Bruce Watson

I'm very sorry for your loss Jeff. I lost my father a couple of years ago. Nicest guy I ever met and I miss him every day. Everyone grieves in their own ways. I can't imagine what you and yours are going through. All I can tell you is that it usually gets better over time. Our thoughts are with you.

What I hear sounds more like two track than actual stereo. That's because the FOH mixer isn't using any stereo pairs, he's just mixing together all the individual mics on stage. Panning individual mics across the range from left to right isn't really stereo, but it can sound pretty good if done well (and that's about all you can get from a studio recording anyway, so nearly all popular music is created just this way). The recording technique used for this video sounds like what I hear from "tapers" (people who go to concerts and record the music (yes, legally with permission, most of 'em)) using a technique called "point at stacks" where they make a quasi-stereo recording by pointing their two mics (usually a pair of hypers) at the stacks of loudspeakers on either side of the stage. It's a pretty effective technique actually -- does a good job of capturing the venue. If, of course, they are doing this near the FOH mixer, but that's usually where management lets them work anyway.

"Because some interviewees tend to move forward and back, I’ve been experimenting for the last 6 months placing 2 overhead mics with different patterns on the boom, then letting the editor choose the track they prefer." I've had people move around enough to get out of pattern a couple of times over the years. Since these have been interviews and not narrative work, I just stop them when they do it, remind them of the mic, and start that part over. If they just can't be tamed, I use the lav feed instead of the boom. I had thought about the twin boom setup you suggest, but the lav backup works just fine for me, and the extra c-stand and boom is a PITA to carry to and set up on location.

Interesting new study that many here might be interested in. Sadly only the abstract of the paper is available in front of a paywall. And I'm not a medical doctor, or in any way qualified to discuss this research in depth. But I can give you my interpretation, simplistic as that is: Basically, scientists have been able to repair hearing loss in mice in the lab. They think it's possible to turn this into either a therapy or a drug useful in treating hearing loss in humans. More specifically, scientists at Harvard and the University of Michigan have learned the cause of traumatic hearing loss (and they think this also applies to age-related hearing loss, aka presbycusis). This damage is to the ribbon synapses that connect the hair cells which pick up the sound vibrations to the nerve cells running to the brain. They found a specific protein called Ntf3 which is part of the process of repairing and regenerating the ribbon synapses. What they were able to do was to use a technique known as conditional gene recombination which uses a drug to turn on specific genes in specific cells. IOW, they turned up production of Ntf3. And this in turn restored much of the hearing loss in the lab mice after two weeks. The implications of this research are profound, especially for members of this forum. Just thought y'all might be interested.

This DR-10X looks like just what I've been wanting -- in form factor and size anyway. I've discussed it way too much already in I hope Tascam will consider swapping all the analog circuits for an AES3 reader, and make a DR-10? that would plug into an XLR connector on a MixPre-D and take the AES3 feed from the MixPre-D and record it. That, I would buy. Probably two.

Tascam DR-10x. This at least looks exactly what I'm talking about. The size and form factor and how it's just a "plug-on recorder" and all, is pretty frellin' close. Maybe I can convince one of the modders to rip the guts out of this and replace it with just the electronics needed to accept the AES3 output from a MixPre-D and record it. Heartbreakingly close, this is. Sigh....

ROFL! Yes, actually, I could. I'm a design engineer by training, and I built stuff like this for 30 years. I can build the box, design and prototype the electronics, and write the software. It wouldn't even take that long. But I've grown to despise writing and debugging device drivers; I've got the skills but not the smallest interest anymore. I do not want to build tools anymore. Now, I want to use tools. I'm looking for a tool, which is the point of my original post. How did you manage to twist that into thinking I wanted to make one? I know that you don't understand why I'd want a small, light, simple AES3 bit bucket that I could plug into an XLR jack on my MixPre-D. I get that you, personally, don't want one. But just because you don't want it, doesn't mean that I don't want it. Indeed, several others here seem to be interested too. I never thought I'd be defending my desire for a tool to the guy who probably knows more about the tools of audio than any other. Ironic, that.

Yes, I get that often enough. Written communication isn't my strength. If there's a thick one here, it's bound to be me. Just sayin'. Here's the "problem". I've got an SD MixPre-D that I use for small jobs. Actually, for me I use it for most jobs (this isn't LA). And SD, in their infinite wisdom, stuffed into the MixPre-D a set of ADCs, formatting software, and the hardware to give the MixPre-D AES3 output, switchable to an XLR socket. So I thought: "wouldn't it be cool to actually use this AES3 output stream?" But it turns out, there's not an easy way to do that. In fact, I can't find any professionals, on this board or any other, that are actually using that AES3 stream at all. Because there aren't any AES3 bit-buckets to take advantage of it. And that was the purpose of my original post. I searched and came up with zilch. So I asked here, asking if any of you knew of any AES3 bit-buckets I could use for this purpose. And the answer I got back was a resounding "NO". Which just confirmed that I had not missed anything in my searching. And for that knowledge, I'm grateful to this group. So I dropped it, let it go, and went on with my work. But the fact that this thread has been revived a few times now, not by me, tells me that there's at least some interest in a small, light, simple, AES3 bit-bucket. So maybe I'm not completely crazy.

Just about any system-on-chip available now contains (way, way, way more than) enough compute power and memory (volatile and not) to be able to do the formatting on the fly. If you have to write a computer utility to do the conversion, no reason not to run said utility on the chip in the recorder. So to answer your question directly, no. I would want this device to give me .wav files. Look at the Tascam DR-100mkII. It will do most of what I want -- take an AES3 feed from an SD mixer, and give me a .wav file on an SDHC card. If... I run the digital signal through an intermediate converter box to convert voltages and impedances from the AES3 requirements to the S/PDIF requirements. Yes, people have reported that they have run AES3 outputs into an S/PDIF input with no problem, but if this is for serious work, would any of us really want to take that chance? And once you add the converter box and the extra cables, your bag is trashed. No one would want to do this. And from what I can tell, hardly anyone is. It's far more convenient to just run line out from the mixer to line in on the recorder, and incur the small analog processing penalty to sound quality. So what I want is nearly the same as what the DR-100 already does. I just want to eliminate some things that I don't need. Like the mics. And all of the analog circuits. And all the analog controls. And the size, weight, and power draw. I just want it to take the AES3 digital feed from the mixer, and give me *.wav files on an SDHC card (two channels, a stereo pair) that can easily be imported into a DAW. And that's really my proposed device's only function. For Tascom at least, the custom chips are already there in the DR-100. The computer processing is already there. The SDHC card reader/writer is already there, and those device drivers already written and tested. I suspect that the hardest part of doing this is design of the case, and the circuit board(s). The rest would seem to be done (for Tascam anyway). Yes, I know it's never that easy. But I've done stuff like this before; it's imminently doable. SD could do this also. They've all of what I need in the 633, already designed, tested, and in production. Except for the case, and the circuit board(s). I just need 1% of what the 633 can do, and in a suitably much smaller, lighter form factor. Not holding my breath for either Tascam or SD to make such a small digital bit-bucket recorder though. Or anyone else. But if someone decides to make one, I'll certainly take a look!

There's always these. More adjustable than hair bands. Works well from short (1m) to long (30m) XLR cables for me.

All these scenes, so little comedy. How about the wonderful scene from Steve Martin's Roxane -- 20 somethings better? If you count, you'll find there's a lot more than 20!

He'll likely get that chance to retire. There is a single plant making cinema film in the world, and that plant has lost most of it's volume in the last four years. Unless the volume picks up, markedly, Kodak will have to close that plant soon. Possibly late this year, possibly as late as next year. Photographic color negative film manufacture requires an industrial process, with a bunch of highly trained technicians to run it. It's not a boutique business. You can't coat film by hand (well, of course you can, but the quality is abysmal, and that's just B&W). If anyone's interested, there's a book out by former Kodak employee Robert Shanebrook called Making KODAK Film that details the process (with pictures and illustrations). What Kodak does is audacious. And as an old industrial automation engineer, I've seen audacious in manufacturing. Kodak takes the cake. I'm just sayin': Do not try this at home.

Since you have one of these units, I'd like to ask a question if I may. I've crawled all over the Soundcraft website, and several vendors for the Expression 1 as well. I can't see anywhere where anyone talks about what sample rates the Expression line supports. Not even in the Expression User Manual that I downloaded. I did find that the Multi-digital USB card only supports 48kHz, but that could just be word clock, it wasn't sufficiently specific for me to know exactly what the docs mean. Does the Expression series support 44.1 kHz, 88.2, 96, 192, or any of the other "standard" digital audio sample frequencies? I would guess that 48 kHz would be OK for us. But this board is supposed to be aimed mostly at music, and a lot of music gets sampled at 96 kHz and higher, then downsampled at mastering time to 44.1 for CDs, and 48 for video. Another way to ask that question is, what sample rates can I see on files imported in a DAW over the various I/O options, like USB?

Yeah, but the quacking keeps me up all night!

Ranks up there with seeing "duck" tape at the hardware store. Sigh... :-)