From: tonyb@juliet.ll.mit.edu ( Tony Berke ) Newsgroups: rec.audio Subject: Low-flying jets, high-flying neighbors (was Re: Recordings with deep bass) Message-ID: Date: 14 Jul 92 19:03:20 GMT Organization: M.I.T. Lincoln Lab - Group 43 In article <1992Jul12.021747.27427@bilver.uucp> bill@bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion) writes: In article <182574@pyramid.pyramid.com> lstowell@pyrnova.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell) writes: >In article <1992Jul10.193001.22382@tvnews.tv.tek.com> >bill@thd.tv.tek.com (William K. McFadden) writes: >>Can anyone recommend some recordings with deep bass on them? By deep I >>mean below 32 Hz. >>Hence, I am looking for some recordings with deep bass, particularly >>pipe organ stuff. So far I have Telarc's 1812, Time Warp, and The >>Digital Domain. What else out there is good? > Is that the Stanford University "Digital Domain" with the 747 > followed by the THX Big Note? I've popped a few woofers with > mine... -Blow a woofer?? You have to work at things like that or be -careless... OK, I haven't told a "dumb things I did with my big PA before I got worried about my ears" story in a while, so here goes... Back in 1983 I was still a starving college student. A buddy and I were feeding ourselves (barely) by running a mobile Disc-Jockey service that was, for New Hampshire, at least, a bit different than the run of the mill dweeb-in-a-polyester-tuxedo-with-a-Pair-of-Yamaha- PA-Speakers-and-a-Peavey-CS400-amp-playing-horrible-sounding-cassettes- and-45's outfit. Specifically, we had (so our customers told us) a pretty diverse taste in music, and always attempted to play this music (too loudly) through as sophisticated and nice-sounding a system as possible, along with as big a light show as we could find power (and money) for. While this did wonders for our gross receipts, it messed up our bottom line (and our backs) to no end. But I digress... We were too poor to have a separate home stereo system, so after our Saturday gigs Rick and I ALWAYS unloaded the system straight from the truck into the living room of our rented house, set it up, and listened to a bit of music (often at 110-120 dB, often at 2 AM or so) to unwind. For reasons that were mostly unrelated to sound reproduction, some of our fuddy-dud neighbors didn't like us, and this late-night listening, aside from being genuinely enjoyable, became our really mature way of dealing with the situation. One important additional point -- our mixer was too noisy to do CDs justice, so we ran from the player through our equalizer (which happened to have these two tiny knobs for gain trimming) into the amplifier stack. Yeah, stack. Six amps, including four Crown DC300s, two running bridged into four-ohm loads. 3500 Watts, no waiting! The speaker stacks weren't as big back then as they eventually got, but we had two 18" vented subs, four 15" vented mids, four 10" lower midranges, some nice Gauss compression mids, and a pile of bullet tweeters. Hardly high-end, but pretty flat, and capable of 125-130 dB across much of the spectrum. We were totally hooked on CDs from the start, as they offered total freedom from acoustic feedback (if you don't count bass-triggered mistracking as feedback). We got into playing CDs at our gigs as soon as they became "generally available", where "generally available" meant that we would regularly go to record stores and find that we owned ALL the CDs that they offered for sale. This caused us to buy some rather odd discs out of frustration, one of which was the Digital Domain. One night we returned from a gig, set the system up, drank a few beers, and decided to hear this as-yet-unplayed "Digital Domain" CD that we'd just picked up on the way to the gig. I plopped it on the player, and we started listening. All I could hear were some crickets outside! As I walked over to the stereo to investigate, I realized that the crickets were coming from the speakers, sounding rather cricket-like in magnitude. I though, "Shit, I didn't just lug 800 pounds of equipment into my living room at 2 in the morning to hear some crickets -- I wanna hear some !!!!CRICKETS!!!! A bit of twiddling of the two teensy volume trim knobs didn't produce the desired effect, so I cranked up the ten or so separate gain conrols on the electronic crossovers and was finally rewarded with some real-man cricket noises. CHEEPA, CHEEPA. CRICK, CRICK. Ooooh boy, now we're partyin' !! I sat down on the couch with Rick, and we stared to CRICK, CRICK read the CHIRP, CRICK liner notes on the CD. I had just gotten to the part that described the track we were listening to when the crickets were replaced by this wonderful recording of a large river at flood level. I smiled in satisfaction, and began reading (this is from memory, so forgive me) "On track one, we strive to demonstrate the entire dynamic range of the Compact Disc format... a live recording of the ambient noise in a quiet forest is reproduced at its natural level... eventually giving way to the pleasant burble of a small brook... Small brook? These were obviously out-of-date liner notes, for by now there was clearly a raging river running through our living room. I stopped reading at about this point, because I went to the window to determine the source of the large aircraft that seemed to be heading towards our house (OK, so I'm a little slow on the uptake... It was late!). You see, we were living on the beach under an approach path of the now-defunct Pease Air Force Base. Operations at 2AM were somewhat unusual, so I went out to see what was going on. Of course, the sound was coming from the speakers and not outdoors. Those of you who've heard this disc will perhaps understand what happened next. You see, the aircraft on the disc can be heard from a long way off. It was recorded on a hilltop with a portable digital recording setup and some B&K microphones that can deal with high SPLs. By the time the plane is overhead, the digital level on the CD is high enough to sound about right (volume wise) in relation to the crickets at the beginning of the crack. That's crickets, not CRICKETS. The basic result of all this is that the damn thing keeps getting louder and louder. And just when you thing "gee, this is REALLY loud", it gets even louder, at which point you say "hot damn, this is INCREDIBLY loud!", after which the noise level increases some more and you run out of adjectives, which is generally irrelevant because no one can hear you anyway. Back in my living room, Rick and I were busy discovering that the compressor whine of jet turbine engines falls nicely into the frequency range that a good horn midrange and tweeter can reproduce at amazingly painful volume levels, which added an interesting twist to the situation -- namely, all four of our hands were occupied protecting what was left of ears, leving no appendages with sufficient dexterity to operate the aforementioned two teensey-weensey volume knobs on the equalizer, which was situated in dangerous proximity to one of the speaker stacks. The CD player was sitting on a shelf in front of which we had left a stack of lighting equipment, so Rick got to witness an interesting one-footed dance where I attempted with limited success to shut the amplifiers off, one by one, with my big toe. Luckily for our woofers, I succeeded before the Big Note happened. The final damage tally was fairly light. No audio equipment was hurt, but a few things had fallen off of shelves, and we lost a dish or two that had been teetering on the edge of a table to begin with. We immediately played the jet flyover portion several more times, to get a better idea of what sort of levels were realisticly attainable with the system. We wound up adopting the flyover/note combination as our signature sign-off at gigs -- it was a big hit. Sometimes we mixed it with the last fragment of Yello's "Oh Yeah" as a final statement. The punchline to this is that our nasty neighbors frequently got woken up by these errant low-flying jets for the next year or so. The people at Pease AFB vehemently denied violating any noise abatement agreements, which made the complainers look kinda silly, since no one else in town reported hearing the flights. On the day we finally moved out of our house, our neighbors and some guests of theirs set up lounge chairs on their lawn and watched while we packed. We decided to move sound system last, so we could at last let them know the source of their torture. The Digital Domain came out once again. The jet blew by, the woofers rattled, the windows shook, but the neighbors, instead of looking over at our house with the shocked realization that it was us all along, were left staring confusedly at the sky! They finally caught on when, five minutes later, the sound system started coming out of the house, borne by hordes hysterically laughing volunteer movers. I've since grown more conscious of the irreplaceable nature of one's ears, but I have to admit, I miss that stuff! Have a nice flight, Tony Berke (tonyb@juliet.ll.mit.edu)