GoodBuyGuys Blog

Our primary involvement with wireless mics is as a battery supplier. That wasn’t always the case. For many years we operated a special events and sound equipment rental business, and wireless mics were a big part of what we did.

If you use wireless mics then you should pay close attention to legislation that is working its way through Congress. The Communications, Consumer’s Choice and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (S. 2686, H.R. 5252) could have a dramatic impact on you. Whether you use wireless every day on the concert stage, or once a week as a volunteer sound tech at your church, this law could complicate your life.

Implementation of this proposal would open up unassigned television broadcast channels to use by any number of unlicensed wireless devices. If you use UHF wireless mics, chances are your systems work in the UHF channel range between channel 50 and channel 70. This range will be available to lots of new devices and you won’t have any way of knowing when something new might begin operating on your same frequency. Battery failure will be the least of your worries!

FOH Magazine has taken the lead in organizing the pro sound community against this legislation. If you are concerned, here is a link to a letter that you can cut and paste, edit with your personal information, and send it to your congressman. The official comment period on this ends on March 2, 2007 so there isn’t mcuh time left for your voice to be heard.

Goodbuyguys.com is a collection of web sites (including buytape.com, buybattery.com, buymicstand.com, buyextensioncord.com, buyaflashlight.com and buywireties.com) designed to deliver a great selection of pro audio supplies.

One of the unfortunate aspects of expendable sales, is they create a lot of waste. Batteries are an important part of modern day life, but it does present a waste issue. Even recycleable batteries must be disposed of once they have expired.

The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (RBRC) is in the business of recycling recharageable batteries and cell phones. Rechargeable batteries are commonly found in cordless power tools, cellular and cordless phones, laptop computers, camcorders, digital cameras, and remote control toys. The mission of the RBRC is to keep these batteries out of the solid waste stream while preserving natural resources. When you see a battery recycling bin in a retailer like Radio Shack or Circuit City, it is probably a part of the RBRC network. Participating retailers display this seal.

The rechargeable batteries that RBRC collects are sent to a state-of-the-art facility where they are recycled to reclaim reusable materials that are used in stainless steel production (nickel and iron) and to make new batteries (cadmium). This organization collects cell phones as well, and refurbishes them or recycles the material in an environmentally sound manner.

If you would like to sign up your organization to participate in the RBRC recycling network, here’s a link to the sign up page.

Several months back I wrote about our new web site and our web developer, Dale. I predicted that his efforts would move goodbuyguys.com to page one for non-paid Google search. It took a little longer than we hoped, but Dale has made my prediction come true. Yesterday we climbed to page one for the very important key word “gaffers tape“. I check these search engine rankings all the time and this really made my day.

Which brings me to my real point about this posting. We also run Google Adwords for key products, and compete for your attention like everybody else. I look at the sites of others who buy the same adwords. When I click on their ads, I’m amazed at how little the keywords they have paid for actually appear on their pages. Why would someone pay good money for the keyword “Procell Battery” and then take you to a page that is primarily about hard hats and safety goggles? Google search is such a powerful tool for getting your products in front of potential buyers, but making your pages what Google wants to see really takes a lot of work. Work that can pay off in page one listings that cost you nothing. This diligence, day in and day out, is something at which Dale excells.

Congratulations to Dale. He is modest about his accomplishments, but I know that achieving a Page One ranking for an important key word in Google is a feather in any web developers cap.

Goodbuyguys.com is a collection of web sites (including buytape.com, buybattery.com, buymicstand.com, buyextensioncord.com, buyaflashlight.com and buywireties.com) designed to deliver a great selection of entertainment production and audiovisual supplies.

Have you heard about “Wolfgang’s Vault?”. I don’t recommend web sites too often, but this one is too good to not share.

When the late Bill Graham, famous concert promoter of the 1960’s and 1970’s died, his memorabilia collection was sold to Bill Sagan, a west coast entrepeneur. This was no scrapbook. Graham had amassed a collection large enough to fill 25 forty foot tractor trailers.

The collection included millions of photos, posters, t shirts, banners etc. from some of the most famous names in rock-Hendrix, Joplin, The Who, The Rolling Stones, etc. The list of names goes on for pages.

Sagan has a unique, and really great business plan, for selling this memorabilia. The items that Graham has collected are for sale at the web site, and Wolfgang’s Vault streams (for free) hundreds of live concerts from this era, including some fo the best known from the Fillmore West. They claim to have over 7000 different concert performances and you can listen any time you want by simply registering at the site.

The folks who run Wolfgang’s Vault are involved in a lot of legal litigation regarding who really has the rights to these concerts, so this may not last. Check it out while you can!

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, and lots of other great products for the concert production industry.

If the new mic preamp device from Sabine, called “Phantom Mic Rider“, can do what it claims, the days of the sound man may be numbered. This inline preamp plugs directly between a microphone and a mixer, at the mic end, and provides almost all of the functions the sound man would perform at a spoken word event.

I spent a lot of time spinning knobs for spoken word and televised events, and this thing would have been a life saver. It eliminates (or at least reduces feedback), provides automatic gain control when the presenter moves too close or too far from the mic, provides proximity effect equalization, controls popping “p” sounds, and, most important, includes an infrared noise gate.

The noise gate automatically turns the mic and and off, depending on how far a presenter is from the mic position. This sensor can be detached from the rest of the preamp and taped somewhere like the top of a podium if that suits your needs better.

the “Phantom Mic Rider” is phantom powered, so no battery is needed. It will work with a stand mounted or podium-style mic, and Sabine claims that its internal digital signal processing will improve the overall sound of almost any microphone.

Only one problem that I can see. The infrared noise gate is activated by body heat, and some of the presenters we’ve worked with over the years appeared to have been dead for some time!

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, and lots of other great products for the audio visual industry.

I wrote a while back on the subject of how people who produce video in front of live audiences are blind to anything that the camera does not see, regardless of what the audience in the hall might be viewing. Well, it certainly seems like they are ahead of folks who do radio shows in front of live audiences. It appears that they see nothing at all!

I have been watching a lot of digital tv and I stumbled upon a telecast of a live radio show produced weekly by the company that broadcasts basketball games at the University of North Carolina, my alma mater. Apparently I was the only person who realized that people might be watching as well as listening.

This show is broadcast from a local restaurant and is done for a live and broadcast audience. The set consisted of the coach and the host sitting at a table with a banner slapped on it with duct tape ( wrinkles and all) and it looked like it had been lit with a couple of maglites. About half the time the single static camera shot was blocked by people walking back and forth in front of the camera, probably on their way to the bar.

Its difficult to understand how an organization that should be as media savy as an NCAA Division 1 athletic department could allow a presentation like this to be seen by anyone. It wasn’t good enough for YouTube!

The proliferation of digital television channels is going to mean that more and more program material that was intended to be heard but not seen is going to be broadcast. I’m not advocating that the bar for production values be set very high, but it’s got to be set higher than this.

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, and lots of other great products for the video production industry.

I often joke that I have coiled enough cable to get to the moon and back. Turns out that I was exaggerating just a little. It appears that it would take about 30 million 50 foot mic cables just to get there. In case you were wondering, its about 284,000 miles to the moon.

Why this sudden interest in proving myself wrong? We’ll, I just came across a device that might have kept me from retiring from the sound business. It’s the Kaltman Cable Coiler. If this thing really works, it would be pretty cool. It is a battery powered device that is designed to coil a 50 foot microphone cable in under 10 seconds. All without kinking or binding.

My first question is how does this device deal with the natural twist in a cable that comes from how the conductors inside the cable jacket are twisted. Both the conductors and the shield have a twist in them and this is why using the under and over style of cable coiling is so important for cable life. The natural twist in the cable is the reason that a good cable can be ruined so quickly if you wrap the coil around your arm instead of using proper coiling techniques.

It also appears from the short video at their site that it is necessary to have all your cables laid out in a manner where they are completely untangled in order to use the coiler properly. This could take a lot of stage space in a venue where you might have 30 or 4o mic cables, all mixed in with extension cords, speaker cables, video cable, etc.

Still, the idea of having a machine do all your cable coiling is intriguing. We are going to contact Kaltman in hopes of getting one to evaluate. I’ll let you know what we find out.

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, and lots of other great products for the entertainment industry.

Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska will always be remembered for his explanaion of the internet as being “a series of tubes“. He was widely ridiculed at the time, but now it appears that there may have been some truth to his statement.

The “tubes” I am talking about is “Yahoo Pipes“. This is an interesting new web aggregator that will allow you to control the RSS feeds and other info that is automatically delivered to your computer. It works much differently than other aggregators, and as the amount of information being offered on an number of subjects continues to increase, you really need a powerful tool to weed out the material that is of no interest to you.

Say you want to set up a news feed to keep track of when your favorite bands would be in the area. You could subscribe to a news feed about popular bands you were interested in, but you would have to wade through a lot of news that was not relevant to your town. You could monitor the web sites for venues where these sorts of bands play, but you would have to wade through info on other sorts of entertainment.

Yahoo Pipes would allow you to combine the feed about bands, the web sites for venues, a local mapping application and a calendar program. Only when the criteria that you set regarding the band, the venues, the geographic area and the dates you are interested in. You would not be bothered with a lot of info that wasn’t directly related to your specific interest.

It is good to see Yahoo come to the marketplace with something new, as they have been pretty far behind in the game of “catch up” when it comes to web innovation.

Yahoo Pipes is not the simplest service in the world to set up, but its power and uniqueness make it worth the trouble. Take a look!

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, and lots of other great products for the entertainment industry.

Yahoo recently did a very unscientific survey of the kind of cases people used for their iPods, and the results were pretty amazing. The number four choice was DUCT TAPE. That’s right, the duct tape wallet craze has moved on to iPods.

Somebody has actually started a business making iPod cases out of duct tape. These cases are colorful and durable and certainly make a fashion statement. At $16.00 each, this may be the most income ever derived from a single roll of duct tape.

Here’s how the Digital Music Weblog described these fashion accessories:

“The cases themselves are everything you’d expect from such a fun-loving company: bright colors, eye-catching, target-like designs, clear plastic windows to protect screens, the right holes for cords, and a touch wheel that works even through the case.”

They must have made a lot of these cases, because they had enough tape scraps to decorate a car:

As for that Yahoo survey, like I said, it wasn’t exactly scientific. They had a total of nine responses.

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.

I’m not really a motor sports fan, but I happened to find myself watching a Nascar race on television over the weekend. The Bud Shootout, Nascar’s first big race of the season, was on tv and I saw something pretty amazing.

It appears that these million dollar race cars use lowly duct tape to control the amount of air flow to the cooling system. How’s that for a low tech solution to a high tech problem!

Apparently, Jeff Gordon’s Chevrolet was having overheating problems and was not getting enough air to the radiator. These cars have sophisticated front bumpers designed to provide maximum down force, and thus holding power. The design of these bumpers restricts air flow to the engine area, as this sort of air deflection causes aerodynamic problems.

A close up of the front bumper during a pit stop showed that the crew had removed a piece of color-matched duct tape about the size of the palm of your hand from the bumper in order to improve air flow the the engine.

This minor change appeared to be all that was necessary to solve the cooling problem so that Gordon’s car could continue the race.

Pro Tapes offers a full line of racing tapes. I wonder if it was a Pro product on Jeff Gordon’s bumper?

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, and other products useful in motor sports.