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Boston
Audio Society
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| Meetings
and other Notices |
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Meeting
Notice for October 2019
Date: Sunday, October
27th, 2019
Time: 6:00 PM – 9:PM
Place: Boston University,
Life Science & Engineering Bldg, 24 Cummington
Mall, 1st Floor, Conference Room 103, Boston,
MA 02215
Featured: Jim Doucas
& his new ZOOM
F6 Digital Recorder/Playback
(+ Music Meeting planning for the November
Meeting)
This meeting is dedicated
to learning about a new field recording technology
from ZOOM Corp, Japan and our in-house test
results. Among its unique features are its
low cost, $650.
What’s new about
this technology is the ZOOM F6 FIELD RECORDER.
It is a low-cost 6-channel digital recorder
with a dynamic range in excess of 120 dB!
It is small – 4” w x 4 .7”
deep x 2.5” h; it weighs about a pound,
can take AC, or 4-AA batteries internally
or a Sony L type camcorder battery. It can
handle SDXC cards up to 1-TB, potentially
recording all day, and it is totally portable.
Jim Doucas will demonstrate his recorder/player
and present test results we ran at Foster’s
Test Bench to ensure it is living up to specifications,
and supply what we know about how ZOOM implemented
this design.
Refreshments will be available
at 5:30 PM
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Directions: Note
that parking is no longer allowed in
the block in front of our meeting place
(temp parking for unloading/loading
is OK). There is a gap in the BU buildings
on Commonwealth Ave. so you can walk
through directly to the meeting location.
At Boston University,
Cummington St. (Mall) is an east-west
street just south of Commonwealth Ave.
It is one-way going west. From Storrow
Drive going east, take the first BU
exit. At the stop sign turn right on
Commonwealth Ave (a left is not permitted).
Bear left and at the 3rd light take
a u-turn, go half a mile and turn right
on Blandford St.(Mall) (at a traffic
light) and turn right on Cummington
St. (Mall) The entrance is on your left,
number 24.
From Commonwealth
Ave going west, after Kenmore Square,
after the tracks come up out of the
tunnel, there is a traffic light at
Blandford. You should turn left on Blandford,
but no left is permitted. Instead turn
right and make a U-turn. Continue on
Blandford and turn right on Cummington
St. The entrance is on your left, number
24.
MBTA Green line
- exit at Kenmore Square or the next
stop, Blandford St. & Commonwealth
Ave. Walk a short distance and make
a left turn onto Blandford Mall and
then a right onto Cummington Mall.
Parking is free
on Sundays and available on Commonwealth
Ave. and Beacon St. (take a hard right
at Kendall Square and park on the bridge
and take the stairs down) and Bay State
Rd (parallel to Commonwealth Ave next
to the river)
-or-
Use your GPS (!)
—
Webmaster's note: Google maps and Apple
maps show them as Blandford Mall
and Cummington Mall. Bing maps
shows them as Blandford Street
and Cummington Street. YMMV.
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The
BAS Message
October 2019 |
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The Boston Symphony live
broadcasts on the internet are a treasure
for music lovers and audiophiles. I don’t
know of any other service like this: weekly
live broadcasts and lightly compressed sound.
They use many microphones so the sound you
hear is the product of the mixing console,
usually too much announcer and too much soloist
for my taste, too sibilant announcer, but
otherwise you can just sit back and enjoy.
It is at 192 kbps. The download on demand
has returned after a year’s hiatus --
it is at 128 kbps but with the advantage that
you avoiding real time streaming issues.
www.classicalwcrb.org/
Webmaster's
NOTE: There are SEPARATE, MULTIPLE streams
available, for example The Boston Symphony
Ochestra, Boston Early Music Stream, The BSO
Concert Channel, The Bach Channel.
To download PAST Programs:
www.classicalwcrb.org/programs/past-bso-broadcasts#stream/0
I measured 70 dB dynamic
range for a recent concert (Sept 21). I took
the ratio of the loudest music—full scale--
with flat response, to the “H” weighted
level of the quietist passage (“H”
weighting is the curve corresponding to the
20 dB Fletcher Munson curve which I approximate
by an 18 dB per octave Butterworth high pass
filter at 500Hz).
I estimate 10 dB of compression
on typical symphonic fare.
I contribute to WGBH (they
own WCRB) and the Boston Symphony
email me here
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| Local
Area Audio News |
| Frequency
Therapeutics in Woburn announces a drug
trial for Hearing Restoration |
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| Below,
other meetings and notices which may be of interest
to BAS members |
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| BAS
MICROPHONE CLINIC REPORT ! |
| In September 2009
the B A S held a microphone clinic, testing 37 different
microphone models. The ambitious nature of the clinic
effort, the extent of data collection, the number
of individuals involved in microphone testing and
in writing various sections of the report, and the
complexity in determining how to construct the clinic
report and make it available to members resulted it
not being published until now. The dataset is extensive.
Representative samples were
included in the abbreviated report in "The
B A S Speaker"
(Fall 2015; v37n3)
Go to the MICROPHONE
CLINIC PAGE for more...
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When collecting
and plotting "noisy" data
it is often useful to have Microsoft
Excel plot a Trend Line through it.
If that data is to be used for
further work, it may be necessary to
have an X-Y table of the Trend Line.
That is not easy to get and this paper
will show how to do it.
Joseph DeMarinis
has a new article here: Extracting
Numerical Data from an Excel Trend Line
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Foster's
Test Bench !
by Alvin Foster ! Click
the logo: —> |
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The rapidly-becoming-famous
BAS Headphone Test Article is
now available in the BASS VOLUME
25, ISSUE 4, on Page 17, available
HERE
PDF 3mb |
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Visit
our PODCAST PAGE
for:
The LIVE video podcast of our meetings,
Archived video of past meetings (only
one so far!),
and Audio Podcast interviews by Alvin
Foster |
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There is a supplemental
and further explanation addendum paper to the
E. Brad Meyer / David Moran paper published
in the September, 2007 issue of the AES
Journal. That page, which documents
the experimental protocol and audio systems/source
material is here:
www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm
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| There
is a Power Point Presentation of the lecture
given by Dr. Barry Blesser at the March 2007
Meeting. The Meeting page synopsis is HERE;
the Power Point Presentation (as a web page)
is HERE |
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Some earlier
BASS issues, previously available only
directly by mail, are now available online,
on the BAS SPEAKER page, HERE
Show your
appreciation for the immense amount of dedicated
work that went into both the original writing,
gathering, editing and printing, PLUS
the more recent scanning and conversion to
PDF format, by joining the Society, HERE
!
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A
L L O F F S I T E L I N K S O
P E N I N T O A N
E W W I N D O W
- AND FOR CONVENIENCE
-
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There is a posting of an ABX article, The
Digital Challenge by Stanley P. Lipshitz HERE
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