Wings Over the Pyre - March 9th, 2007

10:45 pm - Piling It Deeper

The truth finally hit me today.

Broadcasting is just an excuse to get more hardware.

Not being one to pass up opportunity, and suddenly being aware that such investments are now tax deductible as business expenses, I brought a few things home today:

• AT3035 Cardioid Condenser Microphone
• 20ft Mic Cable
• Presonus Firebox Firewire Recording System
• Proline MS220BK Tripod Mic Stand
• Syba PCI 1394 800mbps Firewire Card

The tax deductibility doesn't hurt my feelings at all, truth be told. It'll help shedloads next year given my income is going to be, how do you say, dramatically reduced. Glad the car's paid off.

Now, according to Eric the .5b, this mic makes me actually sound like myself on Skype. Which, in my view, is an absolute advantage. What I can tell you from experimentation is that it's got a -42dB noise wave just sitting here in my noisy room. That's insane. My gut listening says it actually sounds better than the mic at the studio at school. Which, of course, means I have to go to the studio almost never to work on my stuff.

I can, instead, work on things here ... which makes me no end of happy. I prefer my comfy chair and right-height environment.

Luckily for me, my knowledge of computing environments is highly advanced, because getting the Firebox installed took a number of gyrations to pull off. Windows SP2 has a bit of a crazy view of the IEEE 1394 interface; it thinks it's a network. So, of course, the thing came up as a firewalled network. Combine that with the fact SP2 has a bug that can make 1394b 800mbps interfaces simply not work, and I can see that the straight-up non-computer-obsessive audiophiles would absolutely hate getting things like this working.

Me, I shrugged, then pulled the latest drivers from the site, looked through the FAQ, killed the firewall and installed the patch off the Microsoft site, reinstalled the drivers and ... poof, running.

So, yeah. Everything's cool and I can generally skip on hitting the studio on the weekend save if I want to practice with the CD deck fades. For recording? I'm just as well set up here.

This makes me no end of happy. I can't wait to cut my next podcast.