Was lucky to hear these guys on stage at a festival in Manchester last weekend – awesome party band! Think they’re one of those bands you need to experience live really though…

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Martin Audio badged Lab-Gruppen FP6400 going on ebay for cheap right now Martin Audio MA4.2S / Lab Gruppen FP6400 | eBay

Really nice amp, and powerful!

The SE Electronics stuff is really good for the money, would recommend the SE 2200A, I have one and am pretty pleased with it.

I think I might have been at that party actually, or maybe the 2006 one, was it the one near Kew Gardens? I remember dancing lego men on-stage and calling Talk to Frank at about 7am and blowing a big raspberry down the phone at them.

Gary Denke.

@barrettone 544057 wrote:

I agree with most of the sentiment of this post, but on the introvert thing, I don’t think it’s bad to be introverted. It’s not the same thing as being shy. It’s more to do with spending some time alone whereas extroverts do not enjoy it as much/prefer to do it less often/for less time.

But other than that tbh it’s all about having a good time.

Was gonna post something similar but you beat me to it. I’ll just post this vid instead as it pretty much sums up how I feel about introversion/extroversion…

@The Psyentist 543847 wrote:

You don’t think they’re a spammer too by any chance do you lol

I just fucking really hate music…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2tP9s8y2Ic

With the sound muted on the vid and this playing in the background…

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Just found this little gem on Youtube while bored…

Some people are just fucked.

Can I lower the tone…?

@The Psyentist 542619 wrote:

Probably the precise answer the OP was looking for, shame Pat has likely scared them off.

Oh well, I somehow don’t think that ‘some druggy rave forum wot I found on the net’ would count for much in his list of sources anyway.

There is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence from mix engineers that DFA faders, dummy equipment etc can be used to fool awkward producers who want to add more ‘sparkle’, ‘sex’ or some other ambiguous adjective into the mix. When I was at uni, an ex-BBC lecturer of mine described to us his ‘flange and bounce box’ – a mysterious home-built unit with a single female XLR on one side and a male XLR on the other. When a producer was being especially tiresome, they would wheel out this device with great ceremony and insert it into the signal path (‘aha – what you need is the flange and bounce box! We only get this out on rare occasions…’). You can probably guess what was inside the box: a short length of twisted-pair cable!

There is a definite psychoacoustic effect at work here – if you are expecting one sound to be better than another, the chances are that’s how you will perceive it. Take the example of audiphools who spend £1000 on a set of gold-plated speaker cables. They are convinced that they sound better than the cheap heavy-gauge copper found in recording studios around the world (N.B. For anyone interested in fancy cables, a good thing to ask yourself before buying them is ‘does anyone in the professional audio industry use these?’ Usually the answer is no). They even find ways to describe the differences: ‘the sound-stage is brought into sharp focus’, ‘the bass is more solid’. They can actually hear a difference. For the extra £1000 you certainly should be able to hear a difference! However, it is all in the mind, and there has not to my knowledge ever been a successful double-blind experiment that has been able to prove that exotic cables sound any better than their cheaper counterparts. Once the knowledge of which cable is which is taken away from the listener, the mind has nothing to go on and no way of playing tricks.

I think one of the most important skills to learn as an engineer is the ability to tell when something hasn’t made a difference. There are various psychoacoustic factors at play when it comes to preference of one sound over another; one being that people usually prefer the louder of two sounds, even if the only thing that is different is their loudness (this is why it is important to set the output gain of compressors carefully when mastering – the louder, but more compressed sound will usually sound better than the quieter, uncompressed original). There are lots of AES papers on the subject, which I unfortunately no longer have access to without paying a lot of money, but as a student you can download for free (Floyd Toole and Sean Olive are two names that spring to mind from when I was writing my final year technical project). There is also a certain level of competition among engineers as to who ‘has the best hearing’, and plenty of ’emperor’s new clothes’ syndrome going on, where if one person claims they can hear a difference between, say, two different pre-amps, nobody wants to be the one to admit that they can’t tell the difference. I try to be mindful of all these things, as I would rather be unable to tell the difference between two sounds than hear differences that don’t even exist!