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wesg

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About wesg

  • Birthday 09/01/1973

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  • Biography
    I am extremely cool. I maintain my coolness by using a speaker that blows air at me while I play the organ. I also wear sunglasses.

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  • Location
    Inverary, ON, Canada

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  • Interests
    Motorcycles and Music

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  • Occupation
    Nerd

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  1. Hey, Jon, you missed a whole class of products -- power packs with built-in outlets, car batteries, and interverters. I have seen these as large as 28AH. The solution is equivalent to the inverter you discussed, but it avoids most of the DIY cons and looks more professional. Here's one example: http://www.duracellpower.com/portable-power/power-packs/powerpack-600.aspx Wes
  2. Maybe you should get Mickey Hart to design a pickup for you. I'm fairly certain you will find flaws with the frequency response graph for every microphone. His "Beam" is flat from 20Hz to 20kHz. The only other alternative is to point mics at your drums and listen to the result.
  3. Why don't you just point an MD421 at it from a couple of feet back and see what it sounds like? I wouldn't use a shotgun mic because I don't want a tight, focussed, pickup for the frequencies above ~2kHz, which is basically the definition of a shotgun mic. I want to hear the entire gong shimmer. By the way, both the guys using the gong I work with like to get very subtle effects out of it, although this one is only about three feet across. Think trippy psychedelia. But it's loud enough that we can hear it anywhere on stage, which is why the drum overheads work. The gong sits centered behind the drum kits. Or maybe it's the snare mics.....I never really gave it much thought beyond making sure it sounded good. Maybe I should.
  4. Well, the reason *I* wouldn't choose a shotgun mic is because it's a shotgun mic. (Is that answer simple enough? LOL) As for gongs, I think you're going to have a hard time finding anybody who regularly mics gongs. One of my acts uses a gong, but I don't bother mic'ing it. The drum overheads pick it up just fine. PVM 480s, a small-diaphragm condenser.
  5. PSG, ever tried coating the connectors in DeOxit D5 before reassembly?
  6. FWIW - I'm planning to give it to the end user for testing this weekend. I'm pretty I've got a solid design. I just spent some time with a pencil and paper while I still had the hardware in front of me -- here are my notes, http://drbombay.ca/MMT-Bank-Selector.pdf... Feel free to share. Wes
  7. That's probably the most boring "Groupie" story ever. You should have at least bumped for 20 minutes. They have pills for that now.
  8. I could probably build another one with about 6 hours of labour, now that I know what I'm doing. I probably have over 100 hours in this one. Less if I upgraded my tooling and/or made up real PCBs. The hardest part of the build is finding the right traces to cut to intercept the reset line. The schematic diagram I have is wrong, I think they "reflowed" the PCB layout in the CAD program and it chose different gates within the same chips than the earlier version..and they did not reflect this change on the schematic. I bet you could totally build one in a weekend if you were suitably motivated and had my notes. Which I intend to clean up and post. The last major thing I have to do is to order shorter power supply filter caps. The old ones are keeping the case from closing. Can't hurt to replace them anyhow. Wes
  9. Gear pr0n for trevcda -- Schematics to follow at some point. I solved the need for a reset button by building a zero-crossing detector in the LSb of the bank address line; the detector strobes the 8031's reset line whenever the bank switches, essentially powering up into the new bank. The power up sequence takes about a second. Wes
  10. Both threads you've bumped were gone for a long time AFAICT. Maybe the change in ownership has helped?
  11. I don't know anything about AES50 specifically, but I do know. Ethernet can go into exponential backoff when collisions are detected in a hub; switches always introduce latency, and a busy switch can drop packets. None of these things would be very good for live audio. Wikipedia says AES50 is a Layer 1 protocol - that means it's not even built on ethernet -- which is packet-switched -- but lives BELOW that. Sending AES50 into anything like a switch might just kill it outright. I guess it depends how much SuperMAC looks like ethernet frames. It's also possible that you are running AES51 which is encapsulated, IIUC, in ethernet frames. But, for reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph - I wouldn't want to. Wes
  12. In 1996, I was hired to troubleshoot a network at a local office. They had recently upgraded from a 10-base-2 (RG-58), Novell Netware 2, WordPerfect 5.1 to a 10-base-T (CAT 4 UTP), Windows for Workgroups, Microsoft Office setup, at the same time as they added half a dozen workstations in an adjacent building. Their consultant couldn't figure what was wrong, and was pointing at the electrician who ran the network wire. The electrician, of course, said he didn't know a damned about software, but the wire was fine. So I was called in as a favour to a third party. Fast-forward many hours of observation and software troubleshooting. I eventually discovered that the electrician had invented his own colour scheme for the UTP. (Andy is probably laughing now). He was using Panduit jacks that snap together with no special tools, and wired them the same as an RJ45 patch cable -- Blue, Blue/White, Green, Orange/White, Orange, Green/White, Brown, Brown/White. Which seems, okay, right? As long as the wires are the same at both ends? These Panduit wall jacks used connectors with the pins laid out pair 1, pair 2, pair 3, pair 4. So the correct wiring sequence would have been Blue, Blue/White, Green, Green/White, Orange, Orange/White, Brown, Brown/White. So Green/White and Orange/White were exchanged at each end, making it so the signal came out of the wall the exact same way it went in at the hub. Well, Andy, OneEng and a few other folks in this forum already know what the problem is. The problem is that this is unshielded twisted pair. The normal way CAT4/CAT5/etc is set up, pair 1 is reserved for telephone, pair 2 is ethernet transmit, pair 3 is ethernet receive, pair 4 reserved (usually for power over ethernet). What the electrician did was exchange one half of the balanced transmit/receive pairs with each other. Suddenly, we no longer have common-mode noise rejection (like in a mic cable), and we have crosstalk all over the place. So the network mostly works, until there is a noise source, or lots of data. Then, poooof! Network craps out for a few seconds. What's the moral of this story? Oh yeah. Networking has to be done right, and "right" starts at the physical layer. Which is a crap load way pickier these days than it was in 1996. By the way, that was my first experience with UTP. I asked my dad (a military lineman) for advice before troubleshooting this purported software problem. I'm glad I did - his advice was to hand me summary of the TIA/EIA 568A/568B spec describing CAT5 wiring and a sheet describing best wiring practices. I was familiar with BIX from telephone work, but the Panduit stuff was totally new to me. Wes
  13. trevcda - I'll post schematics in this forum when I'm finished. I don't expect to have to reboot when switching banks, but you'll have to have the MMT in a quiescent state when doing so. I am undecided right now whether or not to build a reset button into the unit or not. The risk is that it could get hit by accident. It depends how often the MMT glitches when bank switching, I expect. The other alternative is strobing the PIC's reset line every time the encoder moves. I am using a quadrature encoder, so that is relatively easy. Wes
  14. I happen to have one of these on my workbench right now. I am upgrading the RAM in it for a friend. When finished, you will be able to select which memory bank you want use by turning a jog wheel and changing a the output of a 7-segment LED, and it will have 16 banks. If you have a friend who is VERY good with digital electronics, I would be willing to share schematics when I am done. Wes
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