Technical Difficulties, Skype Updates, Rube Goldberg Audio Setup
The hosts open the show by addressing technical failures in their recording equipment, specifically issues with M-Audio devices and outboard sound cards. They speculate that a forced Skype update on Windows 7 may have altered the audio interface settings, necessitating a workaround using a Zoom H2n recorder. The resulting complex hardware chain is described as a Rube Goldberg setup.
skype· m-audio· zoom h2n· windows 7· rube goldberg· audio engineering
00:00 Adam Curry, John C. DeVora. It's Sunday, December 8th, 2013. Time for your Gitmo Nation Media Assassination Episode 572. This is no agenda. Twas the night before Christmas in FEMA Region 6. That's right, from the Travis Heights Hideout in Austin, Texas. In the morning everybody, I'm Adam Curry. And from Northern Silicon Valley in the Northern Silicon Valley bucket, I'm John C. Dvorak. Alright, might as well explain it right off the bat. Something blew up on my end. Yeah, but it didn't actually there was no actual explosion or anything well That's it. We like this no But we like to make it more spectacular than it is but the plan the planned obsolescence of your rig is getting pretty ridiculous Well, I don't know about this, but I mean it could be the M audio device I told you Audio is yeah M. Audio is generally shite. Yeah, well, this is a par this was working great until just today and
01:02 And then these other devices that do the DDA conversion for these good microphones, most of them are, I mean, if you think that's crap, they're all made by the same jerks in China. Yeah, no, of course. I actually run you through a creative, what is it, Sound Blasters, their high-end, like 265 kilobit outboard thing. Yeah. And that's also marginal. It's a way to what I did here. This is actually the zoom h2n which is a nice little made in China product Is that the one with it with the two mics that that that cross each other on the no? That's the four okay? It's got four mics. Oh wow
01:46 And it has amazingly shit for four mics. Four shitty mics. Yeah, that's great. And so what happens, so I plug this in and then you can go through a rigamarole with the setup and make it so when you talk into this it goes out the USB port and into the computer as though it was a mic. Right. Which is what I'm doing. But It failed when we were talking earlier the same exact way the other thing failed at the port level and you couldn't hear me again and I had to check a bunch of different boxes and get this thing, Skype to listen to this device. So something is, I think it's, I don't know that, I'm not convinced.
02:25 Fully that's the M audio equipment that failed. There's something else I'm gonna have to well I did see the other day because I know I have a a single solitary Windows machine Windows 7 it's on a note notebook and all it does is run Skype for you and the other day as I do shut down Skype and start it back up each time and I got one of those. We are upgrading your Skype experience, which always makes me very worried because I have there's no way to escape out of it. You can't say no, no, I'm okay with the current experience. Please don't change my experience. They're always upgrading the experience and I think that's where things go wrong and you must have had an upgraded experience. Well, I don't remember upgrading anything. No, you have no choice in the matter. When you start up Skype, if you look away, you'll miss it.
03:15 And Skype just says one moment. We're upgrading your experience and that and that was mmm Just the other day, so it's very possible. You got an upgrade of your experience possible There's something amiss, but I'll work on it after the it's okay because this is you know it's not it's it's not all that bad Well considering what the rig is yeah, I'd like I like the Rube Goldstein Rube Goldberg yeah that It's very Rube Goldberg. No, no, this is actually Rube Goldstein. You know what's funny is I'm thinking as this other one thing failed, I said, oh my god, you know, so the first thing I tried before I started the Zoom was I hooked up a Logitech cam which has a microphone on it, even though you know what that sounds like. Yeah. And that wouldn't load it.
04:06 Skype didn't say that yeah, I don't think so interesting so I said well, that's weird that doesn't then I Rebooted Skype, and it still wouldn't load us and all that sucks and so then I think it's alright. That's okay. It's alright. It's alright. We're good. We're good, okay? And I went I went on from there Have you been out amongst the people since Thursday? I've been trying to avoid it. I tried to avoid it and made the mistake of getting in touch with people and actually interacting. You know, you can't really say anything yet about Nelson Mandela. It's just not acceptable. And I got into some debates, let's call it that. Oh, why? Because, you know, here's the funny thing.
