Not An Audiophile – The Podcast featuring podcast episodes with Kim Ryrie, co-founder of the Fairlight Synthesizer and designer of the DEQX processor. 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 Episode 023 and Part Two, Kim gets excited about his new project DEQX and the potential of this new technology to change home audio forever.
Podcast transcripts below – Episode 019 and Episode 023
TRANSCRIPT
S2 EP023 – 1 simple step to speaker and room sound correction with DEQX and designer, Kim Ryrie.
Glenn Dickens virtually co invented Atmos at Dolby
Kim Ryrie: We’ve got Glenn Dickens. Now Glenn was running R and D at Dolby for 15 years.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: he virtually co invented Atmos at Dolby. He’s now working for us as we speak. He’s in the room next door on the blower with Joe, trying to sort out a time alignment issue in, in the, the Bass integration algorithm.
Episode 23, season two of Audiophile features Kim Ryrie on DEQX
Andrew Hutchison: And welcome back to not an Audiophile.
Andrew Hutchison: This is episode 23, season two. Today we speak to Kim Ryrie in part two.
Andrew Hutchison: I said it would be a week, it’s been weeks. I apologize for that. But we’re now back.
Andrew Hutchison: Brad and myself, speak to Kim , make little titters and comments and probably talk over each other a bit too much. We were highly enthusiastic.
Andrew Hutchison: We just seen downstairs where the
Andrew Hutchison: DEQX product was manufactured.
Andrew Hutchison: We met a number of the
Andrew Hutchison: Incredible people that are involved and frankly we were a little awestruck. Kim today in part two tells us.
Andrew Hutchison: Really how DEQX got a start, what.
Andrew Hutchison: It really is, what it does, and how Gen4 is a significant improvement in refinement over the previous generations.
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Andrew Hutchison: In the room, Kim. it’s been matter of minutes since we finished episode one and now we’re recording episode two. But we’re going to strike while I, Brad Serhan’s here as well to help us. the deck story started a lot longer ago than people realize and as you’ve joked, the the oldest startup in the history of startups. I mean 96, I think you just.
Kim Ryrie: 97.
Andrew Hutchison: 97, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Look, the triggered I should say.
Andrew Hutchison: By your, from the previous episode, your amazement, perhaps at how well analog active loudspeakers worked.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right.
Andrew Hutchison: And so no doubt there’s a connection between that experience with the Arty Jack band.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, so just.
Andrew Hutchison: And why you started DEQX. Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So just to recap on that story, we had a band back in the would have been early 70s and and we had a pair of Altec A7 voice of the theatre speakers using the passive crossovers that come with those. And we were blowing the horns up almost every month or two we’d blow the diaphragms up on the horn. and at the time I had a couple of hundred watt amp modules and someone suggested taking them active, which meant having one amp for the horn and another amp for the 15 inch woofer. And then I just built a four pole, 20, four decibels, per octave crossover in front of each amp. And what amazed us was just how clean suddenly the voice of the theatres became. And because of the steeper crossovers we stopped blowing up the horn.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: So that was my first realization of the advantages of active, especially for clarity, you know, minute, you know, reducing crossover distortion in particular. because you know the, for example with a passive crossover you’ve got a 15 inch woofer, that woofer, ah, if it’s got a slow roll off above the crossover frequency. I think the crossover to the horn was about 700 hertz or something like that. you know that’s still outputting nasty stuff up into, not up into 1400 hertz and higher because it’s only rolling off quite slowly. Meanwhile the horn is upset because we’re sending a lot of bass frequency to it which it doesn’t like.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So it’s, it’s nearly at its, you know, X max and getting distorted apparently.
Andrew Hutchison: Beyond its X max and beyond judging.
Kim Ryrie: By your, in our case beyond it.
Andrew Hutchison: Diaphragms a dozen at a time.
Kim Ryrie: Flying diaphragms.
Kim Ryrie: that’s the name for a band.
00:05:00
Kim Ryrie: So anyway, so long story short, yes it is.
Andrew Hutchison: We’re talking horn diaphragm.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, so long story short.
Andrew Hutchison: But I, but I didn’t, but it planted a seed.
Kim Ryrie: Obviously I wasn’t involved in speakers after that because the Fairlight distraction went on for 20 years or something.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And then But in, in Fairlight I’d started using a lot of D. Another good name.
Andrew Hutchison: For a band, the Fairlight Distraction.
Kim Ryrie: But anyhow, so so you asked about how we started DEQX, which the original name was Clarity eq.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And what had happened there was one of our programmers, guy called Brian Connolly had left and started his own company called Lake DSP and Lake, had that name.
Andrew Hutchison: Rings a bell.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Lake had come up with this headphone technology whereby they come up with some HRTFs, which is head related transfer functions, which is sort of how the ears work to Determine where sounds are coming from.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: So each ear filters in a certain way. And if you can reproduce the way the ear is filtering by actually sticking a microphone inside the ear.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Creating, you know, doing a frequency sweep, impulse sweep, I should say. you can create, ah, a filter called an FIR filter. Finite impulse.
Andrew Hutchison: Yep.
Kim Ryrie: Response filter. And you can mimic, if you just stick headphones in your head, you can mimic the sounds coming from outside of your head rather than in between the headphones. And this was this technique that Lake had working and they contacted me. I was working at Fairlight at the time and I was sort of winding down a bit at Fairlight because by then we had venture capitalists and we had lots of politics and I was getting a bit sick of it. And I bet Brian said, can you help us commercialize this, this stuff because we run out of money and need to get investment. Yeah. And so I went and heard it and I said, well, the first thing you got to do is make a little demo. So I wrote a little script with, with Q, calling James Bond into his study to point out that the Russians were trying to get hold of this technology which make headphones work outside of your head. And good Lord, Kyu, this is unbelievable. And of course you put the headphones on and you can hear this happen.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And we ran into, we made this little one minute demo of this and it landed on Paul Keating’s desk, who was the ex prime minister. And and Brian had met Paul out in the street and they had a chat, met him in the street and yeah, because that office was next door in the city. And and Brian was explaining, he got. Paul politely said, oh, what do you do? And he said, oh, we make this technology. Oh, that sounds interesting. And Brian says, would you like to hear it? So anyway, we, we sent up a little CD battery. CD player with headphones. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Landed on Paul’s desk. And next day he was in Lake’s office saying, this is unbelievable. Hooly Dooley. This is fantastic. Hooley Dooley. And show us around. And so long story short, Paul introduced Lake to a rich friend of his who invested a million bucks or 2 million or something. Lake ended up going public. but meanwhile, I’d helped him do all this and, and I said, Brian, do you realize you could use this FIR filtering, technology for loudspeaker correction?
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: You know, you could measure a loudspeaker like we’re measuring the ear, the inside of the ear, the Inside of the ear was. All it was doing was just giving you an impulse response of what the ear was doing. Which amounts to the same thing as what a speaker’s doing the other way around.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but in verse, effectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
FIR filters can correct frequency response, but they also introduce timing errors
Kim Ryrie: And which means you can look at what it’s doing wrong and create an inverse filter for that to correct those anomalies. But the amazing thing about FIR filters doesn’t just correct frequency response because everyone knows, you know, all the audio files listening know that you can change frequency response and it, yeah. Might sound a bit better or might sound a little, the tone’s a bit different, they’re all very nice. But the X factor is the timing coherence is the phase linearity of what’s going on. and what’s amazing about FIR is that you can essentially, It’s complex the way it works mathematically, but effectively what happens is that you can measure
00:10:00
Kim Ryrie: a loudspeaker’s impulse response from that. You can see the frequency groups that are actually being delayed.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Slightly by the electromechanics of the, of each transducer, the woofer and whatever. plus the, the errors that are being introduced by the crossover filters. Because they’re not linear phase filters usually in the speaker, they’re minimum phase. So. And it will delay other people, you can make it delay other frequency groups so that these delayed frequencies can catch up. Now we’re only talking about, you know, probably three or four milliseconds through the mid range frequencies, which is where it matters. Which is where we notice timing going wrong subconsciously. We don’t. We’re so used to hearing.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s not like you can hear all that tweeter arriving late.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. You wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on. and I’m talking about frequency is not just between drivers being out of time. I’m talking about frequencies within one driver being out of time. And so, you know, the old story is, well, sound travels one foot in a millisecond. So in three milliseconds we’re talking about three feet. And again, doesn’t sound like a lot, but we notice it subconsciously. We notice a centimeters to detect where sound is coming from.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So our hearing is incredibly acutely aware. Yeah. I think that when stuff is wrong.
Andrew Hutchison: That’S an important point. Is that for people who not like. Oh yeah, can you hear that? Well, I mean that is sort of these phase differences are kind of how your hearing works. You’ve got to hear an ear on each side of your head for a reason. Yeah. and your brain’s measuring the, the difference in arrival times to work out where stuff’s coming from. Is that right?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, and that’s exactly right.
Dolby bought Lake Audio and used their technology to correct loudspeakers
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Kim Ryrie: Well, you can tell, right, so the head’s only, what, six inches wide?
Andrew Hutchison: Mine’s big.
Kim Ryrie: Mine might be eight inches.
Andrew Hutchison: Brad’s huge.
Kim Ryrie: So if, if something’s coming, you know, off from 45 degrees.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: The difference is only inches.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And we’re picking that up.
Andrew Hutchison: yes, if you work out the time component.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah. so we’re incredibly Microseconds.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, lots of microseconds. Not one microsecond, but yeah, I mean, we’re very sensitive.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, very sensitive to that. So, so that’s what’s amazing about this technology. And so I said to Brian, why don’t you use this? Why doesn’t Lake do loudspeaker technology? He said, well, we’re just so tied up with this headphone stuff and Dolby’s licensing it from us now. They’re going to call it Dolby Headphones and therefore we’re going to go public.
Andrew Hutchison: Paul wants to get his money back.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So that’s. And that is what happened. Paul’s mate, isn’t he? And by the way, meanwhile, they patented the way they do the FIR processing with dsp and we’d made an agreement to license their patent to do speaker correction. And so then of course I’d helped them get taken over by Dolby. Right. So Dolby take them over. long story short, they went public, but then Dolby delisted them and then bought the whole company out.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And now Lake became Dolby Australia with 200 engineers working there in the city for a period. Yeah, I think it’s down to about 100 now. But, you know, they were pretty serious.
Andrew Hutchison: In this city somewhere.
Kim Ryrie: I’m not sure where they are now, but at the time that I was dealing with this, they’re in the city.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Okay. So, but, but Dolby said, no, you can’t license our patent. I don’t want, we don’t want anyone to have this stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And, my partner who’d started, Clarity EQ with Me or now called DEQX Paul Glendenning said, oh, don’t worry, I know another way to do this.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.
Kim Ryrie: I said, really? And he said this is all mind numbing arithmetic that I don’t understand. And so he, he came up with a new way of doing it. The only difference was we had to use floating point DSP arithmetic rather than the lake process. You could get away with fixed point which was cheaper to do back in the day with dsp. So that was our only slight compromise. We ended up patenting our version of it. We had a US patent on that. And so that’s what we’ve been using ever since. So effectively what we’re doing is we can. Well, as you know, as a speaker designer, it’s not just that designing speakers is a whole shopping list of dramas.
Andrew Hutchison: Certainly is a really good way of.
Kim Ryrie: Putting a shopping list of
00:15:00
Kim Ryrie: dramas.
Andrew Hutchison: Say it more kindly and say it’s a grab bag full of compromises or something.
Kim Ryrie: Okay, let’s leave it at that. But going active resolves a lot of those issues, right? So for instance, one issue even going active, you know, the pro speakers, as you say, have been active for many decades, but they started off being analog active. So they were just using 24 decibels nearly universally. 24 decibels per octave. you know, crossover at 2K for the tweeter, whatever. Maybe they were three way, so there’d be 200 hertz to the woofer. but even they weren’t time aligned. Right. Because what, what Pro Audio wanted was an accurate frequency response. They didn’t really care about time alignment because what they had to be sure of is that when they were mixing stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: They just had the levels of everything accurate.
Andrew Hutchison: Right.
Kim Ryrie: So they were totally fixated. Fixated, yes, on an accurate frequency response so that they knew that what went out the door was at least mixed m and balanced properly.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And then they’d leave it to audio files to get their own speakers that cleaned up timing issues or whatever Audio files needed. Well, that’s right.
Andrew Hutchison: I mean they’re only listening to it. It’s not like it’s part of the recording process in the sense that it’s laid down or fixed in the recording. So yeah, you can.
Kim Ryrie: That’s true.
Andrew Hutchison: The customer can fix it at home with their Wilson audios and their adjustable mids and tweens. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: If they’ve got a spare 50 grand US, you know.
DSP came along for studios for active, uh, speakers
So anyway, then DSP came along for studios for active, speakers. And the beauty of DSP meant you could, first of all, you could go to steeper crossovers if you want, pretty easily. even doing steeper than, 24 decibels per octave. Filters in the analog world wasn’t all that easy.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no.
Kim Ryrie: You’d have to really be selecting components and measuring everything. It was a bit of a pain.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Virtually impossible. Passive speakers.
Andrew Hutchison: yeah, I don’t think anyone’s really explored that with a passive filter, but. Brad, have you done a sixth, order passive filter?
Kim Ryrie: I’m sure he has.
Kim Ryrie: No comment.
Andrew Hutchison: No comment.
Kim Ryrie: How that turned out. No.
Andrew Hutchison: So, no, no, it doesn’t.
Kim Ryrie: It, it’s not fun.
Andrew Hutchison: Doesn’t. It doesn’t, doesn’t roll off accurately.
Kim Ryrie: It’s not fun and it’s not easy.
Andrew Hutchison: Creates its own problems when you’ve got.
Kim Ryrie: Capacitors with typically 20 tolerance.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, you’re definitely. Well, your hand. Any passive filter, your hand selected components. I mean, we batch everything up here because otherwise you simply won’t be building two matching crossovers for a stereo pair of speakers. It won’t happen.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly.
Andrew Hutchison: So, you’ve got. So the DEQX product started and of course.
Kim Ryrie: Let me just finish that. Just saying. When DSP came in, what they could then do was delay. At least they could time alarm. At least they could then time alarm drivers and they could do simple parametric eq. So if they had a bit of a peak somewhere or a dip somewhere, they could tweak it to get the frequency response better. So at least that fixed time alignment issues between drivers. Not within the driver, but between. So then when we came along, with fir, we’re thinking, well, hang on, we can now do linear phase crossovers because that’s what FIR lets you do at any, slope. So in the analog world, if you want linear phase, you’re pretty much stuck to a capacitor.
Kim Ryrie: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Single pole.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And if once you go beyond that, you no longer, linear phase. So with our version of fir, processing, we can do steep linear phase. We can do. Typically at the show we just did, we had 12 pole filter. That’s 72 dB active.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And which means it’s just virtually a brick wal do. Which means there’s just no crossover. Even if it sounds all right.
Andrew Hutchison: Like it doesn’t.
Kim Ryrie: It’s, it’s counterintuitive. But it sounds amazing.
Andrew Hutchison: Which it kind of should sound amazing because, I mean, you can, I mean you get the best out of your drum.
Kim Ryrie: I used to. You can’t do that. You got to Have a bit of a cross bit of, you know, melding an amalgam. And you obviously can, you can set with our system any crossover thing. You can do 48 decibels or 36 or whatever.
Kim Ryrie: Right.
Kim Ryrie: but, but we, but with that particular design we did at the show, we chose 72 decibels.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And so and then within each driver we, we can correct any non linearities within the driver itself. Just. Right. Okay. So
00:20:00
Kim Ryrie: you end up getting very consistent timing coherence. We’re only adding milliseconds to the audio, which no one doesn’t care. The only time it matters is if you’re trying to synchronize with the video, but you can get away with about a 15 millisecond delay before video starts seeming to be out of sync with the audio. so that was, you know, that’s the bottom line of the advantage of going active.
You got rid of your passive crossover and you’ve got no cable
there’s other advantages that we talked about which are inherent to any active system. One is that each amplifier is bolted directly to each beaker diaphragm. You know, so not only have.
Andrew Hutchison: You got rid of your passive crossover, you’ve got rid of cable as well.
Kim Ryrie: You got rid of cable not necessarily because you might have the amps m externally, but what you do have, but.
Andrew Hutchison: You’Ve got a foot of cable not you know, well, a foot or.
Kim Ryrie: Even if you’ve got lots of feet, what you have done is you’ve, you’ve only got three or four octaves worth of audio running in each cable.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: You haven’t got ten octaves.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, indeed.
Kim Ryrie: Fighting amongst each other, you know, in a single cable. You’ve also got each amplifier only having to deal with three or four octaves.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know you’ve got a, you got a, a high current amp for your base.
Andrew Hutchison: Indeed. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You’ve got something for the mid range and you could have a 10 watt class A for your tweeter if you want. So yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: So the advantages are, the advantages are ah, clear and they’re immense and yet still in the audio, in the hi fi industry, the concept of a, of a, an active speaker is kind of shunned a little bit by, by customers and dealers. people are a little bit scared of it. Why? Why? I don’t know. Because ultimately just plug them into the wall like a vacuum cleaner and connect up a cable to the back of almost any preamp. Preamp obviously. But any avm, any, just about any audio integrated amp has a pre out pair of RCA sockets these days. I don’t know what the problem is. M It’s a weird thing I guess it doesn’t enable easy comparison between passive speakers and active speakers where the passive speaker has obviously got its own power amp and you know, there’s the saga of, you know, how are we going to compare one with the other and of course probably shouldn’t because the active speaker is immediately in most cases going to sound more correct obviously. But what, how does your product get used? So your customers, of which you have many, you’ve been selling these things for a long time in their initial versions and now you’ve got this new super duper version that’s almost finished beta testing. As I understand it. As far as the software is concerned, it’s a beautiful looking product. I’ve seen it being built, parts that are inside it. This is clearly genuinely high end electronics in every way. It’s not some fake high end thing that’s got a pretty case and just garbage china spec insides. This is a serious product. Lots of processing power but also lots of high quality audio, capability. But how does someone use the product? How do you. Or what, what is the main use? Like are they using it with their home built speakers or are they using existing high quality speakers? Pair of Wilsons maybe?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, just tell us about that. It’s a really good question. So that’s why we have three different models.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So the flagship model, which we call the pre8 because it’s got 8 outputs but that only means that it’s still stereo but you can have outputs for subwoofers, outputs for bass drivers, output for mid range drivers and outputs for tweeters, all of which would then go to their own amplifiers. Yeah, which then go to the, to the drivers. To the drivers. So that of course implies some degree of diy.
Andrew Hutchison: So it kind of does.
Kim Ryrie: You can’t just go into your hi fi shop and kind of. Can I have that box and there’s a pair of connectors on the back for each driver with nothing in between. So it does imply that you’re going to have to do that yourself. Unless and, and that’s what most of our users do. They do do that. They, they will either go and buy an affordable speaker of any kind, they will take the crosshair out and they will bypass their internal.
Andrew Hutchison: So this is a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time. So that is, is that what some customers doing that if they want a pretty box like they want Something that their partner is happy with.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Are they doing just that? Are they going getting a pair of, I don’t know, a pair of 800 series BMWs. And someone will have done this, I’m sure, and take that hefty passive crossover board out of the bottom of the box and
00:25:00
Andrew Hutchison: wire up all the drivers to extra terminals on the back, then via your suggested or their power amps to your DEQX box. Is that. Has that happened?
Kim Ryrie: Totally, it’s happened. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay. On 800 series, I’m using as an example. But certainly they’re getting. They’re getting production quality speakers and kind of getting rid of the bits they don’t need. Yeah. Bypass. Much easier way and simpler way to describe it. Thank you, Brad.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, sorry. Well, well, look, if you just paid, you know, I think I was just looking at an ad for Wilson Audio. Talking of Wilson Audio, is the like $50,000? Yes. you would think twice before you started ripping them to pieces.
Kim Ryrie: perhaps you might leave the crossover in situ, Just disconnect the cables.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, I don’t know where the crossover is, but I know it’s probably potted in a fancy box and it’s bolted down somewhere and there’s lots of heavy cables running to the drivers.
Kim Ryrie: So. Yeah, look, I can’t speak for that particular model of speaker, but. But the point is you don’t. That’s the idea is that you don’t need to pay $50,000 for a pair of speakers. That’s. That’s our hope. But if you’ve already got them and you’re thinking, you know, you feel like an adventure, you know, you can do it and you can do it without wrecking them. You know, you can, you can take things apart in a way that you could put it back together again if you ever want to resell it. But in fact, we’ve just introduced, some amplifier amplifiers for particularly for people that want to go active, because suddenly you need, say, three channels of amplifier per speaker. you know, and then often you might have subwoofers, but they’ll already be active, so you don’t really need four amps. So we’ve done a thing we call. We’ve got. The model we had at the show is called AMPI3 and it’s got three. as you know, we’ve been freaking around with D class amps, mainly because for us, we can deal with D class. Everything else is much more complicated and you can buy amps from millions of places. But for us, we were really impressed with the new Purify line of amplifiers. So the Ampi 3 has three purify modules in it and a power supply and it’s this. And the metalwork is designed that you can actually bolt it to the side of a speaker.
Andrew Hutchison: It looks like you could do just that.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. so you can take out the plate that is holding the existing say bi wireable connectors. Literally take the whole thing out. Then you put a rubber seal around where you then bolt the thing so you keep the, the box airtight. And you can then just wire directly to the, to the speaker so that.
Andrew Hutchison: Where the terminal cup was becomes your port for getting you three lots of cable in there.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That goes straight into the amp.
Andrew Hutchison: Say you, you, you. You’re pulling the speaker up. I mean if you do that to a production speaker you, you’re really not destroying it to
Kim Ryrie: No you’re not. You can put that back later.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: You probably get it. Maybe the average consumer might get a table to give them a hand.
Kim Ryrie: You will probably have to put about four screws into the, into the timber work to hold the at the back.
Andrew Hutchison: Can you blue tack it on double sided tape? Actually being class D, they probably don’t weigh that much do.
Kim Ryrie: Oh they don’t weigh much at all. No.
Andrew Hutchison: You could double sided tape.
Kim Ryrie: No, they’re just quite small but also quite small screws and.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And that. That would be the only downside. so I would imagine if they’re committed.
Kim Ryrie: They’re committed to.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Once you’ve done it you’re not going to be going back.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That’s for sure.
Andrew Hutchison: Because it sounds obviously the, the sound is amazing. So, so just. So that’s one kind of buyer for a deck.
Kim Ryrie: But of course you know you can go to Harvey nor you can go into anywhere. Buy a floor standard of almost any kind.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That costs a couple of grand.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Pair and you can easily do it to that and you’ll get a pretty startling result. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know.
One way you suggest Brad is you don’t change the speaker. You don’t make it active
Kim Ryrie: So let’s now call line up what you can do. One, you could take a high end. What they call high end loudspeaker. and take the DEQX and basically either design your own crossover filters.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: With those drive units or just simply correct it for free frequency and group delay.
Kim Ryrie: Yes.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That’s not, not, not changing the passive.
Kim Ryrie: No, you don’t have to do that. And, and as you know.
Andrew Hutchison: You know so just, just for clarity. So The other way you’re suggesting Brad is you don’t change the speaker. You don’t make it active. You use the power of the DEQX to fix the issues that are inherent in the passive.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right.
Andrew Hutchison: The way that the production speaker. And two, you don’t modify, you just connect it up. Use the DEQX as your preamp.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Twiddle some knobs. Well, run a measurement. No doubt with the M. With the mic.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. And two of the three models we have now are exactly for
00:30:00
Kim Ryrie: that. They’re not intended to go fully active. They do let you do biamping because a lot of say floor standards and even bookshelves let you bi- wire them. You’re still going through their internal passive crossover. So you can’t change the crossover frequency that they’ve. But you can make them steeper. You can put another crossover on top of the
Andrew Hutchison: Over the top.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And typically you’ll only be doing that. See typically inside of, let’s say you’ve got a three way bi wirable speaker. The bottom connector will be bass.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And the upper one will be mid and tweed.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: So which has another advantage is that it makes it easy to measure the mid and tweeter together, without the bass involved. You can do that separately now with the DEQX. So you can use four channels of amps.
Andrew Hutchison: Yep.
Kim Ryrie: You know, one driving the. The upper.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: I mean for left and right.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And so that’s, that’s what you can do with the pre-4 model which is basically intended for a full range speaker, plus subwoofers or for bi wiring, bi amping, existing bi wireable speed. And that’s most of the market at the moment. You know, but for people that really want to go the whole hog, you know, I’d recommend you get the flagship model. You can start off doing that with passive speaking.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: But you know, a year or two down the road you might feel like, well, let’s try. Or you find an old pair of speakers on ebay or something. Ah. You know, a pair of classics. For a pair of classics.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And get into them newly some life.
DEQX software tells you how to measure the speaker rather than a room measurement
And see now what comes with the DEQX, which works with all three models is our software, which is the key to what we do. So it’s all integrated so that you measure the speaker in a certain way. it tells you how to measure the speaker because it’s different from a room measurement. Okay. A room measurement you measure around the sweet spot where you’re going to be listening. Whereas a speaker measurement you want to be at least largely anechoic. You don’t Want much room information in the measurement. It doesn’t matter having some room reflections in the measurement. there’s ways we suggest you’ll do a sort of partially near field measurement. Doesn’t matter that there’s a few reflections from the floor and whatever. you’ll tend to do it off axis to the speaker. You’ll do it, you might say point the speakers straight into the room rather than towing them in and you might measure them towards where the sweet spot is. In other words, you might have the microphone back, say 60cm, something like that from the baffle and then at about.
Andrew Hutchison: 15 degrees or something, something like that.
Kim Ryrie: Back to the midpoint where you might be sitting.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Because that’ll just give you a very clean phase accurate measurement of what the speaker is doing natively. And we need to know that to be able to compensate for that.
Andrew Hutchison: And then you gate that measurement internally. Like in the.
Kim Ryrie: And then. Yeah, internally. The software deals with, to make it.
Andrew Hutchison: Sort of a quasi anechoic measurement.
Kim Ryrie: If you’re measuring the close. You don’t even need to gate it much.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: If at all.
Kim Ryrie: Midway between the tweet and if it’s a two way try and get that.
Kim Ryrie: Crossover stitch up and it’s very easy. And by the way, we have an online support thing which comes with for free for people in the beta program which we have at the moment. we get online with them, we can run them through the software. They don’t need to understand what’s going, going on. No, no, no, it’s all pretty.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’s. I think that’s what I’m. The point I’m trying to make is that both my own interest to understand who is likely to want to. Because the product’s amazing but it is quite, it is clearly designed by a very smart team of people for very smart customers is what it seems. But meaning, that.
Kim Ryrie: No, not.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, but that’s technically savvy.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, they’re technically savvy. They want to come through the back door.
Kim Ryrie: Do they need to be and get.
Kim Ryrie: No, they used to need to be. All our, all our legacy products were a nightmare to use.
Andrew Hutchison: just, just, just so you know.
Kim Ryrie: We had, we had news flash of it but you know it has 160 page manual.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: And
00:35:00
Andrew Hutchison: so you’ve simplified it because we’re on version four now.
Kim Ryrie: Right. Yeah. The whole point of generation four is we, we took the software off Windows. Ah. it’s now all up in the cloud. Which means. Yeah, you can, you can run it from your iPhone. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: You shouldn’t. Not for setup, but, for setup, you should use a real computer. If you can just. On a browser.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And it’ll show. Because that’ll show you the graph. You want to see what’s going on. You don’t need to see them. We can do that online with you. We can make all the decisions. And that’s a free service for people that are setting up. or dealers will do it.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Or anyone that’s even remotely savvy can do it. And the idea of the beta software program we’re in now is just to get that down to the simplest possible user interface we can. Doesn’t, mean that if you know what you’re doing, you can’t get under the hood and be tweaking stuff. But for 90% of what people need.
Kim Ryrie: We can deform so effectively, you’ve got a DEQX, which will just. You bung a pair of speakers on.
Kim Ryrie: And that’s it. You don’t. For those who love the look, the sound.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. You don’t have to even use any correction. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You’ve got all the.
Andrew Hutchison: No.
You should have the mic at least for doing room measurement
And that’s my next question. yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So that’s the first level, in a sense. Sorry.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, yeah, because so someone who just wants a very good quality preamp processor. Oh, well, it is a processor. Not surround sound processor. Dac, but yeah. DAC streamer. A beautiful product that. That’s just beautifully crafted. sounds great. They just want that they can just buy a nice pair of speakers that they like the sound of at the shop.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: They can only make them sound better by. That’s getting out the measurement microphone and, and letting the. Letting the DEQX interpret what it’s hearing and then make some corrections. Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Question then. So when you buy that, what m. Might. Might call. I don’t like using the term entry level just. But you do get the microphone with that, even if you’re not going to utilize.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Because you. You should have the mic at least for doing room measurement. Right. And at least just see if you’ve got room. Correction. Huge room. Room issue. You don’t really know where it is. So he’s.
Andrew Hutchison: That’s right. So, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, Kim, but there’s part two, because I do sort of want to for my own benefit. But for the listener, was saying, we’ve got a DEQX. We’re doing this. But it’s got such a broad range of skills. The other thing of course it does. Is so you take your normal. You like a pair of, I don’t know, focal something or others or B and W something or others or a pair of Dynaudios or Dellichords or whatever. They don’t need any correction. so you’ve got.
Kim Ryrie: Sorry, that was really Dare you.
Kim Ryrie: I didn’t even have that.
Andrew Hutchison: So you’ve got this.
Kim Ryrie: I’m assuming that’s the case.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, we won’t know until we turn the DEQX on. But the point is you’ve. But you’ve put your Dellichords in a room that’s not particularly favorable. The DEQX like it’s all glass and tiles. You live on the river in Queensland. The wind’s blowing through. You don’t want to lock yourself in a, in a correctly, treated space. can the DEQX also deal with that glass and tile emporium, affect the deck extra reverb time that. Because, I mean you can’t get rid of the reverb time. But does it do a bit of like. It is room correction on the DEQX. A separate thing. That’s a separate mode. We’re going to test for room. Because you are. Because you’re going to put the mic like you said, over, the listing position.
Kim Ryrie: It is a separate thing.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And or, or you can, let’s say you’ve got a bi wireable speaker.
Kim Ryrie: And as we were saying, you’ve got one amp driving the mid and the tweeter and you’ve got the other amp doing the bass. Well, the bass is almost certainly crossing over to the mid. Somewhere around 200 hertz. Right. Somewhere like that. And the room as you know, is all about below 200 hertz. Pretty much.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Except when you have glass.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I’m giving you the worst, worst, worst possible case. But, but yes, far as the massive room modes. Yes. They’re under 200.
Kim Ryrie: So you can just do, you could, you could do that bass correction by measuring from the listening position.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And effectively not doing a speaker correction on the bass per se. Because it’s all about room and bass at the, at the listening position.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: so you can, you can do a separate filter which will do that. They have to do it again if you go to a different room. Yeah, sure. But yeah, you can do all that. You can.
Andrew Hutchison: It’ll do a lot.
Kim Ryrie: You can just do different things.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
You can control the software for them remotely if they want us to
Kim Ryrie: It’s why we have the DEQXpert, we call them the DEQX.
Kim Ryrie: Back to ask about the DEQXpert.
Kim Ryrie: Because People often don’t know what all
00:40:00
Kim Ryrie: the options are. And, and it will depend on what their circumstances, what their system is and what their room is like and everything. So in minutes we can see what’s going on and make some recommendations and m. We can control the software for them remotely if they want us to.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, that’s what I’m thinking. Yes. So you can. Look, their machine is connected to their Internet connection.
Kim Ryrie: Yes.
Andrew Hutchison: And you can. And the correction, files or what have you stored in the cloud.
Kim Ryrie: We would tend to use, two communication things. One is the, we would not actually connect via their connection to the Internet to their box. Typically we can do that in the future, but we would tend to run a separate, connection via TeamViewer, whereby we can literally control running it on. And we can visually see you’ve got.
Andrew Hutchison: Your fingers on the button.
Kim Ryrie: So, yeah, we visually see the room and where they’ve put the microphone and we say, no, can you move the mic a bit to the left or can you come out a bit further? And so that’s the way.
Andrew Hutchison: That’s pretty effective. That’s cool.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, and it gives us a very good idea. And then we see the measurements they get. And we got a very good idea just by looking at the measurements, what it’s going to be sounding like a quick question then. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Do you often get them to play around with speaker positioning or is the whole. Is the whole point of the correction is to. I’m just. I have to plonk them there because.
Kim Ryrie: The wife has already decided where the speakers are going or the man. So.
Kim Ryrie: So if it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s not.
Kim Ryrie: If it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: Let’s call it something for adjustment. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: So it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: Let’s call it. As Kim says, they’re already in the correct spot.
Kim Ryrie: Right.
Kim Ryrie: Okay. So therefore, that’s where the DEQX comes to the four.
Kim Ryrie: If there’s an option, if you’ve got a room dedicated. Absolutely.
Kim Ryrie: You can.
Kim Ryrie: We do the formulas and we tell you where the best spot.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Position is. Okay. We’ve got that flexibility, but usually that’s not an option.
Kim Ryrie: Okay. Okay.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay. But what I’d like to do is have a quick break. I want to come back and ask you about, I mean, obviously your history is in Australia, but I don’t want to ask you about the fact of, why they’re made here. So we’ll be back shortly.
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Kim Ryrie: The vast majority of the parts are assembled in Australia
Andrew Hutchison: And we’re back. We’re back folks. Back with Kim Ryrie, at the desk with Brad Serhan and myself. to discuss the remainder of the fine detail of the DEQX generation for. Do you call it a preamp DAC or are you calling it a streamer DAC preamp or you just call or a DSP processor because it can be used in all these different ways. What do you call it?
Kim Ryrie: I don’t know what to call it.
Andrew Hutchison: This is the problem. It does too much.
Kim Ryrie: Well, some people have called it like the Swiss army knife of audio.
Andrew Hutchison: Well that’s kind of what it is.
Kim Ryrie: Well as you say. Well it’s, it’s an integrated. I suppose that’s the best way to say it. It’s an integrated. Well no, only one model has an amp. Yeah, but, but fundamentally it’s a preamp. I guess it’s got lots of digital and analog inputs. It’s a streamer Y. it’s. It’s got high end pro end DEQX in it. state of the art DEQX. It’s got state of the art A to D so that we’ve got. And of course Dynavector, wouldn’t have made a custom Dynavector preamp for us unless they were happy with the transparency of the digital. And it’s totally transparent.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: We’re talking about minus 240db distortion in the digital domain.
Andrew Hutchison: Is that right? Okay.
Kim Ryrie: in other words it’s beyond non existent. The distortion that there is comes in when you go back into the analog domain.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: From the, from the DEQX and so on.
Andrew Hutchison: So you now it, it’s all made. The vast majority of the product of the parts is sourced in Australia and it’s all assembled here. What’s designed here? I mean.
Kim Ryrie: Well, no, I don’t think that’s fair to say. The electronics pretty much all come from overseas. I don’t mean, I mean the chips. Right.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Australia make zero chips.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, we don’t. I don’t think we’re making any reels of surface
00:45:00
Andrew Hutchison: mount resistors either. So. So. Yeah, no, that’s a. That’s right. I guess none, of it’s made here. I guess there’s an awful lot of assembly happening here.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, it’s awfully.
Andrew Hutchison: A lot of, A lot of the parts are, important. Of course.
Kim Ryrie: And it’s all designed here.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but it’s designed here. And is it designed here? I mean, your team of people are mostly Australian.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s all designed. We’re incredibly lucky. I think, you know, over the years that’s where I have been lucky, has been to work with great people.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And we. For instance, Joe Narai, who’s our COO and RD manager, he and I used to compete in the old days selling digital audio, workstations to America.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, right.
Kim Ryrie: He sold hundreds of his dsp, consoles and stuff. And we’ve always been friends. But you know, it’s interesting that the two, the two digital audio workstations the world was buying, both came from Australia from completely separate companies.
Andrew Hutchison: And now you’re working together.
Kim Ryrie: And now Joe’s just joined us. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: this year. And I’ve been trying to get him for a while actually, but I’m getting old. I know. I was gonna say he actually needs someone.
Andrew Hutchison: He looks, he looks younger.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, he is younger. we’ve got Glenn Dickens now. Glenn was running R D at Dolby for 15 years.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: he’s. He virtually co invented Atmos at Dolby. He’s now working for us as we speak. He’s in the room next door. Yeah. on the blower with Joe.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: trying to sort out a time alignment issue in the base integration algorithm.
Andrew Hutchison: So the pedigree.
Kim Ryrie: So we’ve got some pretty heavy hitters.
Andrew Hutchison: Absolutely.
Kim Ryrie: In there.
Kim Ryrie: Chris Alfred worked with me back in the fairlight days. there he was working on the the daw. We got an Academy Award, technical award.
Christoph was co creator of Dolby Atmos
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Chris went up to get. He’s got the little golden thing.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh really?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. For services to the film industry.
Andrew Hutchison: Where’s that? Is this that in the building?
Kim Ryrie: No, that’s at Chris’s house. And what a touch. so we’ve been working together for ages. Christoph. also running Dolby. He was co creator of Dolby Atmos. He’s now, with us as well. Not full time, but as a. Pretty much as a full time consultant.
Andrew Hutchison: so you’ve absolutely got the people you need to make this very complex product work.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right. And Now, Glenn, who I mentioned, he’s on 120 patents.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.
Kim Ryrie: Not many people are like 120. Yeah, he’s the guy who, with Dave McGrath back in the lake days, come up with the first fir pattern.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know, which is what’s made all this stuff even possible.
What’s with Australia and, um, digital processing? It’s, it’s
Andrew Hutchison: So what’s with Australia and, digital processing?
Kim Ryrie: It’s, it’s really an interesting question.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And I don’t know the answer to that. And of course, Tony Furse, who was the guy that designed the original Fairlight dual processor stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: You know, he’s Australian. He’s very Australian. he used to throw boards across the room at me when, I. Well, actually, I should have told you this story. When we started working with Tony, you know, we took over his prototypes and we were making our own printed circuit boards of his stuff and we took it over to his place and he plugged it into his machine and it blew up. And of course we had the polarizing key slightly out of center. Oh, the circuit board, there was like 200 connections on it.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And so he picks the border out of the machine, throws it across the room. Peter and I says, if you guys don’t get your act together, you better, you better forget about getting in business. So that was the equivalent of the.
Kim Ryrie: Zap he almost got.
Kim Ryrie: Really. So, Tony was a character genius. And so we’ve just been, you know, we’ve just been really lucky to have people like that. People like Michael Carlos, who, as I mentioned, you know, he designed the page R, Ah, music sequencer, because he was a music composer. And that was what, to the Fairlight was like what VisiCalc was to Apple. The first spreadsheet. Apples didn’t take off until spreadsheets existed.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And, for us, that was like Page R, you know, the rhythm sequencer, the real time sequencer, and stuff like that. So, yeah, we’ve just had a lot of great people, inventing products before.
Andrew Hutchison: They actually exist in the sense of. Because you mentioned the MIDI thing, you know, where you didn’t invent midi, but the, the concept, you know, you were already doing it at the Fairlight. There seems like there’s a lot of that. So maybe the DEQX is slightly ahead of its, its time.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, look,
00:50:00
Kim Ryrie: it is ahead of its time in the sense that audio has to go this way. It cannot not do this because if it’s going to keep improving, this is the only way to improve.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s a bit stuck at the moment and it feels like, yeah, you’re right.
Kim Ryrie: It’S stuck because of the traditional hi fi marketing regime where you had to be able to swap components. You have to be able to just have a speaker that’s compatible with his amplifier, this amplifier.
Andrew Hutchison: The art of system building or matching system synergy. And I look, I don’t see that going away in the same way as tubes haven’t gone away and books haven’t gone away and haven’t gone away.
Kim Ryrie: But it won’t go away at the, at the, at the high end.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no.
Kim Ryrie: Where people want to experiment and do that. And that’s why we’ve got, you know, the Pre 8 and the Pre 4, where you can choose your own amplifiers and you can do all that, whereas normally an active speaker, that’s all been decided for you in advance, you know. And it’s why audiophiles don’t like a lot of traditional active speakers. No, one way, one reason was what we were talking about, that the focus for active speakers for pro audio, is to get the frequency response right.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: They don’t care too much about the time to be. They just need the balance to be.
Andrew Hutchison: I can, I can see a time when, you know, an active speaker is both affordable and quite stunning in its performance. And it’ll be that performance that will take some people over the edge. They’ll go, wow, that, that. I love the charm factor of my system, but this is, this is stunning. This is. Well, you’re getting to and, and the sense of space and all of the things that they want. They get a little bit of slightly furry with their existing system. It’s a bit of fun. But the digital thing will really. I mean sometimes you, you sort of, it’s like modern cars, right? You sort of. I mean everyone loves an older car for style and the sound, but I tell you what, I mean, a modern car is just, it just works and it works so well.
Kim Ryrie: It is amazing really. We’ve got a Tesla and, and I’ve got a Toyota, right?
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: The thing I hate about the Toyota is having to get it serviced. Tesla, you don’t service them, they just sort of go forever and there’s, I don’t know what, you know, one day the wheels are going to fall off or something.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, catch fire, that’s fine.
Kim Ryrie: Hasn’t caught fire yet. Under the command of.
Andrew Hutchison: They really, they really do if, at all. But no, I’ll tell you another story. It’s just that also the Tesla is so, it’s the tipping point For a lot of people that love cars, a lot of people that love performance cars and you know, great sound and great handling cars have had their head turned by the Tesla.
The DEQX Generation 4 isn’t actually really out yet, is it
Maybe your DEQX product is, is possibly that, that, that thing where people start, people who really love great audio systems could be tipped the other way because yours isn’t. The Generation 4 isn’t actually really out yet, is it? And this is something we should talk about.
Kim Ryrie: It’s not formally out like.
Andrew Hutchison: It’S on beta software.
Kim Ryrie: It’s, it’s. We’re running beta software because we want to just keep improving the user interface. At the moment it’s pretty easy to use. but we’re, we’re making it better.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so that’s, so that’s what that’s about.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And until, and we’ve set ourselves probably the end of Q1 to have that finished. But once we get to that point, we have to sell the system through traditional dealer networks and international distributors and they get very expensive doing that. So at the moment with our beta users, with our beta members, we’re able to sell direct factory.
Andrew Hutchison: So people can ring you up. like we’ll obviously have your website, linked to from our website. People who go through the DEQX website and basically just buy the product directly from you. At the moment.
Kim Ryrie: At the moment.
Andrew Hutchison: For the moment.
Kim Ryrie: For the moment, while it’s still in business. I think we’ve only got another 70, units allocated, so I don’t know how long that’ll last. But, but yeah, the, at the moment, you can get them at basically wholesale price.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And the software you get, over virtually every month we have a sort of new software release. It’s a bit like a Tesla and you know, over the air software. and but by the end of Q1 I think we’ll be going formally released.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so this is a little sweet, little, A little place in time at the moment where you’ve developed this amazing product. The software is basically done. It’s been developed over the last, well no doubt years, but it’s been. People have had their gen 4 units for a while. 6, 8, 10 months, whatever. the software’s much improved over that time with the assistance of the feedback from those users. And I guess that’s part of the package deal is that you get, you get a better price because you’re
00:55:00
Andrew Hutchison: part of the R D team to some degree.
The hardware is largely done at this stage, but the software is still improving
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So we like to hear from our users, our beta users. They well, not so much the.
Andrew Hutchison: Research, but the development part.
Kim Ryrie: To give you an idea, one of our earliest. Well, one of our users is Greg Timbers. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but Greg was running name rings a Bell at JBL. He was a lead designer at JBL for 20 years.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Right here.
Kim Ryrie: And he retired a couple some years ago. A couple years ago. And he’s famous in the industry and he m. has, has had our traditional models, the HDP4. He had a couple of those. They could only do three way active and he needed four way okay for his system that he’s got at home, which was his own Everest jbl. And he said, you know, until I got them I could never achieve what I wanted.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Because they were passive speakers. So so anyway, so we thought I better give Craig one of our early beating units. So we gave him one of the early pre 8. But the software was just a basket case and you know.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, you didn’t give it to him, right?
Kim Ryrie: Well I shouldn’t have done it because poor. The trouble is Greg is so amazing. He, he spent a whole weekend trying to deal with the bugs in the software.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And, and he doesn’t tell you about it until later. He says oh by the way, there’s a few problems here. And he’d written this sort of 80 page manual on how to fix it.
Andrew Hutchison: Or what his complaints are.
Kim Ryrie: But no, he was just saying oh look, you know, so we, we, we got, we worked with them over the next couple of months and then they were about. Took about three software releases before we got it all.
Andrew Hutchison: Shook the basics out of it.
Kim Ryrie: But what he did say, he said but the, but the new hardware makes the old system sound broken.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, is that right? Yeah. So there was a sound quality improvement.
Kim Ryrie: Over your previous improvement just in the. And that’s why we spent so long doing the hardware. Yeah. Okay. The hardware we have now is our third revision of Gen4. So we never released the first and the second revisions.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: But all the beta units got the.
Andrew Hutchison: All the latest versions.
Kim Ryrie: All the latest. So that’s production hardware. So that’s why you know it’s, it’s a, it’s a pretty good deal to get the.
Andrew Hutchison: Sounds like an exceptional deal. yeah, I think anyone who’s interested in, you know, what the hell this thing is.
Kim Ryrie: Well the catch is they got to buy it direct from the factory so they’re dealing with dealers and stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: But I mean for some people that.
Andrew Hutchison: Won’T be a problem.
Andrew Hutchison: I think they’ll like, yeah, I’m happy to deal with the factory. Clearly the talent is there. They know what they’re doing. So, So, yeah, get in touch. you probably won’t get Kim on the phone, but, you might.
Kim Ryrie: You never know.
Andrew Hutchison: But yeah, I mean, and the fact of the matter is.
Kim Ryrie: God help you if you do.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, could be a long conversation. The, the fact of the matter is that the, the software is largely done at this stage. It’s. It’s just the tinkering around the edges that’s left.
Kim Ryrie: I mean, you basically turn it on. We’re still doing a lot of software, but the software at the moment does work. But the new software will just simplify things.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, you’ll always be improving. And I mean all of those, even just the streaming functionality will always. There’ll always be some kind of, you know, firmware update for that, I guess.
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Kim Ryrie: So the good news is, though, Andrew, I think, and not just on the horizon.
Andrew Hutchison: So we’ve got a good news story.
Kim Ryrie: We have a good news story and, breaking here today is that if I decided, if I decide to buy one today, Kim. Yeah, And I don’t really want it. I, just want to reiterate. I don’t want to really play around with the. All the other, you know, what is it called? The thingamajig. And the thingamajig. There we go.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow, you’re really helping the story.
Kim Ryrie: What am I tip?
Andrew Hutchison: You don’t want to do room correction. That’s the word I was after. You don’t want to go active. If you just want to tweak the speaker a bit.
Kim Ryrie: Not even tweak.
Andrew Hutchison: You just want to use it as a music play.
Kim Ryrie: Nice pair of speakers at home. very nice.
Andrew Hutchison: Plug in your old CD player, which it will do. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: But you’ve got a pack.
Andrew Hutchison: You can Bluetooth your partner’s phone.
Kim Ryrie: You could buy that today, couldn’t we?
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, and it works perfectly. So that’s.
Kim Ryrie: That’s what I like.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, the one downstairs that we saw working did appear to work perfectly.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. So the point being rolling start. In all seriousness, you could just buy one today and have that. But the bonus, it’s not the steak knives and all that. So the use of things, you will get a microphone with that and you do. Will have the ability to do room correction and all the other grows. Yes.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that.
Kim Ryrie: That’s the, that’s right.
Kim Ryrie: The. The challenge for the whole Gen4 platform was to be able to compete with the highest end DACs that are out there.
Kim Ryrie: Right.
Kim Ryrie: You know and, and just have the analog transparency top of the line. So that
01:00:00
Kim Ryrie: effectively price wise the deck stuff should essentially be free. You know if you were to go buy high end streamer DEQX preamp, thing. Same sort of price. Yeah as the, as the recommended retail but for now.
Andrew Hutchison: Serhan Swift Bespoke loudspeakers Designed and built in Australia by perfectionists described by reviewers as exceptional. Serhan Swift has received numerous awards here and abroad including sound and image best stand amount loudspeaker 2024 for full information head to Serhanswift.com yeah basically half.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly retail price because it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah it’s a hell of a deal. And what you say is probably the most important point and that is the quality of the stuff that you’re really listening to. The quality of the DEQXs, the way the volume control circuitry works, the normal preamp stuff and then the quality of the streaming and the phono is all and phono stage. The point is. Yeah particularly the price you’re selling it for at the moment. That is it’s a great value for money Preamp the deck stuff is for free but it’s always for free anyhow because even at the price you’d like to sell through normal channels, it’s To me it sounds, I mean you say it seems expensive, I say no.
Kim Ryrie: 27 years worth of development as well.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I think it’s very good value for me.
All our pricing is in US dollars because that’s our biggest market
Kim Ryrie: And may I ask what that prices? We probably mentioned it before for that, you know.
Kim Ryrie: Well all our, all our pricing is in is in US dollars because that’s been our traditionally our biggest market. but About 80, about 95% of everything we’ve made traditionally is export. Right. Europe’s picked up a lot lately but so, but we still advertise in US dollars. So the list price of say a pre 8 at the moment is 15,900 US. That’s list MSRP. our beta price actually we’ve only just announced that you can have not all the options for the hardware. You don’t have to buy the Dyna Vector. no Rodeo. Okay, you don’t have to buy. You can add them later though. you don’t have to buy say the XMOS USB input. You don’t have to buy the digital outs which gets the beta price below 6000 US it’s, it’s 5950 I think it is.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And then it ends up at about 6950 if you have all the extras.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So it’s a lot down from the retail price but that’s normal wholesale. See that’s the way the industry works. The reason this high end audio stuff is expensive is because the dealers need a lot of money. The importers get so much percent the retailer.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, they’re all doing something, aren’t they. The distributor has to warehouse it and.
Kim Ryrie: Market it until promote.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. And then the retailer has to spend a lot of time educating, educating, talking to people and learning about how to use, use it and, and of course putting it all on display and in a bricks and mortar costs money building.
Kim Ryrie: So I might add the pre4 are a bit cheaper than that and so is the LS200 of course.
Andrew Hutchison: Right. Sounds to me like though if you do buy it direct from you at the moment that you get really high quality levels of service, you’ve got this team’s arrangement, you’ve got, you’ve got a team of people here to help support the product. It’s not like you’re left on your own to try to work out how it might work. It’s. There’s a huge amount of support.
Kim Ryrie: So I think when, well we, for the beta, we do directly. Yeah. for the beta members, when dealers start handling their profile. Yeah. We start charging.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. As you.
Kim Ryrie: For direct support. But the dealers would typically do that.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but my, but for the beta program you’re getting a high level of backup service, you’re getting new guys direct.
Kim Ryrie: And you get the normal warranties and all that sort of stuff.
Kim Ryrie: You’ve got the DEQXperts and you’ve got the ability for the DEQXperts to go in virtually.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. And help.
All right, well look, look, thanks again Kim for,
All right, well look, look, thanks again Kim for, thank you many hours of your time. Really appreciate it. The tour of the factory, we’ve got a little, we’ve got enough video footage. We’ll have a little video up to show people, what’s going on downstairs. It’s pretty impressive. thanks Brad. Thanks for your input. Lots, of interesting questions. couldn’t have done it without you. thank you so, a pleasure.
Kim Ryrie: So thank, you Kim.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, thanks again. And look, anyone who’s got any questions, get in touch with Kim. the details will be on our website and not an audio file. Thanks everybody and we’ll be back soon.
Kim Ryrie: Thank you.
Kim Ryrie: Thanks guys.
Andrew Hutchison: Pleasure.
Andrew Hutchison: If you’ve enjoyed the show and you must have because you made
01:05:00
Andrew Hutchison: it this far, can you please perhaps give us a five star, review if that’s.
Andrew Hutchison: What they call it on the platform.
Andrew Hutchison: That, that you prefer. So thanks again for listening. See you in the next episode.
01:05:10S2 EP023 – 1 simple step to speaker and room sound correction with DEQX and designer, Kim Ryrie.
Glenn Dickens virtually co invented Atmos at Dolby
Kim Ryrie: We’ve got Glenn Dickens. Now Glenn was running R and D at Dolby for 15 years.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: he virtually co invented Atmos at Dolby. He’s now working for us as we speak. He’s in the room next door on the blower with Joe, trying to sort out a time alignment issue in, in the, the Bass integration algorithm.
Episode 23, season two of Audiophile features Kim Ryrie on DEQX
Andrew Hutchison: And welcome back to not an Audiophile.
Andrew Hutchison: This is episode 23, season two. Today we speak to Kim Ryrie in part two.
Andrew Hutchison: I said it would be a week, it’s been weeks. I apologize for that. But we’re now back.
Andrew Hutchison: Brad and myself, speak to Kim , make little titters and comments and probably talk over each other a bit too much. We were highly enthusiastic.
Andrew Hutchison: We just seen downstairs where the
Andrew Hutchison: DEQX product was manufactured.
Andrew Hutchison: We met a number of the
Andrew Hutchison: Incredible people that are involved and frankly we were a little awestruck. Kim today in part two tells us.
Andrew Hutchison: Really how DEQX got a start, what.
Andrew Hutchison: It really is, what it does, and how Gen4 is a significant improvement in refinement over the previous generations.
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Andrew Hutchison: In the room, Kim. it’s been matter of minutes since we finished episode one and now we’re recording episode two. But we’re going to strike while I, Brad Serhan’s here as well to help us. the deck story started a lot longer ago than people realize and as you’ve joked, the the oldest startup in the history of startups. I mean 96, I think you just.
Kim Ryrie: 97.
Andrew Hutchison: 97, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Look, the triggered I should say.
Andrew Hutchison: By your, from the previous episode, your amazement, perhaps at how well analog active loudspeakers worked.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right.
Andrew Hutchison: And so no doubt there’s a connection between that experience with the Arty Jack band.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, so just.
Andrew Hutchison: And why you started DEQX. Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So just to recap on that story, we had a band back in the would have been early 70s and and we had a pair of Altec A7 voice of the theatre speakers using the passive crossovers that come with those. And we were blowing the horns up almost every month or two we’d blow the diaphragms up on the horn. and at the time I had a couple of hundred watt amp modules and someone suggested taking them active, which meant having one amp for the horn and another amp for the 15 inch woofer. And then I just built a four pole, 20, four decibels, per octave crossover in front of each amp. And what amazed us was just how clean suddenly the voice of the theatres became. And because of the steeper crossovers we stopped blowing up the horn.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: So that was my first realization of the advantages of active, especially for clarity, you know, minute, you know, reducing crossover distortion in particular. because you know the, for example with a passive crossover you’ve got a 15 inch woofer, that woofer, ah, if it’s got a slow roll off above the crossover frequency. I think the crossover to the horn was about 700 hertz or something like that. you know that’s still outputting nasty stuff up into, not up into 1400 hertz and higher because it’s only rolling off quite slowly. Meanwhile the horn is upset because we’re sending a lot of bass frequency to it which it doesn’t like.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So it’s, it’s nearly at its, you know, X max and getting distorted apparently.
Andrew Hutchison: Beyond its X max and beyond judging.
Kim Ryrie: By your, in our case beyond it.
Andrew Hutchison: Diaphragms a dozen at a time.
Kim Ryrie: Flying diaphragms.
Kim Ryrie: that’s the name for a band.
00:05:00
Kim Ryrie: So anyway, so long story short, yes it is.
Andrew Hutchison: We’re talking horn diaphragm.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, so long story short.
Andrew Hutchison: But I, but I didn’t, but it planted a seed.
Kim Ryrie: Obviously I wasn’t involved in speakers after that because the Fairlight distraction went on for 20 years or something.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And then But in, in Fairlight I’d started using a lot of D. Another good name.
Andrew Hutchison: For a band, the Fairlight Distraction.
Kim Ryrie: But anyhow, so so you asked about how we started DEQX, which the original name was Clarity eq.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And what had happened there was one of our programmers, guy called Brian Connolly had left and started his own company called Lake DSP and Lake, had that name.
Andrew Hutchison: Rings a bell.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Lake had come up with this headphone technology whereby they come up with some HRTFs, which is head related transfer functions, which is sort of how the ears work to Determine where sounds are coming from.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: So each ear filters in a certain way. And if you can reproduce the way the ear is filtering by actually sticking a microphone inside the ear.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Creating, you know, doing a frequency sweep, impulse sweep, I should say. you can create, ah, a filter called an FIR filter. Finite impulse.
Andrew Hutchison: Yep.
Kim Ryrie: Response filter. And you can mimic, if you just stick headphones in your head, you can mimic the sounds coming from outside of your head rather than in between the headphones. And this was this technique that Lake had working and they contacted me. I was working at Fairlight at the time and I was sort of winding down a bit at Fairlight because by then we had venture capitalists and we had lots of politics and I was getting a bit sick of it. And I bet Brian said, can you help us commercialize this, this stuff because we run out of money and need to get investment. Yeah. And so I went and heard it and I said, well, the first thing you got to do is make a little demo. So I wrote a little script with, with Q, calling James Bond into his study to point out that the Russians were trying to get hold of this technology which make headphones work outside of your head. And good Lord, Kyu, this is unbelievable. And of course you put the headphones on and you can hear this happen.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And we ran into, we made this little one minute demo of this and it landed on Paul Keating’s desk, who was the ex prime minister. And and Brian had met Paul out in the street and they had a chat, met him in the street and yeah, because that office was next door in the city. And and Brian was explaining, he got. Paul politely said, oh, what do you do? And he said, oh, we make this technology. Oh, that sounds interesting. And Brian says, would you like to hear it? So anyway, we, we sent up a little CD battery. CD player with headphones. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Landed on Paul’s desk. And next day he was in Lake’s office saying, this is unbelievable. Hooly Dooley. This is fantastic. Hooley Dooley. And show us around. And so long story short, Paul introduced Lake to a rich friend of his who invested a million bucks or 2 million or something. Lake ended up going public. but meanwhile, I’d helped him do all this and, and I said, Brian, do you realize you could use this FIR filtering, technology for loudspeaker correction?
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: You know, you could measure a loudspeaker like we’re measuring the ear, the inside of the ear, the Inside of the ear was. All it was doing was just giving you an impulse response of what the ear was doing. Which amounts to the same thing as what a speaker’s doing the other way around.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but in verse, effectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
FIR filters can correct frequency response, but they also introduce timing errors
Kim Ryrie: And which means you can look at what it’s doing wrong and create an inverse filter for that to correct those anomalies. But the amazing thing about FIR filters doesn’t just correct frequency response because everyone knows, you know, all the audio files listening know that you can change frequency response and it, yeah. Might sound a bit better or might sound a little, the tone’s a bit different, they’re all very nice. But the X factor is the timing coherence is the phase linearity of what’s going on. and what’s amazing about FIR is that you can essentially, It’s complex the way it works mathematically, but effectively what happens is that you can measure
00:10:00
Kim Ryrie: a loudspeaker’s impulse response from that. You can see the frequency groups that are actually being delayed.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Slightly by the electromechanics of the, of each transducer, the woofer and whatever. plus the, the errors that are being introduced by the crossover filters. Because they’re not linear phase filters usually in the speaker, they’re minimum phase. So. And it will delay other people, you can make it delay other frequency groups so that these delayed frequencies can catch up. Now we’re only talking about, you know, probably three or four milliseconds through the mid range frequencies, which is where it matters. Which is where we notice timing going wrong subconsciously. We don’t. We’re so used to hearing.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s not like you can hear all that tweeter arriving late.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. You wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on. and I’m talking about frequency is not just between drivers being out of time. I’m talking about frequencies within one driver being out of time. And so, you know, the old story is, well, sound travels one foot in a millisecond. So in three milliseconds we’re talking about three feet. And again, doesn’t sound like a lot, but we notice it subconsciously. We notice a centimeters to detect where sound is coming from.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So our hearing is incredibly acutely aware. Yeah. I think that when stuff is wrong.
Andrew Hutchison: That’S an important point. Is that for people who not like. Oh yeah, can you hear that? Well, I mean that is sort of these phase differences are kind of how your hearing works. You’ve got to hear an ear on each side of your head for a reason. Yeah. and your brain’s measuring the, the difference in arrival times to work out where stuff’s coming from. Is that right?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, and that’s exactly right.
Dolby bought Lake Audio and used their technology to correct loudspeakers
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Kim Ryrie: Well, you can tell, right, so the head’s only, what, six inches wide?
Andrew Hutchison: Mine’s big.
Kim Ryrie: Mine might be eight inches.
Andrew Hutchison: Brad’s huge.
Kim Ryrie: So if, if something’s coming, you know, off from 45 degrees.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: The difference is only inches.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And we’re picking that up.
Andrew Hutchison: yes, if you work out the time component.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah. so we’re incredibly Microseconds.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, lots of microseconds. Not one microsecond, but yeah, I mean, we’re very sensitive.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, very sensitive to that. So, so that’s what’s amazing about this technology. And so I said to Brian, why don’t you use this? Why doesn’t Lake do loudspeaker technology? He said, well, we’re just so tied up with this headphone stuff and Dolby’s licensing it from us now. They’re going to call it Dolby Headphones and therefore we’re going to go public.
Andrew Hutchison: Paul wants to get his money back.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So that’s. And that is what happened. Paul’s mate, isn’t he? And by the way, meanwhile, they patented the way they do the FIR processing with dsp and we’d made an agreement to license their patent to do speaker correction. And so then of course I’d helped them get taken over by Dolby. Right. So Dolby take them over. long story short, they went public, but then Dolby delisted them and then bought the whole company out.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And now Lake became Dolby Australia with 200 engineers working there in the city for a period. Yeah, I think it’s down to about 100 now. But, you know, they were pretty serious.
Andrew Hutchison: In this city somewhere.
Kim Ryrie: I’m not sure where they are now, but at the time that I was dealing with this, they’re in the city.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Okay. So, but, but Dolby said, no, you can’t license our patent. I don’t want, we don’t want anyone to have this stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And, my partner who’d started, Clarity EQ with Me or now called DEQX Paul Glendenning said, oh, don’t worry, I know another way to do this.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.
Kim Ryrie: I said, really? And he said this is all mind numbing arithmetic that I don’t understand. And so he, he came up with a new way of doing it. The only difference was we had to use floating point DSP arithmetic rather than the lake process. You could get away with fixed point which was cheaper to do back in the day with dsp. So that was our only slight compromise. We ended up patenting our version of it. We had a US patent on that. And so that’s what we’ve been using ever since. So effectively what we’re doing is we can. Well, as you know, as a speaker designer, it’s not just that designing speakers is a whole shopping list of dramas.
Andrew Hutchison: Certainly is a really good way of.
Kim Ryrie: Putting a shopping list of
00:15:00
Kim Ryrie: dramas.
Andrew Hutchison: Say it more kindly and say it’s a grab bag full of compromises or something.
Kim Ryrie: Okay, let’s leave it at that. But going active resolves a lot of those issues, right? So for instance, one issue even going active, you know, the pro speakers, as you say, have been active for many decades, but they started off being analog active. So they were just using 24 decibels nearly universally. 24 decibels per octave. you know, crossover at 2K for the tweeter, whatever. Maybe they were three way, so there’d be 200 hertz to the woofer. but even they weren’t time aligned. Right. Because what, what Pro Audio wanted was an accurate frequency response. They didn’t really care about time alignment because what they had to be sure of is that when they were mixing stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: They just had the levels of everything accurate.
Andrew Hutchison: Right.
Kim Ryrie: So they were totally fixated. Fixated, yes, on an accurate frequency response so that they knew that what went out the door was at least mixed m and balanced properly.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And then they’d leave it to audio files to get their own speakers that cleaned up timing issues or whatever Audio files needed. Well, that’s right.
Andrew Hutchison: I mean they’re only listening to it. It’s not like it’s part of the recording process in the sense that it’s laid down or fixed in the recording. So yeah, you can.
Kim Ryrie: That’s true.
Andrew Hutchison: The customer can fix it at home with their Wilson audios and their adjustable mids and tweens. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: If they’ve got a spare 50 grand US, you know.
DSP came along for studios for active, uh, speakers
So anyway, then DSP came along for studios for active, speakers. And the beauty of DSP meant you could, first of all, you could go to steeper crossovers if you want, pretty easily. even doing steeper than, 24 decibels per octave. Filters in the analog world wasn’t all that easy.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no.
Kim Ryrie: You’d have to really be selecting components and measuring everything. It was a bit of a pain.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Virtually impossible. Passive speakers.
Andrew Hutchison: yeah, I don’t think anyone’s really explored that with a passive filter, but. Brad, have you done a sixth, order passive filter?
Kim Ryrie: I’m sure he has.
Kim Ryrie: No comment.
Andrew Hutchison: No comment.
Kim Ryrie: How that turned out. No.
Andrew Hutchison: So, no, no, it doesn’t.
Kim Ryrie: It, it’s not fun.
Andrew Hutchison: Doesn’t. It doesn’t, doesn’t roll off accurately.
Kim Ryrie: It’s not fun and it’s not easy.
Andrew Hutchison: Creates its own problems when you’ve got.
Kim Ryrie: Capacitors with typically 20 tolerance.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, you’re definitely. Well, your hand. Any passive filter, your hand selected components. I mean, we batch everything up here because otherwise you simply won’t be building two matching crossovers for a stereo pair of speakers. It won’t happen.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly.
Andrew Hutchison: So, you’ve got. So the DEQX product started and of course.
Kim Ryrie: Let me just finish that. Just saying. When DSP came in, what they could then do was delay. At least they could time alarm. At least they could then time alarm drivers and they could do simple parametric eq. So if they had a bit of a peak somewhere or a dip somewhere, they could tweak it to get the frequency response better. So at least that fixed time alignment issues between drivers. Not within the driver, but between. So then when we came along, with fir, we’re thinking, well, hang on, we can now do linear phase crossovers because that’s what FIR lets you do at any, slope. So in the analog world, if you want linear phase, you’re pretty much stuck to a capacitor.
Kim Ryrie: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: Single pole.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And if once you go beyond that, you no longer, linear phase. So with our version of fir, processing, we can do steep linear phase. We can do. Typically at the show we just did, we had 12 pole filter. That’s 72 dB active.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And which means it’s just virtually a brick wal do. Which means there’s just no crossover. Even if it sounds all right.
Andrew Hutchison: Like it doesn’t.
Kim Ryrie: It’s, it’s counterintuitive. But it sounds amazing.
Andrew Hutchison: Which it kind of should sound amazing because, I mean, you can, I mean you get the best out of your drum.
Kim Ryrie: I used to. You can’t do that. You got to Have a bit of a cross bit of, you know, melding an amalgam. And you obviously can, you can set with our system any crossover thing. You can do 48 decibels or 36 or whatever.
Kim Ryrie: Right.
Kim Ryrie: but, but we, but with that particular design we did at the show, we chose 72 decibels.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And so and then within each driver we, we can correct any non linearities within the driver itself. Just. Right. Okay. So
00:20:00
Kim Ryrie: you end up getting very consistent timing coherence. We’re only adding milliseconds to the audio, which no one doesn’t care. The only time it matters is if you’re trying to synchronize with the video, but you can get away with about a 15 millisecond delay before video starts seeming to be out of sync with the audio. so that was, you know, that’s the bottom line of the advantage of going active.
You got rid of your passive crossover and you’ve got no cable
there’s other advantages that we talked about which are inherent to any active system. One is that each amplifier is bolted directly to each beaker diaphragm. You know, so not only have.
Andrew Hutchison: You got rid of your passive crossover, you’ve got rid of cable as well.
Kim Ryrie: You got rid of cable not necessarily because you might have the amps m externally, but what you do have, but.
Andrew Hutchison: You’Ve got a foot of cable not you know, well, a foot or.
Kim Ryrie: Even if you’ve got lots of feet, what you have done is you’ve, you’ve only got three or four octaves worth of audio running in each cable.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: You haven’t got ten octaves.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, indeed.
Kim Ryrie: Fighting amongst each other, you know, in a single cable. You’ve also got each amplifier only having to deal with three or four octaves.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know you’ve got a, you got a, a high current amp for your base.
Andrew Hutchison: Indeed. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You’ve got something for the mid range and you could have a 10 watt class A for your tweeter if you want. So yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: So the advantages are, the advantages are ah, clear and they’re immense and yet still in the audio, in the hi fi industry, the concept of a, of a, an active speaker is kind of shunned a little bit by, by customers and dealers. people are a little bit scared of it. Why? Why? I don’t know. Because ultimately just plug them into the wall like a vacuum cleaner and connect up a cable to the back of almost any preamp. Preamp obviously. But any avm, any, just about any audio integrated amp has a pre out pair of RCA sockets these days. I don’t know what the problem is. M It’s a weird thing I guess it doesn’t enable easy comparison between passive speakers and active speakers where the passive speaker has obviously got its own power amp and you know, there’s the saga of, you know, how are we going to compare one with the other and of course probably shouldn’t because the active speaker is immediately in most cases going to sound more correct obviously. But what, how does your product get used? So your customers, of which you have many, you’ve been selling these things for a long time in their initial versions and now you’ve got this new super duper version that’s almost finished beta testing. As I understand it. As far as the software is concerned, it’s a beautiful looking product. I’ve seen it being built, parts that are inside it. This is clearly genuinely high end electronics in every way. It’s not some fake high end thing that’s got a pretty case and just garbage china spec insides. This is a serious product. Lots of processing power but also lots of high quality audio, capability. But how does someone use the product? How do you. Or what, what is the main use? Like are they using it with their home built speakers or are they using existing high quality speakers? Pair of Wilsons maybe?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, just tell us about that. It’s a really good question. So that’s why we have three different models.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So the flagship model, which we call the pre8 because it’s got 8 outputs but that only means that it’s still stereo but you can have outputs for subwoofers, outputs for bass drivers, output for mid range drivers and outputs for tweeters, all of which would then go to their own amplifiers. Yeah, which then go to the, to the drivers. To the drivers. So that of course implies some degree of diy.
Andrew Hutchison: So it kind of does.
Kim Ryrie: You can’t just go into your hi fi shop and kind of. Can I have that box and there’s a pair of connectors on the back for each driver with nothing in between. So it does imply that you’re going to have to do that yourself. Unless and, and that’s what most of our users do. They do do that. They, they will either go and buy an affordable speaker of any kind, they will take the crosshair out and they will bypass their internal.
Andrew Hutchison: So this is a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time. So that is, is that what some customers doing that if they want a pretty box like they want Something that their partner is happy with.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Are they doing just that? Are they going getting a pair of, I don’t know, a pair of 800 series BMWs. And someone will have done this, I’m sure, and take that hefty passive crossover board out of the bottom of the box and
00:25:00
Andrew Hutchison: wire up all the drivers to extra terminals on the back, then via your suggested or their power amps to your DEQX box. Is that. Has that happened?
Kim Ryrie: Totally, it’s happened. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay. On 800 series, I’m using as an example. But certainly they’re getting. They’re getting production quality speakers and kind of getting rid of the bits they don’t need. Yeah. Bypass. Much easier way and simpler way to describe it. Thank you, Brad.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, sorry. Well, well, look, if you just paid, you know, I think I was just looking at an ad for Wilson Audio. Talking of Wilson Audio, is the like $50,000? Yes. you would think twice before you started ripping them to pieces.
Kim Ryrie: perhaps you might leave the crossover in situ, Just disconnect the cables.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, I don’t know where the crossover is, but I know it’s probably potted in a fancy box and it’s bolted down somewhere and there’s lots of heavy cables running to the drivers.
Kim Ryrie: So. Yeah, look, I can’t speak for that particular model of speaker, but. But the point is you don’t. That’s the idea is that you don’t need to pay $50,000 for a pair of speakers. That’s. That’s our hope. But if you’ve already got them and you’re thinking, you know, you feel like an adventure, you know, you can do it and you can do it without wrecking them. You know, you can, you can take things apart in a way that you could put it back together again if you ever want to resell it. But in fact, we’ve just introduced, some amplifier amplifiers for particularly for people that want to go active, because suddenly you need, say, three channels of amplifier per speaker. you know, and then often you might have subwoofers, but they’ll already be active, so you don’t really need four amps. So we’ve done a thing we call. We’ve got. The model we had at the show is called AMPI3 and it’s got three. as you know, we’ve been freaking around with D class amps, mainly because for us, we can deal with D class. Everything else is much more complicated and you can buy amps from millions of places. But for us, we were really impressed with the new Purify line of amplifiers. So the Ampi 3 has three purify modules in it and a power supply and it’s this. And the metalwork is designed that you can actually bolt it to the side of a speaker.
Andrew Hutchison: It looks like you could do just that.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. so you can take out the plate that is holding the existing say bi wireable connectors. Literally take the whole thing out. Then you put a rubber seal around where you then bolt the thing so you keep the, the box airtight. And you can then just wire directly to the, to the speaker so that.
Andrew Hutchison: Where the terminal cup was becomes your port for getting you three lots of cable in there.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That goes straight into the amp.
Andrew Hutchison: Say you, you, you. You’re pulling the speaker up. I mean if you do that to a production speaker you, you’re really not destroying it to
Kim Ryrie: No you’re not. You can put that back later.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: You probably get it. Maybe the average consumer might get a table to give them a hand.
Kim Ryrie: You will probably have to put about four screws into the, into the timber work to hold the at the back.
Andrew Hutchison: Can you blue tack it on double sided tape? Actually being class D, they probably don’t weigh that much do.
Kim Ryrie: Oh they don’t weigh much at all. No.
Andrew Hutchison: You could double sided tape.
Kim Ryrie: No, they’re just quite small but also quite small screws and.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And that. That would be the only downside. so I would imagine if they’re committed.
Kim Ryrie: They’re committed to.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Once you’ve done it you’re not going to be going back.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That’s for sure.
Andrew Hutchison: Because it sounds obviously the, the sound is amazing. So, so just. So that’s one kind of buyer for a deck.
Kim Ryrie: But of course you know you can go to Harvey nor you can go into anywhere. Buy a floor standard of almost any kind.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That costs a couple of grand.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Pair and you can easily do it to that and you’ll get a pretty startling result. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know.
One way you suggest Brad is you don’t change the speaker. You don’t make it active
Kim Ryrie: So let’s now call line up what you can do. One, you could take a high end. What they call high end loudspeaker. and take the DEQX and basically either design your own crossover filters.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: With those drive units or just simply correct it for free frequency and group delay.
Kim Ryrie: Yes.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: That’s not, not, not changing the passive.
Kim Ryrie: No, you don’t have to do that. And, and as you know.
Andrew Hutchison: You know so just, just for clarity. So The other way you’re suggesting Brad is you don’t change the speaker. You don’t make it active. You use the power of the DEQX to fix the issues that are inherent in the passive.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right.
Andrew Hutchison: The way that the production speaker. And two, you don’t modify, you just connect it up. Use the DEQX as your preamp.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Twiddle some knobs. Well, run a measurement. No doubt with the M. With the mic.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. And two of the three models we have now are exactly for
00:30:00
Kim Ryrie: that. They’re not intended to go fully active. They do let you do biamping because a lot of say floor standards and even bookshelves let you bi- wire them. You’re still going through their internal passive crossover. So you can’t change the crossover frequency that they’ve. But you can make them steeper. You can put another crossover on top of the
Andrew Hutchison: Over the top.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And typically you’ll only be doing that. See typically inside of, let’s say you’ve got a three way bi wirable speaker. The bottom connector will be bass.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And the upper one will be mid and tweed.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: So which has another advantage is that it makes it easy to measure the mid and tweeter together, without the bass involved. You can do that separately now with the DEQX. So you can use four channels of amps.
Andrew Hutchison: Yep.
Kim Ryrie: You know, one driving the. The upper.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: I mean for left and right.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And so that’s, that’s what you can do with the pre-4 model which is basically intended for a full range speaker, plus subwoofers or for bi wiring, bi amping, existing bi wireable speed. And that’s most of the market at the moment. You know, but for people that really want to go the whole hog, you know, I’d recommend you get the flagship model. You can start off doing that with passive speaking.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: But you know, a year or two down the road you might feel like, well, let’s try. Or you find an old pair of speakers on ebay or something. Ah. You know, a pair of classics. For a pair of classics.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And get into them newly some life.
DEQX software tells you how to measure the speaker rather than a room measurement
And see now what comes with the DEQX, which works with all three models is our software, which is the key to what we do. So it’s all integrated so that you measure the speaker in a certain way. it tells you how to measure the speaker because it’s different from a room measurement. Okay. A room measurement you measure around the sweet spot where you’re going to be listening. Whereas a speaker measurement you want to be at least largely anechoic. You don’t Want much room information in the measurement. It doesn’t matter having some room reflections in the measurement. there’s ways we suggest you’ll do a sort of partially near field measurement. Doesn’t matter that there’s a few reflections from the floor and whatever. you’ll tend to do it off axis to the speaker. You’ll do it, you might say point the speakers straight into the room rather than towing them in and you might measure them towards where the sweet spot is. In other words, you might have the microphone back, say 60cm, something like that from the baffle and then at about.
Andrew Hutchison: 15 degrees or something, something like that.
Kim Ryrie: Back to the midpoint where you might be sitting.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Because that’ll just give you a very clean phase accurate measurement of what the speaker is doing natively. And we need to know that to be able to compensate for that.
Andrew Hutchison: And then you gate that measurement internally. Like in the.
Kim Ryrie: And then. Yeah, internally. The software deals with, to make it.
Andrew Hutchison: Sort of a quasi anechoic measurement.
Kim Ryrie: If you’re measuring the close. You don’t even need to gate it much.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: If at all.
Kim Ryrie: Midway between the tweet and if it’s a two way try and get that.
Kim Ryrie: Crossover stitch up and it’s very easy. And by the way, we have an online support thing which comes with for free for people in the beta program which we have at the moment. we get online with them, we can run them through the software. They don’t need to understand what’s going, going on. No, no, no, it’s all pretty.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’s. I think that’s what I’m. The point I’m trying to make is that both my own interest to understand who is likely to want to. Because the product’s amazing but it is quite, it is clearly designed by a very smart team of people for very smart customers is what it seems. But meaning, that.
Kim Ryrie: No, not.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, but that’s technically savvy.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, they’re technically savvy. They want to come through the back door.
Kim Ryrie: Do they need to be and get.
Kim Ryrie: No, they used to need to be. All our, all our legacy products were a nightmare to use.
Andrew Hutchison: just, just, just so you know.
Kim Ryrie: We had, we had news flash of it but you know it has 160 page manual.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: And
00:35:00
Andrew Hutchison: so you’ve simplified it because we’re on version four now.
Kim Ryrie: Right. Yeah. The whole point of generation four is we, we took the software off Windows. Ah. it’s now all up in the cloud. Which means. Yeah, you can, you can run it from your iPhone. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: You shouldn’t. Not for setup, but, for setup, you should use a real computer. If you can just. On a browser.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And it’ll show. Because that’ll show you the graph. You want to see what’s going on. You don’t need to see them. We can do that online with you. We can make all the decisions. And that’s a free service for people that are setting up. or dealers will do it.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Or anyone that’s even remotely savvy can do it. And the idea of the beta software program we’re in now is just to get that down to the simplest possible user interface we can. Doesn’t, mean that if you know what you’re doing, you can’t get under the hood and be tweaking stuff. But for 90% of what people need.
Kim Ryrie: We can deform so effectively, you’ve got a DEQX, which will just. You bung a pair of speakers on.
Kim Ryrie: And that’s it. You don’t. For those who love the look, the sound.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. You don’t have to even use any correction. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You’ve got all the.
Andrew Hutchison: No.
You should have the mic at least for doing room measurement
And that’s my next question. yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So that’s the first level, in a sense. Sorry.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, yeah, because so someone who just wants a very good quality preamp processor. Oh, well, it is a processor. Not surround sound processor. Dac, but yeah. DAC streamer. A beautiful product that. That’s just beautifully crafted. sounds great. They just want that they can just buy a nice pair of speakers that they like the sound of at the shop.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: They can only make them sound better by. That’s getting out the measurement microphone and, and letting the. Letting the DEQX interpret what it’s hearing and then make some corrections. Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Question then. So when you buy that, what m. Might. Might call. I don’t like using the term entry level just. But you do get the microphone with that, even if you’re not going to utilize.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Because you. You should have the mic at least for doing room measurement. Right. And at least just see if you’ve got room. Correction. Huge room. Room issue. You don’t really know where it is. So he’s.
Andrew Hutchison: That’s right. So, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, Kim, but there’s part two, because I do sort of want to for my own benefit. But for the listener, was saying, we’ve got a DEQX. We’re doing this. But it’s got such a broad range of skills. The other thing of course it does. Is so you take your normal. You like a pair of, I don’t know, focal something or others or B and W something or others or a pair of Dynaudios or Dellichords or whatever. They don’t need any correction. so you’ve got.
Kim Ryrie: Sorry, that was really Dare you.
Kim Ryrie: I didn’t even have that.
Andrew Hutchison: So you’ve got this.
Kim Ryrie: I’m assuming that’s the case.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, we won’t know until we turn the DEQX on. But the point is you’ve. But you’ve put your Dellichords in a room that’s not particularly favorable. The DEQX like it’s all glass and tiles. You live on the river in Queensland. The wind’s blowing through. You don’t want to lock yourself in a, in a correctly, treated space. can the DEQX also deal with that glass and tile emporium, affect the deck extra reverb time that. Because, I mean you can’t get rid of the reverb time. But does it do a bit of like. It is room correction on the DEQX. A separate thing. That’s a separate mode. We’re going to test for room. Because you are. Because you’re going to put the mic like you said, over, the listing position.
Kim Ryrie: It is a separate thing.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And or, or you can, let’s say you’ve got a bi wireable speaker.
Kim Ryrie: And as we were saying, you’ve got one amp driving the mid and the tweeter and you’ve got the other amp doing the bass. Well, the bass is almost certainly crossing over to the mid. Somewhere around 200 hertz. Right. Somewhere like that. And the room as you know, is all about below 200 hertz. Pretty much.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Except when you have glass.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I’m giving you the worst, worst, worst possible case. But, but yes, far as the massive room modes. Yes. They’re under 200.
Kim Ryrie: So you can just do, you could, you could do that bass correction by measuring from the listening position.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And effectively not doing a speaker correction on the bass per se. Because it’s all about room and bass at the, at the listening position.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: so you can, you can do a separate filter which will do that. They have to do it again if you go to a different room. Yeah, sure. But yeah, you can do all that. You can.
Andrew Hutchison: It’ll do a lot.
Kim Ryrie: You can just do different things.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
You can control the software for them remotely if they want us to
Kim Ryrie: It’s why we have the DEQXpert, we call them the DEQX.
Kim Ryrie: Back to ask about the DEQXpert.
Kim Ryrie: Because People often don’t know what all
00:40:00
Kim Ryrie: the options are. And, and it will depend on what their circumstances, what their system is and what their room is like and everything. So in minutes we can see what’s going on and make some recommendations and m. We can control the software for them remotely if they want us to.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, that’s what I’m thinking. Yes. So you can. Look, their machine is connected to their Internet connection.
Kim Ryrie: Yes.
Andrew Hutchison: And you can. And the correction, files or what have you stored in the cloud.
Kim Ryrie: We would tend to use, two communication things. One is the, we would not actually connect via their connection to the Internet to their box. Typically we can do that in the future, but we would tend to run a separate, connection via TeamViewer, whereby we can literally control running it on. And we can visually see you’ve got.
Andrew Hutchison: Your fingers on the button.
Kim Ryrie: So, yeah, we visually see the room and where they’ve put the microphone and we say, no, can you move the mic a bit to the left or can you come out a bit further? And so that’s the way.
Andrew Hutchison: That’s pretty effective. That’s cool.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, and it gives us a very good idea. And then we see the measurements they get. And we got a very good idea just by looking at the measurements, what it’s going to be sounding like a quick question then. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Do you often get them to play around with speaker positioning or is the whole. Is the whole point of the correction is to. I’m just. I have to plonk them there because.
Kim Ryrie: The wife has already decided where the speakers are going or the man. So.
Kim Ryrie: So if it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s not.
Kim Ryrie: If it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: Let’s call it something for adjustment. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: So it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: Let’s call it. As Kim says, they’re already in the correct spot.
Kim Ryrie: Right.
Kim Ryrie: Okay. So therefore, that’s where the DEQX comes to the four.
Kim Ryrie: If there’s an option, if you’ve got a room dedicated. Absolutely.
Kim Ryrie: You can.
Kim Ryrie: We do the formulas and we tell you where the best spot.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Position is. Okay. We’ve got that flexibility, but usually that’s not an option.
Kim Ryrie: Okay. Okay.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay. But what I’d like to do is have a quick break. I want to come back and ask you about, I mean, obviously your history is in Australia, but I don’t want to ask you about the fact of, why they’re made here. So we’ll be back shortly.
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Kim Ryrie: The vast majority of the parts are assembled in Australia
Andrew Hutchison: And we’re back. We’re back folks. Back with Kim Ryrie, at the desk with Brad Serhan and myself. to discuss the remainder of the fine detail of the DEQX generation for. Do you call it a preamp DAC or are you calling it a streamer DAC preamp or you just call or a DSP processor because it can be used in all these different ways. What do you call it?
Kim Ryrie: I don’t know what to call it.
Andrew Hutchison: This is the problem. It does too much.
Kim Ryrie: Well, some people have called it like the Swiss army knife of audio.
Andrew Hutchison: Well that’s kind of what it is.
Kim Ryrie: Well as you say. Well it’s, it’s an integrated. I suppose that’s the best way to say it. It’s an integrated. Well no, only one model has an amp. Yeah, but, but fundamentally it’s a preamp. I guess it’s got lots of digital and analog inputs. It’s a streamer Y. it’s. It’s got high end pro end DEQX in it. state of the art DEQX. It’s got state of the art A to D so that we’ve got. And of course Dynavector, wouldn’t have made a custom Dynavector preamp for us unless they were happy with the transparency of the digital. And it’s totally transparent.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: We’re talking about minus 240db distortion in the digital domain.
Andrew Hutchison: Is that right? Okay.
Kim Ryrie: in other words it’s beyond non existent. The distortion that there is comes in when you go back into the analog domain.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: From the, from the DEQX and so on.
Andrew Hutchison: So you now it, it’s all made. The vast majority of the product of the parts is sourced in Australia and it’s all assembled here. What’s designed here? I mean.
Kim Ryrie: Well, no, I don’t think that’s fair to say. The electronics pretty much all come from overseas. I don’t mean, I mean the chips. Right.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Australia make zero chips.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, we don’t. I don’t think we’re making any reels of surface
00:45:00
Andrew Hutchison: mount resistors either. So. So. Yeah, no, that’s a. That’s right. I guess none, of it’s made here. I guess there’s an awful lot of assembly happening here.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, it’s awfully.
Andrew Hutchison: A lot of, A lot of the parts are, important. Of course.
Kim Ryrie: And it’s all designed here.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but it’s designed here. And is it designed here? I mean, your team of people are mostly Australian.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s all designed. We’re incredibly lucky. I think, you know, over the years that’s where I have been lucky, has been to work with great people.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: And we. For instance, Joe Narai, who’s our COO and RD manager, he and I used to compete in the old days selling digital audio, workstations to America.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, right.
Kim Ryrie: He sold hundreds of his dsp, consoles and stuff. And we’ve always been friends. But you know, it’s interesting that the two, the two digital audio workstations the world was buying, both came from Australia from completely separate companies.
Andrew Hutchison: And now you’re working together.
Kim Ryrie: And now Joe’s just joined us. Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: this year. And I’ve been trying to get him for a while actually, but I’m getting old. I know. I was gonna say he actually needs someone.
Andrew Hutchison: He looks, he looks younger.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, he is younger. we’ve got Glenn Dickens now. Glenn was running R D at Dolby for 15 years.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: he’s. He virtually co invented Atmos at Dolby. He’s now working for us as we speak. He’s in the room next door. Yeah. on the blower with Joe.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: trying to sort out a time alignment issue in the base integration algorithm.
Andrew Hutchison: So the pedigree.
Kim Ryrie: So we’ve got some pretty heavy hitters.
Andrew Hutchison: Absolutely.
Kim Ryrie: In there.
Kim Ryrie: Chris Alfred worked with me back in the fairlight days. there he was working on the the daw. We got an Academy Award, technical award.
Christoph was co creator of Dolby Atmos
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: Chris went up to get. He’s got the little golden thing.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh really?
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. For services to the film industry.
Andrew Hutchison: Where’s that? Is this that in the building?
Kim Ryrie: No, that’s at Chris’s house. And what a touch. so we’ve been working together for ages. Christoph. also running Dolby. He was co creator of Dolby Atmos. He’s now, with us as well. Not full time, but as a. Pretty much as a full time consultant.
Andrew Hutchison: so you’ve absolutely got the people you need to make this very complex product work.
Kim Ryrie: That’s right. And Now, Glenn, who I mentioned, he’s on 120 patents.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.
Kim Ryrie: Not many people are like 120. Yeah, he’s the guy who, with Dave McGrath back in the lake days, come up with the first fir pattern.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: You know, which is what’s made all this stuff even possible.
What’s with Australia and, um, digital processing? It’s, it’s
Andrew Hutchison: So what’s with Australia and, digital processing?
Kim Ryrie: It’s, it’s really an interesting question.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And I don’t know the answer to that. And of course, Tony Furse, who was the guy that designed the original Fairlight dual processor stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: You know, he’s Australian. He’s very Australian. he used to throw boards across the room at me when, I. Well, actually, I should have told you this story. When we started working with Tony, you know, we took over his prototypes and we were making our own printed circuit boards of his stuff and we took it over to his place and he plugged it into his machine and it blew up. And of course we had the polarizing key slightly out of center. Oh, the circuit board, there was like 200 connections on it.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And so he picks the border out of the machine, throws it across the room. Peter and I says, if you guys don’t get your act together, you better, you better forget about getting in business. So that was the equivalent of the.
Kim Ryrie: Zap he almost got.
Kim Ryrie: Really. So, Tony was a character genius. And so we’ve just been, you know, we’ve just been really lucky to have people like that. People like Michael Carlos, who, as I mentioned, you know, he designed the page R, Ah, music sequencer, because he was a music composer. And that was what, to the Fairlight was like what VisiCalc was to Apple. The first spreadsheet. Apples didn’t take off until spreadsheets existed.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And, for us, that was like Page R, you know, the rhythm sequencer, the real time sequencer, and stuff like that. So, yeah, we’ve just had a lot of great people, inventing products before.
Andrew Hutchison: They actually exist in the sense of. Because you mentioned the MIDI thing, you know, where you didn’t invent midi, but the, the concept, you know, you were already doing it at the Fairlight. There seems like there’s a lot of that. So maybe the DEQX is slightly ahead of its, its time.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, look,
00:50:00
Kim Ryrie: it is ahead of its time in the sense that audio has to go this way. It cannot not do this because if it’s going to keep improving, this is the only way to improve.
Andrew Hutchison: It’s a bit stuck at the moment and it feels like, yeah, you’re right.
Kim Ryrie: It’S stuck because of the traditional hi fi marketing regime where you had to be able to swap components. You have to be able to just have a speaker that’s compatible with his amplifier, this amplifier.
Andrew Hutchison: The art of system building or matching system synergy. And I look, I don’t see that going away in the same way as tubes haven’t gone away and books haven’t gone away and haven’t gone away.
Kim Ryrie: But it won’t go away at the, at the, at the high end.
Andrew Hutchison: No, no.
Kim Ryrie: Where people want to experiment and do that. And that’s why we’ve got, you know, the Pre 8 and the Pre 4, where you can choose your own amplifiers and you can do all that, whereas normally an active speaker, that’s all been decided for you in advance, you know. And it’s why audiophiles don’t like a lot of traditional active speakers. No, one way, one reason was what we were talking about, that the focus for active speakers for pro audio, is to get the frequency response right.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes.
Kim Ryrie: They don’t care too much about the time to be. They just need the balance to be.
Andrew Hutchison: I can, I can see a time when, you know, an active speaker is both affordable and quite stunning in its performance. And it’ll be that performance that will take some people over the edge. They’ll go, wow, that, that. I love the charm factor of my system, but this is, this is stunning. This is. Well, you’re getting to and, and the sense of space and all of the things that they want. They get a little bit of slightly furry with their existing system. It’s a bit of fun. But the digital thing will really. I mean sometimes you, you sort of, it’s like modern cars, right? You sort of. I mean everyone loves an older car for style and the sound, but I tell you what, I mean, a modern car is just, it just works and it works so well.
Kim Ryrie: It is amazing really. We’ve got a Tesla and, and I’ve got a Toyota, right?
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: The thing I hate about the Toyota is having to get it serviced. Tesla, you don’t service them, they just sort of go forever and there’s, I don’t know what, you know, one day the wheels are going to fall off or something.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, catch fire, that’s fine.
Kim Ryrie: Hasn’t caught fire yet. Under the command of.
Andrew Hutchison: They really, they really do if, at all. But no, I’ll tell you another story. It’s just that also the Tesla is so, it’s the tipping point For a lot of people that love cars, a lot of people that love performance cars and you know, great sound and great handling cars have had their head turned by the Tesla.
The DEQX Generation 4 isn’t actually really out yet, is it
Maybe your DEQX product is, is possibly that, that, that thing where people start, people who really love great audio systems could be tipped the other way because yours isn’t. The Generation 4 isn’t actually really out yet, is it? And this is something we should talk about.
Kim Ryrie: It’s not formally out like.
Andrew Hutchison: It’S on beta software.
Kim Ryrie: It’s, it’s. We’re running beta software because we want to just keep improving the user interface. At the moment it’s pretty easy to use. but we’re, we’re making it better.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so that’s, so that’s what that’s about.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And until, and we’ve set ourselves probably the end of Q1 to have that finished. But once we get to that point, we have to sell the system through traditional dealer networks and international distributors and they get very expensive doing that. So at the moment with our beta users, with our beta members, we’re able to sell direct factory.
Andrew Hutchison: So people can ring you up. like we’ll obviously have your website, linked to from our website. People who go through the DEQX website and basically just buy the product directly from you. At the moment.
Kim Ryrie: At the moment.
Andrew Hutchison: For the moment.
Kim Ryrie: For the moment, while it’s still in business. I think we’ve only got another 70, units allocated, so I don’t know how long that’ll last. But, but yeah, the, at the moment, you can get them at basically wholesale price.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And the software you get, over virtually every month we have a sort of new software release. It’s a bit like a Tesla and you know, over the air software. and but by the end of Q1 I think we’ll be going formally released.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so this is a little sweet, little, A little place in time at the moment where you’ve developed this amazing product. The software is basically done. It’s been developed over the last, well no doubt years, but it’s been. People have had their gen 4 units for a while. 6, 8, 10 months, whatever. the software’s much improved over that time with the assistance of the feedback from those users. And I guess that’s part of the package deal is that you get, you get a better price because you’re
00:55:00
Andrew Hutchison: part of the R D team to some degree.
The hardware is largely done at this stage, but the software is still improving
Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So we like to hear from our users, our beta users. They well, not so much the.
Andrew Hutchison: Research, but the development part.
Kim Ryrie: To give you an idea, one of our earliest. Well, one of our users is Greg Timbers. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but Greg was running name rings a Bell at JBL. He was a lead designer at JBL for 20 years.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Andrew Hutchison: Right here.
Kim Ryrie: And he retired a couple some years ago. A couple years ago. And he’s famous in the industry and he m. has, has had our traditional models, the HDP4. He had a couple of those. They could only do three way active and he needed four way okay for his system that he’s got at home, which was his own Everest jbl. And he said, you know, until I got them I could never achieve what I wanted.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: Because they were passive speakers. So so anyway, so we thought I better give Craig one of our early beating units. So we gave him one of the early pre 8. But the software was just a basket case and you know.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, you didn’t give it to him, right?
Kim Ryrie: Well I shouldn’t have done it because poor. The trouble is Greg is so amazing. He, he spent a whole weekend trying to deal with the bugs in the software.
Andrew Hutchison: Okay.
Kim Ryrie: And, and he doesn’t tell you about it until later. He says oh by the way, there’s a few problems here. And he’d written this sort of 80 page manual on how to fix it.
Andrew Hutchison: Or what his complaints are.
Kim Ryrie: But no, he was just saying oh look, you know, so we, we, we got, we worked with them over the next couple of months and then they were about. Took about three software releases before we got it all.
Andrew Hutchison: Shook the basics out of it.
Kim Ryrie: But what he did say, he said but the, but the new hardware makes the old system sound broken.
Andrew Hutchison: Oh, is that right? Yeah. So there was a sound quality improvement.
Kim Ryrie: Over your previous improvement just in the. And that’s why we spent so long doing the hardware. Yeah. Okay. The hardware we have now is our third revision of Gen4. So we never released the first and the second revisions.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: But all the beta units got the.
Andrew Hutchison: All the latest versions.
Kim Ryrie: All the latest. So that’s production hardware. So that’s why you know it’s, it’s a, it’s a pretty good deal to get the.
Andrew Hutchison: Sounds like an exceptional deal. yeah, I think anyone who’s interested in, you know, what the hell this thing is.
Kim Ryrie: Well the catch is they got to buy it direct from the factory so they’re dealing with dealers and stuff.
Andrew Hutchison: But I mean for some people that.
Andrew Hutchison: Won’T be a problem.
Andrew Hutchison: I think they’ll like, yeah, I’m happy to deal with the factory. Clearly the talent is there. They know what they’re doing. So, So, yeah, get in touch. you probably won’t get Kim on the phone, but, you might.
Kim Ryrie: You never know.
Andrew Hutchison: But yeah, I mean, and the fact of the matter is.
Kim Ryrie: God help you if you do.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, could be a long conversation. The, the fact of the matter is that the, the software is largely done at this stage. It’s. It’s just the tinkering around the edges that’s left.
Kim Ryrie: I mean, you basically turn it on. We’re still doing a lot of software, but the software at the moment does work. But the new software will just simplify things.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, you’ll always be improving. And I mean all of those, even just the streaming functionality will always. There’ll always be some kind of, you know, firmware update for that, I guess.
Serhan Swift Bespoke loudspeakers designed and built in Australia
Kim Ryrie: So the good news is, though, Andrew, I think, and not just on the horizon.
Andrew Hutchison: So we’ve got a good news story.
Kim Ryrie: We have a good news story and, breaking here today is that if I decided, if I decide to buy one today, Kim. Yeah, And I don’t really want it. I, just want to reiterate. I don’t want to really play around with the. All the other, you know, what is it called? The thingamajig. And the thingamajig. There we go.
Andrew Hutchison: Wow, you’re really helping the story.
Kim Ryrie: What am I tip?
Andrew Hutchison: You don’t want to do room correction. That’s the word I was after. You don’t want to go active. If you just want to tweak the speaker a bit.
Kim Ryrie: Not even tweak.
Andrew Hutchison: You just want to use it as a music play.
Kim Ryrie: Nice pair of speakers at home. very nice.
Andrew Hutchison: Plug in your old CD player, which it will do. Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: But you’ve got a pack.
Andrew Hutchison: You can Bluetooth your partner’s phone.
Kim Ryrie: You could buy that today, couldn’t we?
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, and it works perfectly. So that’s.
Kim Ryrie: That’s what I like.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, the one downstairs that we saw working did appear to work perfectly.
Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. So the point being rolling start. In all seriousness, you could just buy one today and have that. But the bonus, it’s not the steak knives and all that. So the use of things, you will get a microphone with that and you do. Will have the ability to do room correction and all the other grows. Yes.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that.
Kim Ryrie: That’s the, that’s right.
Kim Ryrie: The. The challenge for the whole Gen4 platform was to be able to compete with the highest end DACs that are out there.
Kim Ryrie: Right.
Kim Ryrie: You know and, and just have the analog transparency top of the line. So that
01:00:00
Kim Ryrie: effectively price wise the deck stuff should essentially be free. You know if you were to go buy high end streamer DEQX preamp, thing. Same sort of price. Yeah as the, as the recommended retail but for now.
Andrew Hutchison: Serhan Swift Bespoke loudspeakers Designed and built in Australia by perfectionists described by reviewers as exceptional. Serhan Swift has received numerous awards here and abroad including sound and image best stand amount loudspeaker 2024 for full information head to Serhanswift.com yeah basically half.
Kim Ryrie: Exactly retail price because it’s.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah it’s a hell of a deal. And what you say is probably the most important point and that is the quality of the stuff that you’re really listening to. The quality of the DEQXs, the way the volume control circuitry works, the normal preamp stuff and then the quality of the streaming and the phono is all and phono stage. The point is. Yeah particularly the price you’re selling it for at the moment. That is it’s a great value for money Preamp the deck stuff is for free but it’s always for free anyhow because even at the price you’d like to sell through normal channels, it’s To me it sounds, I mean you say it seems expensive, I say no.
Kim Ryrie: 27 years worth of development as well.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, I think it’s very good value for me.
All our pricing is in US dollars because that’s our biggest market
Kim Ryrie: And may I ask what that prices? We probably mentioned it before for that, you know.
Kim Ryrie: Well all our, all our pricing is in is in US dollars because that’s been our traditionally our biggest market. but About 80, about 95% of everything we’ve made traditionally is export. Right. Europe’s picked up a lot lately but so, but we still advertise in US dollars. So the list price of say a pre 8 at the moment is 15,900 US. That’s list MSRP. our beta price actually we’ve only just announced that you can have not all the options for the hardware. You don’t have to buy the Dyna Vector. no Rodeo. Okay, you don’t have to buy. You can add them later though. you don’t have to buy say the XMOS USB input. You don’t have to buy the digital outs which gets the beta price below 6000 US it’s, it’s 5950 I think it is.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Ryrie: And then it ends up at about 6950 if you have all the extras.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.
Kim Ryrie: So it’s a lot down from the retail price but that’s normal wholesale. See that’s the way the industry works. The reason this high end audio stuff is expensive is because the dealers need a lot of money. The importers get so much percent the retailer.
Andrew Hutchison: Well, they’re all doing something, aren’t they. The distributor has to warehouse it and.
Kim Ryrie: Market it until promote.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. And then the retailer has to spend a lot of time educating, educating, talking to people and learning about how to use, use it and, and of course putting it all on display and in a bricks and mortar costs money building.
Kim Ryrie: So I might add the pre4 are a bit cheaper than that and so is the LS200 of course.
Andrew Hutchison: Right. Sounds to me like though if you do buy it direct from you at the moment that you get really high quality levels of service, you’ve got this team’s arrangement, you’ve got, you’ve got a team of people here to help support the product. It’s not like you’re left on your own to try to work out how it might work. It’s. There’s a huge amount of support.
Kim Ryrie: So I think when, well we, for the beta, we do directly. Yeah. for the beta members, when dealers start handling their profile. Yeah. We start charging.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. As you.
Kim Ryrie: For direct support. But the dealers would typically do that.
Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, but my, but for the beta program you’re getting a high level of backup service, you’re getting new guys direct.
Kim Ryrie: And you get the normal warranties and all that sort of stuff.
Kim Ryrie: You’ve got the DEQXperts and you’ve got the ability for the DEQXperts to go in virtually.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes. And help.
All right, well look, look, thanks again Kim for,
All right, well look, look, thanks again Kim for, thank you many hours of your time. Really appreciate it. The tour of the factory, we’ve got a little, we’ve got enough video footage. We’ll have a little video up to show people, what’s going on downstairs. It’s pretty impressive. thanks Brad. Thanks for your input. Lots, of interesting questions. couldn’t have done it without you. thank you so, a pleasure.
Kim Ryrie: So thank, you Kim.
Andrew Hutchison: Yes, thanks again. And look, anyone who’s got any questions, get in touch with Kim. the details will be on our website and not an audio file. Thanks everybody and we’ll be back soon.
Kim Ryrie: Thank you.
Kim Ryrie: Thanks guys.
Andrew Hutchison: Pleasure.
Andrew Hutchison: If you’ve enjoyed the show and you must have because you made
01:05:00
Andrew Hutchison: it this far, can you please perhaps give us a five star, review if that’s.
Andrew Hutchison: What they call it on the platform.
Andrew Hutchison: That, that you prefer. So thanks again for listening. See you in the next episode.
01:05:10
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
00:05:00
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.
00:10:00
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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Andrew Hutchison: Geoff from Hey now Hi Fi sells really good Hi Fi that you can’t get everywhere, both online and in store. You may be interested or you may not. If so, check out his website. That’s HeyNow HiFi.com.au that’s HeyNow HiFi.com.au we were talking about Fairlight.
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
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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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