About Computer equaliser
Computer has to know exactly where everything is and how big it’s going to be, so it can space the grooves apart the right way. Neumann lathes – the automatic lathes – would do all that for you. But most people would try to have one equaliser and sort of fudge the other channel by moving the gain control up and down. The Sontec was the first equaliser that allowed you to adjust the program and the preview, particularly in the bass – which should be in phase – which made the disc a lot better and reduced their reject rate, because you no longer had to worry about overcutting. If you set up the lathe correctly, you were going to get a good disc. This made engineers very happy, clients happy… everyone was happy. And although people liked the original ITI equaliser, George Massenburg and I agreed that we preferred a faster more neutral-sounding equaliser for mastering. And so we went ahead and designed the boards – the earliest Sontec boards – via the telephone. George was in Los Angeles; I was in Baltimore.AS: How did that work?BM: I was the parts person: ‘Okay, you need this kind of transistor, let me see if I can find it’. We were taking the prototypes to Doug Saks’ mastering lab, to fine tune things there… which may explain why people say that this is the closest thing to a tube they’ve ever heard in solid state equipment, because it was developed listening to tube equipment.But we had significant problems. We couldn’t get the first stages of these things to work in any way that made us happy. Then one night I was reading a book about switching transistors, and they were talking about how large the geometry inside a switching transistor was compared to a signal transistor. And I thought, well, if the geometry is bigger, the resistance is lower, and if the resistance is lower that means it has less noise. Why couldn’t we use a switching transistor? So I called George and George didn’t laugh, and he said ‘well, I can try it’. And he built a new front end using a pair of switching transistors, which had enormous surface area inside them, and it worked like a charm! What’s more, it actually sounded good: it was fast, it was stable under the right circumstances, and it didn’t catch fire… it drew a lot of current, but it sounded great. George eventually wrote me another note saying: ‘This is, and always will be, the world’s best-sounding amplifier’. I think he was right… he doesn’t think he was right. When George came in, it didn’t take me long to realise he was a very smart young man who seemed very interested in recording. SONTEC IN THE 21ST CENTURYHearing all this history pour from Burgess was like peering through a looking glass into the whole history of audio. But what of the here and now? Some 36 years later and Burgess
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Output stages for the amplifiers – we got an output stage to work but we hated the input stages. Finally the chief engineer at ITI said, ‘hey, I’ve designed amplifiers before’, so he designed an input stage which we glued to our output stage, and that amplifier (with two variations) are used in the ITI equaliser. It has no slew rate, it’s got a bit of second harmonic distortion, but its really warm and really punchy.FROM DESIGN TO MARKETAS: Did you ever intend to sell the equaliser back then?BM: Well, interestingly, George looked at me and said, ‘do you think we could sell this EQ?’. And I said, ‘I’ve been ready to ask you the same question… I think it’s saleable’. So we talked the boss into getting the engineering people to put it into a package – very much like the Sontec front panel people recognise today. Following on from that, George and I attended the AES show (in New York in 1971). And to our knowledge no-one was doing the live demos on the floor at that time, so we brought an Ampex machine and two sets of headphones. This was a big mistake, because within the first three hours we had people queueing down the aisle. The next day, we had people down the aisle and around the corner, because people were ringing and telling their friends to come and hear the new equaliser! We took so many orders for this thing, I couldn’t tell you. We got back to Baltimore at the end of the show and reported in that we should start making these things in quantity immediately. The ITI engineering manager and chief shareholders had a meeting and decided they were going to make 10 a month and keep them scarce. MAKING THE SONTECBM: They were a bit labour intensive, but conveniently ITI had all these manufacturing people sitting around with nothing to do, because their colour camera was still on the drawing board. ITI then hired a professional salesman to help sell the equaliser and pretty soon the orders came in. They were still only going to make 10 a month, but at least they were selling all of them, which paid the bills.AS: What was the model number of this EQ called?BM: The original unit was called the ME – the Mastering Equaliser 230 – and it sold for $1460 in 1971. This equaliser lasted not quite 10 months. Being video guys, ITI didn’t believe that absolute clarity of audio was important (unlike us!), and worse still, the unit inverted polarity from input to output – you can probably imagine what kind of a commotion this caused among the buyers! We had to recall just about every equaliser and put a little extra block of two amplifiers near the power supply to invert the signal and get it back out in phase.AS: To invert the inverted signal?BM: Exactly. Which was a real fiasco, and didn’t help the reputation. On the other hand,
