borjam

I made two with Canare L-4E5C and TA3F connectors sold by Sound Devices (ordered from Audiosense, Belgium) and it was a real pain in the ass, way too thick. Using star quad for a 3 m microphone cable is probably overkill, but, well... I am going to use them with a Rode Videomic X. No idea of the original manufacturer of the connectors, but I had to literally destroy the boot in order to squeeze the cable jacket inside. On the bright side the pins were great to solder (albeit tiny of course) and I didn't have heating problems. I used a 15 W soldering iron anyway. Whatever. When soldering the Neutrik XLR male conector on the other side of the cables it was a "AHHHHH, this is a pleasure to solder, I can do it with my eyes closed!"

Obviously I have no affiliation with them, but I am just surprised. On August 3rd they announced that Chris Wolf (Rycote) has joined Rode. And I have just learned that they purchased FuzzMeasure, a pretty nice and affordable audio measurement application for Mac OS X. They also bought Soundfield I think. Seems they are on their way to a real expansion from consumer to prosumer to professional? Rather different from Samsung acquiring the Harman Group, firing, it seems, most of the AKG engineers and selling "Samsung by AKG" headphones. Ewwww.

I always laugh at the silly accusations of "fanboyism" regarding Apple. They are far from perfect but we can never be thankful enough for what they achieved in a Microsoft dominated monopoly. And don't forget a non-Apple product which wasn't so successful but whose influence can't be underestimated: the NeXT. I administered one at the Dept. of Mathematics at the University in the early 90's. It was in a sort of no man's land challenging the traditional Unix workstations (Sun, HP, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Intergraph, Apollo...) and at the same time it competed against the top of the line Macs at the time (Quadras). I have one at home (the guys from the University offered it as a gift when they were going to dump it to recycle 10 years ago) and it still amazes people to see what was the real state of the art in software in 1992. They just think I am kidding. Core Audio comes from NeXTStep's SoundKit. They got a lot of stuff right. The Cube even had a built in Motorola DSP56000 inside with full development software. And by 1995 (?) their operating system worked on Intel, Motorola (68000), Sun (SPARC) and HP (PA/RISC) machines. And nowadays Windows still struggles with proper audio support (there is still some driver chaos with that "ASIO" thing, etc).

I know it's an old thread, but it's worth pointing out that nowadays the computer industry generally sucks. Which means that most manufacturers will just change spects at random and simply won't care about problems. Especially in low prices stuff like memory cards, mostly purchased by clueless people who won't realize that they have been scammed. To add insult to injury there are plenty of counterfeits. So, SD marketing their own rebranded but certified cards makes a lot of sense. And I am sure that it's not only a certification issue, but a contract binding the original manufacturer to stick to the agreed specifications. Right now I am using a pair of Sandisks with my MixPre 3 but knowing that SD sell their own media I will get a couple of their cards. On a side note, in the early 90's I designed a multi track recorder for telephone conversations (stock market, 911/112, etc) and you would be surprised at which amount of utter crap I tested just searching for industrial card computers. Finally I had to stick to very expensive cards (3x price compared to the average in that cathegory) in order to achieve uptimes of one year without reboots. So, it makes sense and even though my beans don't depend on the reliability of the cards I will happily get theirs.

And FCC rules don't help either. It's just a guess but I imagine that they preclude any kind of frequency agile design which would make adapting to a new frequency band much more affordable.

No wonder the sales of noise cancelling headphones are healthy!

Agreed, best thing you can do. I am not sure all of the cases will lead to prosecution but the operational intelligence they gather will be very useful to fight this kind of crime. Moreover, I am the security officer at an ISP and I was contacted once by the security services of another country who were indeed investigating a comparable scam (in this case the inheritance scam from a fake lawyer). Finally I helped them a bit.

No, I don’t mean the recorders. I mean the microphones, zeppelin, etc.

Indeed. They also made it lighter. Surprisingly Rode's website claims that the Blimp Extension is not compatible with the mk2, while the box shows the Extension as one of the available accessories. And it indeed works, I've got an mk2 and an extension. I was a bit puzzled when I saw that sudden flood of Marantz producfs. I guess that the brand has become something like Telefunken. Most of those products seem like Chinese OEM stuff. And probably Rode started offering the original Blimp by branding a white box product, only to release a new version by keeping the basket parts but manufacturing their own suspension with the Rycote Lyres. Who knows.

I don't think a 24 bit player can make a difference for most listeners, and especially in less than ideal conditions. 24 bit recording gives a lot of headroom when recording (which is good for dynamic sources that will be somewhat tamed in the mix) and it will help to reduce quantization noise when mixing lots of tracks. Could anyone imagine Pono succeeding with the extraordinarily smashed dynamics of current pop and rock releases? I remember "Monarchy of Roses" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in which it seems that the mastering engineer somewhat solved a system of nonlinear equations, delivering a mastered mix that, adding an enormous amount of distortion when playing it somewhat sounds like music. Seems to be mastered so that the distortion due to the hundreds of clips per second are part of the music. Try an experiment. Play it (on iTunes, for example) reducing the volume from iTunes (ie, in the digital domain) and raising it in the analog domain (monitor volume) and you'll notice how it loses "sparkle" even if you march levels.

I own a MixPre 3 and I am really happy with it. It can be a bit confusing at first, that's right, but only because it's much more flexible than it seems at first and the manual doesn't realy explain the desing philosophy behind the user interface. Once you realize how it works you will be really amazed. The main design principle is: configure it to tailor the way you work and you are set. It will be really foolproof in operation. Also, it's really three devices in one, which can further confuse things: a field mixer, a multi track recorder and an audio interface. Doing field recording (right now mostly birds in mono with a shotgun microphone) I have configured it so that the fader knobs work as a combined analog+digital gain, recording only ISOs (independent, pre fader channels) with no stereo mix and with the headphone just receiving a sum of the inputs without any frills. If you want to monitor M/S, etc, you can also do it from the headphone preset configuration while your ISO tracks are recorded without any processing. Once that is properly configured, it's a matter of record, stop, play, recording levels and headphone monitoring levels. Minimalistic

Interesting. Did they really improve the headphone amplifier electronics? Looking at the model comparison both mention the same output power (100 mW) and a "+24 dB digital gain" option. So, with firmware version 5.0 the only significant difference between the F8 nf F8n seems to be the proper line level output.

Although it’s an old thread I understand that this topic will always be relevant. Nobody wants a ruined day because of malware. And it happens that my real job is computer and network security. So maybe I have some advice/hints to share. I use Mac OS X since 2003 for my job. Previously I used a mixture of Unix operating systems, for example FreeBSD since 1995, and I can’t endure Windows at all. And guess what do my friends and colleagues use? Yes, Mac OS X. So, what’s different between Windows and Mac OS X? This needs a bit of historical context together with a very superficial explanation of some operating system architecture issues. But I promise I will keep gory details to a bare minimum. Unix, perceived by many as an arcane ultra complicated beast, is actually a very simple OS. It was born as a reaction to the development of Multics, a very complicated system. It has a very simple security model (too simple for these crafty days, but more on this later). However, simplicity has an advantage which I am sure board members do really appreciate. Configure a SD recorder and you are ready to go. It’s operation is foolproof because the user interface is so well thought out. Yep, I love my MixPre 3 Unix lost its virginity back in 1988, a long time ago, when a worm/virus (some papers went to great length to determina wether to call it virus or worm) spread over the early Internet. The damage caused by the panic reaction with institutions disconnecting their networks was actually worse than the malware itself and several lessons were learned. Windows. For a start, it started its life as an abomination. You have to be really familiar with with computer architecture issues in order to understand it, so let me use a parallel case. Look at your carts and bags. Calculate how much you have spent on excellent components just in order to avoid minor issues that can quickly escalate to disaster in a shot. Cables, adapters, antennas, splitters, preamps, filters... Again, you buy equipment from manufacturers who really understand how to manage problems. Even a cheap (by SD standards) MixPre-3 has a power management facility that can disable phantom power for an input in order to keep running. Windows was the opposite case. The very stupid architecture of the processor of the first PCs forced developers to do really stupid things in order to make software actually work. Instead of focusing on designing good software, programmers had to spend a lot of energy in fighting the environment. And the OS itself was an astonishingly poor foundation. Bad for an OS, which should be a reliable backbone. Software design is much more complex than it seems. If the operating system/development environment is poorly thought out, problems go out of control and your design will be poor because you had to spread your effort instead of focusing properly. Now, the Internet happened. As I mentioned, Unix had lost its virginity. Back in 1998 a book was published, “Computers Under Attack”, by Peter Dening. A really good reading even for people not very familiar with the subject. At that time computers were simpler than today. I always wonder wether someone from Microsoft read it, let alone understand its content. Windows wasn’t Internet capable until the early 90’s, when you had to install an additional TCP/IP package. Windows 95 brought the Internet, but with a twist. Microsoft tried to create its own Internet and Windows 95 shipped with a crippled version that only connected to the Microsoft Network. Of course it was an epic failure. Now, while in the Unix world lessons had been learned, it wasn’t the case at Microsoft. In the 90’s Microsoft was in a worse security state than Unix in the 80’s. So they begun with their Christmas tree software design. Also, in order to subvert the WWW standards, hijacking the Internet and hoping that only Windows systems would work they added a special component to their web browser, Internet Explorer, called ActiveX. They partly succeeded in the hijack attempt, I remember that many websites were unusable unless you ran Windows. ActiveX was an unmitigated disaster from the security point of view. There was an alternative, Java, but of course Microsoft hated it because it meant that programs ran independently of the operating system. They even tried to subvert it by launching their own tweaked version and hoping that their critical mass of users would mean that developers would adopt the “tweaks”, making platform agnostic Java programs Windows dependent. They also decided to add “macros” to Office. Again, an unmitigated disaster with dreadful consequences more than 20 years later. Why? Because they didn’t design it properly. The Christmas tree philosophy meant “lets throw anything we can inside”, so each program seems to do everything, while the Unix philosophy is exactly the opposite. Each program does ONE task and you have mechanism to have them cooperate. Of course there was an elephant in the room that affected both Unix and Windows: So called buffer overflows, a class of security problems caused by the C programming language. They were first publicly known in 1988 and they can still be a nightmare. That said, proper software design helps a lot against overflows. Confusing, chaotic “design” makes it easier to make security mistakes. And those were the basic ingredients in Windows. ActiveX, Office Macros, and a Christmas tree proliferation of multiple unsecured services that led to the Windows worm incidents of the early 2000’s. At that time it took 10 - 15 minutes for a freshly connected Windows system to go down unless it had a firewall in front of it. On the other hand, Apple has been doing things much better. They have had a share of slips (and even stupid mistakes) but not close to the level of stupidity displayed by Microsoft. Moreover, since 2003 they have been steadily and quietly making under the hood changes. Some even visible and facing vocal opposition from developers like the extensive sand boxing. Are Macs less vulnerable because there are fewer of them? I don’t think so. IOS is very popular and, how many incidents have you seen? Vry few if any, and mostly caused by the “jail breaking” that implies breaking some of the security mechanisms. To make things even worse, and cross platform, other widely used programs had their share of problems. Adobe Flash (a real disgrace, thankfully almost phased out) and the Adobe PDF reader for example. Thankfully, with PDF being mostly standard, Apple developed their own reader which doesn’t suffer from the same security problems in Adobe’s program. On the other hand Microsoft always fought PDF vigorously, which meant Windows users were forced to use Adobe’s reader. In one line, what’s wrong with Adobe’s version? Mostly some “additional” features in the form of “JavaScript macros”. Sounds like Office? Yep! So, what’s better with Mac OS X, despite the lack of magic properties that some attribute to Unix? Several things in my opinion. First: simplicity. I am talking about underplaying architecture, not user interface. Second: the user interface. Windows tends to bomb the user with countless dialogs asking stupid questions. Windows users suffer from “sensory overload” that makes them click “OK” without thinking. That’s not good. Moreover, Microsoft has often encouraged risky behavior by their users. Like mailing executable programs because they didn’t bother to include a file compression utility. Sounds familiar? Third: Avoiding some of the stupid mistakes made by Microsoft, Apple made the Macs a tougher target. This is more important than it seems and the result in the medical world is called “group immunity”. If you want to launch a malware campaign and you hope to infect only some hundreds of users, not just because of platform popularity but because of the difficulty of achieving an infection, well, you will move to riper fruit. Won’t you? Fourth: Apple have understood that modern computers are single user “multi application” systems in which it’s desirable to protect one application from another one. With sand boxing you might suffer a compromise in your text editor but that shouldn’t lead to, say, accessing other private files. Such hard line protections make intrusions useless, again adding to group immunity. IOS is the most extreme case of sand boxing. Now, some security advice for Mac OS X users. First: Delete the Flash plugin. Second: Unless you really need Java, delete it. Although recently they have added so many checks and confirmations and the risk is relatively low. Java is not bad but it has its risks anyway. Third: Forget about Office. Avoid it like the plague. I don’t think it’s even possible to disable the risky macros completely. Fourth: Use Apple’s PDF reader instead of Adobe’s. Delete Adobe’s program. If you absolutely need it to read certain documents, do what I do. Install, use and delete. Nowadays it’s a 5 minute matter. And always tell the person who sent you a non standard PDF to use proper standards. Fifth: Configure Mac OS X to run programs only from the App Store. You can still run other programs but you won’t do it by mistake. It’s a good barrier to prevent accidents. (The explanation is long) Sixth: Always install security updates. If not possible (I know some audio software can be troublesome) try using an alternative web browser such as Firefox. You can update Firefox without updating the whole OS, minimizing the risk of effects on fragile audio software. Seventh: Beware pirated programs. The best security system can’t prevent damage if you trust a program and actually run it. What will the future bring? I don’t know. Apple keeps working under the hood although there is an ongoing battle between developers of third party applications and Apple. Developers don’t want their applications crippled by security mechanisms. That’s it for now. I may add some information if needed, this has been mostly a quick brain dump.

A friend has been working in Qatar for several months and I think restrictions will be comparable. He told me that you could have alcoholic beverages legally, in certain hotels, after showing your passport. They verify that you aren't a citizen of a muslim country that bans alcohol. With an European passport there should be no problem. He is British, any EU passport should be fine. Now I am curious. I've heard horror stories of being forced to surrender your passport to your employer. I guess it only happens to the lowest ranking jobs, but better to be sure in advance and, in that case, I would make sure the Consulate/Embassy and an European company responsible of the job know about your whereabouts. Call me paranoid but my job is to think about the worst it didn't happen to my friend but he's an architect.

Curious to see CAD microphones, they are not so well known! (Spotted e300 and e100)

I don't understand. Have they actually tried a MixPre-{3,6,10}? Have they measured voltage drop in case it happens? In the first place. Did you ask them because you had an issue? Or was it a preemptive question?

By “similar sound” I should have said “similar properties”. Both are colored, indeed they wouldn’t be my choice to listen to music (I have HD600 at home for that), but the coloration somewhat helps to focus on details such as compression problems, which makes them useful. The Ultrasone HFI-650 have better isolation but being heavier, bulkier and in somewhat high temperatures you can feel your ears cooking after an hour or two. The confusing thing with Ultrasone is the model proliferation. It’s a young company and there are so many models. And some of their bananas pseudoscience marketing claims about confined magnetic fields and effects on health don’t help. Anyway, the HFI 650 have been for me for several years and I have used them in lots of concerts with good results.

Yes. But I confirmed they were fake. I am in touch with the LSI Logic staff, at that time I was helping debug some problems in SAS drivers and poking them to do it right And later I could see the real parts with proper Molex connectors. Anyway, not trying to smear anyone. The 7506s I ordered from Amazon.es last week are the real deal. Love them, when I was 16 I had a pair of MDR-v4 and they were very good. Compared to the Ultrasone (HFI-650) the sound is rather similar, with a bit less isolation but, as a plus, being much lighter and comfortable especially in Summer outdoors.

The worst problem in Amazon is counterfeit products. Several years ago I ordered some internal SAS cables (SAS, the up to date version of SCSI) and despite having LSI Logic (later Avago, now Broadcom) part numbers they turned out to be fake. Worst, I didn't notice that the connectors weren't real Molex parts. When I had to remove the cables (I ordered them for a test, I was developing software for a storage system), to my horror, the connectors stuck like crazy. I needed an hour to destroy the "Moolex" connectors without damaging an expensive IBM SAS backplane. And Amazon are so deeply aware of their counterfeit problem, they didn't complain when I returned a completely ruined pair of cables for a refund. Last week I ordered the 7506 after the recommendations I read on this forum and seems they are not fakes But well, at some point I wondered wether it was wise to order a widely copied product from Amazon.

Agreed, it’s too flimsy. At least it’s reversible, I don’t know how many FireWire accidents were caused by reversed plugs.

At least in theory it should be as reliable as FireWire. Why don’t you have a look at the system log?

Actually it's two different problems The first one is the synchronization accuracy. The second one is a trusted timestamping mechanism that can't be played by the users. I can imagine some cryptographic approaches, but it's a hard problem and huge resources will be devoted to subvert it.

I am using a Lowepro camera bag with good padding, an Event Messenger. I don't remember the exact model though but it may be the 100. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/893440-REG/Lowepro_lp36461_0ww_Event_Messenger_100.html?sts=pi A bit similar to the Think Tank bag, but more square looking (I think Lowepro have some odd obsession with right angles) and cheaper. It has a feature I like for urban areas. "Switchable" velcro bands for the bag cover. If you enable them it gets really noisy to open. If you disable them then the cover relies only on the typical snap-on latch. I have been considering modifying the bag, my sister in law has a clothes mending business and she's pretty good. In case I go that route I will share the description of course. The bag has been holding a Fostex FR-2LE comfortably (although with some cable bending) and the tiny MixPre 3 almost gets lots inside. I would add two velcro straps to hold it in place and some molle straps to the front.

Well, the MixPre 3 arrived yesterday. I have only played a bit with it, but WOW! First, the headphone amplifier. I had read all kind of praises, but they fall short. As I was really curious I plugged the recorder to a USB port and I played a good recording I know well. I am happy with my headphones (Ultrasone HFI-650) but I had never heard them like that. I've used them connected to a Metric Halo ULN-2, a Mackie Onyx 1640, my personal mixer (MixWizard 3 14:4:2)... I couldn't believe it. I am only guessing, but seems that these headphones have a low impedance at low frequencies, making them harder to drive for many amplifiers. The MixPre drives them like I have never seen. The poor FR-2LE looked like it was going to catch fire. Some audiophiles would buy a unit just to use it as a headphone amplifier. I remember some got Metric Halo ULN-8 interfaces mostly to use as D/A converters. So I picked up a microphone (AKG SE300B+CK98) and I visited the local wetland to listen to some birds. I also tortured the limiters and HPF, especially with some rough handling of the microphone. At the risk of sounding fanboyesque, even the resistance when turning the faders is perfect. I have read some comments about SD eroding their own market. I don't think that will happen at all. Quite the contrary, I think this low hanging delicious fruit will help them expand a lot. They are delivering the key high performance features at a lower price point but leaving the more specialized ones to the upper series. So, would I be the same with a F4? I don't think so. The limiter and HPF in the analog domain and the headphone amplifier are critical features in my opinion. Now, I am curious. What are SD doing with a 32 bit A/D converter? Adding resolution for low level recordings reducing quantization noise?

I see Note that microphonics exist! Especially old valve equipment could transmit voice if you shouted at it. I have an old Leader grid dip meter here that doubles as an AM transmitter if you shout loud enough! But with modern SMD electronics that's almost impossible, don't worry! Some of them use microwaves although I doubt they can affect your equipment unless you are in the same frequency. So, careful with equipment on the WiFI/ISM 2.8 GHz band. Although I believe that 2.8 GHz detectors aren't common nowadays for obvious reason. At home I have a 10 GHz detector.