Ken & Josie Hirsch

Ken Hirsch has had a varied career in live sound, studio recording, product support and electronics. These days he and Josie, his wife and partner, head up their original company, Orphan Audio, along with the revamped Quad Eight and Electrodyne brands.

LC: Where did you start out working? Do you have an EE degree?

KH: All of my education has been self-inflicted. I found with most of the really good guys out there, a lot of them have really good book learning, but it's only because they'll sit down and read a book when they can't figure out what they need to know. They do it because they love doing it.

LC: What was your first experience working with audio electronics?

KH: A friend of the family owned a scientific instruments company. He had a couple of instrumentation amplifiers lying around and gave them to me when I was six. This kind of sparked my interest. It took off into, "What's really going on behind all of this?" I realized that there was a melding of music and electronics. I would ride my bike downtown to the TV repair store and look for hopeless hulks and haul home tube tape recorders and receivers. I'd take them apart and shock myself badly. Synthesizers essentially were just starting to come in in the early '70s and I started looking at that, started building my own guitar amps and built my own echo unit because I knew I couldn't afford a Binson [Echorec]. Eventually I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. After a couple of years there I realized that I was not quite learning the way I was hoping. I had the opportunity to leave college and move in with a friend of mine in Malibu who had grown up with Alan Sides and some of these other characters in the recording industry. I moved into a house with seven guys, each of us with a different specialty in electronics. We immediately started building a recording studio. Then I started doing little jobs here and there for various celebrity artists in Malibu. They started finding out about this wacky kid with hair down to his waist who could come out and totally redo your studio for you. During that time I started recording albums with Dennis Dragon [issue 69] with the Surf Punks. From there I got a call from a local bar owner who had bought a heap of PA — I sifted through the rubble and built a pretty respectful PA. Here was what set the tone for about the next ten years — "Can you stay and run the place while we find somebody else that will do it?" This repeated over and over again as I would build a huge recording facility, install and wire the equipment in, set it up and do the first sessions — "Gee, can you stay around as chief engineer until we find somebody else who wants to do it?" From there I started going out and I spent the next 12 years on the road touring the world with various bands, enjoying the heck out of it.

LC: Doing live sound?

KH: Doing live, front-of-house sound and band tech. I ended up touring with bands like Little Feat, Toto, Supertramp, Pink Floyd — I think the most fun I had touring was with the Dixie Dregs. That was one of the bands that I got the most time touring with.

LC: What happened next?

KH: I then decided after being on the road for 12 straight years, going back and forth between having a little money and then coming back into town and realizing that the money I had [needed] to go to pay all the bills, I decided maybe I should get a straight gig. A buddy of mine, David Gordon [Quad Eight and Josephson Engineering] got me the chief of service gig with Numark. From there I moved to JL Cooper — I was their automation support and service engineer and I would do all of their field installations. From there I moved to a company called 7th Level, which was an art technology corporation that Scotty Page had put together — he was the saxophone player for Pink Floyd and Supertramp...

LC: Oh yeah! The mullet guy.

KH: Yes. The mullet from hell. We generated capital with a silkscreen operation on the first floor. We did all sorts of unique, licensed artwork on the first floor, which paid for the recording studio on the second floor. We purchased a Euphonix console. At that point I started getting familiar with the console, and this became fascinating to me because of [it's] power. Eventually I decided to move to Euphonix, spent 12 years with them and became pretty much the worldwide specialist on the CS series and the west coast regional service guy. After 12 years of the company I was still the only guy in Southern California. The recent economic downturn forced the company to drop about 20 percent of their staff, and so now I'm sitting here, basically working my butt off developing Electrodyne, Quad Eight and some new products. I am also now in the process of offering our engineering and design skills to other people who want to develop products.

LC: A lot of companies don't actually employ full-time designers.

KH: A lot of times if you've got a product idea you really need someone to help you do the actual electronics or mechanical ergonomic design so that it becomes something people can relate to. As I was doing all of these various jobs, Orphan Audio kind of came to be. In about 1984 or '85 I started collecting documentation, and that's what Orphan Audio really started out as — document preservation for companies that had ceased to exist and nobody was supporting them anymore. I would find little caches of documentation, schematics and spare parts. I started collecting these, not really knowing what I had gotten myself into. I was working for David Baskind in the back of Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, prototyping David's designs and occasionally repairing a pile of tube microphones, learning from David and Ed Bissot. At the same time I met John Hall. Within a few years I had met Dick Swettenham and guys like Harvey Rubens, who worked with David and Ed and eventually was one of the primary engineers at Aphex Systems. Not realizing how Herculean these guys' intellects and skills were, I'd just look at them and go, "Okay, they know what they're doing. I'd better pay attention." It was the greatest thing in the world to be sitting there with people like this. I'd walk up with some document I'd found and it had their signature on it and I thought, "Wow, this is interesting. How did they do that?" And these guys would take the time and explain it to me. It is the nature of their love of what they do.

LC: How did you end up with the names Quad Eight, Sphere and Electrodyne?

KH: We started seeing that companies were casting off their older products. When Mitsubishi came in and partnered with Quad Eight — because Mitsubishi wanted an American platform to sell their X series digital tape machines — they were looking for a marketing avenue.

LC: Legally how do you get the names and the rights to use them for companies?

KH: I started doing research. I went out to the USPTO [United States Patent and Trademark Office]. I went out on the web to the government sites and started doing a trademark search. I discovered that for 15 years and before — basically as far back as the USPTO will track — the words "Quad" and "Eight" never existed together, nor were ever trademarked. At that point I went, "Okay. I've been doing business as Quad Eight, so I have a legitimate claim." I had the assets — the mechanical, electronic and intellectual — and I'd been supporting the products. I sat down with my patent attorney and he said, "We make sure there's no claims on it and we apply." Six months later I had it — same thing with Electrodyne. Electrodyne had been bought, sold, bought, sold and then completely abandoned. This is not the case with Sphere. Sphere is still the property of Don McLaughlin and he is still around.

LC: So in that case...

KH: I have to negotiate with Don directly. That's the thing — I won't just wholesale snatch something out that somebody else has an active claim to. Orphan Audio is really the educational division — documentation, spare parts, engineering and systems and kits. I've designed this front panel that has all of the controls on it — phantom phase, impedance, pad and a rotary gain. Those all go through a ribbon connector that's basically signal, ground, signal, ground, signal, ground, so it's nicely isolated. That goes to an adaptor card and each adaptor card is different for the preamp card you're building.

LC: It's kind of universal?

KH: A universal front end and it can be modified because you can actually cut parts off that card. If you don't need the pad, you can just leave the impedance switch in there. There's a bunch of different ways you can use it. This card forms the basis of almost every preamp that we build, so it's a really nice thing. It was originally intended for internal release and the [second] version that we built is now set up so that I can hand it to anybody who has kit-bashing skills. They can, without spending all the time trying to draw it out, hand wire all the back of the switches. Just plug a few of these things into the circuit board, plug some wires on and bang, there it is. You get something that's at least usable. It's on predictable centers and uses reliable parts. From there I've developed a bunch of what I call "thing-doers" — a term I borrowed from Harvey Rubens. Alpha Products makes this one switch that can be 1x12 and 2x6 and so on, and you can form different things with it. You can create a volume ladder, a multi-point selection switch or a balance section, whatever you want by just stuffing it with resistors. You can create a variable filter by using RC networks on it. We have little amplifier cards, XLR connector cards that have various switching functions for mic and preamp — all of these we originally developed for the custom shop business. These came out of Orphan Audio, but they were developed to be used with Electrodyne and with Quad Eight's custom shop.

LC: I know you make line card and preamp adapter kits.

KH: We've got the Quad Eight 227 kit, which we've supported for many years, and we're just about to finish a Sphere M-1200 kit.

LC: Is that a line card too?

KH: It's a preamp card that was really popular in the custom consoles and all of the Eclipse series. We've got a kit for the Electrodyne LA-1600 and LA-602B line amplifier, which makes one heck of a punchy preamp. Then there's another one coming along for Quad Eight, which is the CA-727 preamp — basically an early '70s, 2-channel preamp on a single 3x6 card. All of the development we do there migrates into Electrodyne and Quad Eight, and initially supports what we call the custom shop divisions of Electrodyne and Quad Eight. Someone will send in a module or I'll pull one out of my shop and rack [it] up.

LC: Aren't there new products too?

KH: From Electrodyne the new products are the 500 series modules — the 501 preamp and the 511 EQ — which are starting to get wildly enthusiastic esponses from everyone. We spent months and months just beating these designs to death and handing them to people and saying, "Do your worst. Don't pull any punches."

LC: In cases like that, are they new designs or modified existing designs?

KH: Again what we did was we looked at the best of what had been done back in the day. With Electrodyne we're looking at late '60s, early '70s. We looked at the design that had the most popular and usable features on it and then we looked at all the different versions of the schematics. Having the original archives really helped because I was able to go into the original production master notes and look through it and go, "Here's a note from John. 'What we should really do is...'" And I'm going, "Ah ha! Now I understand what this extra resistor was here for." I don't just clone something. Anyone can clone something. Sometimes people clone things quite badly — they find a way to cheap out or they miss the point of what the original design was doing. The real challenge is, "How much can I learn from designs that came before?", "What improvements can I put in that people are actually asking for and will use?" and, "What can I change about the circuits that will improve it without detracting from what the original device was?" A lot of times that straddles a difficult line because some of the devices we work with are quite primitive, and you're dealing with a situation where depending on how you load the input and the output — it's going to change things. You have to design the inner workings so that it can compensate and manage them. There are some early Electrodyne compressors that, depending on how you load them they'll behave completely differently. That's not what you really want them to do. They were designed to see 600 ohms in, 600 out and nothing else. That's not true with modern recording gear anymore.

JB: What about Quad Eight?

KH: On the Quad Eight side we've got a new summing mixer coming out which is a slight departure from what everyone else is doing with the summing busses. It's all active and all discrete. It's kind of interesting — a lot of cross-pollination, a lot of the things we learned when we were trying to make improvements on the Electrodyne circuits. We realized, "Oh the 16-volt circuit will work at the bi-polar 28-volt level and all we have to do is tune this up a little bit and we can get an even better performance out of it."

JB: Are you running the business out of your home with just the two of you?

KH: Yeah. We employ Pat Wolfington, former Chief Engineer at Groove Tubes, Gauss and Electro-Voice as part time contract chief engineer of Quad Eight.

JB: But you don't do manufacturing here?

KH: The custom shop stuff is done here, but the new Electrodyne stuff — that's actually being handled by Pete Montessi at Pete's Place.

JH: May I add in a line of legalese? Quad Eight Electronics and Orphan Audio are both LLCs and I'm the principal officer.

KH: There are certain advantages to having a woman own the company, and it releases me from having to deal with all of that day-to-day stuff. I'm just engineering. I get to design. I get to create. I couldn't be happier.

LC: And you get to deal with...?

JH: Everything else. Suppliers, shipping, receiving, finance and contractor management...

JB: And then you manage all of that?

JH: Yes. KH: Her background in corporate management has given her such a wide range of skills that it has really given her the ability to understand how to manage any project from concept to distribution.

www. quadeightelectronics. com, www. orphanaudio. com, www. petesplaceaudio. com

Thanks to Ken and Josie for dinner and drinks, and Jason Hiller and family for hospitality and transportation.