President's Message
June 2006

1.  The movie "Casanova" uses music taken from concertos, overtures and dances written by a dozen or so 18th century composers. Yet, because they have been stitched together in a cinematic way, you are actually hearing a "new" Baroque work. The production recruited Roy Prendergast, a New York-based movie music editor with a background in classical music and composition. Featured composers include Vivaldi, Albinoni, Rameau, Paisello, Corelli, Handel, Telemann, and Soler. What about Mozart? There is evidence that Casanova attended "Don Giovanni"'s premiere on Oct. 29, 1787. "After spending two weeks listening to Baroque music, I finally said, 'well, now we can go to Mozart.' Mozart's style was so different, it just didn't play". In July more than 40 Baroque musicians--named the Hollywood Studio Orchestra for the occasion--gathered in New York with period instruments. "I apologized to them beforehand; I am the person responsible for chopping all this music up. But they were all so delighted that Baroque music was getting this kind of exposure".

2.  I recently built an Ultrasonic Receiver kit from Smartkits ("Educational kits with professionl finish"). It uses a 40 kHz transducer and mixes an oscillator signal to generate a difference frequency in the audible range. The circuit is like that in a heterodyne AM radio. I was able to "hear" the 50 kHz ouput from a piezo tweeter. Presumably it could pick up a bat's sonar as well. The instructions were adequate, with one error on the silk screened pc board. With only 2 ICs, construction is straightforward. Obvious improvements would be a low noise front end and a steep lowpass after the mixer to filter out the sum frequency. They sell many other kits and their 100 series, for beginners, requires no soldering. www.alertent.com Other kitmakers include www.ramseyelectronics.com , www.jaycarelectronics.com , and electronics-kits.hobbytron.com

President, Boston Audio Society

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updated 8/6/06