Not An Audiophile – The Podcast featuring podcast episodes with Kim Ryrie, co-founder of the Fairlight Synthesizer. In Episode 019 and Part One of the Kim Ryrie story, Kim shares his personal history which is also the history of the Fairlight CMI. In Part Two coming soon, Kim gets excited about his new project DEQX and the potential of this new technology.
Podcast transcripts below – Episode 019
TRANSCRIPT
Season 2 Episode 019 Fairlight Synthesizer, music making, two Australians and a barking dog.
This episode of not an Audiophile is sponsored by Stereonet. com
Kim Ryrie: Anyway, we’re in this grotty old workshop in the basement overlooking the harbour. And this was also where Lawrence Hargrave back in the day used to design his aeroplane. Really? He was on the.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, everyone had side workshop facilities and. Welcome back everybody. This is not an audio file. The podcast, season two, episode one. Today Kim Ryrie is on the program. We question him about all sorts of things, including of course the fact that he was the co founder of the world’s first sampling synthesizer, but also about decks. This episode of not an Audiophile is sponsored by Stereonet. Are you looking for your tribe? Visit stereonet.com today to join one of the world’s largest online communities for hi fi home cinema headphones and much more. Read the latest news and product reviews or check out the classifieds for the largest range of gear on sale. Membership is absolutely free. So visit stereonet.com and join up today. Thank you for your time, Kim. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I’ve had a quick tour of the facility with Brad and yourself showing us around just now and it’s very, very impressive. It’s impressive, for what is being done here in Sydney, I guess, as far as what’s being manufactured. But the design is, I, mean, it’s for my tiny brain. It’s astounding.
You’re talking about the DEQX factory in Sydney deqx
So maybe we wind back. So we’re talking about the DEQX factory in Sydney DEQX, which is a preamp DAC streamer, device with most importantly, incredibly high quality dsp, built in. And I want you to tell us all about that, but I want to mind back briefly and have you bore us for four and a half minutes with your backstory, which is long. everyone knows about the Fairlight. It wasn’t just you that were involved with it, but just you made my.
Kim Ryrie: First failed attempt trying to make a loudspeaker happen.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, you’re winging.
Brad Serhan: He dangled the carrots about that. Well, that goes back a long time.
Andrew Hutchison: Speakers were invented then, were they?
Kim Ryrie: Or what? Speakers were just coming out.
Andrew Hutchison: Just coming out.
Kim Ryrie: They just worked out that if you put a coil of wire and a magnet and glue a bit of paper to it, it’ll make a noise.
Andrew Hutchison: Make a noise.
Kim Ryrie: So, that’s sort of my vintage. Really.
Andrew Hutchison: So. Really? So I have no idea how old you are.
Kim Ryrie: Doesn’t matter.
Andrew Hutchison: But was this 60s or 70s?
Kim Ryrie: Don’t ask. This was 60s, actually.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Okay.
Andrew Hutchison: Right here.
Kim Ryrie: but no, it really all started happening in the 70s. early 70s. Okay. I Was always interested as a kid in electronics and audio. And I tried to make passive speakers in the 60s, and I failed miserably to make a passive speaker sound any good. So I gave that up straight away.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: So if at first you don’t succeed.
Andrew Hutchison: Give up, never try, never try again. What was that Homer Simpson thing where he opens the cupboard and there’s a, jiu jitsu suit, a guitar and something else hard to learn. A unicycle, perhaps, shoved in a cupboard, and Bart puts his. I don’t even remember what Bart’s trying to learn. Geez, I wish I didn’t bring that up now, that reference. But it’s a classic Simpsons scene where Homer says exactly that.
Brad Serhan: Oh, yeah, well.
Andrew Hutchison: And he opens the cupboard full of failed attempts. a whole lot of them. And there’s just the standard things that people can’t learn in five minutes. One of them is passive loudspeaker design. So.
Kim Ryrie: Well, I loved audio, so it was an obvious thing to try to do, make a passive speaker. And, you know, you could buy the bits and do all that. But I, My father had a magazine company called Modern Magazines. We did Modern Motor, Rugby League Week, Revs, Motorcycle News, Australian
Andrew Hutchison: Quite a pile of Revs, all those magazines.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. And I. And I was an avid reader of electronics Australia, you know, back in the day. And, I like doing all their DIY projects and stuff. But I showed the. The magazine to my father and said, listen, why don’t we do Electronics magazine? And I, think he probably wanted me to, you know, carry on the family tradition and, you know, end up being a magazine business.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And so he said. Yeah, okay. Well, first thing was he saw all the ads in Australia.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Okay. Electronics Australians. Yeah, okay, let’s do that.
Electronics Today started in 1971 with a few DIY projects lab workers
So we.
Andrew Hutchison: So, just like that.
Kim Ryrie: So.
Andrew Hutchison: So we through the magazine, there’s dollar signs running around.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, well, so we. We found an editor, an English guy called Colin Rivers, who was fantastic. He could spell and write a sentence, which
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Kim Ryrie: I couldn’t do. And, so we started Electronics Today, it was called, in 1971. And, I was working in the DIY projects lab, so there was a few of us there trying to come up with projects for people to build at home. And so we made little amplifier module, 100 watt amplifier modules and stuff like that. And, And you had a month to do it. You had a month to think of what you were going to do the next issue. You had to design product. One month.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: So typically we’d have and typically have two or three projects a month. Right.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. My memory of those magazines is exactly that, is that there was probably two or three kits a month. I never really thought about it as a kid, I guess. But yeah. So you’ve got these. They’ve got to be done every month.
Kim Ryrie: Every month.
Andrew Hutchison: There’s no back catalogue of kits to fall back on.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right. And especially back in those days, there was virtually nothing happening. So, the guy that did most of the designs there, a guy called Barry Wilkinson, a brilliant designer and he was just able to churn this stuff out and I’d help or suggest projects and do all that.
Andrew Hutchison: You’d suggest them and everyone else would.
Kim Ryrie: Do all the hard work. That’s the story of my life, really.
Brad Serhan: well, it’s a superpower.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. I’m great at taking credit for other people’s work. keep going. That’s also the story of Fairlight,
Brad Serhan: but I don’t think so. I think there’s a bit of magic from you.
Kim Ryrie: That’s another story. But.
So the Moog synthesizer had just come out. and. And everyone knew about this is early 70s. This was like 73.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, that is it.
Kim Ryrie: I can’t remember. But it was switched on bark by Walter Carlos. He became Wendy Carlos. And I was just. Couldn’t believe it. I just thought this is unbelievable. It’s. Everyone’s gotta have one of these. And this is the future of everything. And so immediately I conned everyone at the magazine. Remember I was the boss.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You had a bit of sway.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And I said, listen, why don’t we do a DIY synthesizer project so that everyone can build their own Moog synthesizer?
Andrew Hutchison: Which sounds.
Kim Ryrie: And everyone’s going.
Andrew Hutchison: Such a serious project.
Kim Ryrie: I love the way he said conned. So anyway, we found a young guy, who had just finished electrical engineering because we were all flat out doing other projects. And Trevor Marshall, I think it was. And so we worked with Trevor to come up with what we thought would be a good manageable thing. Anyway, long story short, took 10 months to publish this. One month we do a voltage controlled oscillator. Next month we do voltage controlled controlled amplifier. next one we did a transient generator and keyboard controller. So it keeps people coming back. Yeah. So, this went on forever.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And at the end of it we had a thing called the eti because by now Electronics Today had become Electronics Today International. Because we’d opened a French edition and a UK edition. And so we had this. Bing. So we had actually, there were apparently thousands of these built around the world because part suppliers like jaycar, for example, would kit the whole thing as little bits. Here’s the oscillator kit. It wasn’t very expensive, so people would do this. but by the time we got to the end of it, and I’d used it in some projects, friends of mine were making records and stuff, and I’d go and do the synthesizer, and I just got really frustrated that it couldn’t do natural sounds. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get a violin sound or a piano sound or whatever, which I assumed is what you wanted a synthesizer to do, you know, as well as synthetic sounds.
Andrew Hutchison: Like space sounds.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah. And, But then the microprocessor had just come out, the Motorola 6800. And I’m thinking, oh, these look amazing. You know, imagine if we incorporated these into a new synthesizer design. And so by now I’d left, ETI because I wanted to do this digital synthesizer. So to do that, I contacted a schoolmate of mine, Peter Vogel. Said, what are you doing? He said, not much. What are you doing? I’m so not much, but I want to build. Or do you want to build the world’s greatest synthesizer? Because we can. Yeah, we know how to make these analog things. All we need to do is add, you know, these microprocessor things and it’ll all be fabulous. And the way the real problem.
Andrew Hutchison: It’ll all be fabulous. So what was Peter’s.
Kim Ryrie: It’s very Trumpian, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: I’m going to build the best synthesizer in the world.
Kim Ryrie: Trump had used a harder sounding word, like tremendous. Tremendous.
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Andrew Hutchison: Was, Peter’s skills similar to yours, or Peter.
Kim Ryrie: Peter and I at. At school, used to make things at school together. We’d, Peter was a great electronics designer. He, made a thing called Merv, which was a little robot as a school project. It’d wheel itself around and it crash into things and then back off. And this was,
Andrew Hutchison: In what year was Peter doing this?
Kim Ryrie: Well, this would have been. Oh, this is late 60s. Wow. Okay, mid-60s, maybe.
Andrew Hutchison: Kind of impressive in itself, really.
Kim Ryrie: Peter was really good. So we had a great time at Cranbrook. We never learned much, but maybe you did.
Andrew Hutchison: It doesn’t sound like you needed to.
Kim Ryrie: You know, once we, you know, we used to be involved in, the drama society there, because Cranbrook would put on these plays and they were very proud of them. Typically Gilbert and Sullivan and stuff. But the old aircraft resistance dimmers that we were using on the stage were getting very old. And Peter and I thought why don’t we make some solid state dimmers and we could remote control them and everything. And we couldn’t work out how to convince the headmaster to budget this thing. And we figured out it cost at least $300 to make to make it sort of 20 channel dimmer in the late 60s, which seems like a bargain.
Andrew Hutchison: In some ways, but then it was all the money in the world I guess.
Kim Ryrie: So M We poured some iron filings down into the resistance dimmers to give a demonst that there was time that they got replaced.
We made our own dimmers for the opening ceremony of a play
Brad Serhan: Bastards.
Kim Ryrie: And so as you move the dimmers, sparks flying out of everywhere. And so. Oh yes, we better, we better do this.
Andrew Hutchison: Did you have an extinguisher handy at the time or something? Or we just.
Kim Ryrie: No, not really. We figured it wasn’t going to burn up and we figured. So we got the budget, you know, to buy. We made our own dimmers. We weren’t allowed to install them to the 240v, so we had to get a real electrician to do that. But they all worked brilliantly. M so for the opening, ceremony we had it all installed and we had a remote console that we took down into the auditorium. And there was a little switch on it which switched on this giant three phase breaker up in the lighting gallery. But we connected there, a little pot of potassium nitrate and magnesium powder. Which is what, in the old days you used to use that on stage when the witch appeared.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes, yes.
Kim Ryrie: And a little small, small ah, bit of pyrotechnics. So we, we’d organized it. When the senior master turned the switch on to initiate our new thing, the lighting gallery went up in smoke, which it did.
Andrew Hutchison: And, but just, just, just smoke though, right?
Kim Ryrie: No fire, just a bright, bright because magnesium powder, potassium nitrate flash and a.
Andrew Hutchison: Lot of flash and then quite a bit of stink.
Kim Ryrie: So anyway, the poor director of the play was suicidal because the dress rehearsal was in two days time. So anyway, that was what the sort of thing Peter and I did at school. So.
Brad Serhan : High Jinks.Although creating something that worked, that’s the other thing.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah. So well, yeah, the dimmers worked brilliantly, dimmers worked fine. So we left school. so it was actually several years before I called Peter. So let’s start, let’s do this. And I sort of talked him into it. And at the time he was doing video products because color had just Started in Australia, and he was making a little colorizer thing, and, Yeah. Where you just feed in a video signal and you could. Depending on the. On the luminance level.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You could mix your own RGB color. So you do six bands of color based on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and it was. It was really just a special effect. It was. It was just fun.
Andrew Hutchison: If you couldn’t add color to a black and white, TV show, unfortunately, unless. Well, you could.
Kim Ryrie: You could.
Brad Serhan: Remember Aunty Jack, the comedy show? Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Well, I was in the Aunty Jack Band, and. Well, I’ll tell you the story. I’ll tell you the story in a second, Rory. Well, just before I go on, you got to remember that.
Andrew Hutchison: Didn’t you remember the show where they. That the cut. The color was coming up from the rule. That’s right.
Kim Ryrie: And it’s in black and white.
Brad Serhan: Sorry to be so rude, Kim, but I watched it the other day on YouTube and there’s only Jack and Maria.
Andrew Hutchison: Donoghue
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Graham.
Kim Ryrie: Oh, you know, I’ve. Yeah. And Gary McDonald.
Andrew Hutchison: Gary McDonald.
Brad Serhan: And they m. They’re in black and.
Andrew Hutchison: White, but they see it coming up. Coromal, Thirroul And it’s coming all the way up.
Kim Ryrie: To Wollongong, where they were, and keep going. And then it sort of goes half. Yeah. They’re getting drowned in marinated on screen.
Peter and I started Fairlight with no money
I was going to bring up the Auntie Jack band because it was my first experience
00:15:00
with speakers, which is important to this story.
Brad Serhan: Jermaine.
Brad Serhan: Jermaine. In fact, In fact, we might just jump to it because you’re fascinated about the Jack.
Andrew Hutchison: Show, that you were involved with it in some way.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Well, actually, no. that’s a bit of history. I’ll just go back to where we were with starting Fairlight. So we had no money. Peter and I were used to doing things with no money. So it’s why we didn’t even think of that when he said, do you want to do the new thing? We had. My grandmother had a basement free to use, on the waterfront of Point Piper.
Andrew Hutchison: Quite a. Quite a nice place next door to have a workshop.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Her name was Altona. Altona. She and her two sisters owned the three houses in a row, one of which is Altona, which recently sold for, like $50 million or something. No doubt. So, anyway, we’re in this grotty old workshop in the basement overlooking the harbour. And this was also where Lawrence Hargrave, back in the day, used to design his aeroplane. Really?
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, everyone had side workshop fac.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. And my grandmother used to say, this place will never be worth anything. And she literally believed it because when the Japs next come through the harbour in their submarines, it’s the first place that gets shot at. Oh, wow.
Andrew Hutchison: It, literally was a different time.
Kim Ryrie: It was a different time. So she believed that. So anyway, we started Fairlight in that basement. Fairlight was named after the hydrofoil that kept driving past the thing. And Peter and I were arguing about what they call the company, whether it was going to be Rye Vog. That was one of them. well, Peter saw it.
Andrew Hutchison: So the fellow was the name of one of the ferries.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: And would have been one of the old school ones.
Kim Ryrie: Of course, it was the hydrofoil.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, I was the hydrofoil. Yeah, they were cool. Very 70s.
Kim Ryrie: And Peter ended up buying the hydrofoil. They put it out the pasture, of.
Andrew Hutchison: Course, but then, of course the past.
Kim Ryrie: Well then it was going to cost a million dollars a month just to put somewhere and he ended up getting rid of it. But, but we did get the, the life saving life raft off it with Fairlight’s name on it. So that, that was fun. So, amazing. Well, that’s. Anyway, where was I? So we started Fairlight. well, I’m not going to go into the Fairlight. no. Ry. Vogel. Ry Revival. Yeah. Fellas or Vogel. Right.
Andrew Hutchison: Got a certain charm versus Rybog.
Kim Ryrie: Definite. And I, didn’t. I wasn’t even sure I liked Fairlight. I thought, oh, that’s a bit oomigumi, isn’t it? And so. So we ended up just stuck. Right. So it was a.
Fairlight was the first ever sampling keyboard developed using a microprocessor
It was a good name.
Andrew Hutchison: It is a good name.
Kim Ryrie: And, great name. And that’s a whole other story. I won’t go into that because that, that went on for years and, and But it was disruptive, wasn’t it? Was it not? Yeah, because we ended up coming out with the first ever sampling keyboard. First one that could literally play any sound. First piano violins. We were selling them for US$25,000. Couldn’t make enough of them by 1980.
Andrew Hutchison: So just to clarify, the Fairlight, the guts of the Fairlight story. Well, I think people know, people certainly in the music industry know what it was, but I don’t think anyone knows it was 25,000 US.
Kim Ryrie: It was 25,000 US.
Andrew Hutchison: So the price of a house.
Kim Ryrie: Oh, yeah. People literally were deciding whether to buy a unit in the uk.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Ordered by a Fairlight.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And. Wow. And they bought the Fairlight.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And we sold, you know, A lot. There’s a lot of them out there.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And we.
Andrew Hutchison: When you say a lot, I think I heard.
Kim Ryrie: I think a lot. I mean it’s not thousands, but it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: No, I think I heard up to close to a thousand once in a.
Kim Ryrie: But that doesn’t mean it was factual.
Andrew Hutchison: Right?
Kim Ryrie: It was several hundred. Probably three, three, three and a half. I say something more importantly. It’s quite a lot. Who, well, who purchased them? Well, okay, so initially. Okay, so the. Remember I mentioned next door to my grandmother’s house was, a place where Bruce Jackson lived as we grew up.
Andrew Hutchison: That they were building aeroplanes next door.
Kim Ryrie: But, no, no, no. They were building airplanes in where I, where our workshop was. But next door was an even ritzier building. hang on, hang on.
Andrew Hutchison: Let’s stop for a second.
Kim Ryrie: Scary.
Andrew Hutchison: I mean this is, this is interesting. So you. Where you were going to do the Fairlight project?
Kim Ryrie: Yes, where we started.
Andrew Hutchison: that is where Mr. Hargraves. The same building.
Kim Ryrie: That’s the same workshop.
Andrew Hutchison: Same workshop.
Kim Ryrie: Same workshop was a basement of this.
Andrew Hutchison: That’s a, that’s amazing. Australian manufacturing and design history that you’ve got. Absolutely, Mr. Hargraves. And then you take the space over.
Kim Ryrie: And then we take the space over which was where my grandmother’s husband had his workshop and he died many years earlier. So it was full of all that sort of junk which we cleared out. And
00:20:00
Kim Ryrie: it was a fairly big space. And it was, for instance, the sort of thing we were working on. There was a touch sensitive keyboard. we hadn’t worked out how to make the microprocessor work. So someone, when they heard about us doing it, oh, you should meet this guy called Tony Furse because he knows all about microprocessors and in fact he was the consultant for Motorola in Australia. And so we met Tony and unbelievably, Tony had already designed the first part of a digital synthesizer using the Motorola, microprocessor. So, so, and he couldn’t finish it. He had to get on with his own business. He got a grant to get this thing going for the Canberra School of Music to show them how you could add harmonics together to create complex waveforms. And there was a light pen and you could wave move faders up and down on the screen to mix harmonics. And it was already doing that. Everything was hand wired.
Andrew Hutchison: So some of that kind of got melded in with your.
Kim Ryrie: Well, what happened was we were, you know, I was amazed that he’d done all this, he’d already done a parallel processor architecture because in Those days an 8 bit processor like the Motorola 6800, very limited, only ran at 1 megahertz. Tony had come up with a way of getting two of them to run out of sync with each other with common memory in between. So instead of having to interrupt the processor to do anything, which in those days, you know, you go out and make a cup of tea when you interrupted a processor, you could just. You could have an I O processor which is dealing with all your input output, such as playing keys on a keyboard. And the other processor could be doing more complex stuff. And the way Tony had organized it is that, the memory m ran at 2 megs and, and each processor was running at 1 meg, but out of phase, right? So you could put, data from one processor in a memory, the other processor would take it out in the next cycle. So this became, according to Motorola, this was the first implementation in the world of parallel processing using microprocessors. And that was Tony doing that, not us. No, but we. So effectively we hit the ground running because Tony had to. Wanted to offload his requirements to deliver this thing to the Canberra School of Music. And, he said, look, if you take it over, you can do what you like with it, but you’ve got to deliver something to this mob. Right. Sooner or later. Because I’ve got a grant.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh yeah, because he got the grant.
Peter’s machine only had 4k of 8 bit memory
Kim Ryrie: He got a grant to get it started. Anyway, they were in this box which was probably, you know, a meter and a half long by half a meter deep and high. And there were 20 circuit boards in it. 8 inches by 8 inch circuit boards. Every board was different. Yeah, a different function, but a different. But it did it for eight channels, eight notes, effectively.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You could play eight polyphony on the key. So. So I, And. But it sounded horrible. It couldn’t do sampling. It wasn’t designed for that. But, but it was the core of what we wanted because it was manipulating waveform memory. So the way it worked was you would wind up these faders, you could mix harmonics. You have this much first harmonic, this much second harmonic, this much third. It sounded as boring as you can imagine. Really sterile. but it was educational, which is what the Canberra School of Music wanted. And. But I thought, well, that’s all right, but we’ll have to just work out how to make it sound good. So we, we took it over and, I think Tony was. We worked out a sort of little royalty deal. With Tony. And, and then we spent the next probably year designing all those boards onto actual circuit boards, printed circuit boards. we then realized, well, all those.
Andrew Hutchison: Boards that were in the box that he gave you was all on, like.
Kim Ryrie: It was literally on. it wasn’t wire wrapped. It was, it was hand soldered using Teflon coated wires. There were thousands of wires on each board. It was an app, which Tony had done.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: As this prototype. And, so we took this over and Peter soon worked out how, to. We, you know, we said, look, the main thing that happened was that 16k bit memory chip came out. And I said, peter, look at this. Let me explain. Tony’s machine only had 4k of 8 bit memory. And that was the waveform. Each Waveform was only 256 bytes long, which meant we could have up to the 64th harmonic. But in fact, we’re only doing up to 32 harmonics.
00:25:00
Kim Ryrie: and you could play that on the keyboard. So you could create this one cycle of a waveform that had whatever content of harmonics you want. But bear in mind, these are harmonic harmonics, not inharmonics. And natural sounds include a lot of inharmonics. They’re not perfectly mathematically related to the fundamental, especially in a transient sense. So it still didn’t sound even remotely natural. but we had a way of manipulating sound in waveform memory. We had a way of changing the pitch. We could sustain it, things like that. We could, we could vary its attack and decay, stuff like that. Okay, so, and oh, the other thing I didn’t mention is this was before floppy disks, let alone hard disks. So to boot the processor, you used punched paper tape on a teletype, and there was a reel of tape about a foot in diameter.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh no.
Kim Ryrie: That took an hour to boot because the tape would unravel, go through the thing. So if you trot on it because it came from the floor, you’d have to start again. You’d have to glue the tape back together and start again. So this was booting the process.
Andrew Hutchison: Floppies were bad.
Kim Ryrie: Geez. All right. And Well, thank God, you know, the floppy then came out too very soon after this. So pretty quickly we were able to, to, to implement the floppy disk. It was only like 128k, the original floppy disk. Original floppy disk, 8 inch floppy, 128k bytes per disk.
Andrew Hutchison: Right.
Kim Ryrie: And we had 4k of waveform memory in this machine. 4k bytes. We’re not even talking about 16 bit audio. We’re talking about 8 bit audio, right. 8 bit audio means guaranteed 1% distortion out of the box. And that’s assuming you got. You’re using all eight bits worth of level. So anyway, long, story short, we redesigned the 16k memory chip, came out. I said to Peter, listen, the 16K memory chip, why don’t we just have one board that does one channel with 16k of memory? And Peter, all these functions at all these different boards that we can put all that on one board. Uh-huh. And to do eight channels, we just need eight boards. Eight of the same boards. Then you had extra boards which had the dual processor board. You had the memory board, you had the floppy disk controller board, you had the light pen board. This is before mouses had been invented. We’re talking. This is before Apple. Well, this is.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. I mean, for the listeners.
Kim Ryrie: you’re great to have that.
Andrew Hutchison: This is a long time ago.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, we’re talking 75. So Apple.
So is this when you were doing that part of it? Yeah, yeah
Andrew Hutchison: So is this when you were doing that part of it?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: 75. 75. 76. This is.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And Apple came out 70s times.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And, So, and. And we had an operating system that was used for medical and, industrial stuff. And we were able to. I don’t know how we. I’m trying to think how we negotiated this, but somehow I managed to get the source code for this operating system. And it was a real time, very robust, nothing like Windows. It was very limited, but it was.
Andrew Hutchison: I’m guessing that the guy who wrote the source code lived three doors up.
Kim Ryrie: No, no, no, no. It was an overseas thing. and,
Andrew Hutchison: Well, there was a lot of people in that street. Brad, stop chuckling.
Kim Ryrie: I agree with you.
Andrew Hutchison: They weren’t building airplanes. They were inventing.
Kim Ryrie: That’s. That’s true. managed to get that. What happened then? So we got that working so effectively, we had the first prototype unit by 79. So we started spend some years on it. It took four years to get.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Right. And in the meantime, we’d managed to get some family money together to help us. We moved out of the basement, we moved to Rush Cutters Bay, and we started to be introduced to people that knew what they were doing because they.
Andrew Hutchison: Could smell that you were doing something.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So we were really lucky to run into some very, very smart people early on. People like Michael Carlos, for instance, who was the musical director of Jesus Christ Superstar, the first version of it. He came out to Australia with a band called Tully. The, the government didn’t want to let Tully into the country to do Hair. They were the band for Hair when that came out because they had drug convictions, meaning dope convictions.
Andrew Hutchison: heavy stuff.
Kim Ryrie: So anyway, they came here. So Michael is just one of those
00:30:00
Kim Ryrie: geniuses, right? He was a musical, he was a composer. He was, you know, he’s like a polymath, Michael, you know. So he came to us one day, said, Oh, we were introduced to him. We showed him the first, sampling bit of hardware, took it to his house. He had a dog that you could say speak and the dog would go woof. So I said, michael, get your dog to speak. Right. so we got the mic out, got the dog sample, which was a bark.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And that was the first ever, sample sample.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow.
Kim Ryrie: on the Fairlight, in the Fairlight sound library, he got his master’s voice. He’s a dog looking up at the. That’s true. With an actual dog.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And, And bearing in mind we only had 16k memory, but we had variable sample rate from up to 200k. The way we control pitch was simply we varied the clock speed of the dac, but we could go down to like, We could probably go down to about 2k sample rate for a bass note, which meant you’d have all this aliasing noise going on. So we had a tracking filter. So we had a low pass filter that tracked just, you know, at half of the sample rate to get rid of the aliasing noise. So this was like talk about seat of the pants stuff. And But that’s how it worked. And
Andrew Hutchison: A time when storage was at a premium.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Amazing. So. And that’s how all the Fairlights that were selling for US$25,000 had eight bit audio, but they had another eight bits of level control. So it was a sort of pseudo. Yeah, 16 bit. So that. So we always tried.
Andrew Hutchison: But it kind of sounded pretty good though.
Kim Ryrie: It sounded good. Everyone loved the sound. And
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And that was. And that was a series one, series two and series three.
When did hard disk recording start? From the start
Series three went to 16 bits. Much longer memory. So when did hard disk recording?
Andrew Hutchison: The whole catastrophe, the crazy success was from the start.
Kim Ryrie: From the start. Virtually from the start. So what I was just going to say. So next door to the house at Point Pie was a guy called Bruce.
Andrew Hutchison: Jackson that lived what we were up to. Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And Bruce and I were friends. He started a company in Australia called JANDS, which was Jackson and Storey. That’s where is that. Where that comes from. Okay.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, certainly. I think we’re so, so familiar, with JANDS.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Yeah. And so Bruce designed mixing consoles and all this. He was a great electronics designer, and he was particularly into outdoor PA stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.
Kim Ryrie: Which was what JANDS got into. And, when Claire Brothers, who was like the American version of JANDS, you know, 20 times bigger, doing all the big bands and stuff outdoors, Bruce, met. Met with. I, think it was Ron Claire, I think his name was. And, he, soon realized what a genius Bruce was and offered him a job to go and work at Clare. And, So Bruce moved to America. Okay. And, And he offered to build them a mobile console because they were doing these huge outdoor consoles. People like Bruce Springsteen, Elvis.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And, so one day, Elvis’s sound guy was crook and. And Bruce was asked to do his outdoor concert. And he. He told Elvis he wasn’t sounding too good. It was really not sounding great.
Brad Serhan: Thank you very much.
Andrew Hutchison:And, no one had ever told Elvis that before. I don’t think no one had told us anything, anything negative.
Kim Ryrie: So, long story short, yeah, Bruce became the only person Elvis would let mix for him. After that, Elvis bought Bruce an airplane for his birthday. Little.
Andrew Hutchison: Some of the nicest presents you can get.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah. And, And so, you know, and so when we aircraft. Oh, ah, no, it was a little. It was a little 707. No, no, no, no. It was just a little thing. So when we had the prototype, I rang up Bruce and said, bruce, we’ve got this thing and it can play any sound. And by the way, we also had sequencing. Now you could play stuff and it would record what you played.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. So this is Bruce’s introducing Elvis’s team, or Elvis.
Kim Ryrie: Well, not so much Elvis, because Elvis didn’t want to. No sampler. But of course. But of course, Bruce knew everyone in Los Angeles. And, And, So he said, oh, well, we’ll bring it. No, we said, bruce, we’ve got this thing, and it can play any sound. It can play itself. He said, you know, what are you talking about? And I said, well, it can play anything. And he didn’t. He sort of didn’t believe it, actually. And I said, well, Peter will come over with it and. And show you. And if, you know, anyone that can afford 25 grand, because that’s what we think we’ve got to sell them for, by the way. you know, and. And he said, okay, we’ll bring it over. So Peter took it over.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And Bruce first introduced him to Geordie. Now,
00:35:00
Kim Ryrie: Geordie . You know Spam, as in pig meat?
Andrew Hutchison: Well, I know the pigment. Yes, yes.
Kim Ryrie: Spam.
Andrew Hutchison: Spam.
Kim Ryrie: Spam is pig meat. It’s what, you know, everyone has in their bomb shelters back in those days. So Spam was made by Hormel Meats, and Hormel Meats was sort of half of Minnesota. And Geordie was one of the two heirs to Hormel Meats. He wasn’t allowed to go to the factory, but he used to get a lot of m money every month for being an heir to stay away. Because Geordie was a musician, and he used to write music for the I Love Lucy Show. Meanwhile, and then Geordie started the biggest recording studio in Los Angeles called Village Recorder, which at the time heard the name. Yes, Fleetwood M. Mac were recording the Tusk album at the Village Recorder. So the first thing Bruce did was take. He knew Geordie, so he said, geordie, you should see this thing.
It plays any sound. No questions asked, no discussion about price
It plays any sound.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And, took it to Village Recorder. And Geordie said, well, show it to the. Show it to these guys. So they just immediately pulled out their.
Andrew Hutchison: Cheque book, as in what Fleetwood Mac did.
Kim Ryrie: Fleetwood Mac. Okay. 25 grand. Sign here. No questions asked, no discussion about price. Geordie said, now we’ll go and see Stevie, ie Wonder.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes.
Kim Ryrie: Stevie Wonder.
Andrew Hutchison: Who’s in what, in the next room.
Kim Ryrie: Or the next chair? No, he was down the road. We’re talking about Los Angeles. This was in, east la, where he has his studio. And so, same thing. Stevie pulled out his cheque book, put his thumbprint on it. 25 grand. No discussion about price. But while the demo was happening in Stevie’s studio, one of his engineers said, oh, Peter’s got to hear about this. he’s talking about Peter Gabriel in London. So he rings up Peter from the studio, says, peter, you should see this thing. It can play any sound, and it can do itself. He said, oh, well, how can I get to hear one? And so once Peter got back to Sydney, he ended up then going to, London to see Peter Gabriel. So Peter Gabriel, got his cheque book out. Yeah. But Peter’s nephew, a guy called Stephen Payne, convinced Peter to fund starting the distribution company for the UK oh, okay. To sell these things. Because, of course, I just told anyone if they wanted to sell them, they could, you know. Georgie, meanwhile, had said, if you give me the exclusive rights to North America, I’ll buy every machine you can make. So by then he’d already sold one to Carly Simon. And even on Peter’s trip, I think we sold the best at four on that trip. And so is that. Wow.
Andrew Hutchison: I guess I’m jumping ahead to the music itself. But so albums of that, that era. Because now we’re talking very early 80s, aren’t we. We’re talking Tusk.
Kim Ryrie: We’re talking absolute beginning of the 80s. This would have been 80, you know.
Andrew Hutchison: Tusk has got to be. Yeah, I would have thought. Well, they worked on it for two years or something anyhow. But, Yeah, yeah, it was probably 79.80 or something like that. Yeah. So the instrument does feature, I guess on those albums here and there. It must be a long list of credits.
Kim Ryrie: Oh yeah, well, yes, look over the years especially. Well, it was the 80s where it took off, so. And of course being in the UK with Peter behind it, we got introduced to everyone. It was no, it was no problem. and so they sold dozens of machines just in London. And and that was just the series one. And then within a couple of years we brought out the Series 2 and we put MIDI into that. We sort of. We virtually invented midi because on that.
Andrew Hutchison: Note, because I think on that bombshell, we invented midi. gonna take a two second break.
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We’ve covered Fairlight and how it got introduced to the States
We’ve gone, we’ve covered a lot of that story, although we can’t cover all of it because it’s so. There’s so much of it. So. But during that, in the previous segment, we went sideways with Fairlight and how it got introduced to the States and the uk. But you were touching on your days with the Aunty Jack Band. So I want to, I want to, I want to get the backstory on that. Because that, I believe is what led you into active or digital audio. Well, active. Active audio or active, loudspeakers.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: But, just to finish off on Fairlight, which is such an amazing tale, except it’s not a tale, it’s a real story. It actually happened m Incredible success straight away. which at the time, I mean the adrenaline rush on that must have been. I mean you’d spent four years In a cave next to the harbor, trying.
Kim Ryrie: Oh, no, no, that wasn’t four years. That was. No, that was only. That was only about one year.
Andrew Hutchison: One year. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And then we moved to a real office where we managed to raise some money. A lot of work. It was. And it was.
Andrew Hutchison: So, the payoff, though, was amazing, I guess.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. But it was mainly stress.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, then you had to build the things, right?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. I mean, remember, we had no income. well, no, that’s not true. We did anything for money. So we did a sleeping dog car alarm.
Andrew Hutchison: Right.
Kim Ryrie: We did. Remington, Office Machines had heard that we were the only manufacturer of a computer in Australia. So they came to us and said, could we build them, an office computer?
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And I said, well, as long as you can do the software. Cause, you know, we don’t know anything about business software. Oh, yeah, we can do that if you give us, give us the hardware. And so we made them. you know, we managed to put together four, eight inch hard, floppy drives in a cabinet and had a, you know, it ran basic, basically. And they wrote this software. It was pretty bad, but they sold about a. They sold about 100 of those. So it was all helping us with cash flow. And actually, that’s where we did learn about how to make things reliable. Because what happened in that, for that exercise was that they needed a megabyte of storage. So we had four. We only could have four floppy drives. And the original drives were only 128 kilobytes. which means four drives means you’ve only got half a meg. But the double sided floppy had just come out okay. By a company called Shoeguard. And we bought some of their first ones because this means we can do the Remington system. Because if we have four of these drives, they’ll get their 1 meg of memory and it’ll all be fabulous. So we got, we ordered and we had an order for 100 systems. So I ordered, you know, 400 drives from, from, Shugart. And, what we discovered first of all was that these drives would tend to scrape the oxide off the discs after a while. After a while, which was a bit embarrassing. And then, occasionally one side, the head on one side of the disc would write through to the other side.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, no.
Kim Ryrie: It didn’t happen often, but it happened often enough to make you want to kill yourself. They want to kill you. and then two things we discovered. One was that IBM made a floppy disk that. Where the oxide did not scrape off. So that solved that problem. But Then we informed Shugart that their drives were riding to the other side of the drive. And they said, yes, we know, so we’re stopping production.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, crikey.
Kim Ryrie: I said, you can’t stop production because I’ve just accepted an order for 100 machines from Remington, you know Remington, you heard of them? And and they said, well, actually we do know a hand modification we can do to the head that does fix the problem, but it’s too expensive for us, so we’ve
00:45:00
Kim Ryrie: stopped making them. I said, listen, you’ve got. We will have to do something legally if you can’t sort this out because we’re completely committed and you’ve accepted our order. So they restarted the line for us and did some things by hand. But within literally only a few months, a Japanese company came out and I’d. I think it was YE Data they were called. And it was a double sided drive, just beautifully made, no problems, no read through. It was even cheaper.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Sugart dying to stop supplying us.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: So they didn’t care. so we changed over to those. But in the process we just learned how to make these systems very reliable. Because one thing about, you know, the 70s and 80s when we had the Fairlight out, people weren’t. People didn’t know that computers had bugs. They were only used to golf ball typewriters that didn’t have bugs.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes. They just said, well, everything worked. Everything was kind of analog and Worked.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Everything worked. So when bugs happened, the world ended.
Fairlight eventually became uncompetitive in the music business because it was expensive
You know, it was like, this thing doesn’t work.
Andrew Hutchison: It worked a minute ago.
Kim Ryrie: which was why, actually that’s when we bought the source code to the operating system. Because there were problems in the operating system that they couldn’t fix because they weren’t doing with it, ah. What we were doing. So we were able to debug the operating system. And that really ultimately became the downfall of Fairlight because we got so used to having control of the operating system that everyone refused to move to Windows, which. Which is where ultimately the competition came from. Yeah, you know, digi design and. Yeah, so, so.
Andrew Hutchison: So as you move through the 80s and you’ve got your various iterations, version 1, 2, 3, you mentioned. But there were, there were.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, we were also upgrading the processes in the, in the.
Andrew Hutchison: But some point you were doing your interface, doing it the way you’d always done it.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Competition machines.
Kim Ryrie: Well, we dropped out. Effectively we dropped out. We had to stop. We became uncompetitive in the music business because it was, There just wasn’t the resources in Australia to make things as cost effectively.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: As some of the competition was and we’d already saturated the high end market with hundreds of machines. It’s just after a while you run out of people.
Andrew Hutchison: That’s right.
Kim Ryrie: Crazy money.
Andrew Hutchison: Exactly. There’s no home recording guys. Not that there were any really any home recording guys even then.
Kim Ryrie: But by then, you know. But by then we started working on post production.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And we had, we were able to synchronize the, our, our sequences with timecode from. Well you did.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. We finished the previous segment on the bombshell that you invented midi. So is that.
Kim Ryrie: Well, well no, we didn’t invent midi. But, but we effectively brought a structure. We, we preempted midi.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: With everything that MIDI ended up doing we’d already done. Yeah, yeah, so that’s what I meant by that. But no, there was a MIDI organization.
Andrew Hutchison: You didn’t invent MIDI as in the acronym M, but the concept and what it did. You, you were already doing it.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So then we moved to post production because we, we sort of the Mark M. There was a recession at the end of 88 where everyone stopped buying the expensive keyboards. We had to shut down the original fellow company and restart it.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Into post product to do post production.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And so. And because by then we had the first eight track hard disk recorder running. So we could run eight tracks of audio onto a hard disk. and we also had 16 channel. We do 16 notes at a time. We had a lot of buffer memory. You could have minutes of a note on one channel. So I’m thinking, well, why don’t we make you know, a 24 track hard disk recorder for doing post production. Because post production you don’t need all 24 tracks to be playing at once. You only need about 16, which is what we had. You only need a continuous eight tracks, which is what we had. As long as you had lots of buffer on the 16th. So I did this Smoke and Mirrors product and and what happened was you could see the waveform scrolling across the screen and you could see the actual waveforms. You could edit them, cut and paste, do all that stuff. So we had the first digital audio workstation, effectively that could do that. and we just instantly routed to one of 24 output channels depending on what track something was happening on. So you might have atmospheres
00:50:00
Kim Ryrie: taking up a stereo track continuously, you might have music taking up stereo continuously. But everything else was pretty Much bits and pieces. And we got away with that. And we were selling those for $100,000 to Hollywood. They were buying every machine we could make. We had Sony Pictures, Tyler and Glenn, Glen, Paramount, they were all buying these things because it was so fast to use compared to what they were used to. And So that was Fairlight number two in effect, which was post production, which no.
Andrew Hutchison: One talks about, but they should.
Kim Ryrie: No one talks about it because it’s not music. But it was really the first of those systems. Nowadays you can go feel like it was bought by blackmagic, who were the video, company.
Andrew Hutchison: Ah.
Kim Ryrie: Australian company. Brilliant company. So they now own all the Fairlight IP and you can download Fairlight Workstation, for free. Now I thought I’d seen that. Yes. which was genius.
Andrew Hutchison: And then when I saw the name I’m like, yeah, can’t be related to the original.
Fairlight gives away its Digidesign software to help budding digitizers
Kim Ryrie: Well, of course there’s all these options that you pay for. But it was genius on their part because Fairlight had lost the. The early market to have a digidesign.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And And the only way to get the market back was to basically give it away so that people could start using it and train themselves up. And now you can do thousands of tracks using. Using the Fairlight stuff. It’s really, really good. And it’s. And it’s completely integrated with their video editing stuff, which is equally really good. So it’s. Although I’m not involved in that, it’s just great to see that. Well, it’s gone on what’s done with. So, anyway, that was that.
You first met Rory O’Donoghue in Aunty Jack
So I was getting. I was about to tell you about Auntie Jack. Auntie Jack.
Andrew Hutchison: So we want to hear about.
Kim Ryrie: A friend of mine was, I can’t remember how I first met Rory O’Donoghue who was thin Arthur in the Aunty Jack show. But, he had a band. He wanted to start a band. And I was asked, oh, how do we get a PA system together? And somehow I’d come across some voice of the theatre Altec A7. You know the famous Altec A7. So I got a pair of those and we use them for the band.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And I made a mixer for them and the whole thing. And we did. We did tours with Supertramp and stuff like that back in the day.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, but not with my A7.
Andrew Hutchison: No, you were using their PA but. And supporting support act.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Ah.
Kim Ryrie: Oh, hang on. No, sorry. That was Sleeping Dogs. That was a different band. That was Let them live in. That was Doug Ashdown, Oh my God, Doug Ashton. So anyway, with Rory though. But, what we did, we were blowing up the horns quite often because we were quite loud. And the voice of the theaters just have a passive crossover. I think it was 2, 2 pole, 12 decibels per octave, something like that. And the good thing about them was that it was very easy to change the diaphragm because they were designed for theaters. So occasionally if you blew them up, the technician had to run down the stage, change the diaphragm. They only cost, you know, 50 bucks or something to put in a new one and you could do it in.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s interesting though, it’s interesting an observation how things have changed, that they would be concerned about changing diaphragms mid film. Whereas now. Someone told me a story this morning. Was it. Someone was telling me a story this morning about the, Maybe it was Brad, but that, they were in a cinema. It didn’t sound right. Oh no, that was the out of phase thing, wasn’t it?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: And one of the speakers had been out of phase for maybe a month or two. We must sort that out. I mean, you just imagine where a diaphragm would blow now and no one would really. Would really care. But yeah, these were designed to be simply popped apart, pop a new one.
Kim Ryrie: Pop it in and obviously done deal. And then,
Andrew Hutchison: So for the sake of customer service and maintaining fidelity.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, I doubt that they would have changed them in the middle of a movie. I don’t think they were that fragile. But for us they were because we ran them too loud and using them.
Andrew Hutchison: Perhaps in a way they weren’t intended to be.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. And this must, when I think back, this must have been the early 70s because I used the little hundred watt amplifier we did as a project. So I had a couple of the hundred watt amp modules. Yeah. And it just flashed into my head.
Andrew Hutchison: ETI 480. That was the part number of the kit. There was. There was a series of those.
Kim Ryrie: I, I can’t.
Andrew Hutchison: There’s other things you’ve had to remember in recent years,
00:55:00
Andrew Hutchison: but that just, Just
Kim Ryrie: Remember I’ve only.
Andrew Hutchison: There was one particular kit. They just sold it for like 20 years.
Kim Ryrie: It was probably could have been that it was a good one.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, they were, well, two and three, a double five. That’s all it was.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. And so I had some of these lying around and I just made a 24 decibels per octave crossover. So four pole, high pass, low pass. And I can’t remember who suggested to me to make them active, but I’d stop blowing up the thing. So I did that and I mounted. So effectively I had a separate amp for the horn now and a separate amp for the 15 inch bass driver and we put the little 24 decibels prop octave crossover in front of it and it just completely. It was miraculous the improvement. Okay. It was just so much cleaner. Well, yeah, it was just much cleaner. We could go louder. We never blew another diaphragm up because now they had twice the.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, twice rolling off twice as fast.
Kim Ryrie: Yep. And
Andrew Hutchison: And well, when rolling off probably more consistently as well because it was active and not obviously dependent upon the impedance of the Whatever the impedance was doing at the drive.
The sound quality improvement though was the thing that actually grabbed you first
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. That’s another issue.
Andrew Hutchison: So the sound quality improvement though was the thing that actually grabbed you first.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, that’s right. And it was just cleaner. That was the bottom line. More dynamic and just. And that was using, you know, really pretty basic part.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And so then I just assumed everything was going to go active. I just had that assumption. No one’s noticed this yet, but it’s about to happen. Yeah, well, I mean you’re going to.
Andrew Hutchison: I mean you’ve heard this enormous improvement. One could assume in the same way. Although this was before Fairlight. But the point is it was, it was chalk and cheese. Yeah, it was dramatically better.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: The cost of the amplifier module was bugger all for a second one. Really.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Why wouldn’t everyone do this? Yeah, well actually of course in act. In Pro Audio, like Pro Audio, they kind of did.
Kim Ryrie: They kind of did. But of course they couldn’t because the whole marketing of audio and hi Fi meant it was. It would have been way too complicated.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Because you just needed a speaker box to be able to be wired up to an amplifier with two wires, piece of lamp cord. And that was why that. And to this day. To this day that’s why hi Fi is not really HD audio. It hasn’t happened yet. So the. Well, but it’s about, What I mean is it hasn’t happened affordably. No, it’s getting there. But it’s very hard. I mean, yes, you got, you got speakers that can do it and they’re reasonably affordable. but not. But even. I’ll just say to Brad, as good as Brad speakers are the Mewtwo’s for example, by definition they’ve got crossover distortion between their tweeter and woofer. M. Because they’re not perfectly time aligned. They can’t be. The baffle is determining the fact that the same sound, the same frequency is coming out of the tweeter as is coming out of the woofer, at least over that crossover zone, which let’s say is about an octave wide or something. So yeah, it’s subtle, it’s, it’s a subtle reduction in resolution, but it’s definitely there. It’s a sort of a, it’s a flanging. It doesn’t sound like flanging. No, but it’s, but it is phase distortion. It’s a phase distortion and DSPs inactive.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know, lets me now Wilson audio to give the example. They physically put their tweeter back.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know, they have the tilt so the tweeter goes back. I think the mid goes back slightly as well and that will improve the time alignment between the drivers. But doing it in the analog domain is verging on impossible. Not to mention the compromises you make with the passive crossover filter designs. You’re losing, as you say, you’ve got impedance changes dealing with the, you’re dealing with. If you’re able to just take the output of an amp, connect it directly to the winding on a speaker, you’ve got nothing in between. You’ve got real grip from the amp to the diaphragm for every driver. So now you’ve got a lot of options because now you’re doing all your crossover designs in front of the amplifier. Amplifier at preamp levels.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: They’re not having to handle 100 or 200 watts, you know.
Andrew Hutchison: No. So what I’d like to. Absolutely. And it’s a, it’s
01:00:00
Andrew Hutchison: a, it’s a great subject and and it, as I said, the pro audio world has embraced it because the pro audio world is about performance and function and reliability and getting a job done and producing great sound in the process.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: hi Fi is a bit more mystical, bit more magical.
Kim Ryrie: It’s, it is.
Andrew Hutchison: So I want to break this episode here and we’ll tell the deck story in episode two. That’s what I want to do. So, so thank you Kim. Thank you, Brad. By the way, I hope that camera’s not running. And thank you Andrew and thank you Kim. Dodgy looking recording arrangement here and we will be back. Well, we’re going to start recording episode two right now, but you’ll hear it next week.
Kim Ryrie: Thanks everybody. Thank you.
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