After a pretty damm good surf session one fine sunny day in Santa Cruz, California, my friend and fellow recording engineer, Eric Broyhill and I stopped by the Universal Audio offices to talk with Bill Putnam Jr., who along with his brother Jim, revived their father's legendary company. Eric wrote the interview and I took photos. All I have to say is that Bill's a very gracious and inspiring guy, but if he thinks he's gonna sit in his office next time we come through town he's mistaken. We're gonna drag him into the ocean and make him surf.
Eric Broyhill: Let's start with you telling us what Universal Audio is and what it's all about.
Bill Putnam Jr.: We were thinking about this company and what do we call it. We knew we wanted to make cool analog equipment, we wanted to get back into business and we're like, "Universal Audio," which connects us back to our roots for personal as well as business reasons.
What kind of role do you and your brother Jim play in running Universal Audio?
My brother is kind of the creative end. He's in a band in LA called the Radar Brothers, he has a studio in his backyard with an API console and a lot of this was really his idea. We come from opposite schools-my background is in engineering, his is in music. So in remaking some of the old circuits I wanted to make improvements and he was the one who would step in and say, "No no no, stop. These units are great just the way they are, let's leave them alone." You look at anyone else's units and they're all different because it's difficult to go in and not try to make it better.
That's true. What do you think about other companies re- issuing vintage-style gear and their claim that it's totally faithful to the original, but a little better?
Well, I tried to go that route, but my brother stopped me and said, "Let's keep it 100% true to the original." And now looking back I think he was right because that's what people love. So as far as being better is concerned we are the closer to the original units than anyone else and in that way we are better. We opted for attention to detail in making it as close to the original as possible. I think there is room for other units that have "improvements" but that's not what we did.
I recently asked a friend of mine about the new LA-2A and how it compares to the original, which he owns a couple of. He said they sounded great but a little different because the materials used in the original transformers are no longer in use.
That's true but one of the bigger differences I found is the fact that ours are new. The most common thing that goes bad in a LA-2A is the light in the el-op [electro-optical]. These were made and designed to be lights in the instrument panel of an aircraft. But we are applying broadband audio so they degrade. They were not made for this particular application. So the effect is that the old ones are not as sensitive as the new ones, causing you to drive them more to get the same amount of compression.
I heard that as a kid you helped you father build 1176 limiters for your allowance. What was it like growing up with the legendary engineer Bill Putnam as your father?
I got to spend summers wiring stuff up, helping my dad hang and test the UREI monitors in the back yard. We had this 40 ft. scaffolding we used to put the speakers way up in the air above the trees and tested frequency response. It was kind of my dad's own creative anechoic chamber. During tests it was a 110 dB of, "bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup", all day. The neighbors couldn't have been more pleased.
How did your father start out?
He was an RF engineer in a couple of Illinois radio stations and that's how I got into this because my dad got me into radio. I knew how to build radio amplifiers before I could build audio amplifiers. Then my dad was drafted into the signal corps during WWII and during that time my father got into audio recording. Then right after the war he returned to Chicago and opened a recording studio. His big break was recording The Harmonicats. I think the story goes that they needed $350 to do the record and only had a hundred bucks, so my dad agreed to do it as long as he got 10% of the sales from the record. Needless to say it was one of the nation's first million sellers. Bruce Sweiden, who later went to work for my father, said that for its time it was a whole new thing in recording and cited it as the first modern pop recording. It wasn't just put the mics up and record an auditory event, it was the first recording to use artificial reverb. My father more or less turned the studio bathroom into an echo chamber. From there he did a bunch of jazz stuff as well as Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker and Willie Dixon- all the Chicago blues which must have been very cool to be around. He recorded most of the big stuff that came through Chicago. Eventually he started working with Sinatra and Frank talked him into moving the studio to southern California in the early sixties. I later heard from Bruce Sweiden that they were doing a Stan Kenton session where Bruce was the second engineer, and during the recording my dad said, "Hey Bruce take over, I'll be back in a little bit," and my dad took off for good, effectively throwing Bruce into the hot seat. After that he just started building his own equipment, making his own consoles and recording gear. Back then there weren't many audio companies like there are now. So Universal Audio was making consoles and selling them and started buying other companies like Teletronix, Tektronic from Babcock engineering and in '68 he lopped them all together into one company that was UREI- "Universal Recording Electronic Industry", and then went on to make the LA-3, LA- 4, 1176 limiters, and eventually the well-known UREI monitors. Eventually JBL bought UREI and Infinity in one of their first set of acquisitions and for whatever reasons they just quit using the name.
Somewhat successful career as an engineer I would say.
Looking back now, I realize my father had an interesting combination of having a musical background and a technical background that helped him to very much excel in what he did.
Kind of like you and your brother. Are you guys coming out with any of your father's other designs soon?
We have a 2-610 mic-pre out that's based on my father's original Universal Audio 610 consoles. This was a console used to record the Beach Boys, Sinatra, Neil Young, Cream, The Doors — it would not even be feasible to list all the great records done with that board right now. It was also the first modular console. Before that it was all discrete wiring, just a big glob of wire.
Sounds like a lot to live up to, but I understand you've been up to some great things yourself. Tell me a little about the digital end at Universal Audio.
We have been so busy with Universal Audio's analog end that the LA-2A and 1176 plug in's have been a long time coming. But we have now developed such good models of both that we're learning things about the real units we never knew. For example no one ever talked about the fact that the 1176 had a program dependent release-we went to Brad Plunkett the original designer and asked him if he knew that, and he said, "Sure I knew that." But, nobody else did. I find it very interesting that we are still learning things about the real units through modeling them digitally. These plug-ins will be bundled with our UAD-1 DSP card.
What do you think about the Bomb Factory 1176 and LA-2A plug-in's?
From what we can tell they have modeled the knee fairly accurately but havn't even come close in modeling the circuitry properly.
How much detail are you and your team going to in creating your models? Are you modeling every component?
Just the ones that affect the sound. [laughs]
Even as far as modeling the power supply?
Even the power supply affects how the unit sounds.
Are you remaining purist in your modeling applications or are you removing things that cause "undesirable" side effects?
Down the road we may do that, but for now we are going as far as possible to model the exact circuit we are representing like the LA-2A or the 1176.
So once you are successful in modeling your own products, are you going to continue to create models of other classic hardware like the Pultec EQ?
Yes, we have a lot of solid tools in this regard. For example we have a very good transformer model, which is a very important part of creating an accurate model. We have a great transistor model, a great fundamental tube model, and we are very proud of our transformer model. Then at this point we can mix and match like building with an erector set.
Not something you just go buy a Time-Life book and learn at home. What part of your background helps qualify you to create digital emulations of sixties recording gear?
I was part of a program over at Stanford called CCRMA. Julius Smith, who was our instructor, started modeling musical instruments really looking at the physics and coming up with interesting ways to model a guitar string or a trumpet. Not from the perspective of what does it sound like, but how is the sound actually produced. Once we understand the physics of it we can write down equations, then come up with efficient DSP techniques to simulate them. So when you model the actual physics of a guitar, the body, the bridge, the string and you do weird things to it like plucking it at different points and you have done the physics right, your simulation of the musical instrument is going to behave just like the real thing. So in approaching emulation of hardware we have been taking the fundamental view of, let's really look at a transformer and really model it, then put it through a bizarre test and see if it behaves exactly like the real thing.
Sounds like that would need a lot of processing power to use.
One of our big announcements at NAMM last winter was our new UAD-1 DSP card which, in essence, gives you more capacity for handling real-time plug- ins. I have become frustrated, especially when it comes to emulation. For example, reverb needs a lot of memory and processor power to run. And as far as native reverb plug-ins go I don't think there have been any really good reverbs. I really think our RealVerb is the best sounding, and most people will agree. Many, if not most people, using native plug- in reverbs have been working without any real pro- level reverb. So it was very satisfying for us to introduce a pro-level reverb into the native market. With that being said, native processing leaves something to be desired in terms of power. Native processing can't run a lot of reverbs because reverb is so power hungry. We didn't want to compromise to get something to work on your home computer. On that end we focused on this card which has a ton of processing power, I'll give you an example. We have a TDM reverb which is called RealVerb Pro- the native one is called RealVerb. To make the native work we had to make some compromises so it would run. But the card we're introducing is going to allow people to run the real high-powered plug- ins like our RealVerb Pro. It's a PCI card that will allow you to greatly increase the amount of real-time plug-ins you can run and it will come stock with our RealVerb Pro as well as our LA-2A and 1176 limiters and all the chorus, flange, tap delays everyone uses. People will be able to get absolute pro quality stuff. It's going to support VST, PC and Mac as well as MOTU MAS. Since we are no longer limited by processing power we're going for quality not quantity, but were also getting quantity too. We now have a session up with the card in use with a 30-track song of Al Dimeolas. Were running two reverbs, 16 compressors all in real time, and these are high quality plug-ins. It will run over a 32 five- band EQ's on one card.
You very much seem to be a person who is caught between the worlds of analog and digital, do you have a preference?
As far as analog vs. digital- digital is awesome, the amount of automation, the ability to move things around, remembering the session, bringing it up, starting where you left off. You can't do that with analog. But I think good sound cries for great analog equipment on the front end. And of course signal processing, even though I'm not like Bruce Sweiden who thinks all plug-ins are crap, I don't agree with him totally on that. One of my goals is to make a plug-in that Bruce agrees that it sounds good. We are learning so much about how all this stuff works from the digital emulations, and who knows what we may learn tomorrow.
