GoodBuyGuys Blog

If you check by here periodically, you know that I have written several times about the proposed change in wireless mic frequency allocation and how it might impact the pro sound industry. The plot thickens.

On the positive side, US Rep. Bobby Rush (D Illinois) has introduced a bill that would go a long way towards protecting the frequencies currently in use by UHF wireless mics. Rep Rush’s bill (HR 1320) would require that unlicensed consumer electrnonics would require “smart” technology which would detect the presence of other frequency users like wireless mics that were in use in the proximity of the unlicensed device. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, on the negative side of this argument, such “smart” technology doesn’t exist. Even if such technology can be brought to market at a reasonable price by the February 2009 date proposed by Rep. Rush, the intermittent nature of the use of wireless mics would probably make “smart” technology designed to locate “in use” frequencies of little value. Either way, the problem of battery life is going to pale, compared to the problems this changeover will bring.

While its good to know that someone in Congress is taking this potential train wreck for the pro sound industry seriously, it is more than a little discouraging that his solution is based on phantom technology. The companies that want to bring all these new wireless devices using UHF channels to market are powerful consumer goods manufacturers and they are sure to fight against any technology that increases the price for their products.

There are two bright spots in HR 132o. One requires that unlicensed devices must provide “adequate safeuards” to not interfere with other devices operating on these UHF television channels. The other sets a date of Feb. 17, 2009 as the earliest date these new devices could be brought into use.

If nothing else, his proposed date gives our industry a little breathing room.

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 products for audio production.

A lot of my time is spent in evaluating new products and deciding how they might meet our customers needs. We have always focused on expendables, but lately we have added some other products because they seemed like a logical extension of our product line.

Now a new challenge is on my desk. Periodically, I write about the good work of our web developer, Dale. He works tirelessly to build good web sites and get our pages highly ranked with the most important search engines.

Soon after he began working with us, we started a number of design projects as a way to see how we might best collaborate. One of these was wirelessmic.net. We did a lot of work on this site and then put it on the shelf while we moved on to something else. We learned a lot about web design and about collaborating. Building this site was a lot of fun.

Well, now that site has climbed to the top of the ladder for non-paid search for Google, Yahoo, and MSN for the search term “wireless mic”. Dale believes that building information-only sites like this can be used to bring traffic to our e-commerce sites. Buywirelessmic.net will bring customers to buybattery.com, or so the theory goes. Our customers prove the value of Dale’s theory every day.

Having such great search engine results for a very valuable search term makes it very tempting to begin selling wireless microphones. There have been lots of new developments in this field, and every new product generation seems to bring lower prices and greater features.

Still, the idea of tying up a lot of money in this sort of inventory is a difficult decision and would require that we reconsider how products are marketed to our customers.

Is it time to roll out buywirelessmic.com? We’ll let you know.

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 products for audio production.

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.

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 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.

We used to operate a large audio visual rental equipment business here in the college town where we are located. The majority of our rentals were in small sound systems and we rented a lot of what came to be called “PA on a stick”.

This was made up of a couple of speakers mounted on tripods, a mixer/amplifer, a mic and stand, and a simple cable package. It was simple to set up, fit in the trunk of a car, and was a solid revenue producer for this division of our company.

Unfortunately, we had one set of speakers (JBL Eons) which used a different sized fitting for tripod mounting than every other speaker in the rental stock.

What a pain!

I can’t count the number of times an unhappy customer came back in after a rental complaining that the speaker would not fit the tripod.

Totally our fault. No matter how hard we tried, we never seemed to be able to match up these speakers with the only set of tripods we had that would fit. We had some adapters that would work but these seemed impossible to keep up with.

I have no idea why JBL decided to adopt a different standard than every other speaker maker on the planet, but we’ll save that discussion for another time.

OnStage Stands to the rescue.

OnStage now makes a speaker stand that has different sized diameters on opposite ends of the part of their speaker tripod that holds the speaker.

Got the wrong size? Just slip the tube out, flip it over and reinsert it into the lower tube. Problem solved.

We love the OnStage Stand line and have found it to be a great value. Hope you agree.

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.

One of my favorite blogs is engadget. Every day brings info about a “must have” item or something that I wish had been available when I was working as a sound person.

I got out of the sound business at about the time digital consoles and speaker management really began to overtake the sound reinforcement industry, so my background in “hands on” experience with this type of equipment was really limited. Still, I understood that regardless of how great the digital signal path was, sound reinforcement (or recording) still remained analog on both ends. On the input end, a diaphragm in a microphone had to vibrate, based on air movement, and a diaphragm (in this case a cone) had to vibrate, again exciting air movement, in order for someone to hear an amplified, or recorded and played back, sound.

Now it looks like there are finally some real options developing in the microphone end of the equation. The engadget posting is about a microphone that would use a laser to read data and it sounds pretty strange.

Here’s what they have to say: This device will reportedly stream damp air containing microscopic water particles through a tube, while a laser diode beams light through the vessel onto a sensor located on the opposite side. When sound waves enter the tube, the vibration of the droplets will cause the sensor to detect changes optically as the beam is disturbed, supposedly resulting in near-perfect vocal reproduction.

The inventors name is Dave Schwartz and he has a patent on the design.

Okay, lasers, streams of water, and millon dollar mics aren’t exactly ready for prime time, but at least someone is working on solving the front-end-of-the-amplified-chain problem.

What’s next? Digital gaffers tape?

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.

Wondering how to choose a good mic stand? Here are some suggestions. What type of microphone will you be using? It you plan to use the same mic, or mics of the same size, then you will only need to take into consideration one weight. If you plan to use multiple mics of different sizes, you need to be sure that the clutch (the control that allows you to adjust the stand height) and the counterweight (the weight on the opposite end of the boom arm from the mic clip) will handle your heaviest mic. Using a microphone stand with a clutch that won’t support the mic weight will allow the mic to lower itself at the most inopportune time. The lack of a counterweight that will support a heavy microphone will eventually lead to stripping of the adjustment mechanisms. You also need to be sure that the stand base is heavy enough to support the mic. Remember that when using a boom stand, extending the boom arm further from the upright will require either a heavier base for the stand or a larger tripod base. Make sure that your stand will adjust to the highest possible height that the mic might ever need to reach. Some desk stands have height adjustments, while others are fixed height. Do you need to carry the stand around or pack it into a road case or truck. If the mic stand is going to be moved, a folding base is usually better. If the stand will remain in the same location, you may prefer a round base stand. Tripod base stands fit better into tight spaces. If you are going to be moving the stands from place to place, consider a bag that holds multiple stands. Is the stand going to be used by a vocalist who may move towards and away from the stand? If so, then a round base stand may suit your needs better, as it is less likely to get in the way of the performer, particular if it is someone who is wearing high heeled shoes. If you are using wireless handheld mics for singers, then consider using a spring-loaded clip to allow for quick removal and replacement of the mic from the stand. A standard clip might last longer since it has no moving parts, but this sort of clip is designed for a specif sized microphone. Finally, ask yourself if you really need a stand at all. If the mic is going to be used on a drum kit, an onstage amplifier, a musical instrument or a podium you might want to consider a mic clip rather than a stand. Its cheaper, weighs less, packs up quicker and doesn’t take any stage space. OnStage Stands are sturdy, strong, have high quality hardware, long life finishes and easy-to-use one handed adjustments. They are the best value for your mic stand dollar. 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.

Since we sell mic stands, I am not really too focused on highlighting web sites that are in direct competition with us. Still, I just came across a product that is too cool to ignoreWhile the notion of spending $800.00 for a mic stand seems completely out of control, it didn’t take long for me to remember at least a dozen times over my career as a sound person for large public events, when I wouldn’t have been willing to spend that kind of money to save an event that was teetering on the brink of disaster.

No matter how much high dollar equipment you have, and regardless of how brilliant a sound tech you might be, just one presenter afflicted with “mic-a-phobia” or “mic-ignoria” can bring the best planned presentation to its knees.

Any seasoned sound person knows that using a mic with a tight cardioid pickup pattern will give you the opportunity to get a lot more gain (volume) out of the sound system before feedback. Because the tighter pickup pattern rejects more of the direct and reflected sound from the speakers, it is possible to make things louder.

Unfortunately, the use of a tightly patterned mic requires that the presenter stay “on axis”, that is with their head and mouth within the pick up pattern of the mic. Once they stray from this area, either by turning to one side or standing too far behind, above or below the mic, they are lost. You stand helplessly at the sound board trying to twist any know you can to get a little more volume, spending all you time on the edge of feedback disaster.

How great it would be to just hit a switch, like that provided with the Chapman system, and bring the mic closer to the presenter. If you do a lot of these sorts of events, things like awards shows and multi-presenter forums, its not hard to imagine how a system like this could pay for itself. Particularly so, since it might well allow you to hang onto an important client (these events tend to be annual in nature) for many years without being sabotaged by a speaker who just doesn’t know how to use a mic.

Can’t afford this Cadillac solution. Then make sure you have an easily adjustable boom stand or a gooseneck on the mic that adjusts quietly. Don’t hesitate to approach all the presenters before their speeches or performances and remind them to adjust the mic before they begin.