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OC-ness

Since I have nothing better to post, I guess I’d demonstrate how anal I could be with my car.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve got a new iPod [classic] to be used exclusively for the car. But before getting to that, I’ll just mention quick the overall “theme” I decided to apply.

Very simple: all black – right down to the seatcovers. It really looks so clean that way. If you have regular seats (i.e. not leather), try getting black seatcovers for them… I swear you won’t regret it. Plus, they don’t stain as easily (or at all for that matter hahahaha).

The funny thing is, the stock seats are already black… and for my particular model, the dealer actually advised not to put seatcovers – because the front seats have side airbags (which bust out from the seats). I guess seatcovers can get in the way of deployment. But I still ordered a set of black seat covers. Right now, they’re only installed on the backseat. I have to bring them to a taylor and have them altered to accommodate the airbags before I can use them – as soon as I find out exactly where they bust out from. Read More

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A [not so] definitive guide to common audio interconnects

Here’s a very useful post for the travelling audio person.

In BukasPalad, whenever we have performances we usually are dependent on whatever soundsystem the venue has. Knowing how 3rd-world countries work, most of these soundsystems’ equipment and technicians are far from professional. But we’re broke so we just have to live with it I guess.

Aside from worrying about what microphones we have available, the next most important thing was always to make sure their system can play our minus-ones (if need be). This usually meant we had to conenct our iPods (cuz were high tech hahahaha joke) to the PA – and that’s were everything can get lost in translation. I remember the trouble we had in finding the correct plugs and jacks to connect whatever we had, to whatever they had. There were times I would say “yung malaki” (the big one) when I referred to the 1/4″ plug, or “pang-headphones” (for headphones) when referring to a 2.5mm plug; just so I could make them understand the type of adaptor I wanted.

So with that, I’ve taken the liberty of distilling the long text from wikipedia articles and explain what you need to know to communicate what you need to whichever venue sound-technician you talk to. There are a lot of alternative names for these common audio interconnects, and I will attempt to consolidate in one post, the different names used – which I’ve come across over time.

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