Recent content by paulraphael

Soul Coughing, How Many Cans (Dynamic upright bass, almost all in one channel) Billie Eilish, Bad Guy (Billie and her brother want to heat up your speakers) Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny, Our Spanish Love Song (Good cut for evaluating the timbre of acoustic bass. If none of the notes is boomy or...

This. I was going to post something similar. An SPL meter always shows every room I've measured to have a 20db to 40db noise floor, but a spectrum analyzer shows it's mostly in the bass. So not only is it in a range where we don't hear so well, but it's not going mask detail at 2khz, for...

I recently decided to rewire a bass guitar, which meant putting myself through soldering school (thanks, 800 hours of YouTube!) The internet teaches a couple of ways to solder wires to the tabs on a potentiometer. One is to hook the wire tightly through the tab before soldering. This is...

I had no idea these things were even active devices. Just assumed that a couple of the pins passed through an analog signal. This doubles the annoyance that jack has been removed from phones.

Apple is the player to watch here. They're about to get approval to actually call their airpods hearing aids. They're able to leverage massive computing power and R&D. I read an interview with a researcher in the hearing aid space, who said something interesting. He said the success of...

True in principle, but the surge protector's rating should be based on a realistic length of wire, not zero wire. My Siemens unit is rated at 600v let-through voltage on all three poles, with 12" leads. You only have to think about the voltage going up for length beyond that. You should still...

The industry recommendation seems to be doing both: a class-1 or class-2 protector at the panel, and class-3 protectors at outlets where you have sensitive electronics. There are a couple of reasons for this, but a big one is that the "let-through" voltage of the big whole-house protectors is...

Reviving an old thread to share a few things I've learned while researching this. We bought an old house in Philadelphia and had the logic boards go out on a couple of appliances, and started to realize the sheer number of electronic things that are at risk, including big expensive stuff. I'm...

They should remove the strings from the logo! Seriously, is this any good? I have a friend who only drinks non-alcoholic beer and I'd bring him this if you give it the thumbs up.

Back in my audiophilia days, I briefly listened to a tiny pair of Totems and was blown away. Looks like that would have been a short-lived impression. Luckily, I couldn't afford them.

Why not? You'd just need a 1/4" in and a speakon out. I'm waiting to see if the bass amp makers start using these newer generation modules in their heads. They tend come out with new models (using new modules) at more or less the same time. IcePower has been the most popular since the beginning...

The guitarist in my old band used to play through a plain old Fender Twin Reverb (~80 watts? A couple of 12s?) To get the tone he liked, he had to crank it loud enough to make enemies of every sound man below 14th St. in Manhattan. As if being a crappy band weren't enough to make enemies. It...

Clean boost pedals exist, but I'm pretty sure that's not what most guitarists are talking about. The ones people covet and hoard and argue about are distortion sources, all somewhere on the spectrum of "overdrive," "distortion," and "fuzz." Tube versions do exist ... but they're the minority...

Another place that mumbo-jumbo creeps into the guitar world: the fetishization of everything being original. The idea that any "vintage" instrument (hilarious when we're talking about stuff that's younger than half the members of this board) will be devalued by any attempt at refinishing or...

Thing that seems funny about the tube amp religion among guitar players, is that when they need more than just a touch of distortion, they use a pedal. And almost all the favorite distortion pedals use transistors.