Not An Audiophile – The Podcast Live from the Melbourne HiFi Show 2024. Roving reporter, Brad Serhan gets the vibe of the show and chats to two great characters of the show. Chris Allman from Allclear Audio is a new cartridge re-tipper in Australia who is re-making rather than simply re-tipping. Brad also catches up with world-renowned Kim Ryrie from DEQX who is best known for the Fairlight Synthesizer.
Podcast transcripts below – Episode 010
Chris Allman from Allclear Audio
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Allman: Yeah, there’s a lot of retippers out there and it frustrates me now, Anne, because people are cut. You know, they’re buying the cantilevers from Japan, and they’re getting people’s cartridges, cutting and shunting them, putting brass splints in and doing some horrendous things that you wouldn’t believe. when I retip a cartridge, I’m making the cartridge back like it was new again.
Andrew Hutchison: Hi, it’s Andrew here, not an audiophile. Episode ten. We’ve just come back. We, Brad, myself, Sharron just come back from the Melbourne stereo net hi fi and av show which I’d have to say was a great success for everybody concerned. Everyone seemed happy and fantastic. exhibitors, lots of great displays, lots of happy hi fi enthusiasts wandering around and audio visual enthusiasts wandering around enjoying great sounds. Lots of australian manufacturers there, which was a pleasure. Many, I’m not going to mention them all at this stage. We’re going to cover that in a future episode. What we did do, or Brad did in his roving reporting was catch up with two future guests on the show. Chris Allman, who’s more or less a cartridge maker. I’m not sure that anyone realised we made cartridges in Australia but apparently we do. I didn’t know, but I’ve found out Chris is a great guy. I had a chat with him myself as well. Does the incredibly fine work of retipping cartridges. And of course Brad also caught up with Kim Ryrie, somewhat of a legend in australian electronic and audio design. Known of course many years ago for the Fairlight synthesizer. His involvement with that he wasn’t the only person involved but certainly one of the geniuses behind that. A ah, very, very smart man. And of course he has his DEQX or DEQX as it is generally known. dsp pre amplifier, dac streaming. Apparently now type product that you can use to turn a box full of random drivers into an amazing sounding high end loudspeaker. At least I think that’s the gist of it. So Chris is up first. And now these are roving reports. The audio is good for show conditions, quite intelligible. but of course when we have them on the show one would like to think the audio would be slightly better. And we’ll also in the case of Kim, nail him down on structure of the range of his products and what they can achieve. So thanks for listening and enjoy.
Richie Bennett introduces us to John De Sensi and Chris
Brad Serhan: Okay, Mavis Stafford, welcome back to the MCG. It’s Richie Benneaux here to introduce you to, John De Sensi and Chris Allman.
John De Sensi: Of all clear audio.
Brad Serhan: Yeah. Anyway, enough of my silliness. John, how do you know Chris? How. What’s the connection?
John De Sensi: connection is via a turntable that a few of us are kind of building. and I think that’s how it came about, didn’t it?
Chris Allman: yeah, there’s through, through Kevin and,
John De Sensi: Warren Jones.
Chris Allman: Yeah, Warren Jones.
Brad Serhan: Okay.
John De Sensi: He’s building a super duper, sort of reference turntable.
Kim Ryrie: Okay.
Brad Serhan: There’s a few of you sort of joining. Joining the team to. Are you part of the sonic hoops? The listen?
Kim Ryrie: Yes.
Brad Serhan: Okay, we are.
John De Sensi: We are. So Chris, retips and manufactures his own line of incredible cartridges. He’s one of the best re tippers in Australia, if nothing the world.
Chris Allman: Thank you.
Brad Serhan: And what did I see in your room there? What were you showing me?
Chris Allman: Well, yeah, this is a bit of, my baby. I’ve always been interested in passive preamps. Back when I was 15 or 16, when I was messing around with DIY audio, I used to make the most basic of a passive pot, which is, literally a pot and a plastic box and some ins and some outs. And of course, the problem with that, is your source is seeing a different load as you’re turning the, the pot up. So it messes with the frequency. And, yeah, it sort of interested me for a bit as a kid, but, yeah. and then as the years go by, you see there’s other ways of doing this. You can have a resistive pot and again, that’s got its own set of problems. And then there’s the transformer based pots. But the issue with these is the iron core. And the iron core of the transformer causes a dip and a peak in the curve. and I heard about somebody winding these amazing transformers. And, I got him to do some for me, which have got this perma alloy core. And, yeah, the specs are just out of this world, flat to 35,000 hz. a beautiful square wave. So I made one with the most basic box and a stepped pot. And, it was out of this world. So I spoke to John and said,
00:05:00
Chris Allman: how can we make this really audiophile, how can we make this happen? he sort of helped me on the way to, making the beautiful thing you saw in this.
Brad Serhan: It is stunning. I know Andrew, Hutchinson will love.
Kim Ryrie: The look of that.
Brad Serhan: so you two combined to do the design on the final.
John De Sensi: Pretty much, pretty much. So there was a lengthy software kind of development. we wanted to make it remote control, have balance control. We also has a special feature for a passive preamp which is actually having gain. So it’s got a six decibels gain switch which is very useful for a passive, And have I missed anything else?
Chris Allman: Now there’s a mute as well. But there’s, there’s really nothing out there. everything else on there on the passive front apart from nothing, nobody’s got six decibels. Again is they’ve got a motorized pot generally.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Chris Allman: So you’ve got a big motorized pot and then a rat’s nest of wires going to the back of the motorized pot. So you open it up and look inside and it’s all horrible. And because it’s a motorized pot there really is no way of giving you balance. And I said from the outset we need balance. So what we’ve done is John’s help is we’ve got really high quality relays and we can switch out one channel and not the other. So we’ve got balance, all on the remote. And you haven’t got all these horrible.
Brad Serhan: Wires everywhere which what, introduce noise I assume. Pardon my ignorance.
John De Sensi: yeah, they can act as antennas and pick up all sorts of noise. But also you’re lengthening the signal path which actually always reduces the signal integrity or can compromise it. It’s not done properly. And when you’ve got so many secondary wires as a steps attenuated transformer, it’s very hard to kind of twist them all together to kind of reduce cross torque and interact. So we’ve eliminated all that by having a very sort of multi layer printed circuit board that actually takes care of all the messy wiring. So you get this beautiful neat product.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Brad Serhan: Yeah that’s brilliant.
Chris Allman: Right. Now the gain how that works works is that, no other passive has got gain. So how basically a transformer based attenuator works is you’ve got so many turns, a certain number of turns on the primary and then you’ve got stepped increasing terms on the secondary until it’s one to one. what we can do is we can switch out a section of the primary. So you’ve got, if you’ve got, it’s not ten turns, it’s hundreds. But if you had ten turns here and ten turns on the out, that’s one to one. If you’ve got five turns here and ten turns here. You double the volume. So we looked at what point changing what the source sees becomes an issue and starts to change things. And it’s way above what we’ve actually done. So six decibels doesn’t hurt anything and you’ve got gain.
Brad Serhan: Excellent. Right, yeah, crossing that threshold without crossing that threshold.
Chris Allman: But just if you want to keep it all pure, we’ve got it on a switch on the remote, 60 b on six, db off. Brilliant.
Brad Serhan: and, what is it going to self?
Have you selling it direct or, uh. We’re looking at retail
Have you selling it direct or,
Chris Allman: We’Re looking at, retail. and, at, this point it’s looking around $17,000. But we’ve got a show special of $10,000, which is actually quite cheap when you consider the amount of technology in this thing. And the transformers are very special.
Brad Serhan: Obviously that’s the reason why getting these transformers made a difference, obviously, for the whole course. Brilliant. And have you got retailers lined up?
Chris Allman: I’ve got some distributors who are interested and, we’ve met a few people at the show, so probably after the show we’ll have, ah, more of who that might be.
Brad Serhan: Excellent.
is a cartridge retipper and also builds engines
Chris Allman: Well, the other thing I do is I’m a cartridge retipper. M. I also build cartridges and, I’m a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a couple coming out. If I’d had another. If this show was another two weeks away, we would have had a cartridge here. But it was just the engine was made, but the bodies weren’t quite ready. And, Yeah, we just run out of time. But, Yeah, very, very, very proud of what we.
Brad Serhan: Very exciting.
Chris Allman: Very exciting. Yeah.
Brad Serhan: All made here.
Chris Allman: All made here. I wind the coils myself. solder the coils myself. everything, everything is done myself.
Brad Serhan: Amazing. And what now? One thing I haven’t mentioned, the brand.
Chris Allman: All clear. Audio.
Brad Serhan: It wasn’t clear to me before because I forgot to ask and stain it.
Chris Allman: Yeah, yeah. Now, all clear audience.
Brad Serhan: Yeah, well, brilliant. Chris, I’ll come back to you and we’ll chat some more. Kevin, you’re an attractive man.
Chris Allman: No worries. Yep.
Brad Serhan: Thanks, mate. Go ahead.
When I retip a cartridge I’m making the cartridge back like it was new
Chris Allman: Yeah, there’s a lot of retippers out there. And it frustrates me now, Ann, because, people are cut, you know, they’re buying the cantilevers from Japan. and, they’re getting people’s cartridges, cutting and shunting them, putting brass splints in and doing some horrendous things that you wouldn’t believe. when I retip a cartridge I’m making the cartridge back like it was new again. so I’ve been doing something ivanade. Koetsu is many thousand dollars. And I’ll be removing the front pole piece, cleaning the coils, rotating the suspension to fresh suspension. removing any broken bits out of the stub. New cantilever in. And when it all goes
00:10:00
Chris Allman: back together again, they’ve effectively got a new koetsu or, whatever it might be.
Brad Serhan: Restoration is probably not good enough.
Chris Allman: It’s not a retip, it’s a complete writ of service. as new, it’s as new. And I’m aligning the tips within a degree. if I do a diamond only, it can take me several hours to make sure that that diamond is absolutely spot on. Which you actually don’t often get on a factory cartridge because they haven’t got the time that I’ve got to sit there for two and a half hours, making it absolutely perfect.
Brad Serhan: I suppose in the old days of racing cars, blueprinted, if you like, everything sort of the tolerances. Your tolerances are really tight.
Chris Allman: They’re really tight. And I’ve also gone to the extent of Koetsu is now finished and gone. And I’ve managed to find out, because it was never published, I found out which diamonds they were using. I’ve actually got them to make me a whole, which a lot of money. But I’ve got them to make me a run of diamonds. So into the future, I’ll be able to. Well, December they’ll arrive, I’ll be able to reciprocity. It would be indistinguishable from factory.
Brad Serhan: That’s brilliant, mate.
Chris Allman: Oh, well, yeah. it’s a passion. if I’m not retipping, I’m doing something similar, related for myself. So it’s, Yeah, it’s more than a business, it.
Brad Serhan: Comes from the heart.
Chris Allman: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Brad Serhan: Thanks, mate.
Chris Allman: No worries at all. Happy to speak. Yeah. How it sort of all really started to happen for me was, I did a retip, for Mark, who’s running the starrynet show here. And Mark, Dohmann fitted that cartridge to his turntable. And Mark Dohmann sort of went, mmm. Oh, this is nice. And then Mark Dohmann contacted me from that contact and, ah, sent me a box of cartridges. And I opened the box of cartridges and I thought, oh, yeah, I can do that one. I can do that one. And then the next one. This is destroyed. the suspension was split. the coils were broken. It was just an absolute mess. So the cartridge was worth maybe a. There’s not a $1,000. It’s not worth. Not worth doing. So I rang up Mark and said, yeah, look, mark, you know, this, I can do those two, but this one’s not worth doing. And he said, oh, it’s. It’s got sentimental value. Could you do it for me anyway? And at the time I thought, oh, why does he want to do this? This is nothing. Look, okay, Mark, whatever, you know. And I rewound the cartridge and I put a, new cantilever diamond on and, suspension and made it as new. And I sent it back to mark and he rang me up and he said, you’ve just built a cartridge. And I said, yes, I know. And he said, you’ll also be doing all the work for Nirvana.
Kim Ryrie: Wow.
Brad Serhan: Brilliant.
Chris Allman: Yeah. So you almost.
Brad Serhan: Was it a test?
Chris Allman: It was a test, yes.
Brad Serhan: and you more than passed muster. Well, in terms of high jump, you cleared it by a clear way. Brilliant. So that got you on the move as far as your own cartridge. Brilliant. Great story.
Andrew Hutchison: So, yeah, thanks, Chris, for the, info there related to, retipping, et cetera, and how you sort of almost accidentally ended up manufacturing a cartridge from scratch.
If you have questions, feel free to ask them in future episodes
And, now onto Kim. So Kim Ryrie, has mentioned in the introduction somewhat of a legend. The guy is a genius. This interview with Brad. Brad has cornered, him in the back of his room during the show. And, I guess it’s somewhat of a stream of consciousness without perhaps a laying out of the finer details of what the range of the products are. So enjoy. but if you have questions, which you may do, we will absolutely get them answered in a future episode. When he’s interviewed between now and Christmas. and of course, comment, send us an email. Details are on the website. or of course, comments on the YouTube, video. well, not video, it’s an audio. An audio with a picture. But, at least you can comment there. So feel free to ask questions. We’ll have him answer them, when he’s on the show. So here you go.
Kim Ryrie introduces impulse response correction for drivers in loudspeakers
now here’s Kim, talking about his new, gen four range of products.
Brad Serhan: So, Kim, we were talking earlier about one of your new products, regarding taking old speakers. Is that what you’re saying? Probably, if you would.
Kim Ryrie: Yes. So with the new decks, what we call generation four, because we’re now 27 year old sort of startup. So we’ve sort of been doing r, and d for like 27 years. And we’ve had these products that have been very difficult to work because, you know, there were 160 pages operating manuals and was all Windows based software that needed a lot of hand holding. but what it was effectively was we introduced the idea of using impulse response correction for drivers in loudspeakers like Wharfedale Midrange, because they all have, as we know, they’ve all got frequency response errors. But
00:15:00
Kim Ryrie: the stuff that is virtually impossible to address in the analogue world is the timing and phase response. and usually a lot of the sort of equalization you used to do in the analog domain could actually cause more phase problems than you’re starting with. So what we call sort of group delay errors wherever some frequency groups are sort of more delayed than others. And it’s only in the order of milliseconds or fraction of a millisecond. But sound travels 1ft in a millisecond, you know, 30 cm in a millisecond. So it’s not insignificant. And it happens a lot because of the electromechanics of loudspeakers, which is why loudspeakers are, essentially the showstopper when it comes to affordable reproduction of true high definition audio. And it’s why, you know, the best of them could cost $100,000 a pair. You know, when they get it right.
Brad Serhan: The buck stops with a loudspeaker. In a sense.
Kim Ryrie: The buck stops with a loudspeaker.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And then you’ve got the added problem that you’re trying to get an amplifier, that will do ten octaves of audio along one speaker curve. Yeah. You know, it’s all hard work. So then you not only pay a lot of money for the speakers, but you then pay a lot of money for really good amplifiers.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That can pump, you know, tens of amps for base frequencies and, you know, and yet still have air happening in the tweezers. It’s, it’s not easy.
Brad Serhan: No.
Kim Ryrie: You know, so better in, you know, in the pro world when active decades ago.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Whereby you’ve got a separate amplifier for every type of driver. So typically one for bass, one for mids, one for tweeter m, that means you’re dividing the audio into sort of three or four octaves per driver. That makes the job much easier for the amplifiers, it makes it much easier for the cables, it makes it basically much easier for everything. And I experienced that when our band back in the seventies, I got hold of a pair of altec voice of the theater speakers, which is the big sort of, you know, horn reflex place thing.
Brad Serhan: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: With a horn on top. And it had an Altec passive crossover, and we used to blow. The drivers are regularly, regularly, you know, every month or two at least we blow the diaphragm up in the tweeter and someone said, why don’t you do this actively? You know? And at the time, I helped start a magazine called Electronics today became Eti. Electronics today.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Remember it well? Yeah. And we used to do projects every month. And one of those was a little hundred watt amplifier module. So I got a couple of those and then I made a 24 decibels proactive active filter at the front end. So this was my first experience of doing an active speaker. And you know, so we had one amp on the horn and the other for the woofer and put them all in the box and we never blew up another horn again. But more to the point, everything just got so much cleaner. And I’m thinking, well, hang on, this, this was really pretty easy to do, you know, why isn’t everything active? And of course, in the pro audio world, it was already active. But active didn’t suit the marketing of consumer audio because you needed a box that you only needed two wires to connect to the box. You needed one amp for one speaker that everyone could deal with that.
Brad Serhan: Keep it simple.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, keep it simple.
Brad Serhan: Kiss.
Kim Ryrie: And admittedly, it would have been very difficult to do it any other way. And back in the day, amplifiers were expensive. You just couldn’t sort of come up with lots of amplifiers for no money. But what we did when we started, decks, and that’s another story I’d been doing, my company was Fairlight, where we used the first DSP. We used the first Motorola DSP chips at Fairlight to do the computer musical instrument. And, and then, one of our, after I’d left fairlight, the program, no, I still working actually in fairlight. But one of the guys started a company called Lake, and he rang me up and said, oh, look, we’ve developed this headphone technology using finite impulse response filters, which I knew very little about at the time, right? He said, so come and have a, have a listen. And so he showed me, this processing
00:20:00
Kim Ryrie: that we could do with it. They were doing with a chip that the CSIRo had developed. It was called the a 250 or something like that. And it did 250, what’s called taps, of finite impulse response filtering. And he had a little six inch car, loudspeaker, in a shoebox and he had absolutely brilliant. And he measured this speaker, and they created this, impulse response filter that corrected it. And they thought they’d make m their fortune selling these chips to car audio, to car manufacturers, to, ah, make speaker sound better. And sure enough, it did. It was a very short, in today’s terms, it was a very short, low resolution correction because of the technology at the time, but it made a difference to the speaker. And, he said, could fairlight use things? and I said, well, fairlight don’t make speakers, so, you know, we can’t really do that. But, you know, maybe we could think of doing speakers because this is really cute, this technology. And then just as I was leaving, he said, oh, by the way, it takes about 250 milliseconds of processing, so that adds, like, quarter of a second of latency. And I said, no, sorry, we just couldn’t ever use that. But let me know. He said, but we think we’ve got a solution to that. And I said, well, great. Let me, let me know.
Brad Serhan: This is like, this is like, this is now.
Kim Ryrie: Lake. They left the CSIRO. They’d started. Lake. and, and a year later, I got a phone call. Well, we fixed the latency. Come and have a listen. So I had another listen, and they said, could you help us? We’re doing headphones out of headphone technology. Wherever the sound that you’re listening through, through headphones seems to be coming outside of your head.
Kim: Dolby discovered the headphone technology. You sold Lake to Dolby
And it was really impressive. And they said, can you help us market this? And at the time, I was not really full time at Fairlight. I was more a consultant. And I said, yeah, I’ve got time to do that. And so we ended up, long story short, we ended up selling lake to Dolby.
Brad Serhan: Excuse me, Kim, reminisce of the cold. Sorry about this. You sold Lake to Dolby? Well, not you, per se.
Kim Ryrie: We ended up turning people on. Lake went public. Dolby discovered the headphone technology. And I said, well, why don’t you use this to do loudspeakers? And, Brian said, who was the CEO? He said, no, why don’t you do it?
Brad Serhan: Lobbed it your way.
Kim Ryrie: We’re too busy doing the headphone stuff. You know, why don’t you do it? You know, we found it’s all pretty difficult, but, you know, and you should use this guy, Paul Glendenning, who was one of our engineers, and he’s a genius. So Paul and I started at the time, we called it clarity Eq. and we were going to lose license their patent to do the low latency fir. But when Dolby bought them, they said, oh, sorry, you can’t, we’re not going to license our patent. So we’d already started clarity and Paul said, don’t worry, I know another way to do this. So we did it another way. We got a patent for the way we did it. The only difference was we had to use floating point, DSP instead of fixed point, which made it a little bit more expensive.
Brad Serhan: Circumvented there.
Kim Ryrie: We circumvented that. So, and then that’s how effectively clarity started. And so basically what it meant was that you could, as I was saying, you know, loudspeaker electromechanics have a lot of problems, especially the cheap ones. So you could measure their frequency response errors, their timing, their grip delay errors, and you could create a filter. And using the finite impulse response filters, you could compensate the audio that’s driving each transducer to compensate for the shortcomings. And for instance, you would fix, you know, you obviously can’t speed up, delayed frequencies, but you could slow down, the frequencies that were on time.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And let the slower ones catch up. And then you’d glue it all back together again. And so that’s why group delay ends up being so group delay. And we only had to add, you know, say, five milliseconds of delay to pull that off. So, that’s always been the fundamental stuff. At the same time, we correct the frequency response or set it to a target. So at the same. So that was the fundamental stuff that we formed the company to do.
Brad Serhan: That’s the basis of clarity then takes.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right. And the problem was that we could only use DSP chips at the time. This is now back in the late nineties. Right. So we came up with a way of using two dsps, two shark dsps, which were the best around at the time.
00:25:00
Kim Ryrie: And we managed to fit, to do quite long filters. I think we ended up doing, just trying to think, would have been, 16, about 20,000 taps. But that was across stereo. So it’s only about 10,000 taps per left and right channel. And we go say 2000 taps to the tweeter and 4000 to the midrange, another 4000 to base, which wasn’t.
Brad Serhan: So when you say taps, just for.
Kim Ryrie: Taps, taps means the resolution by which you can grabs. Sort of grabs. Yes, effectively it grabs. But if you want to work it out mathematically, let’s say you’re doing a sample rate of, I won’t say 44.1 code to keep the number simple. Let’s say 40k.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Ah, sample rate. And let’s say you have a 4k tap filter. Will you divide that 4k by forty k and you’ve got, ten. Yeah, sorry, 10 should say.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: so that was the resolution we had got you.
Brad Serhan: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Okay, now here’s where it all gets weird. People said, oh, you’re not only doing stuff at 44 one, we want to do everything at 96k. So, okay, now you can dividend 4k by ninety six k and you don’t have 10 hz resolution anymore. Now your resolution’s gone to 20 hz or actually about 24 hz, which is a whole octave.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So you’ve got virtually no resolution down in the bottom optic.
Brad Serhan: Right.
Kim Ryrie: So when people say, oh, you know, you’ll get more resolution going to 96k, well it’s the exact opposite. You’ve actually halved your resolution that you could correct the timing information. So. Yeah, that’s so fortunately these days everyone’s worked out that the high sample rates are completely utter waste of time, especially to all us baby boomers who can’t hear a thing over ten k anyway.
Brad Serhan: So I couldn’t possibly admit that, Kim.
Kim Ryrie: So we spent a lot of time making everything run at sort of meet with all the marketing. So now, and of course we can do processing at whatever you like. We can do 192k, whatever. So every time you double the sample rate you have the resolution of your correction within the frequencies you can actually hear.
Brad Serhan: Yes. Yeah.
Brad Serhan: Especially in the base end.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. But now that everything is being streamed on tidal and cubars and whatever at ah, typically, you know, forty eight k, twenty four bits. That’s right down our alley because that means we’re running at what I call an ideal sample rate.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Gives us good resolution. We’re now running much longer filters in the new generation products so we can do really good. Yeah.
As you go up in octave you’re getting more and more resolution
So we’re getting much more resolution, getting more like for instance in the, in the, bottom up the, in 2020 to 40 octave, we get about quarter octave at the moment and we can do better than that if we want to. It’s sort of good enough.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And as you go up in octaves you’re getting more and more resolution.
Brad Serhan: Yeah, as you go.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So the resolution is like four, four to eight times, better in the new system than the old system. and we’ve got more channels, we’ve got eight. So we can do four way, crossovers. The other issue I discovered is that and you know of course the steeper the crossovers you use.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: The more you can make each driver work in their comfort zone.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So if you’ve only got a very shallow crossover say between the base, the woofer and the mid range driver, for example, if you only had twelve decibels per octave, you know, two pole filter.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Then an octave below that crossover frequency and let’s say the crossover frequency is 200 hz. That means that midrange driver is still getting quite a lot of base energy hitting it which is causing it to move towards its xmax.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Brad Serhan: Which is upsetting it in a modulation distortion and all that sort of stuff.
Kim Ryrie: And it’s just introducing stuff. Not supposed to be there. So if we introduce a As Alan was saying we tend to use something like well from from base to mid range we use 72 decibels per octave. So that’s a twelve pole filter. That’s all verging on a brick wall filter.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That means that you can sort of go as loud as you like and the mid range driver is going to be as happy as Larry because it’s just not getting that excursion excursion.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And it has the other advantage that also
00:30:00
Kim Ryrie: what happens is that the woofer when it’s allowed to be outputting audio above, let’s call it a 200 hz crossover to the mid range, something in that order. it’s starting to be, if I’m starting to, if it’s, it’s, if it’s hearing if it’s output frequencies not at 200 but at 408 hundred those frequencies are beaming forward which is making the dispersion from the driver less natural.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And the same applies when you’re going from the mid tweet especially.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So these are all the advantages of steeper things. Now of course you can’t make filters that steep in the analog world. I mean you can do it that the phase corruption will be just out of control and the tolerance you would need on the components is equally out of control. But you can do it digitally no problem. And because we’re doing because we’re working in the time domain we can actually make the crossovers remain m stay in linear phase which normally you can’t do in the analog world at all once you go past the six decibels per octave. Very shallow filters.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So we can keep them linear phase at very steep crossovers. So we have minimal, almost no crossover distortion between drivers. and you’re keeping the drivers happy as Larry.
Brad Serhan: Comfort zone. It’s all about comfort zone and it’s.
Kim Ryrie: All about even dispersion. You can turn a lot of our drivers literally 180 degrees and they’re verging on omnidirectional. That’s, that’s, that was our party trick we used to do with the nhT.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Speakers. Oh, yes. Way back.
Brad Serhan: I remember that.
Kim Ryrie: And
Brad Serhan: So yeah, that’s the goal. Isn’t the power response being. Yeah. As the power response in the room is even all the way around.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Which just tends to sound more natural, doesn’t it? Yeah, yeah. and you just get a wider.
Brad Serhan: Sound stone and that’s because just those who are listening, you’re not getting that beaming, as you call it, the directivity of the driver drooping off axis. So from the base or the mid range or whatever, you’re crossing over that optimum point where it doesn’t beam.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: The other. But then we’re sort of trying and I’m just sort of assuming the whole audio world is going to go active, you know, tomorrow afternoon. And just, it was just so naive that it was ridiculous, you know?
Brad Serhan: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And I mean, funnily enough, it’s happening more now as people are getting into wireless speakers because they have to put amplifiers in the speakers anyway, so they might as well put more of them.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And these days you can make amplifiers for $10, you know, and very small in cheap.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So what, so what? We have been, you know, it wasn’t a good business.
Brad Serhan: So in other words, you had a particular aim in mind and it seemed.
Kim Ryrie: Like a bad idea at the time.
Brad Serhan: It’s morphed, it’s mutated.
Kim Ryrie: Yes. So that’s right. So I, from day one, like 20 years ago, I’m just thinking we should just focus on active. We should try to get people to go active. And a lot of people did. Of course, we had oems doing it, but also because I was saying that the hardware was limited in its resolution, our resources were limited in terms of the amount of OMB we could do. We ran out of DSP memory a decade ago, all those sort of issues. So then of course processes came out. The sort of things that we have in our iPhones.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And they over the last decade have just got so insanely powerful. 64 bit, you know, quad core, you know.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Orders of multitude more powerful than the DSP chips.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So we just had to ditch the DSP chips, which were fine for doing traditional audio stuff like simple crossovers and simple egg heres and stuff like that.
All the new models initially have streaming capabilities
But they really were not good at doing the FIR stuff. You just needed much more processing power and much more memory. So thats why the new arm processors is made. Thats what we call generation four stuff is its all based around multi core processing. And Linux, which is the operating system which also then lets us get into Internet streaming and all the other good.
Brad Serhan: Things that you currently have on.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, so all the new models initially have streaming capabilities. we’re using volume, with them. So
00:35:00
Kim Ryrie: we can do tire bars and stuff. You can do airplanes. So you can be running stuff directly from your phone, Spotify or whatever, just by airplane. Yeah, but so we’ve sort of tried to package everything into a, into a more integrated solution. And then we’ve moved all our software. All the old software was running on Windows. There was nearly a million lines of code developed over 20 years.
Brad Serhan: Jesus.
Kim Ryrie: And it was just a nightmare. And we thought, okay, this has got to go. Everyone hates windows and having to have PCs running this stuff. Let’s move it all into the cloud. So we had to rewrite all that stuff, a lot of it. And so we had five programmers working on this stuff for years. And so this is a.
Brad Serhan: Sorry to write, but this is the culmination of all that work with the new.
Kim Ryrie: Right. So this is what we call the, for generation four. So it was lots of years doing the hardware as well because. Talk about disasters. Right. So the first round of our hardware development used the AKM DACs and a to ds and sample rate converters. And then the AKM factory in Japan burnt down. Oh, yeah, they couldn’t make the chips. So we spent a year and a half designing that hardware. Had to ditch the whole thing. Then we decided, then I decided I don’t want to buy these arm, processor chips from chinese companies because they’ll just stop production, you know, unannounced. So let’s use the one, these OEM specific ones that Samsung had brought out. They started a company called Arctic and they made these very cute, beautifully made little small arm, processor hardware modules.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So we started to use them and we’d spend about a year developing on that. And then they shut down the company because they weren’t getting enough business. And I’d only chosen them because I thought, well, because it’s Samsung, we can rely on being able to get them forever.
Brad Serhan: So I mean, it’s okay if you’re an athlete and you’re running in the hurdles. Generally the hurdles stay the same as you get towards the finishing line, your hurdles getting higher and bloody higher. So what happened then?
Kim Ryrie: So then I’m thinking, holy mackerel, I’m gonna have to sell the doghouse, keep funding this.
Brad Serhan: Yeah, that’s funny. The dog house you got, kid.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So anyway, then we, found a really good supplier in China, actually, that brought out not only a, good quad processor at the time, but they had an upgrade path for the future, which maintain a lot of compatibility. So we were designing all that. so it’s just been a lot of, you know, lots of balls in the air that have to come together. So it’s why, you know, we’ve been talking about this new product for years and it just kept having problems like this thrown at it.
Brad Serhan: And now it’s.
Kim Ryrie: So we’re finally, now we’ve been, we’ve got about a hundred of the beta unit. We’re in a. So when we finalized the new hardware.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: we, we went through three revisions of hardware just to get it right for production.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So once we got to that point, we announced the beta program that we have. So the software is still in beta.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: and m so that meant that we contacted all our old DEQX. You know, we’ve got a lot of DEQX users around the world.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And we offered them to be part of our beta software testing program. About a hundred of them took that up straight away. So we’ve got 100 units out on test and getting, they’ve been out on test for probably five months now.
Brad Serhan: So when we. Sorry to interrupt you, but when we did the, or, drop us into it momentarily. So when we did the show together in April.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Brad Serhan: Australian.
Chris Allman: Hi.
Brad Serhan: Foster show in April in Sydney. That was, that was just before you released those.
Has there been, have there been many changes since we used your DEQX
Has there been, have there been many changes since we used your DEQX?
Kim Ryrie: There’s been a lot of hardware changes. There’s been a lot of software changes.
Brad Serhan: Right.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And we brought on new people in the software team. We’ve got five, people doing software now. And, we’ve got a new software director, a guy that, funnily enough, I used to work with, you know, 30 years ago, we were competitors, at Fairlight. We made a big, you know, multi channel, massive digital mixing console workstation we used to sell to Hollywood. And he had another company called, I forget what they were called, but he made a competing, digital console. We both selling them to Hollywood and they’re all around the world. We were, I mean, funnily enough, the top of the line stuff for big high. And these were all hundred
00:40:00
Kim Ryrie: thousand dollars a hit type console back in, what.
Brad Serhan: The seventies or eighties? Eighties.
Kim Ryrie: Ah, this would have been the nineties.
Brad Serhan: Nineties, wow.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, late eighties. And, So we had, well, Fairlight had most of Hollywood.
Chris Allman: We had a.
Kim Ryrie: We had Torrey o. Glenn. Glenn. Paramount Pictures, sony pictures, they were buying these things, $100,000 each to do all their post production for their movies. We won an Oscar, actually, for services to the.
Brad Serhan: You’ve got the statue.
Kim Ryrie: not you, per se. Not me. But actually, I’ll tell you who does. Chris Alfred, who’s our cto now. He got the Oscar. He’s got it at home.
Brad Serhan: Do you take turns? Don’t you just. No, no rubbing shoulders with the Oscar.
Kim Ryrie: I’m not allowed to touch it, I don’t think.
Brad Serhan: Okay, fair enough.
Kim Ryrie: So anyway.
Brad Serhan: But Chris is amazing, fascinating in all serious. That’s an amazing achievement.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So we’ve just been so lucky, probably because of the Fairlight legacy. I’ve just always been lucky to have great people working with us.
Brad Serhan: You’ve worked with them over that time and built those relationships.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Brad Serhan: And there’s nothing like that but a teamwork. So you’re now a lot of us.
Kim Ryrie: And Joe Jonah Wright.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: as I said, he was making the other console. He’s a fantastic programmer. He’s done everything. You know, Joe.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Brad Serhan: Right.
Kim Ryrie: And so he’s our coo now. You know, I’m starting to get old. You, know.
Brad Serhan: Can’t believe you’re saying that.
Kim Ryrie: Kim, he’s ten years behind me, mate.
Brad Serhan: Oh, God. I don’t want to argue because you still look young, but, yes, we are both, edgy.
Kim Ryrie: So, anyway, no, Joe’s been fantastic and he’s, Well, he’s a real programmer, unlike me. Right. He’s able to just pull everyone together.
Brad Serhan: And so he coordinates all that. But who was the fellow? Sorry? The fellow that you were competing with, in Hollywood. I took you away from that main.
Kim Ryrie: No, that was Joe.
Brad Serhan: That was Joe.
Kim Ryrie: That was Joe he was making.
Brad Serhan: I’m sorry, I’ve got to apologize. I remember.
Kim Ryrie: And he sold dozens and dozens of those. And we sold them to not only Hollywood, we had, you know, NHK in Japan had had dozens of these Fairlight consoles that were hundred. In fact, they were really expensive in Japan. They were like a couple hundred thousand.
Brad Serhan: So two Australians were basically, you know, we had the.
Kim Ryrie: We had the post production market sewn up. amazing at the early part of it, anyway. And then what happened subsequently with Fairlight is it got bought by, blackmagic in Melbourne who were focused on video.
Fairlight is a digital equalization and crossover system for post production
they had the DaVinci video editor software, but they wanted to integrate audio with their video, so they bought Fairlight. And today, if you go to, blackmagic or davinci, it’s the Fairlight operating system that’s running all their audio. They can run fairlight can now do thousands of tracks, for post production. It’s the fastest growing audio post production thing around, as far as I know, because you can download it for free, the entry level version. Then you can buy hardware options, consoles, moving faders, the whole, it’s a modular approach and it’s all fully integrated to the incredible. It’s fantastic. They’ve done a fantastic job with that. And, so anyway, look, long story short, I’ve always just thought the, the missing LinkedIn audio was the domestic playback environment. And so that’s where we focused DEQX, which DEQX, by the way, I changed the name years ago, mainly because of trademark issues with clarity. And, DEQX stands for digital equalization and crossover, which is sort of, we sort of think of form for doing a high definition allowance. It’s got to be digital, it’s got to have equalization. But that also means time domain equalization, not just frequency response. And the crossovers key to get right, you know, the linear phase crossovers.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So that’s stuff that works.
Brad Serhan: Passive designers only wish, right.
Kim Ryrie: But, you know, I mean, you’re one of the few people that I’ve seen who can make the passive crossover sound amazing. You know, those little speakers from, you guys do the mewtwo. And the problem is we can’t make them sound much better, which is extremely unusual. Usually we can take almost any speaker, measure them, do a correction on them, and they can sound, really alarmingly better.
Brad Serhan: Right.
Kim Ryrie: Your speakers sound slightly better, I must admit, but not that much better with the caliber.
Brad Serhan: I’m slightly, I’m blushing somewhat, but, no, I appreciate you saying, that is great.
Kim Ryrie: No, they’re really astonishing. And it’s, and it’s, and it’s why, you know, they’ve had so many awards, and I just think that’s very
00:45:00
Kim Ryrie: well deserved. So, anyway, thank you.
You were going to talk about taking old speakers or whatever with the new generation
Brad Serhan: I suppose the thing is that I know, I know we’ve probably got a little bit of time constraint on you because you should be upstairs. Was there a rick? Now, we keep it so easy to, just mean I, but what, what we might do is a part two give you a rest, because I think probably need to go upstairs. Not because I want to stop, but I don’t want to dominate. You were sort of going to talk about taking old speakers or whatever with the new generation. four. What I might do is grab you later and we’ll say, okay, break it up. Although, yeah, that wouldn’t just say, hey.
Kim Ryrie: This is part of the reason why we did the amplifiers now. as well, because that was always one of the problems for people being active. Suddenly I need thousands of amplifier channels.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And I don’t want them looking big and clunky and being too expensive. So we’ve also.
Brad Serhan: And that what I filmed.
Kim Ryrie: Hm.
Brad Serhan: Upstairs is that particular unit when we had it, the show, that unit was. That was, that was a different unit. What you’ve got upstairs. Correct.
Kim Ryrie: Sorry, which one?
Brad Serhan: Well, you know how you’ve got the. Where the Dax on board, the streaming on top of the stand?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. That.
Brad Serhan: That one is the one that would potentially sell for what was 20,000.
Kim Ryrie: Is that right? Yeah. That lists. In America we do everything in us dollars because that’s where my markets are. But. So that in America is like 15,900 Us.
Brad Serhan: Gotcha.
Kim Ryrie: and so for the beta people, it’s virtually half. I mean, it’s because for beta, I mean, you know, reading between the lines. Right. Once we go public with the products next year, once we’re out of beta.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: We’ve got to sell through retailers.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Brad Serhan: Right.
Kim Ryrie: Hence the pricing. Yeah, that’s close to 16,000. So meanwhile, for people that want to sign on to be beta users and use the beta software, it’s still production hardware. But, but it won’t be, it won’t be full, release software until the new year. So meanwhile, they get better, they get an advantage. They get an advantage of cost because they can buy them direct from us. They can tell us, oh, we don’t like this. We’d like you to do add this feature. We do all that. and it’s great. So we’ve already got 100 people doing that. We’re just running another hundred units now, which will be for, Because we’ll have another three, maybe four months of beta where that’s an option.
Brad Serhan: And then you can. Then after that.
Kim Ryrie: See, after that, we can’t undersell the retailers.
Brad Serhan: Yeah, no, of course not.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Brad Serhan: So what we might do is pause it now. And because you were going to.
You had to talk about, um. I’m trying to remember how we started this talk
You had to talk about, I’m trying to remember how we started this talk about taking old speakers and sort of applying to, the DEQX, you know, playing around with the filters to take an old pair of speakers.
Kim Ryrie: Is that correct? Well, what we also didn’t talk about is that you can use decks. We have three models.
Brad Serhan: Thank you. Right.
Kim Ryrie: And the one we’ve been talking about is the flagship, which is the one that can do active.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And that you can upgrade existing passive speakers to active with that. Or you can just build a Brad Serhanrom scratch. Or we sell those to Oems.
Brad Serhan: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Who are doing their own designs from scratch. But two other models, one of them is called the pre four. So it’s designed. You just add an amplifier or two. So it’s just the main passive, full range speakers. Right. Or for that matter, full range active speakers.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: and then you can add one or two subwoofers. So it’s got four outputs. That’s the reason for that. And then there’s the LS 200. So that’s really for where you just want to add speakers and keep it simple. For minimum, it’s actually a bit cheaper. A few compromises to the design. right. That’s the fully integrated. Just add speakers. Away you go model, and away you go.
Brad Serhan: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And it’s a little bit cheaper than the others as well.
Brad Serhan: Okay, great.
00:49:15