Hux Electronics : Gallery 6

Greg Simmons, recording the sound of the wind passing over Gosaikunda, one of Nepal's Holy Lakes, high in the Himalayas (over 4000m altitude). In Nepali, "kunda" is the word used to describe these small lakes that are found at high altitudes in the Himalayas. So, in English translation, we would probably call it Lake Gosai. This is one of those photos where, the more you look, the more detail you will find.

The Brisbane Powerhouse production of "Johnno" in July 2006. I was employed as one of the radio techs, my main function was really as trouble shooter for Brett Cheney (the live sound engineer) during the bump-in and rehearsal stages. There was automation in every part of this show (lighting, audio, overhead revolve, projection, rain, pool heating and filtering, etc), the stage was a shallow pool and nearly all of the action took place in the water or on the structure in the middle of the water. A very interesting and complicated production. This photo shows some of the automation set up in the audience area during the tech rehearsal.

Front house at the mix position for "Johnno". Just to the left of the operator was a rack containing the audio automation (you can just see the keyboard), all of the sound effects were automated and the system was fully time aligned, even the delay times for the actors microphones were altered depending on where they were on stage. The subgroup outputs from the console were sent to the automation rack which directly fed all ten of the speaker feeds (a lot of point source sound effects). Of special note were the tram and car effects which came from long throw speakers at the rear of the stage and the reverb for the church scene, the reverb returns were played back by speakers that were aimed at the walls to give a more realistic church feel (spooky). The sound design was by Matt McKenzie of Autograph in the UK (they design for most of the West End productions in London) and the live audio mix was by my old pal Brett Cheney.

An original Marshall JMP guitar amp owned by Kevin Borich, is has a lot of road wear and tear but I reckon it looks great (all that rock history, if only it could speak), it still sounds great too.

The guts of the Marshall JMP, a bit rusty but still all good.

A Fender Super Six, owned by Kevin Borich, I just love the blue lighting gel gaffa taped over the lamp holder (very rock and roll). The Super Six model was originally fitted with six ten inch speakers, this particular amplifier has been cut down to make it smaller and now has two twelve inch speakers.

The Fender Super Six with all new Svetlana (now called SED) "Winged C" output valves. There are now two Svetlana companies, both make excellent valves. The Svetlana brand is now owned by The New Sensor Corporation (sometimes referred to as NSS for New Sensor Svetlana), the original Svetlana company is now marketed and marked as as SED (for Svetlana Electronic Devices), they are the only ones to have the so called "Winged C" (specified as "WC") badge and a are more expensive (some would say better) than the "NSS" versions (which are very good).

Mike Diack's "Workshop Pet". "These are a pair of Gaumont Kalee (Rank Organisation) bottle amps snaffled from an old Cinerama theatre. They run twenty four GEC KT66 output valves which has a most excellent gag factor when I'm being invaded by audiophools." Mike is a fellow pro audio technician and one of the founding members of AARG

A Sontec MES-432C mastering equaliser, owned by Matthew Gray Mastering, Brisbane.

A Sony-MCI JH-24 two inch sixteen track machine, owned by Scream Ahead Studio's, Brisbane. This machine has twenty four tracks of electronics but has a sixteen track headblock fitted (a little unusual but it means that there are lots of spare parts onboard). Serviced by Hux.

An Amek "Big By Langley" console, owned by Scream Ahead Studios, Brisbane. I have not worked on this console yet.

The "Uber Bass", a whacky "stick" double bass owned by Brett Cheney, has an EMG "P" pickup up near the neck and a piezo pickup under the bridge, it actually sounds quite good.

A rack of DBX 566 dual channel tube compressors, this rack got wet and caused the HT tube supply to arc over in all three units, all good now.

An early Avalon VT-737 with purple knobs and screen printed markings, the later and more common VT-737-SP have silver knobs and etched front panels, this is the first purple knob version that I have worked on.

A very sad 15" speaker from a Fender BXR-300 bass combo, not a well bunny.

A DBX 160-SL, a very nice bit of hardware, great quality components everywhere, not the easiest thing to disassemble

An internal shot of the 160-SL showing the huge V-8 VCA chips (one per channel), Jensen output transformers and bridge mode power amps (the four heatsinks in front of each transformer) that drive each output transformer, this is a take no prisoners way of building stuff and is rare these days.

A "Mercenary Edition" of a Drawmer "1969" dual channel tube compressor / pre-amplifer, this should be great sounding compressor, on bench tests it just compressed and refused to destroy sounds no matter how I set it up and abused it, I was impressed.