Jim Feeley

I haven't watched the the full preso yet. But if they made activating the IFB's speaker a two or three-step process, with the last alert something like: "Are you sure you want to have the IFB make noise? Have you wrapped all your cables yet?" then they can probably keep down the number of mistakes. It's a really cool idea. But what I need are motorized bits of kit that return to home base (my bag and cases) if they go missing. Here's a quick demo sketch where an earwig wakes up a young agency client as it starts its journey back to the PSM: Anyway, cool to see some innovation in IFBs...

Sadly, you're probably right. Though someone like Dave Cobb would be a good steward of that board. I kind of think of him as a younger T Bone. But then, he already has a big old API board... https://www.soundonsound.com/people/dave-cobb OTOH, that board is a bargain compared to: Abbey Road Recording Console Used for Dark Side of the Moon Sells for $1.8 Million "The console is being sold by producer Mike Hedges, who bought it off of Abbey Road when the studio was revamping its equipment in 1983. No information about the buyer has been disclosed." Maybe the guy who bought the Black Strat bought it? 🙂 Why Colts Owner Jim Irsay Paid $4 Million for David Gilmour’s ‘Black Strat’ “I love Strats, and this is the Strat,” Irsay says. “This is the one that was the signature guitar for those incredible Floyd leads” Money went to a charity, so OK I guess. And I like that he wants to play the thing: Better than just sticking it on a wall. That's been an issue for my son, who's a musician. He plays sax, and while great saxophones (e.g.,- Selmer Mark VI) for a long time were much less expensive compared to classic guitars (a local sax tech says the prices are lower because, "jazz musicians are broke, and doctors and lawyers don't play sax"), prices have been increasing over the last 10 years. The story is people are buying great instruments, treating them as objets d' art, and not playing them. So while he's set for now, if he needs/wants another instrument to tour (when that hopefully becomes a thing again), it's gonna cost him a lot.

Good point. But it was more interesting than most re-election campaign ads for used politicians. Reverb also tossed up a text article to go with the video: https://reverb.com/news/video-t-bone-burnetts-historic-bushnell-console-is-coming-to-reverb And the asking price was $595,000 USD. It's listed as sold, but don't know the selling price. Jim "didn't have room for it anyway" Feeley

Water bottle with no top on the faders? Yow! (Also: That looks fun. I'll watch the rest later. Thanks!)

Are you the second owner? As in: Did you buy it used? Can you get it fixed locally for less money? Here is their Beijing-based distributor, http://www.dingrun.com , who might be able to fix, or suggest someone to fix, your recorder. Good luck!

[I deleted a long post. I think I was speaking out of place.]

$549, but that includes free engraving. https://www.apple.com/airpods-max/ The advert is pretty cool, though.

No worries, and the trade-in explains it. Yes, it is expensive. Maybe SD's licensing some NR tech and they need to pay a royalty on a per-instance basis, so perhaps the eight-channel/instance version really does cost them more than the two-channel/instance version. I really have no idea, though....

When I re-read your note, I see what you're saying, but when I read it too fast, I thought you were saying the only way to get NoiseAssist for an 833 was to lay down $2000 USD. So I check SD's site. The NoiseAssist plugin is priced by how many simultaneous instances you want to use (perhaps everyone but me already knew that): $600 2 Instances $1100 4 Instances $2000 8 Instances More details here: https://store.sounddevices.com/product/noiseassist/ Also, if you bought an 833 for anywhere near $2000, you got a great deal! 😀

Also, some pretty great music. Just posted from Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the fantastic free music festival (most) every Oct in San Francisco. https://www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com Some details. From a video apparently for a general audience. But great gear, instruments, and vibe:

Thanks for the update Madno. Please keep us informed!

Brilliant!

Thanks Frank and Phil.

Ya, but this is for stuff I'm producing. My fairly limited experience in sending a box of parts to someone and expecting them to configure everything correctly is really time consuming and not consistently wonderful. A couple people have gotten into it, and gave us a FaceTime/Zoom tour of their location (a house, and an office) to help us find a decent background etc. But others stressed at having to mess with a small camera and all that. So as much preconfiguration as possible seems really good. My current idea is ship them a laptop and an iPhone. Just about everyone knows their way around smartphones and smartphone software. So potentially the whole "how does this video camera work? what do you mean, 'whitebalance'?" freakout gets lowered. Maybe run Camo which lets you use an iPhone as a webcam. A friend just used Camo to demo his NLE software to a virtual conference; he's picky and was happy with Camo. https://reincubate.com/camo/ And imo, the iPhone 11 Pro and 12 Pro can produce pretty decent images on auto mode. We'd also ship a small smartphone desktop tripod to them, perhaps a tiny battery-powered light (but that's more complexity), along with instructions. Probably stream/connect via Ecamm Live to Zoom or Skype or something. Ecamm can record a local h.264 file as it streams. And the interface is fairly simple. The interviewees (or someone in their pod) would mainly have to connect the iPhone to the computer, launch Ecamm Live (which can be preconfigured to connect to a specific stream/call), and allow the laptop to access their WiFi network (or plug in an ethernet cable). Seems like having them just need to allow our laptop to access their network presents a lower barrier than asking them to install software and hardware on their own machines and then configure everything. SO ANYWAY... I'm wondering about audio. Lavs seem like an extra layer of complexity for the interviewees. Some of the other iPhone/lightning mics (ie- from Shure and Rode) appear to be low-end and want to be plugged directly into the lighting connector, but we need to that to connect to the computer. And the DPA mic probably sounds great, and could perhaps be preattached to the phone so the person would mainly need to attach the phone to the tripod, plug it in, and use Ecamm Live's monitor to help with framing. But the DPA mic plus interface is $1200...Hmm... I hope to test something like this within a couple of weeks, though perhaps just using the iPhone's mic for the tests. Drop off the laptop, phone, etc at a couple friend's houses, see if they can configure everything (with help from me at my home). Maybe it won't work, and there's always a risk of things going pear shaped... But if we can significantly lower the risk, that's good. Any responses welcome. Well, any helpful even if critical responses welcome. 🙂

This looks potentially useful to me: That picture (and another of the mic attached to a laptop) is part of this DPA PR article: https://www.dpamicrophones.com/news/gene-martin-calls-on-dpa-4097-micro-shotgun-for-sales,-rentals-and-field-production This quote from Gene Martin is promising: “The commercial was shot as a series of video chats from mobile devices and laptops, so we needed something where the actors could be walking around with their phones and not have a large recording device with them,” says Martin. “The client was happy with the video from the devices but was looking to drastically improve the audio. It just so happened that, right at the start of this project, the DPA 4097 Micro Shotgun was introduced. I was originally going to use the DPA 4060 because its higher sensitivity would benefit us being able to have the mic further from actors’ faces. Then, the 4097 was introduced and it was the perfect little microphone for this application; everything from the design to the sound was exactly what we needed.” Interesting. I'd love to hear some second and third opinions. Has anyone here used a 4097? If so, how did you use it and what did you think of it? Bonus points for sharing experiences using it in a manner similar to how Gene Martin used them. Thanks!

And yet, you commented! Wait. Let me translate that into Nolanese. @#%^*(&. ?( ______________%&^P{}>:K I kid. Ya, I'm mostly done with this. But I find it interesting that general-interest media such as The Guardian, are noticing and discussing. And for me, it really does get in the way of his films. But at least having Nolan take credit/blame for this lets people know that the sound department didn't screw up... Some of my non-film/video friends have also commented on Nolan's sound... I don't recall them mentioning that in other mainstream (e.g., non mumblecore) films, because of the consistent high quality of sound departments' work.

In case you're not tired of the topic, here's a column from today's issue of The Guardian, prompted (I guess), by Nolan's new book. ==== Tenet up: listen, Christopher Nolan, we just can't hear a word you're saying The Tenet director has dismissed critics of his poor sound mixing by blaming us for being too conservative. Why must he keep toying with our perception of sound? We’re all aware of the impossible situation that film currently finds itself in. Screens started shutting in the summer. This is because the big new movies have all been postponed. This is because movie studios are nervous about losses. And this is because Tenet, the great bellwether of cinema in 2020, underperformed theatrically. But perhaps an alternate dimension exists where cinema is still thriving. The Eternals is breaking box-office records. No Time to Die is still showing to packed houses. Pre-sales for Dune are through the roof. And it’s all because people flocked to Tenet in their droves. What separates that dimension from this? That version’s Tenet had a better sound mix. People saw it, they understood it, they didn’t immediately tell all their friends that it was frustrating and incomprehensible, and as a result it gave Hollywood the confidence to spring back into action. It’s hard to be anything other than completely perplexed by Tenet’s sound mix, where almost every scrap of dialogue that isn’t being screamed by Kenneth Branagh is smothered under a thick blanket of soupy noise. Don’t get me wrong, it might still be a good film – I’m looking forward to watching it at home with the subtitles on to find out – but a movie where you have to try to lip-read several complicated theories about the nature of time isn’t exactly accessible to a mass audience. Nevertheless, Christopher Nolan is bullish on the matter. The topic of his sound mixes comes up in the new book The Nolan Variations, and he claims that his peers have called him up to complain about it. ==== Rest of the column, a five-minute read (at the most): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/nov/16/tenet-up-listen-christopher-nolan-interstellar-sound-mixing

Ya, Down Home and Arhoolie are less than two miles (~ three kilometers) from my house. Les Blank worked in a room up the stairs by the back racks (his Steenbeck sat unused in the back corner because it was too difficult to move down the stairs). Several times while browsing at Down Home, I'd like the record/CD the clerks were spinning and I'd end up buying that. Such a great place. Whenever any of you are in the San Francisco East Bay (e.g., Oakland, Berkeley, etc), it's worth swinging by Down Home for a visit. https://www.downhomemusic.com

The SFO Museum does fantastic work. I have friends who are curators at two of the big-deal museums out here (SFMOMA and De Young) and they consider the SFOM people true colleagues who do good work. Because they do! 18ish months ago, SFOM had a great exhibition on Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. I just stumbled upon it and was SO glad that I was early for my flight and got to absorb the exhibit. They had his Magnecord tape recorder and explained how that recorder was crucial to his work. Also had lots of other cool artifacts: https://www.sfomuseum.org/exhibitions/down-home-music-story-arhoolie-records I have pix of that exhibit somewhere. But google points me to some here: https://arhoolie.org/sfo-museum-exhibit/ SO ANYWAY, based on that, I'd guess the surf music exhibit is really well curated and does much more than just say, "Golly, those guitars sure had lots of reverb." Thanks for the heads up Izen! Come on out for a visit.

Oh; that book. Yes, it's a real book. But um, as you've probably already seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Messages_in_Water

I remember liking Allen & Heath's 1604-sized mixers. And I regularly work on their digital Qu-16 and Qu-24 mixers and like them. So perhaps there current small analog Zed line is worth checking out. Looks like a couple of 16 and 18-channel versions are rack-mountable. https://www.allen-heath.com/key-series/zed-series/

Thanks everyone! I'll keep an eye (and an ear or two) on the Cat6 stuff. But for now, I'm heading over to Audiopile! Jim

I'm looking for a new XLR analog snake. Maybe up to an 8x4, but a basic four-channel snake would see more everyday use. I think I want a small junction box at the input/XLRF/stage end rather than a fan. Leaning towards 30 meters / 100 feet, maybe just half that distance (still thinking). Not thinking of DIYing; my soldering skills are still OK (and improving because of some hobbies), but I don't know if I'd get everything right on a snake. Not really a fan of Whirlwind (are they better these days?), definitely not a fan of Hosa. Considering a Cat-5/6 system. Is that a good idea? What are the real-world advantages of a simple traditional XLR snake running over something like multi-channel star quad such as: http://www.canare.com/ProductItemDisplay.aspx?productItemID=55 Who's making solid four-channel snakes (either fanned or boxed)? Markertek/Sescom? Remote Audio? What are people's experiences with shielded Cat-5/6 systems such as the ETS InstaSnake and Radial's Catapult? There was a discussion here about InstaSnake, but most of it took place 10 years ago: https://jwsoundgroup.net/index.php?/topic/5054-instasnake-from-ets/&y Any updated experiences? Are the Cat 5 systems holding up in the field? Looks like phantom power works over ethernet cable. Is that working out in the real world? Any drawbacks to using a simple Cat 5 audio snake? Any brands that are especially reliable? Thanks! Jim

Here are some of Glen Trew's thoughts from several years ago; don't know if he still feels the same way (but he does and can of course chime in if needed). From an article on Trew Audio: "Part of what made the Schoeps MK41 so desirable for film and video dialog recording was the “soft edge” when transitioning from on-axis to off-axis. The Sennheiser MKH50 goes from the on-axis sound to the off-axis sound more abruptly, resulting in a surprising off axis sound if it’s being worked by someone accustomed to the Schoeps MK41. Anyway, the long and short of it is that, if you are wanting a Sennheiser alternative that behaves more like the Schoeps MK41, then the Sennheiser MKH40 – and now also the MKH8040 – is the way to go, in our opinion." That's a quote from this article: THE SENNHEISER MKH8000 SERIES https://www.trewaudio.com/reviews/sennheiser-mkh8000-series/