Another shop comfort: Sound

[Wes Stewart]

I once had a conversation with another ham operator who was located in Tasmania. He was an elderly fellow who said that his career had been in the motion picture business and that he had recreated a complete historic movie theater at his home. He claimed to own a vintage Edison projector S/N 2 or something like that.

For his "talkie" equipment he had a pair of huge horns that he said would fill a theater with a few of watts of drive. To obtain one of these he had driven (after sailing to the mainland) all the way to Perth to bring it back.

[Wes Stewart]

Speaking of Glenn Miller, have you heard the CD titled, "The Lost Recordings"?

These were recordings of "The American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force" made to be broadcast into Germany. Miller is even heard to announce some tunes in broken German.

The equipment was the best available at the time (they were using multiple mics) and the studio was Abbey Road (of Beatles fame).

There are some vocals by Johnny Desmond and Ray McKinley (both Sergeants at the time) and a very rare one by Dinah Shore. Great stuff.

Miller was lost shortly after these were done.

[Robatoy]

No I haven't, but I will. Thanks.

[John Girouard]

I've gotta seriously wonder about this argument. I mean, how much time (percentage-wise) are you guys actually working with tools when you are in your shop? For me, that amount is relatively small (10% ?), with the rest being taken up by cleaning, assembly, planning, organizing, laying out, marking, etc.

I've got an old boom box that I sometimes plug my iPod Shuffle into right now, with plans to move an old unused laptop (with a dead display) out there for MP3/AAC/whatever access (side note... check out

But right now, I usually leave it on the one FM station I can pick up that isn't absolute crap. When I'm running the ROS or another noise making tool that I feel comfortable semi-zoning out with, I use those ear-muff type things with the built-in radio (GREAT for mowing the lawn, BTW). When I'm using any tool that could be slightly dangerous, the ear-muffs still go on, but I leave the radio in them turned off.

-John in NH