Microphones | Hacker News Reader

Microphones

coutant.org

160 pointsbrudgers47 comments

Somewhat offtopic: I really wish we had more websites like this one. We should make it easier for end users to learn how to build their own sites and host them, even if just as static pages.

I've scraped numerous websites like these put together by university teachers, intended as learning material for students. Lots of the have now disappeared.

They are crude and unpolished in the modern sense but the content they hold is invaluable. They are not bound by commercial motives and that's exactly what makes them special. The free-form of the medium also enables them to take whatever shape their creator envisages.

Dunno if we should teach more people to make sites like these https://snipboard.io/vAmURn.jpg (zoomed in for obviousness but I noticed it's blurry straight away)

Generally I agree of course. My own site is hosted from a recycled laptop and weights a few kb per page. I don't post content just to have content and might go years between blogs, so no corporate publicity or ad revenue incentives. I miss sites like these, they're so hard to find nowadays.

Yeah, sites were every thing was a graphic so it's not "selectable" and searchable were all the rage in the days of Flash.

how much more light weight could it be by removing an image and just having text and some CSS to style it? I didn't say some CSS library, so enough to style it.

Adobe Flash (the player and authoring tool) was so good for the indie game scene! I'm pretty sure it was horrible for every other use-case, but back in the day Kongregate had some of the most interesting, inventive and well-done games I'd ever scene. I've never experienced so many novel game mechanics, and all because the barrier-to-entry was so low. I see why there was never any money in it for Adobe (btw valiant effort with Flex!) but the death of Flash still makes me sad for this reason alone.

>My own site is hosted from a recycled laptop and weights a few kb per page

It would be cool if such sites joined a web ring and helped promote each other that way. (If high-waisted jeans can come back, why not web rings?)

>We should make it easier for end users to learn how to build their own sites and host them, even if just as static pages.

Its definitely not easy. I recently spun up a public bespoke web server on a $5 VPS. I was surprised by the immediate and constant probes and attacks. Hardening the server was non-trivial for me, as I'm not a professional sysadmin. Nothing was trivial, from setting up DNS to ssh to fail2ban. My setup was as simple as possible (one node, one DNS name, one server process) and it still took me a full two days, plus some extra fiddling, to get it setup properly and reproducibility.

Starting from zero it takes enormous knowledge. Can it be made easier? Yes, I think so. On the high-tech side I think ChatGPT is going to play a role in lowering the learning curve for this kind of stuff. On the low-tech side I think experts could offer help to new learners, but I'm not sure what channels make sense. I'm not sure how it could be simplified without violating the primary purpose of the exercise.

Wym

Back in the 2000s you could just use Microsoft Frontpage, pay for a web host, click upload and your static site would be online in a few hours.

I’m sure there’s still some variation of that out there.

I am doing Obsidian > publish to html > upload to neocities.org account.

Easy peazy.

This is _exactly_ what i meant! Can you share yours?

If what you need is a web server, get a web server. You can get decent web hosting for 20€ per year and it will perform a lot better than your 5€ VPS.

Do you have an example? There is no unambiguous way to define "web server"! Consider all the ways you can rent a host in virtually every state between disassembled parts on a table (Newegg) to renting DC for your own hardware (Hetzner) to running an httpd process running in a hypervisor running on a fully managed server in a DC (VPS) to sharing wordpress db/virtual host space on a LAMP process (wordpress.com). And everything in between. (And that's not every option, either. "Push markdown and let github/gitlab publish it for me" or "write a gist" are in this space, as is codepen, meteor, aws, and reddit - really anything tool or stack that lets you "change the state of the public web". Even HN!).

In fact, understanding this spectrum of options is a task in itself - imagine starting from scratch and trying to pick a path!

At what point on this spectrum do you transition away from "self hosting"? Personally, I put the line at "vanilla VPS". I do not consider sharing wordpress space self-hosted, nor is having a webmin. (And yet, either is certainly more self-hosted than a Facebook group page!) My approach was "device oriented" in that I wanted to act as if I was configuring a fresh piece of server hardware with a new OS and so on. The cheapest way to get that is a VPS. It is at this level that I feel I have the most flexibility, the least lock in, and, importantly, the most leverage.

Shared webhosting as a concept is decades old and still works. You just upload your web pages via (S)FTP and then you can access them on the internet. That's how most people (including me) got started around 10-20 years ago.

I'm still hosting my personal websites on a shared host today, because it just works and requires no maintenance on my end.

Thanks for explaining. I had no idea the issue was so simple.

the service https://www.pair.com has been highly reliable for me for ~20 years now.

I use their "shared web hosting" tier and just upload a static site to my $HOME/public_html directory where it's served by their system. Very simple, and you control the site content (html/css/js and images or whatnot).

I understand the processes required but if you or anyone here knows, what would be the least expensive / most sustainable way to set up a personal VPN & pihole plus a simple website hosted on a server?

I already run a small server at home for NAS / HomeAssistant / PiHole, etc., but I would like to be able to access it anywhere and enjoy the benefits of ad blocking and personal media access on my phone outside of my home network, but I don't want to spend $25+/month for crap tier single 9 service, and at the same time, I don't need flawless service with five 9 uptime guarantees at any price, either.

I'm guessing that I would need a VPS provider that allows SSH access to some flavor of linux server with a static IP or at least a domain name.

Am I on the money with this, or is there something that I didn't consider?

If I am, would you still recommend pair.com or is there a VPS provider that might be a better fit?

For something like this, I’d look at a small cloud instance running at Hetzner or similar. You can run Pihole on that so you don’t have to reflect your traffic through your home Internet connection. You can then use something like ZeroTier or Tailscale to be able to access your home server and the Pihole service while you’re on the road, so you’re not worried about making services available to the whole Internet.

> I was surprised by the immediate and constant probes and attacks. Hardening the server was non-trivial for me

What hardening do you need? My impression was that, with a good password (or password login disabled) a standard Debian + Apache setup was secure enough by default.

ArchiveTeam tend to save those sorts of sites too. For the ones that are still up, they could be sent to archive.org via ArchiveBot:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot

What's wrong with stuff like Wix, Squarespace or even Wordpress for simple content?

Forums were a good compromise, not too commercial and full of great content, but also accessible to people who would rather not spend $5 a month and hand write HTML

I remember when I volunteered at the little local radio station, that it was always working hard to soundproof booths, and putting carpet on the walls for acoustics, and scraping money together for decent microphones. Nowadays, when seeing webcasts of some radio shows, I'm surprised about the flimsy mics, sometimes headset-mics, they're using, and the sort of environments they do live shows from, without seemingly giving away much in terms of audio quality (for speech, announcements, that is). I get they're all behind sound processors, but still...

DSP's have a way of making analog devices obsolete. E.g. DSLR vs Smartphone wars.

If you can't tell the difference, consumers will aim for cheap and microphones are no different.

I'm still surprised that we run XLR cables and snakes all over stages. There should be CAT6 runs and cheap and open source Ultra Low-Latency tx/rx units by now.

CAT6 would not last on stage for very long, even the robust heavy cable and connectors used on stage need to be regularly repaired and replaced. The expense for most of the stuff used on stage is in making it durable enough to have a decent lifespan. Stage life is very hard on gear.

Agreed: CAT6 ruggedized to the required degree would cost the same.

Then you would need POE to power the ADC and DSP at the stage end, which would also need to deal with microphone interfaces which have remained compatible since 1950 -- so there's 73 and counting years of working equipment that people already have.

You can get nearly all the benefit at the cabinet end of the cable runs.

> CAT6 would not last on stage for very long, even the robust heavy cable and connectors used on stage need to be regularly repaired and replaced.

The complexity of digital solutions doesn't help either. A huge amount of maintenance in current systems can be done with just a can of contact cleaner, an ohmmeter and a soldering iron. I can't imagine anyone wants to add problems with configuration, addressing, EMI etc.

As sibling comments have noted, there's durability issues with this for stage use, but this is absolutely the path that a lot of installed audio has gone: Dante/AES67/AVB mics, DSP's with minimal local IO and even direct PoE+ speakers.

As an example collection: https://www.shure.com/en-ASIA/products/microphones/mxa920 https://www.biamp.com/products/tesira-compact-audio-dsp https://www.qsys.com/products-solutions/q-sys/audio-network-...

It is not difficult to get good clean sound just about anywhere, just use a highly directional mic with poor sensitivity, which is what headset mics and the mics journalists use for field work are. It may not provide an accurate representation of the speakers voice and much of the nuance may be lost but often it is good enough especially when the listener does not actually know what the person sounds like. Many of the mics sold for pod casting are of this sort.

> It is not difficult to get good clean sound just about anywhere, just use a highly directional mic with poor sensitivity…

The "sensitivity" thing is a popular myth among podcasters. Headset mics use higher-sensitivity condenser mics, but because they're so close to your mouth, ambient and background noise is proportionately far quieter. More reading on this topic:

• Myth Busted – The Too Sensitive Condenser Microphone: https://www.homebrewedmusic.com/2009/12/30/myth-busted-the-t...

• 15 Popular Audio Myths (see section "Myth: Capacitor mics ‘pick up more of the room’ than dynamic mics"): https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/15-popular-audio-m...

• Top 8 Microphone Myths Exposed (see item 6, which also applies to dynamic vs. condenser): https://www.shure.com/en-US/performance-production/louder/to...

I was not talking about capsule types which you seem to be conflating with sensitivity.

The 1khz/1Pa test is nearly useless on its own and generally in the studio when the engineer says this mic is more sensitive than that one, he is not talking about the sensitivity measurement on the box, he is talking about the sensitivity measurement in context of of the pattern and frequency response for a given setup.

Edit: that is too say I was not talking about the sensitivity measurement on the box either.

Most speakers can operate as a microphone. You just operate them in reverse. Sound waves in a room move the speaker cone which in turn induces a voltage on the speaker coil as it vibrates. In most modern speakers the amplifier circuit gets in the way of making anything of it. "Passive" pc speakers that didn't have an amp used to be more common in the 90s. Usually a cheap set came with a new computer purchase. They didn't have the power/wall wart and ran solely off the power pumped out by your computers 3.5mm audio. My mind was blown when I found out as a young kid that you could plug these into the microphone port and record... from a speaker!

pfft. now the clever hack is using your camera as your microphone.

Like this? http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/

Not a camera, but a cellphone potentially yes. The MEMS accelerometer contained in all phones is a device that turns position and acceleration (therefore vibrations) into digital values, so they could be sensitive to sound, especially when put on surfaces that resonate easily to ambient sounds and voice, like a table. Most if not all accelerometers are however sampled at much lower frequency than sound, then have their signals fed through a low pass filter, which could be either or both digital and analog, so in theory it is possible, still very hard to achieve without some deep hacking. However, if a cellphone was manufactured to allow it, then any app aware of this would have the ability to listen to sounds without involving the internal mic.

This is a marvelous resource. Although I have no real use for them, I am fascinated by microphones and have been lucky enough to see some phenomenal microphone collections at various studios around the world.

I was remember watching an old Dick Cavett clip on youtube back in 2020 and was captivated by the microphones they were wearing as necklaces around their neck while discussing the RFK assassination.

I've been wondering its exact/name model number ever since I watched it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6pL8fE4Tm8

Make and model is tough, but they are among the class of lavalier microphones.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavalier_microphone

What is amazing to me is that, just like cameras have become so accessible to the masses everywhere, cheap condenser microphones that do a pretty tolerable job are now within reach of everyone who can click on Amazon for $20. And unless you're really an audio snob or someone recording for archival / professional purposes, the $700-3000 microphones that were the reference standard of the past are no longer necessary to sound pretty good. (Maybe they're an aspirational equipment just like the big DSLRs are/were).

The miracle of modern manufacturing.

Trouble is figuring out which of the cheap ones are actually good. I went through several that were "meh" to garbage, now using a more expensive Elgato Wave3.

"pretty tolerable" is a bit vague. $20 is too low for any recording project but you can get a decent microphone for around $100 nowadays. However, it's not going to sound good without a treated room (or emulating one in a closet, etc.).

The $20 models are all marketed at podcasters, where the audio requirements are not super high. I think the explosion in podcasting has done more for lower prices than any big advancement in manufacturing.

Mics are still pretty simple though. Cameras have all kinds of onboard computing, and often built-in mics are more advanced although lacking the quality you can only get with larger size.

If mics advanced like cameras, wireless handhelds would have IR time of flight sensors that adjust the EQ to cancel out proximity effect, remove handling noise, and automatically detect feedback. They'd probably also have a tuner since they'd need a display anyway for all the extras, and they'd have modeling to pretend to be different mics built in.

But at least VocoPro made decent wireless mics affordable.

I wonder if our eyes being a more discerning sense compared to hearing drives how much (or some maximum) technology investment that will go into audio improvements, before people evaluating the price of some new microphone say, "eh, can't really tell at this point".

This page is great and anyone who buys a microphone should really have a look at it first. Especially anyone who buys a side address mic[0]. There are so many people on YT who buy one and then position it incorrectly and speak into the wrong part of it, resulting in very poor quality recordings.

0. https://www.homebrewaudio.com/27738/podcasters-on-new-tv-sho...

Those big old RCA ribbon mics like the 44 on the main page are way too cool. I’m privileged to own an old 77DX from the 60s and it’s very special. It’s always fun seeing music stuff on HN.

Then you might appreciate this—Canadian songwriter Joel Plaskett recording the final (and 44th) track on his last album (44) with a 44 live on the floor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVGy8TAoxWo

Sounds just fantastic.

(also into an old Neve desk and Studer machine. Can't hurt!)

holy crap what a blast from the past, before i was working and bought gear, i'd just fawn over these mics and all the rack gear on the now defunct mercenary.com Thanks for the flashback!! :)

A vestige of the internet of my childhood. Wipes tear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com