Theo Verelst Local Diary Page 19
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Thu Sept 2, 2003
After again not making many diary pages, though I've made other ones,
like my Audio page, this is
supposed to get a big page with lots of diary / activity stuff on it,
with a lot of interesting projects and their results, which of course
cannot be heard over the
internet for what they are worth. So if you don't know much about
specifications of audio equipment it's hard to judge what those
thingies are worth, but I assure you most of it is not too often even
equalled by professional equipment.
An important theme, though not really on purpose, is the advance of
electronics and electronics parts, which makes it possible to make
better equipment, or more capable equipment. Also, the price of certain
types of equipment can go down, especially with the advent of
better or more integrated chips, and their use. For instance, while it
used to be hard to make a CD player DA converter of even reasonable
quality, it is currently possible to do the (much harder) Analog to
Digital conversion nowadays on a cheap comptuer sound card of $15.
In the course of time, many things seem to have blurred though, in the
sense of people knowing what 'new' and supposedly more advanced
eqiuipment is supposed to have to offer, especially in quality sense.
Earlier, in the 70 and 80 consumer audio equipment started to get away
from the primary purposes: playing music with it, preferably in good
quality. Gadgets, bells and whishles and all kinds of little lights and
designs are not bad idea, but the idea of quality got blurred, probably
because it is quite a bit harder to judge a DA converter and the
quality of an mpeg compressor then the alrerady hard job of judging a
turntable element, or lets say a good hifi speaker.
CD players and digital audio were supposed to bring impovements in the
area of sound quality, for instance the background noise levels, but
perfection is technically still not trivial at all, even though high
tech science labds probably are capable of doig a near perfect job for
CD recordings. That's a highly scientific discussion to begin with,
though, lets say second year electrical engineering study material at
university would be required basis knowledge.
From experience, I know that many technical issues aren't up to
standard in our modern audio (or video) consumner world, which is not
bad, but many people aren't even aware of it, and much cheap modern
equipment is fun enough and maybe light and fashionable, but
contemporary music has not left us with a normal sense of the
tradiional and sensible HiFI adiagium: every chain is as strong as its
weakest link, and primarily every link is supposed to pass the audio
signal as perfectly as possible, with as little signal distortion as
possible. It seems not many people are aware of that idea anymore,
which leads to completely wrong assesments of the normal hifi equipment
toughts, where mostly it is so that every bit of distortion introduced
anywhere in the audio chain from CD to speaker adds up to distortion
which the listener hears, signal imperfections almost never cancel
out...
Not even to speak about lossy audio compression schemes, like mpeg,
where a lot of the original lifelyness of the audio source can easily
get lost, I mean for internet trransfering of sound files, or
archiving, it's nice, but not as a major quality audio sound source.
That's because information gets lost when the mpeg encoding takes
place, which cannot be regenerated during playback, even though the
play back signal appears to sound more or less like the original,
meaning it doesn't hiss or hum or necessarily sound dull or muffled or
like wow and flutter. It might seem of some special quality because of
this loss of liveliness, but that is certainly incorrect: a lot of less
obvioud signal properties may well be gone, haviing to do with
sparklyness, livelyness, stereo image (how the sound picture comes
across on a set of stereo speakers), and details in the sound. Which is
only better for lower digital data rates (less bits per second are
needed for the same digital audio signal, or more songs fit on one CD)
, but never for the sound itself, it will only deteriorate through mpeg
encoding and decoding.
Speakers over the years have remained the weakest link in the audio
chain by far, and that is still the case. Couldn't nasa, Bose and the
US army team up and make the speakers which make all others redundant?
Well, I'm sure scientific hard work can produce pretty good speakers
making a lot of others pale in comparison, but even in post nuclear
missile times, even when space stations are continuously occupied and
almost a routine human activity, a good set of speakers is still hard
to get by, essentially. That's a discussion on it's own...
What is relatively new, though the concept comes from the late sixties,
is satelite TV, for little money, and also portable. Below a picture of
the LNW (the satelite signal pickup unit amplifying the weak
electromagnetical signal from the centre of the disc) of a very cheap
portable satelite receiver set, in good working order:
It is a pretty small dish and receiver unit, which fits in a suitcase,
and can work on a car battery. I've tried it out from a balcony of a
normal city home, somewhere in the middle of france in the countryside,
and on various locations from a car, where I used a recent USB-2 based
hardware MPEG encoding TV digitizer box:
with a notebook, which works fine, though sometumes starting the
whole thing up is troublesome, and there is too much delay in the
digitizer box to be handy. It does
encode mpegI and MpegII up to video size DVD quality in real time thouh with up to very
good results, also image dynamics-wise, the windows media erkiness,
suggested resolution isn't a problem here, and the file sizez and
interface bandwidth stay nicely withing bounds because of the hardware
mpeg encoder.
Tue Sept 14, 2004, 22:00
This will be a page packed with photos and movies/sounds with a lot of
recent diary stuff.
Beware that this page contains a lot of not
so small images, which may take a long time to load. They were
compressed to the level that they have sufficient remaining quality,
and they are progressively organized, so when your browser (such as
netscape can) supports it, the images when loading become immedeately
visible, but in a course resolution, and become sharper as loading
proceeds. If you are on a DSL or other fast link which is faster than
256 kilobits/sec., then the limiting factor for sure is this server,
not your connection...
No popup windows appear though, no cookies are set, and there is
nothing
special about the images, and no single image is larger than about 200
kilobytes, which is not too extreme.
Equipment making
It's been a while, but lately I've been into making and preparing
equipment again, which luckily was possible, and of course on a very
low budget, though not with small results. Because of a live event
which I amplified (see below) the speakers I'd build needed covering of
the sensitive cones of the loudspeaker units, and it needed to be done
fast before last weekend. Amsterdam electronics stores for one reason
or another don't always have all one wants, but I managed to get a set
of more or less fitting grills, and took time to build in the 4th
speaker (I't's been a 4-way system for while as test) and attach the
protective steel gauzes.
Here the grills are in place for one channel, while the other channels'
speakers have been removed.
The woofers are about 100 Watts american product with laminated
(strong) cone and soft and silicon-like suspension, here shown 'en
profil'.
Closeup of the various speaker units, and the kenwood low-mid squaker
atop of the other channel speaker, as it worked during test.
The result of adding the 4th speaker to the enclosure instead of
attached to the top sounded good when tested with some music.
Also, I needed to fasten the heatsinks in the amplifier, which were a
but loosely attached to the bottom plate thus far, though the amp has
been along to france for a 1600 km drive before, which it survived
fine... The heatsinks in theory could get hot to a limit of 150 degrees
Celsius (the safe temperature limitation built in the chips), and they
must be electrically isolated, or a bad short circuit
would occur. That is because I attached the endstage chips directly to
a
big heatsink, with no thermically imperfect isolation.
I ended up chosing wood as montage aid and isolation between heatsinks
of each channel and the enclosure, which has worked just fine also in
life outdoor amplification, see below.
Photo during work
on heatsink fastening (with the wooden blocks)
A view-while-being-worked-on of the interior of the 2x100W continuous
RMS, 600W Max Music power amp, with a 4 amp fuse, and at significant
power a datasheet based distortion figure of less than 0.005 % (1 in
20,000), high damping, MOSFET endstage characteristics, heavy supply,
and a measurement amplifier build-up.
I'm working on more elaborate audio processing stuff, including a
computer controlled high quality analog
mixer, see my Audio Achievements Page , but
currently this amp has spartan facilities except the specs aren't
spartanic, and the power rating isn't either.
What does it all sound like? Well, also thanks to good speaker buildup
(it's an sealed airtight enclosure, no loose-sounding bass reflexes)
and choice of elements:
The interior of the
speakers has been fitted with glasswool contained in protective
covering on all sides
the sound has been praised also by music knowledgeable people as
beautiful, also at realistic power levels for a PA system, as shown
below even outdoors.
Another type of equipment I'm at least working / thinking /
experimenting on is more electronically and digitally involved, such as
sound processing and sound synthesis. Below a picture of various pieces
of half-products for these purposes:
On the left, 2 Analog Devices blackfin
DSP boards with in total 8 high quality audio channels in and 12 out
with very short
delay can be seen (up to 96kHz/24bits (with limitations) and one sample
delay), which have a big flash memory which can be
programmed from a standard PC for standalone operation. The lower board
on the picture receives supply voltage from a portable power source, a
big NiMh power pack, which should last 3 hours with full processing
power in use, here the BF561 dual core acts as a Chorus
Unit, for which I've released the project sources in Open Source form, while the LEDs have been put to
work as a perfectly responding LED VU Peak meter (the little yellow
lights).
Atop the powerpack a portable Philps CD player, which is of reasonable
qaulity, usable though beatable when using the high Q amp and speakers,
by my self made Burrow and Brown PCM2906 based DA (and AD) converter
attached to a computer or notebook. That combination with some well
chosen music (lets say everything from the 70's through contemporary
Jazzrock/fusion) makes for remarkably nice and open and bright and
'standing' sound. Probably beatable, but not by the normal 'better'
HiFi system. Not even by far.
The middle green Printed Circuit Board is a Xilinx development board.
Xilinx makes (amoung others) Complex Programmable Logic Devices, of
which one is the black square just atop the rainbow band wire, which
has 144 pins, of which most can be programmed as logical input or
output pins. This board makes all those pins available at the edges,
through 4 40 pin connectors which can be wire-connected to the outside
world, such as shown here to a breadboard with a LED display, but in
principle also to the blackfin boards, to provide massive IO
connectivity and complex logical functions. To test the principles and
the design software, I used schematic drawing and some VHDL functions
to make a big clock pulse divider and a 7 segment hexadecimal counter
and display driver, which worked fine and the board functions well,
even on a battery supply.
Lying on top of the Xilinx board the little blue open aluminium case
contains a fast, high quality stereo microphone / guitar signal
amplifier, in this case also fed from a NiMh recharcgable battery
supply. Currently it mixes a high Z (2 Meg Ohm low capacitance
impedance) guitar input with a low voltage phantom stereo microphone
input, but I'm not satisfied with the headroom and amplification
factors, which isn't helped by the, otherwise practical, single 5 V
supply voltage for the used OpAmp. s it happens last week I saw a Texas
Instruments webcast, with interesting shots from their laboratories
(including the use of breadboards!) on Single Supply opamps, teaching
us mainly that the biggest problem with them is the breaddown of common
mode rejection for higher common mode voltages, and therefrom higher
distortion. A relais-clicking audio analyzer box showed the results on
probably an expensive screen...
These guys, like various other electronics players, send free samples
of their parts to prospect customer / designers. That's good. I
recently received oversees (mainly) packages over TNT, UPS, and DHL
couriers, which bring those parts (chips, mainly) asked for from
websites of electronics companies, over the ocean in a few days only.
Good stuff.
The above picture further more shows some of these samples in use in
the upper right corner, where the most crowded white breadboard
contains a working prototype of a high quality, 5 stereo channel real
time computer controlled mixer
based on TI chips.
I'm currently looking into switched filtering: I've succesfully tried a
bit noisy sample from a Dallas/Maxim 5th order frequancy controlled
filter, and will try digitally controlled potmeters of the same for
testing a high quality computer controllable tone control unit.
All this is also very usable basic fabric for a computer controllable
mainly analog signal path synthesizer, which of course I'm aware of.
While thinking about all this and the mighty computer / DSP (with high
Q AD / DA converter) keep in mind that the second year Electrical
Engineering course 'Information Theory', and various other classes,
teach us that sampling and (perfect) signal reconstruction can only
properly take place under well-defined boundary conditions, such as
observing the shannon sampling rate, and buildup of the reconstruction
filter. An example theoretical
analysis of an important case I've written on the Tcl wiki, as an
example application of the industry standard Tcl scripting language and
the Open Source (free) Maxima
mathematical (symbolic) manipulation package.
Sampled
signal perfect reconstruction attempt using limited number of
sinc functions on bandwidth limited additive
synthesis waveform
Supposedly heavy past Delft University signal processing professors
most probably have sinned greatly against these rules, and also seem to
lack understanding of electronics circuits and filters and their (im-)
possibilities...
North Sea Jazz 2004
I was luckly to be able to go to the big dutch but luckily
internationally minded North Sea
Jazz festival a little while ago, of which this is an overview of
the open yard in daytime. They had a web-controllable webcam there,
which could also pick up the image from the big screen, and givea radio
audio feed, that's fun.
A little focus on the appearance of John Scofield in trio formation,
see picture below.
From left to right John Scofield
on guitar, Bill
Stewart on drums, and Steve Swallow on
bass, with whom John has played long ago as well. For those people
unaware of this type of music: it's worth a listen to see how on of the
contemporary Jazz top guitarists uses his unique sound and playing
style in various types of songs and band settings. When I did workshops
at the Delft Music centre many years ago, Scofield was one of the
conservatory Jazz students example guitarists.
What goes on on a Jazz stage, spelling angels, the pits of hell open
and inspiring the New Age sensitive and drugged players? Nope,. though
maybe some factors of the supernatural can be though present and
appropriately beaten or taken serious. We were standing close to the
stage (maybe 5 meters), which was not bad experience at all, which I
knew, I'd seen John play live before, though long ago. There was an
interview with Mike Stern on the Festival radio channel, which I
unfortunately didn't record, where he speaks about the importance of
sound in music.
As a apetizer (it's short...) I've made a little bootleg (har har)
recording of a little piece of a song, with video, but as I said, only
very short. Never hurts as a bit of advertizement, I guess, when
somebody has a problem with it, I'll take it down... (I was not hiding
the little recording, being very close to the stage.) Sound isn't
perfect, but not too bad either, this fragment you'll need to download
first before playing it, because this server cannot serve it in real
time by far. It's a big file, so it will take some download time.
Scofield
live video fragment 1400 kilo
bits/sec, Mpeg video stereo sound. length 1:01 min. (10 MB file
size)
Self performance in France
I performed myself to, most recently last week in les Vosges (De
Vogezen, east north/mid france, nice green area) in a small town,
because I got invited there and to play there, which was a good idea
which worked.
I played the Yamaha S90 synthesizer shown here on the stage with a view
on where later the audience would be, while speakers were strategically
placed on various locations in the town centre.There was a decent and
loud enough PA system, which however didn't make exactly the type of
hifi sound I'd be after... Monitoring was good for me.
I was invited to play in a 3 head band, playing some rock songs, around
dusk in this mideval french setting (town from about 11th century).
Modern technology makes it possible to have an idea of the show over
the internet in the form of this short audio exerpt:
francerock3.mp2
96 kbit/s 44.1kHz stereo Mpeg1 layer 2, length 76 sec, size
900kByte.
That's me on the keys playing (digital...) bass, clavinet (the funkey
'ploing' sound), and electronic organ (at the end).
Here is a video of 2 songs. I've compressed the video to just fit over
this servers' uplink
bandwidth, so when you are on cable or DSL, you should be able to view
straight away, without delay, when you have no competition on the
server:
francerock2_256.mpg
260 kilobits/s (192 video, 64 stereo sound) Mpeg video, length 12:02
min. (file size 22 MByte)
The missing mime types of the server may require you to right
click-save, or
copy link location and paste into your media players' Open Url dialog.
Of course I was partly obnoxious enough on stage to prevent pitfalls
and make at least a reasonable performance with the guitar player. The
harmonica was invited as if it was an open stage, he just walked in.
Notice there is no bass player, so I keep guard on the bass rythm lines
over the synthesizer, which you may hear depening on you playback
system and the quality of the mpeg, challenging, but fun enough.Oh, of
course the songs were basically covers, with maybe one or two times
rehearsal.
For closing this section, a view from a path a little up high, close to
the stage place:
Me performing in Muiderberg, Holland
A little while ago I played some songs on a borrowed synthesizer
(rather a decent keyboard) near a beach on the shore of the dutch
IJsselmeer, which was fun. It wasn't my band at all, and was more like
a jam, which didn't make it less fun.
The 'portable stage',
and (yellow noisy machine in the front) power source and some band
members.
The generator would have been up to 2.5 kiloWatts, a bit big moped
engine equivalent, and equivalanet noise (...) , which probably wasn't
necessary, but a decent enough PA system on the beach, thats fun, with
a roofed wagon containing the PA mixer.
A view from
down the 'stage' on the mics and the beach
A video tape was made of most of the performance, looking like this
(I'm wearing a white hat against the sun):
muiderberg9.mpg
MPEG video 375x288, 25FPS, 44.1kS/s stereo sound,
length
9:12 min (size
86 MegaBytes)
Now way this video will playback straight away, you'll need to download
it! This server can do about 256 kilobit per second upload speed, so 86
MB would take about 80,000/20 seconds makes about 4000 seconds which is
a little over an hour. On a 56k6 modem which works well, this would be
about 5 hours. I've had at least one downloader from the US (across the
ocean...) already who was enthousiastic about the result, so it can
work!
Christianity, again ?
"No Please"...
Well, it depends, it appears the christianity is the producer of the
absolute human lows in history, consistently, but we shouldn't forget
that the origins were the producers of the only and absolute highs in
history, or lets say that which was actually christian, or acording to
Gods laws was that way.
First, a quoted letter I found on the web (see http://www.friesian.com/ross/popper.htm
from sir Karl Popper, probably the greatest and most well known and
respected philosopher of science from the 20th century, which he writes
to a fellow philosopher:
(I compressed the
images for easier loading, but didn't change anything, see the original
page for higher quality)
"I thought that breed had died out". Ahem.
Anyhow, no fascism with him, it appears. Good. I did follow and pass a
heavy philosophy course during my EE study at university, where I
learned about Poppers' "Logik der Forschung". Worthy material, he knew
Einstein, too, and sort of made clear that the logic of research can
only lead to certainty in the sense of disproofing
a theory, and furthermore only make credible that a lot of
independently repeated experiments indicate a certain theory may well
be generally true. A big issue with the advant of quantum physics,
which were quite different from traditional, classical, mechanistic,
physics based reality views.
Christianity of course doesn't simply stand above science, even though
the non-real and powergreedy variations (which are abundantly present)
would like to be like the Pope with Gallileo (being punished for
finding out the world wasn't flat) or when they have to with Columbus
(who sought papal aproval for sailing to America).
A page pair
from the Jimmi Swaggart 'Expositors New Testament' interesting reading
for people wanting to know a bit more about normal interpretation of
biblical material in these times.
With the package from the US containing this new testament, came some
CD's from the early 80's of which I took the liberty of encoding one
example song from 'Homeward Bound' in mpeg, so you can have an
impression of the music, or as far as it stays eatable through
mpegification....:
Leaving' On My Mind
mpeg2 layer 3 22050Hz joint stereo length 7:15 min (size 2.38 MByte)
You should be able to feed the Url to your favorite Media Player, and
hear the song straight away if you're on at least 100 kilobits/sec.
connection.
"Strange
guys, those christians? God? Jesus? Free course"
I saw the above in Delft, near university, a little while ago, probably
the student clubs were advertising for members.
Colloqium
committee Middle ages: Space for prayer or Guest place
The honouring of Bonifatius in Fulda convict,
8th-9th century
This was in university of amsterdam context earlier this year. Auch.
I pictured the
interior of the Maasbach Word Mission place at the Capitool in the the
Hague
I went to the Hague with Barbara and visited the Maasbach mission
centre late sunday morning service for an impression. Nice enough in
certain ways, I'm sure I wouldn't agree with all the doctrine, I was
offended by the presence of some proposterous worship leader (or what
are they called), but not by Maasbach junior himself. The altar on the
right should go, the sermon was ok enough, depending on what you'd come
looking for.
Afterward: the beach in scheveningen on a nice sunny day.
Talking about the christian area of life, I made this picture near the
entrance (the gate) of the Hell's Angels burels in Amsterdam a while
ago:
Maybe that is to unjinx the following hardcore sinfull images, which I
took in the big proposterous jesuit church in Amsterdam:
A
fascistically oriented poster about Jesuit catholic youth group
Amsterdam
This guy, who never came by to help me (...) has been part of sort of
the athmosphere of this clan of heathens, with a pompous and offensive
nature and manner of behaviour that is probably known to many
dutch from TV.
antoine bodar
A dutch church historian Ton van
Schaik called a book of his "een spoedcursus cultuurpessimisme voor katholieke
zwakbegaafden" meaning "A steamcourse cultural pessimism
for catholic ratards". Is that all ? No, these guys are evil, seriously
evil. Jesuitism teaches to find all the sinfull means God allows to
work against the life and will of the real Jesus (assuming He has lived
and still lives), to try to get power in the catholic great whore, and
they are not shunning any means to get what they want. Reading this
dutch life
description there are remarkable parallels with my ongoings,
coïncidence (minus stuff like homosexuality, please..)? No, of
course not. The leader of the Jesuits, which were very hated in
history, even by explicitly mentioning their name kicked out of
gouvernment and organisations because they were too evil, is also a
dutch guy, probably also no evidence. Just like that North Holland (the
dutch province which contains Amsterdam) was known long ago already to
have tolerated the world head of satans church on their land. No
coïncidences, no sir, I don't belief that.
Are these chaps free from abusing children at first communion? Want to
throw the first stone with me? The great whore from Rome is for real,
and is evil, very evil, and cannot be trusted. Some protestant
christians and groups historically were probably bearable, but they are
not. Not ever.
An actual photograph from de krijtberg
Jesuit church in amsterdam:
Abominations against God and his laws and His character, according to
anywhere in the bible.
Do I have things to say about christian subjects? Sure. Probably more
than a bit in the whole of things, even apart from Bible Translation
issues I raised years ago, and for which I'll probably in the near
future make server provision as experiment to begin with.
But those things I have to say are primarily for actual christians who
have a serious interest for at least moderately OK reasons, not for the
papals and their associates. Not because I fear them, just because
that's not my interest, and of a completely different nature, no matter
who all want to claim the opposite. I came across this orange counter
poster, which I find much more fun than the above sh*:
A packet of normal electronics wire with advertisement ! ....
Seriously, I've made some recordings a while ago, where I speak about
christian subjects, which started as trying out some stereo microphones
and microphone pre-amplifier I made, and the USB Analog to Digital
converter I made, but I'm sure they're worth a listen for a person with
serious interest in personal christianity capable of at least a bit of
thinking straight.
The mpegs don't do justice to the actual sound quality, but as those
things go they're pretty ok. I think they're all coded at 96kbits/s MPEG1 layer 3 44.1kS/s joint
stereo, making them downloadable for immedeate playing from this
server if you have a least a cable connection (more than 100kbps)
otherwise they on a 56k6 modem take about twice as long to download as
to listen to. There is noise in the background, consider that folklore
computer fan humming...
Current State of
Christianity 1 11:20 min.
Current State of
Christianity 2 13:47 min.
Current State of
Christianity 3 13:42 min.
Current State of
Christianity 4 9:09 min.
Current State of
Christianity 5 19:34 min.
Current State of
Christianity 6 6:26 min.
Current State of
Christianity 7 9:38 min.
Current State of
Christianity 8 18:19 min.
Current State of
Christianity 9 15:53 min.
Luke 10:30 1
23:56 min.
pope 1
1:09 min. (bit humoristic, in dutch)
2 peter 2:1
9:58 min.
psalm 55:1
7:27 min.
revelation 18:1
18:32 min.
romans 3:10
10:11 min.
Again, you may have to right-click on the links and then 'Copy Link
Location' and then start your media player, use 'Open Url' from the
File menu, and use Paste (or Control-V) to play these files. Or simply
download them by right-click 'save link target as'.
Language interest, PC Hoofdhuis revisited
I brought a digital camera along to the library, and made some
interesting photographs, for instance of this reproduction of the ship
journal of Jan Pieterzn. Coen, from the time ships were sailing from
Holland to the east for trade.
Here lie the manuals of an expensive early digital synthesizer called
the Synclavier. I'll go into these subjects later, just like some of
these books describing digital and analog combined circuitry for
synthesizers over the years.
The Hague, my birthtown and dutch gouvernement city
I lived in the Hague during my whole youth and teens (except for
holydays), not too far from the centre, biking distance, and I went to
highschool near the centre and gouvernment buildings, so I was
reasonably famalier with these surroundings.
I went to the inner court of the gouvernment centre called 'het
binnenhof' with the idea in mind to make some video footage on this
historic location for a documentary or whatever I'll make, and when I
got there I found out that that day there was a performance planned in
the actual binnenhof (centre court), which I don't think happens often.
A big sound system, a stage in front of the official 'ridderzaal' and a
FENCE, mind you, where one would actually have to pay to get in. Shame
on them. The centre of democracy and one would have to pay to get
in! Well, anyhow, one was allowed to pass or view from the side, behind
the fence. Anyhow.
At the entrance an actual airport like roentgen machine was positioned,
where they'd almost pass the digital video tapes through, which of
course I prevented because they might get demagnetized. So an X-ray
machine and a cassier at the entrance of the binnenhof, well well.
And police of course, but that doesn't really bother me.
It appears to me there is stage for the people who are just a bit more
equal than others, would those place cost more money ? They sit a but
higher, too.
Anyhow of course I communicated around a bit, and of course it was easy
to pick up, and later now, that I follow the proceedings of the
gouvernment live over internet, the same, that a lot of people are
really against all that's going on, and also against the symbol of,
well, ehr, badness, the current minister president. A poster from
University of Amsterdam (prominent) publication board:
Second Octobre a big demonstration is planned, see http://www.internationalesocialisten.org/
to at least speak out against all the fascism going on (by lack of nazi
power, lets say). They expect even 100,000 people, which is not small
for dutch norms.
I would consider going and maybe bringing a guitar setup, but probably
I'll be lucky to go to france then, hopefully to Paris IRCAM centre, a world wide known centre
for audio research, which have an open day somewhere in october.
This I saw in the window of a book store in the Hague (which also
exists in Amsterdam, where I tried their free wireless internet
connection with a notebook) called The
American Bookstore:
On the other side of the street this historic (second world war)
sculpture:
Art on the shore of the
hofvijver in the Hague, when I was young I'd go there and see the
houses or parliament
and on queens day there'd be a fair where this photo was
taken
The amplifier and speakers at work as real PA system
As they say "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" ...
When I was a kid, I went to the fair in the Hague, and I heard these
loud audio systems, which I found interesting, and also I heard audio
systems in for instance a park or on a socker field. I always wanted to
be able to play with such equipment, which would make so loud or widely
hearable or interesting sounding noise.
In highschool, I was head of the technical committee and in charge of
the school PA system for events and bands, which was fun.
The system I've described is intended as top audio system for at home,
but at the same time to have the power to be used as a very high
quality PA system, which was one of the challenges building it.
Recently I got asked to have the chance to try it out in a live
situation, where an Amsterdam gallery (a completely differentone...) wanted
to make a singing performance work in front of the gallery, on the
street, so in a big space.
With changing audiences it was a success, and as can be seen below my
amp and speakers were used (only my amp in fact), and they worked
perfectly and with great success in coopereation with reasonable
quality microphones (dynamical and a recent condenser) and a
(expensive) Akai digital recording console:
The amplifier being
right in place, not even blinking at the power levels, staying quite
cool.