Tag Archive for: Yamaha

Mercy Train

I was asked to do live sound for Mercy Train at an outdoor concert. The event was a great venue for the band’s music and I was pleased to be able to do the FOH mix. I had worked on one of their CDs last year and I am currently tracking their second CD.

Between Lorraine and myself, we took several hundred photos. I can only share a couple of them here. A few shots highlight the Yamaha M7CL digital console and the rest of the shots highlight the band.

Great sound system, mics and backline. Top flight. And the band did an amazing job. What a great memory.

The Yamaha M7CL board was a real delight to use. Simple and intuitive. Excellent for live sound.

Vinyl

Yesterday, we tackled one of our storage rooms. Perhaps storage is too kind a word. It was a room where we put stuff. Lots of stuff.

After a concerted effort, we have cleared that room. Now the stuff is all over the rest of house: in the downstairs family room, in the dining room, in the garage. But only for a little while. Big garage sale in a couple of weeks and whatever remains gets designated as give away or junk.

In the process of going through all of this stuff, I came across my record collection. You know, vinyl LPs. Hundreds of them.

I also came across my Yamaha PX-2 turntable which is pictured below. I had picked up the turntable circa 1980. A beautiful and high performing unit.

Does it make sense to digitize all of those wonderful LPs? I thought I would try. Sadly, the turntable did not work. It would stop tracking after five minutes or so. Probably needs new belts and lubrication but where on earth would I find those parts? And, for the small bit of tracking that it was able to sustain, the sound quality was, well, really bad. In the haze of euphoria for all things analog, I had quite overlooked all of the negative attributes of vinyl: scratches, pops, crackles.

Sad to say, most of my LPs live on in the catalogs of iTunes. It is faster, easier and arguably of better quality to simply buy the digital copies from iTunes than go through all of the effort with manually migrating the current collection.

I will spend this evening building up the inventory and, for those LPs that matter, I will get a digital update.

I rarely have time to listen critically to music for pleasure in controlled listening environments. Virtually all of my pleasure listening occurs on the road — trains, planes and automobiles. AAC at 256kbps, or even 128kbps, works just fine. And much more portable than several hundred pounds of vinyl.