The Audio Cyclopedia by Howard M. Tremaine

Will and I were perusing a small thrift store in Los Gatos the other day, when we stumbled upon their small used books section. This is what we found, for $1.00:

This 1,703 page reference guide contains information, schematics and explanations of everything from equalizers, transformers and coils, vacuum tubes, pickups, magnetic recording, power supplies, and dissections of vintage microphones. Yes, everything that this blog is about.

We did a quick Amazon search and found that this book is fairly rare... prices ranging from $80-$300. A Gearslutz search revealed that nearly every audio book ever written references this holy grail of audio details.

That being said, we will be posting excerpts from this book as we undertake the task to preserve the priceless information it holds.

Expect that soon, we're still reeling from how much happiness one can obtain from the exchange of a single dollar.

We-Verb Project: Rob Owen

We have currently been working with Rob Owen, a singer/songwriter from Santa Cruz. Insert shameless plug.... oh, about here: http://www.robowenmusic.com/

Thus far, we have tracked drums, acoustic guitars, a scratch vocal track, and hand percussion (!!!!!!).

Speaking of drums, want a killer kick sound? Try a MA-200 outside of the kick, and stick a D112 inside.... add a little D-Verb (simple, yet sexy) to be a showoff on your blog, and you have this:



And as if you needed visual confirmation:

Here are some other random pics from our aural escapades...

Our drum set up:

Will doing some editing for the bass player:




Blythe holding down the talkback mic so Rob can play in the control room as a reference for the bassist and drummer:


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More will be posted soon as this project progresses.... we are also venturing into open water with assembling a DIY audio project without the proverbial floaties of a printed PCB:

Yes, my friends, a bread boarded Tube Screamer is on the way.

We-Verb Challenge

Before we start getting back into serious posts about our happenings (recording, mixing, our new SCA preamp shootout, wrestling with a multi-mod guitar pedal), I would like to issue a challenge...

Give me one reason why these invalids deserve the acclaim they have been handed out of, what seems to me, sheer accident:

Vampire Weekend... populating the young adult section of a library near you.

SCA: N72

Why yes, we have purchased a Neve clone from SCA.

Be prepared.

The Long-Awaited Preamp Shootout!!

Yes, we have finally waded through the murky, and uncharted-since-university-3-years-ago waters of the first half of a real academic semester, and we are here to boast the results of a preamp shootout that took place over a month ago, that we just haven't had time to share.

[Yeah, I know, worst excuse ever. The actual scenario was that AR and I got abducted by the Digidesign gods.... and... and... yeah, no, I've got nothing.]
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The C84 was amazingly easy to construct. It took us about 4-5 hours total, and it worked on the first try.

Here is our PCB in the "final" stages:


Just as we had opened what we call our "Final Stage Beer"... we discovered that we had 17 more pages of wiring the damn thing to the power supply in the chassis. No pictures of that part... we were a little too annoyed to take pictures, so we probably supplemented that with another "First Stage of Final Stage Beer":


Andddd... we jump to the ultimate tier of construction: Completion with functionality! You can tell it works from the giant LED... you see it there? Yeah you do.



Here it is ladies and gentlemen, the shootout:

Mbox2 with Focusrite preamps:


Seventh Circle Audio C84:


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Coming soon to We-Verb (no, really):

- We will be doing a couple microphone mods... a minor one and a major! More details to follow.

Purple Haze

From the February issue of EQ:


Fig 3. The purple waveform is compressed, while the magenta waveform is the original signal. Note how the uncompressed waveform has much higher peaks.

And yes, that is the original border at the top of the page... nothing screams compression like lavender in contrast to plum.

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This week on We-Verb:

- We won't make you wait any longer: Our preamp is............ functional! (On the first try, might I add!) Scientific shootout between the SCA C84 and the...... Digi Mbox2. It will be nothing less than epic.

Happy New Year from We-Verb!

That's right! We celebrated New Years day the same way as the rest of you, with a glass of bubbly and a nice hot soldering iron to keep you warm. (Also, please ignore the monitors in the background, we are borrowing them to test them out... we will go into failure another time.)

We just wanted to give you a quick update, we have dove in to soldering components to the PCB on the C84 from Seventh Circle Audio.

First we had the painstaking task of sorting through the 150 or so electrical components and parts, matching them up to the Bill of Materials, just to make sure that everything was there. Clearly, the most fun was the tiny resistors, where their value is indicated from several colored bands that each stand for a number, and since the people who came up with this system were not art students, a lot of the colors look similar.

Luckily we have a digital multimeter, so we were able to verify the resistor values accurately. Also, for anyone else pursuing a project like this, once we found the value of the component, we put a piece of tape on it and wrote where it goes (e.g. R22, means resistor 22, which is silk-screened on the PCB):



We will post more as it happens! Since I'm sure you're dying to see it... yes, here is another gratuitous PCB shot: