GoodBuyGuys Blog

I subscribe to a news alert service provided by Forbes Magazine and find that about once a day I will click on a link to one of their business-oriented stories.  They are useful and well written.

This morning they sent me a link to a new service from Yahoo that they called “Yahoo’s Intelligent Search“.    It sounded interesting so I clicked over to Yahoo and entered the search term “Yahoo’s Intelligent Search“.  Not only was there no information on this new service at the top of the page-the first result was for “Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and the second was something about ebay-there was no reference to  “Yahoo’s Intelligent Search” anywhere on the first two pages of search results.

It’s easy to see why Yahoo lags so far behind Google when they are not able to push their own new products to the top of their own search results.

We continue to show good search results for many of our products at Yahoo, but it becomes more and more difficult to understand how they can survive in the search business.  They should have sold Yahoo Search to Microsoft when they had the chance.

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 the highlights of this week’s inauguration ceremony was the performance of a John Williams piece by a well known classical quartet made up of Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Gabriela Montero (piano) and Anthony McGill (clarinet).  It was (at the time) an impressive presentation.

I was particularly interested in this, after reading about Yo-Yo Ma’s plan to play a new carbon fiber cello that was supposed to be immune from effects brought on by cold weather.

It turns out that what the audience (and the world) heard was a little world class karaoke.  The whole thing was a recording, and the public was kept in the dark until today.

In an interview on National Public Radio, Mr. Ma explained that the performance was impossible because of the temperature and that he had even gone so far as to use soap instead of resin on his bow so that his cello would not make any sound.  A piano technician “decoupled” the piano keys from the hammers so that played keys would make no sound.

Maybe it was a great idea to plan to make this performance part of such an historical ceremony, but why not chose performers who could play live regardless of the weather.  There are lots of instruments and performers who can play in cold weather, as was apparent over and over again during the inaugural parade.

I, for one, am incredibly disappointed to learn of this sham, and am sorry that it mars, for me, what was, otherwise a ceremony for the ages.

Want to pretend you had a front row seat at the inauguration.  Click here.

Want to record your own inauguration “lip sync“.  You’ll need a microphone, a mic cable and a microphone stand.

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.

It’s  a long standing business business practice that the “seller sets the terms“.  While its true that you can bargain with a vendor if you think they will sell at a lower price,  in the end, if you are not willing to meet the seller’s price, you’ve got to walk away.

Apparently, customers hoping to walk out of a bankrupt Circuit City store with a $1.99 flat screen television aren’t willing to extend the seller that priviledge.

Lots of shoppers who showed up last Saturday for the beginning of Circuit City’s liquidation sale not only left the stores empty handed, they left mad as well.

Unbeknown to most of these vultures, once Circuit City declared bankruptcy, the court turned their assets over to a liquidator whose job is to get as much money for Circuit City’s creditors as they can.  The management of Circuit City really has nothing to say about pricing.

I, for one, will miss Circuit City.  While neither their selection nor their pricing was  anything special, the competition they provided for Best Buy was good for both the local and national electronics marketplace.

Unfortunately, those customers who waited to show up at Circuit City until it was time to turn out the lights are now finding that liquidation pricing is not even as good as sale pricing was before the bankruptcy.

Lots of challenges for retailers and bargain-hungry customers will be presented in the next few months as our economy works through a really difficult retail environment.  Circuit City’s experience has lessons for all of us.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Enterainment 1 extension cords , OnStage Stand mic stands and quality speaker cables.

I wrote a piece  sometime back regarding where new concert sound techs were going to come from.  The pro sound industry continues to “gray” and pursuing jobs in concert production attracts fewer and fewer young people interested in this career.

A recent story in the online version of Pro Sound News points out what is happening in the pro sound field.  This story highlighted the “retirement” of Paul Owen, after mixing monitors for Metallica for 22 years.  That’s right.  22 Years!

While it is a little surprising that anybody could live through the Metallica soap opera for this long, it is certainly no surprise that there are touring sound techs out there who are actually reaching retirement age.

Paul Owen has logged 1340 Metallica shows and reads lips so well that no one realizes that he has been deaf since 1994.

Metallica’s lead singer James Hetfield honored Owen from the stage at this week’s concert in Detroit.  Wonder if his replacement will be under 40?

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.

The interest in acquiring the broadcast spectrum currently used by many professional quality wireless microphones has been raging for a while.  Everyone knows that some changes will take place in February 2009, when the FCC reallocates some of the spectrum in the 700 mhz range.

I have written before regarding these licensing requirements and speculated at the time that the FCC could really make things chaotic for the entertainment industry. Get ready for a new player to turn up the heat!

As reported in Forbes, The Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, a coalition of consumer’s rights organizations has filed a complaint with the FCC regarding the failure of almost all wireless mic owners to obtain an operator’s license for what is essentially a low power radio transmitter.  This complaint accuses manufacturers like Shure and AKG of deceptive advertising in how their products are marketed.

This is a complaint that could potentially impact millions of microphone owners.

More importantly, it makes a very powerful argument on behalf of those companies that are vying for use of this part of the broadcast spectrum when digital televison comes online in February 0f 2009.

Bids of as much as $19 billion dollars have been placed for access to these airwaves and lots of major players are vying for the space.

While the FCC has rarely, if ever, enforced the licensing requirements for wireless mics, the law is not new and it may not be possible to ignore it any longer.

Want to know more?  Here’s a link to the FCC rule.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Enterainment 1 extension cords , OnStage Stand mic stands and quality speaker cables.  We’ve also got cables for “Wired” microphones!

In reading one of my favorite business oriented blog sites, ducttapemarketing.com/blog, this article resonated with me.

My blog (buygafferstape.com/blogs) is almost two years.  Its a project that I have really enjoyed.

The article I am referring to addresses the issue of bloggers trying to maintain their anonymity and not posting any information about who they really are.  It has never been my intention to remain anonymous, but the idea never crossed my mind to do a posting about who I am.

Here goes!

After 20 years in the special event and concert production industries our company, Harrison Bros. Inc. gradually migrated from being a “hands on” production company to a seller of production supplies online.

My background as a sound tech and special event producer covered both freelance work and a stint at Duke University Technical Services during the 1980’s.  I left Duke at the end of 1985 to start Harrison Bros.

As a production company we offered multiple services, including sound, lighting, staging, labor brokering and production management.  The scale of the events we were involved in spanned a huge range from building dedications with one microphone to constructing the stage for one of the stadium dates on The Who’s 1989 “The Kids Are Alright Tour”.

It was challenging work and I had a chance to travel the country and work with some really high profile acts-Frank Sinatra, DollyParton, Bill Cosby, and lots of others.

Realizing that there wasn’t a great future in hands on work for someone staring down the barrel of his 50th birthday, I knew that it was time to turn our little company in a new direction.

We started out selling colored duct tape, and quickly found that there was a customer base for production supplies out there who were more than happy to tell us about production supplies they needed that were either difficult to find or way to expensive.

I gradually added other tape products like gaffers tape, then batteries, flashlights, tie lines , extension cords, etc. to the point where we now offer about 400 products.

We started by doing catalog sales and direct mail marketing, long before the internet evolved into a  an ecommerce engine.

It didn’t take long to realize that the internet provided a perfect medium for marketing and selling and we rolled out thetapeworks.com and buybattery.com. This took a little while to gain traction, but after a year or so, it really took off.

2003 was a really important year in our business development.  We left Main Street in Carrboro, where we had been since day one and built a new building about 5 miles south of Chapel Hill, and only four miles from my house.  The entire back of the building is a 100′ wide loading dock and having a “purpose built” facility has provided a tremendous  asset for our growth.

In the summer of 2006, we rolled out an important new web strategy, goodbuyguys.com.  This allowed us to combine lots of websites, including buytape.com, buybattery.com, buyextensioncord.com, buywireties.com, buyspeakercable.com, buymicstand.com and buymiccable.com, under the same web portal.

One of the best things about developing this site was being able to use cartoon characters that my Father, Bill Harrison, had drawn for his 1960’s comic strip “Guess Who“.  They are great spokesmen for our company, and using them to represent us has really helped me “find my voice” when blogging and creating web material.

I spend my spare time gardening, sailing, building furniture, and doing metal sculpture (my yard is full of this work).

Even though I left Duke University as an employee, I am a charter member of the Duke Chapel Congregation.  My wife Gina (we were married in Duke Chapel) is a 25 year member of the Duke Chapel Choir and I enjoy being part of the usher team there, along with my two children, Charlotte and Kevin.

Being able to work for myself for the last 23 years has been a wonderful blessing, and I am grateful to all our loyal customers who have helped our business grow.

I am anonymous no longer!

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 quality speaker cables.

We used to do lots of church and auditorium sound system installations and many times, some sort of a patch bay was called for. While including a patch bay in an installation can be both expensive and time consuming, it is always worth the trouble, even in a simple installation.

The industry standard for audio patch bays uses quarter inch connectors or something similar called “TT” (”TT” stands for “tiny telephone”) a standard left over from when telephone systems used physical switchboards. Early sound system patch bays actually used hardware intended for the phone company.

We quickly realized that using the “TT” standard, even though it was embraced by console manufacturers and recording hardware makers, was not the best solution for the job.

While not universally accepted for patch bays, using the XLR standard for these patch bays was a much better solution. It’s hard to come up with a connector design better than the XLR3 connector. It is durable. It can be used balanced (3 wire) or unbalanced (2 wire), it is readily available in places like Radio Shack, and it is inexpensive.

Best of all, it doesn’t require a different kind of cable from the other wires used in most sound system installations. If you have almost any kind of sound system, you are already using XLR3 cables, as these are what is used on almost all microphones.

We tried to include patch bays in several locations along an audio signals path (both inputs and outputs) so that rerouting, patching in temporary sound sources, routing signal to temporary output sources, etc. could be done without unpatching the primary console inputs and outputs.

Using XLR connectors allows you to pass both balanced and unbalanced signals, including phantom power when necessary and use standard XLR “barrel” type adapters like ground lifts and isolation transformers. The “TT” standard does not allow for any of these adaptations.

XLR cables can be patched together “head to tail” to make as long a cable as you need. XLR cables are available in short lengths for standard patch bay use, but any size XLR microphone cable can be used.

Unlike a two pole or three pole “TT” connector, the XLR3 connector can be patched without having to pass the tip of the connector through the ring(s) of the mating female connector. The likelihood of annoying and possibly damaging “pops” and “cracks” is greatly reduced.

Need to trace a signal? Standard tone generators and cable testers can be used with the XLR patch panel without any adapters. None of this can be done with a “TT” patch panel.

If you really want flexibility in your sound system installation XLR is the way to go.

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 . View our full selection of XLR cables at BuyMicCable.com

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.