Paul White
Hello and welcome to the East Sound on Sound podcast. I'm Paul White and with me is Hugh Robjohns.
Hugh Robjohns
Hello. And between us we're going to put the world to rights and whinge about everything that we don't like. Well, to do with music that is anyway.
My whinge of the week, I think, is going to be unlabeled power supplies. I moved house recently and I found I got Something like a tea chest full of power supplies belonging to USB hubs, pedals, bits of outboard kits, small amplifiers. And I didn't know which one was which, really, because the manufacturers don't label them.
So, come on, guys. Sticky labels are not expensive. Please, label the power supplies. And while you're at it, who's going to tell you why he doesn't think we should even have them? Yeah, I'm not a big fan of line lump power supplies, especially on proper professional products. Um, I can, I understand why they need to do it.
There's, there's a variety of technical reasons. There's an awful lot of cost reasons why they, they do it that way. But, you know, for heaven's sake, if I turn up at a, at a recording and I've forgotten a mains lead, I can get a spare mains lead. That's easy. If I turn up without a line lump power supply, getting one of the equivalent voltage and current and all the rest of it is next to impossible.
So why can't you build these things in? Especially for us professional users. And if you are going to give us power supplies, and we understand that for reasons of having them approved in lots of different areas of the world, that standard ones have to be used, apart from labelling them, please can you pick ones that are narrow enough that they don't obscure the next socket along, because it's so frustrating when you turn up at a gig or at a session, and you suddenly realise you've got one more thing to plug in, And you can't because this power supply is hogging two slots.
Yeah, that is annoying. They're just that little bit too fat to fit on the mains plug. You're right. That is annoying. And while we're at it, what about having a standardized connector on the equipment? If we've got to have a line lump or a wall walk power supply, why can't the plug that goes into the back of the device itself be a standard plug that everybody uses that is latching in some sensible way.
So it won't fall out halfway through your session. Um, and that way we could use third party power supplies that we know would fit and work. This is more or less true in the pedal part of the market because the nine volt or the 9. 6 volt pedal power supply with the center negative barrel connector is, is quite ubiquitous.
So we're fairly lucky there, although it's by now means a hundred percent, some pedals are 12 volts and one or two might be AC, which, uh, which will fool a lot of people, but on a, on a similar line that the other thing is the mini USB connectors that are used to connect to various interfaces, phones, uh, iPad type devices.
Um, Kindles. Why are there so many small USB connectors when they're all physically roughly the same size and do more or less the same job? Yeah, that is annoying. There's micros and minis and type Cs and type Bs and, oh, yeah, why do they do that? Everybody has to invent their own connector to make them feel special, I think.
Yeah, who was it said that the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them? Hmm, I don't know, but they got it right. Okay, moving away from hardware just for a moment, how about, um, rental packages of software where the model now is rental only and you have to rent the entire bundle? And there's only one piece of software in that entire bundle that you actually want to use?
The subscription model that a lot of companies are going to, at least it guarantees them a predictable, reliable income, and I can see why that would be appealing to them. Unfortunately, it's not really appealing to us as, as users and consumers. Um, and as you say, you end up having to rent an entire package where you may only want to use one small part of it.
I know a lot of people would like to use Photoshop, but, um, it's part of a rental package with other items that you probably wouldn't use. Yeah, and same with Adobe Audition, I, I used to use that a lot, but these days, uh, I tend to, to use alternatives just because I don't want to have to buy a complete production package just to use one item of software.
Yeah, also on the subject of software, unfriendly copy protection, the kind that requires you to dial home, as it were, to verify that you're actually the, uh, the authorised user of this each time that you use it. So you may go to a gig with a piece of live software and find that there's no internet connection, or you've gone on holiday to somewhere with no internet connection and you can't use your piece of software.
Yeah, that's caught me out on a couple of occasions, actually, where I've got software, subscription based software, actually, as it happens, that, uh, that needs to phone home once a month or so, and unfortunately, my session coincided with the date that it decided it needed to phone home, and couldn't, and therefore decided I wasn't allowed to use it anymore, which was very frustrating.
Now, knowing you, Hugh, I bet there are lots of things about audio specifications that really wind you up. It's when they're not done properly that really winds me up, especially when they're trying to give you the impression that they're much better than they really are, by either not giving you the right information or mispresenting the information in some way.
There's myriad ways they can do that, and I've mentioned it in the magazine on several occasions before. But things like, uh, quoting the equivalent input noise on a microphone preamp without specifying the impedance they measured it with, which makes an enormous difference to the number that you end up with, or the measurement bandwidth that they've used, those kind of things.
Um, or they quote a frequency response without giving you any tolerances to it, which makes makes it completely meaningless. Yeah, the standard is supposed to be minus 3 dB, but looking at some of these, you look at them and when you actually find out what they've done, they've measured it between the minus 10 dB points, so it doesn't mean much at all, does it?
Yeah, this is true. Um, and it's just to mislead those who, who maybe don't have the technical background to understand what they're trying to tell you, or why they're not telling you what they want to tell you, if you see what I mean, why they're deliberately obfuscating things. It's very frustrating. And it's a similar thing with amplifier power, you know, it's so much peak, so much continuous, so much music power, so much not quite catching fire power.
Yes. Yes, so how powerful are these things? Or maximum SPL on a PA system, brackets, calculated. What does that mean? Yeah, why couldn't they actually run it up to that power? Probably because the thing would have blown up when they tried it. Yeah, so there are so many vague things. At the end of the day, your ears have to decide, don't they?
They do, or you read good magazines like ours that tell you the truth. That would do it. Mmm. I'll tell you another one that really gets me is, um, and this is, this goes back 30 or 40 years, really. It's digital meters. They really annoy me, especially the ones that just show you zero dbfs at the top and count down from that and give you no idea at all as to what would be a sensible nominal reference level and how much headroom you've got.
Um, if you go back to analog meters, they just showed you the bit you're supposed to work in. They didn't show you all the way up to clipping. Uh, they didn't show you all the way down to the noise floor. They just showed you the bit that mattered. And that made life really easy. And if you wanted to record a bit hot, you could push the meter up into the hotter end and you knew that's what you were doing.
With digital meters, you just get this, this enormous range and you're not, there's nothing to tell you where you are in it. I think digital meters, by law, should have Green up to about minus 20, orange up to about minus 10, and red above that. And with that kind of color scheme, you know exactly where you're supposed to be working.
You know, if you see the thing hovering between the green and the orange, that's great. If you see the odd flick into the red, you don't need to panic, but you might need to keep an eye on it. If you see a lot of red, Then you can panic. It makes life so much easier. Why don't they do that? Okay, I know some do, but not many, and not, not enough.
Yeah, at least with Logic you have a meter that shows you how much headroom has been used up, uh, with your loudest peaks, so you know how much you've got left to go, but I, I can see what you're saying, it's not quite the same thing. And the other frustrating thing is if you do stick to sensible, uh, recording levels, quite often the waveform display that comes up is too small to read.
Yes. Yeah, I use SADI as my main DAW, and that has a lot of different display options, which effectively sort of compress the waveform shape to make it look better on screen. And that's really useful. So even quiet recordings still produce decent sized waveforms, you can see what you're doing. But it's a very good point.
Another hardware rant I could give you detented potentiometers. This is multi detented. Yeah, the ones that pretend to be multiway switches, the ones that are there to pretend to be multiway switches. And it's companies do it because it's very cheap, much, much cheaper than putting in a proper switch. And they do it make you feel like you're getting a higher quality product than you really are.
So it's misleading. And it doesn't actually have any benefits. Because it's just a pot on the back of this sort of serrated wafer, uh, washer thing that gives you the click positions. Potentiometers have quite wide tolerances, typically 10 or more often 20 percent tolerance. So each click position is going to be different for every different detented pot you put in the box.
So there's no accuracy of calibration involved. And if you have two of them and you're trying to line up channels on, say, two microphone preamp gains or, or two, uh, loudspeaker levels. You're never going to get them matched because the clicks stop you putting the pot anywhere in between. So you'll never get them lined up exactly right.
They're just a pain in the neck. Why do they do it? It annoys me. And another thing. Operating system upgrades stop all your existing software, or some of your favourite bits of existing software, from working because it's no longer supported. That annoys me. Why do operating systems have to be upgraded so often?
I mean, from my point of view, all an operating system should be doing is allow you to run the software that you want to run. Well, I can kind of see why they need to upgrade, because, you know, there are bad people out there that find loopholes and want to do nasty things to your computer. But why, when they do an upgrade, does it have to reset all of your carefully set up personal preferences to everything?
Why do they do that? That doesn't need to change. I can see you're peeved about that. Yes, the other thing about operating system upgrades is that I've had USB audio interfaces before, which have been simple 2 in 2 out devices, and therefore could have been class compliant, but for some reason weren't.
They had to have drivers. Yes, you've guessed it. The operating system's upgraded, the company in question decided not to upgrade the drivers because the product was a few years old, and now I've got this perfectly functional doorstop. That really is irritating. Yes, that sort of built in obsolescence is very frustrating, and especially in this day and age, when we're much more aware of planetary resources and energy resources and all those kind of things, why produce all this?
Good quality stuff, and then stop you from using it because somebody somewhere hasn't been bothered to write a, an updated driver. Very annoying. And as you seem to have it in for computers at the moment, Hugh, how about, um, non removable batteries? That winds me up something terrible, because if you have a laptop where you can take the battery out, if it just slides out from the side.
If you spill water in it, the first thing you do is you take out the battery, you know, you let the thing drain and then, then you get the man that knows about these things to take a look at it. If you've got, uh, one from a certain fruit based company that shall remain nameless with a built in battery and you spill water in it, there's no way of disconnecting the power and, and quite often horrible things happen on the insides.
Yes, I don't know why they do that. Presumably it's some health and safety regulation about, you know, Lithium ion batteries? I don't know, but it makes no sense, does it, really? It doesn't. You know, if I was on the committee of European standards for this kind of thing, as we used to adhere to before we left them, I would have insisted that nothing comes in unless the battery can be taken out by the user within the space of ten seconds.
I might exempt electric toothbrushes, but that's about it. I think it's a good idea. I'll support it. Good. Well, Hugh, I know we could go on ranting about things for ages and ages, but we have to wrap it up somewhere, so what's your final rant going to be? Uh, it's probably going to be the companies, the manufacturers, that think they know What you want rather than what you need and they give you things that are very pretty and elegant and slim and sexy but are really difficult to use.
Like, like laptops that have a single connector to do all the expansion for your monitors and your USBs and your power and that's just not convenient. It might make it a little bit thinner and a little bit less expensive to produce maybe. But it's just not helpful. That's true. If I had my way, each laptop would have at least eight of the old school USB connectors along the back.
Only eight? Yeah, well, to start with. You can always put a hub into each one. But yeah, I think, I think your fruit based manufacturer is guilty, more guilty of this than almost anybody, really. Because they keep coming up with what they think are improved ways of working. Which, in the fullness of time, they may be, but they're just really frustrating in the now.
Things like, uh, when they decided to stop adding CD ROM players, when everybody was still using discs. Especially in the music industry, where clients would always say, Now can I take away a CD at the end of the session? Yeah. And say, Sorry. Mr. Fruit says you can't. Oh, you want to reload your samples and they're all on CD ROMs?
Yeah. Yeah, so people who bring the future kicking and screaming into the present when it should be left in the future, I think they go into our Room 101, don't they? I think they do. I mean, I don't mind them offering an alternative for the future, but you need to do your crossfades a little more slowly than you generally do, I think.
Yeah, so address the future without dissing the past. Yes. We'd better wrap it up there, I think, before we Before we find something else. Yeah. OK, thanks very much for listening, if you have, if you're not asleep by now. So, I've been Paul White, and he has been Mr Robb Johns. I have. Thanks for listening. Bye.
Bye for now. Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information about And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.
