u/eaglebtc

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/xinIixfY2t

I am getting close to the end of this transmission repair project on my 2004 Beetle. In my last post on this subject, the insulators on the original wiring harness had melted, so I had no recourse but to find a replacement harness end with the female plug, and splice the ten wires into the original harness where the wires were still in good shape.

The new harness end had the same colors of wiring as the original harness, but the pins did NOT match the original colors.

Using manual probing with my multimeter, and comparing the results with the wiring diagram from the Bentley manual, as well as the ATSG manual on the 01M, I compiled my own map of the pins on the TCM and the new harness. I drew enlarged versions of both connectors, and wrote down the numbers where they mapped from the TCM to the harness, and which colors went with which wires / pins on both components.

With a complete map of wire colors to pin numbers, I can confidently splice the correct wires together knowing that they won't match at all, but will still be correct.

I bought the Mutant Records limited edition box set of Project Hail Mary all the way back in April. When it finally arrived this week, I was really stunned and impressed by the packaging design. They went all out to make these look and feel like the gold records from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, including details like an inverted stylus to indicate side B.

The album looks out of this world.

I can't quite say the same about how it sounds.

As a safety backup, I recorded the first pass of all four discs and discovered that my copy has a pressing defect on both sides Disc 1 (more on that later).

When I opened the Disc 1 audio file for editing, I did not expect to find a hard cutoff at 17.5 kHz in the spectrogram. So I kept recording the other three discs. They're ALL like this.

17.5 kHz is closer to the cutoff frequency for medium-quality streaming audio (128-160kbps), not something I'd expect on a final soundtrack release.

The gallery also includes screenshots from the following cues:

• Wake Up Buddy
• You Were Loved (burial)
• Dennis Wilson's "Rainbows" (1977 OG, 2010 RE, 2026 PHM)

In each alternating screenshot you'll see the frequency response of the vinyl vs. that of the TrueHD audio off the Blu-ray 4K release (L+R channels only), showing the same musical segment as close as I can match it. The audio fidelity of the score within the film is significantly higher than the vinyl. At the time of this post, my CD copy is still on its way from Mutant Records.

I'm really confused as to why the vinyl mastering engineer would have run everything through a hard lowpass filter when cutting the lacquer. There's just no need to do this on a good lathe. Most vinyl records have a natural rolloff around 16-18 kHz, but a well-pressed disc on a good lathe can cut frequencies easily up to 20-22 kHz, and even as far as 30-40 kHz if such frequencies are present on the original source material. Strings, brass, and percussion have a lot of natural higher order harmonics. A high quality stylus can faithfully reproduce these frequencies, or at least show some forensic evidence in the spectrogram that said frequencies were present on the master recording. The scoring sessions of Project Hail Mary would have been run at 24 bit / 48 kHz, or possibly 96 kHz. The rest of the film would have been edited and mixed at 48 kHz all the way through the post-production stage until final delivery. The soundtrack releases ought to have sourced the original 48/96 kHz digital audio masters from the soundstage.

On top of all this, my copy has a pressing defect that causes severe scratching noises in the last couple minutes of both sides of Disc 1. There's also an audible hiss between tracks that starts in the left channel and migrates to the right channel.

Audio samples of defect here:

• Disc 1, Side 1
• Disc 1, Side 2

I'd love to know if anyone else (pre) ordered this album and encountered similar issues.

FYI, my usual transcription setup consists of:

• Technics SL-1210mk5 turntable
• Audio-Technica VMN45xML stylus
• Art DJ Pre II preamp (Low Cut turned off)
• Universal Audio Apollo Quad Firewire (w/ TB3 upgrade card)
• MacBook Pro M1
• Recording at 24 bit / 96 kHz

(I have a second Technics table with a similar stylus as a backup.)

I'm just so excited that they're finally here, but I spent WAY too much time making this video and haven't even listened to the records yet. I used a Ryobi battery powered task light to imitate the sun, and a second smaller LED further back to keep a tiny bit illuminated in the darkness, just like the film. I tried to make it a perfect loop with the "Centrifuge" music cue. Hope you enjoy it!

This pose was just too good.

Project Hail Mary was at least four years from publication when Harry Styles wrote "Sign of the Times," and yet the track is somehow a perfect match for the mood in the karaoke bar: everyone seems deliriously happy in the face of certain doom. It was "kind of a weird party."

NEEDLE DROP: https://vimeo.com/1220072540

The job of a music supervisor is to find pre-recorded music that fits the mood of a given scene. For Project Hail Mary, that job belongs to Keir Lehman. In the case of this particular song, however, the selection came from within the cast. As Ryan Gosling tells it, he got the idea for the karaoke scene after overhearing Sandra Hüller singing in her dressing room. When Eva Stratt tells Ryland Grace "I used to sing in an East German youth choir," Hüller was describing her own childhood. When she told her teenage daughter they were planning a karaoke scene for the movie, she insisted that her mom sing the Harry Styles tune.

Sandra Hüller knocked it out of the park with her performance, and I think the lyrics of this song form the core of this film's story.

This post is the last in my series on collecting the Project Hail Mary soundtrack. I hope you've enjoyed them!

Here are the previous entries:

• The Beatles: Two of Us
• Ella and Louis: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
• Bill Conti: "The Final Bell" from Rocky
• Ike & Tina Turner: Glory, Glory!
• Tag Team: Whoomp! (There it is)
• Kris Kristofferson: Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down
• Neil Diamond: Stargazer
• Miriam Makeba: Pata Pata
• Dennis Wilson: Rainbows
• Scorpions: Wind of Change
• Mercedes Sosa: Gracias a la Vida
• Carlos di Sarli: El Amanecer
• Turakina Maori Girls Choir: Po Atarau

I have been collecting the albums on vinyl which contained songs featured in Project Hail Mary!

Some of you might be familiar with the old legend that if you played "Revolution 9" from The White Album backwards, you would hear the man's voice say: "Turn me on, dead man." This led some people to believe a rumor that Paul McCartney was dead.

In that spirit, I present a needle drop of "Two of Us" played backwards. Please have a listen, and write in the comments what you think the Beatles are saying.

PORD ELDEEN: https://vimeo.com/1220052635

And I suppose, if you really want to listen to it the normal way:

NEEDLE DROP: https://vimeo.com/1220048561

Here are my older posts in this series:

• Ella and Louis: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
• Bill Conti: "The Final Bell" from Rocky
• Ike & Tina Turner: Glory, Glory!
• Tag Team: Whoomp! (There it is)
• Kris Kristofferson: Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down
• Neil Diamond: Stargazer
• Miriam Makeba: Pata Pata
• Dennis Wilson: Rainbows
• Scorpions: Wind of Change
• Mercedes Sosa: Gracias a la Vida
• Carlos di Sarli: El Amanecer
• Turakina Maori Girls Choir: Po Atarau

As part of my ongoing project to collect all of the Project Hail Mary soundtrack on vinyl, I been gathering every album containing a song that was either heard or referenced in the film. I've now collected all of them, and will be posting the last three in the next few days.

NEEDLE DROP (audio+video): https://vimeo.com/1220071761

During the montage of Rocky and Grace traveling to Tau Ceti, they sing a little bit of karaoke together ... poorly. (Side note: it's kind of hilarious to hear Ryan Gosling sing terribly here, because he's actually quite a good singer: see La La Land and Barbie).

The end credits of the film included the song credits for the karaoke track, but that was as boring as medium-rough-texture-circle-planet. Karaoke tracks are generally covered in the style of the original, so I wanted to find that. I went to the karaoke label's website and listened to several versions until I found a match to the one used in the movie: it was in the key of E-flat, had the sound of a small jazz combo, and some very particular jazz ornamentation on the piano in the background. So I started looking for a version of this track that was probably recorded in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

After listening to dozens of performances, I landed on a version that sounded remarkably similar to the karaoke track. It came from Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's 1957 release, Ella and Louis Again, which was a follow up to their 1956 smash hit, Ella & Louis. They're backed by the Oscar Peterson Trio. The song itself is an American songbook standard written by George & Ira Gershwin, who were part of the legendary body of musicians that worked and published out of Tin Pan Alley in New York in the early 20th century.

Original vinyl copies of Ella & Louis Again in excellent condition are pretty expensive, and I wanted to have a nice clean copy to enjoy, so I bought a new 2025 pressing of the 2xLP gatefold with the same jacket design as the original.

Ella and Louis Again is wonderful recording that was mastered with care. They sound like they're in the room with you. The two of them collaborated frequently, and they have a playful chemistry that's evident in every one of their studio recordings and live performances.

If you're interested in more needle drops, have a look at the rest of my posts in the series thus far:

• Bill Conti: "The Final Bell" from Rocky
• Ike & Tina Turner: Glory, Glory!
• Tag Team: Whoomp! (There it is)
• Kris Kristofferson: Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down
• Neil Diamond: Stargazer
• Miriam Makeba: Pata Pata
• Dennis Wilson: Rainbows
• Scorpions: Wind of Change
• Mercedes Sosa: Gracias a la Vida
• Carlos di Sarli: El Amanecer
• Turakina Maori Girls Choir: Po Atarau