My Slantmaster 50 Story

Back in the early 2000s, I was happily working as a college instructor for a music school in St. Paul. I was the school’s Student AES Club faculty advisor and I was having the time of my life working with brilliant, inspiring, energetic young people who were fascinated with all things audio. Back in my early-QSC Audio days, I’d built a pretty cool ABX tester and, later (after I’d left California and the pro audio business), QSC decided to build a much more sophisticated ABX tester and use it to promote the company’s products. That didn’t work out well and the ABX testers were recalled from the company’s sales force and, I’d been told, crushed to bury the evidence that someone at QSC once thought professional audio people gave a crap about audio fidelity and honest listening tests. I’d been that same dumbasss a decade earlier, so they had my sympathy. Because I’m lazy and that wheel had already been built, I’d bothered Pat Quilter often to see if he could find an unwanted ABX test box that hadn’t died in the garbage compactor.

So, in late 2008 when Pat sent me an email warning me that there was a package coming my way, I thought I knew what would be in it. When it arrived, it seemed almost Amazon-oversized for what I thought would be a 1 rack-space piece. The box was also a lot lighter than I’d expected. I cracked the tape at the top of the box and saw the beige tolex, the leather handle, and the black dust cover and I was confused. I knew Pat was retiring from QSC Audio, so I assumed he’d built a model amp as a memento. When I pulled the amp from the box and saw the Celestion Century 12” I suspected it was more than an empty box demo. I plugged it in, turned it on, and (like everyone I’ve ever show the amp to) said, “Wow!” There is a cool, brief light show from the backlit front panel as the amp powers up that blows everyone away. I spent the rest of the day playing with the amp, which was more guitar playing than I’d done in the past 20-some years.

I brought it to school the next day to show it off to students, employees and instructors, and anyone who was interested. We used it several times in recording sessions over the next couple of weeks. One to-be-unnamed guitar instructor tried to buy it from me, tried to get me to have Pat build one for him, and coveted it so blatantly that I started storing it in the secured record lab area so that it wouldn’t disappear. Over the next year, I used the Slantmaster dozens of times with all sorts of guitars and guitarists and it was universally loved by everyone who heard it. It is kind of sad to admit that the amp has never been used outside of McNally Smith College or my home studio. It has never seen a live gig other than the MSCM’s auditorium stage a couple of times by players who I trusted not to abuse it.

This is what the Quilter Labs website has to say about the Slantmaster 50, “Built to celebrate QSC’s 40th anniversary, the Slantmaster 50 used a linear amplifier to deliver 50 ‘hot watts’ to a simply awesome Celestion ‘Century’ neodymium speaker.

“This was the precursor to Quilter Labs foundation.

“Only one hundred were made and featured a spring reverb! These are very limited, so if you have one you are lucky!”

I have one (#72 of 100) and I am well aware of the fact that I am lucky to do so. I have meant to write something about this amazing gift for nearly 15 years, but a conversation about the Slantmaster in the Facebook “Quilter Musical Equipment Owners Group” about the Slantmaster moved me to finally do the work.

The day I started work at QSC Audio Products in Costa Mesa in early 1983 was the day Pat took his first vacation in a decade. Pat and his mother had booked a tour of Europe on the Orient Express and he’d entrusted me with overseeing the initial production of the first Series One amp, the 1400, without a single unit having yet passed through production. There were . . . problems, but the QSC team of that day pulled together and by Monday afternoon we were cranking out 1400s at a pretty decent pace. The Series One and Three amps were the breakthrough products that put QSC on the pro equipment map and for the next 9 years I was a product engineer, test engineer, manufacturing engineer, manufacturing engineering manager, and tech services manager: 5 different jobs, with a couple that lapped-over each other a bit, in 9 years. Pat and I became friends, partially because I was the interface between his working hours (noon to whenever in the evening) and everyone else and me (7AM to 5-or-whenever-PM). We shared an interest in audio electronics, psychoacoustics, music, guitars and guitar amplifiers, electric vehicles, science fiction and fantasy, literature, and the people we worked with. I quit QSC and left California, after giving notice almost 3 years earlier that I would be leaving when I graduated from Cal State Long Beach, because I could never see myself breaking even economically in southern California and for personal reasons. Pat and I have continued to communicate through email for the past 30 years. I keep his Xmas letters in the same envelope as the letter that came with the Slantmaster.

Ego Noise

This has been a week where two of my blogging interests, motorcycling and blogging, have unfortunately grown together into one large irritation. Last Monday, a parade of nitwit of bikers blubbered past our home at their usual barely-above-a-crawl speed and well-above-a-thunderstorm noise level, proving that there are more than enough reasons to defund the lazy, cowardly couch-potatoes who inhabit our local police and sheriff's departments. If you can’t identify a national, state, and local crime that produces enough noise to drown out a freight train, you are too dumb to be carrying a gun and badge and do not deserve to be wasting public funds pretending to be “law enforcement.” 

A few days later, I went to a downtown outdoor concert and was assaulted by another of the many painful, anti-musical sound systems I’ve suffered in my lifetime. I have an stock of ear plugs in the car, but I shouldn’t have to use them to protect myself in an outdoor concert that drew 75 people max. It took me a few moments to realize that it would only get worse and, as a result, my ears rang all through the next day.

A few days after that, we went to a graduation party for a friend who had been workingm part-time and nights, on her Master’s degree for the last 25 years. Her husband made the event into a “look at me” episode by playing in 3 different bands that were all so loud that nobody could carry on a conversation anywhere in the building. His wife’s celebration was turned into a “I can do stuff too” event for her husband. We all only have a wild hope that she heard, or recognized, at least a few of the many congratulations that were mimed her way.

At the first event, I got into a discussion with a self-admitted deaf guy who argued that the sound system wasn’t as bad as I alleged because he could pick out the three instruments and two voices with some effort. We’re talking about a male and female vocal, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and cajon. If you couldn’t at least make out the existence of those “voices,” the sound would amount to pure cacophony. That is a massively low bar for a sound goober to achieve. At the second event, a musician friend and I decided that an upside to this nonsense is that as long as live sound is this bad, there is no point in wasting a lot of energy on learning lyrics. As Ms. Day said, “Every song is ‘Louie, Louie’ so why bother learning any other song?” Honestly, as long as the vocals were sorta in the general territory of the key, even the melody was obscured by the noise, the dominating mediocre bass and guitars.

A few nights ago, an old friend and his daughter went to a Bastille, Nile Rodgers & CHIC, Duran Duran concert at the Atlanta State Farm Arena. His comment on the show was, "The bands were good. The sound was fairly unintelligible due to extreme loudness. But, I didn't let the sound people steal my joy!" He has been nearly a life-long fan of Rodgers and CHIC and “I didn't let the sound people steal my joy” was the best he could say for his outlay of several hundred dollars for the tickets, the cost of the trip and an overnight stay, and the experience. He also spent a good bit of his life working backstage and FOH with professional sound systems and touring companies. That is how low the bar for live, amplified music has become, at best, we hope the sound system doesn’t ruin the experience for us.

Backing Away from Students

Teaching humans anything is a frustrating task. Most people are infested with Dunning-Kruger Effect symptoms and are incapable of absorbing information on subjects that they have convinced themselves they are natural experts. By "most," I mean well over the average 50% of mediocrity. Unfortunately, that group are naturally inclined to be in a position where they need all of the educational help on the planet just to survive. They are ones most likely to be in a classroom and most likely to be unteachable.

I experienced a big contrast in local musicians a few weeks ago. It reminded me of why I have developed an “I don’t give a shit” attitude toward most musicians and their music; especially live. At one end has been working on a half-dozen recordings with Leonard McCracken. One of the best things about moving to Red Wing has been my friendship with Leonard. He is an incredibly generous musician/person and one of the nicest people I have ever known.

A few weeks earlier, after hearing him perform at Marie's Underground and knowing the difference between Leonard’s voice and what comes out of a microphone (SM58) with his traditional rock star technique, I carefully broached Len with the idea that eating the mic is only really useful when there is so much noise on stage that you’re just trying to get some damn vocal in the mic over the din of drums and stage bullshit. Playing solo, there is none of that competition and I suggested he could back off a few inches and let the microphone do some of the work. We talked a little about proximity effect and how that distorts the mic’s output (and emphasizes plosives and sibilance) so that the best you can hope from an already mediocre tool, the SM58, was a mediocre-to-awful signal that needed lots of assistance from EQ circuits that also introduce distortion, phase shift, and an output that barely resembled the input. Then I held my breath, realizing that I’d overstepped a few boundaries and probably pissed him off.

He ate it up and asked the kind of questions my favorite students often asked when they discovered that microphones are not a simple tool. He’s totally revised his technique and you can understand what he is saying and singing on any system. The following Friday night, I brought an EV RE18 to Marie's for Leonard to use in a gig there. Holy shit, he just sounded magical even on Beatles songs (which I usually hate) and was having a great time using a real microphone on his own system (which is pretty good). Then I went the other way. Leonard took a break and he asked a friend to do a song or two to hold his audience. The RE18 is hard for even a typical country singer to fuck up, although he gave it a shot. For the first time ever, I could hear his lyrics over a PA and discovered that I didn’t dislike his voice as much as I’d thought.

Leonard’s friend, Esther, was sitting next to me and started asking questions about microphones and technique and I explained a little, although her technique is pretty good in the first place. The country guy came back to the table and I complimented him on how good he sounded. He listened in for a bit and started contradicting me with total bullshit myths about microphones and tossed out a lot of terms he clear misunderstands (polarity patterns, frequency response, the tube mic religion, etc) and it turned pissy for a bit. Eventually, he resorted to “good microphones are too expensive,” which I thought was  hilarious coming from a fairly average guitarist who insists on an expensive guitar but even mostly considers himself a vocalist. Funny, but not even a little unusual.

Music stores make their living off of guitar players who think spending money will fix their playing, but who may never realize an acoustic guitar is, for most of us, just providing an simple accompaniment to our voices and songs and stories. Leonard regularly proves that cheap (<$300) guitars are fine. He has a fine collection of cheap Chinese and South Korean electric and acoustic guitars that our local repair guy says "are killing the sales of expensive brands because Leonard's guitars sound so good." Of course, the real story is that Leonard makes them sound good.

The other guy and I are probably not likely to be friends and I can’t say I give a fuck. I am, however,  using the experience to try to fashion this Wirebender blog piece. The experience did remind me that I am mostly done with teaching. It was plenty hard trying to teach anything technical,. controversial, or complicated to 20-somethings, but it’s almost always impossible to teach anything to people who have never studied a single adult subject, are cursed with Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and are OLD. Since Trump, my tolerance for stupid and stubborn has just shriveled to zip and my ideal retirement home looks better every day. Ignorant is a different case. I have no problem with people not knowing much about a subject. There are thousands of subjects that I know nothing about and about which would love to learn more. That is ignorance and there should be no shame in that. Stupidity is a chosen quality, though. Arrogance is even worse.

The cheap microphone argument leaves me pretty cold though. Yeah, I know your favorite rock stars lip-sync into SM58's on SNL and stage and if faking it with a cheap Shure mic is good enough for them it should be good enough for you. (About a decade ago, there was a brief period where Neumann and Sennheiser replaced the SM58's on the SNL stage and that was the ONLY period in that program's history where the music performers didn't sound awful.)

The problem is garbage-in/garbage-out. You can not "fix" the original signal; although you can remove some of the crappier parts and try to hide the deficiencies with EQ and compression. That's not a fix, that's just lipstick on a pig. Transient response, sensitivity, phase and frequency accuracy, off-axis response, and the collection of microphone characteristics that are even harder to quantify but we "know 'em when we hear 'em" are not fixable. If you've tried any of the microphone modeling programs, you (hopefully) have realized that you can not make a Neumann U87 out of an SM58 recording. Ideally, you start with either a well-known microphone of high quality or, even better, with a precision condenser microphone. You can always reduce the quality of a signal, but fixing it is beyond science or software and not even on the same planet as live music.

The question I'm asking is, if a $3,000 guitar will make your mediocre guitar playing sound better, why wouldn't a $500-1,000 microphone do the same for your voice? Trust me, it will do far more than the guitar could ever hope to do.

POSTSCRIPT: I recently watched John Mayer's "Where the Light Is" video. The effort he puts into selecting clothing, a watch, and his guitars vs the thoughtless decision to sing into a CB mic (the Shure SM58) is telling. Obviously, the recording and mix engineers put a lot of work into cleaning up the vocal mess Mayer dripped into their preamp, but his voice still sounds as muffled, sibilant, and distorted as does everyone else who improperly uses an already defective tool.

Recently, I talked a local songwriter into using my RE18, instead of his SM58 for a live recording of a performance that we recorded and will be sold as part of an artist grant project. I had to do almost nothing to the output of the RE18 to make the vocal stand clearly on top of the mix. The artist has commented several times on how great his voice sounded both during the performance and on the recording. He is now deciding on whether he will be replacing his 58 with either an RE15 or RE20, both of which has has owned for years and didn't realize were great live microphones. So, sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.

What You Sound Like Is Immaterial

In 1966 Eric Clapton recorded with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers and music has steadily gone downhill ever since. In the book, The Birth of Loud, the author talks about how Clapton’s insistence on playing his Vox amp at full tilt during the session is what drove zillions of half-witted guitarists to “want his sound” and buy Les Paul guitars. Wrong. The recording tech’s ability to blend the guitar and sonic mess Clapton created into a coherent recording is what misled a generation of wannabe guitar heroes into breaking their backs with overweight Les Paul guitars and driving themselves deaf trying to “get that sound” in the real world. 

That Blues Breakers sound was the result of a coherent group of musicians playing together to create a piece of work that was a musical composition; even though that composition was artificial as hell. Every sucker who ever attended the sonic disasters that all Clapton concerts were from then on (with the possible exception of the Unplugged MTV concert) would confirm that Clapton no more resembled the musician on that recording than I resemble Lebron James. As for the Blues Breaker recording, I’m sure Clapton’s guitar mess bled into every mic in the room, but through a variety of Gus Dudgeon's clever acoustic and mixing tricks Mayall and the Blues Breakers got a decent recording in spite of Clapton’s ego. That’s my take, anyway. After making that record, Eric threw one of his trademark tantrums and moved on, leaving rock history with a mangled story to argue over. Several years of awful Cream concerts marketed by three brilliantly engineered and produced Tom Dowd records (including two miracle live records that almost made the group sound competent in concert) created a couple of generations of tone-deaf, functionally deaf, brain-dead guitar wannabe-heroes. Even someone as clueless as Ginger Baker could figure it out, “The incredible volume was one of the things that destroyed the band. Playing loud had nothing to do with music.”

For the next 50-some years, guitar players have been messing around with guitars, pickups, amplifiers, and techniques trying to create some sort of sound that either identifies them as individuals or covers them in the reflective glory of copying someone else fairly well. Been there, done that. What an audience is looking for is not a single instrument's "tone," but a well-constructed, balanced and interesting performance from a group (even if the "group" is an acoustic musician and his/her voice) and a song worth remembering. Except in a few instances, nobody would cross the street to hear the average guitarist fumble with their instrument, but most of us would dedicate some of our precious vanishing time to hear a great song.

In the end, Eric’s tone was about as important to the song as was the “tone” of every other instrument in the recording; especially the dubbed-in horn section. The song, the arrangement, and the mix are what make this tune worth listening to and that is the message that appears to be getting further lost in the weeds as time goes on. Pop “music” has become more of a visual performance “art” than a musical performance and audiences reflect that weirdness. “Musicians” spend more time on their dance steps and posing than their instruments or arrangements. At the club level, musicians are being taught to perform as a random bunch of individuals with self-interest overwhelming anything resembling music. Even jazz musicians in clubs as tiny as coffee shops “need” amplification because they are incapable of listening to each other and too egotistical to imagine that someone else might be the most important thing in a particular tune. And music dies a painful, sad death at the hands of electronics.

Why Don’t You Leave?

I've had a few people ask me how I ended up in Minnesota—the frozen north, Rocky and Bullwinkle country, Fargoland—after living in California for a decade and owning a home in Colorado. It is pretty simple and I think this song is a fairly straight-forward reminder, at least of California.

Oh there ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
I can't slow down, I can't hold back
Though you know, I wish I could
There ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good

Living in Southern California without a big inheritance safety net was like living on the edge of destruction for most of those years. “I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed” and every time I got a little safety margin built up it came crashing down on me with some piddly medical issue (we never had any major medical issues in California). California is a great place for skilled single people and an ever greater place for people who come from money. I moved there as the provider for a single-income family I was running-in-place for all but the very last year of my life in California. That last year, I was working full time managing QSC’s Tech Services department, going to Cal State Long Beach full time at night, and doing as much of the husband/father thing as I could manage while working and going to school 60 hours a week.

I remember standing in the middle of QSC’s chassis assembly area one afternoon. I was in that spot because I’d been in an engineering/marketing meeting earlier and I needed to install some upgraded product verification software in the assembly Audio Precision test fixtures. While I tried to upload the software, I was being bombarded by questions from people on the assembly floor, the final product test techs, and people who heard I was out there and had questions they’d been saving up for the next time they saw me. Tech Services was in another building and I didn’t venture into the assembly area any where as often as I had when I’d been the Manufacturing Engineering Manager; the job I’d had for the previous five years. The new manufacturing management regime didn’t spend a lot of time explaining itself or answering questions from assembly personnel, so there was some pent-up energy out there looking for an outlet. One of the techs, Tom Northway, watched a while and, when there was a small break in the action, said, “You have the answers for all of us, don’t you?”

I don’t think I ever felt like I had anywhere near enough answers, but I always thought I owed anyone who cared enough to ask for my help, or advice, some kind of attempt at providing that help. The end result, for me, was that I totally burned out trying to be everything to everyone, often at the same time. One of the things that originally attracted me to electronics engineering was the fact that I could focus all of my attention on a problem, a project, or even just a small aspect of a product design and no one would expect me to do anything else. By the time I left QSC Audio’s manufacturing management, I’d practically forgotten everything I knew about focusing on one thing. Moving to Technical Services was the right thing for me to do, for myself, but it was too little, too late. By then, I was so mentally tired that getting out of the California rat race seemed absolutely necessary.

That moment on the manufacturing floor where all of those minutes, hours, and years of constant head-spinning management frustration was eye-opening. For at least a year, I had been telling my family that I was leaving when I finished my degree at Cal Long Beach, but that frantic, frustrating, multitasking moment and Tom’s question sealed the deal. At that moment, I knew I was on the road again; a phrase that has followed me since 1965. Bob Dylan’s line, from “On the Road Again,” has been a song always near and dear to my heart, “Then you ask why I don't live here. Honey, how come you don't move?”

That’s a pretty good description of life in southern California. All my life, I’d heard about “La La Land” and how that “good old Midwestern work ethic” would blow away California (and New York). Don’t believe that shit for a second. Everyone who doesn’t have a permanent silver spoon stuck to their lips is running in place. The pace is frantic, the pressure is intense, the competition is fierce, and the cost of failure can be catastrophic and there are 100 people waiting in line to take your place, if your place sucks. If your place is a really good life, home, job, or opportunity, there are 100,000 people waiting to take it away from you. They probably won’t steal it from you. They’re just waiting for you to drop the ball for a few seconds and they’ll pick it up before you even know you dropped it. And when you lose in California, you might lose everything. The distance from superstar to living under a bridge is far shorter than you can imagine. The path back up is filled with traps, obstacles, opponents, and expenses.

I “made it” in California. I succeed in an occupation that has more failures and escapees than most (engineering). I supported my family in a middle class manner without a college degree or a nickel of inheritance or outside support. I even managed to collect a respectable college degree before I left; after almost 25 years of night classes. When I left, I was more than ready to move and I have never once been tempted to move back to the Golden State's constant stress and motion, high rent, and the precarious lifestyle of the middle class in California. And that is why I’m here in Rocky and Bullwinkle Land.

Brave Spirits or Just Dumbasses?

In August of this year, John Baccigaluppi wrote a TapeOp End Rant titled "An Endangered Species?" The gist of this article was "The beauty of older analog gear is that we can actually fix it with fairly common parts, or at least we have been able to so far. I recently sent a pair of 1950's-era RFT bottle mics to Scott Hampton, of Hamptone in order to upgrade their power supplies and he had this to say, ‘These things are beautiful, in the fact that it's like working on a 1940's truck. Everything is easy to access and is straightforward. [The work is] going quick and smooth.’" This is a much different experience than troubleshooting why a DAW stopped working after the operating system was updated." I’ve owned 1940’s trucks and I remember that they needed major work about every 10,000 miles, could barely make 10mpg, puked out climate-changing emissions including lots of unburned fuel, were noisy, unsafe at most speeds, and rusted as fast as sugar in water. I’m unimpressed. My response to that column was: 


While it is always entertaining to hear old men (or old souls) rhapsodizing about when “spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri,” John Baccigaluppi’s “An Endangered Species” harping about the deficits of lead-free solder was funnier than I suspect it was intended to be. Solder defects have always been a substantial part of electronic equipment failures. In the 80’s, I had a side business repairing Roland Guitar-to-MIDI converters because that company failed to anticipate the mechanical stress of their power supply components on their fragile circuit boards. In my MI equipment repair career, I would estimate that at least 75% of all electronic component failures were initiated by solder connection failures. Even the often-praised point-to-point tube circuits were known to rely on their unreliable mechanical attachment to the terminal posts because the heat from the tube circuits and the lack of flux removal caused the lead to degrade into powdery lead-oxide. As many companies demonstrated over the last century, the beauty of tin-lead solder was that any half-trained chimp could make a mediocre but hard-to-inspect solder connection, but the flaw in that technology was that the circuit designs were rarely conducive to sufficient removal of the flux residue which led to deterioration of the connections with heat, moisture, or just oxygen exposure. 


Like the lovers of big iron American cars, unreliable but repairable out of necessity overweight vintage motorcycles, and lead-based ceramics, Baccigaluppi’s rhapsody for the days past when equipment failed often but could sometimes be repaired with enough effort, patience, and money is nothing new. However, those old vehicles rarely survived 50,000 miles without some sort of major overhaul and while they might have survived in a climate-controlled garage for “60 to 70 years” they were useful transportation for about three years before the cost of repair overwhelmed the cost of replacement. Today, a car that doesn’t last for at least 200,000 miles before needing major work is clearly a lemon.


Likewise, I suspect at least a few thousand “vintage” large format consoles have ended up polluting the nation’s water supply because their performance and capabilities didn’t warrant the cost of repair, let alone the real estate necessary to house that equipment. Like old cars, motorcycles, and pottery, the collector/hoarder business in audio equipment is coming to an end. Baccigaluppi asked, “how many pieces of classic recording gear have you seen in a trash dump?” Last fall, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photo tour and saw a building full of “classic recording gear” and broadcasting gear abandoned to metal scavengers in a Detroit public school building: MCI and Otari tape decks, racks of AT&T patch panels, recording and broadcast consoles, effects and signal processing gear, and piles of audio and video patch cables. The school had, supposedly, tried to find a buyer for the broadcast vocational school’s equipment, but no one was interested. So, sooner or later all of that stuff will end up in a trash dump. About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to obtain a pair of Otari consoles that had been used on the first Star Wars movie, just for the cost of getting the consoles out of a 3^rd floor warehouse and finding a place to store them. No thanks. So, to the trash dump they went along with a warehouse full of 1970’s and 80’s video equipment.


Some products are worth salvaging, if just for the historical value. Most electronic products are obsolete regardless of whether that was “planned” or not. There is an educational value to repairing an old piece of gear and that shouldn’t be discounted too quickly. There are, however, good reasons why the old equipment gets discarded for the new. There is a wide line between tossing a $600-1,000 phone every year to “stay current” and spending hundreds of hours maintaining old equipment that isn’t even close to capable of performing to modern standards. I suspect the best way to decide where you draw that line is by determining what your time is worth.

That response appeared in this month’s TapeOp Letters to the Editor. It was also interesting to read this month’s end rant about how much maintenance analog equipment needs to be marginally musical and how TapeOp’s editor warns newbies away from the stuff for that reason. 

POSTSCRIPT: My grandson gave me his old eBike because it needs a lot of work after a season and a half of daily commuting; especially because of the damage the bike suffered during a Minnesota winter in the Cities. One of the components that failed was the throttle, which is a Hall Effect transistor-controlled electronic device. Wholesale, the throttle is a $2 Chinese-made part, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to obtain that part in the USA except through the bike’s distributor. 

The part is assembled in a way that doesn’t allow for disassembly for repair without either carving into the case or finding a way to dissolve the cyanoacrylate that was used to glue the part together. So, repair is close to impossible and impractical. While waiting for the replacement, I’ve fooled with troubleshooting the circuit and became facinated with the idea that this kind of assembly would fail since it has not real moving parts. 

When an engineering friend was visiting us, I asked if he had some thoughts about why this part might have failed and he tossed it back in my face, “Are you kidding? You know the transistor is mounted on a circuit board, right? Most likely a solder joint failed.” Of course, I should have known that. Consistent with my 55+ years of electronic engineering and manufacturing experience, most likely the failure is a soldering fault.

Concert Review: Crash Test Dummies at the Fitzgerald

The concert was billed as the "Crash Test Dummies: God Shuffled His Feet 25th Anniversary Tour." A better person would have known what that meant, but I was mostly a first Crash Test Dummies album fan. The tour started in St. Paul with the core band of Brad Roberts, Ellen Reid, Dan Roberts, Mitch Dorge, Stuart Cameron, and Eric Paulson.

Local bar solo act, Paul Metsa, was the opener. He was as surprised to be there on the Fitz stage as we were to see him there. He didn’t even manage to get the performance up on his webpage retroactively. He had moments of ok-ness and talked way more than he played, which was an odd choice since he seemed to believe he was getting a lucky showcase that night and should have used the time to demonstrate his musicianship. Ending with a patronizing version of the Star Spangled Banner was pure Toby Keith schmaltz. He was, apparently, desperate to get audience attention.

The FOH guy, as usual, was near deaf. As usual, from the start it was obvious he’d never heard an actual record and imagined that we were all just dying to hear kick drum and bass solos; especially that all-captivating territory between 15Hz and 80Hz. (Or maybe his own hearing is so damaged he needed those frequencies boosted 10-20dB to compensate.) As the night went on, the sound goof became more hearing-impaired and eventually it was difficult to even sense the existence of the vocals unless all three of the band’s singers were really wailing. That was particularly disappointing because I don’t often get to hear a singer with Brad Roberts’ mic and vocal technique. If there was ever a band that deserved to have the vocals upfront and on point, Crash Test Dummies are it.

During the many quiet moments and, especially, when the musicians except Stuart Cameron (acoustic guitar) were absent, Roberts really knocked it out of the park. “Heart of Stone” was so incredible that my wife and I simultaneously and spontaneously turned to each other and said “that was worth the price of the trip, hotel, and concert tickets.” Of course the lyrics are close to our own story, "And so now we are old, both our stories are told and we wait for the end. If you're first to go I will follow you, know that my heart will not mend. And I wish I owned a heart of stone.” Trust me, it does not read as emotionally powerful as it sounded with Roberts’ incredible voice.

As hard as he tried, the FOH goof did not destroy the evening. The musicianship was solid and the spare arrangements allowed many of the high points to fight their way through the sound system incompetence. There were few moments where the lyrics were decipherable, but when those words were either heard or memorized the whole point of this philosophical, insightful band was proven to be true. If there was a Crash Test Dummies’ song that someone didn’t hear Friday night, it was a really obscure one. I held my breath hoping to hear Superman’s Song, but not expecting it if this was really supposed to be the God Shuffled His Feet 25th Anniversary Tour. They played Superman as the end of the regular set and the last song of the encore was "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" Go Figure.

There were many moments that were worth the trip to St. Paul, the hotel hassle, and even the downtown St. Paul parking hassle. It takes a lot to overcome those obstacles, but Crash Test Dummies pulled it off.

Worshiping Tin-Lead and other Old Bits of Junk Technology

The following is a letter I sent to TapeOp Magazine regarding a silly end rant by John Baccigaluppi about how much he loves tin-lead solder and big iron audio electronic equipment. A year ago, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photography tour and I have stuck a video of that

While it is always entertaining to hear old men (or old souls) rhapsodizing about when “spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri,” John Baccigaluppi’s “An Endangered Species” harping about the deficits of lead-free solder was funnier than I suspect it was intended to be. Solder defects have always been a substantial part of electronic equipment failures. In the 80’s, I had a side business repairing Roland Guitar-to-MIDI converters because that company failed to anticipate the mechanical stress of their power supply components on their fragile circuit boards. In my MI equipment repair career, I would estimate that at least 75% of all electronic component failures were initiated by solder connection failures. Even the often-praised point-to-point tube circuits were known to rely on their unreliable mechanical attachment to the terminal posts because the heat from the tube circuits and the lack of flux removal caused the lead to degrade into powdery lead-oxide. As many companies demonstrated over the last century, the beauty of tin-lead solder was that any half-trained chimp could make a mediocre but hard-to-inspect solder connection, but the flaw in that technology was that the circuit designs were rarely conducive to sufficient removal of the flux residue which led to deterioration of the connections with heat, moisture, or just oxygen exposure.

Like the lovers of big iron American cars, unreliable but repairable out of necessity overweight vintage motorcycles, and lead-based ceramics, Baccigaluppi’s rhapsody for the days past when equipment failed often but could sometimes be repaired with enough effort, patience, and money is nothing new. However, those old vehicles rarely survived 50,000 miles without some sort of major overhaul and while they might have survived in a climate-controlled garage for “60 to 70 years” they were useful transportation for about three years before the cost of repair overwhelmed the cost of replacement. Today, a car that doesn’t last for at least 200,000 miles before needing major work is clearly a lemon.

Likewise, I suspect at least a few thousand “vintage” large format consoles have ended up polluting the nation’s water supply because their performance and capabilities didn’t warrant the cost of repair, let alone the real estate necessary to house that equipment. Like old cars, motorcycles, and pottery, the collector/hoarder business in audio equipment is coming to an end. Baccigaluppi asked, “how many pieces of classic recording gear have you seen in a trash dump?” Last fall, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photo tour and saw a building full of “classic recording gear” and broadcasting gear abandoned to metal scavengers in a Detroit public school building: MCI and Otari tape decks, racks of AT&T patch panels, recording and broadcast consoles, effects and signal processing gear, and piles of audio and video patch cables. The school had, supposedly, tried to find a buyer for the broadcast vocational school’s equipment, but no one was interested. So, sooner or later all of that stuff will end up in a trash dump. About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to obtain a pair of Otari consoles that had been used on the first Star Wars movie, just for the cost of getting the consoles out of a 3^rd floor warehouse and finding a place to store them. No thanks. So, to the trash dump they went along with a warehouse full of 1970’s and 80’s video equipment.

Some products are worth salvaging, if just for the historical value. Most electronic products are obsolete regardless of whether that was “planned” or not. There is an educational value to repairing an old piece of gear and that shouldn’t be discounted too quickly. There are, however, good reasons why the old equipment gets discarded for the new. There is a wide line between tossing a $600-1,000 phone every year to “stay current” and spending hundreds of hours maintaining old equipment that isn’t even close to capable of performing to modern standards. I suspect the best way to decide where you draw that line is by determining what your time is worth.

Why Bother?

If this isn’t a kick in the ears, I don’t know what is: “According to a survey conducted by Strategy Analytics, built-in computer speakers are now the most common way to listen to music, by a sizable margin.  In the study, laptop and desktop speakers overwhelmingly topped the list of frequently-used listening methods, with 55% picking the category.

“Headphones connected to a portable device followed with 41% of respondents, alongside stand-alone radio, also with 41%.  Surprisingly, TV speakers were also highly-ranked, with 29% ticking that box.”

While nothing about this information is surprising, that doesn’t keep it from being depressing. More out of habit and curiosity these days, I still read Mix Magazine, TapeOp, Recording, ProSoundWeb, and Pro Sound News. I’m mostly entertained by the seriousness audio “engineers” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) take their degraded “craft.” Almost by reflex, when I read an interview with some kid who has decided he’s the next incarnation of Tom Dowd (No, he won’t have the slightest idea who Tom Dowd was.) I chase down a few examples of the music he refers to as examples of his work. Invariably (Yes, I do know what that word means.), it will be some awful sounding collection of distortion, overused effects, trite synthesizers, and horribly recorded drums.

The critical feedback loop between musicians and their vanishing customers has been wreaked by “portable devices” and the delusional pipedream that some whackos have that high resolution audio will change any of that is nuts. I suppose I should be happy with the resurgence of vinyl, since you can’t get that shit on to a cell phone? If you know me, you know I think going back to vinyl is about as silly as abandoning cars for horses. It’s not the vinyl that matters, it’s the amplification and speaker systems, dumbasses.

This has been a long time coming. This godawful Webcor record player is pretty much what I began listening to in my audio career, way back in 1959. My father bought it for the living room, decided he didn’t like the way it looked (ours was salmon “red”) and dumped it in the basement (where I lived).

My mother had convinced him to buy an RCA console system, but he decided that took up too much room and it ended up in the basement, too. It really was pretty awful, but slightly better sounding than my Webcor. When he remarried, the RCA found its way back into the living room in their new home and it remained there until they downsized after all of the kids had left home.

By then, I had long since graduated to component stereo equipment, then band sound systems, and, finally, recording studio equipment for my home audio system. Our living room system (aka “Home Theater System”) is still a decent receiver and a pair of JBL studio monitors. The down side to that is that, if I bother to listen at all carefully, it’s pretty obvious that Pandora broadcasts in a mediocre MP3 format. Usually, I’m not that focused on the music coming from the living room when I’m working in the kitchen. When I am actually critically listening, I listen to CDs. I’ll put CD quality over vinyl any day.

Too often, when someone under 30 wants to show me some music it will be demonstrated on a cell phone speaker. I have no idea what I’m supposed to get from that experience. I can usually pick out the melody and determine if it is a male or female lead voice. That’s about all I’m willing to invest in that miserable fidelity source, though, which is often disappointing to the person trying to impress me.

To be truthful, if you are a cell phone user I have to suspect you don’t care about fidelity in any form. While I haven’t had a fixed-line telephone for quite a few years, our primary telephone looks a lot like a fixed-line system. Our phone service is provided through our high-speed ISP and an Ooma Tele. The sound quality was a substantial step-up from the fixed-line system provided by Qwest and, later, Comcast in our Twin Cities home. I can, in a few moments, tell if a caller is on a cellphone because the quality is miserable. Always. My guess is if you can tolerate that level of distortion in a voice conversation you aren’t that discerning in any aspect of audio. So, while I’m not surprised that music is being listened to on actual speakers by an audience of 12%-and-shrinking I’m also not impressed by your musical tastes. Your opinion of audio quality is just going to make me laugh, so don’t waste either of our time.

REVIEW: Otari MTR-90 II

NOTE: Now, of course, we’re really into ancient history. When I wrote this, in 2003, there could have been some argument about which tape deck company would last the longest; Studer or Otari. It turned out to be a moot point. I bet Otari, but I was wrong only because one of the dumbest fucking hostile take-over companies in the history of dumb fucking companies, Harman International, bought Studer and pieced out the last production run of the 827 over almost a decade. Otari, on the other hand, simply tossed in the towel and vanished into audio history.

The Otari MTR-90 II multitrack deck is an industry workhorse.  From Disney Studios to Lucasfilm to hundreds of professional studios around the world, the MTR-90 II is one of the most common recording tools in the history of the art and business.  For years, Otari fought the reputation of "Japanese junk," until releasing this product.  Suddenly, the performance of Otari's multitrack 2" machine easily rivaled the best German hardware.  Since the Otari electronics had arguably surpassed Studer's performance several years earlier, this was a major crossroads in the world recording competition. 

The control circuitry, best demonstrated when you use the MTR-90's remote control.  The remote is incredibly powerful and flexible (outside of the incomprehensible and useless "Search Zero" functions), even compared to today's DAW and hard disk recording systems.  There are ten markers with associated one-button locate buttons.  A sixteen-key keypad allows full control of the tape and vari-pitch speed control is available from the remote. 

This unit was released for production in 1987 and remained an active product until 1991, when Otari ceased production on analog recorders (except for their two-track deck).  In the limited form the company currently exists, some service and parts are still available for the MTR-90.  There are a few support companies still making service parts and doing specialty repairs on this deck, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult for studio owners to justify and maintain their analog multitracks. 

Part of the reason for this difficulty is that an analog deck requires regular maintenance.  Unlike the use-it-and-toss-it digital equipment world, an analog deck can be expected to last for several decades.  However, that won't happen if regular maintenance isn't performed.  Head maintenance, transport maintenance, and general mechanical hygiene is necessary for optimal operation of any analog deck. 

The Otari is as easy to service and maintain as the expensive spread, Studer.  When it comes to calibration, it's possible to tweak the MTR-90 to tighter performance specifications than any but the absolute highest resolution digital systems.  The clean, natural sound of analog tape is well in evidence with this machine and it's a shame to consider its eventual demise. 

It's that kind of world, though.  Analog tape is expensive, hard to edit and handle, and tape machine maintenance is a discipline that is vanishing from the recording business.  Thirty years of equipment development created an ergonomic machine that is reliable, easy to use, and durable.  We'll never see the like again.

Technorati Tags: audio recording,analog,otari,mtr-90,mtr-90II

ARTICLE: How to select your stereo components

[Another Wirebender-only article.]

Don't buy by the "Buck Factor"

This can go either way. You can buy your equipment solely based on cost, low or high. If your budget is limited, you may get everything you want for the least possible cost, sacrificing quality, function, and your personal satisfaction. If your budget is unrestrained, you may buy your equipment based on snob appeal and be just as bored with your selections as the low budget buyer.

You don't necessarily get what you pay for, in quality. Obviously, you get the products you paid for, unless the dealer has some old Miniscribe employees in the shipping department and you get a box of bricks, but simply spend unlimited amounts of cash doesn't assure you of anything. Some low-to-mid cost products deliver as much sonic quality as the most expense pieces on the market.

"It ain't what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that ain't right."

I really believe that some pieces of equipment can be picked by spec sheets: tuners, maybe power amplifiers, and probably turntables, for example. Again, it depends on what you listen to.

But some parts of your system have to be listened to. Especially speakers. Toss out what you have been told and listen. Use your ears, not your memory, in choosing equipment. Don't select these pieces on reviews, friends' advise,

To ABX or not to ABX

If you can't hear it, it isn't there. I firmly believe that. If you can't demonstrate a difference between the equipment you are evaluating, you are only fooling yourself. I know audiophiles don't care for this logic. Since so few people can pick out anything beyond the most gross differences using ABX tests, the gigantic price differences between top and bottom-end equipment is hard to justify. Unless you resort to mysticism and doubletalk, ie. The Holy Order of Audiophiles. A religion I am always entertained by, but have not been converted to.

Your listening material is as important as the equipment you listen to. This isn't a slam on the music, but if you listen to rap, metal, Musac, polkas, most music recorded with early fifties tape gear back to Edison's cylinder cutter, or the majority of popular genres you won't be able to tell a significant difference between a $500 Sony portable sound system and the most expensive system buyable. Hell, I know good musicians who are happy with their TV's sound system. If you aren't going to use it, don't buy it. Unless the snob appeal has some payback other than audible. Like maybe your banker is an audiophile and you want to impress him with your taste in equipment so that he will loan you money to build the Neil Bush Memorial Savings and Loan.

Which means most electronic equipment is created equal for most people.

Bigger is Always Better?

I had a weird confluence of audio technology moments this past week. #1 One of the guys who has haunted my Minnesota audio life was amazed at the fact that Behringer and Presonus make “under $5,000” digital consoles. He was raving about the fact that he never imagined he’d be able to buy a 24-channel digital console for his budget in his lifetime. #2 The school where I used to teach bought an Avid D-Show console and one of the kids who will use that system on a regular basis posted a picture and mini-rave about the features available on his new toy. #3 I heard one of the worst sounding shows from one of the best bands ever butchered by a sound system in an outdoor venue that had no excuse for being anything but terrific. That show was “mixed” (to abuse the term) on an Avid D-Show. #4 A guy who I respect a lot advertised his upcoming analog audio class with the claim “once we master the discipline of 4-tracks, we'll do some 24-track sessions.”

When I replied to the first guy’s rave about being able to buy a “large scale” console for less than a grand, I said something along the lines of “you get what you pay for.” 24 full-featured channels with automation, dynamic processing, EQ, and other toys for less than $1,000 means some really cheap and unreliable components have been used in the design. Like it or not, great faders still cost about $100 each and pretty good motorized faders (digital or analog) are still $40 each in quantity. Do the math and you’ll see that nothing in the “pretty good” category can be used in the product we’re discussing. He replied with a rant about how I’m not only a motorcycle “bigot” (for considering cruisers and big, blubbering twins to be the awful engineering botch-up they are) but an audio bigot because I have some quality standards there also.

I always take his insults with a block of salt because he is about as close to stone-deaf as a human can get and still carry on a conversation. Still, his fascination with more gear than he can figure out how to use was a reminder of how goofy the live sound business has become. Pretty much everyone has to have a 24-or-more channel digital console to call themselves “professional” and hardly anyone knows how to do a guitar-and-songwriter folk act in a small coffee shop without fucking it up.

Which leaps us to #4 above. The idea that anyone living today is capable of mastering “the discipline of 4-track” recording is laughable. Mastering anything is a lifetime accomplishment and spending a few hours watching someone else play with a 1/2” tape deck won’t get students anywhere near being basically competent, let alone in the master territory. The same goes for these large-scale, over-featured live sound consoles. If you can’t do a decent simple show, you have no chance in hell of doing any better with more equipment than you know how to use. My deaf friend, for example, wouldn’t know where to start in creating a balanced mix if he only had to balance a voice and an acoustic guitar (very much like the deaf guy who is in charge of screwing up the sound at First Avenue). Adding dynamics, time-based processing, and dozens of channels and signal-path options would only make anything these guys do . . . worse.

So, I think it’s safe to assume that live music is only going to become more of a punishment than entertainment and the only revenue stream available to modern pop musicians will dry up like recorded music sales. Someday, I can only hope that musicians will discover that “less is more” in the sound reinforcement world, just like it is everywhere else in human activity.

Analog Tape Deck Alignment and Calibration

There are more than a few pretty good references on the internet describing the techniques for analog tape deck calibration. Before I list several that I believe are excellent resources, I have a few of my own comments to add to the history of this procedure. I’m not interested in reinventing the wheel, so I’m only going to add what I think might have been left out of the reference links found below.

There is a world of difference between consumer 1/4” (or 1/8” cassette) quarter-track machines and professional 1-2” 4-24 track equipment. Many of us first learned basic maintenance on 1/4” reel-to-reel semi-pro equipment before moving on to the real thing (pun intended) and we brought our toy-gear habits with us.

One of the first places that transfer will rear its silly head is in our procedures for cleaning heads and rollers. A small roller, like that found on the old Teac 3340 or Otari 5050 machines, can easily be cleaned with a cotton swab or two. Since the rollers are easily damaged (the oils extracted) by carbon-based cleaners (alcohol, TriClor III, etc), a cleaner designed for use on these materials is required. The most commonly available appropriate cleaner is mild soap and water applied to a clean, lint-free rag and some serious elbow grease. I recommend a near-white rag and that you keep cleaning until the rag stops removing material (which will be a while if the previous users attempted to clean the rollers with cotton swabs). Other techs have recommended MG Chemicals Rubber Renew, Caig Lab’s RBR100L Rubber Cleaner and Rejuvenator, Texwipe TX134, and American Recorder Technology’s S-21H Tape Head Cleaner. I, honestly, have used soap and water for the last 35 years and have no experience with other cleaners.

Likewise, most semi-pros started using cotton swabs and isopropyl alcohol to clean heads. The cotton swabs are, probably, fine if they are wooden stick swabs intended for non-hygienic applications. Plastic stick swabs sometimes decompose when exposed to head-cleaning chemicals, like isopropyl alcohol, and deposit gunk on the heads. While I am perfectly happy using cotton swabs on most professional heads, I’d prefer to us something like the Calrad Video Chamois to minimize abrasion and maximize surface area on large heads. Isopropyl alcohol is a perfectly acceptable cleaning chemical for this application as long as you don’t cheap out and buy “rubbing alcohol.” Additional chemicals and water are added to rubbing alcohol and I can’t guess what those contaminates will do to your expensive, hard-to-find, easily-damaged heads.

The “easily-damaged” bit is important to note, also. It doesn’t take much of a contaminate to turn a cleaning session into an abrasive head-damaging catastrophe. If you drop a swab on the ground, throw it away. Don’t risk scrubbing your precious heads with a bit of sand, dust, metal, or anything that might damage the heads’ surface or the gap. Some of the last generation of decks had heads that were nearly indestructible, except for the epoxies used for the gap. A bit of magnetic or conductive material ground into the gap and you’ve lost the ability to calibrate one or more tracks.

Professional tape decks all have mechanical calibration and maintenance procedures detailed in the owner’s manual. I recommend you follow those procedures, completely, ever 4-5 calibration sessions. There is no point in making sure your deck is perfectly calibrated and aligned if the deck can’t hold speed accurately, the tape lifters don’t quickly remove the tape from the heads during rewind or fast-forwarding, or if the tension between the capstan and take-up or supply reels is improperly calibrated and causes either lash or stretch in your tape. Every step of the transport calibration procedure is there for a reason and you should buy into those reasons and perform those procedures occasionally.

Detailed resources with near-step-by-step procedures and more information can be found at these locations:

• The Practitioners Guide - Analog Tape Machine Alignment
• Analog Tape 101
• How to Align A Tape Machine for Reproduction – YouTube
• ATR’s Calibration and Alignment Seminars
• Choosing and Using MRL Calibration Tapes
• Quantegy Tape/Time Calculator
• Tape Recorder Alignment (also found here)
• Cleaning and Demagnitizing Tape Recorders
• Zen and the Art of Cassette Deck Maintenance
• I have a few other resources I’ve copied over the years that I don’t feel authorized to post here. If you have questions or interest in some of that information, I’d be glad to provide whatever help I can.

Microphone References

Microphones are my favorite electro-mechanical devices.  For almost ten years, I taught "Microphones: Theory and Application" at McNally Smith College and I have been fascinated with these funky and personable devices since I first discovered reproduced and reinforced sound in the early 1960’s.  I've evaluated the microphones included in this column exclusively in recording studio environments, unless otherwise indicated.  Often, my evaluations were conducted during recording sessions or in classroom experiments.  Like all reviews, much of what I've written is my opinion, based on my experience, listening tastes, personal biases, and the limitations of my ability. I suggest you take all reviews with a small block of salt, mine included. What I might love, you might hate and visa versa.

Some of my favorite texts on this subject are:

The Microphone Book, John Eargle.  Probably the best modern book on this subject. 

Getting Great Sounds: The Microphone Book, Tom Lubin. Another solid book on this complicated subject. The first half of the book is dedicated to explaining acoustics, microphone construction, and theory. The rest is application.

Professional Microphone Techniques, David Miles Huber & Philip Williams (An easy to read, and somewhat simplistic, book with interesting recorded examples on an included CD.)

Sound Advice on Microphone Techniques, Bill Gibson (A very basic book with an included CD.)

Microphones Technology & Technique, John Borwick

Music, Physics, and Engineering, Harry F. Olson

Sound Recording Handbook, John Woram (out-of-print, but a great reference)

Microphones: Design and Application, Lou Burroughs (out-of-print, but possibly the best microphone book ever written)

Microphones for Professional and Semi-Professional Applications, Dr. Ling. Gerhart Boré (Dr. Boré is an ex-Neumann design engineer. However, translated from German, it’s a tough read.)

Perversely, I am a big fan of microphones and have a foolishly large collection of these expensive tools. I'm not a fan of collecting anything, but microphones have captured my heart and imagination. The imperfections caused by the transduction of acoustic energy into electrical energy creates a sonic signature unlike any other device in the audio signal chain except, probably, loudspeakers. Microphones put more of a stamp on a recording than analog vs. digital, digital plug-ins or analog external devices, or any other device in the recording path.

Today, for the first time ever spectacular microphones are available to the ordinary recordist for a reasonable price or, even, outrageously cheap prices. Maybe more than any other reason, it is possible for an amateur recordist or artist to produce a professional sounding product in an unprofessional environment; like a living room. The availability of low cost, high quality microphones is part of the reason that this aspect of recording music has changed so much.

Fair Comparisons

Years ago, I built a specialized test box for QSC Audio Products; an ABX tester. At the time, I thought that box was one of the coolest things I'd ever built and I used it as carelessly as any kid ever abused a toy. Because I didn't want any arguments about noise or distortion in the signal path, I used insanely expensive relays for the low signal switching mechanism and because they are make-before-break and mercury-whetted, switching "artifacts" were minimal unless the products under test had significant DC offset. The contacts themselves were gold-plated silver and the cases were hermetically sealed.

The high output relays were also silver contact, gold-plated but they were considerably less sophisticated, since they had to be able to withstand several amps of switching current with high power amplifiers. Later, the company produced a commercial version of the ABX tester for sales representative use and that product has received a lot of comment (mostly uninformed) on the internet:

• www.qscaudio.com/support/library/manuals/abxman.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test
• http://home.provide.net/~djcarlst/abx_qsc.htm
• http://rinchoi.blogspot.com/2012/09/qsc-audio-abx-comparator.html
• http://www.avsforum.com/t/528546/the-qsc-abx-box

A friend, Rob Schlette, did a well-informed article about some software based ABX testers for TheProAudioFiles.com ), Audio Perception and ABX Testing, a while back and that's a pretty good place to start your own thoughts about the subject.

A few of us--Jake Swanson (S&M Audio), Aaron Hodgson (McNally Smith Record Lab Manager), and I--recently revitalized the ABX tester for use at McNally Smith College of Music. I haven't had a chance to mess with the new unit, but I'm sure it will raise eyebrows and piss off "professionals" every bit as much as did the original QSC product.

So Much Crazy, So Much Money, So Little Common Sense

I've kept the Mapleshade catalog in my junk mail pile for almost a year. I can't throw it away because it is such a perfect example of how nutty audiophiles can get. Statements like "Floor-mounting your amp on maple gives optimum performance. This approach sounds better than rack-mounting (even slightly better than on our SAMSON) because your amp won’t be sharing vibrations with other gear" are so full of insanity that it's hard to copy-and-paste it without throwing up a little in my mouth. 

You absolutely need to order this catalog to get the whole experience. Products like the maple-housed USB-to-S/PDIF connector are incomprehensible from an engineering perspective, but statements like "Our Amish woodworkers assemble a beautifully crafted (and ultra-low dielectric absorption) maple enclosure directly to the circuit board, thereby greatly stiffening the board while creating an ample sink for draining internal board vibrations. This maple enclosure avoids the sound-muddying effects of high dielectric absorption of the usual plastic enclosures-or, alternatively, the energy-robbing eddy currents that plague any metal enclosures (eddy currents are inevitably induced in any conductive wire or plate near signal circuitry)" explain it all. Really!

Now that I've bookmarked this nutty company in my blog, I can finally throw away the catalog. However, I will always miss the picture of a Mapleshade "recording session" in the back of the catalog. This photo will have to work as a substitute, because I can't stand looking at this book for one more minute.

What's the Matter with the Who?

A friend jumped on the Who's Super Bowl XLIV Concert, knowing that I'm a long-time fan. He reported that "Commentary coming in seems to lean towards 'worst Super Bowl show ever.'” Of course, he's getting his data from wingnut talk radio, which is like getting a restaurant review from a McDonald's fry cook. "Taste" is a personal thing, but folks who exhibit a distinct lack of intelligence or common sense in all areas of life should keep their opinions to themselves. That means you, Rush and the rest of the ClusterFox crowd.

As far as being the "worst ever," I don't know how the 1976 Up With People noise-pollution could ever be topped. Awful is way too weak a word. That might have been one of the worst moments in musical history, let alone Super Bowl history. How about 1989's Elvis impersonator: Elvis Presto? Coke gave us that tacky Vegas crap fest. The New Kids on the Block in 1991, with the 3500 kids and foam guitars? That was pretty bad, to express as mild an opinion as I can manage. Garth Brooks and Clint Black in 1993 and 1994 introduced the NASCAR crowd of hillbillies to the rest of us. Fortunately, I skipped out on those games and only saw painful bits of the performances on the tube post-game. U2 turned in a performance in 2002 that reminded us all of how good our local U2 cover bands can be; compared to the real thing. Janet and Justin took a lot of heat for their sex club act in 2004, but they were actually the class portion of a show that included chronic musical catastrophes P. Diddy and Kid Rock. 2006, 2006, 2007, and 2008 coughed up McCartney, the Stones, Prince, and Tom Petty. Nothing particularly adventurous or even lip-sync-free there. In a single concert, Prince caused a gayness outbreak that was worse than three generations of petrochemical pollution and phthalates. The evidence was obvious from all the butt-slapping that went on during the 2nd half of the game (Colts-Bears). Speaking of which, why is displaying a little boob "pornographic" while grabbing a 300 pound lineman's butt cheek barely gets noticed?

Honestly, I don't know why the Super Bowl halftime has turned into some sort of R&R Hall of Fame moment. The only show I can remember actually liking was the 1979 Fleetwood Mac half-time performance and that was only because of the USC Marching Band. I could care less about the Mac, but the USC band rocked. The sound sucked, though.

It is true that 65-year-old Daltry and 64-year-old Townshend were beyond their prime by a couple of decades. Hell, half of the band is dead. What part of that doesn't scream "obsolete?" The problem is who isn't? And of those who aren't, who wants to watch them? For that matter, among the suspicions that the Who's show was lip-synced was the obvious mediocre mix. If Daltry's voice was dubbed, why was the dubbing done after his voice was mostly gone? You'd think they would at least haul out a recording from when he could actually hit the notes. Townshend's guitar phased in and out of the mix through the whole show. I could not figure who who was singing the high harmony's, though. That bit was suspicious.

What about a pro football game would make fans want to watch a couple minutes of music, a fireworks show in the middle of the afternoon, and a whole lot of equipment rushed to and from a field? For all the hype, the whole concept is begging for ridicule and any band desperate enough to jump into that ring is bound to get hammered for the effort. Like working in Vegas, doing the Super Bowl is like conceding the point that your career is pretty much over and you're just in it for the money until that dries up.

Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

All Rights Reserved © 2010 Thomas W. Day

It seemed like a clever idea, on paper and in the advertising: "The Music of Led Zeppelin & Queen with Members of the Minnesota Orchestra." The marketing puff for the concert claimed, "Bridging the gulf between rock n’ roll and classical music, conductor/arranger Brent Havens takes the podium to present The Music of Led Zeppelin & The Music of Queen, a program he scored to extend the listening experience of Led Zeppelin and Queen’s timeless tunes.

"Performed by members of the Minnesota Orchestra and amplified with a full rock band and screaming vocals by Randy Jackson, Havens and his ensemble capture Led Zeppelin’s 'sheer blast and power' riff for riff while cranking out new musical colors."

In reality, it was a painful excuse for a godawful sound company to blast the same old "musical colors" you can experience at any bar in any town in the country. What we got was the noise made by a mediocre garage band blasted at a moderate-sized audience through a PA designed in hell. It was another moment that painfully described why the audience for live music is shrinking so dramatically.

Moof-rumblerumble-moof-moof-rumblerumblerumble-moof . . .

And so it went for an hour or so, until my patience failed and Idecided to save what was left of my hearing. That's my best written description of the garbage that was emitted by the subwoofers. Somewhere in all the mud was a kick drum and an electric bass. Over the top of that, but equally distorted, was a screeching vocal, a honking electric guitar, a splatting snare drum, and an occasional moment of calm where one or two instruments of the 50-piece orchestra broke though. If I'd have brought a distortion meter, it would have registered well over 50% for every moment of the evening.

The Minnesota Orchestra is one of the most impressive orchestras in the nation, staffed with musicians from all over the country and capable off making even the most pedestrian classical music seem worthwhile. This evening wasn't up to the worst of their rehearsals. If I were to blame anyone for the terrible sound quality of the performance, it would have to be "Guest Conductor Brent Havens." He clearly never took the obvious step away from his conductor's podium and into the Target Center to see what kind of mess the idiot behind the sound board was making of his orchestra.

Or, Havens is deaf and thinks that skinny line array and ridiculous heap of subwoofers were capable of reinforcing something as full-range and powerful as an orchestra.

In the 1970's, Hartley Peavey and his band of hearing-impaired engineers assembled one of the worst combinations of horns and drivers into a product called the "SP1." Garage bands all over the country swept up the SP1 and linked it to another of Peavey's aural disasters, the CS800 power amplifier, to create sonic evil that was rarely equaled in professional audio until some deaf idiot decided to pawn off giant versions of Shure's 1960's Vocalmaster columns as clever engineering under the marketing gimic of "array." The two scroungy strings of miserably designed and aligned speakers arrayed over the heads of the Minnesota Orchestra couldn't have held a sonic candle to a quartet of Vocalmaster columns, but they were definitely much louder and produced as much pain and distortion as their aural grandparent, the Peavey SP1.

Even with the handicap of this shrill and distorted system, the orchestra's sound moron managed to make matters far worse. For starters, he mostly seemed to forget that there were 50-some orchestra members who deserved to be somewhere in his mix. Obviously, our goof-behind-the-faders had spent too many drunken nights mixing crappy garage bands doing mediocre covers of Led Zepplin crap and he is now left with such limited hearing that he can only hear 1-5kHz and feel 80Hz and below. Occasionally, a piccolo would pop through in odd bits of the midrange wall of noise, but the horns and strings were lost all but a few brief moments of the entire Queen portion of the show. The string bass players might was well stayed home and spent the evening entertaining themselves.

What wasn't lost was the giant muffled poofing sound of the kickdrum and the constant rumble of random electric bass. The subwoofer was so poorly setup that it failed to reinforce the kick and bass, but simply turned it into a constant LF industrial noise. Nobody who ever heard a decent recording of a kick and bass would mistake this system's indistinct LF noise for those musical instruments. Unfortunately, after submerging the Target Center's mediocre acoustic field with massive LF distortion, there was no headroom left for anything broadband. So, the sound idiot opted to tweek his already narrow band system until it delivered a piercing and painful midband shriek from every instrument he managed to poke into the mix.

In the PR bullshit, Havens claims that his Queen impersonator "Las Vegas star Brody Dolyn" was a perfect clone of Freddy Mercury; "inflections were spot-on and even the wailing rock sound had that Freddie resonance." Since it's obvious that Havens has severe hearing impairment, I can understand his confusion. However, I had the pleasure of hearing Freddy Mercury and Queen live and I can tell you Dolyn isn't Freddy Mercury and the garage band Havens assembled behind Dolyn isn't the rest of Queen, either. Dolyn is a decent vocalist, if a hambone of a performer, but it's hard to believe that a dozen or more local performers weren't up to his standard of musicality. On that note, I was disappointed to see that the Minnesota Orchestra went solidly East Coast for all of the rock musicians in this show. I know any one of those four (drums, bass, guitar, and keys) players could have been replaced with local musicians with equal or superior results. Part of the reason for supporting the Minnesota Orchestra is to support local talent. If the orchestra's administration is incapable of identifying local talent, they are doing the area a serious disservice.

As irritating and aurally hazardous as this was during the Queen portion of the performance, it got much worse when Randy Jackson brought his impression of the worst voice in rock and roll history, Robert Plant, to the mix. After the third tune, I was flinching as if someone was poking my eardrums with a sharp pin every time Jackson squalled at the high end of his range.

I admit it, I do not like Led Zepplin. I haven't heard a thing worth noting from LZ since their first album. I loved Good Times, Bad Times and even covered that and Communication Breakdown in a few of my own garage band ventures (30 years ago), but ten thousand radio-plays of Stairway to Aural Hell and I never wanted to hear Plant's noise again. Like Zappa's early recordings, I'd probably appreciate LZ a lot more if I could hear their stuff before they overdubbed the vocals, but I don't have that luxury.

Put an impression of that awful voice through a sound system limited to 1-5kHz and you have a formula for sonic pain. My wife and I voted to escape before we had to be air-lifted out of the Target Center. My ears were ringing the next morning as though I'd spent a day in a sheet-metal factory. I should have had a hearing test on Thursday so that I could take another one Friday and sue the Minnesota Orchestra for the difference. There is no way that the SPL in the Target on the evening of February 4, 2010 was any where near OSHA approved levels. The sound was painful, harmful, and musically and morally objectionable. I doubt that I will ever trust the Minnesota Orchestra with my ears ever again.

Supposedly, this farce has been going on for 12 years. All I can say is "there is no accounting for taste."