GoodBuyGuys Blog

When asked about the invention of the automobile, Henry Ford said “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” Ford realized early on that a potential purchaser of his invention had no way to conceive of what an automobile was. They were thinking about how to make their current reality better.

Digital audio is quickly bringing live sound to the point where Ford stepped beyond his customer’s reality.

Up to now, the design theory behind bringing digital audio to live sound has been to make the sound person’s reality better. Give them more powerful tools while keeping them in charge of deciding how something should sound.

Now that digital mixing consoles have come way down in price and complication, they are being embraced at every level of the live sound industry. It’s common to see them in churches and schools. Digital microphones are next. When this new mic technology is embraced (sooner rather than later) by the live sound community, the digital signal chain will be almost complete.

I say almost, because there is one giant analog bump in what is otherwise soon to be a complete digital signal path. If you mix sound, that bump is YOU!

How far are we away from the digital live sound reality that doesn’t include the sound guy?

Here’s what I’m talking about.

Take the latest Dave Matthews Band album. It’s recorded digitally and everything on the album can be reproduced and analyzed in the digital domain. Stick with me here. I’m not talking about how a song is actually played, but rather the volume, tonal quality and relationship of all the sounds on the album to each other.

If the band wants to closely reproduce the sound of the record (the “mix” if you will) in a live performance, then why not have the person who used to mix the sound be replaced by a computer that knows what the song is supposed to sound like. Every instrument on stage will soon be introduced into the live sound system either by a digital direct box or a digital microphone. Instead of a human moving faders and twisting knobs, the computer doing the mix will maintain the tonal integrity, relative volumes and dozens of other parameters analyzed from the recorded sound. There will be no problem if the arrangement on stage changes from night to night, because the mixing computer doesn’t really care about how the song is played, only about how it sounds.

It wasn’t long ago that most of us believed that cost, reliability and user-complication would keep digital mixers from ever being accepted in the live sound world. We’re over that.

Look for this to happen with spoken word first.

A presenter will simply read a couple of sentences into a digital recorder that interfaces with a digital mixer. When the speaker steps up the podium, the sound system will already know what he or she is supposed to sound like. When this info is combined with the digital analysis of the output of the sound system (we’ve had this software in common use for years) then the true sound of the presenter’s voice can be delivered directly to every seat in the house.

Will the future of live digital sound need us at all? 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 , OnStage Stand mic stands and “value added” customer service.

I’ve written many times about the problems with rechargable batteries, so I am anxious to try out Duracell’s newest attempt to make this concept work. Carrying the tongue twister name of Duracell Pre-Charged Rechargable Batteries, these nickel metal hydride (NiMH) cells have a couple of features that should be viewed as an advantage.

Nickel metal hydride technology is a lot more stable than other rechargable technologies and it allows Duracell to sell this product pre-charged. You can use them right out of the package. Even if they are a year old. This ability to hold a charge (and hopefully not leak while doing so) means that the problem of the rechargables needing to be charged periodically even if they are not used may have been solved.

It has yet to be seen if these new batteries will have a constant and predictable discharge curve that will make them applicable for wireless microphones.

Unfortunately, there is at least one downside. the suggested retail price for a package of four AA is $12.99!

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.

After years of involvement in the concert production industry, I gave it up several years ago. I went from seeing several shows a week to seeing none and thought that I really didn’t miss it.

Much to my surprise, my son Kevin gave me a couple of tickets to see the Allman Bros. Band in Raleigh for Father’s Day, and I had been looking forward to it all summer. The Allman Brothers had been one of my favorites since I was in college and they had had a major influence on my musical tastes.

Well, Saturday finally got here and we made our way to Walnut Creek Amphitheater. These guys were as good as they had been in 1972. It was amazing to see that a band (including three of the original members) could still be so tight. They were terrific, and the sellout crowd had a great time.

In addition to the original members (as well as a couple of others who have been with the band for years) the Allman’s now feature Derek Trucks on guitar. This wunderkind has already made a name for himself and is bringing new life and vigor to the jam band format. His contribution was understated and fit right end with guys twice his age. We’ll be hearing lots more from him.

Before Saturday, I had convinced myself that supplying major tours was all the involvment with this industry that still interested me. Maybe its time to reconsider that decision.

Thanks Kevin. I had a great time!

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.

Miles Davis, the famous jazz trumpeter, once said “don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there”. That may be great advice for a musician learning to improvise, but it would not have gotten much traction with internet search engines.

When I write an article or blog post about gaffers tape or microphone cables I certainly hope that my writing is something that someone would actually like to read. Regardless, my true intended audience is something known as a robot or a spider. Internet search engines constantly send around these spiders to sample internet content and make notes of what links to what. This is the major source for data to determine what information you are offered when you enter a word or term in a search engine.

Since Miles was famous for playing a piece by completely ignoring what the composer had actually written, what he played would be completely invisible to an internet robot. At this point, robots are indexing text, not sounds, but you can be sure that someone, somewhere is working on a version of spider that can read music and index it for search engines. Its going to be an even tougher challenge to index Miles.

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, and lots of other great products for musicians.

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.

Goodbuyguys.com is located in North Carolina. Its my home and a great place to live and work. It looks like we are going to be getting a new neighbor.

Google has announce their intention to build a server farm in Lenoir, NC, a town in the NC foothills, about 150 miles from here. There was a lot of excitement at first, with stories in all the local papers and coverage on newscasts. Google was promising an investment of as much as $600 million and at least a couple hundred jobs. This in an area of the state that has been really hard hit by job losses in the furniture and textile industries.

It wasn’t until the Governor’s office was ready to make the official announcement that the whole truth about the negotiations were made public. Google may pledge to “do no evil” but the taxpayers of North Carolina might not buy into their philosophy.

It appears that the game was “hardball” when Google executives came to the negotiating table. By the time the deal was sealed to build the server farm, the good people of NC had given up tax breaks and incentives to Google that could be worth $100 million over the next 30 years. This for 200 jobs.

Google will get abatements in propertya taxes, sales taxes, and infrastructure costs.

Most interesting is the level of secrecy this global information provider demanded during the negotiations. Google demanded that NC legislators never mention their name when discussing the deal that would give Google millions in incentives. They demanded to have a hand in writing the bill that would go before the legislature and threatened to pull out a number of times during the 13 month negotiation if they did not get their way.

Lets hope that Google’s move to North Carolina will improve the business climate that they found to be so appealing in the first place.

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’ve been selling gaffers tape for a long time, and Permacel 665 has always been the first choice for most of our high end customers when they purchase utility-grade gaffers tape. Permacel has had a few stumbles over the years, but they are still recognized as the market leader in this segment of the adhesive-backed tape market. That may be about to change.

A couple of years ago, the division of Permacel that makes 665 gaffers tape was acquired by a North Carolina company, Shurtape. Shurtape already made a competitive gaffers tape, so it was a bit of a mystery as to what they would do with the new brand.

In a move counter to other gaffers tape makers, Shurtape announced a price increase on this product, effective at the end of January. This, at a time when oil prices were the lowest in 9 months and cotton prices were at the lowest point in a year and a half. Petroleum based adhesives and cotton cloth are the primary raw materials in gaffers tape, so this price increase just didn’t make sense.

More importantly, Shurtape has now discontinued all colors for this product except black, white and grey. This will have a big impact on how brand sensitive buyers make their purchasing decisions. Those who have never tried another brand of tape because they could get every color they needed in the 665 line, will now have to turn to another manufacturer for colored tape. If they like what they find in the avialable market for colors, then they will probably give the competing brand a try for their black, white and grey as well. I think they will probably like what they find.

We will, of course, continue to offer Permacel 665 for those customers who are willing to pay a premium, but this may be the beginning of the end game for this venerable product.

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.

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.

I have a tractor. It’s just a small one that I use for mowing and landscaping. Its a 1986 model and pretty much held together by wire ties and gaffers tape. But that’s not the point of this blog posting.

As I said, my little Japanese tractor is 20 years old. The amazing thing about this little workhorse is all the implements that my neighbor uses on his 40 year old Ford red belly tractor will fit my tractor too. The mower, the spreader, the bucket scoop-they’ll all work on both tractors.

Even more amazing, both his implements and mine will work on a brand new tractor being imported from Russia or China. Fifty years of tractor manufacturing across the globe and all the implements will work on all three tractors (and thousands of others).

Can you think of any other mechanical system with this sort of compatibility? Imagine a window mechanism from a ‘56 Chevy working on a 2004 Lexus. Not in a million years!

At first, I thought that this was some sort of great master plan by farmers and tractor makers, but now I believe that something else is going on. Something that all the tractor manufacturers really regret.

Here’s what I think happened.

It doesn’t take long for most farmers and landscapers to have as much invested in their implements as they do in the tractor. A good tow behind mower can cost as much as $1000.00 and its not unusual for a farmer to have a dozen or more implements all designed to work with the three point hitch and the power-take-off on the back of the tractor. Implements usually last a long time.

What this means is that even if the tractor manufacturer came up with a better system for attaching the implements to the tractor and powering their moving parts, the farmer wouldn’t buy it because it would mean that his old implements wouldn’t work with the new tractor. This back-and-forth decision making by the farmer-this year I need a new plow, next year I need a new tractor-means that the tractor builders can never make the system obsolete.

You’ll never find a farmer taking his implements to the landfill the way we all dispose of our old electronics because some new upgrade (e.g. USB ports on computers) makes the old system obsolete and the new component incompatible.

Just a theory, but I think that its a pretty good one.

Know of another idea that has risen above planned obsolescence? 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