EMRR
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Posts posted by EMRR
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On 3/15/2018 at 8:01 PM, seti said:
Wear pants while soldering.
Wear pants!
Amen!
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11 hours ago, 32blownhemi said:
They sent me 8 new tubes & installed 4 new ones in my amp (& I got the 4 'bad' ones back). But I had to pay $300... I guess it was easier/cheaper for them to send me 8 tubes than refund money? I'll post a pic of the e-mail they sent me..
You aren't forcing the amp to put out double power, that is nonsense. Why, let's see, if it did, shouldn't that pop the fuse? Immediately?
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On 2/2/2018 at 6:48 PM, 32blownhemi said:
McIntosh finally said the reason my amp showed excessive wear was because I was using the 8 ohm connections. That my K-691 horns are rated 5 ohms & my Jubilee bass bins are 4 ohms. But I looked at the Jubes & they say 8 ohm's on them. Horns don't say... So being hooked up like it was made the amp work twice as hard as it should & wore the tubes out.
OK, they are covering them, but as a tech who mainly works on tube gear, I call complete BS on their claim here. You can be 100% off in impedance match with pretty much any tube amp with not much consequence other than diminished power transfer. An amp like this with higher negative feedback and damping is less susceptible than the average Fender guitar amp mismatch which may do 300 road gigs with no problem.
To me this reads like the transformer was faulty from the get-go and causing excessive current draw in the tubes, which would wear them prematurely. You certainly wouldn't have the tube faults described from an impedance mismatch.
....but I don't really know, at a distance with second hand information......
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My high school music teacher friend tells me the kids NEVER listen to an entire song when it's music appreciation day, and if it's not their thing, they immediately have their earbuds in masking the 'offending' track with something that is 'their thing'. Heavy channel surfing, and a disinterest in anything outside their normal box. As players of instruments, it's not about playing them in front of people either, it's about posting videos. Many also have no idea why anyone would leave home to hear live music, when it's available online so freely. It's a new universe.....
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RIP Ray!
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3 hours ago, JohnA said:
Open E on a Double Bass and bass guitar is 41 Hz. It is quite common to play an open E.
Yes, but! It's also rare with most instruments for that fundamental frequency to be very strong, frequently the 2nd harmonic 82Hz is predominate. If you really want to freak out, put an analyzer on single low piano notes coming from an upright, it's more like 3rd harmonic that's predominate, yet you still get the sense of the proper note.
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Yeah, again, it's the physics of a horn loaded system at play. I'm not sure how much I agree with comments about equalization, so long as you aren't listening at very high volumes. I can get earsplitting levels with a 10W tube amp, which means I have quite a bit of headroom for equalization. My house is 1930, so small square rooms, not the best for this type speaker, but they're still far better than my small boxes. I get a lot of 200-300 Hz buildup that needs to be reduced, and can add 60Hz or lower to good effect, feel the impact of those woofers through the floor and walls. When I'm doing critical listening in front of them, they don't run all that loud. In fact, I'd say bass heavy modern music has an opposite effect; it needs LESS EQ and sounds more even.
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I probably already said it....I turn on dozens of tubes every day at my recording studio, most of them are tubes I put in equipment as I got it restored and online, most of it online 15+ years at this point. Tubes that have died or been replaced for any reason? Less the 6 probably. The Fender Bassman I rebuilt in 1997 has EL34's in it....used Mullards that came out of a retired Altec PA amp. That Fender was used for many years of rehearsals and gigs, still gets used in the studio regularly, same tubes. Must have 40+ years on them.
But a 90 day warranty on tubes is another thing, it speaks to the reliability of modern tubes.
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Only one I have is II. Feels the closest to listening to an original master tape than to any other I've heard, and I have 1st gen American vinyl in the mix. Yeah, you hear the distortions in the master better than ever, because it's clearer than ever. That's the sound of the mix console going crunchy, it's always been there. It's not slammed, in fact I don't think it ever touches 0dBFS, it's a bit down overall. Seems clearer/wider/fatter/more dimensional overall. I need to check out the others.
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They can measure fine and be bad. I have a K55V that has obvious distortion with piano or acoustic guitar recordings, hard to hear with a pumped up rock mix. Do some sort of listening test to the raw parts if you can.
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11 hours ago, dwilawyer said:
AES/EBU is for digital audio only, that standard allows for a broad range of impedance between about 85 and 130 ohms. DMX I believe is 120 ohm. So a manufacturer can make cable that has an impedance of about 120 ohms that will fit into both the DMX and AES/EBU standard.
Standard analog cable is from 45 to 70 ohm.
Well, AES/EBU can be used for analog audio, as I said, it's superior with very long runs because of the lower capacitance.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess from what I read that all the DMX I encounter in the field can't be used for audio because of shield wiring differences. It appears common for DMX to connect shield at one end only, which is good practice in many cases, though definitely not for microphone runs. But I'm the audio guy, not the lighting guy. Anyway, I've never seen that combo version cable before now. Thanks for the explanation.
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On 12/20/2017 at 1:51 PM, Khornukopia said:
I use a 3 pin 50' long DMX cable for my room response measurement microphone. Would work for interconnecting amps also, but XLR cables can not be used for DMX (stage lighting control) applications.
Now that's a strange one, those as a combo. All the DMX wire I've used can't be used for audio.
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When I was first checking out some La Scala, I had a single speaker hooked up to a 10W tube amp, and it would go louder than was comfortable. The horn sensitivity allowing low power tube amps was what got me in the club.
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On 12/13/2017 at 7:22 PM, Coytee said:
My opinion again... I'd avoid the Canare wire. I bought it once and discovered the sheath is woven (verses 'wrapped' on the Mogami)
Evidently, there is a trick to pull the wires out of the woven sheath but I could never master it. MUCH easier with the Mogami to simply unwrap what you need and go from there.
Depends on what you need. Canare is the best I've encountered for live events, and I have a lot of it I've been using for 20+ years, all of it still coils and uncoils perfectly, in fact handling is so much better than any other portable cable I'd put money on it cutting labor costs over time. The woven shield has rejection advantages too. I've run 600-1000 feet of it through basketball arenas during broadcast events, under bleachers and down the side of the floor, through 100's of electrical connections and tons of RF. It's never failed to deliver in that hostile environment. Home use; easily no benefit from those aspects.
Grimm balanced wire gets some great reviews, and I can see where it would have benefits with low level microphone signals, especially passives such as ribbon microphones with very weak signals and huge sensitivity to cable and amplifier loads. It has an additional encasing like a coax cable, which is there to lower microphonics (don't laugh, envision the wire in a remote recording that's run next to a subwoofer or walked on constantly, under gaffe tape). It's lower capacitance than most too. I think it may be braid shield too, not the easiest stuff to work overall.
The other wire in favor many places for balanced analog audio is to instead use 110Ω digital wire, which has greater bandwidth due to lower capacitance. Not really any more expensive. There are testimonials about Hollywood film production places with many miles of wire finding clear benefit from this type of wire in those situations.
Me; I got some Grimm for select ribbon microphone paths in recording, and the wire from wall panel to patchbay is 110Ω digital stuff. That covers the part with very low signal levels that could be most impacted be environmental aspects and wire length.
Whether a balanced interconnect has advantages is going to depend on the send/receive circuitry along with the hostility of the environment in terms of induced noise.
The flip side of this, I believe it's Bernie Grundman Mastering which at one point had removed the additional balancing circuitry (audio transformers) from a bunch of equipment, and ran all connections unbalanced for better sound, with less stuff in the way. In that case we have a facility with very careful electrical planning and appropriate shielding, doubtless a lot of Audio Precision test set analysis of paths aiding decisions outside of what the ears say. I have plenty of paths in my studio control room that are 20-30 feet unbalanced, with no problems. In those cases, it'd take additional stand alone balancing amplifiers to change the situation, which would be more circuitry in the paths.
YMMV....
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I've noticed the Spotify app on my computer does seem to hog a lot of RAM over time, which will clear if closed and reopened.
Amongst musicians, the argument goes one should use apple music over spotify because apple pays the highest (still miniscule) royalty rate to artists, for essentially the same end user cost.
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59 minutes ago, Budman said:
B was at least 2db louder on my rat shack meter
I've done a lot of comparison of preamps, recording program material through them, and comparing. I've found even 0.2dB difference will skew preference. You really have to line up capture files and do a null test, adjust for greatest null, and then compare. Many apparent differences then go away, and it can be pretty hard to tell a difference.
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I would really suggest delving into other streaming services. Soundcloud has about the lowest quality conversion of any of them, unless something has changed very recently. Amazon is right there with them near the bottom.
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16 hours ago, WMcD said:
Maybe I should ask, is there any reason not to use that WAV format?
Yes! Or AIFF. Neither stores metadata, so if your files are migrated or shuffled around, you will have no artist/album/etc info at all.
FLAC or apple lossless (essentially same thing) retain metadata. I use those for CD storage. Both convert back to a WAV/etc that is bit for bit identical to the original WAV, nulls completely if you pair up a polarity reversed copy with a normal copy.
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3 hours ago, derrickdj1 said:
Today I substituted the JJ 12AT7 in the preamp for the Tung-sol 12AX7 preamp tubes in V1,V4. The V2,V3 preamp tubes are Tung-sol 12AU7 and the power tubes are Tung-sol EL34B. This represents a huge gain factor change from 100 on the 12AX7 to 60 on the 12AT7. I had concerns would this make the power transformer work hard, push the power tubes more or less hard. How did the substitution work?
Glad you like it!
Couple things to think about. The current difference is negligible, far greater current differences from switching the power tubes, for example. the gain factors of 60 and 100 are theoretical numbers based on a minimum load, these are not the differences found in the real world, in practice they are far closer together, and the 12AX7 is doubtful to even hit 60 in an actual circuit. A 12AX7 in a 12AU7 slot with typical 12AU7 plate and cathode resistances will barely make any more gain than the 12AU7, if at all, since it's not operating in it's normal conditions.
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A set of tubes in most power amps should run 24/7 continuous for something like a year. The bad transformer (audio? power?) may be the cause. Some other maladjusted part could also have taken trans and tubes out.
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undertook the costs to have it properly safety certified.
That's not a cheap endeavor.
Radial has some money to throw at something like this.
They also own Jensen Transformers now. From the text description on transformer research, if they had Hammond do the iron, it's certainly custom and made to a strict standard.
I like everything I read, first pass.
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PINK FLOYD
in Lounge
1 hour ago, dirtmudd said:That may be my favorite Floyd performance for many reasons, great era, first boot vinyl I had, I recall being impressed by this footage when I saw a poor VHS of it in the '80's. They were still playing out the original vision to great effect, and coming to mastery of the raw tools they used from DSOTM on.
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PINK FLOYD
in Lounge
Saw Chicago and Milwaukee in '87.
Dark Side and later, I've mostly landed on Animals. I tend to like '67-'72 the most in live world, 1st album and then Meddle in album world. Mostly, I've listened to them so much I don't listen to them much anymore.....
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Many times you submit mixes to mastering, and mastering does the damage. I've rejected acoustic recording masters sent back from major mastering houses like Sterling Sound because they jacked levels up into distortion. Unless ordered otherwise, pop music mastering assumes 'as loud as possible'. I sit in on mastering sessions as much as I can, and push for sane dynamic interpretations. Virtually everyone I work with is self-financed, and their tens of dollars don't go far in the first place. My preferred local mastering facility always gives me a hi-res version lacking final limiting, and only one artist to date has used it. It exists, but unheard by all but myself when I delve into the archives. That hi-res version is what would be used as the basis for vinyl pressings, which few can afford to make.
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Cathode Bypass
in Talkin' Tubes
Posted
I have the suspicion that as electrolytics degrade with age, a paralleled film cap comes further into play for maintaining linear response in the upper frequency range. Much less noticeable, if at all, when both are new. Try it with a 20-50 year old electrolytic that otherwise measures and functions fine.