Audio Engineering, Music and Loudspeakers
Introduction
Audio and music have been intertwined passions since childhood, when my parents filled our small home in Ruskin Heights with records played on a monophonic Voice of Music 560. I began pursuing audio seriously in high school during the 1970s, when I received my first opportunities to work professionally.
My first stereo was less a system than an act of improvisation: a used Akai M-8 reel-to-reel, its built-in tube amplifiers driving Akai full-range speakers, with a barely functioning Webcor record changer connected to its phono inputs. A $5 garage-sale DeWald amplifier soon joined the arrangement, followed by STR Beta speakers, Kenwood electronics, a Dual 1249, a Pioneer cassette deck, and a Revox A77. By my second year of college, the system had grown to Harman-Kardon Citation and Crown electronics, several Revox machines, and both Klipsch Heresy and La Scala loudspeakers.
That was only the beginning. Work, curiosity, and a tendency toward excess eventually brought equipment from Bang & Olufsen, Crown, Nakamichi, Yamaha, Pioneer, Ampex, Revox, Scully, Nagra, TASCAM, Altec, dbx, Dolby, Burwen, and many others; along with amplifiers, loudspeakers, and signal processors of my own design. The collection came to include more than sixty microphones and a Scully automatic record lathe fitted with a Westrex 45/45 cutter head and Adamant stylus.
Then there were phono cartridges. I collected dozens of models made between the mid-1960s and 1990, representing nearly every major manufacturer and design approach. I remain grateful that my addiction was to cartridges rather than crack.
Along the way, I built a parallel career as a professional photographer. That naturally led to far too many cameras and lenses, from Pentax and Olympus to Graflex, Mamiya, Minox, and Zeiss; plus a custom Beseler enlarger, Bowens studio strobes, Jobo processors, and the inevitable accumulation of darkroom and studio equipment. I have a habit of going completely overboard whenever something truly interests me.
So yes, I am an analog man in a digital world.
Audio Philosophy
I came of age in audio when reliability, maintainability, and predictable performance mattered more than chasing the last fraction of a decibel. It was a tradition built on high efficiency, dynamics, and ready serviceability. To me, a loudspeaker is a tool first and a luxury object second.
I concentrate on choices that produce large, repeatable improvements, not endless debates over boutique parts. Directivity, crossover topology, driver selection, cabinet construction, room interaction, and reliability matter far more. That is why I generally choose Switchcraft or ITT/Cannon over WBT, Vishay/Dale over boutique resistors, WIMA over exotic capacitors, active crossovers over enormous passive networks, and line-level baffle-step compensation over lossy speaker-level networks.
Yet the loudspeaker is where an audio system finally meets the human ear. We cannot plug a stereo directly into the brain or connect the brain by Bluetooth. Which may be just as well. Designing for home listening therefore requires balance: a speaker should sound vivid, realistic, and emotionally involving without turning every imperfect recording into an ordeal. Studio monitors are the exception. They must be unflinchingly accurate, because a mistake you cannot hear is a mistake you cannot fix.
The dirty little secret is that recordings range from superb to noisy, harsh, and barely competent. A good home loudspeaker should reveal the beauty of the best without continually punishing the listener for the faults of the worst. Finding that balance is one reason my designs take time. It is also emotional work. If I am in the wrong frame of mind, I accomplish little; sometimes the best design decision is to walk away for a few days and return more serene.
Recording presents the same tension. Throughout my adult life in studios, I have tried to create recordings that are detailed, emotionally immediate, and spatially vivid enough to place the listener on the stage. But recording is not merely documentary: the equipment is part of the creative process and can produce performances and sounds that could never exist live. The challenge is knowing how far to depart from reality without losing naturalness. Even when the artifice is impossible, I want it to feel true.
A Few Recordings: Background Comments
Below are a few recordings I’ve made over the years. Sources are mainly analog master tapes run through my Digital Audio Workstation to remove noise then transcode for MP3/streaming audio. Various recorders were used, includng: Ampex 602, Ampex 602-2; “Travelin’ Man,” my customized Revox A77 “suitcase model,” Revox A700, TEAC A3440, TEAC/TASCAM 80-8, Nagra III, Nakamichi 550, and the sole digital recorder, a Korg MR-1000 DSD-format field recorder.
The tracks labeled as "Soundcheck" originally started as backing tracks for what would have been more-polished recordings with vocals. But those projects were never completed. These tracks are all that is left of them. Each was recorded on my TEAC/TASCAM 80-8 eight-channel multitrack.
Notes About The Track “Stoic Guitar Man"
My earliest professional audio work was as a live-sound engineer. Although I was becoming successful, I left the business almost overnight. A concert demanded hours of intense concentration and brought extraordinary exhilaration; afterward, I would fall into what I can only describe as a gnawing, black-hole emptiness. Eventually, the emotional cost outweighed the rewards.
I tried to write about that experience in a song called “Stoic Sound Man.” My friend Alan Ingalls helped me write and arrange it, but the song repeatedly reached dead ends. During one session, Zia Santiago, whose sharp editorial instincts have improved many of my recording projects, remarked, “No one relates to the sound man. They relate to the guitarist.” She was right, and “Stoic Sound Man” became “Stoic Guitar Man.”
The title also had an unexpected prehistory. Years earlier, I had recorded a local band built around two unrelated guitarist-songwriters, Mike Turner and Robert Turner. I had pre-sold the project to Paul Weitzel’s short-lived audiophile label, Diversity Records, because I loved the band’s lean, energetic sound.
During the sessions, however, the arrangements entered a seemingly endless cycle of revision and gradually moved far from both the music I had agreed to record and the project I had presented to the label.
I respected the creativity behind that process, but it became incompatible with my own instincts and responsibilities. Our artistic differences proved irreconcilable, and I eventually walked away. The consequences were severe, both financially and professionally, and my studio remained closed for nearly three years. The experience taught me to choose projects carefully and establish creative expectations before recording begins.
Coincidentally, one of the band’s early demos was also titled “Stoic Guitar Man.” Recorded at my earlier studio in Raytown, Missouri, it featured Mike Turner and David Bramwell. I do not believe their song was ever released, although it deserved to be.
The “Stoic Guitar Man” heard on this page is not the Turner/Bramwell composition. The two songs simply arrived at the same title by very different routes.
