Ray Kimber

Here is a pdf of the booklet http://www.isomike.com/PDF/HighAltitudeDrums0708.pdf

This disc is of the 2007 Blue Knights and the 2008 Blue Knights and 2008 Troopers, extra tracks, beyond the competition progam, are on the disc. Recorded in DSD with a dynamic range of over 50dB, the disc is an SA-CD Hybrid. This disc was a huge hit at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. There are some youtube clips about the technology. Discs are on the way to the offices of The Troopers and The Blue Knights for their members. We are offering a sale for others interested in IsoMike recordings. Here is a link. http://isomike.com/rmaf/ Sale ends in a few days. I hope you all enjoy listening as much as we had recording!

I sent you a message with my cell number - I can get you in.

Isomike again is demonstrating recordings at CES 2009 and we have all the tracks from the upcoming High Altitude Drums disc. Blue Knights and Troopers. So if you are attending CES we are in the Venetian Tower demo suite 34-207. The demo is in 4.0 surround - as will be the SA-CD/Hybrid disc. You will need CES credentials to get in.

Noise at any performance drives me crazy. For the Corps Encore Show in Ogden this summer we turned off the campus central system AC chillers for the duration of the competion - yes this meant that the entire campus got a tad toasty. But the chilling towers are pretty close to the stadium and would be a distraction. We also worked with the campus electric dept starting 2 years ago - guess what? the ballasts in the lights make so little noise we can't hear them even when we are doing the stand-still recordings. At our request the local airport broadcast a "notice to all aviators" requesting them not to overfly the university during the show hours. Then. For the stand-still recordings, besides all the above, we also had police block the roads near the stadium. Ray Kimber

My Bad - I thought there was a comment box available during checkout. No worries, just let me know by DCP message and/or you can email brett@isomike.com - he is the one who does the shipping. And the extra disc will be included

Right around Christmas. A possible delay might be the pressing plant, we use a facility in Austria and sometimes they get a bit slammed during the Holiday Season.

Hi DCP Forum, We have just released for sale the IsoMike 2008A sampler disc. We have it on sale for just $5.00 plus shipping - but if you order it (we use paypal) and mention Drum Corps Planet in the comment line we will send you an extra disc to share. The sale price and this DCP offer ends this Wednesday! After that it is $10.00 The discs are SACD/Hybrid and so will play in a normal CD player, but for the full effect the SACD layer in an SACD player gives you the full resolution of the original master recording. There is a track from The Troopers and a track The Blue Knights, plus 2 tracks of Blue Knights drum line. You can check out the track listing by looking at: www.isomike.com If you get a disc remember that these are uncompressed and so you will need to turn the volume up on your stereo, but do it carefully. AND.... The guys who played drum line for us at the Denver Audio Show were fantastic THANKS!, there were lots of folks who had never had such an experience - some of them are now converted. Ray

Hi, We were lucky enough to record the Troopers and the Blue Knights on consecutive nights in July of 2008 in Ogden Utah. We used the IsoMike system as last year, but this time with some differences. The array was moved down and back a few feet. We took more time with distance and formation of the corps. Oh yea and hyper matched microphones, updated converters and a new Sony Sonoma recorder. We documented what we were doing with 4 HD cameras We used a powerful $40,000.00 set of monitor speakers in the remote booth to better make decisions (And to make better decisions). We better included members of the corps staff to make re-take decisions. I like the result. And BTW so did a few thousand audiophiles in Italy who didn't know drum corps from apple core until a few days ago. Right now I am in Denver with the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest and we will be featuring playback of corps recordings - on a 1/2 million dollar 4-channel system. BTW this is the last appearance of these gigantic electrostatic speakers, they are too hard to move and we risk damage if we dontinue to do so. Here is a link to the show http://audiofest.net/2008/index.php Our demo is in Evergreen Ballroom #F We have copies of the SA-CD/Hybrid Stereo/4-Channel that was presented by the Italian Magazine "Audiophile Sound" at the Milan TopAudio Show. If you introduce yourself to me at the show I'll slip you a copy (We have limited copies for this offer). this disc has a few Corps excerpts on it, including from 08. Live drumming just after 6PM on Friday! I hope to see some fans at the show! Kind regards, Ray Kimber

Thanks for the kind words about the audio, we are working on using an additional site that will let us deliver higher-rez and in stereo. This recording has been discussed on several forums search for isomike on the following site: http://sa-cd.net/ The recording of the Blue Knights has been used in audio shows all over the world as a demo spectacular. It will be pretty much THE featured demo for a show this month in Canada (sorry it is a closed industry show) and then TOP AUDIO in Milan Italy in September. The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver Colorado last fall was the debut of the 2007B disc and the BK cuts were requested more than all other tracks - combined! If things go as planned we will have the discs with this summer's recordings pressed in time for the 2008 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, again in Denver, October 10-11-12 Ray

You are correct in your understanding of "mixing". And..., there is zero mixing on any of the IsoMike recordings. Editing does occur, sometimes just a few edits, sometimes many. For instance there are only a handful of edits in the Blue Knights tracks. Because 1, they played very tight; and 2, we only had time for a limited number of takes/partial takes anyway. Now back to mixing. There is no mixing because there is only 1 microphone per channel - period. I feel that the fidelity penalty IMHO from mixing is too high a price to pay in trade for the ability to micro-manage relative levels of the instruments/sections. And there is no compression or normalizing, no limiting, and no EQ. Finally take a look at this, I completely agree with the premise of this site. http://www.turnmeup.org/ Kind regards, Ray Kimber

We are excitingly anticipating having the Blue Knights back in Ogden Utah for another recording this 2008 summer. There might even be an additional corps. Anyway we located some snippets of video footage from the recording last year in 2007 and have put it on YouTube - sorry about the YT compressed/lowrez/monaural audio. (Yes, the Blue Knights know that it is posted) Ray Kimber, IsoMike http://www.youtube.com/user/isomike

January 7 - 10 in Las Vegas. The Consumer Electronics Show - CES January 7 - 10 in Las Vegas. The Home Entertainment Show - T.H.E. Show IsoMike disc 2007B that contains the recording of the Blue Knights is being provided to all exhibitors of T.H.E. Show and to all the HPA (High Performance Audio) exhibitors at the CES. It is anticipated that many exhibitors and many attendees will have their first Drum Corps exposure with this disc. More than 300 discs have been included in the exhibit display packages. We do expect some favorable press about this recording from publications that heretofore had no clue about Drum Corps. IsoMike will have a demonstration display at CES. The location of the display is in The Venetian #34-207 For CES attendees, we would be delighted to have any DCP members visit the IsoMike demo - we will have the ususal $300,000ish playback system, but other exhibitors will have systems ranging from a few thousand dollars to even more crazy than our system. You will need to have a qualified CES "trade" badge to enter CES - besides qualiying as a "trade" attendee there might also be a fee to get the badge. Entrance for T.H.E. Show may require an entrance fee, but without the stricter credentials required for CES. Happy New Year, Ray

I would like to thank The Blue Knights, The Seattle Cascades, and The Phantom Regiment for their participation in the IsoMike recording experiments. In 2003 I had never attended any Drum Corps performance, and would have thought that it was essentially kinda like a honors HS/college marching band. Summer of 2003, and I don’t recall exactly why I went, I was in the audience for Corps Encore at Weber State University in Ogden Utah. I was completely gobsmacked. I bought a bunch of CDs from the various corps souvenir trailers, and was pretty underwhelmed at the playback. The audio quality ranged from pretty-darn-good to only-a mother-could love-it. I was bummed. Well anyway I had been working on some recording experiments that we were calling IsoMike - for isolated microphones. And while I was disappointed in the current disc offering, I also couldn’t see how we or anyone else could do much better. To record Drum Corps is to try and capture a large ensemble, outside, played at unworldly levels. Oh yeah, I knew enough by then to see that any one of those 3 was going to be big trouble. But I couldn’t get the memory of the emotional reward of listening live out of my mind. Still..., given the stellar credentials of some of the current recording engineers of Drum Corps I was not all that confident that we could even come close. But..., at least we could fail in a new way. So in 2004 as an unknown I sent some unsolicited emails to all the Tier 1 Corps, and amazingly - one said yes. Seems that The Phantom Regiment was planning a rehearsal stop in the area anyway, June 29, 2005 we took our first shot and completely missed the bullseye, missed the whole darn target and ended up with a recording that was completely unusable - even a mom would have pushed the stop button. BTW the set up involved several days of assembling a big truss tower in the stands. We imagined that we had learned something from such abject failure so we decided to have another try. So we sent out another round of emails for 2006 and again, just one said yes. This time The Seattle Cascades. Once more we spent lots of time and money assembling a truss tower in the stands and this time we had enough of a result that we could calculate what we wanted to change. We did include some excerpts of these recordings on IsoMike Demo Discs 2006 and 2007A. While we were less that happy with the results, at least we learned lots. Next we talked to the Blue Knights. Ummm..., as I recall they we not all that enthused. I guess our reputation of a failure followed by a weak result was not a good calling card. But they said yes! And we got something we were excited about. So thanks to the Corps that hooked me as an audience member, thanks to The Phantom Regiment and The Seattle Cascades for willingness to be guinea pigs. Finally thanks to The Blue Knights for playing so freakin' fine for an unknown experiment. Thanks also to the participants of drumcorpsplanet forums. I have learned a great deal by reading your posts about what to strive for in future experiments. High posting participation should not go unrewarded. If you have posted at least 9,000 posts; send me an email and I’ll send you IsoMike 2007B at no charge. I’ll also throw in the 2 discs that have The Seattle Cascades recordings so you can see what kind of progress we made from one year to the next. Kind regards, Ray Kimber

Regarding IsoMike shipments to an APO/FPO address.... Thank you for making me think about this situation - of charging active overseas military warriors for the shipping. I have decided that as a matter of policy we will now charge zero shipping to an APO/FPO address. So if someone pays by PayPal we will take note that it is shipping to an APO/FPO address and immediately refund the shipping. (I suppose there are other ways to do it with discount codes or gift certificates but we are too busy to figure that out in the near term) We realize that APO/FPO address do need a Customs Form attached so I don't know how one slipped out without a form. Best regards, Ray Kimber - IsoMike www.isomike.com

Hi All, My name is Ray Kimber, I am the crazy nut behind the IsoMike recording experiments in Ogden Utah. We recording the Blue Knights this past summer. the dynamic range was tremendous and we didn't do anything to neuter the recording. This has resulted in a disc that is not the usual "normalized" offering. It does require a bit of re-calibration of the playback system to maximize, on playback, what we captured during recording. If you play any disc and it seems too soft then that could be an indicator that the recording is not compressed or maybe only compressed a little. You will need to replay such disc a few times, increasing the volume each time until you see where your volume control setting needs to be for that disc. Here is my suggestion when you play IsoMike 2007B which contains the Blue Knight recording: How to set your playback volume for The Blue Knights tracks 1 through 5 on IsoMike 2007B. Make your listening area as quiet as possible - this is really important. Track 1 is less than 1 minute. Play this track at what would have been your normal volume setting. You will notice that the volume starts at a very quiet level and then builds toward the paint-peeling section of the finale - it will likely seem way too soft to you. Re-play this track a few times and keep increasing the volume control until the loud part of the finale is LOUD, but not louder than you wish or louder than your system will play without distortion, whichever comes first. Provided your system will accommodate the LOUD finale of track 1, we recommend that the LOUD part of the finale really be the kind of extra LOUD that makes you hold-your-breath or gives-you-goosebumps. STOP your player, walk away for a few minutes and then come back and play tracks 2 through 5 without having changed the volume settings. Listen with your eyes closed. Here is the story. Most recordings are compressed and peak limited, but we prefer our music to retain the full dynamic range so we don’t use compression or peak limiting on our recordings. Compression serves to make soft sounds louder, i.e. the soft sounds are then close to the maximum allowed digital level of the disc, therefore the loud sounds can only be slightly louder than or perhaps only as loud as the soft sounds. Think of this as kind of artificially turning up (and down) the volume on YOUR system by remote control (but without moving your volume control setting). So when you play a disc without compression you will need to manually adjust your volume control to “calibrate” the dynamic range to fit within your system’s capabilities. Naturally the wider the dynamic range of a recording the more demanding it will be on a playback system. The Blue Knights proved wickedly capable of very wide dynamics in their playing, and we worked ridiculously hard to have a quiet recording environment, and then we used lunatic-fringe recording equipment capable of proper capture. If your listening environment isn’t quiet enough and/or your system isn’t capable enough - then you won’t be able to hear the full result of how it really sounded live. But if you followed the volume setting routine using track 1, then you will have come as close as your system will allow. There will, of course, be situations where compressed playback might be desirable, MP3 and smaller car stereos come to mind. For those circumstances there are always those tech friends who have programs that will compress the audio for you. What there isn’t - is a program that could precisely un-compress a compressed disc. For the remainder of the tracks on IsoMike 2007B your volume control should be adjusted, up or down, track-by-track, as needed. For example, track 6 is a string quartet and the average level of the performance is less dynamic than tracks 1 through 5, therefore your volume control will have to be turned down relative to the level of the first 5 tracks of The Blue Knights.