SQUAREWHEELS.org.uk
Audio
SQUAREWHEELS.org.uk
This page was last modified on 18 July 2022
On 6 March 2011 I tried creating a uni-framed video with a soundtrack that comprised the actual audio I wished to publish, and uploaded it to YouTube. This method seemed quite satisfactory so I have adopted this method for future audio clips (and re-publication of old ones).
Please switch on Annotations to see a textual commentary as the clip progresses.
HDL Deal Wayfarer railtour departing from Deal on 5 July 2003. It tackles the steep gradient up through Walmer towards Martin Mill; 60-foot rail-joints, and the rare shorter ones, can be heard through much of this recording which also features full power for seven minutes! [8m06s]
Central Line journey from Marble Arch to Bank in 1998. Features the original (Janet Mayo) Digital Voice Announcer. We hear the train approaching Marble Arch at 0727hrs on Sunday 13 September 1998; the journey on board it all the way to Bank; and the train’s departure followed by sound from the escalators that lead up to the ticket-hall. [12m16s]
Sonia (Central Line) – an extract from
the above – delicately announcing This train terminates at Hainault,
via Newbury Park
, on an Eastbound train at St. Paul’s; “Sonia”, so called
because staff declared that It getS ON YA nerves
(!) was at that
time the digitised voice of Janet Mayo, who works for BBC TV in
Nottingham. Janet has seen this page and, although pleased to be
featured on my site, understandably wanted to know, How on earth have
I become known as Sonia?
!! [0m07s]
1959 tube stock: Clapham North to Kennington in May 1999. A trip down memory lane, on what was then the soon-to-be-scrapped 1959 tube stock. Great atmosphere, with the motor-generator sets providing Kennington ambience of a sort some listeners will certainly recall from the 1990s. [9m49s]
Steam loco “Met 1” passing Turnham Green EB on 8 January 2013. Only a short clip, but included because of its rarity-value. [0m56s]
Mind The Gap
: Peter Lodge at
Waterloo, a recording from November 1998 featuring the famous
announcement voiced by Peter Lodge. More details on my LU General Photos
page. [0m23s]
I am a musician, and am perhaps more inclined than some to recognise and enjoy some of the many sounds to be heard in everyday life. For instance, I find that memories need not just be represented by photographs: sound-recordings can instantly transport a person (whose eyes are closed, for best results!) to the situation where the recording was made. Several of you (mostly from “across the pond” in the USA) have written to me to comment on how my recordings of the London Underground brought memories of a not-so-recent visit to London flooding back to you.
As a young child I used to mess around with a beaten-up (1) Sony Cassette-Corder; at the suggestion of—and with the guidance of— my brother I took it along when my parents went to use a large astronomical telescope on a mountain in California (which, being ancient, made many interesting and distinctive noises) for the last time. Pretty soon I was making various other home-made tapes, including covert recordings entitled Mealtimes with Granny (!) and such-like, which have proved surprisingly entertaining (and revealing!) in their own way, decades later.
One thing led to another, and in late April 1998 I bought a MiniDisc recorder with the specific aim of making better-quality recordings of the “Hastings” DEMU (see the Hastings Diesels Ltd website). My MD-recorder soon got used for recording many other types of sounds (see, for instance, my Concorde page!).
This page was created early on, as a place to share some of my earliest recordings that were made when my new ‘toy’ was indeed new. The sound-clips section is very much in need of overhaul and updating of content, but I hope you will find something there to whet your appetite. There are now a couple of recordings on YouTube which may be more encouraging.
All of these recordings were taken by me using a Sony MZ-R30 MiniDisc player/recorder, on Sony or Maxell 74-minute re-recordable MiniDiscs. For the majority of the recordings, I used a Sony stereo electret active microphone, the ECM-MS907 (which was spuriously and wrongly marketed as being “digital”); I’ve been extremely impressed with the quality of its work, and would heartily recommend it to anyone in spite its fairly high cost. For the first three of the old set of sound-clips, I was using a 1970s passive condenser mic, as my new mic took a long time to arrive (end of May 1998).
MiniDisc technology, into which I bought in 1998/9, was soon supplanted by the iPod, and subsequently made quite redundant by the advent of solid-state recording devices. You just wouldn’t choose nowadays to record—using a quietly-whirring machine!—onto a 74-minute magneto-optical disc (even with excellent jog-protection) in a non-PCM proprietary lossy format! Not when you can record much greater amounts of data silently in PCM format onto internal flash memory or SD card whence it can be transferred straight to other computers.
In spite of the somewhat cumbersome means by which MiniDisc audio is extracted to computer, the quality of the MiniDisc recordings is very high—the YouTube-hosted recordings should demonstrate that. MiniDisc’s ATRAC lossy encoding is not noticeable to me (or perhaps the artefacts just haven’t been pointed out to me yet). The old set of recordings is of greatly reduced quality but this is entirely because of being down-sized very lossily to cater for the low bandwidths available in 1999.
The old set of sound-files originally assembled here was created one afternoon in 1999, and the content hadn’t been seriously worked on since until 2011 (see YouTube section). As the University of Kent’s PCs didn’t carry RealPlayer G2, far less RealEncoder, I used Mike Balsom’s computer (using RealProducer G2); so my thanks goes to him for that. All of the clips were encoded at 32.1kB/s (mono). Bleuuurghhh! I suppose it’s a snapshot of how consumer-grade computers were at the time that the above was considered quite normal…
In the early 2000s, a few people expressed an interest in having me make an audio cassette containing a wider selection of, for instance, Northern Line sounds or DEMU noises; since September 2003 I’ve been promising in principle to create a compilation CD-R or equivalent. Much time has now passed. Please see below for my future plans.
Since creating this page I have recorded many fantastic noises (thunderstorm, DEMUs at East Croydon, Doleham and Ore; Hastings unit on tour; lots of good stuff from the Northern Line; Leyland Leopard coach in preservation; Lend-Lease rail-joints near Chilham in a 4-CIG; to name but a few).
I have also been slowly gathering knowledge, understanding, and (working!) equipment & software to allow me to get on with producing both this section of the website, and the compilation-CD:
In 1999 I purchased a Sony MDS-JE530 MiniDisc deck; in February 2004 I finally had a desktop computer that behaved itself (don’t ask); and in July 2004 I tracked down the (ludicrously expensive! £65 for a wire with a transducer on one end!) Edirol UA-1D optical-to-USB audio hookup lead, allowing me to take the optical output of my MiniDisc deck and feed it into my computer via USB. This helps guarantee that I’m producing the best quality (as there is no Digital-to-Analogue conversion and subsequent re-sampling to Digital). And in November 2006 I got a 250GB HDD to give me space on the desktop computer for the MiniDisc samples. However, still I lacked computing-power and available time/energy.
By 2011, I have no excuses (barring time/energy!): computing-power is amply sufficient (MacBook Pro); I have the Mac-compatible Cakewalk UA-1G USB audio interface (Roland’s successor to the UA-1D); there is well over a Terabyte of external HDD-storage at my disposal; and I use Audacity (the excellent free, open-source, cross-platform sound-editor). The rise to prominence of YouTube as a suitable means of publishing streams of audio/video material resolves issues surrounding bandwidth/quality.
We do now have the first such clips published, see above.
As a useful task to distract myself from my own rampaging thoughts and concerns during the first Covid-19 lockdown, I completed the task of extracting (or re-extracting where necessary) and capturing all audio data and all metadata from my entire MiniDisc collection. That’s actually the hard part done now!
The sound-clips that are already published will be re-published on YouTube at full quality; thus we can all be rid of RealPlayer (hurrah!). Then I’ll publish further material as seems appropriate.
Once the clips are sampled, it’s a relatively minor matter of choosing & editing the clips required to assemble the relevant compilation, though of course it probably won’t be on a CD any more. I remain committed to making progress with this project: it’s still just a question of time. Thanks for bearing with me. It would be churlish at this point to presume that people who asked me 20 years ago for a compilation are still going to be waiting for it, but I will still continue to publish my material via this page as and when I can.
2022 July 18
These old files are in RealAudio format; the free RealPlayer can be downloaded from http://www.real.com/player/.
I’m sorry: I’m well aware that RealPlayer is a ghastly application that few would choose to use. I wouldn’t wish to force listeners to use it but I’m afraid that, just for the time being, this is what there is! But one day soon this should change… I have some plans for the future of this page.
This page is hosted at the SQUAREWHEELS.org.uk server, but the sound-files themselves remain hosted at Angelfire to avoid my having to pay for your bandwidth-usage. Therefore, to select and hear the sounds please go to the sounds media page hosted at Angelfire, where the sound-files are.
Please go to the sounds media page to select and listen to the sound-clips.
(1) – Well, it was once I’d got my grubby little hands on it!
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