Category: Icons

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Concert Sound Icons

Mobile Personal Space

Finally got my act together. Moving to California.

Got the van hooked up.   Custom Curtains.

Chose the perfect window-shape to tell what I’m about…

But most importantly- got the sound going.

Found this company that made the sound system for the Dead.   Now they make lil’ mini-cabinets for cars (and vans).

It’s gonna be a great trip.

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‘Hard Truckers’ is a company that makes speaker cabinets and supplies touring equipment for rock bands.  Specifically, it seems, bands in the ‘jam band’ scene.    From their website, it appears that they have been at-work in their current incarnation since 2006.

The roots of this company go much deeper, though.  According to Blair Jackson’s ‘Grateful Dead Gear’, ‘Hard Truckers’ was formed in 1975/1976 after the Dead went on ‘hiatus’ and their roadies were put out-of-work.  But these were no ordinary rocknroll roadies – these were the men responsible for this great icon of the concert industry:  the Wall Of Sound.

(images scanned from Mr. Jackson’s book.  See photos for attribution).

I am not a Grateful Dead fan, but I have always been fascinated by images of the Wall Of Sound.  Jackson’s book tells the story of this bold and bizarre experiment in live-sound-reinforcement.  It’s a long and involved and technical tale, but suffice to say this:  this was a band that was willing to go all-out, no expense spared, in order to try and solve what was essentially a new problem: how do you get ‘good’ sound for a loud band in a space that holds up to 20,000 people?  And the space was different every night?  Stanley Owsley, the Dead’s chief sound engineer, explored this issue, and the solution that he chose to pursue was  to build ‘An integrated system where every instrument (PS: and the vocals) has its own amplification, all set up behind the band without any separate onstage monitors” (Jackson, p. 132).   Ironically, this is the same logic that informs the “latest and greatest” “innovation” in sound-reinforcement, the very un-rocknroll Bose L1 system.

The Wall Of Sound did not last long, and the expense and operational-intensity (aka HASSLE) involved with moving and running this system is one of the factors that Jackson cites in the band’s decision to take a long mid-seventies hiatus…  which is what lead the out-of-work Dead roadies to create the Hard Truckers company.

The little 5″ Hard Truckers that my pal Sundancer put into the Hermosa Beach Express (btw- FWIW – that watercolor and that original Hard Truckers product sheet came from the same lot) were essentially little micro versions of the PA cabs that the HT dudes had been making for Dead.

What a strange story.  Check out Jackson’s book if you want all the details.  It’s worth a read.  These guys were really pushing the limits back then.

No one has ever published a book that tells the history of rocknroll sound reinforcement.  This book will come someday.  It’s a too-often overlooked part of the audio world.  I heard a rumor that someone was working on a book about the PA system used at Woodstock, and this would be a good start.  In a future post, I plan to dig a little bit into vacuum-tube PA heads.  There is a lot to explore there.

Has anyone tried the Bose L1 system?

Anyone ever come across any of the original 1970s Hard Truckers cabinets?

Categories
Guitar Equipment Icons Manufacturers

ICON: Guild Instruments

Even if you have never played a guitar in your entire life, you are probably familiar with the Gibson and Fender guitar brands.

These companies have existed for decades (a century for Gibson) and they are, at this point, American icons. The brands themselves, divorced from the actual products that they represent, get licensed for use adorning other products.

(web source)

Other great American manufacturers are even willing to co-brand with these companies.

(web source)

Gibson and Fender guitars are of good quality, and their ‘classic’ models are functionally/sonically very different instruments, so it makes sense that they have existed for so long in opposition as healthy competitors.
There are, of course, other classic American guitar brands. Martin guitars. Gretsch Guitars. And Guild Guitars. Martin has been around for over 150 years, and they are primarily very demure acoustic instruments.

Gretsch is a newer (80 years?) brand, and instead are known for garish electrics of varied quality but undeniable curb-appeal.

And then there is Guild. Guild never really had a strong identity. They kinda walked the line between acoustic guitars for ‘serious’ folkies and electric guitars for players looking for ‘something different.’ But I have always found them to be the best value in a used (vintage) guitar. The acoustics are a great balance of the chime of a Martin acoustic and the growl of a Gibson acoustic. I love my old Guild acoustic.

It’s much better then my Martins, and i can’t afford a good vintage Gibson, so… Guild is where it’s at for me. And the electrics combine Gibson build quality with the offbeat charm of the cheaper American vintage brands like Harmony and Valco. If you feel drawn to Harmony and Silvertone vintage electric guitars, but you need something that will actual stay in tune and play well… get a Guild.

GUITAR was (is?) a British guitar mag. I picked up a pile of back issues while on tour in England years ago. Here are some great examples of Guild’s 70’s lineup, taken from advertising in GUITAR. (other manufacturers on display in the same issues are Peavey, Ibanez, and Barcus-Berry).

-please follow the link for gallery of vintage British Guild Ads, as well as the conclusion of this piece…-

Continue reading “ICON: Guild Instruments”
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History Icons Manufacturers Publications

Saul Marantz and The Roots of Great Design

A few years ago I bought a pile of old electronic parts from an anonymous junk dealer.  Random stuff- 5 lbs of crappy ¼” jacks,  some VU meters, a box of giant knobs, etc.  The dealer also had a box of old AES Journals.

The AES, or Audio Engineering Society, is just what the name suggests.  A professional organization for those who work in audio.   I don’t know what the main focus of the AES is nowadays (i am not a member), but in the early 1960s it was very technical.  Not so much an organization for people who engineer audio (IE., use equipment to manipulate audio signals), but rather an organization for people who engineer the equipment that recording engineers would then use to manipulate audio.  Let’s put it this way:  there’s a lot of math involved.  Here’s a contents page from 1964.  This issue was devoted to tape-recorder noise reduction. As in, designing the circuits.  Not just building or using them.

There are some more accessible articles, like this piece detailing a custom-made audio console:

…and, of course, all those great old advertisements.

Anyhow, when i had the chance to examine the circa-1970 AES journals that the dealer sold me, it became apparent that they had once been the property of one Saul Marantz.

I knew the name Marantz as it applies to audio equipment – my wife in fact has a complete (circa 1995) Marantz hi-fi system in her studio – but i knew a little about the man.   Turns out he was a fascinating character.

From the NYtimes: “ A man of many parts — photographer, classical guitarist, graphics designer, collector of Chinese and Japanese art — Mr. Marantz was fascinated by electronics from his boyhood days in Brooklyn. His passion for music led to his first attempts at building audio components…. After service in the Army during World War II, Mr. Marantz and his wife, Jean Dickey Marantz, settled in Kew Gardens, Queens. One day in 1945, he decided to rip the radio out of his 1940 Mercury, where he rarely listened to it, and put it to more practical use in his house. But that transplant required building additional electronics to make the radio work indoors. Such was the hook that snared Mr. Marantz for life.”

Saul Marantz was a  career graphic designer at the time.  He left this career once his Hi -Fi components (co-designed with engineer Sidney Smith) took off.

Learning that S. Marantz had been a graphic designer (and collector of Japanese art) really put the puzzle together for me.  The extremely elegant appearance of all the Marantz products (until he left the company in 1968, at least) always made a big impression on me.  Early Marantz hardware was high-end, sure – with prices and specs close to McIntosh pieces – but their visual design is in a league buy itself.

(web source)

(web source)

In another of the Marantz AES journals, S. Marantz receives an achievement award for outstanding contribution to consumer audio equipment.

The ‘classic’ Marantz designs were introduced between 1950 and 1964.  After that point, it became a ‘name-only’ company.  The more recent Marantz-branded products are of good quality, for what’s it worth.

How important are visuals to your appreciation of audio hardware?  How important the tactile interface with the devices?

When everything is reduced (enhanced??) to a touch screen, with the visual experience of audio tools be heightened, or reduced?

Categories
History Icons RCA

ICONS: rca and evaporating knowledge

The story of RCA is a great American industrial story.  From its origins in WW1 to decades to breakups and re-configurations due to government regulation and shifts in consumer patterns, the Radio Corporation Of America was a consistent presence in the manufacture of media-playback devices as well as media itself.  It’s an incredible story.  Check out the Wikipedia entry if you want the details.

For someone growing up in my generation (born 1976), thought, RCA electronics did not have really good associations.  My impression of RCA was basically…  the company that made that crappy electronics stuff that was not as good as SONY (or even panasonic).  Well, by the time i was aware of the RCA brand, the company was only moments away from being broken up and sold off for good.   But just a few decades earlier, wow what a force RCA was.  the 33rpm record, vacuum tubes, mainframe computers, color television…  we owe an incredible debt to the engineers that worked at RCA in the 20th century.  Now that i have access to the pro-audio equipment that RCA was making decades before my birth, I am a big fan.  it’s great stuff.  an RCA BA-2 mic preamp is a great simple design that always gets good results in the studio.  And their ribbon mics?  Amazing.

RCA published an glossy magazine for its engineers.  it’s pretty technical, but i can understand the Audio-related articles.

It’s interesting to read essays that attempt to quantify the acoustic performance of those god-awful ‘french provincal’ Hi-Fi consoles.

I do not know how many people worked at RCA in the 50s/60s, but i imagine it was in the mid 6-figures.  Ironically, even i have been an ‘RCA’ employee – I worked for a few years at SONYMUSIC, of which ‘RCA’ is one of the record labels within this major label.  Of course, by the time i got there, the RCA name (as it pertains to sound-recordings) had been sold and re-sold and licensed so many times that the connection is faint at best.

I live in a town that was once a manufacturing powerhouse, with several major pro-audio companies present.  I will soon publish a post about Bridgeport’s audio manufacturing history.  I have sometimes thought about looking up former SCULLY employees, for instance, and trying to interview them about their work.

Once these people are gone, there will be no one left to ‘fill in the blanks’ about a great many details of audio technology history.

For instance: I was recently corresponding with a gentleman who is an expert on mid-20th century broadcast audio equipment. I was hoping he could clarify a vague detail in the schematic of a very old and very desirable microphone preamp.  Because: if i had a little more info, i could easily ‘clone’ this device and use it in my studio.  Since the vintage examples of this device sell for up to $7000, i have a pretty good incentive to build it myself.  Anyway, this very knowledgeable gentleman himself was stumped by this component as well, as are all folks on the forums.  So who does have the necessary knowledge?  if a HUGE community of thousands of audio and broadcast engineers all over the WWW can’t figure this out…  shit.  It’s the loss of this kind of information that i fear, and this is one of my motivations in creating this site.

Engineers who worked at RCA, and similar companies, back when our prized ‘vintage’ audio hardware was being manufactured, are the only people who can answer certain questions, provide certain skills.  ENAK is the trade name of Clarence Kane, a former RCA employee who now restores ribbon mics.  He is a very nice guy and he does great work, and very quickly.  He has restored an RCA BK5 and a SHURE 300 for me, and he really did a nice job. Dudes like this are a BLESSING.

I am not really sure what i am getting at here…  i am not saying that we should start cold-calling these dudes and finding out if they have piles of old schems and old parts in their homes…  but… after 15 years of going to estate sales all time, i can tell you that they probably do.  The ‘stuff’ of these retired engineers will all eventually turn up, but their knowledge and skills will not.

Categories
Custom Fabrication Guitar Equipment History Icons Technical

Recycled Champs

one of the most famous electric instrument amplifiers of all time is the tweed-covered Champ amplifier made by Fender in the 1950’s thru early 1960s.  Here’s a image of one from 1959 that i pulled off the web:

Fender made true vacuum-tube champs until the late 1970s, but the tweed-covered Champ (and it’s close cousin the tweed-covered Princeton) differ from their later namesakes in a lot of ways.  In the case of the final Tweed Champs, the lack of bass and treble controls  means that there is roughly 20db more gain available vs the later Black Tolex-covered Champ.  This does not necessarily make for a louder amp.  This does, however, make for an amp that can get super distorted and generally Sound Like Awesome.

Tweed Champs cost a fortune to buy.  Eric Clapton apparently used one for the Derek And The Dominos record.  This fact became widely known, and they have been very expensive ever since.  Fender now even makes a ‘re-issue’ (never a good idea) that sells for close to $1000.

champSchem

The schematic is posted above for anyone interested in checking it out. They are very very simple.   Anyhow, since these things do sound so great and they are so simple to build, it’s a lot of fun to build them into Any Old Thing that catches your eye.  Here’s a quick survey of some Champs and Princetons that i’ve built into found enclosures.  You’ll see recycled Intercom units, school PA system speakers, and 16mm film projector speakers.  The circuits in these are all new, built with new or lightly used parts; but the cabinets (that part you actually SEE and touch) are straight up ancient.  I generally take plenty of liberties with the circuit, changing parts, adding features (reverb, add’l gain control, EQ, etc), even building them using different (but similar) tubes, and i’ve yet to be disappointed.

Categories
Custom Fabrication History Icons Technical

Hey it’s one of those old horn speakers

Along the lines of the ‘Carbon Mic’ (see earlier post) are these early horn speakers.   They are visual icons that have become separated from their actual sonic function due to the fact that they do not interface with any other audio equipment that any normal living person would own.  But don’t those things look great?  yes they do.  They look very similar to the acoustic horns that are mechanically coupled to the needles of ancient record players, but in fact these are electrical.

here’s an example of a very old record player which has a horn mechanically coupled to the needle:

On the other hand, the early electro-mechanical horns were made for use with early Tube radios. They have drivers with permanent magnets attached to the base of the horn.  Driver:

These type of speakers date from the 1920s, and they are the earliest common electro-mechanical transducers.  I picked up this example, made by Music Master of Philadelphia, at a yard sale.

Here’s the base of the unit, which contains the driver.

i plugged the very frayed cloth-covered wire into an old receiver and…  sound!  it worked.  the volume level was very very low, tho, even with the 50 watt receiver turned up all the way.

Turns out that these early speakers require a slightly different sort of amplifier than we use nowadays.  Not surprising.  So i built something to do the trick.  I describe the process below for those who want all the bloody details.  Once i had this thing running properly, tho…  the big question… how does it sound?  well, when listening to music recorded in the 1920s (like my Blind Willie Johnson), it sounds fine.

Later music sounds pretty bad.  and not even in an interesting way.  just bad.  But old classical and gospel are cool.   Hearing those old recordings played back on the same sort of system that folks would have used 90 years ago…  wow.  it’s fun.  I have the horn (and it’s attendant special amplifier) hooked up to an Apple Airport Express which hides in the base of a corner cabinet in our house.

Other rooms in the house have their own full-range systems with their own Airports, so it’s really easy to switch up the playback systems depending on mood etc.  Love iTunes on the laptop.

Here’s the tech-y stuff for those of you who care.  So why did the speaker not play back at a decent level when used with my old SONY receiver? A quick bit of online research revealed that these old horn speakers have an effective impedance of 1000-2000 ohms.  WAY off from the 8 ohm speaker output of a contemporary receiver.   Anyhow, to confirm this, i inserted my handy University Sound universal impedance matching transformer (wired to couple 8 ohms to 600 ohms) and what do you know.  the speaker worked fine.   Decent volume level with the volume knob set at 10’o-clock.

Anyway, rather than run this thing all the time with a giant shitty receiver, i decided to simply build a tiny 5watt tube amplifier with the highest impedance that i could easily generate – 600 ohms.   I had some Edcor 5K/600 single-ended transformers lying around from a mic preamp project that i aborted because…  well…  the Edcors don’t have enough low end response to make a good mic preamp.  In this decidedly lo-fi application, though, they work just fine.  I used a 6J7 (for the old-timey look) into a 6V6 tube with a 5V rectifier.  I initially built the unit with a 6L6, but the edcor was getting REALLY hot (i guess they mean it about the 5watt rating) so i switched the tube to a 6V6 (and changed the cathode resistor appropriately).  It runs cool now.

Anyhow, this little amp also has the added feature of two RCA input jacks that passively mix to the input grid of the 6J7.  which is a necessary feature since i use this to listen to (stereo) music from iTunes via the Airport Express.  Also: super-nerdy but maybe worth mentioning – dig the old ‘screw-lug’ speaker connection.  i have been using these a lot lately and i think they add a little charm, even tho they do generally require some dremel-ing to the chassis in order to mount. (i hate the dremel and will do almost anything to avoid it.  Greenlee punches 4eva)

If you find one of these speakers for a good price (mine was $25, down from the sellers asking price of $80), and you can confirm that it works, you might want to pick it up.  One caveat: i apparently got lucky with the speaker that i bought.  Apparently, it’s common in these older units for the magnets to actually have lost their charge, and if that’s the case, they will need to be re-magnetized using wire and very high voltages.  Dangerous and irritating.  There are a few pages on the web that describe this procedure.  It’s pretty incredible to me that this technology is so old that the magnets have lost their charge.  crazy.  will this happen to all of our permenant magnet speakers some day?  will all of those coveted old Alnico drivers be useless at some point?  when?  2050?  Can’t wait for “The Day The Tone Died”  haha i can’t believe i said that….   awful.    Hate ‘Tone’ as a synonym for ‘pleasing sound quality in an electric-guitar sound reinforcement scenario.’

Does anyone out there use one of these speaker systems for music listening?

Anyone have a dedicated ‘antique’ system for listening to certain genres/ periods of recordings?

Categories
History Icons Microphones Technical

ICON: “gimme one of those real old mics…” :::UPDATED:::

When you are creating a set for a musical performance, nothing says ‘old school’ and ‘authentic’ like one of those mics…  those real big old mics with the springs…  what the F are they called?  Turns out that they are called Carbon Microphones, or more specifically, Double Button Carbon Microphones.

And while many a rapper, RnB singer, or songwriter type may favor them for their music video, i can promise you two things:  *)no one would be able to actually hook the mic up and use it, and *)if they did, they probably would not dig the sound.

Carbon mics are the oldest microphone technology still in (albeit limited) use today.  They actually pre-date vacuum tubes.  Wikipedia has a great article on their history and use, so no need for me to retread those waters.  Carbon mics are used in landline telephones, so we all have a basic idea of what they sound like.  midrangey, a little crunchy (distorted), compressed…  hey wait a minute!  that sounds pretty good to me!  Aren’t there like a million expensive DAW plug-ins in order to give you ‘that sound?’ Anyhow, we all know in general what they sound like… but how do those big old music-video props sound?

In order to find out, it turns out that it’s necessary to actually build a power supply.  Carbon mics need a few volts of a DC current moving through them in order to operate.  I found this handy schematic online and put it together.

I added a DC voltmeter so that i could monitor the effect of varying the voltage on the sound (the mic i have seems to like 6 volts).

I used a double-button mic input transformer salvaged from an ancient tube PA head that i had.  To the output of this transformer i added a second transformer to bring the impedance back down to Low-Z mic impedance so that i could use this whole rig with whatever mic preamp i wanted to.  The particular mic i have is a Lifetime Model Six.

I bought it years ago on eBay along with a little tube amp and some shitty speakers (and about a mile of useless rotten old speaker wire) for $150.  Anyhow, i won’t bless you with any vocal performances, but here is an acoustic guitar recording from my living room.  The left channel is the Carbon mic.  The right channel was recorded simultaneously with good equipment (414/omni into an API 512) so you can get a pretty good idea of what i was hearing in the room.  I put a little EQ on the Carbon mic to make it more audible (low pass at 3k, 5 db peak at 1.7K). No other processing was used.  Check it out.

carbonMicTest

Does anyone out there use double-button Carbon mics for audio production work these days?  Music recording? Sound design work?

I heard recently (maybe Tape Op mag?) that someone was making new-production ‘professional’ carbon mics.  Has anyone used these?  thoughts?

UPDATE: I recently had the chance to use this Lifetime Model Six Carbon Mic in a modern-recording context.  We tracked the following cut at Gold Coast Recorders, using the Lifetime for the vocals.  It sounds pretty outstanding…  I feel like you could get 90% of the way to this vocal sound with an SM57 and a fuzz pedal, but that extra 10%…  it’s a game of inches, ain’t it.   This is ATLANTIC CITY, my studio project with T.W.   Take a listen:  Ten Past Midnight