I've tried your mics and really like them. How did you get started?
Bob: We wanted to provide a tool, which actually turned out to be an instrument. Our first microphone, the Studio Vocalist, came about because I was very interested in the human voice — it has a lot of complex qualities to it. And it wasn't sounding too good on some of the CDs of the '80s. I thought it was just me. I thought, "I just don't like vocals anymore, but I liked them back when I was listening to vinyl." It turned out that a lot of people shared the same perception that vocals, especially the "tizz" in a vocal, could really get to you after a while. I started looking into what was going on in the field that was designed to mitigate that. I saw that everybody was going on the quest for the ever-better microphone, going up the scale [to] the $5,000 and $10,000 condensers. So I looked into the physics. I asked, "Why does it sound that way?" We made a discovery: When you activate a diaphragm at very high frequencies, air molecules agitate behind the diaphragm. And there are lateral modes that move across the face of the diaphragm that contribute to the "tizz" sound. I thought, "Well, I guess we're not going to be making any condenser microphones," because the condenser microphone represents a hard surface that the sound works against, and the ribbon microphone is more like a heart valve that moves with the flow — more like vocal chords themselves, which are designed to work with the air and couple to the air. If you've ever noticed seaweed just right at the shore, it just wants to follow the motion of the wave. That's the way that the ribbon likes to perform. We look to nature [for design ideas] because we're dealing with the natural body. We're dealing with the creative output of human beings. It's an organic thing that that has a natural component to it. What is naturally lightweight and is designed to work with air? You can look at a leaf, or a blade of grass or you could look at a fly's wing. This is a potential model for a type of transducer. So, we started looking at ribbons as sort of the main feature, an opportunity. We saw that there had been a lot of interest in that area. We asked, "If ribbon mics are so great, why aren't people using them?" The answer was that they were fragile, they had low output and they sounded dark. What if it was robust, had a higher output and a curve that matched what you wanted to do — like a vocal curve with a bit of a rise to it? A rise in response so that the vocal stands out. We went around and looked at the old and new ribbon microphones and saw that they all required tons of gain on the preamps. So we emulated the output level of a [Shure] SM57, without having to add an [internal] amplifier and without adding noise. That was one of the most difficult parts of the development. But it was a part of the development that I knew we could do, because we had worked with really, really tiny ultrasound transducers. That was the problem with those — getting enough signal so you could image the human heart. Then we were left with tone. "What are the tone options?" Some wanted a really rolled-off response — that's what the Proscenium is. It's intentionally designed to have that old-school, ribbon response like an RCA 44. We did the Proscenium and the Soundstage Image simultaneously. We could go darker and smoother, and we could go in the middle so it was accurate. We put the Soundstage Image in the middle for people who wanted something that was useful for a variety of things and also good at a distance. Then we added one more mic, the SPLx custom-build mic. If you have a lisp or you have a real hissy sibilance or a nasal sound, we can work directly with the artist. The SPLx can be made for extremely loud sound sources, a true 150-160 db. The SPLx name implies "loud", but the SPLx can be any custom microphone — we can roll it off, we can give you a tilt if you want. We can do a lot of things with it.
