What the fuck, man- You guys ever been high/drunk/asleep and purchase random audio gear?

Waddup audio engineers- How are your Grammy Award nominations going? Hope all’s well.

Yesterday some package came in the mail, and I was like wtf. And then it all slooowly started coming back to me…— I often will put random shit in the shopping cart, to see how much my impulsiveness is worth, and then I don’t buy anything. But I checked my email, and it turns out I actually did order a few things a couple days ago from a couple shops. Very pointless shit, because I already have basically everything I want. I do the shopping cart thing for fun, because I used to buy A LOT of shit— but I don’t want to be that guy anymore, especially considering space limitations since tearing down the studio and moving.

Anyway, fuck it- here is the random shit I purchased and the reasoning behind why I thought I might use them (USD amounts converted from Japanese yen):

MXL R144 ($100)– This is one of the most affordable ribbon mics I’ve seen over the years, so I wanted to see how it compared to M 160, which is probably my favorite ribbon mic. I know about “the other one”, but I’ve never been able to catch it. Different polar pattern than M 160, but the thing about ribbon mics is that they are very simple technology, which means that it’s quite hard to fuck them up. I’m imagining I can make this work well.

Passive DI Box ($14)- This is from the house brand of the best online audio shop here in Japan, soundhouse, which means it is random rebranded Chinese whatever, for better or for worse. A lot of my transformer boxes are in storage somewhere. Going to use this backwards for reamping for an experiment I’ve been working on, which is basically trying to make “the longest vocal chain ever”, because I realized over the years that signals going through many components does something special (and yes, the signal gets incrementally fucked, which is somehow something that can be sonically aesthetically pleasing). Since I have a bunch of guitar pedals, I’m just gonna run vocals through as many as I can, in addition to many preamps and compressors.

SM Pro Audio TB-101 ($76)- This is actually kind of rare, but- it’s a starved plate tube preamp that was also once released by sE Electronics in their early days. A lot of people talk shit about starved plate designs, but I feel they are viable for overt mojo purposes. My only experience wth starved plate tube preamps are those by ART and Presonus. So this is filling the gap of starved plate tube preamps that I haven’t used. It’s apparently noisy, so I’ll probably replace filter caps and whatever else, after I study the circuit. If I can get good results, I’ll copy and modify the circuit to fit into an even smaller enclosure.

dbx 563X ($30)- This is a noise reduction unit meant for cassette tape or vinyl to reduce hiss, with variable frequency selection. I wanted to test if this circuit is dynamic or linear, and further, if it works well, it will be used for “the longest vocal chain ever”, due to using some low headroom pedals and a couple channels of a 70/80’s PA preamp.

I now have a lot of very pointless testing to do, but I suppose learning is not pointless. But fuck, I’m just glad I wasn’t browsing anything expensive. Net shopping whilst sleeping can’t be a good habit.