Redsecta Rapaudiology Gear

What is Rapaudiology?

I jokingly came up with the term “Rapaudiology” a few years ago, when a friend was teasing me about how much effort I put into working on audio (which happens to be mostly Hip Hop), and how I’m always trying to make things sound better. He suggested I buy a white coat and have my name embroidered on it and I said something like “yep, and under it ‘Rapaudiologist, Hh.D’.”

Years later, I don’t have a custom-embroidered white coat, but have been using the “Rapaudiology” term mostly on Social Media to describe projects I’ve worked on that I consider being high-quality, artistically as well as sonically. If I mention a project I’ve worked on and it’s got the #Rapaudiology tag, it means that the listener can expect a high-end result.

Over the last few years, I’ve made some accessory gear to help me with day-to-day audio tasks with the same attention to detail and quality that I put into my audio engineering projects. Everything I’ve built uses high-quality components and I thought it would be a good idea to offer some of these things to other audio engineers, at fair prices.

I’ve been soldering things since I was a kid (luckily, I had a dad that let me take things apart to experiment on them) so when I decided to build the gear, I already had the necessary soldering and general electronics making skills. Equipment manufacturers, as of 2003 adhere to RoHS standards and one of the things they no longer use is lead-based solder. Lead-free solder is harder to work with and there’s been questions of reliability and even sound quality (due to poor solder joints) in much of the equipment that has been made using the lead-free stuff. High end boutique manufacturers of audio gear still use lead-based solder (the danger isn’t in the fumes, but rather the handling of it, so I can understand why larger companies would not want their employees working with the stuff). Like high-end boutique makers of audio gear, I also use quad eutectic solder on all of my builds.

Two of the first Rapaudiology units I’ll be making available soon will be an analog VU metering package that isn’t like anything currently available on the market, as well as a completely passive source switcher. Both are customizable and configurable by the user; the idea behind Rapaudiology gear is to create high-quality pieces of gear that are tailored to each user’s individual needs.

Like the “Rapaudiology” audio projects I’m fortunate to work on, these pieces of gear are meant to be of a higher quality than what you would expect from a mass-produced product, as well as being original works of art.