Hey folks, in today's episode of Code Club, I want to try something just a little bit different. What I'd like to do is share with you my thought process as I work through a problem that I'm having in data visualization. I want to kind of think about how I want the data to appear, and then I want to figure out how to use R to create that visual. The problem I'm working on relates to a video series that I did back back at the beginning of this year, looking at the effects of rarefaction on alpha and beta diversity metrics. In this figure that I'm showing you is the current status of my figure. I know it has a lot going on. I have 12 different data sets that I'm looking at. There's 12 different colors here. Don't worry, that's not the way it's going to end up. There's four different metrics, right? So there's SOBs, which is the observed richness, Shannon, the Shannon diversity, Bray Curtis distances between pairs of samples, and jacquard, which is another metric of diversity. Bray Curtis uses abundance, jacquard doesn't use abundance. What you're looking at across the x-axis is the number of sequences per sample. These data sets have, I don't know, between like a dozen and 400 different samples, they vary in the number of sequences. And the question I wanted to answer with this figure is if I use different levels of sampling depth to rarefy my data to, what does that do to the metric that I'm measuring, right? So in other words, if I get 10,000 sequences from each of my samples, what would I expect the average richness, diversity, Bray Curtis distance, and jacquard distance between the different samples? And so the mean would be, again, at 10,000 sequences, what is the average Shannon diversity? The coefficient of variation then would be what is the standard deviation between those 490 samples divided by the mean at 10,000 sequences? One of the things that I'm not a fan of with this is that I don't have labels on the y-axis, right? So the y-axis for the left side and the right side are different. The left is the mean, the right is the coefficient of variation. Each row then is a different metric, whether that's richness, Shannon, Bray, or jacquard. And so on the y-axis on the left over here, what I'd like to have would be like some indication that that's the mean of that metric. And then here, for the right side, would be a y-axis indicating that that's the coefficient of variation. That seems a bit busy because I'm going to have effectively the same y-axis for all four rows of this data frame. I don't know that that's so great, right? And so what I want to work through with you are a variety of strategies that I might use to figure this out. One strategy that I might try instead of having it vertical would be to have it be horizontal. The top row being the mean across all of the samples. The second row being the coefficient of variation. And then I have four columns for each of the four different metrics. I might drop the jacquard because it's really not that different than the Bray. If anything, it is a little bit larger value. But the trends are like identical. You have to kind of stare at it closely to see if there's actually a difference between the Bray and the jacquard. So that's what I want to do with you is kind of show you how I would work through a data visualization problem like this, because I think that's really helpful to see someone's insights and how they think through a problem. And so that's what I'm going to be trying to emphasize as I do this. You'll notice that I'm not in our studio. I'm in virtual studio code. On the left side, I have my text files, my code, as well as the PDF version of the figure I'm trying to make. On the right side, then I have my terminal. That's really enough to know for today's episode. So there's a lot going on in this script that really isn't relevant for the purposes of our analysis. Again, what I'm trying to do is think about how we would visualize the data and create the visual. So I'm going to go ahead and load all of this code down to my line 84 here. So we'll see that that makes a data frame called alpha composite, which has the data set, the method, the method being the statistic, the number of sequences, the standard deviation, the number of samples, the statistic, and the value, whether that's the mean or the coefficient of variation. I also have beta composite, which is the same thing, but with the beta diversity metrics like Bray Curtis and Jakard. In my alpha beta, then I go ahead and I bind those rows, those two data frames together, along with a dummy data frame that I made here. Don't worry about that so much. But again, this then combines the two data frames together. And so you'll see that the one with the alpha diversity metrics had 2,596 rows. This had 1648. And then my dummy one had a couple extra rows. And so you'll see that this is the combined of those three data frames. So again, thinking about the code here, you'll see that I bind those two data frames together. I run it into ggplot, we're on the x axis, as you saw, I used and seeks the y axis is the value, again, that being the mean of the metric or the coefficient of variation. I then group those, the data by the data set. So I'm creating a line for each data set. And then each data set gets a different color. And again, I'm making that line with GM wine. And then I'm using facet wrap to, in this case, create a bunch of different facets that are combinations of the different methods and the different statistics. So if I were to take my my bind rows, and then I then did a count on method and statistic, I would see that there's eight different combinations here, right? So there's the observed richness, Shannon, Bray, Jacquard, and then the mean and coefficient of variation for each, as well as the number of observations I have for each. So the numbers for the beta diversity are a bit different than for the alpha diversity. And that's because I'm building this figure before I actually have all the data. A couple of the data sets aren't done processing. But I've got enough of the data sets here that I can kind of push forward, instead of just kind of waiting a few days for those data to be generated. All right, then I go ahead and make my y axis continuous going from zero up to whatever it tells me, this makes it so that the minimum value on my y axis is zero. I have a scale x log 10, because the number of sequences in my different data sets can vary considerably. You know, here we can see it's, you know, a hundredfold, right? And so I'm going to put this on a log scale. And then I'm using markdown along with gg text. And down here, element markdown to stylize this exponential notation to look like 10 to the third, right? And then I've got chord cartesian clip off. I'm not totally sure why I have this. Maybe I'll go ahead and remove that for now. And then I have my x axis label of number of sequences per sample. And on the y axis, I have nothing. Again, that's because I've got different things in the two columns, right? So the left was the mean of the metric, and then the coefficient of the metric coefficient variation of the metric.  Okay. So again, as I showed you, this with facet wrap makes this figure. So I'd like to basically transpose my visual. And so maybe what I'll do is method plus statistic, tilde, and then n call equals four. And I'm getting an error. And I think that's because maybe it wants a period here. Go ahead and try that again. So now what I've got is I've got the first row, and then the second row is up in the upper right, right? So it's basically doing it road wise. I think if I come over and I look at facet wrap, I think there's a way instead of doing it left to right to do top to bottom. And let's see, so there's dirt equals H, I think that's the argument I want. And so direction either horizontal to for the default or V for the vertical, let's go ahead and do dirt in here. equals V. Now that I have these two rows, I kind of like this appearance, because I can easily kind of scan up and down to look at the Shannon and kind of see yeah, that is starting to level off. And that the coefficient of variation is quite low compared to the other metrics. And it's also trailing off. I kind of like this appearance. My labels are messed up, right? So one thing I could do is put my labels to the left. So I could go ahead and do strip dot position equals left. And that should then put my labels on the left side of the window. And so of course, what you see is that it puts all of the labels on the left side, what I'd rather have is just one label over here on that side, and a label across the different columns. So I think this is a challenge that I have because I'm using facet wrap, let's try facet grid instead. So we'll do facet grid. And I'll go ahead and remove that dirt equals V. And for now, let's go ahead and remove that strip position. I also don't need this and call equals four. And I will then go ahead and do met method tilde statistic. And that will put my method, I think in the y axis and the statistic on the x, maybe the opposite, whatever, I will run it. And if it's wrong, I'll flip it. And sure enough, I did need to flip it. So let's go back. Sometimes it's easier for me to debug than to memorize, right? So in a case like that, it's not a big deal. If I don't remember it, sometimes it's just faster to rerun it and then flip it. So now I've got my four metrics across the different columns. And I've got my mean and my coefficient of variation. I do have scales equals free y there. And so the difference between facet grid and facet wrap with scales equals free y is that with facet wrap, it'll change the y axis on each panel separately. Whereas with facet grid, it does, it changes the y for all of the columns in the same row, right? So what we see is that the mean goes up to, you know, 33,000 or something for all four values, even though Bray and Jacquard never gets above like 0.6, right? And so those look like flat lines. So that's not so cool. So it's not such a problem down here for the coefficient of variation, because it's putting them all on the same scale. One of the things that I could do with this is I could move these labels that I have mean and coefficient of variation to the left side of the figure. And I could, I could work with this to make it look pretty attractive. But the problem, again, that I have is that these four metrics, their mean are all on four different scales. So that's not going to work. So I think what I'm going to do instead seems a bit drastic, but I'm going to make eight different figures. And then I'm going to try to use patchwork to pull them all together. Okay, so I'm not totally sold that that's going to work. So I'm not going to delete this just yet. Maybe what I'll do is I'll go ahead and copy this down. So I'll go ahead and comment this out so I can always come back to it later. I know that that works for the last figure that I generated. So I'm going to go ahead and grab this bound rows. And I'm going to call this composite. All right. And again, if I take composite, I will then go ahead and do a filter where I will do method equals equals sobs. And metric or statistic equals equals mean, again, running these two lines, I see that I've got my my method sobs and my statistic mean, that's good. I can go ahead and pipe this into ggplot aesx will be and seeks actually, I'm just going to grab what I had before, because that would be easier. Again, what I'm trying to do is make one plot that I can then replicate a bunch of times, right? And so then I've got and seeks the value of the data set good, geom line. I don't need this facet grid. I'm going to leave that scale y continuous and scale x log 10. Go ahead and get rid of that. Maybe I'll go ahead and comment out the labels. And let's go ahead and leave the theme stuff there. I'll go ahead then and save this as alpha beta. So the alpha beta allows me to save the plot image. And then down here in gg save, I'm going to save alpha beta to that plot. Again, I'm just trying to get a rough idea of what the figure looks like at this point. Good. So this is my plot for richness for the mean. Great. So if I wanted to get the coefficient of variation, I could then change that statistic for mean to cov run this again. And now I've got the coefficient of variation for the richness value. Cool. So we can hopefully see how I could repeat this eight times. But of course, that wouldn't be dry. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this into a function where I will then say plot method statistic function. Maybe I'll call it m and s for the method and statistic. And then in here I can put method equals equals method, statistic equals equals s. I need to wrap all this in curly braces to define the body of the function, right? And so I'll go ahead and bump this over and this back. I also need to pass it the data. So I'm realizing I've got composite here, but I never defined it in the body of the function. So I'll go ahead and call this composite. All right. And I'll go ahead and bring this down. And let's go ahead and load that. And so now what I should be able to do would be like plot method statistic composite. And then again, for my method, I can go ahead and I'll say sobs, and then mean, and let's go ahead and call this alpha beta. And we got right back what we were hoping for. Cool. So I can then maybe instead of alpha beta, I'll call this sobs mean. And I will repeat this a few times. And so I will do sobs COV. And then I'll replace this mean with COV. And I'll make this Shannon. And then I'll replace that with Shannon. And so then in here, I will put Shannon instead of sobs. And then down here, COV, COV. And let me run these four. And I'm going to put the Shannon mean in here. And so now I see I've got the Shannon mean plot. Good. So we're halfway there. Let's keep going. And I will copy this down and add in the break artist and jacquard. And I'll put in the jacquard COV here, run everything. And there's what the jacquard coefficient variation looks like. Cool. So now I've got my eight different panels. And what I'd like to do now is to tie them all together with patchwork. So back up here at the top, I guess I already had patchwork installed or loaded. So I can come back down here. And I will then call this patch. And let me do sobs mean. And again, across the top, I want the means, right? And then I'll do Shannon mean, Bray mean, and I forgot an e here. And then jacquard mean, right? So we'll go ahead and load that. And then we'll put the patch in here. That's what we're going to save. And so it's putting the four plots together, of course. But it's not putting them in one row. And so we can define that here in a minute. But let's go ahead then, and define this as a group in parentheses. I think I can do that. And then I can do divide by, and then in parentheses, again, I'm going to put all this stuff. But instead of the mean, I want the cov. So I'll copy that and just paste it over the rest of these means on that row, and rerun that. Alright, so what it's doing is it's putting the four means at the top, and then it's putting the four coefficient of variation on the bottom. So I forget how patchwork works the syntax for it, I basically have to remind myself how it works every time I go and make figures for a paper. So I'll do our patchwork. And let's do controlling layout. So I'm basically, yeah, I'm looking for how to control the layouts. And so I'll go ahead and scan down here, looking for something that looks like what I want it to look like, right? And I see that I can control the grid by adding plot layout and call equals three, I'll come back to my code here. And I will then do plot layout and call equals four. And so we'll go ahead and rerun this. So these the eight different legends are really getting in the way. I think if I look back over here, I saw something controlling guides. So I'll come down to that. I can see that within plot layout, I can do guides equals collect. So again, if I come back to my code, and then in here with plot layout, I can do guides equals collect. So let's give this another go. For some reason, that's giving me two guides. I'm also getting the means on the left side and the coefficient of variation on the right side. That seems weird, right? So let's come back to here and see if I define something a little off. Maybe what I'll do is go ahead and remove that division and make it basically straight up addition without needing to worry about the division sign. So let's try that. I'm not sure if that'll work, but we can try. So now I've got the four means across the top, and the four coefficients of variation across the bottom row. I still have the two different legends. I think that's because my beta diversity metrics, the brand, the card, I don't have the rice or the stream data sets that I have for the alpha diversity data sets. So I'm not going to worry about that for now, because when I go back and make the final version of the figure, that should all get cleaned up. All right. So what I want to do now is deal with these labels on the x axis and the y axis. And I want the y axis label for the richness mean and the richness coefficient of variation, but I want to remove them from everything else. So when I'll come back in here and I remember I commented out this labs function and uncomment that. And then on x, I'm going to make that null. And I will also make the y axis null. So let's maybe run this and see what it looks like. So now we've gotten rid of the x and y axis labels. Good. Then what I can do is maybe come down here to sob's mean, and then do labs. And then on y, I'll do mean value. And then yep, they'll stay there. And then for coefficient of variation, I'll do labs, y equals coefficient of variation. And that's a percent. And I misspelled this. There you go. Okay, so let's go ahead and run this. It's good. So now I have the mean value and the coefficient of variation. Or maybe I could say mean across samples. Mean value across samples. Okay, good. I'm happy with that. I would like to get a common x axis though. So if I come back to patchwork, let me see if there's anything else in the guides, maybe adding annotation to a patchwork, that could do it, right? So title, subtitles and captions, tags would be for each of the individual plots. More on tags. Looking here. Not really seeing it. Maybe what I could do is to trick it and do a plot annotation of a caption. So the caption goes at the bottom. So let's try that. So I'll come back over here. And then I can then do plot annotation. And then instead of title, I'll do caption. And then I'll do number of sequences sampled. Like that. I know that the theming is going to be wrong, but we'll roll with this for now. Good. So now I've got number of sequences sampled in the lower right corner. I want to add some theming, right? And so what we can then do is add to plot annotation. As we saw back here, the theme argument, and I'll plop that in there and I probably have too many. Nope, I think I got the right number of parentheses. So theme plot caption equals and we'll do yeah, size equals 18. I'm not sure how big that is, but we'll we'll get the size and then I'll adjust accordingly. And I'll do H just equals 0.5. That'll be center justified. Go ahead and run that. So that looks pretty good. It's centered on the whole figure, rather than centered on the plot, though. So maybe I want to try to bump it over a little bit. So if we do like 0.3, I wonder what that'll get me. So that's maybe a little bit too far to the left. So let's maybe bring it over a bit. So let's do 0.4. That looks good. I like that. Maybe make it a little bit smaller. Instead of 18, let's maybe go down to 14 and give that a shot. I think that looks like a good size. One other thing that I'm noticing is that the aspect ratio of the individual panels is off. It's still set up for my vertical dimension of the figure. So let's go ahead and change the output. So I have width of 7, height of 8. Let's go ahead and maybe make that 5. So I think that looks better. Again, these legends are still kind of messing me up. I'm not going to worry about them so much. But I would like to put a title across the four different columns. And so maybe I could do that with the title function for each of the individual plots, right? And so what we could do up here then, where I added labs for the SOBS or the observed richness, I could go ahead and put in title equals richness. And then I could, I'm going to skip the coefficient of variation. But then for Shannon, I'll go ahead and do labs, title equals Shannon. All right. And then down here for the Bray Curtis, I'll do labs, title equals Bray Curtis. And then for the jacquard, I'll add that labs, title equals jacquard. All right, so let's run this and see what it looks like. Because it's really a title, the font is pretty big. It's also left justified and I misspelled Shannon. So let me fix that first. So get rid of that extra O. I can change the theming for one element across all the plots. I think I saw that down here, right? So with this ampersand, I can add theme element text mono to all of the plots, right? So I will then do that down here. All right. Again, I don't have everything memorized, right? I use the documentation that I can find. And I find things that look like what I want to do, and then bring it over and adjust, right? Again, that's the whole idea of Riffamonus is that we can take ideas that other people had other solutions that people have had found, and then adapt it to my purposes, right? So then I can do plot.title element text. Let's do size equals 14. That sounds good. So I think that made it bigger. Let's go down to size equals 10. So it looks better. Maybe I'll make it bold and centered now. And so we'll do face equals bold, h just equals 0.5. I think this looks pretty good. I'm not totally liking the kind of longer nature of each of the panels. I could, again, reduce the height a little bit. I could also get rid of the jacquard. And I'm kind of inclined to do that, because the jacquard just doesn't look that much different than the Bray Curtis. And getting rid of the jacquard would, I think, help to clean up the appearance a bit more. So I could do that up here with commenting out jacquard, right? So comment that out. And then I'll go ahead and remove jacquard cov here and jacquard mean there.  So let's go ahead and run all this. So I think that does look a little bit cleaner. I don't really need that extra jacquard column. Maybe what I'll do is go ahead and make this mean value across samples be two lines. Let's see, where did I do that? So mean value across samples here, I can go ahead and put in a backslash and there, go ahead and rerun this. And maybe I'll do the same thing with coefficient of variation, have that go over two lines with again, another backslash and so I think that looks pretty good. There's a bit more that I need to do with this figure in terms of the legend, as I already mentioned, also the different colors. This has gone on long enough for today's episode. Hopefully, again, you get a sense of the evolution of this figure and how I tried to use things like facet and wrap facet grid, but ultimately wasn't able to really do what I wanted to do with those. And so instead, pursued this approach with patchwork. Hopefully, nobody comes along and says, Hey, Pat, there was this really simple argument you could have used with one of those facet functions to do the same thing. But I think this looks pretty good. And I'm happy with the way this looks. Of course, like I said, once I get in the rice and the stream data, these two legends will collapse down to one. And I think that'll look pretty good. And if you want to see the final version of this figure, well, you'll just have to look for that preprint to be published or posted later in the summer. So anyway, I'm really happy with this. Let me know what you think of this format of episode. It's a bit different than what I've done in the past. Again, showing you real data visualization that I'm working with for my own personal research, and helping you to see my thought process and the types of questions that I'm trying to consider. And I've got ideas in my head that I then need to translate to code to then get the visual to look like I want it to look. So let me know what you think, again, of this type of episode. And I'm sure there's more tweaking I'll do to this figure. But anyway, let me know what you think. And we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.


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If you've watched any of my video series before, you know that I don't like to stick around and begin or land very long. I like to dive headfirst into the complex stuff because, well, I generally think that people that watch these videos are usually pretty smart to begin with. This series is going to be no different. We're going to dive headfirst into what's called model view programming or specifically the model view controller design pattern. MVC is very complex and I am not even going to joke with you. This is something that experts have a hard time wrapping their head around. We're going to introduce this in the beginner series and we're going to continue this on in the intermediate and advanced series as well. So first off, what is an MVC design pattern and why do you need it? Well, it's a model view controller and it's deceptively simple. You have a model which represents the data but isn't actually the data. You have a view which is what's displayed to the end user and a controller which controls the interaction between the two. Sounds simple and introduce this graphic. Now suddenly we're confused. So you have a model which represents the data but is not the data. You have a view and wait, there's no controller. Isn't this MVC? Well, there's a delegate. So cute way of doing this is they call it a delegate which acts as a controller. So you have the model chit-chats with the back-end data that coordinates with this delegate or this controller who also coordinates with the view. But the view can also pull straight from the model. Sounds confusing, doesn't it? Well, it's because it is. This is a very complex topic. Think of it this way. If you just want to view raw data, you can just pull straight out of the model. If you want to do some sort of custom rendering or editing, you've got to go through the delegate or the controller. I don't really like this graphic because it's hard to understand. So we're going to flip over to Google and you can see here's that same graphic. But here's what I would consider almost a better way of understanding. So we have the model, the view, and then this controller which kind of connects or acts as a bridge between the two. You can see how we've got updates and things like that. So it actually starts over here. I almost wish it was flipped where there's a user action. It goes to the controller. The controller says, do something. Model notifies the controller. The controller comes back and says, update the view. Here's an even better graphic. User says, hey, controller, I'm making a request. Give me all your cats. Controller says, well, I don't actually have the data that's in the model. So model, give me all cats. Model will return some sort of representation. The controller says, well, it's not my job to show you. That's actually the view. The view says, oh, I know how to show this and sends the response back. Actually, this web page that we're looking at here is a perfect example of this pattern. You're looking at the view, this guy right here. The controller is probably some source code on a server somewhere and the model is probably a giant database. There are vastly more complex ways of looking at this. And depending on what graphic you want to look at, everybody's kind of got their own way of really talking about this. And it gets really, really complex. Stack Overflow has a really good conversation called, what is the difference between an MVP and an MVC? This is another thing that people get drastically confused. So we're talking about an MVC, but there's also concept of an MVP. And no, I'm not talking about most valued player. So MVP is a model view presenter. In an MVP, the presenter contains the user interface business logic of the view. What? That makes very little sense because we're supposed to separate the business logic and the view. But that type of model actually exists and a lot of people use it and don't even understand what it is. Where an MVC, well, the controller is responsible for determining the view, not the user interface. So scroll down and this graphic is just beautiful because it shows you that you can have multiple views, multiple models, a single controller or multiple controllers, and MVP is very different. You have views, views go to the view interface, which go to the presenter, which go to the model. So kind of think of this layer right here as the controller and MVP. Just understand that there's two different models and they can get very, very complex. Back to Qtland. Qt comes baked in with some already existing models. For example, a string list model. Remember the model is not the data. String list model so you can actually present strings. Standard item, which basically you can do complex structures and you can do just about anything with this. Q file system, which takes that standard item model and basically makes a model around your file system. And then the Q SQL query, SQL table and SQL relational table. These are all highly complex things, but basically that talks to it back in database. We will not be covering that in this series because it's so complex. Now there's also an abstract table model and item model and list model. So if these don't suit your needs, you can actually build your own right from scratch. You have views, delegates, sorting, convenience classes and so on and it gets really, really complex. I know I keep saying that, but don't underestimate how powerful and yet complex this really is. For example, here's the same data represented in two different views. You have your file system, you have like a details view and then just a simple view. Same data, different views. Qt handles all that under the hood. Now the basic concepts here is you'll have different types of models. You'll have a list model, a table model and a tree model. The list will just have a root with children. Table will have a root with rows and columns.  And you can actually kind of to some degree mix and match these. It gets kind of nuts. Qt, their official documentation does probably the best job of anybody I've ever seen that really tries to explain this. But honestly, you're not going to get it to start working with it. And to make things even more complex, the view itself has sub items. You've got to really understand, for example, roles like a display role, a decoration role, a tool tip role. It just gets insane. So take some time, dive into the documentation and just kind of see how they do things and how things in the Qt world are set up and just how complex things can become. But we are going to have some very realistic examples here. I want you to be intimately familiar that a couple of the core concepts right off the bat and I'm just kind of scrolling through to show you just how long and I'm going to speed up. That's a humongous amount of information to go through. But we're going to cover a lot of the core concepts here. They do have some really good examples. Unfortunately, they come with very limited documentation. And it's kind of up to you to read and digest everything that I just scrolled through. And if you don't really understand that, you're left scratching your head. So we're going to break this down into simple understandable chunks. And we're going to really explain how the model is not the data. The view displays the view to the end user. And the controller is this in the Qt world, almost this magical thing that you just interact with and it generates the information for you. I hope you enjoyed this video. It's part of a larger project out of you to me called Qt Widgets for Beginners with C++. This is a large course with 73 lectures and 17 hours of video footage. This course covers everything from what is a widget all the way down to complete example applications using the skills you've learned in this course. Sorry, there's no QML in this course. This is strictly Qt Widgets. I will make a QML course later on, but this just focus on widgets from a beginner's perspective. Even though this is a beginner's course, you do need to have some fundamental information available. You need to know C++ and the Qt Core Libs. I do have some courses available out on Udemy, Qt Core Beginners Intermediate Advance. It's not necessary you take these courses, but it is highly recommended. And as always, I'm available out on the Voidrom's Facebook group along with 3,000 other programmers. See you there.


I seem to hear sweet nature's music and the songs of man. For I have learned from fancy's artisan how written words can throw the inner ear, trust as they move the heart. And so for me, words also seem to ring out loud and free. In silent study, I have learned to tell each sacred shade of meaning and to hear a magic harmony at once sincere that somehow notes the tinkle of a bow, the cluing of a dove of lead, put a powder on the eave, the love of sigh and drumming of guitar, and if I fool the raffle of a star. That's him. But his interest in poetry is for the visual or the idea rather than the sounds. There's no sound involved there. Purely picture and idea. Well, 20th century poetry is mostly picture and idea. So modern poetry, especially after Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the imagist poets, should be the best or is almost specifically tailored for those who are deaf. Pound pointed out that poetry had three different aspects for him. One was sound, melopia, that one was the dance of the intellect among the words, the wittiness or the sophistication or the strangeness of funny words being put together like the phrase Nazi milk. But the other was the pure picture aspect. The third was the pure picture aspect, the casting of a picture on the mind's eye. Ever since their work, the reason we've gone into a lot of free verse, different from the kind that Bob likes, has been the emphasis on the picture aspect. And especially in the 20th century, there has been a lot of translation from many languages into English and from English into many languages. And the poetry that translates the best is the poetry that has pictures in it. It does not depend on the sound. It doesn't depend on the rhymes, but just depends on the pure picture. So there's been more and more of a tendency to develop an international poetry style, which is free verse that is open verse that doesn't have a recurrent mirror and doesn't have a recurrent rhyme, but has harder and harder, clearer and clearer pictures. Who sat all night in submarine light of Bickford's cafeteria, flooded out on the street, and sat through this dale beer afternoon in desolate beer bars, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox. So what is a hydrogen jukebox in sign language? A hydrogen jukebox. Of course, that refers to a sound thing, the jukebox anyway, is that a jukebox is a mechanical record machine in the bars. Just stand up for why would you say we're hydrogen? Oh, the hydrogen, the hydrogen bomb. The noise of the jukebox is apocalyptic. So the emergence of that kind of rock and roll and that kind of heavy noise is almost like the beginning of the explosion of the end of the world. Hydrogen jukebox. But it does depend on, it's a very abstract one. It's two concrete things. There's a jukebox, and then there's hydrogen. Hydrogen is real and a jukebox is real. And when you put them together, it makes an unusual kind of jukebox. Yes, but if I had to sign without thinking of the English words, I would make some kind of compound. There'd be several signs that you could use to explain the picture that I might get from those two words. But what I'm wondering is once it is explained, does any kind of interesting sparkle come through with that combination? Or does that go dead in translation? At least in translation. Let me try. I don't know if it's what you want. That looks like it. That looks like it. That looks like it.


So first of all, let me show you a thing called using cursor pro. There's loads of things like this.  Again, for doing demos like this, just to help people follow through so they don't lose your mouse in low resolution screen share. So I'm not going to go too deep into cursor pro. If you do presenters presentations in time to time, or maybe you're working with someone who's had limited vision, an app like this can be very helpful. Because it also, of course, really helps people find and track through their own mouse as well.


News Update. Hi everyone, Basel Trapper here for the 11 o'clock Tiger Financial News Network Market Update. That was done up 345 at 34756, attempting to break this inside-track resistance area. Wow, if we could start to trade in the 34850s, that would be fabulous in the high today, so far 34840, and these 100 points move to the upside, let's see what happens. We're looking at the S&P, also doing very nicely, but nothing like the Dow, that's struggling to get away from the Georgia period. Moving areas is up 51, at 4442, it needs, really, it needs the 4555, I'd say even the 4558 area to say, oh, free from that, now I can move even higher, QQQs, 1, 2, 3, QQQs doing very nicely up 523, 343.93, and what we're looking at here is, and I'll put this together with the ARKK, which is the ARK Innovation Fund, see it's got a nice move up today, but the weekly chart is still very poor, so let's see, go back to the QQQ and try to compare it, because there are a lot of stocks in the ARK that are obviously QQQ stocks, and you can see that it's really important to get a move at 343, not good enough, you need to see a weekly close, about 351, 352 to say, aha, trying to get back to the recent high, and you definitely don't want to break below 335, looking at the IWM, the Russell 2000, a good move up, it's stuck in a range, gold is the one that we're watching right now, because the commodities are having a bit of a pullback, gold is down 28, in 1957, Crude Oil is down 5, well, now it's down 4.25, at 103.33, just stuck in a range, it's the TLT, I spent some time on in my show, the Tiger Traditions are, right here at 119.13 with a candle, hopefully a doji candle, with a gap up tomorrow, finally we can get, remember the pattern we looked at yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, AV, this is the pattern that I'm thinking we'll get, is a move up above the channel, then into the channel, a balance, and then maybe come out of the channel to the downside, will the TBT do that? That's the big question, right now I think, it's just at a point that says it could pull back, maybe do a retesting of the highs, but this is a key moment for the yields, we'll see what happens. I'm going to hand you over to Larry Persevento, wonderful show as always I'm sure, coming up, and technical analysis throughout the day, and of course you've got Thinker Swim, you've got Steve Rose, you've got Dave White, and then Tom O'Brien, I'll be back with Tom later on today, have a wonderful day, see you tomorrow Tuesday, Wednesday.


Hey everybody, welcome back today to RetroTech. I have a familiar PVM and that's a Sony PVM14 M2 that we'll be covering in today's video. Now this video is going to go and cover all the way from when you may get this PVM for the first time. Let's say you buy it or you come into a chance to maybe get one and you want to take a look at the PVM ahead of time or maybe you got a great deal on one and you wanted to see what it might need for refurbishment, if anything. Well today's video is going to be really good for that. It's a long video and I've broken it down into segments. So if you want to come back or if there's something in particular you are looking for, definitely check the description of the video because I have time marked each specific chapter because I'm going to go through everything in this video today. We're going to start with kind of the first initial unboxing a little bit of the monitor. Now I'm not going to actually show you an unboxing portion in this video. What I will do is in the introduction here, I'll show you some pictures while I'm talking because this was one of the worst packed jobs that I've seen probably in the last six months where a monitor has not been destroyed. The box was all disintegrated up. There was very little actual bubble packaging and the seller actually used a lot of just really cheap paper to wrap the PVM around and around and around and somehow it survived that trip even though the box pretty much blew up into three or four pieces right after I moved it off my porch inside and so once I got it out of the box, I went through and I did some initial checks on it. You'll see those. You'll see what it looks like before I do any kind of adjustments. You know, I did some convergence checks on it so you can see what it looks like through a professional convergence tool that I used on here to check that out. I've also gone through and I've done some recommended upgrades and maintenance from Sony where they have had actually a fault designed in this PVM unintentionally, but there is a fault in there with the red, green and blue line and the vertical blanking and you'll see more of that in the video to come. And then also we're going to get and clean it thoroughly, calibrate it for geometry, do one final screen check, and then I've actually got some physical body work that I'm going to be doing on the shell too. So just a full packed video. So if you really enjoy PVMs, you could stare out and just watch the restoration or if you're thinking about getting a PVM, this might be a good video for you. Just note that this model is one of the more common PVMs there are and most of the PVMs that you find, a good majority of them, 75% of them will be nearly the same kind of build out as today's 14M2 and also just because something is a 20 inch monitor, it's just pretty much a little bit larger size scaled version of the 14 inch monitor. All the parts internally are nearly the same and it's always the same process. So if you have a slightly different monitor than the PVM 14M2, you still may be able to be, or you still might be able to learn something that may be valuable to you when keeping your PVM up to date and servicing it routinely. So without any more introduction today, let's go ahead now and switch over. We're going to look at the 14M2U and today's repair video. All right, here we've got the Sony PVM unpacked and powered on. I've let it warm up a little bit. So obviously it arrived fine, even though the packing was really subpar in my opinion. And just to show you some of the outside exterior before we really get into the internal hardware servicing, you want to take a quick look at some of the buttons on the configuration down here and besides just your power on button and a lot of your knobs that you have on your M2 model, which are quick adjustments. You can use a lot of these adjustments. Just remember that some of them are not used in RGB mode, but in most other video input modes, they will be usable. Now if I move on to this other area of the button board down here, this is an important area where you will make other adjustments or change input settings to whichever video input you need. And then you can do combination things or change immediate settings like under scan, 16 by 9 mode on the screen. There's also a degauss button that when you press it, it's supposed to help degauss the tube in case any magnetism has affected your picture quality. And then you've got a mesh area over here, which has your mono speaker housed behind it. So this actual monitor itself is in pretty good shape. There is a little bit of minor scuffing and scratching up here to the top area of the bezel and thankfully all the parts as far as buttons and the U-bolts did not get damaged at all in the shipping and packing process. Now there is something on the side here that was in the listing. If we look at the side of the PVM, we have a small ding or dent on the grate where something has hit the side of the shell. Now it's not impacted the PVM's performance in any way, but I told the owner that I would just take a hammer and kind of flatten that out. So we'll do that on this shell. We'll also clean the entire shell off because there is some grime and what appears to be leftover adhesive, some minor scratching along it. And then if we look at this side, it actually looks rather clean, no dings or anything, just needs a little bit of cleaning. And then the backside has that has quite a few scuffs that are going to be more visible and will not be really able to get rid of them, but we will clean it still and then we'll come back and reassemble all this after we do our full servicing, but that's just a look at the outside of the shell. So we're going to look at the 240p test suite now and see if we can pull up some geometry settings that we could see what we're starting with on a screen. What I'm initially going to do here is pull up test patterns so we can see our starting point on this monitor. I'll start with our color bars and you can turn your brightness up. And what you're really trying to see is if your tube does produce this three line gray pattern in here, it should on a 600 line tube.  So that's why you want to pull this up and you can check to see that that is on there. And then the way you're supposed to calibrate this is to have it where that is just barely visible on the screen at all. Barely visible, kind of like that on your screen where you barely see those three blocks, rectangles within the square The next pattern we're going to look at is our grid for our geometry. The first one available 256 by 224. And from initial looks, we're not in bad shape, but what we need to do is decrease or get our vertical centerness down some. And then our pen cushion settings are actually pretty good, but we also need to do a horizontal adjustment. I'm doing a visible check here for linearity, but not just linearity. Also convergence and the linearity pattern is really good about showing any convergence problems that you may have in each corner because you'll see color separation where your whites might show red, blue, generally speaking, you'll see it on one side or the other. Let's do a proper check of the convergence real quick. And I've got this Klein convergence tool. Now, maybe there's some kind of lens you can use on your phone to do this. But what I've got is an actual old tool made by Klein that we'll go in here and actually check the convergence if you just softly place it against the screen. And if we actually look inside here, and so if you try to focus on the beam, which is inside the lens that you're looking into, you can see where the blue it's got three lenses in there. And it just separates the white out into only allowing the blue on the right side, the green in the center. And then ultimately the red on the right, which I'm not able to pick up. There's the red on the right. And what you're looking for is beam uniformity. So you want to make sure that vertically, each one of those colors is pretty uniform in that way. You've got nice convergence for all three colors into a single beam for white and it really can sharpen up your picture, especially in the corners. One of the other good things to check out is a scroll test. So there is a regular scroll test that is quite popular. That is the Sonic background. And you could just use that to make sure that as your screen displays a good 240p image and it goes across the screen that you don't have any tearing or warping due to a linearity problem, which again, I have not seen any kind of linearity problem really on this tube. So that's again, really good sign that it's probably low hours. So now that we've got a good overview of what's going on mechanically with this, the rest of the checks are going to require me to remove the shell, but that's OK because I need to clean it up. And there are some components that I'm going to pull from the circuit board inside here that are recommended by Sony. And it's very important to maybe either check these two components or just go ahead and be prepared to replace them. We're quite cheap, so we're going to go ahead now, but we've got to, again, get the shell off to move any further in this check. Now that the screws are removed, we can slide the shell back. Get out of the way. This is the first inspection back here. So I want you to just take a look at the footage here of the inside of the monitor. You'll be able to see a lot of just dust built up on some components and over time that does happen. And what that can do is it can stack up on some of these components that are actually generating heat and then that dust will act as an insulation on top of these components. And so it traps the heat internally in the component. And then that causes the temperature to go up and ultimately can cause things like electrolytic capacitors to fail or wear out quicker than they should. Now, this is not a lot of dust, but it's a good example of one that has never been probably serviced or looked at inside before. Before I get into the full disassembly of this, I want to show you another test I'd like to perform on the power supply, which is over here on the other side. Again, here's the power supply. The first thing I'm going to do is remove the two screws. So let's lift up a little bit and go ahead and lean this power supply over and to relieve some pressure. You're doing that and releasing these cable holds to give a little bit more space here. Same thing over here and then all along this back shielding. And then I'm going to simply disconnect the top portion up here. This plug cable from its connector. All right, so let's have a little discussion here about the power supply. This power supply works like this. You feed your AC current into the back of the PVM where you install your standard power cable right here next to your input board. And that power then goes directly into this power supply. And then the power supply converts that into the usable power for the PVM. Now, what's going on up here where we're leaving it connected. We're leaving just the degausing cable and the actual power switch, which this feeds over straight into the power switch on the front of the PVM so that when we press that power button, it tells the power supply to turn on. Now, normally how this functions is that power is generated and then properly the current is tuned. And then it sent out this connection where it goes into the main board and then it's sent around into all the other processes it goes through to give you a picture on the screen. I'll show you the connector here, but you're looking at from the far right hand side over here next to this little electrolytic capacitor. You've got a isolated pin that's for five volts. Next to that, you've got a 15 volt negative pin. And then we've got a ground pin right here, kind of in the center. Next to that is 115 volts, another ground pin, and then a positive or just regular 15 volt. 15 volts, obviously our higher voltage and then the five voltage is our lower voltage, but that's going to be DC current. So what we can do is we can get a multimeter and test the DC voltage as we turn the power supply on by plugging it in. And so let's go ahead and do that real quick and do this correctly. First off, we'll check the very first rail. And that is five volts should be DC. So we're going to go red to that pin. And then I like to use this ground right here. And if you look at my meter, it says right at 5.00 volts DC current. So that's perfect. OK, let's check our positive 15 volts. And that's good. That's right at 15 and a half. That's definitely within tolerance. So I've gone ahead and powered it back off. And before I go and do any more testing, I'm just going to reconnect. Again, it is turned off. I'm going to reconnect this to the main monitor. And we'll see. Make sure that screen still functions properly after our testing. Let's power it. Then we still got our screen power up. And we'll just check our menus real quick. There are menus there. Everything's fine. So now we're going to jump into the servicing of the rest of the monitor, which means we'll tear it apart and service the main board. The last thing I need to do before I remove is to discharge the tube. Now, please note that this can be a dangerous process. Now, on this Sony PBM, there's actually fail safes involved. So it's supposed to dissipate all the current even before you discharge it. But that doesn't always work. It doesn't always happen. The way I'm discharging it right now is according to the Sony manual. And the reason they ask you to do it like this without the tool to start with is to prevent damage to your anode cap and your anode cap here. And the point where your tube is on the back of your seat will scratch it with your probe or whatever tool you're going to use to discharge. Now, it's not discharged yet. So what we're going to do is we're going to tap those two prongs under this anode cap against the frame. Make sure you're not touching the metal frame. And if you hear a zap or anything, that means you're discharged. If you hear nothing, that means it's already been discharged, most likely. And the current was out before you even took it apart. So that's just how Sony says to discharge it. And then if you're concerned, you can come in with your discharge tool and discharge that point against your frame also and just make a current path and honestly, if you've got a screwdriver that you could do it with, you could even do it like that and bridge those two points. We're not really doing anything to the back of the anode here, except cleaning around it, so we don't need to worry about that as much. But that's how Sony asks the technicians to discharge a tube. Now we can take a closer look at this board. And also with it completely torn apart like this, it would be easier to clean and get a lot of that build up dust, especially off this area. And then off the boards individually. So here are the three secondary boards that are inside the monitor. First off down here, we have our seaboard, which is our neck board. And the most important thing we're going to do here is pretty much just clean this, just a little bit of dusting. And what you can check on here is for cold solder joints. It doesn't always happen, but it is possible. Most common areas that might develop those are going to be around these little regulators here. And the only reason I mention that is because the temperature can get higher in this area than other areas on this board. And then you can always check around your actual connection points. You're going into your tube. But for the most part, this board looks very clean and definitely no signs of any kind of damage or even real signs of overheating. Sometimes when you get these boards out, you'll see a lot of discoloration on some areas, like I said, especially around these heat sinks and then these larger resistors right here. They'll generate so much heat that you'll get burns on the circuit board. So just note that that does typically happen. So that's a good sign that there aren't a huge amount of hours in or on this monitor and it just needs to be a little bit clean. The next board we'll look at real quickly is our input board, which just pops out. And this is pretty standard stuff for all the M2 series. This board really does never or doesn't really ever have any troubles in it. And I've never had to service this particular board for any reason. There's not a lot of heat generated at all on this board. And so, thankfully, it's a pretty easy one to just clean and move on from. And then this is the power supply. Now there is shielding in place. So we'll need to remove the shielding to accurately look inside here and then clean it properly. But it's pretty much the same power supply for this M series. It'll be the same for the M2 or the M4. And it could also be one of the medical units. So, for example, the MDUs or even the Olympus PVMs all use the same power supply for the most part. And sometimes there are slight variations of the build out on the power supply. However, at the end of the day, it's still designed to put out that specific voltage out of this output. So if it's compatible and it's outputting the proper voltage, even if the build out is slightly different on yours than this one, it's still probably safe to use on your monitor. Now, I've discussed a lot with Savon Pat about the capacitors in here. And he tells me that this power supply was so well designed that the capacitors do not tend to fail. And I've not had many where they have actually failed. I don't know on this specific monitor. But if you don't have a power, you know, you can do the test we did. And if you have some kind of power issue, you can either come back and check the caps on each line. You know, that'll be in the service manual. Or what more often than not happens that Pat told me is any of these ICs on this board can short out and go bad. And you can see on this board, there's just loads of ICs, almost as many, half as many ICs as there are capacitors. And the problem is those are very difficult to get replacement parts for on these, a lot of them you have to outsource and look to eBay. And it's like $15 per chip. Anyway, that's this power supply. It just needs to be clean. And then we can move on to the larger and more important main chassis. All right. So here's the first look at our main board and, you know, you could go crazy and recap this entire board. But 99 percent of the time, that is not going to be beneficial, really. Not an entire recap, unless there's an issue that you just can't figure out. You want to recap it because there's a lot of little spots in here. And it's difficult to recap this without ultimately, you know, if you don't have a lot of experience, you could damage a trace on something and render your monitor useless. But the most important capacitors on something like this, where it's still functioning, yet needs to be kind of checked on preventive maintenance are some caps over in this area. Next to this heat sink, I've done a video in the past where these specific caps control vertical blanking and could cause the red, green and blue lines to drift into your screen. And that's actually a design flaw by Sony on the capacitors that came in this chassis standard. Now, it doesn't always fail, but it's definitely something that came out in a service bulletin and that we need to make sure that we service and, you know, preventively maintain this by changing at least those two capacitors. This is our flyback transformer over here. So that's an important part. And then let's see some other important parts. This is our hot is what they like to call it. And it's just our horizontal out. Trans transformer, I think, or anyway, that's called the hot right there that I see the capacitors. I'll show you which ones exactly we're going to remove. It's actually this capacitor right here and this one right next to it on the other side of the heat sink. That's capacitors five, seven, two and five, eight, four. Let's go ahead and do that just by. Here's those two capacitors. Five eighty four is originally a one micro farad one 60 volt. And the next one is a one sixty four point seven micro farad. So let's let's see what we're going to use to replace these two. And we'll also test and see what the micro farad readings are on these two capacitors. All right, here's my replacement caps. First off, they are both 105 C or Celsius temperature rated, which is important. Now, the first one that is the 160 volt slash four point seven micro farad. I'm going to increase that to a 10 micro farad. I'm going to maintain the 160 volts, but I'm going to go up on the micro farad on there, and that is acceptable according to the Sony service bulletin. I'm sorry that I don't have that service bulletin available. I just remember that from another video I made. And if you want to see those videos, I'll link to them in the description here. And then I'm going to upgrade this second cap that was in C 572, which is a 160 micro farad by or 160 volt, excuse me, by one micro farad. And I'm going to increase that to 250 volt and one micro farad. These are Nishikon caps, high performance. Just look at how much size this capacitor is compared to that. And this one's supposed to be higher quality, better rated and just look how much a lot of it like different in size. This one's pretty similar. It's just obviously been shortened a lot. So that's, that's actually encouraging. But that one's a lot smaller than the one that's come out. So we'll do that. Let's also test these capacitors to see what they look like. We installed now. Let's go ahead now and hook up this first capacitor, which is just one micro farad. I've calibrated my prongs. Should be able to put that in there. Nano farads. Let's go and do frequency 120 Hertz. So when you look in here, 983 nano farads, I believe that should mean that's like 0.983 micro farads. So that's actually within tolerance. Let's check the other one. This one should be 4.7. So we've got 3.6, 4.7 to 3.6. So this one is wearing down. We're definitely past 20 to 25 percent on our cap. So this is this cap right here, which is the one. What was the one on the inside 4.7? It's actually starting to go down and fail. So, you know, it could have been another year. It could have been another month. It could have been another three years. But eventually this would get to a point where it would probably wear down even more. And at that point, it would show the red, green and blue lines on the screen and you'd overcorrect. And eventually this would just pass or fail. And then, you know, it could cause more trouble down the line. I'm just plugging in my AC power right now. All right, everything looks normal on here as the menu is filled up. Now we're going to need to get in here and calibrate. Before I do that, I want to show you on this blank screen how to get into the submenu. Start from your main screen here, press menu.  And it pulls up your submenu. And to move through submenu, you just use the menu and the enter button to go up and down. And you can see here, for example, this is our vertical center. Here's our setting. It's number seven. You can go up and down on that, but we'll do that while we're calibrating. And what we're going to do today is we're going to really be concentrating on settings number 17 and down. 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, number 5. And that should be just about it for the ones we're concerned with. You're making an adjustment to the number by pressing either up or down. Just some tips. This little indicator, it will show what the current setting that is saved is. So right now it's saved at 15. If I go to 10 or 11 and I'm playing with it, I can't remember what it was. Well, as I scroll through back and up and down, it will tell me by putting that marker there. Another thing is this will not save the settings or any changes I do until I press D-Gauss once and it says right. And then I got a press D-Gauss again and it will say right again and you will get that little asterisk that must show. And that means you have written the changes in the settings to the menu and now from now on it will power on, it will start up. Now, if you get in here and again, you don't remember what your setting is or you don't like your setting and you want to reset. You can always power the monitor off and then power it back on and none of your settings will be saved. It will go back to the last default save.  But just to be safe, you can always just power it off and then power it back on. Alright, so we're going to go ahead and start now calibrating the screen for geometry. The color looks good enough, at least to the eye, so that you can use the built-in color palettes. There are multiple different color temperatures. Another thing you'll want to consider is not to close your PVM up or put the shell back on until after you finish your calibration. Because if you have an issue where you have a screen tilt or any kind of convergence that you're going to want to correct, you'll have to do that from behind the monitor. Even if you power it off, make the adjustment, and then power it on to see how it went, you'll still have to do all that from the backside of the monitor with the shell off. And then if you have the rest of that set, though, and you're very confident already in the screen tilt and the convergence, then you can put your shell on and calibrate after that. And that's just going to affect the horizontal and vertical geometry and then the corners and sides and the linearity. It's a little easier to see from the inside if you can see how it's bump and bezeled out.  And I'm going to put a second shirt, fold it over, kind of rag, and put that in between the hammer and the metal. In a way, I don't directly hit it with the hammer and causing it to hit the metal. It was pretty large, that divot originally, and it affected this whole area, and that center point was just pushed in pretty far. Pretty minor at this point, and I don't know that me really using the hammer on it will help it any. It does kind of move a little bit, so if you had some more malleable tools, you might... I want to secure this neck board right here in a place with putting this product right here, black RTV silicone, and it's not going to take much.  Yet it will maintain a good bond there and hold that neck board in place on the CRT itself like it did before from the factory. This can also be used to secure things up around the deflection yoke too if you need to put in, say, a convergent strip or a magnet or something. If you need to add anything, you can add this to the back of the tube, it won't hurt it. And it's definitely better than using a tape or any other kind of adhesive that could permanently bond. The last thing to do is to put the shell back on. You always want to check your screen after you put the shell on. Sometimes you'll have some weird interference that you may not have been able to see before you had the shell while it was still off. Let's test another game out and see how it looks. So at the end of the day, this is a pretty nice PVM. It's been checked out. I feel confident that you should be able to get plenty of years of usage off it, especially for retro gaming. And what I mean by that is you should easily get 3,000 hours of usage on this without any real need for another adjustment. Thanks again for watching today. I am Steve with Retro Tech. I sincerely appreciate all your questions and comments. So please leave those below and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.


Well, it wasn't a clear plan, and to be honest, I didn't even finish school at that time. I was interested in light and sound equipment as a hobby, and basically, if you file it a business, then you can get the equipment at a dealer price. So basically, I filed it as a business to get a better price on my speakers and light equipment. So that was the reason. Very simple. I would say that was a pretty important milestone. I would say the Artist Intercom system has really brought us into the international business. Before that, I've done a little bit of export, but really Artist Intercom has put us on the map in the industry, and we got into countries, well, I was never visiting before. You know, Formula One even happened before the Artist system, to be honest. I was in Lillehammer at the Olympics, and I did a radio interview with Radio Wuppertal, a very small private radio station at that time, and of course, I was extremely proud to be at the Olympics. So I was telling that, and we did the radio and some intercom that was not Artist at that time. It was basically the very first matrix intercom I developed, and while I'm talking on the radio, someone involved in Formula One passed the Autobahn here and basically listened to that radio, and he just felt that, who the heck is Thomas Riedel? That's the story how I ended up in motorsports. You know it's funny, you're right. At the same time, there's a couple of these things over the years which just did happen. I mean, just recently on an interview I made a comment about, well, the next thing I really want to do is I want to be involved in a moon mission, and well, obviously, someone read that, and now the next thing to come next year is we are involved in a moon mission. Basically because of going to the stratosphere with our technology, doing not only the communications and audio but also the professional video which a billion of people saw. Basically, that was the reason why the journalists asked me, well, what's coming next? You already went to the stratosphere, and I just said, well, I want to go to the moon, and now we have that project. No. You know, we did many things, and we have had fun, and certainly we've achieved a lot. You know, I would say the thing I'm most proud of is my largest archive of 30 years of mistakes because, you know, you only learn if you make mistakes, and the good thing is we made lots of mistakes, so we could learn a lot. Thank goodness, most of the mistakes we only did once. Yeah, we're getting close to 500 now, and companies are growing. Just recently we had a meeting in our core management team, and we all believe the company has the potential to double again in the next five. So let's see what happens. Well, we are not one of the biggest employers in town. I mean, Wuppertal has quite a number of big companies, very much underestimated, typically. However, I was born here, and I'm a proud guy living in Wuppertal and being born here, absolutely. You know, first of all, the whole thing has started with rentals, and that was basically my original start of the business with light and sound equipment, and then it got into the radios. So basically, that's how the rental business has started. Over the years, we benefited a lot from the rentals because rentals typically brought the requirements for the new products. So basically, a project comes up, you have a need, and then you develop towards that need, and that's how a new product typically is developed, or was developed, let's say, in the earlier stage. In the meantime, we still benefit from the fact that we can pioneer new technologies, so we can basically bring new technologies into rental projects. And typically, these are very high profile projects. So you get nice marketing for the product, but you also get a gain experience. So that's all pretty good. And I would say the rental business benefits as well because a rental business which always gets latest technology and also can get that in quantities because the same company is the manufacturer, that's pretty positive. Well, the acquisitions of Dellac and ASL have been very important to us. First of all, both companies were very respected companies already in the space of Intercom. And if you are on a gross pass and if you are on a very, very quick gross pass, then the major challenge is finding people. And that's exactly what we did find with both companies, excellent engineers in the Netherlands as well as here in Germany with the Dellac guys. And it was really coincidence that we did make a decision in our management team to hire another 10 engineers for R&D. And only a couple of weeks later, the opportunity of Dellac came up. And guess what, it's about 10 engineers which used to work at Dellac. I think we are, but I think it's really different if you compare that for an artist for instance. When we launched Artist to the Market, Artist as basically with the topology in Intercom we introduced like nodes within a fiber network. This was a brand new approach. This didn't exist and it took people I would say three to five years to really pick on that concept. So it was not like everyone was excited straight away but people were confused, what is this about? Why do I need nodes in a network? Why should I place these nodes in different parts of a building? So basically decentralization building networks which is a given these days. And everyone does that. We've been way, way ahead of time with introduction of artists. Which was pretty hard I have to say because I expected, because I strongly believed in that idea, I've expected that everyone must really jump on this now when we come to the market and it didn't happen. We got good sales and that was fine. And probably more sales would have caused different problems in growth. However I was kind of disappointed in the beginning and I learned that if you are too much ahead of time it's also a problem. With the Bolero system it's a different story. I think we're not ahead of time here. Even so the product is ahead of everything in the market in my mind. But I wasn't happy about wireless products in the market including our own products for quite a while. And I said, you know, we need to do something which really covers the whole market. All products in the market would only cover a certain part, a certain segment. It's like this product can do outside broadcast and being in rental business. This product can be for fixed installations and you know, there you had different products and there was nothing being universal. Nothing which really solved the frequency issues in the market. Nothing which really solved the quality, the low latency and also the intelligence you wish for in the field of intercom. And I had several discussions with my team saying that we're not developing a new system. I'm waiting for the right idea and if we have that idea and basically the path to the technology, then we do it. And it's about three years ago now that basically we came to the conclusion that yeah, now we have it. And basically it was this technology which we call the ADR, which is the advanced decked receiver. You should know that in decked, there is a big issue with reflections. And that problem makes basically all decked intercom systems unusable in very large buildings. So if you have buildings with lots of metal inside and especially if you go to like a football arena, then very likely the system will not work at all or have a very poor performance. And that is something I said, how can you sell this to a rental company? And today it works, tomorrow they go to the stadium and it doesn't work anymore. I can't do that. And to be honest, my own product was the old product, the Acrobat, had that disadvantage. So we always said, well, go to a venue, test it. If it works, install it, and it will work fine. If it doesn't, I can't help. I mean, that's not a product. And I wasn't too proud about that. So we looked for a solution and then on the research level, we got to the point that, well, there is a potential solution here, but we need to analyze whether this really work. And we spent quite some money on basically a research program and we simulated in software whether this idea would work. And that was something which even happened prior to the whole start of the development of Bolero. And when that simulation, basically the result of the simulation said, yes, this looks really like it works, that was basically the moment of excitement when I said, now let's do the right product because the foundation is that technology. We have done more things around, which probably takes us too far here. But basically the foundation in RF, it was the fundamental key. And then we went further looking at, well, how can we do the right intelligence? How can we do the right industrial design for the product that users really feel that this is a nice device? The use is very intuitive. And the result is Bolero. And we believe the market has been waiting for Bolero for a while. And just in the sales numbers, we can already see that we are not basically ahead of the time, but we are behind. Say goodness, we are still with that product, the best in the market. So we get the deals. So that's very good for us. Well, probably also the mistakes were important. Because if you don't make the mistakes, you can't learn. I mean, obviously, if you do something again with the same brain, the same memory, then hopefully you do different mistakes. Not the same ones again. However, I'm still very passionate about what we do. I'm very glad that my parents let me start this and that I got all the support from family, from basically also the early clients. And I would say probably most of the things I would do just in the same way. And I'm very grateful for the whole history of how things happen to me, I have to say. I mean, staying ahead of the competition is a very important thing, obviously, in the business. But I think it also comes as a natural thing if you have such a passionate team and you have a good group of engineers, everyone aims for the best. And that's why it's no matter where you look at, it starts in product management, then you have the engineering team, you have sales people, you have service and support people. And in all these teams, we really try to have the right spirit and aiming for the best. And if you keep going, then in my mind, it's just a given that you stay ahead of the game. I mean, obviously, our competition is doing also a good job and we respect our competitors a lot and we watch them closely. But, you know, like in a real race, if you watch your competitors and you do a good job yourself, well, you have a very good chance to win the race. We aim for the best products. We want to really have a product which does the job best in class. And if we talk about iconic venues, typically this is an iconic venue because there's people there, which whatever they do there, singing, dancing, performing, producing TV programs, they are the best in class in their field. And, you know, if I'm doing a job, I want to have the best tools. So if I'm playing an instrument, I want to have the best instrument as the best musician. And from that point of view in my mind, it is a logical match here.  So there might be issues. And that's the moment when you want to have your partner pretty close. That's, by the way, also the moment when you really learn whether your partner is a good one.


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