| Meetings and other Notices |
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| The May Zoom Only Meeting |
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Date: Saturday Afternoon, May 31, 2025 2PM EST
Featured Guest: Galen Gareis, Retired Belden Engineer, and Designer of Iconoclast Cables. www.iconoclastcable.com or call 850-860-0940.
Topic: Do Cables Make a Difference? - Galen Gareis, 35-year Belden Principal Product Engineer and sole designer of Iconoclast cables.
Blue Jeans Cable (BJC), based in Seattle, WA, an American manufacturer of high-quality, handmade audio, video and data cable assemblies, announced in late 2018 that it has entered into an agreement with Belden Wire & Cable Company. This agreement entails BJC assuming the sales, marketing, and distribution role for the Belden "Iconoclast" brand of audiophile cables. The product range includes various speaker cables as well as both analog and digital interconnects. The Belden-based BAV product line is available through Iconoclast as hand-built, terminated, and tested custom assemblies.
Galen Gareis will present detailed PDF charts and graphs demonstrating the scientific differences between Iconoclast cables and other options on the market. These differences are responsible for the distinctive clarity of the Iconoclast line. It is worth noting that many cables available today may exhibit characteristics that are overly bright, lifelessly dull, sibilant, or fatiguing.
While not every customer may require this level of quality, at BJC, our philosophy is to exceed expectations. Therefore, in the case of Iconoclast, no expense has been spared to ensure superior performance.
Boston Audio Society
PO BOX 260211
BOSTON MA 02126
617.271.6588
Join Zoom Meeting
Ken Schwarz is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Time: Saturday afternoon, May 31, 2025, 2:00 - 4:00 PM Eastern
Zoom Link
Or call +1 312 626 6799
Meeting ID: 843 6359 7657; Passcode 62262
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Hope to see you then.
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THE BAS MESSAGE
May 2025 |
Miscellaneous News
1. The BAS is looking for a new webmaster. The current webmaster will train you and hand it over to you, and provide support as necessary. The website is written in simple HTML. You will need a computer and a high speed internet connection (you will need to download a 6GB backup in a reasonable amount of time). $300 is the annual payment. You may be asked to support admin of the BAS Facebook pages as well.
2. Caterpillar Rap
As they cling to leaf tips, newborn warty birch caterpillars produce vibrations that can ward off invaders approaching their millimeter-size domain.
For warty birch caterpillars, that means patrolling one of the tiniest territories on Earth: the tips of birch leaves. Scientists observed the caterpillars warding off intruders with loud vibrations that advertise they are in command of a domain that stretches a few millimeters across.
"It's like rap battles," said Jayne Yack, a professor of neuroethology at Carleton University in Ottawa and an author of the study, which was published on Tuesday in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
After staking claims, the caterpillars made vibrational signals, called drums and buzz scrapes, produced by striking and scraping their bodies against the leaf. The vibrations are like a "no vacancy" sign that rumbles across nearby stems and branches.
Rival warty birch caterpillars were introduced onto occupied leaves over the course of 18 trial encounters. When confronted by intruders, the resident caterpillars dialed up the signal rate by about four times. If the intruder breached the perimeter of the leaf tip, the defenders escalated the signal rate by about 14 times.
Faced with insistent invaders they'd never defeat, the caterpillars can rappel off the tip on a silk thread, a strategy called lifelining.
"Territorial behavior is really important to animals, including humans, and there are a lot more strategies out there than we think," Dr. Yack said. NYT 22Ap25
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Below, other meetings and notices which
may be of interest to BAS members |
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JUST RELEASED !
A fantastic historical video!
Ken Berger and Kenton Forsythe are the founders of EAW (Eastern Acoustics Works) and they discuss, with terrific overlaid graphics, the history of, well, pretty much every audio thing Boston from the early 70's.
18 minutes and right here: https://youtu.be/fPfQEK0b0mI
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A Boston issue - As MIX magazine reports:
Sound Museum owners cry foul as their tenants likely secure new spaces without them
While the headline sounds like someone has sour grapes, the complete story of how the closure of this crucial Boston rehearsal studio is being handled is far more nuanced and complicated -- particularly since it brings up issues of gentrification, government support of the arts, non-profits' ethics and more. Full Story HERE (WBUR-FM Boston (1/11/23)
And here's an update:
www.wbur.org/news/2023/01/25/charlestown-rehearsal-studios-musicians-boston
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MAHLER 3
In the recent (April 2022) performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony at Boston's Symphony Hall by Ben Zander and his Boston Philharmonic, the recording was done with the three main spaced omnis with two more farther back. No accent mikes or chorus microphones were used nor, it turns out, were they needed. Remarkably, this produced a recording that is as close to the Symphony Hall experience as may be possible.
The info is here: www.bostonphil.org/concerts/2021-2022/bpo4-mahler3
Here is the recording in its entirety as a single .WAV file; 44k / 16 bit; 1hr 47 min
Mahler Sym 3 CD.wav 1.1GB
(For those of you with editing software note that the .wav file HAS markers to denote the movements.)
Here is the exact same Symphony 3 with the movements separated as FLAC files, 48k / 24 bit as a ZIPped file: Mahler 3 Zander as FLAC.zip 1GB
IF you'd like further Gustav Mahler info... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler
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Shop Talk
Shop Talk was a WBUR program about Hi Fidelity, music, speakers, tape recorders, etc. Enjoyed by many during the 1970s, the program's format was ‘talk’ and interviewing major audio luminaries. It was a forerunner of the popular program Car Talk!
Peter Mitchell and Dr. Richard Goldwater were the original hosts. They were later joined by Brad Meyer. Here, John Allen interviews Scott Kent:
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on SPEAKERS.mp3 (81Mb 1:27)
Shop Talk John Allen talks to Scott Kent on TAPE RECORDERS.mp3 (79Mb 1:26)
There is also an episode track on the BAS CD and here is that Description:
Track 12. "Shop Talk", WHRB-FM, November 5, 1984.
Peter Mitchell (on the left), Richard Goldwater, MD (center) and E. Brad Meyer (right) introduce the show with a 1932 stereo recording and prepare to talk with guests Mark Davis and David Moran, both then of dbx corporation.
Shop Talk, which through most of its ten-year life on WBUR featured just Mitchell and Goldwater, was the precursor of Tom and Ray Magliozzi's "Car Talk". As we finished our 9:00-10:30 stint every Saturday morning, Tom and Ray would take our places and begin joking with each other. Eventually the station manager figured out that they were funnier than we were, and that more people drove cars than owned hi-fi equipment, and fired us. Until then, the show publicized the Boston Audio Society, vastly increasing attendance at our monthly meetings. The show came back for a time during the '80's on the Harvard station WHRB, where we appeared once a month as guests of HRB stalwart David Elliott. [EBM]
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| BAS MICROPHONE CLINIC REPORT ! |
| In September 2009 the B A S held a microphone clinic, testing 37 different microphone models. The ambitious nature of the clinic effort, the extent of data collection, the number of individuals involved in microphone testing and in writing various sections of the report, and the complexity in determining how to construct the clinic report and make it available to members resulted it not being published until now. The dataset is extensive.
Representative samples were included in the abbreviated report in "The B A S Speaker"
(Fall 2015; v37n3)
Go to the MICROPHONE CLINIC PAGE for more...
...and don't forget, here is the master list of microphones in the world
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When collecting and plotting "noisy" data it is often useful to have Microsoft Excel plot a Trend Line through it. If that data is to be used for further work, it may be necessary to have an X-Y table of the Trend Line. That is not easy to get and this paper will show how to do it.
Joseph DeMarinis has an article here: Extracting Numerical Data from an Excel Trend Line
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Foster's Test Bench !
by Alvin Foster ! Click the logo: —> |
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The rapidly-becoming-famous BAS Headphone Test Article is now available in the BASS VOLUME 25, ISSUE 4, on Page 17, available HERE  PDF 3mb |
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Visit our PODCAST PAGE for:
The LIVE video podcast of our meetings,
Archived video of past meetings (only one so far!),
and Audio Podcast interviews by Alvin Foster |
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There is a supplemental and further explanation addendum paper to the E. Brad Meyer / David Moran paper published in the September, 2007 issue of the AES Journal. That page, which documents the experimental protocol and audio systems/source material is here:
www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm |
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| There is a Power Point Presentation of the lecture given by Dr. Barry Blesser at the March 2007 Meeting. The Meeting page synopsis is HERE; the Power Point Presentation (as a web page) is HERE |
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Some earlier BASS issues, previously available only directly by mail, are now available online, on the BAS SPEAKER page, HERE
Show your appreciation for the immense amount of dedicated work that went into both the original writing, gathering, editing and printing, PLUS the more recent scanning and conversion to PDF format, by joining the Society, HERE !
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A L L O F F S I T E L I N K S O P E N I N T O A N E W T A B O R W I N D O W
- AND FOR CONVENIENCE -
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