One of my favorite comic books as a kid was Dennis the Menace. I had a favorite Dennis artist, but I didn’t know his name was Al Wiseman until I was an adult. With the exception of a couple knobs for dials, this is an accurate drawing by Wiseman of a 1924 RCA Radiola AR-812.
The AR-812 is significant, because it was the first set available commercially to include the invention that made radio broadcasting a practical medium — Edwin Armstrong’s Superheterodyne circuit.
With the passing of Dame Vera Lynn at 103, World War II slips a little bit further away from living memory. Thanks to magnetic tape recording — an invention perfected in Nazi Germany — this 1950’s re-recording of Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” sounds as though it could have been made yesterday.
I should see if Vera Lynn ever commented on this use of her signature song.
A question in the comments about a microphone coincides with a video chat I watched yesterday. Noted recording engineer, musician, and author Brian Kehew discusses his work in the studio, and how the Beatles worked in the studio. Somewhat ironically, Kevin is apparently using the mic in his laptop computer.
A very nerdy thing I’ve enjoyed doing is listening to the many different combinations of inexpensive phono preamps and cartridges presented on YouTube. Here is how the setup in my home office sounds. Listen quick, in case YouTube decides to yank it, despite many other unofficial copies of the song already being there.
The cartridge is a Grado Black ($75), the preamp a Behringer PP400 ($25), and the turntable is a Technics SL-BD20D. The Technics was the last of the P-Mount (T4P) models, and it was purchased new for $99 from J&R Music World, an outstanding retailer and mail-order service that is gone, but not forgotten.
Robert Crumb has long praised the sound that is characteristic of records from the early 1930’s. The appeal of some of them is likely due to the RCA PB-31 ribbon microphone that, as its name implies, was introduced in 1931.
Expert audio engineer and producer Steve Hoffman cites these recordings on YouTube as examples of the excellent sound quality that was possible using a single RCA ribbon mic.
This link works for standard HTTP on TCP port 80:
https://dograt.com
But now this one also works for encrypted HTTP on port 443:
https://dograt.com
With SSL working, I am contemplating forcing all sessions to use an encrypted connection, but there are many other things to attend to first, including the RSS feed apparently being broken.
Follow-up: The RSS feeds have moved to the https link.
