| Author | Message | ||
| dtrice
Member Username: dtrice Post Number: 88 Registered: 10-2006 |
I'm looking at some used Series I basses. Some of them were made from 1977-1980. I'm fairly certain that Alembic has continued to improve its products (including electronics) and I was wondering if any electronics upgrades/updates would be necessary (or recommended). Any problems with noise or shielding in old models? | ||
| dtrice
Member Username: dtrice Post Number: 89 Registered: 10-2006 |
Also, I have also considered at some point maybe converting one (or more) of these Series Is to Series II. The Custom Quote Generator says that it is $600 to upgrade from I to II (I'm talking about electronics only; not the continous wood, etc.). Is this price for retrofits, too? I'm new to Series so I have a few questions. (Message edited by dtrice on September 04, 2007) | ||
| lbpesq
Senior Member Username: lbpesq Post Number: 2610 Registered: 7-2004 |
Daniel: Since there are a lot more radio frequencies around today than 30 years ago, an older Series instrument will sometimes pick up interference from these sources. It all depends on where you are and your individual instrument. I have two older Series I instruments, a '76 guitar and a '77 12 string guitar. I live in Oakland - San Francisco Bay Area - a relatively dense urban population area. Even so, I have not noticed any problems with either guitar picking up any extraneous interference and have elected not to have the elecronics mod done to either instrumnet. As for upgrading from Series I to II elecronics, as I understand it, this essentially means replacing the 3-way Q switch with a continuously variable Q pot. Some on this board have noted a potential disadvantage in that, while playing on stage, it is a lot quicker and more replicatable/predictable to adjust the 3-way Q on-the-fly than to tweak the CVQ. Personally, I get all I need out of the Series I electronics and have never thought the CVQ would be an improvement. Bill, tgo | ||
| dtrice
Member Username: dtrice Post Number: 95 Registered: 10-2006 |
Thanks for the info, Bill. Adam (2400wattman)told me that his S1 has more bottom end than his S2. Is this common, or is it just one of those "no two instruments are alike" things? | ||
| dtrice
Member Username: dtrice Post Number: 97 Registered: 10-2006 |
By the way, Bill. What are your thoughts on Series guitars. How does the Series electronics affect tone. I don't think I have ever heard a Series guitar. I know someone who is kicking around the idea of ordering. Do you know of any recordings of Series guitars? | ||
| jseitang
Advanced Member Username: jseitang Post Number: 212 Registered: 6-2002 |
david bowie with carlos alomar | ||
| crgaston
Senior Member Username: crgaston Post Number: 419 Registered: 11-2005 |
Daniel, with Adam's basses, the S1 has a vermillion top, whereas the S2 has a walnut top, which would explain the difference. Plus... no two instruments are alike! ;-) (Message edited by crgaston on September 04, 2007) | ||
| hendixclarke
Junior Username: hendixclarke Post Number: 35 Registered: 6-2007 |
I find the older the better. Its like an old 64 strat; Marshal amp tubs and stacks; or a 55 corvette. Old is the best, yet. Why change a classic, for that would be tragic. | ||
| dfung60
Advanced Member Username: dfung60 Post Number: 270 Registered: 5-2002 |
I think the electronics differences between Series 1 and Series 2 are mostly for flexibility and convenience. The big differences are that the Q-switches are replaced by pots and there's the addition of the master volume. The pickups and EQ boards seem to be the same. The Q-switch selects one of three different resistors which tune the Q-filter. The resistors reflect values that are in the range of the CVQ pot, so the Series 2 can dial in filter settings that a Series 1 can't, but if you found something you really liked, you could easily and inexpensively change the resistor. Differences in bass output woudln't be attributed to the electronics. Each bass is different and Series II basses do have more laminations in the neck which may have some effect. The op-amps used in the EQ boards have *very* wide range frequency response, from DC (0Hz)to ultrasonic. From a designer's aesthetic, that's appealing, but in the real world it might not be so good. Your ears can't hear a 200KHz tone, but the EQ boards will happily amplify it if one is presented to their input. That wasn't an issue in the old days, but nowadays there are lots of non-audible electromagnetic emissions coming for the world around us. They get picked up by the instrument by induction and the opamps could be driven into overdrive amplifying it. You wouldn't hear the high frequency garbage, but you might hear distortion or harmonic weirdnesses out of your amp. I'm not exactly sure what they're doing in the Series retrofit, but I believe there are two things going on. One is that they limit the frequency response of the opamps so you don't have these problems cause by inaudible signals. This is one of the things that the ferrite beads around the input cables do - they prevent the pickup leads from acting like antennae. From the descriptions, I think the other thing that's happening is that a higher precision opamp is being fitted. The Series hum-canceller is a pretty extreme implementation. The hum-cancelling coil is just like a pickup without the magnet and it has it's own opamp, just like the regular pickups. The closer you can match the output across frequency between the pickups and hum-canceller, the purer the treble will be (when they don't track together, it will tend to lose treble more than bass). From the description of the mods it sounds like they refit the opamps with a matched set or something. I kind of like the master volume on Series 2, but don't know if I would necessarily want to pay incremental dollars for CVQ. David Fung | ||
| terryc
Advanced Member Username: terryc Post Number: 260 Registered: 11-2004 |
DFung - Do you think with the eventual switch over to digital transmissions will stop all the extraneous RF that has developed over the years. Here in the UK we are slowly moving towards digital signals for both TV & radio although it is still a long way off. But still we have electrical poles and pylons!! | ||
| dfung60
Advanced Member Username: dfung60 Post Number: 271 Registered: 5-2002 |
Actually, I think the RF interference problem will be much *worse* as everything turns digital! It's certainly been this way in the US. In most consumer things, I think you get a better end result as you move toward digital transmission. When you're transmitting in analog, you have to maintain signal strength and clarity as your picture or sound will vary proportionally and perceptibly with the signal quality. I think everybody is familiar with what's happening with digital stuff - you slice the analog source up into pieces over time, then calculate a number that represents the analog signal over that time slice. Then you send the stream of numbers you generate and reconstruct the original signal on the other end. The critical difference here is that you should be able to reconstruct the signal as long as all the numbers make it through correctly. If you're distance from an antenna gives you a snowy analog picture but is able to get all the digital information over, you'll see a strong and clear signal. In the analog world, getting a clear picture probably means that at any given time you need to be able to sense something like 500 levels of signal, but in the digital world you need only to register whether the data coming over is on or off. In addition to making the detection easier, digital transmission can be encoded so you can reconstruct bits that were lost in transit. So you have a much better chance of being able to get a good signal. More digital transmissions in the air are often bad news for the analog stuff up there too. If you remember the buzzing sound your modem used to make when you had dial-up service at the start of connections, you've heard what a digital data stream sounds like - a lot of noise. Your analog TV has to deal with rejecting all that to continue to get a clean signal. The digital over-the-air broadcasts are on a different frequency band, so this isn't that hard, but byproducts and side-effects of transmissions in one frequency can affect others. The ultimate solution for all this is that your bass will probably be digital some day as well. It's easier for digital devices to reject interference from other digital sources. Gibson has secured patents on digital transmission from the guitar with their (largely stillborn) MaGIC system. I feel really bad about this - this was such a natural place for Alembic to be the pathfinder. Digital definitely has good and bad parts to it. Digital information is easier to store and transport and will generally be better than analog for most people. The bad thing about digital is that you have to make decisions about what is "good enough" now and live with them in the future. The perfect example of this is CD audio (now 25 years old!). In CD audio, the original sound is sliced into 44,100 pieces per second, and each instance is assigned a value from 0-65,000, representing the strength of the signal at that point. That stream of information (actually two streams, for left and right audio) is pressed into the CD disks. Your CD player reads that information back and reconstructs it and you rock out! CD has been really successful and the sound quality is good enough to the vast majority of listeners. But for really critical listening, sampling at a higher data rate or with more resolution yields better results which is why ProTools systems sample at 192KHz and with higher resolution. Once you've digitized the original source, there's no way for further technology to improve the sound quality without going back to the source. These days, high compression sound files like mp3s lose even more of the original information, but are still generally "good enough" for most listeners. Enough ranting! I'm not such a Luddite that I would want to turn back the clock, I'd rather just see that people push the technology more so we don't end up permanently trading off quality for convenience. David Fung | ||
| dtrice
Intermediate Member Username: dtrice Post Number: 102 Registered: 10-2006 |
Thanks for the info, David. One of the reasons I enjoy coming to this forum is all of the things I've learned about musical technology (I'm not sure if that's the right terms). | ||
| terryc
Advanced Member Username: terryc Post Number: 263 Registered: 11-2004 |
But LP's do have a nicer, warmer sound than CD's and I miss the large gatefold covers too, so much better to look at. | ||
| cozmik_cowboy
Intermediate Member Username: cozmik_cowboy Post Number: 196 Registered: 10-2006 |
Yeah, I HATE the shrunk-down cover art on CDs. And let's not forget the other handy uses of LP jackets - especially double-fold ones. Try to roll one on a jewel case. Peter | ||
| jbybj
Member Username: jbybj Post Number: 91 Registered: 6-2006 |
Regarding Digital transmissions. I've been told that analog transmissions needed a nice guard band to avoid interference from adjacent signals. This left more space in the spectrum for things like, wireless mics. Digital transmissions can be packed closer together in the spectrum, meaning, more stuff and less empty space. This would indicate to my simplistic mind that we can look forward to more, not less interference in RF. "But LP's do have a nicer, warmer sound than CD's" whenever I hear this sentiment I think, there is nothing warm and cuddly about crackle, ticks. and pops. The awesome sounding records we listened to in the 60's and 70's had the benefit of 70+ years of experience in recording for, and mastering for the vinyl medium. The reason the early years of CD sounded "harsh" had to do with the technical limitations of the converters, and the mastering techniques of the engineers. To make a fair comparison between the mediums, compare CD's to the records of the 20's and 30's, when that technology was newer, and the methods not so tried and true. CD's are still only 20 some years old, and with the latest conversion, and a well mastered recording, you won't find anything harsh about it. I'm guessing that by the time people have been mastering audio for the digital domain for 70 years, they will sound pretty awesome. Besides, there are programs and samples that will let you put vinyl crackle in your tracks if you really miss it that much. Jusy my 3 cents :-o | ||
| dfung60
Advanced Member Username: dfung60 Post Number: 273 Registered: 5-2002 |
Yup, digital transmissions do allow more stuff to be packed into the same piece of spectrum. If an analog signal is to be broadcast at a certain frequency, you needed to have those dead air guard bands above and below because it's hard to build a radio circuit that can recover full signal at one frequency but totally reject the ones around it. Hard to build an analog filter like that that doesn't compromise the (analog) signal. By contrast, it's easier to build a digital filter that has very sharp rejection. Since the signal is digital (and can have error-correction), you can work around interference pretty effectively, within the constraints of the data format you've imposed on the signal. If you're old enough, you may remember back to the original car phones, which were very similar to a police radio system. There were a few frequency slots which the car phones would pick from automatically. I had a friend who had one of these in the early 80's (in his DeLorean, no less). At that time, in the Silicon Valley, there could be a grand total of 20 mobile phone calls happening simultaneously before you got some sort of special busy signal. A little different than today, where you can support thousands of digital mobile signals at any street corner. You can imagine how full the spectrum is now, and how hard it is for old-school electronics to operate properly. There's something to that "analog warmth" in CDs, certainly the case when they were new (didn't the 25th anniversary of the CD just come?). In my earlier post, I blabbed a bit about the CD audio data format (16-bits/signal, 2 channels @ 44KHz sample rate, uncompressed). The sample rate was set at 44KHz because this should allow proper reconstruction of frequencies up to 22KHz from the digital signal. That's higher than most people can hear, so this should be great. But in practice, as always, things aren't always that simple. You can recover a perfect digital stream, but when you convert that to analog audio, you run into those darn imperfections in the translation process again, and those have audible side effects. If you were analyzing the volume level of a pure sine wave in analog, you'd see a smooth, continuous change in voltage, up and down. If you digitize that same signal and analyze that, you'll see the voltage change in discrete steps at the sampling rate, hardly identical. Now, if you have the sampling rate high enough and the steps small enough, you shouldn't notice the difference. But in the early CD players, there were a lot of problems in conversion to analog which passed through a lot of errors induce in the sampling process. This is a quantization or aliasing error. You can see them on the computer screen that you're looking at now, in the form of "jaggies" on diagonal lines and in the fine features of your fonts. The sample frequency of your computer's screen (something like 80-100MHz delivered at 96 dots/inch) isn't sufficient to deliver full fidelity of things like diagonal lines or curves to your eyes. This same problem is happening to your ears when you recover digital audio - there's audio "jaggies" occuring, which your brain will interpret as a cloud of high-frequency fuzz. The best way to fix this problem is to radically increase the sample rate and resolution. Paper is imaged digitally and curves, diagonals, and text don't seem to have a problem. This is because the quantization has been selected to be way out of most people's range of perception (paper is 2500dpi instead of 96dpi). Although that works for imaging paper, it works poorly if you're going to transmit digital data, because now you have much, much more data to move - it will take longer to send and cost more to store. The other solution that's used to address the jaggies is called "anti-aliasing", which is a computational blurring of the signal which should lessen the effects of insufficient sample rate. On your computer screen, instead of calculating which black and white dots to turn on to draw a diagonal line, you draw levels of gray to try to soften the edges and make it look like there was more data or resolution. In fact, there's actually less data accuracy than before. This is largely used on screen fonts to make them less bumpy looking. This is also done on all digital audio converters now - instead of reproducing steps in output levels, the steps are smoothed over with guesses at what they might have been in the original analog signal. Hardly a good solution, but for 99.99% of the population, a solution which is good enough. It's hard to build a good LP record player, and easier to build a pretty good CD player. The resolution of CDs might be lower than optimal, but it made it possible to have convenient and durable CDs, plus you could have the ability to easily hop tracks. I like the utility of digital audio as well as the next guy, and I guess I'm just used to the antialiasing now too. The compressed digital audio forms like mp3 are losing even more data, but perhaps the additional utility is worth it as well (easier to carry an iPod than a CD Walkman with 300 CDs!). David Fung |
