[BraveNewWorld]

aural nirvana

 

[macdonjh]

If you consider condoms and a tube of super-glue a vinyl patch kit, then that would be a resounding YES!

And I thought I was pushing the envelope asking for an explanation of who the One Eyed Man is...

Clean thoughts on a dirty wall.......

When I was growing up, I'd go to McDonalds, or a doughnut shop, in the morning on the way to school and as I matured, eventually to work. There was always a table with a bunch of "mature" men (almost always 100% men). Every morning, there they would be discussing issues of the day. Well, now in 2022, I can't eat McDonalds or Doughnuts every day. No opportunity for me to sit with the guys and shoot the Schiit...... Instead, I come here and feel like this is the modern day equivalent of those days...

Thanks guys!

Leo

Everybody needs a place like Cheers. For me it's the gym I go to, specifically on Wednesday night. The guys who train that night are of like mind and we crack jokes and say stuff which isn't allowed anymore. We have a great time.

I needed two words to convert the notion of feeling the performer was live in my living room. Whether it's Jerry or John Coltrane, that is the illusion I wish to create for myself: my ears, my system, my room, and so forth.

Right now Bill Evans, Paul Motion, and the blessed Scott LaFaro are here with me on a Thursday morning.

Musical Holography

is a solution in need of a problem

I use this all the time. I'm glad there is one other person on Earth who does.

Moar Louder

Ear Bleeding

Furniture Rearranging

Intestine Churning

Just kidding! I will say that live Dead recordings are a reproduction challenge for any system, up there with a dynamic symphony orchestra (but that's much less of my listening). And, the Intestine Churning comment comes from actual experience: amplified cellos at an ELO concert.

In summary: Cerwin Vega...

Got some Schiit coming. It's the first Schiit I have taken, ever. First thing i'm gonna do is smell my Schitt.

I bet your Schiit don't stink...
Yes, I'm leaving now...

 

[ArmchairPhilosopher]

It struck me that there was always something about the sound of the ambient air inside a hall, no matter where I traveled to, that, strangely enough, presented the music with a transparency and vividness at all dynamic levels that never sounded strained or buried. And this would vary from hall to hall. Imaging and sound-stage was never as pinpoint, with eyes closed, as what I got with reproduced music. I always listened to recordings of what I was going to hear the day before attending a concert. It would take about 5 seconds after the conductor first raised his baton and I would be shaking my head in disbelief as to how I was ever able to convince myself how wonderful my latest collection of boxes and wires were.

But, unlike the concert hall, with a reproducing system you can always cue up that symphony, overture, etc. again and again. Or put together your own custom concert. And, pretend it's just like Memorex.

…and not deal with your seat neighbors' mouth breathing and/or body odor, the person behind you constantly kicking your back rest, someone in the room coughing every 20 seconds, the inevitable two or three utter bellends who didn't mute their phones, the AC that's either set to polar vortex or entirely incapable of keeping the hall at below 90ºF…

And then there's this little thing called acoustics. Not all halls are created equal. Even what is regarded as one of the best halls on the planet, Hans Scharoun's great hall of the Philharmonie Berlin, was a complete mess for the first few years of its existence. The hall was rather bright and echoic, patrons weren't able to hear some sections depending on their seating positions, and the orchestra's different sections couldn't hear each other, like, AT ALL. It looked fantastic for the time (1963) and its vineyard-style seating arrangement with the stage centered somewhat in the middle of the hall instead of against the front wall completely revolutionized the way we think about world-class concert halls forever — and even though it was the very first of its kind, it arguably still holds up pretty well to this day. But at first, it sounded like … well … like a$$.
Only after they installed the now-iconic convex acoustic ceiling panels right above the orchestra were they finally able to hear one another. Further acoustic panelings were added to the ceiling, like the chevron-like panelings above the seating area, to reduce most of the bright glare they had to deal with, especially in the more elevated rear rows. But even then, it still sounded, according to a lot of reports from back then, rather dull and flat overall.
Until Karajan had a temporary multi-tiered stage setup installed for a TV recording. During the first years, the great hall's stage was flat, with the musicians all sitting evenly at the same height. To make the orchestra look better when filmed by a TV camera, Karajan had a temporary stage installed that elevated each row of musicians by about a stair step's height above the row before it. Much to everybody's surprise, this changed the overall acoustics in the hall drastically to the better, and the Berlin Phil replaced their original fixed flat stage with a flexible one that could be elevated in tiers electrically, essentially to what it still is like today.

And while the Berlin Phil's story had a happy ending, the new Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg doesn't seem to be quite as lucky. I have yet to read a single positive impression of that hall's acoustics. There appears to be a consensus that the open-pored wall cladding they installed, while a good idea in theory, seems to be too much of a good thing, essentially muffling the entire hall to a degree where any sort of echo or reverb seems to be impossible, which appears to swallow all warmth from the cellos and bass and remove most of the brilliance and luster from the brass. (Although I have yet to hear the hall myself, so I'm taking this with a big grain of salt.)

So, there's certainly something to be said about the benefits of being able to enjoy an evening with the Berlin Phil under Rattle, performing Bruckner on the press of a few buttons, all while you're enjoying a glass of chilled Konteki "Tears of Dawn" in your undies on your couch.

But no matter how good your system, it will never be able to replace the ritual of traveling to a hall, of finding your seat, of making yourself comfortable while you're trying your best not to breathe in too deeply in an attempt to avoid your seat neighbor's aggressively offensive halitosis, the energy that's in the air leading up to the concert, and the pure and unadulterated bliss that is your bathing in the all-encompassing emotional and physical power that is being created so artfully by the roughly one hundred deeply invested world-class professionals on the stage before you.
That just can't be beat.
Ever.

 

[Alcophone]

In other words, the fact that there's no pinpoint imaging in a setting designed to entertain loads of people at once doesn't mean you shouldn't have it in a much more personal setting.
If a ghost started playing an invisible guitar from a position somewhere between your speakers, you'd know exactly where to look, startled as you might be.

 

[Paladin79]

Yes to the first part.

No to the second.

Some well-recorded lossless concerts, Yggy OG, Lokius, Freya+ with the right tubes, a pair of Tyrs, some good interconnects and a set of at least somewhat decent speaker cables (14 AWG or chunkier and well shielded), and a solid set of sealed (as in: not ported) floor standers, and no (!!!) sub — and you've got yourself a pretty darn decent approximation of a symphony orchestra in your living room.

…just ask my neighbors…

Cheap? No.
But not really a challenge, either.

Lmao!!!

 

[earnmyturns]

Bill Evans, Paul Motian, and the blessed Scott LaFaro

Which of those recordings? Many years later, I heard Motian at the VV with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano at what turned out to be one of his last live gigs before he got too sick to play. Another session in the same run of gigs was recorded for NPR: https://www.npr.org/2008/09/03/9420...isell-joe-lovano-live-at-the-village-vanguard

Motian was a true great of understated, subtle, unpredictable drums, a wonderful composer from bebop to avant-garde, superbly sensitive in his interplay with the rest of the band. I have many of his later recordings, so many gems that I'm having difficulty choosing. But since it's so close to Monk's anniversary (gag, I had to miss Miles Okazaki at SFJAZZ soloing Monk) what about the delight below, also with Lovano and Frisell (some of this played at the VV gig I attended in awe back in 2008):

 

[US Blues]

Which of those recordings? Many years later, I heard Motian at the VV with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano at what turned out to be one of his last live gigs before he got too sick to play. Another session in the same run of gigs was recorded for NPR: https://www.npr.org/2008/09/03/9420...isell-joe-lovano-live-at-the-village-vanguard

Motian was a true great of understated, subtle, unpredictable drums, a wonderful composer from bebop to avant-garde, superbly sensitive in his interplay with the rest of the band. I have many of his later recordings, so many gems that I'm having difficulty choosing. But since it's so close to Monk's anniversary (gag, I had to miss Miles Okazaki at SFJAZZ soloing Monk what about, also with Lovano and Frisell (some of this played at the VV gig I attended in awe back in 2008):

Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961

About 10 days before Scott LaFaro left this world in a car accident.

 

[US Blues]

I get the live part, what about the dead part?

Sadly, the artists in question are no longer incarnate.

It's not about a live room (which I have), or a dead room, just the satisfying illusion. Especially when these folks are no longer on Tour.

 

[artur9]

When I was growing up, I'd go to McDonalds,

Leo

10cents burger days!

Being 9/10 siblings, they almost all worked late at McD's. They'd bring back so so many tasty burgers...

 

[Paladin79]

Sadly, the artists in question are no longer incarnate.

It's not about a love room (which I have), or a dead room, just the satisfying illusion. Especially when these folks are no longer on Tour.

I see, I just could not relate it to a dream system.

 

[artur9]

"is as the artist intended".

Many credited artists have compromised hearing after spending too much time listening to sound that is too loud. Many engineers as well. Takes 3 days for one's ears to recover from such a shock.

Anywho, if the artist is the composer, I agree 100%. Problem is, you need to get lots of performances/performers and triangulate to that....

My two words: engaging precision

 

[Paladin79]

Many credited artists have compromised hearing after spending too much time listening to sound that is too loud. Many engineers as well. Takes 3 days for one's ears to recover from such a shock.

Anywho, if the artist is the composer, I agree 100%. Problem is, you need to get lots of performances/performers and triangulate to that....

My two words: engaging precision

Very similar to my own, accuracy of reproduction yet it needs to affect you in such a way that it is hard to walk away, you must hear more. I heard a DAC like that recently put out by Weiss engineering I believe.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

Hey all,

A short while ago, I blathered some words about stamping and 3D printing and how manufacturing is changing and getting reallll interesting in some ways and other people posted CNC robots and other cool stuff I didn’t know existed.

This is not a chapter, but it’s a catch-up on where I am, and a follow-up on those thoughts.

As to where I am, I am deep deep deep in development work, with basically every day being build-a-board test-a-board tweak-the-board reorder-the-board or print-the-chassis tweak-the-chassis print-it-again or new-stuff-coming qualify-it-now tweak-if-needed retest-confirm-repeat.

If this sounds horrifying, it’s not. It’s actually what I love to do. I wouldn’t be designing things if I didn’t like it. So this is really, really good for me.

Frustratingly, we’re working on a bunch of very interesting stuff, most of which I can’t talk about, mainly because it’s wayyyy too early to think of it as a viable product. But I expect 2023 to be extremely surprising, and not just because we had to move both our big ideas out past the end of the year (one as our choice, one due to parts being late, ah well.)

In other news, parts availability is definitely getting better (though still no Analog Devices DSPs, sigh), but costs continue to be bonkers. We’re trying to hold the line where we can, but don’t be surprised if you see some more bumps. Basically, if you’re looking at buying, best to buy early and often. With demand softening, we’ll see if we can turn the screws, but don’t hold your breath.

Okay, on to comments about manufacturing.

Stamping. For a long time, we’ve been using stamping to produce most of our products. This was both very smart (because it costs less if you’re doing more than, say, about 250 pieces), and very dumb, because we just handed over our CNC stuff and had them do the same thing.

A couple of points that should not be missed.

• 250 pieces is nothin. Nothin at all. Literally everything we do is cheaper when tooled and stamped rather than CNCed. CNC is fine when you’re making 50 pieces of a $1200 1” thick front panel (not exaggerating, I’ve seen it), but not a great idea when doing big numbers.
• Stamping is not CNC. CNC parts you pay per hole, per milled edge, per slot, per cut, per complex shape, and when you want to do something like a dimple or something, you get to do a tool anyway and deal with the whining and crying from a company not used to bending metal, and what happens when you bend metal. Seriously, you should see what the first dimpled bottom for Folkvangr looked like. It was a taco. We fixed it, but oh what a pain.

And the biggest point about stamping is this: if you’re not paying for every hole, not paying for every complex feature, not paying for debosses and dimples and swales and stuff, then why not use it to make your product better? You have to get out of the mindset of CNC. And it’s hard to unlearn, when that’s all you’ve ever done.

Bottom line, when you treat stamping like stamping, you get much better results. You’ll be seeing some of what we’ve learned in the flesh here in a few weeks, and I think you’ll be shocked at how big a difference it makes.

3D Printing. For a long time, we’ve been doing 3D printing for prototypes and such. That’s also both very smart and very dumb. Very smart because it does help us avoid boneheaded mistakes, but very dumb because we were unaware of how far 3D printing has progressed. Blame it on being immersed in the industry since the 3D Systems days, when a stereolithography printer with a modest build envelope was $250,000. You can get a LCD resin printer with roughly the same capabilities for about $500 now.

So. Yeah. 3D printing. We recently bought a carbon fiber FDM machine, mainly for doing larger parts, and also some functional prototypes (brackets and stuff you can use). That’s been a learning process when coming from FormLabs SLA printers.

But it’s also fairly amazing what you can do. The larger protos mean that fit and form are much less guess-based now, and the ability to iterate some wacky ideas in real time mean that you’re gonna be amazed at what some of the new products look like.

The real breakthrough, though, started as a disaster.

I designed a new product to use our standard light pipes—injection molded pieces that are done standard 5-up, cut ‘em down for less, stack ‘em up for more, hope you like the spacing deal. The standardized spacing never thrilled me, and the fact we have products with 6 LEDs in a row never thrilled me either. But neither was disastrous until I did this new product…and, due to a change in where we mounted the board, the light pipes were too tall. They literally scraped the surface mount LEDs right off the PCB when installed.

This sucked. Big time. Because that meant changing the injection molding tool. Or throwing away a bunch of metal. Both are big $$$ and a ton of wasted time.

But that’s what we were gonna do—change the injection mold and run new parts.

Of course, during the course of changing the 3D CAD model, I needed to 3D print some prototypes to make sure they fit. They printed fine on clear resin, they fit fine…and hell, they looked pretty much exactly like the production parts. With the white LED light going through them, you couldn’t tell which was injection molded and which were 3D printed.

This led to a crazy thought: what if we just 3D printed shorter light pipes?

I mean, it would be great in some ways. It would save us from changing the tool, save a bunch of time, and hell, we could even print the exact number we needed, rather than cutting them down from 5 places.

But it also sucked in some ways. I mean, resin printers are sloooooow. And kinda pricey in terms of resin.

Right?

Weeeeeeeeeeeeelllll…maybe not. I mean, we had a flexible build plate for the Formlabs printer; we could build directly on it with no supports. So I threw together a “high density” layout of light pipes and ran it. 3 hours for 140 parts. Not wonderful, but tolerable for a short run. Unfortunately, disaster struck and the Formlabs printer dispensed a bunch of clear resin into its guts, and the high density layout proved to be a bit too high density, the parts grew together.

​

Aside: yes, this can sometimes still the state of 3D printing, even on one of the most user-friendly machines out there. Beware.​

But…there was promise. The parts that didn’t grow together worked well.

And I knew there were bigger, cheaper printers out there…printers that used resin that was literally 6-8x cheaper as well. But how would they do? Would these new printers (based on LCD screens masking UV LEDs, typically 6-8K resolution monochrome screens) be able to do more parts, faster?

I went ahead and picked up one of those new big cheap printers (from Amazon so we could send it back if it was garbage, natch). After a fairly easy (but much more DIY) setup, I laid out a 270-up light pipe layout and let ‘er rip. 19 minutes later, we had 270 perfect parts, without a trace of the growing-together problem of the other printer.

Yes, you read that right. 6X faster, 2x the number of parts, resin a 1/6 the cost.

That’s when Tyler commented, “Maybe we can just make all the light pipes this way.”

“Oh no,” I told him. “3D printing is a pain. Even the screens are consumable. You’ll need to have someone here run it, clean it, it stinks, it’s not really ready for prime time.”

But after one printer did a couple thousand parts in a day, I even started wondering. And I ran the numbers. Here’s the completely unexpected takeaway: even when factoring in consumables, operator time, cleaning and supplies, and unexpected breakdowns, it was literally 5x cheaper to print the light pipes. Hell, the raw resin cost was 1/13 that of the injection molded parts! As in, the injection molded parts were $0.16, the resin was $0.012.

Holy moly, we really could do it, if we wanted to.

Jury is still out, but we now have two of these large printers, and two wash stations, both cranking away doing prototypes…and maybe soon more. For those keeping score, that brings us up to 5 3D printers, three in Valencia and two in Corpus.

Sometimes desperation is the mother of invention. More on that later.

All the best,
Jason

 

[xuan87]

I always wondered why you have a resin printer but not a FDM printer. I have been using a FDM hobby printer for years and it has been amazing for printing functional parts to your own specifications rather than trying to find the right one to buy online. Definitely great for prototype and for test the fittings of your designs.

It's also really shocking how much DLP printer prices have come down in recent years, but I still avoid it due to the mess and extra post processing work that you have to do.

 

[Jason Stoddard]

I always wondered why you have a resin printer but not a FDM printer. I have been using a FDM hobby printer for years and it has been amazing for printing functional parts to your own specifications rather than trying to find the right one to buy online. Definitely great for prototype and for test the fittings of your designs.

It's also really shocking how much DLP printer prices have come down in recent years, but I still avoid it due to the mess and extra post processing work that you have to do.

Bottom line, they're both evolving. Once you've gotten a resin printer, you'll find the limitations of FDM to be annoying. Particularly with all the new resins. Super fine surface finish, rubber-like parts, flexible parts, super-tough parts, transparent parts, hell, water-washable resins are a thing now. Yes, there's cleanup, but that's overblown. Especially when it's only a couple hundred bucks to add a wash and cure, and 40 or so more to fill it with IPA. There are plenty of gotchas, still, and lots of tweaky diy stuff, but that applies to both FDM and resin.

Edit: crap, I wanted to attach some photos showing what we're doing, but it's all prototype stuff. I need to print something I can show. Argh.