BLUE (Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics) builds some of the finest microphones available today. The company's commitment to manufacturing its own parts, from condenser diaphragms to the tiny screws that hold them together, helps ensure consistent quality. Company founder Skipper Wise put on hiatus a career as a jazz musician for that of a microphone manufacturer, but brought along the same passion and enthusiasm.
With the microphone market filled with so many options, why would you say your microphones kick ass?
[laughs] I'll give you a rough idea of our approach to things. My background was in music. I have about 17albums out, mostly in contemporary jazz, but I had three different careers — one was a pop career in Europe and most of my albums were released on jazz labels and audiophile labels. I stopped making records about three years ago, because it really got to a point with BLUE that either I was going to commit to it full time or not. It's like with anything in life, I think that it's very hard to wear yourself thin. You commit yourself to one thing and just do it well, that was my experience. It was the same thing with music, and that's the approach to BLUE. One of the things they taught you in music is that if you copy somebody else and do it better you are nothing but a great imitation. And it was a lot of work. I mean, look at Bob Dylan, doesn't necessarily have a great voice, does he? But every time he goes, "Uuhhhh" you know it's him, right?
That's true, the signature sound.
That's right. But that's him. And the thing is, he said, "Well, what are my attributes?" and he found out that he could write lyrics, he could write songs, he had social commentaries and various things that were part of his career and still are. That was the approach at BLUE. We looked at microphones and how people were copying the past, and we think that the past is a great place to learn from, but what you have available today is astonishing. How you fuse those two things in the truest sense is the most rewarding and also the most difficult. What we did is learn from the past quality, and what I learned from a lot of the things that are considered classic today is that people did their best at the time with what was available to them. What's the best I can do, and I believe that's what stood the test of time — people that took that approach in building equipment or writing music, and that stuff seems to be timeless and is still revered today. Now, what happens if you take what you learned from then and apply it to today's standards? You could really go a lot farther, and that's the whole approach to BLUE. We found that we had to be involved with every part including making screws. People said that's ridiculous. Well, can you imagine if you're buying from a different vendor and you get a batch and the screws are just off a little bit, and everything just jiggles a little bit? It's just one of the small facets that add up to a microphone not being right or not being as best as it can be. People always laugh because I'm so involved with such little details, but the problem is if you take 200 little details and add them all up then they become one big issue.
Was the Bottle the first mic that you built?
"We started with the Bottle mic, making it tough on ourselves! Tough, because it was our top-of-the-line microphone. With the Bottle mic, eight different capsules equals eight different sounds of incredibly high quality." But it's not about being expensive. We don't consider the Baby Bottle a cheaper choice than the most expensive mic. It does something different. Because we make capsules, the most important part of a microphone, we can create different sounds so that each mic does something different. This does not mean you should not experiment." "We have found people who use the mics in applications that I would never have dreamed of. But we do have a philosophy of how we have created the sounds of the mics, what we thought each mic should sound like and be used for.
And when was that, as far as making the Bottle mic?
Everything with BLUE was put on the table back around 1991. Seven microphones were designed in and actually it has taken us up to last year to finish that, which was the Baby Bottle. When we started, and it took us a long time to tool up, and putting out a microphone is a very expensive process, it's like recording an album, and we don't have a record company behind us to give us advances. So financially, as individuals without the backing of a large company, we have to build a mic, sell it, take the profits, and put it back in. So at times, it's a difficult existence.
Yeah, a bit like owning a recording studio...
Yeah. I mean the difference with BLUE is that we are not a micro business. I have about 35 people behind us, and we have a factory over in Latvia where our capsules are manufactured. Now, why Latvia? My partner, Martins [Saulespurens] is from Latvia, who I met back in 1988 in Holland... I was doing a television show called Countdown for a hit single I had there. It was like American Bandstand.
The Dutch version of American Bandstand?
That's basically it, [laughs] with a guy that was the Dutch Dick Clark. So Martins was over there to consult for something. I had purchased some old vintage 47s over there — they were rather inexpensive in Europe. And he said, "Well, why don't we clean these things up and make them sound better?" So he fixed up all five mics, and they became the five mics that were known in L.A. That people wanted to come to my studio to use, because of the quality of these mics. I said, "You, know, Martins, there's a whole place for this," and what we did is we started restoring mics and learning allabout that and eventually we said, "Well, we can do this ourselves," all these modifications, and this capsule work, and all this stuff that we're doing — it's so different from what the mic initially started as, why don't we apply these theories to start developing a new line of mics? And so, in '91-'92, we started putting it all down on paper, and had the Bottle mic all the way down to the Baby Bottle. Getting back to the Bottle mic, it retails at $5000 and it comes with a flight case, one capsule, power supply, and cable. The capsules retail at $750.
Yeah, I did the math and it rings out to $11,000. Wow, that's heavy coin!
It is, but then again, it all depends what you need it for. It's a tool, what we make are tools, to help you achieve your goal.
So I guess that it makes sense that you came out with a line of lower- priced models.
Based on the capsule work, for example our Cactus is based on our B7 capsule and the three-pattern configuration. Then it comes down to the Kiwi. The Kiwi's a class-A, solid state discrete mic based on our B6 capsule. Then it goes down to the Mouse. The Mouse has got its own capsule. We really designed it for broadcast. It was really designed to have that edgier-type sound to cut through. It doesn't have the silkiness or the top end of our Blueberry or maybe the Dragonfly. But it was meant for speech-oriented stuff. In fact Ron Roland, one of the big speech guys, has been using this mic exclusively for years. And he's up on our website doing a presentation with it. And then you get to the Blueberry. The Blueberry was what I call our trio of mics for under a $1000. Even though the Blueberry retails at $1299 it pretty much sells in the stores for about a grand. And you can get the Blueberry, the Dragonfly, and the Baby Bottle. And what all three of these mics do for under a grand, each, is give you three unique sounds. The Blueberry has incredible detail in the top end. It'll give you that crispy type of presence that's only associated with some of the more expensive tube mics.
How do you address consistency issues when you're making your capsules?
Well, if you go up on our website we have an anechoic chamber that we rent out once every two weeks, and we do our testing for our capsules — it's over in Latvia, there's a picture of Martins standing in it on our website. They didn't have the type of equipment they have today back then for measuring. The type of monies that we spend on test equipment allows us to be able to measure the capsules and get them all within tolerances that we deem "matched" to one another, so you know that if you go and buy a Dragonfly today and buy one two years from now, you know you can mate it up. You know, this is a lot of effort. It's a constant, constant reevaluating of what you're doing, not resting on your laurels and saying, "Great, it's a success, I'm just gonna sell it." The idea is to look at it, and make it better every day. And that's our philosophy, because we know that this stuff will outlive us if we build it right. And when we're dead and gone, we will have left something back in this world that we're proud of.
