James Demeter | TapeOp

Since the early '80s James Demeter has been promoting the use of tubes in pro audio, and in his excellent amps as well.

What were you doing before you started making gear?

I was the guitar player. I was in a band called The Heaters. We were on Capitol Records. We made it to number 56 on the Billboard Top 100. But we had management who stole our money, and who were incompetent. I found myself with a pregnant wife and no real money. I started working for my good buddy, John Caruthers, who had a guitar business. He brought me in to do some electronics for him. We wired guitars and started to dabble with building things. My cousin was a technician at Jensen Transformers at the time, and he started to mentor me on the basics of audio design. We decided to make a direct box; lord knows those things sounded like shit back then. It was always just a straight transformer, except for the Countryman direct box, which is probably the only decent sounding one out there. I figured I could do better with a Jensen transformer. That evolved into the first Tube Direct box. In 1982 it was the only tube direct box available. I was loaning it out. The road guy for REO Speedwagon took it to a recording session, and the engineer threw it out because he said, "We just got rid of all those damn tubes, and I don't need anymore of those!" Eventually they found their way all over the place, and all over the world. I was just talking with the guys from The Who; they still have their original ones, which are now 30 years old.

What products followed that?

The next product that followed was actually the tube bass preamp. I started making those and people like Stanley Clarke and Leland Sklar bought them. That was followed by my deepest step into the dark side — a tremolo pedal. The [TRM-1] Tremulator came about when Ry Cooder came into the shop and said, "No one makes a tremolo anymore." I made him one using a sine wave. He kind of liked that, but he said, "It's still not quite right." He brought in his Fender Twin amp that had a tremolo — those used a triangle wave that was slightly clipped. I came up with the second version, which is still basically what I'm selling today. I thought I was never going to go into that business; but people kept on asking me for them, so I kept on making them.

Is that probably one of your top-selling units?

Over the years, yeah. We sell a few hundred a year. Not so much now, anymore. The pedal business slowed down a bit.

There's a lot of competition now.

Yeah, there're four or five clones of it out there.

You're not coming from an EE degree. How did you learn to do all this circuit design? Was it just a process of picking up the knowledge?

Yes, as my cousin said, I had a knack. It was like plumbing, but with electrons. I look at it more like cooking with electrons, because I love to cook. It's that weird combination of skills. I used to work at a stereo store and we were a McIntosh dealer. I started to look and see how they worked. I noticed that in the phono section, if I took out that RIAA equalization, I had a tube op amp circuit. So my first mic preamp was basically using that concept, with changing the impedances and the feedback. What they used to call a totem pole circuit was used to drive the low impedance output. That was the first mic pre.

It's interesting, coming from the audiophile or the home-stereo type of world...

I didn't know anything about pro audio designs. When I finally looked at them, I said, "These are kind of primitive." Because the audiophiles really were all about sound, and the pro audio guys were really thinking about utility, to a larger extent. You know, long lasting. They weren't after the cutting edge of high fidelity, at that time.

I had always wondered where the origins of the first tube preamp were coming from.

Just looking at it from a hi-fi guy's thing. Totally different than everybody else, I guess.

In 1985 you were the only person making studio-quality tube preamps, right?

That is correct. The only standalone that was made, and it stayed that way for a long time, too. It was a lot easier to market back then because word of mouth existed. Besides having no competition, everyone was concerned about sound back then. And there was still the mid-sized studio in existence, the smaller guy who wanted to be cutting edge. I was competing against real API and Neve consoles, because it was all still sitting in all the studios. When that mic preamp was made, I didn't put an owner's manual in there because I used to joke, "If he doesn't know how to use it, why in the hell is he buying it?" The only people that were buying them were engineers.

Back then there was a very entry level sort of world, and then there was the pro gear.

There wasn't anything in between. There was a huge divide in quality. The ADAT was the first thing that changed that. Then I really sold a lot of these preamps. The Alanis Morissette Jagged Little Pill recordings are all through that mic pre. Eventually it got to Sting's producer, Hugh Padgham and he turned on a bunch of people.

What kind of facility do you run right now? How many people work there?

Unfortunately we're shrinking, just like the economy. I have three employees and myself, and that's about it. At one time I had eight. That's the biggest I ever got. That's when I was selling five or six hundred mic pres a year. There are only about 3,500 of them out there. To my knowledge, they're all working. I still get people saying, "This is the only mic pre I have" or, "It's the best preamp I've got!"

You also have the HXC-1 optical compressor?

The VTCL-2 preceded the HXC. It was an all-tube stereo unit. The HXC came later and is a single space mono unit. The compressor came out after the mic pre. It took forever to get one that actually worked.

Yeah, that's a tricky set up getting the right kind of light source.

I think I tried 12 different types that they made back then. I came up with one that almost worked, but they had this little latchy-thing that would go on. One day I was looking at it and I said, "Maybe if I just bias this a little bit, it wouldn't do that." I realized I had to do a constant biased voltage, and then they became very smooth and musical. Basically the compressor is essentially my mic preamp. It's the same concept of the op amp again, except this time the gain is fixed with the light sensitive device in front of it, and you turn it up and down that way. The audio all goes through tubes, except for that one little light-sensitive resistor.

The one product I've used extensively of yours is the spring reverb unit, the RV-1, and I just got the new Real Reverb D version. What are the differences between those two?

There're three differences, because you probably got a very early one.

I've got a Demeter RV-1 reverb.

Yeah, that's pretty early. Now Burr-Brown makes some much better op-amp ICs than what I was using. I think I was using Analog Devices' integrated circuits, which are fine, but the Burr-Brown's are definitely better. [Spring reverb tank manufacturer] Accutronics got bought by this Korean company that has totally destroyed the products, which is a real bummer. So I had Ruby Tubes come up with custom springs for me; which is nice option, as opposed to buying the off- the-shelf Accutronics. The new springs are definitely warmer. I miss the slight brightness of the short spring that the Accutronics had, but these are warmer and richer so that's nice. It's one of those audio compromises one has to make in life. But the biggest change is the power supply. Even though I had a custom-made, toroidal transformer, with a shorted first winding, and shielding around it, it still put out hum. Not much, but some. So I was searching the Internet and found this power supply. Plus/minus voltage switches at 380 kHz; you're not gonna hear that. I was going to actually make an external supply with it. My son, who works for me, said, "Why don't you try one inside?" I put it in there and didn't hear any hum. I said, "Well, that's 6 dB better than I had before so I think I'm done."

Marketing amps, pedals, and pro audio gear must be daunting.

There's still word of mouth, because my budget for advertising is not much. That's one of the reasons I faded out of pro audio — I could not compete with large companies whose ad budget was bigger than my entire gross. The other thing that happened was the change of the whole recording business. The small studios that were my customer base disappeared because people had bedroom studios. I couldn't quite crack that consumer market, because I couldn't advertise enough.

Are you coming back a little bit more?

Well, I am nostalgic about it because it was closest to me. My heart was always into pro audio because of course it was hi-fi, which goes back to my roots. It's fun to design those other things, and everything I design is hi-fi. I never quite got the whole thing to morph into me being a big conglomeration. Marketing is impossible for the little guy.

What do you see in the future for your work?

Winemaking. I don't think I could ever stop my day job and winemaking is about as profitable as the guitar amp business. It's like cooking on a very large scale when you have two tons of grapes delivered and you're going through all the machinations of making and fermenting it. I don't know if you know much about winemaking? We crush it, then it goes into open top fermenters and you're punching down the grapes. Eventually it finds its way into a tank, and then into a barrel. I'm playing chemist, or not playing chemist! Good luck. Two years later and it's poetry in a bottle.