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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 16:05:31 GMT -6
Pretty sure that’s the original standard and API raised it within the last decade as it all got away from them. Anyway, the standard is only about what works in their racks or others that bother to get VPR approval, and we know that ship is long sailed…. Yeah, but it as close as we come to a standard 😁 But hey I have a big old 7.5 amp DDA console supply running a single 500 rack, I guess I could run 5 at once.
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 15:35:56 GMT -6
I ordered a bunch of the Neutrik PowerCon true 1 connectors, I’m going to modify my Furman that lives in the amp rack so that I have locking hot patchable connectors. I also want to see if I can fit them into the Amps because once again lockable hot patchable 20 amp connectors would be great. Spent the day playing with REDCO’s custom rack panel design tool. The panels look cool but will not be cheap!
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 15:27:44 GMT -6
The idea of best really doesn’t fit here, and I’m not sure if I would jump into 8 ch of one type and character. I do love Speck EQ’s and could certainly live with 8ch, especially with the filters, but Zi would itching for tone EQ’s like Iron AGE, API 550’s or Neve 10 series. The Seventh circle would probably solve my itch for filters, EQ wise a rack of IAA, CAPI AND SOME NEVE 10 series would fill my need for tone. My knock on the Speck is Clean EQ is something plugins do pretty well, but if I had the Seventh Circle filers I could get by with something like the little Speck 500 series, SSL or My Lawson that is a Neve prism clone for problem solving. There is also the middle ground, the Great River Harrison EQ, not quite clinical clean nor the color machines the Discrete EQ’s are. If you are comfortable going DIY there are a ton of affordable options.
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 14:32:10 GMT -6
At their price point Warm has established themselves as a “ respectable” brand, I’ll bet that if you include mics there are 2x as many Warm products out there than Tubetech. What always interests me is what the modders will do and charge to make this more like the original. I was thinking about that myself. www.reviveaudio.com has a ton of Warm Audio mods. I'm curious if they'll make one for this unit. They are a perfect platform, but you will notice while they upgrade opamps transformers, capacitors and resistors, nothing about pots and switches. It’s a step up when it comes to the sexy brand name stuff, but the parts that will actually wear out? Ah who cares.
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 14:28:56 GMT -6
I don't know enough about this stuff, but can 4 tubes in 2 500-rack spaces safely disburse enough heat? Does not seem likely. Also, how much power does it require? Could it be used in a regular API 500-8B? I’ve had to email API to see if the 500 slots in my Box Console can even power this thing. 400 mA per slot seems like a lot. VPR alliance spec is a 130ma per rail. medias.audiofanzine.com/files/api-vpr-500-spec-479213.pdf
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 11:36:08 GMT -6
Speaking of faceplates...the fact that they put WARM-AUDIO on this one made me laugh out loud. Nice touch! haha At their price point Warm has established themselves as a “ respectable” brand, I’ll bet that if you include mics there are 2x as many Warm products out there than Tubetech. What always interests me is what the modders will do and charge to make this more like the original.
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 11:31:30 GMT -6
Sadly I think you’re absolutely right, it’s sad that it not only has to sound right but look right. The worst part is I know the Avalon buyers would not bite on a box that exactly matched the Sonics but had a plain look, but if you nailed the look no matter what it sounded like it would sell. Hence why the blue faceplate is SCREAMING at me to buy it. But I will remain in control, and exercise my common sense. Plus, my racks are all full anyways - and it would have to be BETTER than whatever I'm removing, so....I will remain in control. We Need a bigger rack!
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 7:17:35 GMT -6
The most egregious use of AT IMHO has been it's push into Jazz vocals and musical theater vocals. Now, I'm ok with tuning a note here or there to fix 1 or 2 things. Don't get me wrong. It happens. This lazy habit of just putting Autotune on a track, setting and forgetting it, or pushing Melodyne to 100% on everything, drives me nuts. I don't want to hear the tuning, especially in this context.
In regards to jazz vocals, thehightenor mentioned Michael Buble. There are actually a number of videos tearing apart it's use on his live performances. He'll go to do a jazz riff or vocal slide, and the autotune has no idea what's going on and totally messes the performance up. Whether that is his team or the show's he's on, it's an issue. I was recently listening to the new Laufey album Bewitched. It's a really nice jazz vocal album. Check out here Bosa Nova track " From the Start." It's a nice listen. But the vocal is melodyned to 100%. She does a riff or a scat and it's just unnatural sounding and took me right out of the album, cause there isn't any variance.
The new live action remakes from Disney have been disastrously tuned. The sound track to Beauty and the Beast is atrocious. They even tune to death Josh Groban's cover in the end credits. He's another singer with a solid voice. The Little Mermaid isn't as bad, but the singing is better in it in general. Still, AT is all over it. The Greatest Showman decided to just make a pop album. Its just tuned to death. Considering the all the Broadway veterans in the cast, it definitely didn't need to be, but maybe this approach was why it crossed so well into the mainstream pop world. So what do I know?
I will admit to keeping Anteres hardware in the live rack to gently help a bit. It’s just to damn easy to become reliant on it and hilarious to see someone who is missing a note and knows it to see the look on their face as the wedges spit it out correctly.
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Post by ericn on Nov 1, 2023 6:06:35 GMT -6
Due to the faceplates alone, I bet that’s why no one has attempted an Avalon clone or any of the focusrite red series 😁. It would be awfully hard to pull off those looks at an affordable price. Sadly I think you’re absolutely right, it’s sad that it not only has to sound right but look right. The worst part is I know the Avalon buyers would not bite on a box that exactly matched the Sonics but had a plain look, but if you nailed the look no matter what it sounded like it would sell.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 18:40:27 GMT -6
Taylor Swift’s 1989 re-recording is egregious. Shh the neighborhood is covered in swiftest trying to figure out where her and Travis are spending Halloween.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 16:21:28 GMT -6
Slant is cool, but also then you've got to build the whole desk. My 3 RU x 3 wide rack sits on an IKEA table - easy. If I were doing a slanted rack, would need to commit and combine the rack and tabletop. For the shorter spaces, Penn-Elcomm makes a 1RU that has brush-fibers in it that's perfect for wrangling cables and keeping things neat. Or add Funklogic panels so that if you have people in the control room who need to turn knobs, you can have them use the "producer's master channel..." Or make your own. Demo labels give you indie cred... Penn Elcom, a rack builders best friend, why after first reading your post I had to place an order.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 15:49:23 GMT -6
Heritage Pricing on a couple of their items doesn't make sense to me, and I wonder what I'm missing?. Asking 10k USD for their 670 puts it out of reach for all but those thinking about the Unfairchild, which I would think is a very small market of potential buyers to begin with. So to get even 50% of that small market share at best to cover your R & D, overhead and make a worthwhile profit for your Company to justify the product development choice doesn't seem logical to me when I see dealers still sitting with their original stock order of them at those retail prices. Even the less costly 5.5k Heritage 660 demo model with 1k off of the list on sale for 4.5k at VK is still sitting there month after month etc.... it just appears to me they've priced themselves out of too much of the market , but I must be missing something. -----So while 2k is within a larger number of consumer budgets.....I'd think the number of buyers willing to pay 2k for a 500 series product is again much smaller and more discerning and the product will have to prove itself worth the price difference over average 500 series I don't see happening in volume........but maybe all my years as a musician for a living has me out of touch with just how many high income jobs there are out there with disposable hobbyist income,......yet all those sitting Heritage 670/660s at U.S. retail suggest to me otherwise... Hunch and strictly a hunch, first 2 rack units at such different price points get confusing, second, look at how the Warm CL1B is being criticized, with this it’s “well we had to make a bunch of compromises to physically fit and meet the power limitations of the 500 series format.” The part they won’t admit 500 series probably cut the street price by $500. Man you would think I work for a manufacturer after reading that.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 13:41:40 GMT -6
I kind of feel sorry for the gang who first used it on Cher, it was a very original modulation effect, it works in the context of the song, and was kind of cool once. Little did they know every pop and hip hop track would copy it for over 20 years, but in the context of once it was kind of cool.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 13:37:51 GMT -6
now to wait for the avalon 737sp clones any day (I hope so) We have a word for those, we call them used, and they are 100 percent faithful to a new one.😎
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 13:36:02 GMT -6
1/4 of the gain reduction tubes. Big part of the actual action. The marketing spin: we reduced the weight. expense of new tubes and heat, see we are geniuses, well in the Apple sense at least. Honestly I don’t have a problem except the idea of a name implying a Fairchild. In my eyes this trend of using names that imply a Classic, but really don’t have much to do with the original is just opening one’s self up to internet ridicule. It was. grand idea but any fairly intelligent Child can tell it’s not a Fairchild.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 13:29:22 GMT -6
I have silicon envy. Just on a lowly M1 Mac Studio... I’m still on Intel.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 12:18:22 GMT -6
The Key to the Ref C and the VTL mics is the time and effort in selecting the best of the Chinese capsules they use, I want to know where all the rejects end up? The Ref C isn’t really my taste but yeah it works for some.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 11:54:04 GMT -6
The only reason I can see for this is a dealer, in a rack with a UL approved PSU you have a UL approved 670 clone, now how many public buildings in CA need a 670?.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 10:42:15 GMT -6
While we’re talking 500 compressors I gotta tell you that matt@IAA & Fern at Iron Age Audio are cooking up some killer stuff in this department. I was recently testing both a proprietary diode bridge, and a “British” FET. Both were excellent and lacked no features even in the small 500 footprint - both had continuously variable threshold, attack, release, output gain, bypass and a side chain high pass. The FET also adds an input gain to that list. The diode was super transparent and I loved using it on vocals, it also boasts some kind of absurdly fast attack time, probably the fastest I’ve ever heard on a compressor. The FET was great in all the usual FET applications, loved it on bass and vocals, it made a heavy rock vocal massive and actually seem “wider” which is a silly thing to say but it’s true! Anyway I’m kinda spilling the beans, I don’t know what their plans are for these but definitely two excellent 500 comps brewing in Texas I was going to make a snarky comment about the new 670 500 series but instead I’ll say this. Matt has a way of taking old classic designs, putting a refined modern twist and getting Bing us boxes that everyone should want and need.
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m3
Oct 31, 2023 10:38:05 GMT -6
via mobile
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 10:38:05 GMT -6
It's easy to ho-hum the incremental improvements in the M3. But I think there's more to it. The reduction of power consumption is noteworthy and points the way towards longer battery life for laptops and even lower fan requirements for desktop. I'm not graphics-oriented (same is true of most people on this list), but the improvement in the graphics cores may quell the complaints of those that work in that area. As far as the improvements in the neural engine, who knows? I appreciate the fact that Apple prefers to keep this processing on-board, rather than sending it upstream to Google et al. There are a number of audio restoration and mastering tools that claim to use AI, but I have no idea if they're currently using the Apple Silicon GPUs and Neural Engine for this work. It would seem to me that there may be substantial untapped resources in the M3 and I certainly hope that developers in our area begin to take full advantage of what's there. I think most think these chips are all about their personal needs rather than the couple taking up space at my local coffee shop / breakfast place charging 2 iPads off of and running YouTube videos all day off a MacBook Pro. Unfortunately those are the customers who keep Apple going not us. For them battery life / lack of heat is everything.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 10:31:12 GMT -6
On the new market SVS Micro 3000 at $899 is where decent subs really start. There is a Dayton Audio 12in kit people like but I can’t remember which one. My secret for subs with crappy covers is this : find a point that works. Then order a pair of Harrison Labs Passive high pass filters. www.hlabs.com/products/crossovers/index_files/Page395.htmY your line level out take one of the outputs to the sub using the built in crossover, other one to the amp for the JBL’s via the Harrison labs in line filter. If you are really handy a Pair of used JBL 18’s in DIY boxes add amp ch and a used TDM crossover.
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Post by ericn on Oct 31, 2023 10:16:56 GMT -6
Cool but why? And honestly I’ll bet one of the biggest issues is it doesn’t run cool at all.
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Post by ericn on Oct 30, 2023 13:12:01 GMT -6
Over the years, a couple of caps here and there and 2 phantom power switches.
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Post by ericn on Oct 27, 2023 16:28:42 GMT -6
An algorithmic pot is far closer to the taper of the original a linear would just feel completely different. I’m not sure but the AB might be the attenuator that’s forced Andrew at Purple to scrap the MC76 and design the MC77. Do you mean "reverse logarithmic pot" -- because that's what I'm referring to. The pot on the SA76A-500 acted like a reverse log pot -- just like the 19" rack version. The problem for me was that, while it feels just OK (not great) on a full-sized unit, the reverse log pot was waaaaay to finicky to adjust with the tiny knobs. I don't really like reverse log on the rack version either -- there's no reason to have that for line-level, make-up gain. I'd much prefer a linear pot. My guess is that's the original circuit had them, so others do it that way too. I don't really know. It’s different then I was talking about the attenuator l.
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Post by ericn on Oct 27, 2023 13:34:56 GMT -6
The Idea for the kick plate drawer idea came about many years ago when a guy I had built a bunch of 24u racks for had 3u shelves at the bottom of each rack and ran out of rack space. Rather than go the route of building all new racks I built 4 4 u racks that were an inch less in depth and we bolted them to the bottom of his 4 racks. We moved the 3 u drawers and his Tripplet rack mount outlet strips to the bottom racks plus a cable tie bar to the back to support the power cords. it took him 3 years to fill those extra 16 spaces. The funny thing is I was in the hospital when he decided he needed 2 more racks, he waited 6 months before he asked a cabinet builder to copy them. When I was out of the coma and just starting to talk he came to visit and felt guilty for having someone else copy the design. I had to tell him it wasn’t a problem, I needed to learn to walk and use a fork again long before using a table saw again. 18 months later I built him 6 new 32 space with our base design with one major change rather than building “boxes” we used an open side frame with removable side panels. The open area of the frames were designed so a Penn Elcom lacing strip would fit for cable ties.
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