time, one of the springs has been touching the side of the tank, doing bad things. So, I decided to take the tank apart to see what was going on. In the process, I broke off one of the lugs going from the on-board preamp to the pan, only to discover that the internal padding used to dampen the sound had completely deteriorated, and one of the springs had gotten stretched almost to the breaking point on one side. The entire assembly decided, at that point, to basically fall apart in my hand.
So, that's a dead person, unless I decide to rebuild that particular spring tank. Not really worth it for the output. Oh well, again.

In order to avoid breaking further things, or discovering things that have already broken, I think I'll go to bed instead.

That's right, folks. The second most pointless day of the year is upon us again, that being Ground Hog Day. If you don't know what that is, fear not, as you aren't missing anything spectacular.
However, if you're still curious, you can read this thing and see what I'm on about. Believe me, it's not information worth knowing!

To celebrate the pointlessness of today, I just spent lots of money, at least for me. I went to our local Music-go-round and picked up two more mic stands and a set of strings for my old Yamaha classical guitar, totaling $53. I then ordered many things from Full Compass to make my life more interesting, and my bank account hungry.
This order consisted of one Audix Fusion7 drum mic pack with 7 mics and drum clips ($354.37), one Pro Co 10 ft. 8-channel XLR snake for the drum mics ($72), a Nuetrik 48-point patch bay ($69), a pack of 8 Hosa, yeah nick6489, Hosa! 1.5 ft. trs inter-connecting patch cables ($24), and 16 Pro Co 3 ft. insert cables($48.99).
I was also looking at the Cad DM-TP 7 mic pack, thinking they would be relatively close in price to the Audix mics. However, it turns out that you get 7 mics (two of them condensers), clips and a case for $125. To be honest, that scared me a great deal, so I went with the Audix mics, which I have heard, whereas I don't know how the Cads sound.
It is quite rare when cheapness scares me, given that I am a cheapscate, but that was certainly one instance where it did.

In doing a bit more research on the DM-TP 7, it looks like Cad uses the same mics for tom toms and snare, whereas the Audix mics are
tailored for the response curve. They give you three tom mics, snare, kick and overheads, whereas, essentially, the Cad mic pack has four almost general-purpose dynamics, a kick drum, and two small diaphragm condensers for overheads.
I've been told that the Audix overheads work great for micing acoustic guitar as well, so of course I'll have to have a play with that. I don't really have a set of matching mics that I'm not using for other things that I like for guitar. The Naiant MSH-2's are OK, but they're omni-directional, and pick up too much room ambiants for that kind of thing.
If I had another match for my MXL V63M, or another MXL-603, that'd probably work better. Even the 603 and the V63M on a guitar wouldn't be so bad, using the small diaphragm mic near the fret board and the larger one closer to the bridge at 90 degrees from each other. Alas, the clip for my V63M broke (it was cheap and plastic anyway), and I have yet to replace it.

The next big money-spending project will most likely involve some sort of acoustic treatment for the room, or, at the very least, one of those RT portable vocal booth things, and some longer balanced 1/4 cables for my keyboards and effects processors, since I'm running those unbalanced at the moment.
At some point, I'd also like a bass amp (I'm running the Variaxe 700 through an active direct box to the board right now).

So, there you have it, my geeky audio related entry for today. Now, let's see if I end up doing anything useful with all this stuff? Anyone want to take bets?

Hi, all zero of you who might care about this sort of thing, other than myself, of course.

As you have probably figured out by now, I have been playing with various VoIP hardware/software for about the past year or so, just because it's something to do, with the added benefit of perhaps learning things that may actually be useful to someone at some point. What a concept!

Near the beginning of last week, my snom 320 VoIP phone (which is really nice, by the way), decided to temporarily die. My guess is that something on the flash chip became corrupted, and now it freezes on the firmware update check in the middle of the boot-up process. It is fixable through TFTP, but I'm lazy, and haven't gotten around to doing something about that yet.
In the mean time, because it was incredibly cheap, and I was a bit curious about a few things, I picked up a Grandstream budgetone 101 IP phone to play with.
This is, I do believe, the absolute bottom-end of the entire range of stand-alone VoIP phones, or at least very close to it.
I got mine for $20 on ebay, but they don't list for very much more if you were to buy a new one.
After having had a play with it for just a couple of days, I've noticed a few things that are rather interesting, at least to me.

First, let's look at the phone... It looks like a really nice speakerphone; nice for WalMart standards, anyway. Essentially, it has the look of a regular cheap speakerphone, with the obvious exception that there is a single 10-base T rj-45 connector on the back instead of a standard RJ-11. But, this being an IP-phone, we sort of expect that. Right?
The back panel also has a 3.5MM headset jack (mic on tip, audio out on ring), and of course the input for the power supply.
As far as operation goes, the phone has a really boring/basic web interface for managing your single sip line and other related parameters, as well as the controls on the front panel, which, if possible, are even more boring, especially compared to my Snom VoIP phone. There are only twelve menu options (not very easy to get lost even though they do wrap), as compared to the multiple menus, submenus and sub-sub menus of the Snom.
The Budgetone also has far fewer buttons than the 320, but then, it's also a lot cheaper than the Snom, and is marketed completely differently, so it has a right to be very different if it wants to, I suppose.

Ring tones; It has three by default, and they're all boring. You can have up to two custom ringtones, and both of the custom slots are already filled by default, until you do something about it.
and, until I accidentally over-wrote it, it featured a ringtone with a fake talking caller ID which reads number only, brought to you by none other than... get ready for it... Allison Smith! Oops, well maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that I made it go away, even though I didn't mean to.
They have a funky little tool for creating custom ringtones, which encodes a wave file into some sort of binary thing that includes the raw PCM data, as well as some other stuff, which is, of course, not documented. Ain't it always the way?

Now is where things get sort of interesting:
The sound on this thing is both amazingly nice and incredibly bad. The output audio from the handset's microphone is very nice, and doesn't bother filtering out any bottom-end or creating any additional unnecessary peaks. The mic element is flat (no really annoying peaks like other... Linksys... phones), and it just generally sounds nice. The ear-piece on the thing, however, is a complete pile. It sounds like it was made entirely out of rubber, and has nothing but mids, and not even many of those. Further testing suggests that all of the bad filtering on that side of the call is entirely the fault of the handset speaker. It's probably easy enough to take the handset apart and find another speaker of the same dimensions, and just replace it. In fact, I intend to try that at some point.

Speaking of the speakerphone, there is a really nice case speaker on this phone (it's better than the one in my Snom 320, actually). It goes very loud without distorting, and has a nice, full range for the size. However, there's this problem... Well, two of them, actually.
The mic output of the speaker phone is actually a pretty good deal quieter than the mic on the handset, and, while it has absolutely no dry return on the speakerphone circuit (no local feedback issues), it also has no echo cancelation. So, if the other person doesn't mind themselves being fed back and forth through the internal mic and speaker on the case, and if you don't mind putting your face flat down on your desk to talk to said person, then it's quite nice. Otherwise, it isn't, really.

However, when properly attenuated, it does make a very viable cheap phone patch solution if you happen to be behind a VoIP PBX. Obviously, the input on this thing expects something at mic level, so you have to be very, very careful when driving a line-level signal into it. Cutting it bac by about 24DB would probably be a good idea, and I plan to make up a cable for myself with some in-line resistors on the tip only for just that purpose.
When you plug something into the 3.5MM jack, it replaces the speaker phone.
As I said previously, you can't hear yourself feeding back on the speakerphone at all, and there is no voxing. While this is really bad form for a speakerphone, it's actually what you generally want for a phone patch to a board, ironically. So, essentially, the speakerphone part of this phone works better for something it was never intended to do than it does by simply existing. Go figure!
In fact, you can crank up your output source well beyond clipping, and the return simply doesn't exist on the other side, which is what makes it so useful for this sort of thing.
The Snom also does this pretty well, but it has an rj14 headset interface rather than the much more convenient 3.5MM of the Budgetone, and I haven't had a proper testing cable made up for that yet, or even a cable with some attenuation to make the current setup a bit more useful than it is now.

Some people tell me this particular phone has some serious nat traversal issues, but I've yet to test that. It very well may be a completely useless piece of crap if your PBX is on another network segment, rather than pretending to be a semi-useless one. I'll have to do further testing on that, as they are still releasing new firmware for this phone quite a lot. My Grandstream Handytone 488 ATA, which I have now sent to seether12 seems to work OK to a couple of PBXs on the greater area network with it's latest firmware, so maybe they have improved support for this one as well.

Bottom line: It's a cheap phone. It does what it does, no more, no less. I expected that when I bought it. I still prefer the Snom as a phone, generally, but this thing definitely does have it's merits.
Let's all make a marketable custom TRS 3.5 to dual mono 6.5MM cable with about 24DB of attenuation on the TRS tip, and have a good patching time... or something?
Maybe not!

I am a bad Borris, and have put lots of Christmas related things off until the very last minute, so I'd better get started on those. Everyone have fun, or at least a good time. Can you have a good time without having fun? I don't know. Someone try it and let me know how it goes, ok?

P.S. for anyone who may be geeky and/or bored enough, you can reach me by calling sip:borris@BadForYou.net. Thank you and goodnight.

I know you've waited at least 19 minutes for it, and it's finally here! That's right, the archive for RealTime 2007.5 is now available! It's four hours of fun, including bad Swedish Christmas songs, bathroom fun, talk of toilets, and Derek and I being generally strange. This is not, by it's very design, an apt description of the show, so you'll have to download it for yourself and have a listen. See?

I bought Derek a pair of Cad M177 microphones, which are basically the singla diaphragm cardioid version of the Cad Equitek E300's, and are very similar to the M179's I have, in everything but the ability to change pickup patterns.
I got these as an early Christmas thingy, because I was generally getting annoyed at his GXL-2400's. Don't get me wrong -- they're quite nice microphones, but his voice through them, the way his system is set up, and some other things really started grating on me. A few months ago, I pointed this out to him, so he said, jokingly, "if you're annoyed about it, then buy me something better!" So, I did.
These particular mics were, of course, used on the stream, and I personally thought the sound was quite nice. The stereo image didn't have quite as much of a hole in the middle as it does when using two GXL-2400's, at any rate. This may be due to the fact that the M177's are a bit more spherical, so the reflection from the back side of the capsules wasn't quite as bad as that of the back side pickup of the wedge-shaped GXL's.
I really don't know, and thus, I'm only throwing conjectures around at this point.
Plus, the bass rolloff on these mics is quite a bit nicer than that of the gxl-2200 or 2400 (which essentially sound the same), and they are less susceptible to the popular popping p problem that is so predominant, and is sometimes proudly displayed to the populous.

OK, now to something more interesting than talk of microphones:
We also have the archive for Car Time 2007 which, naturally, was streamed live from the car as we were on our way back to Statesville, from whence I would then go home. We did this last year as well, but, thanks to better equipment, and the fact that I have way too much time on my hands, and put far too much effort into making it work, it went down a bit better this time around.
This was accomplished using two Behringer XM-8500 dynamic microphones hooked up to my Zoom H4, which was used as a sound interface to the laptop. My cell phone, which currently has an unlimited packet data connection (subject to change as I don't use it all that much), was bluetoothed to the laptop to provide the internet connection.
Through some transcoding, relaying, and a lot of convoluted strange things, we managed to stream pretty solidly, as well as taking messages, all while driving east bound on I40 at 70 MPH. Although the stream was originally done in mono for the sake of quality on such little bandwidth, the archive is in stereo, and with an interesting image that contracts, expands, and moves around a bit, as mics were focused and changed to provide close-up perspectives of things. Unfortunately, due to a huge over sight on my part, some of the best bits of the archive are missing, so almost an hour suddenly becomes 29 minutes and 43 seconds. However, I figured there were enough interesting/amusing bits in this archive to keep it around. So here it is for your general amusement.

I did my usual "Things and Stuff" after returning from Derek's place, but, for the sake of simplicity, and so as not to fill these virtual pages with all it's issues, let's pretend I didn't, and leave it at that.
Perhaps some of the more interesting bits will end up in the stupid folder one day where they belong, but the show as a whole isn't even worth subjecting you to. And, if you were one of those unlucky people who heard it live last night, I apologize profusely. I promise never not to do that again, or something.

Having said all that, I hope those of you who celibrated Thanks Giving around this time had a particularly good one. I did! Weeee! I'm going away now, in case you couldn't figure that out or anything.
73's, and may the whale be with you?

As reported yesterday, Rimmington, the box that has most of my files, has decided to strike out. The OS drive is dying, so I'll most likely replace that tomorrow, and things should be good to go.
Due to this, and a few other things, I didn't do Things and Stuff yesterday, although I technically could have. Things would have been boring, and I just wasn't feelin' it at all.
Never fear, because I have things that are much, much worse, and far more incriminating to yours truely lined up instead.

First, by popular demand, and against my better judgment, we have the archive for the one and hopefully only Bath Time with Borris Show, from August 15, 2007. The intro has the wrong date. Sorry about that.
This show was done live from the bathtub, including the use of a roll-up keyboard, a set of Wizzzoelliam binaural mics clipped to my face (sort of), messages, and, when they worked, phone calls. Oh yeah, and a very leaky, crappy pair of headphones that really sucked a great deal, just so I wouldn't have to wrisk using a nice pair and screwing something up.
At the time, my laptop was acting up and being generally bad, so there are some pops, clicks, and weird buffering things every now and then, but given all the crap I was running at the time, it could have been much worse.
Note; I claim no responsibility for this. I only did it. This doesn't make me responsible for it... Right?

Being the over-zelist audio person I am, just to record the intro to the fake show archive, I dragged my two Cad M179's, the jecklin disk, and my h4 into the bathroom, ya know, to pick up the proper ambients of the place. I could have just as easily and much more conveniently used the Wizzzoes, but I'm boring, so I didn't.
Anyhow, after recording the intro, I thought to myself "What would it sound like if I miked up a toilet with these two microphones in cardioid pick-up pattern?" All the toilets I've recorded previously were captured with omni-directional mics, and I thought that, perhaps, using a set of cardioids instead would yield a better image in such a small space, plus the rear rejection factor.
'But Borris, those are slightly expensive mics, made for capturing vocals, used as drum overheads, and things like that...'
Yes, I know, but you know what? flush that! I can do whatever I want with my equipment, and you can't stop me! In fact, flush it with a tank for all I care!
I don't have a comparable sample with the Wizzzoes or similar mics uploaded anywhere, but suffice it to say that this is very different. But, of course, you'd expect that. OK, let's face it; the fact that I did that in the first place is bad enough. Then, to make matters worse, I have to show up and go on and on about it, making myself look exponentially worse! Oh well, that's my life for ya.

With that, I think I'll save what little dignity I have left... It's not too late for that, is it?

Welcome, one and all, to a Thursday. This Thursday is the starting-point of a month that may or may not do interesting things. Novembers usually are, at least, slightly interesting around here, for no particular reason, other than the fact that they apparently feel it necessary, assuming they have the cognative ability to do such things, to realize that being completely boring isn't the best idea in the world.
Given that, as of now, this month has only existed for five hours and fifty-three minutes, and that this is hardly an accurate representation of what is to come over the next thirty days, one can only speculate... or, in my case, simply not bother at all, and move on.

"So, what's been going on?"
Well, as I haven't actually written a real entry in these virtual page-things other than linking to shows since almost a month ago, not terribly much has actually changed, other than some new toys to play with.
Naturally, being the bad person that I am, I will now launch into a thoroughly boring explanation.

A few weeks ago, the HandyTone ht-488 telephone ATA I traded byron27 for my Sipura SPA-2000 decided that dying was a good thing to do. It died good and proper, with it's FXO relay clicking in and out in rapid succession when the unit was powered on. How's that for appreciation? I had it for four weeks, upgraded it's firmware, made it work probably better than it ever has, and it goes off and dies on me? How nice!
So, being rather annoyed with the Linksys Sipura's sound quality, particularly their way of echo canceling and dealing with different phone impedances and the like, and feeling a little brave, I picked up a Zoom 5801 FXO/FXS gateway, which is very cheap, has pretty sparce documentation, and almost no one seems to own one. So, the few reviews I could find were very extreme in nature. I could only find two or three reviews, and everyone seems to think that, while it sounds good, it has some very strange issues.
Well, that seems to be pretty well accurate.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that about 98% of all the issues I had with both the HandyTone and Sipura ATAs either didn't exist, or were easy to fix with this new Zoom ATA.
Don't get me wrong -- it has it's quirks, and, to be honest, it's one of the strangest things I've come across in a while, until you get to know it, that is.
There are some obscure features missing from the Zoom, such as the ability to direct IP-Dial, not much in the way of viewable real-time stats, etc. Also, it has this tendency to not put the audio through for sip channels that are not explicitly answered, such as the pre-announce and hold music that callers get when they ring my house, or my lobal TBRN PBX extension. It saves a bit of money when you don't have the PBX explicitly answering the sip channel, particularly with toll-free calls, so I'd rather have it that way. But as a result, approximately two people (at the moment) don't get to have hold music when they call me. This is actually a lot more annoying when making external calls, as sometimes instead of phone error messages that you never hear, it just keeps ringing, and you have no idea what's actually going on. Oh well.
However, freakyfwoof meets Zoom tech support and product management, and apparently some of this will be changing. Yes, they actually seem to listen to customer input. What do ya know?
In terms of sound quality, it beats the Sipura stuff hands down, on both ends of the call.
It even defaults to CPC, which is nice if you own any JKAudio product, which, of course, I don't anymore, but for dgl1984, who also bought one of these ATAs on my recommendation as a Sipura SPA-3000 replacement, this is a good thing indeed.
Also, the PSTN gateway is much nicer than the Sipura one, as it loops back far less... you can make it do bad loopback things, but you have to try overly hard, and it will almost never happen in a normal situation. With the Sipura units, it just happened by default. It's better or worse depending on what phone you're using, but it never completely goes away... It's always hanging around in the background, ready to annoy people.
Plus, the Sipura has this incredibly annoying thing called "echo supression,", which, when one knows what to listen for, is an extremely obvious Sipura watermark. It does bad things to the outgoing dynamics, and doesn't really help the echo canceling process very much. The zoom 5801 doesn't do any of this stuff.
You can also get away with boosting the input and output of the FXO or FXS port on the Zoom without having to compensate for bad echo canceling algorithms, so you can drive your equipment much hotter than with the Sipura units, without being annoying to the person on the other end of the call.

So, this new ATA, along with another carbon phone (this being an old Stromburg-Carlson rather than a Western-Electric), and my new Panasonic KXTG-1032 cordless phone seems to be a rather nice combination. I am now spoiled by dect, having never had access to it before, given that it's introduction to the American telecom market is relatively recent. No fizz, good sound quality, and it doesn't break wireless networks, which is a very common thing for 2.4 ghz phones to do, and I've never seen a 5.8 GHZ spread-spectrum phone I liked the sound of. The higher you get, the narrower the spectrum, and the more annoying internal artifacts these phones seem to have.

Now, as if all this geeky phone stuff wasn't enough, there has been a recent firmware update for my Snom 320 IP phone. In this update, they've practically eliminated local loopback, I.E. when you're on the phone, you don't hear yourself coming back through the phone's receiver at all, unless you're very loud and very obvious about it, by which point you are clipping everything out. Potential phone patch? I think so!
I ordered a Plantronics Snom headset, which is esentially a module with an rj-14 on one end and a 2.5mm miniplug on the other, which comes with a headset. The nice thing about this phone is that all the inbound and outbound gains can be very heavily attenuated, so this may actually be a viable solution for a fake hardware patch with little to no annoying dry return. At the moment, I'm using a softphone and a dedicated sound card for phone I/O, going slightly overboard with dedicated dynamic compression on both sides of the call, as well as a harmonic exciter on the phone's output, and I like the way it sounds. But, if I can get away with it, I'd rather use hardware.
IF this works, I'll probably want to buy another Snom, so I can leave one in the studio, and have one at my desk upstairs as well, given that I really like the sound of this phone. However, I doubt I'll find another one as cheap as this one. In fact, I'm just about positive I won't. This was a freak deal in the first place.

With all this aside, my life has been relatively quiet. Nothing overly fun or catastrophic has occured. Just the usual... Sleeping, waking up, reading books, occasionally talking to people, that sort of thing. Nothing worth writing about, really.
Mom started working at Moses Cone Hospital again in September after quitting her job in March. Now, instead of working second-shift during the week, she works 12-hour days on Saturdays and Sundays, occasionally doing a couple of 8-hour shifts during the week when they need extra people around. So, weekends around here are now incredibly boring, not that they weren't anyway, or anything. Don't get me wrong -- I love Dad, but, well, he's Dad... When he's not working, he's asleep on the coutch or in his chair, watching TV. Lots of activity... oh yeah. As much as I interact with my parents lately, I really might as well not live with them. It's really not much fun being 23 and still living at home.
If anything will finally motivate me to get out of this place, find someone to share a rent on a decent house/apartment, etc. that will, I'm sure.

I guess that's it for now. More when there's something worth saying. Later!

P.S. I want a stereo spring reverb unit. Anyone have a spare kickin' round?

Hi all you wonderful cardboard tubes out there, and welcome to another Thursday, and, if I'm not mistaken, the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis's death... Yes, he did really die, despite what other people have said. Higher plain of existence? I dunno, and it's not for me to speculate, so I won't bother. And, since this entry is being typed on my phone, it would take much more effort than it's really worth.

anyway, I've gotten several new thingies to play with over the last few days, because I'm a bad, greedy person. Last week, I of course got the Zoom h4 portable recorder, and I still don't have anything up here to show for it? Yes yes, I know. This is so unlike me to have an audio related thingy for more than a week and have nothing to show for it, however I have some excuses.
The sound professionals phantom to plugin power converter, while it physically looks really nice, is esentially a pile of crap! It would be fine, except the impedance is all wrong, and I can't get much output from the Wizzzoes or any other plugin powered mics I have here, so I guess I'll keep using faithful battery box on the trs inputs. Of course, just to be fun, I don't have a viable solution for that, which doesn't add loads of unnecessary cable. This will most likely change tomorrow.
So, with the wizzzoes being mostly impractical to use at this point, I've been playing with Cad m179's on the fake Jecklin disk, since the Zoom provides 24 and 48-volt phantom power. This is not nearly as portable as using a set of electrets, but it sounds incredibly nice!!! I could have rigged this setup ages ago, but it's not as fun when you can't get far from the studio. The toilet has been flushed. Yay for portability... Uh... Where was I again? Oh yeah...
So I've done stupid things not worth doing, like putting the cads in omni pickup and recording passing traffic, which gives a nice, full sound and a great stereo image, and I like it a lot. Too bad it's not terribly viable to use this setup in the field unless you can get away with being extremely obvious about recording things. This is definitely not bootlegging style, but I'd really love to see it in action. They'd probably work better as cardioids in a big venue with lots of stuff going on. Then again, those mics weren't exactly marketed for that kind of thing, although I bet they would work pretty well. However, I would not recommend strapping these mics to your face, unless your face is really fat, and can handle the weight of two metallic large diaphragm condensers, plus the added drag of the xlr cables. Maybe this would work if Rusty McKlunk were a sound engineer... Don't know? Don't ask!

I also found an incredibly nice deal on a set of Sennheiser hd-280 close-back headphones. $50 is rather nice. I mainly got them as a backup to my audio technica ATHM40fs headphones, which, for the most part, I still prefer over the sennheisers. Not that they're bad, but they're certainly heavier, tighter, and they have a coiled chord, which adds even more weight, and doesn't give quite as much freedom of movement, even though it's pretty long. The hd's don't leak quite as much sound outside, however, but it's only a slight difference. Let's see if they'll last four years like my first pair of audio technica headphones did... I find myself in doubt about that for some reason.

I went to staples on Tuesday, and attempted to buy a set of Sennheiser PX100 headphones, which everyone said was in stock. Well, it wasn't, so I ordered them while I was there. Since they broke it, I got $20 off and free shipping as well, and they should be here in a couple of days.
These, being rather light and foldable, are for use with portable things, since the only working pair of small headphones I have were never matched properly, and don't have a brand. They just say "stereo" on the headband in really huge letters. One side has highs and mids, including a bad peak at aroung 2khz, while the other side has bass, fake mids and no highs. Not good for image referencing, that's for sure!

On Monday, I got a \Snom 320 sip phone for the incredible price of $35. It usually goes for about $179 or so. For all intents, it sounds pretty much like my Nortel 9316, except without the need for an ata! Yeah! No more stupid Sipura spa-2000 loopback for me... unless I use my chordless phone or something. The parents want to make their Vonage go away, so I'll probably unlock their rt-p300, which, in my opinion, sounds loads nicer than the Sipura stuff, and make the spa-2000 successfully die! Although, maybe I won't, since it is kind of fun to play with.
Anyway, the Snom has a rather nice web interface, and even the layers of stuff on the front panel is pretty easy to navigate without seeing the screen. Typing ip addresses from the keypad is a pain, since you can't tell if you're in alpha or number mode. Fortunately, I won't be doing that much, so it doesn't really matter. It's worth it just to have this nice looking business phone with an idle display that shows "You are a bad person!" It's something that a business phone has no business showing on it's display, and it makes people look at me funny and ask questions. What more could I possibly need in life?

As if all that wasn't enough, I got another processor to replace the stupid Phonic a-6500 yesterday, this being the Behringer dsp1424 ultramizer. Yes, I know... Another Behringer product... I tried to avoid it, but the next thing from the phonic I could find that even looked remotely similar was about $900, and I just can't justify spending that kind of money on a processor I'll mostly only use for broadcasting on an internet radio station from which I have no financial benefit! I do all my mastering type stuff with software anyway, saves a lot of space and money... You know, I could scale back pretty far and do my show almost entirely with software processing, one mic, and no board, or even a stereo pair and no board... but I don't want to! I like shiny hardware!
Anyway, this processor is kind of interesting. It's esentially a slightly better, sort of dual band version of my analog autocom with a two-band exciter on it. This makes two pieces in my rack redundant. Since I'm down to 1u free on my 25-space rack, I figure I might as well get rid of the autocom, although I might keep the exciter around. It will surely be useful for something!
Likewise, I'm thinking of selling my boss vf-1, since I really don't use it that much. In fact, I haven't even bothered hooking it up since I got the new board in May. I don't need it for the guitar effects since I have the GenX, and I have better formant pitch shifting with the voiceprism. The vf-1 is a neat box that can do several fun things that my digitech quad iv can't, but I just don't use it enough.

This week was also an interesting one for TBRN.
starting with Venison's show on Tuesday, TBRN had 35 hours of live content, 17 of which were done by John of the John zone. For my part, I did something really stupid which didn't get archived, since I broke things in a bad way. I was the first, and hopefully last person on the network to do a live show from the bathtub, including having full control of my laptop while in the water, stereo binaural mics, and taking messages and phone calls, although the phone part didn't work so well. It was fun, interesting, and incredibly stupid.
Silicon keyboards are strange things to have around.

believe it or not, I actually have some things I need to get done, so I shall put this fake PDA away and do them. Repetative stress disorder will certainly seak me out if I keep typing on this tiny thing. So, 19's for now. Well, ok, so that was supposed to be 73, but I inverted it. Ah well, 19 is more fun anyway.

As some may recall (those that really care), I had some problems with my Phonic A6500 dual band compressor which I bought it May.
It leaned slightly to the left and clipped out in a very bad way.
Feeling that things were not cool, I sent it to Phonic to have it repaired.

At first, the techs saw no problems with the compressor, running tone sweeps and things. However, they didn't have the stereo channels linked.
I told them to link the channels and try again, at which point, Kacy, the guy to whom I was contacting, looked at the meter and went "Oh yeah, this thing is left-heavy, isn't it?"

I didn't hear from them for about a month. I just got a call from Kacy a couple of hours ago, basically saying that he contacted the China production plant where these things are made, and they basically admitted that the entire product line was like this, and recommended not using linked channels.
Yeah friggin' right! You know this totally defeats the point of using it as a master compressor which it is kind of marketed for, right guys?
Did you honestly think people wouldn't notice? Well... OK, some might not, but I do, and it annoys me particularly much.
I brought up the point that my PCL-3200 single-bander has never had any of these stupid issues, and the guy was like "Yeah, it's kind of stupid, but there's not much we can do about it."
Um, Phonic, you seem to have forgotten the slight fact that you made the thing, right? Or are you too embarrassed about the product that you just can't be bothered acknowledging the fact and doing something useful, like making it not suck?

So, they're sending it back to me unchanged, and I'm quite pissed off about this! You know they even wanted to charge me for the return shipping? No way, buddy! I'm not paying for that!
I don't like paying good money for a sub-standard pile of shit!
Looks like it's time to yell at Full Compass and Phonic, and see if I can get one of them to refund me... completely... for this stupid 1-u not-so-well-constructed three-dimentional Chinese asshole!
I still want a multi-band compressor, so it's also time to do more research. Most of them aren't cheap, either. Oh boy!

I got the Zoom H4 and the phantom power converter today, and have just had a play with it, although I've so far done nothing useful. I have to say that the recorder looks really weird, sounds very nice, and will be really interesting to learn. It's quite easy to operate in stereo mode, but figuring out 4-track mode is going to be a rather interesting process to say the least, as the entire menu layout changes when you switch modes.
It's not like I don't have time on my hands or anything, so I expect I'll be playing around with this a bit.
It's also quite sad that almost ten years ago, I spent nearly $500 on a rather basic Tascam 4-track recording tape deck, and this thing is loads cheaper, lots smaller, completely digital, can do all the same stuff and much, much more, and can easily fit in your pocket. I think if I had access to the stuff available now when I was 13, I'd probably completely freak out... oh, and most likely not know how to use any of my stuff. Sound familiar? Thought it might!

Time to read manuals and menus and such.

In all the five years I've been buying and selling on ebay, I've had very few problems with transactions, most of them being my own fault.
Once, I bought something with a money-order (before I had paypal), and forgot about it. Of course, my ebay e-mail was being sent to an e-mail address which I almost never checked, and having completely forgotten that I bought the thing in the first place, didn't notice until about 1.5 months later, long after I received negative feedback for the item. Oops!
Apparently, the post office did some bad things to the money-order, and the seller contacted me... or tried to, anyway. He sent me a scanned image of a very messed up money-order that looked like it went part-way through a paper shredder.
Fortunately for me, the guy was a nice person, and still had the item. I was able to get the post office to give me a new money-order at no cost to me, since they broke the other one, and things were good, even after that long.
So, what did I go through all that for? Well... a cheap little $20 stereo t-mic with two Panasonic capsules on it. It sounds like crap as a stereo mic, and has almost no image, but it's great as a laptop mic or something like it.

Up til now, the only other problem I ever had on ebay was when I tried to sell that cursed Nokia 6630 on ebay, which I wrote about last year. The phone was supposed to be unlocked, and it wasn't. In fact, it was locked to T-Mobile UK, which was really useful around here, let me tell you!
Anyway, I figured since it was just about impossible to get that particular phone unlocked at the time, especially in this country, I'd sell it on Ebay UK, stating clearly that it was locked to T-Mobile UK. This after selling it to a woman on T-Mobile America and finding out that T-Mobile UK has a different sim lock. Well, needless to say, that sucked...
So, I listed it on Ebay UK, and was hit by one of those fake Nigerian money scams, where you are sent a fake PayPal thingy from someone in a London address, and told to ship the item to Nigeria.
How 'bout no?
As a result, I was out $7 or so. It could have been a lot worse, but it sure was annoying none-the-less.

Then there was the time in 2002 when I bought a digitech Midi Vocalist MV-5 and I thought it hadn't been shipped out to me for a month, but in reality, it was sitting at the post office, because they supposedly couldn't deliver it here. So that wasn't really the seller's fault, although he did get a lot of flack from me for supposedly not sending it. That ended up working out fine as well.

Now, however, an ebay seller I'm not so sure about, who calls himself proper_crux, has sold me a sound card... Well, in theory, anyway.
Some of you may know that a bunch of us TBRN people (and even some that aren't) got some funds together and bought the components for what will soon be beeping_becky's new desktop machine, an Intel core duo e-4400 with 2 GB of ram, 500 GB hd, semi-fanless power supply, 18X dual layer DVD burner, etc. It's nicer than my production machine, and I won't like that! It doesn't help that I have all the components in boxes around here, waiting to be shipped.
It's just so tempting to... no no, I won't do it! That's bad! They'd all kill me if I did that, seeing as how most of the contributors to this project read my blog.
In fact, I'll be sending that stuff out either tomorrow or Monday, depending on when my grandma is in town. She has good connections with UPS people to get fun shipping rates from when she had to send lots of things in bulk a few years back.

Anyway, as a personal contribution, I bought an M-Audio Delta-44, a nice, if slightly older but highly reliable high-end sound card, with four inputs and four outputs, which is quiet, clean, and generally nice.
I bought it from this proper_crux person near the end of June for $107 plus $10 for shipping.
I heard nothing at all for a week, then I got a USPS tracking number in the mail. Problem is, the auction specifically stated that the seller would be sending via UPS, which is much easier to track.
A week went buy and I still had nothing. Another half week ticked itself out of existence, and still nothing.
So, I e-mailed the guy a couple of times, and was greeted with absolute silence.
I left him negative feedback and e-mailed him some more, and he was still silent.
Finally, I opened a PayPal dispute, and he e-mailed me back, saying that he was sorry, that he didn't check his e-mail often, and that he did indeed send the sound card to me when the tracking number was issued. He promised to call USPS and find out what was going on, which he supposedly did.
He e-mailed me the next day and said that, according to a girl at his local post office, the package had been sent, but gave me no further info.
Then, naturally, he went silent again, and has stayed that way since.
Of course, USPS seems to think that nothing was ever physically submitted to USPS itself, according to a few different people at different offices.

Before I bought the item, I looked at this guy's feedback score. He didn't have much feedback, relatively speaking, but it was all good, so I thought nothing of it.
However, now that I've left negative feedback for him, I've gotten a couple of e-mails from other people on the feedback forum, basically saying that they're going through the same kind of crap with this particular guy.

I think, very soon, it will be time to escalate this dispute to a claim, unless this guy gives me my freakin' $117 back like he promised he would if the sound card was "lost in the mail." Is it really so much to ask? Yeah, probably!

In other news, I ordered a Zoom H-4 portable recorder, as well as the sound professionals 24-volt phantom to plugin power converter, so I can use the wizzzoes and other mics like it. The H4 has XLR and quarter inch inputs, and does not supply standard plugin power. But, as far as I know, it's the quietest recorder in it's pricerange, with noise floor getting down around -90 DB or so.
The converter is balanced, so the little noise that shows up in recordings while on battery power should, in theory, not exist. Not that you'll hear it with any of my recordings anyway, since this place is never totally quiet anyway.
Plus, it can be used as an asio-capable USB sound card, which is really kind of interesting. Portable recorders aren't really supposed to do that or anything!
I wanted a portable recorder that could be used with both plugin-powered electrets and large diaphragm studio mics without the need for a bunch of external stuff, and having a little multi-track scratchpad doesn't hurt either.
I've also ordered a set of energizer rechargeable 3.6 volt lithiums. I have this little theory that the H4 will run better on 7.2 rather than 2.4/3.0 volts, since the power supply it comes with is rated at 9 volts DC, 300 MA.
The H4 is, from what I can tell, not quite as accessible as the Edirol r1, but as I've done many times in the past with stuff that looked far worse, I'll figure it out, and it will surely be worth the slight loss in convenience.

Oh yeah, and I still have an Edirol r1 for sale, including a 2GB kingston CF card. You do want it, right? Of course you do!

In the summer of 1992, when I was but a wee little bad person, my brother received some tapes from a mutual friend of ours.
These tapes contained some rather interesting content. However, there was this problem...
This mutual friend of ours had this incredibly crappy, dirty, badly aligned tape deck with a permanently magnetic erase head, which made all the highs go away, and added lots of additional noise.
This was rather unfortunate, since one of the most interesting things I'd ever heard at the time was found on one of these tapes.
'And what was that?', I hear you cry.
Well, it was a rather interesting thing that called itself "Chet Chetter's Tales from the Morgue," a series of half-hour stories apparently told by Chet Chetter, morgue attendant, licensed embalmer, and resident story-teller.
I only properly heard two episodes of this program at the time, the first of which being the second of a two-part series, was on this badly made tape. It had lots of drop-outs, had no high-end above perhaps 3 khz or so, but it somehow managed to have a stereo image.
It was recorded by our mutual friend from our local NPR station.
The second I managed to record myself, which was quite a feat for a little person such as myself, since the program aired on Tuesdays and Thursdays I think, at around 11:00 PM, well past the general bed time of an eight-year-old schoolboy. But really, when have limits and barriers stopped me from accomplishing things? For that matter, why have I not accomplished much given the lack of limits and barriers preventing me from... well... accomplishing things?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand:
I, unfortunately, lost track of this program after only having heard two episodes, since it seemed to have simply disappeared after the one show I did manage to listen to and record, and, as I recall, I had to record it twice, since my radio sucked and kept losing the signal. I suppose that's what I get for using an Emerson boombox!
Fortunately, it ran again later that week.

I sort of forgot about it for a while, and found said crappy tape a couple of years later, and listened to it again, despite the bad quality. The trailer on the end of every program always proclaimed "a production by M&J Audio Theater," usually with some sort of cheap audio effect. The two that I heard at the time had a ping pong stereo tape delay at a rather slow speed.
When I had the resources some years later, I did searches for "M&J Audio Theater" on the net, finding absolutely zero relative results, and becoming rather annoyed over time that the net, with it's vast wealth of knowledge, had no info about such an interesting thingy.
I was hoping to find a source where I could, perhaps, buy cd's containing those episodes I heard, and perhaps more, as I didn't know if there were any more of them.

So, after my show on Saturday, I was hangin' round, not doing very much, and decided, for some completely random and totally unknown reason, to try searching for M&J Audio Theater again. Google found four results... Yep, four of them. I was prepared to go "ah crap, loads of irrelevant things" and move on, but the very first thing I found was a link to a 585 MB file on archive.org, proclaiming itself as a container for all of the available tales from the Morgue episodes, as well as some additional background on the program that I obviously didn't know about before.
Finally, after fifteen years, I was able to hear part one of the two-part series. OK, so it's a bit out of proportion having to wait for fifteen years to hear the first of two parts after you've heard the second one and know how things end, but oh well, such is life.
Mind you, it was written in such a way that part two by itself was almost stand-alone anyway, so nothing much was missed. Still, it was incredibly cool to get some more character and event background that I didn't have before.

'So, what, exactly, is this tales from the Morgue thing, and why is it so great?'
Well, it's all about the adventures of a bunch of southern hicks from the friendly, peaceful little village of baluxy, and their encounters with some rather odd things indeed.
These were all produced from 1989 to 1992.
Just how much involvement with the supernatural can you possibly have by being a simple bac-woods manure-haller from a quaint little town with a population of 600?
You'd be surprised... Oh yes you would!
It's incredibly funny, and, for the most part, quite well written produced.
The two guys from M&J do most of the voices for everything, so over the series, it gets a little obvious, but it doesn't detract from it.
I can sight a few well-known sounds that they've used as I have some of them, but it sounds like they did a lot of their own stuff as well.
However, in one episode, I distinctly heard the very same blast used in back to the future III when Doc Brown blasted into the abandoned mine to get the DeLorean out, with some other stuff piled on top of it. Yes, I'm very familiar with it having stolen it myself for use in a Things and Stuff ID.

Also, it's plain to see that these people know how to mix things properly, but they have this odd obsession with mono reverb. Most of their effects and music are in stereo, but no... not the reverb. It's almost like they're making a point to use it on purpose, which, knowing what little I do about these people, wouldn't be too far fetched.

OK, so you want to get these things, right?
Well, Now you can!
As far as I know, this contains all the episodes which were aired on NPR, and a few that weren't.
Have fun.

Just in case you're interested, the episode I heard in 1992 was the second part of 1-800-big bang. Out of all the ones I've heard so far, it's still one of my favorites, but maybe this was because it was the first, and for a while, the last one I ever heard from this series. Just in case you're wondering, 1-800 Big Bang seems to be disconnected or no longer in service. Rather amusing given what happened in that particular episode...

This is Boris, ending another broadcasting day.

OK, I've really gone and broken myself now. I've successfully ordered a Yamaha Motif XS keyboard with an M-Audio sustain pedal capable of half pedaling. Apparently the XS pianos can take advantage of this.
Total price for everything, including shipping: $2223.
Well, sort of... The place I bought it from, American Musical has payment plans.
I generally don't like using those when at all possible, but I figure I'll probably not get one any other way.
I've dealt with these guys before, and so far have had no problems with their payment thingies, despite the fact that they're based in NJ.
So now I get to find some ram for it, which I can probably get at Fake Job, and buy a new flash drive (I lost my old boring 512mb one). Oh yeah, and sell my Motif Classic. Anyone want it? It's in good condition and everything!

Well, I've finally got something to show for my efforts, if it's worth anything.

Here is a storm, or at least a few minutes of one, recorded with the Wizzzolliam mics on the fake Jecklin disk from outside the bathroom window, using a battery box on the r1's line input, rather than using the mic preamp. Despite the fact that this was recorded on line in, normalizing only brought the sound up by about 8 DB, if that tells you anything.
Unfortunately, I drowned the microphones again as they were too exposed, but you'll get a decent idea of how things could potentially sound if I didn't keep screwing everything up, for about two minutes and fifty-four seconds, anyway. You also get to hear all the highs going away on the right mic as it drowns during the last few seconds, but I didn't keep it recording for much longer after that, as I was frantically drying the mics out to record more stuff. However, the rest wasn't worth keeping, really, so I didn't bother.
I've really got to find a good place to put the disk where there's not much around that could potentially screw up the sound, such as walls, but sheltered enough to keep the mics relatively dry while recording.
Or, better yet, I should find a way to overcome my geeky tendencies, and become a useful contribution to society. Which do you think is more likely to happen, given what you know about me?

I have just ordered a new board to replace my dying Behringer MX2642A, this being the Phonic Helix 24 firewire MKII, which has the same number of inputs and busses as my current board, but with two additional aux sends, a firewire interface with direct streaming from each channel descretely, onboard effects (that probably suck?) and all channels have inserts and direct outs, thus the board is more flexible than my current one for general routing and such. I'll probably buy a patch bay to go with it.
I also ordered a Phonic A6500 dual--band compressor to replace the Behringer Autocom Pro as the master compressor, something I've been wanting to do for about 1.5 years now.
All this for $898. Not a bad deal at all, given what it is.

I even purchased a TC-Helicon VoicePrism vocal processor on ebay. The VoicePrism is the older version of the VoiceWorks from what I can tell. It does everything my old Digitech Vocalist could do, only loads and lots better, and more of it. It has some of the TC Electronics reverbs, which rival Lexicon in many respects, so that will be fun in and of itself, as you can drive the two effects units separate from the vocal processing stuff.

So, for the first time in a good long while, I will soon be suffering from equipment overload.
The board and compressor should be here by Thursday, and the VoicePrism on Monday, I think, anyway.

If all this works out, perhaps I can get back to actually recording stuff for people again, I.E. serious multi-track projects with lots of softsynths, streaming samples and the like. I haven't been able to do this reliably for a while, since my Delta audiophile 24/96 doesn't like my SATA controllers when driven with Asio drivers, resulting in some slightly bad times.

I know I could get away with cutting my setup back and using a lot of software processing, especially for the tracking aspect, but man, there's just something about hardware! It's all shiny and has winky blinky lights and stuff! Yeah, that's it! I just like it for the lights... that I can't see.

As most of you will know, I've been playing with VoIP stuff over the past few months. I've come to the conclusion, given how things are, that a good, solid sip softphone would be the best over-all solution for making/taking phone calls on live shows and such, although I wouldn't use a softphone for everyday phone use. That's just a bit restricting.
Last June, I purchased a JK Audio AutoHybrid to interface between my board and the Vonage line. After using several fake phone patch solutions over the years, this was the first true patch I had that was actually useful.
This is a dual transformer, passive patch, with no ICs or active electronics of any kind, so naturally it's not the best solution for those using pots lines unless you want to do lots of ducking on the output. If you don't, you'll get a very filtered instance of your dry signal when the line isn't active. This kind of thing works better on VoIP systems, because you don't have the loop length problem, plus input and output are rather hot compared to PSTN (unless it's attenuated by the ATA), giving a better ratio of signal-to-null by default.

Because this box is passive and has no DSP, and you're only using two wires, you'll get a bit of residual return from your input signal, which has this tendency to break things, particularly stereo images, when you have mics panned out and routed to the phone patch itself. Knowing this, and not wanting to spend $400 on a digital patch (and that was the cheapest one around), plus the fact that this particular one would have needed some serious attenuation to not suck on my line, I decided to use a side-chain on my Phonic PCL3200 compressor in conjunction with two aux sends to duck the signal down when the mic hit the side-chain. This worked OK, with the drawback of only partial full duplex. So, sometimes, things would get missed as a result of my saying things, which was slightly annoying. I say partial full duplex, because it was a bit less limited than half duplex, but not quite full. So maybe 3/4 duplex?

I was relatively happy with this setup, given it's weird issues and limitations, until I got my Sipura SPA-2000 ATA and Broadvoice. I could never get the phone patch to sound quite as nice with the new ATA, plus I was having some weird loopback issues. So, with Broadvoice's open equipment policy, I decided to try some softphones, thinking that would be the end to all those annoying and strange issues, plus I could cut it back down to one aux send instead of using two (one for side-chain and the other for phone input).
Well, this was great in theory, but there are still several annoying shortcomings that I'm still dealing with now.

The first softphone I tried was ExpressTalk. It's very accessible, sounds great, and works... most of the time, anyway.
The problem with this one, however, is that it comes packaged with a lot of software that you most likely won't need if you just want a softphone, such as IMS Telephone on hold player, Axon PBX, VRS recording system, and IVM answering attendant, which, I admit, is pretty cool in it's own right. However, unsuspecting users who install ExpressTalk with default settings might be slightly annoyed at the hold music and messages coming across the sound card, a phone recording system being launched and binding itself to the default recording interface, and separate auto answering attendant and PBX modules that you probably don't want or need being automatically launched and configured in the background.
For the record, I'm currently using Axon until I get a Trixbox system running, which I'm planning on doing shortly. It's decent if you want a basic PBX that will rout calls, but it delegates other things that Asterisk has built in, such as music on hold, answering attendant, etc. to NCH SwiftSound's other modules. The entire package of software can get quite expensive, and is not as flexible as the Asterisk-based stuff. The IMS system is pretty neat, and IVM can do rather a lot, especially if you don't feel like writing out conf files or playing with command line thingies.

So, all the extra software aside, which is fun cleaning up, by the way, there are some other issues with ExpressTalk. For one thing, it likes to play with your incoming and outgoing volumes, taking them both incredibly high by default. There are ways around this, but I really hate it when audio apps take over my stuff like that! If I have levels set where they are, it's for a reason!!!
Then there's the fun default behavior it exhibits when you put people on hold. Now, most other hard and softphones I've seen will simply be nice, and put people on hold like they're supposed to, and not be obtrusive about it, passing things off to the PBX and letting it do whatever it's supposed to do when phones are on hold.
ExpressTalk, however, has two options:
1. Play a really, really annoying wave file over and over again (ask beeping_becky if you don't believe me), or
2. connect to an IMS server.
Well, if you're using ExpressTalk strictly as a phone, you'll probably not be using an IMS server. Plus, the default thingies are bad, and it's one more thing you'd have to change.
Oh yeah, then there's this issue wherein sometimes, only one half of the conversation comes back when you take people off hold.
Conferencing, transfer and the intercom buttons (which I think are just quickdials) require the full version, which you can use for thirty days before lots of rather annoying reminders pop up telling you that your thirty day trial has expired, after which point you are reverted to the features of the free product. This wouldn't be so bad, although call transfer and especially conferencing are really basic features that can be found in a lot of free stuff.
I've also had it try to randomly connect to a VRS server which I don't run, regardless of the fact that I've told it that no VRS server exists.
And, as I found out last night, it will sometimes not forward incoming audio properly. For example: I have an extension on TBRN's PBX (very much in development at this time), which is registered on my own PBX. Calls in or out to TBRN mostly don't work with ExpressTalk, although they work perfectly fine with any other softphone or my ATA. I've seen it work before, and I know it's an ExpressTalk issue, but I can't seem to make it work or not work 100% of the time.

All this aside, it's the most accessible softphone I've used thus far, and it sounds great when it's not being stupid.

The next phone I tried was SJPhone which is completely free, and showed some potential. For one thing, call transfer and conferencing didn't cost extra, and unlike ExpressTalk, it has auto answer and auto conference features, which are really neat. I, however, found several problems with SJPhone as well.
For one thing, the defaults make it look a lot less accessible to screen readers than it actually is. This is actually one of the lesser problems, as you can simply turn off any active skin, and you get a basic looking program with some obvious buttons.
The problems show up when you try to answer calls, if you're not using auto-answer, that is...
With version 1.60 (stable at the time I tried it), the incoming call dialogue would sometimes forget to exist, meaning the phone could ring forever, but you'd have no way to answer it, as they thoughtfully didn't provide a global hotkey for answer and hangup, although there is a nice, dedicated hotkeys tab in the options dialogue.
Also, while it has an auto conference feature, the version I trried did not compensate for added amplitude from additional calls. As a result, all conferenced callers would come in at the same level, and clip everything out. You're supposed to devide the total amplitude with this sort of thing, so that doesn't happen.
By default, and I never found a way to change this, making an outgoing call was torture, since it would continuously play a 2-second loop of a U.S. ring, with no gaps at all, while the call was being placed. Imagine one long, continuous "riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing" while making calls... Very bad!
Another annoying thing about SJPhone is it's tendency to flash the call status, including name, duration, and codec being used, on top of other windows.
Also, you can't assign sound events other than incoming call, which means no more "boing" at the end of a call. That's not the end of the world or anything, and it certainly makes it no less useful, but it does make it less fun.
DirectX audio support is very broken as the audio is being under-buffered, so don't use it. Fortunately, you can turn the option off, and it does let you change buffers manually on the new stable version (more on that in a second).
Hold functionality, however, works just like it's supposed to, and doesn't break things, like ExpressTalk does.
Supposedly, the latest stable build of SJPhone fixes some of these issues, but the sip functionality is either very broken, or I have something very badly configured.
Example; a call comes in. My computer hangs for about 10 seconds. I get a short burst of ring, then the call is droppped. Uh, yeah, really useful there.

Again, it's one of those things that sounds really nice when it works. Actually, the audio quality might be a bit more solid than ExpressTalk when properly configured, and I would use it over ExpressTalk if some of the issues would go away.

Now, we have X Lite,a free, semi-transparent, sort of accessible softphone.
When I first loaded it, I was able to see my Miranda, and through that my desktop, but not X Lite's call logs. This, of course, was rather bad. I did, however, manage to get some graphics labeled, and get it reading well enough to use it. Like SJPhone, it has a conference thingy, and auto-answer. Unlike SJPhone, it conferences properly, compensating for amplitude the way it's supposed to. However, it doesn't auto conference incoming calls, which may not be a terribly bad thing. It's another one of those things that's fun to play with, though.
Again, there are no global hotkeys for taking calls and hanging up; this all needs to be done from the X Lite window, or from the system tray. Raaaaaaaaah! This is a disturbing trend!
At least there are hotkeys for answering, hanging up, placing calls on hold and taking second calls while in the X Lite window, but how 'bout some global ones that will work in any window?
Despite your preferences, when a second call shows up, it will beep at you over your phone output device rather than the ringing device, which, in my opinion, it really shouldn't do. As a result, if you're streaming, everyone will no, by the very annoying "beep beep", that another call is coming in. This doesn't sound cool, and the other softphones I've seen have ways around this. Even setting the ringing device to "none" doesn't fix this behavior.
Also, I can't find a way to read the program and missed call logs reliably, although I can see parts of it sometimes.
The audio system on this phone isn't as good as ExpressTalk or SJPhone, as it breaks up sometimes for no particular reason, presumably another DirectX under-buffering issue which the end-user can't really do anything about, although it's not as bad as the next one I'll write about.
If the audio issues were fixed, and if the call waiting beeps could be redirected properly, I'd use it, even given it's slight lack of true readability, as it has a pretty small footprint.

Then, there's this other cute little thing called Phoner Lite. This has to be the most non-standard looking thing I've seen in a long time. It has a bunch of tabs in multiple dialogues, with each dialogue having it's own tab control. However, all the tab controls have only one tab on them. Why?
This phone is small and cute, requiring no installer. However, it's audio system is horribly screwed up, you have to go through the entire setup wizard in the help menu to change your sound devices (not such an obvious thing to do), and there are loads of graphical buttons that some people had issues finding. I found them, but... well... it wasn't really worth it in the end.

So, getting desperate, I even tried a sip plugin for Miranda, which really tried to work. However, it, like everything else, had some really odd issues.
Putting people on hold with this one is a really bad idea, as when you go off hold, instead of the callee hearing you, they get a nice, clean loopback of themselves. And I do mean a bloody clean one!
Incoming calls show up like authorization requests, and if you have missed calls, you'll get a long list of fake old calls that you supposedly still have coming in, which you have to manually deny, if you want them to go away.
It doesn't want to create multiple sip sessions, even though it has a conferencing feature. Of course, when you get an error every time a second call comes in when you try to answer the new call, or while making a second outbound call, that's sort of a moot point, now isn't it?
Plus, it has this bulky sort of session manager thing that really gets in the way while calls are active. So, while that would have been kind of nice in theory, that sort of broke.
Oh yeah, and of course the audio side of things just had to go and work perfectly... Just to annoy me a bit further, ya know?

I've yet to try Diax, which is a softphone that only works with the Asterisk IAX2 protocol, but it's last update was about two years ago. So if there are any issues with it, they probably won't get fixed any time soon.

I've tried Gizmo's sip support. Let's just not talk about that, shall we? Saves me a lot of typing.

Of course, Skype is out for two main reasons; it's huge, and it's not sip compliant. There are lots of sub-reasons, but most of you will already know my viewpoint on Skype, so I won't bother stating those again.

Conclusion; there is no decent softphone that actually does all the things it's supposed to, and does them properly, that I know of, anyway. If anyone knows something I don't, please feel free to share.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be happy if someone made a hardware sip phone with just a quarter inch (or balanced XLR) input and output, an RJ-45 with a web interface, a keypad for dialing, the ability to transfer calls, and conference both incoming and outgoing calls. Oh, and of course there would be residual from the input signal. Why should there be one at all when you're not using copper wires anymore. Sure, put a mix minus as well as mix+dry in there in case someone needs that sort of thing.
If such a device existed and it were cheap enough, I'd say screw all this softphone crap and use something like that.
This would be such a specialized thing that nobody would want to produce something like this, I'm sure.

Oh, one more thing I forgot; let's not have any filtering or other weird processing, such as autogain (unless it's optional, of course).
These hardware phone patch manufacturers have this thing for filtering the incoming and outgoing audio severely. For example, dgl1984s patch has DSP, and is limited from about 220 to 2.7 KHZ or something like that, when the line itself, even a PSTN, can pass way more than that, especially on the low-end. They say they're doing this to comply with telecom regulations... Right. So why then, do a lot of even really cheap phones have a better frequency response than something you're paying loads and lots of money for? And don't even get me started on the $2000+ Comrex and telos patches and such!

Did you know that Patrick's mic preamps have been mounted up-side-down in a rack for almost a year? Well, Patrick didn't either, until about ten minutes ago.

I ordered a Cad m179 microphone yesterday, which draws 8 MA of power at either 24 or 48 volts. The mics I have now only draw 3 MA, and most budget mic preamps, I.E. the ones I have, don't usually put out enough power to drive these babies properly.
So, in order to determine if I could use this mic straight, or if I'll need to get a dedicated power supply for it, I got my Dad to look at the preamp with a meter, which didn't work out because one of the probes is broke. But, in passing, he asked "Why are these thangs mounted up-side-down?" to which I replied "They are?" to which he said "Well, if they ain't, the writin' on'em is. Where it says 'BlueTube' and 'channel-1' and stuff is all wrong."
These mic preamps are rather simetrically designed, and so, although I've had them mounted up-side-down for almost a year, I had absolutely no idea.
Boy, don't you just love being blind sometimes?

Today, I learned, after owning my Digitech Studio Quad IV for a little over five years, how to use the mod matrix, which allows you to chain effects parameters to one of two LFO's, dynamic levels, or any midi controller from 0 to 127. Why so long? Well, I've learned every other aspect of this unit a long time ago, but never got anyone to help me figure out the mod matrix. It's the only part of the Quad that has a wrapping screen. However, there's a pretty easy workaround for it, which I didn't know about until I found it, quite by accident. What fun!
Imagine a reverb preset that doesn't show up at all until things get really loud, or a delay that randomly changes it's time. Or, how about an algorithm that slows the sound down with a push of the mod wheel on your keyboard? Well, I've figured out how to do all these stupid things and much, much more? Er, yeah.
As a result, I've been playing around with things, and re-discovering what fun, pointless things can be done with an effects unit, not that I never did this before, or anything.

Also, the Guilford County school system got it's first snow day of the season today, as we had both snow and freezing rain. This, of course, did me no good, considering that I'm not in school anymore. I used to love snow days, but now I find them quite blah, since I get stuck with my brother for more time than is technically necessary, seeing as he's still in school. Oh well.
Speaking of school in general, I'm really quite glad I graduated when I did, because now the school system has imposed lots of really odd things that simply didn't exist when I went to school that, fortunately, I will never have to deal with. Ha, ha!

Did you know that the word "loggy" is in the dictionary?
Well, it actually references the word "logy", which has the following definition(s):

Logy: adjective
lacking physical or mental energy or vitality; sluggish; dull; lethargic.
[Origin: 1840–50, Americanism; perh. < D log heavy, cumbersome +
-y
1
—Related forms
lo·gi·ly, adverb
lo·gi·ness, noun

lo·gy (lo'ge)
adj. lo·gi·er, lo·gi·est
Characterized by lethargy; sluggish.
[Perhaps from Dutch log, heavy or variant of English loggy, heavy, sluggish, from log1.]

logy
adjective
stunned or confused and slow to react (as from blows or drunkenness or exhaustion) [syn: dazed]

logy
suff.
= Science; theory; study: dermatology.

And, if you have a Franklin Language master 6000SE, you can look up the word "loggy" and get esentially the same result. Isn't that cute? I certainly think it is.
For a nice, internal reference, I think gol more closely resembles the proper definition of log more than log itself does. Confused? Good! I'm leaving!

Hi. This is a non-standard Borris, which is currently writing from a phone while spinning around in a swivel chair. Both are fun, pointless, and frivolous activities. Wait, do I sense a bit of redundancy here? Yes, I do believe there is a bit of redundant feedback going on here, which, interestingly enough, leads me to the point of the subject of this post, i.e. The actual reason I took my phone out of it's crappy generic case with japanese writing on the top, where everyone can see... Or, at least, all those who can see it.

Today, I learned something interesting about bus powered Usb sound devices, which folks like john and steve have already figured out a long time ago, using an external sound device wherein the interface is looped into itself through external means, I.E. a board, or the output of one sound card is being patched directly into the input of another, especially with 1/8th jacks, tend to introduce lots of bus noise into the system.
i'm working on a project that requires more i/o than I currently have with the audio stuff on lars, my production machine, the result of which may end up on a Things and Stuff in the near future. So, I decided to deploy my m-audio mobile pre external sound card, since it's very clean. However, when I set everything up using it's 1/8th line in and quarter inch stereo outputs, I got bus noise that would give that of the john zone a ron for it's money. This, as you can imagine, annoyed me a great deal, as I know this interface to be a rather clean one, especially for usb, with a noise floor somewhere around -85 db. Why ever should such noise exist on the input path?

Well, after playing around a bit, I found that the bus noise only existed when the other sound cards were connected to my board, and with each added connection, the noise got progressively worse, until, with inputs at nominal, the noise itself was pegging the peak meters at just under -40db, thereby making it completely useless! It sounded a lot like those mic preamps on motherboards where you can hear all the noise from the CPU, GRAPHICS CARD, DRIVE CONTROLLERS, ETC. All at once, only not quite as loud, but a bit too close for comfort. This, as I'm sure you can reckon, is bad.
I thought of bringing the laptop downstairs and using the mobile pre with that, as it would have no direct contact with lars, but them I remembered that the interface has quarter inch inputs as well. You may think that sounds quite stupid, and that looking at it would suffice, but it doesn't. Why? Because m-audio did something rather odd. Putting the left input on the front, and the right one on the back. At a quick glance, you'd probably not think the two jacks were related, let alone a stereo pair, but there you are. I thought the front one was a high-Z instrument input, and the back one... Well, yeah.
They did the same thing with the midisport 2x2. Really a weird design if you ask me.

Anyhow, back to the point... I tried using the quarter inch inputs with some really crappy radio shack cables in the exact same configuration, and, oh looky, no more bus noise!
So, I tried the same thing with a couple of other USB sound cards I have here, all with 1/8th inch inputs and outputs, and got different variations of bus noise. The more power the card needed from the system, the louder the noise got. My Sound Blaster mp3+ had almost no bus noise with RCA inputs, but then when I used it's 8th inch output, the bus noise showed right up on both input and output.

I'm not sure quite what causes this. I thought, at first, that it's just a simple matter of the cables not being balanced, but then again, RCA cables aren't by default, now are they?
I'm guessing the noise from the bus is being caused by cables and components basically acting as antennas, increasing the noise and introducing it back onto the line, which is really quite bad.

As for my particular situation, I can use the quarter inch inputs, even with crappy cables, and it sounds fine, but the same configuration on stereo 1/8th inch input is bad. I wonder if the close proximity to left and right has anything to do with this at all?
I'd really like to know exactly why this happens at all, and a way to get around it when quarter inch inputs are not available, as I know this has been plaguing some people for a long time.
I'm sure there's a quite reasonable explanation of why this happens around somewhere, but I'm just not so knowledgeable when it comes to this sort of thing. So, I'm just going to not think about it anymore. Yeah, that's what I'll do.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of a metal kazoo. That's right folks, a nice, high-end metal kazoo. All the better to annoy you with, my deer...
I also have a set of Klipsch promedia 2.0 speakers, which I got on ebay for $20 directly from Klipsch. They were referbished, and the only thing that's really wrong is that the left speaker has a tiny scratch on the side.
Anyhow, for as small as these speakers are, they really do sounhd quite nice. In fact, they sound better than a lot of sub-sat systems I've seen, without the subwoofer. It's a ported system, so it won't be totally flat, but really, for the size, they're really quite nice.
For anyone asking, I bought them before I knew my cads were going to get damage, or I probably wouldn't have. But, they're good night-stand laptop speakers none the less.

Speaking of night-stands and bed and such, it's time, I think, for Borris to go to bed. Gotta love being unsynchronized with the rest of one's geographic populous, oh yes you do.
So, I'm off. Good [insert time of day here] everybody.

Hi, and welcome to a Thursday? No, actually, it's Friday. Oh well, that's ok.

As the subject states, with all it's lack of gramatical fidelity, my cads got damage!!! My GXL-2200 large diaphram condensers are both broke. And, guess what? I got one of them exactly two years ago today, and bought the other one a couple of weeks later, deciding that I much prefered the sound of the Cads over the Behringer B-2 pro I had at the time. Yep, that's right. And now, two years later, they're both broke! And, before you start asking, no, I'm not one of those scary people who remembers every single insignificant date/time. I just happen to have a couple of files that I recorded when I first got the GXL-2200, and, oh looky! January 19, 2005!

Well, one of the Cads had some issues for a good long time, which got worse after I came back from Portland. I, of course, took them with me to do Things and Stuff while with Mary Ann, as having mics that match is definitely a good thing.
That mic started going pop, fizz, crackle, and other bad things. I kept putting it off saying "I'll replace it next month." Well, several next months later, it's not replaced, and my other cad has now gone and started doing the same thing as well. Makes it pretty well useless when the random noise it generates is sometimes louder than the signal coming into it, not to mention it trips the compressors out big time.

So, for now, I'm using my Marshall V63M in the studio, which sounds almost exactly like the GXL, but it doesn't seem to have as much headroom. Plus, it doesn't have a shockmount. The Marshall is just a little tiny bit too big to use in the Cad's shockmount, so I have to use the stupid little plastic clip that comes with it.
Oh joy.

With loads of things randomly breaking for no particular reason, I still have enough stuff to do things, as well as stuff. I no longer have a single pair of matched microphones around here, which is quite annoying. I used to have two or three sets at a time, but that was way back when... a couple of years ago or something? I should really do something about that, but I have other things to take care of, which have nothing to do with the fake studio at all. Sure, I have plenty of things that need to be fixed/replaced, like my Ion, making this damnable Emu sound card go away and hopefully replacing it with a Mark of the Unicorn Ultralite, and now the mics as well. I'd also like an aditional compressor, which would be a bit more pressing if I actually had a set of matching microphones.
But, as such things go, there are other things that must be dealt with first, before I can play with all that.
Ah well, it's life. I'll get over it. That's what people do.

In other news, someone has just pulled up to the driveway, Dad has just gone out there and is now smoking a siggy on the front porch, and Dexter just said "woof" several times. God, isn't life in the Perdue household so exciting? I sure thought so!

Welcome to the boring life of me, which is, by nature, rather boring, since I am naturally boring.

Today has been mostly spent shopping around for high-end sound interfaces, something which I'd really rather not have to do. However, with Lars, and the change from IDE to SATA, this has now become necessary if I ever want to make use of low-latency Asio stuff, such as softsynths and realtime DirectX and VST effects ever again. As it turns out, I do. So there!
I currently have an M-Audio Delta Audiophile 24/96 sound card, which I like. It's kind of basic on the I/O front, but it's quiet, clean, and generally nice.
However, the older Delta cards with ensemble/Envy chips, such as mine, don't like SATA controllers. Thus, using stuff under Asio, particularly more than one track of audio and/or most softsynths, results in much popping and clicking, skipping, buffering, stuttering, and general badness associated with stuff that isn't conducive to a nice, solid production environment.
Therefore, it's time to get a new sound interface.

A few months ago, I told you all that I was looking at the Hercules fw16/12 sound interface, which has 12 analog inputs and 8 analog outputs, as well as some digital I/O and two sets of midi ports. Well, that card has now been discontinued.
In any case, I found some more reviews, and discovered one really annoying thing about this card, and, in fact, most modern high-end interfaces, which really annoys me a great deal.
Despite some people's assurances that, since it's a hercules interface, it would not be clean, it turns out that the converters on that particular card have a noise floor of only -114 DB. Oh no! All that noise... except not? The noise floor only rises to -105 DB when you include everything else. Still, it's bloody quiet for a card that cheap.
Definitely no problem there, and it's got enough I/O to do everything I want, and then some.

However, most manufacturers, including this one, are putting much more emphasis on Asio support, which means that WDM/Direct sound support is kind of left out in the dust. To illustrate what I mean; With the good old once-reliable Delta cards, like the Delta 44, 66 and 1010, you have a choice of which stereo pairs you want to use under WDM/Direct sound. Applications like Winamp, for example, can use any of the stereo pairs discretely. If, for example, you run a setup like I do, and want to have two winamps (or perhaps some other media player) running on their own dedicated signal paths from the same sound card, you could do this without trouble. Now, however, times are changing.
In the case of the 16/12FW, and, in fact, many other interfaces, they've squished everything into one multi-channel WDM driver, rather than having several discrete stereo pairs that Windows can use.
This is all fine and well if you either want to drive a 7.1 channel system, or your application can pick out the various outputs to use under the multi-channel interface (all the ones I want to use, of course, can't), therefore, this is all rather annoying.
If I'm going to get a new card, I want to be able to take my third sound card out, which is crappy and old anyway, and replace it on the board with another set of stereo outputs, and use it in the same way I could use any other sound device.

So, here are the cards I'm looking at now. I'm not sure which of these, if any, have this WDM functionality, as well as great sound and good support. An accessible control panel would be nice too, although if I can use the basic functionality without doing much, as is... or was the case with my Audiophile 24/96, although it's control panel is easy to use, then all the better. From what I've been told, none of these cards, except, perhaps, the MOTU Ultralite, have a particularly accessible control panel, unless you're a jaws user and utilize something like hot spot clicker, and can get someone to label all the bitmaps and sliders.

These interfaces all have a number of inputs and outputs. I figure if I'm going to get a new sound interface, I might as well expand my connectivity options as well;

• M-Audio fw1814


• EMU 1820M


• Mark of the Unicorn Ultralite


• Edirol FA-101


• Presonus Firebox (the cheapest of the lot)

These range in price from the Firebox at $299, to the Ultralite at $549, strictly based on pricing from Musician's Friend, which I realize doesn't have the best prices around. You can usually get a good idea, though.
It looks like I'll have to spend this kind of money to get anything decent.

For future reference, or perhaps not, the Tascam FW1804 looked really nice, until I found that it only has one stereo output. Why? It's got 8 inputs, why can't it have 8, or at least 6... even 4 analog outputs?
Same goes for the M-Audio fw-410. It's basically an audiophile that supports 24/192 instead of 24/96, has two mic preamps, and has two more analog inputs, but no more analog outputs. More digital stuff though... nice, I guess.

Out of all these cards, the EMU 1820M, according to reviews I've found on the very cool sound-on-sound magazine, is the quietest/cleanest of the lot, even beating out the Echo Mia in terms of noise floor and dynamic range, which is, apparently, pretty hard to do.

There are two versions of that card apparently -- the standard 1820, which seems to go for about $399, and the 1820M, who's price I don't know. The 1820M has a better A/D converter, and it's apparently the same one they use in high-end ProTools recording systems. Yes, I said ProTools. I hate! ProTools with a passion, but I have to say that Digidesign, as blah as they are, does generally use nice hardware. The rest of it can all go off and die, as far as I'm concerned.

So, that's all well and good... Or is it?

Today is December 7. Anyone know what happened on this day 65 years ago? Yep, thought so... Pearl Harbor. My grandfather was a Pearl Harbor survivor, stationed in Honolulu at the time. Scary stuff.

I remember, when I was 7, how they made this huge deal about the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, only having a vague idea of what really happened. Now, 15 years later, it's the 65th. It's purely psychological I suppose, since I'm so young, but it seems like a huge difference between 50 and 65. I know it's really not, and that 15 years isn't a lot of time, but still...

With that, having recently awoken, it's time for me to start my little day. I could do with a shower, and I am in desperate need of a haircut. I think I'll do something about that later today, if you all don't mind very much.

edit: I forgot to mention that my brother Ryan (KD4UIR), got his amateur radio license on this day 14 years ago. Not that it's relevant or anything, since he and I are both very non-active hams, but I figured it would be something worth mentioning, even if it really wasn't.

73's de KE4DYI

First off, let me say happy thanks giving to those who do that sort of thing. Due to Mom working over most major holidays this year, nothing much has happened, and we are having a nice fake thanks giving on Sunday.

Today, while downstairs recalibrating my audio setup and other things, I came up with an idea for getting things cleaner than they already are, which I think may have some merit if I can convince people around here to let me do it.
At the moment, I've got Lars, my new production machine, in a closet, who's doors have fallen off. The closet is on the other side of the room from the mixer, keyboards, microphones, and other such things, to keep things relatively isolated from any noise that is generated by the machine, I.E. CPU fan and hard drives (there are no power supply or case fans).
The only problem with this setup is that I have to run several longish cables back and forth from the system, which I'd rather not have to do, if at all possible.
So, what I want to do is to bore a small hole in the wall near the bulk of my setup, run some wires through that, and put Lars on the other side of the wall.
This would, of course, be quieter in the studio, even if the machine was a bit louder than it already is, and I could get away with running much shorter cable runs.
Because of the way things are set up, this would mean that I'd have to buy more quarter inch cables, another UPS, and probably an active firewire extender for the new sound card that I will eventually get to replace my audiophile 24/96. It also means moving loads of stuff around in the basement, and putting a hole in the wall, and I'm not sure if I can get away with that here. But hey, it's worth a shot.

In other news, I'm going to Derek's place tomorrow morning for the traditional day-after-thanks giving realtime, which I broke last year by being in Portland.
If all goes to plan, we'll be doing a mini-realtime show, otherwise known as PdAudio Realtime 2006.5 at 7:00 PM Eastern, between Bec and Venison Stew.
Since Derek's machine is doing lots of bad things, we'll be using my laptop and a USB card to broadcast. This also means it will be a good deal quieter, since the vacuum-like fan of his production box will not exist.
This is, of course, not necessarily a bad thing.

Now, I'll go away and get stuff together, and other things as well.
73's for now.