Adam curry, John C. Dvorak is episode 737. I'm John C. Dvorak
and northern Silicon Valley while Adam is lost in the woods,
this is no agenda. Hi there. I'm John C. Dvorak in northern
Silicon Valley. And I'm going it alone today, because I've done a
couple of interviews we're going to use on the show. This is a
filler show. Let's be honest about it. Adam is on vacation,
he's taking a break, and I'll blame him. And I'm kind of
taking a break too. This is pre recorded. But it's something we
like to do to make sure that people get some good content
anytime that we're doing something other than the show.
And we will be doing the show again on Thursday. So we want to
remind everybody to definitely go to divert.org/na because we
do need your support even for the shows. I've got two
interviews lined up for you one with John Sculley, the CEO of
Apple, who actually reveals quite a bit in this interview, I
think anyone who's into the computer scene at all will get a
lot of good information from it. That's followed by Bob Heil, the
guy who does the microphones that most podcasters use.
Fascinating guy, great interview, he just has a lot of
stuff to tell us. That's very interesting. So let's start
right off with John Scott. And by the way, before we do that, I
want to apologize John Sculley is using a Macintosh computer
microphone, so he has an echoey sound, and I want to apologize
in advance for that. So let's begin right now with John
Sculley. I'm here with John Sculley. John. Hi, Hi, John, how
are you? Pretty good. Now you have a new book out that has to
do with, I think becoming a entrepreneur, or what's the I
haven't read the book, but I bet it sounds interesting. It's
called moonshot.
It's called moonshot. And as you know, John moonshot as a
metaphor that's been around for a long time in Silicon Valley.
It says that, when something happens that's so significant
that the world is different after it happens than it was
before. It's called a moonshot picking up the metaphor of when
President Kennedy back in 1961 said we're gonna put a man on
the moon and return him safely within a decade. And they did.
Yes. And usually the people who are involved in moonshots are
walk away as billionaires rather quickly.
Yeah, well, this is not. I'm not the man who created this
moonshot, right. And the moonshot, this time is not one
product. But it's really a several different technologies,
cloud, mobility, data analytics, and coming soon Internet of
Things, which are growing at an exponential rate, as you know,
and it's the derivative effect that I'm focused on, which is
the market effect, that the market power is shifting from
the large incumbent companies, to customers and customers are
more and more in control, because they're paying more
attention to the opinions and the recommendations of other
customers than they are to the messages of the incumbent
companies. And you can see that today with so many ways in which
things can go viral, that when customers have something really
good to say about a product or service, it gets out to many
other people very, very quickly. And that's really a game changer
because the technologies are rapidly commoditizing. And the
differentiation becomes how do you find better products and
services that have extraordinary customer experience, hopefully
disruptive delivery costs, and can make customers happy enough
that other customers want to tell about it. And you can grow
new businesses? And there are a lot of examples out there right
now,
how is this different from word of mouth?
It's word about it back in my era, in Silicon Valley, it was
called word of mouth when the apple 1984 commercial came out.
There was no commercial Internet in those days. And it was all
word of mouth that people said, gee, if you see that commercial,
and they pass it on and on, and we didn't even have cell phones,
you recall in those days. And so word of mouth today is
technology enabled with all kinds of chat and photos and
videos and other ways that people communicate.
Has anybody actually studied this? Because it seems to me as
a skeptic, that word of mouth actually goes, I think you could
probably try and trace it to the 1800s or even further back.
Well, you may be right, and I'm a big believer in word of mouth,
if you can do things with it without having to use technology
and it just happens with people talking to people. I think
that's great. I think what's happening though, I think we're
getting more transparency. People have better information,
more information. They know more about products and prices and
and being able to compare products and services than they
ever could before. All of that is helping to shift the power to
the customer. Having more say in how products become successful,
it really changes the ground rules for marketing. Because you
know, big marketing spend isn't enough if you don't have a great
product and service Is that people want?
Well, that's always the case, though. That's that's pre
internet. I mean, if you don't have a good product, no matter
what you do, you're not going to sell many, much of it. Yeah,
well, Human Nature
doesn't change as quickly as technologies do. And so you're
absolutely right that these things have been around a long
time. It's just that they've been amplified. As technology
makes things more accessible to more people more often,
we'll some some of the stuff. I've been watching this, of
course, and some of the things I've noticed is that of late,
the other phenomenon you're describing, are obfuscated
somewhat by the gaming of the system by Google's analytic
their analysis of websites. And when you for example, if you try
still use this as my main example, if I'm looking for the
best weed whacker in the world, I cannot find it online. I can
and then my Twitter followers, and I have 100,000. I use them
as crowdsourcing, which is a new phenomenon where you can
actually go to a large audience at anytime of the day or night
and ask something and you get answers back. I can't get a
definitive answer for the best weed whacker, I can't get a
definitive answer for the best weed whacker using any any
search engine. I get nothing but sites that are exploitative the
ad sites where they sometimes do fake reviews, and they get high
rankings and then they show the weed whacker they're actually
selling coincidentally. And I'm not as much all in on on much of
this sort of thinking because I see too many products that are
not getting the word of mouth. And they're and but all the
opportunities are out there that Facebook is out there that
Twitter's out there, all the systems are out there for
somebody to to make hay. And I'm seeing still seeing a lot of
stuff that doesn't catch on what can be done if you have a
product, and let's make the assumption, this is a good
product, not a crappy product and nobody wants. What happens
if it fails? Well, if
it's a good product, and people are saying bad things about it,
maybe it's not as good as you thought it was. So I think that,
for instance, if you go to Trustpilot, they will put the
ratings of products and services out there. And they'll put the
bad ones there with the good ones. Many companies, when
they're trying to promote their own product and service course
only put up the nice things that people say. And I think that
eventually people see through that and realize that they're
only getting one side of a story. The reality is that what
you're saying is certainly true for some things, but it's not
true. But for all things because we're seeing companies. Let's
take Uber, for example, which everyone would agree with is a
pretty successful company, that they aren't a technology
company. They are an infrastructure company, that's
figured out a better way to deliver a service that people
find really useful. For instance, in San Francisco, I
believe that the taxi industry was about $140 million a year.
Prior to Google, prior to Uber coming out and post Uber, the
taxi industry is still about $140 million a year. So it
didn't change much. On the other hand, Uber has about a 400
million plus revenue per year for its service in San
Francisco. So somebody thought it was worth using the service.
And it expanded the market because as you know, when it's a
rainy day, and you're trying to get a taxi, and you're a lot of
people in town in San Francisco, it's not an easy thing to do. So
I think that the technologies are not what people are buying,
they're not buying the technologies, they're buying
better services as they hear about them. And often it's word
of mouth, someone says, gee, did you try this new service called
lift? Or do you try this new service called Airbnb? Or you
can try TaskRabbit or whatever these new services happened to
be so worried about is still a big way in which customers get
better information. But sometimes that word of mouth is
using technology to telecommunications.
You know, it's funny, you mentioned the Uber numbers and,
and that it hasn't really hurt to taxi business, even though
it's perceived, perceived that it did and the taxi people of
course, are moaning because they figure that that money should be
theirs.
Yeah. Maybe they offered a better service. I mean, I live
in the East Coast when I'm in New York, and trying to get a
taxi when they have a shift change, and particularly when
it's raining, and it's just horrible out and you want to get
a taxi. It's impossible. And so Uber is a godsend in that
particular situation. And of course it will legislate against
a young well, because
we live in a democracy that is largely structured around
special interests and always has been,
right. Yeah, actually, I don't have high hopes for long term
Uber because there's they're I know they're gonna just screw
with them forever.
Yeah, Well, as you can see, it's not just in the US it's, you
know, country after country is coming after them and banning
them for, you know, various reasons. Nobody likes them
because they think they're taking away an industry that
already exists. But San Francisco is an interesting
insight, the fact that the taxi industry didn't go away, it
actually expanded, which he points out to me that people
were pretty fed up with the service attacks his offer, and
there wasn't any alternative. So there was still plenty of demand
out there, there just wasn't enough supply. And over helpful
that supply sorted left.
Yeah, you know, I felt this was the same scenario not to go off
the track too far. But when Napster came out, I've always
harp on this with the industry. When Napster appeared, and it
was a free it was a sharing system. The the year, the last
year of Napster was the highest sales of CDs in the history of
the music industry. In fact, of CDs, sales began to increase
once Napster arrived. And the logic of this for me was that
people discovered new new music because you would go on to
Napster and you'd get a song that you liked, and you wanted a
copy of it, and you'd find somebody's library of what they
had. And you've noticed that they had a lot of stuff that you
liked. And then as you went down the library you saw stuff you
never heard of, but the guy seemed to have the same taste as
you. So you try it out, you say, Wow, this band is terrific, I'll
go buy their CD. And a lot of people did that. And of course,
the industry didn't see it that way. They just saw it as out and
out theft, and trade come before a fall, they decided that was
more important to have this ownership taken to an extreme
and they hurt themselves.
Yeah, that's a wonderful story. And you know, that you just gave
a perfect example of customers paying attention to other
customers. Because you look around, you see what other
people are doing and say, Gee, that's pretty interesting. And
that's a perfect example of customers, assuming a bigger
role in how decisions are made.
Now, if you were to coach and entrepreneur with some new
ideas, and you've seen a lot of them come and go over the years,
and I want to talk a little bit about that about your, I think
overlooked running of Apple for a decade and increasing its
sales tenfold, which people seem to always be befuddled by what
is the one thing that an entrepreneur does? And you've
seen them do over and over again, that they shouldn't do it
all? Is there anything that comes to mind? Well,
you can to be an entrepreneur, you need to be an optimist, and
you need to believe in something, and you hopefully
become passionate enough about it, that you will do whatever it
takes to try to make it successful. Unfortunately, that
can also make you blind sighted to the fact that there may be
obstacles in your way and may not be quite as good in the eyes
of the customer as it is in your eyes. And we often become a
victim of our own success, you get a little bit of success, and
it goes to your head. If you take it to a bigger scale, John,
you and I both remember, in the 1990s, when Intel and Microsoft
dominated the technology world, as the Internet became
commercial with a worldwide web and client server became more
and more important. And the interesting thing is that was
only a decade later, and both Intel and Microsoft, Miss
mobile, and you say well, how could these really smart people
because they are smart people? How could they miss something
that was so obvious, you know, after it happened. And so we we
discovered that when you're in the entrepreneurial world, the
only reason for an entrepreneurial company to
exist, is because it can take risks and do things that other
big companies, you know, may not be able to move as quickly with.
And the big companies may be terrific at scaling. But they
aren't particularly terrific at being able to pivot when an
industry goes through a fundamental change. And so I
think for entrepreneurs, you've got to be constantly scanning
the landscape landscape. I remember, one of the great
lessons I learned from working with Steve Jobs was what Steve
used to call zooming. And he said, you know, let's zoom out
and kind of look at, you know, things beyond our own industry,
and then try to connect the dots and of course, the example when
I was working with him was you know, He zoomed out and
connected the dots between beautiful calligraphy that he
had been exposed to at Reed College and the incredible
engineering workstations using graphics interface that Xerox
PARC was working on at that time. And of course, he
understood personal computers. But he did introduce the apple
two. And so he said she imagine if you could connect the dots
and take things that are in entirely different domains, it
may not be obvious to other people, why those dots should be
connected. And in his case, he wanted to build a product that
would say, computers aren't just for business and technical
people, engineers, scientists, computers are for non technical
people to do creative things. And why not enable people to be
able to publish and make the machines affordable, and make
them easy to use? And so he went off in an entirely different
tack and where other people were working at the time? Well,
that's what entrepreneurs have to do. They have to see things
in different ways and connect the dots. Steve's brilliance was
he knew how to simplify, you know, once he connected the
dots, many entrepreneurs don't know how to simplify, you know,
they connect the dots, but they forget that you've got to make
it a great experience for the customer, or the customer
probably is not going to fall in love with it as much as you do.
Well, that brings me to an interesting question. And
something I think I've thought about I talk about buy your
ticket ever asked you or anybody about the thinking that happened
during the era there earlier in 1990? You were at Dell, what
were your red apples? From what years?
I joined the beginning of 1983 and left in the beginning of
1993 93. You quit? I did. I didn't quit actually I was
pushed out right, you
were you were pushed off because of some strategy, I guess
strategy issues with the board. There was an I don't know if
this is on your watch or not. But there was a moment in time
where the Mosaic browser came out. And it was it was native to
the Macintosh. It was not available on anything else. And
during the same period where this browser first appeared on a
Macintosh, and nothing else at Apple could have possibly
cornered the market on the internet. But instead, the
company fell prey to the there's a kind of a strange thinking
going on during this this early era of the browser based
internet which introduced the mouse to to the interface of the
of the of the internet before that everything was grabbing a
good go to use go free everything was was command line
during this transitional period where Apple could have taken
over the place. Apple came out with something called I think it
was EA world or was it was a clone of AOL and Microsoft was
coming out with MSN as a Information Service not like it
devolved into. So you and everybody, not everybody. I
definitely was not saying this. But I have documentation of
plenty of pundits saying, Oh, well, the internet is great. But
AOL is really great. And that's where everything's gonna go.
Because it's Which to me, by the way, the way I see things AOL
became Facebook, in terms of its community orientation, anyway,
that everyone was pushing this and everybody seemed to got
gotten suckered into believing that these information
utilities, you know, beginning with CompuServe, the source eo
is B kit with AOL was the heavy hitter at the time of 9293. And
then MSN came along and then this I think it was E again, II
World or some something that Apple had, which was actually
kind of nice. What was the it was interesting to me that
everybody got suckered into going into this, the old
fashioned model sticking with the AOL style of online
communication, as opposed to the net, which came out in mosaic
then became evolved into Netscape which went on the PC.
And the next thing, you know, the whole world has changed.
What was going on during that era?
Well, I can fill in some of the gaps. First of all, mosaic
happened after I left while I was there, okay, well,
then you're that gives a plus for you. Okay, but let me
fill in some interesting little details of what you said. First
of all, many people don't realize that AOL almost went
bankrupt. Steve Case came to me in about 1987 or eight, I don't
remember the exact year and he couldn't make a payroll. So we
agreed to make a payroll in return for him licensing Apple,
some of his technology that was used to create the world. So
that was one data point. And so we actually owned, I think about
5% of AOL as part of that deal. The second thing that happened
was that we were working with Cray computer and the University
of Illinois in Urbana. And we had come up with a product that
Bill Atkinson, the first software engineer at Apple that
whoever worked at Apple Bill had created something called
HyperCard. And HyperCard was a prototyping tool, if you recall,
and it was used as a prototyping tool on the Mac, to connect max
over the internet, to the Cray X MP 48 supercomputers at the
University of Illinois, Urbana, on campus, and at that campus, I
believe that Marc Andreessen was an engineering student. Yes.
There Yes, true. So he was, you know, involved with, I think
some of that prototyping of HyperCard on the Mac connected
to the Cray x and p 48. Then, years later, we were actually
working out years later, but in 1987, we were working on
something called the knowledge navigator, which was never a
real product. It was a vision of where what computers might look
like 20 odd years into the future. That was a project I was
working on with Alan Kay. And George Lucas had given me some
insight that we could simulate what this would look like, even
though we couldn't make it from a technology standpoint. So we
made a simulated video of it, which was called the knowledge
navigator video. And I used to take it around the world to kind
of give people some inspiration that Apple really did have a
future beyond what it was doing in those days. So out of that
came, the team that worked on that huge doubly, and Doris
match, went on to a new company that was formed after I left
Apple that was called Netscape. And you remember Marc Andreessen
came to Netscape created the Netscape browser, and it was
called the Navigator. And he definitely had the same designer
who worked on the knowledge and aggregator was the one who
worked on that at Netscape. So what you find in Silicon Valley,
this is very typical Silicon Valley. And you know, you know,
things move around one thing pollinates another thing
pollinates. Another thing. And that's what makes Silicon Valley
so unique is that, you know, people move around, their ideas
move around, and you get the benefit of people being able to
take advantage of little bits of innovation that happen in many
different places. Now, MSN actually came way after I had
left, because until Tim Berners, Lee had created the World Wide
Web with HTML HTTP, there wasn't any way to build a browser on
top of the world wide web. And it wasn't until the browser had
been built and go gay saw that all of a sudden, Netscape came
out of nowhere with a browser running on the World Wide Web.
And it was sometime after that not too long after that, that he
started MSN, the thing that's amazing to me about MSN, I
believe, to this day that MSN still loses money, which seems
really quite amazing considering that it's been around so long,
and I guess it still has a fairly high user base to it. But
those things didn't all happen at the same time, at least in my
era. We didn't have any obvious way to go and build things on a
communications network, because we weren't maybe smart enough to
do what Tim Berners Lee did, which was to create the world
wide web. You may remember back in those days, John, when Apple
was working on General Magic, and another company called
Newton. And we were in those days, expecting we wouldn't have
to build our own telecommunication system, you
know, because there wasn't any way to deliver data over circuit
switch lines at that point in time. So General Magic was a
venture that we funded at Apple, and then we brought in 18 T,
because we needed telecommunications, and we
brought into Sony, as a partner as well, because we needed the
consumer electronics health, Newton was all about
communications as well. But in those days, all we had was the
ability to communicate, you know, maybe four or five feet
from from one newton to another. And of course, it got slammed
because the handwriting didn't really work. Yeah. But, but the
irony of that, is that we had to work with a man named Herman
Houser, who was the creative creator of the acorn computer in
the UK professor at Cambridge University. And he had developed
a unique processor for the, for the acorn, and we work with him
to modify that work into a process there that was called
Arm advance research machine I think it said four. And we own
43% of of the arm at Apple, because it was completely
designed all the design of it because it was the first object
oriented programming language application on a low powered
microprocessor. And that was the first low powered microprocessor
that could handle object based calls. And so everything in the
arm was designed around the dude. So Newton was not
successful. But Newton actually made $800 million, because Apple
eventually sold the 43%. They own that our phone for $800
million, which by the way, kept the doors open at Apple, just
before Steve Jobs came back because one of the really
important decisions Gil Amelio made and it gave them the the
cash to to buy next. So it's interesting how you can connect
the dots by lots of things that happen with many people doing a
lot of innovation along the way, things that you don't often find
in the history books,
know that that story about the arm is a fascinating one. I do
know it. And it's you wonder if they if they were a little more
successful during their Amelio era, which he was tended to be
blamed for. Even though he's, I think it was a National
Semiconductor of Silicon Valley mainstay. He was blamed for
being I think not being Silicon Valley enough, or at least
ambitious enough. But it would be more interesting to me if
they had kept arm to this day, because it's become a very
popular company and Patan very important product.
Well, you know, its market cap today is $26 billion. So 43% of
that would be pretty good. Yeah. The ARM core is in something
like 7 billion mobile devices, so 7 billion mobile devices
around the world. So it went on to become pretty important. And
a lot of the original Newton technology is still found in
many smartphones today.
Now you got involved with smartphones. I mean, very few
people in the United States know about this. But I, since I do a
podcast called The no agenda show, which you should listen to
some time. In fact, if you type no agenda into Google, you'll
see, I think, seven pages beyond whatever. So the I was watching,
I watched foreign news broadcasts, and I was watching
was, I believe was France 24. Van cat. And they did a huge
profile of you on that network. About your phone company, which
you apparently started, I guess, a year or two ago, and it's
already doing quite a quite a decent business. Tell us a
little bit about that.
Sure. Well, I have a number of businesses over in Asia. So I co
founded a firm called inflection point, which we are buying
supply chain companies, everything from IT components to
finished it goods all throughout the ASEAN countries, that
Southeast Asia, India and places like that. And we, like many
people observed over there that, wow, smartphones are really
catching on. And that part of the world is just switching from
2g to 3g, that there's literally billions of young people who
want to own their own smartphone, moved from the
feature phones, which now you can buy for less than $20 Over
there. But they wanted to move to smartphones, but they
couldn't afford the $600 for an iPhone, or for a high end
Samsung phone. So what we observed was that the cars were
selling to a lot of these contract manufacturers in China.
We said gee, the technology has really commoditized. And we
could actually build a very high quality smartphone without
having to invest virtually anything into r&d. And because
we're already in the supply chain business, we don't really
have to invest much into the administration around that
business because we know these markets around around the world
from a distribution standpoint. And so using a frugal expense
model for our overhead leveraging the commoditization
of smartphone technology, we pulled together a really
incredible Silicon Valley design team. And I can't mention all
the names at this point until our products are out on the
market but but they're the people you know, I had worked
with over the years, you would recognize all the names and we
said we will really double down on industrial design and we will
design the best possible system Our phones, we can and will
optimize them around things that are important in places like
Africa where you've got a two hour bus ride to get home. And
when you get home, you have no electricity, and you want to
listen to music or watch the cricket scores or football
scores. And so we optimized around giving people extra
battery life and things that were important and we materially
the sound too much is beach tune, tune the sound to hip hop,
we tune the sound and optimize for the types of music in
different parts of the world, things like that. And so we've
actually built a looks like pretty successful business,
several 100, we'll do, I guess, between three or 400 million in
revenue this year. We're profitable this year. And we're
growing very, very fast. And we are in the emerging markets. Now
we don't sell in Europe or the United States. We're into
Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, is headed off to East
Africa, Tanzania, and Kenya. We're in all the Middle East
countries, both the UAE, the GCC countries, we're moving into
this the CIS countries, which are the former Soviet countries,
we're not going to Russia this time for a bunch of reasons. But
there's a literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of young
people, the number is really over billions of young people
who are in that teenage, early 20s, who aspire to a smartphone,
but have a pretty high taste standard of wanting it to be the
same kind of cultural instrument that shows off and says, Here's
my personality, they just don't want something coming out of a
Chinese factory that looks like a generic phone. So that's the
idea of it. And you know, it's never going to be Jami, you
know, it's not going to be the be a world beater. But it does
create an opportunity for us to Bill what we think can be a
really nice business.
Now this to me, when I first heard this story, what's the
name of the product? By the way, before I ask this question,
it's called OB, OB, I, you know,
check it out, I'm sure on the web, when it comes to mind is
like this is was something that had to happen eventually,
because you're right, that commoditization, if we're gonna
go by Moore's law, things are gonna get cheaper and cheaper
and cheaper to the point where they're, you know, they're what
is right now, the minimum cost from scratch of the of the bag
of parts, at the best you could absolutely do for a smartphone.
Well, you can actually do them for less than than we do.
Because we're not going for the absolute cheapest out there. And
there are people who are literally standing out in the
malls selling smartphones and feature phones. And they have
them in their pockets. You know, you combine like you can buy
Washington in Tiananmen Square, right? For 2535 $45. That's not
the market, we're going after the price points, we're focused
more start around, just under $100. And then we have the
mainstream of our products, it's more like $150. Us. And then we
also sell higher end products, which are, you know, in the high
200 270 $280, the bomb, the bill of materials on those products
are usually about half of whatever
you're doing. Okay, so if it's
a product that's selling for $100, you've got maybe $50, of
build material parts. And
I have been the old rule, there used to be a 4x factor, and then
there's been 3x factor. And then I guess what these because of
volume of sales is so high, you don't need to put your multiple,
so high.
Well, the other thing is because we're already in the supply
chain business and distribution business, and we're and we run
our businesses in Asia, we are very comfortable with businesses
that have had margins that US companies just would walk away
from, and then which we can go in with a product that has a
eight, nine 10% gross margin, and can have an operating profit
of one and a half to 2%. And we're thrilled, whereas most
companies would say, Well, why would I want to be in that
business, but remember, we own the business. The second thing
is that we had looked last year at acquiring Blackberry, and
we'd actually lined up the capital to do it. I have a team
up in Toronto as part of our organization. So we have teams
in London, Toronto, Singapore, Delhi, various places around the
world. And we saw that when we were doing the due diligence on
BlackBerry, we saw that that they had 7000 people working on
their Our handset business. And we were negotiating if they
hadn't pulled the auction, we were hoping to sell it to the
handset business to an elbow. And we would keep the BlackBerry
Enterprise Server business, which is what we really serve as
business, which is what we really wanted. But in the
process of studying that we said, 7000 people, so I asked
our team, CEO, I said, So how many people would you need to
run a handset business like that? He said, Oh, between 50
and 100. And that's when our eyes started to open the window,
why are we trying to buy this company? We have most of the
skills already inside of our businesses. What if we took a
serious look at building our own company from scratch? And that's
what we
will I have to tell you, you're the first first Silicon Valley
guy over the last, I don't know, five or six years that I've ever
heard, take the make side of the make buying decision. It's like
everybody buys nobody makes
no, well, we don't make either remember why nobody's talking
about you, you make you do make. But I'm saying you didn't buy
somebody, you didn't take the easy way out, rather just buy
them and it will run their business maybe do a better job.
Well think of it this way. Remember, I grew up in a
commodity industry called soft drinks, there was very little
difference inside the bottle between a Pepsi and Coke. So I
was pretty comfortable selling a commodity product and building a
distinct personality for. And in the technology world, the way to
build a distinct personality is, you know, it's all in the
design. It's not the marketing. So we watched what yami was
doing with their flash sales in China. And they don't spend any
money in marketing. We watched Google when they started, they
didn't spend any money on marketing. We said if we had a
really, really cool design, we understand distribution
channels. And we understand frugal expense models. And we're
comfortable in a business where we don't have any overhead to
speak of so we can actually make money at price points where the
traditional companies like HTC, and Sony and others are
hemorrhaging losses. Maybe that's forthcoming. And these so
far, so good. But you know, that's one of about 15 companies
I've got, but it's one that kind of tells a different story than
what you might hear. Yeah. And
it's also quite interesting, because when I first heard about
OB, and read about the model and what you're up to, I said to
myself, why doesn't Nokia do this exact same thing? What is
they they've been in the business, they get the supply
chains locked up, they have all these opportunities, and they
just didn't do anything. I don't know, maybe they just felt the
whole thing was to just sell to Microsoft, once they got there.
The Campbell guys hadn't a chance.
Well, the challenge Microsoft has now that they own Nokia, you
remember, they paid $7.2 billion for it laid off about 30,000
people since they bought it. They're still last I heard
hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars every
quarter. And they just announced that they're going to come out
with a Nokia brand. Remember that changing the rest of the
product line to Lumina. They're going to come out with a Nokia
brand product that they're going to sell on a $70 price point.
Well, I can tell you, with their r&d at Microsoft, and their
overhead at Nokia slash Microsoft, there's no other way
in the world they can make any money. So they may choose to
treat it like MSN and say, well, we can we don't have to make
money here. We'll make money somewhere else. But the reality
is, if you're a new company, we had to say, No, we're not going
to go into this unless we can see how we're going to make
money at it. And we actually will this year will
be profitable. You have no zero plans to ever bring these phones
into the United States.
We're certainly not thinking, here's why I was part of the
founding efforts of a company called Metro PCS. Oh,
yes. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I wasn't the founder. But
I was one. That was an outstanding product.
It was an outstanding product. And Roger Lindquist was the CEO.
He was visionary. He was terrific. And it was just a joy
to work with him. And I was kind of like, like, you know, a
marketing resource board member and an early investor in the
company. But in any event that was built on the same model that
the rest of the world is which is a prepaid model, not a
contract, right. And for us, because we are primarily a
contract model. The cost of the phone is buried into the two
year service contract, and the carriers are really in control
of the sales channels. And so it's really, really hard for
someone to break into this business. And so you see someone
like Motorola now owned by Lenovo, is doing brilliantly in
the emerging markets around the world. It's been really
successful for Lenovo, but they don't really try to sell much in
the United States. It's just too hard to crack the distribution
channels and the contract sales model. So there's not any big
logic, why we would come to the US Embassy, we came up with a
radically different strategy, but even Zhao, me, and said,
Don't look for us to come to the US for maybe four or five years.
And of course, they're having amazing success, certainly in
China, but then we'll be in the other markets, but only in the
emerging markets.
What do you think the future for the Apple iPhone is it's become
a cult item. Prestige item is definitely not marketed like
anything else, very wisely gets higher margin because of this
pent up perpetual demand for newer ones that the public has,
or at least the people who are all in on the iPhone. I would
say milieu or what cult maybe. But it's, it's it seems to me,
that is very expensive product that it can't be around forever.
But i By the way, I'm saying this as the guy who said this
will never fly. Even though I never saw the iPhone, I'd made
these predictions because I was goaded into it. I will. I will
say I just but I admire the product. I think it's a great
product. I think it opens the doors to all kinds of cool
stuff. But it seems to be an expensive bottle of wine that is
not that much better than the other cheaper bottle of wine.
Well, when we first looked at getting into the, what I'll call
the budget, mobile economy and the emerging markets, I looked
at it as being like, this is a pretty big expanding niche of
the mobile device market. I now realize it isn't a niche, it is
the market. And the and the anomaly is really apple at the
premium end, you know, apples to BMW, sort of the auto industry
analogy. So, what does Apple do? Well, Apple is actually doing
some really smart things. I think, first of all, if you go
back to WWDC, the worldwide developer conference, last June,
they announced platforms on platforms, they announced
vertical platforms, they announced healthcare, they're
doing, you know, HomeKit, they're Zoghbi working on a car
kit. So they're going into these verticals and building, not just
the horizontal platform that they have the smartphone wars,
always wars with, with Google, but they're going in and they're
building another layer up, which are these vertical platforms.
And they're actually made I do a lot in healthcare. Healthcare is
one of my domains, I've got five companies in healthcare, that
they're going into the healthcare industry, and they're
having quite a bit of success, but of the top, like 19 major
hospital systems in the US, they're already in about half of
them. And they are having a huge impact on many doctors who are
notorious about doing anything with tech using technologies,
who actually feel comfortable with them. And as you know, as
as sensors become more prevalent, and built into more
things, and particularly medical devices, and they get better and
better. And data analytics get better and better. I think Apple
is going to find a nice franchise in healthcare. They
are I think, behind the curve versus Google in terms of the
connected home because Google has nest and drop cam and some
other things. But my guess is you'll see Apple take their iOS
technology, what's what's not apparent, I think everybody that
I know, you know, this is that about eight 80% of everything
that Apple sells is based now on iOS, because they are smart that
their iPhone is about 70%. And their iPad is about 10%. So that
gets them to 80%. And there's a lot of speculation that that the
MacOS will eventually move over to the arm, and it will take on
more and more of the characteristics of iOS. So I
think they are going to take iOS across televisions, I think
they'll take iOS, not television sets per se but I mean more see
OTT type services over the top services. And I think that
you'll see Apple take that big investment that they have in an
iPhone, which is what the iOS and then the various other
things like iTunes and App Store's on top of it and they're
going to continue to verticalized it would be my
guess, because you just can't keep those high margins and just
be like Google, I mean, look at Samsung, I'm at Samsung is
literally getting killed because they got Xiaomi and Micromax and
some of these regional phones coming up with very very good
products looking more and more like the iPhone at half the
price or less of what the iPhone is selling. And for Samsung has
said in there, with incredible investments in research and
development, huge overhead, huge marketing spend, they spend more
on marketing than Apple does by a lot. Oh, yeah, four or five
times more. And so they they've got a completely broken model.
So if anyone is going to fall first is not Apple, it's going
to be Samsung. And my guess is Samsung's going to retreat back
into making components and moving into, you know, their
other appliances. You know, they sell washing machines, and
refrigerators and stuff like that. So my guess is you'll see
Samsung moving away from this high performance on smartphones.
There was yeah, there's been a lot of discussion about this
recently. Samsung has also for some unknown reason developing
its own OS. What is the thinking behind that? Is that when you
use Android as an inexpensive proposition?
Well, they've been working, it's called Tizen. And they've been
working on Tizen, for many years, they just, I think, are
in the process of releasing the Tizen phone, I don't think
anybody wants it. So my, my guess is, it's not going to do
very well. But But Tizen is going to be the operating system
that they intend to use for their internet of things, you
know, all of their connected appliances and things of that
sort. And it may make some sense, they're just not, you
know, knowledgeable enough to know the specifics on it. The
other issue thing with what Samsung has done in the galaxy
six, their newest phone, which just comes out at the Mobile
World Congress, they aren't using a Qualcomm Snapdragon
processor. And that's really big news. In other words, they are
retreating back to things they can control with hardware,
because that's what they're experts at, man, as you know,
they started a Silicon Valley campus a few years ago with the
announced purpose of really becoming a major innovative
force in software. But that's yet to happen.
No, to say the least. Or have you heard of any other operating
systems for phones that are floating around? Maybe kind of
under the radar?
There are a few. I'm just trying to what is the one that begins
with you? I can't remember. But But I think it's almost
irrelevant. But why does anybody want another operating system?
When you get Android for free? So my guess is? I'm both Bucha.
I think it's called?
Oh, yeah, I'll just make a comment. That's a Linux
operation, obviously. And that guy made a comment that they're
going to affect this been for over a year or maybe two, that
there have been there's been discussion about an operating
system for phones, that is going to be a Linux product of some
sort, even androids also Linux product.
Yeah. I don't think that's the biggest news around. Sometimes
people invent things that, you know, don't really need to be in
the Linux world, it would be nice if it actually got its act
together. I think the pride have a Linux box, couple of them, and
they they're great. And you get all kinds of free software, and
you can load them up with with make it functional. So it's just
you wouldn't know the difference, really. But there's
still these things missing. And they can't seem to get around
it. Like Adobe, for example, refuses to put any of its
products on Linux, because and this story I'm told is because
Warnock was irked when ghost script was invented, and they
thought it was gonna ruin him. And so he just has a grudge
against the think it's just a corporate thing. Now,
the thing to watch, John is, is, if there's a new operating
system, it probably needs to be for the Internet of Things where
you've got low powered sensors, and power management is a big
deal. And you know, the smartphone operating systems,
you got a lithium ion battery in there, they're pretty big. But
what do you do with the little miniaturized sensors all over
the place? And I'm a co founder of a company called misfit in
Silicon Valley, and we do sensor based products. But we have six
month Battery Life Summit, one of our major focuses is how do
you how do you extend the length of battery time on these sensor
base based products? It's a very different set of challenges. And
when you're dealing with smartphone, you
have high hopes for the Internet of Things. That's one thing I
wanted to get to last year, which is the Internet of Things
I've been to a couple of kind of showcases of where they're
having Internet of Things items. I'm not immediately a fan of the
idea of Internet of things because this harkens back to me
to the I guess the late 80s When IBM was touting what touting the
idea that the washing machine would call the washer repairman,
and that then your refrigerator would know that you needed milk
and so in order milkweed maybe didn't want milk, but it's going
to do it anyway. And all this kind of bull crap as far as I
could tell. So it began, I think what the personal operating or
personal area operating system where you have, like, just, I
think pre Bluetooth, where you have a little, some sort of a
little network around you that did things or, you know, got you
into the Walmart and put your name up on a board role, that
sort of thing. I always found these to be unnecessary to
anyone's normal life.
Yeah. So here's where I think you have to start. It's not in,
in the consumer space. So yes, you know, Tony Fidel did a
beautiful product with Nest and, you know, drop cameras is cool.
And, you know, GoPro will probably add sensor
communications. So So those things are cool, but that, but
that's not, you know, this trillion dollar industry that
IDC talks about the place where it's really going to have an
impact, I believe, starts in manufacturing. And we're already
seeing that manufacturing is returning rapidly to the US, but
it's obviously not what the same jobs. And it's using, you know,
more and more of what McKinsey has labeled the digitization of
work. And so the people who were behind the McKinsey digitization
of work effort are GE, Cisco, Intel, maybe IBM, I'm not sure,
but certainly the first three, and they're betting heavily on
it. So if you're GE, and you're making jet aircraft engines, you
put 200 sensors on it, and as it's flying over the Pacific is
reporting back, theoretically unfold, maybe it actually in
real time, and it's looking at the outside air pressure, it's
looking at the internal thermal conditions, it's looking at the
speed of the rotors, it's looking at the use of fuel at
those different speeds and pressures. And it's making real
time adjustments on both safety issues and fuel consumption
issues. So that's a very practical example of Internet of
Things That has nothing to do with hooking up your
refrigerator to automatically put or melt when you when you
run out. I'm a skeptic of that, too. And so I think it's going
to be more industrial, commercial, things that are
going to be less expensive. And I think that the people to watch
are not the people who aren't necessarily particularly
creative. It's the it's the big old, lumbering companies like GE
and Intel, and Cisco and others, who may well be defining it.
Another one is what has been labeled as smart cities. You
know, IBM is working on smart cities, Cisco is working on it.
The idea of smart cities is if you could simplify the effort
that people have to find a parking space, you can save
fuel, if you can manage the traffic patterns more
efficiently so that the traffic lights are able to adapt to
whatever the traffic is at a particular time of day, in a
particular location. depending on traffic. You know, you can
save gasoline, you can if you have a very hot day, and you
want to to turn down the number of cycles that the air
conditioning is used in commercial buildings. So it's
imperceptibly smaller than changed and what people can even
recognize, but it saves an incredible amount of fuel.
That's another example. So So these things aren't particularly
sexy, but they're real. And they probably will take. It's not
like introducing the iPhone or Introducing Google, these aren't
moonshots these are things that just kind of work their way into
our society and our economy. But I didn't think ultimately will
be big. Now the estimates are, and it just astounds me the
numbers I hear thrown around 50 billion wireless connected
devices by the early 2020s $17 trillion cumulative industry by
the by 2030. And so these numbers are so large, I can't
even get my head around it. So I think it will happen, but I'm
not sure if it will happen in a way that says dramatic as
introducing, you know, an iPad or an iPhone? Well, you
know, we have a company in Berkeley that's involved in
this. They make sensors that are placed around track traffic
signals at intersections, and they have them all over the
place. And I think they've got a couple of them outfitted around
here and they and they give you a variable pattern for the way
the lights work. If it's kind of interesting, it does I don't
think it's flawless, because I have one near me. And I gotta go
visit these guys because I think they're probably right because
it doesn't sound sexy, any of these levels, because it's not
because it's not it doesn't involve consumer electronics,
which seems to be the only thing that people would deem is sexy.
I don't think traffic new traffic signaling systems. ever
be thought of as That. Is there anything that you see before
we're gonna wrap up? Is there anything that you see in the
consumer electronics space, as you always have actually been
more of a mass market, consumer electronics, you know, type of
guy and so far as your marketing is concerned? Is there anything
that you see out there that people should maybe pay some
attention to in there not?
Absolutely. For the last eight years, I've been really deeply
into health care and telemedicine and things of that
sort. And the consumerization of health care is one of the
biggest things that's already starting to happen. Now, it's
going to be every bit as big as electronic banking. Remember how
skeptical people were 25 years ago about electronic banking and
ATM machines? Well, it's going to be massive in in the
healthcare industry, because more and more of the
responsibility for your own wellness and health, for cost
reasons and for better health reasons are going to be turned
over to people to manage themselves or manage members of
their family. And it means that medical devices are going to be
able to monitor things we're going to be able to customize
health for individuals admitted because you know, in healthcare,
you've got hospitals, doctors, and you've got insurance payers,
and none of them share information with each other. And
if you're a chronic care patient who has five or six specialists,
none of those specialists share information with each other. So
there's a long way to go to improve healthcare and rather
than trying to change all of the, you know, incredible
legacy, illogic things that have built up our healthcare system,
it's a lot easier to start fresh and start with the with the
consumers slash patient, and start to give them better tools
and work your way back and monitor them and create new data
information on these patients. And that's what we're doing at a
company I have called MD live, we have another one called rally
health we sold to, to United Healthcare, which is a consumer
engagement company, again, I always do the consumer side of
it. And, you know, I've got still like, four others like
that. So I'm very enthusiastic about the opportunities for the
consumerization of healthcare, and many, many derivative
businesses that will come out of it.
I guess it would account for the popularity or, or at least the
experimental popularity of these Fitbit type operations where you
wear something and it helps you figure out what you're up to.
Yeah, well, you know, some of that's novelty. I mean, I'm a
founder of a company called misfit in Silicon Valley, we
just raised a $40 million, round out 175 million pre and we were
way oversubscribed. So but we're doing a lot more than just the
devices and they're quickly commoditizing. We're heavily
into data analytics. So we'll have about 240 people in the
company this year. And most of them are in the software and
data analytics side of the business. We're very big in
Asia, we sell in 51 countries, and what are the Fitbits in
those type of products. So the first generation is kind of like
looking at the the early personal computers, you know,
they sort of tell you what's that there's something
interesting going to happen, but they aren't really the
interesting things themselves. We're gonna see some incredible
advancements. For instance, sleep is one of the areas I'm
particularly interested in sleep deprivation is the highest cause
of loss work, worker productivity, and American. And
there are lots of things we can do beyond just sleep apnea. In
terms of improving people's wellness, through sleep, you
have high comorbidity, which means high correlation between
sleep apnea and other chronic diseases like COPD and PTs PSTD.
And type two diabetes, hypertension, congestive heart
failure, things of that sort. That's where the big, you know,
cost of our healthcare system is and these things are all tied
together, particularly the returning veterans coming back
from Afghanistan and Iraq. You know, we we were working with
the VA hospitals, two and a half years ago, and we saw that the
this crisis that suddenly caught everybody by surprise that these
that the VA hospitals weren't giving very good service and
there was a backlog of over two years for some procedures with
these vets. We were seeing it all. And we I remember sitting
around with my my colleagues saying Yeah, somebody is going
to discover a crisis here in a year or two and of course, here
it is. So I don't know why these things are so much a surprise to
people even in the VA or the or the government but they're
pretty obvious when you're sitting there watching as you
know, someone in the industry themselves know in the private
sector side.
Well, that's so how many companies are you running? Are
you your how Are you part?
I do no heavy lifting. I don't run a single company. I helped
found several of them. I'm an investor. I'm on the board of
many of them. I like private companies, not public companies.
And I'm the Rainmaker. I bring in this strategic relationships
and open doors and recruit talent, things of that sort. So
I'm involved in about 15 of
it, as I recall, you are up in Vermont or New Hampshire or
someplace like that for a while. may mean, right. Yeah, Maine,
which is a far cry from Silicon Valley. And now you're in
Florida, which is a far cry from Maine. Well,
Maine, I went to Penn, in fact, you probably remember about
Metcalf. Oh, yeah. So Bob is one of my very best friends. And he
and I lived near each other in Woodside and we live near each
other up in Maine in the summertime. And we've co founded
an organization called Pop tech. And we were back in the in the
90s, helping demystify high technology for non technical
people. And we brought in a lot of friends from MIT and Carnegie
Mellon and Stanford and various places to help us with it. And
so there's this quite an interesting, technical related
community up in Maine in the summertime, especially out of
the Boston area. So I was there. But then I got divorced. And so
I don't go to Maine anymore. So I'm now down in Florida, and I
spend time in New York, and I'm out in California, you see a
couple times a month as well.
All right, well, I think that'll conclude we should talk again
sometime and maybe in the next six months or something and
catch up with the latest sounds good. Thanks, John. Was John
Skelly. I hope you got something out of that want to remind
everybody that we do have a show coming up on Thursday, we have a
show coming up twice a week, every week, and it's going to be
live again Thursday morning. divorce.org/and. A, we will be
naming all the people that became executive producers for
these last two shows on that show and crediting everybody as
usual for helping us dvorak.org/na We do need your
continued support. So let's move on to Bob Ohio, who is a
microphone designer but also as a sound guy who is very famous
for creating the big wall of sound that became popular
popular with the power trios of the 70s. Very interesting
character, I had a good time talking to him. So I'm talking
here with Bob Heil, and who is you're in Illinois.
I actually am in Missouri right now. That's where my home my
station lab and all that. You Ozarks, but our plant is back in
Illinois,
so you're up in the Ozarks and up died round Branson, or
someplace like that.
Uh huh. Right at 3540 minutes north of blant. Branson, just
north of Springfield, Missouri.
I've always I've been in the Ozarks a couple of times in
Arkansas. And one of the things I think is cool if they have
wineries up there. Yeah. And one of them just actually make some
dynamite product. This familiar something or other I can't quite
remember their name, but they make a tremendous high quality
wines. Drive up there some time and get some nice wine growing
area I have to say. So how did you get started in audio in the
first place?
I guess it all comes about because of ham radio.
So you are what made you become a hammer in the first place.
One of my high school chums when I was a sophomore, actually,
it's kind of a interesting story in that I had been playing
accordion when I was 10. I think everybody was issued an
accordion taste. And my high school chum his dad's was the
organist at the Baptist Church in Marisa Illinois, little town
of 2000 people out in the coal fields in Southern Illinois. And
he also his dad was also the music director, the grade school
man. I was about 12 years old. I used to go down to his house
because he had a brand new Hammond organ and his son was my
best bud there and I'd go down and play that organ and went
down there one time and I heard all of this stuff in the back a
bunch of tones and stuff and after I got through playing the
old Hammond organ, I went back there and my my friend George
was learning the Morse code to get his ham radio license. And
long story short is that I followed him and a couple of
years later I got my license and we became very involved in ham
radio and also at the same time very involved in the in the
Oregon situation my mother and father bought me a beat Free
when I was 12 years old, which was really something in those
days, it was actually a C two model. But I then just I both of
those hobbies kind of went together and they were hobbies
at that time. But then I ended up becoming the substitute
organist at the Fox Theater at the age of 15. For Stan, Ken, I
became his protege. He taught me so much stuff about the
Wurlitzer and I learned to listen that this is important in
that we had to voice and tune those six 7000 pipes in that Fox
organ. And I he taught me how to listen harmonically dissect what
you're hearing, it's not just in tune, but does the note beside
it have the same harmonic characteristic as a note, above
it, and so on. And you had to go through 1000s of pipes and they
all had to had to sound the same harmonically. And of course, in
tune, while I learned how to listen, it was just a real
blessing. And that's how it started i i played, oh, gosh, I
played about 15 years professionally. And I had a pipe
organ in a restaurant in St. Louis, I built that pipe organ.
We built the pipes and stuff over wicks pipe organ in
Highland, Illinois, and Martin wick became a very dear friend.
But I could do all the electronics of it to a lot of
relays and all kinds of switches and stuff. And the two just,
they just fit together. So well in my life,
I try to explain a little bit more I, the funny thing is about
this tuning by ear and listening to harmonics versus just in tune
notes. I've heard this from motorcycle repairman that are
really good. They say that they their real instrument. At the
end of the tuning cycle is the hear what the cylinder sound
like as it because it come out of the pipes, it's really
listening process more than anything else, what so you're
you're so if I took a and just tuned, say 20 pipes, just by the
notes with a tuning device, how would that differ from some
harmonic information being missed out on?
Well, they would be in tune, you would know it immediately. If
they're not in tune. However, one of them might have more mid
more mid range sound, and the other one might have more top
end. And then the other one might have a little lower
frequency than the other. Now that has nothing to do with the
the pitch it has to do with what it sounds like. And like in the
pipe organ, we have ranks, sets of pipes you anywhere from 61
out and 90 plus pipes in a rank we'd have a clarinet, they
actually sounded exactly like a clarinet that they would be from
one inch out to 16 foot. And as you go, let's take middle C you
can see that in your in your mind, middle C and as you go to
C to D right beside it. r e r f is your run up and down those
two are three notes. Are they harmonically perfect? Do they
both have the same balance of highs, mids and lows, of course,
they would be in tune. But we're talking about the harmonic
content of how they sound to each other because we want them
to all sound the same. And that there are two adjustments on
pipes, one at the top that you lengthen or shorten the pipe for
the pitch. The other one is down on the read. There's a read in
the bottom of that clarinet pipe. Same thing with the
trumpet pipes who actually have bells of brass trumpets from one
inch to 16 foot and they look exactly like a trumpet. They are
the end the bells of trumpets but instead of somebody blowing
in them, it's their set into a chest that has air valves in it
and push the key it causes air to come up. That's how it works.
But they all have to be harmonically related to the next
one beside it and
how long does it take? How long does it take to tune something
like that? Wurlitzer Oh,
and or an instrument like that. It could be days it could be a
week.
You still play?
Yeah, I just played a concert Friday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The Sooner Chapter of the American Theatre organization, a
very nice instrument that the club has restored over the years
and they have it in a technical college theater. And we had a
whole bunch of people there and I still play I love playing
these concerts in these old theaters. Then, of Friday
morning, I played at the Miami Coleman theater, just a gorgeous
theater in Miami, Oklahoma, and that's just across the line of
Missouri, Arkansas and where they all meet right there
together. Kent. In fact, I went Missouri, Kansas, back to
Missouri, right during the corner is Miami and they have a
gorgeous little Oregon. And I played there too. And I'll be
doing more concerts this summer there.
Are you Yes, I
love playing Do
you like going around the country playing alien
instruments like different organs? Because they're all I
guess there's very few of them that are standardized there,
especially in big churches, they would all be different.
Yeah, the only thing is, I don't play any church stuff. It's all
theatrical stuff. Wurlitzer is mostly and and all the word it
says basically, we're the same, the consoles were the same that
the clarinet stopping and just close your eyes, they are right
here about one o'clock to die patients, stops there at about
two o'clock to trumpets are here and so on. And so the consoles
are laid out the same. And you can pretty much have no problem
with that the situation is how they perform how they work. And
if they're tuned and voiced properly, and so on. And yes,
you're right, they all differ no matter what they are. And it's
it's kind of fun. And of course, that's part of the artistry of
old theater organist is to be able to pile on a strange
instrument and make it sound really good. And that's that's
part of it.
So this ear development where he fine tuned your your abilities
just for your sensory awareness of the differences in the
harmonics that evolved into you becoming, I guess, where you are
today, and so far as the microphones are concerned, but
in between, you were the guy who did a lot of rock concerts. And
and Well, from what I understand, pretty much invented
the idea of a wall of sound, literally a wall of sound where
there's so much noise coming out. It just blows people away.
Yeah, that was an interesting thing I had played all those
years and I got I really got tired and got married, wanted to
stay home at night a little bit. So I was very fortunate. I go
back to my little hometown, 50 mile southeast St. Louis,
Marisa, Illinois. And I was so fortunate I got a Hammond organ
franchise and opened a little music store there. That's pretty
amazing. Because it Hammond I had worked for them when I was
1920 years old i i was a demonstrator at the NAMM shows
and their music shows. And I would play the organ to
demonstrate it in their booth and so on. But I so I knew the
right people on Okay, let's see if I can do this. And it
happened. I got a Hammond organ franchise. So I started selling
lots of Hammond organs. Because I was well known in the St.
Louis area because of playing at the fox and the restaurants and
the TV and the radio and all that. But it was very strange
that I started getting these kids would come in with their
amplifiers and never forget one of the first he came in and he
had this box and he said this a music store and I said yes sir.
What's up me? Oh, my amplifiers broke. And it was a Fender
guitar amp. I'd never seen one. And being a ham radio operator.
I was very inquisitive. And I turned it upside down. And what
did I see? A pair of five, year five, year four and a pair of
606 as well. Those are common parts of a modulator and Nard
ham transmitters but turned upside down and I knew exactly
what he probably tried to make it go to 12 and it only went to
10 and blew it up. So I had to spare parts there and about 1520
minutes I had it fixed and he was just freaked out. Oh my
goodness. You didn't even have one of them schematic. No, I
didn't have one of them schematic thing. And the word
started flying around Southern Illinois in the St. Louis area.
There's this guy with a soldering iron and band started
coming to me to fix their stuff. And then at the same time, the
promoters in St. Louis. One called me one time and I wanted
to rent a Hammond organ. And that just parlayed into all
kinds of things with you Because in those days, Hammond organ
stores were Steinway dealers and all as you never even couldn't
even walk in a store unless you were in a suit practically.
Well, here I was as freaky little music shop. I started in
Southern Illinois and you could buy Hammond organ there and we
started renting them, renting them to like Janis Joplin and
all these great bands that would come through Stevie. When he was
a little baby. I call it but the promoters had to, they had to
rent a Hammond organ that needed to come to downtown, they'd have
to have this much PA and I thought to that, well, I started
going to these rock concerts, and I'm going to what is going
on, I have these little bitty junky little columns and four or
five speakers in them to fill it 15,000 seat room, you gotta be
kidding. And so, another blessing hits me one day about
67. That would have been, I roll by the Fox Theater hadn't been
there now and a few years, I want to say hi to the stage
manager. I grew up to the back door. And here's these great big
speakers out in the in the alley. So when I said, What's
going on here, he said, Oh, we're putting in new speakers.
So what's all those out? Now? We're throwing them away? I
said, Really? Can I have them? So I went and got a truck and
haul these Alltech a fours not all tech a fours. Huge. Yes. I'm
very familiar with that speaker. Yeah, they're, you know, they're
huge. They're 10 foot wide and about six or eight. Hi, I had
four of them and had some, some JBL horns I acquired and some
tweeters, and I needed to get some amplifiers. I had heard
Macintosh was pretty good. So I bought a bunch of Macintosh
amps. And the next thing you know, I had this really far out
PA and I didn't know no one else was had not done this. And I get
a call one day from that stage manager at the fox. This would
have been in 7071. Hey, you still got those speakers? And I
said, yeah, do they work? I said, Yeah, I got him hooked up.
He said, Here, talk to this guy. They came in here tonight. And
their pa didn't show up. He handed the phone to Jerry
Garcia. The Grateful Dead showed up at the Fox Theater, my
beloved Fox. And I've been hanging around in since I was
15. They had no PA and I told him what I had. He said well get
it up here. And they were incredibly impressed because it
was something special. And there's an article you can go on
the Internet into Google and put the night rock'n'roll sound was
born. And there was a guy there that obviously was there because
every every word of that is true, and how it happened and
out of there that night, they took us right out of there on
tour to finish up their tour because they had no pa it had
got confiscated the night before they hit St. Louis by the drug
agents and the FBI and whatever because their sound guy wasn't
supposed to be out of the state of California. I was Lin put all
that together. So again, it was another blessing that happened
to me these things just happen. And I from there, we hit the
front page of billboard that we had this little store in
Southern Illinois got the Grateful Dead sound contract,
and all kinds of promoters and people managers were calling me
in 1971. I got a call from the who. And that started another
one I was I was just bombarded with people wanting that PA. So
we built two more and we had three of them on the road during
the 70s. We did all kinds of stuff with humble pie and
Frampton and of course Joe Walsh that's how I really started that
scene was back in 68. I got with chose James Gang and Joe and I
after I was on tour with him a couple of weeks found out we
were both hams and it changed our whole relationship. I mean,
it's it's a relationship you could only dream for because it
wasn't any kind of oh gosh, he's a he's a rock guitarist or the
star or whatever. He's a ham radio friend of mine and we just
have so much fun together, wiring things and blowing things
up and all that but that's that's how it really all started
is right there in that late 60s, early 70s With this monster pa
that I had built and then Joe wanted to go on his own and he
started Barnstorm, he wanted to put that together so he and I
put it together. I helped him get all the equipment together
and then we had to figure out how he was going to do this
song. He He wrote called Rocky Mountain way. He had recorded it
in his studio and use Pete Drake's little what he called
Talking actuator was a little bitty three inch speaker and a
funnel. And it was real in the studio was fine. It was real
weak or when very strong. And he said, How are we going to do
this live? So, Joe, when I got a big old 250 Watt JBL driver and
built a little low pass and high pass filter, put it together,
and the TalkBox was born. And I didn't think about it much. It
was Joe's thing I didn't, I didn't think beyond that. But
all of a sudden, when that song became a hit, I thought, Whoa, I
better do something. So we started building them in our
plant where we were building amplifiers and speakers and all
this sound gear. We did a lot of firsts in there. We built the
first modular mixer, the first modular power, amp, all these
many, many things, 1000s of speaker cabinets. Paul clips was
a great, great mentor of mine, Paul called me one day and
wanted to come and visit me and he did and we became great
friends. And he helped me so much learn a lot about acoustics
and how to match speakers to the boxes, you're building and tune
them and free air and all of this. And it just become a
marvelous thing. And that plant was where we developed this
TalkBox and Peter Frampton, his little girlfriend, Penny McCall
called me one day and she said, I have got to have a Christmas
present for Peter, this would have been 74. Just hang on. I
had known Peter because we had done dozens and dozens of
concerts with humble pie when he came over here. And when he left
the group, of course, we continued with humble pie Steve
Marriott in a group. But I sent that to that TalkBox to Penny
and she gave it to him. So he Frampton ended up with one of
the Heil talk boxes for Christmas. And you can write the
rest of Peters history. I
got umbrage with that thing.
There's a nice video on our website, there's a whole bunch
of videos, where you got to sit down with Joe and Charlie
Daniels and all kinds of people. But one of them's with Pete with
Peter in Nashville a couple years ago, it's really great
because we were reminiscing all the days that he and I met on
the road and did so many things. And then how important to talk
box was to his career.
I was talking to you the other day about about standing waves
floating around in an audience, which is one of the things that
Grateful Dead and maybe one other band, I think the
charlatans that used to be in the West Coast, accomplish this
feat. And it was used for the purposes of making you feel
funny in the audience. And if you were on certain drugs, it
would be enhancing. Now you're familiar with their their
ability to do that, and how it's accomplished. Is there any way
you can even explain it to anybody?
Well, I can take you back to late 30s with Paul clips. Paul
clip was hired by the government they gave him about I think it
was 200 a week or whatever, a large ammunition depot in Hope,
Arkansas around hope Arkansas. And he had developed this horn,
it was so big. He built it on the back of back of a flatbed of
a 40 foot semi. And this was a horn that after he got it all
together, got it tuned and all this but the speakers on it
would do like two cycles one or two way down there in audible to
you. And when you walked in front of it. You didn't know
what hit you. It was really weird. You couldn't hear
anything. But the senses of your body would just go crazy. And it
was going to be a weapon on the front line in Europe for World
War Two. Fortunately, the war ended and of course before he
got it done, he never got to take it on the frontline. But it
was out in this in his I call it I call it his his play toy and
it was really a workshop for him if he had like a real a one room
schoolhouse with all of his urine stuff in any had his plant
where he built his folded horns. But he had this, this huge horn,
and it was going to be a weapon. And that's kind of I think where
you going with this is that you can cause your senses to go just
crazy with all these super low frequencies that you can't hear.
But it causes you to go and just you don't know what's happening.
Well, there was an element of that in this particular sound
because it didn't really have anything to do with the music.
Right? Right, they would just do some sub harmonic frequencies
way down at one to two to five cycles way down in there. You
didn't hear it, because there was no actual tuning or tone to
it. But it was just, it was movement of air, a lot of air.
And that's what happens is your senses of your body and know
that and his it's really an amazing thing.
It's very rarely performed. Now what did he keep? did? Did the
Eclipse keep that big giant horn?
I don't know. It probably is there. It's rather interesting.
I remember one day took me down in the basement of this like one
room schoolhouse, we couldn't even get in at it. We just had
all kinds of what I call carcasses of speaker cabinets.
And he stood on the steps until you say I see that that's how I
did this. And that one did this and he's pointing out all of
these prototypes or experiments or whatever. I can't answer but
I would imagine that is in that basement still now they're
they're doing a thing at clips. They're forming a museum for
some of his very early work. So that might be part of it. But he
was an amazing man and did so much for audio i i still remain
my thinking that he was the father of Hi Fi between him and
George Wright, the great theater organist, who was my great
mentor. George had some wonderful recordings of the word
sir. And they were well done. And oh 54 567 on the Hi Fi
label. And this, this record album would get down to 30
cycles easily. But it also would have it had a 32 foot Borden in
it. That sucker would get down to 16 cycles. And the Hi Fi guys
loved it. And he had almost had a hit. They caught up on the top
10 called quiet village. Yeah, there was an orchestration of
that. Also, was Martin Denny, I think did George bite had the
one that the hifi guys went nuts and you'd go into Hi Fi shops in
the 50s they were playing quiet village of George writes on that
word, it's because that thing would rattle your bottom end
like nothing. And that coupled with the Eclipse horns was was
an amazing thing that happened to progress. The Hi Fi industry.
Why didn't you go into that business? And we I mean, you
seem like you were set up to go into amps, guitar amps, real
amps, speakers, that whole that scene? And but you've grabbed it
and you've gravitated to microphones?
Yeah, it's it's a great question. And I don't know why
it just the way things happened in my life that that I got
thrusted into in the interest of building things and doing all
these things. I you know, I think the big change was was Joe
Walsh his friendship when we got together with the James Gang on
me, we were doing some things that nobody was doing in that
industry. And I just got carried away and you can't do it all. So
that's what happened.
So how did you get started with microphones? Because that's what
you're known for more than anything else right now.
Well, I got tired of being on the road. Oh, those years? Well,
there's
one reason
well, in 1988, he wants along in there. And the music scene also
changed. A lot of my big artists are not on the road. I didn't
know where music was going. Punk Rock came in. And they that was
a whole different scene that I didn't know much about. And so I
just I sold my whole rig I said, See you and I closed that
section of my life in my my career, sold the PAs off and
they kept work In fact, Townsend bought half of it took it back
to England. He was renting it out to young man's but anyway, I
came back home, I hadn't been on the ham radio and about 12 years
and I turned on my Collins kWm to and I'm going what in the
world happened to this? Because all I heard was this big rumble
Bumi bassy bottom end and go, What happened to the art Collins
articulate audio? And it was gone. Now what is this? So I
contact some of these stations. And yeah, I got my new Kenwood
and I got one of you. So what is that? Well, these are new rigs
made in Japan, they're great. Well, they might have been
great, but they didn't sound very great. They were not
articulate. Articulation is extremely important. And so what
we ended up hearing was stuff like this is like, Whoa, don't I
sound great? No, I can't understand what you're saying.
So I thought, hmm, we need to do something. So I did. We built
the first equalizer. It was a little box that I had taken the
bass and treble sections out of one of my mixing consoles, we
had built 1000s of them. bass and treble, and I little battery
operated box, you could plug your Kenwood mic or shoe or
whatever mic that just sounded awful. And you could equalize
it. And just like I just demonstrated it with a little
bit of equalization. It became very articulate, and
articulations important in ham radio, because we want to get
the spoken word across. So I, I built I did a thing for Qs T,
that's a magazine from the a double RL and it became I didn't
even think about where it was going. I wrote an article How to
build that equalizer. Well, it was a cover award for the July
1982 issue. And I didn't even know they had a cover award. And
we started seeing all kinds of people come to me Hey, build as
far as Bill, because I showed you how to build it, just go out
and buy your parts and build it. That's what ham radio operators
did. Okay. So then I called back a few workers and my plant we
started building, we built 1000s of those little equalizers, then
I got the idea long about oh, ad for, you know, we could build a
microphone and had that articulation in it. And so we
built we started building microphones for the ham radio
industry. And we have become the leading manufacturer worldwide
for headsets and microphones to that industry. And it's really
quite, quite lovely, because we've done so much for so many
groups. And we're talking groups like the group that just went to
Navassa. The group that's out right now, and these guys will,
this, they'll collect a lot of money, I will talking to half a
million dollars, we're not talking $10 Here, over a year to
these clubs and stuff, they'll get this money together and they
find some desolate island that nobody even lives on. And
they'll take all the gear out there fly helicopters, however
they can get there and talk to people around the world for two
weeks. And it gives ham radio operators a chance to talk to
somebody like that and get their confirmation card and all that
well. They use our microphones almost exclusively because of
that articulation value. They have to cut through all the
noise and the many, many stations on. And so that's how
we got that going. And it's been there and we just were
constantly just came up with a brand new headset that's just
released his last month. But about six, seven years ago, Joe
called me we had a home in California for number years just
out there kind of having fun. And here's a second home to just
get away from it. Spent a lot of time with Joe in those days. He
said, Hey, come on, talk to you. Come up here. So I go to his
home and studio city and we sat down his kitchen and he had an
SM 58. And he said, You gotta do something with this. We mean I
got to somewhere that he said, Well, he said it doesn't it
doesn't sound very good. I said well, yeah, but that's what you
used. Yeah, right. That's what we used when you and I were
doing this years ago, but he said now They've all moved off
to China. And I didn't know that. I said what do you mean,
he said this stuff is facsimiles of what But they did back in the
60s. And so I'll do something for you here. Okay, there is an
SM 58 I didn't do anything to the console, I just changed two
microphones. And it lost all of its articulation. It lost all of
its presence. It lost all of its glory. You're on an SMP eight.
This is an SM 58. I'm talking
this is one of the new Chinese versions.
Yes, well, it's this one's about, Oh, this one's about I
think six or seven years old.
Yeah, no, it doesn't sound and you sounded better before.
So then he said, You got decent hair. The other thing is the
pattern. If you're not right in front of it, forget it. Your
ear, you get real thin and all that I'll go back. And this is
our premium primo vocal mic, the PR 35. And again, trust me, I
did nothing to the console. I'm just unplugging and plugging a
microphone. And this is what Walsh and I came up with. He had
the idea of building a large diaphragm dynamic, and nobody's
done it short tried to put they failed. I know that for a fact,
because one of their engineers was a good friend of mine. And
we used to talk about a lot and oh gosh, 15 years ago, they
tried it and failed. And I never thought about it anymore. But
Joe wanted to do things. And so we started building all kinds of
crazy things. And I did it for Joe, I never looked beyond that.
Because I'm building microphones for ham radio, nobody's going to
come in and tilt the Sennheisers in the shores and all of that.
No, that's crazy. Well, I was wrong. We came up with products
that are just blowing these things away. Why are they
blowing them away? Because it's new technology that two crazy
ham radio operators come up with on a kitchen table. I mean, that
that's just I, I just think about it so much John, and it's,
again, it's a miracle that happened my life and Joe is a
big part of it. And every time I would come up building him
something, he'd go pass it around to his buddies and the
first thing you know, the these things became predominant in the
rehearsal halls out in California. And today, it's it's
amazing hundreds and hundreds and the Super Bowl, the IDM. And
Zell just saying that the national anthem on this very
microphone, the PR 35 and award shows and just on and on and on
and on. There's so many people Stevie Wonder, Charlie Daniels,
just this so many artists of today, because the microphone
works. Carrie Underwood's Underwood's work words about it,
as she said, This is my instrument. So no matter what
they bring on the stage, I don't care. This the PR 35 is her
instrument. And I never thought about that before. But it's
true. Microphone is an instrument. And it's it's just
being heralded by so many people. And we're very blessed
again by the fact that we were able to bring all this to being
one of the big factors in how good it sounds is not only the
sound of it, but the pattern. I'll move now I'm off 90 degrees
to the side, 90. No other dynamic microphone will do that.
No, you got to be sitting right in front of it. Now I'm right in
front of it. Now I'm moving at 90 degrees, I just went 180
degrees, you probably never heard a change in that audio.
Try that with any other microphone. And you know, the
minute you get away from it, you got to it's got to be on on your
right on your lips are it loses its value. And so then we
started building things for the broadcast industry. And as you
well know, Leo Laporte found it. On and on, there's so many,
we've got over 1000 broadcast stations, that's taken their
1966 designed our e 20s. That was the creation of another ham
radio friend of mine, Al Khan. And that is now being built in
China. And it's just so sad to see these guys, the young kids
that now own those big companies because the founders and the
dreamers are gone. They're just copying what grandpa did in
China. And that's is not good. There, there are all kinds of
new ways to do things and new materials. And that's what we
have done. And I took the ideas that Joe gave me. And here we
are. And we're very, very blessed again, that we can do
all this. And, and it's, it's, it's fun to be able to, to help
artist and broadcast guys and podcasters. Man, we have just
got just a ton of podcast guys using our PR 40. Because the PR
40 is it's become the God of the broadcasters. And again, it's a
large diaphragm. And Joe said to me one time, how are you going
to do this? Remember that big antenna? You had you had a huge
antenna and mute turned that around? Man, I didn't hear you.
So can't you do that to the microphone? And I get to think
about that. And I go back into my into my little office and
station and in ham radio station in Illinois. And I'm going yeah,
we can. It's all about phasing. You take two microphones and you
put them together, you got three dB plus, it's great. But if one
of them's out of phase, and you're talking about nothing,
nothing. Well, why can't you do that to the rear? We did. And
we're the only microphone. Dynamic microphone, that's all
we're doing is dynamics that has more than 40 dB of rejection,
that that's almost, that's almost unheard of. It's
impossible. Well, yeah, it's possible with any of our
microphones. And they all do it every one of them. Because Joe
gave me that idea. I never thought about applying antenna
theory to a microphone, but I did. And it's all about phasing.
And I got three and a half acres of antennas out here behind me.
I love antennas. I've loved them all my life. Since I was 15.
Man, I was in a freak for antennas. And here I've got
phased arrays on 75 meters, I got phased arrays on 40 meters,
these are all wire antennas out here. And when I flipped the
switch, it reverses them. And so I can cause my signal to go to
LA. All right, and I'm right here in the center of the
country. Now, right in the middle of where Kansas,
Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma meet. That's basically where I
am, I can throw my signal just by throwing a switch and cause
my light transmitter to be heard on the East Coast, or to be
heard on the West Coast. And you gain a lot of a lot of power, so
to speak, the ability for them to hear you or you to hear them
by just rebased reversing the phase. That's what I did in the
microphones. Nobody else is doing it, you're getting very
weak rear rejection from these microphones, they get a lot of
feedback and all that stage wash and noise coming off of a stage
with big amplifiers. That's why they love the Heil microphones
because they don't hear all that junk. And there again, it's ham
radio, coupled with learning to listen, and learning to listen
to those that want something. And you know, there's a lot of
that going on, too. You try to talk to an engineer today and
you don't want to talk to you. He's not going to change
anything he knows at all. He went to school for that. So I'm
not her I know more than you do. Well, I think the artists know
more than any of us as to what they need and want. And we are
so happy. I have a microphone Nepal Rogers asked me to build
him and I did I have a microphone HRD Daniels wanted me
to build for his his sound man wanted me to build for him. We
even call it the PR 31 BW for Bob workman. That's the number
on the microphone. Bob workman came up with this working with
Charlie Daniels. And did I take credit for it? Heck, no, I
didn't. It wasn't my idea. But he did take my PR 30 The big
diaphragm and reworked it a little bit. But we we named that
microphone after him on and on and on. And we listen intently
to our artists because they know and that that's I think the real
the real foundation Ohio sound. We've been doing that for
decades. And we're we're very thrilled about this and we're
we're coming up on our 50th year John, I can't believe it but we
are and it still continues. My wife now owns the company and I
just stay here in the Ozarks and she's a huge convinced
have you. Have you thought about modernizing the condenser mic
which seems to me to be mostly based on a 1947 design still.
No I don't Unlike condensers, I never have like condensers. And
I've proven we don't need condensers. And when I say that
a lot of people say, yeah, right, this guy's crazy until
they spend time with our PR 30s. It is an amazing microphone.
It's a large diaphragm dynamic. What's wrong with condensers?
They're too sensitive, they pick up the whole room, they have no
good rear rejection. So you can't use any of that where you
really need rejection. Every single solitary condenser has
this rant, raspy top end, every one of them $5,000 to $2. They
all have this. If you're listening, that listen. And that
bugs me. Why do we have to put up with that, then you got to
have this stupid phantom power? So I said no. And it was Joe and
I, we both agreed, you know what? I think we can do the same
job or better with a dynamic. And we will I
will say the PR 40. silence If you'd listened to one, it sounds
like a best of one of the best condenser mics that you can
imagine. What about Lavell ears? There's a little sub segment of
the market that's needed badly for many of those are
condensers.
I know that. And I have never touched that. And boy, do I get
so many people asking me they said, Wow, look what you did to
that dynamic? Well, you'll never be able to do that was a
dynamic, I don't believe but I need to I need to start looking
into that. Because maybe we can. I just been so busy with all
this other stuff. And I need to I need to start focusing on some
of that. The last couple of years have been headlong into a
couple of huge ham radio project with the new headset, the new
Pete pro seven. So I'm pretty much finished. And we're on the
market with it. And it's getting great reviews. So I might have
to look into that. That might be my next project, John, because I
do know the dynamics are a real scourge.
Yeah, I would be very interested in what you come up with for
that because I think level errors, which are used more and
more and more by even amateur videographers, because you can't
really if you're out in the field and you got you're using a
Canon five d to take videos with somebody you gotta miked up, you
have to have miked up, you can't, you can hold a mic in
front of them, then it's just kind of clunky, but they're
miked up and they can. And people when they're miked up,
they also feel more at ease when they're discussing something as
opposed to having a mic thrust into their face.
Right. So but as I'm saying the dynamics of those dials the Not
that that dynamic range, the transient response of the things
are just a scourge. Yeah, no, you need to fix it that's needs
to that's what needs to be addressed. And it seemed like
nobody wants to address those issues of dynamics, the dynamic
range, the all of that of the lavalieres. And that's what we
need to maybe look at next. Who knows where we go?
Yeah, that'd be great. So what, what is your best selling mic
right now. And by the way, I'm,
that's hard to say it's probably the PR 40 and the PR 35. They
they'd be running a race together. And but right behind
it is to pr 30. I still maintain for me, the 30 is it, it's just
a gorgeous microphone, it is it is the condenser replacement.
And I have a lot of broadcasters using a PR 30 It doesn't have
quite the low end i I rolled the last octave of the PR 40 off, I
left the mid range articulation, the top end the same, but it's
not quite as broad, which is, is really needed in a lot of
applications of recording and so on. But it it also sells well.
So, but there's no question the 40 and the 35 are in the horse
race as to who's first? Well, I
use a 30 and a 40. I like the 40 the best and that's the one I
recommend people buy. Yeah, especially podcasts. It's not as
though you're gonna get your full frequency response over
something like Skype, but you get at least if you're giving
Skype the best possible signal, it usually comes out. Okay, on
the other side.
Well, if people John, it's all about what we talked about in
the beginning. It's the harmonics. A lot of people don't
quite understand that but even though you're rolling your
equipment off, in this case, Skype or the mixers or whatever,
even though you roll it off, it may be what 45 5060 cycles.
There's something about this harmonic is shoe, that when you
speak in that microphone, there are some rich harmonic showing
up at 60 and 90, or 60 and 80. This depends on your voice. But
you get some harmonic issues from that wide response to the
PR 40. And that's one of the things about it that it just
makes it sound stunning. And even though you're not using the
whole range, directly, you are harmonically and that's why I, I
always for broadcast podcasts and so on, I also recommend the
40. There's there's just nothing that will touch it.
Do you ever worry that there's a component one you because you,
you source your components from all over the place, you're not,
you know, building the circuit necessarily with an old, single,
you know, like resistors, and a soldering gun. You so you source
from here and there, including your diaphragms and all the
electronics that go into the case and everything else. So you
ever worried or think about one component being so critical that
you don't even know it's critical? And then you get
something changes? And all of a sudden now that microphone
sounds? Does that sound what it should sound like? Is that like
I would be worried sick about that personally?
No, no. And the reason is that we don't receive products built,
we receive components from various countries from the UK,
Malaysia, South America, Japan, Taiwan, these all get shipped.
And I design them right here, where I'm sitting in my what I
call my station lab is my ham radio station in my lab, this is
where I do it all. And I just this morning received another
piece for this new product we're doing in ham radio, they, they
really have made an improvement on it. And I of course, I
accepted it. And now that I will go into this new product instead
of one that I did a couple of weeks ago. And I am the guy I
ixnay it or I say yeah, then I send it over to our plant, our
production manager and our product manager. They all look
at it. They listen to it, they too are trying they've been
doing this for years. Our service manager, she is amazing.
She'd been with me for 20 plus years. We all agree yes, this is
going to be a better component than those components come to
our Illinois plant. All of the little things that connectors
this the resistors the wire, all of the different things. And
then of course, the diaphragms, the support the shock mount for
the diaphragms because a lot of our microphones have shock
mounts internal in the microphones. And so no, if a if
one of our suppliers let us down and they do not supply the parts
at our at our level, then we'll go somewhere else. We'll find
other manufacturers but we've been doing this whole golly,
it's it was about 1985 I started discovering you can't do it in
America anymore. It's so sad, John, you you just can't find
anybody to build parts in America. They might be able to
do it but at ridiculous cost. And of course you're not going
to sell your products for that. So I have a parch broker she is
an amazing lady. She travels the world for the past 30 years
speaks seven languages. And all she does is buy electronic
components for different manufacturers. We're very happy
that we're one of them since 1985. And she's also she has a
level she knows what we want. So there's a wall up there that has
to be broken if anything's going to change Well it never will
because we won't let it
I see Do you how many models do you have right now Mike's
talking about like these capsules
are probably about 30 I mean that's that's a ham radio and
all of it together. Something Do you have you each one was all
these components come in to our plant and we assemble them? We
test them three times, three different people three different
times and three different aspects and then they're boxed
and shipped out of their. Every microphone the last test we have
some studio JBL monitors Crown amplifier and a mixer. In the
last test, there's three people in that plant that really know
how to listen. And we actually listen, even though the scopes
and on the second run when in the second testing stage and all
of that's there. I don't trust it, there's still something
about listening and know it's rare. If it looks good on
scopes, and generators and all of the analytical gear, fine,
it's going to be okay. But once in a while, there's just some
little cork, it just doesn't sound right. And these guys and
gals know when they listen to it. And that last third test
through the JBL studio monitors, yes, this is good, or
something's weird. That one doesn't make it.
Are there any mics out there that you respect other than the
your brand?
I don't, I don't listen to a lot of the others, to be honest. So
I don't know what I used to respect. No, because they're all
facsimiles or what they, what they used to be and what I grew
up with, and their founders are gone, and they're there. They're
not very good. And that's why we're doing what we're doing.
How long does it quality, Mike, last? Is it appropriate to buy
one on the US market ever?
Well, you never know what somebody's done to one. I just
got an email this morning from some guy, he bought a microphone
from eBay. Somebody took that cartridge out of it and stuck
something else in it and sold it with as our microphone and he
took a picture of it and go like, why would anyone
you feel sorry for you? Because they blew it out? Maybe they'd
do that?
Yeah, you never know what well are, they're going to take our
element and put it in something else they got you never know
what they're doing. But I have some microphones, some of the
very first ones we've built back in the early 80s. They're great,
I still use them, they're fine. As long as you haven't done
something weird to them, or spilt water on them or that kind
of stuff.
Why should people never blow into a microphone? And Is that
still true?
Of course it is. Because it when you do that you cause that
diaphragm to exceed its travel design. The magnets and the
voice coil, have a specific tolerance of how far it can go.
It's just like a piston in a car. That piston can only go so
far down. And if it goes too far, you just destroyed the
block. Same thing with microphones. If you blow in it,
I see guys pound their hands on top of one. Man, it's the death
of them. Because it might not cause it not to work just now.
But it's going to cause a problem down the road where that
diaphragm isn't as tight as it was because the trend and then
the transient response in the dynamic range has harmed because
that that force of air coming down on that is much greater
than what it was designed to do. And we take a lot of pride and
all that. In fact, we are the only absolute only microphone
that the young rap artists now they can cup it. That's
something that just oh here a few years ago, oh my God. Don't
do that. Because when you put your hand around a microphone, I
can't do it. It isn't because I won't do it. But I can do
something like this. It sounds like this. Because you're you're
causing the element to be put into a tuned position. It's in a
a cavity. And when you cut a microphone, that's what happens.
I did that outside. But let me show you something. You can't
see this. But I am now cupping to PR 35 There's absolutely no
change. I'll take my hand off the microphone. And we created
this microphone so that you can't detune the element. It's
very important. Because if you don't have that if you did it to
anything assure us and if anything, it's going to sound
like this. It's like a tunnel that it's in because that's what
happens to it. When we cut our microphone. It doesn't change it
because we designed it so you can't detune it. That's become
very A very popular in the art history today.
What is very What about dropping the mic people drop them on
purpose. They dropped by accident they have him at the
end of a mic stand and they throw him to the ground.
Well, you probably will see no problem on it. And many, many
times but again, you might and that can happen to any
microphone. Because you've got a the diaphragm sits over the top
of the voice coil, the voice coils got a magnet up inside it
a magnet of a Linko. What we do is we take the we take the
magnet structure when we build it. And we mix Boren and iron
with it. This is something I don't think anybody else is
doing at this level out. And when we mix Boren and iron, it
makes that magnet 10 times stronger. That's why high, all
microphones have this incredible transient response. And what
that means that when you you're singing or whatever, and it goes
to the bottom, it comes back fast. It's got a great fast
attack, snappy, that's all because of the bar that all of
that iron mixture. Well, if you drop that, you might it might
break. I mean, it's it's probably unlikely and I have a
lot of microphones guys drop and they'll bend the screen on top
or something but microphones still work. So it's not a huge
issue, but it is you shouldn't just be him do that. But we just
like any other manufacturer microphones. Ours probably will,
will last just the same.
What's your thoughts on ribbon mics?
Well, that to me, they're they're too sensitive in
handling. You just you can't use them on tour. They're so
sensitive because they've got a piece of aluminum stretched
across a mag ribbon. And yeah, and that ribbon can be destroyed
just by dropping it are moving and harder. Just carrying it
around. Yeah, either very frank, I've wondered
myself, how do they ship a ribbon mic without damaging it?
Yeah. Well, that's a that's a good question. But there again,
I I got one of the old original. I got two of them sitting over
RCA is back into 3044. I believe. Oh, man. Yeah, that
those things were amazing. But they weigh about 30 pounds are
huge. The magnet inside. And you you had the mic stands or half
inch pipe thread. You couldn't dare put them on the mic stands
today. But oh, they sound great. Got a big bottom end. But you
know what? The PR 40 sits right beside him and sounds very
close. So I don't think we need all of that. And again, a lot of
this is a fad. It's an ego, oh, I got this. I got this condenser
ear right. I only look at one thing. And they have all lost
it. In fact, one of the big companies maybe the biggest used
to have in their logo. Performance. They took that word
out. They do not have the word performance anymore. We do we
love to talk about our performance. Because our
microphones are performers as some of the many, many hundreds
if not 1000s of top artists that are using our microphones
because of the performance. That's why they use a
microphone. I found a mic or use a microphone if it doesn't sound
good or has poor performance.
Yeah, I agree. It's a big deal. I want to thank you for this
chat. We've talked for about an hour and you're definitely one
of the most interesting people out there. I think you're kind
of underrated. Whatever that means. But But these mic the
microphone revolution that you've done with these with
these dynamic mics is pretty outrageous. And I and I think
maybe you kind of sensed this too is that I'm glad you did it.
But why did it have to be you it seems as though this is just
should have happened anyway. And which is I think what Walsh was
always, you know, just complaining Why isn't why do I
have to? Why did why did what is Bob? Hi, I'll have to make
design a new mic because nobody else is doing it. And
through there's a simple, simple answer to that. And I got the
answer. Many times from the artists that I run around with
these days where the old Any company that listens and does
something about it? Many, many times, some of my friends who
are an artist would ask the other microphone companies they
do this do that, oh, well, we have this model. And it'll do
that in their mirror. They don't listen, they they have this ego.
And they walk around with their nose in the air if it rained,
and probably Duran. They it's, it's really sad, because who
knows better? How a microphone should behave? Then the artist,
yeah, the person who has to dance it, that's my whole deal.
And it doesn't make any difference if that artist is a
broadcaster, a podcaster. Musician, or just somebody that
uses a microphone and a ham radio station, they all have
their thoughts and desires. And we have always been that way.
All of the people that have worked with me, for me alongside
me, we really take it seriously. When somebody calls us and says
something and we do something about it. Bob workman probably a
great example. I mean, workman was he'd been with Charlie
Daniels forever. He's got 32 microphones of ours on the
stage. And he came to me one day and says, Hey, I don't want to
offend you or anything, man. We're good friends. And I said,
What's up? He says that pr 30? What's in the bottom half of
that? And I say, well, nothing. Is it acoustically? There
nothing there? I didn't know. So what? Can I cut it in half? And
just use the top end? Is that does that sound the same as it?
Yes, there's a plate in there doesn't sound any different. So
we did. And we came up with a PR 31 BW for Bob Workman, and the
whole story and his pictures on the back of the box. And you
there's one just one example goes Joe's the biggest one where
all the rest, we talked about that. But we listen to these
people. And I don't care who it is. I mean, it can be an artist
with a million selling album, it can be a broadcaster in his
little station in sitting in the wilds of Iowa, it could be a
podcaster in his basement. It doesn't make any difference of
their level. It's a user of high on microphones. And if they talk
to me, and they have an idea, we're gonna listen to them. And
you know, what, if we think it's viable and better, we do it.
How did you get the microphone under David Letterman set? I'm
sorry, you get the microphone on the David Letterman set.
Well, I learned about this. It's kind of an interesting thing,
because I have watched lately, but they would switch it around.
Here's the deal. One, you know, they always had Johnny Carson's
RCA 77 on it. And it was on Dave's desk. And one day the
crew came in. And that microphone was gone. And
Michael, who is one of the audio engineers, for the show, told me
this because I work with those guys. They use some of our mics
for the band and stuff. And he's gone some back some years now
when that happened. Because I asked him, Well, how did it get
there? He said, Hey, we were ready to tape. What are we gonna
do? He said I had a PR 40. And I just stuck it up there. And it's
kind of interesting. It's that sit there for years. And then
all of a sudden, I see other microphones every once in a
while I'll see a Neumann and and then all of a sudden, the PR 40
is back. But that's because somebody stole the RCA. And
that's that's the story I got from Michael and I can verify
that time and time again, give me his phone number. But it It's
a strange deal. But they you know that microphone to Dahlia
has to be pointing in the wrong direction.
Oh, yeah, well, none of those microphones, they're all stage
props. If you look closely, they're using Lavell ears
because they're running around and all of that, that that mic
now when it when Carson was there, that was different story.
They had an overhead boom, and that microphone, but since
lavalieres came in why that's what they've been using, but
it's just a profit. We're very, very happy about the fact that a
br 40 has been on and off that desk a number of times. That's
great.
So Bob, thanks for being with me.
While I'm so happy to be here and I appreciate you taking the
time to talk about some of our history.
That was Bob Heil and I hope you enjoyed that interview along
with the one earlier with John Sculley and remind you that we
do have a show on Thursday live 9am pacific time as usual
dvorak.org/in A for your continued support. I hope you
You enjoy this interview. We don't do these that often, but
we do them once a year, maybe, maybe twice a year. You're
lucky. A lot of people always want to interviews. They always
say, oh, let's do some interviews. And now, you know,
you know, what do we do? This is how we do them if we're going to
do them at all. And I want to thank you for listening to the
show, and I hope you'll be here on Thursday and continuing your
support. I'm John C. Dvorak from Northern Silicon Valley and
absentia Adam curry, from Europe. Adios MoPhO
devora.org/n A check it out. The ice caps are melting. The polar
bears are dying. This is just amazing. It's amazing. That's
amazing. Harris. It's amazing. That's amazing. This night has
been amazing.