New mesa subway amps and cabs!

[agedhorse]

USB-A will be a very long lasting standard with a deeply installed user base.

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

Analog FM or the old analog TV standard wet truly analog. Digital OTA or Digital Radio transmit an encoded, compressed digital signal over frequency modulation. But since they’re encoded, that can use a smaller amount of bandwidth which is why you can get the .2 .3, etc channels on a digital broadcast.

Yep. Old analog TV used a form of AM (Amplitude Modulation) for video and they couldn't even get a full double sideband signal in the 6MHz allocation so they used what was called Vestigial Sideband. It was a lopsided signal around a video carrier. The current TV signal is 8VSB (Eight vestigial sidebands). In most cases you can squeeze maybe four or so different TV channels into the same 6MHz bandwidth as could barely carry one in the analog daze. Cable uses a different system from OTA. After the next TV conversion, currently in progress, OTA will be using still a different encoding/modulation scheme. Best Buy gotta be loving the FCC.

When TV stations converted from B&W to color, they weren't given any additional bandwidth because color was required to be backwards compatible with B&W. Now we have HD and 4K and who knows what's coming along in the future. Gosh, is the human eye even capable of resolving 4K? If not, it's a terrible waste of bandwidth. I'm still waiting for Smellavision, but only for certain shows. I think someone is trying to do that on an iThing or GooglePlay-App-thingie.

The TV audio was straight up FM just like on your FM radio. On the older FM radios that had manual tuners you could scoot down to the bottom end of the FM band and listen to the audio of a Channel 6 TV station if you had one in the area. This was great for in the car reception of that TV channel. The only difference was that the TV audio was 25KHz and FM radio was 75. And since it was FM, lower modulation indexes translated into lower volume. You had to turn up your car radio significantly higher than when listening to an FM radio station.

Digital radio (HD in the US) adds 100s of carriers to the upper and lower edges of the regular FM signal. According to the folks who invented (bribed the FCC to allow their) HD, "HD" does not stand for anything. We thought it meant High Definition Radio, but the company was just riding the wave of HD everything else at the time. The problem is that the radio station plays the same programming on both the FM part and the primary HD signal. This way when you loose the HD the radio blends back to the FM. This has to be seemless or it can get very intrusive. For it to be seamless the HD has to sound like the FM. So how is THAT high definition?

When the Ch 6 stations started going to digital and if they moved to another, usually UHF channel, some people started broadcasting (Illegally) FM-only where the ch 6 audio carrier used to be. They became known as FrankenFM stations.

When almost all of the TV stations in the US got converted to digital we lost the use of the 700 MHz band for things like wireless mics, wireless guitar and IEMs. And now that the goobeemint is forcing many of the TV stations to change frequency again, we are loosing the 600 MHz band. Ya'all wanna be careful when buying any used wireless gear that it isn't above 608 MHz (US). Or else you may find that "the man is at the window, the man is at the window."

Enough already. I want to hear more about Mesa's new babies.

 

[Jim C]

Slight derail but I bet others amy also want to know:
Do they still use vacumm tubes in radio and TV transmitters?

 

[agedhorse]

Slight derail but I bet others amy also want to know:
Do they still use vacumm tubes in radio and TV transmitters?

I believe they still do in some., "OGB" will be more current on this.

 

[DJ Bebop]

This is where reading the manual would be helpful...

 

[agedhorse]

Note that I intended the part about reading the manual in an inoffensive way. This is a new and fairly unique feature so I understand the potential for confusion and misunderstanding.

 

[kobass]

"When in doubt, RTFM."

 

[mmbass21]

Note that I intended the part about reading the manual in an inoffensive way. This is a new and fairly unique feature so I understand the potential for confusion and misunderstanding.

I like the USB option, as an android user a 1A or 2A output would've been ideal but it's just an added feature and the furthest thing from a deal breaker.

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

Slight derail but I bet others amy also want to know:
Do they still use vacumm tubes in radio and TV transmitters?

Well they still do but almost everything new now can be solid state.
For example... I share a tower with a TV station getting Repacked (moved to new channel).
Their new transmitter will be all SS. Their transmitted signal (with antenna gain) will be about 650 KW.
There is also an FM (Grandfathered 110KW) station on that tower that just put in 40KW of SS transmitter.
It's all packed into two 6 foot equipment racks. (Radio drool)

Unlike for us bass players (loosely applied in my case) the broadcast tube rigs are less expensive than SS, they don't sound any different and per the FCC, tube and SS power is all the same.

 

[agedhorse]

I like the USB option, as an android user a 1A or 2A output would've been ideal but it's just an added feature and the furthest thing from a deal breaker.

Not practical in this case.

 

[12bass]

What? No RS-232 port? Not designed with a slide rule? What is this world coming to???

 

[agedhorse]

What? No RS-232 port? Not designed with a slide rule? What is this world coming to???

Correct, even I recognize that RS-232 is in its final hours

Can't say quite the same thing about the slide rule however... I was having coffee with a group of engineers this morning and we were in fact discussing the slide rules we used at the beginning of our careers. Some of us still have ours!

 

[Jeff Scott]

...slide rules ..... Some of us still have ours!

Nothing like nostalgia!

 

[agedhorse]

Nothing like nostalgia!

Yeah, in this case the good 'ol days weren't quite as good as some people remember. I was slow as hell and not very accurate (depending on the definition of accurate)...

 

[12bass]

My NexStar GPS 8 is controlled with a smartphone via an RS-232 to Bluetooth module. Actually glad that the standard is still in use as it helps to retain compatibility over decades, plus it works perfectly.

 

[agedhorse]

My NexStar GPS 8 is controlled with a smartphone via an RS-232 to Bluetooth module. Actually glad that the standard is still in use as it helps to retain compatibility over decades, plus it works perfectly.

In the factory automation and lab instrument field, RS-232 is still generally supported, as is HPIB.

 

[nostatic]

Yeah, in this case the good 'ol days weren't quite as good as some people remember. I was slow as hell and not very accurate (depending on the definition of accurate)...

True, but one thing I saw teaching chemistry through the mid 90s to '00, students relied on the calculator and had no idea about approximation and orders of magnitude. Using a slide rule, you have to understand that first. I lost track of the times a student would come to office hours with wrong answers, I'd ask them, "does that seem like a reasonable number?" and they would stare at me.

Then I smashed their calculator with a hammer. Or at least wanted to

Well, unless it was an HP w/RPN...I still have my 15C somewhere...

 

[agedhorse]

Yes, you have to understand the problem and what a reasonable range of solutions to expect.

 

[Jeff Scott]

Well, unless it was an HP w/RPN...I still have my 15C somewhere...

I know where mine's stashed away.

 

[beans-on-toast]

I don’t know how many times I encounter kids operating a cash that can’t make change unless the register tells them what to do. They can’t do basic math in their heads.

Many have no penmanship skills. No cursive writing.