Was there a reason?

Some days you go to the shop and it all runs like a fine clock.  Every cut fits, every decision works.  Your clamps hold the work in the right place until you finish nailing.  You make that perfect mitered joint, no filler needed.  The squeezeout of the glue is just right.  More work gets done in a couple of hours than you imagined when you started the day.

Then there are the others.  Nothing, and I mean nothing works.  Every board has to be recut, nails miss their board, clamps slip.  You can't find anything.  Run out of glue.  No screws.  The nailer jams. Shit just happens and happens and happens. 

Today was one of those latter type days.  I used to force myself through and try to accomplish something.  I've learned just to walk away.  If in a couple of hours nothing useful has been accomplished other than raising my blood pressure, I quit and go home.  It's not worth it.  I usually have to tear apart whatever I did during those times anyway. 

I'd rather make a customer wait, or my own projects wait, than half ass it fixing mistakes. 

Re: More Later, or my journey through audio land

I've been screwing around with this stuff a long time.  Mostly dabbling at the edges, figuring out ways to get my fix without spending massive amounts of money.  I've never been able to spend the big bucks on audio.  And in retrospect, I think that's a good thing.  It made me particular, and realistic.  Particular about what kind of sound I liked, and realistic about what kind of equipment was necessary to create it.

I remember my first diy speakers.  T/S parameters weren't very old then.  I had this Radio Shack book with charts that you used to find the parameters from the measurements.  I went to the local tv shop and pestered them until they let me use a tone generator and voltmeter to check my drivers.  They were some old 15's out of a guitar cab.  Looking back, they were probably celestions and worth a damn fortune now.  So anyway, it was a ported 15 with a piezo tweeter.  Damn they got loud.  And were probably pretty nasty, but at 16, who cares. It wasn't too long after that I put a biamp, (yes in 1974) system in my car, with outboard amplifiers.  Nobody even knew what hell I had.  2 6x9's in the back, 1" domes and 5 1/4's in the front.  And it was a cassette.  8 tracks still dominated in those days.   As I recall it didn't get loud, but it sounded good.  That seems to be my M/O with car stereos to this day.  They don't really get insanely loud, but they're balanced and sound good. 

The vagaries of youth.  They never leave you, you know.  The stuff that got your blood boiling then still does today, whether you admit it or not.  

DIY or buy.?

I hang out at lots of forums.  I don't post on very many, for a couple of reasons.  One, DIY is frowned upon in many places.  Two, there is a core group of haters out there who dis Bill's cabs and diy in general every chance they get.  I've done a couple of internet flame wars, and won't do it again.  It's not worth the effort.  The old internet saw "Even if you win, you're still retarded", holds so true.

I just don't get the resistance.  DIY in home audio is an accepted practice, acknowledged to provide better sound for your buck than virtually any store bought speakers.  I accept the fact that if you're meeting riders, diy won't cut it.  Engineers going from gig to gig need some consistency.  But at our level, who's ever even seen a rider?   Most of my gigs are just glad to have a PA.  If it wasn't for me, they'd cobble together something that sounded like crap, but got loud.

Cost effectiveness is one of the arguments.  You can buy decent stuff cheap enough that it's not worth your time to build it.  They have a point, until you compare performance.  Open up a cab and take a look.  Maybe it's a plastic box, mdf or particle board.  BB is pretty rare under 1k.  And plastic boxes sound like plastic boxes, talk about the generic me too look.  They ALL look alike.  The cheapest components they can find,  the simplest construction possible.  Speaker in a box.  That's all I see at the sub 1k level.  Oh, and add a self powered version, now you've added an amp to a $500 speaker.  So which should sound better, the $500  with the amp, or the one without? 

I see post after post after post about which speaker to buy.  Picking nits.  The differences of anything under 1k is marginal at best, unless you get clear down to the white van speakers.  (Can you say Gemini?)

Do your homework.  Get smart about sound.  It can be very complicated, but the basics are actually pretty easy.  Response, sensitivity, dispersion.  None of those are hard to understand, and will serve the vast majority of users.  Know the limitations of what you're looking at.  Then make the choice to diy, custom build or factory cab.   Just be aware of the  tradeoffs, time vs money vs quality.

Relentless, but with One exception

After rereading my last blog, I realized there is one area that the pursuit of really innovative products seems to be stuck. The last and most important link in the chain. Loudspeakers. The basic design of the speaker is well over 100 yrs old. Sure, materials have improved, performance has improved, but the basic moving diaphragm from an electric motor is unchanged. Sure, there has been some odd stuff (plasma tweeter)over the years, but nothing that could be used in the pro world, and not much in the home audio world. Probably the last big breakthrough in speakers was the creation of the acoustic suspension box in the late 50's. Even then, it was improvements in the then 50yr old cone and driver that made it possible. Really more of a tweak than a breakthrough.

There's nothing like the revolution that DSP and digital technology are creating.  As I walked through NAMM, everybody has a speaker in a box.  Nothing special, nothing exactly exciting.  The exciting part for all of them was the onboard amps, dsp enabled, that allows you to overcome the limitations of loudspeaker design. 

Not to disparage the upper end stuff out there.  I saw some truly astounding and well designed line arrays and subs.  But all the midrange stuff shows very little imagination. The low end stuff is just crap.   Tweaks to drivers, but still, a speaker in a box.  You can do the same with any decent software, a good driver and a table saw.  It used to be rocket science to design a good direct radiator box,  it's not anymore. 

I know that's why I was so drawn to Bill's boxes 5 years ago.  They broke out of the mold.  Even though horn technology is probably the oldest, nobody had revisited it seriously for years.  There's still some black art in a good horn, which makes me very happy every time I use them.  Yes, it's a speaker in a box, but what a box.  They're different.  They're unusual.  And I made them.  That's the best part. 

Relentless and Antique

The march of technological innovation. Relentless. As I wandered around Namm yesterday the technology on display was astounding. But what's interesting about it is all of this innovation and technology is for one thing. To make music, and most of that music comes from instruments that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Antiques. Even the most techno music has recognizable instruments in the mix. The hardest sound to get right? Drums, the oldest instrument in existence. It's almost genetic that we should know how a drum should sound.

We are tasked to reproduce faithfully the sound of that one receives, sitting in front of someone creating transient art that disappears into the wind. It's our job to create that transient moment for many people, at once, before it disappears. The better we recreate what the artist intends, that shared sense of wonder from live music or a dj mix that drives a crowd, creates a sense of community and interconnectedness. We've all had those magic moments when it was all perfect. The band was on, the mix was right, the crowd electric. That's what it's all about. Pursuit of that moment.

We are not alone

Touching on the prior theme of being obsessed with this stuff, we are not alone. After attending NAMM yesterday, there are lots of us. An army of us. Not just the big companies, but small one man shows, little bitty companies, all pushing the envelope with new ideas, new products, and a passion for the business. And more than that, a passion to make it sound better, work better, be more fun, and be more about the music.

Beware, though. The snake oil salesman are out there. I walked into one booth to look at cables, as soon as I heard the salesman say you have to listen to my cables for about an hour and you'll hear the difference, I beat a hasty exit. I didn't see any clocks with orange dots or jars of audio marbles, but that kind of bullshit exists here, too. Monster has a booth with "Pro Audio power cables". Like the feed we get from the places we play is some kind of pristine 120v 60hz sine wave.

That's all from the kid in the greatest candy store ever for this obsession, for today.

Where I'm coming from

This blog is what the title says. A journeyman's discussion of pro audio, and the obsessive hobby/business it can become.

Being for journeymen doesn't mean if you're a pro you can't weigh in. Just keep in mind who this is geared to. I know I don't have 20k for a desk, or 5k per cab for speakers. I do this for fun, if there's any money in it great. If not, hey I got to get loud, play with cool stuff, and make my son's band very happy, along with whatever other bands are playing at the time.

Who I am. I've been messing around with audio since high school. I sold and installed pro and home systems for 3 years during and after college. Started out as an EE major in college, which gave me a fairly sold background in the basics. My hobby took a back seat for a very long time with marriage, kids, and life. I owned a hardware store/bicycle shop (odd combination but it worked) for 15 years, currently own an equipment rental business. I kept my hand in enough to satisfy my audio jones dabbling with my own home audio. About 5 yrs ago my son started a band, and I decided to build them a PA. So I started a little internet research to catch up on the pro side. I came across Bill Fitzmaurice's unusual horn designs, and they really appealed to me. Not only for the price/performance claimed, but because they were outside the speaker in a box paradigm.

The audio monkey on my back kicked back into life at the first play of those cabs. I built cabs for me, more for my son's band, and finally became a builder for Bill's cabs to sell. From building those cabs my site www.SpeakerHardware.com evolved. My hobby has become my business, and is more fun than I could have ever hoped for. I still run sound for my son's band, and play with gear every chance I get.

More later