Over the short history of live sound, we have continuously benefitted from improving technology. I’m lucky to have been there from the beginning of big touring PA systems. I’m also a little unusual because I’m both mixer and equipment designer. It makes for a different perspective.

The new processor we have developed is a significant step forward. It’s the result of many years of experience and a unique team of people. Before getting into the technical highlights, it might be interesting to talk about the evolution and motivations that led to the development of this new tool.

As a kid, I had an electronics lab under my house in Australia. A small group of kids from school enjoyed electronics - we would go to the Army/Navy disposal stores to scrounge for components. Our group built an AM radio transmitter with a ridiculously long antenna stretching from one end of our school to the other that we operated after school, right along side our favorite pop station. We didn’t realize that we had made a super-efficient combination of antenna, funky old tubes (valves to us), resistors, capacitors and inductors. Instead of broadcasting our student radio show to the neighborhood, we were broadcasting over most of Sydney. Then the Aussie “Feds” busted us!

Two of us from that same high school group went on to start our own sound and lighting company at age 18. Phil Storey and I dropped out of university, and with $50 each, registered the company at my home address. We operated out of my bedroom (in a boat shed) before we could afford to move to real premises above a nearby shop.

An early production line at fledgling JANDS, which went on to become Australia's largest sound and lighting company.

The company was initially called J & S Research Electronics, until someone suggested the name JANDS. We designed and manufactured all sorts of lighting, guitar amps and PA gear, in addition to starting a light and sound rental division. Our PA system consisted of full-range loudspeaker columns and amplifiers with simple tone controls. No crossovers necessary, and what passed for equalization (We didn’t even call it EQ back then.) was just bass and treble knobs. If you couldn’t do it with bass and treble then you were out of luck mate!

PA EVOLUTION

I sold out of JANDS and planned on traveling, meeting Roy Clair around 1970 when he came to Australia with the band Blood Sweat and Tears. He brought the sound system with him because there was nothing in Australia. The PA was the first we had seen of a horn system in Australia. Before his arrival, he had the “W” bass boxes built to save shipping weight, and its affiliated costs.

Roy put four 15-inch woofers in the two W boxes, added his multi-cell mid-range horns and “bullet” superhigh tweeters to make a three-way system. The show was outdoors, and I was very impressed; although in retrospect, the Altec (Lansing) 1567 tube mixers, Altec cut-only EQ and domestic crossover by Pioneer were pretty basic by today’s standards. The crossover gave you a choice of six, 12 and 18 dB/octave crossovers and the hiss came for free. Linkwitz-Riley crossovers were unheard of.

Early EQ using magnetics. Inductors made from transformers, pictured along the bottom, work with capacitors to create frequency selective boost or cut.

Roy invited me to come and visit Clair Bros in the U.S., so I stopped by on my way to London. Clair Bros was really small, based in an old barn north of Lititz, Pennsylvania. Morris Kessler, founder of SAE, a pioneering hi-fi company, had built what was effectively his high-end consumer graphic EQ into a card designed for a mixing console. Clair Bros had installed these printed circuit cards into a few mixing consoles, and this was my first opportunity to use selective EQ circuitry.

It used old-fashioned toroidal inductors, made from wire that was wound around magnetic cores that varied from the size of a nickel up to the size of a mini doughnut. When you combined these different sized inductors with various capacitors, it created a switchable, frequency selective circuit that allows for boosting or cutting a particular band of frequencies.

These inductor based circuits are expensive to manufacture, and as soon as op amps started to improve, they were replaced by electronic equivalents. That’s the interesting part. I didn’t really think the electronic equivalents sounded as nice as the original. There was something about the simplicity of the original inductor style EQ circuitry that sounded warm and natural, which complimented the music flowing through them. We later found that this was largely due to the limitations in the new integrated circuit amplifiers in the non-inductor versions.

The Clair console that folded out of its case and included plasma bargraph meters.

I ended up working with Clair Bros for a number of years. It was a fun time because most of the stuff we take for granted today was being developed out of necessity. Elvis Presley was my main mixing and sound engineering job. We had to develop methods to hang sound systems - not for sound quality - but to sell the maximum number of unobstructed seats. We were first to use the upside mounted chain hoists to lift the PA, copying the idea from one of the touring ice shows.

GRAND EXPERIMENTS

We also experimented with new crossover designs, equalizers and methods to get the PA dynamics under control. Our first attempt to prevent the amplifiers from blowing up was to put dbx 160 RMS (Root Mean Squared) limiters on each output from the crossover, right before the amplifiers. The amplifiers used to blow up all by themselves let alone from being overdriven.

The RMS limiters used dbx’s proprietary RMS analog modules to control the dynamic range. RMS is a method to measure the true heating power of an alternating voltage. Loudspeakers can tolerate very high peak power, but it’s the RMS power heating the voice coil that will do them in at some point. So it makes a lot of sense not to use the transient peaks or audio average to limit the power output. RMS limiting has the added benefit of sounding smoother and more natural. The short transients get through, and the extended high power is reduced.

Roy Clair patching one of the first live mixing consoles in 1971. It used magnetic inductors shaped like mini doughnuts, borrowed from the graphic equalizers on the left, to create the switchable EQ.

In the early ‘70s, Ron Borthwick and I developed a very unusual mixing console for live sound, and it went on to become Clair Bros’ mainstay mixing console into the ‘80s. It was unique on a number of fronts. The control surface folded right out of the case - no heavy lifting up on to a table. It was the first console to have plasma bargraph meters, which also displayed simultaneous RMS and peak levels. And the meters were conveniently located beside the faders, right where you tend to look. In addition, it was the first live mixing console to have parametric EQ. I had researched the circuits in a prototype console I built in Australia. Before that, the only EQ options were external graphic equalizers and various stepped frequency filters. To be able to continuously tune the frequency and change the shape was a fantastic new experience.

I like to think that when I hear a problem frequency I go right to it on the equalizer. In reality, I’ll probably have to grab a couple of different sliders on a graphic EQ to find just the right one. The continuously variable frequency control of a parametric EQ lets you sneak up on exactly the right area of interest.

Prototype of the first parametric EQ for live audio. Note linear faders for frequency selection and boost/cut to allow the operator to see the EQ condition in a quick glance.

The prototype console I built in Australia actually used linear faders to tune the frequency. I always liked that idea because you get a better graphical representation of the frequency. The position of the sliding knob shows the frequency setting, contrasted to having to look down on a rotary knob to find the frequency. My friend Morris used my circuit and linear potentiometer idea to build the first parametric EQ for the hi-fi industry, under his SAE product line.

Today it’s nearly impossible to find a professional mixing console without parametric EQ, which enables you to change the bandwidth coverage with a simple twist of a knob. The shape of the selected range of frequencies is a function of the resistors and capacitors. The same basic bell curve shape is shared by all EQs, both digital and analog, and is very difficult to vary. For my taste, the filter shape we’ve all been using for years skirts into neighboring frequencies that I often don’t want to affect.

I went back to Australia for a couple of years and founded a joint venture called Clair Bros Australia P/L, which competed with my old company, JANDS. It was a great experience as a mixer because we had to take every tour that came along, but it could become a bit boring because other than the occasional tour in Japan, Hong Kong or New Zealand, we covered the same four or five cities in Australia. So I moved back to the U.S. The successful joint venture with Clair set up the relationship that would follow years later for the development of the new processor.

I left Clair Bros in 1978 and worked for Bruce Springsteen over the next 10 years, and in between tours I started a couple of businesses with the aim of relying less on a life on the road. The first business was promoting and setting up distribution for the first music sampler, from Fairlight. Some friends in Australia created it in the house next door to where JANDS was founded, believe it or not.

DYNAMIC CONSIOUSNESS

As one of the first digital musical instruments and the first ever sampler, the Fairlight gave me a first class introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of digital audio. It used only 8- bit converters, which made me really conscious of dynamic range in digital systems. Each time you add a digital bit, you improve the dynamic range by about 6 dB. With 8 bits you are only playing with 48 dB dynamic range. I was weary of making excuses for the noise - “That sax sample has a nice breath sound to it!”

After my involvement in launching Fairlight, I decided to start my own digital audio company. Previously, while on tour in Japan, I was given one of the players for the brand new CD format, by Hibino Sound. You couldn’t get CD players in the U.S. at that time, and there was very little recorded material available, but I bought as many CDs as possible.

Bruce and "The Boss" walk Madison Square Garden in 1978. Springsteen liked to walk to every area of the venue while the E Street Band played. Jackson dreamed of a remote control.

Mr. Jackson mixing Springsteen at Wembley Stadium on the "Born In The USA" tour, 1985, using two of the folding consoles designed 10 years earlier.

When I hooked the player up to a PA system for the first time, I was prepared for a revelation in sound, and it was a revelation all right, but not what I expected. Sound was harsh, edgy and disappointing. I thought my high-end cassette player sounded better. Thus began an obsession to find out why.

Living in Santa Monica at the time, history repeated itself as I founded a new company in the garage. An obsessed aviator, and living right next to Santa Monica airport, I elected to name the new company Apogee Electronics Corporation, after the highest point in an orbit. (The guys from Apogee Sound chose the same name a couple of months later, creating some confusion.) Apogee Electronics was the beginning of a long series of discoveries of just what compromises the sound of digital audio. That’s another story, but I learned a lot, and it was great fun for a small company to be able to make big improvements in many different aspects of digital audio.

I sold out of Apogee as part of my divorce - yes, many lessons learned not just in live sound and digital audio, but also in life. It was time to put them all together in a new company. Kim Ryrie, the co-founder of Fairlight, had introduced me to David McGrath. David had co-founded a small company called Lake Technology in Sydney.

The early iO/Contour team (left to right): Bruce Jackson, David McGrath, Marcus Altman and Stewart Bartlett.

Before we move along to the overview of the Lake Contour in the following pages of Live Sound, I’d like to share a quick story. Before I joined Dave and Lake Technology, Clair Bros had an idea to improve the sound for every member of an audience. They wanted to give a shirt-pocket radio receiver and headphones to every member of the audience. The radio would then enhance the audio coming from the PA system.

There were numerous problems in achieving a practical solution. The biggest: how do you make the sound from the radio, traveling instantaneously, arrive at the exact time as sound from the PA, which takes a millisecond for every foot traveled?

A prototype radio receiver devised to enhance audio from the live PA.

We made 20 prototypes for Clair Bros that achieved the goal, thanks to a very tricky algorithm by Dave that compares the two sound sources and looks for a match, thereby setting a digital delay for the radio. The effect of the high-quality sound arriving at your earphones at the same time as the PA has to be heard to be believed. Lake built the prototypes, but for one reason or another, the idea hasn’t been fully pursued. It was then that I suggested to Roy and Troy Clair that we start a joint venture to develop new technology that became the Clair iO processor and now the Lake Contour. (I really wanted to design a digital mixing console for live sound. Roy and Troy thought that we should work our way up to the console and suggested there were a lot of shortcomings in digital processors. That sounded pretty interesting too.)

We based the company out of my garage here in Santa Monica; that’s right, the same garage where Apogee Electronics was founded. At this point all the lessons described above came together. The biggest lesson I had learned: just because it’s digital doesn’t mean it is necessarily going to sound better. I also knew that digital processing breaks you of the bounds of analog electronics. Some things can’t be achieved in the analog world - digital makes possible things that haven’t been done before.

Well, after that story, an author bio really seems superfluous. For the record, Bruce Jackson is senior vice president of research at Lake Technology. He was audio director for the Sydney 2000 Olympics opening and closing ceremonies and Barbra Streisand's sound designer/engineer for a decade. He can be reached at B.Jackson@laketechnology.com.

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