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September |
September 18 AUTUMN BBQ CELEBRATION: A GATHERING OF HI-FI AFFICIONADOS This past Sunday, I held a BBQ party, celebrating the near-completion of my dining room renovations. Among the guests were some very distinguished hi-fi people, educators and people from the radio industry. Bass Pig got plenty of attention, but the joy was kept under strict control by my wife, who made it absolutely clear that there would be no earthquakes this weekend. (Gosh, we never got past "signal present" LEDs lighting up on the QSC power amps.) This gathering was special, as the man who is responsible for acting as the catalyst that resulted in my often-considered-sick quest for ultimate bass, was present. We had not seen each other three decades, since that fateful afternoon when he subjected me to the JBL Paragon and several Cerwin-Vega subwoofers. At departing time, we met briefly and decided that we'd have to have a private meeting, while the wives take a walk outdoors with the kids, some time in the future, so that we could put the system through its paces. "It's a 'guy' thing," he explained to my wife, who is still struggling with this pig side of my personality. All in all, it was a successful gathering and everyone had a good time. And we have a lot of leftovers to last the rest of the week.
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RESTORING THE 1812 OVERTURE'S CANNON SHOTS This is a pet project of mine. I've suspected for quite a few years, and later verified what my ears told me via CD ripping and waveform editors, that several of the cannon shots in Telarc's 1812 Overture were severely clipped. This project came about with the advent of precision waveform editing, using a high resolution Wacom stylus on a 2048x1536 display, giving lots of real estate for drawing in waveform data that was lost in recording. The first step was to make room for the replaced dynamic range. This required lowering the overall level of the recording by 8dB. That created enough room to extrapolate the rise times of the cannon explosions. The remaining steps involved a lot of 'artistry' on my part, inspecting the existing waveform's trend and trying my best to draw in the harmonics riding on top of the low frequency waveforms. Here's a look at the ORIGINAL and the RESTORED versions of the last cannon explosion in the 1812 Overture. (Images will open in new browser windows.) I think it's rather obvious from appearance, that the dynamic range is quite increased over the original. I estimate that the new peaks are at least 7.5dB stronger, requiring about 7-1/2 times as much power to reproduce, as the original recording needed. FIXING THE E-MAIL PROBLEM I sent a few test e-mails to this site to check if the e-mail was still working, as it's been a few weeks since any new mail has arrived. Lo and behold, DirectNIC, our domain provider, somehow went into la-la land with the e-mail forwarding, although I had the correct forwarding address set up. Simply re-pasting the same e-mail address and saving the settings has magically made e-mail work again. So if you were trying to write me all these months and not getting a reply, this was the reason why.
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CARPET LEVITATION, WITH SUBSONICS This day's entry is a strange one, but not all too strange coming from Yours Truly. It is a tale about me experimenting with deriving more fundamental from a recording and then cranking it up a bit. The boost in the fundamental tone resulted in an unexpected event, as seen in this video clip:
I did not expect that to happen, but had the bright idea to videotape it. The on-camera mic just generated awful distortion, so I linked up the MotU 896 and made a better recording so that the audio portion could be heard. Now a popular item on Youtube. :-) What you're seeing here is the opening 16Hz organ pedal tone to "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss, performed in this Telarc digital recording. The SPLs were too high for my CEL 241/1 sound level meter to read at any close range, so I parked it 30' away and logged 133dB @ 16Hz. Just another crazy example of Bassmaxx driver capabilities.
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I PASSED MY STATE INSURANCE PRE-LICENSING EXAM! This day marks the first major step of substance toward my new career as a financial specialist. I took the exam at a state facility and passed and got the certificate which will enable me to get licensed as an "insurance producer". In October, I will also be getting my mortgage license, allowing me to write mortgages and solicit business for mortgage financing. Down the road a bit, I will work toward getting Securities licensed, enabling me to sell various investments, as well as variable annuities. I'm pretty optimistic about this new business, as the trends in the financial market will create a situation where I can help a lot of people with their debts, fixing broken life insurance policies by replacing them with less expensive and better coverage, rescuing people trapped under the vice grip of Adjustable Rate Mortgages and even helping those with smaller debt get out from under high interest debts and consolidate those debts. Now that the bankruptcy laws have been tightened, that means there will be more families that will be open to refinancing products that I market. October is team-building month in my shop, and I am going for it!
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