The Good:

• Small enough to easily fit in a jacket pocket or the like
• Use less resources to make and ship
• With the gatefold jacket, printed inner sleeve, and color vinyl options, these look as cool as most full-size albums
• Plays fine on manual turntables

The Bad:

• Sound quality is (unsurprisingly) compromised
• Price isn’t lower than typical 7-inch singles

The answer to the ever-shrinking pool of qualified engineers is (drum roll, please) more I/O. That was just one takeaway from our second Studio Master Class hosted by Jay Tyler with panelists Rob Bertrand, CEO for Inrush, and Alex Bonello, Insoft (HDVMixer).

The premise is that the more I/O, the more pathways you have to the components in the airchain for troubleshooting and fixing problems remotely. Rob pointed out that adding more Blade I/O seems like overkill at first, but it’s often impossible to troubleshoot and correct problems remotely without that access. “There are not enough of us out there to keep all the stations going that need help. We’re going in and constantly thinking, ‘What can we leverage to ensure that we’re able to respond wherever we are, to whatever problem comes up for a client?’” commented Rob.

“Unfortunately, we’re not growing new broadcast engineers,” agreed Jay, adding that Blades decentralize the Ethernet switch as a practical, affordable way to get to problems quickly in the absence of a nearby engineer.

Hyman's 30-minute talk, while spellbinding, raised issues of feasibility that seemed insurmountable. Would audiophiles want to spend the time required to rip their favorite tracks to a computer's hard drive? And wouldn't a drive large enough to hold high-definition audio files be prohibitively expensive?

Only three years later, Hyman's dream has materialized. Hard-drive storage capacity per price point has jumped almost a hundredfold. Gracenote has become the international leader in digital media technology and services, providing complete management systems for digital media. There has been explosive growth in the number of online music vendors—iTunes.com, Rhapsody.com, Urge.com, and Napster.com, to name a few—that sell or rent downloadable music to music lovers.

aptX HD is a variant of the aptX codec, designed specifically for high-definition audio. It supports 24-bit/48 kHz audio transmission, with a maximum bitrate of 576 kbps. While not truly lossless, aptX HD offers a significant improvement over standard SBC, with a more detailed and nuanced sound.

LDAC, on the other hand, is a proprietary codec developed by Sony. It supports 24-bit/96 kHz audio transmission, with a maximum bitrate of 990 kbps. LDAC is designed to provide a more accurate and detailed sound, with a focus on preserving the dynamic range and frequency response of the original audio signal.

Both aptX HD and LDAC offer a superior listening experience compared to standard SBC, but they still don’t quite match the quality of wired connections or true lossless audio transmissions.

Six-fader, two-bus Axia DESQ console is a cost-effective, small-footprint console option perfect for small production studios, remote vehicles, content ingest stations, etc. //

DESQ requires no countertop cutout and takes only 16” square of desk space; it connects to the QOR.16 integrated console engine with a single power/control cable. DESQ is ideal for standalone installation, but works with larger Axia networks too. A DESQ control surface and a QOR.16 integrated console engine constitute a complete RAQ system, but two DESQ consoles, or one RAQ and one DESQ console, may be paired with a single QOR.16 for cost-effective multi-console deployment.

Now, the Axia iQ family takes a step into the virtual AoIP future with iQs, the software version of iQx that does not require a physical surface. iQs is a soft console controlled by a full HTML5 interface, allowing you to not only control a mix from anywhere, but on any device—Mac, Windows, tablet, laptop, even your phone!

Imagine mixing/producing audio on a tablet or a smartphone anywhere, at any time! Imagine a console that has no hardware and runs entirely on any reliable and easily sourced computer platform. Now imagine it can also interface with all the equipment you have now.

Axia Altus–a software-based audio mixing console controlled by any device with a modern web browser. Altus represents the future of innovation where both advanced audio mixing and flexible deployment converge.

Heroes. They encourage us to hope, to trust, to believe, and to achieve. For 50 years, Moody Bible Institute’s Stories of Great Christians informed and inspired listeners with biographies of real people . . . average men and women . . . who were called and equipped by God to show His love to the world. These dramatized, 15-minute stories bring to life 600 years of heroes of the faith. Listeners hear the voices, music, and sound effects of classic radio. They’ll be reintroduced to historic men and women they admired since childhood and meet new heroes whose stories will expand their world and deepen their Christian faith.

WAGO lever nuts are typically used for household electrical - often in place of wire nuts.

They can also be used for splicing or splitting audio lines.

Here is a simple distribution box with WAGO components mounted on a DIN rail:

The WAGO 221-413 lever nuts are mounted on a 221-500 mounting carrier which is mounted in turn on a 222-510 angled DIN-rail adapter.

The end stops on the DIN rail are "DIN Rail Terminal Blocks End Stopper Bracket" (Amazon).

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Welcome Good Old Days subscribers!
Please find below your free downloads. You can click on the links to listen online or RIGHT click and choose “Save As” to download to your desktop:

Classic Radio Club
High quality audio of your favorite classic radio shows, Delivered Monthly

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Magnetic Tapes

Remember, this transfer that you (or I) are about to undertake may be the last time (and hopefully the best time) that the original is transferred. Here are some suggestions:

1. Make at least two masters and a listening copy. Keep one set of masters off-site. //

2. Make straight transfers before processing. Save these as better noise processing algorithms may be available in the future.

3. Save a good portion of the noise footprint on the tape without other signal information for later noise reduction processing.

4. At first, worry less about a final product than getting a good, clean transfer with as few artifacts as possible.

5. Above all, listen…are you getting the best transfer you think you can?

This checklist is not a complete guideline. It contains only those items that experience and testing show will have an immediate or severe effect on magnetic tape. Failure to adhere to the items on this list may cause premature loss or deterioration of magnetic tapes and should be considered misuse of the medium. These are minimum handling requirements that summarize good practices.

If the restoration/preservation reformatting is for an institutional client, then the first transfers should be as unprocessed as possible — at least the initial copies that are archived should be done that way. The main reason for this is that processing algorithms will always get better and they may hide some information that is useful to future researchers–information that today we consider “noise.”

I am conservative when setting audio levels when making transfers because there is no way of knowing the loudest portion of the signal in advance. So I generally transfer at 24 bits and then raise or normalize the level prior to dithering down to 16 bits for the distribution copy. If I’m working on music, I will generally archive the 88,200 ks/s or 96,000 ks/s files before the normalization.

Processing should generally be done on a copy. The exception to this in my mind are private clients who want the best possible copy of their parents’ wedding, or some other important event. If applied conservatively, noise reduction and equalization will be appreciated by these clients and most of them won’t care a bit that it’s been processed. I keep the unprocessed files on my servers until I am sure the client is happy with the processed version.

As to what to use, there are a wide variety of options available. At the high-end, this falls into the category of “remastering” rather than simple restoration and I’m sure there are options that I’m not aware of.

As a first step, I am very pleased with the basic capabilities built into Samplitude. In addition to that, I use Algorithmix Noise Free Pro as well as the Sound Laundry suite. Really tough projects can often be improved by the filters in Diamond Cut 6 Live/Forensics and most of the filters are available in the lower-priced Diamond Cut 6. Diamond Cut and their main dealer, Tracertek, often run sales which was how I upgraded to Live/Forensics.

Other products with excellent reputations are Cedar Cambridge, Quadriga Audio Cube, and many others. Listening to and discussing with other users via one or more of the mailing lists listed here is very useful.

Often a tape comes in for restoration that has been poorly wound or poorly stored. Here is an example:

cinched tape

One of the interesting things about this particular tape was it had been recently wound on a constant-tension professional machine prior to shipping to me.

We think that the entire tape had not been re-wound, allowing the higher tension wind to compress the inner core slightly, causing this cinching. After transferring the tape (which didn’t show much ill effect for its cinching), we still found it difficult to get the tape to wind smoothly on the reel.

Therefore, our current suggestion is if you find a tape like this, do not rewind it and attempt to clear up the cinching unless you are also ready to transfer the tape, as there are no guarantees that it can be wound better after unwinding.

In 2006, I wrote a blog post (here) called “Let Sleeping Tapes Lie: What to do with poorly wound tapes”. For years, tape experts have been suggesting that it is not as good an idea to rewind tapes as was originally thought. This was partially based on the fact that most rewinding in archives was done on the oldest, junkiest machines so as to not wear out the good machines. Unless rewinding is done on high-quality tape transports, it is indeed counter-productive.

It seems some people new to tape are confused over how to align a tape recorder. This is the abbreviated version.

If you want to record on a tape recorder (and I do not recommend doing that these days as you’re just generating more tapes that will need to be transferred later) the first thing to do is get the playback correct. //

Anyway, I think that quality digital recording will capture sounds closer to the original than analog magnetic tape. This has been true in most tests run since the early days of digital recording and why most of the classical engineers who are looking for accuracy and not colouration were early adopters of digital. If you wish to record on analog that’s wonderful, but consider that analog tape is being used as much as an effect or sound-colourant as it is a storage medium. Also, remember that your legacy of tapes will be much more costly to preserve and migrate than digital files, although they may withstand neglect better.