Spanspek

Now that's a provocative title! Why? Here's what I think (warning: opinion). A significant proportion of private school students do not live within walking distance of their schools. Or, even if they do, Mum and Dad are so paranoid they won't let them walk. (Kids are always angling for a lift to school... I did!) I think it likely that a higher proportion of children attending state schools live within walking distance. The quality of a school is a significant factor in the decision about where to live. If you're going to send the kid to a state school, you'd like to be close to it. The same is probably true for many parents who favour private schools, but since there are other factors -- like which hokey religion you subscribe to, and which school Daddy and his old boy mates went to -- chances are you can't find a school to your liking close by. Quite a lot of prestigious schools are in areas where hardly anyone can afford to live and since you're sacrificing your arse to send your kid to one of them... You get the idea. The alternative is, of course, public transport. One sees a lot of children in uniforms on trains, trams and buses. But an awful lot don't go by public transport, either because public transport is hopeless or it takes too long. (Guilty! It takes me at most 30 minutes to drive to work, even in the worst of peak hour. Walking and catching three buses would take at least 90 minutes and cost me three times as much.) So they drive. A lot of them are driven in hulking great SUVs. So, to summarise... 1. Greater distance to school 2. Driven, rather than walking or catching public transport 3. In an SUV QED. Private schools contribute more to global warming than state schools.

I just updated Habari (this blog software). It took a little bit of work because there was PHP4-compatible code in a couple of plug-ins: mainly of the sort... $instance =& new $classname; My web host has just upgraded to PHP 5.3.1 which absolutely forbids this. Search and replaced, and it's all fixed!

I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas. I like to see the pleasure as people celebrate. I hate the crass commercialism and forgetting or not even knowing what it's all about. Don't get me wrong. After some considerable musing on the subject, I decided I don't really believe in God. I don't bother her and she doesn't bother me. And I think the idea that Jesus suffered a horrible torture at the hands of the Romans to save us (all of us, for all time) from our supposed "sins" is obscene. But part of the story of Jesus is what it's about, and if you're going to celebrate you'd better understand that. The tricky thing is how to explain it to my son. I want to tell him the story behind it but I don't want him to believe in God or Jesus. Don't be so shocked! You want your children to hold to your values and beliefs, don't you. I bet a good many of my potential readers (I don't have any actual ones) send the kiddies to Sunday School while rarely darkening the doors of the church themselves. Or if they don't, they still talk about God and Jesus or send the kids to a church school. (The massive public funding of private schools sure is a great way to undermine the separation of church and state... but that's another blog post.) So how are my aspirations any different? Still, I've come to accept that most people seem to need a crutch. The scientific method doesn't offer that. While it seems less likely that major discoveries will be challenged and that we know more and more about everything, one principle remains. Anything can be contested. Find a new explanation for observed phenomena or behaviours based on solid data (whose acquisition ought to be repeatable), and out goes the old one. There's not much solace in that. I suppose people want certainty. I revel in the uncertainty. It's exciting and challenging. If you refuse to accept the scientific method by insisting that God exists with no evidence in support of the claim, you really ought to eschew everything that has come about as a result of the scientific method. Imagine... No car, no phone, no television (hey, that's not a bad idea!), no refrigeration, no medicines formulated since about 1700. (You wouldn't be reading this either since it's on a computer screen.) I suppose it's hard to do, though. Especially at this time of year when a thousand iPhones are flashing at you in the mall.

After a lengthy period of negotiation, I can finally reveal the story behind my new stash of audio gear. Well, the audio gear isn't new but the stash is new... for me anyway. I've been sitting on this post for a few months now. What a good blogger I am! I was going to post pictures. Perhaps I will soon. My partner takes an interest in real estate. Prices would have to drop by 40% before we'd even consider buying, so we've decided to keep renting for now. Nevertheless, she keeps an eye on things. So she was trawling realestate.com.au and came across a listing for an flat in Canterbury. One of the pictures was a room filled with old audio equipment, most notably an RCA 44BX. Now that's the sort of thing you don't see, as the vendors and their agents usually want to present the property in the best possible light. This was weird. So I sent a message to the agent saying "I'm not interested in the property, but I am interested in the audio gear". The recipient very kindly sent the email on to the vendors. It turns out that the flat came onto the market from a deceased estate. The gentleman who lived there was an ex-3AK engineer. He'd kept a bit of old equipment, presumably when the station upgraded. His daughters were faced with the prospect of selling the property and they had to clear it out first. The place was full of records, hi fi equipment (more cassette decks than you've ever seen in one place!), tape machines, mics and some radio station gear. He had lots of books about audio, trains and model trains. He even had a model railway line around the perimeter of his studio room. I started talking to the sisters and told them my interest and what I'd be willing to pay. I gave them lots of information and stated what the gear could be worth if it was tested and restored. As they didn't have the means or inclination to do so, they accepted my offers. Some items were claimed by old friends of their father's... and that's fair enough. When I returned from my travels last month, one of the sisters very kindly contacted me. They had only a few weeks to empty the flat of gear So, what was the gear? Here' a comprehensive list:

• RCA 44BX - legendary vintage ribbon mic, apprently in full working order
• STC 4033 microphone - a huge old piece with ribbon and pressure gradient elements - use either one or mix them together!
• Sennheiser MD421 - vintage with the Tuchel connector
• Sennheiser MD21 - omni "reporters' mic"
• Byer 77 tape machine - these can apparently be turned into funky mic pres
• Pye limiter - valves glowing and working
• A weird piece of Pye with input only - it seems to be some sort of signal measuring device
• AWA G51 limiter in pretty bad shape - this will need a lot of restoring
• Uher handheld mic with a DIN connector - probably cheap and nasty but you never know
• Nagra tape machine
• Two enormous hand-built radio consoles

What did I get? All of the above except...

• The family decided to keep the RCA 44 but lend it to an old radio mate of their dad's
• The 421 was promised to someone else
• One of the Byers was promised to someone else and I thought I'd try just one, to convert to a mic pre
• The Nagra went elsewhere - that's OK since I don't want a tape machine

EDIT: To make greater sense

Later, a Telefunken-badged Sennheiser MD21 and a rather cheap-looking Uher mic which turned out to have a Shure Unidyne 55 embedded inside it, without the tranny (that's weird), turned up, so I got them too.

END EDIT

I took the weird Pye thing because they didn't know what to do with it. Now, all of this feels a bit odd. Every sound engineer hopes to come across a stash of gear. But it's become increasingly unlikely that there are many to be found. People realised a long time ago how good the older gear is. It's no longer possible to pick up classic Neve modules for a few hundred bucks. All the TV and radio stations have been cleaned out and one would have to trawl garage sales if there was even the slightest whiff of electronics. (And any electronics gear at a garage sale probably wouldn't be pro audio anyway. Still, if you have a pair of AWA G58s lying around, do contact me!) It's not that this stuff is particularly high-end, but, still, I never thought this would happen to me. I also feel like a bit of a pirate. I shouldn't. I was completely up-front with the family. I told them what the gear was worth, what it would take to restore it, what I was willing to pay and why. So I count myself very lucky. There's a bit of money to be spent: the AWA has to be restored and modified, the Byer needs to be cleaned up, racked and modified, and the Pye should be checked. And then there are the four Calrec modules and two Auditronics modules I have sitting in the queue! I also have a JBL 7510 with three cards (12 mic pres) which needs to be wired up (I got the one with proprietary connectors, not the one with XLRs) and possibly modified. I'm in audio purgatory!

The trip to Troll Mountain was the last thing I did before leaving Sweden. The trip home began at 9am on Friday and ended at 7am on Sunday (that's 11pm Swedish summer time): 38 hours. As I seem to have a talent for sitting next to very wide people, I only got to sleep between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. A window seat in the second last row (2 seats only) is the best place in cattle class!