Faceoff

Faceoff
Originally uploaded by Taylor Sherman

Weekend

Sunday, February 24 2008

MB's Birthday!

We went to the Hi-Life for brunch this morning, then over to the Woodland Park Zoo for a couple hours. That was cool, we mostly saw the tropical rain forest exhibits, the nocturnal house, and the lions / tigers / bears. Then a trip to the store, and , and later watching the Oscars. I was bummed that TWBB didn't win best picture. As good as No Country was, I thought the other was better.

Yesterday – a good small-team rehearsal, working on Igor's new piece the whole time. I came home to work on installing the acoustic panels while MB worked with the house team further. Then we walked around Green Lake – we were going to get ice cream at the marble slab, but they were closed, so we got a peanut butter / banana smoothie from WW that was really yummy. It was nice and sunny, if cold. Then, a trip to HD to get some hardware – the drywall screws I had weren't right for mounting things to drywall, they are actually for mounting the drywall itself. So I got some funky little plastic jobbies that turned out to be complete pieces of crap. Whether they broke before or after they stripped out a giant hole in the drywall was a toss-up. Anyway, decided to just use the too-long screws, which worked great. Thankfully I didn't hit anything behind the wall with them. Then the panels just pushed right onto the impaling clips, no sweat. Mounting the next series of panels – which will arrive in March – will be harder, as some are going on the ceiling.

After that, I picked up MB again and we went to Yanni's to see Lost Pedro – 1 play. We had a yummy dinner along w/ Meleah and Diana while Chris and Howard played. We also ended up splitting an entire bottle of wine between the two of us, as it turned out that nobody else wanted wine. So we were both pretty zonked from that and all the food, and got to bed around 11.

Friday night we watched Stop Making Sense which is just amazing. David Byrne is awesome. We both wondered how much coke some of the players had done before the show, but that's just the way things were/are/whatever I guess. They certainly put on quite a show.

Tomorrow, back to work.

deet deet deet

Monday, February 18 2008
22:22

Recapping. . .Thursday: picked up MB at 6:30. Traffic wasn't too bad until we got to within a few blocks of Benaroya. MB claims she never really guessed where we were headed, even when she saw the building w/ its "Symphony" banners and such. Anyway, we parked in a lot next door for $6, quite a bargain for downtown! And walked over to the place. It was very crowded – nearly sold out, I think. It's a very lovely hall. The first piece was orchestral highlights from a Wagner opera, apparently a comedy. That was OK. The next was a horn concerto, written specifically for the Symphony's principal French, uh, hornist. It did absolutely nothing for me. It was really a musical non-event from my seat. Then, the intermission. MB was having a good time, though she also didn't go for the music so far. After the break was Dvorak's 9th – much better. I don't know the piece much at all, so for the most part it was new. All pretty enjoyable, then there was one moment near the very end that had me grinning from ear to ear, and nearly shouting. It was just two melodies played on top of one another, but super wonderful. On the way home, we thought we'd give 13 Coins a try, but they had a 45-60 minute wait, so we skipped that and stopped at the Hi-Life, fancy clothes and all. This was the first time I'd worn one of my new suits (the black quasi-tux one) since the cruise last February. It's all too big for me now! Wow. Anyway, we had a salad and some pizza and some wine which was all very tasty.

Friday night, a get-together at Howard and Diana's for D's birthday. That was good. We got there pretty late, as I had to work late. So we mostly ate the food we brought, which was OK since I was hungry. There was still 1.5 bottles of wine and an entire chocolate cream pie left over, plus we were given a few bottles of beer and a tub of hummous to take with as we left.

Saturday, calisthenics were a free-for-all sort of thing, which was really good actually. Then the sitting, a trip to Java Bean, and a 30 minute meeting to discuss the facility search. Progress and dead ends on a few different fronts. Rehearsal was good, we continued learning a great circulation that is part of something Bob has written. The bass line for it is very Mick Karn-esque, I think.

After that, I listened to some music at home while MB and the house team had a circle w/ Curt. We got some pho for lunch. We saw Juno which was excellent – funny, touching, super well-written. Then, over to Curt's for a get-together in honor of Dev, who was in town w/ his managee. That was a pretty lo-key affair, beginning at 10:30, and Dev showed up at around 12! CF was also there, as well as Bill and Frankie. I'd never really met Frankie before, she's great. Christina brought some soup – something Spanish that starts with a Z? – and it was really one of the best bowls of soup I've ever had in my life. Absolutely delicious. We also brought the aforementioned pie, I had one slice. Anyway that was a nice relaxed evening, we got home around 1 I think.

Sunday: slept in, MB went to yoga, during that I walked to the PO to get the SC mail, and grabbed some coffee and a scone on the way back. The weather was beautiful, so I suggested we go to the park – Discovery park. We thought about walking there, but as it's such a large park and involves lots of walking inside, I drove. That was very nice, still sunny though fairly windy and nippy. We walked around the entire park plus a little extra here and there, so probably about three miles worth. After that, we went to Café Flora. We got there at exactly 5 PM, which was good because that's when they open! There were about 6 other people waiting outside the door, too. We stuffed ourselves with yummy vegetarian food and dessert and wine, it was very good. Then, home to digest and convalesce after the various exercises of the day.

Today, back to work. People leaving or getting ready to leave for GDC. I got to test a new game idea, it was fun and very silly, which is good.

I had a package waiting for me at home – some of the acoustical wall panels I ordered. They are good, the color turned out just right to match the walls. These are just the three pseudo-suede ones that will go on the bar side wall. There are still 8 more panels that will go other places (and are twice as thick) to arrive, I don't know when. This place isn't so hot about doing things like communicating. So I spent some time listening tonight, noticing the differences with them in place (though just leaning up against the wall) and not. Some times it's more noticeable than others, though fairly subtle for the most part.

music: Opeth - Ghost Reveries; Arvo Part - Tabula Rasa

Hello Again Again

Tuesday, February 12 2008
22:49

Tuning The Air is in a bit of a limbo – we have nowhere to do our next season, which is somewhat tentatively penciled in for March through June. CHAC had some downsides we don't want to put up with any more, and it was darned expensive too. We could "fall back" to Trinity but nobody really wants to do that. We have seen some potential new spaces – some in the "new home" category, some in the "just for the show" category – but nothing is a winner yet.

The trip to Mexico is getting near enough that some advance planning is going on. Woo! Warm weather will be a nice change. I'm very happy to have a traveling companion for this trip!

I ordered some acoustic room treatments about a week ago. The company is a bit flaky, well their online system is. So, I had to put some effort into getting important details from them: how much will shipping cost? when will they ship? Finally got a number for the former, and a "two or three weeks" for the latter. OK.

I bought a subwoofer – a Velodyne DD-12 – last week. It comes with a microphone, and cabling to hook it up to your system and your TV, such that it will do frequency sweeps from 15Hz to 200Hz and display the result on your TV. So that is incredibly handy. For setting it up, for sure – something I documented w/ pictures on Flickr so I won't go into too much here. And, when I get some bass traps, it'll provide objective feedback on what effect they may have.

Speaking of comparisons – I got the hybrid SACD of the remastered PG album "So" the other day. So, I put the CD in the Rotel and the SACD in the Oppo, cued up the same tracks, and A/B'd them. There was a distinct, not terribly subtle when listening intently, difference. So, I swapped the discs. This meant 16-bit CD data from both players. The difference remained, and perhaps slightly pronounced (I should have gone back to the first arrangement after that). The Rotel has more detail, a deeper soundstage, and more "contrast". With the SPL meter I couldn't detect any volume differences, but I should do that using a -20dBfs test tone just to be sure. A slight volume increase can fool you into thinking you're hearing something else "better".

Speaking of test tones, one of the test CDs I got recently has a "MATT" – Music Articulation Test Tone – track. It is really pretty awesome. It has tone bursts that are 1/16th of a second long, followed by 1/16th of a second of silence. Each burst is 2Hz above the previous, and they go from 28Hz up to 780Hz and back down again. It was pretty much exactly as described in the booklet: it sounds like "TUT-TUT-TUT-TUT" most of the time, but anywhere where you have resonances or strong reflections it turns into "BLUDDABLUDDABLUDDA". So as the frequency goes up it will pass through these chaotic sections once in a while. If you listen on headphones, it's all the TUT-TUT stuff because there are no reflections. I didn't write down the track times where they happened, so I don't know the exact frequencies at this point. But there is one up near the 780Hz turn-around. Anyway, the test will be seeing if I can make them go away, or lessen them at least, with the panels that should be arriving in a week or two.

So, I've been meaning to do a "Taylor's top 10 albums of 2007" list here – not ones that were released in 2007, necessarily, but the ones that were on "heavy rotation" for me last year. I'm not sure yet if it means "more than the previous year" – some things I just listen to a lot, and have for years. Anyway, I'm out of time tonight so that'll have to wait.

Today's listening included: King Crimson - The Great Deceiver disc 3; Carla Bley and the Lost Chords find Paolo Fresu; and a Russian Circles album that was really boring.

Graphy

room_response_012808
Originally uploaded by Taylor Sherman