I just received three units of the above – depicted ‘weatherproof case’ (10.6″ (L) x 9.8″ (W) x 4.9″ (H)) from my fav purveyor of dirt-cheap electronic supplies MCM ELECTRONICS. Now, when I ordered ’em, they were on sale for $7.99 each. But $9.99 is still an unbelievable price. These things are incredibly close knock offs of the industry-standard Pelican 1200 for 1/4 the price.
Above, here’s one of my $7.99 cases already in-service providing a good home environment for my SE1A mics (another great unsung deal in audio…). Cases are a good idea.
Download a 3pp article from B.E , 1965, on the subject of wireless microphones used for broadcast reporting. Author is R Fetterman. BTW: is that a large collection of RCA OP-7’s pictured above?
From BROADCAST ENGINEERING Mag, circa 1964, plans by one Robert Tiffany on the design and construction of a low-cost ‘standby’ broadcast console. Output amp stage uses my fav line output transformer, the UTC A-25: still unequaled among air-gapped plate:line transformers for low-frequency response. BTW, add a 600:60K mic input transformer to the front of this thing and you’ve got a pretty nice mic preamp with a LOT of gain.
I know there’s not too much value in my ‘re-tweeting’ (it’s safe to use that verb as a generic descriptor now, right?) something that the Ole Gray Lady published, but the piece by Jon Caramanica in Friday’s NYT really got my attention. The article concerns a hip hop reissue label in Mass that’s doing terrific business because they have realized that the consumer-value inherent in certain sound-recordings can by applied, via symbolic transference, to what are essentially display or decor items. Even tho the sound-recordings THEMSELVES no longer have cash value due to ‘the internets,’ by packaging certain totemic items alongside those sound recording it is possible to imbue the totems with a value that far exceeds their manufacturing costs. WELL DONE. I worked for many many years on reissue campaigns at one of the last Major Labels, and while we occasionally had products that skirted this semiotic territory, we never really went all the way. These folks, ‘Get On Down,’ made the realization that it does not matter HOW LITTLE cash value there is to be had in sound-recordings at this time in history, because the emotional value, the use-value of those recordings in the lives of consumers, is still as great as ever. Click here to read the piece in the NYT. And if yr into classic hip hop at all, you will probably be very tempted to purchase some of these objects/recordings here: Get On Down.
Download a five-page article from Broadcast Engineering mag regarding “Live Music Pickup” for broadcast. This article seems to be primarily concerned with recording large live ensembles of acoustic instruments on-location; I.E., symphonies and the like. It is written by one Robert Carr, then product-manager at SHURE.
Today on PS dot come: a short but v v informative piece from BROADCAST ENGINEERING , July 1963, which gives specs for nearly all of the broadcast compressors that were available that year. Models covered include: Collins 26J Auto-level, Collins 356E, Fairchild 666A, 666, and 663; Gates M-5167 Sta-Level, GE BA-9 Uni-levele, ITA AGC-1A, Langevin AM-5301 Leveline, Quindar QCA-2, and the RCA BA-25A
In NYC in the mid-seventies, an electronic-based band arose amongst all the guitar punks, a band that was known as much for their confrontational post-beatnik vocals as for the strange and intense sounds that emanated from their famously homemade electronic sound equipment. A band who has become, in the decades since, one of the few acts that is truly ‘required reading’ in the lexicon of avant-garde rock n pop. Or, as James Murphy so brilliantly puts it in his apocryphal tale of musical uber-taste, “I was there, in 1974, the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City… I was working on the organ sounds…with much patience” (skip to 2:50… or, actually, don’t… this song kinda rules).
So yeah I am talking about Suicide. If you don’t know ’em, check ’em out… it is amazing+terrifying that this record came out in 1977… truly truly AOTT. And plainly awesome too. I really love this band, and they inspired me greatly in the early 2000s, when I was performing with a punk band in Brooklyn using an analog drum-machine rig based around some old Roland beatboxes, voltage controlled filters, and a CV-generating homemade theremin to control the whole thing.
This felt fairly fresh to me in the year 2001; so that fact that Suicide was doing this same thing 25 years early was mindblowing. I had to wonder; how the hell did these guys make all the stuff? Even in the year 2000, DIY’ing synth equipment was fairly unusual for rock musicians; but in 1975? That was like black magic! Well I think I found the grimoire.
NEways… kinda a long setup to what will be… the first OUT OF PRINT BOOK REPORT we’ve had in a while. And oh boy will there be more coming. I was recently at a really fascinating estate-sale somewhere in Marin County, California, where I met an elderly engineer who sold me a library of ancient audio-tech books and wished me luck on my travels… the pick of the litter was the above-depicted “Experimenting With Electronic Music,” by Robert Brown and Mark Olsen. Published in 1974, it is TAB books catalog number 666. No joke. This just keeps getting better.
The book starts with some fairly uninteresting discussion of various commercially-available synthesizers circa ’74, but soon gets into a wealth of both schematics and ideas regarding DIY’d audio electronic circuits. Here’s the TOC:
There’s a ton of great stuff in here, and while I honestly have no idea whether or not the particular transistors spec’d in these circuits are still available, I would imagine that there are subs available… even if you never build anything from the book, I think anyone with an interest in early electronic music will find it fascinating. Here’s a few projects that I plan to do at some point:
“Experimenting with Electronic music” is available from a few sellers on Abe Books. It ain’t cheap, but I’ve been digging for these sorta books for 20 years now and this is the first copy I ever came across.
There is a lot of Magnecord material on PS dot com… I didn’t plan it, it just kinda happened. Which is the story of my life in general. For better and for worse. I was at the flea mkt a coupla years ago and I found a pair of Magnecord PT6s, complete and in nice road cases, for $25 each. I fixed ’em up, made some recordings with them, and then stuck em in the studio (where they have actually been used on sessions, BION). The circa 1963 advert you see above is no joke. My PT6s are close to 65 years old and they still work fine. How many other pieces of pro audio hardware can you say that about?
Soon I heard from the son of the guy who designed a lot of the circuitry (and the heads) of the PT6. Back in the 1940s. The Boyers family sent me just a ton of material that had never been made widely available (you can start here), and I uploaded it all… the end result of all this being that if you search the WWW for ‘Magnecord,’ yr gonna end up here. BUT. But but but. So far I’ve only touched on Magnecord in 195os. Today I will introduce some materials relating to the Magnecord of the 1960s. I’ve never personally seen, or used, any of these decks. But maybe you have. Contributions welcome in the comments section…
Above: The Magnecord 1021 Mono recorder circa 1964. Anyone? What was the equivalent level of machine in the Ampex line?
Above: another advert for the 1021.
Above: by 1965, the Magnecord 1000 series included the 1021, its stereo cousin the 1022, the stereo 1028 (a higher-end model that used tubes? strange…) and the 1048, which seems to be similar to the 1028 in all respects other than tape handling speed.
Above: GATES Attache 70, Dynamote 70, Courier 70, and Unimote 70 solid-state remote amplifiers circa 1965. I somehow ended up with a box of those side-reading VU meters; how the hell do you cut panel holes for those things? Useless.
Gates SolidStatemen studio broadcast boards circa 1964. The Executive, Diplomat, President, and Ambassador. Has anyone had any luck parting these out and re-purposing the mic preamps? Anything worth exploring there? There’s one of these things available locally for a song and I feel bad about just hacking it up; is it even worth the time? Seems like there are an awful lot of these things out there and nobody wants ’em. WHICH IS precisely the sentiment that people had towards all that ‘vintage tube stuff’ when i was a kid… hence my hesitation…
Harris-Intertype Gates. Keeping America On-Air. (I just made that up). OK folks, besides the Sta-Level… what else is still worth using in the world o’Gates? Drop us a line….
I just received three units of the above – depicted ‘weatherproof case’ (10.6″ (L) x 9.8″ (W) x 4.9″ (H)) from my fav purveyor of dirt-cheap electronic supplies MCM ELECTRONICS. Now, when I ordered ’em, they were on sale for $7.99 each. But $9.99 is still an unbelievable price. These things are incredibly close knock offs of the industry-standard Pelican 1200 for 1/4 the price.
Above, here’s one of my $7.99 cases already in-service providing a good home environment for my SE1A mics (another great unsung deal in audio…). Cases are a good idea.
