| Meetings and other Notices |
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| The January In Person Only Meeting |
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JANUARY 2025 MEETING NOTICE
Date: Saturday, January 18, 2025, 1:30 – 3:30 PM !!!
NOTE DATE & TIME!! -LIVE ONLY-
Place: BAS Meeting at the Chelmsford Bible Church
128 Gorham Street, Chelmsford, MA 01824
Featured Guests: All attending!
Topic: White Elephant Sale, Favorite Recordings, and Audio Literature Review
Bring anything you want to sell - playback equipment, recording equipment, accessories, media, computers, video, electronics, etc. Please tell your friends and pass the information on to interested parties. The BAS Open Forum and business discussions will start at 1:30 pm. As usual, the public is invited. Come see what the BAS is about! Table(s) will be available for your items to sell.
During the selling forum, others will present favorite recordings for playback on the provided stereo system. Recordings you have made or engineered are of most interest.
The Boston Audio Society is a gathering place for audio and video hobbyists. For 53 years, we have worked diligently to create an atmosphere of consumer, audio education at its best.
This is a new Meeting Site. The Lexington Center is unavailable. The Church has lots of parking spaces and tables for your equipment and easy access.
Light refreshments will be available at the church
Directions to 1/18/2025 BAS Meeting at Chelmsford Bible Church
128 Gorham Street, Chelmsford, MA 01824
From Route 128/95 South: In Burlington take Exit 50A to Route 3 North (Stay right - Lowell/Nashua)
From Route 128/95 North: In Burlington take Exit 50A to Route 3 North (2nd exit off that ramp.)
• On Route 3 North take Exit 79 (Billerica/Chelmsford).
• At the end of Exit ramp go left onto Route 129 East (Billerica).
• Take next left onto Brick Kiln Road.
• Follow to the first STOP SIGN at the 3-way intersection.
• Take SHARP right.
• See the church in front of you across the street.
• Cross that street and enter the church parking lot.
Entrance is at the rear.
Boston Audio Society
PO BOX 260211
BOSTON MA 02126
617.271.6588
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Hope to see you then.
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This meeting will not be Zoomed.
You must be present to attend the meeting.
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THE BAS MESSAGE
January 2025 |
Miscellaneous News
1. The BAS is looking for a new webmaster. The current webmaster will train you and hand it over to you, and provide support as necessary. The website is written in simple HTML. You will need a computer and a high speed internet connection (you will need to download a 6GB backup in a reasonable amount of time). $300 is the annual payment. You may be asked to support admin of the BAS Facebook pages as well.
2. The BAS is looking for a new president. The past president will assist in the transition. Elections will happen soon.
3. College Students Outdo Boeing at Drone Warfare - Wall Street Journal, 22 Oct 2024
In an antidrone technology competition earlier this year, Boeing showcased a futuristic laser weapon that can punch a hole straight through a hostile aerial threat.
The multinational -- and several other defense giants -- lost to four college students who knocked drones out of the sky using sound waves. The rookies' device was developed in the backyard of one of the student's parents, using an old car speaker.
The four University of Toronto engineering students spent around $17,000 of their own money to develop their antidrone technology. Their speakerlike device blasts ultrasound waves that destabilize a drone's navigation systems, sending them off course or crashing to the ground.
"We are building from scratch, we had no reference whatsoever," said Anna Poletaeva, one of the students.
All materials have a so-called resonant frequency -- the point at which they vibrate most when hit by sound waves -- This could be used to destabilize drones midair. It is akin to the science class demonstration of shattering a wine glass with sound.
The pair enlisted a robotics student, who unscrewed two "tweeter" speakers from his car. Tweeters produce higher-pitch sounds, which the team blasted at drone components in his living room. An electrical engineer, Michael Acquaviva, joined to build the device's circuitry.
Canadian Army officials have indicated that they could be interested if the company can increase the range at which it stops drones to at least 100 meters, or 328 feet, up from 50 meters.
The company is confident in getting past 100 meters but that surpassing 150 meters will be tricky.
Overall, their technology could be ready to deploy within the next two years.
"It's exciting for sure, sometimes a bit daunting," said Poletaeva.
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Below, other meetings and notices which
may be of interest to BAS members |
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JUST RELEASED !
A fantastic historical video!
Ken Berger and Kenton Forsythe are the founders of EAW (Eastern Acoustics Works) and they discuss, with terrific overlaid graphics, the history of, well, pretty much every audio thing Boston from the early 70's.
18 minutes and right here: https://youtu.be/fPfQEK0b0mI
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A Boston issue - As MIX magazine reports:
Sound Museum owners cry foul as their tenants likely secure new spaces without them
While the headline sounds like someone has sour grapes, the complete story of how the closure of this crucial Boston rehearsal studio is being handled is far more nuanced and complicated -- particularly since it brings up issues of gentrification, government support of the arts, non-profits' ethics and more. Full Story HERE (WBUR-FM Boston (1/11/23)
And here's an update:
www.wbur.org/news/2023/01/25/charlestown-rehearsal-studios-musicians-boston
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MAHLER 3
In the recent (April 2022) performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony at Boston's Symphony Hall by Ben Zander and his Boston Philharmonic, the recording was done with the three main spaced omnis with two more farther back. No accent mikes or chorus microphones were used nor, it turns out, were they needed. Remarkably, this produced a recording that is as close to the Symphony Hall experience as may be possible.
The info is here: www.bostonphil.org/concerts/2021-2022/bpo4-mahler3
Here is the recording in its entirety as a single .WAV file; 44k / 16 bit; 1hr 47 min
Mahler Sym 3 CD.wav 1.1GB
(For those of you with editing software note that the .wav file HAS markers to denote the movements.)
Here is the exact same Symphony 3 with the movements separated as FLAC files, 48k / 24 bit as a ZIPped file: Mahler 3 Zander as FLAC.zip 1GB
IF you'd like further Gustav Mahler info... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler
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Shop Talk
Shop Talk was a WBUR program about Hi Fidelity, music, speakers, tape recorders, etc. Enjoyed by many during the 1970s, the program's format was ‘talk’ and interviewing major audio luminaries. It was a forerunner of the popular program Car Talk!
Peter Mitchell and Dr. Richard Goldwater were the original hosts. They were later joined by Brad Meyer. Here, John Allen interviews Scott Kent:
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on SPEAKERS.mp3 (81Mb 1:27)
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on TAPE RECORDERS.mp3 (79Mb 1:26)
There is also an episode track on the BAS CD and here is that Description:
Track 12. "Shop Talk", WHRB-FM, November 5, 1984.
Peter Mitchell (on the left), Richard Goldwater, MD (center) and E. Brad Meyer (right) introduce the show with a 1932 stereo recording and prepare to talk with guests Mark Davis and David Moran, both then of dbx corporation.
Shop Talk, which through most of its ten-year life on WBUR featured just Mitchell and Goldwater, was the precursor of Tom and Ray Magliozzi's "Car Talk". As we finished our 9:00-10:30 stint every Saturday morning, Tom and Ray would take our places and begin joking with each other. Eventually the station manager figured out that they were funnier than we were, and that more people drove cars than owned hi-fi equipment, and fired us. Until then, the show publicized the Boston Audio Society, vastly increasing attendance at our monthly meetings. The show came back for a time during the '80's on the Harvard station WHRB, where we appeared once a month as guests of HRB stalwart David Elliott. [EBM]
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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...
...and don't forget, here is the master list of microphones in the world
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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 an 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 T A B O R W I N D O W
- AND FOR CONVENIENCE -
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