omg you guys

Someone on Facebook semi-accidentally pointed me to the first photo I put up of my studio. Welcome back to 2009:

 

July 2009

SO EMPTY. So unconditioned! So… echoey! It didn’t take me long to start building more sound baffles, I remember that.

I particularly like the weights set. In case, you know, I needed to do some sets between… sets. XD

Here’s the same room now, three full-length albums, an EP, and a couple of singles later:

November 2013 (enlarge)

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

ribbon mic buildout

I’m still chasing down radio-frequency interference ghosts in the preamp – yes, I am still the Ghost Host – but I did promise a ribbon microphone build post! And the microphone seems to be behaving fine, so why not?

First, you should know what a ribbon microphone is. It’s the first truly high-fidelity microphone design; those RCA diamond-shaped microphones you seen in old films? Ribbon microphones.

Yep, these things

They’re the only high-fidelity microphone you can make at home, if you have all the parts; there are no active components. They’ve never fallen completely out of use, having a characteristic sound which is particularly good for strings, classical instruments, and, curiously, metal; recently, they’ve come back into fashion.

Perhaps you see my attraction.

The active element is a nonmagnetic conductive ribbon, corrugated, and stretched between two high-power natural magnets. The vibration that sound waves in the air induce in the ribbon creates an electrical current, which is your signal. It’s a very low power signal, and the ribbon is crazy thin, making the microphone very delicate – I won’t be taking this microphone out.

So let’s make one! This one’s built from an Austin Microphones kit, but you can just get the design plans and roll your own parts list if you want.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

grab while the grabbing is good

Y’know what? All my Bandcamp downloads are now set to pay what you like, including zero. Also including one MILLION dollars, but I suspect most people are more interested in the zero part.

Physical CDs are discounted, too.

I did this for the Scalzi crowd a few days ago; some of them have been taking advantage of it, and you should get a turn. G’wan, download, hit the tip jar if you want, and if you don’t – I’m a supervillain. Who’m I to judge? XD

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

anybody want a broken robot?

Anybody want my old Nimbie NB-11 CD/DVD burning robot? It'd be for tinkering - it's a marvellous device in theory, but it never worked really right.

To its credit, it never wrote a bad data side. That's the best thing I can say about it. But the input tray holds 100 CDs; despite this, I only broke 20 without the robot flipping out _one time_, iirc. Usually, once it got going - and it would generally take a few tries - it would get 15 or so before needing to be restarted.

Doing Lightscribe runs, on some designs, it would reject every disc as bad after printing correctly. Other label designs didn't do that. I never understood why. I managed to make it work less badly a couple of times, but each time, it eventually ended up being random again, and now just idling it'll start doing flaily-robot-arms, and once last week it managed to eject a disc that was in the process of being lightscribe labelled.

I took the burner unit itself out, because that works and I could use it in my workstation. The robot takes SATA drives, tho', so anything would do. That part is cheap and easy to reinstall, and if you have one already, it'll work with some modifications. (Basically you just have to take the front plate and the tray plate off - they just snap off, no tools required - and possibly will have to make the drive eject further than normal, depending upon your drive. Instructions for this are on the web if you search for them.)

Anyway, anybody wants a project with a potentially decent payoff - it'd be a great box if it just worked - let me know.