CH: What were those early days like?

UB: In those days we had five or six people on staff. We had a little lunch table where we sat together; there were no management issues or language barriers or time zones, we just discussed things and did it right away. Looking back, in many aspects they were crazy times, but fun times too. People were so motivated, trying to help, working late, sometimes weekends – nothing was too much of a bother. It’s something that we still have today, but we’re a bit more organized now…

CH: How did you make that transition from cottage industry to big industry?

UB: Everything starts with someone who ignites something. Ultimately you have to be passionate to do something and you have to find people who believe in you. You have to inspire people to say, ‘C’mon, we’ll do this together’. I think I’ve been able to convince a few people along the way.

CH: So what where you making and how were you making it?

UB: In the early days we produced de-noisers, which were perfectly suited to the eight-track machines of the day. Initially, we sold three a month, we ramped up production by 10 a week and I remember thinking, “We must be near saturation level”!

Now we’re producing 2.5 million products a year, and I think the sky’s the limit. But it was fun how we built that stuff. We had a metal shop around the corner which built the chassis, the PCBs came from another smaller factory, and we also bought a lot of surplus material from TV companies (Bosch, Siemens) – I would go to this warehouse, walk in and climb the shelves to try to find the stuff I wanted. I was able to buy a lot of components at a much lower cost that way.

CH:< So you were on a mission to cut costs from the beginning. Why was that?

UB: When I moved from Switzerland to Germany in 1982 I studied classical piano and sound recording at the Robert Schumann Institute. But this school only had two microphones for 200 students. That was it. So you had to wait three months to borrow that gear even for a few hours. I had no chance of becoming a sound engineer in that environment! I needed equipment. I looked at what was available, opened the lid and thought, “Why does this cost $2000 when the components inside are worth just $100?”

Without considering the business implications I thought: I can make this stuff. And my friends said that if I was making one for myself to make one for them too. So I’d sold 10 pieces before I had actually built them! Then it was 50 pieces, and so on.

So it became apparent that a lot of people were in the same boat as myself – musicians simply couldn’t afford equipment.

MADE IN CHINA

CH: When did you realise your fortunes would be inevitably linked with China?

UB: In the early days I bought a lot of components from importers and distributors who bought stuff from China and I discovered that if you really want to pursue the dream to build great gear at a great price, Europe was the wrong place to do it. So as early as 1990 I hopped on a plane and went to China.

In China I soon discovered that these guys’ favourite saying is “No problem”. So if you believed them, you’d think they could do everything – I should have been more wary. So you’d get these wonderful samples, and then they’d send you a final shipment of ‘bananas’ – and I’m sure a lot of manufacturers who read this article will have gone through the same experience.

CH: So the factories and sub contractors had their own agendas?

UB: Yes. They’re trying to maximise profits too of course, so they can just as easily change priorities to other customers – they chase the money, so your supply-chain gets screwed up or, worse, they start to substitute your components with stuff you haven’t specified. You walk in and tell them how to do things and that approach only lasts for the time you’re there – you walk out of the factory and things go back to the old routine. You can’t control quality that way. And again, many people who manufacture in China will know exactly what I’m talking about.

Ultimately, I figured out you can’t do business by fax, and back then email wasn’t what it is today. You had to be on site. So in 1997 I moved to Hong Kong. That was a real turning point. Up until then we were constantly struggling to get enough units built.

CH: Was it a case of running to catch up with demand?

UB: I was constantly using my cash to finance production again, and getting enough manufacturing equipment in and designing new gear for sale. In those days we didn’t plan for infrastructure properly; it was a case of putting fires out.

CH: And more recently you’ve taken a step further and actually established your own factory in China.

UB: That’s right, we’re one of the very few who have decided to go the hard way and build our own plant. That was about seven years ago now, and it was a very wise move. We’re now totally in control of our own destiny; it’s the only way we can provide the quality that you see today.

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

CH: Behringer led the low-cost charge but how low can prices go?

UB: For many years our mantra was ‘double the features, half the price’, but that hasn’t been the case for some time now. We don’t want to be the cheapest and we’re not the cheapest any more – we will never win that race. Our investment goes into quality and quality costs money. So we definitely go for added value.

‘Added value’ doesn’t necessarily mean more and more features; I think it’s more about refining the user interface. You want to make it super-intuitive for people to use, you want to automate a lot of functions and I think that’s the next direction. We work on convergence of technologies and invest heavily in R&D. We have R&D centres in China, the U.S. and Germany and employ about 160 R&D engineers – they’re the heart of our company.

CH: What makes you bounce out of bed in the morning? 

UB: I enjoy working with great people. Having great people around me is phenomenal and I always appreciate having people around who are better than me. If you want to be successful in life you have to hire people who complement your weaknesses, and it’s worth remembering that there’s always someone better than you.

I admire a lot of people in our company and have a great urge to learn myself. I’m an avid reader, which helps me to learn from people better than me. You can’t afford to stop learning. My mum is 78 years old; she went back to university when she was 60, graduated at 65, watches CNN and calls me up to say; “Have you heard about the latest merger?” And that’s the stuff that keeps you young, that’s the trick to staying motivated. Again, you only need to look at [Roland’s] Mr Kakehashi. He’s over 80 and still involved in R&D. You gotta keep learning, that’s the fun in life – to improve yourself and give other people a chance to improve themselves. 

POST SCRIPT: CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

So how exactly is Uli turning his company ‘upside down’? Uli reiterates the phrase ‘leaders not followers’ time and again; millions are being spent on R&D; and while others are laying off staff, Behringer is on a hiring spree. Will this amount to a raft of world-beating products? Only time will tell. But what is obvious from my interview with Uli is that we’re witnessing a generational change, and the New Behringer will look, feel and probably sound quite different. 

SAME AS IT EVER WAS

Talking to Burgess revealed just how little things have changed in the audio industry over the decades. Despite the technical revolutions that have flowed through in the last 50 years, the ‘studio enthusiast’ has always worked extremely hard to make ends meet. The common thread has always been a passion for sound, and long working hours. It’s consistently been a world where discussions about business models and profit margins seem to drift into the background like reverb…

BM: We were so busy trying to find customers and get the new recording studio going that we didn’t watch out for our business very well. Then one day we discovered that if we were in business six more months we’d be out of business because we were losing money. We had a quick meeting, and decided, ‘well, we could make pressings of the recordings we were doing’. We weren’t too bright you see; we didn’t know this would be very difficult! So, without knowing just how difficult, we borrowed money from a bank and bought what was probably the only mono fusion press ever made by Mr Gerry Mentor – one of the founding members of the AES. It was an intriguing process, where you took a round disc of plastic, and a back sheet of microscopic granules of pure vinyl; put them into this mould with the two labels; and closed the thing in what was called the ‘hot press’. When you took it out again you had a record. They were very good machines, because the vinyl was really hard, so the high-end was really great compared to commercial records where the plastic was softer in order to mould it faster. But we soon outstripped the capacity of that machine and decided to buy ‘real’ presses.

Unfortunately, steam presses drive you up the wall, so we moved the pressing plant to downtown Baltimore four blocks from ‘District Steam’, which supplied high-pressure steam services to a lot of the buildings. We found a location in the basement of a large building, set up two presses there and ran ourselves a pressing plant business! But before that we had to start cutting. We had probably the second Neumann lathe in the US – a manual lathe, not an automated one. There we did cutting, we sent the plating out, we sent out the manufacturing of the labels, and we made records, and we made money… all of which supported the studio until it could eventually stand on its own two feet.

We mostly survived by doing commercials. I was working two jobs: in the day time I’d be at the pressing plant, and at night, when my partner had gone home, I’d do music sessions. In the process I accidentally wound up doing a song that sold big time. After that, producers started calling us saying, ‘can we come down and record with you?’. When they’d turn up, however, they’d see the studio, and go, ‘you recorded that hit song here?’. And we’d say, ‘yes sir!’.

FOUR YEARS LATER

After four years working two jobs and hellish hours, Burgess met up with a young man who would go on to change one particular aspect of the recorded music industry forever. Coincidentally, they’d both been to the same school but had never crossed paths due to their age difference…

BM: I was in the studio one day and in the door walks Dean Jensen (Jensen Transformers) and in tow was little George Massenburg – who at that time was about 15 or 16. Dean and George lived two houses apart and knew each other well. When George came in, it didn’t take me long to realise he was a very smart young man who seemed very interested in recording. We got along real well and the two of them helped me with a console I was building at the time. We didn’t know what we were doing, and built this thing using new untried ICs that were available at the time – an interesting process, shall we say. The console eventually worked alright, but there was a lot of yelling and screaming. We learned a lot of things to never ever do again.

AS: What were these things?

BM: Never use untried ICs for starters. And never put a console in an operating room and build it there. Build it someplace else and move it in. We didn’t have anywhere else to build it and we (optimistically) thought we could finish it off while my business partner was away… big mistake.

Meanwhile, the pressing plant had grown, with four machines up and running – business was good. But there were serious philosophical differences between my partner and I, and eventually we sold the business to a company called ITI, who were getting into audio/video production at the time. ITI was, at that time, in the process of designing and gearing up to build a small colour movie camera and they had this enormous building, so we moved the pressing plant and recording studio in there. The only thing we lacked for all the new studios was consoles. So the president of the company said ‘let’s go to New York, and look at consoles at the AES show’, so we did.

THE BIG EYE OPENER

But when we got to New York – in 1968 I think – and the president saw the prices, he was shocked: ‘hey these things are expensive! We have an engineering department, why don’t we build our own?’. George looked at me and smiled, I looked at George and smiled.

What George and I wound up doing was designing a console that was way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, there’s only two of them, because it was all logic controlled, believe it or not. You could press an input button and assign it to any number of outputs, you could press an output button and assign any number of inputs to it. You could even ‘query’ it. By which I mean, you could press an output button and see what inputs were connected; you could press an input and see what outputs it was connected to, including the reverb channels and the auxiliary monitors.

I designed the architecture while George worked on mic preamps and all the rest. But we still had an equaliser that didn’t work and we tried everything to fix it. We also had a fella who was an engineering student at Princeton University, and the three of us tried and tried to resolve the equaliser problem… we could have written a book entitled; ‘300 ways not to build an equaliser’. We finally got close, but it still didn’t do what we wanted it to. A Pultec’s not bad, we thought, but it doesn’t do this and didn’t do that. So we kept at it.

BREAKING THROUGH

BM (continues): Eventually we broke through the barrier. George was doing recording sessions at the time – at night in the makeshift studio using the equipment we’d salvaged from the other building. Then one night, he came into the lab after a session and worked on it some more, and finally found the ‘magic bullet’ that made it work. The next morning, when I arrived at eight o’clock, driven into my office door was a knife holding a white piece of cardboard that said, ‘This is it, this works!’.

It was crude, it was noisy, it had distortion, but it worked. Obviously there have been a lot of refinements to EQs since then, but that breakthrough forged the way ahead. At the same time we’d also been trying to design input and output stages for the amplifiers – we got an output stage to work but we hated the input stages. Finally the chief engineer at ITI said, ‘hey, I’ve designed amplifiers before’, so he designed an input stage which we glued to our output stage, and that amplifier (with two variations) are used in the ITI equaliser. It has no slew rate, it’s got a bit of second harmonic distortion, but its really warm and really punchy.

FROM DESIGN TO MARKET

AS: Did you ever intend to sell the equaliser back then?

BM: Well, interestingly, George looked at me and said, ‘do you think we could sell this EQ?’. And I said, ‘I’ve been ready to ask you the same question… I think it’s saleable’. So we talked the boss into getting the engineering people to put it into a package – very much like the Sontec front panel people recognise today. Following on from that, George and I attended the AES show (in New York in 1971). And to our knowledge no-one was doing the live demos on the floor at that time, so we brought an Ampex machine and two sets of headphones. This was a big mistake, because within the first three hours we had people queueing down the aisle. The next day, we had people down the aisle and around the corner, because people were ringing and telling their friends to come and hear the new equaliser! We took so many orders for this thing, I couldn’t tell you. We got back to Baltimore at the end of the show and reported in that we should start making these things in quantity immediately. The ITI engineering manager and chief shareholders had a meeting and decided they were going to make 10 a month and keep them scarce.

MAKING THE SONTEC

BM: They were a bit labour intensive, but conveniently ITI had all these manufacturing people sitting around with nothing to do, because their colour camera was still on the drawing board. ITI then hired a professional salesman to help sell the equaliser and pretty soon the orders came in. They were still only going to make 10 a month, but at least they were selling all of them, which paid the bills.

AS: What was the model number of this EQ called?

BM: The original unit was called the ME – the Mastering Equaliser 230 – and it sold for $1460 in 1971. This equaliser lasted not quite 10 months. Being video guys, ITI didn’t believe that absolute clarity of audio was important (unlike us!), and worse still, the unit inverted polarity from input to output – you can probably imagine what kind of a commotion this caused among the buyers! We had to recall just about every equaliser and put a little extra block of two amplifiers near the power supply to invert the signal and get it back out in phase.

AS: To invert the inverted signal?

BM: Exactly. Which was a real fiasco, and didn’t help the reputation. On the other hand, people were forgiving, because it was a new model. The other problem was the unit wasn’t very robust. If you wiggled the front panel controls, the boards inside came loose, because they plugged into the front panel from the back. This was not a good idea. So it wasn’t long before the MEP 230 came out. The ‘P’ was added to mean ‘pots’. That was around about the time we started work on a mastering equaliser, and that was an MES, which stood for ‘Mastering Equaliser: Switches’.

We then made a mastering equaliser for our own mastering room – the cutting room – it was the only one in the world. George and I sketched it out on a piece of paper, picked the frequencies, gave it to the engineering guys and they made it. The same frequencies are being used today, but what people don’t realise is that we didn’t research the frequencies at all, we simply said, ‘hey, let’s divide it up in half octaves here, and third octaves there’. We did it with a slide rule and that was how the MES got its frequencies, and how the original equaliser came into existence. It looked exactly like the one here with me now, except that it had a Gotham Audio logo on it.

AS: Gotham?

BM: ITI figured I was too busy managing the whole audio division, so they had someone else sell them. I was okay with that; Gotham were good people, although the president of the company told us that maybe he might sell five of the mastering equalisers – maybe a maximum of 10 – because in his words, ‘there was no need for it’. He only sold one! We’ve since sold over 400.

Then, still in the early ’70s, a strange thing happened, and ironically it was the incident that drove the spike into the ITI coffin. We were at an AES show in Los Angeles when a gentleman from Paris came up to the stand, pointed to the backdrop of pictures of the ITI console and said, ‘is that the ITI console?’

‘It sure is,’ I said proudly.

‘Could you make me one?’

‘Make you one? I certainly could,’ I blurted. Thankfully I knew exactly what it cost, so when he asked ‘how much?’ I said ‘75k’. The next morning he appears with a cheque drawn from a Paris bank for $10,000. Soon after this incident another gentleman arrived and said, ‘I understand that so and so just bought a console from you’. I said, ‘yes, he did.’

‘Well they’re our major competitor,’ he went on… ‘So I want one bigger and better. Can you make it?’

‘How much bigger and better?’ I inquired politely, and he says he wants one with more channels, and I say, ‘sure, I can do that’. I think I told him $95,000, I can’t remember, but he said, ‘I’ll bring you a deposit.’ And he did.

So needless to say we rush back to our hotel that evening and phone the Baltimore office with the great news that we just sold two ITI consoles! The president then says, ‘I’ll call the engineering guys and call you right back.’ 20 minutes later he calls back and says, ‘the engineering guys don’t want to build consoles’…

BODY BLOW

BM: Well, as far as George and I were concerned, that was pretty much the death blow. Soon after that incident George and the salesman both left the company. The salesman, at least, saw the writing on the wall – ‘if you can’t give me products to sell, why am I here?’ Eventually I left ITI as well.

By this time ITI was getting into all kinds of financial difficulties. Then one day, the bank decided to shut the place down. The company sat in the building for months and months while the bank figured out how to sell it, and finally in January of 1975 – in a driving snowstorm – they had an auction. At the auction, George Massenburg – with Earth, Wind & Fire’s backing – bought the entire big studio, a company in Nashville bought the mastering lab – if you want to call it that – and I bought the pressing plant. Moral of the story: if you save your pennies you eventually get stuck with record presses! Looking back on it, I often wonder to myself, what was I thinking!

When the auction was over, they’d sold a lot of miscellaneous stuff. They’d sold resistors, capacitors and all the hardware. ‘But what happened to the equalisers?’. I looked around, and there, under a tarpaulin on the floor, was all the engineering, drawings, front panels, and chassis – all kinds of stuff. I said to the auctioneer, ‘How much for this pile of junk?’. He said, ‘give me $75’. So I did, and consequently became the owner of ITI. That was a really exciting day. George was like, “you actually bought it?”

“I actually bought it,” I said. “… for 75 bucks!”

THE $75 COMPANY

BM: We quickly found new premises for the pressing plant gear, moved the important stuff into our very, very small house, and started to make the Sontec equalisers in the front room, with my wife doing the assembly and yours truly procuring parts. We eventually re-hired many of ITI’s good people, and went back into manufacturing. I went out and started selling the mastering equaliser, which at that stage nobody had ever really used before. Sterling Sound bought the first one, which is still there in use I think. After that, people started saying, ‘they’re using it at Sterling… we need one’.

AS: So what made the Sontec EQ so popular; what gave it its character?

BM: Well, good question. Remember the Sontec was designed as a mastering EQ – for cutting vinyl. A cutting lathe needs to be able to control what’s known as the ‘preview’ channel, because it’s 6/10ths of a revolution of an LP ahead of the ‘cutting’ channel. The computer has to know exactly where everything is and how big it’s going to be, so it can space the grooves apart the right way. Neumann lathes – the automatic lathes – would do all that for you. But most people would try to have one equaliser and sort of fudge the other channel by moving the gain control up and down. The Sontec was the first equaliser that allowed you to adjust the program and the preview, particularly in the bass – which should be in phase – which made the disc a lot better and reduced their reject rate, because you no longer had to worry about overcutting. If you set up the lathe correctly, you were going to get a good disc. This made engineers very happy, clients happy… everyone was happy. And although people liked the original ITI equaliser, George Massenburg and I agreed that we preferred a faster more neutral-sounding equaliser for mastering. And so we went ahead and designed the boards – the earliest Sontec boards – via the telephone. George was in Los Angeles; I was in Baltimore.

AS: How did that work?

BM: I was the parts person: ‘Okay, you need this kind of transistor, let me see if I can find it’. We were taking the prototypes to Doug Saks’ mastering lab, to fine tune things there… which may explain why people say that this is the closest thing to a tube they’ve ever heard in solid state equipment, because it was developed listening to tube equipment.

But we had significant problems. We couldn’t get the first stages of these things to work in any way that made us happy. Then one night I was reading a book about switching transistors, and they were talking about how large the geometry inside a switching transistor was compared to a signal transistor. And I thought, well, if the geometry is bigger, the resistance is lower, and if the resistance is lower that means it has less noise. Why couldn’t we use a switching transistor? So I called George and George didn’t laugh, and he said ‘well, I can try it’. And he built a new front end using a pair of switching transistors, which had enormous surface area inside them, and it worked like a charm! What’s more, it actually sounded good: it was fast, it was stable under the right circumstances, and it didn’t catch fire… it drew a lot of current, but it sounded great. George eventually wrote me another note saying: ‘This is, and always will be, the world’s best-sounding amplifier’. I think he was right… he doesn’t think he was right.

SONTEC IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Hearing all this history pour from Burgess was like peering through a looking glass into the whole history of audio. But what of the here and now? Some 36 years later and Burgess is still exhibiting his wares at the AES (as is George Massenburg). From what little I knew, Sontec hadn’t existed as a company for decades and Burgess Macneal was almost mythical in his elusiveness – the pro audio equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. So what does the Sontec EQ consist of nowadays… and I had to ask him where he’d been hiding all these years.

BM: Well, I’ve always been here. And as for the Mastering Equaliser, it’s the same… well no… I’m half lying. Here’s the deal: The unit was originally designed to be semi modular. When the ITI unit was first built they were using a military connector. So when we did our first Sontec, we built exactly the same board, the same size, with the same connectors in the same locations, so we could just drop it in. That way people with ITI boards, could drop in Sontec boards and get back to operating again.

These first Sontec boards are to a large extent very similar to the present ones, except for the tuning amplifiers. At that time we were using an IC, and it was the best IC available, but it was a long time ago – we made those boards up to around 1987. At that point I went into a complete redesign. Originally they were called MEP 250A, 250B, 250C and they were all – internally and structurally – very different to this. I went back and redesigned the thing to go into a discrete amplifier at the tuning stage. Which did two things: 1: it made it quieter in the EQ mode, and; 2: it gave it about 6dB more headroom in the equalisation circuits, which most people don’t notice unless they push the originals really hard. With the new amplifier I found by changing two resistors it became a lot more ‘crash’ resistant. That’s been the major change.

AS: What do you mean by ‘crash’?

BM: If you push an amplifier too hard, it clips. And unlike tubes, transistors clip hard and you’ve got all kinds of garbage coming out. So by moving the clipping level up 6dB, it became a lot harder to push the equaliser into overload when EQing. There have been minor changes in components too. The earlier modules were ‘potted’, whereas the later versions – from 1988 onwards – have little plug-in boards, no potting, and they work fine.

AS: So the switching on these new ones is all ‘original’?

BM: The switches that ITI used, and the people that made them, went out of production long ago. We subsequently found a good substitute, after a long time searching, and we used them for about eight years. But then I grew unhappy with them after reports of noise and people having to clean them started filtering in. I inquired about repairs with the supply company, only to discover that they’d been bought by somebody bigger, and they, in turn, by somebody bigger still. From there someone had decided that these were military grade and you could only buy a thousand at a time, at some ridiculous price, and we said ‘that’s enough of that’.

I eventually discovered Shallco and told them what I wanted. Initially they said they couldn’t do it, but after looking through their catalogue and saying, ‘couldn’t you take one side of this switch and one side of this other switch and put it with this body?’ they said, ‘I guess we could try it’. After a few reworks I still needed the positive feel, but without the ‘click’. They said, ‘we already make a switch like that!’. The new one works like a champ.

IN & OUT OF PRODUCTION?

AS: One thing that confuses me about all this Burgess is… has Sontec always been in production?

BM: Yes. With the Sontec we’ve been in continuous production since the spring of ’75. There was a period in the late ’70s and early ’80s when digital equalisers first appeared and business for analogue mastering equalisers disappeared. But eventually it went crazy again after the people that bought digital EQs started to revert back to analogue. The Sontec equaliser hasn’t changed much at all in that time; people’s perceptions have just swung back. You don’t want to fool around with a unit that does exactly what people expect it to do.

AS: Well especially now that they’ve become a classic. People are more concerned with what hasn’t change than what has.

BM: Well, that’s 100% true, but making them the same is now almost impossible because you can’t get parts. The transistor industry, for instance, stopped making some of the products 15 years ago. Trying to get those transistors sourced is a major headache. And we’ve even gone to the extent of having one transistor custom made for us.

Most of the Sontec equalisers I make are now 9dB models [boost and cut] and that’s a result of the Japanese wanting 6dB, and this being a compromise. So, effectively, we’re a large shop. I make everything modularly, and if you want a 9dB that does this, I take those switches, this front panel, and those boards, plug it all together in the chassis and voila!

AS: So, you’ve basically got Sontec building blocks that piece together.

BM: Exactly. Modularity has its plusses.

THE HOME OF SONTEC

AS: Do you still do all this in Baltimore?

BM: We don’t do any of this in Baltimore. My wife and I had wanted to move out of Baltimore for quite a while, so we eventually found what I call ‘Little Italy’ – a rural county in Virginia with a lot of farming, basic manufacturing… and very nice people. Pearisburg is the name of the town – a beautiful place with a population of about 2500, where half the county is national forest, filled with deer and bear and trout streams. When we first discovered it, the only trouble was it had no commercial rental property to speak of.

But then one fateful day we had a meeting with a local real estate agent at his home, where, over lunch, his wife said, ‘did you show them the old school?’. He said, ‘oh they wouldn’t be interested in that dump’. And my wife and I say, ‘Dump? Let’s look at it!’

Turns out it wasn’t a dump, but rather, 16,000 square feet of abandoned elementary school on seven acres! So we talked to the school board that owned it, and they said, ‘well, we’ll have to have a meeting’. We explained we were definitely interested in the building, and that we were keen to sign a lease. They said, ‘let’s not get excited Mr Macneal. We can’t do anything hasty, we’ve got to talk about this, think about it, and talk to some other people in the government’. At which point a fellow sitting two seats down from my wife – who’s the editor of the county newspaper (and a lawyer) – gets up, and says: ‘gentleman, I can visualise the headline in the paper next week: ‘School Board Scares Away First New Industrial Company To Move Into This County In 10 Years’.

So they called an ‘executive session’ in the bathroom, and five minutes later came out and said, ‘Okay, let’s type up a lease immediately.’ After this was done they paused and said, ‘now of course we’re going to have to charge you more than what the last tenants paid. And I said, ‘how much is that going to be?’. And they said, ‘we’re going to have to charge you $500 a month’. Well, we were paying $6000 for our manufacturing facility in Baltimore and my wife had to kick me under the table to keep me from laughing! So I said, ‘well it’s tough, but I guess we’ll have to deal with that’. They even put a clause in the lease stating that it’s continuously renewable at the same rate. I’m definitely in hick-town!

And that’s where we are today and I love it. We live in one end of the building, my wife’s piano business is up the hallway, and further up the hallway is Sontec/ITI, which takes up 40% of the building.

AS: So then… I guess the last question is, ‘how do I get myself on the list for getting one of these?’

BM: Send me an email.

AS: If I jump up and down, can I get higher on the list?

BM: I haven’t read your story yet… Never let it be said that I’m not candid, sometimes to my detriment! How desperate are you, when do you need it?

AS: I’m not in a real hurry.

BM: Good, then you’ll have to wait, but it’ll be worth it!

VINTAGE CHEESE

After further perusal of the JLM Aladdin’s cave, I spot various top-notch items of vintage equipment…

JM: We buy heaps of vintage gear. They’re nice bits of kit to own, and we do hire certain stuff out to folk around Brisbane. My original AKG C24 is super rare – one of the first few hundred serial numbers – I reckon it’s recorded half the stuff done in Brisbane. I’ve also got an AKG C28a, it’s like a valve 451E with removable capsules – that’s really cool. There’s also Neve compressors and Pultec EQs that I’ve slowly reconditioned; they all get hired out as well. It’s my own little fun collection.

BW: So compared to the revered classics, how do you think cheaper mass-produced gear stacks up?

JM: (laughs) See the funny thing about that end of the market is, I can’t understand why some of those manufacturers didn’t spend five dollars extra and make a decent preamp. There’s no reason for it really. And it seems to me that people pay far too much attention to the technical specs of a product and not to what the real story is, which simply involves using your ears – what it sounds like. Plus there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s really difficult to service. Some pieces of gear have to be entirely dismantled – all the knobs taken off and pots unbolted from the front panel – before you can get in there to replace a two-dollar component.

We’re also really big into the feel of things. I can’t believe some bits of supposedly nice kit that have weak and wobbly pots and controls. For mine, it’s gotta be built like a tank and feel really good to use – I love that stuff!

ON THE RACK

Sitting on the shelf next to the vintage esoterica is one of Joe’s new 500 series racks. These use a standard API ‘lunchbox’ chassis and power supply, and accept the new JLM 500 series preamps and EQ units. This one turns out to have been commissioned by none other than AT’s own Gavin Hammond…

JM: This is the most elaborate one we’ve made so far. We’ve combined two of the mixers to make a 12:2 headphone mixer. We’ve then added some VU meters to take up some of the unused space in the rack unit. The mixer section is completely separate from the preamps and EQ; there’s actually 12 inputs at the back, and if you don’t plug into these rear TRS points, the pre and EQ modules are half-normalised into the mixer section.

BW: So why has Gavin gone for one of each preamp type, rather than a pair of each?

JM: Variety mainly. The (single channel) Dual99v is just massive on vocals, while the TG500 is huge on guitars. Both the TG500 and Dual99v have variable impedance, which gives each pre a huge range of tonal balance. He’s only gone for one of each for the extra flavour options, and there’s not enough space in the lunchbox for two of each type. If he needs to process stereo material afterwards, it’s just a case of running both sides through the pre and matching the files up afterwards. The 500 series gear has just flown out the door recently. After redesigning our preamps and EQ to run on the 16V rails (that any 500 series lunchbox uses) and keep the same headroom characteristics, they’ve been a massive hit for us.

BW: I know you do a lot of ‘kits’ that anyone confident with a soldering iron can put together. What came first, building custom gear or the kits?

JM: Building gear. I started building gear because I couldn’t afford the good vintage stuff for myself. I’d gotten used to playing with this stuff in the studio – Pultecs and Neves etc – and just had to have some of that gear myself. The only way to make that happen was to build my own. The kits kinda came out of that ethic. Magoo (Black Box Recording, Brisbane) still has one of our original LA-2A clones, and they were built 18 or 19 years ago.

The JLM99v was developed in early 2001 through to 2004. I was building lots of different discrete op-amp topologies, to see what sounded best in different applications and what could run on high voltage rails for extended headroom. The first kit was the Dual99v kit, which came out in 2004. At that time I was racking heaps of old vintage gear, a process that involved several repetitive bits that I was hand making for each job.

So, first came a five-rail power supply designed to power almost any audio device. Then I developed a kit to provide 48V phantom power, pad and phase switching to old Neve line amps that were getting converted to mic pres. I call that the ‘Go-Between’, which was a literal name as well a tribute to the Go-Betweens, who I’d worked with at different times.

They were originally only made to help me rack old gear quickly and more efficiently. Then it led me to thinking that perhaps some DIY guys might want to use them. So I worked out the pricing and mentioned them on some forums and the orders just started rolling in.

Everything was selling so well that I fine-tuned the power supply design into a neater five-rail, called the Powerstation, and a newer three-rail power supply, called the AC/DC. Then I started designing a Go-Between Plus, which accidentally grew into the Baby Animal mic pre. That’s turned into our most popular kit to date.

The kits have grown into their own thing, with three or four new kits every year to date.

GOOD FROM BAD

BW: Is there any single thing that separates the good mic preamps from the bad ones?

JM: I think the biggest thing is that most people are using the wrong types of pre’s, especially if they’re recording rock music. There are some good preamp designs but I think they’re used for the wrong purpose. There’s a preamp design that’s been used by SSL and Amek, based on a topology that was actually designed by Graeme Cohan, an Australian guy who worked for National Semiconductor. It’s a very pure and fast preamp and a configuration that’s great for recording at a distance in a good room – like most orchestral work. But it’s not so good when you’re shoving a mic three inches from a snare drum and having to deal with a really accelerated transient speed and tonal imbalance.

BW: What’s brought that about then? Do you think there’s been too much of an emphasis on so-called ‘clean’ signal paths? For example, we’ve been through an era where if something couldn’t pass a 20Hz to 20kHz signal it was considered rubbish.

JM: The 20-20 spec is a good basic test, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how the pre will sound for warmth or colour. Our Dual99v and TG500 both test 20-20k but they sound nothing like each other. That’s why people are going for all this vintage stuff, like the V76s and what have you, because they can’t believe how fat it sounds. I think this is the real issue. When you’re close-miking an instrument, especially drums, it’s almost a case of two wrongs resulting in a right. There’s so much brightness and the mic is so close to the sound source that you want a pre that will absorb some of that attack. Transformers in the preamp path will do that for you. To a degree, transformers will absorb sound like your ears do. So, for my money, close miking really requires the warmth of a transformer.

Most people are close miking these days, but you don’t want that transient speed sent through the pre and into a digital recording system, which in itself is a very fast medium. The result just doesn’t gel together very well. The older Neve pre’s almost take that approach a little bit too far, so in our version of the old 1073 or 1290, we actually use a faster output transformer that stays flat under all loads. The old Neves can vary a lot, depending on the output load.

BW: You mean the output impedance of the preamp?

JM: Totally. People don’t realise that. With an old Neve module, where the output is sent into a 10kΩ Digi 002 or something, suddenly there’s a 3-4dB bump in the top end. Then you go into a 600Ω load and you’re struggling to get to 20kHz. This is the trouble, people take vintage gear out of the era it was used in and combine it with all their new stuff, which is all high impedance and hotter levels – and often end up with less than ideal results.

A lot of the vintage remakes or clones will sound different when plugged into different devices – it’s an unpredictable topology. We don’t like that to become an extra variable in the recording process. The JLM design philosophy is to keep our ‘fat’ sound happening no matter what our pre’s are teamed with. The variable input impedance control on some of our units is really good.

We’re also really into making things with clear starting points on the controls. For example, our impedance controls will have a centre detent that denotes the best starting point. Our Dual99V pre is set up with 5dB steps and a 5dB trim control – so you can’t go wrong with your signal-to-noise, you’re forced to do it the right way. But then, if you know what you’re doing and want to get a bit more ‘sound’ or colour out of the unit, the trim control can be switched so it becomes a full-on fader – you can overdrive the pre 10-15dB and really get it to start welling up and changing its colour. Both our TG500 and Dual99V preamps have this same feature, and we’re about to do a Neve 1290-style pre as well. We just like to keep things operationally sensible.

500 GOOD REASONS

BW: I noticed you have a little 500 series Pultec… is that based on an EQP-1A?

JM: The PEQ500 you’re talking about has similar features to a Pultec EQP-1A, but it’s certainly not the same. We wanted to outdo most Pultec-clones, so the unit’s got way more frequencies to choose from and ours can do the same job as a Pultec 1R [a quite rare Pultec design with a switchable shelf]. When you press the Q control, a blue LED lets you know the unit is in shelving mode. The boost control becomes a shelf and the Q control affects the slope into the shelf. Plus, the circuit is driven by our 99V op-amp on the way in, so there are no impedance changes when you alter the EQ setting. The input impedance of an original Pultec will change continually. With full treble boost with full Q the input impedance gets down to about 150Ω, which most modern gear can’t drive properly. The PEQ500 has been designed so that, no matter what you’re using it for, you won’t have to worry about these sorts of impedance mismatches.

BW: So what’s the attraction of the 500 series form factor?

JM: It’s cool because everyone can start with a single channel and build up the ‘lunchbox’ as they go. With the more traditional racks you’re stuck with formats of two or four. With these lunchbox racks we can build to a certain size and spec, then the customer can pick and choose their flavours. We’ve even built a mixer in this format – the first company to ever do that. With the mixer module you can use it to directly monitor signals for latency-free recording, you can even use it to sub-mix stuff back into your DAW. It’s a super-clean summing section and one of the few devices we make where we intentionally don’t add any colour.

We’ve got plans for new 500 series products, compressors specifically. Eventually we’ll be making our own lunchbox unit that will hold eight modules, with the power supply at the back rather than taking up front space. Then we’ll probably be looking at some kind of single unit rack that will accept the 500 series modules as well.

BAM – THANKYOU MA’AM

BW: I had no idea you were building monitors as well. Can you tell me a little about them?

JM: The BAMs? They’re based on time alignment concepts similar to what Dunlavy came up with. There’s mechanical time alignment and then there’s an electronic equivalent. Dunlavy never continued with the concept, but we’ve gone ahead with built-in amplification, and we use full active extension roll-off and a full mathematical engine for the crossover – it doesn’t use a filter as such and isn’t found in any other speaker.

It’s all-analogue circuitry, but what it results in is, if you put a square wave into these monitors, three metres away from the front of the monitors you won’t see the tweeter and woofer signals torn apart into a triangle waveform. The square-wave is reassembled. They’re a very fast-sounding speaker and there are three 140W amps in each cabinet so they pack quite a wallop. We’ve cheated a little bit with some extra porting in the cabinet (Dunlavy always kept to sealed designs) but the results are pretty astounding. We’ve probably got about 40 sets out there in studios at the moment. I’ve had offers from companies to actually make them in the US but I’m not keen on letting these get out of my hands and mass produced – the smallest errors in construction could end up with some less than optimum-sounding monitors – I’m basically not prepared to let anyone else look after the quality control.

JOE – GOING BANANAS

After a smattering of listening tracks I’m suitably impressed with Joe’s monitors. The bottom end is quite incredible and, as Joe suggests, the vocal effects seem to almost hang behind the main vocal parts like a different entity. The image is also surprisingly deep, a testament to the speed and time alignment of the monitors. As you can see from the pics, the BAM monitors are a ported, dual bass driver design, akin to the D’appolito concept [two drivers either side of a central tweeter], but Joe shows me a smaller prototype that uses a single bass driver and tweeter that’s yet to be put into production. The rationale is: people want the BAM sound in a more portable cab.

Of course, finding myself in the bowels of the JLM Audio powerhouse, I couldn’t help enquiring about getting a few Neve modules I’d collected over the years, racked and powered up. The workroom goes quiet… Joe explains that vintage retrofits is a market JLM is attempting to avoid. Sure, there’s always the odd rebuild he can’t say no to but as far as JLM Audio is concerned there are bigger and better fish to be frying. And after having a listen to the JLM devices and taking on some of the JLM ethic and advice, I’m thinking there’s probably a better and easier way.

Vintage gear is just that – vintage. It constantly needs maintenance and can often be nowhere near as good as a combination of old-school transformer technology combined with modern sense and design. Joe Malone is a fellow who combines these virtues extremely well.

Text: Andy Stewart

THE QUESTED PHILOSOPHY

Roger Quested: I never try to sell speakers. I just say to people; ‘listen to them, compare them with other brands and decide what you want’. But unfortunately not many people do that. It’s the minority of customers that actually go and listen to different things and say, ‘I like the sound of those speakers best, I think I’ll buy those’.

I’ve never looked into the physics of speaker design much either. I tend to design with my ears mainly. The fact is, I became a speaker designer by accident in many ways – my background is in audio engineering. The very first speakers I built were simply designed to replace a blown pair of soffit-mounted speakers at a studio I was managing, so I didn’t even think about the design as such, only the quality of the components. I just built something to fit into the space the previous speakers occupied.

Andy Stewart: You’re one of very few people, it seems, who still designs and builds specialist soffit-mounted speakers [speakers that are mounted in a wall], and perhaps the only one who would profess to rely so heavily on his ears. Can you tell me what defines a soffit-mounted speaker, in your opinion?

RQ: Basically, if you take any of the speakers that I’ve designed to go into soffits – I’m talking about the Quested 212s and 412s, for example – and put them on stands, they’ll start rolling off at about 200Hz; way too high to sound any good. Conversely, if they’re soffit-mounted in a well-constructed room, they’ll be flat to 20Hz. Frankly, I’ve never been all that interested in why they work. I guess it has something to do with the surface area of the baffle because the 210s, which have a big surface area compared to the size of the drivers, work very well free-standing. But when you get something like the 415, where around 80% of the baffle is covered in driver units and ports, it doesn’t work so well unless it’s soffited. For other speakers, like the nearfield VS2108 for example, you wouldn’t gain anything by putting that in a soffit.

AS: The VS2108 has quite an extended bottom end. Presumably if you put that speaker in a ‘half space’, you’d just end up with too much bass. Is that what you’re driving at?

RQ: Exactly.

AS: You must have seen countless ‘free-standing’ nearfield monitors incorrectly placed in soffits over the years…

RQ: I have, and what I advise people to do if they’re really determined to have that soffit-mounted ‘look’, is to build a simple framework, then cover it in fabric so that it looks like a soffit but doesn’t behave like one.

AS: Your soffit-mounted speakers are certainly well known, but it’s the nearfields that are surely the most common of all Quested speakers nowadays. How and when did you start designing those?

RQ: Well, the development behind all of my speakers starts with work on the drive units themselves, and then I make the electronics that link these components together as simply as possible, whether they’re active crossovers or passive. When you look at the passive crossover of the VS2108 for example, you’ll notice that it only has about five components, whereas some speaker crossovers have 10 or 12. If you make the crossover simple it’s going to have a more effortless, open sound to it. The same applies to the active ones, with the EQ. To keep the box size down you have to introduce a very shallow 6dB per octave – even less – low frequency lift in it. You can get the same result without it of course, but you’d have to have a box three times as big!

Once you’ve worked on high quality components you then add a decent amplifier. One thing I often notice with other people’s two-way active designs is that they tend to feed too little power to the tweeters. For the high-end driver you’re not using a lot of RMS power, but that’s no reason to afford them less – you still need the headroom. In the VS2108A, we’re feeding 120 Watts to the bass driver, but we’re also sending 100 Watts to the tweeter. I learnt this technique at the very beginning of my design career while working on the prototypes of my big three-way active systems. We had three Yamaha amps at the time: a PC5002 on the low end, two PC2002s at 450W on the mids, and a PC1002 at 100W per channel on the tweeter. Initially what was happening was that we were blowing up tweeters (rated at 25W) all the time, but as soon as we put double that amount (200W) on the tweeter… no problems at all!

AS: I imagine the instinct must have initially been to back off the power supplied to the tweeter rather than increase it.

RQ: That’s right.

AS: So it was the levels of distortion then that was blowing them up, rather than sheer power?

RQ: Yes, it’s square waves that kill tweeters – transient square waves off the amplifier. It’s obviously a law of diminishing returns once you reach a certain degree of amplification, but in principle the more power and headroom you’ve got, the better a speaker’s going to sound.

NECESSITY – MOTHER OF ALL INVENTION

Like so many of the early speaker designers in the pro audio industry, Roger Quested found himself at the forefront of speaker development out of sheer frustration with the studio monitors he’d been forced to work with for so long…

RQ: I started building speakers because I simply couldn’t find any I liked. At the time (around 1982) I was managing a studio in London called Dick James music, and I’d worked there as a freelance engineer in the past. They’d had Eastlake monitors originally, which had two bass drivers and a compression driver that were – when you worked all day – a bit tiring, to say the least. Somewhat bizarrely, between the time I agreed to become the studio manager and my first day on the job, they changed the monitors to UREI 815s, which sounded much nicer than the compression drivers in the Eastlakes, but the problem was they used to break all the time because all the low bass was going through the dual-concentric cone.

We had English producer, Gus Dudgeon, in the studio remixing Elton John at one point and he broke one twice a week. This was a crazy state of affairs so as soon as he’d finished the project I started looking around to see what else was out there. I was originally intending to use a 10-inch Tannoy dual-concentric for the mid and tops, and get a couple of 15-inch bass drivers to fill the room, but before that happened I stumbled across this ProAc hi-fi system which I thought sounded excellent. I spoke to the guy who owned the company and he said the midrange was made by ATC, so I got a couple of those and four Gauss bass drivers… but do you think I could find a decent tweeter? I mean, there weren’t any!

So what I eventually used as a tweeter was an Audax driver, which the company actually sold as a high/mid hi-fi component. This was okay up to 16kHz – and in the studio you didn’t want or need anything flat to 20kHz anyway – so I tried that and it worked out very well. I set them up in the studio and eventually one of the freelance engineers approached me and asked if I would make a similar pair for a friend of his who was rebuilding a studio nearby. I agreed and pretty soon the word got around. Before I knew it, I was building speakers for Trident, Sarm West, Abbey Road, Westside, and Townhouse.

RE-QUESTED NEARFIELDS

AS: When did you build your first Quested nearfield monitor?

RQ: I guess in about ’85 or ’86. All the initial sales were of big soffits, of course, but at one point a couple of producers asked me if I could make something like an NS10, only a bit more powerful and a bit more accurate. This request eventually gave rise to the H108, which was designed to be as small as possible and still work. Funnily enough, we’re selling more of those now then we ever have.

AS: And then you designed the larger passive VS2108, is that correct?

RQ: No, actually the next nearfield I developed was intended to be an ‘active’ [powered] version of the H108.

AS: I always thought the VS2108A started life as a passive speaker…

RQ: No, it started out as an H108, and then (I can’t remember why, I think it was because of Genelec), I decided to make a powered version of it. But since there wasn’t enough room at the back of the 108’s cabinet to dissipate the heat from the amplifier, I had to make the box bigger. So that became the VS2108A.

Soon after it was released I got a call from a guy from a studio in New York – a very big facility with something like 20 rooms at the time – who said: ‘We’ve tried everything and we’re going to go with your H108 because it’s the best sounding nearfield we can find… we just wish it had a bit more bass’. This call came on a Friday afternoon, so I said: ‘I’ll call you back on Monday’. Over the course of that weekend I experimented with putting the H108 crossover in the active VS2108 cabinet without the amplifier, because in a bigger box you’ve naturally got more bass. I quickly re-tuned the cabinet and sent a pair over to New York the following week, and when they heard them they ordered 40! Personally, I think I still prefer the H108. In fact, it’s still what I listen to at home.

ROGER QUESTED: THE ENGINEER

AS: Can we go back further to when you first started engineering in the ’60s. What do you remember of your first session as an assistant?

RQ: My first session as an assistant engineer came at the beginning of ’68 at Olympic Studios in London, recording the Rolling Stones’ Jumping Jack Flash for Top of the Pops. It was quite an interesting first job actually because the film editor had cut the footage up without listening to the soundtrack, so you can imagine what it sounded like. And yet somehow Charlie Watts, who some people argue isn’t the most flamboyant drummer in the world, managed to play along to the picture, and then the band overdubbed the other bits afterwards onto the eight-track recorder.

AS: So they recorded the track to the film? That’s bizarre!

RQ: It was quite bizarre andit was the only time I ever saw that happen. And of course, Mick Jagger was there at the Olympic session, cursing the editor all the while, not realising he was standing right behind him! Olympic was a great studio to train in, we used to do jingles from eight o’clock in the morning and feature films at night.

AS: What was the first album you worked on at Olympic?

RQ: The first album I worked on there was Led Zeppelin 1 – as an assistant to Glyn Johns. That was an amazing week in the studio, that’s for sure. The whole album was finished in a week. From the start of the session to the end of the last mix took seven days to complete, mainly because of budgetary constraints obviously. None of the band members were wealthy guys back then. I mean, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page were session musicians, so they did earn some money, and I’d met John a few times before because he used to do a lot of sessions at Olympic on bass and keyboards. But the other two members of Led Zeppelin were penniless. John Bonham, for instance, was so broke he used to come down to the studio on the train and jump off before it got into the station so he didn’t have to pay the fare!

One thing I vividly remember was the mic setup around his kit during that session. There was an AKG D20 on the bass drum, a Neumann U67 on the floor tom and another one placed as an overhead, with a Beyerdynamic M160 on the snare. And to this day I still get people saying to me things like, ‘I put those mics up and it doesn’t sound anything like that’.

AS: Was the whole band set up in the room together?

RQ: It was. We were in Olympic’s main room, Studio 1, which was big enough to record orchestral music, so there was plenty of room to fit the band in there with all their instruments. It was a great sounding room. Most of the vocals were recorded live with Robert Plant in there with the rest of the band, with everyone performing at once. A couple of vocal bits were changed here and there, but most of it was live.

AS: Is that what created the ‘sound’ of that album more than anything else, would you say?

RQ: It was just the sound of energy, pure energy in the room. Led Zeppelin 1’s sound is mainly the sound of very competent people in there getting on with it. I mean, there was no time to waste, they just got in there and did it. I only recently got the album on CD actually, and it sounds twice as loud as modern recordings even though there’s no more level on it, it just sounds louder because of the energy levels in the room.

AS: What board was Led Zeppelin 1 recorded through, do you recall?

RQ: I don’t think it had a name back then. The tech guy there was Dick Swettenham; a very clever guy, who later started the company, Helios. So although the console didn’t have a name I guess it was – to all intents and purposes – a Helios, given that Dick made it. It started off as a four-bus console. Then when the studio took delivery of the eight-track 3M recorder, Dick added four knobs for the extra four groups – there were no chassis expansion packs back then! It was a good-sounding board.

AS: And after your time at Olympic you moved to Morgan Studios, is that right?

RQ: Yep, I moved to Morgan [in Northwest London], where I stayed for a long time. Originally Morgan consisted of just one eight-track room and the place was working 24-hours a day, with two engineers. It was booked solid all the time, so much so that we had two builders permanently on staff there for a few years building extra rooms. We ended up with four rooms, and eventually the original studio was made into a bar and restaurant.

AS: What albums of note did you record there?

RQ: We used to do loads of stuff. I mean, at one point we had – and I don’t think it would happen nowadays – four albums that we’d recorded in the American Top 20 at one time: Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, John Denver, and The Kinks. I guess Abbey Road would have been the most famous studio around the world, but the two most prolific studios in London at that time were Morgan and Trident. Trident recorded David Bowie and Elton John but in terms of sales we would have been the most prolific.

But my memory is not as good as it used to be. I remember recording The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies there in 1971, mainly because I used to live in Muswell Hill, just down the road. Actually The Kinks were one of my very first customers when I started Quested. They built their own studio in ’86 and bought two pairs of monitors off me back then!

AS: Well, presumably it’s both. The gear wouldn’t have developed cult status if it hadn’t been intrinsically good. Outboard gear like the 1176 has only become iconic because over decades it’s proven itself on countless occasions to work and sound great.

BP: Yeah, I agree. And importantly, the people who were designing the equipment – including my father – were designing it with music in mind and that’s what made some of it so good. My dad was into specs too, of course – I remember watching him run frequency response curves and looking at the square waves on an oscilloscope all the time – but at the end of the day, it was listening, ears and music that mattered most. Putting a sine wave through a piece of gear and looking at it on an oscilloscope is all very well but that’s not what we use these things for. They’re supposed to make music.

The most humbling aspect of being in this industry is that it’s really the music that matters, not all this gear stuff that we geek out on all the time. I’m a gear geek and I love technology, but at the end of the day the only reason I’m doing this is because I’m not a very good musician, and this is compensation! It’s all about the music that goes through the gear. People who’ve designed great stuff with gear – like my dad, like George Massenberg – have understood this. Critically they have both been users of their own gear.

AS: Presumably you’re in the perfect position then to assert that what makes gear great isn’t always something you could measure on a spectrum analyser, and that ‘good’ isn’t necessarily expected to equate to the highest ‘spec’.

BP: I think what’s important today is to make gear that can broaden a person’s sonic palette. And it amazes me still when people ask, ‘should I buy your pre or should I buy a Manly pre?’ because there’s effectively no answer to that question. I always answer with: ‘What are you buying it for? What are you going to do with it? What mics are you using?’ Listening is the only way to find out what works and, frankly, there’s no such thing as ‘better’ on a philosophical level. You can’t answer that in this business, right?

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE MUSICAL

AS: There’s often a gulf between what a designer perceives to be ‘good’ and what musicians and mix engineers want. In terms of Universal Audio gear, do you just ad lib this philosophy?

BP: Well, I think the philosophy’s changed a little bit from when we first relaunched Universal Audio. When UA first began in its modern form my brother and I talked a lot about its design principles. My brother and I are quite different: he’s very much an analogue soul – he owns an API console, loves outboard gear and analogue tape, and he’s also a very good musician and songwriter. I, on the other hand, have always been an avid listener and more technically minded.

I studied physics and electrical engineering at grad school and focused mainly on digital signal processing, and I always knew I wanted to apply that learning to audio and acoustics. So it was really through our differences that we recognised the potential for the company to embrace both design philosophies: digital and analogue. In the end we concluded that there’s no right and wrong to any of this. So we combined the two camps together.

AS: My impression previously was that UA was principally an analogue company with a digital arm tacked onto it – coming here it’s obvious that this isn’t the case.

BP: Well, from day one we realised we were going to develop digital and analogue gear in equal measure. And let me tell you, it was a challenge to get those original analogue designs to market in a very pure, great-sounding form. As you know, people have done analogue recreations of these ‘classics’ before, but they’ve always fallen into the trap – as we did ourselves initially – of trying to make them ‘better’. You know, one of us would say: ‘Oh, I can make this design better by changing that resistor,’ or ‘there’s a problem with that meter circuit,’ or ‘I know how to make the 1176LN quieter.’ In that situation my brother used to just slap me (across the phone) and say: “Anything different is wrong!”. And he was right.

AS: But you obviously can’t apply that philosophy to UAD cards for instance…

BP: No, of course. And the digital gear is every bit as important to us as the analogue designs, so we really wanted to take the ‘soul’ of the analogue gear and somehow encode that digitally. With our other newer analogue designs we’ve also tried to take the essence of some of the original gear and expand on that heritage. But again, it all comes back to the palette – we have stuff like the 110 that can be very clean, and the 610, which has a very distinctive sound that’s great for some things and not right for others.

A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON

AS: Was there much of gap between the demise of the old UA and the birth of the new one?

BP: There was definitely a gap. My dad started the original Universal Audio in the ’40s, which later turned into UREI in the late ’60s… around ’67 that was.

Then, in the early ’80s he sold UREI to Harman Electronics due mainly to health problems. He wanted to focus on family and those types of things – his priorities changed, I guess you’d say.

AS: Did you have much to do with your dad’s company back then?

BP: Yeah I did. I would hang around the studios, especially when people like Bing Crosby were coming in; I’d always want to go see that! But it was my older brother who really experienced the company during its heyday, during the ’60s when my dad was recording a lot of stuff. By the time my dad had me he’d already turned more into the business executive. He’d come in to record special acts but he wasn’t mixing a new act every night. He was very much focussed on design by then, which is what he loved as much as anything.

I spent a lot of time with him in the lab working on speakers and power amps mainly. So my shared experiences with him were more of the technical side of his personality, less on seeing him behind the console. He actually built the test labs at our house so it was difficult to avoid really! We had a 45-foot trailer pulled into our front yard at one stage, which was equipped with a 30-foot scaffolding that hauled speakers up into the air to get them away from reflections so he could make free-space measurements. He wasn’t you’re average dad, that’s for sure!

MODERN PERSPECTIVE

AS: Does the modern incarnation of UA feel linked to the past in a visceral kind of way, given that most of the original ‘classics’ are often no longer used for the purpose they were originally intended?

BP: I think it does, but then it would be hard for it not to, I guess. You know what’s different though – and let me just be careful about how I say this – there’s a lot more attention to detail and scrutiny of products now than ever before. With computers being as powerful as they are today, you can analyse specifications to the ‘nth’ degree, far more so than I ever remember my dad doing. And I think this is primarily because the world has changed, and gear is used in so many different ways now. For instance, my dad would never have  taken a distorted kick drum track and tucked it behind his ‘clean’ kick drum; he probably never even dreamt of doing that! But we can do that sort of thing now; it’s an extra tool in our production palette. But because there’s so much gear in the world now, so much technology and so much capacity for mangling a sound, you can get lost in the gear, lost in the manuals and forget about the music. It’s easy to obsess over this stuff and sometimes it’s hard to know where to stop.

So I think, in that sense, the company feels different but it’s mainly because the world we live in is different. I certainly don’t think my father cared any less about the equipment – au contraire. What has changed is that his designs are used today in ways he probably never thought possible.