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!

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.

Hi, and welcome to a rather annoyed Borris. North Carolina is, for once, getting quite a bit of rain. Unfortunately, my basement is receiving quite a bit of it as well, the bulk of which is being collected by my studio floor. Some things are damaged, such as my amp (which, at last check was full of water), a UPS, and at least one of the ATAs (the one that supplies phone service to the parent's vonage line). Other broken things will surely be discovered.

However, before the massive clean-up project begins, I decided it might be fun to take a swim in the studio, which, while isn't technically accurate, sure felt that way.
After listening to this file, you may understand while there will most likely not be a show this Saturday.

This was recorded with the Iriver H320 and an Audio Technica AT-822 single-point condenser. I'd much rather have used the h4, but I couldn't find any charged AA batteries. Shame on me, or some such crap!

Anyway, back downstairs I go, the shop vac for to utilize. However, given the weather forecast, I might as well not bother. Lots more rain, and possible tornados are expected. Fun old times over here!
Anyone want to share in the joy?

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?

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.

As many will no doubt know by now, even if many don't care all that much, my main desktop, Rimmington, died nearly a month ago. Since then, I've been using the laptop for everything but studio stuff.
I've been looking around at components for a Rimmington replacement, which I've decided to call Drugie (pronounced Drew G). If you don't know what Drugie is, you're not missing all that much, though it is kind of an amusing story, whichI won't relate here.
However, it's pretty hard to build a cheap box that doesn't supercede the specs of my studio box, which was pretty nice a year and a half ago. Rar!

In principal, I don't want my general purpous workstation outstripping the machine I use for audio production, streaming, etc. so I've decided to build a new studio box (which I really don't need), and move Lars to the bedroom.
Only thing is, Lars will have some of Rimmington's old components, and Drugie will have some new ones, plus a few added from the original Lars. So I don't know if I can even get away with calling Lars... well... Lars after this point, either.

I've decided on the following components (when I can afford to build, most likely in June). Those who are in the know about this sort of thing, let me know what you think of this combination of crap:
GIGABYTE GA-P31-S3G LGA 775 Intel P31 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail $64.99
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Quad-Core Processor Model BX80562Q6600 - Retail $219.99
OCZ Reaper HPC 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model $70.99
I will still use the dual Seagate 250GB SATA2 drives at the 16x dual layer Liteon DVD-rw, since I don't really see a need to change those out, though I may add another 500GB or larger drive at some point. No need in changing power supplies; my Coolermaster 430W PSU should work fine, and I don't need a new case, either. Then again, I've been using the same case for all incarnations of my production box for the past five years, and it is getting a little strained.
I haven't quite decided if I would be better off with a high-end wolfdale core2 duo, or Intel's cheapest Kentsfield quad core (probably the latter). Hum d dum, so many choices...
Or, I could just save some money and build another cheap dual core AM-2 system for general purpous apps, and keep large as he is, which I don't really want to do. Not, of course, that I have any issues with my current AM-2 system, but... well... it's the principal of the thing, ain't it?

In other news, I am being payed to work at fake job every weekday and Saturday for the next three weeks starting today. It won't be much, but it will be more than what I've got, so I shan't complain about that. I have a few more prospects lined up for work, so we'll see how that goes.
I'm tired of looking up specs, trends, reading reviews, and dealing with computers in general, but there will be more of that coming to a Borris near me. SO, bleh!

Screw this; it's shower time!

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

Hi. This is an entry, brought to you by a bored Borris on a bed, which, I might add, is caving in slightly on the left side. Borris thinks he needs to get a proper box spring, because Borris doesn't like it when his bed is slanted on one side very well.
Oh, don't worry, he still manages to sleep fine in it, but then Borris can sleep just about anywhere, so it really doesn't matter too much. All the same, it is slightly annoying for Borris.

This week has mainly been spent playing with mics.
On Tuesday, I finally got another Cad M-179 to go with the one I ordered in February. They seem to be matched pretty well. The problem, however, is that, when I got the mic, the little knob used for adjusting the pick-up pattern was really, really tite, and amazingly hard to turn. I guess I could have taken it back and gotten it replaced, but instead, I took the casing off and played with it a bit, making it much more loose, the way it should be, then put it back together. So all's well with that, at least.
I just hope I didn't do anything incredibly obvious to void the warranty, in case something blah does happen to it.

I also got a set of Naiant MSH-2 microphones, as well as a stereo bar for a mic stand. These are 10 MM diaphragms vs. the 6 MM of the MSH-1, and they're a bit less noisy, and slightly hotter on the output. The sound doesn't seem quite as thin to me, either, probably because it's a bigger capsule and has a wider axis.

The bar is nice in that it holds two clips, and the mics can be positioned at any angle within the bar, and the bar itself can be rotated on it's own clip. There is also a third thread in the center of the bar, which I'm assuming you would use for a baffle between the two omni-directional mics. I don't have a baffle, but now I want one, just because I don't have one. You could put a third mic on that thread if you really wanted to I guess, but then you run into more phasing issues, as well as loads of things weighing down the stand, which is never a good thing.

These mics are rather clean, and don't have the phasing issue that was present with the MSH-1, wherein the MSH-1 and just about any other mic on the same mix would be inverted. To compensate, I'd have to flip the mic out of phase on the preamp's channel strip, but it's not necessary with these.

I think my cleanest semi-portable setup is now these two MSH-1's or my two M-179's running into my MobilePre USB via the laptop on battery power. It's certainly a lot less portable than my r1, but assuming I wanted to do some stationary field recording, or recording live stuff where I didn't have to hide behind the shadows, this might work out a bit better than the r1 as far as signal-to-noise, and all that sort of thing. This is all theoretical, of course, and god only knows when/if I'll be able to compare these two setups in the real world.

The only problem here is that, when I went to take the bar off of my mic stand, I dropped it and broke one of the mic clips. Fortunately, they're just standard universal clampy spring-loaded things you can get anywhere, so it's not a big loss or anything.
Also, on Wednesday morning (or maybe before), my other Presonus Bluetube broke for no apparent reason.
Last May, I broke one of the channels on one of my preamps by, I think, accidentally shorting something out across the preamp with a bad XLR cable. As a result, it goes "buzzzzzzz" really loudly through one channel when the circuit is open, or when you're trying to use a mic. The High-Z quarter-inch input works just fine.
It's one of those things that I've been meaning to have fixed, but haven't gotten around to it yet, because I'm lazy.
And now, after not using my other preamp for several weeks, I plugged it in the other day only to discover the same issue with that one, same channel and everything. I honestly have no idea what would have caused it, since it's not had power applied to it since January. So I'm left with two preamps that both half-work, and it's really rather annoying.
My board has issues providing power to both of my M-179's at the same time. They work fine, but the headroom goes down a bit when both mics are active. So, I guess I'll need to get some dedicated in-line fantom power supplies for them, something I was hoping I could avoid. How boring!
When you get nice stuff, you have to buy more nice things to make your nice stuff even nicer, I guess. It never ends.

This entry does though, because other than playing with microphones all week, nothing much has happened worth talking about. So why waste my time and yours going on about nothing at all, when I could be wasting my time by not doing anything instead of going on about not doing anything? I think this is a more efficient approach, don't you? Sure ya do!

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.