Blog of Rick Pepper

Bill Fitzmaurice is the maestro when it comes to DIY horn-loaded speaker systems. He’s got designs large and small, wedge, sub and tall. I’m seriously considering one of his designs for our new church location (I’m entertaining a single copy of the dual 12 version.)

My last DIY project served us well, but I’m looking for something with a little more projection and defined dispersion. The high SPL of all his designs are an added bonus. I’ll probably recycle my existing sub, after that I think a couple of these loaded with dual 12’s would do nicely.



Our previous PA “tops” (times 4). Those are dual Vifa 8’s (same as used in one of the older Mackie self-powered studio monitors), Audax Pro (PR series) 6 inch mid (used by EAW for eons), and Audax PR series tweet.



The sub, those are the venerable Swan 305 woofer from Madisound, now “out of print.”



Bear in mind, this is all in a 40 X 40 room with 10 foot ceilings.

Lightroom made a believer out of me. There are a couple factors in its favor that don’t entirely have to do with its feature set, one is the $99 educational buy I qualify for as a homeschooler, the other is it’s performance on less-than-bleeding-edge hardware. For right now my MDD 1.25 dually has to do the job, and Lightroom officially runs on it and can get the job done. Beyond that the loupe is the only thing from Aperture that I’m jealous of, but at least the RGB values are displayed and dynamically follow the cursor in Lightroom. The main selling point beyond that is that it seems to be a more transparent and less demanding front-end to Photoshop, it’s just easier to relegate it to being a “pro” RAW converter to replace the Camera RAW plug-in, and skip all the library features. “Fill light” rules!

I haven’t gotten to this one yet but my pastor is reading it and is very impressed with the book, not just for teens! Do Hard Things. Their father is the author of another excellent book, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”.

Many of the fathers in our church finished reading the book “Raising a Modern Day Knight” (and related materials - including the videos) recently.

I highly recommend this course (or just the book) to any father, whether young or old, there’s something in here for you.

Episode 19 of the FaithTools podcast is up and ready for download.
Mike, Van, Daniel, Brad and Colin talk about building credibility, decibel levels, volunteer appreciation ideas and more.

Many of the fathers in our church started on the book “Raising a Modern Day Knight” (and related materials) recently.

A nugget found in chapter 2 gives us a pattern right from God the Father, showing how He talked to and about his Son. Found in Matthew 3:17, it shows us that God affirmed His love for His Son, and His approval (we may say “pride”) of His Son; “And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” The book encourages a father to observe skills in their son and tell him “you are good at _____.” I found myself heartily nodding my head to this insight, especially the affirmation aspects of it. So far good stuff!

I have young children, which means I need to pre-screen films before taking the kids to them. This time my wife and I were both able to go, together, which is rare. My first response is that Pixar has been successfully assimilated by Disney. They have passed the apex of their existence. It was only a matter of time, nobody is that good. There were the pop culture appeals to parents with Star Wars, Star Trek and 2001 Space Odyssey inferences, and for the geeks in the crowd (me) there was the biggest laugh getter - the Macintosh Quadra (AV series is my suspicion) startup chime when Wall•E re-charged, twice. I also have to assume that Wall-E’s resemblance to “Johnny-Five” (Number Five) in “Short Circuit” wasn’t a fluke. There are societal messages, some of which are well stated - “I didn’t know we had a pool!” Hello?! Disconnect your retina’s from the TV. I give them high marks for transporting you far away from the daily grind, it took me a few minutes to plant myself firmly back into reality after leaving the theater. It’s certainly safe for kids of all ages, question is if their attention will be held. We’ll probably rent it to answer that question, or maybe catch it on the B side.

I haven’t spent a ton of time with these applications, but after some productive use of them thought I’d offer these observations; both seem way too bloated and clumsy, really what I think would get the job done is just a more robust RAW import tool for Photoshop, designed to be just that - the front door to Photoshop. Being able to browse a group of photos that may have something in common i.e. hard-to-get white balance shot in fluorescent lighting or some other odd environment, where you want to be able to copy the settings from one and rapidly apply to all the others en masse is nice, but I don’t need [yet] another black hole to store my photos or even a database of previews of my photos in, I just need a robust RAW access point for Photoshop. But I think Lightroom wins here as far as easily dropping in images from a shoot, processing them and then just deleting them (source files included if you wish.) That’s close to a transparent front end for Photoshop.
As far as GUIs and such, Lightroom feels more like Elements than Photoshop - the interface kind of has that dumbed-down feel, too much navigation garb that gets in the way. But I’ll give it this; it will install and run on my [ancient] Mirrored-drive door G4, and with patience gets the job done whereas Aperture has to be hacked to even install and then performance is decidedly not.
Here is an image processed first with just Camera RAW in Photoshop CS, and lots of fiddling with layers and screening and such to lighten up the grass and trees in the foreground, 10 minutes worth at least (well, okay, 5 minutes.) Now compare that to about 1 minute in Lightroom and only a noise filter pass (Noise Ninja) in Photoshop.

I’ve never been so excited about Windows. The de-facto standard free speaker building (mainly woofer/subwoofer cabinet calculator) application, WinISD is only available for Windows. There is a free online version, but now with an Intel based Mac you can run WinISD on a MacTel for free using Darwine. This screen shot is a bit “Beauty and the Beast” as far as GUI’s, but it works!

Episode 18 of the FaithTools podcast is up and ready for download.
Brad, Van, Colin, talk about Google Apps, Twitter in the Church and our favorite podcasts. And Brad gives a peak at some upcoming ProPresenter features.

Mike Sessler mentioned this podcast in a recent post of his, here’s the iTunes podcast URL for this episode from Mars Hill Church entitled “Spirituality of the Cellphone”, it’s a must. Below are my initial comments on Mike’s blog’

“Right on Mike. In a lot of ways I find technology further defining and making ever-so-blatant the distance (or on the better days the nearness) there is to other people. We have so many more options for communicating, and yet we don’t make use of them. It can make more plain to us those we are near to, and those we actually aren’t, even though we wouldn’t admit that. It makes the distance grow greater in a sense. I have asked myself this a time or two; does my gospel and my lifestyle work when “unplugged.” With digital photography now you could [almost] take 100 photos in your sleep, but when participating in family or church events I feel challenged to balance the “one for posterity” and the here-and-now when it’s much easier to just be the face behind the lens. Modern day scribes is what we could be called, recording sermons and capturing photos and video, it can give God material to work with in the future to show us where He’s taken us and where we’ve come from. Some of us maybe need to take it more seriously - the fact that we’re capturing the “yesterday’s” of tomorrow, some of us maybe need to not take it so seriously.”

While on walk-about I spotted this little guy.

Episode 17 of the FaithTools podcast is up and ready for download.
Mike, Van, Colin, Josh and Rick talk about Wireless White Spaces, Set Design and more Twitter.

Now that my friends, is a thing of beauty.

Paul Clark is the topic for this post. Thankfully most of his material is still available digitally from his site. Drawn To The Light stands out the most, this was the first album (yes vinyl) of this genre I bought. Eye of the Storm is cool, and the Storm Suite was almost other-worldly at the time. “More Heat Than Light” off of Awakening From The Western Dream has a very distinct - and tasteful 80’s sound to it, is it coincidental the album features guys from Mr Mister? And this track in particular features a tasty bass guitar sound, very classy.