Message Board

I've listed my lightly used copy of Boscorelli's Stompbox Cookbook on Ebay. It's been out of print for a number of years, so it's difficult to find. Great book with lots of cool stompbox projects. The Ebay item # is 150430694293.

the room in question is going to be a tracking space with a 13 ft tall cieling, and i am making some clouds over top between the beams for broadband absorption. Wait a second: do you have any open space between the top of the 13 ft wall and the ceiling beams? If the wall if perpendicular to the bea...

You need air space and mass to reduce the sound level. Gluing small pieces of drywall to the girder won't help much. Frame a wall in front of the pictured girder that does not touch the girder. Two layers of 5/8" drywall would be great. If you can sacrifice 4-6 inches between the girder and the new ...

Entertainment, Gang of Four.

I was astounded by Andy's, John's and Larry's comments about gear reviews in the letters section of the most recent Tape Op. Apparently negative comments in gear reviews are inappropriate ("if something sucks I just don't have the time to use it or review it"). This makes absolutely no sense to me f...

Mannish Boy, Muddy Waters.

When Danny McK. demonstrates his ability to "hear" the differences among power cables and correctly identify "broken in" cables in controlled blind ABX tests, I'll stop ridiculing him. Until he or anybody believes him is willing to do that, his claims are unsubstantiated bullshit.

Miles

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the "Behind the Gear" article about Danny McKinney in the May/June issue. There is an appalling amount of audiophile goofiness: tube power supplies sound "lush and beautiful", audio cables need to "break in" to sound good, and (my favorite) he thinks the hyperexpen...

If you want to increase the gain on a track without fucking up the dynamics, normalization is not necessary: just turn up the bleeding channel fader! Granted, you need to pay attention to levels, but bumping up the channel fader to a reasonable level solves the problem that many of the people who po...

independent of the playing, which amp sounds better, clip1 or clip2 ?? Either tone could be right for a particular song, given the arrangement and the sound of the other instruments. Either tone could also suck. The best advice I was ever given about guitar tone is this: there is no one "better" to...

On the other hand, file sharing still presents a conumdrum for artists. I want people to be able to download my music for free, as long as it's a good quality file. If it isn't, when people hear a crappy low-resolution MP3 version they might think "this sounds like crap", thus negating all of the h...

I think it's relevant to compare the cost of CDs to the cost of DVD movies. For about the same price as a CD, you can get a movie (with a soundtrack, in many cases) and lots of extras. Moreover, the cost of producing Hollywood movies is far higher than the cost of producing a pop music CD. Given thi...

Check out these boxes: http://www.radialeng.com/ I've got a JDI ( the green one) and it rocks. It's the basic model and they get crazier from there. Seriously, check these things out. You can also go to the Jensen web site and get the schematics for this type of passive DI. If make it yourself with...

A book that helped me to understand this digital stuff is Bob Katz's Mastering audio. I highly recommend it. Short answer to the 24-bit question: 24-bit buys you a lower noise floor than 16-bit, which is useful. However, the smaller quantization steps of 24-bit do not produce a more "accurate" digit...

miles- I dont know if you create things or not, but I hope for your sake that nobody ever tries to steal your stuff. These laws are in place for a purpose, hopefully you'll never see first hand why. Ive been in a copyright battle for several years now and its just a terrible thing to have to go thr...