In many a studio the Empirical Labs Distressor is as much a common sight — and sound — as a guitar amp or coffee machine. And for good reason — it works well, it's highly tweakable, and it sounds great. Could it be that the Distressor is the ultimate compressor? The only other product currently available from Empirical Labs is the Fatso, a "warming box" for digital that has drawn more raves from many users. Dave Derr has headed his Empirical Labs for seven years, used to work with Eventide, and has a past as a rock-n-roller. Plus, he's a down-to-earth guy who takes pride in the fact that many amazing records get made using his products.

So what made you decide to become a "gear designer guy"?

[laughs] Like most people in the industry, I was a musician for many, many years, and I was raised in a family of engineers.

What do you play?

I started out with rock guitar, but I was a music major in college and studied classical piano and composition and theory — all that stuff. Then after college I was in a group for twelve years as a professional musician. And was very lucky, had a blast — we had a recording contract and everything.

Oh, really? What was the label? What was the band?

The label was called Ransom Records — it was distributed by RCA — and the band was called Jack of Diamonds. We were kind of like contemporaries of The Hooters and a couple groups from the Philadelphia area.

Were you doing gear and electronics while you were a musician as well?

In the band I sometimes would get stuck with repairs. I was always trying to keep the PA working right, but I wasn't really designing anything. When our band broke up I was kind of milling around. I happened to be in a Radio Shack, and a guy was in there that had seen my band and started talking to me and he told me his company was looking for an electronics technician, and I jumped on it. It was a medical company, and a guy there named Jim Bryan kind of took me under his wing. He was a senior engineer from MIT, and he was so good to me. Whenever I had a question he always encouraged me to come to him and ask. He let me have access to all the parts I could ever want at the company — he was interested in audio himself. From that I started teaching myself. I got a couple of books from Radio Shack: AC circuit analysis, read it, got a scientific calculator, worked through the problems, and shortly after that I applied for a job at Eventide as an engineer. I had gotten to where I could do amplifier design and I had a pretty good feel for how to do low noise circuitry. I was never good at taking tests ever. Richard Factor at Eventide sat me down on my interview and gave me a test, a written test, and left. I just happened to know almost everything on the test and I got the job at Eventide.

About what year was this?

I think it was '86.

And what was some of the stuff you worked on at Eventide?

I was a real hack of an engineer — I wasn't trained as well as the other guys — but I had a lot of audio knowledge in h the AES show in New York. He said, "Dave, you're inow things should work. My first project there was canned because of my ineptness. It wasn't an audio product, though, at least not directly. I got thrown into a group of great engineers — Ken Bogdanowicz [Tape Op #62] and Bob Belcher.

Ken Bogdanowicz started Wavemechanics.

He's just a wonderful person and a brilliant engineer. And I was lucky enough to be thrown in with him and Bob. Those guys, again, hauled me up by my boot straps, showed me a lot of things, and made me feel stupid a lot. The three of us designed the H3000, which later went on to become the 3500 and all its incarnations. I did the analog section and helped out a lot with the interface and presets.

How long were you at Eventide?

Nine years, I believe.

After that did you start Empirical Labs?

No, I had a recording studio — a 24-track analog recording studio in a big house.

Where was this?

This was in Garfield, New Jersey. Busy all the time — never made a lot of money from it. Immediately after I left Eventide I started working on a couple of products. The Distressor was the main one. I spent probably three or four years kind of tweaking that. I was using it the whole time, and at first I was hesitant to use it on real paying clients! Then I kept tweaking it, paying attention to detail, tweaking it until it became my favorite compressor. And, you know, I don't think it was my favorite compressor because I designed it, it was because I had these other great compressors around and I tried to take what was the best from them and apply them to the Distressor. When you have LA-2As and 1176s and Neves sitting around and you start not using them... that was when I kind of knew I had something that was going to stand up in a certain number of professional fields.

So how do you launch a product like that?

That was also very lucky for me. Fletcher from Mercenary Audio, along with George Massenburg [Tape Op #54], had one of the first Distressors. George was very encouraging and Fletcher, god bless his soul, insisted that I come show it at his booth in '95 at the AES show in New York. He said, "Dave, you're in my booth," and I was like, "What do you mean?"

Yeah, that sounds like Fletcher all right.

I was right next to Dave Hill from Crane Song. We both showed at Fletcher's booth. I am indebted to Fletcher, because from that show we got a lot of response. Then the second stroke of luck to launch was Gill Griffith from Wave Distribution. I had worked with him at Eventide and he left Eventide, he was the salesman, and he brought all his knowledge and sales expertise to selling the Distressor. And boy did that work out.

How many Distressors have you sold?

We're going on six thousand. I've been lucky.

So, how does the Distressor work, generally speaking. What's going on inside?

I had literally breadboarded probably thirty or forty compressors in my day, and different topologies and different chips, etc. When I got my first 1176 I was awoken, and then an LA-2A and then a Neve 2254 — I think those are the three pieces that really said to me, "These things have an amazing sound unlike anything new." I wanted to know why. It was not hard to find out the basic reasons why. What was hard was I wanted to be able to offer those kind of sounds, not only as emulations, but also bring something new to a compressor, as well as to bring reliability to it, in a small size, while offering some of the non linearity of tube equipment, in a small, indestructible box.

It's definitely well put together, in terms of build quality.

Basically we use a discrete VCA that we designed. It's not the cleanest VCA, on purpose, but what it does have is very little DC artifacts. That's very key when you want to start putting on a lot of compression. Then the big change, and I think it was the first time it had been done, was we provided digital controls of the analog path. I designed an analog path that could be manipulated digitally, switched around digitally. In other words we extended digital controls into more and more of the circuitry because we saw that it opened up new possibilities. Especially in emulation, the reason we can emulate some of these [compressors] is we click in and out different circuits. We're accurately giving you different compressors in that box, and by using digital controls, that lets me switch them in and out or vary them slightly.

As far as switching between the different functions, is that basically all the switches are doing and the pots are more about the gain?

Yeah the pots are strictly pots — they're not digital encoders — and they control the audio in and out and the decay time. Those are not digital, obviously, but they are affected by the digital controls. The attack and the release change their time concept, depending on which ratio you're in.

So when did the unit start picking up steam?How long after you exhibited at AES did you really start selling a lot of units?

We were lucky. We started selling some after that AES with Fletcher. Tchad Blake [Tape Op #16 & #133], one of my favorite engineers, he's a real nice guy, he got one. George Massenburg was about the first. And then people saw those guys using them...

So it was more of a word of mouth thing at the beginning?

A lot of it initially, yeah. There was no advertising until 2000. Never did an ad, it was almost all word of mouth, and Gill Griffith our distributor. We got them into major engineer guys' hands, again a lot of it was going to a lot of trouble to try and make them reliable. It's impossible to make anything 100% reliable, but we go to a lot of trouble, and I think people appreciated that. We had gotten a few major engineers, like Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #84 & #129] and "Mutt" Lang. A lot of the biggest people in the industry ended up purchasing some.

The piece was nominated for a TEC award?

Yeah, last year. It was actually the newer version of it. It's the same version, it's got some new options.

Oh, the British mode and the stereo phase correction thing.

Yes. So the EL8x, the x being the differentiator, was nominated. George Peterson at Mix encouraged us. He tried it and really saw something different in it and said, "I'm going to give you guys a review in here even though you only have one product and you're a new company. No one's ever heard of you." And that little leap of faith was key.

When did you start developing the Fatso, which is your newest piece.

'97, and you know it's funny — we've thrown away two other products. We actually went all the way through the design phase, shipped a couple and threw them away. The Fatso almost got thrown away also, because it was so hard to make and very expensive.

Oh,really?

Yeah. We wanted the Fatso to be under $2000 by a good ways, and instead it's more or less $2500. And most people, most of the beta testers, said that was too much. I thought it was too much, but it's apparently not too much. We overcame some of the production problems and technical problems just again, as in the Distressor, through tweak after tweak after tweak.... and we're still tweaking. Also we've provided for upgrades and options on the Fatso.

So you have a new version?

What happened was we made four or five prototypes. Two we could not get back. One to Mick Guzauski, who said, "I want it. I'll pay for it." And Brendan O'Brien said, "Are you going to make any more? I'll buy this one if you will make some more." And of course at that price it wasn't very hard to make more. We already had the P.C. board designed — it was just a matter of ordering. A few more major engineers tried them out, we did some more tweaking, and they've been going ever since. In fact, we've been steadily back ordered. We haven't really been able to make them fast enough. But the upside is that it's one of a kind. Some people think that the Fatso is just a compressor and it's really not.

So what do you think about the whole digital plug-in thing? Have you thought about doing plug-ins?

We've thought about plug-ins all the time. That's a really nasty market. The reason it's nasty is that people steal. As soon as they release something, someone breaks it and it's on sites for free. The second issue is getting it exactly right. There are software developers offering emulations of classic compressors, and they're okay as long you don't try and do what pro engineers do with them, which is use them radically. You try and use some of these 1176 plug-ins or LA-2A plug-ins radically, and they fail. The large reason is sample rates are tough to get around when you need to attack really fast. But the second issue is you're modeling something — you can model things to all different degrees. Do you model the fact that an old 1176 sample and hold cap gets leaky and loses it's value and starts changing the sound? I don't think they do. Do you model the fact that diodes vary a little bit from unit to unit and different components in even the smallest of circuits can have a noticeable effect when a compressor is used radically. Sometimes if you blanketly try and model something, you miss one component interaction or one, what you call AC, or one time constant, that affects things noticeably when used in a radical way... I can go on and on.

Are you working on anything right now, as far as new products go?

Yeah, we always have so many ideas, you know. The ideas, as anyone in the field will say, are easy. It's finishing them and making them producible that's hard. We have three products that we're working on. If you're competing with something that's classic you have to be classic, and you have to be strong and you have to be just as fool proof — between those quality issues I have killed a couple products. There are a lot of original products out there where the idea is incredible, but the implementation sucks, and conversely there is a lot of mediocre mouse trap ideas out there that are incredibly well implemented. So, the best products are the ones that get both: The really original, neat, useful concept together with concise fun-to-use implementation.

What are you working on these days?

I can mention a couple things. Some filter EQ boxes, and more warming boxes.

Oh yeah, I like that term, warming boxes...

Yeah, and we do have intentions to do digital products. It's just, as anyone will tell you — any pro, top of the line engineer — digital has the promise of being cheap and in everybody's home, but when they're on the clock and with top level performers, the top engineers almost always fall back on analog technologies. And the reason is, it's been highly refined and it's not dependent on mathematics. Anything DSP or digital processing is complete math. So unless the mathematician is really aware of musical subtleties, and in tune with what makes engineers and producers light up, it's a tough field.

So, do you think we are at the pinnacle of analog design as far as gear goes?

This is something that I talked about with George Massenburg — it's something that makes you think. What if technology had progressed so fast that we never were able to tweak tube circuits? Or tweak analog tape? What if those years were only one or two or three years before we found digital accuracy? Think of what we would have missed. We wouldn't even know the warmth that analog tape brings to things, we wouldn't know the bite and the intensity that a hard hit tube can offer, we would have missed out on all of that. We probably wouldn't of even had good guitar amps, our guitar sounds would be completely different, maybe we wouldn't even be using guitars. I think analog is going to be around for a long time because of the refinement and the tweaking that musically-oriented people did. I do think that digital can probably offer anything that the analog world can offer, but that it currently does not. And I think people like Manley, Tube-Tech, Avalon... those people keep experimenting with tube circuitry and combining it in new hybrid forms to give us new colors, and new things to emulate in the digital domain.