To begin with, how did you get started in designing audio gear?
Thirty-two years ago I was working for a guy that built hi-fi equipment. His trick was to take Dynaco gear, hot rod it and sell it. He would buy the raw kits from Dynaco, hire me and a couple of friends and we'd put them together and install the mods and stuff. He'd pay us by the kit we assembled. I could build a PAT-5 in about an hour, a Stereo 400 power amp in an hour and half. I was making pretty decent money doing real simple solder and assembly work. I was doing that and kind of learning electronics as I went. I went from building hi-fi stuff and crossed over to the rock and roll field. There was a company in town building a large mixing console, which was not really available at that time commercially. The [Yamaha] PM1000s and 2000s were just starting to be on the scene then, but they were very expensive and didn't have the capabilities [the company] wanted. So they were building their own 32-input, 8-bus live sound console. The guy that did the original design work bailed on them, so they brought me in to finish it. I went from hi-fi and occasionally a garage band to working on the road, doing a fair amount of national acts in a touring PA company. I was about 22, so I was cocky. I have a habit of picking companies that don't work out. They went belly up. I went from there to the recording studio scene, 'cause I was tired of carrying big PA crap around. There was an active scene and a necessity for techs in the recording studio market. Again, still being young and cocky and knowing everything, I started diving right into everything and learned as I went — tape machines, consoles, synchronizers and automation systems. [I] got a real job and worked in the electronics industry for ten or fifteen years, learned a lot more electronics and low level signal handling. I was halfway through that and the audio came back, with people asking me to build these preamps I had been building. It started getting in the way of the industrial stuff, so we decided to make it a product here rather than just something I did at home. It just took off.
I'm convinced that being "young and cocky" can be great fuel for innovation. Who were you working with during this phase of your career?
My partner Dennis [Pfab], who doesn't really get talked about a lot on the audio side — he and I were working for an industrial company that went tits up and they stopped paying us. We hung around longer than we should have and ultimately picked up one of the products just at the tail end of development. One of the companies needed production, so we took that and started working in his basement and built it and sold them. That was the basis for Great River Electronics. We were doing that — a few other designs came along a little bit later on — and it was during that period that the preamp came back to haunt me. I designed this clean, simple preamp - that was the MP-2 in '90 — and built a number of them for local studios and friends. By '95, when we were pretty well along with the industrial stuff, about once every three or four weeks somebody wanted one. It took me 12 to 14 hours to build one and that started cutting into things. We decided to start actually manufacturing — get them built up and do the mechanical work on more of a commercial basis, rather than me sitting with a drill press and pounding them out one by one. That preamp ultimately got out to the national market, because I discovered the Internet — hooked up with Scott Dorsey, Fletcher, Mike Rivers and sort of the old guard of rec.audio.pro. It really was my friendship with Fletcher [Mercenary Editions] and his willingness to take on the product and sell it that put the audio stuff over the hump. I was building the preamps and CBS radio came along and said, "Hey can you build us some mixers like this? We need them in six weeks." So I said, "I'll need some money down first." The next morning Fed Ex had an envelope with $15k in it and a note that said, "Get started." That is how Great River evolved from working in a basement. Now we're in a 4,000 square foot building with half a dozen employees, besides the partners.
Large companies like CBS are not exactly known for their ability to do anything quickly, let alone hook you up with a good amount of cash in 24 hours.
They had bought a bunch of digital systems that were supposed to be developed, installed and working for their office news feeds, and that was just not going. They needed analog backup — in case all systems failed, they still had a way to get on the air because their digital stuff wasn't getting delivered. They never did put the digital stuff in. We also started showing up at AES shows. The company just happened along 'cause I managed to be in the right place at the right time. David Josephson was real instrumental in helping us along — he's a fairly high mucky muck in AES.
In terms of design aesthetic, is there a set of parameters that you follow when you begin to develop a new piece of gear?
In general, I've always preferred the electronics of the preamps, tone controls, compressors and limiters to not muck things up too much, because I came from the era of big, fat, old tape recorders that did enough damage to the signal. I was always striving to get better signal to the tape machine, so when it came back off it didn't sound so bad. When digital came along it changed my attitude a little bit, because you needed some of that meat that the tape and big old transformers did to the stuff. The cleanliness of the digital systems and the later tape recorders like the [Otari] MTR-90 would put an anemic signal back off, but it really was quite accurate — as opposed to something off an [Ampex] MM1100 — big and fat and rolled off on the top end, got that nice head bump in it — you know rock and roll! But I still like having clean, solid electronics ahead of it. So I still don't like electronics that break up significantly when they're used in a normal fashion. I like the electronics that get out of the way.
What about the coloration of transformers?
I tend to pick transformers that sound nice, and not perfect. Although on the original preamp, the goal was to get as clean a transformer as possible — it was basically for classical recording, where you want to recreate what the mic picks up, but have the benefits of all the bandwidth limiting and RF rejection that transformers give you. I wanted a really good transformer because it gets rid of headaches, but at the same point, it was going to be very expensive because it had to have as low distortion as possible, low coloration. In the later generation of products, the MP- 2NV specifically was a collaboration between me and Fletcher. He said, "Dan, can you build something like this? We need something with some meat and mass to it, but we don't want it to be old and funky either." So I took off with this sort of '70s design, just cleaned it up and did a few technical things in terms of the power supply and the distribution of grounds — things like that that would give a little more accuracy and yet still have more of the coloration. The circuit is unbalanced, having not exactly perfect transformers on the inputs and the outputs. With the EQ-2NV, I went back towards trying to make it as clean as possible. I wanted the amplifiers to basically disappear and do their job — then any of the coloration would come from the inductors in a circuit if you started really pushing them, or the input transformer likewise. In a semi-related thread, you know I think digital is king.
How has digital affected the product you're designing now?
In general, I'm going to still stick with clean signals, because as digital improves, it reveals more of the errors in the source equipment. I want it to be capable of extremely high performance with coloration that's very carefully chosen to my taste. If I'm going to put a transformer in there, we'll listen to a number of different transformers, or rewind them a couple times to get them the way I want them to sound or not sound.
