Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Today I’ve been looking at & listening to the new Ardour 7.1 free and open source software DAW on Windows 11. Looks and sounds awesome:
The music you see within that program is from Dan and Chris, you can listen to that one on Wikiloops if you’d like to. The program seems to work fine, so next step is to also install it on Linux 🙂
And like always, thanks for viewing, listening, and reading.
I had downloaded the new Ardour 7.0 for both Linux and Windows as soon as it was released, but haven’t tried it yet (except that on Windows I installed it parallel to the 6.9 version I already had).
In case you’re interested, here’s what’s new, in about 4 minutes:
Maybe I’ll try it with the next song & project I’ll be “working” on 🙂
As always, thanks for watching. And thanks and congrats to the Ardour team of course.
Edit, from later the same day: as soon as I show this, there’s a new version again. See here…
I reported about yesterday’s interview event, and in case you haven’t seen it, here are three hours of talks and interesting news about the upcoming version 7.0 of Ardour. Starts at 30:11 according to unfa, one of the hosts.
Enjoy…
Zuleikha – or “Aki” as she prefers to have her called instead – has some original Google earbuds from the Pixel 3a phone. Yes, the ones with cables, and from a time when manufacturers still added those goodies (like power adaptors and headphones) to their expensive products.
Sadly, one of them is dead, so she can hear only one side when she’s out and about, time to get her new ones (or so we thought, more to that later).
First I wanted to get her the new Truthear Crinacle Zero for around 50 bucks (Euros/Dollars), but these were sold out immediately after being on the market for a few days. Out of further options, two stood out, the Moondrop Aria (~80€) and the Moondrop Chu (20€). So after a short brainstorming with Mitchie, I ordered the latter, and yesterday they arrived:
I’ve read and seen some tests about them, so I was very curious how these would sound. Turns out, very good – but these aren’t for Aki.
Further explanation: these are maybe *too* good for her – she immediately heard some “hissing” sounds from her phone (Pixel 4a 5G), and also from mine (Pixel 4a). Not so much from the older Nexus 5 or from a Huawei 8″ tablet we also have, but for her own phone she found them unbearable. Neither Mitchie nor me heard that, but then again, Aki’s ears are almost half a century younger than mine…
And why do these stay? Well, for me. I’m no big fan of in-ear monitors or headphones, my own Sennheiser CX 1.00 which I still have are terrible, *for me*. That must have to do with my ear canals, I’ve never had or heard anything which would have the most remote hint of bass, even not with the biggest rubber or silicon “plugs” mounted. Until the Chu, with their biggest “spring tips” (which cost 13€ alone). These still aren’t comparable to good over-ear headphones like the Sennheiser HD569 or HD560S, but at least they don’t sound “shrill”, or produce only treble. There’s a hint of bass even for me, and that’s why I decided to keep these for myself. Maybe those “Crinacle Zero” – with lots more bass under 200Hz – would be even better? I don’t know, but honestly, these kind of IEMs aren’t that important, I don’t use them often enough to justify further expenses for myself. Plus the Chu we ordered came with a microphone in their cables, so I could even take phone calls with these, with the phone in my jacket pocket – so I’m sold.
And Aki? Well she’s still not sure, she absolutely loves the sound of her old cable Pixel buds, so we don’t know, can’t replace these because they’re not made anymore… hints & tips anyone?
As always, thanks for reading.
Update from Saturday, 18:35:
I have to revise my first judgement about these Moondrop Chu IEMs: they are awesome! Get them if you need 20€ in-ears. Writing this from the old Nexus 5 phone on which I’m listening…
Or: your low latency is not my low latency
With makers of mobile phones and even notebook computers ditching the headphone sockets, more and more people have come to accept in-ears and headphones without cables, most of them using Bluetooth technology to transmit the audio to and from your phones, notebooks, computers, and so on.
And some people – like those playing games – noticed that it takes some time to get audio “streamed” to your wireless cans or in-ears, and that there can be lags between the picture they see, and the sound they hear.
But that’s not the worst. Even with “low latency” Bluetooth codecs – aptX speaks of 40ms – they still forget that there are people for whom this is much too much.
Musicians for example – some people claim that they can hear latencies of around 10ms (I can’t), and so we all set our audio interfaces to the lowest possible settings to achieve latencies of possibly 5ms or better – otherwise it would be hard to play in time with what you hear from others’ tracks coming from your DAW (digital audio workstation). We spend quite a lot of money to get interfaces like from RME or other professional vendors which can give you these low latencies – and then we should add 40ms for the Bluetooth cans only? No way.
Which is why musicians like Zuleikha or myself will always stay with cables, and only buy devices which offer a proper headphone jack. There’s no way around it. KISS principle anyone?
You probably don’t mind the lag if you’re listening to your phone while jogging. But we do – we simply have to. And we’re the ones you’re listening to (or so we hope, but I speak for all musicians here).
So please stop these claims of having ‘low latencies’ if you don’t even consider musicians.
Thanks.
Have a listen to this, from 25 years ago:
The bassists are, from left to right: John Goldsby, Christian McBride, Ray Brown, and John Clayton, four real superstars on bass. Note that John Goldsby (who plays the first and longest solo) was the student of John Clayton and Ray Brown, and John Clayton was also Ray Brown’s student. I don’t know that much about Christian McBride, but he’s also a monster player, no questions there…
Edit: just read that all three “other” bass players were students of Ray Brown who invented the group “SuperBass”. See Wikipedia.
Also note that John Riley plays on a Telephone book from the city of Cologne, Germany. And bravo to Carmen Bradford on vocals as well, what a lovely performance 🙂 Proves again how well a human voice goes together with upright bass, a fact that Ray Brown knew very well – he was married to Ella Fitzgerald…
Found via Bonedo who in turn got it from No Treble.
As always, thanks for viewing.
This morning I set my new toy to the ‘FLIP TOP-Style’, which should make it sound like an Ampeg B-15N. Then I loaded Don’s and Rolf’s awesome ‘Waking The Cat’ song into my DAW, closed my eyes, and these guys transported me straight to Memphis, TN:
As always, thanks to my friends at Wikiloops for all the fun, and thanks to you for listening.
Couldn’t afford a B-15N, and an Ampeg SVT with its two fridges is a bit loud for our living room, so I bought this instead:
Hear it here – a first take with the bass going into two channels (as you can see in the photo, I used the parallel output for a clean bass as well):
As always, thanks for viewing, listening, and reading 🙂 More to come…
Here’s a good shootout – the first one blind (and I’va had preferences, more to that later):
Here are some more, but not a blind test this time:
Ok, and it’s amazing how close they are, isn’t it? And to reveal my preferences: in the first one with the bass alone I thought “C” was the best, while together with the drums I clearly preferred “A” and also “D” (maybe in that order).
Don’t know if that was tested in a live situation with some 50 or more meter cable which would make a difference between some active and passive DI boxes (and basses, for a passive Fender Precision you’d rather have an active DI on these distances I think).
So my choice, considering that I also play an upright with a passive piezo pickup – and these want high impedance interfaces, preferably 10 MOhm, I’d either go with the Rupert Neve RNDI (which sounded the most “musical” in my opinion), or the Radial PZ-DI with which you can select the input impedance from 220kOhm, 1, and 10MOhm. The RNDI has 2.2MOhm in its “instrument” setting I think. Both cost about the same, “middle priced” which is under 300€/$. But maybe a 95€ Radial SB-4 “Stage Bug” (5MOhm input) would do almost the same job, and very nicely. And something like that fits into each bass case 😉
Also interesting: the comparison with a (very good) audio interface which shows that for normal home use and with asymmetric instrument cables about 3 or 4 meters long you wouldn’t need any of these. Just like Marco from the local music shop said: costly diminishing returns…
As always, thanks for reading.
Many of the people who were discussing (tube) preamps for bass in TalkBass – I wrote about that here – were doing so because they nowadays go on stages without even using a real amplifier on top of a cabinet, or some kind of combo amp like I have it. With a bass you can do this theoretically using only a DI box to connect your instrument to the mixing console, and then the tone will be shaped there and sent to the P.A. system for the audience to hear it. What you get back from the mixer in that case is a monitoring signal which is a mix of yourself and the other musicians on stage, and nowadays more and more people are using in-ear monitors to hear that, so not even monitoring wedges are needed anymore. That way, stages have become pretty silent, especially when also using electronic drum kits instead of real ones.
Some people tho – normally guitar players, but also bassists, keyboarders, drummers and so on – want to create a sound which they send to the mixer, and therefore use pedal boards or all-in-one multieffect devices which also simulate amplifiers and even speaker cabinets, once for their own in-ears, but also because they want to have their sound sent to the mixer, and not having the mixing guys create that for them.
Here’s a guitar player explaining how he does that with one of these devices – interestingly it’s the same one which the thread owner on TalkBass also bought for his bass guitar:
Here the guitar player also uses a Radial DI box to send the signal to the house, and as I mentioned, in theory that’s all you would need as a bass player. And even people like Geddy Lee (Rush, Yes, and other bands) are doing it like this since a while… times they are-a-changing, aren’t they? 😉
As always, thanks for reading.