How did you end up in this field?
A friend of mine, who I'd gone to school with, Steve Desper, had become the mixing engineer for the Beach Boys. He told me I should move to California and get my foot in the door of the audio business in Hollywood. It turned out that the Beach Boys had all their touring equipment built by Quad/Eight. I managed to get a consulting job after building a few pieces of custom gear for the Beach Boys. Steve arranged for me to interview at Quad/Eight, and who interviews me but Deane Jensen! He was ready to launch the transformer company — this was in 1971. He was making noises about leaving his job at Quad/Eight, because he was a system engineer and he'd just become VP of engineering. The discussion turned over to the fact that he was working on this new amplifier — a really good audio op amp — because Bud Bennett, the owner of Quad/Eight, was such a cheapskate that he wouldn't spend money on an extra transistor for the amplifiers in the Quad/Eight gear. Of course that was the beginning of his work on his 990 op amp. We started talking about slew rates and all. At the end of the interview, Deane told Bud that I was really sharp and they ought to hire me. They did, then Deane went off and started Jensen Transformers. We really didn't see that much of each other, except at the occasional AES meeting, or something. I worked at Quad/Eight for three years. One weekend, frankly, I got stoned, and I came up with this idea for Compumix. We could gather a little data from the faders and a few switches. I'd learned from telemetry work I did before on how to generate digital codes, bi-phase especially, which I thought was particularly suitable for tape recording, since it's not polarity sensitive. I made this proposal to Bud Bennett, and much to my surprise, he thought it was a good idea. I don't know how much you know about Compumix,but it was actually very successful.
Was that the one that would rewrite mix data to another track, and you'd bounce back and forth?
Yeah, that's how the original worked. It laid down the initial data on one track, and then as you did updates it would bounce the data back and forth between two tracks.
People have to understand that this is long before SMPTE timecode was lurking around.
When I explain this, people say, "But that's so simple." But think about those days! There was no such thing as a floppy disk. The densest form of logic that you could get was standard TTL [Transistor-Transistor Logic], a few flip-flops, and NAND [Negated AND logic] gates in packages. This was all built out of very small-scale integrated circuits. A lot of it was very, very analog. It's not as simple as you might think, looking back. We established some industry standards, like using the -15 dB mark on the fader as a reference point for updating. That was my idea, which apparently caught on through the whole industry. We got it to market. We affectionately called the control unit the "ironing board," because it somewhat resembled that; and the processor was called the "mailbox." The mailbox had all the VCA control channels, decoding hardware, and line amps in it. Much to my shock, Bud actually gave me a rather large bonus that year for Compumix, because it was such a financial success.
What jobs did you have after Quad/Eight?
I got lured away. A guy walked through the front door of Quad/Eight and said, "Who designed Compumix?" They showed him to my office, and he just kept making higher and higher offers. It was this start-up company called Laserium that did laser light shows. They were looking for a way to automate a laser light show. I moved over there, and I must have almost doubled my salary. I was over there for seven years. Actually, in '76, I filed a patent for a digital recorder based on a VHS machine. It used the mechanics, but completely gutted the electronics. We could record four channels of audio, as well as all the control information for a laser light show on a videocassette. It was a very popular show, but the company got mismanaged. Capitol Records was looking for somebody; I went out there for an interview, and I got a job there as manager of electronic development and engineering. My major job was to completely overhaul all of the high-speed tape duplicator electronics for the XDR cassette tape program [eXtended Dynamic Range]. One of the engineers that worked under me, Keith Thomas, and I sat around one day and brainstormed about a digital loop bin. We had digital masters for all the music, so why did we need to make this intermediate analog running master, which was nothing but trouble? It was a 2-inch tape running at 480 inches per second — this machine made you hold your breath whenever you turned it on. Why didn't we just get a large memory at high speed, load all this music in there, and then play it back at 64x speed into some D/A converters so that the pancake reels on the cassette tape would be first generation analog? We ended up having to design our own DACs [Digital-to-Analog Converter].
You're printing to the cassette at a really high cassette speed.
At 64x actual speed.
So your digital frequency has to be very high.
