Better sound without additional black boxes.
Have you considered room acoustics? That’s my first question when people ask me for home theater advice. Your theater’s acoustic environment is as important to your system’s sound quality as any single component. Sure, you can improve the sound with a new amplifier, new speakers, or the latest and greatest EX/ES processor; however, if your room isn’t acoustically optimized, you still won’t get maximum performance from your system, no matter how much it costs. Adding acoustic treatment is probably the easiest and most effective thing you can do to improve your sonic environment. Granted, it can be daunting to calculate reverberation times so that you add the right amount of acoustic treatment. Fortunately, Performance Media Industries (PMI) has done the work for you with their CinePanel acoustic-treatment kits.
We added a CinePanel kit to our newly built listening room (see the October and November 2002 issues) after our original attempt to use home-built acoustic treatments failed. Fiberboard covered with 6 inches of R-19 Fiberglas and poorly wrapped with black fabric proved to be ugly and relatively ineffective. PMI’s kits are designed around your room’s size in square feet and make basic assumptions about the room’s construction and design. You can go to www.cinepanel.com to see how many panels you might need for a particular room. Our room, for example, is 18 feet by 14 feet, or about 252 square feet. According to PMI, we’d need either a 12- or 14-panel kit. Given the fact that our room has nothing but flat surfaces and contains little furniture, we opted for the 16-panel kit. Most living-room theaters require fewer panels because they already have some diffusive and absorptive material like bookshelves and sofas.
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The tremolo pedals were subjected to listening tests in one marathon session so that each could be given a fair comparison. Although some testing was done with a Les Paul and a 5w EL84 Class A amp, the final tests were made using a Fender Stratocaster and a Tech 21 Trademark 60 amp set up for clean sound so that the true sound of the pedals could come through. 
A tremolo pedal should pass the full range frequencies without dulling the tone and importantly, have no throbbing or pulsing caused by the internal low frequency oscillator modulating the power supply or feeding through to the output. Also, if the pedal is noisy, the signal will have a faint cyclic hissing sound. While not audible on a typical noisy stage, it could be a problem while recording. Click here for a sample of the LFO throb sound. Please realize that this is highly amplified for demonstration, but it is definitely coming from the pedal since the throb matches the pulsing of the LED and changes when the Rate knob is adjusted. (more…)
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Headstock Productions recently released a big documentary film which is now available on DVD through their website. Here’s the full scoop from the site:
“Strat®Masters is the most important audiovisual documentary to tell the story of the worlds most iconic instrument - The Fender® Stratocaster® Guitar.
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Periodically someone will come out with some contraption that promises stronger fingers, better speed, greater endurance etc., however few of them give you no more help than squeezing a tennis ball would. Not so with the “Gripmaster Hand and Finger Exerciser!” This product has been available for a good number of years - proof in my mind as to its effectiveness. The Gripmaster (more…)
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