Things to do at Church

Here is a picture of my new game console at church...

http://www.mackie.com/products/sr56-8/index.html

(actually we have the sr40-8), but it looks about the same. We also have an effects module we run on an aux send and comes back on an Aux return so you can send some poor vocalist their own voide (made into a chipmunk) back on their monitor where no one else can here it... lots of fun things to do. We also have a bunch of mackie 450 speakers each of which is capable of nearly 120db without distortion and two large subs. Granted the system pales in comparison to what we saw at the Steven Curtis Chapman consert last night, but it's still fun and I'm actually starting to understand what is going on with all the sound stuff. Oh and we have something must churches never consider... an audio compressor. This is a really good thing, so when your vocalists decide to overrun the mix it just compresses them back into reality :). The compressor is setup for 8 channels so well run it on the sub group mixes with the insert send and return hoookups on the board. See the sr56-8 manual if you don't know what an insert send and return are. I finally got it through my head, took me a few months to actually get it straight which knob to turn in a reasonable amount of time to have the desired affect. (i.e. vocalist (unnamed) says hey more keys in my monitor... I search for the appropriate knob and they say "that's good"... I'm thinking wow that's some imaginary amplifer 'cause I still haven't found the knob yet...)

Anyway when you guys are here for t-day we'll have to stay later and play with the board a little.

p.s. Keith maybe you should try "working" at work, helps the time pass better. I have started to get board with test, too much production stuff (it's interesting but not relavent to any other company in the world) and too little new learning, so I accepted an offer and moved to PE... same pay, but now I get to interact much more with product issues and learn more about semiconductor crap and less pressure to resolve production issues. My official title (which will probably change in a few months) is "Semicondutor Product Engineer" sounds fun and I get a slightly bigger cube. Oh another difference from test... money, I have a wintel pc basic p4 2.8ghz, but they're gonna get me a linux box (since Cadence has ported all the design tools to linux ....) and they just mentioned casully oh they usually put a decent amount of memory in them (like 4GB). I guess that is and isn't impressive since I've logged into some of the solaris rnd severs and they have around 30GB of memory.