Josh Florian: “Ruining Audio Less,” The Truth About A/D Converters, and His Secret PEP Process

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by two notes. Audio Engineering two notes is a leader in the market for load box, cabinet and mic simulators. Gunner, the days of having iso rooms or having to record an amp at ear bleeding volumes to capture that magic tone. The torpedo live reload and studio allow you to crank your amp up as loud as you want, but record silently. Check out www do two-node.com for more info.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

And now your host Eyal Levi. Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. I am Eyal Levi with me is someone that I've known for way too long now. And the reason I say that is because it means that we're fucking old over 10 years at this point.

(00:00:52):

Mr. Josh Florian, one of the smartest and most talented people I know. He's a drummer and an audio engineer by, I'll say at this point by hobby because what he really actually does is make magic boxes, meaning make super high end audio gear. When I say super high-end, let's just say that if a Ferrari is considered a high-end car, the McLaren would be what people who consider a Ferrari to be mass produced would get. So what Josh makes at his company, JCF audio, would be more like the McLaren's of the audio world. They're so high up there that even the guys getting apogees and things like that, which are considered very good, this is still way further up and he's built gear for me in the past and you've heard his stuff on lots of my recordings and I've always been impressed by things that he's remained adamant about, never having too many things on a piece of gear because it'll interfere with the quality of the audio down to lights and power switches and things that we've argued about in the past. But the thing is that when you talk to people who know about his gear or have used it, everybody just talks about it. It's the, I dunno, it's godly and magical, which I agree with. So thanks for being here. Of

Speaker 3 (00:02:33):

Course, man.

Speaker 2 (00:02:34):

Nice to talk to you again. I know we haven't talked in a little bit.

Speaker 3 (00:02:37):

It's been a

Speaker 2 (00:02:38):

While. Yeah. I'm looking forward to picking your brain because I haven't picked your brain in a while.

Speaker 3 (00:02:43):

Yeah, well it it's there for picking and plus I don't have the mohawk anymore either, so the brain's exposed. Perfect.

Speaker 2 (00:02:54):

When did you get rid of the mohawk?

Speaker 3 (00:02:56):

About maybe a year ago. Everybody has this full of hair that they're giving in life and mine was a little bit shorter, so

Speaker 2 (00:03:05):

It's sad.

Speaker 3 (00:03:06):

Yeah, it happens.

Speaker 2 (00:03:08):

I'm about to get rid of mine too.

Speaker 3 (00:03:09):

Yeah, there comes a point where it don't work anymore and it's all good. I told myself when I was very young, I had long hair for a long time that when it would go, it's going to go and I'm not going to try to save it. So

Speaker 2 (00:03:23):

Yeah, I'm about to have to go through that too. I've had long hair since I was 13, but it's one of those things where it's probably better to just get rid of it than to be that dude who doesn't.

Speaker 3 (00:03:35):

Yeah, it doesn't what was right for me. Some people hold on past their prime, let's say, and never was my thing.

Speaker 2 (00:03:49):

Well, I mean, I completely understand. It's a hard thing sometimes for some people to deal with, but just got to rip the bandaid off.

Speaker 3 (00:04:02):

The only thing changes is part of life. If you can't change, you die.

Speaker 2 (00:04:08):

Yeah, exactly. Alright, well haircare with Josh and Al,

Speaker 3 (00:04:15):

This is way more important than the gear.

Speaker 2 (00:04:17):

Nice to have you here. So ruining audio less, that's the motto of your company and I think it's interesting. I think it's funny and it's clever, but I also think it's interesting because one thing I always talk about is that every time you put something in a signal chain, you're ruining the audio just a little bit more. And so when you make the decision to use a plugin or a piece of gear, the benefit needs to outweigh the damage you're already doing. And that's why a lot of the really great mixers whose mixes have gotten to see through doing this, one thing that I've noticed, which is almost uniform, is that they use as little, typically they're their chains are about as simple as it gets or as simple as they can make them. And I'm wondering if your motto for the company has anything to do with that idea or if you've got your whole own Josh explanation for it or if it was just a clever

Speaker 3 (00:05:26):

Motto, A mixture of things. I think somewhere along the way when I was in my first intern gig at a studio in Baltimore, I think somebody had mentioned, had said something sort of along the same lines, not in those exact words, but it was like sucks less audio or something like that. It may have been Drew Zurich. I don't know the phrase just sort of always stuck with me and the feeling and the understanding of audio chains that I obtained sort of on top of that didn't happen until later. So the phrase sort of reappeared later on with different meaning. But yeah, the way I've always approached audio and audio systems is that if people say less is more or whatever, that's not exactly it. The way that I sort of explained it is that the best, everything is nothing, which means that what's the best equalizer? The best equalizer is no equalizer. If you have to put one in because you have a problem or something, you can solve it with one. But it's sort of just a mantra. Do not insert gear into a chain reflexively just, oh, this is supposed to be in here or whatever. Don't just sort of make decisions for yourself ahead of time until you listen.

Speaker 2 (00:06:45):

And does that kind of mentality reflect and why your pieces are so, I don't want to say simple because they do complex things, but simple in that they do the thing they say they're going to do and nothing else. If you're getting one of your units, it's going to do what it says what as advertised and incredibly well, but you're not always going to get even an LED with it.

Speaker 3 (00:07:15):

Yeah, the ED, I mean, I try to build things mean the way that I build things in a lot of cases is very expensive, so I try not to clutter things too much. I mean, I have been accused of clutter in some cases, and I think it's true in some cases, but you try to just not reflexively add things, even features on boxes that people are just sort of expecting to see power switches. We've had conversations about that. I hate them because the reason that I don't have power switches on my boxes is just that something that's going to break. And I don't want to deal with somebody returning a piece of gear because the power switch, they're just turning the thing on and off every day. It's ridiculous. And in most cases, it's kind of a punting operation too, where inserting a piece of gear into an audio system, it's almost certainly going to be plugged into a rack rider or a firmament or something that's got a power switch on it already, or it's going to be spending most of its time on anyway, so what's the point?

Speaker 2 (00:08:11):

Makes sense. Yeah. Alright, so I want to know what drove you to get started building stuff? Because I feel like, for instance, being a guitar player, there were always those types who were into building guitars or being like Lu airs or whatever, and I never understood it. I was always like, why would you want to do that when you could just be like me and play? But they're like different. They're different. People wired differently. They have a passion for how the guitars are built and I was always really happy that those guys existed because I couldn't give a shit less about how a guitar is made, but if I needed it fixed, there you go. And I guess, I suppose I feel, and I've always felt the same about audio gear in that I'm not a gear guy.

Speaker 4 (00:09:05):

Never

Speaker 2 (00:09:06):

Have been. I mean, I like good gear. It helps you do good sounding stuff sometimes, but I've never really cared. I've never cared. And so it always fascinates me when someone does care the way that you do. Were you always like that or was there something that triggered it?

Speaker 3 (00:09:27):

I'm not really sure. I think people have asked me this before, I don't really know. It is just a mixture of factors of things that I was doing at a time. I mean, I've always been a tinkerer since I was a kid into computers and things and coding when I was a little bit older. And then going through recording school and then getting into mastering when I moved out here to LA and meeting certain people and certain techs and things that it just sort of, and also opportunities that just sort of presented themselves. When mastering lab in LA was going to open another facility in Ojai, there was a lot of gear that needed to be constructed. So that was a role that sort of fell into. And so there's a mixture of opportunities and things that you sort of gravitate towards and a mixture of stuff. I play guitar too, so back when I'm 14 years old, I have a Strat or whatever and I really want to hear what this guitar sounds like with another pickup in it or it's just something that comes off the top of your head like that. And it didn't scare me and I didn't feel like it was going to be detracting from the time that I was spending with the instrument at all to sort of put the thing on the kitchen table and try another pickup in it. So

Speaker 2 (00:10:39):

It's interesting that you say scare you because that would scare me to this day. Doing it myself scares me. So it didn't even register as like, oh no, this is complicated or

Speaker 3 (00:10:54):

This

Speaker 2 (00:10:55):

Is beyond me. You just did it.

Speaker 3 (00:10:56):

I don't think so. I told the story recently to Nicole who we both know who works for me, my father when I was very young when I was five or six years old, I remember he used to bet me money that I couldn't disassemble one of my toys and reassemble it. Oh, there we go. Yeah, I think that, there we go. That's what I was looking for. I think when I told this story, Nicole said, then you probably never had any choice in life. I'm like, yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:11:25):

Yeah. So lessen to all you parents out there. Train them young.

Speaker 3 (00:11:30):

Sure, yeah. Get money involved early on and make 'em disassemble their toys. Yeah. So I dunno, I think maybe some of that's where it came from, just the sort of the macho little games like play fighting that you have with your dad when you're a kid. Maybe that's where it came from. I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (00:11:54):

My business partner, Joel Ick, who is not on the podcast today obviously, but he is training his daughter to understand that she's, I think five or something. She already knows the difference between a product and a service business and what product market fit is and all these dumb business terms that we use all the time.

Speaker 3 (00:12:21):

That's a little much, but hey, whatever works, man.

Speaker 2 (00:12:24):

But hey, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, she could have a company and someone will be interviewing her about it. She'll be like, well, my dad made me build all my toys from scratch. So from a young age you were building toys, you were getting paid to build things. That's kind of interesting.

Speaker 3 (00:12:47):

Yeah, that's the longest short of it. Yeah. So I got forced into this circumventing the child labor laws. Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:12:55):

That's hilarious. So by the time you were in high school, were you super comfortable with it to the point of doing it, I guess semi-professionally for money? Or were you just still hobbying? Where were you at by the time you were in high school?

Speaker 3 (00:13:15):

That was all still, I mean that music and playing music was still the main sort of focus of my life from all the way up until basically when I started this company in 2004. So you're talking 1992 through 1996. Yeah. I'm just playing music and just trying to, if I work at modify anything that I own like my amp or guitar or change a piece of gear or whatever, it was all sort of in the service of sounding better and playing better music at that time. I didn't really have this as a career on my mind at that point.

Speaker 2 (00:13:48):

What made you switch from being music focused to building stuff focused?

Speaker 3 (00:13:57):

A couple of things. As you well know, being in a collective, like a band or something. I mean, you're always dealing with other people and other people's needs and priorities

Speaker 2 (00:14:10):

And things. Yes, I do. Yes, I know that very well.

Speaker 3 (00:14:13):

Yeah, so that happens and there's always a little, after you go through a big experience like horror or career or whatever in that field, you always end up taking away some negative things from it because it's inevitable. So there's some of that. And I also, around the same time period sort of saw a where the engineering craft or the engineering, the business of being an audio engineer was sort of changing and becoming something very different than it was prior to that.

Speaker 2 (00:14:48):

Something that you didn't like, right?

Speaker 3 (00:14:50):

Yes, that's true. I was an editor at Mastering Lab at the time, sitting in front of a sonic station just cutting together, you're going to be cutting this podcast. I'd just be doing that three or four records a day every day.

Speaker 2 (00:15:02):

Remember you telling me, just sorry to interrupt, but I remember you telling me that you hate how it's become the equivalent of a video game.

Speaker 3 (00:15:09):

Yeah, I hated the sort of aspect of recorded performances becoming like a video game that bummed me out. I mean, I realized that, it's interesting you mentioned that because there are parts of audio editing as it applies to other audio fields that does not bother me as much. Like people editing podcasts or people editing commercials or television or something. I mean, I never had any moral qualm with that. Then music was something that was close to my heart and I really didn't like the feeling of it turning into a game of Tetris. It didn't excite me. It doesn't interest me musically. So there was that. And

Speaker 2 (00:15:55):

So you saw that that's the direction engineering was going or kind of like Not for me. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:16:03):

I mean the part that really turned me off of the whole thing was the fact that it was becoming commoditized. It was just like, if I can do this, if I can sit down and do this, then anybody can sit down and do this. And everybody started getting cheaper and cheaper computers. And then when GarageBand started shipping with, right, with the operating system, it became very,

Speaker 2 (00:16:22):

So you saw this in 2004?

Speaker 3 (00:16:24):

No, I saw it coming long before that actually. After I had started at Master Lab around 2001, things were changing

Speaker 2 (00:16:32):

Because these things that you're talking about, I mean, I've been watching the change as well and of course and been paying close attention, but they didn't really start coming into full fruition until years after 2001.

Speaker 3 (00:16:48):

Yeah, no, I saw it coming. I knew where it was headed and it wasn't really disparaging of the whole thing. I recognized it was changing, it didn't click with me, and other things clicked with me more.

Speaker 2 (00:17:02):

Fair enough.

Speaker 3 (00:17:03):

So I spent more time in the shop at the lab than I did after a while than editing and burning discs. I, that's just what happened. So

Speaker 2 (00:17:13):

Well, I mean, I think that it's mature to say it's changing and I'm not going to disparage it. It's just not for me, but it's mature to be able to understand that you may not be able to control the direction the world is going in, but you can certainly control what focus you give to your life.

Speaker 3 (00:17:35):

Oh, certainly There's a key distinctions to make.

Speaker 2 (00:17:38):

Yeah, I mean, well, I say that because I see a lot of guys who don't like a certain direction and it bums me out for them because it's like, dude, you can't fight a tsunami.

Speaker 4 (00:17:50):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:17:50):

The future will happen and it'll happen whether you like it or not. So don't fight the future. Fight for your own focus.

Speaker 3 (00:17:59):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:18:00):

In my opinion,

Speaker 3 (00:18:02):

Certainly first, I mean, you have to at first be in control of your own life. If you decide to head up a movement or something or get people on board or make a collective, that's something that sort of has to come after. You got to be comfortable sailing your own ship first.

Speaker 2 (00:18:18):

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So you weren't happy with the way engineering was going. What else was it that, sorry for tangenting us? I do that.

Speaker 3 (00:18:29):

No different things. I mean it being less about music and more about video games, that was part of it. Part of it was the electronic side of it just sort of clicked with me. It was something I was always sort of technically oriented. So maybe getting out from in front of the gear and getting inside it is something that just, it was a natural gravitation. So it is a mixture of conscious effort and also just going with what feels good. I don't think there were, and obviously there're practical considerations. Can I make money doing this? How much is these engineering gigs paying and bills and all that. There's lots of factors involved, but those are big ones.

Speaker 2 (00:19:12):

Okay. And then so fast forward to 2004, you started JCF audio.

Speaker 3 (00:19:18):

I did. Right when I got back off to, I had gotten out of this band and come back to Los Angeles and decided, hey, I want to make a go of it as I think, I guess what the phrase I would've said in my own mind is I want to be a tech. So I had some contacts from people that I knew, from a clients who had worked at the lab or freelance or other people or whatever and just started taking, I had actually been building converters since the end of college and since 1999 I had done a couple of different things for me and a couple of other people. So I decided, hey, converters is something that I like, I enjoy, I understand the technology, I like playing with that kind of thing. But in addition to that, on a strictly technical level, I saw that there were some open doors for me. There were some things that could be improved upon that were really easy to improve upon and always being sort of quality minded in that department always. I always wanted to do a better job at this craft. I thought I could do better and I saw an open door and just wanted to run for it. So that's eventually what sort of turned into the latte, the first product.

Speaker 2 (00:20:26):

Let's talk about converters a little bit. Your converters are regarded among some of the very best out there and I can say from my own experience shooting them out against other things that they're incredible. Your stuff's incredible and your gear was some of the gear that helped me understand the importance of good converters. So right around that time was when I was first starting to really get it. I think I was pretty serious about recording until about 2005. Then the band stunted my growth. I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just shift of focus for a few years. And I got back into it around 2009, 2010, and I knew you for a few years and didn't even know you had a gear company, but I think around 2009, 2010, you started sending me pieces to try on recordings and I bought some pieces off of you. And that was the first time that I really started to understand what a major difference these pieces of gear make and why they're so expensive and why your stuff that you recorded on an inbox sounded poopy compared to

Speaker 4 (00:21:38):

Stuff

Speaker 2 (00:21:39):

You recorded on something much higher end

Speaker 4 (00:21:41):

Conversion

Speaker 2 (00:21:42):

Wise. And I know some people who out there who have a following who are pretty smart, who put a lot of effort trying to get the point across that converters make no difference. So I wanted to talk to you about that. Have you ever seen any of these videos where they'll be like, the converters in my Hewlett Packard PC or whatever are the same as this ultra expensive converter. There's no difference. It's all snake oil. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 3 (00:22:21):

It's a mixture of things going on there. I mean, somebody taking a video and identifying that one ship set is used in some product is the same in some other product that costs way less money that doesn't make the two products that equal or the same thing or performing in the same environment the same way. I mean, you're sort of comparing two different things. They happen to have two pieces in it that are the same. While it is true that there is a sort of defacto family of conversion product that is ubiquitous and that's meant for audio, does not mean that all of the products are the same or they do the same job or they do it the same way or for the same purposes even. There's a lot of difference involved. So what do I think about people trying to demonstrate that they are the same thing?

Speaker 2 (00:23:16):

Well, they're trying to say that no offense to people, to brands that make budget gear, there's a time and a place for that stuff, especially if you're a beginner. A beginner's not going to spend five grand on two channels of conversion or whatever, and

Speaker 4 (00:23:35):

They

Speaker 2 (00:23:35):

Shouldn't have to, but they're trying to say that companies trying to sell you super expensive conversion or just trying to rip you off. You can just get lower line stuff and it'll be exactly the same and that's not the stuff you should be paying attention to. You should be paying attention to everything else

Speaker 4 (00:23:57):

In

Speaker 2 (00:23:57):

The signal chain. And I agree with the last part, which is you should be paying attention to everything else in the signal chain anyways, but

Speaker 3 (00:24:04):

Well, yeah, that's

Speaker 2 (00:24:06):

Exactly, it's like duh,

Speaker 3 (00:24:10):

The assertion that all companies that make expensive conversion products are trying to rip you off is a little bit of a stretch. I mean, I wouldn't agree with that. I mean, my stuff is very expensive and I could guarantee you, I'm not trying to rip anybody off. It is expensive. And people who look at my product on the shelf or something and identify it as something that's not for them, they're not required to buy it by putting it in front of them. I'm not saying that they, they have to part with their money. There are situations where things are overpriced and it's more sensible to purchase something that's more affordable and they may happen to have the same modulator in them or something. I dunno, I can't come up with any specific examples off the top of my head. But a blanket statement like converter companies are ripping you off is just that the statement doesn't hold water

Speaker 2 (00:25:03):

And that all conversion is the same.

Speaker 3 (00:25:05):

No, it isn't by any stretch of the imagination. There are a lot of similarities between a lot of mainstream products. There's a family conversion called Sigma Delta, which is, or Delta Sigma, depending on the way you think about it in your head. But it's a technology that exists that is very cheap and easy to manufacture and it's why it's ubiquitous in audio. So audio in the conversion world sometimes gets the little, where the industry is sort of patting us on the head going, you guys want your 24 bit performance? Isn't that cute? We get a lot of that from the technical end. But yeah, there are certain things that are used that are pervasive in products for audio. It's like a glue that sort of ties 'em all together and some people sort of latch onto that in code. No, these things are all the same. It's just not true.

Speaker 2 (00:26:01):

Alright, well then if you've got some elements that are the same, then what are the elements that make them different? Well,

Speaker 3 (00:26:10):

Everything else except for a little modulator and digital filter on a chip. I mean there's everything else that's involved. Even ludicrous stuff that seems innocuous like chassis. What kind of boxes is it in? Power supplies interface, jacks switches, relays component. You can name every component under the sun. And the way it's all put together, there are really, really poorly made, really expensive products and they're really wonderfully made cheap products in everything in between.

Speaker 2 (00:26:46):

And I guess do you find that every single one of these items that you would put inside a box makes a difference? Right.

Speaker 3 (00:26:54):

I wouldn't say that every single one makes a difference in a demonstrable, measurable context. I think that that's a bit of a stretch too. But topologically speaking for me, the way that the pieces are sort of integrated together and there are some components that are hypercritical in some cases and sometimes those components don't exist in others designs at all. So it's speaking about this stuff in generality starts to break down. The more focus you get on any one given area, you can't really make blanket statements about anything. So it's kind of like an onion. You can't really get to the center of anything.

Speaker 2 (00:27:31):

Yeah, I hear you on that. I guess I'm pushing for as dorky and specific as you want to get. We would love to hear about it.

Speaker 3 (00:27:42):

Sure. I'll give you, let's pick out just one thing as an example that people probably familiar with power supplies or something. Okay. So power supplies is a big one for me. The most common thing that exists in audio gear today for a variety of reasons is a thing called a switching power supply, which is basically just, there's a small little DC power supply that converts power that comes in from the wall, which is of course AC into dc. And then there's a high frequency sort of oscillator circuit that takes this power and transfers energy across a very, very small transformer core. And it's allowed to be very, very small and lightweight and cheap because it's doing it at a very high frequency. And that energy is rectified and turned into DC and then used to power loads on the other side. That's the way a switching power supplies works. These things are manufactured in China almost exclusively, although in a couple of other countries too. But they're made in China by the zillions at a time. You can buy them right off the shelf. They're cheap, they're shitty, but let's just say they're cheap, they're ubiquitous. They are in some cases come with, this is difficult to explain, but if you build a product with it, it sort of sets up your procedure for getting the box certified a little bit easier.

Speaker 2 (00:29:07):

Got it. Okay. And that's why it's ubiquitous, basically because it just makes your life easier.

Speaker 3 (00:29:14):

It's ubiquitous for a couple of reasons. One, they're lightweight, two, they're cheap, they're easy to make low profiles so you can build smaller boxes and things. It is all about efficiency from a cost and weight standpoint more than anything else. And also efficiency of the finished product, meaning it doesn't generate a lot of excess heat and this entire family power supply is something that I've completely disregard. I don't think that they're really worthy of. It's a little complicated. There are situations where switchers, it makes sense, but I just don't think it's really worth the effort to have something that has a lot of differential noise, which means that you can have noise across the voltage that's generated. And also where it's a really shitty performer is what's called common mode noise, where the whole power supply makes noise this way with respect to ground. They're poor performers in a couple of different departments, and it's just not something that I need to do. If I need to charge somebody a hundred extra dollars or something to have a linear power supply that I'm going to do it and it's going to weigh a little bit more and it's going to cost a little bit more. It's just a bridge that I'm not really willing to walk over for a low power device.

Speaker 2 (00:30:27):

Makes sense.

Speaker 3 (00:30:28):

Yeah. Is that nerdy enough for you?

Speaker 2 (00:30:31):

Yeah, love it. Even though I feel like I might not understand everything there is to understand about this stuff, I love hearing about it and that's why I want to talk to you about it because when I get asked these questions, I'm like, well, I know there's a difference between converters because I've heard the difference. But then I get hit with the argument of, yeah, but that's subjective, bro, that's subjective. It's like, okay, fair enough. I don't know how I can argue with that,

Speaker 4 (00:31:10):

But

Speaker 2 (00:31:10):

I just know that I've heard the difference. And guys I know who make records that sell Aton can hear the difference. And while it's subjective, everyone's hearing is their own thing. I would much rather listen to the opinions of guys who know how to manipulate sound in the real world than

Speaker 4 (00:31:29):

Guys

Speaker 2 (00:31:29):

Who are just trying to debunk something on YouTube.

Speaker 3 (00:31:32):

Sure, yeah. That's sort of family of people who are into that kind of thing. I mean, I don't really get it either. I agree that people's hearing is subjective. It's true. But what's really fascinating, and one of the really important things that I learned at Mastering Lab is that people's hearing is far less subjective than do you think. And what people run across sort of inadvertently is the false notion that I inserted this piece of gear in my chain and I listened to it and I got X opinion about it, and that means that that opinion is attached to this piece of gear, and I take it out of this room and go plug it into this studio somewhere else under completely different circumstances. And you're immediately in a mindset, well, it must be the same thing. I must be getting the same thing. And so you're immediately attributing you're feeling or your opinion about this piece of gear to the gear itself rather than its systems integration. It only exists under this circumstance in this rack with this stuff. And oh, this box was humming really badly, but except it's in a plastic enclosure right next to a power transformer and that's why it was humming. And you take it out of there and plug it in somewhere else and you don't have that problem. Well, the device isn't humming anymore, so whose problem was it? It's not really the fault of the gear, it's just a situation with the system that doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (00:32:56):

Yeah, very true. So back to talking about your personal history, there came a point where you started making custom rigs for some pretty intense characters like Paul Reed Smith for instance. And at first I thought it was a secret, but then a bunch of people know that you do it. So I can think of so many times that you're like, I'm going to Maryland to build him a board

Speaker 4 (00:33:32):

Or

Speaker 2 (00:33:32):

To rewire his whole room. And those of us who, I mean, I don't really know him personally, I've met him a few times, but I know a lot of people that know him, and he's a pretty intense genius, intense, intense character and he loves working with you. And I know of a few other people like that who just, they go to you for this kind of stuff. And how did that start happening? How did you start becoming the go-to guy for the insane genius dudes who make a ton of money?

Speaker 3 (00:34:08):

It is always nice to work for a client that is passionate about something. I mean with Paul as far as pro audio is concerned, when I started working with him, he didn't really know a whole lot about how pro audio gear works or whatever. He was mainly a guitar guy and sort of casual vintage gear collector, but it wasn't really his wheelhouse. So I just started doing certain things from him. He needed a studio rewired and he needed a bunch of gear built and I would talk to him about certain things and he would say, Hey, that's a great idea, let's do it. So he's been a good client and that's all well and good, but more specifically, I don't know exactly how I became the go-to guy for certain custom projects and things, but it's something that I really enjoy doing because it really grows out of understanding the history of these companies, where they come from, the characters and the people that were involved and looking at the thought process that goes into certain lines of equipment.

(00:35:14):

And a lot of this stuff you can decipher by reading schematics more than anything else. I mean, you can see if there's an example of a piece of gear that was built by one guy that worked for this company and then he ended up leaving that company and going to another company and you see some of the same things appear in this other product for another company, and the lay person would get kind of confused by that and be like, well, these are two different companies that must be different people or whatever. This business is pretty small and there are key figures when you go back, there's maybe under 50 people or something who were really responsible for generating all of this equipment that anybody that's in audio engineering would know about. You say LA two A or 1176 or something. I mean, that's something that every audio guy knows what that is, but there was basically one or two people involved in generating it in the first case. So knowing the history and then people were interested in things, oh, I really want an LA two A, but I really wish that it had more output headroom or something like that. So I'll do a variant of it, taking the ideas from the past and sort of bringing it into a modern context. That's something I enjoy doing. It's fun because it's sort of part artistry and part science, and it tickles all the fun parts of my brain, I guess.

Speaker 2 (00:36:31):

Well, can you talk about some of the custom jobs you've done? Maybe football Reed Smith or anybody? I just think that you've done some, I've heard about some interesting stuff you've done for him.

Speaker 3 (00:36:43):

Yeah. Well, for Paul, I've built a lot of stuff. We did some monitor controller stuff and a D to a system and A to Ds and modified a lot of his preamps. And what else did we do? We did so many things. I can't even remember. He had a whole fleet of microphones that needed to be set up and powered correctly and all the stuff that would've been done sort of reflexively back in the days of large full service facilities being everywhere, especially here in Los Angeles, there's a lot of those places used to have staff techs and people that would have sort of coherent, consistent theories about interconnect and were allowed to draw lines around and put fences around their own studio and saying, when something comes in and is going to go into our studio and it's going get it used, it's going to get wired and treated a certain way so that it plays nice with everything else. That's something that was done reflexively say in 1975, and it's something that people don't even know existed today.

Speaker 2 (00:37:46):

I honestly didn't even know that existed.

Speaker 3 (00:37:48):

Yeah. Well, I mean even gear itself, I mean, in the very, very early days of audio recording equipment, you had engineers, guys that would be responsible for generating the recordings and they would come to technical people and be like, we need to do A, B, C, and D, and we don't have gear to do that. So it becomes purpose-built. You say, build me a piece of gear that's going to solve my problems, A, B, C, and D. And that's where all these equipment that everybody like LA two A and 1170 sixes and all the old UA stuff, that's where all this stuff grew out of solving problems for people sort of on the fly.

Speaker 2 (00:38:21):

Interesting. So you in lots of ways are continuing that tradition in your own way

Speaker 3 (00:38:27):

A little bit. Yeah. I like to think I am varying degrees of success with it.

Speaker 2 (00:38:32):

Well, I mean, I think that whether we like it or not, the days of the old studio are gone with very few exceptions.

Speaker 3 (00:38:40):

Largely

Speaker 2 (00:38:42):

There is a few holdouts, but who says they'll be here in 10 years? But one thing that will be here in 10 years is guys who have the passion for it and the money to make it happen. Who will hire people like you to do it for them?

Speaker 4 (00:38:58):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:38:59):

So I think that that will still be here without a doubt. There will be the Paul Reed Smiths of the world who want the best of the best in their own studio,

Speaker 3 (00:39:10):

And they'll

Speaker 2 (00:39:11):

Pay to make it happen.

Speaker 3 (00:39:13):

And like you mentioned earlier when you were explaining me and my perception, the way I'm perceived by other engineers and guys in the business, I mean to me when I do this stuff, there's not an enormous amount of gray area and what's acceptable and what isn't acceptable. It's not just like a wide palette. You can do anything. There's things that make sense and things that don't make sense, and there's a pretty clear line between them. So me taking that sort of attitude got interpreted as I only build stuff for elites, or it's like elitist or it's, it's only really expensive, really high-end stuff. That's all stuff that got generated by things that got said about me. When I build a piece of gear for somebody, I'm just trying to do a really good job with it. And I'm trying to think of an example. An SM 57 is an amazing piece of engineering, but I don't think anybody would call that an elite microphone or something. It is just a smart, sensible piece of gear. So there will always be people who are interested in having things sound good and having systems that integrate well. It it's something that still pays the bills for me. So I enjoy making audio systems that work for people.

Speaker 2 (00:40:32):

Yeah, it's interesting about the SM 57 and pieces of gear like that where maybe it's not considered a piece of elite gear, but I can't think of a single elite studio that doesn't have at least eight of those. It's interesting that there are those pieces of gear that they might not have the highest fidelity, but for some reason they're just the workhorse that everybody agrees on. Doesn't matter, the genre doesn't matter, the budget levels doesn't matter. Everyone just agrees this is the standard or the workhorse for this type of thing, and we will all own it.

Speaker 3 (00:41:16):

In the case of the SM 57, it's something I actually don't know a whole lot about the history of it. Just something I could come up with off the top of my head. I mean, maybe they had a very, very successful marketing campaign. The SM 57 was re-released, I think at least three times why it is that they're everywhere. I mean, they're affordable, they do their job. They're also very robust, meaning you can drop them on the floor five or six times and they will still function correctly. The case being that whatever that strange steel material is, gear catches on for different reasons in different circles for different things, and it is all a bit of a mystery.

Speaker 2 (00:42:01):

Yeah, I guess there is an element to it, kind of like why does a piece of music catch on? There is definitely with music, there's the, no matter what you put into it, marketing or production wise, there's always got to be that timing thing where the collective consciousness of the audience needs to be

Speaker 3 (00:42:23):

Prepared,

Speaker 2 (00:42:23):

Ready for it and wanting for it. And

Speaker 3 (00:42:25):

That

Speaker 2 (00:42:26):

You can't predict that. I mean,

Speaker 3 (00:42:31):

Nirvana was a big one there. That was the weirdest thing in the world because I mean, seventh grade, I can remember, remember the summer that that record came out and retrospectively thinking about it now and the feelings and that all of my friends and all the people that were into it at the time, it was just the situation was as such that the world was primed for that kind of thing. And they did it, and that's what happened. It was just something that just sort of happened.

Speaker 2 (00:42:57):

I think I was around that age too, and it's hard to explain to people that weren't there sort of thing, but I wasn't allowed to listen to rock or metal or anything like that by my parents growing up. I always had to sneak it. And before Nirvana really, I had no interest because it was mainly this glam eighties shit

Speaker 4 (00:43:22):

That

Speaker 2 (00:43:22):

Was big. And whenever I would come across it at a friend's house or whatever, I'd be like, what? They're all dressed like girls and I don't know, it just didn't speak to me. And then Nirvana happened. It was like, yes, this is just right. And that's kind what I'm talking about. There wasn't any greater thinking to it. It was just this is right. This felt right at the time. This spoke to me and my friends. And I seriously doubt that Kurt Cobain had marketing meetings about that.

Speaker 3 (00:44:01):

No,

Speaker 2 (00:44:01):

He was just doing his thing. Yeah, you can't predict that

Speaker 3 (00:44:05):

The sub pop and the DGC guys, there may have been some planning involved in there, but I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (00:44:12):

Maybe some planning on how they would release a record, but I really don't think they planned to change the face of popular music forever.

Speaker 3 (00:44:20):

No, I mean nobody plans to do that. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:44:24):

Exactly.

Speaker 3 (00:44:24):

I guess not.

Speaker 2 (00:44:26):

But I think that back to the SM 57 convo, I think that for a piece of gear to be that popular for that many decades in a row across so many, this is pretty impressive.

Speaker 3 (00:44:40):

It is very impressive.

Speaker 2 (00:44:42):

I can't really think of another piece of gear that's like that. Pervasive.

Speaker 3 (00:44:48):

Yeah, the SM 58. Alright, sure.

Speaker 2 (00:44:55):

For live use,

Speaker 4 (00:44:56):

Right,

Speaker 2 (00:44:56):

Though I do know a lot of studio guys that have those. So another question about when you're doing custom projects, does that feel different to you than when you're making gear for JCF?

Speaker 4 (00:45:15):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:45:16):

Okay. So is it like another business or how do you categorize that in your head? Well,

Speaker 3 (00:45:25):

It is just a different thing. I have a line of products of stuff that we manufacture and sell, and then on a more custom basis if somebody needs something specific or mostly JCF is focused on conversion products for the most part. There's a little bit of leeway in there too, but the stuff I do on a custom basis for people can be anything. Anything is ridiculous. I mean, I just finished a custom project that was a 16 channel switcher box for live playback. People have these rigs that they do playback stuff for live tours, and they have a redundant rig that they need to have switch over when one of the machines locks up or drops out or something. So I just did the high speed switcher box for that kind of situation. That's something that would never really make sense as a product for JCF audio. I mean, I don't think there's really enough call for it, but it's something that's fun to do on a custom basis, something that's a little bit outside the norm and unusual.

Speaker 2 (00:46:21):

And do you like the interaction with high powered minds that want stuff that's off the menu?

Speaker 3 (00:46:29):

I, well, I like working for anybody who has needs that are not met that are sort of within reason. I don't want build the home or the car with 15 horns or something. That's kind of ridiculous. But I like it when people approach me. I like working professionals that approach me. I need something that does this and I can't believe that it doesn't exist in the marketplace, and can you build me something that will solve my problem? And I am able to say yes, that's something I enjoy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:47:02):

If it's that big of a deal that it solves a problem that's on the marketplace, why don't you then just turn it into a product?

Speaker 3 (00:47:08):

Just because somebody, one person has a specific need for a specific piece of gear, doesn't necessarily translate into a product. There needs to be enough call for it to make sense because the tool up to do a product is very, very expensive. You have everything from promotion and getting all the pricing information together to manufacturing and it's a big production to make a product.

Speaker 2 (00:47:33):

All right. So let's talk about one of your products. One that I've owned and that is incredible. So D eight, it's a high quality eight channel D eight converter, super high quality, and it's got something that you made a proprietary process called pep. And I remember when you first introduced me to PEP was in a hotel room and you couldn't really describe what it was, but I had

Speaker 3 (00:48:06):

Some DOS program material, I think.

Speaker 2 (00:48:08):

Yes. Yeah, that and Muse and some other things. And you said, listen, try to clap along when it's on and when it's off. And when it was on it, I don't know how to explain it, everything just felt better. And so that's why I bought it and I started processing mixes through it and sometimes tracks through it. And I'd say that maybe nine times out of 10 it worked. One times out of 10 it made things sound worse, but that's okay. That's any piece of gear. But nine times out of 10, it made stuff sound, not just sound, but feel better, but I don't know how to explain it.

Speaker 3 (00:48:52):

Well, that's the whole thing with pep specifically. For starters, you're talking about the a D eight, the A channel A to D converter, the new product that DAT actually has a slot for. Peppa doesn't ship it.

Speaker 2 (00:49:03):

Oh, you're right. 80, sorry. I own the 88.

Speaker 3 (00:49:06):

Yeah, with pep. The whole thing was I had to figure out some way to convince the people who were in that demonstration to be able to feel the music rather than anytime you corner an engineer and you say, listen to this or whatever, they immediately have their engineering ears on, and they're not listening to instruments or performances or anything. They're just picking, oh, how's the top end? Is it extended? And if you're immediately in that mindset, it's already over. So that's why the clapping thing, I was trying to get people to listen to music rather than to try to listen to what equalizer somebody used or something. So yeah, the whole experience of having everything sort of feel like it's in the right place.

Speaker 2 (00:49:52):

So this is basically an algorithm and you switch it on when you're doing the conversion and stuff just kind of feels better. But can you talk about it a little bit? I remember you tried explaining it to me a few times and it just shot right over my head.

Speaker 4 (00:50:10):

And

Speaker 2 (00:50:11):

Maybe now that I'm a little older, I'm a little smarter and can try to understand it. But what is it?

Speaker 3 (00:50:17):

Well, I get kind of tongue tied explaining it to people too. I mean, I could explain it to you exactly what it is, but I end up sort of forfeiting too much of the intellectual property of my company. So I can't do that in a lot of cases. And I'm always playing tap dance when I explain this to people, but it's worth a listen. If you hear it, that's the experience. You can't even describe it yourself. So I don't think I'd do much better. I can talk a little bit about why I chose to put it in an aided e converter and why it's there.

Speaker 2 (00:50:53):

Yeah, how about that and what's the point of it?

Speaker 3 (00:50:55):

I think that this thing that sort of gets fixed with the process is something that engineers spend a lot of time sort of tripping over. It's why I wanted it early in the recording process. And you could liken in a very sort of general abstract way to the recording on a multi-track tape machine. I think that doing that, I don't want to say it solves everybody's problem, but it sort of sets you up to spend less time tripping over sonic dilemmas further down the recording process. It sort of helps you out ahead of time, if that makes any sense. So that's why it exists in the say it is this magic cure all. Let's just say that it's a magic cure all for sound, right? If you call it that, well, obviously you want it early in the chain so that you can make your decisions about what you're going to be doing to shape and manipulate the sound based on what you're hearing.

(00:51:58):

I mean, that's all you have to work with when you're mixing, you're listening to lay backs or whatever, you're making decisions and acting based upon what you're hearing because that's what you have to work with. So what came in off the floor, what went into the tape machine is of little consequence because nobody's ever going to hear that again. It's what comes off of it that's important. So using that as a cheap model or whatever, that's why it exists early in the recording process and why applying it later is sometimes a situation that can get, you find that you're having to make more compensations and more adjustments as a result of it being there, which is a little bit unfortunate.

Speaker 2 (00:52:39):

Well, back to what we were saying at the beginning about how some of the best mixers have the simplest of chains, and also the whole other thing about how we always talk to people about get it right at the source, get it right at the source. But if you actually do get it right at the source and have everything come in the right way, then you do have to make less decisions later.

Speaker 4 (00:53:03):

Oh, you do.

Speaker 2 (00:53:03):

Which will lead to hopefully better sounding mixes and masters. And I did notice that when I tracked through it with it on the level of fixing that I had to do afterwards, much lower was much lower,

Speaker 3 (00:53:19):

Which it's sneaky because it's like a phantom. It's very difficult to sell that to people. Be like, look at all this time that you would have spent doing this had you not done this. Basically, it becomes very vaporous, but it is real. It's absolutely real. The less time that you spend and the less problems that you have to solve, the better off your situation's going to be. I don't think anybody would disagree with that.

Speaker 2 (00:53:42):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again though, I think it's one of those things where someone would just need to try it out over a, it's hard to sell people on something that would be part of a project that would span weeks. So this process that you would be doing at the very beginning is going to save you time over cumulative over the period of weeks and maybe months. And that's great about it. But here, so buy it off of this and we promise. And then by the time you get done with that project, probably the time to return the product to wherever you buy it from has expired. Right? So it's a tough sell, but I can definitely say that it just does something incredible to the audio.

Speaker 3 (00:54:44):

And I also tell people as far as their engineering ears are concerned, when it gets applied, in some cases it actually ends up sounding not as good. And that's something that's sort of part of and parcel with the product on off. If you have your engineering ears on, and in a lot of cases it's not going to win the on-off contest with your engineering ears on. But the part that's really cool about this situation is that if it's supplied in the recording process at the point in the recording process that's suggested by the product, meaning upfront, you have at your disposal probably if you have a workstation and plugins, infinite numbers of tools at your disposal to fix all of the problems, the small problems that it may introduce, you do not have any tools to fix the problems that it does solve.

Speaker 2 (00:55:31):

Can you talk about some of the problems that it solves?

Speaker 3 (00:55:34):

Well, that's the previous conversation that we just had, the sort of gen se quois about it is that don't have, there isn't anything else that does that. It is just that. And if it ends up sounding a little wooly in the low midrange or something, you know what? You've got a bank of probably 40 equalizers in front of you that you can dial a little bit of low midrange out, but you're not going to be able to get that with anything else.

Speaker 2 (00:55:57):

True. Have you ever had anyone actually figure out what it is?

Speaker 3 (00:56:04):

No, not that has told me no.

Speaker 2 (00:56:07):

Okay. So to date, no one's been like, I think I know what you're doing in pep and here it is, and you've been like, fuck you figured it out.

Speaker 3 (00:56:16):

No, in fact, I dare people to figure it out in the manual. Something that's unavoidable. It doesn't really much matter if people figure it out or whatever. I'm not going to give it to them. But the way that it's integrated is pretty special. And it's also the way that it's packaged in that device or whatever, nobody's going to, it doesn't bother me at all.

Speaker 2 (00:56:37):

I was just curious. I remember that when I had it back in Florida, A lot of people would be like, okay, I bet it's doing this, and I'd hit you up and you'd be like, Nope, that's not what it's doing. It'd be like it's a transient shaper. Nope.

Speaker 3 (00:56:56):

Well, it can shape transient, but no, that's, it's not like a transient designer or something. No, that is not how it works.

Speaker 2 (00:57:07):

Do people still react to it the same way?

Speaker 3 (00:57:10):

Yes. Especially, I mean, under demo circumstances, yeah. All the people that have bought the product, I haven't received any negative feedback from it. I'm sure that there is. That's So

Speaker 2 (00:57:20):

Those of you guys listening, are you going to be at NAM in January?

Speaker 3 (00:57:24):

I think so. We haven't made final decision yet, but I'm hoping to go this year. I try to do it at least twice a decade or something. So we relax there in 14. We want to do it again.

Speaker 2 (00:57:36):

If you find JCF audio at nam, get a pep demonstration. Highly recommended. I know a lot of you guys listening will be there. Go to the JCF booth and ask them to show you pep. Yeah, just do it now. What's your opinion on, I feel like three years ago this trend started happening of guys getting kits to build gear. The DIY trend started and I feel like it's kind of tapered off a little bit. I

Speaker 3 (00:58:11):

Think it has a little it a little, yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:58:14):

You guys realize that it's harder than they thought.

Speaker 3 (00:58:17):

There's probably a little bit of that. The DIY sort of scene, at least in the audio world, has been sort of under the radar, but it's been around really since about 1990, since the beginning of the internet really. But I mean really in some meaningful way, probably 1999 or 2000 and continuing up to present day. And it got very popular there for a minute. And it's been met with varied success, I'd say.

Speaker 2 (00:58:48):

Yeah, I think that, I mean, I know it's always been there, but I think that there, about two years ago was when every single person who has never even touched a piece of gear in their life maybe suddenly wants to get a lunchbox and start building their own 500 series units. Sure. And some guys started selling units like that, and I bought a couple and they'd be the worst made pieces of shit I've ever gotten in my life. But I do know that some guys really found their calling that way too.

Speaker 4 (00:59:29):

Sure.

Speaker 2 (00:59:30):

They didn't realize they were afraid of making gear and they found these DIY kits and realized maybe it's not as tough as I thought. Maybe it is tough, but it is not like this totally mystical thing. I can actually do this.

Speaker 3 (00:59:52):

Maybe

Speaker 2 (00:59:52):

Within a year or two I'll be decent or something. And I know that some of them actually really got a lot out of it, but what are your thoughts on that movement?

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):

On DIY?

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):

I in a certain sense am sort of a child of DIY in many different respects, so I can't really knock it too badly. If people learn from it and get something out of it, then yeah, I'm all for it. I will say that if you're going to make a box or you're going to make a product and give it to somebody else or sell it to somebody else or whatever, there's a bar that needs, you need to get over the bar in order to make that happen. And yeah, there are some things out there that have sort of grown out of that world that are a little bit questionable, but if you get something out of it that's positive, then it's a good thing. I mean, I would never be somebody to sort of poo the amateur world or whatever. It's just not something I'm about. But if you're going to make a product and sell it to somebody, at least I guess I have some shame involved. I'm not going to sell somebody some complete piece of crap.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):

Well, I think that some people thought that it was going to become so big that it was going to torpedo a bunch of

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):

No.

Speaker 2 (01:01:18):

Yeah, I never saw it that way. Because to get good enough to make gear that competes with the big boys, you're not going to just figure that out based off some DIY kit.

Speaker 3 (01:01:29):

No, I mean you might be able to get away with making a bunch of slew of utility preamps to do whatever to record a drum set with or something. Yeah. Can you accomplish that? Yeah, probably so with maybe some help or maybe a little bit of experience. Yeah, you can get that done. Is it going to torpedo API or something? No, it's not something that they're worried about.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):

In fact, they were actually pushing it. A lot of the DIY 500 series came from API themselves. They wanted to sell racks, so that's why the 500, the VPR Alliance sort of sprung up. There were a lot of companies who already manufacturing things for that format and they wanted a little bit of oversight and regulation over the community so that people were not returning their racks saying that they had blown up because somebody decided to stick eight modules in that were all shorted out or something.

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):

Interesting. That makes a lot of sense to me. I dunno, I've always figured that it would be smart to figure out how to get behind that community

Speaker 4 (01:02:30):

Rather

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):

Than fight it. One of those things of you can't fight the future.

Speaker 4 (01:02:34):

And

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):

Also, like you said, you don't want to get your stuff returned because people are blowing it up.

Speaker 3 (01:02:41):

Yeah, they didn't. Yeah. Building. One of the things that was exciting about 500 when it started to get really popular was the fact that if you were going to make a product that was a 500 series device, you didn't have to go through any UL or CE certification procedures because you're not selling anything with that connects to the wall for power. You're just selling a card with that somebody puts DC on. So the large companies like API or whoever else, I can't think of the other companies that make 500 series racks like Pete Montes Company A Designs Vintech does. Lots of people do. Sure. I just couldn't think of one. So all the companies that are a little bit larger that would be willing to make open racks for that kind of thing, that can go through this certification procedures and you don't have to worry about that. So hey, just put the important stuff in and don't worry about power.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):

I wonder if people are still buying 500 stuff with the fervor they were a few years ago. I haven't heard of it quite as much.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):

I don't think so. It's cooled off a great deal and a lot of people have sort of turned on it saying that the 500 format is no good or whatever, and I started to roll my eyes at that whole thing too.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):

Oh, I heard that too. People, I don't know why. What was that all about?

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):

I have no idea. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. The 500 format is pretty spectacular. There's lots of things that it can't do, but for simple bipolar, regular 16 volt stuff that you do with discrete op amps or monolithic op amps or whatever, I mean the sort of building block stuff, you can do a lot of stuff in that format and it's a wonderful arrangement. I don't know. I don't understand how it got pooed Somewhere along the way, somebody said something that was probably crap and it got passed around.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):

Here's my opinion, and I could be wrong, but probably someone tried to build some stuff and fucked it up, they don't know what they're doing and then decided that it was five hundred's fault, not their fault. And some people who did the same thing agreed probably. And then it became a thing where a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing try to build some 500 series gear

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):

And

Speaker 2 (01:05:02):

Blamed it on the gear instead of pilot error.

Speaker 3 (01:05:06):

Entirely positive.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):

That's my take on it because, and here's why. When you get a good 500 series rack with really good 500 series gear made by people who know what they're doing, you don't have the kinds of problems that they said they were having all these power issues and noise issues and all this stuff, you don't get that. If you have a 500 rack and there's a bunch of API stuff in there, it will generally work perfectly fine and sound perfectly fine and you won't have all those problems. Will there be a defective unit at some point in time? Yes, maybe. Possibly. Of course. But to the degree that they were saying absolutely not DIY stuff. However, if you put a 500 rack filled with stuff you made in your garage and you're not that good, well hey, of course it's going to break.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):

It's certainly impossible. I mean, nobody would PPO an API 1604 or the whole desk or something, not the new one deal. Nobody would PPO the 1604 oh, the 1604 can't sound good. Which it is the exact same thing just with a, it's all the same edge connectors and up and down 16, there's nothing different about that versus a 500 series rack. It even has a 500 bucket right in the back of it before the meter bridge. So nobody would poo poo that. Why are you poo-pooing the 500 format? He's saying A-P-I-A-P-I couldn't make a console that sounded any good because of the way it was arranged. That's ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):

I think I'm right. I think I'm right. I think that's what it was. Certainly could be. Well look, I never heard about 500 series being shit until the DIY thing got really popular a few years ago,

Speaker 4 (01:06:55):

Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):

So if it was really shit, I think a lot of really, really well-known engineers with opinions that matter who know what they're talking about would've already told us that 500 is shit. It's been around quite a while. And the other thing is the guys I know who know what they're doing, and some of them build gears, some don't, but who've got 500 racks haven't sold theirs off. So that's my other hint.

Speaker 3 (01:07:31):

Yeah, no, it's not a fad. There really is nothing to the format when you really get it is just a sort of standard way of powering and getting audio in and off of a one channel format. There's nothing really involved with the format at all. It is standardized, which is the reason why it caught on and became a thing. So yeah, I think we all know what that's about.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):

So do you ever have any aspirations of mass producing your products? Like the latte or anything

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):

That you make? You have to get a little choosy about what the words mean or whatever, mass producing or whatever. I mean, I think A OF, the blackface a A was the highest selling piece of pro audio gear in the business. In the businesses' history. There were like 110, 110,000 of them sold.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):

That's impressive.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):

Yeah, it is. This business is pretty small. Yeah, it's getting bigger. With the advent of home recording and having sort of everybody and their mom and buying gear has sort of bumped it up, but not to the degree that you'd really think it still really is a

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):

Small business and not for the high end stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:08:56):

Yeah, it's certainly not for high end. So yeah, am I going to sell 10,000 lattes or something? No, the answer's no. There's just not enough people out there that what's going to make sense for and who are at that price point.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):

So that means you would need to change your price point, which means you would probably need to drop the quality some.

Speaker 3 (01:09:15):

It means you would have to manufacture in China, which is something I don't do. I manufacture right here where I'm sitting

(01:09:22):

And sometimes Nicole's bench too. It depends on what's going on. But yeah, manufacturing in other places is not something that I'm not going to rule it out, but it's not something that really appeals to me that much. You could write a book on the entrepreneur that comes up with an idea for a product and then begins to manufacture it in China and then that idea is stolen and passed off to another assembly house and sold to someone else in some other country. I mean, it's endless. So it is a thing that I don't really, I enjoy doing. So this all just makes sense for me the way that it is.

Speaker 2 (01:10:07):

Makes sense. Alright, so speaking of mass market, can you talk a little bit about the flooding of the market with lower quality equipment and the importance of seeking out high quality gear? I kind feel like sometimes people compromise quality for cost and then they wonder why their results

Speaker 4 (01:10:32):

Aren't

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):

Great. And I mean, one, let me just give the disclaimer that I do believe that you can make great records on less than great gear if you know what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):

If

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):

You know what you're doing, you can make anything work. But a lot of guys will end up buying some really budget garbage and then not understand why their raw tracks don't have, they're just not that good. And what are your thoughts about that?

Speaker 3 (01:11:03):

I think that the statements you've made are largely true. I wouldn't go so far as to say that you can make a great record with anything. That's

Speaker 2 (01:11:12):

Fair enough. No, you're right.

Speaker 3 (01:11:13):

You're right. There's some situations where you're just going to have not enough stuff or stuff that is just, it can only get so good. So everybody has a different sort of opinion about what's good or not, but within reason. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):

Within reason. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:11:27):

Sometimes the gear is a limiting factor. People not taking responsibility for their purchasing decisions. Guess what you're saying? I bought these, I spent $300 on 24 preamps and how come my record doesn't sound like journey escape or something. Perfect example. I dunno what to say to those guys. I mean, get your shit together. There is a point where you on the curve where you sort of do get what you pay for down near the bottom. I don't know. I think that we were talking about earlier with the advent of home recording and things getting smaller and cheaper and everybody started moving into their house to save money is I think that manufacturing companies saw that as a great big opportunity. They got a great big boner and we're like, Hey, we're just going to, are going to a hundred dollars our way to a better future with all these people that are willing to buy stuff.

(01:12:36):

So there's a lot of stuff out there that's sort of catered to that kind of thing. And for a lot of those people having one knob that says level and one XLR on the back that will take their microphone or whatever and they turn the knob and the sound comes up and that's just enough for them. And for people that are doing voiceovers for low quality output like elevator music or something, all sorts of situations where high resolution audio is not important, it's just you need to have, can you record sound at home? Does it make noise? Does it sound like speech? Okay, great. Then we're done. And it just doesn't matter. So there are other markets out there rather than quality audio out there. Audio is involved in all over the place now. Even your gas pumps blaring audio at you when you're trying to pump gas. So there's a lot of shit out there that is in need of basic services that don't need to be very good.

Speaker 2 (01:13:34):

I mean, even in my own situation where I try to do things as high quality as I can say with recording drums, if I was to build a studio now and I had a limited budget and say I was doing 32 ends, I would get 24 high quality preamps with different makes and models, whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:14:06):

But

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):

I get 24 awesome ones and then I get an Octa pre. And the reason I'd get the Octa pre is because those final channels for me are always trigger splats, things like that, trigger splats and talk back and throwaway tracks.

Speaker 3 (01:14:21):

There's always situations where utility is just, it's really, it is really good enough.

Speaker 2 (01:14:26):

Yeah, it's exactly that utility. And so in that situation, I don't see why I need to pay top dollar for eight channels of great preamps for the utility tracks. It's pointless.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):

You don't,

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):

But am I going to run my overheads through that? Hell no. And I would be hard pressed to run anything I plan on keeping through that. But if I was to buy four octopus for my 32 ins and then try to record drums through that, and then people suddenly start saying, what's happened to your drum tracks? I shouldn't be surprised.

Speaker 3 (01:15:08):

Probably not. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):

Probably not.

Speaker 3 (01:15:11):

I've not had any hands-on experience with the ocpr, but the feedback that I've gotten, it's not been very positive. So I don't know, maybe you could get away with it and have it be okay.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):

It's not that great. But I mean, what do people expect? Right? It's super budget and it's not supposed to be that great in my opinion. I mean if you're using it for anything other than utility tracks, you can expect that your tracks won't sound that great in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):

Yeah, I mean when you're buying a piece of gear like that, if it's for utility purposes, the thing that you're interested in doing is continuing to work. You want to spend $300 on this and then you do not want to spend any more additional money or time thinking about it. You just want to have the thing function forever. Correct. And then there are question marks about whether is it going to last forever? Is it going to burn up in a year and then I get screwed. So there's always that too.

Speaker 2 (01:16:08):

Yes, there is that. I didn't even think about that, but I guess I had one for years and it never blew up on me. So

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):

Yeah, with the Chinese manufacturing thing, I mean this is a whole podcast unto itself, but the one thing that happens when you manufacture things at a big company in one of the provinces in China is that in a lot of cases these factories have very, very poor quality control, but they have very good manufacturing methods. So you can manufacture something and you can get maybe six out of 10 of the ones that are made are perfect and then four of them don't function at all and they all ship that way and six of them will work probably forever and four of them don't even work when you open the box up. So

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):

Is it really that crazy of a percentage though, 40% shipped or garbage?

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):

Depends on what you're discussing. I mean a Chinese microphone capsules for example, you can get 10 of 'em off the line and first 10 look immaculate and the next 10 look like somebody had put a snare drum on wrong or something. They're all rink buckled up and stuff. I'm saying I'm not singling out one factory over there. In general, the trend is is that they have kind of poor quality control, but they sort of worked on trying to fix that too.

Speaker 2 (01:17:28):

Wow. I just didn't realize that it was that extreme.

Speaker 3 (01:17:31):

Oh, it can be

Speaker 2 (01:17:32):

Of a difference. I mean I figured it would be more like one out of 10 comes up.

Speaker 3 (01:17:38):

It depends on, no, well it depends on how complicated the procedure is. Something like a microphone capsule is, it doesn't take an enormous number of steps to manufacture a microphone capsule to manufacture a printed circuit board with 2000 components on it or something That's a lot more complicated and a lot more expensive. So there are testing procedures that happen in-house before things get shipped or whatever. So the rates go way up.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):

So are you thinking that your main reason for not wanting to go that route is the quality control if they got it together over the next 10 years, would you consider going that route

Speaker 3 (01:18:16):

More? No, that's just one thing. The other thing is stolen. That is, I mean as soon as you send your intellectual property over there, you basically have just written it off

Speaker 2 (01:18:25):

And you take your intellectual property seriously, which you should

Speaker 3 (01:18:29):

Some of it. Yeah, some of it is inconsequential, but some of it's very important. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):

So can we talk about some of the obstacles that you faced when starting your own audio company, how you overcame them?

Speaker 4 (01:18:41):

Because

Speaker 2 (01:18:44):

Just for the people listening who maybe want to start their own audio company or I'm sure that some of the obstacles you faced apply even to people who don't want to start their own audio company. Just how you overcame them

Speaker 3 (01:18:58):

And people who want to start their own company, period.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:19:01):

Get yourself a tax professional step one.

Speaker 2 (01:19:05):

How early on did you do that?

Speaker 3 (01:19:07):

Not until six years in, which was six years too late.

Speaker 2 (01:19:12):

Let me tell you that with our company, this one that you're talking to, we luckily, my business partners, Joel and Joey, they have other companies. This wasn't their first company and they already knew about this. So we've been pretty serious about doing it right with the IRS from the beginning and man with the way it's grown this past year, if we hadn't done that,

Speaker 4 (01:19:43):

You'd be screwed.

Speaker 2 (01:19:44):

We'd be in a world of pain. I mean it's pain right now. Writing the checks are the pain and they hurt, but they don't hurt the way they could hurt. So you got one six years too late, but hey, at least you got one.

Speaker 3 (01:20:01):

Yeah, it is not just the IRS too. I mean there are lots of here doing business in California, there's lots of tax entities that you have to deal with. There's the franchise tax board and the board of equalization, also the IRS. There's a lot of, you can trip through all this stuff. You can just learn by making mistakes and doing and that's how I learn. It's kind of the hard way. I don't know if it's better or worse or whatever, but especially when it comes to dealing with the IRS, they really do not play. If they get an inkling that you're not being forthcoming with them, they will really come after you hard and there's no appeal. There's nothing you can really do that's going to help your situation. I mean sometimes some congress members have some sway over some things that happen with the IRS, but I mean once you have an issue with them, the issue is going to get resolved one way or another, they'll just start taking your money automatically, even money that you don't have. So it's

Speaker 2 (01:21:04):

Only one way out and it's the way that they say is okay.

Speaker 3 (01:21:08):

Yeah, I mean I suppose you could fake your death or something like that, but the percentage of people that have successfully done that is nearly zero.

Speaker 2 (01:21:21):

Alright, so get a good tax professional right upfront.

Speaker 3 (01:21:25):

Absolutely. And we have been very lucky. I haven't had too many problems even waiting that long. But yeah, just do it. If you're going to start a company, make sure you get somebody who really knows the tax code on your side or pay them to be on your side and proceed that way because you do not want to learn. There are certain organizations that you don't want to learn by. Bad example.

Speaker 2 (01:21:49):

So what are some of the other things that you think people starting a company should just get together right away?

Speaker 3 (01:22:01):

All the stuff you probably don't want to deal with that are sort of utility things like PR in whatever form it takes, whether you're doing advertising or having down to simple stuff like having business cards made up. Just all the stuff that you need to interact with other businesses or people that you may meet. It's something that even I struggle with to this day. It is all stuff that I'm not into. I build gear. I'm not a schmoozer and I'm not an advertiser in any sense of the word. So getting all the utility stuff up and running before you hit the ground running so that you're not sort of having to screw with that stuff later on I think is important.

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):

Let me add to that and I'll say that, look, I know that a lot of you guys listening are not into marketing or pr and one of the things that makes me lucky is that I naturally am, and same with my business partners. We're fortunate that that's something that we are just into. So we've learned a lot about it on our own to get better at it because we're just naturally interested in it. There's a lot of negative stigma attached to it. A lot of guys in the music industry or in engine audio don't like it because they don't want to feel like a used car salesman or they feel like it's kind of dirty. It's just a weird stigma attached to it. And I get it. I understand. I feel your pain, but the quicker that you can get over it, the better because your products will not sell themselves. And actually a lot of the leading thinkers from Silicon Valley, for instance, I've heard that people say that you should spend as much time working on the marketing of something as you did building it. Now that might not be realistic for a lot of people listening,

(01:24:02):

But you should at least take that to mind and to heart that the people out there who are selling billions of dollars worth of stuff are saying marketing is almost if not as important as the product itself. And it hurts to think about that because we put so much of ourselves into what we make. But you really should think about that and I don't think it's an accident that my company's grown as fast as it has. I mean I think our products are great, but I think that us being good at marketing

Speaker 4 (01:24:35):

Is

Speaker 2 (01:24:35):

Another part of it. And we also hired someone who's really great at marketing to help us just with that. In addition to us being good at it, we brought someone in.

Speaker 3 (01:24:45):

Yeah, that's the part I was going to chime in with is if you happen to not be good at this kind of stuff, then just get somebody on your team. That is because it's extremely important.

Speaker 2 (01:24:55):

I mean being that you're not into it, what have you done to get around that?

Speaker 3 (01:25:01):

I had a team of dealers that's just in the particular field that I'm in that most people sell through dealers, people who are sort of responsible for carrying a number of brands and pimping for lack of a better term. Those brands and people who are good at customer service, who are able to answer questions or on the ball and all that kind of stuff. All the things that a small company like mine are not, don't have the resources to deal with. So there are teams of people out there that move gear and interact with people and spend times on forums answering people's questions and all that kind of thing. So being in sales and having a team of dealers that sell your equipment, it is pretty important.

Speaker 2 (01:25:43):

So you mean as a for instance, like Vintage King or something?

Speaker 3 (01:25:47):

Yes, as an example. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:25:49):

As an example. They actually, I didn't even think about it, but they actually do a really good job of selling to people and I know that in this high end market sometimes it's hard to get people to go along with things. They need to hear them in real life. And I know that vintage king, depending, they don't always do this, but sometimes you can get them to send you five different units to demo out and then you keep the one you want and pay for that one as long as you send the others back. Of course they won't always do that with everybody. I think you probably have to have a history with them or something, but that's some pretty extremely good customer service. Just doing things like that and it shows an understanding of the market. And also the other thing you said is resources. You need the resources to be able to do that. A dealer like them can do that. They do have the resource to do it. If you don't have the ability to just send off five units, it's understandable. But yeah, partner with people who can do the things you don't want to do.

Speaker 3 (01:26:56):

Absolutely. There's no reason not to. I mean you recognize a need for your business or whatever and I should be involved in this. I need this. There are relationships that you can develop. It doesn't mean that it needs to be part of what's inside your cell wall. It just means that you need to have access to these kind of resources and get them to work for you, which is what business relationships are and foster them. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the way business works. That's the idea. If it's something that you need, it doesn't need to be inside your own body. Yeah, it's something that you can contract.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):

Well it's funny that you say that because I think a lot of entrepreneurs or guys early on in things have a problem with delegation or have a problem with wanting to do everything themselves.

Speaker 4 (01:27:45):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:27:46):

And I think that delegation is one of the smartest things a business owner can do. So because I imagine if I was a part of JCF, let's just say that I was your co-owner. I started JCF with you, and if I had to tell if I was talking to my co owner, business partner, Josh, about all these things we got to do, we got to market this shit, got to come up with something badass for next year or whatever. I would rather that if you were my partner, I'd rather that you do what you're best at, which whatever that is, inventing stuff and making stuff, I would want you focused on that rather than taking on all these tasks that you might not be into or might not be great at. So I'll take those on or since I'm not your business partner, somebody hire somebody else. But it's important to do that so that you can focus on the things that matter, the things that will move the needle.

Speaker 3 (01:28:53):

That's just a sensible use of your time. That's all it is. If you're good at this stuff, that means it probably means you're pretty efficient at it. So you're making good use of your time. If you are sitting there at night with pens and a light table trying to design yourself a logo or something and all you want to do is just go home, that's not efficient use of your time. Hire yourself a design artist or a graphic designer or something who's going to do a good job with your company brand or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:29:23):

God, it's so funny man, people put so much time into the main offering and then the core product and then we'll do stuff like what you just said, not be a graphic designer and then sit there and try to make a logo. That's why you end up with so many of these audio websites that look like they're from 1996 on GeoCities. You know what I'm talking about? Totally.

Speaker 3 (01:29:50):

And I have a kitchy love for that kind of stuff. So I would laugh my ass off for the thing, but it's just because I like it as not a reason. That should be the face of your company. You should put your foot forward like that. It should look like GeoCities from 1990s. It should not. Okay, I'm saying that officially. I just would think that's really funny. If it did, it had a bunch of animated

Speaker 2 (01:30:09):

Gif. Yeah, it's always hilarious. I mean it's funny but not so much if it's you.

Speaker 3 (01:30:19):

Yeah, if your company is serious and you're trying to be serious, making people laugh right out of the gate is probably not a good idea.

Speaker 2 (01:30:27):

So we have some questions from our audience for you. Oh

Speaker 3 (01:30:31):

Cool.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):

I'd like to that I'd like to ask you.

Speaker 4 (01:30:34):

Sure.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):

They're actually stoked that you were coming on.

Speaker 3 (01:30:40):

Oh cool.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):

Got some good questions.

Speaker 3 (01:30:44):

Alrighty.

Speaker 2 (01:30:44):

Hang on. I'm just bringing them up. They disappeared off my page.

Speaker 3 (01:30:49):

They've all been withdrawn.

Speaker 2 (01:30:51):

Yeah. Everybody was like, nah,

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):

Fuck this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:30:55):

Fuck this guy. No, here they are. It's just my computer's moving at crawl speed.

Speaker 3 (01:31:05):

What do you want

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):

A very new MacBook Pro

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):

That's crawling?

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):

Yeah. Oh yeah, it's crawling man. I feel like computers will just always crawl because everything else around them that you run on them is going to keep on trying to improve. So always be skimming right at the edge of the computer's ability to keep up.

Speaker 3 (01:31:33):

Right? It's like being promoted to the level of incompetence.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Alright, here's our first question. Sure. Here's from David Fuller, which is what separates a really high grade A to d, D to a from the prosumer boxes,

Speaker 3 (01:31:52):

A number of things, but the first thing that would come sort of strike me is features like a pro box that's aimed at a specific test that's sort of purpose built for, say it's for mix guys or something. They're supposed to be capturing a mix off of analog console or something. It's probably not going to have things like phantom power and pads and onboard mic prison, that kind of stuff. So not being featured to death is one thing. Usually there's some hints in the build quality that will, if you take the lid off or just look at the lid in the box itself, does it feel like a solid piece of gear?

(01:32:40):

And going back to the earlier part of the conversation, something I'm going to take a whole lot more seriously a linear power supply than a switcher, but that's something that's sort of specific to me. These are all things I'm trying to make distinctions between something that the average person would be able to identify on a piece of gear versus somebody that builds gear for a living would be able to notice prosumer versus, well more importantly than making distinctions between them using it. Have a listen to the thing. There are situations where prosumer boxes will outperform something that's really supposed to be meant for high end. So the first thing that I would do to it obviously is listen to it, make sure it's integrated correctly, make sure it's connected correctly. Make sure you make sure read the goddamn manual and you're not requesting of this device something that it is not capable of doing.

Speaker 2 (01:33:46):

Funny that you say, read the manual. I feel like that was in our very first podcast episode we talked about that people just don't read these days. But that's a great point that you should actually know what your gear is supposed to do.

Speaker 3 (01:34:05):

You should, and there's so much assumption assumptions all you have. I mean if you don't read the manual, you just take the thing out the box, well here's what it's presenting me with. It's got these buttons and numbers and stuff and I'm supposed to just, all of your operational behavior with the device is just drawn from inference rather than reading what the guy who put it together had to say. I recognize that in some cases, especially with mass produced products, that there are manuals that leave a whole lot to be desired and sometimes features are left out entirely or you've got the wrong manual or there's a lot of that shit too. But for devices that are coming from usually smaller companies or mid-size companies, there's going to be some interesting information in there and maybe some insights into how it works. And there's obviously going to be hard numbers that you can read to make sure that the thing is, it's like a minus 10 input or something and here you are driving plus 24 into it and wondering why it's distorted and there's no sensitivity control and just dumb shit like that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:11):

It is kind of amazing. I guess when you're listening to converters against each other, if you were doing a shootout, what would you be listening for? Is there anything, this is me asking, is there anything in particular that you would be, because I feel like in lots of cases, conversion we're talking about, aside from getting total garbage, we're talking about stuff that not many people will be able to notice. We're talking about adding a percentage of quality to the tracks that may be hard for some people to perceive. So are there any dead giveaways?

Speaker 3 (01:35:55):

Dead giveaways for

Speaker 2 (01:35:58):

Or what's better or what's worse?

Speaker 3 (01:36:00):

Yeah, lemme think for a sec. Well, here's something that I would do for example, it's not something I suggest everybody else do and you can infer the wrong information from this, but if you're setting up, say you have an analog console and you've got some mix up there or something that you think really sounds great and you want to print the thing into some digital storage device or whatever and you're trying out three different converters, here's the situation that comes up a lot. If I've got all three of them set up in parallel, the very first thing that I'm going to do is that I'm going to monitor the back end of this thing and turn the thing completely wide open and make sure that there isn't audio playing so that nobody dies. But listen to what the floor sounds like and right away you're probably going to figure out if there's any problems. Like one of them is squealing or maybe two of them are squealing because the first one is squealing and is actually passing noise into the second one because you have them connected in parallel. Things like that is your test setup democratic? I mean you have to make sure that the test that you're doing is not BS to start with and that's a whole separate podcast by itself.

(01:37:23):

So I'm going to have a listen to the noise floor going to this is even before you play audio or whatever, calibrate it, make sure that they're doing or you have some sort of level playing field between these things, these devices that you have set up. I'm sort of hand waving here and making a hypothetical situation where you can try three different converters into the same storage device or something, which is not many people have. The other thing you have to do that's really hypercritical is that obviously you have to have a monitoring environment and some gear that's associated with monitoring that you trust and understand and how to use. But if you're evaluating like an A to D for example, you really have to have the ability to monitor an analog source before it goes through a conversion process or the conversion process that you're trying to isolate so that you know what you had to start with before you get on the backside of it.

(01:38:21):

Many people in the modern recording studio don't even have the ability to listen to a sound source before it hits a converter and it's written off as well. Nobody ever gets to hear it, so why should I care? Well, it may change your purchasing decisions or change your decisions about what you think is good and what gear that you think should go in the chain. If you were able to, here's the steer drum, whack, whack, whack. How many people actually assign that to some analog monitor control, turn the thing up and listen to the thing before it goes into a workstation? Almost nobody. It is very rare that that even happens. So switching back to our more common example of I have a mix and I'm going to print it or whatever. You want to have the ability to listen at least highest resolution you can get whatever form that takes with your monitoring. You have to listen to what went in and you have to listen to what's coming out and also understand that since you're going into the digital domain, you have to come back out and you are subject to the backend monitoring as well. So you're evaluating a lot of things at once and having the ability to monitor the front side of it is going to increase your understanding of what you had to start with so that you can make the correct comparisons.

Speaker 2 (01:39:38):

I think that a lot of people try to make their comparisons based off of written descriptions, which I think is really dumb, but

Speaker 3 (01:39:47):

I'm serious. I think a lot of people make their decisions based upon consensus or things that they read on gear slots.

Speaker 2 (01:39:53):

Yeah, so stupid. Alright, here's one from Diamond, Jeff Collier, which is if I wanted to become a designer or a builder, where should I start? I'm already taking basic electronics courses but don't know where to go after the fundamentals. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:40:08):

That's a tough one. Just the way that the studio business used to run. It's the same sort of tutelage thing. You used to get a job at a studio and learn from people who are doing it already and get internships and be around it all the time, that kind of thing. I was lucky enough to have fallen into that kind of situation. I could suggest that you may not find it, it may not be available to you and it's obviously a shrinking world and there are not a lot of guys out there that really know the stuff backwards and forwards, which you hopefully will be able to involve yourself with if that stuff doesn't pan out. I guess that I would have to say classic learning institutions, like you're taking basic electronics, but what does that mean? Are you taking a course at a college or maybe your teacher has some ideas about continued education after that online stuff. I actually have considered opening a school for this very thing exactly for guys in his situation. I realize there's not a lot of sort of focused instruction, meaning if you're into gear for audio, there's not a lot of, there isn't a lot of schools or places you can go that you're going to learn about electronics specifically from an audio perspective,

Speaker 2 (01:41:36):

Remember there's something there for us to talk about

Speaker 3 (01:41:38):

If

Speaker 2 (01:41:39):

You're thinking about educating people.

Speaker 3 (01:41:41):

I have been thinking about it for a long time. It is something I think that could be really great because there is a little bit of a gap between learning about electronics and a book and learning how to do a good job with electronics for audio. There's a lot of missing sort of hand me down knowledge that that you could sort of only get from the old timers who were doing it already kind of thing.

(01:42:14):

So yeah, it's a thing. I hear you. Like I said, if you're in formal education, talk to the people who are heading up the formal education for you. Maybe they have some ideas about other things and other topics that you could cover, other courses that you could take so forth. And also from the sort of studio end of things, if you live in a big city, go get a job in the tech shop of any studio that you can get somebody to see if you can get somebody to take you under their wing. That's about all I could offer. I recognize there's not a lot out there.

Speaker 2 (01:42:46):

I think that was a great answer and I'm making a note to myself to hit you up later about educational stuff because

Speaker 4 (01:42:56):

Could

Speaker 2 (01:42:56):

Have an opportunity there. Sure. So Andrew Simmons is wondering, do you think that a basic understanding of electronic building slash design is someone that working in a studio should have?

Speaker 3 (01:43:07):

That's a good question. That's a really good question.

Speaker 2 (01:43:10):

It is. I've never even thought about that.

Speaker 3 (01:43:12):

Yeah, it certainly can't hurt. There's no situation where somebody with a basic understanding of electronics is going to be going to have less credibility than it not being the case. So yeah, I think it's important. I think that if you're looking for a specific area to be a topic to get into that is really going to pay off. Practically speaking, it's interconnect. Knowing how to build cables, knowing how different types of output circuits and different types of input circuits work with each other and knowing how to cable and patch base and that kind of thing. That's all stuff that is, it is never negative. Having an understanding of how that stuff works ever.

Speaker 2 (01:44:01):

And I can back you up by saying that me as an engineer, audio engineer, I barely even feel comfortable calling myself an engineer because I don't do that stuff. And if there's been one aspect that I've felt insecure about over my career has been about that stuff, the building stuff, making cables and all that because I never learned how to do any of that stuff and well, I can record the hell out of things and I think that that's been my saving grace. But whenever something would break, so it always give me that pit in the stomach kind of feeling of I hope we can find somebody or hopefully the guy that I'm working with knows how to do this. I sure as fuck don't.

Speaker 4 (01:44:53):

Sure. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:44:54):

And one of those things, thinking back if, well, I never considered audio engineering to be like my main calling in life,

Speaker 4 (01:45:02):

But

Speaker 2 (01:45:03):

If I did, I would've definitely learned all that stuff. And I would say that these days with the market becoming a lot more saturated and there being a lot more competition, you always need something to give you an edge.

Speaker 3 (01:45:18):

Oh, of course.

Speaker 2 (01:45:19):

And that is a fantastic edge to have. It is to know how to fix things when they break. Give me a break. That's wonderful stuff to know.

Speaker 3 (01:45:27):

Yeah, I mean I can't really see a situation where that would be a negative. I mean, you could contort the situation into some absurdity, like you don't want to get bogged down with that when it distracts from you from recording or from your session or whatever. But if something's breaking or broken and the session can't get around it or whatever and you are able to fix the situation and get the session back up and running, that's money. In most cases it's physical money. It's somebody's money that's being better spent or not wasted and that makes you valuable. For me, when I came out of school, even before I really got into electronics for audio professionally, I was king shit at synchronization. And believe me, that was a very, very complicated topic with a lot of different digital recorders for tape workstations, analog tape machines, and having all those things run together in sync for a period of time during the transition between analog and digital. If you understood all that stuff, you were king shit. And that's kind of where I started with that.

Speaker 2 (01:46:31):

Okay, here's a question for Nick Matzke, which is having used entry level converters for years and I recently moved to some of the mid-level stuff like RME and dangerous, I struggled to notice the difference in conversion quality even in my treated room with good monitors. Do you think that to hear the differences in inverters as you go higher up the price chain, you need to have really high end speakers or be running at really high sample rates to know the difference also, when you get to the really expensive converters, is it more about imparting some sort of character on the sound rather than just providing clean flat conversion?

Speaker 3 (01:47:07):

Yeah, it depends on what it is that somebody is selling you or what it is that you expect from the product that you purchased. In terms of it adding something, I'm not going to carefully define what it is the conversion should be. It could be a lot of different things. You have to know what it is that you're purchasing and take some responsibility for it. It's not surprising to me that you're not hearing a lot of differences between entry-level stuff and mid-level stuff. First off, I don't really recognize that there's a book, a table that you can look up where this device manufactured by dangerous is a mid-level converter or something. I mean, that's all a little bit foreign into me, but no, it's not shocking to me. Based upon the devices that you described that you're not hearing differences between them, is it necessary that you have expensive speakers or some sort of, is it necessary that you've run at higher sample rates to hold the difference? Absolutely not. In fact, that can in some cases be inversely correlated where the higher you go, you can start to hear more. Especially in the Sigma Delta family, which is most ubiquitous is Did I cover everything there? Sorry, I got lost.

Speaker 2 (01:48:26):

Keep going. That's great.

Speaker 3 (01:48:27):

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of stuff. What you need is a high resolution monitor chain in order to hear, you have to have a monitoring system. That is something that I would qualify as being high resolution. If you can't hear differences between A and B and the differences are there or other people tell you that there, there's a possibility that you're simply not hearing them. So is it necessary to have high resolution in order to hear differences between prototypes? Yes, it is because in a lot of cases they're all pretty good and if you're monitoring and up to stuff, you're not going to hear anything different along the same lines. There's also this weird thing that happens when you get into high resolution monitoring that you're, the higher resolution your chain gets or the more sensitive your ears are, the worse a lot of things can begin to sound and that includes your speaker system. So just having things so when you're cleaning up your monitoring system, it's not just a question of waiting until everything starts to sound really good to you, something sounding really good. It's not an indication that it's high resolution. By the way, those aren't the same thing in a lot of cases. They're also inversely correlated where stuff starts to sound worse when you're able to hear further into it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:47):

Yeah, I actually have noticed that with certain monitors that are super high end, things start to sound worse because you can hear more details. You can hear problems that you couldn't hear on monitors that weren't so detailed. Yeah. Now is that better or worse? That's up to you, but they're doing their job.

Speaker 3 (01:50:08):

It is up to you and it means different things to different people. Some people want monitors that make them feel good about life. They're not high res, but they're fun and they're able to, like EDM guys, there are lots of EDM guys that do, I've been on sessions where EDM guys are putting tracks together and I'm like, I walk in and I'm like, I don't even know what my name is on these speakers. And you're able to make stuff that is making the ass move on the dance floor. That means you're doing your job. I don't understand it, but good on you. Yeah, when you get into monitoring, you're talking about an extension of your ear. So as things begin to become a little wishy-washy, but like I said, the school of thought that I come from, where less is more and the more simple you can accomplish tasks, the better off you are in terms of knowing your ass from your elbow.

(01:50:56):

So you got to have a high resolution chain in order to identify flea forts. I mean, that's something that's of course true in a lot of cases. It isn't flea forts. Then there are real meaningful differences between stuff. No, it doesn't shock me that you're not hearing them. It could be due to X, Y, and Z. Audio systems are very complicated. There's a lot of moving pieces. There's a lot of different types of integration issues. It is a combinatorial process. Every time you have two pieces of gear, you've involved a third object and that is the interface between the two of them. So it's compounding. If you've got 16 pieces of gear, how many different interconnect links do you have? And you're just assuming that they're all blameless when they're not.

Speaker 2 (01:51:41):

Fair enough. Jamie McIntyre is wondering, as someone who's had to work almost exclusively in the box, I wonder how big is the difference between popular software emulations and their hardware counterparts to someone with extensive experience in pro audio hardware and what goes into it?

Speaker 3 (01:52:02):

Yeah, I think that the impulse model world that exists out there, plugins emulating a gear. I mean, I don't think many of them are very good. Initially they were all almost uniformly horrible when that stuff started. It got better. Some of them are very convincing. Is it the same as using the object? Almost by definition it isn't because the joke in the tech world is, I have a broken 1176, and you say, which serial number? Because they're all different. They went through 10 different design revisions. They're 50 years old, they've been through 15 different texts. They're all snowflakes. And so the models, which version did they model?

(01:52:54):

So no, if you don't know the real thing, you have no idea. And you could also draw a line there and say that's simply the end of it. If it's a plugin that functions and it does something for you and it accomplishes task, who's going to fault you for using it? If you get results with it, great. Does it need to sound exactly like the other thing? Well, for the old timers, for people that are used to using those boxes, it's a little bit of an insult when the plugin doesn't hold up, at least to some degree. But I also recognize it. It doesn't have to, it could just be an unfortunate side effect that it looks the same as the old piece of gear. Just use it.

Speaker 2 (01:53:29):

Yeah, totally. Okay. This guy has two questions, but one of them I feel like we've already answered. So Johnny is wondering, what do you think of the current mid price converters on the market? I hear a lot of people saying all converter chips are pretty great now, as opposed to maybe five or 10 years ago when there was a huge difference between the mid price stuff and the upper tier converters. Is that true? No, that's not true at

Speaker 3 (01:53:57):

All. The most ubiquitous a DD converter chip that's in use in pro audio today is the AK 5,300 series, which has been on the market since 2001. There's literally been no change since 2001. DDAY is a little bit of a different story. There are a couple of new things on the market, especially in the last handful of years or whatever, but they have not really found their way into pro products very much so. No, I don't agree that there hasn't really been much change in the last couple of years versus the previous tier.

Speaker 2 (01:54:32):

Interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:54:33):

There have been new products come out and there have been people that have worked around existing issues with smart engineering and sometimes things have been made worse. And one big issue that exists in the converter world now is heat management. I probably should not get into any specifics here, but there are some large popular companies out there that are dealing with enormous heat problems now.

Speaker 2 (01:54:58):

Yeah. Let's not talk trash on any specifics, but So they're trying to make the studio less of a raging hot box hellhole?

Speaker 3 (01:55:10):

No. They're

Speaker 2 (01:55:11):

Just trying to keep their own units from melting.

Speaker 3 (01:55:13):

Yes. Yeah, the struggle is real and it's hard to do. I mean, you're trying to jam six between 32 and 32 channels bidirectional and a one rack high box or even a two hypo. That is a massive engineering challenge

Speaker 2 (01:55:35):

Asking a lot out of this physical world we live in.

Speaker 3 (01:55:39):

Yes, you are.

Speaker 2 (01:55:41):

So here's a question, question. Final question from Aidan Brock, which is, he's got a few questions, but we'll end with him.

Speaker 4 (01:55:49):

Go for it.

Speaker 2 (01:55:50):

What are some good resources or ways to learn about the design of audio hardware? I tried to find some for a university project, but they seem rather scarce.

Speaker 3 (01:56:01):

All I can say is that the internet is a wonderful place now. I mean, you can go back through the history of all the popular big companies or all the companies with which there is lore built around them, put it that way and see what they did. Most of the stuff is public domain. It's a mixture of public domain and stuff that is out there that the people who own it have simply not put up a stink about it. So there's a lot of that and you can read into a lot of things by reading s schematics and doing Delta, doing comparison between things like, here's version one, here's 1176 is just a one example that just takes some analog compressor. It went through 10 design revisions. Go back and look at all the different design revisions. They're all in one PDF that you can get online. What do you notice that's different about them? Have a look at what changed with time and try to figure out why.

Speaker 2 (01:56:53):

So basically take responsibility and do some research.

Speaker 3 (01:56:59):

Yeah, look online. There's not a lot of resources out there that are sort of instructional. You got to dig a little bit. I mean, there are some good books out there if you're into Power Amplifiers that there's a book by g Randy Sloan High Powered Power Amplifi Construction. That's a wonderful book. Radio Shack had a whole series of books. There's an ancient remain book called the Audio Encyclopedia, which is something that everybody should know that's interested in being in audio tech. Should have, it's a little bit hard to find, a little bit of pricey, but they're out there. You can get 'em on eBay. Ken Pullman's book on digital audio, the old Brown one. I'm sorry, I don't remember the title right off hand, but somebody can look it up for me. There are books out there that are very, very good. The Art of Electronics is another good one. The things that I mentioned in concert with Amazon and Google should get you very, very far today.

Speaker 2 (01:57:59):

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (01:58:01):

Also keep the library of this stuff too. It's really easy just to make a folder and every time you see something, start sucking it down. Just start saving things. It's talking about an inconsequential amount of data to keep all this stuff. So just build a folder and start looking at things.

Speaker 2 (01:58:17):

Alright. The second part of his question is, what are some areas of outboard equipment design that you believe is seriously lagging behind everything else?

Speaker 3 (01:58:27):

Multi effects box. Yeah. Just died. It fell off a cliff in the nineties with plugin.

Speaker 2 (01:58:35):

I remember that.

Speaker 3 (01:58:36):

Yeah, there's no call for that kind of stuff at all now because I will get specific here. Congratulations to STI for selling the M seven and having it be a great river. But I think it's a great unit. I'm all for it. I'm very surprised that it is done as well as it is with plugins being what they are and the nature of effects being something that's sort of tertiary or at least secondary in the recording process. They're always something that's sort of added on, and if it isn't the greatest thing in the world, then it's okay. So I'm very surprised that people that sell effects boxes have managed to do as well. They they have.

Speaker 2 (01:59:16):

Well, I think that's all the time we have for now, but Josh, I feel like there's at least a couple more episodes we could do just off of different things that we said. This is a whole other podcast episode.

Speaker 3 (01:59:32):

Thank you. Congratulations to you for having the balls to put me on. I don't think that many other institutions would be willing to put me in front of a camera, so thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:59:42):

Seems like an obvious choice to have you on.

Speaker 3 (01:59:46):

Thanks for I'm game AK about this whenever you'd like.

Speaker 2 (01:59:50):

Yeah, man. Well I will definitely be asking you again and thank you for being here. Nice to talk to you again. You too. I haven't spoken to you in a while and thank you. Cool. Alright man, talk soon. Have a good one. The Unstoppable

Speaker 1 (02:00:05):

Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by two notes. Audio Engineering two notes is a leader in the market for load box, cabinet and mic simulators. Gunner, the days of having iso rooms or having to record an amp at ear bleeding volumes to capture that magic tone. The Torpedo Live reload and studio allow you to crank your amp up as loud as you want, but record silently. Check out www.twonotes.com for more info. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit nail the mix.com/podcast and subscribe today.