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I should mention that while you don't need golden ears to tune a piano, you do still need to be a bit of a weirdo to get through the whole thing. That top octave is a *very* tough neighborhood. And if you've got a professional technician coming in to tune your higher quality piano... definitely keep...

So the piano I started with was a 1973 Wurlitzer spinet. Not a great piano by any standard, and as a spinet it had the added bonus of being hard to work on. I did get it to where it sounded pretty good in the midrange (where all the money is anyway), and it stayed in tune pretty well too. But it had...

Sources - youtube, of course. Also books, I have the venerable book by Arthur Reblitz about repairing and tuning pianos, also Mario Igrec's much more recent "Pianos Inside Out". And of course old-fashioned message boards, like the Piano Tuner's Guild websit http://www.ptg.org which has a great forum...

...but I've been actually doing some of that stuff lately, and I thought it might be interesting and useful to share. I suppose it started when I got that "basket case" Wurlie from another TOMB member a while back, but it didn't really kick in until several years ago when I was talking to a real pia...

these are meant more for permanent installation in a Muzak system I think. Well yeah, I'd imagine so. That's the whole Radio Design Labs thing, odd little problem solvers. Need a mic preamp to feed the bingo announcements into the organ speaker? They've got you covered! Need to mix a stereo thing d...

It’s funny, I think I remember reading a review of the Redcloud in tape op and thinking, “what would I ever need 8 little attenuators for?” First mod I did after building that Hamptone JFET preamp was adding output attenuation. While it's nice to get pretty decent preamps in almost anything these d...

When we were in Williamsburg with Brad's Calrec console we couldn't use our stands so we bought a set of the Primacoustic Recoil Stabilizers. They worked. The have foam and steel. They are quite heavy. They worked really well. I *knew* I was getting something wrong. The Recoil Stabilizer does have ...

Wow, super cool! That looks like a big project, even if it isn't a "big" studio.

I didn't try to take the ISO-Puck Minis apart. Height was a consideration when I looked at some of the products. The ISO-Puck Minis were the lowest profile of the products that I looked at. So the eternal question here is whether you want your monitor rigidly attached to the Core of the Planet, or ...

I've seen some people stack their screens vertically to better fit the space. And probably it wouldn't be super difficult to turn a widescreen 90 degrees and tell your operating system to match that. Probably wouldn't work for older folks like me with the progressive glasses, though. Looking up at a...

I love those old Silvertone amps. Have you seen that new pedal that supposedly does the sound? https://jackson.audio/products/1484 Hey, that's interesting. I did rebuild a 1484 a few years ago, and it was ridiculous how many resistors (nearly all of them) had drifted quite a lot. Cheap little carbo...

With a PCB instead of point-to-point wiring, the weight of the transformer can cause damaged if dropped. I'd take a *very* close look at all the solder joints and especially around the transformer. Maybe even touch them all up with a little fresh solder.

A really simple method is the "circuit disturbance test". You plug the DI into a mic input, crank up the gain a bit (be careful of your speakers/ears, a limiter would be a good idea) and probe the signal path with a metal tool from the mic jack inwards. You should get a "pop" every time you touch th...

So one question might be "what kind of shape are the originals in?". I wonder if it's like those old Silvertone amps, where the really desirable sound is when enough resistors have drifted in value.

I should really try those myself. I had some of the mopad style foam blocks (but off-brand) and they were worthless. I forgot about these - they would fit perfectly where I need them too... Application dependent, of course. I was at some place where they had those Recoil Stabilizer things, and when...