Using the Dreamplug's Crypto Chip

After talking with colleagues regarding this box (there are now several around) I learned that the encryption is pretty slow. But this is without the hardware encryption enabled. So let's see if it can be enabled.

For more information visit:
http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2030.0

Reference

Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G6950 @ 2.80GHz

$ openssl speed -evp aes128
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 12582002 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 4295548 aes-128-cbc's in 2.99s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 256 size blocks: 1121451 aes-128-cbc's in 3.01s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 284735 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 35731 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
OpenSSL 0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 01 Jul 2008
built on: Tue Dec  7 12:16:36 EST 2010
options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DKRB5_MIT -I/usr/kerberos/include -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -Wall -O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m32 -march=i686 -mtune=generic -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -Wa,--noexecstack -DOPENSSL_USE_NEW_FUNCTIONS -fno-strict-aliasing -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_PART_WORDS -DOPENSSL_IA32_SSE2 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DSHA1_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DRMD160_ASM -DAES_ASM
available timing options: TIMES TIMEB HZ=100 [sysconf value]
timing function used: times
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-128-cbc      67104.01k    91944.84k    95379.22k    97189.55k    97569.45k

On the DreamPlug without Hardware AES

$ openssl speed -evp aes128
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 1520029 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 451973 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 256 size blocks: 118487 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 29964 aes-128-cbc's in 2.99s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 3758 aes-128-cbc's in 3.00s
OpenSSL 0.9.8o 01 Jun 2010
built on: Thu Feb 10 21:19:23 UTC 2011
options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(ptr,int) des(idx,risc1,4,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -O2 -Wa,--noexecstack -g -Wall
available timing options: TIMES TIMEB HZ=100 [sysconf value]
timing function used: times
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-128-cbc       8106.82k     9642.09k    10110.89k    10261.92k    10261.85k

HOWTO Configure Hardware AES with OpenSSL

First I had to get some things set up:

#NOTE: Be aware of space, I moved a lot of directories to an attached esata disk for more space and speed. Then symlinked them into place.
sudo aptitude install build-essential
cd /usr/src
wget http://dreamplug.googlecode.com/files/linux-2.6.33.6.tar.bz2
tar -xjf linux-2.6.33.6.tar.bz2
ln -s linux-2.6.33.6 linux
ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.33.6 /lib/modules/2.6.33.6/build
ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.33.6 /lib/modules/2.6.33.6/source
cd /usr/src/linux
wget http://archlinuxarm.org/mirror/with-linux/2.6.33/2.6.33.6/sheeva-2.6.33.6.config
zcat /proc/config.gz > .config
make uImage && make modules
wget http://download.gna.org/cryptodev-linux/cryptodev-linux-1.0.tar.gz
tar -xzf cryptodev-linux-1.0.tar.gz
cd cryptodev-linux-1.0
make; make install
echo "cryptodev" >> /etc/modules
modprobe cryptodev
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocf-linux/files/ocf-linux/20110530/ocf-linux-20110530.tar.gz/download -O ocf-linux-20110530.tar.gz
tar -xzf ocf-linux-20110530.tar.gz
wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8r.tar.gz
tar -xzf openssl-0.9.8r.tar.gz
cd openssl-0.9.8r
patch -p1 < ../ocf-linux-20110530/patches/openssl-0.9.8r.patch
./config shared threads zlib --with-cryptodev --openssldir=/etc/ssl --libdir=/usr/lib --prefix=/usr
make depend; make; make install

Fix the versioning: http://chris.dzombak.name/blog/2010/03/building-openssl-with-symbol-versioning

Results

Then here are the results after with OpenSSL

$ openssl speed -evp aes128
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 78428 aes-128-cbc's in 0.14s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 76194 aes-128-cbc's in 0.17s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 256 size blocks: 63152 aes-128-cbc's in 0.06s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 39103 aes-128-cbc's in 0.04s
Doing aes-128-cbc for 3s on 2048 size blocks: 23210 aes-128-cbc's in 0.00s
OpenSSL 0.9.8r 8 Feb 2011
built on: Thu Jul 14 09:50:39 MDT 2011
options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(ptr,char) des(idx,cisc,16,long) aes(partial) idea(int) blowfish(ptr)
compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DHAVE_CRYPTODEV -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -Wall
available timing options: TIMES TIMEB HZ=100 [sysconf value]
timing function used: times
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   2048 bytes
aes-128-cbc       8963.20k    28684.80k   269448.53k  1001036.80k 47534080.00k

Yeah way way faster. Oh and SSH uses OpenSSL. So be careful. It can cut your connection and you will need the JTAG to reconnect.

Setting up the Dreamplug

Just recently I got a Dreamplug from Global Scale Technologies. It is pretty cool in that it only draws 5W of power and comes with plenty of processing power and features for all sorts of things. It is initially designed for prototyping for full scale products. However it is great for the hobbyist to mess with and have a lower powered computer for servers, voip, etc.

In my case I got one to primarily act as little home server for file sharing, ssh, printer sharing, and scanner sharing. Eventually I would like to deploy one at the studio for backups and archiving as well. In the past I have used old desktops, but my latest one died and I got tired of paying the money to run a whole machine that sits idle 90% of the time. But as with anything the 10% of the time I need it, I need it, so it is definitely worth keeping around.

These are just some notes of things I ran into and I hope someone will find useful. I know I will on the next round with one of these.

Of course the website and user guide pretty much has zero information on it. At least it has nothing very useful. It mainly talks about the ports and interface and such.

In the box you get way more that it seems. The power supply can disconnect and be run with a DC cable. It can act as a brick or you can use another power cable. It comes with sliding connectors allowing you to switch. It also comes with cover plates for exposed contacts and a Cat5e network cable (which will handle gigabit).

Mine came preloaded with Debian Lenny. I was expecting it to have Ubuntu. Not sure what is going on there. Seems that many pre-shipped with Ubuntu, but mine is Debian, so no clue. But things did work out of the box. I am more of a RedHat guy and got spoiled with the GUI's in Ubuntu. So Debian (even though closely related to Ubuntu) is different enough to be a little slow going.

Since it came preloaded it was already partitioned and everything. It looks to have about 2GB of onboard storage which is nice. It starts up as a wireless access point as you can see from /root/init-setup.sh. It also starts up Samba, SSH, Bluetooth, FTP and (attempts) lighttpd. The AP is automatically set up to bridge to eth0 which is DHCP. It also boots at runlevel 2.

To get on the machine, I had eth0 DHCP and I picked it up off of my DHCP server. You can ssh in with root and the default password (check the UserGuide for it).

Oh and BTW, the LED's are obnoxiously bright. If you look in the init-setup.sh script and the wlan script, you can see how to turn them on and off. But not sure how to dim them and definitely not how manipulate the power one. May need some opaque tape for that.

So for my setup first things first:

• Change root passwd
• Turn off the AP by running wlan.sh
• Remove it by commenting out /root/init-setup.sh in /etc/rc.local. That will also turn off bluetooth. On reboot, it will be LAN only.
• Set a static IP for eth0. Since mine will just be a server (already have a firewall/router) there is no need really for eth1 or wireless. So you have to edit /etc/network/interfaces and change it to static with the right address, gateway, and netmask. However a bit of a gotcha is that ifplugd will stomp on it. So you must take out eth0 out of /etc/default/ifplugd. More information available here: http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1960.msg5610.html#msg5610.
• Change hostname in /etc/hostname
• Oh yeah and install NTP (aptitude install ntp) which defaults to the debian pool. Then change the timezone: dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
  

After that initial round, that at least takes care of the tricky stuff. After that it should all be regular *nix stuff.

Other stuff I did:

• Installed LAME which wasn't as trivial as I had hoped. Added "deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main" to /etc/sources. Then I had to add the GPG key "gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key 07DC563D1F41B907" then "gpg -a --export 07DC563D1F41B907 | apt-key add -". Then "apt-get update." Took a few rounds of this to get some of the additional keys and I had to comment out a local apt repository from global scale. Then trivially "apt-get install lame" More information about getting lame from here: http://parabans.com/howto-install-lame-mp3-ripper-on-debian-linux-using-apt-get/. (Lame is slow as shit on this box BTW)
• Installed smbclient (apt-get install smbclient) which then updated the rest. I decided to swap out the smb.conf file with the default one since it has comments that act as documentation.
• Installed nmap, mainly to make sure I close all the right ports. Right now my only linux machine is a netbook with a crazy small keyboard.
• Removed mysql from the startup scripts then uninstalled ( update-rc.d -f mysql remove, etc. apt-get remove mysql-common, etc.)
• apt-get autoremove since there were some packages it was complaining about.
• Added Cups Printing: http://wiki.debian.org/SystemPrinting
  

  aptitude update
  aptitude install cups cups-client hpjis
  aptitude install links
  links http://localhost:631/
  

• Then added Scanner Sharing
  

  aptitude install sane
  ... bunch of configuration
  

• Installed and configured samba

Performance specs are decent depending on what you are doing. Anything using the memory cards is dog slow. Off of an Esata Hard Drive things are much better. Samba speeds are excellent, it also does great as a scanning server. SSH under high loads is pretty slow (ie. sshfs). I set up a squid server and changing the default cache directory to hit the Esata drive makes it much much faster. I tested some basic MP3 compression and file compression tests, they are also slow.

Essentially this thing is geared for I/O such as a NAS or router. While it will work doing some CPU intensive stuff, don't hold your breath. Excellent for a power efficient small server with great I/O. Pretty happy with what it will be doing for me.

I will be posting more tests regarding SSH port forwarding and web page delivery as time progresses.

Some Updates

Well it has been a long time since I have posted anything. As many of you know, I have moved back to Santa Fe, NM. It is nice to be back and I have been swamped with business. Hopefully there will some releases that I will be able to talk about here soon.

I have teamed up with Jesse Albright of DMBD Audio and renamed his studio to Desert Den Studios (www.desertden.com). With his rooms and my gear, we have built a fairly capable studio.

For the past 9 months it has been extremely busy which is good! But hence why the web presence and other musical endeavors have been ignored. That is about to change! Since I have some time away from my dayjob due to the Las Conchas fire, I can refocus on getting things back up to date.

GSP1101 Impulse Testing with 5150 Model

Well just in case you hadn't heard, the C55 Beta Firmware was released for the Digitech GSP1101 on http://www.mustbebeta.com/. If you haven't tried the beta firmware yet, DO IT. It adds so many features to the GSP1101. Stan, as he calls himself, has been a lifesaver to the GSP1101 and I hope that Digitech takes notice of how customer service and product support should work.

There have been tons of additional features. The C48 and previous added a 5150 model for high gain, plus a bunch others. C55 adds more flexible routing like a compressor in the loop, pre/post FX, etc.

The most notable new feature is the ability to load up to 10 Impulse Response cabinets. Personally I feel the stock cabinet modeling is the weakness of most modelers, GSP1101 included.

The downside to the GSP1101 Impulse Response loading is that it can only load the first 128 "taps" due to memory restrictions. This test is to see how much it affects the tone.

The Impulse I used is one I made with my ENGL Powerball for the Impulse vs. Mic Test. But to put things into perspective, I also used S-PresHigh by Catharsis. Then to test the modeling, I also ran the Nick Crow 8505 through both impulses.

Guitar is a Schecter A-7 7-String with Seymour Duncan Jazz Pickups Reamped through an Edcor Transformer. DI was cut with my LineDriver/Buffer box.

Drums are Steven Slate, Bass is a Lakland through Guitar Rig 4 and a limiter. Master bus has T-Racks Linear Phase EQ just rolling off the rumbly low end and then Steven Slate's FG-X for level.

Guitars have ZERO PROCESSING on them. These are just raw, lots of issues of course with low end rumble and high end fizz. For impulses a high and low-pass are essential, but I wanted to give the raw sound. I did do my best to match levels.

The GSP1101 settings are an 808 low drive, high volume, tone around 70% into the 5150II model set flat with gain around 70%.

Nick Crow 8505 Settings are Flat with gain around 70% with BTE's TS Secret boosting with the same settings as the GSP1101.

Impulse was made with an ENGL Powerball into and ENGL V412 with Celestion Vintage 30's. Single SM57 through an ACMP-73 chinese N*eve clone.

Special thanks to LePou's LeCab, Nick Crow's 8505 Amp Simluator and BTE Audio TS Secret.

So here is the order of the clip:

• GSP1101 -> Powerball Impulse 128 Taps into GSP1101
• GSP1101 -> Powerball Impulse using LeCab
• GSP1101 -> Catharsis S-PresHigh using LeCab
• Nick Crow 8505 -> Catharsis S-PresHigh using LeCab
• Nick Crow 8505 -> Powerball Impulse using LeCab
• GSP1101 -> Vintage 4x12 Stock Cab Sim

FULL BAND CLIP:

GUITARS ONLY:

Obviously some big differences! It is almost like GSP1101 is tuned for the Powerball Impulses and the 8505 for the Catharsis ones.

I tried other impulses from Catharsis, Alu, and Recabinet loaded into the GSP1101. They sounded really hollow and generally bad. I didn't spend a ton of time with it, but that is definitely something to consider. I bet it has something to do with the length or the impulses not being cut at zero. But I do like the improvement of sound with my own, which is what I care about.

Right now, the GSP1101 will continue to be in my Live Rig since I think it sounds great there. Been GAS'ing for an AxeFX, but the price just scares me. I like the processors for live work and for writing scratch tracks, but it would be sweet to have keeper tracks or at least better sounding tracks.

By popular demand, here is the The Powerball Impulse I used.

Impulse vs. Real Cabinet

I have always been a fan of modelers and hope that the next generation will be better than the last. It is a great theory, a whole room of amps and FX in a single software package or device. The problem is that they sound usable at best. Tube amps just dominate in so many ways.

However, the tube amps are large and heavy, require expensive maintenance, and are just a pain all the way around. Not to mention they are comparatively much more expensive even with offshore manufacturing closing the gap. Also in the studio (and even live) they are incredibly inconvenient. In order to sound good they must be loud and mic'd properly in a good room. Modelers can sound their best completely direct.

The reason I still support modeling is that I can record at anytime and anywhere with a laptop and USB interface. Also when mixing, a badly mic'd or improperly dialed amp can sound horrible. Or you need a specific tone that you don't have or don't have the time to mic, a modeler can be just the ticket.

Anyway I personally think one of the biggest breakthroughs and a weakness with modeling has been impulse responses of speaker cabinets. Essentially it is a sine sweep sampling. Do some searches and you will find that there are lots of links and discussion and packs for sale.

They sound very good, especially compared to other speaker simulation techniques, but they still lack something. Many say they don't breathe, that they are static and not 3D sounding. The problem is that most people don't really have the time to do a proper shoot out. Then using 3rd party impulses is a crap shoot since there is no way for you to compare with the real mic counterparts.

With free individual impulses it is often frustrating since there are so many out there of varying quality. Then with packs for sale or free, they have positions and combinations and such, but sometimes positions even down to a 1/2" is not enough. Millimeters in any direction or angle can have rather large effect on the tone.

But even for myself I have never done a proper shootout properly isolating all the variables... until now.

Testing Procedure

The goal here is to isolate everything but the speaker cabinet vs. impulse. So I mic'd up an ENGL 4x12 Pro (Celestion Vintage 30 speakers) with a single SM57. It is roughly at the edge of the cap where the cone starts, maybe 5mm more on the cone side. Straight on and about 1 inch from the grill.

The amp is an ENGL Powerball. The impulse was generated via the ENGL Powerball FX return. Master volume: 9:00, Depth Punch: 11:30, Presence 2:30. Sine Sweep and Deconvolved with Voxengo's Deconvolver 12-Seconds at 32-bit float 44.1khz.

Preamp is a TNC-73 Chinese Neve Clone from a group buy. They are similar to a Chameleon Labs. I had it set to low impedance and driving the it a little hard with the output rolled back.

DI's were cut with a Schecter A-7 7-string (mahogany body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard) , bridge pickup, Seymour Duncan JB7, tuned to standard with low B. DI was an EWI LDB-1 into a Behringer ADA8000 modded with BB OPA4134 clocked via a DBX Quantum mastering processor.

Re-amping was done via a DIY Jensen style Re-amping interface with an Edcor WSM 10k:10k.

The reamping was done with all the same settings through the mic'd cab. Then again but capturing the signal from the pre-amp and run through the impulse of the mic'd cab set-up loaded up in Poulin's LeCab, no high pass or low-pass filters. All variables isolated except the cab/poweramp combination and speaker impulse.

Results

Each clip has 4-bars of 3 riffs double tracked on their own, then in a mix. Peak levels matched then adjusted slightly by ear.

16-bit 44.1Khz WAV Files. Below are 320kpbs MP3's.

ENGL Powerball Real Cab and SM57

ENGL Powerball Impulse

Interestingly I am having a hard time hearing a difference on my Roland MA-8's that are in my office. But in the studio the first thing that popped out was a increased high-end/upper mid-range and just sort of lacked depth and was just grindy.

From another perspective the Mic'd cab could be described as wooly and muddy and warm and distant. The Impulse being more clear and in your face. Plus people tend to like more high-end just like they like things louder and perceive distortion as being louder.

So to help minimize this perspective, I added a high-shelf to the Mic'd cab:

ENGL Powerball Real Cab and SM57 with a High Shelf

Oh how the plot thickens! Now the Mic'd cab to me has more buzz, but it has a crunch and a grind to it with a 3D-ness. The impulse sounds 2D and lacks depth, just something unpleasant.

So how do we add depth? Well besides EQing with the rest of the mix and using mids to move instruments, how about reverb? In this case the impulse should have grabbed the room as well. But maybe without the percussive nature of the sine sweep, we need a separate room impulse. So I threw on Cubase's REVerence with the default Studio Room Sample and blended to taste.

ENGL Powerball Impulse with REVerence

Future Tests

At this point it would be time for a blind test, and that will probably be for another time. My opinion is that you could work with this. To send this out blind without some "training" like this, it would be a total crap shoot, you can hear differences, but which is better? Which is the cab vs. the impulse. Maybe some new riffs and testing is in order.

Also I would like to take some modelers, plugins and hardware and do the same tests. Through a cab and then through an impulse of the same setup. Maybe with some forum support, this can happen. Although I will likely have to start over with a new impulse since I can't leave my cab mic'd up into eternity.

Other Arguments

One could argue that the tone is bad to begin with so it is impossible to make a fair judgement. Well that may be true, but that isn't the point, it is relative to each other. Also the playing is so bad... well yeah. I focused on what I do, lots of chunk, some thrash, and some diminished chords, I mean at some point every engineer should do their own tests and come up with their own conclusions.

With one mic (SM57) on the Powerball it is a careful balance. Usually I need to two mics, one getting mud and beef and a condenser for the highs. With a single 57 fizz is a problem, so I minimized that. But it is a bit muddy. Plus it needs some EQ as well. AKA. Mudball in some parts.

PHASE: Personally I could hear a big difference between the two on my monitors RAW, so I didn't try too hard to flip the phase. Once you get into processing, things get out of control. You can try on your own though since the guitars are panned hard left and right. But consider that there is a time delay between the speaker and the mic vs. the impulse. So you will have to compensate. Then you will want a frequency aware phase adjuster because of the time shift. Then since they are different takes, there will be some inherent clock skew which will give an exaggerated amount of left-over that will change over time. So go by the lowest amount.

At least for me this answers a BIG question: Are impulses a waste of time? I really wasn't sure. At this point I don't think they are, they are very close and definitely usable. Especially to the point where the average listener probably won't notice or care.

That being said I would probably still elect to mic a cab given the option.

Audio CD Mastering Drives and Lite-On iHAP422 Review

Well I just installed my new Lite-On Drive iHAP422. In Audio Mastering the "standard" I guess was to get a Plextor Drive since they had this awesome CD tester called Plextools. Well Lite-On has a similar product called K-Probe. Plextor and Lite-On are the only ones that provide this capability. But Lite-On does make drive for lots of other brands. There is also Nero's DVD-Speed and DVDInfoPro which support selected brands and models as well.

"Mastering" technically is the creation of a glass master for replicated or stamping CD's. Duplication is burning CD-R's. So besides the sonic and creative aspects, a mastering engineers job is to pre-master a CD ready for the replication plant. To spec, a CD must have below 220 C1 errors per 10 second chunk which is actually quite high. Most respected mastering houses shoot for below 100, many for below 50. And you want no C2 Errors or CU errors.

In a nutshell C1 Errors are correctable errors, the others are not. They are caused by a combination of the media, drive, and the speed. There are a lot of internet folklore as to why this happens and I don't really know either. In general, slower tends to be better, but on modern faster drives, half the recommended speed tends to give better results. But really every drive and media combination is different. Some media/drive combinations may want full speed.

Taiyo-Yuden is regarded as the most consistently good media. They recently got bought out by JVC and used to be TDK. Most shelf brands buy their media from wherever they can get it the cheapest, so your results will definitely vary. So you will have to test on your own, but Taiyo-Yuden is cheaper in bulk online than shelf-brands anyway.

Back in the old days, things were a LOT more finicky. I own a SCSI Plextor Drive and a SCSI Yamaha drive since they were the best for their time. They were very picky about media. These days it doesn't matter as much but it is still something to keep in mind if you are burning your own masters for replication.

Better yet, leave it to a Mastering Engineer. But so many bands are going DIY or having their Mixing Engineers do the mastering. So for you guys:

• Plextors are hard to find and are expensive. Lite-On's are cheap and relatively easy to find.
  Buy Taiyo-Yuden, JVC, or TDK media, or do a lot of testing and tuning.
  
• Get K-Probe. Test your masters after burning them. Shoot for below 100 C1 Errors per Second, I would say 50.
  
• Learn your burner and find which speed gives the lowest BLER/C1. But half-speed is a good starting point.
  
• Test EVERY disc. It only takes a minute and you know what you are sending out is good.
  
• I still listen to every disc too on an old CD-Player just to be extra sure and listen for clicks and pops or any other weirdness. The band should do the same.
  

This particular drive so far is quite nice. From reading reviews, many are DOA so test it as soon as you get it so you can get another if it breaks. It is very fast and pretty quiet while burning. It has LightScribe which is cool for labeling discs, but terribly slow (20 mins for a full Disc). Now that I have a Disc Printer I will not bother with it anymore, but I have media to get through.

Just pulling some craptastic media, I was able to get a BLER of 11 and 66 TOTAL at 16X. Can't complain about that! I think on the report it was actually POSTECH!

With my new stock of Taiyo-Yuden Ink Jet Hub Printable Non-Branded media I got 0.. that's right ZERO C1 errors across the board! AMAZING! Call me crazy, but I think it even SOUNDS better than the crappy media. I have heard this theory before, I think it might be mostly placebo and I don't have the time to scientifically A/B double blind.

My old stock of TDK media on my ASUS drive gave me a BLER of 5 with 31 total which is quite impressive as well. So many drives will be fine for burning, but you can only test with a handful of them. You might as well go with a Lite-On where K-Probe is free and you get an awesome drive as well!

Couple projects done and some updates.

Well it has been a while since I have had time to blog. But things are going pretty well in the Ortiz Audio side of things.

In January I finished up with Younger Brother. Straight up Rock and Roll that came out really well. It was a long haul with them, but the final product was worth it. There are samples on my site to hear for yourself. You can also find them on iTunes, Amazon, etc. Or you can get a disc off their website http://www.youngerbrotherband.com

Also finished up with Independent Progress. Started them in Feb. and was able to knock them out in month. Ty and I tried a new technique with these guys. Instead of doing DI's and re-amping, we built some awesome looking and sounding gobos. These allowed us to track them live and do overdubs on the spot.  It was definitely the way to go. Their album came out great!  You can grab their stuff off their website as well http://www.myspace.com/independentprogress

Also check Independent Progress on tour over the next couple of weeks. For you NM folks, they will be hitting The Underground in Albuquerque on April 12th.  So check them out and say hello. They are cool dudes, so don't worry.

On the geeky side of things, I am checking out a new flash MP3 player for the site. Hopefully it will make things a bit smoother.  Also got some new card designs and maybe website ideas in the works.  Lots of stuff to post on, from new gear, to all sorts of fun things happening.