Yesterday it was Polish jokes about Soviet technology; today it’s trying a Russian-made TUNG-SOL tube in that ART TUBE MP mic preamp I played with last week. I got advice from Ben Deschamps that I should, because the ART preamp ships with whatever was cheapest that day, and swapping tubes around can make a big difference.

And, hey, I think in this case it rather does. I’d apparently had a best-case low-bidder tube before, so bringing in the Russian didn’t make a big difference in noise level. But the amp’s tonal differences are certainly highlighted.

I should note: I also realised I could bypass the mic preamp stage in my TASCAM completely by going to line-level inputs, as opposed to leaving it in the mic input port at zero gain, like last time. The effect should be similar, but may not be. Regardless of which change mattered the more, I really think you can tell a difference between the preamps now, even in mp3.

The Russian-made tube gives the ART TUBE MP a lot more of what I think of as a “guitar amp” sound. That’s 100% unsurprising, now that I’m typing it out, but it’s still interesting to hear it.

The way that this preamp “likes” mid-bass is emphasised more, I think, as is its noted disinterest in the finer points of higher harmonics. That part of the sound reminds me of the AKG microphones I have, but with more interesting sonic effects down in lower frequencies. I suspect it would get on well with cello, as the AKG200s do.

I don’t know that I’d call the ART “warmer” at the high end – I might call it “less precise” – but it’s certainly a difference regardless. I should try this with the AKGs, later, to see if their similar areas of interest lever each other up a notch, or clash in some unfortunate way. Pleasantly, I have pairs of those, too.

For the recordings linked below, I’m switching between the two basically identical M-Audio NOVA large-can condenser microphones set up side by side and played into simultaneously. The levels are as close as I could reasonably get; it was a bit harder this time, as there were audible differences, and I’m using a bit of light compression as would be used in real life.

Unlike before, since the difference between the two preamps is more obvious, I’m also including a 50/50 mix between the two inputs during one of the repeats in each of these. That produced some interesting qualities, I think, on the octave mandolin.

In both recordings, ART MP tube pre-amp starts; TASCAM follows. Tell me what you hear on your speakers!

• Irish Bouzouki (mp3) – “Supervillain For I Love You (intro only)”
• Octave Mandolin (mp3) – “Thirteen” (a few chosen chordal excerpts)

Whaddya think, sirs?

I have basically implemented a very old joke from Poland about Soviet technology:

A Pole waiting at a railroad platform in Moscow wants to know the time. He sees a man approaching him carrying two large, heavy suitcases, and asks the fellow if he what time it is.

“Certainly,” says the Russian, setting down the two bags and looking at his wrist. “It is 11:43 and 17 seconds. The date is Feb. 13, the moon is nearing its full phase and the atmospheric pressure stands at 992 hectopascals and is rising.”

The Polish visitor is astounded, and asks if the watch that provides all this information is Japanese. “Not at all,” says the man, indignantly. “It is a product of the latest in Soviet technology!”

“Well!” says the Pole, impressed. “That is wonderful, you are to be congratulated!”

“Thank you,” the Russian answers, straining to pick up the suitcases as the train arrives. “But I’ll admit, these batteries are still a little heavy.”

To wit, these self-powered iPod speakers:

iPhone compatible

Okay, they are obviously not actually generally for use as iPod speakers. They’re the stage monitors I’ve been working on occasionally for the last few months, but they are now both rebuilt to be self-powered! They have 50-watt Class T amplifiers built-in, as well as power converters for line voltage. I knew all those spare computer power cables would come in handy eventually.

I did not, despite temptation, add Bluetooth. But I could.

Now it’s time for some burn-in. Hopefully, I’m almost done! 😀

eta: Well, hell, the new amp’s channel 1 got noisy after a couple of hours and stayed that way. channel 2 is clean so far – all of these boards are dual-channel – let’s hope it’s good.

eta2: So far, so good: WE’RE BURNINATING THE AMPLIFY (video with sound)

eta3: With this speaker, they apparently originally tried to put the panel right behind the tweeter horn, where nothing could be inserted. Then they moved it and patched the hole with plywood. I just made it one big panel, with a big blank area.

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

Okay, so I was looking at the photos of the natural gas explosion in Greenwood that destroyed at least three businesses and two buildings, and The Angry Beaver (right across the street) didn’t look too badly beat up – like, I saw a photo of the front windows being shattered but still in place, and I figured “okay, not as bad as all that, clean up and board up and open for business.” But here’s this, from /r/Seattle:

My boyfriend owns the bar directly across the street (Angry Beaver). We were closing down when the explosion happened. We thought ‘terrorist attack’ and all four of us ran out the back door. I think we are lucky to be alive. All of our windows blew out, bottles flew off the shelves, the ceiling blew out, stuff in the kitchen exploded. Our bar is destroyed. I don’t know how we came out alive, but not a single one of us was hurt. I don’t know what the fallout will be tomorrow, but we have our staff and regulars at our house right now drinking whiskey. We took pictures of the damages. I feel sorry for our insurance.

Hey, yeah, apparently WORSE THAN IT LOOKED. The Seattle Quebecois and Newfoundland trad communities might want to jump in here maybe? I have no idea how, or even how to get that ball rolling, though. Supervillain fundraisers tend to be some variant of “hold the world hostage by taking over the moon,” which isn’t real applicable here.

Everybody pass the word along, so at least everybody knows?

eta: Here’s the Beaver’s ‘closed for now’ post.

eta2: Here are multiple confirmed aid pages for the businesses destroyed or damaged in the explosion.

Anna and I had a big worldbuilding session last night. Well, not so much worldbuilding – more world plotting, for The Free Court of Seattle book three, the follow up for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker.

A nontrivial chunk of the “how things work” this time is coming from me. I have solved multiple major problems here. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not a prose writer. I’ve tried; I’m not good at it. But I can certainly make lives difficult for characters and I can certainly figure out how to make it make sense; I am serving as executive producer in charge of fucking shit up for Anna’s characters here, and I love it.

And the best part is, see… the last album, Bone Walker – we’ve been calling it the soundtrack for the series, but people assume it’s really for the first two books, since that’s what’s out. And I’m quite sure readers who listen to “Something’s Coming” think it’s about the start of Faerie Blood, book one. We encouraged that a little bit, I admit, putting it at the start of the album.

But the reality is, these assumptions are wrong. “Something’s Coming” in particular is serving multiple masters. I’ve been saying “thematic spoilers ahead” since the beginning. I’m pretty sure that washes off people, but you’ll find out how much foreshadowing I did in book three – and how much of a “related work” (in the Hugo sense, as in eligible this year, aheh) Bone Walker (the album) really has been.

I cannot wait for that to happen.

I mean, obviously, I have to – wait, I mean – because Anna’s only in outline mode now. But… yeah. I know how this all goes down, you don’t, sorry. This is gonna be so great. 😀

We took off north for Maillardville and Festival du Bois, having missed it last year, partly because Anna loves Quebec traditional music, partly because I just like festivals, and partly just to blow this joint.

Let’s be honest: when the supervillain thinks the crazy is getting a bit thick? The crazy is getting a bit thick.

On the way, thanks to the Elfquest fandom revival as of late, I finally got Anna to take a picture of this street sign near the festival that I’ve been meaning to shoot every time I’ve been by it:

If this means nothing to you, that’s okay, the Elfquest fans will like it

We didn’t really have goals – there were bands Anna wanted to see, but mostly I just like the show, by which I mean the festival. I like festivals, particularly ones that are in that little sweet spot of busy and energetic without being swarmed by too many people for the space.

We did play for several hours on Saturday – a few during the day as sessioneers, then another couple at the afterparty in the musician hotel.

2016 Session Musician Pin, Festival du Bois, Maillardville, Coquitlam

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a French traditional music player, I don’t know any of it, and I’m mostly there on Anna’s coattails. But I’d had the sense to bring along my mandolin – which in this environment is very quiet – so I could fake it about half the time, only getting loud when I’d figured out what I should be doing. Plus I was surprised to discover that in fact I did know one or two of these, so that was a nice discovery.

That didn’t stop me from hiding under the table during the evening jam. I was playin’! I was just playing very quietly as I tried to pick these things up. 😀

I think of the performances we saw, MAZ – an EDM-traditional fusion band with some jazz influence – was the most surprising. I like how they are reinterpreting this music. Réveillons was fun too – Richard Forest showed up a lot at the sessions, as did Lisa Ornstein. And I met a really nice new fiddler there too – Jocelyn Pettit. She’s got an album! And, of course, Anna’s large session crowd.

We also brought up a bunch of East-Coast Girl Scout Cookies that our friend Angela had bought, making us her COOKIE MULES.

Then on the way back, this happened:

What Could Lay Behind This Innocent-Looking Cookie Box?

NO ONE WOULD EVER SUSPECT

If this was 1923 and Victory Boulevard was still the only improved road north from Seattle we would be on this shit. COOKIES NORTH! CIDER SOUTH!

(fructose and ethanol)

I need a smuggler accent. I keep trying to go into pirate. That really doesn’t work.

Anyway, that was fun, and if you’re in BC, or close enough, you should go to Festival du Bois next year. It’s small but everybody’s relaxed and happy and they have maple ice candy, which is fantastic.

Which reminds me, actually, that was one of the little fun highlights, because there’s part of making that candy which involves smacking beds of crushed ice with a paddle, and that’s loud, and we were right next to them, so they would work in time with our playing, just like they would’ve and should’ve, since some of these were also work songs. It was one of those yes this this is right moments where small things fall together to make a moment of nice.

And that’s really what I kind of needed.

eta: Anna has a bunch of photos on her writeup over here.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a con we were going to appear at as Music GoH this autumn – We Are All SF Con, a first-year on the Washington State coast – just alerted its GoHs and attending pros via its Facebook group that 2016 is officially off. It won’t be there; we won’t be attending.

I had heard some things a few days ago that led me to believe this was pretty likely, so I am not surprised.

If you know you’re going to have to cancel an event, this far out is a much better time than closer in, so this is the smart thing to do. They’re talking about giving the con another go in 2017; hopefully it will be on the smaller scale that I advised when they were first starting to put this together. Also, I think they need more work on their intra-committee communication, but, hey, a year and a half isn’t out of the question. These are solvable problems.

Our condolences to the concom and staff who had been working hard on pulling off the always-difficult first-year fan-run convention. Better luck next time, everybody.

Hiraikotsu – the giant boomerang from Inuyasha – ACTUALLY WORKS WHAT:

This isn’t as crazy as the actual working Nausicaä glider, but it’s up there.

Also, if this isn’t the most Fallout 4 thing you’ve seen this week outside of the game, you have to tell me what is because damn:

Probably Brotherhood of Steel, could be supermutants

That’s from a book that’s just out, Abandoned in Place, about early space programme architecture that was, as per the title, abandoned in place when it got outdated or put out of use for good. All the photos in the preview are good, but I’d wondered where some of the source for Commonwealth tech came from, and I guess now we know.

Leannan Sidhe and I were kicking around at an estate sale – she was looking at some PA kit that had been advertised, turned out really not interesting – and I noticed a little neglected microphone pre-amp sitting in the corner. I’ve never bothered with separate microphone pre-amps, much less tube-driven ones, but I was curious about it.

So I went to the manager running the show, and said, “I don’t need this, but it might be fun to play with, what’s your best price?” And so I strolled off with it, and today I set up a pair of side-by-side M-Audio NOVA large-cap condenser microphones to make some simultaneous recordings. Both mics ended up going through my TASCAM interface, with one going through the tube preamp first, then to the TASCAM with the TASCAM’s gain cranked down to zero. The control mic gain on the TASCAM was set to match final recorded levels. A few samples are linked below.

First thing I noticed: jfc this thing has gain. If I need something LOUDed at the pickup level, I now have that piece of kit. I kind of had that kit already, but that was the ribbon-mic preamp I built specifically for the ribbon mic I built, and that can’t provide phantom power like this does. (And it shouldn’t; phantom power destroys some ribbon mics, including mine.)

The second thing I noticed is that… the difference is pretty subtle. I mean, I expected that. And part of that might’ve been having both lines going through the TASCAM at the end – but it had to go through something for digital conversion, or I can’t record.

In studio, I can hear small but audible differences. The TASCAM’s preamp seems to like mid-bass more than the ART TUBE MP. I think there’s a little quicker response in low base in the ART, in a way that I recall from tube amplification equipment like EICO and Dynaco gear.

Outside the studio, though – on a good consumer headset on my laptop? I’m not hearing much of any difference in 320kbps mp3. I think I’m hearing a little in uncompressed WAV files, but not a lot. That may be the laptop’s D/A converter, I don’t know. On the laptop speakers, I don’t hear anything different – though really that has to be expected.

Worth it? For what I paid, sure! I have a serious business gain DI/pre-amp out of it. Sound-wise? I dunno. I really do think there is some subtle difference and if I’m in an environment where I’m having to rein in mid-bass and pop the low end a bit, maybe it’d be better to do it with this thing than in equalisation later. Probably would be, in fact. But it has a pleasant enough sound to it, regardless. I’ll probably play with it on bass guitar, later.

Anwyay, here are some recordings – they’re edited so that consecutive repeated musical phrases alternate between the ART tube amp and the TASCAM interface’s built-in mic preamp. What do you think – do you hear anything?

Irish bouzouki: WAV mp3
Octave mandolin, tuned to open E5: WAV mp3
Bodhran, two different strikers (traditional, bamboo): WAV mp3

eta: I make a point of not talking American politics here much, but I do elsewhere, and watching the GOP’s civil war start in earnest is kind of neat.

Hey, if you haven’t been paying attention to the new year of The Venture Brothers, I just want to do you the favour of telling you to get back on that, because, no lie, they haven’t had writing this tight in forever. The move to New York, the fleet of new characters, the unforced but substantial shakeup of scenario have worked wonders. It’s not that it’s a different show, it’s not even going back to the show it was in 2003-2005, it’s more… a much-needed natural evolution for the better.

I don’t want to get into spoiler commentary in the main post, but Anna and I are actively making fan theories about what’s going to happen next, and making guesses about characters and character development, which is just… something which has not been a feature of this show for a while. I was a little worried by a couple of short scenes at the very beginning, but so far my fears have turned out to be totally unfounded.

Plus, they’ve got their dialogue patter magic back again. After the first two brilliant years, that did undergo – let’s face it – a bit of a decline. The production woes didn’t help anything, and the decision to spend a whole series writing about “beautiful failure” was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a success.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – the show did improve generally after the lows of series three, which was mostly a write-off. (That awful episode where Dr. Venture wants to capture a gorilla to sell to a circus or something, mid-third-year? That’s the nadir right there, the “And the Children Shall Lead” of Venture Brothers. Just unwatchable.) Series four took real steps up back out of that pit, and there were very good episodes later in the run – “The Silent Partners” and “Pomp and Circuitry,” for example, and “Everybody Comes to Hank’s” is a standout. And series five started to get back into the swing of things, started to work pretty well out the gate.

But this is the year they’ve broken through, back to that level of excellence they showed the first two runs. This is a series where they’re just firing on all cylinders all the time. It started with last year’s single-episode hour-long special, “All This and Gargantua-2,” which succeeded on every level, and it’s been chugging full steam ahead ever since.

So – yeah! If you lost track of the show during the rights fight and the time in the wilderness, now’s a very good time to catch up. Start with “All This and Gargantua-2,” because it’s excellent, and because it should get you on the ground running for what’s going on now. And enjoy.

I have missed this show. Not just The Venture Brothers – I mean this writing, this level of The Venture Brothers. It’s so nice to have it back.

I’ve posted about the effort to save KPLU as an independent Puget Sound radio station – with independent and good local journalism – a few times now. Pacific Lutheran University is selling the station, and right now, KUOW is the buyer, with intent to shut down their news and local programming and make it a full-time jazz outlet.

If KUOW’s direction of the last two years is any indication, the resulting station will basically be a syndicated-NPR-jazz feed with no local programming of note, and certainly no meaningful local news coverage. Since the new DC-based programme director took over, KUOW has become a wasteland of national syndication and corporatism. I’ve stopped my support.

So now is a very good time to pledge and keep that from happening, because they have a $200,000 matching grant, which means that all donations right now are doubled. It works like a Kickstarter, in that pledges are held pending meeting the goal. So go to their support page now and throw money – every dollar will be doubled for the next week. And thanks.