{"id":989,"date":"2011-08-07T22:49:47","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T05:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/?p=989"},"modified":"2011-08-07T22:49:47","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T05:49:47","slug":"videos-and-hackery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/2011\/08\/07\/videos-and-hackery\/","title":{"rendered":"videos and hackery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Zorp, who was in the audience at the Gypsy last month, I have a couple of live videos on my YouTube channel! If you&#8217;re reading this on the band site, you might notice a new videos tab, to match. Guess what it does! XD Here, have a video:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"501\" height=\"285\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1tciAP4HOCw?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/><i>Live at the Gypsy Cafe; Video courtesy Zorp<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s &#8220;Something&#8217;s Coming.&#8221; I&#8217;ve also posted the first recording &#8211; from the same performance &#8211; of &#8220;<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XKJdHtAkg9g\">World Trapped in Amber<\/a>,&#8221; which will appear on <i>Din of Thieves<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>I celebrated Seafair Weekend by rebuilding a 1978-era Pioneer power amp. I&#8217;ve had this thing kicking around for a while, and have used it as a monitor amp in the studio, but it&#8217;s always been noisy and kind of cruddy, and I was going to replace it until I found out that audio fidelity in my price range has actually been going downhill for the last 10-15 years as more and more money gets put into remote-control\/iPod and iPhone interfacing\/digital output\/etc and less into basic sound quality.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never thought much of this amp, really; I picked it up used, for no money to speak of. Turns out replacing a whole fleet of really old capacitors makes it A GOD AMONGST AMPLIFIERS. Well, okay, not really. But &#8211; re-capped &#8211; it has one of the cleanest transistor preamps I&#8217;ve ever heard. Cranked all the way up to maximum output on all drivers, the preamp noise level in studio reference headphones is ZERO. You hear <em>nothing<\/em>. It&#8217;s fucking inaudible. And silence on speakers, too. It&#8217;s kind of shocking.<\/p>\n<p>I still have some more work to do &#8211; I&#8217;ve got distortion on channel two on speakers only (headphones are pristine) caused by me trying to hack together the correct replacement cap value when I didn&#8217;t have it, and the tone control board is still a noise fountain and still needs the other half of its caps swapped. (Right now I&#8217;ve got it bypassed, and you shouldn&#8217;t be using that shit in a studio anyway, but I like having all the functionality of a piece of equipment available.) If finishing the rebuild doesn&#8217;t solve the tone board noise issues, I&#8217;ll leave it bypassed. Or maybe add a switch, to cut it in and out. &#8216;Cause this amp sounds <em>great<\/em> now. Seriously, I had no idea.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s no Dynaco ST70, don&#8217;t get me wrong. But I never knew it was capable of really sounding <em>good<\/em>. Turns out, in fact: fuck yeah! And that&#8217;s the kind of surprise I could use a lot more often. If you have some hackery in you, and see an old Pioneer (or similar) amp hanging out in a garage sale or thrift store or something, and it powers up at all &#8211; buy it and recap it, it&#8217;s probably worth the rebuild. This one was.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what I did with <em>my<\/em> Seafair weekend. What about you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks to Zorp, who was in the audience at the Gypsy last month, I have a couple of live videos on my YouTube channel! If you&#8217;re reading this on the band site, you might notice a new videos tab, to match. Guess what it does! XD Here, have a video: Live at the Gypsy Cafe; [&#038;hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diy","category-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}