Speakers

In the WCBN studio there were a pair of monitor speakers from Tannoy. Late one night, in keeping with the rather eclectic decor of a student-run radio station, I modified the logo on the speakers by blacking out the initial “T”… Later on, someone added an exclamation point to the end. I don’t know if it ever became an imperative for late night shows, but I liked it…

I’m not just randomly writing here, there’s a trigger for this particular reminiscence… I’ll get to it eventually.

I was an early technology adopter (it’s pronounced “nerd”) when I was broadcasting too. I have an old Powerbook 180 that I’d load up with audio clips and SoundTracker MOD files and patch it into the mixing board. Somewhere I’ve got a bunch of floppies with MOD’s on them…

A lot of people may never have heard of MOD files. Y’see, back in the old days of the internet, before this newfangled and fancy mp3 format became widespread, people used to assemble their own music using multiple tracks of sampled or synthesized sounds. The files were intended to be small and portable, and a lot of people would share them with friends and post them on newsgroups. There was a whole pre-Napster underground of shared music. A lot of them were incredibly innovative too.

Unfortunately, MOD files seem to have fallen by the wayside. The most recent Macintosh MOD utility that I’ve been able to find was last updated in 1996…

Actually, after a bit of poking around, I’ve found that the most recent version of PlayerPro is out and about and less than six months old… I’m going to have to download it and see if I can track down my old MOD library…

The thing that got me thinking about MODs is something that Apple came out with recently called “Soundtrack.” Some folks are using it to create their own techno mp3 files from sound samples and loops. I’ve got a stack of old vinyl records from various sources and I think it’d be great to incorporate some of them into something new… Heck, I wouldn’t mind just transferring them into a digital format so that I could play some of them. I’ve even got a USB audio input gadget to do it with. All I need is a good turntable.

And a replacement power supply.

That’s what got this whole thing started. I brought the powerwave in to work to see if it would solve a problem that a client was having with a microphone & camera setup, and I discovered that I’d misplaced the power supply. It’ll run fine off of USB for recording and playback, but it won’t act as an amplifier without the power supply. And that’s a pity, because it’s got a nice little breakout-box to hook up monitor speakers, just like those “ANNOY!” ones in the studio at WCBN.