Name Behind the Name: John Meyer – Meyer Sound Laboratories

EARLY DAYS

Christopher Holder: John, by the time you and Helen Meyer started Meyer Sound you’d built FOH systems and floor monitors for (Bay Area rental company) McCunes Sound Service in the ’70s. Why launch your own company with the ACD studio monitor?

John Meyer: The idea was to build a powerful monitor and use that technology to launch into other areas. We started by searching the globe for high-powered drivers that were linear. At that time virtually every high-powered driver was designed for guitar cabinets and was built to distort. But we found one company that was also making guitar speakers but they hadn’t got around to making their driver designs distort yet – they’d built a 100W speaker that was clean. So we used that in the ACD studio monitor. And it attracted a lot of attention. It was clean and powerful. They weren’t like current studio monitors which change their frequency response with level – this was different. People from [film production company] Zoetrope came by, and thought they’d be good speakers for the opening of Apocalypse Now. So for three months we worked at the movie theatre in San Francisco where the film was to be premiered. Along with the monitors, we built the subs for the napalm explosions, generally just developing the technologies. In short, things started to connect with the players that would help with our launch into the industry.

CH: How did the studio monitor design translate into success in the live sound market?

JM: First up we tried the studio monitor on stage, but it wasn’t quite powerful enough. So then we evolved it into the Ultra monitor. Here was the smallest, most powerful speaker that anyone had every heard. It would do over 120dB… this thing would just tear people’s heads off on stage, which is what they wanted at that time. They wanted it really loud so they could hear it above their amp’ed drums and backline equipment.

CH: Sounds like you were very much working hand in glove with the end users – the musicians?

JM: One of the things I’ve learned is that you’ve got to satisfy the musicians first. If the monitors don’t work, it doesn’t matter about anything else – you’re dead. So it’s only when the band’s happy with the monitors that you can start to think about the PA – the house system. And that led into us working on the design of the MSL-3.

CH: Which, apart from sounding amazing, was famous for being the first PA cabinet to use trapezoidal geometry. What led you to the trapezoidal design?

JM: We wanted a product that people could buy more and more of – start with a small system and add to it as necessary. One of the things that was happening at the time, and it happened at McCunes too with my first products… you build these cabinets so that a few would sound good, but as soon as you put 10 or 20 together they start sounding bad again. We were determined to develop a system that, when you moved from four to eight to 16 or 32, the power would increase but the sound wouldn’t start degrading.

CH: What was it about the design of the MSL-3 that made it work in large arrays as opposed to what had gone before it?

JM: It worked because we figured out how to put boxes next to each other. Which sounds simple but took a lot of work. We started out by putting 60 of these neat little 12-inch drivers we had into a huge barrel-shaped speaker. We found the variation in the low beam from the system was more serious than we thought it would be from a direct radiator system like this. We were seeing a lot of low beam – 10 or 15dB as we moved across the front. Then we decided to experiment with multiple horn-loaded drivers (rather than direct radiators), because we knew that’d work a little bit better… All up, we spent about a year experimenting with horns, figuring out a way of coupling things together so it didn’t get worse and worse when you put more and more together. And, in the end, that was really the secret to the MSL3 – being able to array these cabinets and hold up their characteristics, so people could put these big systems together. That was the hardest part – figuring that out.

CH: And I guess it’s easy to forget that you were fundamentally doing everything from scratch here… You didn’t have a lot of precedents already in the marketplace.

JM: We had a lot of things to overcome. It wasn’t just a matter of building a product that sounded good – it had to last. For example, drivers: in those days, if you drove them too much the magnetic fields would slip. Mostly, driver designs were held together just with their magnetic field. Which was fine, but one big whack would move the voice coil. We talked with JBL about adapting one of their older driver designs that had a keeper ring. You have to think about these things. I mean, people are initially very careful with a new system, but after 50 days of a tour things change – people start slamming gear into the truck, slamming gear down the ramp. They’re tired, and the delicacy goes out the window. You have to know this.

CH: It’s about knowing who your customer is, I guess?

JM: Exactly. It’s important for people to understand the trade that they’re going into. It’s not just a ‘thing’ that you’re building, it has to fit into a culture; it has to work for the people using it. It has to be roadworthy.

CH: And it sounds like you were intimately linked with the musicians of the day to fine-tune your designs?

JM: The bands were very helpful. They gave us time to set things up. In the early days it wasn’t uncommon for us to spend a week with the Grateful Dead setting systems up. Meanwhile, the big audio companies were just downright nasty. They found the whole live music scene irritating and thought the whole thing would just go away. For example, when we tried to get some special drivers built they’d demand that we order 10,000 units… you didn’t get any help from the big companies. You just had to appeal to the bands themselves. Also the record companies at the time were enormously supportive. It wasn’t until later that they decided these band tours should make money. These tours weren’t making money in the early days, they were being subsidised by the record companies. They were just ways of promoting the album.

FEELING THE POWER

CH: Meyer speaker designs are almost entirely self-powered. What started you down the road to that design philosophy?

JM: From the very early days, before Meyer Sound, I was keen on the advantages of a powered design. But back in the early ’70s people had their favourite amp company and those relationships were very entrenched. So to accommodate people’s preferences we started making processors to allow people to use their favourite amps – Crown, Crest, or whoever. Then in the ’80s those allegiances became a problem when the amp companies started dictating to their customers what size amplifiers they should be using with our products – they started to take a ‘we know best’ attitude, spec’ing overly powerful amps for our products. The amp companies simply thought that the higher the rail voltage the better – but this was from people who seemed to have no idea that their amps weren’t driving a resistor, but actually driving something that has force and energy and it only takes one peak of very high voltage to break things. It’s like jarring, like dropping a glass on a table – you get to a certain point and it shatters. We couldn’t convince the amp people to stop doing this, so about eight or nine years ago we decided, in order to keep our stuff from breaking, we would have to start supplying the amps ourselves. So, the short answer is: the amp companies forced us. Saying that, I always liked the idea of selling powered designs, so I didn’t take too much convincing.

CH: But bringing your existing customers around to the idea of a powered design mustn’t have been easy. There are plenty of benefits to having the amps in with the speakers but it’s a different way of thinking, isn’t it?

JM: It was actually Disney that helped us on that front. Disney was embarking on producing the Beauty & the Beast Broadway show. They’d never done a Broadway show before, and they didn’t like all the noise the amplifiers made on stage and backstage, so they came to us and told us as much. The question was: could we power the speakers so they wouldn’t have all the noise on stage? That was funny because everyone in Broadway had got used to the noise but Disney was new to theatre and didn’t see why they had to put up with it. So that’s what we did. We supplied a powered system without all the noise. And, Disney being Disney, people started to think – if they did it for Disney it must be okay from a safety point of view. In fact, because it was a Disney show we found that the permits we required to hang all this power in the air arrived much quicker than they normally would. So it was that show that gave us the opportunity to launch the powered speakers and gave the new designs quite a bit of instant credibility in the market. We had no idea it would become so much a part of our business. We thought that if it became 50 percent of our business it would be amazing. Of course now the bulk of our work is all powered.

CH: Why is it that so few of your competitors have gone down that powered route?

JM: Once you go to a powered product it’s a huge commitment. One of the nice things about unpowered products is that, for some reason, the industry and the government don’t pay too much attention – they just don’t think about them. But as soon as you power it, they take a lot of interest. All the agencies get really interested and they want it to be fireproof, and they want $50,000 worth of testing done on it – they don’t see it as some industrial speaker anymore, they see it as something consumers can plug in and play with. So it shifts the responsibility back onto the manufacturer tremendously. We’re lucky. It wasn’t nearly as expensive 10 years ago as it is now to jump through those hoops. It’d be hard for us to start a company making powered speakers right now.

CH: So, in essence, the whole powered design philosophy wasn’t so much about addressing technical issues as it was about making sure you knew what amps people were using?

JM: Both. Powering our speakers meant we could guarantee a level of performance and it also makes our gear user-friendly. For example, you don’t have to figure out ground loops anymore. We have about 24 ground loop connections per speaker. You could do that in an amp rack like we used to – but that takes about two weeks! It’s extremely hard. You can mess around with these things for days to hunt down a hum. Meanwhile, if that’s done for you in manufacturing – which admittedly takes a lot of time – it means you’re guaranteed of the results every time. That’s the exciting thing – being able to solve things before you get to the show.

Saying that, obviously not everyone is convinced of the benefits of our powered designs. Someone once said to me: “The engineer won’t have anything to do.” I couldn’t believe it. “Are you serious? You can’t be serious! You won’t be setting up amp racks, but there will be plenty to do on a show without worrying about amp racks!”

CH: Meyer Sound now makes the bulk of its components on site, at your factory in Berkeley. Obviously you care about making sure everything is built to your exact spec and when it’s under your roof you can best ensure that. With the march of exacting manufacturing tolerances and hi-tech design methods, are speaker systems easier or harder to ‘drive’ than they were 20 years ago?

JM: When you talk about modern PA’s it’s hard not to talk about line arrays. Line arrays are all the rage, and the interesting thing about line arrays is that they’re actually quite hard to use… in the sense that they’re not intuitive. What was nice about the MSL3 and MSL4 was that they were very intuitive – you just keep making the arrays bigger and bigger and it covers a wider and wider area. Line arrays are the complete opposite: the longer you make the array the more the sound keeps changing (because of the coupling and the length effect). So you need more technology to tell people what’s going to happen.

Also, line arrays are often hard to fit into a room – they’re great for large outdoor shows but getting them into just about any room is a challenge. To me a line array is like someone who comes in and wants to buy a zoom lens. It’s just going to take one kinda picture. You feel like saying to them that they’d actually be better off with the regular fixed lens. But people think you’re not catering for what they want.

CH: Which brings us to the LD3 processor for your line array systems. Is it almost a case of: ‘You really want a line array? Here you go, buy ours. But if you’re going to use a line array, try this to make it sound as good as it can’?

JM: Right. So rather than explain how complicated they are – which no one wants to hear – the LD3 is about creating a product that helps people use a line array that’s expressed in terms that they understand. We like to talk about frequency and phase, array gain and the length of the array affecting the coupling efficiency, and all these intellectual concepts… but no one has the first clue what you’re talking about. A few engineers who work on this stuff all the time will have a feel for what you’re talking about, but the rest will just hope they’ll remember it long enough to do something with it. But engineers do know how many speakers they have in the array, they know how far away they are from the speakers and they can measure the temperature and humidity – and they’re the terms we use on the LD3. It allows you to get your system ‘flat’ and you can tweak it to your own tastes from there.

CH: Are there still too many technical barriers then? In other words, are we making things unnecessarily hard to operate?

JM: In many cases I think we are. For example, I got the idea for the LD3 from driving a car. It doesn’t ask me what fuel mixture I’d like – I’d hate to have to guess that, seeing I could burn out the engine if I’m wrong. I’d much rather just step on a pedal and have it go forward and turn the steering wheel and have it go right, than have a series of very complicated command structures. Just imagine what driving a car would be like if it was designed by a software company! Of course, I’m not going to name names, but there’s only one software company whose software is so hard to use that it breaks the computer just about every other day… It’s insane!

DIGITAL GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MEYER

CH: Meyer’s SIM DSP-based audio analyser is into its third generation, so you’ve obviously done a lot of work as a company in the world of digital. Meanwhile, the LD3 processor is digitally controlled but the processing is still analogue. Can you give me the scoop… when are we going to see a Meyer digital speaker controller?

JM: We’re seriously working on it. It’s part of our overall SIM strategy to have that measurement technology and in the same package be able to control the speakers. The reason we think we can make a contribution is that I think people launched their digital processors prematurely. For starters, for us to build a device that goes in front of our speakers it has to have at least 115dB dynamic range otherwise you get hiss.

CH: And currently you’re not seeing that?

JM: We’ve found that most digital speaker management systems aren’t put on enough voltage, so they clip – instead of setting the output voltage at around 20V they set them for just a couple of volts. They came out with the technology before it was quite ready. People have jumped the gun. It’s got to be as transparent as analogue before you get people excited. Otherwise, what’s the point? We don’t want to go backwards.

CH: So you’re not overly impressed with what’s on the market already?

JM: I can tell you that it’s shocking to see some of the stuff people are building. It’s like the early days of transistors – they’re not being very careful, or they don’t think it matters. But it matters a lot. Digital is different. The distortions that digital creates are different to distortions that we’re used to. People used to analogue distortions can’t put their finger on digital distortions. Again, like the early days of transistors, it was hard to say what was wrong with those amplifiers. They were measuring perfectly. Magazines were quoting .0001% distortion. But they didn’t sound very good.

CH: Is it a case of the measurement devices letting us down?

JM: Traditional measurement devices aren’t cutting it. That’s why we’re now building tools to hear those distortions… like SIM 3. And those distortions can be quite serious. They just show up differently. They can look like broadband noise – no harm in that – but it’s broadband noise with an edge because it’s synchronous to something. It winds up sounding ‘edgy’ because a lot of harmonics are attached to what’s going on. You really need to figure out what’s going wrong out there and then you have to build instruments – not the other way around.

CH: Amongst certain parts of the digital cognoscenti it’s almost like you aren’t allowed to hear distortion because you can’t measure it.

JM: That’s right – if you say anything in the negative they get mad. But if a lot of people are complaining it’s worth investigating. I’ve found a lot of things that way: just going out and observing; listening to what people are talking about; setting things up exactly the way it was when people were complaining; and measuring it.

We feel we can make a contribution to digital. We have the LD3, which is digitally controlled analogue and a good step in the right direction. We’ll then try and make a digital version of that and have that analogue ‘equivalent’ to compare it against. I’m probably saying more than I should, but there you go… there’s your scoop!