How to Kill Your Business

I should be an expert on this topic, since it took me almost three years to officially crush the life out of my studio maintenance and equipment repair business. However, intentionally ending a business isn’t really the subject I’m referring to here. I might talk about that some time in the future, but not now. What this rant is about is unintentionally (I think) killing a business with crap service.

Way back in the mid-1980’s, I got caught up in the US manufacturing quality movement as a manager at QSC Audio Products. Because we were trying to qualify as a Dolby and LucasFilm theater system vendor, we needed to up our manufacturing, quality control, and customer service game substantially. At first it seemed like an almost impossible task, since we were probably a 10-15% defective out-of-box vendor and LucasFilm wanted something more along the lines of 0.001% reliability figure. We, however, would be satisfied with 3-sigma ( a little better than 99% reliable) performance as a baby-step toward first-world quality standards.

I found the Phil Crosby “Quality Is Free” book and took one of his courses in L.A. That turned me on to W. Edwards Deming and his books. Those two sources got me and the company headed in the right direction. After a second 3-day Crosby seminar, I ended up getting a part-time gig as a Crosby quality instructor, which I kept for about two years. Early in my classes, the Ford guys were just starting to put some meat behind the “Quality Is Job One” campaign and Don Peterson had just taken over the whole company. (An engineer running an engineering company, imagine that?) Those guys were hungry for ideas because Ford had a habit of replacing engineering guys with MBA morons and they all knew there was a small window in which they could jack up Ford product quality before the company went back to business as usual and form (and advertising) over function. Having those determined and desperate engineers in my classes put a lot of pressure on me and the Crosby organization to provide a lot of value in a short lecture.

One of the QIF lectures included something I remember being called “the 5/5/5 rule.” Whatever it’s called, it comes from the restaurant business. The basic idea is that it takes $50 in advertising to get a customer to try a new restaurant. 5 seconds of poor service will alienate that customer. It will take $5,000 in advertising to get them to try the restaurant a second time. This was a big deal to lots of us, including the Ford engineers. Along with the customer service variation on the Pareto Effect, which is much more discriminating than Pareto’s 80/20 ratio: 1 to 10% of your customers will complain about a product failure while the other 90-99% will simply stop buying your products. Knowing that the cost of poor service is high and hidden and that the likelihood that your customers will tell you when you’ve screwed-up is low is huge. It means that you have to take the few who care enough to complain seriously enough that paying attention to your customers becomes a habit.

The fact that most businesses do the opposite pretty much wraps up the secret to killing a business. Half-assed, intentionally asshole-ish, inattention, or even a few seconds of distracted service will send customers out the door with the intention of never coming back. If you don’t believe me, you are either a very forgiving customer or seriously in denial. Most customers “forgive” poor service by checking the business off of their list of preferred vendors. They might even do it unconsciously, but nevertheless the effect is the same as aggressively complaining about the service/product and shouting “I’m never coming back!”

I realized how far this unconscious effect can carry the other day when my wife delivered her lesson from our winter trapped in VW-powered Winnebago, “Never have your house attached to your vehicle.” She thought the problem was that our Class C RV did not allow us to separate our living quarters from the vehicle. Since she is incapable of driving a vehicle with a trailer, her lesson essentially says “Stay in motels or stay home.”

My lesson, also delivered almost automatically, has been “Never buy anything from Volkswagen and, ideally, avoid all German vehicles.” I have followed that by describing the miserable service I received from two VW dealers in Albuquerque, the stories I heard about VW service from unhappy VW owners all over the country, and so on. As I write this, I am realizing how many times I’ve told this story and heard it repeated back to me from other people with similar, often second-hand, versions of the same message. By ignoring customer complaints (and VW may be completely immune to customer feedback), VW has created a community of VW-haters who are spreading the word faster than any advertising campaign could hope to compete. Now that’s a perfect example of “how to kill your business.”

Taking Pop Seriously?

When I was born, in 1948, the Woody Woodpecker cartoon theme song was the #1 “Top of the Pops” song on the charts and Pee Wee Hunt’s “12th Street Rag” was the best selling song of that year. If that doesn’t make you question the importance or artistic value of pop music, I don’t know what will.  Wikipedia’s List of Billboard Year-End #1 singles and albums would be depressing if you were inclined to pretend that pop music was anything more than mind-numbing distractions and kids’ music. The list contains some real dogs, a lot of drivel, some major embarrassments, and not more than a dozen songs that might be called “semi-adult music” by the least critical apologist for the pop genre.

I’m taking a class at Southeast Technical Community College called “Introduction to the Digital Arts and Creative Multimedia” and the most irritating aspect of that class is the instructor keeps asking “What examples of current digital . . . art do you think will be appreciated in 100 years?” My first guess is always “commercials.” Money and selling shit is what our current culture takes most seriously and I don’t expect that to change in 100 years. Kids’ music? Not so much.

Being A Technoblaster

During the dozen years I taught technology classes I was probably less-than-friendly to people with no technology skills. In a program (Recording Engineering) that required fairly extensive technical skills it wasn’t at all unusual to find that my students had absolutely no familiarity with technology beyond playing with their cell phones or video games. That crowd was irritating and impossible to educate, but they didn’t bother me until student “retention” became such a big deal that I couldn’t purge their lame asses from my classes. There was another much smaller category of student, however, that caused me a lot more grief. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to call them “technoblasters.”

Too often my technoblasters were sincere kids who really wanted to do well. They studied, did their homework, did fine to really well on tests, and they paid attention in class or during labs. They participated. They did everything I asked them to do and, sometimes, more. However, every time they touched a piece of technology, they broke it. One irritatingly consistent aspect to their destructiveness was that they always used the passive voice when they admitted breaking something, “The knob/switch/control or microphone/stand/speaker broke.” Or “I didn’t do anything and the computer quit working.” They never damaged anything themselves. It was always the passive tool that broke itself.

Rarely, I would be on site when one of these inanimate objects committed suicide, but when I was on-site it was pretty obvious what happened. Not only did my technoblasters break the equipment, they did it brutally. They would tighten a mic stand so hard they stripped the grip or handle. They would twist a knob until the pot broke or the set screw on the knob started cutting a groove in the shaft or they’d start spinning the control behind the panel until it ripped out the wires or destroyed the circuit board. One kid so consistently insisted on plugging Aux outputs into headphone amp outputs or main buss or group buss outputs that he earned the nickname “Smokey.” He failed his first semester record laboratory, twice, because he fried the console early in the test. The second time he took out the +15V power supply and set final exam testing back a day for several classes.

One of many things all of these kids have in common is a disconnect between their perception of how they use technology and reality. They honestly think they are paying attention to the equipment, treating their tools with respect, and being careful. In fact, they are distracted and on a completely different plane than the work they imagine they are doing. As sad as this is to admit, my wife is a technoblaster. So, I’ve had a front row seat and backstage pass to observing the life of a technoblaster for almost 50 years. Like these kids, when her tools and technology fail her she always describes the events leading to the moment-of-breakage passively. Exactly like these kids, she is always distracted and mostly unaware of her actions and attitude. I can’t think of a single time when she has wreaked some piece of equipment or broken a tool when she could accurately recount the steps she took before the equipment failed.

Eventually, I suspect my ex-students will develop an attitude like my wife’s. She is a firm believer that technology hates her and she hates it right back. She has constructed a mental suit of armor that allows her to ignore her own complicity in equipment failure while assigning the blame to a personal feud between her and the offending technology. One of the tactics I used to overcome this attitude in work situations, including a few “technology instructors” and engineers, has been to require a detailed description of the equipment failure before I accept the task of fixing it or before I’d allow one of my employees to fix it. If “it’s broke” is all I get, I put that job at the back of the schedule so we can do work that is properly defined. Often, “it’s broke” is a user error and will magically go away if I ignore it long enough. If it’s real, repeating the instruction that the failure mode and mechanism must be described before a repair can take place will often force the user to retrace his/her steps and learn something about how the failure occurred.

Of course, none of that works with my wife. If I waited for her to properly define one equipment breakdown before I fixed it, nothing in our household would work because she will just move on to the next victim. And, of course, I’ve been trained by 50 years of marriage to just follow her around putting out fires.

What I Have Learned about Live Sound

My first live sound “gig” was as a stage hand in Dodge City, Kansas for the Ventures when they played Dodge’s Civic Auditorium (Remember the days when auditoriums were named after their purpose, not some corporate asshole who bought off the city council?) in 1962. I was 14 and had been playing guitar for a couple of years. The Ventures were my heroes. Bob Bogle, Nokie Edwards, Mel Taylor, and Don Wilson were everything I aspired to be as a rock and roll guitarist (The Band that Launched a Thousand Bands). Their song, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, was my favorite of the time. I had bigger aspirations, at the time, for my trumpet playing, but that wild hope was doomed to disappointment.

1) I conned my way into the good graces of the Catholic High School’s head nun (or whatever she was called) and got myself a job lugging the Ventures’ amplifiers into the auditorium and setting up their one microphone for the house sound system. The first thing I learned about live sound came on that gig: age/senility usually comes before talent or knowledge. Dodge City’s auditorium employed an old guy who doesn’t care never gets replaced. Dozens of times, since then, I’ve run into the established house soundgoof ruling shows like a plague on music. Jump to #9 to see why there is damn little hope of fixing any of these problems.

2) When it comes to sound system design and components, weight and convenience are more important than sound quality. Thirty years ago, Carver came out with a line of bullshit and the PM-1.5 amplifier and the phony specs revolution began in earnest in pro amplification.  This POS claimed to produce 450W/8Ω stereo and 1200/8Ω mono with the more important characteristic being a 21 pound total weight when real amplifiers doing that kind of work were a lot closer to 100 pounds. Sound companies and audiofools went nuts over the PM-1.5 and it’s variations. It turned out that the 1.5 was interesting, but fell way short of the claims. The 4Ω minimum operating impedance should have been a tipoff. The Carver amp not only didn’t do what the company claimed it would do, it also sounded awful; especially when it clipped. It clipped often, in fact. When it did, it made this whacked out “splat” sound that often blew up speakers.

None of that stopped sound companies from filling up their racks with Carver 1.5’s and creating awful noises they passed off as “sound reinforcement.” After a while, it became apparent, even to the deaf dudes who mix live music, that the Carvers were pretty damn awful. However, the “light is right” mantra arrived and sound companies have been worshiping that magical concept ever since. The disease has spread to speaker systems. The “miracle of speaker arrays” has invested almost every sound system on the planet and music suffers because of it.

3) Deafness rules the occupation. Back in the 80’s, an audiologist setup a test booth at an AES convention. The audiologists’ tests found that live sound “engineers,” in particular, were consistently functionally deaf. As long as the people running sound systems are incapable of hearing the difference between music and distortion, live music is hopeless.

4) Nobody remembers anything. Back before we had all of this sophisticated equipment, we did “sound reinforcement.” The sad fact is that we did better before we had infinite equipment. Music sounded more like music without tens of thousands of watts and piles of array speakers. I’m unconvinced that technology is taking us anywhere but in the direction pointed out in #9.

5) Sound guys are notoriously ignorant of room acoustics. For example, the practice of making grunting noises so that the sound doofus can attempt to EQ out the room resonances is depressingly ignorant. There is nothing about the information you can get from snorting into a room that will be corrected in system setup. See #6. Sound system speaker placement is traditionally wrong and has been for decades. Of course, the most important thing in a show is the appearance, not the sound, so justifying putting the speakers on the extreme sides of the stage is all about maintaining a visual line-of-sight of the artists from all seats. That doesn’t have any effect on putting the speakers overhead (and low, for close seats), but it would require an ability to think about how sound is propagated in a room.

The simple fact is, the only way to resolve room resonances is with acoustic treatment. You can cut the resonant frequencies from the system, but any transient information (drums, for example) will stimulate the room regardless of the sound system. You could, however, move the speakers, especially the subs, so that they do not optimally stimulate the room. Better yet, don’t overdrive the room unnecessarily so room resonances are working overtime.

6) Sound guys do not understand speaker or microphone polar patterns or even what those characteristics imply. Currently, there is a delusional faith in the “miracle” of loudspeaker arrays, regardless of the well-known limitations (by engineers and physicists) of that system design. A quick look at monitor and FOH speaker placement is a pretty strong argument for proof of that ignorance. Even more, the strange practices FOH guys have regarding the fact that their array systems sound so radically different in fairly similar seating positions.

The total disregard for hyper and super-cardioid off-axis characteristics creates a terror of these very useful microphones because sound guys do not get where the monitors must be positioned. If you look at the polar pattern at left, is it not clear that the response behind the microphone is damn close to the response in front? 90-120  and 240-270 degrees off-axis is pretty amazing, but the traditional monitor placement is idiotic.

7) Repeatedly, sound guys select incompatible-to-the-sound-source microphones (SM58 on all vocals) and try to “fix” that with EQ. There are some applications, I suppose, where the SM58 works pretty well. However, GIGO, especially at the beginning of the signal chain is ultimately true. The 58 has mediocre proximity characteristics (so bad, in fact, Shure does not publish that data). The creepy 5dB bump at 2-6kHz emphasizes sibilance problems so irritatingly that characters like Garrison Keillor sound like a rattlesnake with a lisp using that microphone. The “fix” for those problems usually involves a collection of EQ moves that make all of those problems even worse. The real solution would be to dump this mediocre tool and pick a more suitable microphone.

8) In the worst acoustic environments, sound guys almost always over-mic complicated sound sources. In a situation where reflective surfaces are already creating a disaster zone of phase problems, the attitude is consistently “If one mic will do the job, won’t eight be better?” There are few situations where a collection of microphones will make a phase disaster less of a disaster. Complicate that with the fact that more microphones means more bleed from other instruments (and more phase problems on other instruments in the mix) which is usually “fixed” with crap-loads of gating which only fixes the problems when the gates are closed creating an awful sounding drum kit.

The next goofy move from the live crowd is multiple microphones on guitar cabinets, including distance mics. If we’re talking about stacks of amps, mic’ing the damn things is a waste of time. If we’re talking about a combo amp, the sound quality will not be improved with more mics, since there are pretty extreme limits on quality on a live stage. Isolation or tone, those are the options. Pick one and don’t do anything to delude yourself you can have both.

9) The reason all of these problems are unlikely to be solved is that customers are not that critical: beer over music. 30-some years ago, my partner built a spectacular front-loaded, horn-less FOH system and started doing shows with it all over Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. The experiment went poorly. The bands he worked with loved the system, but clubs didn’t. It took a few shows until one of the bartenders asked Dan to crank up the system, dramatically. When Dan explained that the system was operating optimally and much more volume would distort the system, the bartender said something along the lines of, “Music lovers don’t drink, drunks like it loud and distorted. Crank it up.”

Unfortunately, that rule is true in almost all music venues. Drunks spend more than people who are there for the music. The louder it is, the more the drunks drink and the more room there is for more drunks, since the music fans will be driven out.

State of Software Amateurism

Last winter,  I engaged in more than a couple discussions with kids who consider themselves to be computer experts (by profession, at the least) who believe that if you aren’t using the latest OS, you are a hillbilly. As of March 2014, the above chart reflects US computer OS use, per a pretty large sample survey.

The statistic that most interests me is “Other,” the 1.99% of users whose technology was, apparently, unimportant to the surveyors. On last winter’s hibernation/retirement trip to New Mexico, I met a surprising number of people who run their businesses on old versions of Windows: all the way back to a law office using Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a graphic artist using windows 98, a collection of small business owners who network and advertise their group on the web using tools from Windows 95, and several people still on Vista. I listened to music created by a 1960’s almost-a-rock-star created on a TASCAM 80-8 1/2” reel-to-reel in a camper trailer and bounced down to MP3 on a free version of audio software long-absorbed by Adobe.

That chart sort of reflects how little the computer-user market is driven by computer software hype-sters. Outside of academia, it appears that few of us care what the OS hucksters are “supporting.” Since Microsquash officially discontinued “support” for WinXP April 8. 2014, I suppose XP isn’t holding as strong as it was in March of that year? Well, the above chart was generated in May, well after Windows dropped support and XP still clung to 25.3% of the total market. More users moved from XP to Win7 than to Microsoft’s actual current OS, Win8. So much for driving the market.

I think this all points to the fact that consumers are more interested in value and function than “support.” The reason for that could be that Apple and Microsoft don’t really support anything well enough for consumers to care.

Why We Don't Make Stuff

The Presonus MP20 Preamplifier Conundrum

Oct 20 11:21 AM

I have a pair of MP20 preamps that need repair. Since Presonus no longer provides support for those products, is it possible to obtain a service manual, schematic, or any technical information for these pres that would making servicing them possible?

 

October 21, 2014 11:50 AM

Technical Support PreSonus Audio Electronics

 

Hi Thomas,

 

Thank you for contacting Presonus Technical Support.

 

Your MP20 device falls under the category of End of Service (EOS) support. This means that Presonus no longer has parts, manuals, schematics or suggestions on repair facilities for this product available to the public.

 

We are sorry for any inconveince this may cause, but please let me know if there is any more questions you have about currently shipping products and ways to replace this device.

 

Thank you,

Adam Brandon
Technical Support Agent
Presonus Audio Electronics
18011 Grand Bay Court
Baton Rouge, LA  70809

 

October 21, 2014 12:58 PM          

Thomas Day  

 

You should check your own website before hitting the boilerplate response button. That or actually go to the trouble to ensure a statement like "Presonus no longer has parts, manuals, schematics or suggestions on repair facilities for this product available to the public" is true by eliminating the page that disproves the statement: http://www.presonus.com/support/downloads/MP20. Obviously, anyone who has ever been in a manufacturing environment would never say or believe a company would destroy schematics or service information. In a digital world, none of that stuff takes useful space and provides valuable history. This statement should be, at a minimum, be reworded to something mildly credible.

 

In the past, I have been reasonably supportive of Presonus products when students, friends and customers ask about low priced recording products. I've heard a lot of horror stories from people and students who have purchased Presonus and experienced premature product failure and poor customer support. Until now, I had only experienced Presonus' service tech hostility when trying to obtain schematics and service information for products still serviced by the company. Clearly, Presonus is not particularly interested in promoting word-of-mouth customer relationships and I will now be among the many who do not take the company and its products seriously. I regret ending up in that crowd, since I was once a fan of many Presonus products.

 

October 21, 2014 10:20 PM

Gary - PreSonus Audio Electronics

 

Thomas,

 

This was not a boiler plate response. Being that the MP20 was first manufactured in 1998 and was discontinued in 2008, it is understandable that we may no longer service such a unit. It was one of the first groups of devices we ever manufactured.

 

The main reasons that units are shifted into being discontinued are due to lack of any further available part for service, outdated and incomparable technologies with modern supported technologies/computers/hardware, a replacement or new generation of a product has been released and or due to a combination of any of these the overall manufacturing lifespan of the product is complete. It has been PreSonus' policy since the beginning that we have not released schematics publicly. We actually are currently reevaluating said policy, but our current stance is not one that PreSonus takes, but many companies. So much so that companies such as Apple actually bought a company this year due to them publicly reverse engineering all their products and showing users how to service and repair them. We at no time ever stated that we have destroyed said requested schematics. As the schematics, technology and designs are the intellectual property of PreSonus. It is up to us how we handle such things.

 

Again, I want to reiterate that we are currently taking a look at options that will allow us to release some schematics to customers.

 

We do not at anytime release currently manufactured product schematics to anyone aside from our qualified Service Departments. We take our products seriously and want to insure that they are repaired to spec, so that we someone like yourself experiences one out in the field it properly represents the product and you are not possibly experiencing someones attempt to repair one of our devices, which may or may not be up to par.

 

Gary Hasenbeck
Technical Support Lead
Dealer RA Support Supervisor

PreSonus Audio Electronics

October 22, 2014 09:52 AM

Thomas Day  

 

Gary,

 

You're right, I misread the statement "This means that Presonus no longer has parts, manuals, schematics or suggestions on repair facilities for this product available to the public." I assumed Presonus had gone from the previous customer hostile "proprietary" attitude to claiming the non-existence of such material. You might notice some inconsistency in Adam's statement, since I found the manuals on your own website.

 

There are better companies than Apple to use as a model for customer service, but I can see the internal justification. Apple, however, has done a fairly good job over the years of providing the service manuals their internal techs use on the internet. Otherwise, Apple has done a terrific job of making enemies out of friends and haters out of loyal customers for 30 years. Pro audio is the wrong business to be playing their game, though. One good reason vintage studio equipment holds value is because it is serviceable. While Presonus has pretended to have a stranglehold on good technicians, companies like Epiphone have gone the route of creating products designed for the DIY market. Unrepairable, but otherwise useable, equipment puts a stain on a company's image that results in downgrading future products. There is no reason Presonus should feel compelled to continue servicing old products, but withholding that information from owners appears to be more an act of spite or disregard than any pretense at preventing "reverse engineering."

 

To people with product repair history, a corporate terror of reverse engineering usually indicates a more likely fear of being discovered as a company with a history of reverse engineering (Behringer, for example). If Presonus is honestly worried about a competitor reissuing the MP20 that might be an indication that the product has a larger market than assumed when it was cut from production. It should be obvious that a statement like "we take our products seriously and want to insure that they are repaired to spec" is inconsistent with preventing service from any source once Presonus has decided to cut itself loose from the responsibility of providing service.

 

I appreciate the time you took to reformulate a response to me. I would encourage Presonus execs to reconsider this policy since I believe it has a greater affect on customer perception than a cursory and uninformed perspective might indicate. A high cost of moving manufacturing overseas is that engineering and management lose massive quantities of irreplaceable skill. When a company falls into the pit of deluding itself into believing it is possible to be an "ideas and marketing business," the handwriting is on the wall. Four decades of American manufacturing and engineering skills have been lost in dozens of industries from this fallacy.

You Know I’m Gone When . . .

For 13 years the core of my service shop had been my Audio Precision ATS1, the coolest piece of test equipment I’ve  played with since I had constant access to the AP System I at QSC. When I was doing regular studio maintenance, I carried this great piece of equipment along on almost every service call. I had customized an old biomed ICD case to fit the AP and that case and the equipment it contained flew across country several times, travelled in the back of my nasty old Ford Escort through heatwave and blizzard, and suffered the slings and arrows of living in my basement shop for more than a decade between trips. AP knocked it out of the park with this series of test gear and I learned more from using mine than I did from four years of electrical engineering classes.

You can get to many of the same places with regular test equipment, but you get there mu ch faster with a great piece of specialized gear. Frequency sweeps with a variety of resolutions, speeds, and steps, which are documented and printable, provides a lot more immediate information than an otherwise perfectly functional sweep generator and oscilloscope. The same goes THD, phase, IMD, input impedance, and power measurements. A variety of otherwise painful, complicated, and troublesome system checks can be almost automated with the ATS1 and that makes troubleshooting a pro console in the studio environment more consistent, professional, and documentable. Again, that’s also true for multi-track tape decks, external gear, and studio wiring.

A few years ago, I more or less planned on letting my estate sort out the value of things like the ATS1 and a few other indispensable pieces of electronic test equipment I’ve relied on for most of my career. When I retired last year, I began to reconsider that plan. I have felt no compulsion to return to audio engineering, even on a hobby basis. So, last week I put the ATS1 on eBay (http://www.ebay.com/itm/301350546710?ssPageName=STRK:MESOX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1561.l2649) for a very reasonable price and a rental company snapped it up. I’d rather see it used to death than have it rot in my basement shop unappreciated and unused. Electronic equipment, like mechanical equipment, needs occasional use to keep electrolytic capacitors and other parts operational. I’d say I hated seeing it go, but I didn’t. We’ll use the money on our retirement home and being mortgage-free is more important at this point in my life than having the capability to do work I no longer want to do. With that in mind, this is my odd way of saying “so long and good luck” to a great piece of equipment and some great years of my career.

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Without the ATS1 in my toolbox, I have one more excuse to turn down crawling around under a studio console or banging my head against some moronic piece of poor design work or swabbing out Coke, coke, or some other crap from broken effects boxes.

Test Your Ears or Shut Your Mouth

30 years ago, Pat Quilter handed me a piece of junk that QSC had purchased to help make objective evaluations of audio gear; an ABX box that had been sold by some audiophile company a few years earlier. The original box had goofy firmware that occasionally retained incorrect test history, lousy circuitry for switching, and limited current capabilities. Since we would be testing everything from line-level signals to power amp output levels into a common speaker system, I pretty much dumped everything except the remote control and redesigned the whole box. From a previous engineering project, I had a few mercury-wetted, silver contact low signal relays in my parts bin, which I used for the line-level switching components. From the design work I’d done on the “award winning” Wirebender Musician’s Preamplifier, I incorporated a hard-wired parallel shielded signal path that minimized crosstalk (to 85dB unweighted), wiring capacitance and inductance, and kept the connectors-to-relay-to-connectors signal path as clean as possible. For the high power signal path, I used gold-plated dual banana connectors and some silver-plated-contact motor controller relays, also from my previous design engineering life.

From there, we took every opportunity to drag engineers, musicians, recording professionals, live sound professionals, and office staff into the test lab, out in the field, at music stores, and in recording studios where we could test our and competitor’s designs against the discriminating hearing of anyone who would submit themselves to testing. Mostly, we learned that hardly anyone could hear the difference between great gear and crap. Years after I left, QSC turned the whole ABX concept into a product and discovered that proving your customers have mediocre hearing is not a great marketing tactic. On average, the “ABX test” established something that an audiologist discovered at a 1980’s AES, most audio professionals are “functionally deaf” and hate having that demonstrated in public. After a study that categorized the most arrogant audio professionals (live sound “engineers”) as being as deaf as their product consistently demonstrates, the AES banned audiologists from AES shows until the late 90’s. The HEAR organization began providing “confidential” testing at AES conventions in 1997 (“The results of the free hearing tests are kept confidential and maintained in a database that tracks hearing screenings performed for AES members since 1997.”) and even their by-profession data is kept secret.

A recent Pro Audio Review article, “Why Gear Doesn’t Matter,” has similarly fired up everyone from audio amateurs to professionals to, especially, boutique gear manufacturers. Even though any good design engineer will admit that getting a simple audio signal, 20Hz to 20kHz, through modern electronics is a pretty remedial design task, the fact that most modern records sound like crap is easier blamed on not having the right gear rather than recording mediocre musicians playing lifeless music using techniques that are guaranteed to squeeze the life out of any song ever played.

On the other hand, a good number of those functionally deaf recording engineers have managed to record some amazing music over the years. Knowing your limitations and compensating for them intelligently, along with possessing musical knowledge and technical skills, will carry you a long way. When I first sat down with my new toy, the company ABX tester, I discovered a lot of painful things about myself. Listening through high-end headphones, to studio monitors, to audiophile speakers, and decent home stereo speakers, I first discovered an old bias of mine—bipolar output transistors vs FET transistors—was an illusion, in my case. For years I had been convinced that I could clearly hear the difference between bipolar and FET output components and my ABX tester proved that was bullshit. Next, I experimented with slew-limiting, another characteristic I was certain made a big difference. In my case and many other listening test subjects, I learned that a slew of over 4V/μS was reasonably clearly “superior” to a slew under 1V/μS.  Going for higher slew improvements didn’t seem to produce an audible advantage. Harmonic distortion turned out to be considerably less apparent than I’d expected, too. In fact, lots of professionals failed to detect clipping distortion until it exceeded 0.5% and as much as 2%. Put a low-pass filter on the clipping and detection got even worse.

It has been 20-some years since I played with an ABX box and I’m sure my 66-year-old ears are considerably less discerning than my 30-year-old ears. Time is not kind to the hearing mechanism. However, when I hear young or old people make ridiculous claims about the difference in cable “sounds” or insisting on having some over-priced preamp coupled with an even more overpriced microphone before recording pop “music” is possible, I instantly blow off that person’s opinion as bullshit. I’m not buying any of it.

A couple of years ago, a friend (Aaron Hodgson) and I built an ABX test box to use with our school’s AES chapter and various equipment experiments at the school. Since I retired last fall, I am not in a position to be part of that testing, but Aaron is “ready and willing” to let anyone who is interested test their hearing at the school or locally. We went to the same extremes with this tester that I’d used on the original ABX box in the 80’s, including using the same mercury-wetted relay. If you really want to know if you can hear the difference between a Presonus preamp and a Great River (or any other brand), this is your chance.

My good friend, Rob Schlette, wrote an article about digital ABX self-testing for the Pro Audio Files, “Audio Perception and ABX Testing.” Not only does he provide readers with links for ABX software and some history, Rob has written an excellent step-by-step testing procedure that should produce consistent results and provide the testee with a lot to consider. At the digital signal level, there are several ABX test programs you can play with for free. Try more than one to be sure your results are consistent.

On the other hand, if you don’t want to know what you can’t hear, you’re not alone. My experience demonstrated that most “professional audio engineers” were happier not knowing their limitations and became downright hostile when they discovered their golden ears were tin. If that’s you, have fun blowing your money on overpriced gear and get used to knowing that the music you play and record will be something different than your illusions.

College Is Dead; Long Live Education

The first attempt at higher education I experienced was a disaster. The school was Dodge City Community College and my first major was Music. I had been, intermittently, a fairly successful rock and roll musician for a few years and wanted to extend my musical knowledge to theory. DCCC wanted to teach me how to teach K-12 music, a career path that was dying in 1966. I learned quickly that my school’s music department had damn few actual musicians as instructors. After a wasted semester, I moved to Business and a few weeks later, left that school for good. My first attempt at college was a bust and I was convinced I’d never set a wasted foot in an institution of “higher learning” again.

A few years later, I was working part-time and getting paid full time in Dallas, Texas and with some spare afternoons available I reconsidered my education. Junior colleges were still cheap and so was my time. Right in downtown Dallas was a school several of my friends recommended, El Centro College. I signed up for a couple of the classes I’d flunked in Kansas by dropping out unannounced and stumbled into an unexpected bonus: high quality teachers who cared about their students. In my K-12 and partial college experience, I had no more than three instructors who gave a flying damn about providing value to their students. The overwhelming attitude of my first years’ instructors was that of a pissed off babysitter. At El Centro, I had excellent instructors who cared about their students, knew their subjects, and taught their classes like professionals.

Unfortunately, I went back to the Midwest and suffered the usual crap-for-brains characters who “teach” at a variety of institutions from western Kansas to Texas to Nebraska. Since I’d experience real instruction as an adult, I at least knew when I was in a mediocre situation. California took the whole education experience up several notches. Even in the state’s community colleges, the majority of instructors were not only PhD’s, they were brilliant. The only place I experienced less-than-excellent instructors was in my CSULB minor; technical writing. My Creative Writing and English instructors in that program were as excellent as I’d come to expect from California’s higher education system.

Where’s this all going? I’m glad you asked.

In my experience, the excellence I’ve enjoyed in my education has all been in practical, technical, and vocational training. I include Creative Writing in that group. When the education system is focused on providing value to students, it works. When it is misdirected toward theoretical educational philosophic goals, it becomes pointless and aimless. 50 years later, if you look at the schools I’ve mentioned (and linked) you’ll see some warning flags and some encouraging signs. My first school, DCCC, appears to believe it’s primary purpose is to entertain the local public. If the website is any indicator the school’s focus, sports and cheerleading are the primary activities of its students. El Centro has focused on a few practical vocational specialties and created programs that are economically practical and valuable to their students. The same applies to CSULB’s engineering, design, and even the more traditional programs.

For-profit institutions are getting their asses handed to them in the current economic environment. I recently visited with some of the administrative people at Southeast Technical Community College and they, too, are experiencing a slow-down in enrollment. Unlike other schools, they are not in a panic mode. They’ve been through this before and realize that college enrollment often goes down the when economy is strong. People are less likely to work on improving their skills if their skills are marketable. That’s not smart, but it is human nature. STCC makes a big deal, internally and externally, of their 80% graduate employment rate (a number for-profits only wish they could emulate). Their business model is to provide marketable skills to their graduates along with a reasonable dose of traditional liberal arts education. In my experience, that provides a much more focused goal for the teachers, which provides more value to students. In a decent economy, what we usually call “higher education” is nearly useless. It is an unfocused, disconnected-from-reality waste of time and money that provides value to such a tiny portion of students that intelligent parents should avoid any contribution to that sort of system. If kids want to flush their future into the toilet of general liberal arts, they should after being honestly counseled to the fact that any job they could get after that education could be obtained without it.

When the Only Information You Have is Disinformation

Mostly, I like TapeOp Magazine a lot. The interviews are interesting and, sometimes, educational and the profiles of people who make the tools of the pro audio industry are rare opportunities to read something about how designers think. However, I do not care much for TapeOp’s product reviews. In fact, I only read them for the humor factor. This month’s magazine has a review with a product type that I think has to be about 90% bullshit: high end “monitor controllers.” If there is any product that makes more claims with less evidence than $1,000+ “monitor controllers,” I do not know what it is.

Way back in the early 1980’s, pro audio went the same route as the audiophile market; all bullshit and no meat. When Mix Magazine, the fluffiest of all audio magazines on either side of the high-buck carousel, bought the last technical holdout in the audio publishing world, Recording Engineer/Producer (RE/P), and closed down the competition in 1992, that was pretty much the end of pro audio being a reality-based industry. From then on, reviews have been test equipment-free and full of biased and unfounded fantasies. “The Audio Precision distortion test” was replaced by “I feel the music more in my soul” sorts of bullshit. We haven’t recovered since.

A friend and I used to argue about publishing’s lack of credibility. This friend, Mark Amundson (past Technical Editor for FOH Magazine), used to agree that even his own reviews were pretty fluffy. In two month’s worth of magazines, he had reviewed a total POS Peavey mixer and a Midas mid-priced mixer using almost identical language. When I pointed that out, he said, “Tom, you have to learn to read between the lines.”

I replied, “White space is what’s between the lines.”

I think my next Wirebender rant is going to be about bullshit terms used to describe magical audio qualities. The phrase that fired up this rant was in that bullshit monitor controller review, “The feeling of this unit is immersive; even at these low levels, I felt the music was all around me, and it made the sweet spot wider.” Sounds like phase problems to me.