DAT-heads Digest #831
Contents:
quick SHN trades (Bob Ramstad)
Tom Petty "Mini Tour" Dates ("Darrin McKeehen")
Zefiro ZA2 (David Minches)
Re: Zerifo Inbox Question ("Erick del Valle")
RV: Zerifo Inbox Question ("Erick del Valle")
Zoltrix Nightangale warning ("Pat K")
Matrix ?s (SBD + DAT) (acffh)
DAT>PC sound card problems: a solder-free future? (Peter.Snowdon@cec.eu.int)
ISO One for Woody (Tommy & Robin Danscuk)
DAT's up for grabs (Deadtour@cs.com)
RE: Zoltrix Nightangale warning (Warren Melnick)
re: dat to pC (rob@allstarupgrades.com)
Jeff Beck Portland, ME Tree (Jmratman@aol.com)
ISO NICK CAVE from last night (PoFA...SF) (jay)
Audio CD-R (PAUL HOVORAK)
Re: DAT "LP" mode (Len Moskowitz)
From: Bob Ramstad <rramstad@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: quick SHN trades
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 16:21:47 -0800
I have the following SHN discs for immediate trade:
The Cure, Glastonbury Festival, London, England 6/24/90
Echo and the Bunnymen, Empire Theatre, Liverpool England, 1988
Public Image Ltd., Crawford Hall, Irvine CA 1992
Pearl Jam, Finsbury Park, London England, 1992
Peter Murphy, Ventura Theater, Ventura CA 1992
Suzanne Vega, Coach House, San Juan Capistrano CA, 1993
The The, Sony Studios, New York City, NY 1993
Each is from original Westwood One CDs that were borrowed from a radio
station. The lineage is CD->(digital)->DAT->(digital)->DAT->WAV->SHN.
No DAE and no resampling. I mastered these myself from DAT.
In SHN format, The Cure fits on a 74, and any two of the others fits
together on a 74. In audio format, The Cure fits on an 80, and pretty
much any two of the others fit on an 80. Long story short, all the
SHN files fit easily on 4x74.
I have some SHN copies made on TDK media and would love to send them
out for some quick trades. No jewel boxes, no writing on the discs,
just envelopes with info files on the discs. I am interested in
highest quality SHN material, especially non-jam band. Bootlegs which
have been "liberated" are great, too.
If you are not familiar with SHN, take a look at etree.org (which
seems to have been down for a few days) or at
http://www.gulftel.com/sharris/tapers/shn/links.htm
-- Bob
From: "Darrin McKeehen" <dmckeehen@hotmail.com>
Subject: Tom Petty "Mini Tour" Dates
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 02:06:05
May
9 - Corvallis, OR - Gill Coliseum (on sale 3/31)
11 - Nampa, ID - Idaho Center (on sale 4/6)
12 - George, WA - The Gorge (on sale 3/31)
15 - Denver, CO - Red Rocks (on sale 3/31)
16 - Albuquerque, NM - Journal Pavilion (on sale 3/31)
18 - The Woodlands, TX - Woodlands (on sale 4/7)
19 - San Antonio, TX - Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre (on sale 3/31)
21 - Dallas, TX - Smirnoff Music Center (on sale 4/14)
24, 25 - Santa Barbara, CA - Santa Barbara County Bowl (on sale 4/7)
27 - Marysville, CA - Sacramento Valley Amphitheatre (on sale 3/31)
28 - Concord, CA - Chronicle Pavilion (on sale 4/1)
30 - San Diego, CA - Open Air Theatre (on sale 3/30)
June
1, 2 - Las Vegas, NV - The Joint (The Hard Rock Hotel) (on sale 3/31)
Aren't the names of some of these venues getting ridiculous??!!
Seems like Deer Creek is now called Verizon Wireless Music Center of
something idiotic like that......
Don't mix that up w/ the Smirnoff Music Center ")
Mary Jane's Last Dance
D-Rider
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
From: David Minches <dminches@snip.net>
Subject: Zefiro ZA2
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 22:48:47 -0500
Not that they (Greg) is closing up shop, what other options are there for a
card that can be used to transfer DAT to PC and do sampling frequency
conversion?
From: "Erick del Valle" <edelvalle@netline.cl>
Subject: Re: Zerifo Inbox Question
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 00:05:19 -0500
From: Len Moskowitz <moskowit@panix.com>
Subject: Re: Zerifo Inbox Question
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 15:12:33 -0500 (EST)
Cameron <TheWarehouse41@aol.com> wrote:
> what will I need to connect a Zefiro Inbox to a Sony D8 (please be as
> specific as possible)?
If you have Sony's RK-DA10 coaxial input cable, add a 1/8" mono miniplug
adapter to the RK-DA10's RCA plug, and
it will plug into the InBox's coax output.
Hey Len, what about the sony RK-DA10P, it will works fine?
Erick
From: "Erick del Valle" <edelvalle@netline.cl>
Subject: RV: Zerifo Inbox Question
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 00:07:40 -0500
>From: Len Moskowitz <moskowit@panix.com>
>Subject: Re: Zerifo Inbox Question
>Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 15:12:33 -0500 (EST)
>
>Cameron <TheWarehouse41@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> what will I need to connect a Zefiro Inbox to a Sony D8 (please be as
>> specific as possible)?
>
>If you have Sony's RK-DA10 coaxial input cable, add a 1/8" mono miniplug
>adapter to the RK-DA10's RCA plug, and
>it will plug into the InBox's coax output.
Hey Len, what about the sony RK-DA10P, it will works fine?
Erick
From: "Pat K" <Hoobash@hotmail.com>
Subject: Zoltrix Nightangale warning
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 00:19:09 -0500
I got myself one of these cards. I add the cable for coax digital input as
directed. I got signal with lots of clicks in it. I sold the card and the
next owner(d8) had the same trouble. I thought the trouble was my awia hd-s1
deck. It wasnt. I searched around deja and found I wasnt the only person
having troubles. I also tried cmedia 8378 onboard a pcchips motherboard. I
had the same troubles there. Some of them work right and some dont. If you
want a sound card with cmedia that will work try the midiman 2448. It only
cost $90.
From: acffh <morst@itis.com>
Subject: Matrix ?s (SBD + DAT)
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 23:38:13 -0600
In theory, any mixer with the correct number of inputs (4) will get you there,
if you have the adaptors to hook it up. In practice, most small amateur
mixers are designed to take up to only about 0.8v. This Semi-pro gear will
not be able to handle the ~1.4v professional-level SBD signal without
overloading, so if you don't have enough headroom in your mixer, you would
need something like in-line attenuators, also called pads (they pad the volume
down and keep hot signals from overloading the input channels)
Now, many pro and semi-professional mixing consoles have built-in pads on each
input channel, but if you aren't able to get one of those, you could just
attenuate (turn down) the hot signals with a bit of extra circuitry as I
mentioned. Naturally, if you want low noise charactaristics, you would be
well-served to look into a good quality mixer that has what you need built-in,
rather than having to add more complexity. I have heard of people using
Samson mixpads in the field, they can run on DC power and have 4 imputs, but
if you have a SBD patch, you might be able to get house AC as well, and have a
lot more flexibility as to your choice of mixing gear. Mackie's 1202 would be
probably be a good-sounding option especially if they have the VLZ preamps for
your mics available on that model- I know they put them in the 1604, not sure
about the 1202. I'm not certain, but the 1202 might also take batteries for
portable operation.
Now, about the delay- if you can place your mics on the stage, that will cut
down the delay time almost to nothing. If you're mic'ing from the middle of
the house, it would be desirable to delay the SBD feed with the best quality
delay unit you can use, (speed of sound at sea level is about 720 feet /
second, use that as a guide to figure the millisecond delay- 1000ms=720 feet)
You can measure the distance from the mics to the sound source (the main
speaker stacks, probably) and figure 1000/720 ms/foot to get the timing for
the delay (examples- 72 feet away from the stacks delay would be 100ms. At 36
feet away, you're looking at 50ms) It's gonna be close to that for most
applications, I guess high-altitude recording would be different!
If you really wanted to be a stickler for audio perfection, you could convert
the SBD signal to digital, and the mic feed to digital, and use a digital
mixer to delay and combine the signals. If possible, start with 24-bit
quantization, mix at 20 bits and dither to 16 for the DAT deck, that way all
the self noise from each stage should be nicely buried by the inherent
limitaion of the next one, just like professional recording- Record the
tracks on 2" analog, mix to 1/2" analog, then dump it to digital for
distibution to the masses who only have 16-bit resolution in their cars, boom
boxes, and even most home audiophile systems anyhow. . .
Like Einstein said: everything should be made as simple as possible, but NOT
SIMPLER!!! (my caps)
Hope that's simple enough to be helpful without losing the gnarley details!
-tom / acffhmorST
hahahahahahahahaha!!!
PS- I mix sound for a band called Reason For Leaving- see our website-
http://www.rflmusic.com and let it be known that any video or audio tapers can
bring their rigs to our shows and experiment, we love it!
-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=--==--==-=-=-=-=-==--=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=----=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-==-
I am looking to tape a show with a combination of the SBD and my mics. My
questions are... What can I use to combine the 2 in a reasonably priced
manner? And also is there a delay between the board feed and mic recording?
The venue will be small but will this still be an issue? Any help would be
appreciated.
-Heikki
From: Peter.Snowdon@cec.eu.int
Subject: DAT>PC sound card problems: a solder-free future?
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 09:51:57 +0200
>>the zoltrix card seems the way to go, but it has optical inputs. core
sounds does not have a 7pin>optical cable (or am i just missing it?). anyone
have info on where to get one? i'd like to avoid any soldering if i can help
it.<<
i've been looking a lot at soundcards recently, and have decided to go with
the RME hammerfall lite. you get two optical I/O, one coax I/O, and one
internal (for CDROM e.g.): all of them digital. the card supports s/pdif,
toslink and adat formats. and if you have audio software which uses ASIO
drivers, you can get fabulously low latency.
the fact that the optical I/Os can both be used as ADAT means in effect that
if you ever want to expand your set up to include studio-based analogue
input, you can have up to 16 stereo channels on the go simultaneously!
also, drivers are available for mac and linux, as well as windows.
the list price is $545, but you can find it for less than that if you look
around a little.
http://www.rme-audio.com/english/index.htm
the only snag is that you need some sort of D/A for monitoring purposes. so
this is not the lowest cost solution out there. but it is highly expandable
and adaptable, which - since i'm just starting out and have no idea where
this new 'hobby' is going to lead me - makes me feel that at least my
investment is relatively future-proof.
(this recommendation is based on reading dozens of articles in the audio
magazines, and talking at length to several dealers on different continents:
the personal experience part is set to start in 2-3 weeks time...)
peter
From: Tommy & Robin Danscuk <robntom@optonline.net>
Subject: ISO One for Woody
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 07:27:13 -0500
Seeking One for Woody from the Microtech Gefell source that has circulated.
Lots of stuff in return.
Tommy
From: Deadtour@cs.com
Subject: DAT's up for grabs
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 08:17:01 EST
With the summer festival season right around the corner, I thought I would
clean house a little bit. I am offering the following DAT tapes in trade for
new sealed Sony tapes. Preference goes to the person who wishes to take them
all.
Phish - 9-15-00 Hershey,PA (set 2 only) (1)60m
Phish - 9-17-00 Merriweather,MD (2)60m
Phish - 7-8-00 Alpine, WI (2)60m
Phil & Friends - 7-28-00 Camden, NJ (1)60m
Phil & Friends - 7-29-00 Merriweather, MD (1)90m
The Recipe - 12-31-00 Lancaster, PA NYE (2)60m
Ratdog - 12-01-00 Electric Factory, PA (1)90m
The Other Ones - 9-16-00 Camden, NJ (1)90m
Bob Dylan - 7-23-00 SPAC (1)60m
Merl Saunders - 6-16-00 MAMA Fest, MD (1)60m
Inca Campers - 12-31-00 Lancaster, PA NYE (1)60m
Total Count is eleven 60m and three 90m tapes. They must be Sony DG60P and
Sony DG90P computer grade tapes.
All recordings were made with the following rig:
3 Nakamichi CM-300 mic. bodies (multiple capsule combinations) > Nakamichi
MX-100 three mic. mixer > TCD-D8.
Except for the Dylan which was recorded with Nakamichi 700 series > M1.
None of the tapes have printed covers or setlists. I do have CD covers with
that info.
More offers to come.
Please e-mail me privately if interested or if you have any questions
Thanks,
Chris Brown
From: Warren Melnick <warren.melnick@astata.com>
Subject: RE: Zoltrix Nightangale warning
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 08:44:00 -0500
There is one thing to note with the nightingale - they do have a noticable
number of bad boards. What you describe happened to me. They cross-shipped
me a new board and no more problems.
================
Warren Melnick
Director of Research and Development
Astata Corporation
=====Original Message=====
From: Pat K [mailto:Hoobash@hotmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 12:19 AM
To: datheads
Subject: Zoltrix Nightangale warning
I got myself one of these cards. I add the cable for coax digital input as
directed. I got signal with lots of clicks in it. I sold the card and the
next owner(d8) had the same trouble. I thought the trouble was my awia hd-s1
deck. It wasnt. I searched around deja and found I wasnt the only person
having troubles. I also tried cmedia 8378 onboard a pcchips motherboard. I
had the same troubles there. Some of them work right and some dont. If you
want a sound card with cmedia that will work try the midiman 2448. It only
cost $90.
From: rob@allstarupgrades.com
Subject: re: dat to pC
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 11:16:07 -0500
>>> To the people interested in the Zoltrix nightingale. Word of warning,=
if
you check the dat-heards archives you will see that the Zoltrix does
Re-sampling of all digital input at all times. THis card will not do pure
digital transfers. <<<
Please don't spread disinformation. You couldn't be more wrong! I think=
you're confusing the Zoltrix with the Soundblaster.
The Zoltrix Nightingale will do perfect digital transfers at 44.1kHz or=
48kHz. There is no unnecessary resampling because the card does not have=
the ability to resample even if you wanted it to!
Rob
=A0
"The prestige of the government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably=
by the prohibition laws. Nothing is more destructive of respect for the=
government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be=
enforced."
- Albert Einstein, physicist, philosopher, Nobel Laureate. 1879-1955.
From: Jmratman@aol.com
Subject: Jeff Beck Portland, ME Tree
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 11:38:38 EST
This tree is now closed. Look for a structure sent to you personally by the end of the week.
JR
From: jay <jay@3rdperson.com>
Subject: ISO NICK CAVE from last night (PoFA...SF)
Reply-To: jay@3rdperson.com
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 10:17:48 -0800
Wow,
I saw nick cave for the first time last night at the Palace of Fine
Arts in San Francisco(went with some big fans) and had a great time. I
found him quite entertaining and his new song to be pretty funny. If
anyone taped this show I'd really like to get a copy on DAT or CD. I
have nothing from this genre to trade, but lots of Medeski Martin and
Wood that I can trade if you're interested in hearing some quality piano
and keyboard playing from a different genius with a different style. If
you're not into that, I would gladly take a B&P instead.
Thanks,
Jay
From: PAUL HOVORAK <washaufizzi@yahoo.com>
Subject: Audio CD-R
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 10:05:40 -0800 (PST)
I was wondering what the consensus of opinion is on
using digital input to a Audio CD-R for DAT to CD
conversion. Specifically Phillips CD-R's.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail.
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=text
From: Len Moskowitz <moskowit@panix.com>
Subject: Re: DAT "LP" mode
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 15:21:53 -0500 (EST)
<DHami44862@aol.com> wrote:
> ...Pushing the little switch thingy on your DAT machine over to that
> "friendly" little LP mode, will do more then just increase you recording
> length, in order to give you more time on the tape, your recorders A>D
> convertors must do something with the quantization bits that cannot be stored
> due to decreased tape speed. They are discarded. This results in loss of
> audio quality, generally in the upper most frequency's, which will, in the
> end give you just about the same compression scheme and audio quality as Mini
> Disc.
This is correct.
Back in '93, when the TCD-D3 came out, Greg Hanssen (of Zefiro
Acoustics) decoded the 32 kHz LP format and found that it was a
non-linear 12-bit code. This means that it discards information and
increases distortion when compared to the linear PCM code that DATs
otherwise use. And the fact that it uses a 32 kHz sampling rate means
that *all* frequencies above roughly 15 kHz will simply not get on tape.
Here are Greg's posts:
From: Greg Hanssen <hanssen@cssgi.mdc.com>
Subject: LP mode (32k sampling)
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 10:17:26 -0700
Hello folks...
One thing I'd been meaning to try with the SPDIF card was to see how
Sony encodes a 16bit signal into 12 bits for the LP mode on their DAT
machines. Well last night I conducted some experiments and (for those
who are interested) here's what I found:
First off, they say it's non linear, so they aren't just chopping off the
4 least significant bits (that would dramatically reduce the dynamic range).
Instead, I assumed they were using a log scale transform such as the phone
company does for its digital network. The method is called companding and
involves encoding quiet sounds with a lot of precision and louder sounds
with less precision. I would have expected sony to use a ROM to encode
the 16 bit (65536) to 12 bit (4096) and back again, but it turns out the
transform is a lot more linear than I expected. If we treat a 16 bit sample
from a DAT or CD player as a number from -32768 to +32767 and have a discrete
value for every quantization level in between we get 65536 values. But the
signals recorded in LP mode still have (almost) the same range, but only
4096 discrete quantized values in between. It turns out there are discrete
ranges of values that get encoded with different precisions. If you look
at the bit representations it really makes a lot more sense, but here's how
they do it:
The innermost values (close to 0) (the most quiet sounds) are encoded one
for one, so a really soft piece of music would be encoded exactly the same
in LP mode as it would normal mode (excwept for the sample rate obviously).
These values range from -512 to +511, so we have 1024 of the 4096 (12 bit)
values that are encoded one for one.
The next louder values -768 to -512 and +511 to 767 are encoded at 2 for 1.
So now we're encoding 256 * 2 + 1024 + 256 * 2 (or 1536) values in
oopps.. I wish I was using an editor for this... that adds up to 2048 values
of the 16 bit signal encoded into 1536 values of the 12 bit... sorry..
The next range of values (in the 12 bit domain) -1024 to -767 and 767 to 1023
are encoded 4 to 1 (ie, the 2 least significant bits in this range are
chopped off)... this keeps going more and more outward until the last range
which encodes the really large (loud) signals with just 1 discrete value
per 64 values in 16 bit mode. All in all this gives us:
256 * 64 +
256 * 32 +
256 * 16 +
256 * 8 +
256 * 4 +
256 * 2 +
1024 (centered around zero) +
256 * 2 +
256 * 4 +
256 * 8 +
256 * 16 +
256 * 32 +
256 * 64 = 65536 (or 16 bits!)
of course this is all done with only 256 * 6 + 1024 + 256 * 6 (or 4096) values
.. which is 12 bits.
This transform is actually pretty easy to do in hardware, and I now see why\
Sony did it this way rather than using a 64k ROM do do a more precise log
function... I plotted it out on my screen with the 12 bit samples on the
horizontal (4096 values) and the cooresponding 16 bit samples (-32768 to
32768) plotted on the vertical, and it looks something like this:
(Greg's going to try to draw with dots)
------------------------------
From: Greg Hanssen <hanssen@cssgi.mdc.com>
Subject: LP mode again.
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 10:23:30 -0700
Well that was dumb.. I draw with dots and the mail program takes it
as an EOF.
Ok, well I'll draw my 12bit to 16bit transform with plus signs.
+
+
+
++
++
++
++++
++++
++++
++++++++
++++++++
++++++++
++++
++++
++++
++
++
++
+
+
+
Something like that. Anyway, as you can see, samples close to zero (the
center) are given a lot of discrete values (1 to 1 actually) to encode
really soft signals, whereas loude (larger) signals have less and less
possible discrete values giving it less precision. This is how
Sony crams 16 bit values into 12... I hope somebody else out there found
this as interesting as I did!
--GH
I only use LP mode when I don't need the highest fidelity and need its
longer continous recording time.
> Perhaps Len Moskowitz, resident recording genius at Core Sound, friend to
> audiophile recording people everywhere might lend his insight.
<blush!>
I hope that this helped.
Len Moskowitz Binaural and StealthMics (tm), Cables, Interfaces
Core Sound http://www.stealthmicrophones.com
Teaneck, New Jersey http://www.core-sound.com
moskowit@core-sound.com Tel: 201-801-0812, FAX: 201-801-0912
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