The AM Forum

I do indeed detect an improvement in audio quality with all-vacuum tube analog ham gear compared to what I get with a firmware DSP type receiver, which sounds good in a sterile clinical way, but is flat and dull sounding at the same time. 

I also have just discovered that I, or more precisely, my stereo, is an object of scorn to some, because it represents the old way of listening to music, which is to sit, and well, listen to the music which is to say, give it my undivided attention, since it is supposed to be enjoyable, otherwise, why would I be doing all this?

But no, such ancient apparatus such as analog stereos, vinyl records, CDs even, and (cover your ears or in this case your eyes) dare I write it, speakers are the equipment of the old order along with the high fidelity that went with them, because now, all music or any sort of sound recording, is to be compressed, folded, stapled and spindled, in a tiny box with little ear pods, so the nose produced can be heard while multitasking.  We no longer want to just sit and listen to something--BORING! and the new barometric indicator of this is that younger consumers prefer what I would consider poor sound reproduction quality over something with fidelity. 

How did I learn all this?  Start reading here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10audio.html

At least now I know why cell phone audio is tolerated and why I stick with a copper land line.  It's for the same reason I stick with my 30 year old stereo.  I'm old.

Rob

I can't imagine hearing Inna Godda Da Vida on an iPod with earbuds. ::)

John

^^ Indeed.  Best served from a hissette deck into aftermarket 6X9s shoehorned into the back deck  ;D

Inna-gadda-da-vida is 17 minutes long.  It was 27 miles from my college campus in Mankato, MN to Waseca, MN via US 14, going thru the small towns of Eagle Lake and Janesville, both popular speed traps.  Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it, is to drive from Mankato to Waseca before the end of the song.

Did it many times in my old '78 Fury 440 police interceptor...

John, good to talk to you Sunday night.  I'll probably be QRT for the next several days due to wx and Dayton hamvention.

JN you are certainly a man of mystery--Minnesota, Greece, 750 w. TMC rigs, what else have you not revealed?   :D

Sounds more like a Blues Brothers mission.........

Re: ipods & true HiFi, I don't think any one will be shoving this in the Ol' aural canal any time soon:

 http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=223270

Kind of like watching the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" at home. Somehow its just not the same.  ;)

Inna Godda Da Vida in my primer red 60 Pontiac and high school sweetie

Anyone know what Inna Godda da Vida means? 

I use to listen to Inna Godda Da Vida in my 62 Dodge Lancer with a JC Penny's 8 track with Lafayette bookshelf speakers in the back seat.  Oh yes, I can't forget the color organ under the dash!   
Joe, W3GMS 

Definitely Audio Karma here. I prefer the sound of my hissette deck in my 2003 LeSabre over the CD sound. My vehicle has both and the tapes are really nice. Your typical Dolby HX recorded flat.
A little Infinity sub bass for a little more ooomph.

The tube amps have a nicer sounding bass and the high end doesn't hurt.

Fred

The legend is that the singer was incredibly stoned and was mumbling "in the garden of Eden"...

Indeed, the maroon Fury in the pic was identical to mine.  The white decal was removed from the doors but it still had the state serial # sticker across the back.

Means the DJ needs an extended trip to the bathroom.

In-a-gadda-da-vida wasn't in the rotation at WTOS (don't ask me why). Our usual "gotta grab a newspaper" selection consisted of Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold", or almost anything from Pink Floyd's "Animals" album. Long about the mid-90s, a band called Seahorses came out with a tune called "Love is the Law". The radio edit was the usual 3-ish minutes, but the album cut went a little over ten. We never played the radio edit.

For those really long absences (as in "gotta run home for a few") I had a 1/4" half-track open-reel mix of Pink Floyd's "Echoes", with "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" played over the whalesong guitar in the middle. That was 27 minutes, if I recall correctly.

Needless to say, I had a lot of fun messing with the heads of all the stoners listening to us in the overnight hours. Gained a following for it, too.

Now it's just another completely dead art form.

I was really hung up on LARGE fast cars in my teens/20's. I picked up a retired unmarked police highway '78 Impala in the 80's. (I'll post pics some time).
I kept it bone stock outside with the alley light but it ended up with a mild 454, TH400, Hooker hdrs, a full length 3" exhaust and tall gearing w/ 3:08's . It wasn't Realy FF but certainly FF for a full frame bannana boat and it loved the Hiway. Audio was a mish mash of Cerwin Vega, klipsch, a Sony head/amp, home made cross overs and a healthy home brew, mid-range bass cabinet . ( not ghetto style bass )  
I was a freak for drive train dynamic balancing and the car would drift up well over 100 if one didn't pay attention on the PA trnpk, NY thrwy or up in MI at school.
My girlfriend at the time would steel the Impala and leave me her Honda accord.
I don't have to tell you where the gas guage would be on return.  :P

*funny, I got quite, ahemm, Lost this weekend listening to Floyd's Animals LP.... ;)
amazing stuff on there and good for the blood pressure.


** "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" can sneak up on you after being lulled off bye the first tracks, it can be a bit freaky if your not ready for it  ;D

This is nothing new.

The first reduction in quality of "consumer audio" for the sake of convenience to be widely accepted by the public occurred when hissette tapes displaced reel-to-reel.  I suppose 8-tracks could be included as well, but they hit a dead end because they were cumbersome and didn't work very well, and weren't all that convenient anyway.

That's one of the reasons "HD Radio" hasn't taken off. Nobody really cares about the alleged improvement in sound quality over analogue FM, if indeed it does exist. 90% of the stuff spewed out on the AM band (political/sports talk) could just as well be delivered via slopbucket. What all commercial broadcast radio needs is new directions in content.

The home stereo component system complete with full size speakers, like amateur radio, would be considered by some to be "faintly embarrassing".

But then, at the other extreme, audiophiles spend tens of thousands of dollars on "high end" audio. In addition there is the misguided audiophile crowd, AKA "audiophools", who have  been conned by tricksters' smoke-and-mirrors into sinking huge fortunes into bogus audio crap like $600 power cords, $1000 speaker cables, wooden volume control knobs, cable break-in, oxygen-free copper, "tessitura", ad nauseam.

 ;D ;D ;D

Same trip with the song, "El Paso."  Remember,  "Out in the West Texas town of El Paso I fell in love with a Mexican girl." ??

I heard an old DJ tell the story - they would put that record on when it was time to take care of busness. When they heard the bathroom monitor saying, "I felt a bullet go deep in my chest,"  they knew it was time to get out the paper and start moving fast... ;D

T

Well Don, if the proof is in the puddin', people are coming around. Forget about picking up any decent vintage reel to reel or even marginal tube AF amps, on
e-pay, etc. on the cheap. There is a strange Renaissance taking place toward "commodious" vintage, audio gear.

com·mo·di·ous   /kəˈmoʊdiəs/  Show Spelled[kuh-moh-dee-uhs]  Show IPA
–adjective
1.spacious and convenient; roomy: a commodious apartment.
2.ample or adequate for a particular purpose: a commodious harbor.   ;)

You are correct and, other than church, my first encounter with the song was 1957.  I can't remember the artist name but it was sung as a ballad.  If you would like to research some lyrics from an old tune that you appreciated in such poor quality in your past years, try this link:  http://lyrics.astraweb.com/    In 1957 I didn't have a cassett or 8 track so AM had to do for romancing the sto...er girl.

I was dialing around the web in past weeks and came across several sites that are pushing vinyl again.  It has a big following in the high end crowd.  Wonder if we will go back to worrying about scratching records again?  Oh well what is new is old and what is old is new.

The problem with CD's is that the digital to analogue sample rate leaves audible "teeth" on the waveform. The Super Audio CD was supposed to correct that, but unfortunately that technology has apparently gone the way of the Sony MiniDisc, another quality product that never quite caught on with the public.

I can appreciate the virtues of vinyl, but every place I have ever lived, the environment has been too dusty to keep records from becoming full of annoying ticks and pops after only a few plays despite my best efforts to keep them clean.  Also, vinyl doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range even of regular CD's.

I remember my greatest record cleaning disaster was  back in the 70's.  I purchased a thing called a "record preener".  It was a cylinder covered with something like velvet, with plastic foam inside.  It came with a bottle of liquid cleaner that was squirted into the cylinder to saturate the foam.  The idea was that the liquid would migrate to the surface to wet the velvet, and with the record turning, you lightly laid the velvet surface on the rotating disc, and the wet fibres would extend down into the grooves and clean out the crud, plus neutralise any static buildup.

The thing worked.  I could clean a record and would always find a line of dust and crud on the surface of the preener.  It was easy to wipe off the preener to make it clean for next use.  It substantially reduced the crackles and pops.

To keep the liquid from evaporating during storage, the preener was inserted inside a hollow plastic cylinder that was relatively air tight. My great disaster occurred when some kind of fungus contaminated the liquid and the soup incubated, leaving a sticky gummy residue on the velvet surface.  I ruined several records before I figured out what was going on.  I still have those records but have never found a way to clean the gunk out the grooves.  It leaves the sound extremely distorted and sometimes causes the record to skip, plus it added a tremendous amount of surface noise.

Hell, DON,
I just take my vinyl to the sink and wash in warm soapy Dawn and rinse.
The Audio Karma folks are usually pretty down-to-earth with the audio stuff. Not too much Phoolery with the magic cables, etc.
They love Fishers and Magnavox and the old "electronic Coffins".........consoles

Fred

Sad thing is that with the high speed A/Ds and the technology available - digital high fidelity could be great.

But no one cares about music quality -  the IPOD is king.

I tried that but the detergent seems to leave a waxy film of its own.  Don't remember what brand I used, but maybe the wrong stuff.

Best audio trick in the genre was the alternator whine mixed into the beginning of "Wish You Were Here."

Dave I always thought that was the sound of a high speed tape shuttle on an open reel machine, which would be appropro in 1971.  During fast-forward or rewind, the tape is lifted from the head stack, but enough gets through on the playback head to hear it do just that. It even changes pitch as the reels shift their load, and the spooling motor feels the change in ratio, just like a set of gears.

"Wish You Were Here" - Eddy Fisher, 1956?  One of the first 78's that came along with my new Philco kiddy AC/DC record player; electrocute the baby-boom larva.

Nostalgic thread,,,,,,,,,loved the LP album art.

Don, DAWN dish washing soap will not leave any residue on the vinyl.

There were two songs that I could 'SEE' where the record cutting engineeer widened the grooves for more volume/bass. Like the big grooves on those 10 inch dance records
"Stained Class".....Judas Priest towards the end of the cut. The ending increases about 3dB
"Life's Been Good"..........album version...........Joe Walsh transistion from radio version to the LP version............heavy bass and drums
ohhh boy we're going audio here
Fred

Fred, Detroit said wins on race day tranlate to sales on the showroom floor. HiFi AF ragchews could be argued to contribute to on air quality HF comm.  ;)  

Ivory liquid is my favorite. It's great on greasy hands and will cut through anything else it's used on. Plus, it has copious amounts of alcohol too.  No residue. You're squeaky clean. 

I used to use the Disc Washer system. It had the fluid you applied to a velvet brush. It work for the most part getting dust off of an LP but I always found washing with Ivory, luke warm water and a horse hair brush to be superior to any commercial LP cleaning device. Even the record cleaning machines some record shops had.

I entered the audio scene middle late sixties built numerous speaker systems from the
first draft of two 5 inch speakers wired off the alarm clock radio to just buying a
Marshall twin stack.. ;D ya ya ya Big Sound.. ;D and wiring the tuner an Tape machine in  :)

But whatever I did I always tested the bass response with the beginning of these two songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBnSWJHawQQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc0XEw4m-3w

73

Jack.

Sounds exactly like an automotive alternator with a shorted diode. The pitch changes quickly like in a car when it shifts gears. The tune starts out with the bottom rolled off like the sound of an auto radio. 

Funk was where it waz at..:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll3uipTO-4A

73

Jack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBI-pBJg7aI

Klaatu!  Wow Don, now that brings me back.  I received the Hope album for my 13th birthday.  What way out there psychedelic Beatlesque warning to the human race.  Planet destruction is such a drag.  Thanks for the flashback.

Those citizens who questioned, those suspect harborers of doubt, were brought before a panel of the Ministry of Health.
They were tested and encephalographed
'Til rendered quite insane
When in accordance with the laws
They reprocessed their brains

Klaatu reminds me somewhat of the Synthesized Beethoven tracks from Clockwork Orange.
Interesting stuff. I haven't heard this since grade school and some never.

Get some elmers wood glue and with the record spinning squeeze some out on it. You want just enough to be able so spread it thinly with thin plastic spatula or junk credit card. Once the glue is completely dry, you can remove it in one complete sheet, the glue will rip out the gunk right along with it. You dont want it too thin ir too thick. Practice makes perfect.

Done this to a cruded up The Guess Who album and it rally made a big difference.

2.Archaic  Suitable; handy.
[Middle English, convenient , from Medieval Latin commodiōsus , from Latin commodus  : com- , com-  + modus , measure ; see  med-  in Indo-European roots.]

Not to be confused with odious.

It's an Electronic Renaissance
http://amfone.net/Amforum/index.php?topic=21605.0

I never put much stock in "lifestyle". It always seemed like a contrived fad no matter which way you look at it. In some ways, contrived by powers to generate revenue by creating an image to which people with any level of disposable income are "driven".

The only bc station I worked at was a top 40 country station with jingles, short 45s in rotation and you had to grit ur teeth and hold on until network news at the top of the hour.  Fortunately, there was so much to do that you didn't have time to think of your bio break needs. 

Someone has used reel to reel gear, I think it is M.W. Persons.  I'll check and post a link if I'm right.  Yeah, he has Revox A77 and a lot of parts:  http://www.mwpersons.com/revox.html

Rob

My favorite Klaatu song was "ANUS of URANUS"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeUMpAy1NK0

Fred

A cool thread: 'tubes, tape and cars!'.  While I'm all for analogue audio -- I have a homebrewed PP tube amp driving B&W speakers, via a new turntable given to us as wedding gift 2 1/2 yrs ago (my XYL and I still buy vinyl) -- I won't knock iPod.  

I had a surreal experience listening to an iPod while waiting for a flight out of Vancouver.   Sitting in the passenger lounge and facing a 2 1/2 hr. wait for my flight; I pulled out my iPod (the basic/cheapest Nano) to listen to mostly live blues: Johnny Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Albert King.  Sitting there looking out over the tarmac at the snow capped mountains in the distance, I could almost feel the heat from the tube amps and thought I was at those concerts.  A memorable listening and 'involving listening experience'.  

And for the really nasty crusted moldy vinyl that you sometimes pick up: try running it through the dishwasher.  It gets them at least playable.

73  Alex

one of the ones we grew up with:  ;D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDkhzHQO7jY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgps85scy1g&feature=related

Vinyl record cleaning:   I found that a 50-50 solution of Everclear (near pure grain alcohol) and water, with a teeny tiny amount of Photoflow (a surfactant) cleaned vinyl records better than any other solution I ever tried.  I made some "mittens" out of white velvet (Dyed velvet "runs" from the alcohol) to gently get down into the grooves.  And, if possible, a rinse with distilled water helps more.  The Black Velvet is for later during the listening sessions.

Long album cuts:  When the cart machines that had the trip cues option developed, it kind of solved the problem of 2 minute 45's and the urgent bathroom visit syndrome problem.  You simply engaged the trip cues at the end of each cut to fire off the next cart machine.  6 cart machines @ 2 minutes each = 12 minutes of available "break" time.  The problem there was if the machine miscued, or the trip cue wasn't recorded on the cart, you ended up with the awful dead air.  There was ALWAYS a monitor speaker in the mens room.  And, when the trip cues failed, there was always the hilarious scene of the on-air person running back to the studio, pulling his pants up as he hobbled down the hallway.

There was also the opportunity to "simulate" a monitor speaker failure, while the on-air guy was taking care of business, and turn the monitor amp off while he was out of the studio.  We'd kill the amp, hear a lot of hustling and bustling in the mens room. along with some language taught at truck drivers school, and in a few seconds, the on-air guy was running down the hall, somewhat disheveled, back into the studio.  Then we'd hear another round of truck driver talk when he found out there really was no failure.  We'd have to explain that the "manager" wouldn't approve of the expense to repair an intermittent monitor amplifier.

Some choice albums that were specially placed in a "special bathroom" bin at a hard rock station I worked at included:  Kashmir - Led Zepplin, Revolution #9 - Beatles,  Roll Over Beethoven - ELO, Squonk - Genesis, etc.

73
Ted  W8IXY

Funny, I always thought it sounded an awful lot like a brush motor from a power tool (not that the two don't sound pretty much identical). The pitch changes never struck me as a gear shift.

Now I have to listen to it again when I get home. This'll bug me all week.  >:(

,

War,,,and Rare Earth..ya ya  :)

Listening carefully, it could be a reel-to-reel in rewind and someone slightly braking one of the reels to allow the tape to speed up and slow.
I would have to listen again on a clean vinyl or CD copy with headphones.

Fred

The one that bugged me most was the hook in "Every Morning" by Sugar Ray. I know it was something I'd heard many times and thought it was from Santana. After two years of searching it turned out to be "Suavecito" by Malo. Carlos' brother Jorge was in that group.