Actual ceiling finally being installed! It is all further along then these pictures highlight! The whole ceiling is hung on acoustic hanging clips and furring channel.

So what's going on you say?!!!

Well.... We have been cranking like crazy to get the ceiling up in the new space, I will post pictures at some point!

We have also come very close to concluding our tests with various tubes and such with our GLABS-UF47 and we feel while the two tube 408a concept makes an interesting sounding and very musical mic, it is not quiet or reliable enough for prime time. We are leaning towards the Phaedrus-Audio solution as it sounds excellent is reliable and also if you ever find one you can drop a VF14M tube right in and all you have to do is recalibrate the voltage! Capsule choice on the other hand is still the great debate. Thiersch Elektroakustik makes two really great capsules that are M7 in the classic sense but I think what most recordists and vocalists really want is the K47/49 Neumann variant. Sadly the latter pushes the cost of a GL-U47 up about $800.00 USD as Sennheiser (owner of Neumann) will not sell in bulk discount! Maybe we will offer both!

We are also busy cataloguing all our acquired gear and will be selling off what we don't feel is absolutely necessary moving forward, its a lot of really cool stuff people!!! We will most likely open up shop on Reverb.com.

Just got the Lexicon 224 back from a complete revamp, sounds great!

It had stopped working years ago and I finally got it together to get it fixed. But I even went a step further and had it totally recapped and recalibrated. I have been told that it will now last a good long while and that it sounds probably better then the day it left the factory. I sure know that it sounds damn good to me!

It was rebuilt and repaired by Dane Beamish of Beamish Electronics in Cleveland Ohio!

This pic is not of my exact unit as I did not take pix before installing.

(click to expand photo)

So what started out as an audio restore has of course turned into the audio monster from planet RETRO in the lost star system O.L.D.S.H.**! But dang it sounds good! Also surprisingly quiet for an all analogue signal path. Things to note in the pic: SM-PRO PM-8 summing box between the ubiquitous NS10M's and the Dizengoff Audio D4 REDD47 copy to the left on top of the Focusrite Twin-Trak . The PM-8 is the consoles 2-Buss. We are not 100% done yet but its coming together. As an aside the PM-8 is what Black Lion Audio offers as an upgraded version and Dizengoff Audio is owned by the guy who started and then sold Black Lion. You can't see it in the pic but under the console is 16 channels of Steinberg AD/DA and the Transformer Line out interface. It all works!! BooYa!!

So since we last did an update here we have been really busy. Actually recapped half of all the input channels on the PM2K. Whew! Time consuming and tedious. Built an ELA M251 copy, so cool!!!

But more importantly started actually doing projects. My room still isn't up and running but I have been doing things at a fabulous studio in Brooklyn called Degraw Sound. It's owned by a really top notch guy named Ben Rice and he has partnered in a way with two ace dudes Gian Stone of Stone Recording and Harper James. It is a really awesome room with a really good vibe. Trust me people it really is about the vibe!

The artists are one Roman Urbanski a NYC based singer songwriter with a truly gifted voice, the other is Stose a Punk, Hip-Hop artist who speaks volumes about social (in)justice! In short stay tuned!

There is a company in the country of France that calls itself MicandMod. They are run by a person who goes by the name Yannick and Yankimusic on the forums. I am taking the space and the time to debunk this groups offerings because they are plagiarizing cads. They have taken other peoples recent designs and offerings and subcontracted copies and offered them up as their own without even so much as an acknowledgement. I would ask that you actively boycott this company. If you need further confirmation you can go to again my favorite haunt groupdiy.com and do a search you will see this persons behavior led to being banned from the forum. Which believe me is a painful thing for the moderators, as it is a really fair place.  This is also a departure for me. As opinionated as I can be in conversations with people I have relationships with. I never vent in public forums or on line without extreme care tempered by extreme conviction. In this case I feel morally obligated to ask for your support in this boycott.

So the latest in the mic copy saga is a note-for-note U67 build. This was an interesting one for me as I have never used a U67 in my life. I was building mics and everyone who heard them always said ever thought about building a U67 copy. So I finally did. The high impedance part of this build is what one might call "challenging"!

Credits: The body was sourced from Chunger at store.studio939.com. The internals such as PCB and transformer are Austrian from Max Kircher, AKA IOaudio. The capsule is Australian from BeesNeez Microphones a K6. The PSU PCB is Canadian from Dany Bouchard AKA poctop on the forums at
vintagemicrophonepcbkit.com. The tube is a genuine NOS Telefunken EF86.

How does it sound you say? Really good warm with a smooth top, also very low self noise for a tube mic. The Beesneez K6 capsule is really nice, beefy with out being forward the low end is fat for when you want that,  but tightens up very nicely when the mics highpass filter is engaged and this one sounds, to my ears, that both sides are identical in tone and timbre. Rare if you ask me most dual capsules are ever so slightly different.

Again a lot of reference material at GROUPDIY.COM

So as stated earlier i had to have a card to convert the SIP to DIP for the HA1457 swap. It was really easy and straight ahead. I had some help from Chris Mitchell with the R&D he is the one that determined the need for the caps to ground on the power inputs to avoid parasitic oscillation and did some really scientific analysis between the two chips. Check his saga at:

So the Yamaha PM2000 is one of the only non-consumer products to use The Hitachi Corp HA1457 Chip. It was a very HiFi chip in it's day. It uses a dual rail +- 24VDC power scheme and it is clean reliable and has headroom for days. The down side is the rather cool but rare SIP package. So a replacement that plugs right in ain't out there. But time marches on. The TI OPA604 chip uses the same power scheme and has much better noise and linearity specs. So it is really a toss up. But I think to my ears the OPA604 is worth the time to replace. Yes I had to design my own PCB to make this work.

So this is where we tap the PC Board of the input modules. It is just past the main 10K Master fader and just prior to the pan matrix, the PCB pad is marked O1 on the PCB. From here the orange wire that is seen going off left of the image goes to a DB9 connector that will end up on the front plane of each input module. I chose to do it this way so as not to have to modify the already heavily populated backplane. This could be done mind you but it takes some PCB surgery two spots for each module and that's 64 operations that must be done right in close quarters. NO THANKS!