Whoops. So yeah, this is the tech thread. Over there is the music thread. Not really related at all. What I meant to post here was:
I'm transferring stuff over to my new laptop. And I recreated my email addresses over in Thunderbird and I have one work address right now that's downloaded 13,000 spam messages. Now admittedly, that's the address I use to fill out web forms and is the most vulnerable to spam. And I tend to ignore it until I need it, like today, but still. That's a daggone lot of spam. Guess I'd better get to deleting. Whenever it finishes. Maybe I'd better go take a shower first.
(eta: current status is 3333 of 13,896.)
that's an overnight job if I ever heard of one!
I went to the sound shop this morning to pick up some cables. We got to talking about the inauguration. He learned some info from the company that did the sound/video for the event. With the crowd so far away, they had a ton of delay towers. As the name says, the towers are time delayed to the source. So each tower has it's own delay time. The farthest tower had a **9 second** delay time. That is HUGE! Think about it. If you say, "My fellow Americans..."
...
...
Ya, 9 seconds later, the back section is starting to hear it! Then they had to time delay the video screens to that, so the lips on screen lined up with audio coming out of the speakers. Then you remember, that speed of sound is not a constant, like light is. And that the speed of sound can vary from barometric pressure and temperature.
It's freaking awesome! Totally geeking me out. I've never dealt with sound system delay of more than 1 second or so. Almost always in milliseconds, but never 9,000 of them! Hell, our mixer here at work can only do about 600ms!
Anyhow, I thought it was freakin' cool, and wanted to share.
Oh, yes, that was very evident from being there. It was weird to see Aretha throw her head back and open wide, but not to hear her voice come out. It was probably a 4 or 5 second delay where I was.
That is super cool. I'll have to pass that along to the SO, he'll love that.
OK, here is a link to really push the point. It's from a well respected colleague who does show control and sound stuff. Watch the video, it's awesome (well, as a sound geek!)
[link]
ETA, another colleague commented on my Facebook (where I xposted, cuz I'm such a geek), and she worked the PREVIOUS inauguration, and had this to say:
I remember the delay issus from the last Inauguration. One other interesting note about timing the arrays. The roads between the various sections of the mall don't close until the day of the event... so you can't leave yellow-jackets down to run signal to the the further out arrays (at least last time we couldn't) It was always a team effort to rapidly run the cable pre-yellowjacketed across the streets and check/time the delays. It only took a truck or two deciding to brake while on top of the cable, and the yellowjacket would start to get badly dragged. At each street crossing, two or three of us had to be stationed to guard the cable and run out between lights to fix any problems with the yellow jackets. Fun times :) No stress :) But last time they didn't have video ... so there wasn't the problem with getting the two to line up. I often wondered what it was like to be "watching" the Inauguration and only be able to hear it... and see ants moving around on a platform. video=goods
In case you were wondering what a "yellowjacket" is, it's this:
[link]
Oh HELL no. You're the United States government. You want to do this truly massive, glorious setup to allow literally millions of of people be witness to this historic event, and even
you
cannot let me tech this right?
*sigh*
Something mentioned in that blog post about delay reminded me - one fun thing about working in sound? As he said, for most intents and purposes, our signals arrive "instantly." Signal travels through cable at a very significant fraction of the speed of light. Depending on the type of cable involved, it can be over 95% of
c.
(100% if you're using optical cable)
But when you start dealing with very long cable runs, even a significant fraction of
c
becomes detectable. Like he says in the post, even milliseconds count.
100% if you're using optical cable
That's just one of those things that are really neat about physics. Optical sound! Whee!
But when you start dealing with very long cable runs, even a significant fraction of c becomes detectable. Like he says in the post, even milliseconds count.
At c, light travels about 300km in a millisecond. That's a really long cable run.
