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.

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.

This Is Revenge?

On the way out of my local library last week, I spotted The Revenge of Analog by David Sax on the “new books” shelves. The sub-title is “Real Things and Why They Matter,” which is oddly confusing. I guess I had no idea that real things had ceased to matter or that analog was particularly “real.” Design Magazine did a brief review of this book a while back and I was entertained by the gushing over vinyl records, as I usually am. Revenge spends the first chapter raving about how and why vinyl records have made a big comeback. I think Sax has the how down pat, but is a little fuzzy on the why.

Jack White, the big proponent of vinyl who has yet to make a record that doesn’t sound like shit, has a quote in Revenge that seems to sum up his philosophy, “With vinyl, you’re down on your knees. You’re at the mercy of the needle. You watch the record spoin and it’s like you’re sitting around a campfire. It’s hypnotic.” I have not problem imagining X-geners and Millenials wanting to be down “on their knees” to mediocre technology, but “romance” and messing with cleaning records and putting up with manufacturing defects and high prices don’t seem compatible to me. White, like his idol Neil Young, claims “the actual sound of analogue is ten times better than that of digital.” If that were true, Young would have made a second decent record and White would have made at least one.

If you read Revenge, don’t expect technical competence. Statements like, “Digital music takes an analog sound wave and translates it into 1’s and 0’s, inevitably sacrificing chunks of information, and sound, in the process. Usually, digital files are compressed to a smaller size to make them easier to download and stream, and their volume levels are jacked up to compensate. But none of that really matters to the vast majority of music listneers, who aren’t really that concerned about sound quality.” You might think Sax would have passed something this stupid by someone who knows something about audio engineering, but you’d be wrong.

The book does make one solid point in the chapter on vinyl, though. In explaining why “digital data” is at fault for devaluing popular music,:the ease at which decent recordings can be made with digital technology put the lie to the idea that artists are a rare commodity. With 8 billion people on the planet, it’s pretty hard to imagine that world wouldn’t produce twenty to fifty million musical geniuses. With access to professional quality recording equipment available to most of those few hundred million musicians, the result is a flood of brilliant, original popular music (and hundreds of millions of dramatically lessor talents) and a swamped buying public.

Sax’s take on the studio recording process is even more open-mouthed baffled and impressed. He is so enamored with the past that he didn’t even bother to ask if analog tape and vinyl have any sonic drawbacks. Likewise, when he finally discovers live music, he writes, “a great live band is a bolt of lightning, and an iPod is a lightning bug.” Imagine what he would think if he were to attend an orchestra concert?

The 2nd chapter is titled “The Revenge of Paper.” You’d think it would be about books and magazines, but it’s about a fashion accessory called the “Moleskine notebook.” There is a chapter for “The Revenge of Print,” but since I’m reading this book on my Android tablet it may not carry the appropriate clout, at least in my case.

Vinyl vs. Bits

For some reason, I've toted around about 100 pounds of vinyl and a last-generation direct drive Sony turntable for the last two decades. It hasn't been much of an effort for the last dozen years, since the whole pile has lived, boxed, and sealed in my basement. Last week a friend loaned me his new turntable-to-USB toy and I decided to convert some of my old records into a format I might listen to. The experience has been eye-opening. 

No, I haven't been converted to an analog fanatic. Just the opposite, in fact. 

The more I listen to the magical world of vinyl the easier it is to understand why records vanished so quickly. Another friend who loves all things old and expensive is convinced that my dislike of the classic "snap, crackle, and pop" sound of records is overly picky in a world of crappy live sound systems, digital television dropouts, and grossly over-compressed CDs and other audio media. I admit that I do like the dynamic range of a 1968 LP. However, the max s/n of a record was somewhere in the 50-60dB territory and CDs easily exceed that range. 

The fact that modern mastering standards generate non-musical products does not condemn the technology. There is a boatload of crazy vinyl philosophy on the web. One of my favorite nutty claims is "Vinyl was custom made for the human ear." Vinyl -- like CDs, MP3s, and tape -- was made to generate a pile of money for someone. Several someones, at best. There is absolutely nothing about the RIAA equalization curve that bears any relation to the best function of the human ear. The incapacity of records to tolerate the sorts of phase oddities that surround us every day is another example of how poorly vinyl records and reproduces acoustic activity. The lack of dynamic range and LF capacity and the phonograph records inability to store and reproduce distinctly different information on the left and right channels is even more data for the "vinyl sucks" argument. 

And, of course, "snap, crackle, and pop" were still everpresent. Clean them, lubricate them with expensive concoctions, put them in a vacuum chamber and records will still contribute their irritating "quality" to the listening experience. 

 But that's not the point of this rant. The real surprise for me was how often my old records had been mixed by crazy people. I'm not talking about the early "stereo" mixes that were just bastardizations of mixes that were intended for mono; like the early Beatles stereo records (instruments full left, vocals full right). No, I mean "modern" mixes intended for stereo records that are just nuts. At first I thought there was something wrong with the turntable. No one would be so careless with pan controls, would they? I was wrong. They would. A bunch of the Warner Brothers stuff I'd kept out of nostalgia is practically unlistenable because the mixer was clearly on crack. Guitars that swing from one side to the other, drums that vary their pan dimensions or are so obviously spaced mic recordings that are so radically spaced that half of the kit resides only in the left ear and the other half in the right. Of course the kick is buried in the limpid center and the bass mumbles around that same vicinity. 

The "obvious" advantage of records completely escapes me while listening to this mess. All this brings back nasty memories of my own record past. At Wirebender, we never found a mastering lab that did much more than not piss us off. When we had a budget for 3 or more mastering options, we selected the one that did the least damage to our master tapes. Never once did a record even approach the dynamic range, frequency response, or stereo image of the original final mixed tape. I remember the phrase, "I hate this one the least" as the closest thing to acceptance we ever managed. 

Finally, after all these years of lugging 100 pounds of vinyl around, I'm going to be able to clear out this section of the basement to make room for something useful. The next pile of junk I'm going to pare away is my collection of unstarted model motorcycle kits.