GoodBuyGuys Blog

A newspaper article headline in the business section of yesterdays Raleigh, NC News & Observer caught my eye.

“Losing The Cords On Flat TVs”

Thinking this AP article might be about extension cords, I read a little before realizing that the author, Peter Svensson was actually talking about the ability to send television data to a large screen TV wirelessly using technology similar to the WIFI signals now found distributing computer data in so many homes.

Three different wireless protocols for delivering data to flat panel televisions will be featured at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It uses recently allocated spectrum that is not supposed to interfere with WIFI and it has a range that reportedly will limit it from spilling into your neighbor’s apartment. This has the potential to make the home theatre installer’s life a lot easier.

Unfortunately, no where in the article did the writer even mention the most important cord of all. THE POWER CABLE! That certainly isn’t going to be lost anytime soon.

One of the most popular locations for large flat panel televisions is over the mantle. How many houses are built with an electrical outlet in the middle of the wall over the fireplace? Not many.

More importantly, while the installation of low voltage cabling for video and data can be safely installed by a hobbyist or homeowner, the installation of a 110volt electrical outlet needs to be done by a licensed electrician. Doing this installation in a space adjacent to a fireplace flue requires special cable and a lot a care to prevent creating a fire hazard.

LCD and plasma display video monitors use a lot of power, and ideally, the electrical outlets they are plugged into also need special surge protection to protect the TV from electrical surges. Providing power for such an expensive item shouldn’t be done as an afterthought.

Now, when flat TVs can lose the power cord, that’s an article I look forward to reading.

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I was adding some components to our office alarm system yesterday and had to plug in a new outboard power supply (wall wart) to power it. While there was a spare outlet (two, actually) available, the two power supplies already plugged into two of the four available outlets rendered the last two useless.

Whether you are dealing with duplex (two outlets) or quad (four outlets) the spacing of your wall outlets has not changed for decades. The space above or below (as well as side-to-side for quads) is still spaced like it was when houses and offices were built in the 1950’s. There are lots of devices designed to get around the problem, but they require additional components, complication and expense.

Since no single connector would ever plug into multiple outlets at the same time, there is absolutely no reason to continue to adhere to this standard. Why don’t wall outlets built into new buildings reflect the need to plug power supplies directly into the wall without covering adjacent outlets? It wouldn’t prevent any devices currently in use from being plugged in, but would accomodate all the devices we now use that require wall warts.

This is a great opportunity for those who market residential and commercial installed wiring devices to solve a problem, create added convenience for the end user, make a safer environment (fewer overload and trip hazards) and maybe even make a little more money themselves.

Let me know what you think.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Count on us to meet your power distribution needs.

My experience with using personal computers goes back to the early 1980’s, so I’ve had more than my share of opportunities to set up, take down, reconfigure, and generally wander around computer peripheral cabling. The more I handle this stuff, the more mystified I get.

I began my career as a an audio techncian, and spent many years building, setting up, configuring, and repairing concert sound systems. People who design computer peripheral wiring could learn a lot from the audio industry.

While the performance and compatibility of computer peripherals continues to improve, the interconnections between these devices never catches up. I can’t think of a single data-type connector that comes close to matching the performance of the lowly audio XLR connector, a design that is well into its second half-century of use.

I just spent 15 frustrating minutes trying to replace a computer monitor in the office, only to be reminded that there are at least three (if not more) different pin configurations for a D-sub connector, even though they all have the same physical shell. Maybe, it’s just me, but I almost always have to try to plug in a USB connector at least two times, as there is nothing visible on the outside of the connector to indicate which end is up. I guess there are savings involved in making ethernet connectors with with almost useless plastic locking pins, but the savings quickly evaporate when you spend a half-hour trying to pry one out of a computer port after the release tab snaps off. The list goes on and on.

Audio connectors, on the other hand, are designed to be patched in the dark, repaired (when necessary) in the field, and to be common to hundreds and hundreds of different manufacturers equipment. The Shure SM57 microphone ( probably the most popular and common in the world) uses the same connector now as when it came to market in 1965. A 40 year old SM57 works with a brand new Chinese-made microphone cable right out of the box.

We’re depending more and more on computer-based devices all the time, and the portability designed into these items means that they are constantly having to be cabled and uncabled. Hopefully, manufacturers will consider adopting some connector standards that are up to the task.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Count on us to meet your cable needs.

In the rush to jump on the high definition television bandwagon, Honeywell has introduced an HDMI cable that they claim is “self healing”. According to Engadget, Honeywell’s CurexE cable has some sort of error coding built into it that uses inline LED’s to show whether the signal chain is transmitting the correct info to your HD device. It’s hard to understand how they can all the device “self healing” as it has no ability to address problems at either end of the the data transmission so it can’t really “heal” anything.  At best, it can only diagnose what may be wrong with the components it connects.  And that’s on a good day!

Frankly, this item looks like it was developed by the marketing department rather than engineering. Here’s how this product is described in Honeywell’s own press release:

“We’ve made this cable intelligent by integrating a chip into the connector that performs two major functions,” said David Coleman, Program Manager, CE Cable Products, Honeywell. “First, the chip’s line driver ‘cures’ corrupted HDCP and EDID data that can lead to serious audio and video artifacts. Second, we added ‘light’ in the form of LEDs embedded into the connector that let installers monitor the most critical elements of the HDMI interface for problems.”

The parentheses around “cure” are theirs and their description of the “cure” doesn’t really shed much light on this voodoo.

As the broadcast industry approaches the deadline of 2009’s conversion to digital television, a lot of consumers are going to be taken to the cleaners by televion accessory makers who bring very little value to the table. Honeywell’s CurexE cable looks like one of these offerings.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Great products for audio-visual production available on the internet everyday.

It’s always interesting to stumble upon a new type of customer for our products, and I have noticed recently that we are getting more and more orders from lawyers and courts. I had not thought much about it until I stumbled on this blog posting.

More and more lawyers offices and courts are struggling with the technical demands of media coverage and the need for tech savy technicians in the courtroom. Many courthouses date back to the earlier half of the twentieth century and they are woefully behind when it comes to providing the kind of support that is now expected by the legal profession, the media and the public. Its not unusual to enter a courtroom now and find mic cables and extension cords held down with gaffers tape all over the room. If the proceedings are high profile, this tangle of cables may stream out the door, down the stairs and out into the street.

The need for audio visual supplies now often extends back to the attorneys’ offices as well. Many law firms have whole departments that are involved in preparing presentation materials for courtroom work. This now extends far beyond the realm of flip charts to include professionally produced videos, wireless mics, enhanced audio recordings and computer-based presentations.

While it is unfortunate that these technical demands may be overwhelming the courtroom, its a great thing that high tech tools are available to participants in the cases.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your audio visual supply needs.

If you carry a cell phone, you know how easy it is to receive calls, no matter where you are. Your phone number works all over the country. Folks who use VOIP phone services like Skype and Vonage can plug their internet phones in almost anywhere in the world and get calls on their local phone number.

Justin Timberlake’s Future Sex/Loveshow has taken the concept of staying connected to a new level. As reported in the July 2007 edition of PLSN magazine, the Timberlake summer tour is saving thousand of dollars on telco costs by carrying its own internet based phone system.

WANetics LLC is providing the hardware and technical expertise that lets the Future Sex/Loveshow skip the costs of having the venue provide expensive temporary phone service and hardware. Not only do they not incur local telecommunications expenses, but details like phone and fax number remain unchanged, regardless of where the tour is performing.

Each of the tours five departments (promoter, production, accounting, crew and tour management) has its own dedicated road case that accomodates phones, cables, a fax machine, batteries, wifi and an ethernet switch. All voice and data services are provided through a broadband internet connection and then distributed on a frequency that will travel well throughout the production area of the venue and will not interfere with WIFI frequencies.

According to the PLSN article, the tour reported that voice quality was excellent and that overall service was good even in venues where internet quality was less than perfect. Best of all, the whole system worked no matter what part of the world they were in. The system even provided special phone capabilities like voicemail and conferencing.

Personally, after having paid lots of these telco bills myself while working as a promoters rep, I’m not shedding any tears for the local phone companies that will lose this revenue stream. They consistently overcharged and underperformed.

Look for this service to become the standard for large touring organizations of all sorts in the near future.

Want to know more about WANetics tour support? Here’s the link!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. All the supplies a major entertainment tour needs.

We’ve been trying, with some success, to establish an Ebay presence for some time. Our Ebay store, BuyMicStand, has had some limited sales success and I guess we will stick with it for awhile longer. The difficulty of posting. selling, communicating with customers, etc. is so harder on Ebay than running your own ecommerce site with a shopping cart that is difficult to understand Ebay’s success. We’ll probably eventually add items like mic stands and extension cords, but it is so difficult to do that I keep putting it off.

I guess that if you have only a single item to sell or you only sell occasionally, then an auction site makes some sense. But Ebay stores are entirely different. They almost always use the “Buy It Now” concept, so there is no real auction going on, and the fees that Ebay forces you to add in order to list your product are far beyond those that are necessary if you run your own shopping cart.

There is so much information pushed at a merchant who is trying to manage his online store, that you sometimes feel like you are going to go blind trying to find the link you need to manage one aspect of the store. The user interface is rarely updated and the result is that Ebay pages are so stuffed with images and text that it is impossible to focus on any one thing. This may be okay if you are shopping, but if you are a merchant, its different. You should be able to link to a page where primary merchant functions like adding an item or adjusting a price can be done without having to seek these functions out among others like “Eligible for Relist Fee Credit” and “Change my cross-promotion preferences“. These may be useful tools for power sellers but they shouldn’t be given equal status with user functions like “Sell My Item“.

Ebay has continued to maintain its dominance for online sales but they are ripe to be challenged by someone who does it better.

We’re ready to roll out a new domain, and my task is to create new content to support this domain. We want to both make it more useful to our customers and appealing to search engines. While I enjoy the task and like the challenge, I am constantly wondering why I need to redo a job that someone else has already done, and probably done better.

Buymiccable.com is our latest edition of web sites at goodbuyguys.com. We know from lots of experience that there are few tools more powerful for building web site traffic than good, keyword enriched content. There’s not that much content online about mic cables, but what is out there is pretty good. When someone like Proco creates a really useful guide like “How To Choose The Right Cable“, then we are happy to link to it, even though we sell a competing brand of mic cables.

Rather than try to keep our potential customers away from competitors content, we’ll jump at the chance to provide our customers with good information, regardless of the source.

The challenge is, of course, to create new and useful content of our own that doesn’t simply restate the information that another web site has already provided.

I’ve got a lot of work to do!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, MagLite flashlights, Procell Batteries, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Entertainment 1 extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands , and, now, Hosatech microphone cables.

No sooner had I written about being taken in on an April Fools hoax for a “wireless extension cord” than I come across this.

The article was about a product that can wirelessly transmit power for recharging to any device that is equipped with a special Powercast module. While this device doesn’t have the ability to transmit large amounts of current like the wireless extension cord promised, it does have great potential for ridding us of all the cables needed for recharging our wireless devices.

Powercast has been nameda “Best of CES 2007″ designation from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, so I guess that this one is not a hoax.

A device like a cell phone or an MP3 player which has the powercast module included can communicate and receive power from is charger wirelessly via radio waves. Products enabled with Powercast Technology will make it to the marketplace before the end of the year.

This technology has generated lots of interest in the tech publications industry. Popular Electronics says that Powercast is capable of delivering up to two watts of power, using transmissions in the 915 megahertz range. Power can be transmitted over a range as great as 10 feet and multiple devices can be charged (each with its own Powercast) at the same time. Its even considered safe enough for you to charge your cell phone while it is in your pocket.

While there doesn’t seem to be any device that can replace the extension cord on the horizon, the prospect of getting rid of all those little cables attached to device chargers is really intriguing. Battery chargers are really hard to keep organized, so the concept that each device might be able to keep track of its own charger, without the user constantly plugging and unplugging could be a real boon to the growth of wireless, battery powered devices.

I hope my new theme song is “He won’t get fooled again“.

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

It may be the last day of April, but I just fell for a great April Fools Joke. It started when I googled “extension cord” to see how we were doing with that search engine. Much to my surprise, one of the page one search results took me to ThinkGeek for an ariticle about “wireless extension cords.” That’s right. WIRELESS EXTENSION CORDS!

When much of your business is based on cables and the tape that is used to temporarily affix them to the floor, then a concept like this is pretty scary.

I immediately sent a link to this article to one of our resident gadget geeks and asked him if he thought that this was possible. His analysis was “possible, yes” “safe, no.” He even referenced some work by Nikola Tesla from the late 19th century to support his opinion.

While it does appear that common household current could be turned into microwaves and transmitted wirelessly, it would create all sorts of electrical havoc, as well as more than a little risk for anyone who got in the signal’s path.

I couldn’t resist doing a little more research and found that lots of gadget oriented web sites like digg.com and the daily giz whiz had picked up on this article as well. Everyone had an opinion.

When I realized that the price for this potentially revolutionary consumer device was only $34.99, I couldn’t resist so I clicked on “Add To Cart”. Instead of a confirmation of my order, here’s what I got:

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