[LAD] Half-OT: Fader mapping - was - Ardour MIDI tracer

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 23 August 2014 08:11:01 Ralf Mardorf did opine
And Gene did reply:
> On Sat, 2014-08-23 at 07:56 -0400, Grekim Jennings wrote:
> > I have a Presonus Audiobox which can sound fine for an acoustic
> > guitar, but throw a drum at it and it is automatically over full
> > scale and unusable.
> 
> Actually you cant blame a preamp, if the microphone is missing a PAD
> switch.

That is not something I have seen in a mike, but one really should carry 
an adapter to allow the mike to be fed into a line input.

Sent out to record a session of the State University of Iowa Scottish 
Highlanders, which was scheduled to be on a 20 or so acre practice field, 
it started to rain so they had moved into a quonset hut along one edge of 
the property.

I had the best tape deck in our inventory at Woodburn Sound Service in 
Iowa City, a Tandberg, which had slightly better specs than a Berlant we 
also had, and a legendarily good mike, an Altec M-21-b (hey this is 1957 
folks & that mike sold new for 600 1957 dollars!) when they fired up the 
22 bagpipes inside that quonset hut, it was not only painful to my ears, I 
found I had to clip lead the mike into the line input, and was hitting +3 
on the vu meter at a gain crank of about 1.25 on a 10 scale.

But the recording itself turned out fairly decent and we sold about 65 
copies on single sided acetate disks, cut on our own recording lathe.  The 
M-21-b was a powered condenser mike, ran on 150 volts of bias, had a 6AT6 
vacuum tube in it for a cathode follower output and could make around 140 
volts p-p at its output into a 10k load.  That was the mike they used to 
record the cannon shots, about 6" below the muzzle of the cannon, for the 
Mercury Records version of the Overture of 1812.

With that sort of headroom in its output, it simply didn't clip.  It was 
also rated 20HZ-17Khz flat.  When Emory Cook went to Trinidad to record 
the then illegal steel drums, the recordings also contained the crickets, 
very faithfully reproduced on his 78 rpm lp's of the day.

But my lifelong familiarity with tinnitus started in that quonset hut.  
And I haven't heard a cricket in 50 some years.  OTOH, wearing out several 
high power rifle barrels at the target range over the last 50 years has 
also had its effect even if wearing 30+ db ear muffs to do it.

Un-Funny thing about that is that when I walk into a store with an 
ultrasonic Doppler burglar alarm, I am in instant ear pain and can't get 
out of that store soon enough.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
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