Mike Rivers
-
Posts
1,007 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Events
Articles
Downloads
Gallery
Store
Posts posted by Mike Rivers
-
-
Biggest impact is loading of the tuned circuit (tone stack), changing its design frequency(s) and/or its system gain. The tone stack is basically a passive filter. which is vulnerable to impedances at its input and output. Since the triode is not an ideal buffer, the impedance of its elements has to be factored in the design of the tone stack.
OK, maybe you need to better translate "tone stack" for me. Is it a specific circuit with specific component values common to all amplifiers of a certain category, that will produce a specific set of frequency response curves (to what tolerance?) for a given setting of the controls? I thought it was simply the tone control portion of an amplifier circuit, and that part of the characteristics of that particular amplifier is how the sound responds to setting of the tone controls. Seems to me that whether or not the output of the tone stack is buffered, it can be designed to have a workable range of control.
Is there something dynamic going on? Will an un-buffered tone stack operate differently when playing loudly or softly?
And what's a better buffer than a triode (if it's the right triode)? Maybe a pentode with a little help to the electrons getting across the vacuum by a push from another grid?
Most student tube guitar amps omitted the tone recovery tube for economy. The amp will still work, but the phase splitter following the tone stack is not as good a buffer. So tone controls in such an applications are a bit more limited due to adverse loading.Can you be more specific? In what way are they "a big more limited?" And how might this affect the playing of someone who knows he's playing through an inexpensive or 'student grade' amplifier?
Top models like 1950s Fender Super, Twin, and Bassman with treble/mid/bass tone controls did not have tone recovery triodes, instead they placed a high gain stage consisting of both triodes of a 12AX7 BEFORE the tone stack. Tone recovery triodes following the tone stack became the standard by the 1960s, which was an economy move to reduce tubes.I can understand putting more gain ahead of the passive tone stack, hence driving it at a higher level will improve signal-to-noise ratio, but so will driving it from a low impedance source. Is the 12AX7 used as an amplifier followed by a cathode follower to drive the tone stack?
OK, I looked for a schematic of one of those amplifiers and lo and behold, the Bassman 5F6 (the second Bassman schematic I looked at), sure enough, has the tone stack fed from the cathode of the second half of a 12AX7, though the cathode resistor is 100 kΩ, which seems to be rather high if the purpose is to provide a low impedance source for the tone stack.
I could be out to lunch here. Make me smarter.
-
I just had my detailed reply eaten by the software so maybe it doesn't like this discussion.
You said that the tone recovery thingamajig goes between the tone stack and the phase inverter (or a single-ended output stage) so how does the output (source) impedance of the tube affect the tone stack? Is that impedance, or the load on the tone recovery tube reflected back to its grid significantly? Does the capacitance of the grid, or any capacitors connected to the grid affect the tone stack? That's not inconceivable since the pots in a typical tone stack circuit are 250 kΩ or so.
What I know about tube circuitry is mostly from my ham radio days in the 1950s and '60s. Stray capacitance is important in RF circuits because it can become a resonant circuit with the inductance of a piece of wire and cause an unwanted oscillation. But I don't figure that a guitar amplifier is going to oscillate at 20 MHz or so.
There actually are some transformerless tube output circuits, but they're tweaky. An output transformer is the way to go. Not only is it to match the impedance of the speaker with that of the tube, but it also keeps DC off the speaker.
So what were we originally talking about in this thread? What circuit designs within an amplifier should be modeled and what's not to bother with?
-
I ordered an Aston Element from Sweetwater, they are waiting for a shipment. Having read the reviews in Tape Op and Sound on Sound, and the description of the crowd-sourced critique/evolution of this mic, it sounded like a great choice to add to my humble mic locker. Active moving coil (dynamic) large diaphragm.
I wonder what's really behind the grill. The days of reviewers taking a microphone apart and describing its workings in detail seem to be lost in the past. I know what "active," "moving coil," and "large diaphragm" mean in microphonese, but I'm not sure why Aston is using such mystery in describing it. One review I read mentions that the diaphragm is unusually thin for dynamic mic. Is there are a real voice coil attached to the diaphragm? Or perhaps is it like, or something like the Fostex "Printed Ribbon" mics where what serves as the voice coil is printed directly on the surface of the diaphragm, with nothing hanging off the back and sliding over a magnet? Fostex also makes headphones with that same technology.
I'm all for creative microphone design and engineering but I'd like to have some idea of what it has besides voodoo.
Dr. Mike - Are you hinting that the Aston Element is a copy of something else? Or that other Aston mics are copies other existing mics with, perhaps a clever addition like the aiming light on their small Starlight? They do seem to be focused on switches that change the voicing of the mic so the reviewer can say something like "didn't require any EQ."
-
... Buffers are near infinite input impedance and near zero output impedance. Triodes aren't that ideal.
Triodes (and, in general, vacuum tubes) aren't characterized by an input or output impedance, it's the circuit configuration around the tube that determines those characteristics. The input impedance is pretty much determined by what resistance determines the grid bias, and the output impedance is determined by the resistor across which the output voltage is dropped. A tube in a conventional amplifier circuit (with voltage gain) with a 47 kΩ plate resistor and AC-byapssed cathode resistor will have an output impedance of around 47 kΩ. A cathode follower circuit, which is generally used as a buffer, with a 100 Ω cathode resistor will have an output impedance of about 100 Ω.
At least that's how it usually works, but guitar amplifiers are designed for a special purpose.
I've got track templates that go like
Pultec (input impedance) > LA2 (V1) into Scheps Omni Channel (tone stack) > LA2 (V2) > Reaper asymmetric distortion (phase inverter/crossover distortion) > Scheps Omni Channel (saturation/transformer) > Melda dynamic eq (impedance curve/damping effects) > "speaker sim dujour".
I was once looking for a crossover distortion generator and made one out of two back-to-back diodes. Where can I find the Reaper asymmetric distortion plug-in? Is it part of the standard Reaper installation? I haven't been keeping up with my Reaper versions but that sounds like something I'd like to play with - not to simulate the sound of an instrument amplifier, but to illustrate the different sound of two different kinds of distortion that measure the same THD. One with crossover distortion sounds more unpleasant than one with pure harmonic distortion. I used this in an article about specifications.
-
Moral of the story: If you buy an English sports car, make sure you know a really good mechanic.
That's what I remember from the 1950s and '60s when I cared about cars. Better than knowing a good mechanic, you need to BECOME one, and enjoy it. I thought it was kind of neat that I could synchronize SU carburetors by ear with a piece of garden hose, and it was a revelation when neighbor Brit and former Jaguar owner (who said it's a beautiful car, but a 'pitch' to start) gave me his Uni-Syn that he swore he would never need again.
And just yesterday, I tried starting up my workbench computer to get some Audio Precision graphs of transformer performance for Kuru, and it didn't boot, just beeped at me. I believe the beep pattern means there's a memory problem, but now there's a new product for another day. Good thing I don't have any deadlines.
-
"Tone recovery stage" must be one of those terms that people who work with instrument amplifiers invented. There are probably more.
I'd call it a buffer.
Is there a glossary of those "amp" terms somewhere?
-
Other things that matter...
. . . tone recovery stage or not . . .
What the heck is that? A guitar amp term like "tone stack?" (I've been trained by what that means)
The permutations are ENDLESS.Not endless, but there are a lot of things that can affect "tone" if changed, with no "standard" designs.
-
I'm waiting for a DAW that abandons the "temporal shunt" tape-traveling approach to recording, and instead just buffers inputs continuously and displays everything you've done on a *continuous* timeline, that would look like one of those "earth epoch timeline" graphs; the session started "here", this happened "here", "here" and "here". It would change the process from *the illusion* of "rewinding" to what I'd call "true non-linear editing", in that you'd have functions that while in recording mode would behave like "rewinding" (loop to start of track; loop to start of edit point) it would show up on screen as a linear plot, a line with annotated "notes" of the transport controls but would actually be a horizontal representation of a playlist.
If that's the way you work, you aren't creating music/art, you're assembling a bunch of attempts at playing music. How do you know you're getting toward where you're going if you don't listen to playbacks now and then?
But on the other hand, a good bit of music that we hear today is conducted from fragments, some recorded in the studio, some recorded at home, some are sounds captured on the street with a handheld recorder or a phone, some are pre-made loops. You mess around with that stuff long enough and you (the engineer/producer) become the artist. And indeed that's the gig for some.
In my world, you know, when you start recording, how you want the final product to come out, and everything you do, even if it's just a nutty idea that you try and it works out to fit nicely (or doesn't, and you know it won't go into this song) those involved with the production need to keep things on track so that most parts go toward a pre-conceived goal, and not become a pile from which maybe you can make a song that you never really thought about until you started going through the recordings you have available to work from.
Gimme music, please.
-
It looks like the base wasn't shipped. I talked to Latch Lake via email (very helpful and responsive), and the base is shipped in a separate box and is quite heavy. I think the seller thought she had a complete, new product and sold it as such.
I wonder where or how she got a new stand without the base. Occasionally a tube mic will be sold without the power supply by a seller who doesn't know that it's part of the mic system. In some cases, it's been discovered that the mic was stolen and the crook didn't know to steal the power supply, too. Usually it's someone slipping the mic into an instrument case before leaving the studio after a session. In your case, it's unlikely that someone would slip a Latch Lake stand, less base, into a case and walk out of the studio with it, but it may have been stolen from a shop.
I hope you can work something out, though I suspect that the seller isn't going to buy a new base from Latch Lake and send it to you.
-
Sir Mike, it is an Alesis Multimix 8 Line
That's a pretty old product, isn't it? Not that there's anything wrong with old products. Here's the link to the real McCoy, good photo, and yup, it's "Discontinued." I'll bet it would be really useful to keyboard/electronics musicians, but nothing I could get excited about for recording. I often see "does anybody make" queries for a mixer with a bunch of line inputs and a minimum of mic inputs they don't need, and there are always a couple in the marketplace, some remarkably expensive (but nice).
https://www.alesis.com/products/view/multimix-8-line
-
Sir Mike, it is an Alesis Multimix 8 Line
That's a pretty old product, isn't it? Not that there's anything wrong with old products. Here's the link to the real McCoy, good photo, and yup, it's "Discontinued." I'll bet it would be really useful to keyboard/electronics musicians, but nothing I could get excited about for recording. I often see "does anybody make" queries for a mixer with a bunch of line inputs and a minimum of mic inputs they don't need, and there are always a couple in the marketplace, some remarkably expensive (but nice).
https://www.alesis.com/products/view/multimix-8-line
-
In keeping with this thread being for small, affordable studio rigs, I'm testing mics that come in under $200 new and often much less used. . . .
Currently trying the Neat Worker Bee, I don't expect it to work well as a close in vocal mic. Then I will check out an EV PL95 and a Blue Encore 300 and see how they hold up. I know my Shure Beta 87a works well and used they are often well under $200. I want to try the 87c which is true cardioid instead of supercardioid. One of these days...
I was pleasantly surprised with the TZ Stellar X2 $200 largish capsule condenser mic. I don't really need any more mics, but I bought this one based on a glowing review from someone I trust. Figured that I could send it back in a month for a refund if it didn't do something useful that other mics don't, or if it was too much like other mics I already had, but, doggone, I kept it.
Not that I needed another U87, but, as a glittering generality, I'd say that it's about 90% of a U87 for less than 10% of the price. On my voice, it was barely distinguishable from the U87 I put next to it (neither one clearly sounded better), sounds excellent on acoustic guitar both from about 3 feet away and at the "neck meets the body fret" position up close. Sounds good on banjo, and would probably do well with a drum overhead because it can capture the room nicely if you let it.
What more can you want from a $200 mic, other than that it only cost $100?
-
This looks like an interesting mobile solution for recording out and about. It does 24bit at
96khz and will record all 8 tracks plus a stereo master track simultaneously.
"Sorry, we couldn't find that page."
So what is it, really?
-
Musicians reluctant to changes isn't the problem. The reluctance is when the interface of the software drastically changes with little gains in functionality. You memorized where all the functions were, and suddenly you have to re-learn them. It takes effort to re-learn a new interface. With each Windows upgrade, Microsoft kept moving functions to different places.
That's my beef, too - changes to the user interface. With some software it's like they take advantage of an update just to juggle around the menus or icons and occasionally even rename a function that's only changed a little internally. I think that comes from the marketing department - they need something that will make the customer buy the new update or continue the subscription.
My MIDI computer for 25 years was a 1993-era WFW311 computer running Cakewalk Pro Audio 3. No it won't do digital recording, no you can't used modern plugins or VSTs, no I don't care.I thought that Cakewalk Pro Audio was revolutionary (to Cakewalk users) because you could record audio files and insert them into sequences. But that's not like we do it today.
I, too, have old computers running old software, with the "works good enough for me" attitude. A new convolution reverb that I use when I do a new mix of an old recording isn't really going to make it sound any better. An iZotope Rx noise scrubbing might indeed help, but I don't have any commercial prospects for income from a purchase because nobody really wants to re-mix this stuff. There's a market for de-loused Robert Johnson or Leadbelly or Jelly Roll Morton, but for the band of college students who play at the local Irish pub.
I was just having a conversation with a Unix-head friend about the fact that I still use a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet to do my bookkeeping. It's full of macros and a few functions that don't translate to Excel or Libre Calc - it just won't run on anything but the real program. This was freeware (the spreadsheet, that is) and it so perfectly fit what I wanted to be able to do that I've kept using it. I look at bookkeeping software on and off, but, geez, you have to really understand bookkeeping in order to use one. I just want to be able to total up how much money I spend and how much I took in for my quarterly estimated tax returns, and when 1040 time comes around, know what categories my expenses fit in so the IRS can have something to do.
When I moved my "office and writing" computer to a 64-bit Windows 7 system for the sake of some other software, I have to run Lotus in a virtual Windows XP box. I still have some computers that will run it directly, but I've gotta keep up with the times.
-
I believe it's intended solely for archiving.
Ah, yes - put the data someplace where you know it's safe, you know where it is, and you probably can't get to it very easily. Isn't that what an archive is?
-
Tape today has two places:
Let's not forget museums!
Interestingly, tape is still alive for digital archival storage. It looks like the next big advance in being able to fit lots of data in a small space will be in tape-land, not semiconductors. IBM says it has developed a method that can store up to 330 TB of uncompressed data on a palm-sized tape cartridge.
That's a lot of data to lose if it dumps and you haven't backed it up. That's something that sounds like it would be good for use in a well managed archive where there are regular backups, hopefully to a different medium.
We in the audio community know a lot more about tape and its failure modes. I wonder if the IBM folks are aware of how their tape might fail and when. DAT didn't live up to its supposed life testing, and we know how not to make analog tape now, but digital tape is a whole different ball game.
-
I have a friend with a studio in a commercial space. He has a Studer 827. Like me, he is a digital native and only got the tape machine much later. He said it was fun to learn how to use, and kind of a cool historical lesson in how records used to be made. But no one will pay him for the tape, and everything is way easier in PT.
Tape today has two places:
- The hobbyist who just wants to have one and use it for hobby-like projects (paying, not payng, your own music)
- The professional studio that has clients who want tape and have the means to pay for it (money is no object sessions)
I have an assortment of 1/4" tape decks that are used for transfers, not recording. In fact I have the erase and record heads disconnected on most of them just so I don't accidentally erase a tape. People occasionally pay me to make a transfer, but not for recording. And, as I believe I've said before, for multitrack projects I have a few Mackie hard disk recorders. Their WAV files can be imported into every DAW that I've encountered so, after tracking here, they can work on the project at home on their DAW. If they want to mix here, I have Pro Tools, Reaper, and Mixbus ready to load or import their sessions. The only projects that I start in a DAW are experiments. I don't want to waste a working visitor's time re-learning or figuring out a DAW for the sake of using a DAW. But no tape.
An analog console will work with any DAW as long as you do the system engineering homework and build things up correctly. And needless to say, I don't do software subscriptions. My Pro Tools is Version 10 and that's where it'll stay.
- The hobbyist who just wants to have one and use it for hobby-like projects (paying, not payng, your own music)
-
Fair warning: I am not making this up. I have actually heard people say during Q&A at seminars they preferred tape because they could sort of chill, and gather their thoughts while the tape rewound.
When all we had was tape, which was the period when I did most of my recording in a studio environment, waiting for the tape to rewind was just expected. The musicians would talk after the take, and wouldn't shut up to listen to the playback. Rewind times aren't usually very long, but I know that sometimes seconds can seem like minutes. If you're doing an overdub - a real one where you erase the portion of the track that you're re-doing, a re-wind to check the punch or decide to just do another is usually just a few seconds, and that's a reasonable time to get set for playing again.
Some tape decks had better locators than others - that's something that computer certainly do better. What I (as engineer/tape-op) sometimes got frustrated with is if you had set a marker at the time you wanted to start rolling and the deck wandered back and forth around that marker for a few seconds before parking.
I recommended that after hitting "stop," they wait for a while before hitting "play."I often do that because I know the players aren't ready to go as fast as the computer is. That's something that you learn when working with other musicians. When you're recording yourself you can work at your own pace and you probably don't rush yourself. If you're letting the computer do the work - set up for automatic punch-in and loop - the player can get rushed, and if he's not quick on the draw and yell STOP after the music starts playing, you're risking over-writing the last (maybe best) take. But then most people don't work in the destructive mode like tape always was unless you did your fixes on multiple tracks so you could decide later on which was the best one. Set the DAW up right (usually the default) and you always have the Undo button.
-
The dirty little secret is that many of the early "16-bit" products used 12-bit DACs. As to minidisc, ATRAC was a horrific data compression scheme when it was introduced. Sony fixed it over time, but then it was too late - it already had such a bad rep that nothing could fix it.
And yet, there were a few "pro" Minidisk recorders that were quickly adopted by the news media to replace their Marantz "pro" series of portable cassette recorders. The biggest problem with ATRAC was that they had to transfer it to tape in order to edit or even copy it. That was fixed by the time the multitrack Minidisk workstations came around, and I know a few folky records that were made on those.
Unlike the CD, which was originally a music medium that was adopted by the computer industry, the Minidisk was originally developed as a replacement for the computer floppy disk, but that never caught on.
-
Just think how valuable social media would be, if the participants discussed ideas instead of people.
That's how I thought social media was supposed to be. Maybe that's the real reason for why I don't find, at least what most people consider "social media" something in which I want to participate. It makes me feel a little more normal to consider that forums like this are also "social media" and we handle it civilly, and discuss ideas and hard stuff like gear, theory, and good practice.
-
Even better...I have a Telecaster from 1966, and I can still buy strings for it
Can you imagine if you went to pick up a guitar one day, and upon opening the case, you're told that you not only need to buy entirely new strings or it won't play, but it now has seven strings instead of six, and the bridge is entirely different and has to be intoned from scratch? Well, that's a little far out, but you might find that the brand and type of strings that you've been using on that guitar for many years, after finally being happy with a string that sounds and plays great on your instrument, is no longer available. Or (and this has happened to me) you can no longer find your favorite strings, but you're told that this new type is the same as the ones you've been using. New packaging, new name, new model number, and maybe they changed a couple of gauges in the set by a couple of mils. I had a similar awakening 10 or so years ago when Charmin switched their descriptive brand names to "Ultra Soft" and "Ultra Strong" and I didn't know which one to buy to get what my A$A was accustomed to.
The only approaches I've found that work is to keep everything updated all the time, which is indeed a maintenance issue, or leave everything alone.Oh, don't I wish. Seems like these days, whenever I open an app on my phone that I haven't used in a month or so, I get a notice that it's obsolete and offers me an update. If I don't take the update, I can't use that app. This is mostly with commercial apps like airlines, hotels, grocery stores, and such. When I look at the app info to see what's new or changed, most of the time it's something like "to give our users a more pleasant experience." BAH HUMBUG!
-
I won't deny that Vox amps have their problems. The biggest PIA is the cheap quality jacks.
No flaky jacks on a plug-in, but you have to deal with driver updates, application updates when you update the OS, "no longer supported" messages when you try to make your version compatible with a new version of something else.
The jack on your real amplifier can be replaced in half an hour and, if you get a good Switchcraft part, will last another 30 years.
-
I'm not an analog tape diehard. I sold my Ampex MM1100 more than 20 years ago, and now the 1/4", cassette, and DAT machines are only used for playback - transferring analog recordings to digital. But I'm not an enthusiastic software DAW user either. One reason is that I don't record much any more that I need more than 2 tracks. I've put many more recording hours on my portable digital recorders than I have using Reaper, Mixbus, or Pro Tools. Another reason is that the projects that I work on don't require a lot of fooling around. No massive amounts of signal processing, no drum replacement, little or no vocal comping.
When I have a multitrack project, my Mackie HDR24/96, which works almost exactly like a tape deck until you get into editing, gets put into service first. If someone wants to take home a Pro Tools file to work on, I'll import the HDR's WAV files into a PT session and send him on his way. Like a tape deck, the user interface doesn't change so I don't have to re-learn things that I use. I don't have to get a new tape deck when I update the operating system on my computer. Nor do things get discontinued that require a new "tape deck."
I never really was bothered by maintenance when I was recording on tape. An alignment took a few minutes, and then I was sure that it was working to the best of its ability. Unlike with software, when something breaks, I usually know why or can figure out why pretty quickly. I feel uncomfortable "fixing" a software problem by downloading a new version of the program or of a driver for the interface hardware that I'd been using for years. Maintenance is maintenance and it doesn't go away because you don't have motors, ICs, and tape.
So that's why I don't keep up with the latest plug-ins or reverbs or updated versions that let you upload your work to YouTube without leaving the program. If I was 40 years younger, or if I've been working continuously over the past 40 years, I'd probably have gone with the flow. But since I don't feel any compulsion to, nor do I think it will make the little work that I do now better, I'll stick with what works for me, and won't discourage others from trying new old things.
-
Also check out the work happening at audiosciencereview.com.
Thanks for that. I looked at a couple of their speaker reviews and they seem to be measuring the right stuff. Did you check out that measuring gizmo that they're using?
Anyone Using a Touch Screen Monitor with Your DAW?
in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
Posted
This isn't a new idea. I remember seeing one at a NAMM show many years ago that they had running with Cubase (I think). It was pretty big, maybe 2 x 3 feet, and in a wood frame that tilted it up at maybe 20-30 degrees, very much like a drafting table, though not adjustable, at least in the demo setup, though there's no reason why it couldn't be mounted on an adjustable stand. The goal was to be able to move throughout the "tracks" view of an audio project more quickly than dragging a mouse or spinning a scroll wheel. As I recall, there was a portion of the display reserved for (and programmed for, in this demo) transport control buttons and track arming. I think it was called Oak or Leaf something or other. It's probably in one of my NAMM show reports on my web site.
And then there's the currently available Slate Digital Raven MTZ, which, one of the developers that I was chatting with informally a few years ago, described it as a king-sized iPad. I suspect that this is one of those great ideas that are ravenously adopted by a relatively small number of users, and shrugged off by the largest group of recording and mixing users who are using systems that they've assembled from off-the-shelf software and components (i.e. most of us here).
Perhaps Craig's modest enthusiasm of the concept, plus the availability of large touch-screen monitors at a price affordable to a reasonably profit-active small studio will get some traction. And perhaps it's a bonus that, because it looks like a big TV set, it adds some reality to working with video, and maybe even when working with immersive sound.
He ought to write a book.