Podcast transcripts below – Episode 019

TRANSCRIPT
Season 2 Episode 019 Fairlight Synthesizer, music making, two Australians and a barking dog.

This episode of not an Audiophile is sponsored by Stereonet. com

Kim Ryrie: Anyway, we’re in this grotty old workshop in the basement overlooking the harbour. And this was also where Lawrence Hargrave back in the day used to design his aeroplane. Really? He was on the.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, everyone had side workshop facilities and. Welcome back everybody. This is not an audio file. The podcast, season two, episode one. Today Kim Ryrie is on the program. We question him about all sorts of things, including of course the fact that he was the co founder of the world’s first sampling synthesizer, but also about decks. This episode of not an Audiophile is sponsored by Stereonet. Are you looking for your tribe? Visit stereonet.com today to join one of the world’s largest online communities for hi fi home cinema headphones and much more. Read the latest news and product reviews or check out the classifieds for the largest range of gear on sale. Membership is absolutely free. So visit stereonet.com and join up today. Thank you for your time, Kim. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I’ve had a quick tour of the facility with Brad and yourself showing us around just now and it’s very, very impressive. It’s impressive, for what is being done here in Sydney, I guess, as far as what’s being manufactured. But the design is, I, mean, it’s for my tiny brain. It’s astounding.

You’re talking about the DEQX factory in Sydney deqx

So maybe we wind back. So we’re talking about the DEQX factory in Sydney DEQX, which is a preamp DAC streamer, device with most importantly, incredibly high quality dsp, built in. And I want you to tell us all about that, but I want to mind back briefly and have you bore us for four and a half minutes with your backstory, which is long. everyone knows about the Fairlight. It wasn’t just you that were involved with it, but just you made my.

Kim Ryrie: First failed attempt trying to make a loudspeaker happen.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, you’re winging.

Brad Serhan: He dangled the carrots about that. Well, that goes back a long time.

Andrew Hutchison: Speakers were invented then, were they?

Kim Ryrie: Or what? Speakers were just coming out.

Andrew Hutchison: Just coming out.

Kim Ryrie: They just worked out that if you put a coil of wire and a magnet and glue a bit of paper to it, it’ll make a noise.

Andrew Hutchison: Make a noise.

Kim Ryrie: So, that’s sort of my vintage. Really.

Andrew Hutchison: So. Really? So I have no idea how old you are.

Kim Ryrie: Doesn’t matter.

Andrew Hutchison: But was this 60s or 70s?

Kim Ryrie: Don’t ask. This was 60s, actually.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Okay.

Andrew Hutchison: Right here.

Kim Ryrie: but no, it really all started happening in the 70s. early 70s. Okay. I Was always interested as a kid in electronics and audio. And I tried to make passive speakers in the 60s, and I failed miserably to make a passive speaker sound any good. So I gave that up straight away.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: So if at first you don’t succeed.

Andrew Hutchison: Give up, never try, never try again. What was that Homer Simpson thing where he opens the cupboard and there’s a, jiu jitsu suit, a guitar and something else hard to learn. A unicycle, perhaps, shoved in a cupboard, and Bart puts his. I don’t even remember what Bart’s trying to learn. Geez, I wish I didn’t bring that up now, that reference. But it’s a classic Simpsons scene where Homer says exactly that.

Brad Serhan: Oh, yeah, well.

Andrew Hutchison: And he opens the cupboard full of failed attempts. a whole lot of them. And there’s just the standard things that people can’t learn in five minutes. One of them is passive loudspeaker design. So.

Kim Ryrie: Well, I loved audio, so it was an obvious thing to try to do, make a passive speaker. And, you know, you could buy the bits and do all that. But I, My father had a magazine company called Modern Magazines. We did Modern Motor, Rugby League Week, Revs, Motorcycle News, Australian

Andrew Hutchison: Quite a pile of Revs, all those magazines.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. And I. And I was an avid reader of electronics Australia, you know, back in the day. And, I like doing all their DIY projects and stuff. But I showed the. The magazine to my father and said, listen, why don’t we do Electronics magazine? And I, think he probably wanted me to, you know, carry on the family tradition and, you know, end up being a magazine business.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And so he said. Yeah, okay. Well, first thing was he saw all the ads in Australia.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Okay. Electronics Australians. Yeah, okay, let’s do that.

Electronics Today started in 1971 with a few DIY projects lab workers

So we.

Andrew Hutchison: So, just like that.

Kim Ryrie: So.

Andrew Hutchison: So we through the magazine, there’s dollar signs running around.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So, well, so we. We found an editor, an English guy called Colin Rivers, who was fantastic. He could spell and write a sentence, which

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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We’ve covered Fairlight and how it got introduced to the States

We’ve gone, we’ve covered a lot of that story, although we can’t cover all of it because it’s so. There’s so much of it. So. But during that, in the previous segment, we went sideways with Fairlight and how it got introduced to the States and the uk. But you were touching on your days with the Aunty Jack Band. So I want to, I want to, I want to get the backstory on that. Because that, I believe is what led you into active or digital audio. Well, active. Active audio or active, loudspeakers.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: But, just to finish off on Fairlight, which is such an amazing tale, except it’s not a tale, it’s a real story. It actually happened m Incredible success straight away. which at the time, I mean the adrenaline rush on that must have been. I mean you’d spent four years In a cave next to the harbor, trying.

Kim Ryrie: Oh, no, no, that wasn’t four years. That was. No, that was only. That was only about one year.

Andrew Hutchison: One year. Okay.

Kim Ryrie: And then we moved to a real office where we managed to raise some money. A lot of work. It was. And it was.

Andrew Hutchison: So, the payoff, though, was amazing, I guess.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. But it was mainly stress.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, then you had to build the things, right?

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. I mean, remember, we had no income. well, no, that’s not true. We did anything for money. So we did a sleeping dog car alarm.

Andrew Hutchison: Right.

Kim Ryrie: We did. Remington, Office Machines had heard that we were the only manufacturer of a computer in Australia. So they came to us and said, could we build them, an office computer?

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Kim Ryrie: And I said, well, as long as you can do the software. Cause, you know, we don’t know anything about business software. Oh, yeah, we can do that if you give us, give us the hardware. And so we made them. you know, we managed to put together four, eight inch hard, floppy drives in a cabinet and had a, you know, it ran basic, basically. And they wrote this software. It was pretty bad, but they sold about a. They sold about 100 of those. So it was all helping us with cash flow. And actually, that’s where we did learn about how to make things reliable. Because what happened in that, for that exercise was that they needed a megabyte of storage. So we had four. We only could have four floppy drives. And the original drives were only 128 kilobytes. which means four drives means you’ve only got half a meg. But the double sided floppy had just come out okay. By a company called Shoeguard. And we bought some of their first ones because this means we can do the Remington system. Because if we have four of these drives, they’ll get their 1 meg of memory and it’ll all be fabulous. So we got, we ordered and we had an order for 100 systems. So I ordered, you know, 400 drives from, from, Shugart. And, what we discovered first of all was that these drives would tend to scrape the oxide off the discs after a while. After a while, which was a bit embarrassing. And then, occasionally one side, the head on one side of the disc would write through to the other side.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, no.

Kim Ryrie: It didn’t happen often, but it happened often enough to make you want to kill yourself. They want to kill you. and then two things we discovered. One was that IBM made a floppy disk that. Where the oxide did not scrape off. So that solved that problem. But Then we informed Shugart that their drives were riding to the other side of the drive. And they said, yes, we know, so we’re stopping production.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, crikey.

Kim Ryrie: I said, you can’t stop production because I’ve just accepted an order for 100 machines from Remington, you know Remington, you heard of them? And and they said, well, actually we do know a hand modification we can do to the head that does fix the problem, but it’s too expensive for us, so we’ve

00:45:00

Kim Ryrie: stopped making them. I said, listen, you’ve got. We will have to do something legally if you can’t sort this out because we’re completely committed and you’ve accepted our order. So they restarted the line for us and did some things by hand. But within literally only a few months, a Japanese company came out and I’d. I think it was YE Data they were called. And it was a double sided drive, just beautifully made, no problems, no read through. It was even cheaper.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Sugart dying to stop supplying us.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: So they didn’t care. so we changed over to those. But in the process we just learned how to make these systems very reliable. Because one thing about, you know, the 70s and 80s when we had the Fairlight out, people weren’t. People didn’t know that computers had bugs. They were only used to golf ball typewriters that didn’t have bugs.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes. They just said, well, everything worked. Everything was kind of analog and Worked.

Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Everything worked. So when bugs happened, the world ended.

Fairlight eventually became uncompetitive in the music business because it was expensive

You know, it was like, this thing doesn’t work.

Andrew Hutchison: It worked a minute ago.

Kim Ryrie: which was why, actually that’s when we bought the source code to the operating system. Because there were problems in the operating system that they couldn’t fix because they weren’t doing with it, ah. What we were doing. So we were able to debug the operating system. And that really ultimately became the downfall of Fairlight because we got so used to having control of the operating system that everyone refused to move to Windows, which. Which is where ultimately the competition came from. Yeah, you know, digi design and. Yeah, so, so.

Andrew Hutchison: So as you move through the 80s and you’ve got your various iterations, version 1, 2, 3, you mentioned. But there were, there were.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, we were also upgrading the processes in the, in the.

Andrew Hutchison: But some point you were doing your interface, doing it the way you’d always done it.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Competition machines.

Kim Ryrie: Well, we dropped out. Effectively we dropped out. We had to stop. We became uncompetitive in the music business because it was, There just wasn’t the resources in Australia to make things as cost effectively.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Kim Ryrie: As some of the competition was and we’d already saturated the high end market with hundreds of machines. It’s just after a while you run out of people.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s right.

Kim Ryrie: Crazy money.

Andrew Hutchison: Exactly. There’s no home recording guys. Not that there were any really any home recording guys even then.

Kim Ryrie: But by then, you know. But by then we started working on post production.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Kim Ryrie: And we had, we were able to synchronize the, our, our sequences with timecode from. Well you did.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. We finished the previous segment on the bombshell that you invented midi. So is that.

Kim Ryrie: Well, well no, we didn’t invent midi. But, but we effectively brought a structure. We, we preempted midi.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: With everything that MIDI ended up doing we’d already done. Yeah, yeah, so that’s what I meant by that. But no, there was a MIDI organization.

Andrew Hutchison: You didn’t invent MIDI as in the acronym M, but the concept and what it did. You, you were already doing it.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So then we moved to post production because we, we sort of the Mark M. There was a recession at the end of 88 where everyone stopped buying the expensive keyboards. We had to shut down the original fellow company and restart it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Into post product to do post production.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Kim Ryrie: And so. And because by then we had the first eight track hard disk recorder running. So we could run eight tracks of audio onto a hard disk. and we also had 16 channel. We do 16 notes at a time. We had a lot of buffer memory. You could have minutes of a note on one channel. So I’m thinking, well, why don’t we make you know, a 24 track hard disk recorder for doing post production. Because post production you don’t need all 24 tracks to be playing at once. You only need about 16, which is what we had. You only need a continuous eight tracks, which is what we had. As long as you had lots of buffer on the 16th. So I did this Smoke and Mirrors product and and what happened was you could see the waveform scrolling across the screen and you could see the actual waveforms. You could edit them, cut and paste, do all that stuff. So we had the first digital audio workstation, effectively that could do that. and we just instantly routed to one of 24 output channels depending on what track something was happening on. So you might have atmospheres

00:50:00

Kim Ryrie: taking up a stereo track continuously, you might have music taking up stereo continuously. But everything else was pretty Much bits and pieces. And we got away with that. And we were selling those for $100,000 to Hollywood. They were buying every machine we could make. We had Sony Pictures, Tyler and Glenn, Glen, Paramount, they were all buying these things because it was so fast to use compared to what they were used to. And So that was Fairlight number two in effect, which was post production, which no.

Andrew Hutchison: One talks about, but they should.

Kim Ryrie: No one talks about it because it’s not music. But it was really the first of those systems. Nowadays you can go feel like it was bought by blackmagic, who were the video, company.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah.

Kim Ryrie: Australian company. Brilliant company. So they now own all the Fairlight IP and you can download Fairlight Workstation, for free. Now I thought I’d seen that. Yes. which was genius.

Andrew Hutchison: And then when I saw the name I’m like, yeah, can’t be related to the original.

Fairlight gives away its Digidesign software to help budding digitizers

Kim Ryrie: Well, of course there’s all these options that you pay for. But it was genius on their part because Fairlight had lost the. The early market to have a digidesign.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: And And the only way to get the market back was to basically give it away so that people could start using it and train themselves up. And now you can do thousands of tracks using. Using the Fairlight stuff. It’s really, really good. And it’s. And it’s completely integrated with their video editing stuff, which is equally really good. So it’s. Although I’m not involved in that, it’s just great to see that. Well, it’s gone on what’s done with. So, anyway, that was that.

You first met Rory O’Donoghue in Aunty Jack

So I was getting. I was about to tell you about Auntie Jack. Auntie Jack.

Andrew Hutchison: So we want to hear about.

Kim Ryrie: A friend of mine was, I can’t remember how I first met Rory O’Donoghue who was thin Arthur in the Aunty Jack show. But, he had a band. He wanted to start a band. And I was asked, oh, how do we get a PA system together? And somehow I’d come across some voice of the theatre Altec A7. You know the famous Altec A7. So I got a pair of those and we use them for the band.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And I made a mixer for them and the whole thing. And we did. We did tours with Supertramp and stuff like that back in the day.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, but not with my A7.

Andrew Hutchison: No, you were using their PA but. And supporting support act.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah.

Kim Ryrie: Oh, hang on. No, sorry. That was Sleeping Dogs. That was a different band. That was Let them live in. That was Doug Ashdown, Oh my God, Doug Ashton. So anyway, with Rory though. But, what we did, we were blowing up the horns quite often because we were quite loud. And the voice of the theaters just have a passive crossover. I think it was 2, 2 pole, 12 decibels per octave, something like that. And the good thing about them was that it was very easy to change the diaphragm because they were designed for theaters. So occasionally if you blew them up, the technician had to run down the stage, change the diaphragm. They only cost, you know, 50 bucks or something to put in a new one and you could do it in.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s interesting though, it’s interesting an observation how things have changed, that they would be concerned about changing diaphragms mid film. Whereas now. Someone told me a story this morning. Was it. Someone was telling me a story this morning about the, Maybe it was Brad, but that, they were in a cinema. It didn’t sound right. Oh no, that was the out of phase thing, wasn’t it?

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: And one of the speakers had been out of phase for maybe a month or two. We must sort that out. I mean, you just imagine where a diaphragm would blow now and no one would really. Would really care. But yeah, these were designed to be simply popped apart, pop a new one.

Kim Ryrie: Pop it in and obviously done deal. And then,

Andrew Hutchison: So for the sake of customer service and maintaining fidelity.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, I doubt that they would have changed them in the middle of a movie. I don’t think they were that fragile. But for us they were because we ran them too loud and using them.

Andrew Hutchison: Perhaps in a way they weren’t intended to be.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. And this must, when I think back, this must have been the early 70s because I used the little hundred watt amplifier we did as a project. So I had a couple of the hundred watt amp modules. Yeah. And it just flashed into my head.

Andrew Hutchison: ETI 480. That was the part number of the kit. There was. There was a series of those.

Kim Ryrie: I, I can’t.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s other things you’ve had to remember in recent years,

00:55:00

Andrew Hutchison: but that just, Just

Kim Ryrie: Remember I’ve only.

Andrew Hutchison: There was one particular kit. They just sold it for like 20 years.

Kim Ryrie: It was probably could have been that it was a good one.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, they were, well, two and three, a double five. That’s all it was.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. And so I had some of these lying around and I just made a 24 decibels per octave crossover. So four pole, high pass, low pass. And I can’t remember who suggested to me to make them active, but I’d stop blowing up the thing. So I did that and I mounted. So effectively I had a separate amp for the horn now and a separate amp for the 15 inch bass driver and we put the little 24 decibels prop octave crossover in front of it and it just completely. It was miraculous the improvement. Okay. It was just so much cleaner. Well, yeah, it was just much cleaner. We could go louder. We never blew another diaphragm up because now they had twice the.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, twice rolling off twice as fast.

Kim Ryrie: Yep. And

Andrew Hutchison: And well, when rolling off probably more consistently as well because it was active and not obviously dependent upon the impedance of the Whatever the impedance was doing at the drive.

The sound quality improvement though was the thing that actually grabbed you first

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, exactly. That’s another issue.

Andrew Hutchison: So the sound quality improvement though was the thing that actually grabbed you first.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, that’s right. And it was just cleaner. That was the bottom line. More dynamic and just. And that was using, you know, really pretty basic part.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And so then I just assumed everything was going to go active. I just had that assumption. No one’s noticed this yet, but it’s about to happen. Yeah, well, I mean you’re going to.

Andrew Hutchison: I mean you’ve heard this enormous improvement. One could assume in the same way. Although this was before Fairlight. But the point is it was, it was chalk and cheese. Yeah, it was dramatically better.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: The cost of the amplifier module was bugger all for a second one. Really.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Why wouldn’t everyone do this? Yeah, well actually of course in act. In Pro Audio, like Pro Audio, they kind of did.

Kim Ryrie: They kind of did. But of course they couldn’t because the whole marketing of audio and hi Fi meant it was. It would have been way too complicated.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Because you just needed a speaker box to be able to be wired up to an amplifier with two wires, piece of lamp cord. And that was why that. And to this day. To this day that’s why hi Fi is not really HD audio. It hasn’t happened yet. So the. Well, but it’s about, What I mean is it hasn’t happened affordably. No, it’s getting there. But it’s very hard. I mean, yes, you got, you got speakers that can do it and they’re reasonably affordable. but not. But even. I’ll just say to Brad, as good as Brad speakers are the Mewtwo’s for example, by definition they’ve got crossover distortion between their tweeter and woofer. M. Because they’re not perfectly time aligned. They can’t be. The baffle is determining the fact that the same sound, the same frequency is coming out of the tweeter as is coming out of the woofer, at least over that crossover zone, which let’s say is about an octave wide or something. So yeah, it’s subtle, it’s, it’s a subtle reduction in resolution, but it’s definitely there. It’s a sort of a, it’s a flanging. It doesn’t sound like flanging. No, but it’s, but it is phase distortion. It’s a phase distortion and DSPs inactive.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: You know, lets me now Wilson audio to give the example. They physically put their tweeter back.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: You know, they have the tilt so the tweeter goes back. I think the mid goes back slightly as well and that will improve the time alignment between the drivers. But doing it in the analog domain is verging on impossible. Not to mention the compromises you make with the passive crossover filter designs. You’re losing, as you say, you’ve got impedance changes dealing with the, you’re dealing with. If you’re able to just take the output of an amp, connect it directly to the winding on a speaker, you’ve got nothing in between. You’ve got real grip from the amp to the diaphragm for every driver. So now you’ve got a lot of options because now you’re doing all your crossover designs in front of the amplifier. Amplifier at preamp levels.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: They’re not having to handle 100 or 200 watts, you know.

Andrew Hutchison: No. So what I’d like to. Absolutely. And it’s a, it’s

01:00:00

Andrew Hutchison: a, it’s a great subject and and it, as I said, the pro audio world has embraced it because the pro audio world is about performance and function and reliability and getting a job done and producing great sound in the process.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: hi Fi is a bit more mystical, bit more magical.

Kim Ryrie: It’s, it is.

Andrew Hutchison: So I want to break this episode here and we’ll tell the deck story in episode two. That’s what I want to do. So, so thank you Kim. Thank you, Brad. By the way, I hope that camera’s not running. And thank you Andrew and thank you Kim. Dodgy looking recording arrangement here and we will be back. Well, we’re going to start recording episode two right now, but you’ll hear it next week.

Kim Ryrie: Thanks everybody. Thank you.

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01:01:17

The technology of the Fairlight synthesizer was a defining moment for music. Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel’s initial idea was to build the ultimate synthesizer “The world’s best synthesizer” — a machine that could faithfully reproduce any sound. By incorporating the then cutting-edge microprocessor technology and leveraging the emerging power of digital memory, they envisioned a tool that could push the boundaries of music creation. Little did they know their first experiment would become a historic milestone.

In Part One, Kim Ryrie tells us his personal story which is also the story of the Fairlight. The quirky story of the Fairlight’s first-ever sample is a reminder that great ideas often have humble beginnings. Today, digital sampling is an integral part of music production, but its roots can be traced back to a humble workshop in Sydney and the bark of a loyal canine. It’s a story that highlights not only the ingenuity of Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel but also the unforeseen reach that often accompanies groundbreaking innovation.

YouTube BBC Archives The Sound of the Future Fairlight CMI

YouTube Sydney Morning Herald and The Age How the Fairlight CMI changed the course of music.

YouTube The Today Show Peter Vogel demonstrates the Fairlight CMI

EP019 Kim Ryrie episodes, transcripts, history and pics on Not An Audiophile.

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM THIS EPISODE

“I called Peter Vogel and asked him if he wanted to build the world’s greatest synthesizer….”

“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?“

“he had a dog that you could say speak and the dog would go woof. So I said, get your dog to speak. Right. so we got the mic out, got the dog sample, which was a bark. And this was the first ever sample on the Fairlight”

“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.“

“So we had the first digital audio workstation, effectively, and we just instantly routed to one of 24 output channels depending on what track something was happening on. . 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….”

THIS EPISODE SPONSORED BY STEREONET

People mentioned on this episode –

Kim Ryrie Fairlight CMI & DEQX
Peter Vogel Fairlight CMI
Brad Serhan Orpheus & Serhan Swift
Andrew Hutchison Dellichord Loudspeakers, Stereotech Audio furniture, HiFi and Stereo Audio Repairs
Tony Furse Motorola
Michael Carlos (Director)
Bruce Storey
Fleetwood Mac Tusk
Peter Gabriel
Carly Simon
Bruce Springsteen
Elvis Presley
Stevie Wonder
Clair Bros
Rory O’Donoghue (Aunty Jack Show)
Lawrence Hargrave

Brands mentioned on this episode –

Fairlight CMI Series 1 Series 2 Series 3
Motorola 6800
Moog Synthesizer
Altec A7

Businesses mentioned on this episode –

Stereonet
HeyNow HiFi
Waxx Lyrical Club
DEQX
Dellichord
Serhan Swift
Mac
JayCar
Tully (band)
JANDS (Jackson and Story)
Village Recorder (Studio)
Remington
IBM
YE Data
Windows

Magazines – Modern Motor; REVS; Rugby LeagUe Week; Australian Cricket; Electronics Australia; Electronics Today

Music courtesy of –

Please Listen Carefully by Jahzzar http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/please-listen-carefully
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/GGVFRIgP7uc

CREDITS –

Guest management, regular co-hosting – Brad Serhan

Host, audio production – Andrew Hutchison

HiFi News wrap for 2024. VOTED best sound Stax SR-X9000 Headphones and Acapella Loudspeakers feature in the “blew me away” category.

OVER AND UNDER-EXPOSED HIFI BRANDS – KEF, Monitor Audio, Wharfedale, T + A, WiiM are a few of many HiFi brands that we see over and over in reviews and news. What about all the amazing brands that are as good or better that are never talked about? Andrew and David “pull the pants down” on some brands and models that are the best, rarely-heard-of HiFi brands including Acoustic Energy, Esoteric Audio, Accuphase, Dellichord, and a surprising combination of LAB and Marten Audio.

DISCUSSION – The destruction of a brand? In the world of audiophiles, where precision and quality are paramount, a recent incident involving Tom Evans Audio has sent shockwaves through the community. Known for their high-end audio equipment, Tom Evans Audio recently found themselves at the center of a controversy that has left many questioning the brand’s future.

Do people care where their HIFi gear is made? and 2025 predictions for small brands.

Ep018 News in HiFi episodes, transcripts, history and pics on Not An Audiophile.

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM THIS EPISODE

“I kind of see the same products mentioned over and over again. They only seem to have seven brands. KEF, Wharfedale, WiiM, T + A, Monitor Audio to mention just a few.

“if you got a good review in a magazine you were made. Things have changed“

“We all know there’s supposed to be a Chinese wall between editorial and advertising. That’s patently untrue as we all know”

“Ferrum out of Poland.. is quite extraordinary”

Tom Evans Audio. The Streisand Effect and the destruction of a brand.

People mentioned on this episode –

Andrew Hutchison
David Corazza
Brad Serhan S1 Episode 001
Mike Creek S1 Episode 016
Jon De Sensi S1 Episode 005
Alan March S1 Episode 003
Barbra Lica

Brands mentioned on this episode –

Leak Audio
Monitor Audio
HiFi Rose
Wharfedale
Luxman
T + A
KEF
WIIM
Acoustic Energy
Esoteric Audio
Accuphase Laboratory Inc
Dellichord
BlueSound
Lumin
Aurrender
Ferrum
Creek Audio
Exposure
Fell Audio
March Audio
Pitt & Giblin
Serhan Swift
OAD Ultrafidelity
Boulder
Duntech
Totem Acoustics
Morel
Acapella Audio
MBL Audio
Marten

Models mentioned on this episode –

BlueSound – Node (2024) –
NAD – 3020
Eversolo – A6
Ferrum – Wandla HP
Creek Audio – 4040
LAB 12
Stax – SR-X9000

Businesses mentioned on this episode –

IAG – International Audio Group
Stereophile
Darko Audio
Cheap Audio Man
Mend it Mark
Tom Evans Audio
Louis Rossman

Music courtesy of –

Please Listen Carefully by Jahzzar http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/please-listen-carefully
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/GGVFRIgP7uc

CREDITS –

Guest management, regular co-hosting – Brad Serhan

Host, audio production – Andrew Hutchison

Delve into the intricacies of HiFi cable technology, construction, the impact of materials and the science behind high quality cables. The conversation takes a real turn into debunking cable myths including burn-in processes and poor sound from thick plastic cable coatings. Andrew Hutchison believes that cable lifters are the “stupidest” piece of HiFi bullsh**t” but Matthew Bond and Brad Serhan have some theories and science that may disagree. Claims of different cables having different “timing” and cryogenic treatments.

Matthew shares his insights on the Nines competition regarding copper purity, challenges the credibility of certain cable technologies, and explains the importance of dielectric materials in audio cables. The discussion also touches on the subjective experiences of sound quality improvement over time and the impact of cable construction on audio performance.

EP017 Matthew Bond episodes, transcripts, history and pics on Not An Audiophile.

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM THIS EPISODE

“Directional cables are bullshit.”
“Cable burn-in is a capacitive phenomenon.”
“Triboelectric noise is a poorly made cable issue.”
“The Velocity of Propagation doesn’t vary much at all. It is microscopic”
“Cryogenic treatment is just bogus.”

People mentioned on this episode –

Matthew Bond – Matthew Bond Audio
Brad Serhan – Orpheus & Serhan Swift
Andrew Hutchison – Dellichord Loudspeakers, Stereotech Audio furniture, HiFi and Stereo Audio Repairs

Businesses mentioned on this episode –

Matthew Bond Audio – Cables
Dellichord Loudspeakers
Serhan Swift Loudspeakers
March Audio
Les Davis Audio
Hitachi
Kyocera
Litz wire

Music courtesy of –

Please Listen Carefully by Jahzzar http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/please-listen-carefully
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/GGVFRIgP7uc

CREDITS –

Guest management, regular co-hosting – Brad Serhan

Host, audio production – Andrew Hutchison

Podcast transcripts below – Episode 016

TRANSCRIPT
S1 EP016 Creek Audio: Mike Creek reveals the inside story

Andrew Hutchison interviews Mike Creek, the man who started Creek Audio

Mike Creek: You know, you could do worse, than follow our lead and don’t give anybody any credit. Don’t advertise, don’t market your product. Let the dealers do it for you. And they were fighting each other for it in the end. So it was a kind of inverse logic. You know, instead of trying to make yourself well known, I was saying to people when they phoned up, I’m sorry that your name’s not on my list.

Andrew Hutchison: And hello, welcome to not an Audiophile, the podcast. I’m Andrew Hutchison and this is episode 16, season one. And today we are interviewing Mike Creek, the man who started Creek Audio. He gives us some considerable insight into how it happened, how it continues to happen. It’s a great story of, electrical engineering, amplifier design, marketing, industrial design, all sorts of details. Let’s go. Hey, thank you, Mike, for, coming on the podcast. Not an audio file. It’s greatly appreciated. And, and I’ve got some probing questions for you that aren’t that probing, but I, would love to hear, the story of how Creek kind of came off a clean sheet of paper to some degree, from what I understand. And, and lots of other questions that I’ve got. just generally, I guess, about your thoughts on amplifiers, maybe the industry a little bit, what have you. And, But, how did it start? you know, the way it seems from an outsider’s point of view. You designed this fairly straightforward, good performing amplifier and you offered it to the market and people ordered thousands. Is that what happened?

Mike Creek: basically, yes. It didn’t come from a clean sheet of paper.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Mike Creek: Took some, inspiration from a product I’d made for my father with the help of a very, special engineer. Special in special needs, I think, if you know what I mean.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, he’s an engineer, right?

Mike Creek: Huh? Yes. So, yes, I had inspiration, from that and other things which I’ve been working in a company, as a freelance, engineer, stroke developer and copywriter for about five years, I suppose, when one day they. During a long recession, as we often get here.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: they said, guess what? You were the first in. You’re the last or the last in, first off.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And, you’re not, you’re not contracted here to work. So sorry, we’ve got to let you go. It didn’t help that they owed me sort of three months worth of money.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Mike Creek: So I was, I was working on a shoestring and my mother, I know, was. Was having sleepless nights about how I Was going to feed the family and dreaming of us as a family standing on the side of the road with the suitcase or something.

Andrew Hutchison: Surely not hopefully quite that bad, but.

Mike Creek: More confidence in us. I have more confidence than she did in myself.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: Well, essentially what happened is I had been working for a company called Ambit International, which was a sort of electronics company that made products or parts available for radio amateurs. Radio. Mainly radio products and not, not commercial, radio, I mean you know, sort of mobile radio for, for people in cars and they call it PMR radio and that, that kind of thing with radio amateurs on short wave and very high frequency, things in VHF and uhf. So very different from mine. Yeah. And that sort of thing. Yes, indeed. So I was surrounded by hamsters, as they call them here, radio amateurs. And they were all, you know, a nice bunch of people. And that company grew very, very quickly.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: In the end it grew too fast for its own good and they had to sort of draw back in a little bit. And in that same year that I left them and started Creek Audio, Alan Sugar, entrepreneur in the uk, who I had some connections with through work, had also employed one of their,

00:05:00

Mike Creek: one of their directors, called Roland Perry to design their first PC computer, so computers in the same year that I started the Creek Audio brand.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh yeah. So, ah, yeah, because Alan Sugar was the AMSTRAD man. Is that, is that, that’s it.

Mike Creek: Well AMS is Alan. yeah, Sugar trading.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. Okay. I haven’t thought about that for a while, but yes, that’s I mean he’s got such a history since then I guess. But that’s that’s Yeah, yeah. So that’s how he got his. Well that was, Was that his first big. Without going off view. But was that his first big success business wise? Was it the AMSTRAD computer?

Mike Creek: Oh no, no, he, he left. Well there was a history going back to I go back to my father’s days. My father worked for a, a businessman in North London called Peter Hent. Sorry, called Robert Henson. And Robert Henson had a son called Peter Henson. He had two sons, but Peter was the one I knew best.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: And Robert Henson and my father knew each other from sort of post war period when he gave my father a job as what they refer to loosely as a van boy. In other words, here’s a bunch of electronic components. Go out and sell them to retailers.

Andrew Hutchison: No, okay, yeah, yeah.

Mike Creek: Would buy you know, things from, from the back of the van, basically, you know, what stock he had available. And Alan Sugar worked for Peter, sorry, Peter Henson and Robert Henson, but Peter was really his boss.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And then one day, Peter, I’m, I’m keeping this brief because I’m sure he wants to concentrate on other things, but Peter did what he put on van. And Peter sort of accused Alan Sugar of stealing some stock.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Yeah.

Mike Creek: Alan, went home and had a sort of hissy fit and decided, didn’t want to work for a company that didn’t trust him anymore.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

My father went out and bought his own products from suppliers that Henson had

Mike Creek: And went out and formed, AMS Trading.

Andrew Hutchison: All right.

Mike Creek: And he went out and bought his own products from all the suppliers that he already knew that Henson had. And the rest is history.

Andrew Hutchison: Certainly is.

Mike Creek: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Yeah. Well, that accusation was a boo boo then, wasn’t it? On the. Because I guess, he was somewhat, sharper at business than the people who had accused him of.

Mike Creek: Yes, indeed. Well, he had a, he had a certain extra, that they didn’t have. And the foresight, unlike, you know, Robert Henson, the father, employed my father as a van boy. And my father said, why don’t you get into doing this? Or why don’t you buy these and sell that? He said, well, I went, I won’t use the expletives, but basically said, if you think you can do it any better, go and do it yourself. And he did.

Andrew Hutchison: And he did.

Mike Creek: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh dear.

Mike Creek: So the history repeated itself.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.

So, um, okay, so that’s similar you um, to when you re amstrad

So, okay, so that’s so timing similar you to when you re amstrad versus Creek Audio and you released the cas, which is, you know, obviously I was probably referred to as the CAS or was it the CAS.

Mike Creek: 4040 CAS people called the CAS. I never even thought of it when I called it cas, but it was just Creek Audio Systems to me. And that’s what we printed on the front panel. And with, I had a sort of a no cost involved ah, logo developed for me by one of my colleagues in the art department of Ambit International, who in his lunch break said, well, let’s get three letters. Let’s make the S the biggest one and put the C and the A in the gap between the top and the bottom. And I didn’t really think about it too much when I thought, that’s great, that’s that job done. Now move on to the next, And then they kept that until about 1985 or 86 when I changed it for a more readable logo.

Andrew Hutchison: Hey, speaking of logos though, is the current logo not. It’s the same that you’ve had for a very long time I think, isn’t it?

Mike Creek: Yes, since about 85.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. So that is the 85 logo still. Yeah. Well that’s, that’s, that’s that’s borderline a record I think in, in hi fi industry as far as logos. I mean

Mike Creek: Steady on. I mean it’s been a bit tweaked.

Andrew Hutchison: Well yeah, yeah. Polished a little. But

Mike Creek: Yeah the gist of it seems originally done on a drawing board you see of course these days done with, with cad and so it’s sort of sharpened up a bit.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. But I think it’s a similar style. I think it’s the same.

Mike Creek: Oh it’s exactly the same.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Mike Creek: If you

00:10:00

Mike Creek: look at it quickly, if you want to look at it in you know, blown up a hundred times, it was quite different.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My father manufactured audio equipment from 48, 1948 to 69

so the, so the, you’re saying the 4040, the design was a bit of a spin off of something else. did it.

Mike Creek: Well it was the spin off of an amplifier. how should we say it’s what they would refer to as separates.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: My father manufactured audio equipment from 48, 1948. So he started as a reel to reel tape recorder manufacturer when there was any perhaps only Ferrograph or Brunel in the industry at that time.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And imports. And he was made the first like truly lower cost domestic audio tape recorder and tape being new in those days from BASF and previously it had been wire recorders. So he bought a tape deck from a company solely making tape decks.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And added his own amplifier, separate amplifier, separate oscillators and you know it was done. It wasn’t integrated into sort of a modular.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Mike Creek: And about later on when tape recorders I didn’t fall out of fashion but the government taxed them overnight from 0 to 45% in a budget that killed the business. Overnight he switched to making record players. Okay. And that’s when I joined the business. I mean I’d been working you know in holidays and things like that for the business before. But in 69 when I joined him we started making record players and later into music centers as I referred to then. And there’s a music center kind of resurgence now. But towards ah, the end I was doing R and D and development work and off site manufacturing as well as managing the production line and doing all sorts of different jobs. But I just saw demand, for a separate integrated amplifier and a, Separate, tuner. AM FM tuner. That’s what I developed together with, another colleague called Jim. Jim Samiotis.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: who was the special, engineer I was talking about. He was a friend of mine as well as a colleague, but he worked freelance and I sort of saw the advantages of working freelance because you could do as much or as little as. As you wanted for a company and still make a living. So, at a certain point in time when the founder of Ambit International got in touch with me one day because he was also doing consultancy work for us on radio and said, come to a Christmas, or New Year’s party with him. And I turned up and not knowing what to expect, and we sort of talked on the bottom of the bottom step of his staircase, for the whole evening where everybody else was having a party.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And the next day it was, it was. It was confirmed that I was going to go to America with him on a project that he’d been asked to. To carry out for a Greek guy from America.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And you know, they had these requests, for making something that was very unusual and not easy to achieve in those days.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And I went to the American Embassy, got a visa, handed my notice in and basically, became freelance from that moment onwards at the age of 23.

Andrew Hutchison: All right, so that’s a. That’s an early start. it’s probably, I was going to say a brave move, but I guess at that age it was. Was all very exciting and there was no thought that it could possibly go wrong.

Mike Creek: It was certainly. It was certainly exciting. And I wouldn’t say it’s dangerous, but it was certainly dangerous to my economic.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes.

Mike Creek: I had to pay for the ticket. And in those days the ticket, considerably. I wouldn’t say it was any different in. In actual money to the price it would cost you now.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

Mike Creek: Except in those days that would be ten times more expensive.

Andrew Hutchison: Absolutely. Yeah. Isn’t it? It’s one of those things that you know, hi Fi and airfares have hardly changed in price. I mean, hi Fi has gone up a bit, but I mean, geez, airfares is, The airfares and the price of music. Recorded music never been cheaper. So, So. So then the, the connection there. So that was the relationship that. Well, the engineering relationship, effectively that helped that.

The 4040 was your first product for Those that are wondering why we’re talk

And I should mention that the 4040 was your first product for Those that are wondering why we’re talk particular amplifier. And

00:15:00

So the, how did the, how did that. You connect the dots to the development or. I mean you made the decision to build separate. A separate tuner. Separate. Separate tuner. A separate amplifier. Integrated amplifier.

Mike Creek: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: At what point did that sort of you go right, I’m going to do this, you know, I mean, you decided you wanted to do it. I mean did you look at things like the NAD? I feel like the NAD 3020 was almost happening at the same time. And of course a few other UK built amps, were probably a little more expensive than where yours ended up in the market.

Mike Creek: The arcan.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: A and R Cambridge as it was called then.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: A 60.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’s the one I had in mind. And I had it partly in mind because it’s kind of a luxurious but slimline version of what yours ended up being in a way.

Mike Creek: Yes. It had a real wood cover and it had a. It was physically larger and heavier. I don’t know, I, I hadn’t really much of a clue what I was going to do to begin with. But after looking around what was available for me to use, I came to the conclusion that the covers that I, that were produced in as a. What’s called a vinyl wrap for my father’s amplifier which had ceased production by that time. Yeah, about. There were about two or three hundred of them left.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Mike Creek: And I also had a wooden, a prototype of a wooden cover made years beforehand but never used, which was lying around in my workshop. And I always looked at this and thought one day I’ll fit an amplifier in there. But it was too small to fit an amplifier in when I first got it.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay.

Mike Creek: But by the time I looked at it for the second time or late later, you know in eight. Late 81.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: Which is when I became unemployed. my attention was more focused on that but knowing that would be more expensive to produce, I just looked at these surplus to requirements wooden covers, vinyl wrap ones which were a box which were truly top and bottom.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Cover.

Mike Creek: And you just slid the electronics through the box and bolted it underneath.

Andrew Hutchison: Underneath. Yep.

Mike Creek: I, I suppose it looked as ugly as a hat full as in Australia. And what.

Andrew Hutchison: We wouldn’t say that, would we? Yeah, we prob. Have actually. So. Yeah, so. So it was a bit chunky looking.

Mike Creek: Yeah, it was too chunky. So I, my. At the time I was married and my father in law ran a shop fitting business. He, he did carpentry and joinery and. And French polishing is another thing, you know, different business, but another branch of his. His empire, so to speak.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And then I popped Workshop and said, can I use your, your span saw? And I just. I saw the one in half and reduced the front to back depth.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And, looked at it and thought, well, that would work. At the Windsor amplifier that it was modeled after had an in. Had a extruded front panel, which was not made or it wasn’t custom made for Windsor. It was just, how should we say, a stock, extrusion.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: And again, I thought, I’ll make it less expensive by using a, sheet metal. So I produced a sheet metal front panel, you know, bent to fill in the, routed or the rebated front edge, and, a smaller chassis and I put it into a box where the depth of the box appeared to be greater, you know, to be the actual depth of the amplifier, when in fact it was about through 2 to 3 centimeters, less, deep for the chassis. So the heat sink of the amplifier which I used, it was another off the shelf. Heatsink.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: stuck out the back and had some better cooling efficiency than it would be if it was trapped inside.

Andrew Hutchison: Inside, yes. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Creek: And it also allowed you to put the plugs in the back without them sticking out or being visible. So you could almost put the amplifier against a wall.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it was very shallow, came away from underneath kind of thing, so.

Mike Creek: Exactly. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So, Because, yeah, it’s a while

00:20:00

Andrew Hutchison: since I’ve seen one of those 40 40s in the flesh and I. I’ve kind of forgotten. The. It wasn’t overly deep, as I remember. It was incredibly, slimline. It was very thin, I guess is the word. Is it? I mean, it was certainly short. and I’m thinking it was like, I don’t know, is it like an inch and a quarter high or something? Like, maybe it was an inch and a half, but it was. It wasn’t very high, was it?

Mike Creek: It was about 55 millimeters. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so a couple of inches here.

The Windsor amplifier sold for £99 including tax, correct

All right, so. Well, you know, as we probably should say these days. 55 millimeters. Yep. So, what was the inside, the electronics, the. The sort of topology of the amplifier? I’m guessing quite simple and straightforward. I mean, people listening probably don’t realize that this amp, as I remember it sold in the UK once you launched it into the market, was it for £99, correct.

Mike Creek: Including tax? Including tax, I think probably, yes. Which was about 10%, I believe. Twelve and a half percent, something like that.

Andrew Hutchison: So, I mean, that sounds outrageously inexpensive, for what was, you know, a very serious amp as far as its performance. it was very musical, had adequate power. I mean, it was, I guess, set the scene for your later models, really, as far as the way it sounded, I think. Would you agree with that or would you. Or do you feel that it was. It was. It was. It was adequate for the time, or do you think. I mean, what I’m really saying is, do you think one of the reasons. Well, yeah, that’s. That that shouldn’t be taken, perhaps the way it sounded. But what I meant was, were you just happy with the sound or were you rather ecstatic with the sound that you achieved for, what was an incredibly inexpensive retail price?

Mike Creek: I have to say that it was. It was stooping a little bit low for me to make something like that when I knew I could make something better.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: But I always had a thing for this amplifier that we used for the Windsor amplifier. And although I’ve been making sort of large Mosfet power amps and preamps which were very, very complicated as kits for. For, hobbyists to make, which were cutting edge technology, this, this was the. The very opposite, you know, the antithesis of what I’ve been making before.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: But it had a certain something, you know, had a. It had a sound.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah.

Mike Creek: That was a very, Soothing and smooth to listen to, considering. As you say, it was a relatively simple amplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Mike Creek: The power amp had, Let me think, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 transistors in total. But the power transistors were Darlington. So were they.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: They were two transistors. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. So two Darlington’s a, channel and, And five sort of small signal sort of transistors.

Mike Creek: No, no, three.

Andrew Hutchison: Three small signals, three small signal transistors and two Darlington outputs. Oh. That’s a simple circuit. Okay. All right, so.

Mike Creek: Well, that. That’s why I said it. It was, five in total.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow.

Mike Creek: including the. The Darlingtons, which, were operated in class B. And that’s no bias, no idle current.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: initially I didn’t put any devices in there to try and, nudge them into class ab.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: But later we used two or even three diodes to. To try to sort of give them a little bit of current, a sniff, crossover distortion.

Andrew Hutchison: So. Okay.

Mike Creek: The unusual thing about it was that the. The class A driver, was two stage. Well, essentially two stages. It was two devices, which created an Enormous open loop gain. And this enormous open loop gain would have been unnecessary if it had not been for the fact that to simplify the amplifier, I used the open, you know, the high open loop gain closed around two feedback loops. One, okay, DC and the other ac. And the AC feedback loop, powered or overcame the insertion loss of the tone controls. So I didn’t even use a transistor or an OP amp for the tone controls. I use the feedback from the power amp to encapsulate it.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, wow. Now I’m even more impressed. I mean, this is actually it. That’s one of the simpler, simplest amplifier designs that includes tone controls probably ever made in production. I would have thought. Would it? I mean, because, I mean.

Mike Creek: Yes, but it hadn’t been. It. It came after the Windsor and, other products similar to that which were

00:25:00

Mike Creek: lost since they were used as record player amplifiers.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And it was only when I used that circuit in the integrated amplifier, which was 1012 at the most watts into eight ohms, that you could see or hear. It, benefits, because otherwise you’re using a record player amplifier. You know, the source was a, an auto change turn signal and, ceramic magnetic cartridge.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, magnetic cartridge. Okay, no, ceramic cartridge.

Mike Creek: No, no. Sometimes magnetic.

Darlington amplifier had characteristic sound that you couldn’t design

More often than not, a ceramic cartridge.

Andrew Hutchison: So let’s just wind back a little bit to the class B because people’s ears pricked up briefly. because. So you got away with that. Why is that? Because of the characteristics of the Darlington or was it something you did? I mean, you, you mentioned that ultimately you changed the design a little to give them a little, bit of, idle current or, you know, what have you. Yes, but the initial version, how did it sound with, with that somewhat? well, you know, rudimentary, you know, design. And was. It was in fact this magic sound that you’re referring to, this very musical sound, smooth sound, I think you said was actually because of the simplicity of the circuit. Do you think?

Mike Creek: there was a bit of both there? But this particular circuit had, a character, a characteristic sound that you couldn’t design. It just. It was a bit of serendipity.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And, the serendipity that I’d experienced when taking the Windsor amplifier to my, my bedroom, which doubled as my hi fi room, where I was playing sound through a pair of, floor standing, four, four driver loudspeakers with the base mid and treble being from KEF B139, B110 and T27.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep, yep.

Mike Creek: and Coles Super Tweeter and the base was, was transmission, line loaded.

Andrew Hutchison: Right.

Mike Creek: And I used to, used to play these fairly loud in my room with a, with a radford transistor, radford preamp and power amp. And I, I always thought there was something not, you know, not to my taste until I brought the Winds of Fire and then listened to that and I thought well okay, so it’s only 10 watts opposed to 50 watts. But apart from that, in a small room it was a lot more pleasant to listen to over a period of time.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And that, that’s what spawned the idea of using that circuit. But, but supercharging it with a few more volts and bigger capacitors and humbucked it a little bit to get rid of. Because I should have mentioned that the reason it had so few transistors is it used resistive current sources. Not transistors, or diodes or anything reference. So that tends to lead to a bit of power supply ripple ending up in the signal path if you don’t filter it properly. So I would do that. it was still very simple but the sound quality of it. A colleague of mine, who or friend of mine should I say, who I often used to ask questions of, was a field sales engineer at Philips, semiconductors. He wasn’t the transistor salesman, he was the integrated circuit salesman, but he was classically trained and he proffered sort of a kind of a technical explanation to why it worked. And he said that you have so much open loop gain in the circuit that if it’s not going unstable, it’s used to in a certain way create what would otherwise be known as dither, in a digital. So there’s a sort of a noise or which you can’t hear but it’s going on there that is used to fill in the transition between the positive and negative half cycles of the signal.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: So if you were to look at it at high frequencies, yes, you could see crossover distortion but it appeared not to be there. You know, just in the same way that a digital, a 16 bit digital signal without dither, wouldn’t sound as good as it would together with dither. and so, and that, that was really

00:30:00

Mike Creek: the, I would say the technical explanation if anyone should have asked me. Yes, which I don’t think they did. But looking back on it now, it kind of worked because of like an error that was a positive, you know, instead of an error which was Only a negative.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, so it is a very, A happy arrangement, like one that’s meant to be in a way because as you say, it had a certain sound and it worked and maybe it kind of shouldn’t.

Mike Creek: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: But, And Oh, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say something about the,

Mike Creek: Well, I was gonna. I’d fill in while you’re thinking about that. Say, thinking about it now, if I’m going back to my radio days in the short wave radios. Works on different principles either by heterodynes or, you know, super heterodynes or before that, super regenerative. It was almost like a super regenerative amplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, okay.

Mike Creek: To the point of oscillation. And when you got to there, you got the peak gain and the peak sensitivity and so on.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: It kind of worked like that.

Thank you everybody for listening to the podcast. Please subscribe and comment

Andrew Hutchison: we’ll take a quick break. Back folks in a second. Thank you everybody for listening to the podcast. It’s really appreciated and even more appreciated is, comments, likes, five star reviews, that kind of thing. It’s also very much appreciated. So if you’re enjoying the podcast, please subscribe, follow like and comment. And thank you to the listener in Canada for commenting on the sound quality. We are, working on it.

Mike Creek’s first amplifier was class B, not great sounding

We’re back with, Mike Creek and we’ve made the discovery that his first amplifier was in fact not just great sounding, but, was class B, which, you know, he doesn’t mention too much in the brochure, I guess. Or did you? You didn’t.

Mike Creek: I didn’t deny it. I wouldn’t make it a selling feature either because that’s the kind of amplifier that musicians would expect to find in an amp. A guitar amp for PA Amp of today.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: and it was done purely to save on the heatsink. Heatsink was one of the costliest items inside an amplifier. except for those companies, I shall not mention by name, who didn’t use heat sinks. They just used the case.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, by name. You’re not going to mention them by name.

Was the output stage symmetrical then was it is that is

Okay.

Mike Creek: All right, good.

Andrew Hutchison: the. Yeah, I was going to say idle current. Well, there isn’t any. So basically when you turn the volume down, the amp was stone cold, more or less.

Mike Creek: Indeed it was. It was completely. There’s no idle current and therefore no, apart from a small current draw from current sources in the power. Power amp circuit. And you know, we’re talking about five or six milliamps in total. And the same with the preamp. Yeah, there wasn’t much of a Preamp, the very first ones just had an emitter follower. And so it was unity M gain.

Andrew Hutchison: Buffering circuit kind of thing.

Mike Creek: And the gain required for the tone control or insertion loss. To overcome the insertion loss, just use the feedback from the power amp.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: And for the volume. Sorry. For the pre. The phono pre amplifier we used a Philips OP amp which was designed primarily to be used on a single rail power supply, which is the other thing I should mention. This was a AC coupled single rail power supply. So what it saved in some areas like having two power supply caps, one larger one, it had to pay for. If you wanted low frequencies, you have to use a really fairly substantial output coupling capacitor, something like 2200. And strictly speaking it should have been full rail in case anything went wrong. But we used to play it sort of let’s say not quite so safe and put something like 50 volts in instead of 63.

Andrew Hutchison: 63, yeah. Okay.

Mike Creek: Yeah. Keep your fingers.

Andrew Hutchison: This is for the coupling cap. We’re talking about the output coupling cap. Yeah. yeah. So if nothing goes that. But if something does, you’re going to exceed that. well, so you’re saying the

Mike Creek: Well if it. If the sensor, you know, voltage or the midpoint voltage drifted above what it should have been. Yes, half of the. Out of the highest voltage supply, then Then you could over voltage that cap. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: It was very rare that it did that and it usually would do that as a result of one or both power transistors breaking. Well generally if both power transistors broke, it would. It would take the fuse out and so it would. It would save everything that would otherwise over voltage.

Andrew Hutchison: And so instantly was your. Was your design sort of goal

00:35:00

Andrew Hutchison: to make. So was the output stage symmetrical then was it is that is. So the devices were the same?

Mike Creek: Yeah, well, it was symmetrical insofar as there was a pos, a PNP and an mpn. but you still.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, you still just had the one rail voltage and you coupled the output which I guess is. Which was really kind of in the 70s was particularly with your. With your father’s business with the radiograms as we would have called them here. That, that was pretty typical in, in an output stage. I, I guess it’s For whatever reason I was just maybe how it was done at the time.

Mike Creek: You should mention that initially we used transistors. but not making the circuits ourselves, we. We bought a module from. Well they were called Mallard modules. I think it was an LP 1162 if memory serves me. Okay, stranger. If I can remember that.

Andrew Hutchison: Bizarre.

Mike Creek: Yes, I can remember that. I can remember the telephone number of Mallard as they were allowed to call themselves. Even though Philips bought Mallard.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: Decades beforehand, but they still carried on calling things, including the valves or tubes.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.

Mike Creek: And that, that, that was, how should we say, one of the earlier, record player amplifier circuits we’d use. They were mono. They came with a, essentially a bra. Aluminum bracket which was the heatsink and you bolted them onto a chassis and hardwired to terminals on there. Later, as we developed our own, we did experiment, with. My father was always like. He was rather interested in using the latest technology and we were an early adopter of power amp ics.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: First one from a company called sgs, which morphed into, st. Yep. And the other from Texas Instruments who haven’t changed their name. but both the ST or SGS and the Texas ones were very good at performing, pyrotechnics. Made good indoor fireworks. If even if you just breathed on them or did something to them, they were very unreliable.

Andrew Hutchison: We’re talking STK ics. The earlier ones, sg sgs. Oh, the SGS ones, yeah. Well, yeah, well. So the SGs were the forerunner. Yeah, yeah.

Well, ST as in, um, the, the brand ST now. Which, uh, I think, has, has taken over

Mike Creek: Well, ST as in, the, the brand ST now.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: Which, I think, you know, has, has taken over or did take over that. Or that it morphed into that back in the. Back in the day. I’m, I’m not sure of the history of that. so, you know, I’m not going to say too much about it, but I would say that they were all that. When the sales reps came around and you complained about unreliability, they would always say it was your fault, it was the way you used it. If you sent them back, some broken ones, they said we can’t take these back for, credit because you’ve soldered them so well, how would we know whether they worked or not?

Andrew Hutchison: Well, the semiconductors.

Mike Creek: One of my many jobs was to drop these ICs into a ZIF socket, zero insertion for socket, pull the lever down and test them. And out of 5,000 you might get 1,000 that worked or.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, wow.

Mike Creek: I remember taking them back, two Texas Instruments in a van, huge box of these things and giving them to them. They just looked as if they wanted to cry. And I said, we can’t use these anymore. If you don’t sort out this problem that’s.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s a horrible failure. Right. Gee whiz. So you. Yeah. You’d be one of filtering that before you started assembling the amplifiers and soldering them in. Right. So

Mike Creek: Yes. Well yet they were time consuming to remove and to replace. And you didn’t guarantee that the next one you put in would work either if you pre test it. But then you kind of thing that a company like Texas or even SGS at the time would have done their homework. But they were really running, you know they were pushing the envelope regarding technology. And obviously in later days these things have become rock solid. But what I’m talking about is the early 70s when it was kind of cutting edge technology.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed, indeed.

Mike Creek: And we just went back to using transistors and the transistor circuit that I commissioned Jim, Semiotis to make was this class B circuit which was very economic. and it’s. And its use of transistors. Having

00:40:00

Mike Creek: said that, you know a small signal transistor cost three pence is more. It was more expensive. Not even accounting for Inflation then to buy a transistor than it is now. But I still think we could have gone a different route. But In. In its own way, you know it has helped spawn the first Creek amplifier.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed. And do you think I just. The thought I think that I had in the previous segment that I had forgotten was that When you mentioned that it was a capacitively coupled output stage, that single rail that I always feel like there’s a certain charm to that.

Mike Creek: Indeed. But it’s not linear. It’s not linear in the sense that you know the, the capacitor doesn’t have a strong influence on the way it sounds.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, no. I guess that’s the.

Mike Creek: Hence why I used ah, AC feedback which wasn’t used on the Windsor. I put feedback not only after the capacitor but also after the Fuse. So I incorporated the nastiness Of a bad connection. Bad connection or a fuse.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: Or the, the negative sound quality effects of a non linear resistor if you like inside. In the circuit by putting global, global feedback around.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. So I mean it’s a, It’s a. It’s a bit of a classic exercise in In you know, I mean in thinking.

Mike Creek: It’s called value engineering.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. It’s, it’s. It’s the heart, it’s the. It’s much harder than trying to build something for $50,000. Isn’t it? Because it’s

Mike Creek: Well Exactly.

Andrew Hutchison: You make everything.

Mike Creek: People realize that. But it is as you quite rightly say, ah, quite, quite a lot harder to budget or build something to a budget than it is to have no budget and just make the best that you can produce using anything that you can buy in low quantities at very high prices. Because part of my job remit was to buy product parts and component parts at the best price to where the profit margin was, let’s say, ah, at ah, best, marginal and worst you’re making a loss if you didn’t buy well, you didn’t make any money at all out of it. So really that was my experience of making consumer electronics before I started cre.

There’s an elegance to making everything in a circuit work optimally

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. Yes. And, and so I was going to say, I mean there’s an elegance to making everything in that circuit work optimally in a way so that it, it sort of aids every other part of the circuit. You don’t have to sort of add some circuit off over the side here to sort of fix this issue or whatever. You really have to make everything just sort of balance very sweetly. And it’s well it’s something I appreciate in here. I’m not sure that everyone that’s listening kind of gets the. Just how. I don’t know, elegant is the word really. I, I think. Would you agree that just to get everything to a very simple circuit to work well and make a musical sound is a nice thing?

Mike Creek: Well, I mean that is exactly what made it elegant is the fact that there wasn’t even a trim pot in it for adjusting midpoint or whatever. We would set or trim the amplifier with two fixed resistors and if it was out, if the offset was too high, I’d adjust it so that you’d either add a resistor across one or another resistor to trim it, you know, a higher value soldered on. So if you ever saw the back of one, there would be occasionally a resistor soldered across the back to fine tune it rather than paying for a trim pot which as you know don’t always work after 10 years.

Andrew Hutchison: Well no, they are unreliable little things and and of course they do cost an extra, a couple of pence as well. So what now the whole thing with the trimming then and tacking an extra resistor on is. So who was building these things when you. I mean we, maybe we should cover more of the story where you, you kind of entered the Market with this, this wonderful, wonderfully simple amplifier. And from what, from what I know, it was taken up by dealers, I presume, at least at the UK level, where you were no doubt driving around and showing it to people. it was taken up very readily and you quickly found yourself in a situation where you needed to make more.

Mike Creek: Is that what happened? well, actually the way it rolled, out initially was that I, I’d taken a risk and

00:45:00

Mike Creek: borrowed £4,000 from my local bank. After the bank manager actually came down, sat in my living room and had a cup of tea and a biscuit and we discussed what I was doing and he lent me £4,000 on, on the strength of my conversation, with him with no personal guarantee.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay.

Mike Creek: And that’s component to make the first hundred pieces.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay. Just the hundred.

Mike Creek: And if I hadn’t. Yeah, just a hundred. And needless to say, it’s more expensive when you do just a hundred and a thousand or ten thousand.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, I’m.

Mike Creek: Which I’ve been used to with my father’s company, so I feel it. That’s what I was kind of for.

Andrew Hutchison: Aiming at, being conservative in a way. But I mean it’s still quite a. I mean I’m saying just 100. Being slightly sarcastic because really with a new design and a brand new business, that’s a, that’s a reasonable commitment.

Douglas Brady says he borrowed £4,000 to start Amplif

You have no idea at this stage because you’ve not shown anyone anything at this point, have you, when you borrowed the £4,000 or did you have an inkling that it was going to work?

Mike Creek: Well, having made things before which were a lot more expensive, expensive for Ambit and made things which were a lot cheaper from my father’s company days and we used to, we would make, products in the hundreds per week and not, really sure, where they were going to because my job was manufacturing. Not so much selling them. Although I didn’t know all of the customers my father had, which were mail order company companies mainly, and including the Navy, Army, Air Force Institute, nafi, which was a big customer, bought products we made and sent them to Germany to the army bases out there for the, staff out there to buy through a catalog. So rarely did we actually sell to retailers. In fact, we sold through wholesale.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: Wholesalers took a chunk of your profit margin. So we were always pushed for profit margin and it was marginal most of the time.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: but the attraction for me was not to go that route but to go direct to retailers. And so I looked In a few magazines, hi fi magazines at the time. And I looked at the house, how should we say, the, the better respected brands. Yeah, which included the likes of Lynn Name, Riga Exposure, that, that type of thing. And I saw that essentially they all supplied a limited number of dealers throughout the uk. Now at this point in time I was green as could be. But I did have a few experiences, of taking products to shows and demonstrating them with ambitious International and also as a kid going with my father to consumer electronic shows where he would be demonstrating his products. So showing products and shows was second nature to me even though I didn’t have a budget much, much of a budget for doing it. So I took the first sample amp to a London show in Swiss Cottage which is no longer going. But it was M Managed by a chain of stores. Well there was two, two stores, actually, but that. They sponsored it, they ran it and it was something I had done once before with Ambit. And so I was familiar with the venue and familiar with what needed to be done. And I took the Amplif amplifier, the integrated amp and I also took a power amp.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And the power amp was a Mosfet power amp which could produce 100 watts. And I’d simply made that as a backup in case the integrated amp sales were a bit less than I’d hoped for.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yes.

Mike Creek: In fact, I met a few contacts there which who were interested to both sample the amplifier after the show. And also I met my first salesman whose name is David Palmer and he’d been working as a freelance salesman, selling Rogers and one or two other brands. But he and I just hit it off straight away. He lived in Sheffield, or just north of Sheffield actually. and I was living in London, North London at the time. And so we weren’t exactly.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

Mike Creek: But he, he came to my house after the show. So he drove down from Sheffield to London and spent a day with me and we went through it and he went off with his sample.

00:50:00

Mike Creek: And a week later I was about to go out shopping with my wife and the post arrived on a Saturday, as you got post on the Saturday Seems odd, but.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: But there was a sort of a far. A relatively fat empty envelope from Sheffield in it. Yeah. When I opened it, sitting in the car, ready to drive off and thumb through about ten, purchase orders on, you know, his good old fashioned salesman’s sales purchase order pad. Yes, yeah, I, I had orders for about 50amplifiers in.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh wow, okay.

Mike Creek: One of the, one of them was from a company called Doug Brady. Not Doug Brady, it’s the wa. Brady and Brady started in Liverpool a long time before I was born and it was a husband and wife team. And then the son, Doug Douglas Brady, who later branched off when he found it impossible to work with the family business anymore. Carried the theme on himself elsewhere. But he, you know, he ordered 10 from the strength of one demonstration of the amplifier. Wow. Knowing it was a brand that had no history at all and no, no factory either.

Andrew Hutchison: So.

Well, this is the interesting thing. Knowing how to manufacture in quantity, I took the decision early on

Well, this is the interesting thing.

Mike Creek: Forced to have to make a decision.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, I mean that’s both the most, you know, obviously probably one of your happiest memories at the having this bundle of orders sitting there. But at the same time what am I to do? How do I, I mean it’s always the, it’s your, it’s your worst but best hope in the sense that you’d love to sell a lot of amplifiers but how the hell am I going to build them all? So what, what what did you do? And I guess you did it pretty quickly because what was the expectation do you think of these dealers as far as a timeline to deliver the amplifiers?

Mike Creek: Well, they were used to the the fact that if something was worth having they had to wait for it.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Lucky.

Mike Creek: In those days Riga would be on a three or four month waiting list. If you ordered a turntable, you’d. Look, you’d be lucky if you got a turntable from Riga in less than six months, maybe even a year.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh really?

Mike Creek: It was kind of the equivalent of Morgan cars where they only built €25 five a month get on the.

Andrew Hutchison: List they were building. Yeah, okay.

Mike Creek: But you know that, that, that was the, that was the scene then. Knowing fortunately how to manufacture in quantity, I took the decision early on, before I even started Creek Audio, that I never wanted to have anything to do with manufacturing again if it was the last job in the world. I didn’t want to employ m. Staff in a factory.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Mike Creek: And be chasing members of staff to come into work or stay for the whole week or not go off sick with a sniffly nose or some other excuse and all the other, you know, human resources type problems which I’d experienced from five years with my father’s company. Company.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Mike Creek: And didn’t want to repeat.

Andrew Hutchison: No.

Mike Creek: So I had before starting Creek Audio to make the, the the electronics myself, been freelancing for other companies and one company that ah, came up for me other than Ambit International, which was the a company that was a competitor of my father’s in the 50s, 60s and early 70s called Van der Molen. Van Der Molen was a company formed by Mike, Michael Van der Molen and his wife. And they were actually, she was about 2/3 of the way from where I lived to where I worked in Brentwood in Essex. And the things I popped in there and just said, give us a job, you know. And he said well yeah, we need somebody to develop this or that or the other. And I said well that’s okay, I can do that. He said how much do you want? And I said well I think I wanted 120 pounds a week, you know, for a 40 hour week. And he said I’m not paying you that. That’s twice what I pay myself. Sorry, that’s what I charge. It’s not a charity. So we didn’t work together. Oh. Similarly I did the same with Amstrad and he wouldn’t pay me what I wanted either. You know, I would have been one of his earliest apprentices or apprentices or whatever. You know. He would have been a nightmare work for. Whereas Michael Van Der Molen was a sweetheart, you know, he was just a really nice person and

00:55:00

Mike Creek: his wife also. And he would manufacture for us for about three years on a subcontract basis. And he took our production up from 100 in, you know, first order, up to, in 18 months. We were manufacturing about 1350amonth. Oh wow. And 500 tuners a month as well. Plus another model also called the 4140 which was the sort of more high end version.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: So we were cooking on gas at that time.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. I mean that’s completely impressive, isn’t it? I mean that’s a that’s an. It’s stunning. So I, I don’t think this happens anymore. And I’m m not sure why or whether. I mean it’s just a different time I guess. Thing is, I don’t know how that even works. You just couldn’t imagine starting a new audio business. And even if it was an amazing product, would it get going that fast? It just feels like, I mean what did you have for marketing? Did you have a sort of a piece of paper with a sketch on it or something and a logo? I mean, I feel, I mean there’s so many things these days to piece a, I get a product going. I mean as you well know. I mean you still are in the business. I mean, there’s this. Manuals, packaging. There’s, Of course, now there’s lots of certifications and stuff. And it’s a much more complicated circuit. But it just. I mean, you know, it just. I don’t know, you made it, I guess, you know, youthful enthusiasm. And you kind of had it running, obviously, very quickly, because you.

What age were you when you, um, made this magic happen

What age were you, Mike, when you, made this magic happen? Do you remember? Roughly?

Mike Creek: 30.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Mike Creek: Yeah. 30 years old.

Andrew Hutchison: You knew it all.

Mike Creek: Well, I was 29 when I started it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Mike Creek: 30 in the first year. And, I think I had a few. A few positives on my side. First, I had the salesman, David Palmer.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Okay.

Mike Creek: Who was covering two thirds of the country. I. I did the Southeast, which he was somewhat, Ah, disappointed he didn’t get that as well. And made the numbers difficult for him.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: Because he did all the traveling and I did all of the easy bit.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: I could. I could get to a dealer in 30 minutes, in some cases in London even quicker. And he couldn’t even reach one dealer in. In that time.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: However, he built it up. He stopped selling anything else. He just concentrated on that.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And his advice was, you know, don’t do anything. You don’t do anything different.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: Plus the fact I had advice from Roy Gandy.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And Terry Davis, who’s Roy Gandhi’s, manager. so. In Finance director.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: at Riga Research. And they said, you know, you could do worse, than follow our lead and don’t give anybody any credit. Don’t advertise, don’t market your product. Let the dealers do it for you. And they were fighting each other for it in the end. So it was a kind of inverse logic. Know, Instead of trying to make yourself well known, I was saying to people when they phoned up, I’m sorry that your name’s not on my list. And I said, nobody’s ever told us that before. Well, and when it does come on my list, I’ll get back in touch with you. But, you know, I was very fortunate that I allocated a maximum number to the dealers I felt would do the best for me.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: And I didn’t m. I had a big map on the wall of the country and.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: Where the drawing pinned or marker pin where I wanted or needed a dealer to get geographical coverage. And I tried to avoid having more than one dealer in one city or town.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: with a couple of exceptions. I mean, London was the big exception because it was, necessary to have them here and there. But in the end we did as much business as we could when giving no credit to any of them. And we didn’t ask pro forma payment. We didn’t ask the money up front.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, no.

Mike Creek: But in those days you took a check with a delivery.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes. Yep.

Mike Creek: So. And COD didn’t even give them. Ah, I didn’t even give them, you know, extra discount for early payment either. So cash settlement discounts? None. I just said, you want them, you have to pay for them. This is the price.

Andrew Hutchison: I guess that’s all changed now. But just so. So at some point you bought a world map and stuck that on the wall and started putting pins in it. Is that,

Mike Creek: Not very long after that first, you know, exhibition?

01:00:00

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And yes, I had a, let’s say a smaller map of the world because didn’t want to, Expand beyond the UK earlier than I should have done. And in a certain way, looking back on it now, it was both positive and a negative thing to have an overseas market.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And it didn’t stop the phone ringing, from countries all around the world asking for this product which was being reviewed, well, in magazines. And they just saw these magazines and thought, oh, they don’t have a distributor in this country. Let’s see their distributor. And my first distributor in Australia came to. Well, two. Two of them came to visit.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And I made the choice to go with Derek and Jackie Pugh, who were running company called Concept Concept Audio Audio out of, Sydney.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Let’s say if I was recommending loudspeakers for anyone, then

Mike Creek: And later on, they sort of, became one of my, you know, better customers. But they. I knew them as well from my experience of, You know, Mordaunt. Short was a company I used for. Let’s say if I was recommending loudspeakers for anyone, then let’s say Mordaunt Short, Ms. 20 was the speaker that I would have recommended to go with it. amongst others.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: and they were the importers for more than Short.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed they were. And the store that I was involved with, sold both products, which is how I, you know, know something about the 4040 because it was on. The MS.20s were there and the 4040 was on the shelf. And And I didn’t know, at that point, Derek, or Jackie because I was. Or a. They probably wouldn’t have visited the far, corners of the country. Maybe they did get around. I don’t know, Jackie. Perhaps. I don’t know. Did Derek go on the Road, we, we don’t know.

Mike Creek: But the point is Derek, according to his biography, autobiography. He did. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh he did. Okay. But yes, because he’s got tales to.

Mike Creek: Tell of the road. Yeah. I think later on he, he he, he, he sort of backed off from doing that. And, and I think Jackie did go out on the road a fair bit. Usually to naughty dealers who didn’t pay on time.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep, yep.

Mike Creek: With a sharp, a sharp stick.

Andrew Hutchison: Sharp stick. And give them a poke. Yes.

Are we talking the days of the fax at this point? Almost. Not quite

so, so really the sweet time then. almost linear or maybe exponential growth from 82 I believe through till. I mean was there three or four years of. I mean it must have been crazy times, but at the same time crazy. But you had yourself organized because you had all of them, all of the manufacturing, subcontracted, contracted out. I mean I still imagine you were just, the phone was just going bank because I mean that’s how business was done to some degree. Although you were getting letters, I guess, getting mail. But early faxes. Are we talking the days of the fax at this point? Almost. Not quite.

Mike Creek: But telex.

Andrew Hutchison: Telex, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What Was facts like 80s?

Mike Creek: We didn’t have a telex. No, we didn’t have a telex machine. Although I was used to one.

Andrew Hutchison: yep.

Mike Creek: Working for Ambit. They had everything, you know. Yes, they were very, very modern and cutting edge. But faxes started at about 80, 687. Yeah, but I didn’t get one until I sold the business in 88. which was kind of necessary then. Even, even if it wasn’t sort of long lasting as my own, it was a thermal fact. So if you, it didn’t read it fast enough.

Andrew Hutchison: Don’t leave it in the sun. Yes, I have an order here for 500 units. Well, but it’s faded and disappeared.

Mike Creek: Yes, exactly.

To have 600% growth per annum would be dangerous for any business

So the, I mean to answer your question, you said about the exponential growth. It certainly exponential growth is great if you got a fundamental, you know, well funded capital base. And I didn’t, I was borrowing.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: Money to make money and borrowing money at a higher rate of interest at times.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh well that was the high interest era as well.

Mike Creek: Interest rate went up from sort of an average to, to Something that was phenomenal. I think it was about 18 in the UK at one point. Yes, in, in that period of time and you know, whilst trying to pay the, pay my mortgage and you know, run the business and employ staff and chase overseas debts where the distributors didn’t Pay in advance. Not always. Anyway, I began to give credit, and that’s where it started to go a little bit crazy.

01:05:00

Mike Creek: And I had to say that it was, to use a sort of an economics term, over trading in the extreme.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: To have 600% growth per annum would be dangerous for any business.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And one day that came very close to wiping us out because our factory, which was not far from where we were, but it was, you know, sort of like half an hour drive. The Michael van der Molen came to me rather sheepishly one morning and said, here’s your delivery very. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. And I said, what’s the good news? He said, the factory is okay. So what’s the bad news? I’ve calculated that, Well, we didn’t have enough fire insurance to cover the materials that we’ve ordered on your behalf. Now, when I say they’re subcontractors, we paid for all the materials. We just paid for them to produce the product.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Mike Creek: And then produced it. Up to a certain point, they never completed. Completed it. We, we by that time had, taken on space for a factory to do the final assembly.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: Testing, packing and dispatch. And I was doing that in my house, quite happily until I got to 100 a week. And when you’ve got a hundred amplifier boxes in your house, you know, stacked on the staircase like LEGO bricks. And I had two garages at the bottom of the garden with one of a, retired man down there drilling holes in heat sinks and tapping them and that kind of thing. And you think this is. This has got to move to a more professional basis.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And that’s when expenses went up, of course. And, then coupled with that and, the fact that the factory nearly burned down because the factory next door court light. And they only just stopped the flames from licking over and joining up with the next one where our place was. But we literally had, three months production in finished stock, sub assemblies and, partially assembled products and, raw materials for the next month following that. Yes, I mean, Vandermohlen operated in a big factory that was once their own, but they just operated for me in a small corner of it as a subcontractor. And the rest of the factory was sublet to other companies. And it was those other. The factory of fire.

Andrew Hutchison: okay. Yep.

Mike Creek: Factory next to them. But it was just. They were just fortunate. And it was that at that point also he went to his accountant, who coincidentally happened to Be my accountant.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Mike Creek: And my father’s accountant for me.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And the. The accountant advised me to put my prices up, which I did.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And then the next week, Michael Van De Mollen went and told him to put his prices up. which wasn’t very helpful if you’ve done it the other way around. I could have avoided having to put my price is up twice up again.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: I took a sort of wrong move there and decided that he was, you know, having a laugh. And I just said to him, I’ll find somebody else to make it. And, he took it reasonably well.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: But he didn’t like the fact that he was almost 100% manufacturing for me, and if I’d taken the work away from him, he’d have no business at all. So I was being a bit hard. No. Taking it away from him. But I just felt that if I didn’t find a cheaper way to produce things or put my prices up for twice in one month, which would seem.

Andrew Hutchison: Like a chaos, that’s a problem.

Mike Creek: I would be stuck. the problem was that the person I took it to, who claimed to be capable of producing the numbers, wasn’t capable of producing even 10% of what we required. So, okay, the, delay in production and sales and the, cash flow crisis that that caused really, put me in a bind. And, at the same time, I had, you know, problems at home, which I’ll just, say were caused by health problems my wife had. And that made me concentrate my mind on what I was doing and looking after her and looking after my son. And looking after the business was taking a toll on me as well.

Andrew Hutchison: Not well, no doubt.

Mike Creek: Coincidentally. Yeah, Coincidentally, we had a visit from our Dutch distributor one morning who used to turn up

01:10:00

Mike Creek: at the drop of a hat and, say, good morning. I’ve brought the coffee. I didn’t know you were coming. And he said, yes, I want to go and visit Mordaunt Short. I’d like to buy their loudspeaker. I’m just saying. All right, I’ll ring Christopher Short. So I did and introduced him to this guy who had an entourage with him. They went down there and met him. And, Chris Short rang me later and thanked me for the introduction. I don’t think he wanted to work with them, but, he said in passing, and when are you going to join our happy band companies down here? And I just said, pardon? Oh, you know, we bought EPOs, loudspeakers, and, companies doing really well. And you know, my company, Mordaunt Short was sold to TGI plc, the.

Creek Audio acquired from me because it had a very high stock market valuation

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: Company that contained Tannoy Goodman’s, and some other companies as well. Tannoy Goodman’s, Morden Short, EPOS, Marten Audio, which was a pro audio company.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: They, they had a stock market valuation which was very high and I think their shares were worth 123pence at the time, which was quite high. And they acquired Creek from me because I, I felt it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, under the circumstances it was, it would have been a relief, wouldn’t it?

Mike Creek: well, yes. I mean with my wife with a life threatening illness and my son having to be taken to school each day and all sorts of other problems as well.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: I thought, take it, take it, take it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: Give me a job.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: So they gave me a three year service contract, and a percentage of the net profits. My mistake was not to request a percentage of the gross profit.

Andrew Hutchison: You still never be any net profit.

Mike Creek: No, the net profit could be whatever their accountants decided to make it. And I was therefore in a position where I made the Creek Audio made more money pro rata, in its first year than any of the companies in the group did.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And it because they had a successful business and it was rated at a, let’s say a PE or profit earnings ratio of 10.

Andrew Hutchison: Uh-huh.

Mike Creek: That $1 earned by profit earned by Creek meant $10 to their share price, $10 to their net earnings. I mean.

Andrew Hutchison: Uh-huh.

Mike Creek: So that Creek did well for them. The second year not so well. And the third year made no profit at all. Surprise, surprise. Even though they’d increased the turnover.

Andrew Hutchison: And is that, well, the net profit? No, because they managed to account themselves out of that to your detriment.

Mike Creek: Accounted for. All of the high earning directors of the company suddenly became M consultants to Creek Audio.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Yes.

In Australia and New Zealand at the time there were import tariffs

Well, I think that’s another chapter closed. I’m going to have another quick break and we’ll come back and we’ll, I guess for this episode we’ll wrap up the the 4040 story. We’ve not, we’ve not made it a long way through but, but it’s certainly an exciting, exciting part of the Creek story. So back shortly, folks. Thank you everybody for listening to the podcast. It’s really appreciated and even more appreciated is comments, likes, five star reviews, that kind of thing. It’s also very much appreciated. So if you’re enjoying the podcast, please subscribe, follow like and comment. And thank you to the listener in Canada for commenting on the sound quality. We are working on it.

Mike Creek: Well, I, I didn’t not advertise, but what I did is I didn’t make a you know, sort of expensive full page color advert like Mission used to do or back cover or front cover.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, yeah.

Mike Creek: Inside front cover. The, the advertising was simply a list of dealers where they could be listened to. Because in those days people used to go and listen to things before they bought them.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah. And obviously the amp demonstrated well and and people. And it was not like it was, I mean, an enormous buying decision. Well, it might have been Australia by the time Derek got his hot little hands on it, because I have it and I don’t know if you remember the retail price in Australia, but it was not the it wasn’t 200, I think it was probably. I can’t remember, but I’m going to say as much as 600. I think it was. there was some handling fees to get it here, which which is to some degree is understandable. But it was also the way it was at the time. There was not a lot of global price parity like there is now. And some listeners would say, well, there’s still a problem

01:15:00

Andrew Hutchison: with that. Some brands still play that game. But because of the Internet, there’s, it’s very transparent. I mean your current models. Because if we skip ahead. No, should we skip ahead. People, people may not realize you still, you sold the company, but magically you own it today. So obviously there’s a part of the story in the middle that we’ve conveniently left out. But your current 4040, the new 4040, does it sell largely for the same price all around the world? Is it, if you take into account exchange rates and what have you. Taxes. I would say it does.

Mike Creek: Well, to answer that, I should just go back and mention the fact that in Australia and especially New Zealand at the time there were import tariffs.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, there was.

Mike Creek: And in New Zealand, we. We wouldn’t sell complete products to them during that period of time. We would only sell semi knockdown. So. Yep, they would, they would buy a printed circuit board, tested and control knobs, maybe a front panel which was printed or not. I can’t remember exactly.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Mike Creek: And they locally sourced metal work and a transformer.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: Connectors. And they assembled it and built it and so you know, sold it as a, as like a New Zealand brand or a New Zealand version of that brand.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah, okay, that’s. I mean we did a bit of that I think in Australia probably in the 70s more, but I think. I can’t remember what the impression duty was, but it was when you were doing all of this.

Mike Creek: It was the time when it was coming down.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Mike Creek: I’ll ask Jackie the next time I see her or speak to her rather because, she’ll remember those things. She’s, she’s good like that.

Andrew Hutchison: I can’t. It’s sort of. I mean everyone was at it. I mean, I you know, I bought hi Fi out of the UK as a teenager because it was half the price and if, you know, if you were. Well, I wasn’t there but I had a neighbor who was, who was traveling backwards and forwards and it was just so much cheaper. It was kind of ridiculous and I felt a bit guilty doing it. I still bought stuff locally as well, but there was a couple of pieces that were just so much cheaper. I guess you were putting it in a suitcase and avoiding some duty as you say. There was also 30% sales tax as well. So as sales tax goes, it was a big number, but it was on the wholesale price because it was a wholesale sales tax. But it’s still a lot of, a lot of money equivalent basically to your 20% VAT, I guess, that you’ve got now.

You worked for Chris Short at TGI on a three year contract

I do have other questions, but I’ll just. I think what we’ll do is we’re going to wrap up episode one because I think we’ve, we’ve covered so much. But the way I would like to wrap it up is that you tell us briefly how your time went at TGI and then obviously at some point you weren’t working there anymore. I think there’s a story to that. Perhaps m. You went to work one day and maybe it was time to go from there as well. I think you mentioned it to me once, but I can’t remember quite what happened.

Mike Creek: Yes, I was employed by them on a three year contract. as I mentioned before and it was Initially working for my immediate boss was Christopher Short. And unlike Robin Marshall of Apostle, who had a seat on the board of directors as part of his deal when selling EPOS, I, I didn’t have such a deal. I’m not sure that it would have wanted it. But you know, I did have to write monthly reports. Okay. As a contribution to the monthly board meetings. And it wasn’t the easiest of rides working there because of the the politics that used to go on there. But moreover, I think it was the politics which were associated with Chris Short and the way he liked to run his company and the micromanaged the accounts side of things. Where I had been of the opinion that budget to develop new products would be relaxed when I sold the product to him, the company to Mordaunt Short but in fact it wasn’t any better than in fact it was in some respects more tightly controlled than when I was running it myself. If I wanted a new meter or I wanted a new distortion test set or whatever was necessary in those days, checking the quality of what we were making. Yeah, he would, he would say it’s not in this year’s budget, I’ll put it in next year.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, okay.

Mike Creek: And you’d say well it’s,

01:20:00

Mike Creek: it’s hardly significant but you know it doesn’t mean that we can make something or check something or test something in a way that would guarantee that what we say it is capable of it is in fact capable of it. You don’t want to journalist with a test set like that to tell you otherwise.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.

Mike Creek: And that was a risk when you had products reviewed by the likes of Paul Miller in those days who would be one of the early adopters of high precision test equipment and would sometimes, how should we say, ah, pull, pull companies products to pieces. regardless of any sort of backlash they would, they would show in terms of removing advertising or other other financial rewards for getting a good review. I mean that’s a that’s, that was a kind of a whole held back development of new products.

Andrew Hutchison: It would have. And just on that subject, I mean I do remember and you’re going to straighten me out on this but I feel like yeah that there was quite a, was quite a few magazines, UK hi fi magazines that were pretty honest in their reviews. I mean they, they would, they, they did write not so much bad reviews but they would point out the limitations of a product. They weren’t skating around the, the issues. They’d, they’d mention it. Is that, is that your memory? I mean that’s what you just said in this particular case is that, I mean it was, that’s the way I remember it. It was, it was not, not all magazine.

Mike Creek: There were objective reviews and there were technical reviews. Indeed if you wanted a technical review you either made sure that the sample they got was working correctly or you got a bad review.

Andrew Hutchison: Indeed.

Mike Creek: And in reality I maybe naivety I always just supplied something from the production line. I never.

Andrew Hutchison: You didn’t make a special one anyway.

Mike Creek: Which I’m not saying other companies did. But it’s possible.

Andrew Hutchison: It is possible. Not just possible. I’m pretty sure that might have happened. But It’s Okay. Yeah, m an interesting time but there was a certain honesty about it and I wonder whether that was part of their business model is that they. People would want to read their reviews because they were, you know, they’d knock the occasional product down a peg so to speak. And But I mean Even bloody what HiFi used to do 3 and 4 star reviews which I think they’ve they’ve banned now. I don’t think they do three star reviews of products anymore. They just simply send the product back and say we’re not, not reviewing this or something. But I mean back in the day I’m sure there were genuinely, you.

Mike Creek: Know, they were definitely capable of doing that. And it was a lottery. Yeah, you may be right. It’s not a lottery now but it was definitely a lottery then. And you could almost say well the reviewer got out the wrong side of the bed that morning or something because m. Some. Some of it wasn’t really justified.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, they just I guess if you were on the, if you. You could be unfortunately on the receiving end of a bit of spice just for the sake of Like I say, it’s a part ah of their business model was to to appear to be more open and honest than maybe other magazines or something. But

Christopher Short and I had some difficulties after the second year

But back to the So the difficulties. So you’ve gone from working for yourself to this corporatized world and frankly you’re not really enjoying it, but your three years is up. and was it time to go at that point?

Mike Creek: it happened earlier than that. after the second year Christopher Short was having some difficulties with the board of directors for his own position and he and I had how should we say, a turbulent time together. Yes, I’m used to running my own business and so was he and I think he just found my approach to doing things was not as he would have liked it to have been. So you know, it would be like saying if you had a great idea you try to exploit it. But in his view if it doesn’t fit into the budget you didn’t exploit it till the next year.

Andrew Hutchison: Which was.

Mike Creek: It was too prescriptive my approach to doing things. And we did sort of rough each other up or rub each other up the wrong way a little bit and It certainly happened at hi fi shows if I was ever at one with him. And in those days of go to CES in Chicago, the summer. CES in Chicago.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: He would almost insist that all of his staff and those distributors he was keeping a friendly eye on be in bed by 9:00.

Andrew Hutchison: And that’s

01:25:00

Andrew Hutchison: not why you go to hi fi shows.

Mike Creek: Yeah, he obviously didn’t, he didn’t get the script. He didn’t get the script that we did anyway.

Andrew Hutchison: okay. Yeah. So not, not going to get on with him. Yeah. Okay.

Mordaunt Short terminated your contract early because you weren’t happy

So so you made it to two, the two year mark and it was time for a change.

Mike Creek: Obviously they, they felt that I had a contract for three years but they terminated it early.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And they did so first by getting rid of more by getting rid of Christopher Short. So he disappeared and he was sub replaced by his second in command who was the accounts director, Jackie Stevens, who and I got on very well with. Everything was running very smoothly, more, more smoothly than I could have ever imagined until the board of directors appointed a new person to run both Tannoy and Mordaunt Short and its subsidiaries being Creek and EPOS

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Mike Creek: And that person’s remit was to come in and make savings or do things that he’d been told to do. Now I guess I’m with him. Well, but I didn’t understand his approach to coming in on the first day at Mordaunt Short and asking to see me at 9 o’clock and me being out the door at quarter past, without even a chance to clear my desk. So you know, it was, it was that ah, prompt.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay, well that’s, that probably isn’t a very happy day in your memory because that I’ve never been asked to do that. But I certainly know a few people that have and it’s slightly traumatizing really when you go to work. Not expecting that. so how did you did you take it positively or like you seek out the positive in it, the fact that you got a fresh start or you had the shits.

Mike Creek: I was somewhat shocked because I hadn’t worked for anyone for many years and that person only being my father. And he might have done that but then he might have changed his mind afterwards. I had no opportunity to talk to this person again. or not for a while after, after a while I did. But I have to say that at that particular point in time I just thought you’re in breach of contract and I’m going to make sure you know about it. So I contacted my account, my lawyer who was a particularly good one and he was about to sort of unleash the the hands of hell or dog, whatever expression you could use to ensure that my contract was honored. And they did actually say oh sorry, we might have overstepped the mark. How about this? We employ you for six months as a freelance person and you are required to write a story or the history of Creek Audio in six equal parts for us and our marketing team who was at a different branch of the company.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Creek: Another, another office in the country which which I did. And I reported to the marketing office, never to the factory.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Mike Creek: I had no idea what they were doing and they never asked me for any advice after that. And it, it suited me not because I was prepared to accept being paid six months money for what is essentially five days work. But the fact is, I mean that does happen a lot. But the, the fact was I wasn’t really happy working there. And I didn’t really find out until just before that my relationship with my wife had broken down to the point where I wanted to divorce. And that divorce caused me to be homeless.

Andrew Hutchison: This is not going well. I don’t know why I’m chuckling my job.

Mike Creek: I’ve lost my home, my son. And I was living with my parents in a spare room and traveling by. By car, which was my company car which they let me keep for about a week and then I had to deliver it back to them. Right. And then, then I was really somewhat stuck. however, very stuck.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow.

Mike Creek: I was say that I had an idea that I wanted to exploit which was to continue in the field that I was in by some means or other. And I was working with one or two other people in the industry who’d also separated from the company they’d

01:30:00

Mike Creek: worked for and had ideas as well of a similar nature. So I did start another brand but I was also you know, forced by the nature of the bi directional contract that I had to not compete with Creek Audio. Of course for the first six months after I left them.

Andrew Hutchison: so.

Mike Creek: But that just, just gave me the time, Gave you the time to get it going. So I did that. It was a company called EMF Audio or Electromotive Force Indeed. And initially I wasn’t going to make an amplifier. I did subsequently because of problems in achieving the result that I wanted. But the, the product I wanted to make was a mains regenerative power supply. Something that something a company like PS Audio makes nowadays.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Mike Creek: I wanted to produce like a mains powered but completely isolated or off the grid source of clean power for running audio equipment from.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow. So you were a bit of a pioneer then really. I mean that’s. I don’t think anyone had really. Anyone was really thinking of doing that in the. Because this is this stage we’re talking late 80s or something. Are we, or what.

Mike Creek: What year it was? You know, 88. 80, something like that.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep. Wow. Okay. And on that, on that on that note, I’ll stop recording. It will say goodbye to all the listeners and I will, I will convince you while you’re still here to to give me part two of this sometime in the near future. Because I have a. Still have a pile of questions here that I want to ask and If that’s okay with you. So.

Mike Creek: Perfectly.

Andrew Hutchison: I really want to thank Mike, Creek, ah. For coming on the show today and telling us probably more than we all bargained for. but it’s all been very interesting and we will be back with more with Mike soon and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks everybody.

Mike Creek: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s a pleasure Mike.

01:32:03

In the world of high-fidelity audio, few names resonate as strongly as Creek Audio. The latest episode of our podcast takes you on an enthralling journey with Mike Creek, the visionary behind this iconic brand. From a modest start to becoming a household name, Mike shares the trials, triumphs, and serendipitous moments that shaped Creek Audio’s legacy.

The conversation opens with Mike recounting his early days as a freelance engineer, His first Creek Audio product wasn’t a fresh slate but rather a culmination of experiences and ideas.

Listeners are treated to a deep dive into the technical aspects of amplifier design. Mike explains the simplicity and elegance of his first product, the CAS 4040, a straightforward yet high-performing amplifier that defied conventions with its class B design. His approach to value engineering, making the most out of limited resources, is both fascinating and inspiring. Creek Audio was almost an overnight success, quickly taking the UK, HiFi world by storm. Initially, this huge interest in Creek Audio caused the “problem” of too many orders for the fledgling business. Now Creek Audio is a world wide, well loved HiFi success story.

40+ years on, Creek Audio is going strong and has released the CAS 4040A, 40th anniversary amplifier model into the market for the world to enjoy.

Ep016 Creek Audio episodes, transcripts, history and pics on Not An Audiophile.

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM THIS EPISODE

“before I started Creek Audio I made the decision that I never ever wanted to have anything to do with manufacturing again if it was the last job in the world. With all the problems I had experienced with my father’s company in the five years I worked there that I didn’t want to repeat….”

” You entered the market with this wonderful, simple amplifier..it was taken up very readily and you quickly found yourself in a situation where you needed to make more..”

“it was overtrading in the extreme. To have 600% growth per annum would be dangerous for any business and one day it came very close to wiping us out…”

People mentioned on this episode –

Mike Creek – Creek Audio Systems
Andrew Hutchison – Dellichord

Models mentioned on this episode –

Creek Audio Systems – CAS – Model 4040 integrated amplifier

Businesses mentioned on this episode –

Doug Brady HiFi
AMBIT international

Brands mentioned on this episode –

CAS – Creek Audio Systems –
EMF Audio
Mordaunt Short – loudspeakers
AMBIT
Linn
KEF
Rega
Exposure
EPOS
Tannoy
Goodmans
Marten Audio
Phillips
Arcam
NAD
Windsor

Music courtesy of –

Please Listen Carefully by Jahzzar http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/please-listen-carefully
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/GGVFRIgP7uc

CREDITS –

Guest management, regular co-hosting – Brad Serhan

Host, audio production – Andrew Hutchison

The takeover of McIntosh Group by Bose – Andrew Hutchison and David Corazza can’t see how this controversial move will be good for HiFi.

The “stupidest” modifications or tweaks inc fancy bi-wiring links – so many people will argue to the death that there is vast improvement in sound when you use these. Kooky audio ideas including Improving CD sound by colouring it in with specialty green pen sourced only from HiFi retail stores? What about gear that offers passive absorption of bad EMF and other badness affecting sound quality? Or auxiliary turntable tonearm with a brush on the end and other kooky HiFi ideas that are no longer around (for a reason).

HiFi regrets – selling the Goldmund Reference Turntable (David) and selling any HiFi I owned in the past but mostly the kit KEF B139 speakers and a Thorens turnable that went in the wheelie bin (Andrew).

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM THIS EPISODE

“Bose customer service said we no longer have that as a spare part. The customer may be suitable for our new customer exchange program for an equivalent product” and the offer was a $999 bluetooth speaker with a credit…. since when is that an equivalent to a Bose 901?”

“Bi-wiring links…the short answer is no. The long answer is I don’t care. I am yet to be convinced that it’s really an improvement. I see no substance to it..”

“In a corner there was literally a Goldmund Reference Turntable and physiologically I involuntarily gasped and it was like seeing a f*ing unicorn because I’d read about this mythological creature…. only two or three made it to Australia and there in front of me lay one beckoning….. going, you don’t need that second kidney……”

Ep015 News in HiFi 2 episodes, transcripts, history and pics on Not An Audiophile.

People mentioned on this episode –

Andrew Hutchison
David Corazza
Roy Gandy – Founder of Rega

Brands mentioned on this episode –

Bose
McIntosh Audio
Sonus Faber
Lexus
Audioquest
Discwasher – SC-2 – record care
Dustbug – record care
Goldmund Reference Turntable
Meridian
KEF
Teac
Thorens
Panasonic
Sony
Denon
Alpine

Music courtesy of –

Please Listen Carefully by Jahzzar http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/please-listen-carefully
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/GGVFRIgP7uc

CREDITS –

Guest management, regular co-hosting – Brad Serhan

Host, audio production – Andrew Hutchison

Have you ever wanted to sell your speakers and try something else because they just don’t sound the way you thought they would? Maybe the something else you should try is acoustics.

“The result was….”Oh, my God, Oh, my God, Oh, my God. What did you do!” What David Spargo from Praxis Acoustics did was simply make small changes to the geometry of the system so that it wasn’t interacting with the room modes so strongly. There was a bit of offset so the arrangement was changed to asymmetrical rather than the equilateral triangle we all think we need.

In the first part of this episode, David goes in depth into human perception of sound and why we hear what we hear. In the second part of this episode, David gets practical discussing simple changes that make a big difference to the sound from our systems.

David Spargo episodes, transcripts, history and pics on Not An Audiophile.

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM THIS EPISODE

“We can’t possibly cope with all the sensory input our bodies collect every day so our brains filter, present important information and we fill in the gaps based on our experience. Does that throw subjective auditioning and reviewing of HiFi into question? Well yes, in a way it does”

“The shape of your ears, the shape of your head, what you know, references based on experience all changes what you hear”

“The most expensive gear in the world is not going to sound great in a bad room. A quite modest system can are really enjoyable, and other rooms you walk into and you just go “this sounds terrible, and you are insane.”

These people, brands and places are mentioned as part of the story. No payments were received.

People mentioned on this episode –

David Spargo – Praxis Acoustics
Andrew Hutchison – Dellichord
Brad Serhan – Serhan Swift
Floyd Toole – Author/Acoustician – Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms

Music courtesy of –

Please Listen Carefully by Jahzzar http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jahzzar
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/please-listen-carefully
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/GGVFRIgP7uc

CREDITS –

Guest management, regular co-hosting – Brad Serhan

Host, audio production – Andrew Hutchison

Podcast transcripts below – Episode 010

TRANSCRIPT

S1 EP010 Live from the Stereonet HiFi & AV Show 2024 – Chris Allman on re-tipping cartridges & Kim Ryrie from DEQX.

Chris Allman: Yeah, there’s a lot of retippers out there and it frustrates me now, Anne, because people are cut. You know, they’re buying the cantilevers from Japan, and they’re getting people’s cartridges, cutting and shunting them, putting brass splints in and doing some horrendous things that you wouldn’t believe. when I retip a cartridge, I’m making the cartridge back like it was new again.

Andrew Hutchison: Hi, it’s Andrew here, not an audiophile. Episode ten. We’ve just come back. We, Brad, myself, Sharron just come back from the Melbourne stereo net hi fi and av show which I’d have to say was a great success for everybody concerned. Everyone seemed happy and fantastic. exhibitors, lots of great displays, lots of happy hi fi enthusiasts wandering around and audio visual enthusiasts wandering around enjoying great sounds. Lots of australian manufacturers there, which was a pleasure. Many, I’m not going to mention them all at this stage. We’re going to cover that in a future episode. What we did do, or Brad did in his roving reporting was catch up with two future guests on the show. Chris Allman, who’s more or less a cartridge maker. I’m not sure that anyone realised we made cartridges in Australia but apparently we do. I didn’t know, but I’ve found out Chris is a great guy. I had a chat with him myself as well. Does the incredibly fine work of retipping cartridges. And of course Brad also caught up with Kim Ryrie, somewhat of a legend in australian electronic and audio design. Known of course many years ago for the Fairlight synthesizer. His involvement with that he wasn’t the only person involved but certainly one of the geniuses behind that. A ah, very, very smart man. And of course he has his DEQX or DEQX as it is generally known. dsp pre amplifier, dac streaming. Apparently now type product that you can use to turn a box full of random drivers into an amazing sounding high end loudspeaker. At least I think that’s the gist of it. So Chris is up first. And now these are roving reports. The audio is good for show conditions, quite intelligible. but of course when we have them on the show one would like to think the audio would be slightly better. And we’ll also in the case of Kim, nail him down on structure of the range of his products and what they can achieve. So thanks for listening and enjoy.

Richie Bennett introduces us to John De Sensi and Chris

Brad Serhan: Okay, Mavis Stafford, welcome back to the MCG. It’s Richie Benneaux here to introduce you to, John De Sensi and Chris Allman.

John De Sensi: Of all clear audio.

Brad Serhan: Yeah. Anyway, enough of my silliness. John, how do you know Chris? How. What’s the connection?

John De Sensi: connection is via a turntable that a few of us are kind of building. and I think that’s how it came about, didn’t it?

Chris Allman: yeah, there’s through, through Kevin and,

John De Sensi: Warren Jones.

Chris Allman: Yeah, Warren Jones.

Brad Serhan: Okay.

John De Sensi: He’s building a super duper, sort of reference turntable.

Kim Ryrie: Okay.

Brad Serhan: There’s a few of you sort of joining. Joining the team to. Are you part of the sonic hoops? The listen?

Kim Ryrie: Yes.

Brad Serhan: Okay, we are.

John De Sensi: We are. So Chris, retips and manufactures his own line of incredible cartridges. He’s one of the best re tippers in Australia, if nothing the world.

Chris Allman: Thank you.

Brad Serhan: And what did I see in your room there? What were you showing me?

Chris Allman: Well, yeah, this is a bit of, my baby. I’ve always been interested in passive preamps. Back when I was 15 or 16, when I was messing around with DIY audio, I used to make the most basic of a passive pot, which is, literally a pot and a plastic box and some ins and some outs. And of course, the problem with that, is your source is seeing a different load as you’re turning the, the pot up. So it messes with the frequency. And, yeah, it sort of interested me for a bit as a kid, but, yeah. and then as the years go by, you see there’s other ways of doing this. You can have a resistive pot and again, that’s got its own set of problems. And then there’s the transformer based pots. But the issue with these is the iron core. And the iron core of the transformer causes a dip and a peak in the curve. and I heard about somebody winding these amazing transformers. And, I got him to do some for me, which have got this perma alloy core. And, yeah, the specs are just out of this world, flat to 35,000 hz. a beautiful square wave. So I made one with the most basic box and a stepped pot. And, it was out of this world. So I spoke to John and said,

00:05:00

Chris Allman: how can we make this really audiophile, how can we make this happen? he sort of helped me on the way to, making the beautiful thing you saw in this.

Brad Serhan: It is stunning. I know Andrew, Hutchinson will love.

Kim Ryrie: The look of that.

Brad Serhan: so you two combined to do the design on the final.

John De Sensi: Pretty much, pretty much. So there was a lengthy software kind of development. we wanted to make it remote control, have balance control. We also has a special feature for a passive preamp which is actually having gain. So it’s got a six decibels gain switch which is very useful for a passive, And have I missed anything else?

Chris Allman: Now there’s a mute as well. But there’s, there’s really nothing out there. everything else on there on the passive front apart from nothing, nobody’s got six decibels. Again is they’ve got a motorized pot generally.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Chris Allman: So you’ve got a big motorized pot and then a rat’s nest of wires going to the back of the motorized pot. So you open it up and look inside and it’s all horrible. And because it’s a motorized pot there really is no way of giving you balance. And I said from the outset we need balance. So what we’ve done is John’s help is we’ve got really high quality relays and we can switch out one channel and not the other. So we’ve got balance, all on the remote. And you haven’t got all these horrible.

Brad Serhan: Wires everywhere which what, introduce noise I assume. Pardon my ignorance.

John De Sensi: yeah, they can act as antennas and pick up all sorts of noise. But also you’re lengthening the signal path which actually always reduces the signal integrity or can compromise it. It’s not done properly. And when you’ve got so many secondary wires as a steps attenuated transformer, it’s very hard to kind of twist them all together to kind of reduce cross torque and interact. So we’ve eliminated all that by having a very sort of multi layer printed circuit board that actually takes care of all the messy wiring. So you get this beautiful neat product.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Brad Serhan: Yeah that’s brilliant.

Chris Allman: Right. Now the gain how that works works is that, no other passive has got gain. So how basically a transformer based attenuator works is you’ve got so many turns, a certain number of turns on the primary and then you’ve got stepped increasing terms on the secondary until it’s one to one. what we can do is we can switch out a section of the primary. So you’ve got, if you’ve got, it’s not ten turns, it’s hundreds. But if you had ten turns here and ten turns on the out, that’s one to one. If you’ve got five turns here and ten turns here. You double the volume. So we looked at what point changing what the source sees becomes an issue and starts to change things. And it’s way above what we’ve actually done. So six decibels doesn’t hurt anything and you’ve got gain.

Brad Serhan: Excellent. Right, yeah, crossing that threshold without crossing that threshold.

Chris Allman: But just if you want to keep it all pure, we’ve got it on a switch on the remote, 60 b on six, db off. Brilliant.

Brad Serhan: and, what is it going to self?

Have you selling it direct or, uh. We’re looking at retail

Have you selling it direct or,

Chris Allman: We’Re looking at, retail. and, at, this point it’s looking around $17,000. But we’ve got a show special of $10,000, which is actually quite cheap when you consider the amount of technology in this thing. And the transformers are very special.

Brad Serhan: Obviously that’s the reason why getting these transformers made a difference, obviously, for the whole course. Brilliant. And have you got retailers lined up?

Chris Allman: I’ve got some distributors who are interested and, we’ve met a few people at the show, so probably after the show we’ll have, ah, more of who that might be.

Brad Serhan: Excellent.

is a cartridge retipper and also builds engines

Chris Allman: Well, the other thing I do is I’m a cartridge retipper. M. I also build cartridges and, I’m a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a couple coming out. If I’d had another. If this show was another two weeks away, we would have had a cartridge here. But it was just the engine was made, but the bodies weren’t quite ready. And, Yeah, we just run out of time. But, Yeah, very, very, very proud of what we.

Brad Serhan: Very exciting.

Chris Allman: Very exciting. Yeah.

Brad Serhan: All made here.

Chris Allman: All made here. I wind the coils myself. solder the coils myself. everything, everything is done myself.

Brad Serhan: Amazing. And what now? One thing I haven’t mentioned, the brand.

Chris Allman: All clear. Audio.

Brad Serhan: It wasn’t clear to me before because I forgot to ask and stain it.

Chris Allman: Yeah, yeah. Now, all clear audience.

Brad Serhan: Yeah, well, brilliant. Chris, I’ll come back to you and we’ll chat some more. Kevin, you’re an attractive man.

Chris Allman: No worries. Yep.

Brad Serhan: Thanks, mate. Go ahead.

When I retip a cartridge I’m making the cartridge back like it was new

Chris Allman: Yeah, there’s a lot of retippers out there. And it frustrates me now, Ann, because, people are cut, you know, they’re buying the cantilevers from Japan. and, they’re getting people’s cartridges, cutting and shunting them, putting brass splints in and doing some horrendous things that you wouldn’t believe. when I retip a cartridge I’m making the cartridge back like it was new again. so I’ve been doing something ivanade. Koetsu is many thousand dollars. And I’ll be removing the front pole piece, cleaning the coils, rotating the suspension to fresh suspension. removing any broken bits out of the stub. New cantilever in. And when it all goes

00:10:00

Chris Allman: back together again, they’ve effectively got a new koetsu or, whatever it might be.

Brad Serhan: Restoration is probably not good enough.

Chris Allman: It’s not a retip, it’s a complete writ of service. as new, it’s as new. And I’m aligning the tips within a degree. if I do a diamond only, it can take me several hours to make sure that that diamond is absolutely spot on. Which you actually don’t often get on a factory cartridge because they haven’t got the time that I’ve got to sit there for two and a half hours, making it absolutely perfect.

Brad Serhan: I suppose in the old days of racing cars, blueprinted, if you like, everything sort of the tolerances. Your tolerances are really tight.

Chris Allman: They’re really tight. And I’ve also gone to the extent of Koetsu is now finished and gone. And I’ve managed to find out, because it was never published, I found out which diamonds they were using. I’ve actually got them to make me a whole, which a lot of money. But I’ve got them to make me a run of diamonds. So into the future, I’ll be able to. Well, December they’ll arrive, I’ll be able to reciprocity. It would be indistinguishable from factory.

Brad Serhan: That’s brilliant, mate.

Chris Allman: Oh, well, yeah. it’s a passion. if I’m not retipping, I’m doing something similar, related for myself. So it’s, Yeah, it’s more than a business, it.

Brad Serhan: Comes from the heart.

Chris Allman: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Brad Serhan: Thanks, mate.

Chris Allman: No worries at all. Happy to speak. Yeah. How it sort of all really started to happen for me was, I did a retip, for Mark, who’s running the starrynet show here. And Mark, Dohmann fitted that cartridge to his turntable. And Mark Dohmann sort of went, mmm. Oh, this is nice. And then Mark Dohmann contacted me from that contact and, ah, sent me a box of cartridges. And I opened the box of cartridges and I thought, oh, yeah, I can do that one. I can do that one. And then the next one. This is destroyed. the suspension was split. the coils were broken. It was just an absolute mess. So the cartridge was worth maybe a. There’s not a $1,000. It’s not worth. Not worth doing. So I rang up Mark and said, yeah, look, mark, you know, this, I can do those two, but this one’s not worth doing. And he said, oh, it’s. It’s got sentimental value. Could you do it for me anyway? And at the time I thought, oh, why does he want to do this? This is nothing. Look, okay, Mark, whatever, you know. And I rewound the cartridge and I put a, new cantilever diamond on and, suspension and made it as new. And I sent it back to mark and he rang me up and he said, you’ve just built a cartridge. And I said, yes, I know. And he said, you’ll also be doing all the work for Nirvana.

Kim Ryrie: Wow.

Brad Serhan: Brilliant.

Chris Allman: Yeah. So you almost.

Brad Serhan: Was it a test?

Chris Allman: It was a test, yes.

Brad Serhan: and you more than passed muster. Well, in terms of high jump, you cleared it by a clear way. Brilliant. So that got you on the move as far as your own cartridge. Brilliant. Great story.

Andrew Hutchison: So, yeah, thanks, Chris, for the, info there related to, retipping, et cetera, and how you sort of almost accidentally ended up manufacturing a cartridge from scratch.

If you have questions, feel free to ask them in future episodes

And, now onto Kim. So Kim Ryrie, has mentioned in the introduction somewhat of a legend. The guy is a genius. This interview with Brad. Brad has cornered, him in the back of his room during the show. And, I guess it’s somewhat of a stream of consciousness without perhaps a laying out of the finer details of what the range of the products are. So enjoy. but if you have questions, which you may do, we will absolutely get them answered in a future episode. When he’s interviewed between now and Christmas. and of course, comment, send us an email. Details are on the website. or of course, comments on the YouTube, video. well, not video, it’s an audio. An audio with a picture. But, at least you can comment there. So feel free to ask questions. We’ll have him answer them, when he’s on the show. So here you go.

Kim Ryrie introduces impulse response correction for drivers in loudspeakers

now here’s Kim, talking about his new, gen four range of products.

Brad Serhan: So, Kim, we were talking earlier about one of your new products, regarding taking old speakers. Is that what you’re saying? Probably, if you would.

Kim Ryrie: Yes. So with the new decks, what we call generation four, because we’re now 27 year old sort of startup. So we’ve sort of been doing r, and d for like 27 years. And we’ve had these products that have been very difficult to work because, you know, there were 160 pages operating manuals and was all Windows based software that needed a lot of hand holding. but what it was effectively was we introduced the idea of using impulse response correction for drivers in loudspeakers like Wharfedale Midrange, because they all have, as we know, they’ve all got frequency response errors. But

00:15:00

Kim Ryrie: the stuff that is virtually impossible to address in the analogue world is the timing and phase response. and usually a lot of the sort of equalization you used to do in the analog domain could actually cause more phase problems than you’re starting with. So what we call sort of group delay errors wherever some frequency groups are sort of more delayed than others. And it’s only in the order of milliseconds or fraction of a millisecond. But sound travels 1ft in a millisecond, you know, 30 cm in a millisecond. So it’s not insignificant. And it happens a lot because of the electromechanics of loudspeakers, which is why loudspeakers are, essentially the showstopper when it comes to affordable reproduction of true high definition audio. And it’s why, you know, the best of them could cost $100,000 a pair. You know, when they get it right.

Brad Serhan: The buck stops with a loudspeaker. In a sense.

Kim Ryrie: The buck stops with a loudspeaker.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And then you’ve got the added problem that you’re trying to get an amplifier, that will do ten octaves of audio along one speaker curve. Yeah. You know, it’s all hard work. So then you not only pay a lot of money for the speakers, but you then pay a lot of money for really good amplifiers.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: That can pump, you know, tens of amps for base frequencies and, you know, and yet still have air happening in the tweezers. It’s, it’s not easy.

Brad Serhan: No.

Kim Ryrie: You know, so better in, you know, in the pro world when active decades ago.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Whereby you’ve got a separate amplifier for every type of driver. So typically one for bass, one for mids, one for tweeter m, that means you’re dividing the audio into sort of three or four octaves per driver. That makes the job much easier for the amplifiers, it makes it much easier for the cables, it makes it basically much easier for everything. And I experienced that when our band back in the seventies, I got hold of a pair of altec voice of the theater speakers, which is the big sort of, you know, horn reflex place thing.

Brad Serhan: Yeah, yeah.

Kim Ryrie: With a horn on top. And it had an Altec passive crossover, and we used to blow. The drivers are regularly, regularly, you know, every month or two at least we blow the diaphragm up in the tweeter and someone said, why don’t you do this actively? You know? And at the time, I helped start a magazine called Electronics today became Eti. Electronics today.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Remember it well? Yeah. And we used to do projects every month. And one of those was a little hundred watt amplifier module. So I got a couple of those and then I made a 24 decibels proactive active filter at the front end. So this was my first experience of doing an active speaker. And you know, so we had one amp on the horn and the other for the woofer and put them all in the box and we never blew up another horn again. But more to the point, everything just got so much cleaner. And I’m thinking, well, hang on, this, this was really pretty easy to do, you know, why isn’t everything active? And of course, in the pro audio world, it was already active. But active didn’t suit the marketing of consumer audio because you needed a box that you only needed two wires to connect to the box. You needed one amp for one speaker that everyone could deal with that.

Brad Serhan: Keep it simple.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, keep it simple.

Brad Serhan: Kiss.

Kim Ryrie: And admittedly, it would have been very difficult to do it any other way. And back in the day, amplifiers were expensive. You just couldn’t sort of come up with lots of amplifiers for no money. But what we did when we started, decks, and that’s another story I’d been doing, my company was Fairlight, where we used the first DSP. We used the first Motorola DSP chips at Fairlight to do the computer musical instrument. And, and then, one of our, after I’d left fairlight, the program, no, I still working actually in fairlight. But one of the guys started a company called Lake, and he rang me up and said, oh, look, we’ve developed this headphone technology using finite impulse response filters, which I knew very little about at the time, right? He said, so come and have a, have a listen. And so he showed me, this processing

00:20:00

Kim Ryrie: that we could do with it. They were doing with a chip that the CSIRo had developed. It was called the a 250 or something like that. And it did 250, what’s called taps, of finite impulse response filtering. And he had a little six inch car, loudspeaker, in a shoebox and he had absolutely brilliant. And he measured this speaker, and they created this, impulse response filter that corrected it. And they thought they’d make m their fortune selling these chips to car audio, to car manufacturers, to, ah, make speaker sound better. And sure enough, it did. It was a very short, in today’s terms, it was a very short, low resolution correction because of the technology at the time, but it made a difference to the speaker. And, he said, could fairlight use things? and I said, well, fairlight don’t make speakers, so, you know, we can’t really do that. But, you know, maybe we could think of doing speakers because this is really cute, this technology. And then just as I was leaving, he said, oh, by the way, it takes about 250 milliseconds of processing, so that adds, like, quarter of a second of latency. And I said, no, sorry, we just couldn’t ever use that. But let me know. He said, but we think we’ve got a solution to that. And I said, well, great. Let me, let me know.

Brad Serhan: This is like, this is like, this is now.

Kim Ryrie: Lake. They left the CSIRO. They’d started. Lake. and, and a year later, I got a phone call. Well, we fixed the latency. Come and have a listen. So I had another listen, and they said, could you help us? We’re doing headphones out of headphone technology. Wherever the sound that you’re listening through, through headphones seems to be coming outside of your head.

Kim: Dolby discovered the headphone technology. You sold Lake to Dolby

And it was really impressive. And they said, can you help us market this? And at the time, I was not really full time at Fairlight. I was more a consultant. And I said, yeah, I’ve got time to do that. And so we ended up, long story short, we ended up selling lake to Dolby.

Brad Serhan: Excuse me, Kim, reminisce of the cold. Sorry about this. You sold Lake to Dolby? Well, not you, per se.

Kim Ryrie: We ended up turning people on. Lake went public. Dolby discovered the headphone technology. And I said, well, why don’t you use this to do loudspeakers? And, Brian said, who was the CEO? He said, no, why don’t you do it?

Brad Serhan: Lobbed it your way.

Kim Ryrie: We’re too busy doing the headphone stuff. You know, why don’t you do it? You know, we found it’s all pretty difficult, but, you know, and you should use this guy, Paul Glendenning, who was one of our engineers, and he’s a genius. So Paul and I started at the time, we called it clarity Eq. and we were going to lose license their patent to do the low latency fir. But when Dolby bought them, they said, oh, sorry, you can’t, we’re not going to license our patent. So we’d already started clarity and Paul said, don’t worry, I know another way to do this. So we did it another way. We got a patent for the way we did it. The only difference was we had to use floating point, DSP instead of fixed point, which made it a little bit more expensive.

Brad Serhan: Circumvented there.

Kim Ryrie: We circumvented that. So, and then that’s how effectively clarity started. And so basically what it meant was that you could, as I was saying, you know, loudspeaker electromechanics have a lot of problems, especially the cheap ones. So you could measure their frequency response errors, their timing, their grip delay errors, and you could create a filter. And using the finite impulse response filters, you could compensate the audio that’s driving each transducer to compensate for the shortcomings. And for instance, you would fix, you know, you obviously can’t speed up, delayed frequencies, but you could slow down, the frequencies that were on time.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And let the slower ones catch up. And then you’d glue it all back together again. And so that’s why group delay ends up being so group delay. And we only had to add, you know, say, five milliseconds of delay to pull that off. So, that’s always been the fundamental stuff. At the same time, we correct the frequency response or set it to a target. So at the same. So that was the fundamental stuff that we formed the company to do.

Brad Serhan: That’s the basis of clarity then takes.

Kim Ryrie: That’s right. And the problem was that we could only use DSP chips at the time. This is now back in the late nineties. Right. So we came up with a way of using two dsps, two shark dsps, which were the best around at the time.

00:25:00

Kim Ryrie: And we managed to fit, to do quite long filters. I think we ended up doing, just trying to think, would have been, 16, about 20,000 taps. But that was across stereo. So it’s only about 10,000 taps per left and right channel. And we go say 2000 taps to the tweeter and 4000 to the midrange, another 4000 to base, which wasn’t.

Brad Serhan: So when you say taps, just for.

Kim Ryrie: Taps, taps means the resolution by which you can grabs. Sort of grabs. Yes, effectively it grabs. But if you want to work it out mathematically, let’s say you’re doing a sample rate of, I won’t say 44.1 code to keep the number simple. Let’s say 40k.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Ah, sample rate. And let’s say you have a 4k tap filter. Will you divide that 4k by forty k and you’ve got, ten. Yeah, sorry, 10 should say.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: so that was the resolution we had got you.

Brad Serhan: Okay.

Kim Ryrie: Okay, now here’s where it all gets weird. People said, oh, you’re not only doing stuff at 44 one, we want to do everything at 96k. So, okay, now you can dividend 4k by ninety six k and you don’t have 10 hz resolution anymore. Now your resolution’s gone to 20 hz or actually about 24 hz, which is a whole octave.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So you’ve got virtually no resolution down in the bottom optic.

Brad Serhan: Right.

Kim Ryrie: So when people say, oh, you know, you’ll get more resolution going to 96k, well it’s the exact opposite. You’ve actually halved your resolution that you could correct the timing information. So. Yeah, that’s so fortunately these days everyone’s worked out that the high sample rates are completely utter waste of time, especially to all us baby boomers who can’t hear a thing over ten k anyway.

Brad Serhan: So I couldn’t possibly admit that, Kim.

Kim Ryrie: So we spent a lot of time making everything run at sort of meet with all the marketing. So now, and of course we can do processing at whatever you like. We can do 192k, whatever. So every time you double the sample rate you have the resolution of your correction within the frequencies you can actually hear.

Brad Serhan: Yes. Yeah.

Brad Serhan: Especially in the base end.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. But now that everything is being streamed on tidal and cubars and whatever at ah, typically, you know, forty eight k, twenty four bits. That’s right down our alley because that means we’re running at what I call an ideal sample rate.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: Gives us good resolution. We’re now running much longer filters in the new generation products so we can do really good. Yeah.

As you go up in octave you’re getting more and more resolution

So we’re getting much more resolution, getting more like for instance in the, in the, bottom up the, in 2020 to 40 octave, we get about quarter octave at the moment and we can do better than that if we want to. It’s sort of good enough.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And as you go up in octaves you’re getting more and more resolution.

Brad Serhan: Yeah, as you go.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So the resolution is like four, four to eight times, better in the new system than the old system. and we’ve got more channels, we’ve got eight. So we can do four way, crossovers. The other issue I discovered is that and you know of course the steeper the crossovers you use.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: The more you can make each driver work in their comfort zone.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So if you’ve only got a very shallow crossover say between the base, the woofer and the mid range driver, for example, if you only had twelve decibels per octave, you know, two pole filter.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Then an octave below that crossover frequency and let’s say the crossover frequency is 200 hz. That means that midrange driver is still getting quite a lot of base energy hitting it which is causing it to move towards its xmax.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Brad Serhan: Which is upsetting it in a modulation distortion and all that sort of stuff.

Kim Ryrie: And it’s just introducing stuff. Not supposed to be there. So if we introduce a As Alan was saying we tend to use something like well from from base to mid range we use 72 decibels per octave. So that’s a twelve pole filter. That’s all verging on a brick wall filter.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: That means that you can sort of go as loud as you like and the mid range driver is going to be as happy as Larry because it’s just not getting that excursion excursion.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And it has the other advantage that also

00:30:00

Kim Ryrie: what happens is that the woofer when it’s allowed to be outputting audio above, let’s call it a 200 hz crossover to the mid range, something in that order. it’s starting to be, if I’m starting to, if it’s, it’s, if it’s hearing if it’s output frequencies not at 200 but at 408 hundred those frequencies are beaming forward which is making the dispersion from the driver less natural.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And the same applies when you’re going from the mid tweet especially.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So these are all the advantages of steeper things. Now of course you can’t make filters that steep in the analog world. I mean you can do it that the phase corruption will be just out of control and the tolerance you would need on the components is equally out of control. But you can do it digitally no problem. And because we’re doing because we’re working in the time domain we can actually make the crossovers remain m stay in linear phase which normally you can’t do in the analog world at all once you go past the six decibels per octave. Very shallow filters.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So we can keep them linear phase at very steep crossovers. So we have minimal, almost no crossover distortion between drivers. and you’re keeping the drivers happy as Larry.

Brad Serhan: Comfort zone. It’s all about comfort zone and it’s.

Kim Ryrie: All about even dispersion. You can turn a lot of our drivers literally 180 degrees and they’re verging on omnidirectional. That’s, that’s, that was our party trick we used to do with the nhT.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Speakers. Oh, yes. Way back.

Brad Serhan: I remember that.

Kim Ryrie: And

Brad Serhan: So yeah, that’s the goal. Isn’t the power response being. Yeah. As the power response in the room is even all the way around.

Kim Ryrie: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Which just tends to sound more natural, doesn’t it? Yeah, yeah. and you just get a wider.

Brad Serhan: Sound stone and that’s because just those who are listening, you’re not getting that beaming, as you call it, the directivity of the driver drooping off axis. So from the base or the mid range or whatever, you’re crossing over that optimum point where it doesn’t beam.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: The other. But then we’re sort of trying and I’m just sort of assuming the whole audio world is going to go active, you know, tomorrow afternoon. And just, it was just so naive that it was ridiculous, you know?

Brad Serhan: Yeah, yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And I mean, funnily enough, it’s happening more now as people are getting into wireless speakers because they have to put amplifiers in the speakers anyway, so they might as well put more of them.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And these days you can make amplifiers for $10, you know, and very small in cheap.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So what, so what? We have been, you know, it wasn’t a good business.

Brad Serhan: So in other words, you had a particular aim in mind and it seemed.

Kim Ryrie: Like a bad idea at the time.

Brad Serhan: It’s morphed, it’s mutated.

Kim Ryrie: Yes. So that’s right. So I, from day one, like 20 years ago, I’m just thinking we should just focus on active. We should try to get people to go active. And a lot of people did. Of course, we had oems doing it, but also because I was saying that the hardware was limited in its resolution, our resources were limited in terms of the amount of OMB we could do. We ran out of DSP memory a decade ago, all those sort of issues. So then of course processes came out. The sort of things that we have in our iPhones.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And they over the last decade have just got so insanely powerful. 64 bit, you know, quad core, you know.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Orders of multitude more powerful than the DSP chips.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So we just had to ditch the DSP chips, which were fine for doing traditional audio stuff like simple crossovers and simple egg heres and stuff like that.

All the new models initially have streaming capabilities

But they really were not good at doing the FIR stuff. You just needed much more processing power and much more memory. So thats why the new arm processors is made. Thats what we call generation four stuff is its all based around multi core processing. And Linux, which is the operating system which also then lets us get into Internet streaming and all the other good.

Brad Serhan: Things that you currently have on.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, so all the new models initially have streaming capabilities. we’re using volume, with them. So

00:35:00

Kim Ryrie: we can do tire bars and stuff. You can do airplanes. So you can be running stuff directly from your phone, Spotify or whatever, just by airplane. Yeah, but so we’ve sort of tried to package everything into a, into a more integrated solution. And then we’ve moved all our software. All the old software was running on Windows. There was nearly a million lines of code developed over 20 years.

Brad Serhan: Jesus.

Kim Ryrie: And it was just a nightmare. And we thought, okay, this has got to go. Everyone hates windows and having to have PCs running this stuff. Let’s move it all into the cloud. So we had to rewrite all that stuff, a lot of it. And so we had five programmers working on this stuff for years. And so this is a.

Brad Serhan: Sorry to write, but this is the culmination of all that work with the new.

Kim Ryrie: Right. So this is what we call the, for generation four. So it was lots of years doing the hardware as well because. Talk about disasters. Right. So the first round of our hardware development used the AKM DACs and a to ds and sample rate converters. And then the AKM factory in Japan burnt down. Oh, yeah, they couldn’t make the chips. So we spent a year and a half designing that hardware. Had to ditch the whole thing. Then we decided, then I decided I don’t want to buy these arm, processor chips from chinese companies because they’ll just stop production, you know, unannounced. So let’s use the one, these OEM specific ones that Samsung had brought out. They started a company called Arctic and they made these very cute, beautifully made little small arm, processor hardware modules.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So we started to use them and we’d spend about a year developing on that. And then they shut down the company because they weren’t getting enough business. And I’d only chosen them because I thought, well, because it’s Samsung, we can rely on being able to get them forever.

Brad Serhan: So I mean, it’s okay if you’re an athlete and you’re running in the hurdles. Generally the hurdles stay the same as you get towards the finishing line, your hurdles getting higher and bloody higher. So what happened then?

Kim Ryrie: So then I’m thinking, holy mackerel, I’m gonna have to sell the doghouse, keep funding this.

Brad Serhan: Yeah, that’s funny. The dog house you got, kid.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So anyway, then we, found a really good supplier in China, actually, that brought out not only a, good quad processor at the time, but they had an upgrade path for the future, which maintain a lot of compatibility. So we were designing all that. so it’s just been a lot of, you know, lots of balls in the air that have to come together. So it’s why, you know, we’ve been talking about this new product for years and it just kept having problems like this thrown at it.

Brad Serhan: And now it’s.

Kim Ryrie: So we’re finally, now we’ve been, we’ve got about a hundred of the beta unit. We’re in a. So when we finalized the new hardware.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: we, we went through three revisions of hardware just to get it right for production.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So once we got to that point, we announced the beta program that we have. So the software is still in beta.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: and m so that meant that we contacted all our old DEQX. You know, we’ve got a lot of DEQX users around the world.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: And we offered them to be part of our beta software testing program. About a hundred of them took that up straight away. So we’ve got 100 units out on test and getting, they’ve been out on test for probably five months now.

Brad Serhan: So when we. Sorry to interrupt you, but when we did the, or, drop us into it momentarily. So when we did the show together in April.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Brad Serhan: Australian.

Chris Allman: Hi.

Brad Serhan: Foster show in April in Sydney. That was, that was just before you released those.

Has there been, have there been many changes since we used your DEQX

Has there been, have there been many changes since we used your DEQX?

Kim Ryrie: There’s been a lot of hardware changes. There’s been a lot of software changes.

Brad Serhan: Right.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And we brought on new people in the software team. We’ve got five, people doing software now. And, we’ve got a new software director, a guy that, funnily enough, I used to work with, you know, 30 years ago, we were competitors, at Fairlight. We made a big, you know, multi channel, massive digital mixing console workstation we used to sell to Hollywood. And he had another company called, I forget what they were called, but he made a competing, digital console. We both selling them to Hollywood and they’re all around the world. We were, I mean, funnily enough, the top of the line stuff for big high. And these were all hundred

00:40:00

Kim Ryrie: thousand dollars a hit type console back in, what.

Brad Serhan: The seventies or eighties? Eighties.

Kim Ryrie: Ah, this would have been the nineties.

Brad Serhan: Nineties, wow.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah, late eighties. And, So we had, well, Fairlight had most of Hollywood.

Chris Allman: We had a.

Kim Ryrie: We had Torrey o. Glenn. Glenn. Paramount Pictures, sony pictures, they were buying these things, $100,000 each to do all their post production for their movies. We won an Oscar, actually, for services to the.

Brad Serhan: You’ve got the statue.

Kim Ryrie: not you, per se. Not me. But actually, I’ll tell you who does. Chris Alfred, who’s our cto now. He got the Oscar. He’s got it at home.

Brad Serhan: Do you take turns? Don’t you just. No, no rubbing shoulders with the Oscar.

Kim Ryrie: I’m not allowed to touch it, I don’t think.

Brad Serhan: Okay, fair enough.

Kim Ryrie: So anyway.

Brad Serhan: But Chris is amazing, fascinating in all serious. That’s an amazing achievement.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. So we’ve just been so lucky, probably because of the Fairlight legacy. I’ve just always been lucky to have great people working with us.

Brad Serhan: You’ve worked with them over that time and built those relationships.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Brad Serhan: And there’s nothing like that but a teamwork. So you’re now a lot of us.

Kim Ryrie: And Joe Jonah Wright.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: as I said, he was making the other console. He’s a fantastic programmer. He’s done everything. You know, Joe.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Brad Serhan: Right.

Kim Ryrie: And so he’s our coo now. You know, I’m starting to get old. You, know.

Brad Serhan: Can’t believe you’re saying that.

Kim Ryrie: Kim, he’s ten years behind me, mate.

Brad Serhan: Oh, God. I don’t want to argue because you still look young, but, yes, we are both, edgy.

Kim Ryrie: So, anyway, no, Joe’s been fantastic and he’s, Well, he’s a real programmer, unlike me. Right. He’s able to just pull everyone together.

Brad Serhan: And so he coordinates all that. But who was the fellow? Sorry? The fellow that you were competing with, in Hollywood. I took you away from that main.

Kim Ryrie: No, that was Joe.

Brad Serhan: That was Joe.

Kim Ryrie: That was Joe he was making.

Brad Serhan: I’m sorry, I’ve got to apologize. I remember.

Kim Ryrie: And he sold dozens and dozens of those. And we sold them to not only Hollywood, we had, you know, NHK in Japan had had dozens of these Fairlight consoles that were hundred. In fact, they were really expensive in Japan. They were like a couple hundred thousand.

Brad Serhan: So two Australians were basically, you know, we had the.

Kim Ryrie: We had the post production market sewn up. amazing at the early part of it, anyway. And then what happened subsequently with Fairlight is it got bought by, blackmagic in Melbourne who were focused on video.

Fairlight is a digital equalization and crossover system for post production

they had the DaVinci video editor software, but they wanted to integrate audio with their video, so they bought Fairlight. And today, if you go to, blackmagic or davinci, it’s the Fairlight operating system that’s running all their audio. They can run fairlight can now do thousands of tracks, for post production. It’s the fastest growing audio post production thing around, as far as I know, because you can download it for free, the entry level version. Then you can buy hardware options, consoles, moving faders, the whole, it’s a modular approach and it’s all fully integrated to the incredible. It’s fantastic. They’ve done a fantastic job with that. And, so anyway, look, long story short, I’ve always just thought the, the missing LinkedIn audio was the domestic playback environment. And so that’s where we focused DEQX, which DEQX, by the way, I changed the name years ago, mainly because of trademark issues with clarity. And, DEQX stands for digital equalization and crossover, which is sort of, we sort of think of form for doing a high definition allowance. It’s got to be digital, it’s got to have equalization. But that also means time domain equalization, not just frequency response. And the crossovers key to get right, you know, the linear phase crossovers.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: So that’s stuff that works.

Brad Serhan: Passive designers only wish, right.

Kim Ryrie: But, you know, I mean, you’re one of the few people that I’ve seen who can make the passive crossover sound amazing. You know, those little speakers from, you guys do the mewtwo. And the problem is we can’t make them sound much better, which is extremely unusual. Usually we can take almost any speaker, measure them, do a correction on them, and they can sound, really alarmingly better.

Brad Serhan: Right.

Kim Ryrie: Your speakers sound slightly better, I must admit, but not that much better with the caliber.

Brad Serhan: I’m slightly, I’m blushing somewhat, but, no, I appreciate you saying, that is great.

Kim Ryrie: No, they’re really astonishing. And it’s, and it’s, and it’s why, you know, they’ve had so many awards, and I just think that’s very

00:45:00

Kim Ryrie: well deserved. So, anyway, thank you.

You were going to talk about taking old speakers or whatever with the new generation

Brad Serhan: I suppose the thing is that I know, I know we’ve probably got a little bit of time constraint on you because you should be upstairs. Was there a rick? Now, we keep it so easy to, just mean I, but what, what we might do is a part two give you a rest, because I think probably need to go upstairs. Not because I want to stop, but I don’t want to dominate. You were sort of going to talk about taking old speakers or whatever with the new generation. four. What I might do is grab you later and we’ll say, okay, break it up. Although, yeah, that wouldn’t just say, hey.

Kim Ryrie: This is part of the reason why we did the amplifiers now. as well, because that was always one of the problems for people being active. Suddenly I need thousands of amplifier channels.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: And I don’t want them looking big and clunky and being too expensive. So we’ve also.

Brad Serhan: And that what I filmed.

Kim Ryrie: Hm.

Brad Serhan: Upstairs is that particular unit when we had it, the show, that unit was. That was, that was a different unit. What you’ve got upstairs. Correct.

Kim Ryrie: Sorry, which one?

Brad Serhan: Well, you know how you’ve got the. Where the Dax on board, the streaming on top of the stand?

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. That.

Brad Serhan: That one is the one that would potentially sell for what was 20,000.

Kim Ryrie: Is that right? Yeah. That lists. In America we do everything in us dollars because that’s where my markets are. But. So that in America is like 15,900 Us.

Brad Serhan: Gotcha.

Kim Ryrie: and so for the beta people, it’s virtually half. I mean, it’s because for beta, I mean, you know, reading between the lines. Right. Once we go public with the products next year, once we’re out of beta.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: We’ve got to sell through retailers.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Brad Serhan: Right.

Kim Ryrie: Hence the pricing. Yeah, that’s close to 16,000. So meanwhile, for people that want to sign on to be beta users and use the beta software, it’s still production hardware. But, but it won’t be, it won’t be full, release software until the new year. So meanwhile, they get better, they get an advantage. They get an advantage of cost because they can buy them direct from us. They can tell us, oh, we don’t like this. We’d like you to do add this feature. We do all that. and it’s great. So we’ve already got 100 people doing that. We’re just running another hundred units now, which will be for, Because we’ll have another three, maybe four months of beta where that’s an option.

Brad Serhan: And then you can. Then after that.

Kim Ryrie: See, after that, we can’t undersell the retailers.

Brad Serhan: Yeah, no, of course not.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah.

Brad Serhan: So what we might do is pause it now. And because you were going to.

You had to talk about, um. I’m trying to remember how we started this talk

You had to talk about, I’m trying to remember how we started this talk about taking old speakers and sort of applying to, the DEQX, you know, playing around with the filters to take an old pair of speakers.

Kim Ryrie: Is that correct? Well, what we also didn’t talk about is that you can use decks. We have three models.

Brad Serhan: Thank you. Right.

Kim Ryrie: And the one we’ve been talking about is the flagship, which is the one that can do active.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: And that you can upgrade existing passive speakers to active with that. Or you can just build a Brad Serhanrom scratch. Or we sell those to Oems.

Brad Serhan: Yes.

Kim Ryrie: Who are doing their own designs from scratch. But two other models, one of them is called the pre four. So it’s designed. You just add an amplifier or two. So it’s just the main passive, full range speakers. Right. Or for that matter, full range active speakers.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: and then you can add one or two subwoofers. So it’s got four outputs. That’s the reason for that. And then there’s the LS 200. So that’s really for where you just want to add speakers and keep it simple. For minimum, it’s actually a bit cheaper. A few compromises to the design. right. That’s the fully integrated. Just add speakers. Away you go model, and away you go.

Brad Serhan: Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: Yeah. And it’s a little bit cheaper than the others as well.

Brad Serhan: Okay, great.

00:49:15

Podcast transcripts below – Episode 013

TRANSCRIPT
SEASON 1 – EPISODE 013 – UK made HiFi Amplifiers: HiFi legend, Douglas Self consults with Kleio Audio for award winning amplifiers.

Garry Wise: I went home and, wired it into my hi fi and all this kind of stuff, and it was a proud moment. And I’ll tell you what, you sounded brilliant for about 30 seconds and.

Andrew Hutchison: Hello, welcome to not an audiophile episode 13. Hey, not an Audiophile is really, somewhat different to other podcasts because, everyone that we have on is a industry professional of some kind or another. And today we’re, interviewing another industry professional, although he was very much a customer, and decided, hey, I’m not going to buy another amplifier, I’m going to build one. Today we’re speaking to Garry Wise at. Well, I don’t know the name of the company. It’s, It’s. Is it Kleio or how would you. How do you pronounce it? It is Kleio.

Garry Wise: So it’s pronounced it Kleio. Off.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s as simple as that then, is it?

Garry Wise: Yeah, I’ve heard it called everything. Kelly. O.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes, Kleio.

Andrew Hutchison: But, yeah, but isn’t that your fault? I mean, you.

Garry Wise: From what I’ve read, I can take responsibility for that.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you know, it’s. So it’s got something to do with Greek mythology. Is that the gist of it?

Garry Wise: Yeah, basically, yeah. I was struggling to find a name and I remember looking at all these books and saying, oh, how to name a business? And it was sort of, I’ll have something memorable and then should I find something which, you know, relates to music and all this kind of stuff. And then I started looking at all these brands and some of them are so predictable with their names. And I thought, you know what? started reading this sort of Greek mythology website and I thought, that looks kind of right, that would be quite nice. And I run it past my wife who’s sort of the boss, and she said, oh, yeah, that sounds good. Let’s go it. Do it. So there we are. And I thought it was quite good, actually. Five letters.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, that’s. That’s right. I mean, it. Look, it looks good. It. I mean, and look, it’s. It is pronounced apparently the way I thought it would be, but, it is. I probably. I initially thought, yeah, Kleio. And then I later on I. Oh, is it. There’s like, there’s a little twist there with the extra letter, but anyhow, no, that’s great.

Garry Douglas’ headphone amp is manufactured in the UK, not overseas

So what, I mean, well, let’s introduce you properly. so Garry, Garry, you, many years ago now, really, in a way, from what I am led to believe, so at least nine or 10 years ago, decided that you wanted to Be in years.

Garry Wise: Really?

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. You decided you wanted to be in the hi Fi business, which, is a noble idea, but, you’ve obviously gone about it in a very methodical way, although I’m led to believe you’ve actually had the preamp and the integrated amp, on the market for a while. can you tell us a little bit about that? But before we let you answer that, let’s say, you are, very proud of the fact that the product is not, just designed, but manufactured in. In. I was going to say the uk. And I guess it is the uk, not just England. I guess you might have stuff from, you know, over the border, but you can tell us about that. But that’s. So, that’s part of it. And it’s a brand that perhaps the listeners have not heard of until now, but I came across it sort of somewhere on Instagram, I think. And I just love the look, the styling, and I love the cheers. Well, I love. I felt as if this had some serious bones underneath the casework. and I guess the fact that it’s machined from solid was maybe gave me that feeling. But look, tell me all about it. What. How did. How did this start?

Garry Wise: I think I had a moment of insanity, I think, trying to join the hi Fi district.

Andrew Hutchison: But we’re a friendly bunch of people, right?

Garry Wise: Oh, well, I’m discovering that along the way. So there’s the odd one. it’s a long story, to be honest, and, I think if I got paid for every time I’ve told this. Probably have quite a lot of money priming you, basically. Well, you never know. Not huge amounts. It all kind of started around, 2010, to be honest. My. My wife, went to uni as a mature student and that was a choice. We got married quite young and she fancied going to do a degree, which was fair enough, really good, really supportive of that. And, I was in the process of kind of looking at upgrading the hi Fi, which I’d had since about 2005. That, was not my first proper system. So we can chat about in a bit if you like. And, I needed. I had an MF80 integrated amp and it didn’t have a headphone socket. And I started like, oh, I need to get a, headphone amp for this amplifier. You know, it’s really bugging me. And I started, you know, doing the research, you know, like, us. High five. She’s, yes, do start looking at all the different brands. And then I was trying to set a budget of how much I wanted to bend and

00:05:00

Garry Wise: you go down the rabbit hole. And I think one day I just, I said to her, I’m not sure how much money to spend on this, this headphone amp. And she was, I think I was doing her heading, to be honest. She said, can’t you just buy one? Like make your own or something? It was just some flippant comment.

Andrew Hutchison: Make your own or something.

Garry Wise: Make your own. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: An open invitation.

Garry Wise: No, exactly. Yeah. And I thought maybe, maybe I could get a kit from ebay or something like that. I don’t know, some kind of, okay, random thing. But I’m one of these guys who sort of goes all in with, with something. and I started looking at building head, the headphone amps and headphone amp design. And my brother in law, he kind of has tinkered around with electronics through the years and he’s not a pro, but you know, he’s good at a schematic and he can put something together.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: And we kind of just had these odd conversations and this is how the story evolves. The next thing you know, he said to me, oh, I’ve got this. I said, what about if we just make like a integrated amp with a headphone socket instead? If we’re going to all this effort of, you know, kind of building something out of a little kit. And he was like, oh, why don’t you read this book of power amplifier design by Douglas Self?

Andrew Hutchison: That book?

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: And I was like, well, I ain’t got, I haven’t got a clue about anything to do with this. But I thought, yeah, you know, sounds fun. Let’s have a little read. I could have got a page in. I don’t understand this. So chuck that to the side.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Garry Wise: And then we just ended up this thing of like actually forget the headphone amp, push that to the side. Let’s try and make our own integrated. And that was probably my downfall because that was where we all started.

Andrew Hutchison: yeah.

Garry Wise: It was, it was a brave move from there. Sorry, Andrew.

You don’t have a headphone amplifier yet. You still haven’t

Andrew Hutchison: No, all I was going to say is on the basis that you, in your range of products to skip ahead, you don’t have a headphone amplifier yet. You still haven’t?

Garry Wise: No, I can’t.

Andrew Hutchison: Project head box, but I actually. And there is, ironically there is, there is no headphone socket on your integrated either, is there?

Garry Wise: No, there isn’t. No.

Andrew Hutchison: So you haven’t really, you haven’t really got around to your headphone amp yet. But let’s, let’s go back to the story though. So

Garry Wise: Oh no, that’s fine. So no, basically I kind of view that we work together and try to do a few bits and then in the end my brother in law, he kind of sort of like oh, I don’t think I can help you with what you want. You know, I’m not really good at designing stuff and I was kind of left. I’ve got this passion to kind of do something at this point and he, I thought do you know what? In for a penny and for a pound. I’m just going to email this Douglas Self guy. No, really understanding. He’s going to email him and see what he can if he does any sort of freelance work. So I kind of chanced it and I got a reply. M back within 24 hours and said yeah, I’ll do some consultancy. hang on, let’s.

Andrew Hutchison: Whoa, whoa, whoa, just slow down for a second. So you’ve got the Douglas Self Guide to How Amplifiers Should Work. And I forget the name of the book but is it the classic text I presume. Yeah, which, which I thought was written like in the 70s. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, so you go, I’m reading this book from the 70s. Yeah, I’ll ring up the author. He seems to know what he’s talking about and of course you know.

Garry Wise: Exactly.

Andrew Hutchison: He certainly does. Right, so. And you get him on the email within 24 hours.

Garry Wise: Yeah. And I think there’s this thing is, okay, this is big level of like God tier, kind of engineers in the world. But what everyone forgets is everyone’s just people. They’re all humans, they’re all trying to earn a living and it’s sort of, oh, you can’t, you know, you can’t contact that person. They’re sort of one of the top leading hi fi engineers. It’s like well, audio engineers, you know, you just go, well I think he wants to make a living like we all do. So that’s just.

Andrew Hutchison: I’m completely impressed and what you say is of course completely right. But it’s just, I mean I think the thing is the legend of that name when it comes to amplifier design is such that it’s, it’s, you know, it’s you just. I don’t know, you’ve impressed me. I mean how? Well, I mean you’ve impressed me as much. I’m impressed two ways. One, one that you. I’ll just do this and then I’m second. Secondarily completely impressed. That you got this very fast response to your email.

Douglas was determined to make an all British audio product

So what, so what, so what path did you go down then?

Garry Wise: Well, so then we kind of, you know, it was all kind of business, like, really. And sort of, you know, how do we, What do you. What do you want to make? I don’t really know. Pre power combo. And I was like, yeah. I said I was just going to go for an integrated. And he kind of soaked the seed of. Well, you could, you know, it depends how flexible you make your design. Yeah, you could use the preamp for one of them and just, you know, then have the power amp side separate and put it in one case. unfortunately, we kind of. We did, we did quite well. We got all respect done. we got a lot of block diagrams working, but we kind of. I don’t say forenet fell out. That would be the wrong word. I’m obviously very respectful, but I think there was an element of. I was very, determined in what I wanted to make. This had to be an all British

00:10:00

Garry Wise: product.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: Made in the uk. And we kind of get into the level of let’s do lots of expensive prototyping in China. Let’s do lots of stuff here. And it kind of, for me, I didn’t have. Yeah. I didn’t have the budget to kind of.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Garry Wise: Support that. And I kind of felt a bit swept away. Yeah. Right. Okay, well, thanks. Thanks for everything you’ve done. Let’s kind of park things for now while sort of assess.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: Where we are. So I kind of did my own. My own research locally to find some guys who could do some sort of PCB layout and manufacturing and all these kind of things. And I bumped into a bunch of guys who I would say took me where I need to go. And it’s, it’s kind of ironic because, I rung them up and they said, I will come round and, let’s have a conversation. I said, well, I haven’t got an office. I work for my dining room table at the moment. And they said, oh, it doesn’t matter. They came round and they sat down and it was all really nice. Had a cup of tea and biscuits, classic stuff. And it was really good. And they walked away and said, what would you actually want to do? And I said, well, this is what I’m doing and this is what I want to do. I want it to be all made in the UK and all this kind of thing. I had my passion.

Andrew Hutchison: You hadn’t had your passion beaten out of you yet by reality.

Garry Wise: Not yet, no. That came many years later. But no. So we, we kind of went back and forth. and they said to me, right, I can see what you’re trying to do. They went away, obviously. They took some stuff away of them and everything. We signed the NDA and all that kind of stuff. And they went, Garry, to be honest, I think we can help you out with this. our md, John, he’s done a little bit of work in the audio side. he’s not a top end, total end audio engineer, but, we think we can deliver you exactly what you want. What do you think? And I thought I said, you know what, I’m one of these guys who gets left by their gut instinct as well, to be honest.

Andrew Hutchison: Of course.

Garry Wise: And which is help. But they really, they really read the room well.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: I said, okay, when I get some money, that’s all funding, should we say, let’s see if we can do something. And I’ve got a couple of grants, you know, Nothing major, so 1500 pound here and there as part of like a UK manufacturing kind of thing. And I gave them this brief to kind of design this preamp, with all the necessary PCBs associated with input selection and like a processor board for the volume control. And we spec’d it all out and they took some of. But were a lot of spec level stuff which I wanted to incorporate from the work I did with Douglas.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Garry Wise: And they said, all right, okay, fine, let’s, let’s see. We come up with. And that was kind of mid-2013 at this point. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: Wow.

The power amp side of things, we had to outsource that

And around. Yeah, time goes.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, time wizards. Yeah.

Garry Wise: And I got to. It was just before this, it’s before Christmas in 2013. And they said, Garry, we’ve got your working prototype.

Andrew Hutchison: Wow, that’s a hell of a Christmas present. Yep.

Garry Wise: Yeah. Do you want to come and collect it? And I was like, yeah, okay. So I go down in my car and drive down to Folkston, which is on the Kent coast.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Garry Wise: And they give him this box. It was like a fruit box, you know, we get like apples and pears.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Garry Wise: And in it there’s all these this big plastic grated sort of thing with a load of. I’ll send you a picture. And it just had a load of pcb.

Andrew Hutchison: Please do send a picture kind of. Yeah.

Garry Wise: So various PCBs just. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Various aspects of the designs, sort of. Yeah. I was going to say hot, hot melt glued together.

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Yeah, but zip code.

Garry Wise: Exactly yeah. Ah. And it was very. All very rough and.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: Kind of stuff. And, I went home and, wired it into my high fi and all this kind of stuff. And it was his proud moment. And I’ll tell you what, you sounded brilliant for about 30 seconds with static feedback and that kind of stu. and I rung them up and I said, oh, I, wouldn’t have next. I said, yeah, played it for about 30 seconds. It sounds great. I said, but then he started doing this and they said, oh, don’t worry, Bring it back down. We’ll have a look at that. And they did it. And next, you know, it came back with all these wires kind of all over the place and. But funny enough, he came back the second time. Yeah. And it played brilliantly. We had it on for. I use it as my main system. So you had to hard. Like it didn’t have a power on which you’d have to plug in straight into the main wall. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. But it was. But it was great. And I kind of thought, I’ve got something here which, I can work with. I forgot to say as well, we kind of. The power amp side of things, we had to kind of look to outsource that because the main focus was going to be on the preamp statement. Making that really good. Yeah. So we went to Ice Power in the end.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: Because they. Well, no, it ruffles a few feathers here, but I think what gets misconstrued is that as a manufacturer, you, need someone who’s going to work with you. And it’s very. Well, people say, oh, go to Purify, go to Hypex, go to all these brands who, you know, probably shouldn’t name, but it’s about how does the customer service work?

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you named the other two Class D amplifier module makers.

00:15:00

Andrew Hutchison: That’s fine. Everyone knows who that.

Garry Wise: Yeah. So you kind of. It’s. For me, it’s like, how. What’s my, relationship like? What’s my account manager like? How do I get technical support? And how that was. And it was. It was phenomenal. And to be fair to Ice Power, not m trying to do a promo here, but they said, oh, we’ll fly someone else. Work with your guys if we need to, and all this kind of stuff. And.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: And it was really good. So I kind of. I’ve got some sort of loyalty there with this product in. But they really helped me out in the early stage.

Andrew Hutchison: are you dealing with. Are you dealing with Denmark or where does the thing happen.

Garry Wise: Yeah, that, that. So I deal with them. M. Directing in Denmark. Yeah.

You were getting great sound 10 years ago, you’re saying

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Yep.

Garry Wise: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Which is, you know, which is. Which is cool. You know, that’s. That’s. That’s good. And there’s nothing. I mean, look, I mean, I think that, you know, you say ruffle a few feathers, but I mean, I think that people are both, customers who want to buy audio products who are, you know, are enthusiasts and. And know what Class D is or what they. They think they know what it is. And, And many manufacturers, of course, it’s all. It’s. It’s. It’s swinging that way. And I respect you. We’re not, you know, we’re not more than 10 years away from, A bit of a Class D invasion, I think is. More and more people realize it’s. It actually a. It now sounds pretty damn good. And, And I think any reliability issues, that, may have been there. I mean, you know, we’re talking 20 years ago, really, I think, for the. You know. I mean. And you’re. And you’re talking actually 10 years ago. So, I mean, I guess those modules have been improved since then anyhow. But you were getting, you know, you were getting great sound 10 years ago, you’re saying.

Garry Wise: Yeah, definitely. 100%. Yeah. And that. That. That was good. So, I mean, back to the. At least the kind of, where we were. So we did a. Kind of. So we had our.

Andrew Hutchison: So you had a good lasher. prototype that was sounding great.

Garry Wise: Yep, that was great. And then we moved on to a sort of a few refinements from there.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: Kind of like, how can we make this a bit better? You know, so kind of. I had a. I kind of had like a tape loop in there at one point. So I took that out and moved up the PC. Pcb. to get an extra set of, sort of XLRs in there as well and kind of just rented it. I wanted it kind of stripped back to an extent.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: and I used my. Say, my musical fidelity x 80. That’s my little. I know it’s a. It’s a. It’s a budget amplifier, but it was kind of, It was very basic. Yeah. You know, a few. Few RCA ins and, like a record link and a kind of out. And that was it really. but it was like the heart of the system, so I kind of wanted to replicate that anyway. And then we can’t say from a hardware perspective that was kind of. That was the Sound. We just. I kind of was happy with it sounds fine. So it sounds fine indoors.

The philosophical aspects of the design probably come back to initial conversations with Douglas Self

Andrew Hutchison: What ingredients in the preamp do you think? or what was there a Phyllis and I’m guessing this, the preamp. The philosophical aspects of the design probably come back to the initial conversations with Douglas Self, I would assume rightly.

Garry Wise: Yeah, we did do a lot of. Yeah, we did do a lot of. I was, I was very. When I was talking, I spoke to Douglas about it and that was kind of, you know, relay switching, nice little circuit paths and things like that.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: I fed all that onto my guy John, and he was very much like, yep, absolutely fine, let’s do this. Yeah, he had some experience with certain relays and things and components which worked well with some other things he’s done, and said, yeah, let’s. I suggest we use these brands and things. I think, I think it’s Panasonic and Panasonic relays and always.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you can hardly go wrong.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, so.

Garry Wise: So it’s quite, it’s good stuff. So.

Andrew Hutchison: And that was, Yeah, so the goal being there was, was, you know, less concerned with cost and more concerned with, of course, reliability and sound quality. Is that.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Was there something about the volume control circuit that you wanted to improve

Andrew Hutchison: And what, what about the volume? And I want to get into bogged down in fine details because I’m, I’m no expert, but was there something about the volume control circuit, the way that you dealt with that, that was.

Garry Wise: I wanted. Yeah, I’ve got. I, I used to live in a terrace house. So, not sure what the house is like in Australia, but basically expensive house on the side of the house. Oh, okay, fair enough.

Andrew Hutchison: So pretty much the same as your houses, really.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely very expensive over here. and it was this thing of. I used to listen to music in the evening when I came home from work and I’d be sitting working on Kleio in my dining room. It’s like half past eight in the evening.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: Excuse me. And basically we to not annoy my neighbours. It was always that thing of like, how do I get the volume quite, quite right? And it was okay on the sort of what you call like an old fashioned knob where you could just tweak it, just touch it without the sound being impacted too much. But I was really what I really wanted with Kleio. and I’m trying to cover so many bases with this product, I’ve probably exhausted it all. But it was. How can I have it still sounding good at ah, 10 o’clock at night whilst not winding my neighbors up. Yeah, so it was kind of. The volume

00:20:00

Garry Wise: in its own. Is, 256 positions on that digital encoder.

Andrew Hutchison: Is it really?

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. All right.

Garry Wise: Yeah, it’s a. A Borns one. What, what we’ve done, we’ve made the software work in a way that, for the first one third of the volume control, it’s very small increments. Okay.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, okay. So is it. It’s a motorized pot then, is it.

Garry Wise: Is it.

Andrew Hutchison: No, it’s a digital attenuator. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: But that’s. That’s a. It’s a very, very fine, level of, Very fine. I was going to say. Yeah, wrong word segments, but, yeah, very, I mean, so what I was going to say half a db, but you’re talking a tenth of a DB at lower levels or something. Is that the,

Garry Wise: Yeah, some. Something like that. So he’s got. The first few notches are quite, quite small. I mean, as you get to over like a third of the way.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: The lights increase a bit more in the volume you’re getting. I mean, when you get over the set, the final third, they’re sort of bigger chunks and it’s just so you can have a little bit more control.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: that lower level, what I call the everyday,

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Garry Wise: Kind of environment. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: No, that makes complete sense.

How did you end up with the whole concept of CNC milling

Okay, so. So then when it’s, I guess you’ve got the basic, You’ve got basically the sound and the feature set, and obviously someone’s got to design a proper circuit board. But then at that point you’ve got to think about what case you’re putting it in. So how did you. How did you end up with the whole concept of. Of CNC milling out of us out of a billet of solid aluminum? What was the thought there?

Garry Wise: That was m. Me being overly ambitious again. okay, so. Took a bit of inspiration from a 2010 iMac I’d sitting around on the. On my, in my study at the time. And that was kind of a bit of a thing at the time. Sort of, you know, Apple using these big chunks of aluminium. and then there was obviously other. Other, brands which had done stuff, I think of like, back in the time, you know, like Jeff Roland.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: Design group. They kind of had that wavy front panel with the machine from Solid and stuff. And I kind of like that. But with the whole Class D thing, we could get away without having loads of ventilation holes and all them kinds of things. And I always. I know it sounds controversial but I needed a design which kind of my wife would be happy with. Within the lounge. Yes. I couldn’t have something which was going to be like big heat sinks and you know, takes up the size of a, you know, got bedside table, you know in there and cost the earth to run. It was kind of like this. Is this for me? Hi Fi music should be sort of integral into the whole family environment. So you know, it’s just a really good sounding box. It looks cool. and it sits in the rack or whatever. And that’s great. You know and maybe if you’re having an argument about what should we. Should we buy this one? It’s like. Well actually I prefer this one. It might be a bit easier to flex your credit card if it looks right.

Andrew Hutchison: I think, I think that, I mean that’s a very real world line of thinking and probably ah. Is a thought that doesn’t enter too many mid to high end hi Fi designers consciousness. Ah, but probably should because actually it’s not just about the so called sort of silly expression wife acceptance factor. But it’s also. Yeah, but it’s also just. It’s. It’s real world. You don’t want it to be. You don’t want to look like a piece of machinery in a way. And And clearly you’ve avoided that. And, and, and And it’s a very attractive industrial design which we’ll get to in a second. But so you.

A lot of the design for the desk was done by you yourself

So your thought was that you kind of like the hewn from solid look and feel. But is there I guess there’s a precision advantage, you know, as far as casework. Is that is that something that you were keen on as well?

Garry Wise: Not. It wasn’t. It wasn’t really about the position. I don’t think it was just a case of I wanted to make something look really good and would be a sort of like a statement in that way.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. Okay.

Garry Wise: And it was then a case of how. How do I get. What sort of design do I want? I actually a lot of that design was probably 80% myself. because I used to have this book which sounds pretty sad now but I used to have this green book. I still got it downstairs and it’s got like a notebook and it’s just got all of my little ideas for the business and how I was going to do it and I’d have these little drawings which I’ll just not sketch out on a pen and Sort of, oh, that looks cool, that looks nice. Let’s try and make that. and kind of all these different ideas.

Andrew Hutchison: That’s fine.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah. One day it might be worth some money, you know. but it was just. I kind of evolved this, this way of thinking and I had the eight, the seven leds down the, down the side and I had the volume on the left because normally it’s on the right and it’s just kind of like. Just tried to mix things up a bit really. so I sent them off to. I got in touch with an industrial designer, who done some work for, a lot of work in the professional industry really, regarding sort of lighting desks and sound desks and things like that. So.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: so I kind of wanted to work with someone like that as opposed to just Sol. We’d make lovely aesthetic things for

00:25:00

Garry Wise: the home. and that was a good relationship. And I basically took all my, all my parts down there and said, John, this is what, another. No, another job.

Andrew Hutchison: Another job.

Garry Wise: This is what? This is what, another job? Yeah, this is what we need. And he said, right, okay, this is my little sketch. What do you want to do? And he came back and he sent me these eight ideas and some of them were awful and some of them were great. and in the end I just, I said this is my best one. Can you, And he said I was trying to explain to him what I wanted and I’m a very visual person. So I just, I fired up the computer, opened the file, sit around a bit and said, take this bit out, put this here. I ended up with that sort of keyhole shape thing on where the volume is.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: which everyone says, oh, if you copy that from quad. No, it was just basically I was trying to combine volume lights with the input select bar number M logo within the same section. It kind of just naturally evolved like that. So I kind of ended up with that and then it was all right, okay, fine, let’s get some prototyping done. So then we had some first stage prototypes of the casework. but that in its own has been a journey.

Andrew Hutchison: oh, I mean, this is. I mean, I mean, I know. And I think people who have not tried to make something out of nothing also realize, I hope they do at least just how much work. I mean, work. It’s not really work in a way, is it? I mean, it’s, it’s. You wouldn’t call it work, but, it’s, it. Maybe it, it does absorb an enormous Amount of time and thought though.

Trying to get something finished properly is the biggest challenge in the business

So you, I mean how long would you say that it took to kind of get the casework worked out? Was it six months or a year or was it not so bad?

Garry Wise: The casework was pretty good. We got that done quite quickly. I’d say fraught. Probably took about six to nine months in total by the time we worked out all the tolerances and all that kind of stuff.

Andrew Hutchison: still quite a project there, right?

Garry Wise: yeah, definitely. And it’s all time bound because I’m obviously sending a part back to a machine shop then working on some updated drawings who then need to slot that into their production process then say okay, well we’re going to do it this week and you should have it back by on a two weeks time or something like that. so before you know it, time can run away very, very quickly indeed. without even realizing. So yeah that, that is a bit of a thing but I think, I think more, more than casework. this is an issue we’ve dealt with even recently is finishing. I mean. Yeah, trying to get something finished properly is just the biggest, I think the biggest challenge in, in the business. Casework, easy PCBS and electronic design. Not a problem. Getting someone to do something consistently,

Andrew Hutchison: Consistently well at a good price.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: A price where you can, you know, you can actually sell the thing for a sensible price when it’s completed. There’s so many little component parts to this whole package. Yeah, I remember once and I look, I don’t know if it’s changed but you’re not the only problem. Years ago I was at name, having a bit of a tour around there and there was. Oh yeah, there was all these there was one particular room where they sort of had all the, a lot of casework, a lot of front panels and they were, I said oh, what happens here? Well this is where we, we run QC over all of the, all of the front panels and the lids.

Garry Wise: Right.

Andrew Hutchison: And the reject rate was quite high. Yeah. So look, we are talking small stuff. Don’t get me wrong. These were things that, they showed me a few examples of things that didn’t pass and I mean you know they were pretty subtle but they of course if you, you know spending £15,000 on a, on a, on an amplifier, the casework has to be perfect. There’s not even in your, Your price range, 5,000, it’s still got to be perfect. You know there’s no, there’s no it’s good enough. It’s just particularly when you consider that every iPhone that comes out of the iPhone factory is perfect and it’s not that kind of money. You just.

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew: We’ve had an evolution on, on um, finish

Andrew Hutchison: So getting back to. So you spent nine months getting the casework. Right. How. So what is the finish? So you’ve got. Is it. It’s some kind of a aluminum grade. We don’t know and probably don’t care. But what, but obviously it’s, it’s something that machines nicely and finishes nicely. And then.

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: So then how do you. You’ve got different colors available. What, what is that?

Garry Wise: We’ve had, we’ve had a bit of an evolution on, on finish. So we used to use, when we started, we used a sort of powder coat, which was kind of industrial and it was, it came out consistently.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: and that was great. That was, that was fine. But then we had issues with a limited colors and availability and the, that was, that was one, one challenge. alongside this, this kind of all relates. Andrew. So what, what happened was, my, my dad is involved with, he’s retired now, but he was involved with machining of stuff. He was like an engineer, but he didn’t do this type of work. And we had over a dinner table conversation

00:30:00

Garry Wise: and he said, oh, in his kind of fatherly way. So how much are you paying for that unit? And I said, oh, gave him the price. And he said, oh, you’re paying too much. And I was like, oh, really? He said, yeah, whatever suppliers, you know, you’re getting that from, they’re putting a little bit of margin on there for you. And this is all my learning curve.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: You know, like, you know, being working in this manufacturing field. And he said, I’ll put you in touch with someone who can do that cheaper. And I was like, okay, here we go. So I spoke to some guys.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: And they said, yeah, come down, come down, come down with all your stuff and we’ll have a look. And bear in mind I. Working with models at this point. And they said, yeah, well, I think we should change that, that base plate and we should change that rear and we should do this and we could put a bit more thickness in here. And I think if you had this and it. So I said, okay, how much is going to cost me? Yeah. Whilst they’re sort of, you know, mucking around with extra ideas. And they said, no, no, no, we’ll do it as a deal, you know, if you do, we do these mods for you. We’ll cover the cost if you, if you buy. If you do like a 4 off production. So yeah, okay fine. I could do 4 in my stock. That’d be good. So we did that. But what these guys have done in a fairly positive way they tightened everything up. The tolerances have gone up an extra notch so they kind of closed the gap and everything was sort of. Someone used the term a mosquitoes penis size kind of tolerance and it was great because everything really was. You couldn’t you know there was no gap on any. As any parts went together. But then we had a challenge of okay so that’s brilliant but how am I m going to end up. I can’t get this powder coated now because I’ve got all this.

Andrew Hutchison: No, because it’s too fine a tolerance.

Garry Wise: Too thick.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: Yeah. So we went around the houses and a friend of mine who’d done some work for us before, he said I think what you’re looking for is you need like a paint type finish but with but the actual light with no tolerance. And I said well okay, have you got any ideas? And he said yeah, often you should look at Cerakote which is some sort of American product they use on guns and whole host of things. In fact I later found out one, a really top end American speaker manufacturer actually use Cerakote but they don’t advertise it. Yeah. And they are kind of done some work with these guys and yeah and that’s where we are now. We use a Cerakote finish. It’s really tough. It hasn’t got any. You can use the same tolerances as we’ve got which are really tight but you don’t have to take them into account. So so that, that’s kind of where we found.

Andrew Hutchison: So it’s. So it’s not, it’s not anodizing or is the process similar? Is it a chemical process or. It is a paint.

Garry Wise: It’s, it’s. They call it a coating. Yeah. What they do they sort of use a fine kind of. We, we have to use sorry a part of when we did the EMC test in there with some requirements the metal to metal contact to boost up the you know the sort of containerization of all of the, not the signals and all that kind of stuff. So what we did we had to make sure there was good metal, metal contact. So we have the whole, all of the parts dipped in iridite which is a kind of like anti corrosive coating. So that the meth, the aluminum, the bare aluminum doesn’t tarnish over time and keeps up the good levels for them. So then with the, with the Cerakote, what they do, they mask up all of them areas and then they blast it with like a really fine sort of sand.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, okay.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah. And then you get like a. Just like It’s not a rough, like a rough finish, but it’s not in a way it looks rough, but it’s smooth.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, it cleans up. It sort of. Yeah.

Prepares it. So then what they do, then they put this coating over it

Prepares it. I mean it’s a great preparation blasting like that gives a nice even finish, you know. So that’s with a touch of texture to it. Does it? Or is it like very fine texture?

Garry Wise: It’s. It’s one of them. You can sort of see the texture.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: You can’t actually feed it.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: So then what they do, then they then put this coating over it. but it’s quite clever in that they. You. If you want it glossy, you can put the high gloss layer in. If you want it matte, you can do that if you want to kind of. You can sort of just make up like a wizard or something. Make up your own kind of potions. I want a bit. Yeah. M. In a cauldron. You put a bit more metallic finish in there and a bit of high gloss hardener in there and stuff. And that’s. And that’s what they do. And then the standard colors I’ve got on the website, just for ones from there thingy. But we can kind of tweak it sort of. Oh, that, that black looks nice but you can have a bit more metallic in it as well. So we’ve kind of. We’ve got the standard colors listed, but we use But we put a little bit more metallic in it so you get a kind of more reflection on the black. I still want to stand a matte black box sitting in my lounge. You know, it kind of you. That, you know, we, we’ve done that whether people like it or not. You know, it’s always subjective.

Andrew Hutchison: But the, but it’s a. It’s a. It’s. And of course it’s a very permanent finish. And

Garry Wise: Yes.

Andrew Hutchison: Which of course is from. You know, is clearly one of your key goals that you’re making. Things that will literally last a lifetime,

00:35:00

Andrew Hutchison: I guess is, is. Is. Is what you’re angling at. Yeah, definitely.

There’s a lot of manufacturing going on in the UK

So I’ve got a question which I’m just checking my notes. and I don’t know. Well, actually I did Have a kind of a question about the team of people that you surround yourself with and it really. You sort of. I mean you’ve really found all of these skilled people who are obviously leaders in their little area of manufacturing. and of course I’m slightly jealous because I always feel like there’s you know, there’s. There’s a lot of manufacturing going on in the UK and that you’ve got these, that you’ve got these people. Excuse me, You’ve got these people doing high quality work and they’re. I mean, and these are. These people are mostly in Kent, which is where you. Yes, where you. Yeah, you’re in, Is it Faversham?

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, yes, I’m in Favisham, which is sort of like the sort of north.

Andrew Hutchison: The northern. Yeah, the top end.

Garry Wise: The top, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s still not. Still not far from London though, is it really? I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, not a long way out and. But But these, these subcontractors, if we lower their, call them that, they’re they’re all sort of handy, are they? They’re sort of. There’s. There’s no one that’s at the other end of the country that you’re using as such, or is it.

Garry Wise: No, the only. If I look at sort of component supply, the bit of. It’s not plastic, it’s. It’s actually glass bit like you get on like a iPhone screen.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: but it’s. That comes from Berkshire.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: Which is, you know, probably sort of not. Not far north of London or to the west of London. And to be honest, that’s. That’s the far. The supplier who’s the furthest away from our base. Everything else. Yeah, all. Everything else is done in Kent. So, so this case work is done.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s not just a UK.

Garry Wise: Eight miles from my house, it’s.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, is that right? So it’s not just a UK product, it’s a Kent product isn’t kind of known for Both. Well, I call it the. What I call more about gardens and flowers or something. And of course, I think you grow, you grow a lot of Because I’m a bit of a beer guy.

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: A lot of hops. Right. So, yeah. And Kent is well known for amplifiers now as well apparently of. Of premium quality.

Garry Wise: Yeah, well you’ve got. Obviously you’ve got kef.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it’s not too far away. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Garry Wise: And Cord Electronics. Oh, is that right?

Andrew Hutchison: Cords in Canada. Yeah. Okay. Right here.

Garry Wise: Yeah. I actually share the. My production facility, the engine. The engineering guys who do the casework they actually made called CD player casework.

Andrew Hutchison: Nicely done. You drop that smoothly. Conversation.

Garry Wise: Yeah, well, you know, it’s just saying it’s.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, their casework is, Is, is, Is, you know, is, Is quite amazing. Quite often it’s quite extravagant, isn’t it? So, definitely, yeah.

Garry Wise: Very, very bold design there.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: All right.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, that’s. Yeah, that’s, that’s. That’s kind of what I’m talking about really, is that you’ve got these other manufacturers, who need these services as to. No doubt there’s all sorts of other things made that require quality machining. So, yeah, it’s completely impressive.

Delacour loudspeakers are made in Australia and cost $3,000

yeah, so you. So, so when you got the first. The first.

Andrew Hutchison: So K105 is the preamp. K135 is the integrated, which I guess is largely the same but with some ice, modules. And I don’t want to imply. Oh, you just dropped some ICE modules in because obviously, clearly there needs to be a power supply for them and there’s. It’s.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: And yeah, it’s. It’s a different product. But when did you manage to get those sort of kind of fully resolved and out onto the market?

Garry Wise: I made. Well, we had a. It’s, been a little. There was a little hiatus.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. All right.

Garry Wise: For a few years. And I don’t mind sharing your story because everyone always asks, well, hang on. You launched this. References to your product in 2015 and, then you. There’s m. More recent activity and basically.

Andrew Hutchison: You went on a holiday.

Garry Wise: Yeah, no, Well, I wish. No, we ended up, I say me and my wife had been trying for. On and off for about 10 years to have some kids and. Okay, we didn’t. And then I literally just launched the brand and then I found. We found that she was pregnant.

Andrew Hutchison: Delacour loudspeakers. No, I’m not going to tell you about how they’re made in Australia. They’re designed in Australia and they’re very high quality and they sound great. We’re not going to talk about that. $3,000 for the new 70s is great value for money. And the people that heard them at the Melbourne show when we released them the other day, love them. 16.99. You can buy the ready to assemble kit. All the hard work is done. Crossovers are assembled, cable looms are made, there’s connectors fitted. Soldering is all done. All you have to do is glue six pieces of wood together twice, one for the left and one for the right. The phone number is on the website, delacord.com or of course email us or any other way you care to get in touch. Release a carrier pigeon with a small moat attached to its foot. We’ll send you our 5 page PDF with all of the details. Thanks for listening. Back to the show. And we’re back.

Garry says Covid was interrupted in 2022 and started again in 2023

So, yeah, Garry,

00:40:00

so, you had a bit of a break, to create. Well, you’d already created the family to sort of to feed and nurture the family. and so, at what point then did you, I mean you said Covid was an interruption, so I’m guessing what, 2022, 2023, you, you kicked it off again. Is that what happened?

Garry Wise: We did, yeah. I, I’ve had some data inquiries in on and off over the years, kind of, you know. and I just want to mention a good friend of mine, Andy, Andy Holt, who kind of has been a bit of a sort of mentor to me along the way and he, he got in touch with me like in 2015 when we first sort of touched the market with the products.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: And he, he, he was the first person to see it, listen to it, he wanted to support it. But obviously we became quite good friends, along the way and we kind of had this thing of like, oh, yeah, well, he just goes, just bring it down when it’s ready, bring it down when it’s ready and all that kind of thing. So he was kind of my first, thing. But we, with COVID it was difficult time obviously for lots of people in different ways. But there was the, in the UK it was. You could buy stuff from a shop but you couldn’t go inside it and sort of demo the products. So it just seemed a bit fruitless to kind of, yeah. Have a new brand trying to launch when people just buying things that sold like Name and Riga and Lynn and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Flying out the shop, I mean it.

Andrew Hutchison: Was a great, you know, so it was a great time to sell stuff. But you needed, it was, I guess a lot of it was being done online and I guess because of that it was, it was known brands. Yeah. Okay.

Garry Wise: Yeah, definitely, yeah. So I thought it’s pointless. So it got to the end of 2022 that, around that time and then we kind of had, we had stock made up, you know, after we ironed out all of our issues over the years and got something which was really happy with. And then that’s when we started kind of pushing it, you know, kind of actually. Right. Let’s, let’s get in front of retailers and that’s been a whole learning curve and a different experience on its own.

Andrew Hutchison: I’m sure it has. So yeah. You say if, you’ve got. Have you been to any of the local shows, or have you just. Just basically driven around the country and showed a few retailers your product or what’s the

Garry Wise: I’ve. I’m kind of doing. I didn’t want to. I’ve had. I’ve got a couple of sales agents. Well, I’ve got one at the moment because one guy had Was you doing it part time between another role. But they’re kind of doing the rounds, going around to retailers and doing all that kind of stuff. But they work for other brands as well. Yeah. Yeah. So, it’s kind of like you don’t know how much air time your products get in. which is fine for me because I’m not trying to become a big manufacturer overnight.

Andrew Hutchison: But you know, you’re clearly not in a hurry. This is very well. And that. That’s meant as a compliment really. But the point is you, yeah, you. It’s fitting in with your life but it’s also the I don’t think it’s. I don’t. For what you’ve done, you’ve taken. You’ve turned nothing into something and you just simply can’t do it overnight. So when you finally get it more or less right, there’s no point rushing it. And I guess it. I think if the products as good as it looks. I mean I haven’t heard it but I have little doubt of the, of the quality of the. Of the way it’s made. I’ve seen some pictures inside, etc. I suspect it will somewhat sell organically as word gets out. Is that, Is that kind of part of it?

Garry Wise: Yes. Yeah, definitely. And I’m not trying to, run down kind of, you know, retailers, but there has been that thing of. I want to. Because I’ve put so much effort into it in my own. I’m not happy to just shift boxes and go to a lower margin. sorry, a bigger margin for the retailer in order to get the sale. It’s the kind of thing of like, look, this is who we are, this is what we’re doing. Do you want to be part of a. Helping a brand over. Over a longer period of time, you know, when we get the rest of our products out and Basically the people on our website I’ve listed so far, and we’ve got other demos and people buying demo kit already in the process. They’re people, retailers who have kind of gone, yeah, I like what you’re doing, I like what you stand for. we want to be part of it, help you out. And that’s kind of, that’s important to me. As opposed to having 200 retailers up and down the country just shifting boxes for the sake of it. I want someone to go in, make an informed decision on. They want this product and, and the retailers really behind it, to be honest.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, It’s a difficult, needle to thread, so to speak, to know. Yeah, I mean, literally finding supportive the right, the right people that really, I guess appreciate the work you’ve put into what you’ve tried to create.

Is it becoming less commonplace for UK brands to be made in the UK

Which is becoming, I guess, I mean, just speaking generally, is it becoming less commonplace for all of those UK brands that we know to be made in the UK now? Is that. I mean, we know just. I mentioned NAME before and I have heard rumors that NAME have. Have moved some of their manufacturing away from Salisbury. Is this something that’s. Is happening across the, country or.

Garry Wise: You know, I don’t know. I mean, I’m m. Kind of suppose I’d keep myself in my own little bubble, to be honest. But, I mean, I do hear similar sort of things. You

00:45:00

Garry Wise: know, some manufacturers are taking. They’re using more sort of assembled in the UK as opposed to necessarily made in the uk. Yeah, I mean, there are brands I actually do admire, and all that kind of stuff.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, what are those brands? I mean, because of cord, I guess, you know how good the casework is. But,

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Andrew Hutchison: And they’re obviously because of that. I clearly they’re still largely made in the uk. I mean, I mean, you know, I opened up pieces of equipment and I. I mean, in fact I bought a transformer, the other day for an older musical fidelity, that the guy really wanted to be fixed. The transformer had, you know, gone open circuit and was unrepairable. Short or shorter turns, it doesn’t matter. But I needed a transformer. I actually bought it out of the UK from a transformer maker and I’ve forgotten their name now, but they clearly make toroidal transformers for a lot of different purposes. I mean, this. And there’s. I think there was a couple of others that I saw in the process of googling it. But that that was the one that actually Musical Fidelity suggested I get in touch with. And they did a great. Transformer was great and it fitted. It was almost exactly the same size as the original. So there’s still lots of component manufacturing happening there, obviously. So,

Garry Wise: Definitely.

Andrew Hutchison: So, what the hell was my question?

Garry Wise: I don’t know. I mean.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, the products that you admire. That’s right. That was what I was, wondering. Yeah. You started it, so finish it.

Garry Wise: Yeah, I did, yeah. Sorry, I better finish it. I don’t know. I’m. Cordy’s a good example. I do like the casework. It’s a bit. Some of the design could be a bit controversial. M. But ultimately they Making a statement and they stuck with that kind of design. I like that. but even other companies like Exposure, I think they’re based. I think not. What? Yeah, but design is quite simple, I suppose you could call it that. And I don’t mean that in a. In a rude way. No, no, but they make a good. They make a good sounding product. and it’s all. It’s all done here, you know, they don’t have the big marketing thing of like, name and all them kind of guys. But no, they, they do make. But the pricing is good, you know.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, they’re pricing. Yeah, no, I’m familiar with. I know the brand and I actually know Tony, ah. Quite well. And Oh, you do, yeah, and yeah. Lovely product. Yeah. Great sound and Yeah, I. I believe. Well, I mean, you know, I, I know they make them there. I mean, I. Everyone buys in bits and pieces from places, I guess.

Garry Wise: But yeah, well, we do the same. So.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, of course it’s unavoidable. it’s not like everything is made in the uk, so, yeah, yeah, I’m pleased that you, that you like that brand. I agree. it’s a bit of a. Exposure, is a bit of, a dark horse in a way because, when it started, I think the original, the guy that started the company and Julian Verica at Name were kind of mates and they weren’t that far apart from each other and started at the same time. But clearly the brands have taken two completely different paths ultimately and, and sound somewhat different, but yeah, one’s super famous and one not so much and yet both excellent products. So there’s a.

Less exposure is great, but maybe there’s a lesson in that

Garry Wise: Less.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s a lesson in that somewhere. I’m not sure what it is, but, But I mean, Julian was a huge personality, so maybe that. That was Maybe that’s part of it, I don’t know. But But yeah, exposure is great.

UK brands disappearing offshore but still flying Union Jack high

Is there any other any other brands that you spring to mind or ones that you. Ones that you used to like but they don’t make the stuff there anymore. Is that, is that part of it?

Garry Wise: Yeah, kind of. I suppose. Like I used to have Well I still got it. I say I’ve got Musical Fidelity Kit. I kind of like. I liked it. Obviously they’ve kind of been bought out. When Anthony Michaelson I think you know, retired.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: the guys project sort of took it on but it’s kind of. It sort of sits a funny place for me because it’s kind of a British. They still got British logos on their product on their website. But I think a lot of the R D now is done in Austria.

Andrew Hutchison: probably.

Garry Wise: But it’s still made in Taiwan. What is it man? Because I wouldn’t have any objections to find some more of their kit or whatever. You mostly use my own now. But it’s that thing of like. I don’t know what does it stand for? And that confuses me.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, okay, okay, so that’s an interesting point. So what does it stand for? Yeah, I mean it’s, there is a, there is a strong history of of UK brands disappearing offshore but still flying the Union Jack high and and, and changing the terminology to you know, designed and engineered in the U.K. and. Or England and It’s not really the same thing. Yeah, so I’m trying to think of other, other brands. I mean there’s, there’s a lot of little brands still making electronics in the UK obviously and you’re one of them. So But there’s others and I, I’m not going to mention a whole string of them but I guess it is now more the smaller brands that are making things locally. Is that the Is that your thought?

Garry Wise: Yeah, I believe so.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, definitely.

Garry Wise: Yeah. I know, I know a couple of guys who make sort of phono stages and headphone amplifiers and things like that and I, I talk to a few of these guys and Yeah, they’re kind of at the 300 pound price point make it

00:50:00

Garry Wise: and that’s, that’s great. They’ve got, they’ve got good businesses from that as well and Yeah, and that’s, that’s good. So. Yeah, but it is all happening, you know I think maybe at the. Not the. Where you’ve got to be a bit more specialist and start trolling the audio forums to find all these little brands. But yeah, they’re definitely out there. Yes, I think, I think we’re quite.

Do you think you will, uh, getting the word out there with Kleio

Andrew Hutchison: Do you think you will, from the point of view, getting the word out there, do you think you will go to like the Bristol show at some point or something like that? Or is that not really.

Garry Wise: I would like to. The problem I have with the shows, and I probably sound like some opinionated guy here.

Andrew Hutchison: Please do. Because we like, we like an opinion.

Garry Wise: Okay. I, I struggle with the shows, to be honest, because I’ve been to, I’ve been to a lot of them and it’s always the same kind of thing. You’ve got people collecting bags for all the brands, people, playing in a jazz, which I can’t stand. And you know what? I think I’d end up probably in an argument with someone because I was at the show one.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay. Yeah.

Garry Wise: And, it was his half a million pound folk, how kind of set up with all this stuff. And this guy, they were playing some classical and jazz and I was there as a, like a punter as opposed to a read, like a manufacturer. And it was early 2011. And the, bloke. Bloke chips in, who’s sitting down, says, oh, can you put some, Beyonce on this, please? Yeah. And the bloke went, no, we haven’t got any of that.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: Oh, well, he goes, well, we, we don’t play that type of music on this.

Andrew Hutchison: We don’t play that type of music.

Garry Wise: He said, he said, well, if I was to spend this much money on the high fi, I want to hear what it sounds like. And they, and they were like, no, no, no, no. Well, if you bought this system, maybe you’d start enjoying this type of music more. And the bloke was like getting quite confrontational. And he said, yeah. And. And he was going, no, because I’d use this for my whole family. And if my daughter wants to listen to Katy Perry and my wife wants to listen to this, this is the type of music, we’re going to be using.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah.

Garry Wise: And he said, well, no, we haven’t got, we haven’t got that tough music. And this other guy chips in and said, calm down, calm down. He’s not trying to cause an argument. And I thought this is, this is just the pinnacle of like, what goes on here. You know, every room you go into has got Miles Davies playing or something. It’s like I walked down, the road of a corridor of a show once and someone had some Lady Gaga playing. Yeah, well, here we go. This is what, this is finally. Because in reality this is what people use their music systems for. You know, I don’t own any jazz music or anything. I’m not, not running it down. But when I get a Kleio prototype here and I’ve, you know, when I’ve had one back from a retailer visit before it goes out again or something and I wire it up, yeah, my wife’s got, I don’t know, God knows what on some sort of like, you know, R b from the 90s or I’ve got, you know, some rock music or something. You know, the kids have got their My Little Pony soundtrack playing for it. You know, that’s because, because that’s reality. That’s really what these systems are for. You know, let’s have some fun with it. You know, I kind of, I kind of avoid the shows just because I find them a little bit kind of of clique-y. But it’s a good way of getting out there so.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, in front of a certain audience by the sound of it. But what,

Andrew can’t stand the term audiophile. Can you lay some meat on the issue

Yeah, so you’re, you’re not a, you’re not a fan of the term audiophile, is that, is that,

Garry Wise: Yeah, that’s correct. I can’t stand that term.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: Oh, you hit the nail on the head now, Andrew.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, we, I mean there are people listening of course, but they’re, they’re Of course. And some of those.

Garry Wise: No offense to the.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, no, no.

Garry Wise: But the thing is, it is the thing.

Andrew Hutchison: I don’t know my. I mean, we’re having a bit of a joke when we say not an audiophile and, but, but we’re, we’re really, we’re really saying, you know, that we’re, we’re in the trade, you know, so we’re, we kind of are audio, files in a way, but I guess we’re very serious and we’re sort of. Everything’s sort of a performance orientated audiophile, although audiophiles would say that they are performance orientated, but I mean sticking to the laws of physics fairly closely and you know, I guess. But it’s not just that. It’s, it’s a. Look, it’s a bit of a, it’s, it’s kind of having a crack at the term, but not really because it’s now bizarrely and, and probably has been for 10 or more years in quite common usage, you know, and not in, not in a, not in a way that’s anyway, disparaging. Whereas back when I started in this audio, business, it was. It was kind of a term used. And this is, this is the problem. If you’re of a certain age, you real. You remember when the term was slight, it was disparaging, really. Oh, here comes another audiophile. You know, like. And, it’s not like that anymore, but it is quite funny in some ways to hear it used in a way that, you know. But you’re obviously thinking of the term applying to us to a particular segment of audio equipment enthusiast. do you. Can you. Can you lay

00:55:00

Andrew Hutchison: some meat on the.

Garry Wise: Elaborate.

Andrew Hutchison: Elaborate a little.

Garry Wise: Yeah, yeah, I suppose. I suppose it’s. At the end of the day, I, I got into this because I like music.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: And hi Fi gives me a good route to get the best out of the music. Yeah. So that’s, that’s my position. And I think, realistically, a lot of people. Is that what it’s for? But it’s come a bit of a kind of. I won’t use the term I was gonna, use, but kind of, you can treat all the heart. Okay, well, let’s use X tree. Hi Fi’s like a penis extension.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay, so what do you just Hang on a second. Do penis extensions exist? Is that what you say? I want to know more. I need to know more about.

Garry Wise: I don’t know. I’m not a consumer.

Andrew Hutchison: But, you know, you’re comfortable. Keep going.

Garry Wise: I will. Yeah, but it’s that kind of thing of. Oh, well, my system’s not as good as yours because I’m using these cable lifters what cost £100 for a bit of wood, you know, and, it’s kind of arguing amongst each other. And you know what? If you wanna. If you want to spend your money on that stuff. Brilliant. That’s great. I, you know, I’m sure the companies who make this stuff aren’t going to complain.

Andrew Hutchison: No, no, no.

Garry Wise: But it becomes this kind of inner, sort of fighting kind of thing about people just running down equipment for the sake of it. Whereas, like. Are, you actually listening to the kit? Because I don’t know if you are. And, And I think. And I see in other kind of things, I do a bit of cycling, you know, and I just want to. I just go out on my bike and ride for like 12 miles at a time and get some fresh air and clear my head from whatever’s going on. Right. But then you find that the enthusiasts go, oh, you shouldn’t be riding that Bike and why using M tires and why are you not wearing this stuff? I just want to enjoy my bike.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: And it’s the same with the high five stuff. And I think I know there’s a market to be made from selling all the accessories and all that stuff. And I get that. That’s great.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah.

Garry Wise: But I do find that when it becomes kind of you’re losing purpose of what it’s for, what the hi fi is for, then are, you getting actually enjoyment from it? And I don’t know. And I think that’s. That damages, I think for me, the industry perception, obviously.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah. I think from an outsider’s point of view, you know, the outsiders looking in at some kind of, you know. And so, yeah, it’s interesting you’re describing the term and what you don’t like about it. Largely the way I don’t really care that people want to use cable lifters, but. Which is, you know, from my point of view is kind of funny. But, you know, but the thing is. But I don’t care that they do. But when, but then you make, you make hi fi, which is a good old term. You make it look a bit silly when people look in as music lovers into the hi fi world or the audiophile world. We all, not we, not you or I, but the ones that are going on about the particular brand of cable lifter that works, these other ones are rubbish. I mean, I don’t know if they do that, but I mean, you’re implying they do and that’s scary. I mean, if I found that on the Internet, I would, I would clearly turn away because that is an argument about 0.00001% difference, which I’m just not interested in. Because these same people probably have diabolical acoustics in their listening room.

You need to start with basic cables when developing a speaker

they probably don’t, but they. One thing’s for sure, you could tweak the acoustics a little, improve the sound a lot. Whereas the cable. Yeah, that’s the bit that, that does my head in is the, the tweakiness of it, but the. Not, not perhaps prioritizing the tweaks, you know, successfully.

Garry Wise: Yeah. Oh, I agree. And I think perception that, you know. No, no, I agree. And I think, I think there’s that big thing of, you know, oh, the manufacturers must be using these really expensive cables and rooms to do all their tuning, all that kind of stuff. And I think reality, it’s that kind. I’m not trying to, you know, tell everyone that Father Christmas isn’t real or anything. Like that. But realities that kind of, you know, that’s not really how products are developed, you know, and the manufacturers aren’t using 10,000 pound speaker cables to necessarily test their stuff they’re using. I’m using. I use basic bell wire to start with, you know, because I think you can, if you can get it sounding good on the, on the rubbish stuff.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you actually kind of. No, I’m absolutely with you. We use very simple cables when developing a speaker because there’s a good chance that if you put a really fancy cable on it, it will only improve it. and, and it will improve it by some margin. But you need to start in the. I mean you need to use a cable that’s appropriately priced for the price of the product. In the case of your amplifiers, you’re not going to put a 2,000 pound set of cables on them. Right. I mean that would be ridiculous.

Garry Wise: So you know, I use some Supra by wired cables which I got about 20 years ago and I’m quite happy to admit the kit we use, I use. My speakers which I use for testing are a tenth of the price of yamp before I’m selling. So I use an old set of bowers and Wilkins 602s 3s, all the time. And right now people are falling

01:00:00

Garry Wise: down.

Andrew Hutchison: Around their WI Fi speaker or whatever they’re listening.

Garry Wise: And a set of Dali Zenza ones which I picked up for about £150 from Richer Sounds because realistically, you know, although I’m in the trade, I can get a discount. I don’t have a, I don’t have necessarily all the funds to keep investing speakers. And for me, I used these speakers for 20 years. I know how they sound, you know.

Andrew Hutchison: Ah, yes, on, yes.

Garry Wise: So for me I can go, I can put a bit of Kleio kit on it and go, right, okay, this sounds good. I can hear the improvement here, X, Y and Z. But then also let the let the retailer have the magic of exploring how that sounds. You know, I went to a retailer once, yeah. And we tried everything. We had Spendors, we had audio vectors, we had some DYN audios. And it was like, okay, right. They had may enjoy their journey. When I was there for about three hours it was kind of, oh, this sounds good with this. Let’s try this one. Now can we try this? And it’s kind of spec in the system for a customer based on what they think works well with the kit. For me I just need to make. No, it makes decent sounding Audio before I commit to the design kind of stage.

Andrew Hutchison: yeah, no, no, I think the bit that’s most important that you said is that you know how those loudspeakers sound. You’ve been listening to them for years and all sorts of different things, and that, that’s, it’s no different to, an audio engineer knowing his monitors. Well, he doesn’t need the latest monitor, he needs the one that he knows how things need to sound on that, so they sound right when the finished product is played on something else. And this applies equally to what you’re doing. So, I mean, you are the wizard, to use your previously mentioned term, as far as voicing the way that amplifier works or at least make making sure that the design sounds the way you wanted it to and that it’s fun to listen to. And, yeah, you’d be silly to actually listen to it on a fancy loudspeaker that you’re not familiar with how it performs. And you’re right. Then you go to a retailer and you can mix up a potion of whatever works together. As a matter of interest.

So what’s the general feedback when you take an amplifier out to a retailer

So what’s the general feedback when you take an amplifier out to, a retailer? Is there a little bit of surprise that the thing sounds as good as it does?

Garry Wise: yeah. I mean, surprise is maybe the wrong.

Andrew Hutchison: Word, but, you know, I mean, but I mean, you’re selling them, these people are buying them off you and they’re selling them to customers. So clearly they’re very happy with the performance.

Garry Wise: Well, one guy, one guy I spoke to, he used to be a name rep, and he came over and got, he’s wired it up, he’s plugged it in, he’s played about five minutes of music and come over and shook my hand and said, you’ve done an absolutely amazing job, mate, based on what you, where you’ve come from and what you’ve made. And I felt I’d be emotional at that point. Wow, this guy sells, you know, topping kit for the last, you know, however many years. And I just kind of. Things like that. Some things have gone well, some things have gone bad. One guy said it was the worst amplifier he’s ever heard. Really. But then.

Andrew Hutchison: Hang on, don’t fast forward over there. So he, so you, you made a time, you went there with your gear. He had a listen to it.

Garry Wise: I didn’t. My, my, my agent did.

Andrew Hutchison: Oh, your agent did? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Garry Wise: And then he rung me up and said that demo didn’t go well. And I Said, what happened? He said, well, he listened to it. We, was there for about two hours. And he said it was the worst amplifier he’s ever heard in his life. And I said, okay, fine, well, thanks for the positive feedback. At the end of the day, wow, he’s like, cars. And, you know, I think I’ve heard you mentioned. Mentioned it before on your podcast. You know, people think different opinions, different cars. But what the, the ironic thing about that was though, at that point we hadn’t had any press reviews, but when I won. When I won the best of 2023 from, the year.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: they got on the phone and said, oh, could you come back and give us another demo? And I was like, is that right? Yeah. I said, no, because I, I don’t think you get two bites of a cherry on that because, you know, at the end of the day, if he was that impulse, if you liked it. Yeah, you should have. Like I’ve said about retailers buying into it and kind of.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, yeah.

Garry Wise: Supporting Vatican, actually. Okay, fine. we can set it on its own merit without the reviews. These guys just wanted reviews to kind of back it and then try. And I thought, no, do you know what? No. Maybe in a couple of years time when I’ve stopped being angry about it, I’ll let you go. Actually, no, you’ve had your chance and you’ve wasted time. You know, my guys had to go out there, use fuel and stuff, and, he’s come away with no sales.

Andrew Hutchison: So.

Garry Wise: Yeah. So, yeah, worst amplifier he’s ever heard in his life.

Andrew Hutchison: Interesting that he comes up with that bold statement and, Which is clearly ridiculous because, I mean, the worst amplifier he would have heard in his life is probably something made by Sanyo about 45 years ago with 8 watts with germanium transistors or something. But anyhow, so, so, so he, He.

Garry: It was somewhat divisive. I don’t know, it was divisive

Isn’t it funny that he makes that bold statement, but it sounds like it was not. I don’t know, was. Was it more of a. I don’t know, it was

01:05:00

somewhat divisive. It’s.

Garry Wise: I mean.

Andrew Hutchison: And sent. How did, how did this change. How did the amplifier sound change? Because it won an award. This is, this is.

Garry Wise: Well, that’s the bit I don’t understand.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, that’s. See that. That tells you a little bit about that retailer and I guess, less. Less of a.

Garry Wise: Less, ah.

Andrew Hutchison: Of a. I, was going to say. I almost said Golden Ear, which is a terrible term in itself and comes back to the audiophile thing. A bit. But I mean, clearly he doesn’t trust his own judgment. It was safer for him to say it was bad than say that an unknown product was good, I think is what I’m trying to say.

Garry Wise: Yeah. Or that it would be difficult for him to maybe sell to his customer base. I don’t, you know, everyone’s got their own. But, you know, people know who come. Comes in the door regularly and all that kind of stuff. So maybe that was it. But I’ve been quite. With all these retailers, I’ve kind of been a bit too friendly, as I’ve been told, you know, because I let people have it on demo without any real time for commitment. You know, I think most of the thing is, you know, you have it for a couple of days and say, I want it back and are you buying one? Yes or no? I kind of just let them have it for a couple of weeks, you know, because I don’t want to be Mr. Pushy. That’s not really what I’m about. And I really. I know it’s one retailer who’s, on our website, I won’t. I won’t name it. They just said, you’ve been really ambitious with what you’re doing, and we really support that. And I was like, yes. And that’s my downfall because I’m kind of like, yeah, after product for two weeks, don’t worry about buying it or not, you know, So I know that these are lessons I’ve learned along the way. But, yeah, the retail has been a. You know, I’m juggling a lot of things, really. I’m juggling design, marketing.

Andrew Hutchison: You certainly are.

Garry Wise: Finance.

Andrew Hutchison: someone’s got to run. Someone’s got to write the instruction manual. Who did that?

Garry Wise: That was. I came back. Well, actually, I wrote the instruction manual. and it was quite good because at the same time we wrote it, I was doing the, EMC and the CE compliance. So it was a case of. I had to put the. I got the guy to make sure that the, user manual was conformant with all of the current standards. You have to put in the user manual and all that kind of stuff at the same time. And he was writing stuff. You know, it was. Right. And I, I wrote. It was quite a learning curve because I wrote something. The guy said, you need to add this in. And I said, I think it was along the lines of make sure you switch off the power before or something. Normalize. Don’t cut the cable if it’s still plugged into the mains. And I said, 40 years gonna do that, right? And I have to find the reference. And the guy said, you got to treat everybody as an idiot, even if it sounds ridiculous. You’ve got to put it in black and white unless you want to get sued. And I was like, but. But Colin. I said, no one’s gonna. No one would do that, would they? And he’s like, don’t ask, Garry. I’ve been involved in all the lawsuits and stuff and things like this in the past. Just put it for the sake of a line of text. Just write it in there. And I was like, fine. Okay.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s a bit like the,

Are you familiar with the meme I’m going to lower ourselves and mention

Are you familiar with the meme I’m going to lower ourselves and mention? I mean, there’s a picture of like a, maybe a, you know, a Honda 4 of, you know, from the 70s. and that the meme says something like, when this bike came out, there was a whole chapter on how to adjust the valve clearances on the new model Honda. It mentions don’t drink the contents of the battery. It’s, It’s. Yeah, times have changed, I guess. So, Yeah. Although, you know, there’s always been silly people around cutting power cords with the power still on, I guess. Or has there. It seems. It seems hard to believe, but it is. It is the world we live in. And look, you’ve only got to write it once, you know, so, you know, the pain has been suffered and it’s done. Hey,

Garry Wise: Yeah, that’s true. It’s.

Andrew Hutchison: There’s. With things we could talk about for hours and I mean, boring things that perhaps people don’t want to hear about. And I. Because, I mean, packaging is another thing that’s, It’s, such a. Such an important part of a product, and yet it kind of gets potentially tossed away on the same day as someone takes the product home. So, But you’ve got to get it from A to B in a way that, it won’t damage the amplifier. And of course also that it looks kind of nice when you unpack it. and no doubt you’ve employed a packaging professional there, but we’re not going to go down that, that path.

Kleio is working on a number of power amplifiers. Is that getting closer the power amp models

I was just going to say, look, we probably should wrap things up, but is there something else that you’d like to mention? And of course there’s no reason why we can’t chat in the future. This is not the end of we will never speak again. Because I feel like when you bring out your power amplifiers Which I notice on the website are coming soonish. I don’t know when but do you have any. Is that getting closer the power amp models?

Garry Wise: Yeah. So. So obviously given our size, what when we designed the. The actual kind of roadmap for the product.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Garry Wise: The numbering is kind of was. You know some people might recognize it but I kind of you to use

01:10:00

Garry Wise: like the BMW kind of numbering sort of thing. Yeah. So kind of like it was K1 was like one was the first series and then it was kind of like the middle number sort of indicated sort of what. What was in it?

Andrew Hutchison: A bigger engine?

Garry Wise: Yeah. The five was like Oh, it’s an amplifier, you know for example. So I’ll just put that on there. And then basically the preamp was 105 because it hasn’t got any power amp modules in it. And then one was going to be the mono, two was going to be the dual mono and the three was just integrated because it’s like the all in one sort of like you know.

Andrew Hutchison: Yes.

Garry Wise: Unit. But the one for 115 and the 125, it’s just been one of them m things where by you know, we’re only small, we need to grow. We’re trying to. We’re actually, you know, I’m quite open with this. We know we’re looking at getting some investment for this business to really sort of turbocharge our efforts. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: And that’s kind of going to be good for us. And it means that we can get all of these products which people keep asking for. We go to a retailer of an integrated and a pre and they go where’s the power amps? We go, well they’re sort of in development. And they are. And they are in development. They’re 90 done. I just haven’t got the case work finished for them. So it’s that kind of thing where once we grease for wheels with our integrated and pre then we can sort of quickly get the kind of the power amps out. But I’ve. I’ve got a DAC which has already been done. and that. That’s going to be a slot in kind of upgrade to the 135. You’ll be able to sort of back that input 7 which is basically just like an MP3 connection because I needed a spare connection on the board has actually got ability to plug a DAC into that okay. Socket. So that’s going to be there. the same with the 105. I’ve got a headphone amp Coming out eventually and a phono stage. But it’s just a case of getting these. Kind of getting more momentum behind the brand as well. And then for me to kind of go, right, let’s, you know, as we. If things improve, funding comes in, let’s kind of bring all this stuff to the market and then hopefully, you know, we’ll be sitting here in a few years time and saying, yeah, that Kleio brand. Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: Look, I, I Gotta. Well, you have made a wave. It’s just that it’s. It’s probably not left the shores, of Great Britain just yet because other than obviously by the power of the Internet, but I mean is. Is. Is export something that in due course you, I mean you no doubt would embrace that because it’s

Garry Wise: It’s.

Andrew Hutchison: It’s the way forward, I guess, the way you grow brand. But But it’s not something you perhaps thought about much at the moment. But I mean, you’ve got so much of it right. It looks. I mean, let’s just summarize because. Yeah, I probably should wrap things up with. I’m sure, you know.

Garry Wise: Sorry.

Andrew Hutchison: Yeah, yeah, no, don’t apologize. It’s the very. It’s a super interesting conversation, at least for me. Hopefully it is for the listeners as well. But it’s Yes, yes, I really do.

You’ve got the styling right. Once you’ve got that basic styling,

Andrew Hutchison: So, you. You’ve done it so logically. So you’ve got the styling right. You employed a professional, you. It’s beautifully made. I mean, these are things. And of course all reports as it sounds fantastic. So I mean, these are the three key things, I guess. But The thing is, it does have to look good. It is such an important thing and So that you’ve taken the time and you’ve got that right. So. And you’ve. Once you’ve got that basic styling, I guess the power amps fall into line and probably look similar, I guess. And. And Excuse me, but, So. And then you’re talking about taking in some investment and. And I guess productionizing things or speeding up. Yeah. Okay.

Garry Wise: In fact, I think a bit more control.

Andrew Hutchison: You’ve actually got bigger, Premises. You’ve got premises these days or you. You. You’re not still building them on the dining room table, right?

Garry Wise: No, I don’t know. I don’t build anything on the donor table, actually. I’ll say. I. My sub. My subcontractor who does all the PCB design.

Andrew Hutchison: Yep.

Garry Wise: Not. Not designed sort of manufacturing because obviously, you know, they’ve got the right Kit for that. Yes, they do all of the assembly. So what I do is I get all parts shipped to them.

Andrew Hutchison: Okay.

Garry Wise: Then they do it as a sort of packaging box. It, you know, away out we go, you know, that kind of stuff.

Andrew Hutchison: So it’s a smart way to do it because you don’t need a giant factory so really that you, you can grow the business, without any big jumps in investment, I guess to some degree where you. Yeah, yeah. You don’t have to buy or not another one.

Garry Wise: You know, I pay a fixed price for a finished package product as opposed to paying staff and having the relevant health and safety insurance and all that kind of stuff, you know, so I do pay a premium there, but in, in some ways. But I know that if there’s any faults and stuff, I can just go back to and say what’s happened here? You know, you can sort it out. It’s not. Not got a disciplined staff and getting put on a course to learn how to sold a property.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, you, you know where you stand as far as your costs that you, you.

Garry Wise: Yeah.

Andrew Hutchison: You can’t lose money effectively. So, you know. Yeah. Now look, Garry, I really appreciate your time.

Garry Wise: Thank you.

Andrew Hutchison: Pretty sure the listeners will as well. It’s an interesting story. I mean it’s, it’s, it’s a big part of your life, obviously, to, to make that decision to do it and then you’ve

01:15:00

Andrew Hutchison: actually done it, which is, which is, you know, very impressive and congratulations on, on getting it to the point where it exists and you’ve got it in retailers because it’s, it’s not, You and I know how hard it is to do as anyone else who’s started with nothing and tried to, Yeah, nothing in the sense of a clean sheet of paper and try to take something from your imagination and make it real. And it’s of course very satisfying. So good on you and thank you so much. a pleasure and thanks for your time and we will speak, again soon. Anyone who’s. When I say soon, it could be. Well, it’ll be. It might be power amplifier time, who knows? And that sounds like that’s about six months away or something. But, you never know if people have got questions and they, they may well have questions. Kleio, is. Which, is K L E I O is I guess.co.uk I forgot to check the URL.com.

Garry Wise: Just straight. Okay. Yeah, I thought I’d go big, you know, avoid the.

Andrew Hutchison: Well, yeah, yeah. You’re planning on exporting to the US so domination indeed. Yeah. So that’s, that’s where there’s further information. We’re obviously going to have pictures when the, when the podcast goes up so people will know how good the amplifiers look. But more information there, the awards, reviews, what have you. And I was just going to say if anyone’s got questions of course they can email you but they could ask them on our YouTube channel where this podcast will also be. No one really listens to audio only files on YouTube but it is a great place to put comments and ask questions. So I will wrap up this time. Thank you Garry. very interesting conversation and thanks again and have a great day.

Garry Wise: Great. Thanks for having me on Andrew. I really appreciate it.

Andrew Hutchison: A pleasure, a pleasure.

01:16:40