Improvise, adapt, adapt, adapt... and overcome

[Old No7]

Some of you were probably expecting a stable X stand...

 

Old No7

 

[stoken6]

Yeah, if I had to drive 8 RCAs, one of the right channel and 7 of the left, that's how I would do it. Off the headphone jack.

 

Cheers, Mike

[ElmerJFudd]

Haha! Who doesn"t need a feed from this guy?

[drawback]

Shouldn"t this tread be in 'Shameless Plugs?'

[PianoMan51]

Obviously unbalanced.

[16251]

Better than this.

 

[area51recording]

Better than this.

 

 

Ok, dude.....how did you manage to get in my house?

[jeffincltnc]

Wall warts always end up like this.

[David Emm]

Early in my newbie audio years- like many of you, I'm sure- I had a giant ziploc bag of ill-advised adapters. Radio Shack and no-name-at-all were major contributors. That first picture isn't exaggerating much! It seems all the more quaint in an audio-over-USB world of wonders. OTOH, I have a mini-jack headphone adapter in permanent residence on my audio interface. It never ends, even within the reduced set of things I need.

 

Back when I first landed a Minimoog (my first synth), I had a friend whose rig sported an odd mix of ARP, Korg MS-20, PAIA, early cheeze-Casios and guitar pedals. His ARP Sequencer struggled to stay in the saddle. We probably made every possible mistake on the list, but I began to possess the analog basics. That led to the Dark MIDI Ages, where it was new, glorious and maddening when it went south. Now all of that is in the rear view mirror. I can just boot up Logic and get to it without the searing stench of ozone and adrenaline. When the biggest problem you've had in two weeks is resisting the urge to buy one of the giant soft Oberheims, its possibly a sign of a return on some good karma.

[KuruPrionz]

My greatest moments in connectivity:

 

1. As a curious adolescent, I got a Radio Shack stereo preamp for magnetic cartridges (turntable). It had 4 RCA jacks, an input and output for each channel. $3 or so, quality stuff.

I got a pair of RCA female to 1/4" TS male plug adapters, a long pair of RCA to RCA cords and a short pair of the same. I plugged one adapter into my guitar, added the long RCA cord which I plugged into the input of the left channel of the stereo preamp. I used one of the short RCA cords to run from the output of that channel to the input of the next channel and the second long cord from the output of that channel to my guitar amp. Cascading solid state gain stages, I invented them. I turned the amp on with the volume down, the guitar was cranked. If I just barely turned the amp up, it was loud. If I didn't play a note, an almost G note would oscillate out of the preamp. When I played a note, it ring modulated but really distorted and not in a good way. The noise floor was a ceiling but the notes were even louder. My parents hated it, so I loved it.

One day when I was elsewhere, it disappeared.

 

2. I bought a Univox solid state guitar amp for $25. It was small, had a volume and a tone knob and one jack. It wasn't very loud and sounded completely uninteresting. I decided that I hated it and therefore, it must die. I hardwired a piece of brown lamp cord across the fuse holder so there was no protection. Then I took a guitar cable, plugged it into the external speaker output of a late 50's Fender Tweed Deluxe that my brother bought at a yard sale for $20. I ran that into the Univox with a speaker cabinet and turned everything all the way up. Somehow, it lived. A friend and I played a duo gig at some disaster in an abandoned theater in Biola - a town that did not have one horse. I pummeled the Univox for a good hour plus at full volume, driven by the Fender, also at full volume. The Univox did not die.

 

So I gave it to a friend and I think he still has it and it still works. Catfish amp, too dumb to die.

[area51recording]

I do miss "The Shack" and their "Wall of Connectivity".....I used to joke that with stuff from that wall you could figure out how to connect a bathtub to a Volkswagen.....