Today on PS dot com: a 1971 article by one Robert C. Ehle on the subject of ‘The Electronic Music Studio.’
Download here: Elec_Music_1971
The article includes a schematic for an audio-triggered frequency divider (ala early ‘woodwind synthesizers’) and some interesting other bits, such as discussion of tape-based time compression (which we covered earlier,,, click here for that article).
Bleep Bleep.
Bloop Bloop.
#dubstep
Above: what the authors suggest you do NOT do…
How y’all doing out there in the land of Ooo… srry for the dearth of new ‘content’ lately; it’s been v v busy here at PS dot com HQ. Anyhow, I recently came across an interesting article in an old issue of DB magazine concerning distant-mic’ing. The authors are Roger Anderson and Robert Schulein; you can download it here:
DOWNLOAD: Distant_Micing
Essentially, the concept is that best-results with distant-mic’ing are obtained when the microphone is as close to the most prominent boundary (in most cases, the studio floor) as possible.
I use both a distant-mic and a close -mic on pretty much every instrument that I record at GCR; I don’t always use both sources, but shit, we’ve got a big, great-sounding room, why not record it? But I’ve always set the distant-mic on a stand approx. 4-feet above the floor, much like the diagram above. I carefully position it to obtain what I feel is an appropriate balance between direct and reflected sound, but I’ve never thought much about how far it is from the floor. Anderson & Schulein make a very compelling argument for doing otherwise, and I’m gonna give it a shot at this week’s sessions.
To all my working recording-engineer readers: thoughts on this technique? Weigh in,,,
,,,and today, perhaps unsurprisingly: some of the new kit unveiled in 1971 at the NYC AES show, also via DB mag. Of note: Auto-Tec, Scully, Ampex and 3M intro’d new 16-track machines, Neve made a push for a new console (would this have been the series 80?), AKG introduced the BX-20 reverb, Melcor showed its model 5001 electronic reverb (anyone???), and a new company called Eventide introduced a digital pitch-shift device! The Neumann U47-fet and Sennheiser MHK-815 mics were introduced, as were the Marantz 500 and Crown M2000 power amplifiers.
Click here to DL a pdf of the proceedings: AES_1971_DBmag
There is just a shit-tonne more of this stuff, so click the link below to READ ON;;;;;
above: the GRT 500 audio-tape evaluator c. 1970
Just in case you were too-young/too-hypothetical to have attended, we are pleased to bring you highlights from the 1970 convention of the Audio Engineering Society (via ye olde DB Magazine, r.i.p.). You can download the whole shebang here…
DOWNLOAD: AES_1970_DB_mag
…and we’ve also reproduced it below for your browsing enjoyment. Products on offer at that time include: mixing consoles from Electrodyne, Gately, Quad-Eight, Spectra-sonics, Fairchild, Langevin, and Altec. Opamp labs had kits on offer as well. Tape machines include 3M, Otari ‘of Japan,’ Teac 7030, GRT 500, Norelco (Phillips) pro-51, Sony Superscope TC-850, and Ampex. Dolby’s model 360 N/R system debuted, as did the Melcor ‘all electronic’ reverb and the Urei LA-3. New microphones on offer included the Electro-voice DS-35 and the Shure SM-53.
I know. The grey box above ain’t much to look at in the abstract. But, it’s what’s inside the box that we are concerned with today. Jsn at Boozhound Labs (hf ‘BHL’) sent me one of his new “JFEt Phono Preamp Kits” to check out, and I’m glad I did. It was a quick+ easy project that has greatly improved my LP listening situation in the living room mini-system.
Above you can see the BHL preamp right beneath a little stereo power amp (with A/B input select and a stereo volume pot). The power amp is a design that I have built dozens of times for clients: a single 6SN7 is shared to provide one voltage-gain stage per channel, with each channel using a 6L6 (cathode biased) class-A to provide approx. 8 watts of power to each speaker. Just so you know where I’m coming from, here’s the complete setup: ADC QLM 30 mk III cartridge mounted on a Technics 1200 table, then into the BHL, then to the SE 8-watt power amp, and finally to JBL 18ti speakers. Very circa-1980. The other input of the power amp is connect to an Apple Airport Express so that I can stream music off the iPhone or the macbook. Certainly not an audiophile setup, but I’ve never found it lacking.
The BHL kit ($89 direct) comprises the board that you see above, all the parts to stuff the board, instructions, and a bunch of good quality wire. I supplied the Hammond steel chassis and bottom plate and the vintage-style lamp holder and big power switch, plus a $13 24v switching power supply from eBay, some El Cheapo-brand dual RCA jacks, a binding post, and a goofy old Amphenol connector to mate the power supply.
Note that since this thing is running at 24V, I had to try to find a 24v bayonet bulb for the vintage-type jeweled-lamp. Don’t use a 6.3V bulb from yr parts drawer here! It will not end well. Luckily, MCM electronics had 28v bayonet-base bulbs (the closest value that I could find to 24v) for just a few cents. Anyhow, I went through this trouble since I wanted the BHL preamp to match the appearance of the power amp perfectly, but you could easily build this board into whatever you want. Here’s a dude on Instagram who went for more of an ultra-modern/brutalist look for his build. Point is, you can do whatever you like as far as the visual aesthetic yr after. I probably spent about $50 for the non-included components for my build.
The circuit is super-simple and it’s very very easy to assemble. The BHL site has a transcript of the directions that come with the kit if yr curious. It took me less than an hour to solder all the parts together. As Jsn explains on his site, “This is just about the simplest circuit possible that will accomplish what we need – reverse-RIAA equalization with gain. This is 2 JFET gain stages with a passive (no feedback) RIAA equalization network sandwiched between them.” Simple as it is, the components included are of a very high quality.
Now, I was replacing a very cheap phono preamp with the BHL (I had been using a $50 Rolls VP29), so keep that in mind – but here were my initial impressions, which the past month of 4-hour-per day listening has proven to be (subjectively) correct:
*The sound is very good; the low end is a bit more even and less ‘rolled off’ versus the ROLLS preamp. Vocal-area midrange is a bit more forward. The high end seems to sound about the same, but the cartridge/LP is probably the limiting factor as far as treble.
*The biggest improvement is that the self-noise of the BHL is so much lower. And there is less hum. So overall there is really a huge difference in terms of background noise, which just brings out so much more detail in the music. And honestly, I never even thought that my ROLLS preamp was noisy until I installed the BHL.
*Gain is a little lower than the ROLLS that it replaced (maybe 2 or 3 dbs). Not ideal, but not a huge deal.
Full disclosure, and maybe this is unnecessary: Jsn provided the kit to me at-cost. That being said, at the street price of $89 I do still think it is a very good value. If yr thinking of testing the waters of Audio DIY (and you like listening to LPs…), I could not think of a better place to start. Jsn is a great guy, and it was his old BHL blog that was one of my greatest inspirations in starting PS dot com; so if you dig this website, support the dude and get yrself some upgraded sound in the process.
About 10 years ago I had a dark purple 1986 Camaro Berlinetta with a 305 and the digital ‘knight rider’ instrumentation panel. I bought it for $775 (only 83k miles!) from an old lady who grumbled, “don’t kill yourself Don Johnson” as she handed me the keys. Except for one odd incident in which the car would simply not turn off, it was 100% reliable and I loved driving it. I sadly had to sell it because I lost the parking space it slept in. I was poking around the ole MacBook today trying to find some pics of it, and there ain’t even one! I guess that 2005 was maybe riiiiiiiight before the era of ubiquitous photography of every single fkkn facet our goddamn lives, and maybe I’m better off for it. Maybe Camaro is just better off living in my midnight-blue tinted memories.
While I couldn’t find any Camaro car pics on the laptop, I did stumble on the above-depicted germanium Fuzz Face ‘clone’ that I decorated with a mid-seventies Camaro badge. I buy these old chrome auto badges in lots at the flea market; if yr patient, you can get em for a buck or two each. Anyhow, this is one of the only guitar pedals that I ever built and it turned out great, despite the fact that I simply used whatever old NOS RCA germanium PNP transistors I had around, without so much as even looking at the data sheets. I just tried a few different types until the thing sounded like a Fuzz Face, and voila. One cool detail: in the image above, check out the massive mil-type chassis-mount oil cap (far left) that I used as the output coupling cap.
Above is the very simple schematic that I apparently pulled from FuzzCentral. Much like my Camaro (the car), my Camaro (the fuzz) was sold off many years back, and yeah I kinda miss it. Can’t keep em all…
How y’all doing out there in internet land////
Tonight I will be taking a dip into the murky waters of real life social interaction with a 4-hour DJ set at FIREHOUSE 12 in New Haven CT. I’ll be trading off with my good old pal JBW aka SWAY with a night full of weird dark old rock punk and soul. And maybe some electronic terror if you stay late enough. You can check out my instagram to see some of the recent-findings to be spun up tonight.
45 Crown Street, New Haven CT. 9P -1A
Come on down and hang out with all the regulars and irregulars. No cover.
Just about a year ago I published an article entitled “Obscure Mechanical Reverbs of the 70s.” Included in this this survey was the Quad-8 RV-10. Now, y’all know how much I love spring reverb (also here…), so I was pleasantly surprised when I received a phone call from one J. VanLeer (his photo at left), who claimed to be the inventor of this obscure device. In VanLeer’s words:
“When with the HAMMOND ORGAN CO. I worked on spring reverb tanks – after HAMMOND closed, these were made first by GIBBS, and OC ELECTRONICS than ACCUTRONICS who sold out to BELTON (Korea) and now a Chinese firm MOD makes spring tanks. The RV-10 still sounds the best ’cause it makes use of 4 different (length, diameter & wire gauge) rather that 2 or 3 with only difference in length.”
Vanleer patented this unique twist on spring-reverb technology and then apparently leased said license to Quad-Eight. By his reckoning at least 357 of these units were sold. VanLeer sent me via post the original product-sheet for the RV10. I reproduce those here for your edification and downloading: QuadEight_RV10
Below are some photos of the interior of the RV10 (from an eBay listing that ended in January 2014 at $446). The parts and build quality is extremely high – with hefty input/output transformers, and a UTC O-series (inside an O-17 case), which I presume is the recovery-pickup transformer.
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ed. note: Mr. VanLeer had quite a long and interesting career as an innovator of electro-acoustic devices; click here for an article about his career (use Google Translate to translate into your own reading language).
Note: I performed extensive frequency, level, and actual studio tests on the 864 clone today, and several interesting details were revealed. Text has been edited to reflect that.
From 1954 through at least 1963, the Federal Television Corporation built an audio limiter called the AM 864/u for the US Air Force and US Army. The 864 is a simple, rugged device that accepts 600 ohm balanced or unbalanced line-level signal, offers a single front-panel input-attenuator control, and compresses the output level at a 10-to-1 ratio once the threshold point is reached. The output is also 600-ohm balanced or unbalanced, and it offers a maximum 36db of gain. The rear panel of the unit displayed the threshold and ratio controls, although these are confusingly referred to as (respectively) CURRENT and THRESHOLD in the manual and schematic. Attack and release times are fixed, and the manual indicates them at .05″ and 2″ respectively.
As you can see in the diagram above, the 864 was intended to be used as what we call a ‘broadcast limiter’ – the final step in the signal chain before the broadcast transmitter.
Download the original 1963 manual for the AM864 (apologies to whomever did the epic work of scanning this 55pp document; I have long forgotten where I got this file from)
DOWNLOAD: Federal-AM-864-U-Manual copy
After having scratch-built an Altec 436 compressor years ago, I wanted to try building an 864. The circuits are very similar, although the 864 uses the older 1940s-era octal tubes and uses a feedback circuit from the plates of the input tubes (rather than the output tubes, as in the 436) for its compression control signal. More importantly, though, the 436 remains a bit of an oddball underdog in the vintage-compressor market while the 864 enjoys a very strong reputation. Anyhow, like the 436, the parts cost to build one of these things is negligible, so I figured what the hell.
This is going to be a very long + detailed +technical article, so I’m going to ask y’all to please click the link below if you dare to READ-ON,,,,
“Samuel George Davis, Jr. was born in the Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City, as an only child, to Sammy Davis, Sr., an African-American entertainer, and Elvera Sanchez,[9] a tap dancer of Afro-Cuban descent. At age 7, Davis appeared in a film in which he sang and danced with Ethel Waters[10] During his lifetime, Davis, Jr. stated that his mother was Puerto Rican and born in San Juan; however, in the 2003 biography In Black and White, author Wil Haygood writes that Davis, Jr.’s mother was born in New York City, to parents of Cuban, Afro-Cuban, and African-American descent, and that Davis, Jr. claimed he was Puerto Rican because he feared anti-Cuban backlash would hurt his record sales.
“Davis nearly died in an automobile accident on November 19, 1954, in San Bernardino, California, as he was making a return trip from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.[24] The accident occurred at a fork in U.S. Highway 66 at Cajon Boulevard and Kendall Drive (34.2072°N 117.3855°W).[25] Davis lost his left eye as a result. His friend, actor Jeff Chandler, offered one of his own eyes if it would keep Davis from total blindness. The offer was not needed.[26] Davis wore an eye patch for at least six months following the accident.[27][28] He appeared on What’s My Line? wearing the patch.[29] Later, he was fitted for a glass eye, which he wore for the rest of his life.
“While in Community Hospital, in San Bernardino, Davis’ friend, performer Eddie Cantor, told him about the similarities between the Jewish and black cultures. Prompted by this conversation, Davis—who was born to a Catholic mother and Protestant father—began studying the history of Jews. He formally converted to Judaism several years later, in 1961.
“In 1957, Sammy was involved with Kim Novak, a young actress under contract to Columbia Studios. The head of the studio, Harry Cohn, was worried about the negative effect this would have on the studio because of the prevailing taboo against miscegenation. He called his friend, mobster Johnny Roselli, who was asked to tell Davis that he had to stop the affair with Novak. Roselli arranged for Davis to be kidnapped for a few hours to throw a scare into him. His hastily arranged and soon-dissolved marriage to black dancer Loray White in 1958 was an attempt to quiet the controversy.” (SOURCE)
The Shure SM-56 (click here to download the specs) was the 2nd generation of the Shure 546, and as far as I can tell they are pretty much the same mic. We have an 546 at Gold Coast Recorders and it’s my go-to top-of-snare mic. It sounds pretty similar to an SM-57, but the top end is a little smoother; it seems to mellow things out a bit but without ever sounding dark. SM-56s and 546s have become outlandishly expensive in the past few years, so if you find a working one of these for under $150, i’d recommend picking it up. As this 1977 advert shows, the SM56 was sold as late as 1977.
