Another celebration of theinnovators and inventions that fashioned the pro-audio world

Genius!Genius!Genius!Genius!Genius!Genius!222Brought to you by the makers of

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Genius!2

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Dave, though it took a while, what led up to your ‘breakthrough’?DG: In 1985, I was working on the HP family of horns at Electro-Voice, and I started to notice a pattern among the various HP prototypes and the HR family they were replacing. Some horns sounded more musical than others, and I was able to isolate the particular details that made the difference. Once I understood the causes of these “non-musical” artifacts, I hypothesised that those artifacts might be mitigated by using signal processing to cancel the associated reflections and resonances. So, I suppose that was the “A-ha!” moment. Unfortunately, the tools to test my theory didn’t exist at the time, and it would take nearly 20 years and a move to EAW before I had both developed the software to create the settings, and had a powerful enough

DSP platform available to me to implement them.

Even then, while I knew I could improve the impulse response in technical terms, I really didn’t know how audible the effect would be. That first time we listened to a “focused” prototype was definitely the

“Eureka!” moment.

What was so ‘disruptive’ about this?Prior to that, DSP for loudspeakers had primarily been a convenient and precise way to implement minimum-phase filters that could have been created with analogue

circuits (plus delay). The ability to create specialised non-minimum phase filters allowed us to eliminate the effect of non-minimum phase physical artifacts. As it turns out, those artifacts are quite audible.

What was the consequence?It radically changed the art of loudspeaker design for me, because it increased the range of designs that could be made to sound good. I’ve been experimenting ever since, using approaches that have practical advantages but would once have been classified as “bad ideas”.

Of course, I also gained some notoriety as a result of the “Gunness Focusing” branding EAW chose to use. That came in very handy when we launched Fulcrum Acoustic!

www.fulcrum-acoustic.com

Lightbulb moments aren’t always immediate. Sometimes the lightbulb goes off and it takes years for the idea to be realised. That’s the way it was with Gunness Focusing and Temporal Equalization, which are suites of tools and techniques for using FIR filters to improve the performance of loudspeakers.

Dave Gunnessdesigning

David Gunness and Gunness Focusing

The achievements of audio engineer, studio designer, producer and Universal

Audio founder Bill Putnam Sr would be difficult to summarise in 3,000 words, let alone a mere 300. His credentials as a studio pioneer began to be cemented as early as the late 1940s when he founded one of the first independent studios in the US, Chicago’s Universal Recording, and United Recording and Western Recorders in Hollywood. United Recording was sold to business partner Allen Sides in 1983 and was renamed Ocean Way.

On the R&D side, the initial tube console that Putnam designed for Western Recorders is often cited as the first modern recording console. In 1958 he founded Universal Audio, later renaming it United Recording Electronics Industries, or UREI. Also

emerging from his busy lab was the first US multi-band audio equaliser and iconic recording equipment such as the UREI 1176LN Classic Limiting Amplifier and UREI Time Align Monitor.

He was the first engineer to use artificial reverberation in commercial recording and, along with his friend Les Paul, played an important role in the early development of stereophonic recording.

Equally at home in the studio in artistic ‘mode’, Putnam was involved with landmark sessions by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Little Walter and Dinah Washington, among other pivotal artists.

Putnam passed away in California in 1989, at the age of 69, but 10 years later Universal Audio was refounded by his sons, James Putnam and Bill Putnam

Jr. They had two main goals: to faithfully reproduce classic analogue recording equipment in the tradition of their father; and to design new digital recording tools with the sound and spirit of

vintage analogue technology. The company remains a vital force in the development of studio equipment.

www.uaudio.com

The classic photo: Putnam recording Sinatra

Bill Putnam Sr. and the studio HISTORICALGENIUS

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