One of the problems of mankind

By Michalis. If an old lady comes along and tells that in order to restore your lost hair you can do this, and asuming she tells the truth, almost no one will beleive her.

Some of euroelectron's mistakes

There are many but here is one. It was thought in the early days of euroelectron that mic should be next to mouth. Far from truth, 12in or more as seen on classic Columbia 30th street church studios photographed sessions gives an amazing vocal sound. Archtect and sound engineer Hatznicolaou adviced to mic the nose, not the mouth. Rescent Pleiades experiments as written on euroelectron are done with mic at 16in, above head at 45 degrees from head, micing the head, not just mouth or nose. Head vibrates too and emmits sound. So many values of inductance for microphone filter to compensate for the bass boost proximity effect can be erroneous. But they are still very much perhaps needed but the inductance must be higher since the bass boost starts at a lower frequency when a high mic to source distance is used. See for example the rescent post on SM58 using a 175mH to 175mh signal transformer at the output of the microphone. See also other posts made in the more rescent years for better values of inductance including the Pleiades gentle slope high pass filter made with 130 ohms in series with only 20mH and the total in parallel in microphone's output. Here the turnover point is high in frequency to create the sparkle that is so much liked in produced vocals but the series resistor reduces the slope so that the vocal sounds correct with correct body. The point to remeber is that it is not only proximity effect that needs to be compensated. There must be flat frequency response not only from mic to loudspeaker but from the whole chain, from vocal chords of singer to listener's brain. And if we take it further from producer's brain to listener's brain. See references, bibliography on past euroelectron posts.

Thank you Pano for showing me the way many years ago on JFETS, very simple schematic, with K163

The classic and of course ingenious anode or drain or collector follwer single eneded in class A (electrons flowing all the time) amplifier, sounds amazing and so low noise especially perhaps at very low currents for low noise small signal amplifiers. And such schematics of course sound amazing too for power amplifiers. Thank you Lefteris too for bringing to my attention the classic Neumann U47 microphone schematic, same configuration too.

Pleiades 2 K117 RIAA 9 Volt powered record player MM cartridge preamplifier operating in class A is ready in box

It sounds amazing and huge and lowest noise, see previous post. The size of the aluminium box is a bit more that a 7" single on one dimention and a bit less on the other. The lid may be made from transparent orange plexiglass. No soldering has been used on this. How? Everything was wirewraped, and small components were inserted in the Nickel brand from Taiwan breadboard. Even on the Neutril beautiful XLR female RCA D type chassis connectors a tiny hole and been created with a circular drill vice for hand making acuurate holes. Then the thing solid core teleco wire was wired around the signal terminal a few turns. Surprisingly perhaps then is absolutely on noise problem on the preamp. Everything sounds so big and at the same time low low even using the low output tiny Stanton EEE AR stylus. For hygenic, possible signal contamination problems, it was decided to stick to perhaps Nasa's point to point mechanical joints but without then using solder.

When given an extremely low volume, so low i could barely hear the backing track, even i could sing beautifuly in tune

Why do most of us including many singers sing out of tune and below ie flat rather than sharp?

One important explanation seems to be on the begining of chapter :The Influence of Mind, on the fabulous book Sound and Hearing - Stevens, Warshofsky created after so my experiment at the Harvard university's Psycho-Acoustics lab. At high sound intensity the brain hears the same frequency flater ie with lower pitch. So the singer thinks she, he is singing correctly in tune, but in fact everything is below in frequency by a little but very annoying amount. And this may make a potentialy hit song not a hit song at all. What do the Whitney Houston level singers do? Do they sing on purpose higher so that the mistake sounds correct? Do they get a very low volume output to their headphones so that their brain hears the correct pitch on the backing track? Do they have immunity to the pitch change by highter intensity? Do they get their voice loud enough on their headphones so that it sounds flat too as well as the backing track, and the producer fiddles with the mix until intonation is correct? Phil Ramonne on his book Making Records states clearly that whenever a problem of intonation by the singer is encountered the first thing to take care is the headphone mix... Also Sir George Martin states in his All you Need is Ears (if memory is correct) book that good singers when they say sing just a note on their own the result sounds in tune with itself, meaning (if memory is correct on reading the book) that the overtones of their voice sound in tune with the fundamantal to the listener's brain...

On making the Pleiades 175mH:175mH (not 200mH or 240mH as fewer turns of wire were used) microphone filter for SM58

As can be seen from the title it is a transformer ie there are 2 coils hugging each other, rather than just one coil as in ordinary Pleiades filters. So it not only low cuts but isolates too as each wire is not electricaly touching each other. They communicate through the music sent as an electromagnetic wave from one coil to the other. It may be called the Pleiades Liliya microphone filter if Liliya agrees. It took yesterday and today to make it. 0.16mm diameter wire was used. 2 small Leukosilk spools were wound with a few meters of such wire each. Then hand was holding the 2 ends of both wires and wound both of them on a wooden stick along its lenghth. The thin wooden stick has wood removed from its ends with a tiny file so that it can accomodate the wire. Then both wires were wound with the help of the wooden stick through the small Magnetec 073 nanocrystaline toroid. This way of simultaniously windiing 2 wires seems to be called bifilar. It looks as if only one wire is wound. Each wire at any point in space is at the same electric potential (voltage) to its pair. So there is no or minimal capacitance between them. Using a Siemens if memory is correct similar size ferite core wound bifilar way, the frequency response was flat up to say 450KHz! It was a nightmere to keep it extremely tidy without each coil jumping over the other but it still looks very nice. About 69 turns were wound for each wire to fill the toroid space and give an inductance of about 175mH for each coil which should also be great for omnidirectional microphones as a nice low cut of bass prominance of environment and usuful signal. The inductor was placed inside Neutrik modules to look really profesional and beautiful and today afternoon was ready. It was tested then with male singing voice indors, outdoors (noisy balcony) and staicase. Singing the phrase I like you just the way you are - Billy Joel. Mic distance was 16in or 19 in. Without the filter, ie mic on its own, the sound was bass heavy, full of boominess even at the balcony. With the usual German inline transformer of 230mH:290mH(?) (470mH at low frequency), the vocal sound much clearer, with very nice midrange, high frequency detail, just a bit of mudiness. With the just made Pleiades 175mH:175mH signal transformer bass mudiness from proximity effect etc was completly removed, midrange was very nice and big but a bit standing out too much, high frequency detail amazing, like a ribbon mic perhaps. The sound as heared sounded close to the Billy Joel quality as recorded by Phil Ramone on apparently a Beyer M160 double ribbon microphone. Anyway I am not Billy Joel. Signal path: indoors, or noisy outdoors, or staircase, male singer singing Just the way you are - Billy Joel - Shure SM58 Mexico at 45 degrees from above towards nose at 12in to 19in distance - Pleiades inline 175mH:175mH high pass filter transformer - Sony TC-D5M on Left channel - monitoring through its tiny spaker or Sennheiser HD-580 or Pleiades 2N3053 single transistor amplifier in class A feeding Celestion Ditton 150 in a small reverberent room The best recording was the one done on noisy (machinary and birds) outdoors. Actually a Pleiades (130 Ohms, 20mH) gentle slope high pass for adding crystal clear sparckle may not be necessary as the SM58 capsule has an inherent high frequency boost. Good luck if you decide to make one.