A while ago, I saw Tony Fabris of Vixy & Tony using a ridiculously large Windows tablet to display his lyrics and sheet music. He’d also whipped together some software to organise it and such. It was awesome.

The trick was he’d got the tablet relatively cheap, because it was huge, but also the first release of Windows 8 on tablet, and there was something weird about it I think? I forget. It already didn’t exist anymore, but he had one.

Anyway, I’ve been watching for a similar opportunity ever since, because I kind of realised there was an arbitrage opportunity floating around right about… well, let’s go to the napkin:

See, past a point, as tablets get larger, they become less useful as tablets. Above 11″ or so, they rapidly become both unacceptably awkward and heavy, particularly at widescreen ratios. Oh, sure, you can get a keyboard, use it as a really awkward laptop, and a lot of companies are making laptop “convertibles” now as people try to figure out that format. But even done well, that’s basically a laptop that can make do as a shitty tablet, all at laptop prices.

Now, on the other hand, if you want something to sit in front of you on a music rack and display your chords or whatever, you want that extra, impractical-for-carrying-around size. And you don’t mind a little more weight, because it’s a lot lighter than a bunch of three-ring binders.

And LCD screens in those sizes and ratios are everywhere now from OEMs, because laptops. So everybody keeps trying to make tablets at those larger sizes because IT CAN’T MISS AM I RIGHT? Except every time it’s the same plan, it’s the same plan, and everybody ends up on fire and dumping these things.

So the trick is to find something in that little red bar, at the end of the too-heavy, too-big-for-normal-people 13-14″ downslope-of-heaviness while still in the awesome-for-sheetmusic range of musician happiness, all at the right oh-shit-this-was-a-bad-idea-get-rid-of-these-things price range.

There’ve been a few qualifying tablets floating around pretty much constantly since I saw Tony’s, all from one or another GeneroMaker, but they’ve all been too junky for one reason or another. Bad screens, bad battery life, double-digit DOA rates, whatever.

Until possibly now. Meet the latest iteration of this mistake, at $150 on Amazon right now.

3rd Generation iPod for scale because I left my sonic upstairs

The photo here isn’t great, but I don’t want to move the tablet because it’s doing the first-time charge. But trust me: it’s huge. It’s slightly over three times the size of Anna’s Kindle. It’s got a good screen, it’s heavier than some laptops but it’s thin, it’s got 5-7 (claimed) hours of battery life, decent viewing angles, and it’s running Jelly Bean so can talk to the usual app stores. It’s got USB and expansion and all that. The onboard sound is terrible and it’s not super fast, but that’s not what I need it for.

And almost all the positive reviews are from musicians using it for exactly this.

There will probably be more of these, but this is the first one I’ve seen since that old Windows tablet of Tony’s that meets all the requirements for such appropriately little dough. I’ve had it for all of a few hours, so this isn’t a review, but it is your notice: the arbitrage opportunity you may have been waiting for is now here.

I’ve got all these “passive” speakers that are part of my PA kit. “Passive” means they are speakers without built-in amplifiers. That was the norm for a very long time, but isn’t so much now.

And I’ve been thinking there’s this super-snazzy mixer I’d like. It’s this, in the 1608 model specifically.

Now, I can use that with external amplifiers. I don’t have to do anything clever. But it’d be nice not to have to haul around as many pieces and leave the amp at home, right?

So I started looking around at amplifier boards I could build myself, with the idea of making my non-powered “passive” speakers into powered “active” speakers, with built-in amps.

And that’s when I discovered “class T” amplifiers, which are fairly new, and are single-board units like this one.

And it’s like $23, which is crazy. But they’re all priced like that. All the Class T amps are dirt cheap, but commentary on gear boards is actually pretty good, particularly for these 2050-based units.

Does anybody know anything about these personally? Because I’m pretty intrigued.

I continue to be bemused by the ongoing return of vinyl LPs. Another year, another set of gains, in both units and revenue. Data from Statistica:

It matches what I was seeing in an RIAA PDF from earlier this year. Vinyl sales are doing very well, thanks, and are the only ownership segment that’s actually rising. Streaming revenue is climbing too, but wow, not enough to make up for all the down segments.

Data again Statistica, this graph Forbes

I think there are a couple of things going on here.

First, the LP surge – yes, of course it’s at least partly a fad. That’s not durable, and the increase in rate of increase is most probably a warning sign.

But aside from that, I think the rise in LP sales may be related to the LP package being a physical/tangible object that’s interesting to have for itself. Certainly, if you’re going to pick a CD vs. a vinyl LP as an interesting physical object, the LP wins. Bigger covers, more interesting art possibilities – the whole drill. But…

I wrote a while ago about how the RIAA made music ownership a negative value. I think that’s still pretty much true, for digital.

But I don’t think that perception ever reached vinyl. Vinyl had been written off by the time the RIAA swung into self-destructive smashy smashy. And I’m wondering if vinyl still caries a weight of ownership that digital no longer does.

I mean, I just had a friend of mine who has never owned a turntable and is the opposite of a hipster say she’s thinking of getting one. This shouldn’t be ignored.

The downside for the artist, of course, is that LPs are a lot more expensive to make – particularly for indies. And smaller living spaces mean less space for storage of any kind of stuff, including LPs. That’s a limiting factor, and while it might become less of one as housing stock rebalances, that rebalancing is a longer cycle, and probably won’t come early enough to matter.

or somebody will find a way to make it their job

The second statement I take from these graphics is that the industry – as of 1st half 2014 – is still both sinking and on fire. That Forbes chart shows year-to-year revenue changes in stark numbers – down categories at $-394m (downloads, CS, synchronisation, others) vs. up categories at $+231m (streaming, vinyl) year-to-year.

That’s a $163m revenue loss. I certainly don’t see how vinyl can staunch that much bleeding. And the streaming revenue gains – while obviously more substantial, and where the industry is betting its future – don’t even make up for the drop in paid downloads. They’re just cannibalising their own revenue streams.

We’re still living in a post-scarcity environment. And there’s no rearrangement of desk chairs that can change that fact. Delay the repercussions a little, sure; stop them, no.

Me, I want to release something on Edison cylinder. It can in fact be done; there’s a company in the UK doing it. And wow, it’s expensive. But if, you know, 20 people want to go in at $50/each for cylinders, I will do it. I will do it in a heartbeat.

No? Yeah, I didn’t think so either. XD

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This is Part 11 of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of essays about, well, what it says on the tin. In the digital era, duplication is essentially free and there are no natural supply constraints which support scarcity, and therefore, prices. What the hell does a recording musician do then?

I’m going to be forcing mobile-mode on iPhone users today while I try to see what I can do to improve the mobile view of the blog. Sorry about that if it affects you! It’ll go back to normal later today.

Last call for the Secret Blog Discount sale! All pay things on Bandcamp – meaning all music, and both Free Court of Seattle novels in paperback – are 25% off with this checkout code which expires TODAY!

     happybird2015

But! There’s a surprise sale on Amazon for author Angela Highland’s other books. Carina Press didn’t notify her, they just did it. So if you’re interested in her other series – the Rebels of Adalonia novels – Valor of the Healer is a staggering 99¢ right now. G’wan, get it – at 99¢, it’s not even really splurging.

There are a lot of new visitors here over the last week, and almost all of you are here for the Hugo Awards gaming/Sad Puppies articles. And that’s great – welcome!

But I am a musician, after all, so how about a welcome present. First: all pay things on Bandcamp are 25% off with this checkout code:

     happybird2015

That includes all music, and both Free Court of Seattle novels in paperback, which I can stock and sell via arrangement with the author.

Read more

Speaker two, out of the gate, actually sounded a little better than speaker one. Particularly the tweeter, since with some cajoling, it actually came back online with less effort than the tweeter in speaker one.

So of course I started with speaker one, because yeah, it’s do the worse case first, see what I get. And that came out pretty well. So today I’m working on speaker two, the one that had all the extra crap like fibreglass insulation inside, and start taking it apart.

I get the tweeter driver taken apart, and the foam (like in speaker one) is made pretty much out of spiderweb and motor oil at this point, and I replace it, and then I look at the driver dome diaphragm.

That’s not good

So yeah that’s not good at all. So I work on pulling it off, and it’s not easy, and in fact it’s very not easy at all in ways it should be, and I’m thinking, oh, this is not good, and then I manage to wedge it out of the driver.

oh ick

Yeaaaah, something crawled up there and died

It took a lot of work to get all of that out of the dome and also all of that out of the slot where the driver cone lives (and yeah, it was in there too), and to be honest, I’m really confused that this tweeter worked at all, much less as well as it did.

Anyway, I did all the things I did on the other speaker (rebuilt the crossover, changed the design like in speaker one, added in the new compensation circuit like in speaker one, pulled out the giant twitter rheostat, added a standard quarter-inch connector, also fixed some physical oddness in the back panel that wasn’t in speaker one), and put it all back together pending the new dome.

This is playing back the track I was using most often as a reference before. Once again, given the condition of the cone, I’m astounded it sounds this good. You can hear some of the problems the damaged cone is causing, nonetheless. This one makes it more obvious – lots of sibilance hiss that isn’t in the recording.

But yeah, that’s really most of it. Need a new part, I can order that, the rest is cosmetic. I’m going to build some mini-screens to hide those air-holes in the front, since they aren’t cosmetic; I’m not sure what to do about the outsides or the grille yet; it’ll need something. I could felt them, I suppose, but… I’m not sure. Might be fun to go all brass and stuff, why not?

Back from Norwescon! Here’s what opening ceremonies looked like from the orchestra pit.

It’s All Bendy

And I ran into Aang and Kyoshi, who I thought I’D NEVER SEE AGAIN AAAAAAAAAAAAA or something:

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!

The panels I was on were really well attended, the Leannan Sidhe show I was playing went really, really well, and PDX Broadsides and Bards of a Feather made great first-time Norwescon impressions, and Saturday night was standing-room-only, but the big news for me, personally, is:

I’m stepping down from running nwcMUSIC.

This is a big deal for me; it’s been my baby, but after six years running music at Norwescon and five years building nwcMUSIC as a festival, I need to hand it to other people. I’ve built a legitimate programme here, and I’m really excited that it has momentum and all the tools are in place and everything – but it’s time for me to step down.

The position I’ve created has been, frankly, too much for one person. Certainly for non-supervillains. So there will be several far-more-manageable positions created by my departure.

There will be opportunities like Concerts Lead, Daytime Programming Lead, Publicity and Communications Lead or whatever they end up calling it, possibly a Special Events/Filkcircle Lead. There will be non-lead positions, like Concerts Second (what I’ve called “Water Fairy,” ably managed by Anna in the past), Concert Sound Engineer (replacing the most excellent Jen and John after six years), possibly Videographer (if K decides to move on as well), and so on.

It’s been very hard work, and I’m glad they’re breaking it down into more positions moving forward. It needs to be; nwcMUSIC has been personality-driven this whole time, because really, that’s how a lot of these things get going. Supervillains got FORCE OF MIND, after all. But a lot of times, that’s how these things end, too, when that personality steps away, or is killed by James Bond, or whatever. Job hazards.

But I promise this: you will not be going in unaided. I will share everything I’ve done and learned. I won’t be on the convention committee next year, but I really, really, don’t want to see nwcMUSIC go away. It’s built up into a nice community (that I want to continue to be part of, as a musician), it’s a really good educational experience for the participants, it promotes participation in your own culture, and it’s a heck of a venue for nerdy and geeky artists.

So someone – several someones – need to take my place. If no one does, it really will go away, and I don’t know anyone who wants that. So please – even if you aren’t the right person for any of these positions, cast that net wide, and pass along the news to everyone you know.

And contact Norwescon Special Events – specialevents@norwescon.org – to get involved. It’ll be a couple of months before much happens for 2016, but they’ll want a list of potential people as soon as possible. This is a big change for Norwescon, too.

I said this at the last show, but thank you again to everyone who has come and played; everyone who has come and participated; everyone who has come and been part of an audience; thanks to K Wiley, videographer, who has worked his ass off to get us livestreaming; and most of all, thanks to Jen Kilmer and John Seghers, who have been our amazing sound crew these past six years. Without them in particular, quite literally none of this could have happened.

We’ve got a hell of a thing here. Keep nwcMUSIC going. I’ll help. And contact specialevents@norwescon.org to join in, today.

I rebuilt and altered the crossover circuit on the worse of the two speakers. Check it, here’s the new crossover. I kept the original coils, but moved them so they’re out of plane with each other, which matters for clarity and prevention of crosstalk.

New CrossoverThe numbers on the board are kind of wrong, those were what was there before, plus or minus 20%, except for the one that had pretty much completely failed from age. That’s okay, electrolytics do that. That’s why I went with film.

I made a phone recording, just using the built-in microphone. The last recording, of the other speaker, I was able to get it sounding reasonable through inappropriate use of EQ once I got the tweeter to come back online. Even that was a huge step up from where it had been.

This recording? Purely flat equalisation. Absolutely flat. Played off an iPod through my Sampson amp, into the speaker, recorded via phone mic.

Whaddya think, sirs?
 

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This post is part of a series on restoring infamous vintage stage monitors. Spoiler: they made good, in the end.

I got given a couple of terrible, terrible looking- and sounding- speakers, and a pretty good power amp that has been in storage for a while, as a set. I haven’t started working on the amp yet, but it’s supposedly actually just fine. Yay!

But these speakers, goddamn. I mean look at this. This is already cleaned up. The other one is not better.

Already Cleaned. No, really.By the way, if anybody knows how to get this goddamn horn off this tweeter driver? I’d like to know. Is there a trick? I took off the bolts and NOPE NOT MOVING. But it had to have been assembled in place, because you can’t fit it into the cabinet face otherwise. If it unscrews (after bolt removal) I don’t see how – I put a lot of force into it with a strap wrench and got nowhere.

HONK HONKHonestly it’s like trying to fly the Constellation after the Doomsday Machine hit it. I got them wired up tho’ – it took some custom cabling and alligator clips, but I got them running. Limping along, anyway. But by that time I’d already discovered that despite their shitkicker exteriors, inside? All JBL pro gear. Really pretty high-end stuff. I don’t get it either.

If only we had some phasers…Once I had them stable, I figured out the reason there was no high end was because hey, guess, what, neither of the tweeters were doing anything! The first one, I got back online by working around a bad connection. No idea how long that had been out. The second one…

The second one, I looked at, and tried to figure out what the hell they were doing with this weird circuit and this giant pot that like varied between 0 and 10 ohms maybe, and seemed to be in parallel with the speaker. Eventually I decided it was part of an inexplicably assymetrical Zobel circuit and realised that making it symmetrical would fix other problems too, so that’s fine, except…

…then I got the same circuit out of the now-working other speaker and discovered the one I’d been analysing had been misassembled since construction.

That’s as in at least 25 years. Probably 35 or so. SPEAKERS SURE DO SOUND DIFFERENT WHEN YOU ACTUALLY HOOK THE TWEETER UP, DON’T THEY? Or rather, hook it up so you haven’t filtered around it.

Which is what someone had done.

I am apparently the first to try to figure this out. I’m certainly the first to find it.

Honestly, I don’t even know what to say about that.

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This post is part of a series on restoring these infamous vintage stage monitors. Spoiler: they made good, in the end.