Quote:
Originally Posted by HookedOnHardware  Let's get people like Barefoot, Toft, Katz, Ohlsson, Albini, Massenburg etc (I could go on but you get the jist) in here shall we?!
If your name wasn't included in the above, feel free to post anyway  . |
I began teaching myself to build guitars, amps and speakers when I was 13 years old. But I only officially started working in the audio industry about 4 or 6 years ago, depending on how you look at it. Before that I was either doing academic research or working in industrial R&D. In the late summer of 2005 the confluence of some health issues along with the growing popularity and workload of my moonlighting speaker business wound up getting me fired from my senior engineer position at Intel. Serendipitously, only a couple of weeks would pass until I met my future business partner. Tetness invited me to bring these odd new speaker prototypes that I was working on down to LA for a "shootout" with some other well established and highly regarded monitors. Being a newbie to the industry, I wasn't really familiar with any recording monitors to speak of. I only knew them by reputation. And the only real perspective I had on my on gear was that I simply set out to build the best speakers I possibly could within a reasonable price range.
So, I went down to LA thinking that I would get constructive criticism about my fledgling monitors. There would be discussion about their pros and cons relative to those other speakers and it would be a great learning opportunity. I brought my prototypes to a beautiful home studio in the hills of North Hollywood, a giant front picture window overlooking the setting sun and the city lights. We setup all the monitors. I quietly sat in the back of the studio listing along with about 6 invited recording engineers. As they cycled between the monitors, altering levels and positions, I thought to myself "is everyone else hearing what I'm hearing, or am I just too self deluded about my own speakers to be objective?" Well, it turns out that everyone was hearing what I was hearing. And the discussion was not on the level of "we like this about your speakers and that about those speakers." The discussion was focused on how my new design seemed to be on a completely different level than the other monitors in the room and perhaps on a different level than most any monitor that some of the engineers had ever heard. It was a very unexpected and exciting moment. Of course, those prototypes were named the MicroMain27.
Since then we've sold speakers to some extremely talented and highly respected people. Some are artists whom I've idolized for years. I've even had the opportunity to meet a few. But I would say it's that evening in the Hollywood hills when my still rough hued MM27s sang clear above the rest, that is the scene in my audio career, so far, that shines brightest in my mind.