Back Page: At Odds With Mythology
He’s not gonna take it anymore!
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A lot of what we deal with on a daily basis is technology, and a lot of what we deal with on a daily basis is art. The sum of what we do is fusing technology and art to create an
entertainment environment, which on its best day may actually make
the audience “feel” something. |
We throw around the term “vintage”, most often meaning a piece of gear
has tubes so most certainly it must sound “warm”. Or, “it has the same
capsule as a ‘Model X’, it’s just like an old ‘Model Y’ module, if a ribbon
microphone sees phantom power the world will end...” Blah blah blah.
But the fact is just because something is old, it’s not necessarily good.
The only thing tubes will make warm is the air around them. It’s just
as easy to do a lousy job of circuit design with tubes as with solid state.
WAY TOO PREVALENT
The quantity of “stuff” I see masquerading as audio equipment because
it has a little glowing thing inside is staggering. We have tube mics,
tube equalizers, tube mic preamps, tube compressors (that all sound like
LA-2A’s even though they have less in common with a LA-2A than a Buick...
Except the tubes.). At first I thought it was a joke when I ran across
a web site offering a tube motherboard for a computer! Like the computer
was going to sound better or some nonsense like that.
One thing can always be counted on good tube designs cost serious money.
With an inexpensive tube unit, chances are way better than even that it’s
one of the plague of cheap, current starved, marketing “toobs” that have
become way too prevalent in our world.
So much of what we do and so much of what we learn comes from talking
to our brethren, with marketing generated buzz words steadily creeping
into our vocabulary without our even noticing. We start to use terms like
“warm” any time some musically pleasing distortion comes into the picture,
or when it doesn’t sound “brittle”, “hard as nails” or a “phase shifted
into oblivion” piece of garbage.
One of my “favorite” (sarcasm intended) myths is the “designed by” hype.
Companies are springing up left, right and center, building stuff that
was “designed by _____”, but seeing as how the circuit is now public domain,
they attempt electronic necrophilia often to the most boring of results.
But remember, it was “designed by ______”.
Things like component selection and board layout play a major role in
the sound of any unit, the power supply might be remarkably inadequate
for the task at hand, but the myth of “designed by” prevails. So it must
sound like it came from the mountaintop! (Yeah, that’s the ticket.)
PAINTING THE PICTURE
Let’s face it, given the option of reading even an elementary book on
circuit design or having a beer and talking to girls... Well, it ain’t
really much of a choice now is it? As sound people, we’re “artists” in
our own right, we paint the picture that is the music.
O.K., so we’re supposed to be a bit geeky on the side, but really, how
much do you need to know about circuit design to move some faders? And
all of this stuff is going to be digital in the next couple of hours,
so why bother to learn more of the nuts and bolts of circuit design?
With that in mind, what’s the “Cliff’s Notes” version of what to look
for in a piece of audio electronic equipment? Headroom, for starters,
and bandwidth is another. If the piece can’t drive a 600 Ohm load to +22,
or a 1 kOhm load to +28; if the bandwidth is less than 150 kHz, or if
it rolls off before 3 Hz on the bottom, then it’s probably not going to
perform for squat.
If it isn’t balanced (and don’t get me started on the myths surrounding
transformer vs. transformerless designs), with a completely linear phase
response through the low end of the audio spectrum, it’s junk. But these
could just be myths I picked up in a bar room. You never know, unless,
of course, you do.
Fletcher heads up Mercenary Audio and also hosts a popular forum on ProSoundWeb’s Rec Pit. He can be reached at fletcher@mercenary.com. And we still want to know what he really thinks!
December 2003 Live Sound International