Orient Blue Mako

I did finally make a watch purchase after the holidays this year. I wasn't able to get the Seiko Alpinist that I have so coveted in the past few months. The nearly $500 pricetag was just a little too much to swallow in this economy. I am very happy with the Orient that I settled on, after many nights of internet research. I have admired the brand for a while, as it has been a staple in the asian market forever, and is just now making in-roads in the west. Some of their models, frankly, don't do it for me, but the divers I find to be quite classic. With the coming of the new year, prices on-line plummeted and I couldn't help myself... Trigger pulled.

Being that this is what I would consider my first real watch as an adult (it doesn't have C3-PO or R2D2, or any of the cast of Sesame Street on the dial, and it isn't a Swatch) I was pretty excited when it showed up on my doorstep. I won't go on and on about the packaging, but the box is a nice touch, and it makes you feel like you've got a much more expensive piece in your hands. The heft of the thing is great. You get a very strong sense of solidity and strength. So far, I would say that you can't beat the Mako for value. Water resistant to 200 meters (660ft.), day/date, rotating bezel, and automatic movement, all for just over a hundred bucks. The stainless steel bracelet was the deciding factor for me, as I have always had trouble with the fit of traditional watchbands. Having the ability to custom fit the bracelet was key, not to mention the look is without a doubt, burly.

I do have my one gripe, which apparently I share with every other Mako owner. The end-links that attach the bracelet to the watch case are hollow, rather than solid, as you will find on more expensive models. Pardon me, but this is truly the "weak link" of the entire watch. I have heard that due to rather thin spring bars and this hollow structure, this will be the watch's downfall if there is to be one. I am not complaining. For the price, I still think this thing is a steal.

So there you have it, if you're interested. Maybe this mini-review will help if you to are about to jump into the world of the watch fetish. There are certainly more pressing issues in life, but this is just a little corner of mine.

My Amazement and Appreciation For Technology

Please take this post as an article completely independent of all others that you will find here. I would not want to be labeled a hypocrite for my contradictory love of all things electronic, and incessant pleading for mass lifestyle change to the small and simple. I still and will always believe that simple living saves lives, with the exclusion of really complicated music studios and fancy microphones.

I was thinking about signal flow the other night. If you are producing a record for mass distribution, you are always aware of the specter of background noise and ways to reduce it. With the advent of "in the box" recording, where a computer and analog-to-digital converter is all you really need to track, edit, mix and master songs, this is really easy to take for granted. I have never had to deal with serious routing of a signal chain from mixer to outboard effects, back to the mixer, to a recording device (maybe a tape machine) and back again. Worried, that at each patch to an input or output jack I am creating a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio that will have to be dealt with sooner or later. This change in the way that recordings happen is truly a revolution in music on par with the advent of the CD, the single largest jump in audio technology to be available to the masses.

Let me explain in further detail. Because it is possible to record directly to a software recording program (usually called a DAW, or desktop audio workstation) the only objectionable noise that might be captured could be sounds outside of the studio space: like car horns, dogs barking, sirens from the nearby hospital, low flying aircraft, etc. You get the point. In my little makeshift studio, the worst offender is my computer's fan, which runs almost constantly. The sound of the fan running is usually not intelligible in the final product, meaning, listeners don't usually say to me "hey, is that a computer fan running in the background there?" It sounds more like white noise. And it drives me absolutely nuts. I have tried to cover the tower with heavy blankets. I have looked into the investment of longer cords and cables, so that I could "remotely" operate the computer, which I could place in the closet. I have tried to "EQ out" the low hiss. I think I have resigned myself to the fact that I am not producing U2's new album, so maybe I should just shut up and deal.

If you are really clever, can figure out the programming and have a lot of money to spend on digital libraries of sampled instruments, it is possible to avoid microphones all together and compose entirely in the digital domain. No noise concerns there! I've done a little of this and I have to say, it's pretty amazing. You can integrate the sound of a snare drum recorded in absolute silence in some fancy studio somewhere into your tracks and enjoy pristine stillness at any frequency outside of the drum itself. As Borat would say, "Niice."

So back to analog recording. I am going to hereby give mad props to anyone who produced music before the advent of digital technology. These folks waged the constant battle to keep a high signal to noise ratio intact, while routing their music through all manner of outboard gear. In fact, if you weren't using a really expensive mixing console, you probably did all of your EQing, compressing, limiting, gating, what-have-you on numerous external devices. Each, with it's own signal-to-noise characteristics.

This brings me to the most interesting aspect in all of this technological gibberish, musical claptrap, recording hocus-pocus. Now that we have eliminated the ghost in the machine: noise, we're well on our collective way to letting it back into our music. To some degree. There has been a huge resurgence in the use of "antique" recording equipment. Everything from microphone pre-amps to dynamics processors, these vintage monsters from the stone-age of sound run on vacuum tube power, giving them unique tonal character that you just can't get nowadays. Even with the finest software impersonations of these studio bits (that's a whole other post waiting to happen) you just can't achieve the dynamic range of tubes. Turns out our ears really dig the oh-so squishy, flexible sound of all kinds of things, not just guitars, pushed through vacuum tubes. Voices warm up, synthesizers seem to have more depth, horns seem less brash...

I find this so bizarre. In the late sixties and early seventies, electrical engineers were doing all they could to eliminate tubes from anything that utilized them. Apart from being wickedly hot and fragile, they're generally onerous to replace, and quite simply: they fail. So musical amplifiers of all types switched to transistors, for all kinds of reasons. Cheaper. Smaller. Used less power. Safer. Very rugged. Studios all of the sudden, could be smaller, and quite a bit cooler. I guess this is a case in which convenience has not won out, because here we are, January 2010, and you can leaf through any Musician's Friend or Sweetwater catalog and see page after page of tube devices, waiting to fill your rack-spaces. Many of these are faithful reissues of classic studio gear from decades ago.

To be fair, we have come a long way. Chances are you would not link these boxes together in series, like batteries in a flashlight, pumping up the noise floor at every step. The computer is going to sit right in the middle and be your virtual hub for these elements, so that any excess noise is limited by the device itself and the few number of connections: 2 (1 in and 1 out). The fact that you are recording to a hard drive in your computer is a huge space savings over an analog tape machine and all of the hardware associated with it. Everything is getting tinier. My mixer, which I consider a luxury because I made perfectly decent recordings before I owned it, is about the size of a small notebook. 12"L x 10"W x 3"H. Amazing when you consider it houses four microphone pre-amps, an audio interface, on-board effects, and eight traditional channel strips.

Where is this industry headed? I can't really envision the future of pro audio and recording technology. For the moment the advances seem to be focused on improving the bit-count on all software programs and plug-ins, which to me seems rather esoteric. If I can't eliminate the sound of my computer fan from my live tracks, then why would I spend good money to eek out a bit more headroom and dynamics by recording in 24 bits/192kHz? Effectively, you would be able to hear the fan muck a lot better.

From my chair, I will continue to marvel at the advances as they roll by, only buying the few bits and pieces I feel are necessary to produce at my level. I am constantly aware that what I possess in my simple studio now holds more power and tools than Eddie Kramer had at his disposal when he recorded Jimi Hendrix, or the late Willie Mitchell when tracking Al Green.