GoodBuyGuys Blog

The online newsletter from Pro Sound News is a great source of news for the pro audio industry. It is avialble through a an online subscripton and there is always an item I find interesting.

Heil Sound, a company that made a name for itself in the 1970’s (they came up with the voice box sound heard on “Frampton Comes Alive“) is now a high end microphone manufacturer. Their special Pink Pearl Mirophone , a large diaphragm vocal mic, is being offered in a pearl pink finish in a fund raising effort for breast cancer awareness. This mic has a really flat response cure and an extremely linear cardiod pattern.

Working with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Heil will donate a portion of every sale of this mic to the Komen Foundation. They’ve pledged a least $6800.00 to the cause.

The Heil PR20 (pink and other colors available) has a special linux structure that handles very high sound pressure levels and is claimed to be immune from overload.

Here’s a link to the PSN story, and another link to the Heil announcement.

If you want to know more about the Heil Mic, click here.

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 many other products sound pros need.

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.

You don’t usually think of car batteries as expendables, but it looks like that is changing. An interesting article in this weeks Wall Street Journal talks about how the demands of today’s electronic-laden cars are taking a real toll on their batteries. A car battery has traditionally lasted 3-5 years but the addition of power sapping devices like DVD players, GPS systems, heated cup holders and security systems has radically altered the life of these batteries.

The design of the auto battery is little changed in decades and what we ask these batteries to do was never imagined 10 years ago. It used to be that about the only thing that used power when the car was shut off was the clock. Now all sorts of items from the cooling fan to your cell phone charger continue to use power long after the car has been parked.

Experts in battery maintenance recommend that the battery be disconnected when the vehicle is parked for more than a couple of weeks. Better yet, use a device called a “trickle charger” to keep the battery charged up even when the car is not being used. These same experts warn that the biggest threats to battery life, extreme weather and harsh vibtration,can’t be avoided.

With the cost of a replacement battery sometimes exceeding $200.oo a little thought given to battery mainteance can go a long way.

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 maintenance supplies

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.

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.

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.

There’s nothing like a real world test to let you know if a product performs as advertised.Goodbuyguys.com got its start doing hands on special event and concert production and began selling the products we used all the time. We don’t do too much “hands on” event work anymore, so its a little more difficult to check out our products.

When I decided to build an outdoor kitchen this summer, I thought it might be nice to cover part of our new patio with an awning. I welded up the frames and mounted them to the side of the house and then went to an old friend who is a sign painter to get the awning cover.

At his suggestion, several years ago, I had replaced an awning by using a vinyl banner that he provided. It worked great and saved a lot of money, so I decided I would use a banner instead of having a custom awning made.

We had grommets set on 6 inch centers rather than on just the corners so that it could be stretched tightly over the frame.

Now for the test.

We have sold wire ties for years, mainly to expo companies and installers who use them for bundling cables. All of our black wire ties are supposed to contain ultraviolet light protection to keep them from breaking down due to exposure to sunlight. I was able to stretch the awning/banner to the frame using 11 inch black wire ties and it looks great. If the UV protection works as advertised by the manufacturer, the ties should last as long as the awning.

Check back with me in a few months and I’ll let you know how they are holding up.

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.

Imagine my satisfaction in discovering this morning that one of our goodbuyguys.com sites, buybattery.com, has achieved page two ranking in google for the search term “duracell”. This is amazing, particularly when you realize that entering “duracell” in the google search engine returns 9,550,000 hits.

Our web developer, Dale Norris, has been working on this site since June and he has followed all the generally accepted search engine optimization strategies to achieve this ranking. No secrets. Just hard work. His attention to detail never ceases to amaze me and his ability to stick with a task day after day is amazing to behold. No one web master has a complete knowleged of how to achieve top rankings in search engines (no matter what your email may say.) Dale is part of a really amazing community of open source web developers and he gives as much to this community as he gets. His contributions to goodbuyguys.com reflect greatly on the open source community.

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.

In the coming months, we look forward to adding sites like buygels.com and buywirelessmic.com to our goodbuyguys roster.

Dale will continue to work on buybattery.com until its page 1. Keep checking at google. I know he can do it.

Buybattery.com is about batteries. Duracell Procell batteries. The kind you use in flashlights, wireless mics and electronics. We don’t sell automotive batteries, but maybe we should.

Here’s what happened to me yesterday.

I have to keep lots of vehicles on the road. Seven at the moment. They all need batteries. In fact our trucks all use dual batteries.

I bought a battery for an older car that I don’t drive very often, so I decided to get a really good one so I could start this cart up every month or so, even if I wasn’t driving it regularly. I went with Interstate, supposedly one of the best batteries you can buy. I got a 75 month model, one of the best you can buy.

Well, after 34 months that battery failed. It wouldn’t hold a charge. In fact, it wouldn’t even take a charge. Since I thought I had gotten the best warranty available, I assumed that I could just take it back to the dealer and get a replacement-with some sort of pro rating, of course.

Boy, was I wrong. Since I had bought the battery through our company account, the manufacturer, Interstate, claimed my car was a “commercial vehicle”, so the warranty was immediately cut in half. Interstate would not offer any warranty support. The dealer, a company that I had done business with for years, simply washed their hands of the whole matter, so I was out of luck.

Interstate, a privately held company with $650 in annual sales could have solved this problem for just a few dollars and made a customer for life. Instead, they claimed more warranty exceptions than any warranty I have ever seen.

The results:

~I will never buy another Interstate battery. That’s a fleet of seven vehicles, and growing, that will never use another of their products;

~I will never buy another battery from this local dealer, a company that has had my business for over 20 years;

~I will take every opportunity I get to make sure and tell this story to anyone who will listen.

Interested in how a honest warranty that really cares about the customer should work? Here’s ours.

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 took a call this morning from a customer interested in our M1 Adhesive Remover. We have just recently added some cleaning products to our web site, and this led to an interesting discussion with our new customer.

First off, his application for M1 was the removal of mildew. Most of our customers use it to get adhesive residue off their cables, so mildew removal was a new application for us. I am going to give it a try. This customer says that it is much better than chlorine bleach.

The more interesting part of our discussion was posed by his question “Why is this stuff so hard to find?”. M1 is made by a small company in Georgia and you won’t find their products in Home Depot or Wal Mart. No surprise there. These national retailers make you jump through lots of hoops to get on their shelves and lots of small manufacturers don’t even try. Even if you do succeed, pricing pressures by the retailer may mean that you never really make any money.

He found us on the web, using a Google search . I tried it myself, and was amazed to find that our site, thetapeworks.com was the first site on the page. It struck me as odd that we would score better than the maker of the product. In fact, the maker of this stuff could not be found anywhere in the first five pages of search results. I finally got tired of looking.

While we are happy to have a page 1 ranking, it is really surprising that so many businesses continue to miss out on such a powerful tool for building brands and selling their products.

Got a suggestion for using M1 or an observation about brand building on the web? Let us 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 production supplies