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Celebrating the inventors and innovators who shaped the world of pro audio
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Genius! Brought to you by the makers of
Celebrating the inventors and innovators who shaped the
world of pro audio
Genius!
3
CONTENTS4Editorial and contributors
6Rupert Neve and the Mixing Console
7Crown’s Gerald Stanley and the DC300
8Dave Martin and the ‘Philishave’
9Andy Hildebrand and Antares Auto-Tune
Miller Puckette and Max
10Kees Schouhamer Immink and the CD
11Peter Burkowitz and the EMI REDD.17
Ray Dolby and Noise Reduction
12Klas Dalbjörn and Lab.gruppen PLM
13Paul Van Hees and the PE-133
Herbert Jünger and the Jünger Audio D1
14Michael Gerzon and Ambisonics
15George Massenburg and Parametric EQ
Dan Dugan and the Automixer
16CEDAR’s Christopher Hicks and “De-Everything”
17Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg and MP3
18Gerrit Buhe and Sennheiser Digital 9000
19John Stadius and the DiGiCo SD7
20Bruce Hofer and the Audio Precision System One
Georg Neumann and the CMV-3
21Soundcraft’s Graham Blyth and the Flightcase Mixing Console
22Peter Neubäcker and Melodyne DNA
Stefan Kudelski and the Nagra I
23PMC’s Pete Thomas and ATL
24David Dearden and the Audient ASP8024
Ahren Hartman and Shure Axient
25Funkion One’s Tony Andrews and the Mid-Range Horn
26Jesper Lind Hansen and the Pascal S-PRO2
John Meyer and Self-Powered Speakers
27Ivor Drawmer and the DS201
28Rog Mogale and Void Acoustics’ Air Motion
Jeff Byers and MIDAS
29Aidan Williams and AV Networking (Dante)
30The Geniuses’ Geniuses!
Genius!
4
The brainy ones. The backroom boys. The
boffins. Genius! is all about celebrating
those clever people whose inventions have
transformed the world of professional audio.
Too often – and it’s not just in this
industry, let’s be clear – when we hear or
read about new technologies, the messaging
is accompanied by a large dollop of
marketing spin and a sizeable side order of
superlatives. It’s only later, when we reflect,
that we can make a valid judgment call as to
what that technology as really done for us.
Hence our aim here: to recognise the
smart people in pro audio and marry them
up to key products, technologies or features.
To shine some light on the magic, if you will:
to examine where our ‘genius’ was when
the ‘lightbulb moment’ happened; how that
spark became a reality; and what happened
next, for the ‘genius’ themselves and for the
wider industry.
Of course, there are an awful lot of bright
people out there, so this is just one swathe.
There are plenty more for another time...
Dave Robinson, editor
ALL HAIL THE BOFFINS!
EditorDave Robinson
Deputy EditorJon Chapple
Managing EditorJo Ruddock
Advertising ManagerRyan O’Donnell
Sales ExecutiveRian Zoll-Khan
Head of DesignJat Garcha
Production ExecutiveJason Dowie
Genius!
Erica Basnicki“David Edward Hughes,
inventor of the first ever
microphone. Microphones are
by far my favourite piece of kit
and I love that each has its own
particular nuance. Not unlike
wine, which I also love.
“I would also choose
Dorothy Parker: She could
cut you in half with just a few
words, then casually sit there
and wait for you to get it. She
also validates how I feel each
month around deadline, having
famously said, ‘I hate writing.
I love having written.’”
David Davies“A musical innovator
responsible for the birth of a
new genre – ambient – as
well as groundbreaking
collaborations with the likes
of David Bowie and Talking
Heads, Brian Eno was also one
of the first people to realise the
recording studio’s potential as
an instrument in its own right.
Away from music/pro audio,
I’d nominate astrophysicist
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell,
who was the first person to
observe pulsars in the late
1960s – but who was sadly
excluded from Nobel Prize
recognition at the time.”
Mike Hillier“Daphne Oram. She founded
the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop and pioneered
much of British electronic
music long before many
people even knew what the
phrase meant. But her real
genius lay in the Oramics
synthesizer, which used waves
drawn onto film to control the
amplitude, timbre, frequency
and note duration.
“For my non-industry genius,
I’ve decided on Ada Lovelace.
She was the only (legitimate)
child of Lord Byron and a
well-known mathematician,
who counted among her fans
Charles Babbage and Michael
Faraday. In 1843 she translated
an article by Luigi Menabrea,
about Babbage’s Analytical
Engine, adding her own notes.
These notes include the first
ever computer program.”
Kevin HiltonWithout magnetic audio tape,
which Fritz Pfleumer invented
in 1928, there would have been
no pre-recording on the likes
of Revox, Studer and Nagra,
and no efficient sound editing,
which most likely would have
meant no musique concrète
and no BBC Radiophonic
Workshop. And interviews
would have been long and full
of ‘ums’ and ‘ers’.
“Away from audio? Nigel
Kneale, the visionary writer
of the Quatermass series
fascinated by what happens
when the rational world meets
the supernatural head-on.
He foresaw the coming of
reality TV in The Year of the
Sex Olympics (1962), while
The Stone Tape (1972) used
the search for a new audio
recording medium as the basis
of a chilling ghost story.”
Marc Maes“Audio-wise, Jim Marshall of
Marshall Amplification, because
rock music wouldn’t have
existed without the famous
EL-34 valve amps and
4 x 12” stacks.
“I would also choose Carlos
Santana. He’s been around
since my first vinyl purchases.
His natural craftsmanship and
ability to create emotions with
nothing but six strings are pure
genius. Throughout the ages,
Carlos gave proof of mastering
multiple facets and musical
styles, within his signature
sound.”
Phil Ward“John Lennon: Given that
any of the geniuses in actual
pro-audio design that I would
nominate already appear
elsewhere on these pages, and
that Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter
wasn’t born in my home
town, it has to be Lennon. The
Picasso of rock, with an even
sharper bite.
“And then, the genius of
Søren Kierkegaard. No, he
didn’t just sit there biting the
heads off whippets. He shook
off prescriptive idealism and
made existence something
you’ve got to sort out for
yourself – with or without a
bible.”
Our contributors and their choices of genius, in pro audio and beyond…
NewBay Media
1st Floor, Suncourt House,
18-26 Essex Road, London,
UK, N1 8LN
© NewBay Media, 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owners. The contents of Genuis are subject to reproduction in information storage and retrieval systems. NewBay Media is now the Data Controller under the Data Protection Act 1998 in respect of your personal data. NewBay Media will only use your data for the purposes originally notified and your rights under the Data Protection Act 1998 are not affected by this change.
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Cover image of Michael Gerzon with
Revox machine Paul Hodges
Genius!
6
It seems rather obvious now,
but the idea of channelling
disparate audio signals through
a device that would let you
listen to them simultaneously,
and even begin to blend them
harmoniously together, was a
radical one. But that’s exactly
what British composer Desmond
Leslie required at the beginning
of the 1960s: as a musique
concrète specialist, his sound
sources were not instruments
but multiple tape recorders. The
one-off solution provided to him
by Rupert Neve was nothing less
than the future in a box.
“I met Desmond in a London
recording studio when I was
touting for business,” remembers
Neve today. “Everyone thought
he was a nutcase. He looked at
me and said ‘Have you heard that
transmission from Jupiter?’ – I
had no idea, but I indulged him
by saying ‘Yes, and how about
that other one from Mars?’… He
took me entirely seriously, but
that’s how we got on the same
wavelength. He told me about an
important commission from EMI,
and that led to a fairly simple,
line-level mixer.”
And that might have been that,
were it not for the explosion
of pop music as the ’60s took
off . Two London studios in
particular – Bryonstone Street
and Recorded Sound – followed
Desmond Leslie’s lead and
saw the advantages of Neve’s
invention for a much more
commercial output. The early
models were valve-based, and
included studio and outside
broadcast iterations. But by the
time another studio, Phillips
Records, became a client, Neve
had moved on to transistor-
based designs and, furthermore,
the addition of equalisation to
the consoles to enable much
more creative reinterpretation
of a recording – and a means
of re-visiting the music without
having to book the musicians all
over again.
“They asked if there was any
way I could ‘lift’ the guitar out
of the mix – bearing in mind
that everything was in mono
then,” Neve continues. “The
equaliser was essentially a
steep-sided ‘presence curve’,
a mid-frequency lift centred
between 1kHz and 2.5kHz. The
real innovation was that it was
tunable to the guitar frequencies;
up to then the standard type of
EQ was a kind of low-frequency
broadcast fi ltering. It was an
amazing opportunity. With
hindsight I would say that was
the breakthrough – although I
didn’t realise it at the time! The
classic Neve equalisers that
followed that were all based on
the same approach, and became
an integral part of the consoles
that just took off beyond my
wildest expectations. By 1973 we
had over 500 employees….”
The work continues today at
Rupert Neve Designs, based in
Texas, and has latterly produced
Neve’s fi rst discrete analogue
mixer in 30-plus years: the 5088.
With its signature single-sided,
fully discrete amplifi cation
and transformer isolation, the
product aims to supply all of the
qualities admired in the classic
consoles but without the “full-
time occupation” that seems to
go with them: maintenance.
“Just as in 1963,” Neve adds,
“I hope and believe that some of
the things I’m working on now
will have strategic importance.
The current resurgence in high-
quality audio needs us to address
the signifi cant performance
specs so that the market will
have concrete information to
eliminate the subjective hype.”
www.rupertneve.com
Rupert Neve and the Mixing Console
Rupert Neve:
“Just as in 1963,
I hope and believe
that some of the
things I’m working
on now will have
strategic importance”
Detail of the channel strip
from the (current) 5088
Genius!
7
Gerald Stanley and… the Importance of Answering That Knock at The Door
Since landing his fi rst job at
Crown in 1964, Gerald Stanley
has racked up an impressive line
of credits, not least of which is
being selected, in 2008, by the
Audio Engineers Society for the
distinguished AES Fellowship
Award recognising signifi cant
contributions to power
amplifi er design.
While still an undergraduate at
Michigan State University,
Stanley joined Crown as a
part-time tape recorder line
technician, draftsman and
amplifi er design engineer.
At the university, Stanley
developed amplifi er designs, at
a time when transistor failure
mechanisms (and solutions)
weren’t known. His work would
initially result in an amplifi er that
was reliable, but when taken to a
hi-fi show in 1966 was criticised
as being too “small” in relation
to other 75 watts-per-channel
models appearing at the time.
In the spring of 1966, with
a Master’s degree in hand,
Stanley went to work on the
size problem as Crown’s
full-time designer of tape
recorder electronics but, most
importantly, power amplifi ers.
The electronic protection
methods to be used were
now adequate, and with a
newly forming knowledge
base on semiconductor failure
mechanisms, it was possible to
deploy paralleled single-diff used
power transistors in a circuit
(Class-AB+B) that had ample
speed and previously unattained
reliability which allowed for the
creation of the DC300. It would
become the fi rst reliable, solid-
state, high power amplifi er.
By 1968, the product was
shipping in quantity and fi nding
new markets for DC coupled
power. Some of the early
adopters were makers of jet
engines and makers of sonar
transducers for the military. With
all other models either smaller
or unreliable, Crown had the
market to themselves for a time.
Since then, Stanley played a
pivotal role in most of Crown’s
major lines, starting with the DC
300 and including the Macro-
Tech, K, CTs, I-Tech, I-Tech-
HD and ComTech DriveCore
series amplifi ers. He’s also
contributed to the design and
development of tape recorders,
signal processors and audio test
equipment. In over 50 years
working away at Crown, he has
been named as an inventor on
49 patent families (many families
represent several patents due to
foreign versions). The patents
line the offi ces of Crown’s
Elkhart Indiana HQ.
Stanley takes a holistic view
of the industry’s evolution. “The
fi rst Crown power amplifi ers
were accessories to the tape
recorders,” he says. “But over
time, the accessories outsold the
original products.”
Stanley says he’s proud of
Crown’s unwavering focus on
customers. “Each product we’ve
added has brought a unique
value and performed in support
of the other products,” he says.
“The incorporation of
digital signal processing is a
natural for adding value to
most signal processing
products. Power amplifi er
systems are no exception.”
Stanley’s words of wisdom?
Have fun. And answer your
door. “I started as a kid, using old
radios that were being discarded
around the neighbourhood,
and it was a lot of fun trying to
determine why the designers
had done this or that,” he recalls.
“The lesson: If a kid comes to
your doorstep asking for an old
PC, give it to them. Your old
PC may transform the world in
due time.”
www.crownaudio.com
A young Gerald Stanley in his early days with Crown
The DC300 would become the fi rst reliable, solid-state, high power
amplifi er, and set Crown on the road to success
Genius!
8
The late Dave Martin will be best
remembered for kick-starting
the modular, horn-loaded
revolution – heralding a new era
in sound reinforcement after a
generation of WEM columns.
Believing that bands could
deliver a better audience
experience at ever-increasing
capacity venues, Martin’s early
inspiration came from seeing
the RCA W folded-horn cinema
cabs when Iron Butterfly first
toured with them. Because they
measured seven feet high and
weighed 500lbs they didn’t want
to pay the return freight back,
and so the system was sold to
British rock band Yes.
The Australian rethought
the folded-horn concept and
produced his famous 215 Mk1 (2
x 15”) bass cab, which was later
transformed into the iconic 115
(1 x 15”), he quipped, “by sawing
it in half.” The bass crossed
over into Vitavox horns with
JBL2482 compression drivers
around 500Hz.
Martin’s horn-loaded systems
proved to be a big step up
from the earlier direct radiator
columns, which couldn’t keep
pace with the demands of the
emerging progressive scene.
With early adopters including
Pink Floyd, ELP and The Who,
Martin bins and horns joined
rock royalty through the
‘progressive’ era of the early-to-
mid-70s.
Yet Dave Martin’s most iconic
product was arguably the
legendary MH212 ‘Philishave’
– so named because of its
resemblance to the Philips
electric razor of the time. And
the band that put it on the map
was Supertramp – one of a
number of bands who had been
seeking more power in the vocal
midrange region.
So how did it come about?
The design brief was to develop
a mid-range device that was
compact, loud and crossed over
into the HF horn well above
800Hz. Initial designs using
ATC 12” direct radiators in the
MR212 twin-angled mid and
MR312 ‘threepenny bit’ were less
efficient than the horn-loaded
bass and HF sections and didn’t
go much above 800Hz.
Martin’s imaginative solution
was to look to the compression
driver principle to increase
efficiency and extend frequency
response upwards by matching
a speaker diaphragm to a
smaller throat by means of a
phase plug.
Introduced in 1978, the twin-
driver MH212 was the first ever
dedicated cone midrange horn,
and with the 115 or 215 Mk2
bass bins and HF2M treble horn
completed the modular system.
The name ‘Philishave’ resonated
louder than the components
from which it was made – and
quickly became an industry
standard around the globe.
Another pioneering principle
that Dave Martin adopted was
to stack the bass, mids and
highs in separate columns.
The 1980 Dire Straits’ tour in
Italy was a perfect example
of the science of stacking,
with the Philishaves and horns
arranged in columns to throw
further – a forerunner of line
array thinking, while for the Free
Mandela concert at Wembley
stadium in 1988, seen in over
40 countries, Concert Sound
fielded a colossal 98 x 215 Mk2
bins, 60 Philishaves and over 60
HF horns plus JBL bullets.
And so with his early
mission fulfilled, the heritage
and pedigree have been
handed down to subsequent
generations of development
engineers within the
company, and the quest
to achieve the same
pioneering excellence through
innovation remains intact. For
these are truly legacy systems,
and to this day, Dave Martin’s
horn-loading philosophy
continues to be a key principle
in the touring products of
Martin Audio, the company
he founded in Covent Garden
in 1971.
www.martin-audio.com
Dave Martin and the ‘Philishave’HISTORICAL
GENIUS
7,000W Martin Audio rig for Pink Floyd, Earl’s Court 1973
A young Martin with
classic ‘Philishave’ stack
Genius!
9
Love it or loathe it, pitch-
correction software is here to
stay, having made an impact
on the industry even before
Auto-Tune was released in 1997.
“Two months after I started
development I took the half
completed product to the NAMM
trade show and demonstrated it
at the Digidesign booth. Several
producers insisted on getting it
NOW, one explaining he’d just
paid $60,000 to make [unnamed
superstar] sing in tune. Auto-
Tune would have done the job
perfectly in minutes.” Now a
permanent fixture in studios,
pitch-correction software
such as Auto-Tune is as likely
to be used to gently push a
performance into pitch as it
is to be creatively abused to
create an almost synthetic,
vocoder-like effect.
Dr Andy Hildebrand got his
Ph.D in Electrical Engineering
specialising in signal processing
in 1976, then went on to work
at Exxon doing seismic data
processing research and by
1980 had co-founded Landmark
Graphics Corporation, which
he left in 1988 to go back to
school to study composition at
Shepard School of Music in Rice
University, then founding Jupiter
Systems, which became Antares
in 1990. Much ink has been
wasted trying to link his time at
Exxon with the development of
Auto-Tune by Dr Andy (as he is
affectionately known) laughs
this off; “the reality is there
was 17 years in between and
they have nothing to do with
each other”. But Dr Andy isn’t
afraid of extending beyond his
comfort zone, and recently while
examining guitar waveforms
was inspired by his daughter,
a cardiologist, into developing
tools for pacemakers. “It turns
out that defibrillating pacemakers
make errors based on not
correctly computing the pulse
rate: sometimes they shock what
they shouldn’t, which can be
problematic. Sometimes they
don’t shock when they should,
which can be fatal. So now I’m
working on pacemakers as well.”
www.antarestech.com
Andy Hildebrand and Auto-Tune
While computer-generated
music can be traced back as far
as the 1950s, by the late 1970s,
when a young mathematician
named Miller Puckette took a
Computer Music course at MIT,
the hardware and software
necessary to create music
in realtime on a computer
still wasn’t available. “I was
frustrated by having to wait for
the sound to come out of the
computer. So I got busy trying
to find a way to get the sound
to come out in real time.”
That development wasn’t
easy. While at IRCAM in the
mid-80s Puckette developed
Patcher, a GUI programming
environment which could
control MIDI, but still had no
real-time audio of its own.
The patching style however,
caught on as it enabled
musicians to quickly visualise
what they were programming
without having to learn a
complex coding language.
“I wanted Max to be easy to
use so that musicians would
be able to work directly with
it without having to rely on a
technical assistant.” Not until
1989 did the IRCAM Signal
Processing Workstation – a
NeXT computer with three
expansion DSP cards – finally
provide Puckette with the
necessary DSP to run real-
time audio and Max/FTS
(Faster Than Sound) was born,
enabling real-time audio signal
creation and processing. The
original version of
Max, without the FTS
extensions, was licensed
to Opcode in 1990.
In the mid-90s Puckette,
now at the University of
California San Diego, sought
to remedy some of the
weaknesses of Max/FTS,
and began work on Pure
Data (Pd) as an open-source
patching language. Inspired by
Puckette’s real-time audio in
Pd, David Zicarelli then
re-used the audio side of Pd
in Max, and in 1997 launched
Max/MSP which is now
developed and maintained
by Cycling ’74 (cycling74.com).
“It was pretty clear to me
from the beginning (1998-ish)
that Max/MSP was going to be
widely used. The Macintosh
and MIDI synth platform
was catching on quickly
and there weren’t any other
easily useable programming
environments for it.” Puckette
continues to work on and
with Pd at the University of
California San Diego.
Miller Puckette and Max
Miller Puckette in Taiwan
The latest version of the ubiquitous software
GENIUS
Genius!
In the 1970s, South African
born Kees Schouhamer Immink
worked at Philips Research
in the Netherlands on the
videodisc: an optical disc that
could store up to 60 minutes
of analogue video and sound.
It was a technical success, but
a marketing disaster. The next
format, however, would change
the audio world forever…
How did you end up with Philips Research working on the Compact Disc?At that time, research was split
up into three main groups:
physics, chemistry and
electronics. I am an electronic
engineer and optical recording
was being investigating in
the physics group. Electronic
engineers weren’t allowed to
work in the physics group – I
was the first one who did.
Apparently, management found
out that a multidisciplinary group
would be better. There was a
vacancy so I applied and was
accepted, and for about five or
six years I was the only electronic
engineer there.
What led to the development of the actual CD format?The physicists and myself
were working very hard on the
‘video disc’. At some point, the
Audio industry group asked if
we could also make a disc that
contained sound only. We were
very academic at the time, and
very independent, so we said,
“Sure, we can. But we don’t. It’s
trivial.” So we just said “no” to the
people who actually gave us to
money to do all the research! A
few months, later two engineers
from the Audio industry group
came to do some experiments
with these sound-only discs.
It was absolutely the initiative
of the Audio industry group to
investigate the possibility of a
sound-only disc.
Is it true that the playing time of the CD was designed to accommodate a Beethoven symphony?At some point in time we
received a message from the
top brass that the playing time
should be 74 minutes. Later,
I heard about the Beethoven
story… have you ever heard
the recording? [The Ninth
Symphony, recorded during the
Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951]
It’s horrible! It’s a noisy, mono
recording that nobody wanted
to listen to. Why someone would
use that as a yardstick for the
playing time of the CD, I don’t
know! [Laughs]
Was there a specific moment when you realised this was something special?Well, that’s difficult because I’ve
had those moments before.
I believed that the video disc
would become a very great
commercial success, but it
wasn’t. It was the greatest
blooper I had ever seen! But the
CD was, and we were able to
develop that in a year because
we had so much experience with
the video disc.
What happened next?When we first brought them
to market, sales of CDs were
very slow. There were only two
factories in the world actually
producing them: Phillips and
Sony. Nobody else had any
interest. It took at least three
years before I heard of a third
factory starting and I thought,
“now, we’re getting somewhere”.
But there was initially lots of
opposition from the music
industry. It was understandable;
they were selling vinyl records,
making money and the industry
was happy with that. Shops had
no interest either: they had to
make room for CDs, and they
were happy selling vinyl. So
why change? Eventually it was a
success, of course, and in 2000
it reached its peak. Sales are only
20% down from that peak, so it’s
not doing so badly.
What do you think about your contribution to the audio industry?Maybe I was too serious when I
did all this work. I should’ve taken
more time to do something
else. That’s one of those regrets
people in their final days always
have. The number one regret
is always not spending more
time with the family. But when
you’re in your 30s and 40s, you
don’t have time for your family.
[Laughs] I’m joking… but it’s
fantastic if you can look back
at a career that has so many
highlights and has changed the
world of consumer electronics
so much with digitisation that all
started with the introduction of
the CD.
www.turing-machines.com
http://www.exp-math.
uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/
beethoven.htm
Kees Schouhamer Immink and the Compact DiscImmink is now
president of Turing
Machines, where he has
been granted around
10 US patents for new
coding technology
Immink received an Honourary
doctorate from the University of
Johannesburg in June this year,
in recognition of the remarkable
contributions he has made to
intellectual and public life
10
Immink at Philips research in
1980, developing the Compact
Disc with an Apple II computer
Genius!
11
There aren’t too many figures
in pro audio who can be said
to have crossed over into
the mainstream and become
household names. But the
late Ray Dolby – whose
remarkable 50-plus US patents
had a seismic impact on both
consumer and professional
audio – was indisputably one
of that select band.
In the professional studio
world, it will be for Dolby’s
pioneering work in noise
reduction technologies
that he will be most fondly
remembered. The first of
these Dolby NR (Noise
Reduction) systems, Dolby
A, came into use in the mid-
1960s at the same time as
multi-track recording was
becoming ubiquitous, and
quickly became a recognised
benchmark in studios
worldwide. Subsequent
versions, such as Dolby
HX-Pro, served to broaden its
usage considerably.
While the company he
founded in 1965 and which
bears his name, Dolby
Laboratories, retains a strong
presence in the studio market,
its position in cinema audio
now seems particularly
unassailable. Having launched
the Dolby Digital surround
sound compression scheme in
the early 1990s, the company
has gone on to introduce
widely-adopted systems for
5.1 and 7.1 configurations.
Now it looks set to usher in
a new era for both cinema
and home audio with Dolby
Atmos, its object-based audio
technology designed to deliver
three-dimensional sound that
has already been implemented
in hundreds of cinemas.
Confirmation of Dolby’s
popular status was abundant
in his later years, with the
Hollywood venue that hosts
the Oscars being renamed the
Dolby Theatre in 2012. Slightly
less exaltedly, he was also the
influence for a setpiece joke
(“you don’t do heavy metal in
Dubly, you know!”) in classic
1984 rockumentary, This Is
Spinal Tap.
Described as a “friend,
mentor and true visionary”
by current Dolby Laboratories
president and CEO
Kevin Yeaman, Ray Dolby
passed away aged 80 in
September 2013.
Ray Dolby and Noise Reduction
Ray Dolby in his workshop
HISTORICAL
GENIUS
Recognition that stereo
separation was set to effect a
profound change on studio
recording techniques, EMI
established a new design
team to ascertain and act on
these new expectations – the
REDD: Record Engineering
Development Department – in
the mid-1950s. The REDD.1 –
Abbey Road’s first dedicated
stereo mixing system – was an
early result of the initiative, but it
was 1958’s REDD.17 (below) that
truly marked the beginning of a
new era.
Through the analogue and
digital eras, the design and
feature set of recording consoles
has changed dramatically. The
10-input REDD.17, however, is
arguably the desk that created
the basic template, with a row of
faders, bass and treble EQs on
each of the eight channels.
Interestingly, the technical
mastermind behind the REDD.17
wasn’t even based in the UK.
Peter Burkowitz worked out of
EMI Electrola in Germany, where
he fashioned a modular design
that would allow the REDD desk
to be easily assembled
and disassembled.
Burkowitz and the team back
in London – which was led by
Abbey Road Studios technical
engineer and REDD project
founder Lenn Page – worked
closely together on a desk that
soon became the default Abbey
Road recording desk.
Perhaps most importantly in
the long term, the REDD.17 also
provided the groundwork for
the REDD:37, the console that
marked Abbey Road’s entry
into four-track recording.
Additional EQ on each channel
was among the features of a
desk that soon became a
legend of the studio world
thanks to its use on The Beatles’
EMI material up until the
end of 1963 – a hugely
exciting period that saw the
release of the Fabs’ first two
long-players, Please Please Me
and With the Beatles.
Meanwhile, many of The
Beatles’ subsequent recordings
were captured on the next
generation of REDD desk, the
REDD.51, which was introduced
in 1964.
www.abbeyroad.com
Peter Burkowitz and the EMI REDD.17 Console
Burkowitz (right) with former Abbey Road technician Brian Gibson, who kindly supplied this picture
HISTORICAL
GENIUS
The original REDD.17
(pic courtesy of
Abbey Road)
Genius!
12
Klas Dalbjörn is fondly known as
‘The Brain’ by his colleagues at
Lab.gruppen, where he currently
holds the position of product
research manager, a company he
joined as an engineer back
in 1992.
Dalbjörn holds an MSc EE
degree from Chalmers in
Gothenburg specialising in
electroacoustics and digital
signal processing, and it was
here, in the 1980s, that he
first began working with Lake
Processing, an avenue of
research that was to change
the face of the company and,
arguably, the live sound market.
The Lake FDP-1 was an
early Lake implementation,
allowing emulation of long
convolution filters. Working with
the Lake FDP-1 to be able to
evaluate filters to compensate
for speakers within rooms, his
academic work brought him into
contact with David McGrath, one
of Lake’s founders.
“This gave me the knowledge
and courage to approached
Lab.gruppen in 1991 with the
promise that I could design
a really good loudspeaker
processor for them. Dan
Bävholm, one of the Lab.gruppen
founders, knew that they would
eventually need to incorporate
this into the amplifiers, so I got
hired and I started working in
February 1992, actually thinking
I could do it in a few months. At
this time Lab.gruppen was still
small and all previous design
efforts had been made by the
founders themselves. Luckily
they knew that things don’t
happen overnight and I was
allowed to spend most of my
time to work on this ‘product for
the future’.”
It took five years, in fact:
the innovative loudspeaker
processor, the DSP24 (which
emulated four 8192 FIR taps
at 48kHz); while the industry
wasn’t quite ready for such a
sophisticated device in 1997,
it marked Dalbjörn out as a
superior technical talent on
the rise.
“Around 2003 my work task
focus shifted towards defining
and specifying new products,”
he continues. “I was quite sure
that I didn’t want Lab.gruppen
to deliver an ‘amplifier with DSP
inside’ – I wanted to create a
‘loudspeaker processor system
with amplifier blocks inside’.”
And so it was in 2007,
PLM (Powered Loudspeaker
Management) introduced the
world to Lab.gruppen’s most
powerful four-channel amplifier
platform, integrated with the
industry-leading digital sound
manipulation features of Lake
Processing. The result was
a seamlessly unified sound
reinforcement core that offered
unprecedented flexibility,
pristine digital filtering and delay,
plus effortless ability to drive
difficult loads. When compared
to conventional approaches
using separate components,
the PLM Series afforded
significant advantages in sonic
performance, user functionality,
rental inventory practicality,
and long-term cost savings in a
package that has since gone on
to power some of the biggest
tours on the planet, including
U2’s mammoth 360⁰ Tour.
In his role as product research
manager, Dalbjörn continues
to nurture product ideas for the
Lab.gruppen and Lake brands.
In 2014 – as Lab.gruppen
celebrated its 35th anniversary –
Dalbjörn helped introduce two
new amplifier platforms, D Series
and PLM+, both of which feature
new technologies straight from
‘The Brain’ including Rational
Power Management (RPM), a
technology that ensures the
most efficient and logical use of
total amplifier resource.
labgruppen.com
Klas Dalbjörn and PLM SeriesDalbjörn is known
as ‘The Brain’ to his
colleagues
PLM10000Q (later version with Dante capability)
Rack after rack of PLM on the
legendary U2 360° tour
Genius!
13
With the Apex PE-133, Belgian
audio manufacturer Apex
designed the first ever and still
unsurpassed EQ combining full-
parametric and graphic equaliser
in one device. And contributed
to the pro-audio vocabulary: the
‘paragraphic equaliser’ was born.
The idea to develop a new
equaliser came in 1988, when
Paul Van Hees, as sales manager
with production house EML’s
sales division, was looking
for an alternative product for
the HIT (Harrison Information
Technology) equaliser. “They
were the pre-digital times, mind
you, everything was analogue,”
remembers Van Hees. “We
needed a hardware solution… Of
course, you had the stand-alone
versions of both the graphic
and parametric equalisers – the
combination we had in mind was
really innovative: the first device
combining the two EQs.”
From the very first
development, Van Hees had
the feeling of going beyond
the trend. “The PE-133’s
parametric section featured
unprecedented fine frequency
tuning, offering notch filtering
up to -45dB,” he says. “Specially
manufactured precision faders,
frequency adjustable high-pass
and low-pass filters added to
the efficiency of the new type
equaliser, aiming at both the
sound reinforcement and studio
market.”
The PE-133 was first shown
at the 1989 Hamburg AES –
one year later, the PE-133 was
awarded by the King Boudewijn
Foundation, underlining the
importance for the further
development of the pro-audio
industry. First clients to order the
PE- were the Belgian national
broadcaster, the Videaudio
recording studio in Brussels and
The Dutch National Film and
Audio Service in The Hague. Next
came the Disneyland Paris park
with an order of 70 PE-232 (the
PE-133 stereo version).
“They were fun times
then – pro-audio was in full
development and the whole
industry was less organised and
structured,” Van Hees looks back.
“It was really the storming spirit
of business.”
www.apex-audio.eu
Paul Van Hees and the PE-133
Herbert Jünger grew up in
the old East Germany, or the
German Democratic Republic
(GDR) as it was formally known.
During the mid-1970s he studied
electronic engineering and then
worked for a high frequency
measurement company. He
also played in bands, where his
knowledge of electronics was
useful to his fellow musicians.
“There was nothing available
in the GDR at that time so
everything had to be re-built
or copied,” he explains. The
same was true in broadcasting
and Jünger’s talent for creating
equipment that was becoming
commonplace in the West
brought him to the attention of
television and radio engineers.
At the beginning of the 1980s
Jünger produced the first
analogue compressor in East
Germany, based on the VCAs of
a dbx unit that had been brought
in via his aunt. This was followed
by the analogue Dynamic
Transponders that made
his name among broadcast
engineers looking to reduce the
wide dynamic range of CDs for
FM transmission.
The algorithm Jünger
developed for these units
also formed the basis of the
first digital products products
produced by his new company,
Jünger Audio, which was
formed with his wife Irmgard
in 1990 following the fall of the
Berlin Wall the previous year.
The D1 was among the first
digital compressor-limiters and
addressed what Jünger saw as
a distinct need in the German
market: “There were the first
digital recorders and mixers but
no processors. With the
growth in CD mastering
there was a great need to
use all the headroom of
16-bit without clipping
and artefacts.” The D1 was
short-lived but led to the
D01, D02 and D03, which
were used widely in
broadcasting and mastering.
www.junger-audio.com
Herbert Jünger and the D1
Paul Van Hees (left)
with Apex technical
director Hendrik-
Jan Gieleis
Herbert Jünger,
who created Jünger
Audio in 1990
The D01, D02 and D03 processors from the early ‘90s
The PE-133 paragraphic equaliser
GENIUS
Genius!
14
Tragically, Michael Gerzon
did not live long enough to
see his greatest achievement,
Ambisonics, become part of the
quest for a truly immersive
audio experience.
Born in Birmingham at the
end of 1945, Gerzon had, like
many geniuses, many interests
and brought his undoubtedly
immense intelligence to bear
on other areas of audio. He
was involved in the early
development of digital
compression and processing that
formed the basis of Waves’ fi rst
products. But it is his
work on Ambisonics that
cements Gerzon’s place in the
sound pantheon.
Gerzon was both a
mathematician and a recording
engineer. His father, David,
who had studied physics
and chemistry, gave the shy,
introverted Michael his fi rst reel-
to-reel tape recorder, which
both helped in his school studies
and began a life-long interest.
While studying mathematics at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
Gerzon joined the University
Tape Recording Society (OUTRS)
with like-minded fellow
student Peter Craven, who
would work with him on future
developments. It was the now
defunct Studio Sound magazine
that published Gerzon’s tongue-
in-cheek glossary of audio terms,
including his observation that
stereo was an obsolete format
with two loudspeakers missing.
Gerzon was dismissive of
the quadrophonic systems that
were produced in the early to
mid-70s. Working with others,
including Professor Peter Berners
Fellgett of the University of
Reading, he set out to overcome
the technical and acoustic
shortcomings of quad and
create something that captured
and reproduced an accurate
sound picture.
His conclusion was that
proper spatial imaging could
only be achieved if the actual
acoustical signals contained
in the recording environment
were recorded. He defi ned the
soundfi eld as comprising the
absolute sound pressure
level and the three pressure
gradients: left/right, front/back
and up/down.
Having calculated such a
system, which was named
Ambisonics (both syllables from
Latin, ‘ambi’ for ‘around’ or
‘surround’ and sonic for sound),
Gerzon and his colleagues
needed a specialist microphone
to record the necessary
information. The resultant
Soundfi eld microphone, which
has four capsules mounted on
the faces of a tetrahedron, was
manufactured fi rst by Calrec
Audio, then SoundField and now
TSL PPL SoundField.
The Core Sound TetraMic is
also based on Gerzon’s patents
and for some time both it
and the Soundfi eld were the
only practical realisations of
Ambisonics. Despite enthusiasm
for it among studios and record
companies, the recording and
mastering format itself faded
away in the early 1980s.
Gerzon was downhearted at
this, something not helped by
persistent ill health and stays
in hospital. His later work with
Waves raised his spirits, and
supplied necessary income.
The irony is that multichannel
systems such as Dolby Digital
and DTS were becoming
established for the cinema when
Gerzon died in May 1996.
Nearly 20 years after his death
Ambisonics has a new lease
of life as today’s researchers
attempt to produce a fully
immersive soundscape. The
SoundField mic (with a capital
‘F’) also continues to evolve.
As its current designer, Pieter
Schillebeeckx, says, Michael
Gerzon was a genius because
of his wide range of interests,
including Ambisonics, lossless
compression, music recording
and poetry, which gave him core
visions beyond just mathematical
equations, although he did
ultimately use mathematics
to solve the technical problems
he faced.
With thanks to
Michael Gerzon: Beyond
Psychoacoustics by Robert
Charles Alexander, Dora Media
Production 2008;
www.michaelgerzonphotos.org.
uk; and Paul Hodges for the use
of his photographs
www.ambisonic.net
Michael Gerzon and Ambisonics
Michael Gerzon in playful mood
Today’s TSL SPS200
Software Controlled
Microphone – but it all
started with Michael
The OUTRS group (L-R):
Gerzon, Paul Hodges, Peter Craven and
Stephen Thornton. Hodges: “This was
taken in June 1968, when Stephen and
I were just starting fi nals, and getting
ourselves distracted!”
HISTORICAL
GENIUS
Genius!
15
A recording engineer who
has worked on more than
400 records over fi ve
decades – including landmark
releases by Little Feat, Mary
Chapin Carpenter and
Randy Newman – George
Massenburg is nonetheless
most closely identifi ed with his
groundbreaking work in the fi eld
of parametric EQ.
Equipped to make more
precise adjustments than other
types of equalisers, parametric
EQs allow users to control three
primary parameters: amplitude,
centre frequency and bandwidth.
Their capabilities have seen
them become defaults for studio
recording and live sound.
In 1972 Massenburg
completed the writing of an
infl uential technical paper,
entitled ‘Parametric Equalisation’,
which was presented at the 42nd
AES Convention. Massenburg’s
fi rm, George Massenburg Labs
(GML), has subsequently released
a long series of parametric EQs,
including the industry-standard
8200. To this day, channel
EQs based on the designs of
Massenburg or fellow pioneers
Daniel N. Flickinger and Burgess
MacNeal remain ubiquitous.
Founded in 1982, GML
has gone on to develop an
extensive range of console
automation devices,
analogue signal processors,
microphone preamplifi ers and
power supplies, all based on
Massenburg’s original circuit
designs. Among the fi rm’s most
celebrated products is the GML
8900 Dynamic Range Controller,
which is designed to react to
loudness in the way our ears do
– rather than to voltage levels.
Still deeply involved with
R&D, Massenburg was awarded
a further patent in 2013 for a
variable exponent averaging
detector and dynamic range
controller. Underlining academic
credentials that include
several visiting professorships,
Massenburg also serves as the
CTO of METAlliance (the Music
Engineering Technical Alliance),
a union of music producers and
engineers focused on achieving
the highest standards of audio
and music delivery.
Rounding out a fulsome CV,
Massenburg continues to design
major recording studios, with
credits including The Complex
and George Lucas’ Skywalker
Sound in California, and
Blackbird Studio in Nashville.
www.massenburg.com
George Massenburg and Parametric EQ
The GML 8200 parametric equaliser
Genius is often more than
one idea or fl ash of brilliance.
Creative and technological
greatness can be seen as when
a person creates other things
or continues to improve the
original invention. Dan Dugan
had the initial spark that led to
the auto mixer, which, 40 years
later, is still evolving.
Dugan sees himself as an
inventor but, unlike John Meyer,
who he regards as a genius,
one who did not have formal
engineering training. The young
Dugan made “smelly chemistry
experiments” and “played
with electricity”. He was also
interested in the combination
of the artistic and the technical.
“When I went to the theatre
I always wanted to go
backstage and see the
lighting board,” he says.
Dugan went on to work in
theatre lighting and sound
but audio later took over
completely. In 1968 he was
the fi rst person in US regional
theatre to be called a sound
designer. While on a touring
production of Hair soon
afterwards Dugan began
to consider the problem of
handling multiple channels at
the same time.
“I started working on how
to deal with many open mics
and what to do with them
when they weren’t needed,” he
explains. This led to an adaptive
threshold with mic gain
adjustment, which he patented
in 1974 and demonstrated as the
Dugan Music System at the New
York AES the same year. This
was based on the fi rst practical
automatic mixing algorithm but
Dugan knew it could go further.
While “tinkering” with the
logarithmic level detection of
the Music System he decided
to see what eff ect using the
sum of all the active input mics
as a reference would have.
This did away with the need
for an external reference and
produced the Dugan Speech
System, which he patented
in 1975. “I almost didn’t
understand what I had done,”
he comments. “But when I was
writing the patent and had to
do the mathematics it turned
out to be quite simple. It was a
discovery rather than
an invention.”
Dugan says he has
“been mining that vein
every since” and feels there
is “still a way to go with it”. At
the age of 71 he expects to be
working for “20 more years”,
so the genius of the automixer
burns on.
www.dandugan.com
Dan Dugan and the Automixer
Dan Dugan in his workshop
GENIUS
16
Genius!
CEDAR AUDIO’s Series 2
products – the DC-1 Declicker,
CR-1 Decrackler, AZ-1 Azimuth
Corrector and DH-2 Dehisser –
rescued historic audio archives
while improving audio fidelity
for a new format.
How did you end up at CEDAR Audio and working on the original “De-Everything” products?CEDAR in its original form grew
out of research carried out in
the Engineering Department at
the University of Cambridge,
opening officially in February
1988. I was a student in the
right place at the right time. I
heard about what was going
on and was interested in it, so
I arranged for my final year
project to be with the professor
who did the original research.
He was sufficiently pleased with
my work that he introduced me
to CEDAR.
So how did the De-Everything products end up on the market?They were originally a solution
to a problem at the British
Library’s National Sound
Archive. The Archive has a huge
collection of historic recording
media, some of which had been
stored badly, others of which
had just deteriorated naturally
through being played, so they
approached the university to
see if anything could be done
to remove the effects of this
degradation. Having done that,
we rapidly realised that people
have a lot of other
audio problems, and
that’s where the idea of
‘De-Everything’ came from.
Was there a particular point at which you realised this was something quite special?That came very early; one of the
prototype systems was featured
on a 1988 BBC television
programme called Tomorrow’s
World, and suddenly we had
people clamouring at the
door asking “when can I have
one?” We also attended many
tradeshows in the early ’90s,
and being able to demonstrate
a digital signal processing
system that could remove the
scratches, crackle or hiss from
a recording in real-time while
visitors were on the exhibition
stand listening to it… that really
made people’s jaws drop.
What happened next?All of this was happening
at the time that the record
companies wanted to extract
value from their back catalogue
by re-releasing it on CD, so our
real-time restoration products
were also in the right place at
the right time. But we soon
started finding other uses that
suggested interesting and
significant developments for
CEDAR as a company, taking
us into new areas such as post-
production, audio forensics and
security. Today, you can divide
CEDAR’s activities into three
areas, and the company works
very closely with national (and
other large) archives as well as
the film and TV industries, plus
law enforcement, counter-
terrorism, and other security
forces worldwide.
What are your thoughts on having contributed something so important to the audio industry?It’s great to have been there
right at the start of audio
restoration. Everyone takes it
for granted nowadays that you
can remove noise from an old
recording, but being involved
first-hand with the original PhD
research that grew into those
first products was really exciting
and is of course something to
be very proud of – personally as
well as part of the company.
www.cedar-audio.com
Christopher Hicks and the “De-Everything” RangeDr Christopher Hicks (right)
with engineering director
Dave Betts and their Academy
Awards for technical
achievement in 2005
Promo
shot of
Series 1
DC-1
Declicker
from 1992
Genius!
17
Sometimes the academics strike
pure gold. The Working Group
for Electronic Media Technology
in Ilmenau, between Frankfurt
and Leipzig, is just one of 56
Fraunhöfer Institutes established
by the post-war German
Government specifi cally to
bridge research and industry:
to kick-start new business with
good ideas. It worked. And
one of the most commercially
successful ideas became MP3,
or Layer 3 of the Motion Picture
Expert Group standard for
compressed audio, to give it
full billing. Professor Karlheinz
Brandenburg led the team that
developed it.
Compressing audio became
a good idea as soon as the
Fraunhöfer placed Integrated
Circuits at the heart of its
agenda. “For me it started
with my PhD in 1982,” reveals
the professor, “when my
thesis advisor suggested
– theoretically – ISDN for
music as well as speech. I did,
eventually, prove to the exam
board that it was possible!”
It all kicked off with ISDN
codecs, with Fraunhöfer
supplying software for both
the Telos Zephyr and Dialog4’s
MusicTaxi in groundbreaking
OEM deals. Research has led
the organisation into every
area of media delivery from
digital broadcasting to internet
streaming, but MP3 changed
the world.
Published in 1993, MP3
off ered the nascent World Wide
Web audio fi les a fraction of the
size of those used in CDs. The
exchange of fi le formats ending
‘.mp3’ quickly caught on and,
although professionals pointed
to an unacceptable breaching
of psychoacoustic barriers,
consumers didn’t mind at all.
“It became an avalanche that
nobody could stop,” refl ects
Professor Brandenburg, who
remains very positive about the
commercial future. “Overall
people spend more money on
‘industry content’, especially
if you include live sound,” he
says. “It’s just that they expect
it to be with them everywhere,
on portable devices. In other
words, it’s still something to be
valued.”
Now that digital delivery
is ubiquitous, the vested
interests in every layer of audio
and video transport have
exponentially compounded.
Still, while Fraunhöfer pushed
MPEG-21 towards “a complete
framework for multimedia in a
commercial environment”, MP3
players had a clear run until just
recently. However: whether the
smartphone really suits MP3
usage remains to be seen.
www.iis.fhg.de
Professor Karlheinz Brandenburg and MP3
Genius!
18
Gerrit Buhe obtained his amateur
radio (‘HAM’ radio) licence at
the age of 14 and built his own
first own short wave transceiver
shortly afterwards. He’d already
learned Morse Code three years
earlier. No surprises then that he
decided to make his hobby his
profession, studying electrical
engineering with a focus on
communications technology.
After his professional start
in a small engineering office in
Rostock, he moved to Siemens
in Munich where he developed
Mobile Radio Base Stations as an
RF and DSP engineer, eventually
broadening his experience
to include software systems
engineering with the University
of Paderborn. Buhe joined
Sennheiser in 2002 with the
challenge of introducing digital
transmission technology into
demanding wireless microphone
systems. The result, 10 years
later, was the Digital 9000 Series.
Buhe started with a team of
four, swelling to 20 towards the
finalisation of the product.
Since its launch in late
2012, Digital 9000 has been
implemented in events all over
the world: The Voice and X
Factor recording in several
different territories; prestigious
awards shows in Switzerland,
Malaysia and Australia; and of
course, the last two Eurovision
Song Contests. As a leading
wireless systems delivering full-
bandwidth uncompressed audio,
it has found favour in theatres
and musicals (the huge 14-18
musical in Belgium for instance),
with classical producers and
leading event production
companies too.
Around 10 years of research
and development went into the
Digital 9000 system. Looking
back, what was Buhe’s greatest
challenge? “The greatest
challenge was at the same time
an ever-present one: developing
a wireless microphone system
with digital transmission
and really outstanding audio
characteristics meant going
close to the limits of physical
feasibility. And once we are at
these physical limits, technical
complexity positively explodes.
We went into a huge amount
of detail in many places and
developed a lot of small solutions
that enabled us to achieve higher
data transfer rates for the audio
data than is usually the case.”
Does he think that his
Sennheiser team has now
developed the ideal digital
wireless microphone?
“The absolutely ideal digital
wireless microphone doesn’t
exist – but I think we are very
close to it!” he laughs. “But
seriously, there is no such thing
as the ideal microphone for
all applications because, due
to the physical limitations that
I mentioned before, a digital
microphone must always make
a sensible compromise, for
example as regards the operating
time, size and weight, or range.
But – never before has such high
audio quality been transmitted
wirelessly in the UHF band as
with Digital 9000.”
Digital makes things easier
then..?
“I would rather say that digital
is one of those modern magic
words that make things appear
simple, which are in reality based
on or require highly complex
internal processes.”
Nevertheless, the magic will
continue with further extensions
planned to the Digital 9000
family… At press time, the
company had just announced
the launch of the D1 instrument
wireless series.
www.sennheiser.com
Gerrit Buhe and Digital 9000
The 9000 Series was used extensively at a staging of
Verdi’s La Traviata near Masada in Israel last year
Buhe delivered the
technical presentation at
the 9000 launch in 2012
Buhe was building
his own radio
receivers in his teens
19
Genius!
The industry’s wholesale
transition from analogue to
digital mixing is often traced
back to the pioneering work
done at Soundtracs, the
UK-based studio desk maker
spearheaded by business
visionary Todd Wells. From 1980,
Surrey University graduate John
Stadius was Wells’ technical
director, and therefore directly
involved in the conception,
design and execution of the first
digitally controlled analogue and
later fully digital consoles ever
produced. Soundtracs evolved
into DiGiCo, and with it Stadius
turned his attention to the live
sound sector for both touring
and fixed installation.
On 5 September 2007, DiGiCo
revealed the ‘future-proof’ SD7
console. It wasn’t the company’s
first, and followed both the D5
Live and five years of vigorous
evangelising about mixing live
concerts digitally. But it featured
something called Stealth Digital
Processing, and nothing would
be the same again…
“The D5 Live was essentially
based on the original Soundtracs
digital platform for post-
production,” says Stadius. “It was
when we adopted the FPGAs for
the SD7 – and beyond – that
the paradigm shifted: just look at
how the feature set has changed
since then, without changing the
hardware. By definition,
you reconfigure the FPGA. You
can reconfigure channel
counts, features…
“We designed it so it wasn’t
full up at the beginning and we
could add these things. If it’s
fixed DSP, you’ve got a fixed
amount of processing. FPGA is
ultimately flexible, provided you
choose the right device in the
beginning – which we did.”
The ‘right’ device was one
big enough to accommodate
the feature sets demanded by
customers, such as dynamic
EQs, valve emulation and other
musical priorities. Making that
choice was trickier than it would
be today, as the chips now are
generally more powerful. It
had to be future-proof, as was
Stadius’s vision – “and it still
is”, he adds. The emphasis on
flexibility in all current designs
bears this out, although not all of
them embrace the FPGA model.
“You have to place some
restrictions on customisation,”
Stadius points out, “otherwise
users can simply lose their
way! You can make it too
complicated…”
Since the SD7 DiGiCo has
been able to develop a ‘suite’ of
consoles that all run on the same
software, making upgrades a lot
easier for every size of product
and – a real industry contribution
– unrestricted file exchange
between them. “We’ll not move
away from FPGAs now,” Stadius
continues, “while others use PC
cores or SHARC-based engines
for processing. You can’t build
those into the work surface,
which gives us a great advantage
– we have no external rack for
the processing. It’s one chassis,
one power supply… less to
go wrong.
“Also, if you’re running the
operating system on the same
core, or chip, as the audio
processing, you lose the audio
if the operating system has a
fault. With our solution, you can
reboot the whole surface and the
audio carries on running. That’s
pretty fundamental in live sound,
and why we have dual engines
on the SD7.”
For Stadius himself, ‘genius’ is
personified by none other than
Albert Einstein. “He was a patent
clerk with no technical training,”
Stadius says, “so how he
came up with all these
explanations of the Universe
is just mind boggling.”
www.digico.biz
John Stadius and the SD7
Genius!
20
Thomas Edison said genius was
“one percent inspiration and
99 percent perspiration”. Bruce
Hofer cites this as a definition
and has proved it over a long
career designing T&M (test
and measurement) equipment.
He has been behind many
measuring devices but it is the
System One (S1) frequency
analyser and waveform
generator that encompasses his
technical vision.
Hofer worked as an assistant
in the Labs Instruments Division
of Tektronix while studying
electronics at Oregon State
University. After graduating in
1970 he joined Tek fulltime,
working on units for the 7000
Series of oscilloscopes.
Eight years later he switched
to audio and was lead engineer
on the SG505 audio oscillator
and AA501 distortion analyser.
But when Tek began to focus
on video T&M and dismantled
Hofer’s audio team, he three
colleagues decided to set up
their own company.
Audio Precision was founded
in 1984 with the S1 as its
initial focus. The IBM personal
computer had just come on
the market and Hofer saw its
potential for controlling the
system. “It was an impediment to
selling the S1, though,” he says.
“People weren’t convinced PCs
would be long-term and didn’t
like having it on the bottom of
the invoice.”
When AP became a reseller
for Compaq it bundled those
PCs with the original S1 without
mentioning the fact. “Most of my
contribution to the design was
the program that ran in the GUI,”
Hofer comments.
Hofer says the innovation
process is “hard to verbalise”,
perhaps because “some of
my best ideas come while I’m
asleep”. After that inspiration
comes the perspiration of
simulations and development.
AP has pushed on into
the digital age with products
including the APx Series but the
S1 was only discontinued in 2002
and is still listed in the archive of
the company’s website.
www.ap.com
Bruce Hofer and the AP System One
An early interest
in making things
and conducting
experiments
presaged Georg
Neumann’s entry
into precision
engineering
training aged
just 15. A further
15 years later,
Neumann and
business partner
Erich Rickmann
became a part of
the then-unfolding
revolution in
recorded sound by
establishing Georg
Neumann & Co.
Much of their early R&D was
focused on improving the poor
quality of sound recordings,
which at that time were
frequently made with carbon
mics. The Reisz Microphone
was an early success, but
it was with the CMV-3
Neumann Bottle Condenser
Microphone in the mid-’30s
that the company
really began to make
its global mark.
Using a capsule
diaphragm originally
consisting of a collodion
foil with a thin layer of
gold, and able to accept
multiple capsules including
the iconic M7, the CMV-
3’s merits included “the
complete absence of
noise, the absence of a
response threshold, a
scarcely detectable level of
distortion, and a very
linear frequency response”
(in the words of a 1939
operating manual).
Crucially, the design was
also the first condenser mic
that could be manufactured
in large quantities. Worldwide
distribution was established
and the mic rapidly became
a staple of news and radio
reports, including the Berlin
Olympics of 1936, British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain’s
notoriously ill-founded ‘Peace
for our Time’ speech of 1938,
and countless broadcasts
during World War II.
Neumann’s factory was badly
damaged during the war, but
once relocated to the Allied
part of Berlin after 1945 and
re-established under the name
of Georg Neumann GmbH a
further highly productive period
ensued. The M49 and M50 were
among the celebrated designs
to emerge under the watchful
eye of Neumann during the
subsequent decade.
Still passionate about sound,
Neumann remained closely
involved with new R&D efforts
until his death in 1976.
www.neumann.com
Georg Neumann and the CMV-3 Condenser Microphone
HISTORICAL
GENIUS
System One (top), Two
and Cascade
Genius!
How did the Series 1 desk come into existence?My first work on building
consoles had been undertaken
with Bill Kelsey, who I met when
I was working at the Compton
Organ Company in the late ’60s;
it was during this period that we
constructed the large mixing
desk that was used by Emerson,
Lake & Palmer at the 1970 Isle
of Wight Festival. By the time
we got to the Series 1 in 1974,
Phil [Dudderidge, Soundcraft
co-founder] and I were building
nice-looking modular consoles
that shipped in Cripple Creek
aluminium flight cases. I think it
was Phil who suggested ‘why not
build the mixer into a flightcase?’
and so we did.
Remember that this was a
discreet, transistor-based
design and that all parts
were often quite expensive
then, but we still managed
to get the mixer built into a
flightcase with multicore and
stagebox for the original price
of £992. It was the product
that really began to make
Soundcraft’s name.
How soon did you realise that it was a hit?Almost immediately – it caught
on quickly across the industry.
It also provided a template for
what was to follow, with a lot of
the new circuitry being shared
by the Series 1S and Series 2.
The Series 1S also introduced
the four-band EQ with two
swept mids and was the first
to use transformer-less mic
preamplifiers. Removing the
need to have transformers meant
a dramatic cost-saving per
channel, plus they sounded so
quiet and good.
With Soundcraft firmly established as a major industry player, what do you regard as the next landmark console in its history?Probably the 1624 recording
console from the late ’70s which
allowed engineer and producer
to work side-by-side at the
console. It introduced the idea
of using flat ribbon cables to
connect the internal patchbay to
the input/output modules. This
idea was taken further by also
using ribbon cable to replace
the traditional motherboard as
a means of connecting all the
modules to the large number of
audio buses and power rails.
How do you feel about your overall contribution to pro audio?Well, it just kind of happened! My
career path was not particularly
typical; at university I studied
electrical engineering, rather
than electronics, so I obtained
plenty of maths and engineering
knowledge generally, but only
did a short course on transistors
and was essentially caught
between [the demise of] valves
and the rise of the op-amp. It
wasn’t until I started working
with Bill Kelsey that I first got
involved with designing the
building blocks of audio, and it
was Bill who showed me how to
lay out circuit boards.
The result is that I really
learned the art of electronics
by doing it, and in retrospect I
feel that was a big advantage.
It allowed for the possibility of
significant breakthroughs as I
was not loaded down with
any classical notions of
what you could or couldn’t
do. Coupled with my “what if”
nature, it meant that all kinds
of options were open and
Soundcraft was able to
progress pretty rapidly.
Further reading: http://www.soundcraft.
com/products/product.
aspx?pid=64
Graham Blyth and the Flightcase Mixing ConsoleGraham Blyth
with one of
his Soundcraft
creations
21
Genius!
22
Munich-based Celemony
was founded in late 2000 and
soon became a familiar name
in the DAW-based studio
environment through its popular
pitch correction software,
Melodyne. Then the company’s
Peter Neubäcker introduced
DNA (Direct Note Access) to
the package, and suddenly
users could grab individual
notes of audio in polyphonic
arrangements and shift them
around as if using a MIDI editor.
And it’s all down to some
wrongly recorded percussion…
How did you get started?I have always been interested
in studying the mathematical
relationships in music. At first, I
used paper, a pencil and a pocket
calculator. Then, in the mid ’80s,
I realised that a computer would
be the ideal tool to help me with
my research, so I taught myself
to program. At the beginning of
the ’90s, I switched to a NeXT
computer with the integrated
DSP, audio processing also then
became possible. [NeXT was
a shortlived business created
by Steve Jobs when he first
left Apple.] The question that
interested me above all at the
time was what a “sound” actually
is and how one can shape it. I
developed a process for handling
sound independently of its pitch
and evolution over time.
Even before Direct Note Access, Melodyne was gaining traction as one of the preferred pitch correction tools. Was polyphony always a goal?At the start, Melodyne was not
conceived as a correction tool at
all: my idea was rather that you
could use existing audio material
to compose freely with; that in
the process of composition you
could position sounds freely in
terms of time, duration and pitch.
But Melodyne then came to be
perceived by users as above all a
correction tool.
The editing of polyphonic
material was, of course, always
an implicit objective. There
were no rational grounds for
anyone saying: “I only want to
edit monophonic material”,
but based on what I knew at
the time I did not at first even
consider it possible. Having said
that, I had long reasoned that if
we, as listeners, are capable of
identifying the individual notes in
polyphonic music, there must be
indicators in there somewhere.
What lead to the breakthrough that resulted in DNA?One day a friend sent me a
recording of a track with a
marimba, the problem he had
was that in the performer’s
part one of the notes had been
miscopied. Unfortunately the
marimba had been hired for
the session and was no longer
available, so they were stuck with
a wrong note in the recording.
And because successive notes
played on the marimba run
into each other, it could not
be rescued with the existing
monophonic Melodyne. By
this time, my thoughts on the
subject of audio separation had
advanced at least to the point
where I could conceive of having
a go at solving the problem. It
often happens that I have ideas
that go on fermenting for years
without my writing anything
down or doing any actual
programming. Even though
I had not yet written a line of
code, once I began it all went
very quickly: only a week later,
I was able to send the user the
marimba notes as individual
audio files.
What are the next challenges you hope to tackle?With our future tempo detection
feature, a new workflow is
possible: a musician can play the
music freely in their own tempo
when recording, and the tempo
track with its beats and bars is
later extracted automatically
from the recorded material. This
then makes it possible to copy
notes from any one passage into
another or synchronise a drum
track to the recording later.
www.celemony.com
Peter Neubäcker and Melodyne Direct Note Access
While a couple of people
on our list have become
household names, there are
many more who have still yet
to receive their due mainstream
recognition. One of this number
is Stefan Kudelski, whose 1951
patent ushered in both the
first portable recording
device and the company that
continues to bear his name –
the Kudelski Group.
Born in Poland but educated
in engineering in Switzerland,
Kudelski was at university
when he patented the Nagra
I. Generally regarded as the
first portable recording device,
the Nagra I was a compact
(approximately the size of a
shoebox) reel-to-reel tape
recorder. Word of its quality and
portability soon spread, with
radio stations in Switzerland
among his earliest customers.
But it was the Nagra III –
which emerged in 1958 – that
arguably had the greatest
impact of Kudelski’s designs.
Able to synchronise sound with
the frames on a reel of film, the
Nagra III can be claimed to have
changed the entire dynamic of
film production for the ensuing
generation. The mechanics of
capturing high quality sound
had previously meant that
many films were effectively
studio-bound; alongside the
then-emerging 16-millimetre
camera, the Nagra III helped
to pave the way for a new era
of filmmaking in which much
more shoots would take place
on-location.
Directors to adopt the Nagra
III in its early years included D.
A. Pennebaker, who used the
recorder during production of
Don’t Look Back – his 1967 Bob
Dylan tour film that arguably
counts as the first classic
music documentary.
Kudelski and his firm
continued to innovate in the
field of miniature recording.
Increasingly, security and
surveillance became critical
markets for the firm, with the
early SN Serie Noire machine
reportedly adopted by the
American secret services.
Today, Kudelski Group is
under the leadership of Stefan’s
son, André. Stefan himself
passed away aged 83 in 2013.
www.nagra.com
Stefan Kudelski and the First Professional Quality Portable Tape Recorder
HISTORICAL
GENIUS
Stefan Kudelski was born in Poland but educated in Switzerland
The Nagra I, regarded as the first
portable recording device
23
Genius!
Peter Thomas was born to be
a designer of audio equipment.
A passionate music lover and
hi-fi fanatic from an early age,
his fascination with audio
technology endures in his
current day job as owner and
chief designer at UK monitor
manufacturer PMC. Visitors
to the company’s former
factory in Bedfordshire got
used to sidling past additions
to his ever-growing archive
of vintage speakers, recording
devices, microphones and other
recording ephemera (in their
new HQ, the collection has a
barn to itself).
Moving after engineering
college to the BBC, Thomas
eventually became responsible
for the technical upkeep of
Maida Vale studios, home of
the legendary Radiophonic
Workshop, and was tasked
with sourcing a high-output,
low-distortion main monitor
for the studio. He met many
loudspeaker designers to
discuss designs, but became
convinced he could improve
on their products – a common
milestone on the path from
engineer to designer. Eventually,
he decided to try to design
the required monitors himself.
The clean highs and mids
of electrostatic panels were
appealing, but lacked power
and level, while ported designs
off ered the bass response, but
were too distorted for reference
monitoring. Drawing on the
best acoustic attributes of these
designs, Thomas returned to
the concept of the transmission
line loudspeaker, fi rst within the
BBC, and then at PMC, which he
co-founded in 1991 to continue
his design work commercially.
Transmission line speakers
were popular in hi-fi circles
in the 1960s and ‘70s for their
low-distortion, high-output
characteristics, but fell from
favour by the ‘80s for being too
complex to realise practically.
Thomas’s vision was to
recognise their potential, while
simultaneously coming up with
engineering solutions to remedy
their past defi ciencies. For years,
diff erent speaker designers had
been focused on honing sealed-
cabinet and ported designs,
but no-one had attempted to
reimagine the transmission line
with modern materials or design
principles. “They were cabinets
with labyrinths inside, crudely
damped with long-haired wool,”
explains Thomas today.
“They sounded OK – not
great. But the theory made
sense. I thought that if we got
rid of the wool and got the
absorption right with some
with some properly engineered
bespoke damping, we might get
somewhere. It was the start of a
long, expensive journey…”
There’s a reason PMC’s fi rst
speakers and active electronics
– built by Thomas himself and
still in use at Maida Vale 24 years
later – were called the BB5s.
“The BB1, BB2, BB3 and BB4
didn’t really cut the mustard…”
explains Thomas today with
characteristic modesty.
The Advanced
Transmission Line
(ATL), PMC’s
refi nement of
the concept,
features in all
their designs,
from large-
scale studio
monitors to hi-fi
models. Integrating
crossovers and drivers
into an ATL cabinet
requires high-specifi cation
engineering, and still has to
be tailored specifi cally to each
product. “That’s probably
why the concept failed in the
1970s,” comments Thomas.
“Put simply, it’s easier and
cheaper to build speakers
another way! Perfecting
transmission line designs
demands persistence, a
holistic approach, and obsessive
attention to detail. But after
23 years, we must be doing
something right…”
www.pmc-speakers.com
Peter Thomas and the Advanced Transmission LinePMC owner and
chief designer Peter
Thomas, with the
high-frequency
dispersion fl ange
from the QB1-A
The QB1-A system
The damping in the long cavity or labyrinth of a transmission-line speaker is an important aspect of the design. The cavity is connected to the bass driver with a non-resonant cabinet vent at the other end, and theoretically, by the time audio has passed through the labyrinth, the damping should have removed
all of the low-mid frequencies. (The diagram shows the ATL for PMC’s new twotwo6 box.) If the transmission line is properly designed, the remaining low-frequency audio emerges from the vent in phase with the bass driver output, extending the speaker’s LF response and overall SPL capability, and producing a speaker that goes very low for its size, but remains accurate, free of distortion across its entire frequency response compared to ported designs, and tonally consistent irrespective of level. However, gett ing the TL design right for a given speaker is notoriously diffi cult in engineering terms. Hence “an expensive journey”…!
Transmission lines..?
Genius!
24
“Analogue console design –
that’s probably what I’ve done
more of than anything else,” says
David Dearden, best known as
designer of Audient’s fl agship
ASP8024. Aff able, supremely
knowledgeable and humble
to the last, fate seems to have
earmarked him for consoles
from the outset.
Dubbing himself “a high-
school drop-out”, his fi rst job
was at a Johannesburg studio
in 1968 where he quickly
established himself. “I knew a
bit about electronics, so I was
commandeered into helping to
build their new valve console.”
On arrival in the UK in 1970 for
what was intended to be a short
work experience, 20-year-old
Dearden secured a position as
junior maintenance engineer
at Advision Studios where he
was involved in converting the
studio’s in-house built 8-track
console into a 16 track system.
In 1973/74 he specifi ed the
design and construction by
Quad Eight of two new consoles
for Advision, one of which was
arguably the fi rst automated
console in the country. By 1997
he found himself honing his
skills at console manufacturer
MCI, then Soundcraft. In 1981 he
joined forces with Gareth Davies
to form DDA.
It is testament to their design
that many Dearden-designed
DDA and MIDAS consoles are
still in use today, but it was the
culmination of his 30 years’
experience with analogue
consoles – and the formation of
a brand new company Audient,
with the accompanying clean
sheet of paper - that brought his
most signifi cant design, ASP8024
into existence.
Introduced in 1998, it was
unashamedly analogue and
described by Dearden as “…a
very fl exible, good sounding,
simple to operate console”.
True enough, ASP8024 is a
straightforward, inline design
with no digital accoutrements
thus ensuring a future-
proof design which is still
manufactured today (over 500
sold!). “In essence it has barely
changed, just a few additional
frame sizes, optional patchbay
and the DAW interface option.”
Early customer feedback
confi rmed that ASP8024 was
something special: “Customers
were saying how easy it was to
use, how they never had to look
at the manuals.” In particular,
educational facilities across the
board praised the console’s
versatility and easy intuitive signal
path.
Dearden has just celebrated a
‘signifi cant’ birthday yet is still up
to his elbows in future Audient
product design. “I haven’t been
put out to pasture yet!” he quips.
www.audient.com
David Dearden and the ASP8024 Console
“It’s a wireless microphone
system that is intelligent
enough to know if it’s being
interfered with, and then
capable enough to do
something about it to resolve
the interference,” says Ahren
Hartman, senior director of
engineering for Axient.
Specifi cally, Axient
combines spectrum analysis,
channel allocation and device
management into one network-
based platform for fail-safe
wireless audio. As more and
more users fi ght for fewer
available frequencies, Axient
has truly earned a place on the
Genius list.
Getting Axient to market
took “the better part of fi ve
years”, says Hartman. “It was,
and probably still is Shure’s
biggest R&D productisation
eff ort. The team size at the
peak was upwards of 70
diff erent engineers, marketing
and operations
people.”
Hartman,
whose education
was in wireless
engineering,
joined Shure in
1989 when the
company entered
the wireless market with the
L-Series. His focus has been on
wireless products ever since,
including SLX, PGX, UHF-R,
Wireless Workbench 6, and the
recently introduced PSM300.
For the past 10 years, he’s also
been working with regulators in
Washington, including the FCC
and Congress, “getting them to
understand who we are, who
our markets are and who our
users are,” he says.
As far as a career highlight,
“Axient was defi nitely the peak
as far as depth of engineering
and the impact on the market,”
explains Hartman. “We had a
great team. Looking back on
it, it was a very large company
eff ort. There were defi nitely
times when I know a large
part of the team thought I was
literally crazy for trying to get
us to build a system that didn’t
seem like it could be built from
an engineering standpoint.
There were defi nitely points
in the project when I thought,
‘well, this is just never going to
work. What am I doing? I am
crazy!’ [Laughs] At the end of
the day you need a little insanity
to keep you going.”
www.axient.net
Ahren Hartman and the Axient Wireless Microphone System
A complete Shure Axient system
Audient
ASP8024:
over 500
shipped!
25
Genius!
Fascinated by sound generation
since the 1960s, Tony Andrews
is associated with some of the
best point source PA solutions
ever made and, with a team of
loyal colleagues, has brought
to market several systems to
garner the epithet ‘legendary’.
Beginning with the Festival
System, which grew out of
early solutions for both the
Isle of Wight and Glastonbury,
Andrews went onto develop
the TMS-3, Flashlight and
Floodlight systems as a
co-founder of Turbosound.
He’s now at the helm of UK
independent manufacturer
Funktion One and continues
his pursuit of ultimate point
source sound.
What was the big breakthrough?It was when we discovered
the mid-range cone-loading
technique: the efficient
loading of cone drivers instead
of compression drivers. It
first went into the Festival
System, used at the re-started
Glastonbury in ’79, then into
the Turbosound TMS-3 – and
we’re using derivatives and
developments of it today.
We’d been very disenchanted
with large-format compression
drivers in the early ’70s, and we
liked the sound of cone drivers
a lot more. Credit where it’s
due, [Turbosound co-founder]
Tim Isaac had the inspiration for
the loading technique: we were
experimenting with small-ish
cone drivers – about 8-inch
– and Tim placed a rolling pin
right in front of it! Suddenly a
lot of sound came together. It
allowed us to horn-load the
cone driver and get as much as
a 10dB increase in efficiency,
which is a lot. I suppose you
could call it a ‘wave organiser’.
When did you realise you were onto something?Once we’d made a proper
prototype in 1976, we were
testing it on the back lawn at
Ridge Farm Studios. I walked
from one end of the grounds to
the other and it hardly seemed
to decline in volume at all. It
was blindingly obvious that the
cohesion, and the projection,
was way ahead of everything
else we’d ever made or heard.
Where did you go from there?It’s evolved with every
generation, but the one that
really did it was the TMS-3. That
was an all-in-one box, evolved
from the separate 15s, 10s
and HF pieces of the Festival
System. It just went global, and
was the benchmark for most of
the ’80s.
What has been its main contribution?A generally heightened
awareness of mid range
intelligibility. As now, to some
extent, the mid was very ‘there’
and people weren’t used to it.
It’s still a challenge, but at least
it’s now a part of the whole
picture.
What are you working on now?We’re beta-testing a new
system called ‘Vero’, which is
very much the next generation
of what we’ve been developing
at Funktion One – with all
the heritage right back to that
moment on the back lawn in
’76. It evolved into what we
called Axehead technology, first
used in Floodlight, but next year
you’ll see just how well refined
it has now become…
www.funktion-one.com
Tony Andrews and the Mid-range HornTony Andrews in Ibiza
Stack for Genesis gig in Bochum, Germany 1979, with experimental point source high frequency elements Test set-up in Ben Duncan’s workshop circa 1979
Genius!
26
For all the advantages of self-
powered speakers, in almost
every sound reinforcement
application, there are constraints
in terms of power to form
factor, effi ciency, and other
performance and quality
related issues that limit just how
compact, loud and aff ordable
they can be.
Launched in 2013, the Pascal
S-PRO2 represents a major
leap forward in the design of
the Class D amplifi er modules
that power all kinds of active
professional speaker systems.
Almost 40% smaller than a
“regular” professional amplifi er
module with half the power
output, at the time of its launch,
the scale of miniaturisation is
remarkable; and at just 215mm
x 80 mm x 25mm, it remains the
smallest commercially available
1,000W professional amplifi er
module around.
36-year-old Jesper Lind
Hansen, senior R&D specialist
– and co-founder of the
Danish professional amplifi er
manufacturer, with CEO Lars
Rosenkvist Fenger and senior VP
of business development Peter
Frentz – was lead designer on
the project. As a gigging DJ in his
spare time, Hansen appreciates
design objectives from the
perspective of an end-user of
professional audio equipment:
“They want a product to be
as compact and as loud as
possible.”
As remarkable as its compact
size, is the S-PRO2’s optimum
electronic performance and
stability, audiophile sound quality,
simplicity of design and ease
of integration, not to mention
an aff ordable price tag; a
combination of design attributes
that greatly reduces the barriers
of entry for manufacturers to
the professional self-powered
speaker market. As a direct
consequence of Pascal’s
design, third-party
manufacturers can now
produce more compact,
portable, higher SPL
loudspeaker boxes than
ever before.
“The design of our
power supply was
inspired by looking at
the approach of other
industries, such as LED
lighting,” continues
Hansen. “This led to a
process of optimisation
to produce a new audio specifi c
power supply that was far more
effi cient and therefore smaller.”
Amplifi ers are defi nitely
Jesper’s ‘thing’, he says: “I have
always been doing amplifi ers
and power supplies. I started at
university and I haven’t stopped.”
Stranger perhaps is what he
does for kicks: “I like to go to
concerts to listen to sound
systems that have our amplifi ers
in them. I get a strange sense of
gratifi cation.”
www.pascal-audio.com
Jesper Lind Hansen and the S-PRO2Jesper Lind Hansen with
the Pascal S-PRO2, the
smallest commercially
available 1,000W amp
module today
The S-PRO2 module mounted
on an amplifi er plate
In the 1970s, sound companies
were building most of their
own loudspeaker and console
equipment specifi cally for
the type of music they were
supporting. To confi gure a
system for a show, technicians
had to combine amplifi ers and
speakers and make all of the
proper electronic settings. The
degree of success depended
largely on the technicians’
experience, and it wasn’t
uncommon for shows to be
interrupted or end prematurely
by failure of the sound system.
Self-powered systems were
the solution presented in 1990
by John Meyer, Meyer Sound
co-founder and CEO. Meyer
had researched low-distortion
horns and integrated, large-
scale loudspeaker systems
while working at the Institute
for Advanced Musical Studies
in Switzerland. Building
self-powered systems was a
controversial move at the time,
as the concept was brand new
in live sound. By advancing self-
contained loudspeakers with
built-in amplifi ers for recording
studios, large concerts and
beyond, Meyer believed self-
powering would eliminate
heavy, expensive amplifi er racks
and large loudspeaker cables,
thereby lowering costs. Without
the need to calibrate gain and
crossover settings, these self-
powered systems would also be
much easier to use. However,
the biggest motivator for Meyer
to build such systems was
their sonic advantages, as his
goal has always been to build
high-quality linear systems
that would deliver a consistent
performance show after show
and reproduce a variety of
materials with extremely low
distortion.
“We hired an ad agency in
the early 1990s to research
how people felt about
powered speakers for sound
reinforcement, and they came
back after a survey and said that
nobody wanted them.”
The industry has come a
long way since the 1970s.
Self-powered systems have
proven their worth and are
here to stay. From palm-sized
loudspeakers to large-scale
arrays, self-powered systems
are heard around the world,
in diverse applications from
theatrical tours to museums
and stadiums.
“Bill Graham used to say that
in the end, with all of the work
it takes to do a concert, and
all the eff ort it takes for fans to
come to a show, it’s got to be
worth going. It’s easy to forget
that our goal as technology
providers is to create a fun
experience for the audience so
they will keep coming back.”
www.meyersound.com
John Meyer and the Self-Powered Speaker GENIUS
John Meyer with a LYON array,
just one recent incarnation of
his self-powered design
27
Genius!
There’s a story online that
suggests Ivor Drawmer’s
world-beating gate processor
was born of frustration after a
session in the studio. It goes
along these lines. A sound
engineer couldn’t get the result
he wanted when recording a
drum kit because the cymbal
crash kept opening the mic
on the toms. Young Drawmer,
a keyboard player on the
session, realised he could fix the
problem, and returned the next
day with a hastily assembled
circuit board with a couple
of connector leads attached.
When the engineer wired in the
device, he was stunned to find
the toms opened the gate,
but the cymbals did not.
Bang, the frequency-conscious
gate had arrived….
Is this how it happened, Ivor? Did you really solve the issue ‘overnight’? I’m afraid the story is not quite
correct. It’s true that engineers
wasted an inordinate amount of
time trying to gate the drums. I
saw a lot of that: trying different
placement of mics and fiddling
with the gate threshold to get
a reliable take. So I discussed
the problem with engineers and
wondered how it would be if the
gate didn’t hear the cymbals and
vice versa.
I concluded that separate low
and hi pass filters working in
conjunction with the gate would
be the most versatile solution
to this and I started work on a
design. But triggering wasn’t the
only problem. Most gates on the
market at the time had a slow
attack time and only attenuated
to 40dB, leaving unwanted
noise in the background. The
result was better than nothing,
but, well, let’s just say there was
room for improvement….
I had made a single channel
prototype which we still have –
and it works!
The first demo I did of the
gate was at Fairview Studios
near Hull. I’d known the owner,
Keith Herd for a few years: a
lovely guy, and technical, having
built his own desk in the ’70s.
We rigged up the gate and he
played a track with the gate
shut. Nothing! So he wound up
the gain and the gate opened,
nearly taking out his speakers!
Impressing Keith wasn’t
easy. He’s heard it all and built
plenty of gear himself. So when
he went ‘WOW!’, I knew I was
on to something. That was a
good feeling – so I went into
production with the DS201 gate.
That was in 1982. You can
hear the difference in drum
sounds between pre and post
1983/4 as studios bought them.
Were you a natural with electronics and circuit design, or was it something you came to through long periods of learning and experimenting?I was interested in electronics
from the age of 11 and it has
remained my hobby ever
since. I worked as a test
engineer at Tektronix and
did a couple of short courses
there. Then I decided to start
a band. I wanted a Hammond
organ but couldn’t afford
one, so I set about building
an organ and learned a lot
during that process. The rest I
learned along the way, repairing
amplifiers in the van on the
road from one gig to another.
Making little sound effect boxes
in tobacco tins!
What impact did your invention have on your business/company? It changed everything. Suddenly
the business had to expand
and get serious. We turned pro.
From a guy in a basement
to a small factory in a couple
of months.
What was your next move as a designer/inventor?Compressors. The first two
were the DL221 and DL231,
now discontinued, followed by
the 1960, which is still selling
after 30 years.
What are your thoughts on having contributed something so important to the recording industry?There are a few pro-audio
products over the years
which could be described
as landmark products.
If the DS201 is regarded
as one of those, I’m proud of
that. Fantastic.
www.drawmer.com
Ivor Drawmer and the Frequency-Conscious GateWhen Ivor Drawmer couldn’t afford
his own Hammond organ, he set
about building one instead... On the
desk, the first design of the gate sits
atop the more familiar DS201 model
Genius!
28
Not your average speaker
designer: that’s Rog Mogale,
founder of Void Acoustics, for
whom the pursuit of audio
technology seems to have been
in his DNA at an early age. While
most young kids were getting to
grips with wooden blocks, at two
years old Mogale was drawing
drivers and horns on old shoe
boxes and wiring them together
with string, in what could well
have been the very fi rst disco
sound system.
Paradoxically, he was at the
time profoundly hard of hearing.
“Deafness delayed my speech
and it wasn’t until I was nine that
anyone could really understand
what I was saying,” he refl ects.
“This gave me a totally unique
perspective on life, and later, on
speaker design.”
Mogale rapidly acquired a
wholly diff erent set of skills as
his hearing improved, becoming
not only a highly profi cient
multi-instrumentalist, but also
developing an innate sense
of aesthetics that was later
responsible for making the
loudspeaker a form of visual
inspiration.
Mixing live and producing
records for some of the seminal
acts of the ’80s and ’90s, he
was simultaneously honing his
acoustic design skills; it was with
the formation of Void Acoustics
in 2002 that Mogale’s dream of
creating loudspeakers that refl ect
and relate to their surroundings
became reality with the three-
way sculpted Air Motion
loudspeaker.
“I couldn’t take going to
great looking clubs only to
see an ugly
black box hidden
away in a corner” he explains.
“Everything had moved forwards
in club land – even the moving
lights had style – but where was
the aural equivalent of the shift in
visual awareness?”
This acute observation led to
the creation of the Air Motion.
“First, I threw away the box.
No box, no resonance. Then I
selected the very best transducers
I could fi nd and matched them to
horns with minimal colouration.
I’m proud that we achieved
a product totally without
compromise, either sonically or
visually,” he explains.
Air Motion and its triangular
cousin Tri Motion, with their
unique palette of fi nish and
colour options, are now one
of the leading choices for
EDM events and high-impact
nightclubs, proving that
outstanding audio quality and
iconic aural art can grace
any interior.
www.voidaudio.com
Rog Mogale and Air Motion
A remarkable 44 years have
now elapsed since Jeff Byers
and Charlie Brooke established
MIDAS with an original focus
on the design and manufacture
of musical instruments and
amplifi ers. But it was in no
small part thanks to Byers’
engineering expertise and vision
that the company evolved to
become the pro-audio giant it
subsequently became.
In fact, it was in Byers’s
own London fl at that the fi rst
powered MIDAS consoles were
painstakingly put together. A
collaboration with Martin Audio
that saw calibrated MIDAS/
Martin Audio systems become a
stalwart of concert tours helped
precipitate the next phase of the
company’s development, but it
was the specifi c introduction of
the PRO4 that really catapulted
MIDAS into the next phase
of its evolution.
High-quality signal
processing, rugged construction
and a compact form-factor
masterminded by Byers’s team
were among the elements
that endeared the PRO4
to a generation of acts and
sound engineers. AOR titans
Supertramp were the fi rst band
to take the PRO4 out on the
road, in 1974, but during the
ensuing decade the landmark
tour credits piled up thick and
fast: The Beach Boys, Billy Joel
and Pink Floyd’s historic The
Wall (1979-80) tour.
The PRO4 cemented MIDAS’s
quality credentials and paved
the way for several busy decades
of R&D that yielded countless
fl agship analogue consoles,
including the XL3 and – most
successfully of all – the XL4.
A further refi nement of
MIDAS’s vision of portability
and high-spec components,
the Heritage 3000 emerged
in the early 2000s and further
consolidated MIDAS’s live
market status, with Bon Jovi,
AC/DC, Coldplay, Foo Fighters
and Sir Paul McCartney among
those taking either the XL4 or
Heritage 3000 out on the road.
Post-2006, MIDAS has
continued to fl ourish in the
digital era with desks including
the PRO6 and PRO2.
Jeff Byers and the Founding of MIDASJeff Byers (left) with
customer ‘Mark’ and
Chris Rogers (right) in the
Stanhope Street HQ in
London, in the early 1970s
The utterly distinctive
Air Motion system
Mogale says his deafness as a child gave him a unique view on life
HISTORICAL
GENIUS
Genius!
What would we do without
the internet? Each day we rely
upon the rapid and accurate
execution of thousands of digital
transactions with scarcely a
concern, as IP technology has
proven so incredibly fast and
reliable. Despite this proven
robustness, the audio world has
remained largely unaffected for
years, as practitioners of sound
design continued to use point-
to-point analogue connections
and pre-IP digital formats,
with the accompanying
problems of noise, weight,
complexity and cost.
In 2003, Aidan Williams
considered a different possibility.
An amateur musician and
producer with degrees in
Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Williams
was working at the Motorola
Australian Research Center in
Sydney, Australia developing
plug-and-play networking
technologies.
“I looked at my audio gear,
my computer running Logic,
and the various MIDI and audio
cables connected it together
and thought, ‘this should be a
network, and it’s not,’” he recalls.
The ubiquitous Ethernet port
with standard TCP/IP protocols
had everything needed to
replace all the cabling with a plug
and play network: that is where
AV belonged.
Combining his passions and
expertise, Williams and four
other former Motorola network
engineers began to develop
the ideas and technologies that
would become, by 2006, Dante
by Audinate. Physical media
pathways were replaced with
logical ones, using existing IP
standards and readily available
network hardware. The team
refined their solution to operate
at scale, covering large areas
and connecting hundreds of
devices, transporting thousands
of channels of tightly synced,
low latency uncompressed
audio. The native qualities of
IP technology allow complete
integration of networked
audio with computers, so that
everything from device control,
monitoring and signal routing
is now done with easy-to-use
software on an ordinary Mac or
Windows PC, eliminating the
need to handle devices, move
cables or input “magic numbers”.
“We just couldn’t see the
point in having specialised ‘AV
switches’ or ‘AV Network Cards’
when our aim was to use the
ordinary IT equipment all around
us,” recalls Williams.
“One of the biggest
contributions Dante has made
is to show that ordinary IT
technology can do signal
processing, and ordinary IP
networking can transport audio,
each with outstanding quality,”
says Williams. “There’s a mindset
in the industry that AV is such a
special category of ‘thing’ that
ordinary computers or networks
aren’t sufficiently capable or
reliable – but we’ve shown that
simply isn’t so.”
Today the system that Williams
and Audinate conceived is the
most widely adopted and fastest
growing IP media transport
solution in the world, with over
160 OEMs now licensing
Dante, and new Dante-
compatible products
being released from major
manufacturers on a regular basis.
Finally: that name. Dante
comes from Digital Audio
Networking TEchnology, right?
“Actually, there is no meaning.
It is just a name. We thought
of it having the same flavour
as names like MANET (Mobile
Adhoc Networking),” reveals
Williams. ”I sometimes joke that
the rest of the team refused
to copy my preferred name
– Advanced IP Digital Audio
Network, or AIDAN – so we
ended up with Dante.
But, and let me stress this,
that is only a joke!”
www.audinate.com
Aidan Williams and AV Networking
(Left) The first FPGA-based prototype made by Williams and his team. (Right) Earlier still, a prototype based on a Blackfin processor
Audinate CTO and
Dante developer Aidan Williams
29
Genius!
30
The Geniuses’ Geniuses!Who do the smart people look up to? Who inspires the brainiaks?
To conclude, here are the collected revelations of some of our boffins…
BRUCE HOFER (Audio Precision)
“Tomlinson Holman, Peter Baxendall, who developed
tone control circuits; Robert Adams of Analog Devices, Stanley Lipschitz and John
Vanderkooy. They all have the ability to think out of the box.”
DAN DUGAN“Chuck Butten. He was largely responsible for the first multi-way amp in concert sound. He also produced a summing bus
for intercom and the first really successful interface at a time
when everyone was using carbon telephone mic headsets.”
KEES SCHOUHAMER IMMINK “My genius is Rudy Van Gelder, because his recordings of jazz
music are of ever-lasting beauty.” GERRIT BUHE“Claude Elwood Shannon,
the father of modern digital communications and
information theory. His work laid the foundation for today‘s information age. He also had
a whimsical vein and invented things like rocket-powered
Frisbees, a juggling machine, a mechanical mouse that can
navigate a maze, a Rubik’s Cube puzzle solver and the well
known ‘useless machine’.”
MILLER PUCKETTE (Max/DSP)
“Eric Lindemann, the man behind the Synful software synthesizer. He was my boss for a few years at IRCAM, but
then left to start his own company. His new synth has the most natural sounding instruments I’ve heard – much more natural-sounding than samplers. He’s somehow figured out
how to get the transitions from note to note in synthetic imitations of orchestral instruments to sound natural.”
PETER THOMAS (PMC)
“Alan Blumlein. Among much else, he developed binaural recording for reproduction on disc, and a lot of stereo
recording theory. But he wasn’t just a theoretical engineer. He
got his hands dirty, and wouldn’t give up on an idea until it
worked as well in the real world as it did in his head. Brilliance and tenacity – that’s what the best designers need, and Alan
was one of the best this country has ever had.”
IVOR DRAWMER (Drawmer Electronics)
“There are quite a few really talented designers out there.
Back in 1970, the band I was with bought an Orange PA, so we went
to the Huddersfield factory, where I met Mat Mathias, who started Matamp. A very clever
guy indeed.”
HERBERT JÜNGER (Jünger Audio)
“Bob Orban. He came up with the first analogue compressors for
FM radio and it is still a major brand. But his processors are
different to ours: they make the FM signal very dense, even loud.”
TONY ANDREWS (Funktion One)
“It has to be [Serbian-American inventor] Nikola Tesla – such a visionary, and a real polymath.
He was walking in a park and ‘saw’ the first AC motor in the sky; went home and built it; and it worked. He’s responsible for all
the AC in the world. He emigrated to New York, and overturned Edison’s campaign
to establish DC as the power supply. AC won out, but everyone remembers Edison!
He’s what you call ‘unsung’ – and a bit nuts: one time, during a quest for broadcast power, he built
a giant ‘Tesla coil’ and used the whole Earth as a capacitor. It generated bolts of reverse lightning over 100ft long – taking out the local generator.
You’ve gotta love that kind of ambition…”
ANDY HILDEBRAND (Antares)
“I think my fellow plug-in developers Gilad Keren and Meir
Shaashua are geniuses. They founded Waves and programmed a number of excellent algorithms. They are genius because of their
expertise and forward-looking technology.”
JOHN STADIUS(DiGiCo)
“Old Ray Dolby did pretty well for himself, didn’t he? He certainly had the right
marketing plan… He worked out how to overcome all the problems
of noise in tape-based systems, which was clever. It’s purely
historical, now, because you just record onto a USB key.”
GRAHAM BLYTH (Soundcraft)
Bruce Jackson, who designed the Clair Folding Mixer. It was a great piece of engineering and he was a
lovely man, too.
ROG MOGALE (Void Acoustics)
“The father of British PA, Charlie Watkins.”
