GoodBuyGuys Blog

When we were still active in event production, one of our “bread and butter” event types was conference audio. We live in a college town and there are lots of meetings that have to be reinforced for audiences and recorded for later transcription.While not as exciting as concert audio, this was lucrative work with good hours and a high quality clientele. Best of all, it did not require constant updating of equipment and trying to meet performers performance riders and eqiupment wish lists.

It did require microphones-lots of microphones. We worked with boundary mics like the Crown PCC160, podium goosneck mics like the Audio Technica 857 and more standard mics like the Shure SM57. Regardless of the mic choice, there was need for lots and lots of cabling. A neat look was always required and micing up tables, tucking wires under table skirting, long runs of multicables to prevent trip hazards and lots of taping down mic cables was always necessary. It meant a lot of set up and strike time.

Revolabs, a European microphone manufacturer, has a great new product that solves all those problems. Their Solo TableTop Wireless Boundary Microphone provides the conference audio technician with up to 16 separate, digitally encoded, boundary table mics. They are rechargable (only two hours charge time) and will perform for up to 8 hours of talk time. Over the life of this system, it could pay for itself in battery savings.
Revolabs offers this mic in both omni and cardiod patterns, so it should be possible to work this great idea into lots of different conference set ups.

Bandwidth is a very reasonable (for spoken word) 100-6800 hz and the range, depending on pickup pattern, can be as much as 100 feet.

This is a package any conference center might want to consider for their Christmas wish list.

Seen a good idea for audio technicians? Share it with us.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

The Wall Street Journal certainly isn’t thought of as a source of entertainment reviews. Nonetheless, their Friday edition almost always includes a compelling review of either the best or worst in new film and theatrical shows.

Last Friday, I had a chance to read a really fascinating review of the new Disney edition of Mary Poppins at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Broadway.

This was of particular interest to me, as this show, still in previews, has recently become a customer of ours. They have ordered Electratrac cables among other things, and we are proud to be a supplier.
We have supported a number of Broadway Tours (The Lion King, The Phantom of The Opera, The Producers, etc.) for many years but it has been tough to break into the New York Market. Finding customers for our supplies on Broadway has been all but impossible. The New York theatre community is very close and doesn’t quickly welcome outsiders.
The WSJ focuses on the show’s special effects and spends a lot of time differentiating this show form the movie. No Julie Andrews in this production. The describe the star, Ashley Brown, as a “prickly” and the sub-headline for the article is “a spoonful of vinegar“.

Still, their overall review is very popular and they predict that this show could run for decades.

Many lament the “Disneyfication” of Broadway, but between The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, it is hard to argue with success.

Congratulations to Kevin Barry in Mary Poppins electrics department. He has become valued customer and we look forward to his longtime success with this show.

Sometimes you just have to live vicariously. That’s one of the great things about working with the customers we have. They do great things.

Long-time customer Carolina Ballet just returned from a tour of China and they took us with them. Well, sort of, anyway.

On of his last stops before completing packing for the trip, our good friend Ross Kolman, the lighting designer, for Carolina Ballet, dropped by our warehouse to pick up a case of gaffers tape. Destination, Beijing. And six other Chinese cities.

Carolina Ballet took their adaptation of the classic Swan Lake half way around the world for three weeks of performances in China. Their trip was sponsored by the North Carolina Dept. of Commerce, and as an NC based business, we are proud to have played a small part in spreading the word about the terrific North Carolina arts community to Asia.

Carolina Ballet has been an expendables customer of ours since their beginning nine years ago. They have played to thousands of North Carolinians and we are proud that they have chosen to work with us.

Their holiday production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker is not to be missed.

We love to work with all sorts of arts groups. Tell us about yours!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

Matsushita, a Japanese consumer electronics company (you probably know them better as Panasonic) has come up with a clever solution to an age old flashlight dilemma.

Here’s the problem. You always have a flashlight around the house, and you always have batteries. But, when the power goes out, the batteries you have are always the wrong size for the flashlight with the dead batteries.

Matsushita has the solution. They have won an Industrial Design Excellence Award for a flashlight that will use three different sizes of batteries. Imagine being able to rob the remote control or your CD player when the lights go out. The Matsushita National BF-104

will use C cells, D cells, or AA cells. When one size runs down or is unavailable, just turn the switch and you have access to a whole new power source.

The National BF-104 flashlight is only $8.00 and is available directly from the company. Too bad the web site is in Japanese!

Seen a good (or bad) flashlight idea? Share it with us.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

We still occasionally rent sound equipment, and I just finished checking in a small sound sytstem rented by a student group. WHAT A MESS!

These guys had carefully taped down all the mic and speaker cables using duct tape-not the best choice, but certainly a common one. So far, so good.

When it came time to strike the cables, instead of taking up the duct tape, they pulled the cables up through the duct tape. Not an easy task! It took a lot of extra effort.

Now each cable had a thin stripe of duct tape (with bonus adhesive) running along its length. To top things off, they had left all the cables in somebody’s hot car trunk over the weekend.

Pulling a cable up THROUGH the tape forces the adhesive (a very sticky natural rubber) against the cable and coats it all over. Because the tape is mostly vinyl, with just a little fabric to reinforce it, the vinyl bonds itself to the wire jacket and immediately begins to attract dirt and stick to everything it touches.

Time for the M1. I have never seen anything perform as well as this stuff for removing sticky adhesives. M1 Adhesive Remover works wonders. Just a quick wipe with a soft cloth along the length of the cable cleans this problem up in a hurry. It works really well on scuff marks, latex paint, and all sorts of other sticky problems.

Got a good use for M1 (or any of our products) to share with our readers? Let us know.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Pro Gaffer gaffers tape, Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, M1 Adhesive Remover, Electratrac Multioutlet extension cords, OnStage Stand microphone stands, and lots of other useful great supplies.

Everytime I think that there are no good mic stand ideas left, I come across another one. Sennheiser has mated low tech to wireless in a really clever way with their new line of wireless mic stands.

Plug your mic into the top of the stand and a wireless transmitter-lots of companies like Sennheiser and Lectrosonics make these-into the base and you have a truly wireless solution that can be moved around a stage or set without any cabling issues. It also means that you can make a normally wired mic (e.g.- a backline amplifier mic) really wireless without buying more wireless mics.

Now that wireless mics have become reliable enough to use in situations where wired mics have been traditionally used (e.g. miking a drum kit) quick set and sound stage changes will become much easier.

Look for this stand to be used extensively on television award shows, or in any environment where fast stage set changes are necessary. It would be great for festival environments as well. As wireless mic battery life improves, this will become a workable solution in more and more entertainment production applications.
Here’s something else to look for. Sennheiser stands are extremely expensive. It won’t be long before one of the quality offshore stand makers comes out with something similar. Then we’ll really see this idea take off.

Have you seen a good new idea you’d like to share. Let us know!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Pro Gaffer gaffers tape, Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, wire ties from Bay State, Electratrac Multioutlet extension cords, OnStage Stand microphone stands, and lots of other useful great supplies.

I came across an interesting article recently in Consumer Reports about batteries-specifically battery life. I had hoped that it might clear up some questions we (and our customers) have about battery life. Unfortunately, it did just the opposite.

In a nutshell, the article came to the conclusion that battery performance was a function of the power drain of the device in use. It seems that a well designed and manufactured battery would have superior performance across the board, but that is not the case.

Why should one brand of battery give better results in a digital camera and another battery do better in a portable cd player. The magazine fails to address this basic question.

The number one use for our battery customers is in wireless microphones. There are fewer high drain devices using batteries and rarely is there a case when so many people might be impacted by poor battery performance. Consumer reports didn’t address wireless mics (not really a consumer device), but a lot of their conclusions are still worth considering.

One of their most interesting findings was that the performance of some generic (house brand) batteries was good. In fact, they rated the Kirkland Brand from Costco to be a better value (peformance and cost) than a number of national brands.

They also went out of their way to recommend that you always use the battery a manufacturer recommends with that device. It has always struck us as odd that Shure ships their wireless mics with Duracell CopperTops even though the Duracell Procell is what the market to the pro audio market.

It would be interesting to run a test of the Kirkland brand in a wireless mic. At a cost of $.20 each in volume, a real cost savings is a possibility. Maybe we’ll set up a test.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Pro Gaffer gaffers tape, Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, wire ties from Bay State, Electratrac Multioutlet extension cords, OnStage Stand microphone stands, and lots of other useful great supplies.

One of the most interesting stories floating around the net today involves a little company called U Tube. No I’m not talking about YouTube.com, I’m talking about a company that actually sells metal tube making machinery.

I am constantly working with our web developer, Dale, to build up traffic for our web sites. He does a great job, and our web traffic continues to grow.

How about if you could see your site visits go from hundreds a day to millions every day, literally overnight. That’s what happened to U Tube.

All the news coverage regarding Googles purchase of YouTube.com has apparently led to a bad case of “i can’t spell it itis” on the web. UTube.com has had to upgrade its servers three times, has seen its site crash daily, and is usually unavailable to its customers and prospects. U Tube has asked YouTube.com for assistance in resolving the problem, but no offer has been forthcoming. All they really want is help in changing their domain and getting a new site up and running

U Tube, an industrial equipment vendor in Perryville, OH, has been in business over 20 years and claims, rightly I believe, that Google owes them some consideration regarding the damage that has been done to their web presence. They claim that they have lost business because customers and prospects are regularly denied access to their web site while some college student is looking for yet another video of a dog catching a frisbee or somebody dropping Mentos into a Diet Coke bottle.

Since YouTube.com has been no help in getting this resolved, Ralph Girkins, the owner of Utube.com is now trying to decide whether to sue Google or simply sell his domain name to someone who wants to instantly have millions of site visitors.

I wish goodbuyguys had that sort of problem.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

If you follow this blog, you know that I’m no fan of rechargeable batteries. The majority of our battery customers use batteries in wireless microphones, and the performance of rechargeables in this application has real problems.

Still, we do support the concept of reuse in the products we sell whenever possible. One good example is Velcro’s One Wrap Straps. They’re handy and can used many, many times without creating any waste

Reusable tape? Now there’s an idea!

Thanks to Geico Insurance, everybody knows what a gecko is. Real geckos can’t talk, but they do have a very special characteristic that makes them amazing characters. They can walk upside down as easily as they walk right side up. Wall climbing? No problem!

What’s that got to do with tape? Stick with me for a minute.

The geckos’ trick, according to National Geographic, involves millions of microscopic hairs on the pads of their feet. Each hair, or seta, provides a miniscule adhesive force called van der Waals, which operate over very small distances but bond to just about anything. Robert Full, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, believes that adhesives can be developed that are as strong (and infinitely reusable) as what geckos have on their feet.

I doubt that this technology will work its way down to the point of having reusable gaffers tape anytime soon, but it could happen someday.

Meanwhile, imagine yourself hanging upside down from the ceiling. That would be cool.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.