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Who is that “Man in the Wilderness”? We’ll find out next week, but a point in his favor is he’s wearing a Sarong with pot leaves on it. And apparently, tag… you’re it, as he’s found Bud. Nearly done with the Hemp Island story! (Liz will do the inks today and I’ll have this colored tomorrow sometime)
I had this drawn last week, but the events in Paris really bummed me out, and our country’s reaction to it bummed me out even more. So, I was set back a few days trying to deal with it all in my head. Plus, I’ve been busy with some new business too, so that’s a good thing. I changed the look of the native like three times before finally settling on this look. And I know, he did not have on a flower lei in his last appearance. I’m allowed to change things when the mood hits me. Good to be the King. 🙂
Here’s an album track of 1977’s “The Grand Illusion” by Styx. A slow Tommy Shaw rocker that builds up by the end. As a rule, I’m not into slower rock songs, especially while drawing. I have to maintain a certain rhythm or I lose my motivation. But this title fit today perfectly, so I went with it.
Is the gang finally found salvation at last ? 🙁
I cannot wait to see the next update.
They’re going home very soon. Gotta get to New York in time for the black-out you know. (Hint to the next story) 🙂
Oh does that cover makes me feel old. I had that on 8-Track.
Well, vinyl is making a comeback, if the space devoted to it at Barnes & Noble is anything to judge by…
Personally, I’d welcome back vinyl. I’m an old audiophile by nature and can’t stand these tiny, little speakers of today. I want my 15″ woofer Jensens back that literally could knock you on your ass when the canons of the “1812 Overture” went off. 🙂
In 1955 my dad was the head of the Professional Products Division of Ampex. Our stereo (everybody else had low-fi Hi-Fis) used movie amps and speakers from the ToddAO systems. The speakers had one inch of compliance or movement and the amps were rated at 100 watts each by movie ratings. The home music ratings would be more like 1000 watts each. Movie amps were run at about 10% output in order to minimize distortion. Net result was that the brass cannons in the 1812 overture could blow out a zippo lighter! It’s all about moving a column of air….
EXACTLY! Smaller speakers have the frequency range, but can’t MOVE that much air. To really FEEL the music, you have to have the power and size to move air in the room.
1000 watts?! Whoa! I think the most I ever had was 100 watts RMS per channel. But yeah, 1000 watts would definitely handle the 1812 cannons! Man! To hear that! 🙂
If you grew up in Seattle in the 70s and early 80s, the speakers to have were the ones you built yourself at SpeakerLab. Every Saturday, they would hold a class to make your own at the Roosevelt store. The ultimate was the SpeakerLab K. It was their takeoff on a Folded Klipsch Corner Horn. By cabinet design, the 12 inch base was turned into the equivalent of a 30 foot bass horn. The mids were handled by an 18 inch horn and the highs by a 6 inch horn. A company even used them as earthquake simulators!
The crowd was always complaining about the sound system during the midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So a friend decide to build a pair of Ks to use. He also needed an amplifier to drive them and it had to be cheap. Well, Fred was an electronic whiz. He found the plans for a servo amp and scaled it up to a few hundred watts a channel. The frame was about the size of an oranges crate out of angle iron. The driver transistors were mounted on two of the long pieces (one for each channel) as heat sinks.
Well, Midnight Saturday came. The crowd yelled turn it up. He turned it up a little. They yelled again and he decide to let them have it full tilt. He couldn’t tell if they were still yelling for him to turn it up after that. All he could hear was the movie. The bass was so strong, he could feel it through a few inches of solid concrete in the projection booth.
Unfortunately, during a later test, disaster struck. As long as the signal is clean from the amp, you can overdrive a speaker safely (I think the Ks were rated at 125 and Fred was pushing 5 to 600 watts). One cheap little part in the amp blew, causing the driver transistors to all blow. Distortion quickly went past safe levels. The woofers went “woof, woof, whomp.” Enough energy there to make a two inch coil into a one inch coil. Good times 😉
Excellent story! I blew out my Heathkit stereo amp when I sneezed while testing the voltage on the output. POOF! Face full of smoke and some blown transistors. I did manage to fix it. 🙂
Unfortunately the mastering and pressing equipment is aa 60 years or older. Hopefully, new vinyl manufacturing equipment will be produced soon.
on the pressing side, i’m with ya, but probably not for the same reasons yer thinking of. like the mastering side, there’s very little room for improvement because, well, how much better can you make the process of squishing a slightly-molten vinyl puck at a 120 tons of pressure? the process of pressing a record is exactly wot you’d think — it’s mechanical. it’s metal presses squashing out molten pucks of vinyl in-between two thin sheets of nickel strapped to dies into flat discs at 120 tons of pressure.
the only room for improvement would be new presses, but they’d probably be based on the old ones, albeit with newer parts that might be more easily replaceable. most of the pressing plants have a little bit of a hard time keeping their presses running, mainly because a lot of them were custom-built mo-sheens and the company that designed/built them all are long gone; all the guys that are/were keeping them running are all getting old/retiring/dying off.
some new presses with a higher reliability factor (and, truth be told, those old presses are pretty damned reliable for the most part) and high spare parts would help that side of the industry.
but on the mastering side, honestly, there’s very little improvement that can be made to that process and equipment, unless something major happens in the fabric of reality and the rules of physics, space/time, and ohms law are massively, massively altered.
there are a few people who indeed have designed and built newer cutterheads and amplifiers that are pretty amazing. i’ve met one of them and used some of his designs in practice and they’re pretty excellent. but in all honesty, you can’t make the wheel any rounder or roll any better — the newer kit is all based on the old designs and ways of doing it. slightly different designs all equal pretty much the same thing since the old cutterhead designs (neumann and westrex being the top two) are tried, true, and most importantly, reliable. “new and improved” honestly does sweet f.a. in that department since, again, the wheel can’t get any rounder without breaking the rules of reality. there is no reinventing it.
signal processing has gotten leaps and bounds better since the 50s, so the signals going into the amps and cutterheads can be light years better than what it used to be. 9 times out of 10, though, it’s not. using a cd as a source for cutting a master is probably the most common source. it’s rare when a label or artist wants to use a high resolution digital source or a high fidelity tape source for cutting the masters from.
unfortunately, many people, and strangely, especially not modern digital mastering engineers, haven’t really figured out that the modern ways of digital mastering, ie brickwall compression with 100% rms and no headroom whatsoever, not only sucks in the digital realm, but is relatively incompatible with and really sounds horrible in the analog domain where amount of dynamic is paramount to its sound quality, and where a little bit of distortion will be embellished into a LOT of distortion by way of the reproduction method itself. 100% sausage signals sound bad in the digital domain (unless you grew up with that and think that’s what “normal” recordings should sound like — sadly, many kids these days are accustomed to this), and they sound even worse when transferred to the analog domain since the cutting process, by way of the mechanics of it, embellishes the distortion that digital clipping produces in the worst possible ways. and yet source masters are still submitted to cutting houses that look like someone just applied 100/1 compression to it and called it good. aside from that, a lot of them have no idea about the resonant frequency of cutterheads, or how to deal with high frequencies and which are going to distort the most when cutting. they assume that the equipment can reproduce the full frequency spectrum 100%, when they should be concentrating on rolling off some of the high frequencies and de-essing others to get rid of the distortion.
i digress.
you cannot blame the “old equipment” for a shitty-sounding record. if that were the case, then all “old” records that were cut, pressed, and sold would’ve sounded and would still sound terrible, right? collectors seek out old copies of stuff because it’s going to sound shitloads better than most of the so-called “new-and-improved” remasters of the last two decades, since remastering usually ends up turning the old recording into a digital sausage/clip-fest.
if anything, the blame for a shitty-sounding modern record should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the dolt(s) who thought no dynamic range / 100% signal with loads of digital clipping was the best idea to get good quality sound out of a digital medium that simply cannot support it due to lack of bits and cycles-per-second of sampling, or the modern digital mastering engineer who thinks that’s just the best, most wonderful-sounding way to go. most of them don’t and their paycheck is wot’s making them do it. others must just have tin ears.
the only way i can kinda see this process changing is by way of 3D printing. some people have actually 3D-printed records and come up with something slightly resembling the music they sought to reproduce, and with better 3D printers with higher resolutions, this idea, in practice, can only get better and better. but they’d still have to figure out a way of analysing/reproducing an analog signal 100%, and quite frankly, i think that’s still quite a long ways off.
What do you think of the dbx encoded albums?
But it still is better than the old radio sound guys in the early days that rode the vu meters to keep the needle in one spot.
Holy crap, Dee, don’t hold back, tell us what your really think! 🙂
Seriously, excellent reply.
Have the vinyl, reel-to-reel and the CD. Their best album.
Dana w – I am with you, except I still have that 8 track
My ’69 Caprice had an 8-track in it. I think the only 8-track I had was a Dean Martin album so I could entertain my Mom in the car. I installed an aftermarket cassette deck into the car while I owned it. Remember reaching down to the transmission hump to change out tapes while driving 80MPH on the highway? Yeah, me too. 🙂
My ’60 Austin Healy Sprite never had even a radio. The reason was that you couldn’t put in a system big enough to be heard over the noise of the engine, wind buffeting and the screams of the passenger.
My Miata has speakers in the headrests or I’d never be able to hear the radio/CD player.
Yeah, the Miata has all of the things we wanted back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but couldn’t afford or hadn’t been invented yet. My ’91 Miata has the limited slip diff. as well as all the std stuff. Imagine in 1960 having a car with all that engineering. Not even Ferrari had all that stuff then. My brother had a couple of MGAs and a Austin Healy A-100-4 and my dad’s pride and joy was his Series 2 Lotus Elite with the Coventry Climax 1216cc engine tuned to about stage 3 putting out about 130 bhp.
I really regret the breakdown of the eight-track players I used to use…there’s a song by the Jarmels that was on true stereo on an eight-track compilation that wasn’t released in any other format…
I think I’d prefer to stay lost. 😉
Given the activities Bud and Robyn were… enjoying… then, yeah, me too! 🙂
My favorite three Styx songs (no particular order): Crystal Ball, Suite Madame Blue, and Man in the Wilderness (so much better than Tommy’s other track on the album, Fooling Yourself).
Equinox is a very strong album and in ways better than Grand Illusion. Never got into Crystal Ball, but I’ll have to give it a new listen as my tastes have softened over the years and I’m more open about what I like.
Ooh. Color today.
Crazy week. I had to cram 5 days of work into 3, so I was swamped until Thanksgiving. Color makes such a HUGE difference for me. There are times I think “Black and White would be fine” and then I see the finished page and that thought gets tossed out every time. Takes me about 6 hours to color each page. A lot of layers going on there! 🙂