Doug has been a proponent of high-quality, high-end tube recording gear for ten years now. His mic preamps, EQs and direct boxes are known as some of the best-built and greatest sounding in the audio business.
So, how did you become an audio gear designer for the stars?
Ha Ha! Well, you know the real story goes back a long time to when I was a kid. Because I was always building electronic things, some audio, some radio things, some other kinds of electronic stuff. I was always interested in it. I was also interested in music so it was sort of a logical thing to do. I was a studio owner for fifteen years before I started the manufacturing business.
So you owned a studio but not anymore?
Yep, I decided that I no longer wanted to work all night.
Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like you came to your senses!
Yeah, I think, for the most part it's for people who are younger, and when you get to a certain point you say, "You know, I would really rather sleep at night." But I still love it and I still do occasional location recording, so I keep my ears tuned to what good audio is supposed to sound like. You know, when I started out experimenting with electronics, transistors were expensive and there wasn't a whole lot of information about audio and transistors and I just started out with tubes and I'm just more comfortable with them. And it just happens that I prefer the sound of them. When Istarted the manufacturing business about ten years ago, there were a few tube manufacturers out there, but certainly not like there is now. And, you know, I just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right product.
How much of your background in music has had an impact on how your designing aesthetic has evolved?
Probably a lot. My father was a classical musician, he played French horn in the Philadelphia Orchestra, and when I was a kid I used to go to concerts all the time, but I also went to rehearsals and recording sessions. And sometimes I would just wander around the hall just listening, or sometimes actually my father would let me sit on the stage with him, during a rehearsal.
Was this under Eugene Ormandy?
Yep, it was.
So you used to kind of hang around the concert hall while your dad was doing his stuff?
Yeah, although I have to admit when I was eight years old I was sort of more interested in seeing what went on backstage, you know, just fascinated by the hall and everything. But I think the influence of hearing music that way stuck with me and my father wasn't the kind of person who listened to records. We didn't really listen to records in our house. So my exposure to music was almost entirely to live music, which I thought everybody was like that, but later on I realized that's not the way it is. I mean we're into the second or third generation of people, the majority of their experience with music usually comes out of loudspeakers.
So, now I'm looking at your stuff on the web here and it's pretty pricey stuff, why is that?
Well, it's very expensive to build. The audio transformers are all custom made for me by Jensen, and they are expensive transformers. There's just no way to get good transformers without spending a lot of money. And, you know, I want stuff that's going to last for a long time and be really reliable. Being a studio owner I know what it's like, you don't want gear that doesn't work, especially if you're recording performances or something where you only get one shot at it. So I designed the stuff to be extremely robust and with real conservatively rated components and really the best components that make sense to use in there, and all those things tend to increase the cost. To a certain extent I purposely choose that niche because I wanted to keep the company relatively small so I could run the whole thing myself, which I've pretty much been able to do, although I have people assemble the units for me now. But, in order to do that I sort of picked that high-end niche, and in addition to being a business decision it was also a personal decision, because I'd rather build really good equipment rather than mediocre equipment.
Are you still recording at all?
A little bit. I recorded a concert on Sunday — a performance of a choir and a chamber orchestra in a church. I do a few of those a year. This was a multitrack recording, but it was all performed at once. I just recorded to multitrack to have some versatility later. My days of doing over dubbing are done forever, I hope. Multitrack is a lot of fun and I really enjoyed doing it for the years that I did it, and there are things you can do that way, that it would just be impossible to do any other way.
What's your signal path when you engineer a concert like the one you just did?
In this case, which is pretty typical of what I do, I used a pair of Coles ribbon mics through one of my preamps directly to a DA-88. And the same thing with a pair of B & K 4000s real wide space back in the hall, so another VT2 pre amp to a couple other tracks of the DA 88 just to mix in some additional room if I needed it. And I had a couple other spot mics, but I doubt if I'll end up using them, they're just for safety.
The VT2 is completely point-to-point, is that right?
That's right, yep.
Even at the high end, there aren't a lot of people doing that sort of construction when it comes to mic preamps. That's more sort of an audiophile thing, isn't it?
Well, I think that the advantage of doing point to point is that you can actually make the interconnection leads much, much shorter. There are very few places in that circuit where audio actually goes through lengths of wire. It's pretty much just through component leads. And maybe that little bit of difference wouldn't be particularly audible, but if you take that and add another dozen or twenty other little minor things that all help to improve the sound, then suddenly those start to make a difference where one by itself probably wouldn't. I just like point to point because you can really work in three dimensions — when you're doing a printed circuit board you really have to run things around in circles to get from one place to another. Lead lengths get pretty long, and when you do a point to point you can keep them really short. It probably isn't a huge factor, but it's just one of the factors.
I really like the choice of those knobs.
Well they're the same knobs that I use on the mic preamp. It's the same series. They were originally made by Raytheon — I guess they go back to the forties. Another company is taking over the manufacturing of them. They are very expensive knobs, but they are really high quality and I like the way they look.
So as far as your equalizer goes, did you base that on anything, like a Pultec?
Well it's a passive LC equalizer, which is the same kind of circuitry as Pultec. There's only so many ways you can put inductors and capacitors together, so in that sense it shares a lot of common circuitry with the Pultec approach, but in a lot of other ways I went completely differently. The active electronics are totally different, I think it's a much higher quality. And as nice as those Pultecs were, they really were a minimal cost design, and they really cut a lot of corners to hit a price point, I would imagine. I wasn't under those restraints quite as much so I was able to do some things that wouldn't have been cost effective for Pultec to do. The inductors that I use in there are custom made for me by Jensen. We worked for a long time tweaking that design and getting them just right. They are extremely consistent from unit to unit and the matching is absolutely precise.
Are you thinking about designing a compressor?
Well for several years I've been experimenting with compression, trying to come up with something that really pleased me. I hope to have that as a product one of these days, but it's got to be really good. It's got to be something that I feel really strongly about, and I'm really proud to put my name on it. If it doesn't meet those criteria then I don't want to do it. I'm not particularly interested in doing another LA-2A, which is a wonderful compressor, but there are a lot of them out there. I don't think the world needs another one. I want to try and do something that's a little bit different and still has the kind of quality that I want to be associated with.
