Hideaway Studio Busy In The Lab!

[HideawayStudio]

Just to reassure everyone that much is happening behind the scenes...

The side of my sound design (perhaps obsession is a better word!) that far less get to see is that I spend an inordinate amount of time in my vintage synth workshop returning all sorts of esoteric tube infested old gear back to life as these things join an ever larger collection of secret weapons. To say I have a love affair with tube technology is putting it mildly - it forms a vital part of my sound.

Anything that can colour, bend, blend, distort, shape, respond to or track sound is very important to me.

Some old gear is really very precious to me and its doubly exciting when I discover unexplored/forgotten equipment that turns out to be highly musical even when it was never designed to be used in an artistic context...

Like 1960s all tube Bruel & Kjaer Frequency Analysis test gear modified for artistic use in the studio...

OK... it's official now - I am addicted to these things.. the look of them, the smell of them... the taste of them!

Celebrating my 15th 1960s Bruel & Kjaer wakeup and overhaul in the workshop this year..

..with another three in for resurrection this week!



Originally being particularly high end (read.. eye wateringly expensive) test gear for use in vibration and acoustical analysis almost all of the units have had to be modified for studio use mainly to tame their output stages because up to 90V DC at the output terminals is not exactly mixer friendly.

The all tube 2107 BPF with its continuously swept tuning with up to 50dB slopes in max regeneration!..

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/ ... onic-rider

Currently working on a gorgeous pair of model 2112 all tube band pass filters based on a bank of tube amplified passive high Q L/C resonators - one of which has been a particularly arduous to return to life...

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/ ... monic-pads

This demo may at first seem a little underwhelming until you realise what you're listening to is a single sustained complex chord which when fed through a filter with 120dB/octave slopes ends up breaking the input signal down to pretty much its sinusoidal components which means all filter settings end up being musically related to the input signal but sound nothing like it. As the tuning is moved around what is perceived as the fundamental frequency and its associated harmonics appears to change forming something that sounds like a series of chords but in fact it is just one.

And its all hand cranked goodness as there is no way in heck this lot could be voltage controlled without the use of a large servo motor...

And such technology I have even tried to capture the essence of in new designs of mine - needless to day - also calling heavily on tube technology:

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/ ... -in-action

[Doug1978]

Sounds really wonderful Dan - great looking lair too!

But please don't eat them:

'I am addicted to these things.. the look of them, the smell of them... the taste of them!'

[deastman]

Those are really quite extraordinary!

[HideawayStudio]

Most of these units are 50 years old and arrive absolutely filthy inside and out. Each unit is meticulously cleaned in inside and out and visually inspected. The transformer winding to the 410 Volt HT rail is temporarily disconnected and the unit slowly run up to test the heater rails including the regulated DC heater rails to the tubes on the front end of the input and output amplifiers (only very expensive designs had regulated DC heater rails in those days!).





A variable high voltage and current limited bench supply is wired into the B+ rail and the HT is slowly brought up to around 70 volts to check for excessive loading in relative safety. It is quite surprising how many tube designs will work at this sort of voltage as long as the heaters are running at their proper temperature. A very quick functionality test is carried out. If it looks promising the B+ voltage is slowly increased to 150 volts and the unit left running for several hours whilst monitoring for temperature build up in the electrolytic caps.

Usually a plethora of grid decoupling caps, burnt out cathode follower resistors and the occasional excessively leaky HT smoothing cap are replaced along with fresh pilot lamps in the meter and tuning dials.

The bizarre gearbox on the rear of the model 2107 is part of an elaborate mechanism to auto-switch between adjacent frequency ranges when the huge tuning dial is turned to either extreme meaning that you can sweep the entire 20Hz to 20KHz audio spectrum in a handful of turns of the dial.

The active tube regeneration (all tube!) allows slopes from around 20dB/oct to nearly 50dB/octave and with the studio mods everything can go into glorious saturation if required.

A Closeup of a Newly Revived Model 2107...



A Stack of 3 Extremely Rare Late 50s Rohde & Schwarz UBM Tunable Indicating Amps I Restored Last Year...



This bizarre all tube amplifiers feature active tube regeneration that can be wound all the way up to crazy self oscillation and tune across the full audio spectrum. They were originally used to home into and measure very specific frequencies.

Some of the vintage test gear collection at Hideaway Studio selected and used in my sound design..

[whyterabbyt]

Gorgeous looking gear. I'd ask how much it would cost to get something like that restored, but I'd be nervous to find out.

[HideawayStudio]

Gorgeous looking gear. I'd ask how much it would cost to get something like that restored, but I'd be nervous to find out.

A heck of a lot less than sourcing and restoring an original Pultec EQP-1A that's for sure!

[HideawayStudio]

I have just completed restoring two late 1960s Bruel & Kjaer all tube Band Pass Filter sets modified for studio use being tested as a stereo pair for the first time shortly after restoration at Hideaway Studio.

I am now (somewhat nervously!) trying to get some hours on them during soak testing.

This is the first time I've attempted to run up two of these unique filters as a stereo pair:

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/dual-2112-test-i

First you hear the sound sent through the filters in non-selective "Linear" mode and then the selective band pass filtering is enabled.

The source instrument in this case is a little Alesis Micron playing a single sustained chord whilst the two filters are set to different tuning positions.

They sound particularly beautiful when each unit is set to adjacent 1/3oct bands.

Unlike the 2107s these units filter in steps using a large bank of high Q L/C resonators (a coil and a cap in parallel as a resonant tank). Although each step is at 1/3rd octave spacing, at the crest of each L/C resonator band the slopes fall away at over 100dB/octave which is very considerably more than most analog studio filters. This highly selective filtering results in an almost haunting quality. Filtering white noise through these sounds quite eerie too.

They also have a much less dramatic 1 band/oct mode.

On a completely different note I was very excited to see this week that both Stephen Howell and myself have been very kindly credited on the new Jean Michel Jarre album, Electronica. I think Steve would have been amused by being immortalised in the credits as "Sir Stephen Howell"...

[Aloysius]

What do you use to clean dusty, greasy circuit boards and their components?

[HideawayStudio]

What do you use to clean dusty, greasy circuit boards and their components?

Its quite a labour of love and usually starts very broad brush and becomes more detailed as things start to clean up. A really deep and detailed clean is usually in order as 50+ years of baked on dust can leave assemblies literally black with grime.

Usually it involves vacuuming out the fluff/dust/debris in conjunction with a paint brush. Then using a load of wet wipes to mop up decades of grime, then isopropyl alcohol and cotton buds around all of the components and old solder flux removed with significant quantities of the same from the pcb tracks using a stiff brush.

After every cycle it slowly gets better. The chassis and front panels are treated with a mixture of alcohol, cream cleanser (Jiff), WD40 and Beeswax.

Like all restorative work its a slow gradual lifting process - amazingly under all that 'orrible gunk lurks many a diamond in the rough such is the robustness of these old monsters.

[Aloysius]

Thank you. Very useful information. I'll copy and paste into a file.

[dmbaer]

The owner of the auto maintenance place where I take my vehicle for service restores antique radios as a hobby - we're talking as old as WW II models in some cases. He's usually got one or several recent projects on display in the lobby of the repair shop. Lot's of people know of his interest and he no longer even has to go looking for these things - they come to him.

He was telling me that in about half the cases, the insides are completely covered with a slightly orange-ish and slightly greasy patina (which he believes actually helped to preserve the original electronics) while others were just replete with garden variety dust. He eventually came to realize that the former models came from the homes of routine smokers.

Glad I managed to quit quite some time ago.

[HideawayStudio]

There is definitely an eerie quality to the 2112s.

They can also render some unusual effects processing drums: (dry channel sections also through 2112 tube stages):

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/ ... 12-test-ii

This one is quite mesmerizing... a single loop fed into the 2112 pair each manually tuned in 1/3rd octave steps to produce a shifting harmonic effect...

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/ ... -resonance