He’s older than me, too.
It looks like a wireless SM58. A modest microphone at ~$200. But still . . .
He probably told the audio guy what he was going to do. But that’s totally my bias.
I suspect in all highly controlled events, such as this one, the mic drop is long planned. And hopefully the mic is provided a safe soft place to fall.
But I still do not appreciate the humor or the lack of respect it represents.
Sadly, most of American humor is grounded in violence to people or things, vulgarity, swearing, heavy-handed sexual references, cruelty, insults . . . Great stuff.
Unfortunately, all I can do is call it out in my little end of the world.
[/soapbox]
Elk - I guess I don’t understand what a mic drop signifies to you. Clearly it’s loaded in some way?
Sorry for the rant, a mic drop is just symbolic of a mindset I find offensive. I dislike deliberately abusing a nice piece of equipment as “expression.” It is mindless destructive vandalism.
Perhaps an apropos analogy is to envision videotaping intentionally dropping a DMP onto a concrete floor to express you do not like the CD which is playing.
You don’t have to be a recording engineer to cringe at deliberate abuse of equipment. Or a dog owner for abuse of puppies. 
Bootzilla said
As Thanksgiving is upon us, I suggest we be thankful we have a DAC that is firmware-upgradeable, that the upgrades are free, and that the end user can install the upgrades. Many audio products are not firmware-upgradeable...Yes, I do understand all that. My Ayon DAC is not firmware upgradeable, and I've never felt like throwing a brick at it because it always behaves exactly as intended. My video processor has a FPGA in it and it's also firmware upgradeable; there have been plenty of times I've felt like throwing a brick at it. It is marvellous what can be done with vanilla off-the-shelf FPGA simply by brilliant minds tweaking software. But it shouldn't take brilliant minds to operate stuff that is programmed by brilliant minds.
Ted Smith saidYour statement sounds promising no matter what! Thank you Ted for keeping the DSJ at the front of sonic excitement!I hesitate to claim that all clicks and pops will be gone, but more of them are and some more of those that are left are quieter.
Hey Ted and Paul, this is awesome info 
looking forward to the upgrade - so excited!
My excitement is somewhat tempered by all my praying on old knees to the software karma gods whilst facing in the general direction of Boulder CO that this one will work for me first time, without any drama.
Understandable. Some have had ridiculous amounts of trouble swapping firmware. For others, it is simple and without drama.
I have no idea why. I am certain many of those who have had issues are doing everything correctly as we understand it. But there must be something, an explanation.
Elk saidUnderstandable. Some have had ridiculous amounts of trouble swapping firmware. For others, it is simple and without drama.
I have no idea why. I am certain many of those who have had issues are doing everything correctly as we understand it. But there must be something, an explanation.
I do believe there may be an explanation for some of the difficulty. Without doing digging to find the old upgrade instructions that were posted in this forum for upgrading to Huron, IMO they were not the best. As I recall, I remember them being either ambiguous, not comprehensive, or otherwise less than perfect, and leading to confusion.
Instructions for something like this should be simple, explicit, and comprehensive. Follow the bouncing ball… step one, step two, step three, etc. All steps listed, in the proper order, nothing left out.
But I note there have been some staffing changes in this space. So maybe we can hope for some improvements in the communication of the upgrade process, leading to less confusion, and more people successfully getting it right the first time.
My recollection was that Huron was very different from earlier iterations. The problems seemed fairly random, and Ted and others helped develop a process based on these new and evolving experiences. We didn’t know what to do until we knew what worked. Until it was released and lots of people upgraded and had random issues, I don’t think the revert-and-restore process had ever been needed before.
There is the possibility that not every eventuality was covered, or that people followed parts of the process, but not all.
There have always been upgrade problems - if people ever didn’t use the eject function of their OS when writing DS cards or USB sticks they could be leaving a landmine for future upgrades. A little more rarely they might have lost power in their DS when it was writing a cover which could cause a SD card corruption.
In any case the format a card, revert, reinstall has always been the recommendation.
The additional confounding problem was that some units had “bad sound” just after an upgrade, doing a power off/power on after the upgrade process fixed that. I’ve found a couple of possible problems in the FPGA that might have caused this and have fixed them. I haven’t had that problem here with, even 20 or 30 loads a day during the development of Redcloud so I hope that that problem is fixed, but we won’t know until we have a lot of clean installs.
On the DS Sr. the Huron install problems were less common than previous releases if forum posts and service calls per upgrade download is the metric.
On the other hand the DS Jr bootloader had a problem that causes a significant number of users to have upgrade problems - Huron was the first release to run into it. Never the less, the reformat, revert and then reinstall worked for almost all of them. A few needed a force load version to allow a proper upgrade. To make people’s lives easier the DS Jr Huron download on the PS Audio web site was changed to do a force load.
Hopefully more of the people that have a problem with upgrading will believe that they could indeed have a problem on their SD cards (or USB sticks) and will follow the format, revert, reupgrade instructions, (perhaps with an additional power on/off.)
Ted Smith said Hopefully more of the people that have a problem with upgrading will believe that they could indeed have a problem on their SD cards (or USB sticks) and will follow the format, revert, reupgrade instructions, (perhaps with an additional power on/off.)Amen.
I should be clear I’m not trying to blame customers for the upgrade problems. The bootloaders in the PS Audio units should be validating the content of the software more carefully before using it…
PS Audio has multiple approaches to helping with this in the works. But in the mean time we just need people to realize that short of that, often a revert is all that’s required and that PS Audio support is always there to help.
Elk saidElk, I was using "mic drop" as a figure of speech. Per Wikipedia, a mic drop is "an expression of triumph for a successful event," and I used the term in complimentary fashion to refer to the upcoming Redcloud release. I did not mean any disrespect toward actual microphones or the recording community generally. Peace out ...But I still do not appreciate the humor or the lack of respect [a mic drop] represents.
Bootzilla said I was using "mic drop" as a figure of speech.Along with a GIF of an actual physical mic drop. I assume it is clear my objection is to actually dropping a microphone onto stage which frustrates me.
But to be safe, please use the phrase “punt a puppy” from now on. It will not offend anyone as it is merely a figure of speech.
Ted Smith said I should be clear I'm not trying to blame customers for the upgrade problems.I hope no one took your comments this way.
It is not uncommon however for users to resist taking the steps recommended on this forum which we know often work to resolve their problem. And then continue complaining.
Of course, there others who carefully follow every suggestion and still have problems. This is a legitimate problem.
I almost take for granted that the upgrade of the Octave is done from within its Octave app (pushed) or with a software button in a web interface (browser). All my newer equipment works like this.
I guess introducing this into the DS at this stage is not practical, nor possible (?)