Who is Bob Heil and where did he come from?
I started in 1955 as the pipe organist at the Fox Theater in St. Louis. I was fortunate to learn how to voice and tune that pipe organ as a teenager. That's where I learned to listen — listening is a real art. I played for twelve years professionally in restaurants, theaters and concert halls — theater organ, not church organ. I started a little music shop in late '66 — Ye Olde Music Shop. Through HAM radio I was learning how to build and design at the same time all this was happening. My music shop career started out with Hammond organs. I was renting them to groups because none of the traditional Steinway piano dealers would do that. I'd be into these groups and find out, "Wow, their PA is terrible!" They're using little columns and playing twenty-thousand seat halls. That's what started Heil Sound. I built this monster PA out of some old speakers that they threw out at the Fox Theater — A4 Altecs. Big stuff — nobody was doing that. I got a call from the Fox one day for this group that didn't have a PA. Well, the group was The Grateful Dead and their gear had been confiscated in New Orleans the night before! That was when Owsley [Stanley] got busted for being out of the state — the police took him and his PA. The band didn't know what had happened. The theater called me, handed the phone to [Jerry] Garcia and he said, "What do you got, man?" I told him I had Macintosh amps, all A4 Altecs and multi-cell horns. That was big-time for 1971. Nobody was doing that. They took us on tour. I realized from that experience that there was a need to package gear.
John Baccigaluppi said he just saw an old Heil console come through his studio.
We started building them around 1969 through to about 1980.
Who designed those?
Me. We built everything in-house. We built the circuit boards. We stuffed the circuit boards. We tested each one. They're all modular. The reason I did that — what if you're a group out in the field and channel six dies? What are you going to do? "I've got to send the board back." Just unplug channel six and send it to me. You're still working. You're down one channel but you're not down ten channels. Pretty ingenious for 1971.
How many of those consoles were there?
Oh, thousands. They're on eBay all the time.
So other sound companies or bands could purchase systems from you?
We were the first company back then to build a package PA. You could come to Heil Sound in 1972 and leave the facility with a complete system: snakes, road cases, everything — even a modular mixer. I remember that that we helped put the system together for Showco — their first system. I was working with SUNN [Musical Equipment Company] at the time. I was their largest dealer and I designed the SUNN Coliseum for them, but I was also building our own business with Heil Sound. That went on until 1980. The road work was getting tired and the music dealers weren't paying their bills. I got into building microphones for the HAM radio industry. That's my first love. We build hundreds of thousands of mics a year and it's really fun because we're the only ones. Shure left. Electro-Voice left. Astatic left. They all got out because it's a small market. We brought quality to HAM radio. Joe Walsh, an avid ham radio operator, has been my friend all these years and one day he said, "You know Bob, I want to use this Gold line [which is our HAM mic] on the stage." I said, "It's not good enough." He said, "It's better than a [Shure] SM58." I said, "No, Joe, I don't think so." I was at his house and went downstairs to his little studio and he proved it to me. So I had to start listening all over again, and we started building mics for this market. I want something new. We're bringing new technology, new materials.
I know your background as a design engineer. Do you work with someone who knows how to fabricate parts?
Yeah. I'm definitely not a schooled engineer, but I do all of the designs. I build the prototypes for field-testing.
What's the process for that?
I can build a microphone out of other pieces and parts. I know what I want because I have a station lab of different diaphragms, magnet assemblies and so on. I put mics together roughly in my lab. That's where I do all this. I listen on a 4410 JBL speaker. Over the years I have met some incredible engineers in the UK, Japan and Malaysia — some of our better parts are coming from Malaysia. The Chinese — they make the whole microphone and they just stamp your name on it. No, no, no. I have one friend who's a tooling engineer — he builds my handles. I recently met up with a suspension engineer who designs parts in sorbothane rubber. If you look at my stuff it's all different from other companies. I want that. I show the engineers what I want and we go back and forth until we get something that works great.
How did you come to the idea of a large diaphragm dynamic mic and how are you getting around some of the physics problems that people have encountered in the past in trying to design these?
I was sitting in Joe Walsh's house one day. He said, "You know Bob, the bigger things are the better they sound. You need to build me a big microphone." So, as a joke, I started working on big diaphragms. One of my friends that used to work at one of the major mic companies — he was an R&D [research and development] engineer and he got fired from there because they don't do R&D anymore — I called him and asked, "What is your experience with large diaphragms?" He said, "They don't ever work." I asked, "Why?" He said, "Because the transient response is going to be awful." The answer being because, like big wings, you can't move it. Joe and I figured out how to 'tame' the monster and make it work.
