Graves On SOHO Technology

Back in the spring of this year VUC founder Randy Resnick made the trek to Germany to attend AMOOCON, a conference for Asterisk Users. AMOOCON started out in 2007 known as AsteriskTAG which literally translated means “Asterisk Day.”

While at AMOOCON Randy made a point of recording some of the presentations. These recordings can be found on the VoIP Users Conference site. Various sessions were recorded by the conference organizers and are available on the AMOOCON site. There they also have quite a lot of video of the formal sessions.

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On the surface this might seem a wee bit off topic, but bear with me as I will get there eventually. My thanks for Crunch Gear’s John Biggs for pointing out this You Tube clip documenting the making of the song “Money” by Pink Floyd. I’m a fan of the band and have also followed their individual solo careers in more recent years.

Further, I’m a big fan of Alan Parsons, who engineered a number of the bands recordings. Alan appears in the clip as well. He’s a master recording engineer which is something that I especially admire, having spent a portion of my youth in such endeavors myself.

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(this started as a quick comment on my Facebook page, but I’m moving it here so that people outside of FaceBook can join in)

With apologies to the McKenzie brothers. There appears to be an odd cross between two of my passions in the works. As I get more into the daily use of wideband telephony I wonder if there’s a potential to leverage some surround sound techniques to take conferencing to a new level?

It couldn’t be the puritanical kind of approach used in music recording. It would be more a matter of using surround panning to position participants in an synthetic soundfield. I wonder if this has been done to any degree elsewhere?

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Some time ago I had installed a couple of in-ceiling speakers into our living room. I did it one Saturday while my wife was out. That was a mistake.

When she got home she was disappointed that I had done this without consulting her. I had mistakenly thought that built-in gear would be inconspicuous and so desirable from her perspective. She, on the other hand, felt that cutting holes in the ceiling of our vintage 1920s craftsman style house was a bad idea. She’d rather leave it as original as possible.

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My brother-in-law Fred is something of an audiophile. Not the ridiculous, “I-paid-a months-wages-for-that-rca-lead cantcha-just-feel-the-increased-sonic-emotion*” kind of guy, more pragmatic but with an open mind.

*see Pear Audio Cables vs James Randi for details

A few years ago Fred built a set of speakers from a kit. It was a pricey kit but they sound great so why quibble. They look great, too. He had fun making them and the reward of making something exceptional with your own two hands cannot be overstated.

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A few weeks after the Behringer monitors had arrived I learned of the mating subwoofer, Behringer’s B2092A. This was also a comparable bargain, so I bought two. Yes, stereo subwoofers. Such decadence.

The B2092A is beautiful in a way that many people will not appreciate. It’s a device built to a task with little concern for superficial things like aesthetics. It’s a 4th order double-tuned bandpass enclosure housing two long throw 8” drivers, their amplifier and crossover electronics. The built-in amp provides 360 watts rms below 80Hz with a range of adjustments to compensate for level and placement in the room.

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