Getting My Geek Vitamins

I’m obviously vitamin-starved. At the last Fair Trade Book Store open mic, I blew off my usual mediocre acoustic guitar piece and brought my MacBook Pro to demonstrate a vintage musical piece to the small group of musicians and musical kids. My wife warned me to “keep it short,” so I wouldn’t bore anyone (meaning her). I did my best to make it brief, but mostly what I pointed out to myself was how much I miss having a few friends to talk about recording, recording technology, and music.

For a few years, working at Musictech (then McNally Smith College of Music) was a full emersion geek-out experience. Every day, I was close to instructors and students who not only loved music but who were fascinated with the physics, electronics, acoustics, and psycho-acoustics that is core to the production of modern music in any of its forms. The geek factor slowly vanished from the school as many of the tech-intensive instructors left and were replaced by people whose claim to fame was Pro Tools expertise. I guess there is a geekiness associated with being really good with function and quick-keys, but it’s not something I care much about. You can polish turds until they shine, but they are still just little bits of crap. Without some knowledge of how the physical equipment works (microphones, preamps and signal chain, acoustics, signal processing, and human hearing), knowing how to cut up performances into well-aligned bits just isn’t very interesting.

So I retired and moved from the Twin Cities to Red Wing, where we made new friends, found more things to do than we have time to do them, and picked up some new hobbies (like guitar building and cabinet-making). It turns out that I miss some of what I lost.

25 years ago, I quit my last full-time music industry job and found work in medical devices. Admittedly, too much of my motivation was money. Eventually, it turned into lots of money. While the money was good, one of the first things I noticed about the people I worked with was “this is not my culture.” While there were a few outdoor recreation types in Engineering, most everyone in medical devices and medicine was focused on making money, getting promotions, and acquiring stuff. I could easily go for months without hearing anyone hum atonally to themselves, let alone sing or play a musical instrument. I felt a little like a Stranger in A Strange Land. Or a lot.

I guess I have to do something about that. It turns out that not working with musicians and technical people is more of a deprivation than I expected. Go figure.

'Nough Said

Meeting Genius

One of the things I looked forward to when I moved to California was getting to hear the Crusaders play, since they rarely toured by the early 80’s. We moved to Huntington Beach, a few blocks from the Golden Bear where I was privledged to see my favorite group so often that it became a regular expectation. When we moved to Red Wing, MN I had slightly lower expectations, but one of them was that I hoped to see Leo Kottke in the Sheldon Theater.

Friends and neighbors from our old home in Little Canada had told us that hearing Leo in this small, acoustically excellent theater was one of the most amazing musical things they’d ever experienced. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Kottke’s music for forty years and a friend of mine, Scott Rivard, was the engineer for Leo’s first record (A 1976 release titled “Leo Kottke.), so this seemed like a fairly reasonable expectation. Little did I know that Leo had an unpleasant experience at the Sheldon a few years back and had made it clear he wasn’t coming back again. Lucky for me, the present Production Manager for the Sheldon, Russell Johnson, had cleared up that muck and restored Leo’s confidence in the theater.


Back in September of 2015, when I saw the Leo Kottke concert on the Sheldon’s 2016 schedule, I signed up to be part of the “crew” for this show. The crew was me, Russell, and one of the part time Sheldon employees, plus Leo’s son-in-law.

When Mr. Kottke and his son-in-law, Dennis, arrived, I directed them to the stage and Russell introduced me. We had a mutual acquaintance, Scott Rivard, whose work we both admired. Scott engineered Leo’s first record and I worked with Scott at McNally Smith College of Music. I also knew Scott, a bit, from earlier encounters when he was with Minnesota Public Radio and was the recording engineer for many of Garrison Keilor’s programs. Leo had some very generous and insightful thoughts about his experience working with Scott. It seemed like a good start.

Days before the show, Russell had warned me that Leo liked to experiment during his sound check. At my suggestion, Russell had setup the Sheldon’s pair of Earthworks condensers, but expected we might not get to use them. On cue, the experiments began with a new toy Leo had acquired, a Grace “Felix Instrument & Microphone Preamplifier/Blender.” He was hoping to use the Grace preamp to combine his six-string and twelve-string guitars' piezo and magnetic pickups into something resembling a guitar sound. He fooled with that preamp for about 45 minutes, obtaining a tolerable electric pickup sound and the volume he wanted in the room. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. He switched to his standby Countryman DI for the 12-string and decided to stick with that, with the Grace on the 6-string. After a few minutes with the Countryman, he decided all of the time he’d put into the Grace’s setup had been a pointless exercise. So, the plan was to use the Countryman DI on both guitars. Russell asked if Leo wanted me to strike the microphones. Leo said, “No, I’d still like to hear them.” He put away some of his gear and we trucked his guitars to the chair in the middle of the stage.

I removed the line for the Grace pre and positioned one of the Sheldon’s SR30 Earthworks where I thought it would best replicate the sound I heard Leo going for with his preamplifier. Leo said, “That’s where I always put the mic.” He asked Russell to kill the pickup (through his Countryman DI) so he could hear the mic alone. Leo didn't want a monitor, so he was listening to the mains a bit off-axis from the stage. We had two of the Earthworks out, but one was positioned for his voice. So Russell just brought up the volume of the mic I’d just positioned. Leo played for a few minutes and said, “I don’t know why I mess with pickups. What do you think?”

Everyone agreed that he sounded amazing through the mic only. Leo and Russell experimented a bit with a blend of his magnetic pickup and the microphone which didn’t do significant harm to the tone. After a bit, Leo looked at me and said, “What do you think, Tom?”

“The more mic, the better. Nothing beats a great microphone on a great acoustic guitar.”

Leo started another song, while I was back at the console with Russell trying to figure out where DiGiCo hid the phase switch on the virtual channel modules. The mic was too close and Leo was used to choking-up on the mic for the usual gain-before-feedback (plus to-hell-with-sound-quality-I-want-it-loud) reasons. Russell asked me to reposition the mic to avoid some of the plosive and sibilance sounds. I pulled the mic back about a foot from Leo’s mouth and dropped it till it was a few inches above the top of his guitar, slanted toward his face and off axis of the guitar. Leo looked at me as if I were more than slightly crazy.

I said, “Without a stage monitor and at this system volume, feedback won’t be a problem. I think you’ll be more comfortable and I know you’ll sound great. If you don’t like it, I’ll get a regular vocal mic and we can go close.”

He started the song again and liked it a lot. Again, he asked what everyone else thought. We all agreed that he sounded incredible and that the system was dialed in.

During the show, rarely, Leo occasionally and habitually leaned in toward the mic and was rewarded with a small plosive burst. He started turning those moments into part of his routine and got a some laughs out of it. However, he worked that pair of microphones like the studio professional he is and turned in an incredible show.

Not only did I get to accomplish one of the goals I’d set for moving to Red Wing, but I got to know (a little) one of the artists I’ve admired for four decades. It was one of the most rewarding and musical evenings I’ve enjoyed in my 50+ years in music. Leo Kottke’s willingness to experiment coupled with his over-riding goal of producing the best sounding show possible was inspiring.

Music as Art (or bullshit)?

The internet news has had a good time with “Asshole of the Year” Martin Shkreli’s greed and corruption, but one small aspect of the multi-millionare’s story seems to have barely dented the group consciousness. Shkreli paid $2M for a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album, just for the bragging rights. Many of us have heard that, but until the recent edition of Pro Sound News I hadn’t heard much about the Wu-Tang Clan side of the story.

First, here’s what Shkreli got for his money:

• “An engraved silver-and nickel box and a 174-page manuscript containing lyrics, credits and anecdotes, printed on gilded parchment and encased in leather by a master book binder.”
• A pair of customized PMC MB2-XBD studio monitors (list price $85,500).
• A guarantee that “there are no other physical or digital duplicates in existence.”
• A requirement that they buyer “may not release any of the content for a period of 88 years.” Here’s the bullshit part (outside of all things SHkreli): On their best day, the self-promoters also known as the Wu-Tang Clan are not known for any particular audio fidelity concerns. Their “music” (see sample below) is pretty much the usual hip-hop culprits of sampled instruments, sampled voices, cheezy repetitive beats, what passes for spoken word “poetry” in this sad age, and indiscriminate distortion mostly due to noise-induced hearing loss since the primary requirement from speakers from Wu-Tang’s producer, Tarik Azzougarh, is “I like my music super-duper loud.”

At the self-delusional side of this transaction is Azzougarth’s claim that this whole marketing scam was an attempt to “bring value back to music.” (Choke. Sorry. I threw up a bit.) “We wanted to do something that was radical and the complete opposite of everything the music industry stands for,” said Azzougarth from his palace in Morocco.  Music, he said, “Feels like it’s something you play in the background while checking your Twitter feed and updating your Facebook status.”

He fixed that, for sure. Shkreli had an intern pick up the “album” and other bullshit included in the $2M purchase and, supposedly, he hasn’t listened to any of it yet. He’s bragged about it, but since it’s not really music, original, interesting, or even worth showing off to his prison buddies he hasn’t listened to it.

Way to go Wu-Tang Clan and Azzougarh! You’ve not only taken kid’s music to the heights of fine art (stored in a 1%’er’s closet where no one will ever have to suffer hearing or seeing it) you’ve saved the rest of us from having to listen to your godawful bullshit in bank elevators, on what passes for speakers on some saggy-pants kid’s cell phone or the bleed from his earbuds, or as the warm-up music pre-concert anywhere ever. Your “world-record breaking art project” has assumed a place slightly below every kid’s favorite display format; mom’s refrigerator. Your little piece of drivel is well-hidden in the asshole-of-the-year’s walk-in closet. Better yet, the FTC might end up owning all of Shkreli’s crap and, when that happens, they might just toss the whole mess into a dumpster.

Acoustic Resources–Room Modes

I hesitate to include the original Room Modes calculator in this series, since it absolutely requires Visual Basic to work properly. Since it works incredibly well and, supposedly, VB was cobbled back into Office 2010, I’ve added it to the list of my old MSCM class reference materials and tools.

For you less-technical Mac users and non-VB Windows-based Office suckers, I’ve linked the more remedial Linkwitz Lab MacRoomModes calculator. It works, but no nearly so easily, since you have to resort the data manually to get the sequences right after entering new room dimensions.

More computer OS-independent is the JBL/Infinity Harmon Room Mode Calculator. I have no idea where I found this and it seems to be missing in action on the current JBL website. The thing to keep in mind with this tool is that the first tab, “WAVES,” is where the room dimensions must be entered. The 2nd page’s fields are protected.

Acoustic Resources–New Gervais Tools

In his terrific book, Home Studio: Build It Like the Pros, Rod Gervais included links to a collection of very useful spreadsheet tools. I collected them into a single spreadsheet, labeled the tabs, and gave that to my MSCM students: New Gervais Tools. Rod provided us with calculators for Sabin RT60, panel absorber design, mass-law transmission loss, room modes, and quadratic diffusors.

 

There is a whole folder of acoustics tools, including this tool and many others, called "Acoustics." If any of that is useful to you, go for it.

Acoustics Resources–Sabin RT60 Calculator

When I taught “Acoustics” and, later, Room Acoustics at McNally Smith College of Music, many of my assignments directed my students to fool around with some spreadsheets I’d created to experiment with the effects of building materials and acoustics tactics. One of the most popular was an Excel file called “Sabin RT60 Calc.” I started work on this spreadsheet on the Office version that came about the time Office appeared on Windows for Workgroups v3.01, back in the late 80’s. It took a serious upgrade with Office XP and a bunch of additions in Office 2003, where its development stopped when Microsquash removed Visual Basic macros from Office. To use the whole "tool," you'll need to enable the macros when you open the file. Dropbox.com is a bit of a pain to use as a cloud resource, but at the top right of the screen you'll find a "Download" button. You can ignore the bit about creating a Dropbox account, if you like, and just download the file to your computer.

 

The first tab in the spreadsheet is the “Sabin Calculator.” However, the coolest thing (IMO) about this spreadsheet is the “Materials List” tab, which contains data for 280 different acoustic materials from really slick RPG specialty absorbers to empty theater seats and wall board. The idea is that you can cut-and-paste the “Material” through the “8k” data into the “Sabin Calculator” room surface fields and build a pretty detailed estimate of your proposed room’s reverberant characteristics. I’ve used it in all sorts of room designs and, outside of room mode problems, it is very accurate.

If your room is relatively dead (<1.0S) or small (<3,000 cubic feet), the next tab, “”Norris-Ering Calculator,” uses the “Sabin Calculator” data to more accurately estimate the reverberation. The flaw in the Norris-Ering formula is that it can not cope with absorbtivities >1.0, which isn’t often a problem but can rear its ugly head with some exceptional specific frequency absorbers.

The “Measured RT60” tab is a place where you can put three sets of measured RT60 test data in a spreadsheet for averaging.

 

Finally, the “Helmholtz Absorbers” tab contains a spreadsheet with calculators for two different sorts of Helmholtz absorber designs, perforated panels and tube traps.

 

Best of all, it’s free and easily modified. If you add anything cool to the spreadsheet, I’d appreciate it if you would send me an updated version and I’ll put it on the site and if you “sign” your update it will remain on the spreadsheet.

Bullshit Audio Terms

I’m not even close to being the first guy to gag on the bullshit marketing terms applied to non-existent audio equipment qualities.

Immersive: As in “I felt the music was all around me. . .” (Other bullshit terms used for this generally non-existent quality are “open,” and “air.”) Bob Carver made a nasty audiophile device called the “Time Lens,” back in the 80’s. If you like “immersive,” you’d love this thing. This awful device screwed with mid and upper-mids L/R phase relationships so severely it was hard to locate any sound sources in some rooms. Carver had some really fancy explanations for why sound seemed to be originating everywhere but from the speakers, but simple test equipment (an oscilloscope) demonstrated the fact that frequency-dependent phase relationships were being messed with and the result was semi-entertaining until it gave you a headache. A surround sound mix can be “immersive,” if the speakers and listener are properly placed. Otherwise, stereo means “solid” which will always put the listener in a position facing the sound sources and, at best, a good mix and proper playback system will provide left, right, close and distant perspective. And that’s it. If you hear signals behind you, your system or room acoustics are screwed up.

Warm: (aka “creamy,” silkiness,” and “natural”) Ideally, you might hope this means some mild addition of even harmonics—mostly 2nd—distortion contribution that might seem pleasant. Usually, what most people call “warm” is the result of slew or crossover distortion and is in no way pleasant if you are used to listening to low distortion reasonably accurate sound reproduction. Distortion-wise, we tend to “like” what we’re used to hearing and if we spend enough time with low fidelity equipment and recordings we’ll learn to love that. That is not, however, a good thing.

Presence: Three decades ago, I had the pleasure of getting to mess with a Mark Levinson stereo power amplifier when I was a design and test engineer at QSC Audio Products. The Levinson claim to fame from advertising and reviewer hype was “presence.” hen I put a Mark Levinson amp on the bench, what I found was a slowly rising upper-midrange shelf that peaked at about 3dB at 3kHz (along with the associated phase distortion created by this built-in EQ). Otherwise, there was nothing special about this overpriced equipment in any regard. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t particularly stable when super-sonic signals or reactive loads were introduced, and it wasn’t particularly low distortion (IMD or THD wise). A few moments with some simple electronic test tools would have dispelled the magical claims from a power amplifier with a silly built-in EQ, but audiophile magazines shy away from test equipment and objective listening tests.

Wide Dynamic Range: Dynamic range is a fairly straight-forward specification in audio equipment: “the ratio between the largest and smallest values of a changeable quantity.” At the most impractical theoretical extreme, the human ear is capable of detecting 140dB of aural signals. That assumes 0dBSPL as the threshold of hearing, which quickly deteriorates from infanthood to adolescence with age and noise exposure to more practical values of 15 to 30dBSPL. This also assumes the maximum sound pressure a human can tolerate and discern is 140dBSPL; a dubious claim at best. 140dBSPL is, for example, typically described as a full-throttle jet engine at 50 meters. A typical gun muzzle blast generates an impulse sound pressure level of 140dbSPL or more and that exposure is commonly known to cause permanent hearing damage. Relative to 1V (0dbV), the theoretical perfect (but practical) unity gain amplifier will produce 123dB of dynamic range. This can be bumped up to about 129dB if the relative maximum is 10VRMS. So, regardless of the unrealizable human hearing maximums, 123-128dB of dynamic range is pretty much as good as it gets in the real world. This relatively straight-forward specification and its associated practical limits are regularly ignored in the bullshit marketing world where numbers as insanely silly as “200dB” are quoted regularly and stupidly. Keeping in mind the analog thermal noise threshold, it’s useful to remember that every combination of amplifiers that produces an exponent of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.) will reduce the combined dynamic range by 6dB. “Floating-point audio” or 64-bit or any other bullshit aside, physics and biology put an end to the realistic gains we’re going to get from playing with numbers.

This list of bullshit words is not by any means complete. I’ve left out color and taste sensory analogs, for example. A good rule to apply to modern ad-driven reviews and marketing claims is “any asshole can write marketing bullshit.” There is no one checking these claims with test equipment or even half-decent ears. So, if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

Technorati Tags: advertising,marketing,audio equipment,product reviews

Killing Music Loudly

I’ve owned a couple of recording studios, worked in a dozen studios owned by far richer people than me, designed a few studios, owned a sound company, designed and manufactured pro audio gear for six different companies (including my own, Wirebender Audio Systems). For 50-some years, amplification, microphones, and loudspeakers have been my life's major fascination and research subject. I taught recording studio design and acoustics, microphone theory and application, recording technology theory, and another half-dozen subjects at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, MN.

 

With all of that behind me, I’m rarely encouraged by the sight of microphones and a sound system in a live performance venue. Almost all of my favorite live performances have been as close to sans-PA as possible. I used to play, and spectate, at a folk club in Dallas called “the Rubaiyat.” It was a 50-80 person club that served booze and bar food and hosted some of the best known folk acts of the 1960’s: Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Tom Paxton, Jim Croce, Arlo Guthrie, and lots of lesser-known talents including a spontaneous 2-15 member group we called “the Volunteer Jug Band.” There was no sound system of any sort in that club and the audience heard the performers just fine. I’ve seen a couple of shows at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis and those acts either didn’t use the house system at all or used it so carefully it was unnoticeable. In fact, that might be the key to running a great sound system.

 

The best known and most widely used live microphones in the world are a pair of coarse objects known as the Shure SM57 and SM58. The most critical quality these two blunt instruments bring to a stage is indestructability. The 58, for example, is known for its ability to be dropped from a 20’ stage to a concrete floor and not sound any worse than before the fall. Maybe the beginning to reinforcing sound rather than just making shit louder would be to get rid of the crappy tools and try doing the job well for a change?

On the Ground Video

More of a place marker than anything, but part off this video was recorded in our old Little Canada house.Through a weird combination of NPR and motorcycles, Andrew Melby included me on an email asking for an "abandoned house" that he could use as a backdrop for a Heireuspecs video. We were in the process of selling our home and moving to Red Wing, so while our place wasn't "abandoned," it wasn't being lived in at the time and I volunteered it for the project. 

Our house is scattered all over this video. In order of appearance: the guitar player, Josh Peterson, is situated in my wife's old art studio, in the basement. The keyboard player, DeVon "DVRG" Gray, is sitting in front of our bedroom closet. Bass player, Sean "Twinkie Jiggles" McPherson (a fellow McNally Smith College instructor, is standing in front of a paneled bookshelf I'd built in the living room. Lead rapper, Midway Felix, is sitting in that same bedroom closet and, then, magically moves into the living room for that knotty pine paneling look near our bay window and down to the basement (where my bass trap comes into even better view). The drummer, Peter Leggett, is sitting under the stairwell in the basement, where I had installed a really terrific 5.1 entertainment system. You can even see the edge of one of my built-in bass traps at the far left of the camera. 

I do not know the location of the decimated warehouse where the dancer is doing her bit, but that was NOT our home. ;-) I really don't where Chastity Brown is pictured singing her parts, either. 

For us, this was a really nice ending to our 18 years in that home. When we moved there, in 1997, the place was a wreak. The previous owner had pretty much trashed the property, inside and out, and we wanted to live by a "lake" so badly that we took on far more of a project than we'd imagined. Our grandson grew up in that house and along the shores of that lake. 2 1/2 dogs and a half-dozen cats spent their lives in that home. Dozens of wonderful friends enjoyed fireworks on Little Canada Days in our backyard, starting with our oldest daughter's wedding reception and continuing until the last August we lived there, 2013. The yard was home to parties and a graduation ceremony for a summer Production class at McNally Smith College when the school decided to be too cheap to bother with a graduation ceremony for the first time in its history. 

This was one of the official videos for Heiruspecs' album "Night Falls."