Spanspek

By now, most Pro Tools users realise that "native" versions will always be limited. Whether it's I/O or track count, you have to spend a lot more money on an HD system to get what you want. There is no middle ground. It's $3000 or $30,000.

So when I came across this, I was salivating. That's right... read your way through the first few pages.

An M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge with Pro Tools M-Powered 7.3, 7.3.1, 7.3.1cs1 or 7.3.1cs2 will give you 32 channels of simultaneous I/O, not the limited 18 mentioned in the disclaimer on the M-Audio website.

Thanks to ebay and willing sellers, I have Pro Tools M-Powered 7.3.1 and a ProFire Lightbridge. I can confirm that this combination will indeed record on 32 tracks simultaneously. Since I have no A/D converters, I haven't tried this with actual audio signals feeding the thing.

After a lengthy period of negotiation, I can finally reveal the story behind my new stash of audio gear. Well, the audio gear isn't new but the stash is new... for me anyway.

I've been sitting on this post for a few months now. What a good blogger I am! I was going to post pictures. Perhaps I will soon.

My partner takes an interest in real estate. Prices would have to drop by 40% before we'd even consider buying, so we've decided to keep renting for now. Nevertheless, she keeps an eye on things. So she was trawling realestate.com.au and came across a listing for an flat in Canterbury. One of the pictures was a room filled with old audio equipment, most notably an RCA 44BX.

Now that's the sort of thing you don't see, as the vendors and their agents usually want to present the property in the best possible light. This was weird.

So I sent a message to the agent saying "I'm not interested in the property, but I am interested in the audio gear". The recipient very kindly sent the email on to the vendors.

It turns out that the flat came onto the market from a deceased estate. The gentleman who lived there was an ex-3AK engineer. He'd kept a bit of old equipment, presumably when the station upgraded. His daughters were faced with the prospect of selling the property and they had to clear it out first.

The place was full of records, hi fi equipment (more cassette decks than you've ever seen in one place!), tape machines, mics and some radio station gear. He had lots of books about audio, trains and model trains. He even had a model railway line around the perimeter of his studio room.

I started talking to the sisters and told them my interest and what I'd be willing to pay. I gave them lots of information and stated what the gear could be worth if it was tested and restored. As they didn't have the means or inclination to do so, they accepted my offers. Some items were claimed by old friends of their father's... and that's fair enough.

When I returned from my travels last month, one of the sisters very kindly contacted me. They had only a few weeks to empty the flat of gear

So, what was the gear? Here' a comprehensive list:

• RCA 44BX - legendary vintage ribbon mic, apprently in full working order
• STC 4033 microphone - a huge old piece with ribbon and pressure gradient elements - use either one or mix them together!
• Sennheiser MD421 - vintage with the Tuchel connector
• Sennheiser MD21 - omni "reporters' mic"
• Byer 77 tape machine - these can apparently be turned into funky mic pres
• Pye limiter - valves glowing and working
• A weird piece of Pye with input only - it seems to be some sort of signal measuring device
• AWA G51 limiter in pretty bad shape - this will need a lot of restoring
• Uher handheld mic with a DIN connector - probably cheap and nasty but you never know
• Nagra tape machine
• Two enormous hand-built radio consoles

What did I get? All of the above except...

• The family decided to keep the RCA 44 but lend it to an old radio mate of their dad's
• The 421 was promised to someone else
• One of the Byers was promised to someone else and I thought I'd try just one, to convert to a mic pre
• The Nagra went elsewhere - that's OK since I don't want a tape machine

EDIT: To make greater sense

Later, a Telefunken-badged Sennheiser MD21 and a rather cheap-looking Uher mic which turned out to have a Shure Unidyne 55 embedded inside it, without the tranny (that's weird), turned up, so I got them too.

END EDIT

I took the weird Pye thing because they didn't know what to do with it.

Now, all of this feels a bit odd. Every sound engineer hopes to come across a stash of gear. But it's become increasingly unlikely that there are many to be found. People realised a long time ago how good the older gear is. It's no longer possible to pick up classic Neve modules for a few hundred bucks. All the TV and radio stations have been cleaned out and one would have to trawl garage sales if there was even the slightest whiff of electronics. (And any electronics gear at a garage sale probably wouldn't be pro audio anyway. Still, if you have a pair of AWA G58s lying around, do contact me!)

It's not that this stuff is particularly high-end, but, still, I never thought this would happen to me.

I also feel like a bit of a pirate. I shouldn't. I was completely up-front with the family. I told them what the gear was worth, what it would take to restore it, what I was willing to pay and why. So I count myself very lucky.

There's a bit of money to be spent: the AWA has to be restored and modified, the Byer needs to be cleaned up, racked and modified, and the Pye should be checked. And then there are the four Calrec modules and two Auditronics modules I have sitting in the queue! I also have a JBL 7510 with three cards (12 mic pres) which needs to be wired up (I got the one with proprietary connectors, not the one with XLRs) and possibly modified.

I'm in audio purgatory!

I went to a Pro Tools 8 demo at JMC Academy on 8 April. It was run by Digi techster Brent Heber.

There are lots of improvements over Pro Tools 7:

MIDI Editor:

• Multiple tracks in one view—events are colour-coded
• Editing looped or duplicated MIDI segments alters all iterations

Score Editing:

• MIDI editor has a score editor mode
• print mode for editing printed scores
• can export Sibelius (.sib) files, but can only read MIDI files—WTF?

Virtual Instruments:

• Vacuum—monophonic, dual oscillator synth. Has about half a dozen overdrive controls for distorted everything!
• Xpand now responds to up to four MIDI channels
• Boom—a grid-based beat box editor like the old TR808 sequencer
• Mini Grand—sample-based piano with a 900MB library and reverb effect
• DB33—a Hammond-style organ with a cabinet effect that can take an external input
• Structure sample player now allows one to drag and drop regions from audio track playlists. Different versions (free or paid) have different features

Plugins:

• all the usual DigiRack plugs with a true stereo EQ3,a new version of Sansamp, new algorithms in D-Verb
• some plugs previously available for money are now free: DFi and Maxim
• Eleven—guitar simulator. Different versions (free or paid) have different numbers of amps and tones

"Comp" edit workflow is much improved:

• Loop recording takes can be in one file (as before) or in separate playlists (new preference setting)
• If in separate playlists, those playlists can be displayed in the edit window below the "main" playlist
• Can copy selection of region in comp playlist to main playlist

BUT...

Digi still hasn't fixed the loop record to include pre- and post-roll in the loop. As before, pre-roll is played before the first iteration of the loop and then only the selected part of the timeline or playlist is looped. I've been asking Brett about this since version 6. For those times when the context of the punch-in is important to the performance—most of the time—loop record is useless.

All in all, it's looking pretty good. There are still things one would like to have, like removal of the 18I/O limit in LE, but Digi has demonstrated time and time again, that they won't do anything that would poach the HD market, and they still don't provide an upgrade path with any "middle" ground between LE and HD. It sucks, but what can you do when they have the market power?

If you're reading this between August 16 and 26, 2008, then this entry is valid. If not, then forget it!

I now have one pair of Calrec PQ2647 modules for sale. You can see the listing on ebay or read my previous post.

Update!

They didn't sell, so I've relisted them for a little bit less. Here's hoping....

They arrived! I've played with them a bit for a couple of weeks.

Yes, two Calrec PQ2647 modules have arrived, nicely racked up by Rob Squire at Pro Harmonic. The other pair is with Mixmasters for evaluation.

Rob has set them up with separate mic and line inputs, switchable with the original LINE switch. From there one can use the EQ section (more on this below). The auxiliary send section does not work at all. I had thought of maybe using a send to get multiple outputs or a final trim control on the output, but it is apparently quite hard. Rob says there are a number of switchable options on the circuit board (accesible via little DIP switches) which have to do with the order of components in the signal path, mute control, and so on. That's OK. I can live with them just being mic pres and EQs.

I played with a ribbon mic and the EQ section straight away. The mic is a Speiden SF12, but one purchased before Royer started manufacturing the design. The mic is beautiful: not a great high end but the best stereo imaging ever (it is a Blumlein configuration).

I've never had a quiet enough mic pre to use it well. All cheaper mic pres, based on SSM2017 chips and the like, are not quiet enough at high gain settings: wind the attached trim pot past the 3 o'clock position and they hiss. The first thing I notice was that the Calrecs don't hiss really at all. Even at 60 dB + 15 dB trim (a whopping 75 dB), they're pretty clean.

The EQ is great. Well, perhaps not great like certain pieces of classic gear, but good. There are low-pass and high-pass filters, each with three selectable frequencies. The high and low shelving bands each have two selectable frequencies and an unspecified amount of boost or cut. It's at least 12 dB and may be 15 dB. The mid band is a bell curve and has the same gain and variable frequencies between 200 Hz and 8 kHz. The EQ certainly sounds very musical and is very useable. The switchable frequencies are very sensible.

I tried it out on a piano: OK, but since the instrument was not great, it was hard to tell. Certainly the pres gave me what I expected given the mics (AKG C414s). Then I used it on a female vocalist with a fair degree of "air" in her voice. A bit of mild compression dulled that a bit so I dialled in a couple of clicks above 5 kHz. The top end shimmered! Since the C414s were the best mics available, that was what we used. They're too neutral sounding to be a good vocal mic, but through these Calrecs I'd reconsider!

Mixmasters engineers tried them as a line-level EQ and a mic pre. They were a bit non-descript but said they were decent. Mind you, those chaps are surrounded by Avalons and vintage Neves and the like. One wouldn't expect a cheaper Calrec channel strip to do the same thing. So, all in all, I'm very pleased.

Mixmasters is sending the second unit back to me. So if you want a couple of decent mic pres and EQs, contact me before they go on ebay or Mixmasters gets an interested buyer.