Danny McKinney

Danny McKinney is a textbook case of a very busy man with a whole lot of irons in the fire. Requisite Audio is his boutique outboard gear company. Standel is his company that designs guitar amps. And he also makes super high-end cables. We talked to him about his design philosophy and tube based power supplies.

What is your background? When and how did you get into designing gear?

When I was a kid I started experimenting with speakers and I had a lot of fun doing it, but I really wanted to be a musician. I was a musician professionally for nearly twenty years and I kept suppressing my knack for electronics and my interest in amplifiers. In about '96, I retired from playing and went into it [designing gear] full-time. I've picked up a lot of thoughts and ideas and concepts from many people that I've met over the years, but my number one mentor would have to be Bob Crooks, who was the fellow who founded Standel.

Standel is the guitar amplifier company you now own and operate. You say Bob Crooks was your mentor?

Yes, he was. Not for as long as I would've liked. I met him when I was fourteen and had a very casual acquaintance with him and later on, about '98, we started getting together on a very regular basis — and then he died in '99.

You're probably best known for your outboard gear. What was the inspiration for the current product line that is being built by Requisite Audio?

My ins piration has been to study and learn and read as much as I can. I'm constantly reading. I like the hi-fi designers and I read a lot about what they're doing, things they're experimenting [with], and I like to try everything that I can — certain things along the way work out to actually be very effective. Along the way I start collecting these new techniques, things that I've tried and have worked out well for me. So often, my observation has been that the audiophile guys are really so deep into what they're into, as far as coaxing out better performance in their gear — I want to bring that to recording. Same with the cables — audio guys have been doing tricked out cables for twenty years. To me, cables seem almost new to the recording world. Some of the cables that are out there now that people are using are really not great designs and they're sold to people to use in studios. I think for good music, the place where these cutting edge designs need to be is in the beginning of the chain. These audiophiles try so hard to reproduce records the very best that they can, and yet a lot of times the gear that was used to record the records is not as good as the gear that's playing it back. I want to try and bring more of that type of quality to the front end of the process.

The piece of gear that I have heard about most via word-of-mouth is the PAL Plus. Could you explain the lineage of that piece — where it is now and where it came from?

About 1998, I had built a limiter that was based on the LA-2A and I had been building a mic preamp called the Y-7. I thought it would be a good idea to put the two together, because if you did that, you could get rid of some of the redundant circuitry and make a more direct path. That was my beginning, putting those two elements together, and then from that time to now it's been a constant refinement of that concept. My idea, and what I want to continue to do is to have designs combining a mic pre and limiter, and I want to continue to evolve that platform into the future. So now we're at the PAL Plus mark three. Eventually, at the rate I'm going, probably in about two to three years there'll be a PAL Plus mark four. Same with the limiter — we had the L2M, we're now building the mark two, and eventually there'll be a mark three — probably about two years away for that also. I look at these as platforms and things to continue to evolve.

How long is the build cycle on the PAL Plus and L2M?

Well, with the Requisite gear what I've been trying to do is build things in batches — like I did a batch of thirty L2Ms recently and so when an L2M is ordered right now, it's usually about a three or four week waiting list from the time of the order to the actual delivery. But with this last batch of PALs — there were people who had been waiting for probably eight months to get their PALs. That batch is sold out and we're now building the next batch of thirty. That batch is not sold out, but by the time we actually start delivering that batch, that batch will be sold out. So depending on when you order, it could be anywhere from four weeks or eight or nine months.

Talk about boutique.

Yeah, it's total boutique. Hand built. There are only two of us here building these things. This is small potatoes — a really small shop.

Tell me about your tube power supply versus solid-state power supply for your product line.

Right now everything is being shipped with the solid- state supply, which is an outboard supply that connects up through an umbilical cable, and a single supply is capable of running a pair of units. It's pretty standard design there. It's very over-built for the job it's being asked to do, but it's somewhat a standard type of idea — nothing too exotic there. The outboard tube supply is a three-rack space set-up where it's using tube rectifiers, audio frequency chokes, oil and polypropylene capacitors everywhere. It's really kind of old school design. It's very expensive design, but the sound of it is extremely lush and beautiful; where with the solid-state supply you might think of as a more aggressive supply. Both of them tonally sound different. There is no reason a person couldn't switch between the supplies for doing different things. My belief is that the power supply really sets the tone for the entire unit. We can talk about caps and transformers and various tubes, whether they're modern made tubes or vintage tubes, the different resistors, all of those things matter, but it's all sitting on the power supply. And for me the power supply — that's the holy grail right there — that's what sets it all up. To me, power supplies are hypercritical.

You're saying that if I use a PAL Plus with the tube version of the power supply, the same unit would sound totally different with the solid-state power supply?

It's still going to be a PAL Plus, but over the course of using it you'll start to find certain material where the tube supply might be too lush and too beautiful and inappropriate for a particular style of music, and you'd feel more comfortable with the solid state supply. Ultimately though with the tube supply, for my ears, my listening — that's when you get to a place where you're really bringing more detail, more life, more definition of the original performance to the final end listener. I think it makes it through the process and survives the process and comes out the other end completely euphonic. It's a just a fantastic sound, but you don't always want a fantastic sound. It's always going to be subjective to the producer and the style of music and the point you're trying to make. There's every reason in the world that a person want a solid- state supply and do with that. The tube supply allows me to go to a place that I really want to go and offer people because it's just not something that people get to hear all the time. It's a very special experience.

Let's talk about your cables. What makes a cable like yours so expensive? I mean, your cables are really pricey.

It's mostly the time. The materials are moderately expensive, but the time to make them is where it really gets involved. It's a lot of labor. It's all hand done.

How long did it take you to develop the high-end cable line — in terms of the R & D process?

Actually, the way I got started in cable was I met a fellow who was a cable designer. At the time I was a recording engineer — and when he brought them by for me to check out I was strongly skeptical. I just didn't want cables to mean anything because it's just going to make my life more complicated. You know, you've got all your money tied up in all the gear and everything, and then you find out that maybe it could be even better with cables and you see what's involved with that, and you've already spent a lot of money on cables. So cables were something I wasn't interested in, but after some time it really started to click with me. Along the way there were a couple of cables that I had heard and liked better than what we were doing, and so I wanted to study more what they were doing and see what was happening there. It took about three or four months to come up with what we are currently doing. That was all strictly, "Build a cable and listen to it. Maybe build a dozen cables and listen to all of them and see what they're like." We had a lot of good ones and a lot of bad ones in there and it's just a matter of trying things and listening to them. As far as calculations or doing measurements or anything like that — I don't do anything like that at all. I just build them and listen to them.

How about consistency between cables? If you're not using test equipment, how do you make sure there is consistency between cables?

Once you have it down, it becomes very consistent and repeatable. It's very moderate in terms of machines that we have — it's mostly hand work and you get a feel for it. The cables also have a break-in time and it's very interesting to listen to say, an older cable that we did — and then you hear a new one when we finish it and compare it to say, a cable that might be a year old — and it is amazing how over time they seem to get better.

Over what period of what time would you say you notice a difference?

Well, in the last year I redesigned our power cable and I took it over to a studio in Los Angeles that has been using our cables for a long time. They had one of our original power cables there, and for my comparisons of making these new designs, I took over a brand new cable of the old design and listened to one of the same cables that had been used for a year. It was amazing how much better the year-old cable sounded. They just seem to break-in,, so I would guess maybe a year. I don't know if some point if they stop breaking in and there's no improvement to be made, but there's definitely a break-in time and that's true with mic pres — it's true with compressors. When I make guitar amplifiers it's also true with those. If I get a guitar amp in for repair and it's a couple of years old, it always sounds better than a brand new one.

Do you have anything on the horizon or are you going to keep tweaking the current product line?

Well, the PAL Plus and the L2M limiter are both designed and done for the next couple of years, and now we'll just be producing those models. My main project on the drawing board is a monitor that I've been working on for quite a long time, using digital crossovers and vacuum tube power amplifiers. I'm really excited about diving into the world of monitor design.