DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Last week I spent a couple late nights finishing up some cleanup editing on my drum tracks for Michael Capella. I was doing the final export of the final song — literally, I was 20 minutes from being 100%, completely done with the project.

The export failed. The message from Pro Tools was, “bounce handler could not keep up.” This happens occasionally, if some background process steals too many CPU or i/o cycles from Pro Tools. The fix is as easy as increasing the buffer size or disabling networking or quitting any other app that might be running.

The second attempt hung. This never happens. Pro Tools is just about the most stable application I use. Hanging is a bad sign. I couldn’t force-quit, either, a worse sign. When I rebooted and the export hung a second time and I again couldn’t force-quit and had to reboot, it was a worst sign. What’s worse than worst? Super-worst? Überworst? Liverwurst?

My recording rig is an old Powerbook. All audio files live on an external Firewire drive, which now appeared to be having “issues,” a euphamism I occasionally employ just before tearing a piece of recalcitrant computer hardware from its mounts and drop-kicking it off the balcony into the creek. I recalled, during the second reboot, that this device had originally been the boot drive in a refurbished G4 tower, and therefore had seen untold levels of abuse at the hands of uncounted previous owner(s). Not good, or maybe less than that.

The drive mounted. I immediately began copying the key audio files to my Powerbook’s internal drive. This failed too. Oh, really not good, or definitely less than that.

I actually had backups. At most, I’d lost a couple hours’ editing work. I wasn’t at risk for having to re-record anything. But hardware problems get under my skin.

Then it hit me — maybe the problem wasn’t in reading the external audio drive, but writing to the laptop’s internal drive. To find out, I attached the external drive to my workstation. It mounted fine. I copied all the important stuff to my workstation’s RAID, and burned a DVD of all my current music projects, while holding my breath.

Some time later I regained consciousness to the happy ‘bing!’ sound that means disk verification completed successfully. So, my audio drive was fine… it was my laptop drive that was dying.

Fortunately, my laptop contains little data that can’t be restored or recreated easily. But I tried to recover it anyway, by booting from CD and repairing the directory, always a sane first course of action. The repair failed with a disheartening message like “optimization failed due to device corruption,” which I read to the sonic accompaniment of a quiet repetitive clicking sound that, in my experience, invariably means “your disk drive is well and truly fsck’d.”

You’ve started your backups, right?

My story ended happily. I cabled the powerbook to my workstation via Firewire, booted it into “target disk mode,” and successfully repaired the disk with no apparent data loss. It tests clean; the S.M.A.R.T. diagnosis passes. I can’t explain it, but I’m not complaining.

I’d be wise to replace it, and I probably will, even though that will contribute yet-another questionable piece of storage hardware to the boneyard.

Good eco-news always catches me by surprise, I guess because I so rarely get any of it.

This is really neat: the owners of Maui Recycling have opened a biodiesel car-rental agency on Maui and Oahu. You can rent a new diesel VW Beetle or Golf and burn pure recycled vegetable oil (B100 biodiesel).

There are only one or two B100 fueling stations on each island, but I think it would be hard to use up a full tank of gas within a week on the island. I mean, driving 500 miles in a week is something you go to Maui to stop.

Once we began using my growing collection of tech-conference tote bags as earth-friendly grocery sacks, I realized that the good folks down the road at O’Reilly could promote the effort by using real reusable bags instead of the inexpensive cotton/canvas totes that are the current conference standard.

I found a strong candidate at reusablebags.com: the Earth-tote is a $20 nylon sack that mimics the form factor of traditional foldable paper grocery bags. It has a lifetime guarantee! Which means, among other things, that the handles won’t pull off if you try to carry more than a few kilograms of food. Double one of these superbags, and you could carry home a stockboy to put your groceries away for you.

The Earth-tote is made from 600 denier coated Cordura nylon, which is actually a stronger fabric than the body of my old Aerostich Roadcrafter motorcycle suit. So, not only can you carry your organic produce home without poking yet-another paper-or-plastic finger in the eye of Mother Nature, you can drop your groceries on the highway at 65 mph without so much as bruising a single locally-grown Fuji apple.

Wait, you don’t drive to the grocery store, do you?!?!?!

In a fit of late-night eco-angst, I sent a thoroughly unsolicited email to one of the conference guys at O’Reilly suggesting that future conference attendees would be better rewarded with a dedicated, lifetime-guaranteed, truly reusable shopping bag, which no doubt would look fabulous with the O’Reilly logo stamped on the side. I was surprised to receive a thoughtful reply a couple days later: my suggestion has been passed along.

I’ll find out in October if it got any traction. The conference team gives away books like there’s a fire in the storeroom, so I surely hope they’ve found a way to justify spending 0.71% of everyone’s Web 2.0 Conference admission fee on an Earth-tote.

Ever since the story of the 100 MPG carburetor, I’ve been wary of miraculous claims of fuel-saving inventions. A reasonable person has to think that after 80-plus years of development, the world’s engineers have done just about everything they can do to wring a few more MPG out of the internal combustion engine (ICE). If nothing else, the success of recent hybrid models proves that the best thing you can do to improve the mileage of an ICE is to turn the damn thing off.

A recent article in Popular Science made me question the facts. It’s a story about Somender Singh, a mechanic from Mysore, India, who claims to have “conquered the internal combustion engine.”

His invention is not a miracle carburetor. It’s not a device at all. If anything, it’s something you’d take away rather than add to an internal combustion engine. And the result, Singh claims, are phenomenal:

• improved fuel efficiency (up to 25%)
• increased torque
• reduced idle speed
• reduced operating temperature

It sounds miraculous. Either this is the best-kept secret on the planet, or a load of crap.

Here’s the original PopSci article:
Obsession: Mr. Singh’s Search for the Holy Grail

Here’s the website of the inventor, Somender Singh:
http://www.somender-singh.com/.

Here’s the invention, in seven easy steps. Don’t forget your Dremel tool:
How do I cut a groove?

During my recording session last Fall, I used a pair of AKG C1000S mics as drum overheads. I bought them on the recommendation of some website or other, several years ago, and always believed them to be great without having any basis for judgement (or, perhaps more to the point, any budget for an upgrade).

Subsequent reading, especially on the old Tape Op message boards (R.I.P.!), revealed a mass of bad will toward this mic. Here’s a representative review of the C1000S: “I keep them around in case I ever need to loan a microphone to someone I don’t like.”

While upgrading my studio this year, I replaced the C1000S mics with a pair of (genuine Russian) JSC Oktava MK-012s, based again on web reviews, although in this case a lot more of them. When I first wired up the MK-012s, I was playing and monitoring through headphones. I was so shocked I stopped playing — compared to my memory of the C1000S, the Oktavas sounded like I’d removed three sheets of tissue from the mic capsules. The presence and transparency of the Oktavas blew me away. Suddenly all those mean reviews of the C1000S seemed justified. Suddenly, I felt I was really hearing my own drum kit.

I finally took the time to put together a couple simple comparisons of the MK-012 and the C1000S. Just for fun, I included a 3rd pair of mics too. The two sound samples below include 4 bars of each of the following mic pairs, in this order:

Drum Overhead Mic Test 1 (MP3)
Drum Overhead Mic Test 2 (MP3)

I recorded these tracks in separate passes, about a minute of each pattern for each mic pair. From each pass I selected a 4-bar pattern with no unusual transients. I normalized the excerpts, then combined them in Pro Tools, exported as AIFF, and converted to high-quality VBR MP3 via lame.

In all cases I used the Focusrite [Update: Focusrite designed the mic pres in the Mbox, but not the ones in the Digi 002.] mic pres built into my Digi-002 Rack. I used no EQ or compression, which would have masked the differences in the signals. The only change to the signal path between each of these tests was the amount of gain applied via the mic pre: the Oktavas need no gain; in fact, I can clip them with a rimshot when the gain knob is zeroed. The C1000S needs several dB of gain. The 635a needs a whole lot more than that. No, these aren’t scientific measurements — it’s probably sufficient to say that, if anything, the MK-012 is relatively hot (which is why they supply a -10dB pad), but all three mics are well within the range of a typical mic pre’s gain stage.

Coming into the test with the burden of my bias, I expected the C1000S to sound like an AM radio compared to the Oktavas. These expectations were not justified. The Oktava is superior, but the C1000S isn’t the dogmeat mic some folks say. But it would take a more skilled engineer to make it sound good, and it might never sound as good as the Oktava.

Here are my impressions: the MK-012 (the first third of each of these two clips) is brighter, with smoother high-end response and a wider dynamic range, than the C1000S. The C1000S has a colored top end; I don’t like what it does to cymbals — they sound distant and pangy. The MK-012 has a more appealing, more transparent sound. The EV 635a doesn’t really belong in this test. This mic doesn’t have near as much range as either of the condensers. The lack of high end response is obvious here.

I can hear that the C1000S is more directional than the MK-012. All three mic pairs were set up in the same position, yet the drum kit seems to change size over the course of each clip. Curiously, even though the stereo field in the C1000S samples is wider, I prefer the Oktava’s imaging. The Oktava samples sound more natural. This may be a side-effect of what I perceive as very rough high-end on the C1000S, though.

It’s instructional to listen to short excerpts of the second clip, from the last, then middle, then first third. The 635a has a nice lo-fi thump on the toms. The C1000S, in contrast, brings in an appealing high-end slap (plus about 20dB of cymbal). Then, changing to the first third of the clip, what I primarily hear is a whole load of low end — the kick and toms suddenly have body. Also the hi-hats sound less brittle in the MK-012 track.

Repeating this reverse-order test with the first clip, I hear less-pronounced differences. The kit sounds far away and muffled in the last third of the clip, due to the omnidirectional pattern of the 635a. In the middle third, I hear a top-endy sound; the drums have snap but no body. In the first third, the kick drum has a full, round thump, perhaps surprising for an overhead track. The snare is brighter, poppier, more present than on the C1000S track.

Overall, I’m happy to say I can hear why engineers have been raving about the MK-012 for years. These Oktavas are great-sounding mics: they deliver a full, balanced kit sound with no EQ.

A final note on these tests: all mic pairs were placed in the “recorderman” position. It’s possible that other positions might be more suitable for some of these mics. For example, the 635a’s would have sounded much better had they been placed inside the foam-lined mic case, with no cables attached. Heh.