Tony Andrews

Gerd Janson

This gentleman to the left of me, who goes by the name of Tony Andrews, is the man behind Funktion-One, a brand that came to prominence in the last few years. It’s the main soundsystem at Berlin’s Berghain, Cielo in New York, a few churches somewhere, an opera house or two…

Tony Andrews

Space Ibiza.

Gerd Janson

Space Ibiza, for those people who like to spend their summer on that island. He has quite a long history when it comes to soundsystems. He’s opinionated about the quality of sound and we’re going to hear from him about it. So please welcome Mr. Tony Andrews.

[applause]

So before, we end up at Funktion-One, sound quality, signal chains and distortion and all these things, how does one get into the business of building loudspeakers?

Tony Andrews

If you’re asking when it started, it started with an interest in hi-fi. I didn’t have much money when I was 16, 17, so I bought some speakers and built my own boxes and just began to investigate stereo. The first thing I remember strongly was that Jimi Hendrix’s [Electric Ladyland] album, had some amazing stereo panning. I don’t quite understand why we don’t do more of it today. But anyway, it was very exciting. After I’d learned about hi-fi, bands touring was relatively new then, and the idea occurred to me, “What we need is for a band to be hi-fi quality,” so that’s the kind of mission I decided I was going to get into – to try to get hi-fi quality at really loud levels. This was back in 1970/71 and the first band I toured with when I made my own system was Pink Fairies, and they were supported by a band called Hawkwind, who you probably will have heard of. It was one of those occasions where the really good band broke up and the support band became a stronger thing.

Gerd Janson

Hawkwind, for those who do not know, was the band a certain Lemmy started in and he went on to form a group called Motörhead, who were the loudest band on earth.

Tony Andrews

That’s what they’d like to think, but as we all know, it’s not about levels, it’s about quality.

Gerd Janson

We’re going to hear about that… Were you making music itself or just interested in the scientific aspects of it?

Tony Andrews

When I was about 16, I had a bass guitar but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have the front to get up on stage. I was too nervous, believe it or not. But I always find myself fixing the things that got broken so it kind of developed that way.

Gerd Janson

And you’re also self-taught, right?

Tony Andrews

Yeah, I had a background in physics, and I did reasonably well academically. I got a place at university, which lasted about three weeks, because I just couldn’t stand the idea of sitting there taking notes and having to remember them four months later. I’d been doing that for years and I couldn’t take it anymore. Anyway, there was a psychedelic explosion, and where it was at was the music. So that was another thing that attracted me to it.

Gerd Janson

Can you remember the first loudspeaker you built? Did you model it after a certain loudspeaker you couldn’t afford, or did you play it by ear?

Tony Andrews

No, completely played it by ear. I didn’t understand all sorts of things at the time, but you try things out, just like you do in music, you try things out and listen to them and see how they make you feel. I guess that’s how we learnt about bass. We had one of the original hi-fi speakers. We were playing around in the room and my brother put it in the corner, and of course all the mids and highs disappeared, but there was this sudden big improvement in the bass. So, we went out to the garage and we built the corner of the room and I thought, “The corner of the room isn’t a good shape, let’s turn it around… Let’s reverse it.” That’s how the first bin evolved. So, you could say it’s an accident, but when accidents happen, it’s good to observe what’s occurred. And if it doesn’t make sense, find out why. Or if it’s something interesting see if you can’t pursue it further.

Gerd Janson

And you pursued it further.

Tony Andrews

Very much so.

Gerd Janson

Before Funktion-One there was another brand you did. When did it occur to you to make this your living, not only to go on tour with bands, but manufacture your own sound equipment for them?

Tony Andrews

Well, in the ’70s we were a rental company, and in those days most rental companies built their own equipment. We were a touring company, so we were working with bands like Santana, Jackson Browne, Iron Maiden, later Kool & The Gang, people like that. In the ’70s, everybody was building their own equipment, so we just evolved our ideas. One of the things we were concerned about was the compression drivers that get used for midrange and high frequencies to this day. They’re only small metallic diaphragms, when you give them a lot of pressure it goes to rag, it just rags out. Technically, you’d say they go non-linear, it’s not faithfully reproducing. It’s adding up to maybe 40-50% of its own sound, which is distortion. So, we started looking at cone drivers, which is for midrange, probably about ’74. By ’76 we had the first Turbo, which is a way of organizing the waves from a cone driver, which is in the same principle as a phase plug in a compression driver. Do you guys know anything about the basics of loudspeakers and the various types that get used? Oh, OK, let’s try another angle. When you go into a club and it feels like there’s a chainsaw taking your ears off, that’s a compression driver – it’s clipping. Not clipping like the meter’s going into the red, it’s clipping mechanically, it can’t hold its integrity. So, this was an obvious weak point in getting loud sound.

Gerd Janson

Why do you have them in the first place when they have the effect of a chainsaw?

Tony Andrews

Because they’re very good converters of electrical energy into acoustic output. Their efficiency is high, like a direct radiator. Say a 12" speaker, a really high-efficiency one would have 100 or 101 dB for one watt for one meter. This is a sensitivity figure, so sensitivity is about how much of your amplifier energy is being turned into acoustic output. I guess these speakers would be 92 or 93. They won’t be very efficient. The typical home speaker is maybe about 3 or 4% efficient, which is really low. The truth is 100 acoustic watts in the air is enough to kill you, just to give you an idea of how inefficient the majority of loudspeakers are. So, the compression driver has an efficiency approaching maybe 30%, so you get a lot of sound out of it. The problem is, you get the high efficiency but you get masses of distortion. And distortion is something that bothers me greatly, right from the beginning it seemed to be the wrong thing. So, the question is, can you replace the compression driver with something that’s as efficient but doesn’t suffer from all the horrible sound that can make? So, cone drivers; paper is an organic material – it’s much more natural, it’s closer to the speed in air than, say, metal. You’ve only got to think of a dustbin and the clangy sound it makes and then you think of something like a guitar body, which is made out of wood, or a violin. These are more natural human sounds, and the speed of sound in organic materials is closer to what it is in air. So, a metal diaphragm is not a very nice thing. All compression drivers have this. It used to be aluminum, these days they’re titanium, because it’s longer-lasting, stronger. So, we started evolving cone driver midrange probably in the mid-’70s, and we’ve been continuing that evolution to the present day. We’ve understood more and more how to load a cone driver to get the maximum amount of energy with the minimum amount of distortion. We’ve reached a point now where the speakers, even at high level, are clean enough that we start looking and have done for a long time further up the chain, up to the beginning of the music-making process. Maybe I’ll let you ask another question.

Gerd Janson

So, when you talk about back in the day, the problem was getting the right loudspeakers, to manufacture them. Now you have them, more or less, so where’s the problem now?

Tony Andrews

The problem these days is that it seems to have reversed. A lot of the problem has come with the arrival of digital. Let me say right from the beginning that, actually, digital can be as good as, or even better than, analog. But there are more things that have to be considered and got correct with digital than with analog. Analog in some ways is simpler and easier. Then we have the worldwide web, and in the beginning the bandwidth was very narrow, quite small. The bitrate was low. Storage space was incredibly expensive, so the MP3 got invented, more or less as a holding situation, a stopgap until things could grow up. The problem is they become bad habits, reinforced by iTunes. Everyone says Steve Jobs is great, but he didn’t do anything for audio.

Gerd Janson

Before we speak about the audio quality, maybe you can explain. They’re not familiar with the whole soundsystem thing. What’s the main difference between an analog and digital soundsystem?

Tony Andrews

The main difference… The main difference in today’s world and experience is that digital can sound quite harsh. A lot of the texture and the depth is missing because they don’t take all the information. You can do some simple sums, like what is the dynamic range of human hearing? Well, it’s going to be zero to the threshold of pain. Pain kicks in about 135-140 dB. That is really, really loud. A nice listening level is probably about 100-105, so if you like, there’s 135 dB of dynamic range available to the human hearing. So, bit depth is how we measure digital dynamic range. So, eight-bit depth is going to have a quite narrow dynamic range. The loud bits are only going to be so loud, and the difference between the quiet bits is not going to be so much.

So, if you do the maths, it comes out as about 24-bit depth, about the same range as human hearing in terms of dynamics. So, the bit depth is the dynamic range and – you probably know this but I’ll repeat it anyway – the sample rate is the amount of slices taken through time. Considering the fact that the human auditory system can discern time differences down to 15 microseconds, not milliseconds, so 15 millionths of a second has a meaning for the human auditory system… The ear’s not this funny shape for no reason. There’s a purpose to all the funny little curves and the shape of it. It’s to do with vector location. I guess when we were on the plains of Africa or in the jungles, and certainly at night, the eyes were not going to help us if we were going to become prey to some predator. But if you hear a sound, you don’t have to see to know where it is. In the jungle, I guess, you’re relying more on your auditory sense. The auditory system for humans is incredibly well developed. You instantly know where something’s going – even when you walk into a room blindfolded, you know it. You walk out of the room you know it, because the processing is always on; it never stops. That’s why, if you’re in a bad acoustic environment, like a pizza place with tiled floor, hard walls and ceiling, glass, somebody puts a fork down, everybody hears it. Everybody’s shouting because they’re trying to get their voice heard by their friends above the general noise. If you’re in a room like this one, which is acoustically reasonably dead, it’s a pleasant environment, it’s not hard work to exist in it.

This is something that’s always there, always with us. The outcome of being in a bad acoustic environment for a couple of hours is that you begin to feel irritable and tired, because the processor is on all the time. We’re just not aware of it in a conscious way, but we feel the result, which is tiredness. Architects don’t ever think about the acoustic properties of the spaces they’re designing. They should, because the acoustic properties make for the mood and the feeling and the ambience of the place, and it’s good to pay attention. For example, the nice little huts you’ve got around here for making music, they’re great because the walls are all different angles, so you don’t get any standing waves. But it would be quite an improvement if there were some cloth in the ceiling to absorb the high frequencies. High frequencies’ perception spoils the reflection of your stereo image. When you’re mixing, you want to be hearing just the speakers – assuming that they’re reasonably truthful and not glamorizing or underplaying – as a good reference, so when you go out there it’s not miles away from whatever the average is. But if you go out there and play, there’s going to be all sorts of things you’ll encounter. So, there has to be kind of a ground zero, and that’s what a studio’s for.

Gerd Janson

And would you also recommend the bedroom studios at home to have just a bit of cloth?

Tony Andrews

I certainly would. It’s not rocket science, acoustics. You just want things that absorb, so the sound doesn’t come back. With the speed of hearing and everything, you pick up that reflection. It spoils your perception, just from the loudspeakers. In fact you don’t even want to hear the loudspeakers, you want to hear the result. So, when I’m listening to a system, I’ve got my test tracks. I put them on, I get in the middle of the speakers. How well does the sound stage? This is the key thing, as to why audio quality is so important. It can be a transcendent, spiritual experience. When you become part of something, as you can with audio and good music, your mind can open. I’m not saying it’s going to follow exactly, but many people have this experience, which is why there are hi-fi nutcases in the world, I guess.

Gerd Janson

And why do you think your loudspeakers are so popular with clubs or electronic music in general?

Tony Andrews

They’re popular in clubs because people aren’t suffering from the politics of the live music world. It used to be a pioneering thing. When we were in it in the ’70s it was a very different category of people. We don’t do a line array.

Gerd Janson

What is a line array?

Tony Andrews

It’s the strip of speakers you see each side of the stage when you go into a concert. They’re actually quite easy to fly, but as a way of doing audio they’re extremely flawed. You’re never going to get the precision that we’re talking about. You should be able to do better than these [points to speakers] in a big concert. It’s easy with one speaker to get a reasonably good result, especially if your room is okay. But if you’ve got lots of speakers they really take some organizing to, if you like, sing off the same page. They’ve all got to be in time, in sync. It’s a bit like rowing a boat – everybody has to row together at the same time.

Gerd Janson

But why’s the line array method so popular with live music?

Tony Andrews

Because we live in a world that is dominated by convenience, rather than production values. When you’re in clubs, you don’t have these ideas. I mean, the live world is incredibly political. When you’ve got glamor and celebrity, it’s not so much the celebrities but all the people around start going a bit crazy. This kind of madness develops. I can honestly say the sound in concerts today is not as good as it was 25 years ago, when it was more analog and line arrays didn’t exist. That’s my opinion. Clubs like our stuff because they’re just listening to audio. Obviously, they want strong bass that’s musical when you play a bassline that’s got various notes in it. It’s got all of them, it doesn’t just do one note. The mids are clean and strong. It’s the distortion levels. We can get loud sound really, really clean. The high frequencies are very pure, because the crossover point is high.

What’s the crossover point? The crossover point, there will be two crossovers in this [gestures to the speaker next to him], not to mention a load of processing, but between the bass speaker and the midrange, there will be one crossover, and between the midrange and the high there’ll be another. So… I thought of something as I said that. See, another thing about audio, we talked about how fast it is, how important timing is and how deep we can perceive the difference is in time arrivals. But, also, it’s the breadth of the audio spectrum. It’s ten octaves wide. All the colors we see are of the rainbow, and the rainbow is one octave. So, although light’s electromagnetic waves and sound is waves of compression and rare reflection, everything in the universe seems to be built on an octave. So there’s one octave of light. With one lightbulb, you can get all the light you need, the full spectrum, which, when you add it together becomes white. It’s incredibly difficult to do that with ten octaves, which is why four-way soundsystems are split into bass speakers, mid and high and sometimes low-mid and high-mid and high. If you go much beyond that it’s probably not necessary, and you’re complicating it to the point where you could probably get more problems than good results.

The four-way system is about the maximum. But the reason you have to do this is that bass wave is easily as long as this room and a high-frequency wave is about this long [holds fingers about one inch apart], so we’re talking huge orders of magnitude difference. The difference between red light and violet light is not much, we just see this narrow spectrum. If we saw the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum ,we probably wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere without bumping into something. It would be too much. So, the windows of perception that we have as humans, they’re what they are, and they’ve evolved the way they have. We have ten octaves in sound so it’s very, very broad. It’s also 360 degrees, and your reading vision is a very narrow cone in front of your eyes. Peripheral vision goes out to here [spreads arms], but with audio it is 360 the whole time. So maybe I’ve given a reason as to why speaker systems are often divided up into bass, mid and treble. The crossover is the thing that takes the full-range spectrum and divides it into bass, mid and treble, that’s what a crossover point does.

These days, because of digital – which is a positive thing about digital – is it allows us to delay the time by milliseconds. I don’t know if they do that with these, but where these are starting from, it’s not all on a flat plane. So, the time adjustment will delay the one at the front to be at the same point with the one at the back. Our hearing is so discerning that we will hear that that isn’t right. We won’t go, “Oh, the timing’s wrong,” we’ll just go, “OK, it’s alright, but it’s not great sound.” To get great sound, all the frequencies need to arrive almost at the split microsecond together, because of the timing sensitivity that we have.

Gerd Janson

Everyone who ever played in a club without monitors can maybe feel you on that.

Tony Andrews

When it comes to trying to time the beat for the next record?

Gerd Janson

Yeah. As soon as you’re in, you wonder, “What did I do wrong? It sounded right just a second ago.” You have that delay.

Tony Andrews

Yeah, you do, and quite often we have to take any time delay off the monitors, because some DJs are really sensitive to it. They’re hearing a meter. Sound travels at, well I know it’s 1,100 feet per second, but I think that’s about 376 meters per second. It’s quite slow, so you really do have to pay attention to it if you’re making a soundsystem. But that’s not what you guys are doing – you’re making music, I guess.

Gerd Janson

Yeah, but some of them are playing that music in clubs.

Tony Andrews

If you know about soundsystems and you put your music on and it doesn’t sound right, then maybe you can do something about fixing it. There’s a great lack of good sound engineers in the world in general. There aren’t so many. That’s all I want to say. I don’t want to be rude.

Gerd Janson

You don’t name names. OK.

Tony Andrews

What else could you say here? Tons really.

Gerd Janson

Keep out of the reds.

Tony Andrews

So, assuming the sound’s okay and there’s an engineer who’s got it nicely dialed in for the room, any room’s got a nice working level. Too little and you don’t get enough excitement; too much and you start to crush people, especially if it’s distorted. So, the idea here is to try to keep the sound as clean as possible. I know that some kinds of distortion are part of the musical thing.

Gerd Janson

You’re not talking about the Jimi Hendrix kind of distortion, are you?

Tony Andrews

No, that was his sound. Even harmonic distortion is actually quite pleasant. The distortion you get from even a bad soundcard – most of them are not that good – it’s also overloading it. That kind of distortion has a lot of square waves in it – they’re not natural. The ear doesn’t like them. I know we’re living in a world where quite a lot of ugly things are considered good, but I can’t come to terms with distortion being a beneficial thing to the average human. It’s in everything from MP3 to bad soundcards to bad original samples.

To me the most important thing is to have a good beginning. So, it’s a nicely recorded vocal, or it’s a good sample, it’s a good quality. When you’re mixing it, the levels want to be just right, not too quiet. They don’t want to be too loud, because when it’s clipping and in the red you get that horrible crunchy sound. If you do this half a dozen times, you’ve not got much left. It’s not just that you’ve got distortion, which is non-linearities, artifacts, things that didn’t belong in the original signal in the first place; it’s the fact that the clean side of it is missing, the depth, all the information that can make sound such a beautiful experience.

When the sound is good, you want to open yourself to it. When it’s bad it drives you away, it’s something to avoid. So, good samples, good beginnings, sensible gain structure all the way through, keeping the life in it. An eight-bit sample will not have all the information that a piano’s got in it, all the harmonics. For instance, an MP3, even at 320kbps, has only got 20% of the information of a CD. So, if you translate CD quality, which is 16-bit 44.1khz into kilobytes per second, it comes out, I think, at about 1410. So, a so-called high-quality MP3 is 320 kilobytes per second – that makes a CD five times more information. So, obviously lots of stuff is going to be missing. I’m not an expert on digital, but I know it’s looking for significant bits. There’s a level at which an MP3 will reject any information that is below a certain level in the mix, which means all your subtle harmonics are gone; they’re not there anymore. And the effect on your sound is like looking at a two-dimensional picture or really being in the place. That, to me, is another reason why audio quality is so important. It’s a multi-dimensional experience when it’s good. When it’s bad, you might as well put paint on a wall. It’s not the full thing.

I am concerned that generally in the world the appreciation of this is going downhill, and it’s a combination of bad use of digital, such as MP3s, and line arrays at concerts. iPods have got people to the point where they almost prefer the sound of an iPod to real audio. Quite often when engineers get on a Funktion-One system when they’re doing a live band, it frightens them because when you move an EQ you get a response. It’s like taking a guy who’s been driving a Ford Focus, a pretty standard car, and putting him in a Formula One car. They’re actually quite hard to drive, because they’re so sensitive – you have to be careful and know what you’re doing, but if you do, you can get the most amazing results live. In fact, good live can be better than the recording, because the number of stages between the original and the end result is at a minimum. So, to expand on that point, every time you take your audio and put it through a processor or copy it from one format to another, unless the mathematics is perfect and the algorithms are wonderful, it’s going to be degraded. It’s always been there that the minimum number of stages between the beginning and the end will always give you the best audio. It’s very hard to hold onto all these subtle things that make a Steinway piano a Steinway and a cheap copy a cheap copy. Most people can tell the difference, but they’re both pianos. So, a line array will give you sound, but it won’t give you any more than a two-dimensional result.

Gerd Janson

What do I do if I have a bad back and I don’t want to carry records around? Or I’m all about efficiency and I just want to travel with two USB sticks in my pocket?

Tony Andrews

If you’ve got a collection of vinyl, the first thing to do would be to translate it into digital. So you get yourself a good record deck and you put, say, an Ortofon moving coil cartridge on it, because they’re one of the nicest-sounding cartridges you can get. Don’t use a DJ cartridge, because they’re built for strength, not finesse. The only things I know that are going to work nicely are an Apogee, a Prism, or this little box which, I think, is about €150 – It’s from Echo and it’s very nearly, if not as good as a Prism or an Apogee. Somehow, they’ve got the right chips with the right mathematics and the audio that comes out of these is amazing. We use it to judge all other soundcards. So, if you use a really good analog-digital converter and you get it down at 24/96, you’ve got it in digital format. Then when you play, Traktor or any of these will play a WAV file…

Gerd Janson

Is someone here using Traktor? And the rest are Serato, right?

Tony Andrews

Something to tell you about Traktor – we were quite amazed at this, and we only learned it a couple of years ago – we were asked to evaluate the Traktor soundcard, and we came back with a report that wasn’t happy at all.

Gerd Janson

So, other companies come to you…

Tony Andrews

They do, yeah. Because our thing is audio and Funktion-One is our personal expression of our quest for good audio – people tend to see us as a yardstick, a measurement. So, people send us amplifiers: What do you think of this? They send us soundcards and Native Instruments did. And when we told them what we found they were quite concerned. They came over and visited, and through the course of it they heard what we heard, which was a fairly degraded sound playing a well-recorded WAV file, and they began to suspect the software. At that point I got introduced to Foobar – which, sadly there isn’t a Mac version of – but it’s a shareware file-player.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

There’s a Mac version. Hooray! The thing about Foobar is, it’s just a straightforward player. There’s no tricks, bells or whistles, it’s not phoning up somebody saying who you can share it with, it’s just playing the music, and it does it really, really well. When we played the same tracks with the Foobar through the Native Instruments soundcard, it was actually pretty good. Not quite as good as the Echo, but pretty damn good. So, it was in the software – and this is the thing to remember about all software – two weeks later, they came back and said, “This is what you do: you go into preferences, then the mixer section, you take the EQ from Exone to classic, then further down on the mix list there is auto-leveling and auto-limiting,” neither of which you really need unless you’re completely crazy. But if you’re doing this professionally, you should be at that point. Anyway, you get rid of those, because it turns out they’re adding extra layers of processing, which is actually degrading the sound quite substantially. I think Native Instruments has it as standard like this now in their late releases, with the classic EQing in place of the Exone, and then you uncheck these things and it becomes a simpler file-player. So, we haven’t even got out of the laptop and already there are things to think about. With Serato I think the soundcard is the dongle for the program, if I’m not wrong.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

So, you’re kinda stuck with their soundcard, which up until the last release was pretty bad. They’re not on their own with this bad soundcard thing. Some of the Pro Tools soundcards were pretty bad as well. Believe it or not, Pro Tools cards were crap, some of them. I think that’s what gave Prism a market. It’s quite sad that you can do all this clever stuff mixing and recording, and then, in the final analysis, when you turn it back into analog, you can take so much of the life away from it, because a soundcard will usually have digital-to-analog converters and they need to be good. It’s not easy to get digital to analog converted to an acceptable quality. It’s only recently that it’s become something you can do without costing a lot of money, as proven by this device.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Yeah, CDs are okay. They’re certainly better than MP3s. Because, if we talk about CDs, then we have to talk about Pioneer CDJs. The 2000 is a far better machine than the DJ1000, the Mark 3. They can be okay. But you have CD format and it’s got to decode that, and if you’ve got a digital input, you can come digitally out of the CD player, straight into the ubiquitous 800, which actually, although it’s not offensive as long as it’s not in the red, it isn’t proper audio at all. So, if you come out of the CDJ analog then you’re already using the converters in the machine. So, there is a size of window that the audio can get through. It’s like cleaning windows – you clean one window and you see another one behind it that also needs cleaning and you keep going on like that until the light gets in. Pursuing clean sound, you can be really loud and really strong but it doesn’t hurt, it’s got no square wave content. Sometimes you want to put jagged-edge sounds in for sensationalism or whatever, but there’s not many people who find that a great diet. I certainly don’t mind a bit. But there is a reason why there’s a diatonic scale – harmony is everything. So, what you asked about CD players, did I answer you?

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

At trade shows we always have a demonstration room because demonstrating the equipment is much better than talking about it. So, we feel if people get an experience they’re going to remember it. We’d been using an analog preamp that was actually made for us in 1982 right up until about two years ago. After discovering Foobar and this nice piece and turning some vinyl into digital form, then we were burning some CDs and using the analog preamp. But after getting Foobar and finding the soundcard, we now go directly from the laptop to the soundcard straight into the crossovers or the soundsystem. We don’t even go into the mixer. It’s not so easy, because you haven’t got a fader there, but you can use it with a mouse, or if you’ve got a controller it’s great. That is less stages than having a CD going from that to an analog thing and then the crossover’s digital, so there’s another set of converters.

So, if you’re thinking about what the audio has to do and minimizing the number of changes it has to go through on its way to the end result, it’s going to retain more of its integrity. It’s what I call signal path integrity. Pretty much every piece of equipment I get, we set everything at unity gain, plug the input into the output really quickly, because your sonic memory is about three seconds long. That’s all you’ve got to make a decent evaluation, but that’s how we test things in the first place. If the audio quality is not up to it, then it’s not worth going any further. So, that’s the first thing we do with anything anybody sends us – we put it in the circuit, we take it out of the circuit. It’s not easy to do that, but we try to do it.

Gerd Janson

What would be your ideal set-up, if you can?

Tony Andrews

A completely dead room. Something at least as dead as this room is here. You’re never going to be able to have anything but a hard floor. Case in point, this February, Space said to us, “We’ve been using this system for seven or eight years, we want to raise the game, do something new and different.” So, I came up with a plan, went out there and said, “Look, I’m only going to do this if you treat the ceiling of this place, because we’re standing here talking and I can hear the low-mids coming back down to me. That’s just me talking, so what’s it going to be like with 10,000 watts on? That’s going to be the flavor of the room. So, I will do another step forward on the soundsystem, if you treat the ceiling.”

Turns out they thought this was okay, they would do it, they got a nice chap in from Barcelona and he did a really nice job. But there was an observation that I was curious about, which was why was I only getting the low-mid back from the ceiling? Because this looks like a concrete ceiling, and I should get some high frequencies back as well, but I’m not. So, when we were hanging the stuff in the place and I was up in the roof, I could see they’d sprayed some of this – I don’t know what you call it, flock or something – they’ve sprayed some of this material on the roof, but it was only sufficiently absorbent to take away the high frequencies, so the mids were still there. So, when I got up in the roof, which was some time in May, that’s why I realized why I was getting that reflection.

So, in your writing room, the place where you’re doing stuff, when you walk in and you’re talking, listen to what’s coming back. If it’s a good room and it’s nice, the sound of your own voice is going to stay inside your head. If it’s not so good, it will sound like it’s all around you, coming from every direction. You’ve already got all the equipment you need about your person to evaluate an acoustic space. You don’t need a laptop or a load of equipment and microphones and graphs. Most real-time analyzers average over a very long time, as far as the ear is concerned. The ear works in microseconds. The front edges of everything are really important. This is known as the transient, the beginning of the sound. If you were to remove the transients from a violin and a guitar and just played the envelope rather than the beginning, it’s not easy to tell the difference between those two instruments. So, you need the beginning to tell you what it is. Then when you think about intelligibility with speech, it’s in the consonants, the “t”s and the “k.” They’re the things that give it edges. If I start mumbling [mumbles] and not talking very clear, it’s the consonants that go first. So, transience is really important and speakers need to be fast.

See these are very nice, pleasant, but I find these a bit slow. I’m used to them being snappy. Over 40 years, this is where me and my partners have finished up thinking what the most excitement and best part of audio is. In the beginning you follow your instincts and what you feel to be right. If you’re lucky later on, you’re able to work out what it is that attracts you and maybe wrap some science around it. I can do that if I sit down and write something, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting conversation. So, I don’t go too technical, because in the end it’s about music, which is about feelings. It’s a way to find out more about yourself.

Personally, I like old-school house from the ’80s to the ’90s when there was a positive feeling, it was happy, there were vocals, key changes, some melody. The thing that gets me most is the disjointed rhythms. I have said to people that if my heart were to behave like this I’d be in hospital. There are certain things that don’t change, thank God, for eons, breathing and thinking and your heart beating is one of them. That’s old, but it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. What I see with digital is that all the good stuff learned during the analog period of audio has been replaced to quite a large extent by the way digital behaves.

Back in the ’60s a guy called Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. And now we’re in the digital age, audio has shifted to the message of that medium, which is actually very fussy. It can be very wrong and a lot of people have got very used to it. The point I’m making is the digital thing could’ve taken what was begun with analog further. I’m here talking to you guys because it’s of great concern to me that rather than going forward and building on what we understood, we’ve swapped one kind of imperfection for another. It has not gone further at this point.

Gerd Janson

Why did it go wrong, in your opinion, if the possibilities were all there?

Tony Andrews

How deep do you want to go? [Laughs] How much time have we got?

Gerd Janson

We still have a bit.

Tony Andrews

Just take the Russian Revolution, for instance, which began with some apparently good ideals for the people. And it didn’t take long…

Gerd Janson

So, the MP3 player is like Stalin?

Tony Andrews

I’m just saying that the default mode of human endeavor is for it to go around in Circles, and when you’re on the other side of the circle, you’re actually going in the opposite direction from where you started. Going from the Revolution to Stalin, from communism to fascism, is a glaring example. It’s human behavior, because we all assume someone knows better, or someone else is taking care of it. It’s not necessarily true. As far as I’m concerned, audio is wide open. It needs to get better. It’s a very uplifting and deep subject, and I guess that’s why you’re involved in it. But the musical side… Well, music itself is an amazing thing we have. I can explain why we have such good audio perception and how it helps our survival, but why we’ve come up with music and we’ve got a scale that sounds in or out of tune is a fascinating question and I’m not saying I know the answer.

Gerd Janson

And you still haven’t lost hope for the turning point in the digital age? You think it can still be an advantage for audio?

Tony Andrews

The fact Funktion One exists with such a strength, despite not doing line arrays, so we’re not in with the fashion, but there’s enough people who get our audio quality to make us successful… This is the way the world works. If we’re quite popular and good in clubs, people put the idea around that we’re no good for live, because they’ll only use a line array in live, and we don’t have one – that makes it quite hard. But people market against us by saying we’re no good for live. I can honestly tell you that a good loudspeaker, and this is a good loudspeaker, you can put any kind of music through it and you can appreciate it. Any good soundsystem is the same. So, to say that one system is good for one kind of music and another is good for another kind of music is displaying great ignorance, frankly, about the subject.

Gerd Janson

So, the pigeonholing that goes on with musical styles doesn’t apply to loudspeakers?

Tony Andrews

No. Only in as much as certain things, like with dance music, if a system’s got good bass then you can maybe consider it alright for dance music, even if the midrange is shoddy and the highs are nasty. But if you want to do speech, the human voice – and here’s another thing that’s come into my head – the thing to evaluate a system on is a good vocal track. I do listen to dance music, electronic music, on a system, but that’s the last thing I do. The first thing I do is listen to a male or a female voice. I’ve got tracks I put on that I know well, because the human voice is what we actually listen to most of the time. There are nearly seven billion human voices on the planet and every one is different. Everyone can recognize their friend’s voice, even if you’ve only met someone a couple of times. We’re really tuned into voices. So, if you get to know a good well-recorded vocal track and put it on your speakers, it’s going to tell you an awful lot straight away. A typical thing would be the compression drivers are very forward and they give you 3-5k much too strongly. This is where all the cut in the sound is, the edges of the transient are most noticeable. But if you haven’t got the stuff below 2k, if you haven’t got the wooden frequencies, you’re missing something. A lot of production is done like this now. It’d always been present and I think it’s to do with… are you guys aware of the Fletcher-Munson curve? Human frequency sensitivity?

Gerd Janson

I’m not.

Tony Andrews

It’s actually not a linear curve, so our sensitivity to various frequencies is quite different. The peak of it is at 4kHz, interestingly enough, and bass is actually quite low. So, if you look it up, it’s certainly not straight, it’s kind of all over the place. But the most sensitive region is 4k, which is probably where most of the intelligibility when you’re listening to somebody is coming from. Around 4k is where the “t”s and the “s”s are going to be. If you’ve got a vocal and a guitar, which have a similar frequency range, and you try to put them both in the 2-5k area, then they’re going to be in conflict. Actually, a guitar can have some really lovely frequencies low down, around 400-500. So, to get a nice mix, you don’t cram it all into the place where we naturally pay the most attention. You layer it. You put different things in different parts of the spectrum. That way, you maintain separation and therefore more information. I’ve run out again…

Gerd Janson

Should we maybe open it up for some questions? Here’s a microphone, I hope it works.

Audience member

I’ve got a couple of questions if people don’t mind. I think these are out of my price range so I’m going to use nearfield [monitors]. Do you have a decent tip for near-fields?

Tony Andrews

I’m sure the Genelecs are okay. We do make some small loudspeakers. I took a different approach in that I wanted them to be really good converters, the efficiency thing, and I thought a speaker that is this big, it’s very silly to ask it to have serious bass. What it can do is the definition area in bass, around about 100-200. So, they don’t go really deep, but they’re really fast, and they’re pretty even and they’ll tell you the truth. DJ Magazine in the UK last year gave us a studio monitor of the year award for one of our loudspeakers. The thing is there’s no EQ thing you need with it, you can use it with any amplifier. It’s naturally flat, naturally time-aligned, because you don’t have to have a delay to get your speakers in line. Maybe they’ve done this with these horns, maybe they’ve lined up the voice coils, so they have a natural timing. As far as recommending studio monitors, well, we’ve made some speakers that are pretty nice, but I’ve also told you the design compromise that came into it. If you’ve got a subwoofer on the floor, job done.

Audience member

I’m a singer and I always have a hard time singing with a Shure SM-58. It makes my voice really harsh. I just hate that microphone and it’s everywhere.

Tony Andrews

Yeah it is, and you know why? It’s the same thing I was talking about with the 4kHz and the cut, it has what they call a presence boost, so it makes the cut in the voice stronger. But if you already have…

Audience member

I have it, but I want to put it away.

Tony Andrews

So, you don’t need a mic that artificially boosts that part of your voice. You should try a load of microphones and maybe sit in front of your monitors, not too close, in case it starts feeding back, but just talk into it. Actually, it’s hard to know what your own voice sounds like but your friends will know. Ask which one makes me sound most like me. I would think here, where there’s an opportunity to try different mics, you should do that. The SM-58 has been around since the ’70s, and it has always had that presence boost, and I think it’s great that you noticed it. But with a female voice, you really don’t need that improvement, because it’s a retrograde improvement at that point, because you’re making a spike.

Audience member

It’s terrible, I hate it.

Tony Andrews

Do you think you’ll get a chance to do that? Maybe try a Beyer microphone?

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Yeah, Neumann’s are really good. There will be a mic that doesn’t have that presence boost. Did you know that sounds are cultural as well? They used to be, less so now. It’s very reminiscent of an American sound, the SM-58. Not so much these days, but it’s very strong in the high-mid. There’s a certain well-known company that are still very strong with their high-mid and that’s the thing that does the chainsaws in your head. Sorry, am I not talking into the mic? You’d think I’d know about that by now.

Audience member

I own a Pioneer 800. Don’t shoot me, but I do have a reason. I know the sound quality, it does my head in, especially the fact that Allen & Heath and Funktion-One mixers are fantastic.

Tony Andrews

Thank you.

Audience member

I genuinely love playing your mixers, especially when they’re configured to the system as well. But the Allen & Heath, the knobs and all the faders are crap, they’re a real pain. But the Pioneer, the effects are something I really like to use. But is there a signal path or a way I can internally modulate the Pioneer’s circuitry in order to rectify its sound? Because from what I’ve heard there’s an internal limiter on Pioneers, there’s a stamp when it comes straight out of the speakers. So, I was wondering if you might have suggestion. Obviously, I’ve thought of channeling a Pioneer into a good mixer then out of a great system, but that’s just a prolonged effect I assume, the same problem just with adding an extra chain to the path.

Tony Andrews

Yeah, once it’s been degraded you can’t bring it back. You just make it worse the more you do. So, what can you do with a Pioneer 800? I suppose you could go into it digitally and that way you could leave out…

Audience member

From a 1210? It wouldn’t be CDJ. Technics.

Tony Andrews

Oh, so you’re going into a phono preamp?

Audience member

Yeah, and generally from Serato as well. Sometimes through vinyl too, but most of the time Serato.

Tony Andrews

Yeah, but he wants to use his 800.

Audience member

I really just want to use the effects on the 800, that’s what it’s all about. If you could maybe put in a few effects on your mixer I’d appreciate it [laughs].

Tony Andrews

There’s a story about that mixer and frankly it was like pulling teeth. It was really, really hard work with these guys, but they had a fantastic analog circuit and an old broadcast-style mixer. That’s how DJ mixers used to be in the ’80s. We said, “Look, if we could get at least a crossfader in this, it could be good.” I’m suffering because the 600 – forget the 800 – was actually an audio masher, it was a disgusting piece of equipment and I’ve actually told the Japanese engineers that to their faces, more or less. They were very apologetic, that was nice. But the fact is it’s been destroying audio for a long time. The 800 at least became inoffensive, but it’s got no bass and the sound comes out very flat indeed, there’s no dimension left in it. One of the world’s standard mixers out there in analog is the Midas XL4 and XL3. They’re big, but you get a nice juicy sound out of them. This guy went on to do the XTA, which are the crossovers we use, and we gave him an 800 to see if he could do something with it. He said, “Tone, this mixer has not been built with a view to audio quality.” There’s intrinsic stuff there, like the level of chip quality, the level of converters, very hard to get around. The mixer we make, you can put effects on it, but it’s old-school style where you send signals out on a sidechain and then bring it back. To be frank, I don’t understand half of it, but certainly it’s not been taken up.

Gerd Janson

He could connect the Pioneer to your mixer then and just use the effects.

Tony Andrews

Yeah, you’re right.

Audience member

Oh yeah, Jesus, through an auxiliary bus? Sorry, sorry.

Tony Andrews

That was a stroke of genius. Blindingly obvious, but.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Or maybe just get the effects box.

Audience member

I know, but the thing with the 800, it was the first Pioneer with the post-echo. Everything before that was a pre-echo. So when you used an echo effect and you stopped it, it didn’t have an echo. The effect stopped. But with the 800 it’s [makes echoing noise] and that’s the only reason, because from an electronic mix building up, the post-echo is brilliant, because it adds another nuance to when the drop comes in.

Tony Andrews

I’m sure there’s a way to do that with the Formula Sound.

Audience member

I’m going to look into it. I won’t take up your time.

Tony Andrews

No, it’s cool, man. I’m happy.

Audience member

Obviously, we all of us spend a huge amount of time in clubs and I’m just wondering how important is it to protect our ears, wear plugs?

Tony Andrews

Incredibly, really important. Once they’ve been damaged you can’t go back, it doesn’t repair. I guess you know that in the ear there’s all these tiny little bone hairs and if they get overstressed they actually break. When they break, that’s when you get the ringing in your ears for a day or so afterwards. That’s already too late in some regards, although the brilliance of the human brain and body means you will compensate to some extent for the damage that’s done. But it’s better not to have it done at all. The warning that I remember from when I was younger is that my ears used to tickle or start to itch a bit. I think that’s the moment you’ve either got to get the earplugs in or get out of that environment altogether. Because once it’s happened you can’t repair it. The first things to go are going to be the delicate ones, which of course, are going to be the high frequencies, with a wavelength that long [holds fingers close] and bass the size of the room. So, I agree, 100% it’s really important. You can get some nice plugs that mold to your ear, and they’ve got a nine or 15 dB cut. A lot of DJs are mixing with earplugs these days, which seems crazy but I think they’re doing it to get more bass, because that’s what’s left; you don’t hear the bass, you feel the bass.

Audience member

Let’s say you forgot your molded ones or you don’t have them. Is it still a good idea to use any plugs?

Tony Andrews

Absolutely. I’ve used rolled-up bits of tissue paper to put in my ear.

Audience member

I’ve lost 20% of the bass in my left ear.

Tony Andrews

Of the bass?

Audience member

Yeah.

Tony Andrews

That’s interesting.

Audience member

Of the bass frequencies on my left ear. I can always hear a buzzing.

Gerd Janson

What did you do?

Audience member

Just DJed a lot, maybe. Was always using my headphones on a loud volume on my left ear, so maybe because of that. I have a question – all live musicians are really scared with the feedback. Can you talk a bit about feedback, what causes it, how to prevent it? And one of the reasons I get feedback is when the acoustic guitar body vibrates. It vibrates and resonates, because of the waves, not the frequencies.

Tony Andrews

You understand it already.

Gerd Janson

Please tell us about it, I’m sure everybody wants to.

Tony Andrews

I assume you’re talking about feedback from a loudspeaker, so the sound it’s putting out is being picked up by something that’s resonating, maybe a guitar body or even a microphone. I’m sure I can make this feed back if I put it too near the speaker [moves mic]. That’s all it is, it makes a loop. So, it picks up the sound from the speaker and sends it back to the speaker again, so it just keeps getting louder and louder.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Well, the level, but typically it will be at a specific frequency. That’s why an onstage monitor engineer, every single channel he’s got, he’s got graphic equalizers on it. The thing is to take out the part that’s feeding back without taking out the whole sound. I mean, yes, you can get rid of the feedback by turning the whole thing down. But then you’ve lost the point of why you’ve got a monitor on stage. So, you have to try to take out the little slices that are causing the trouble. The idea for a stage monitor is to try and make it as even and flat as possible. In fact, you should do that with any speaker, because that’s what the human likes. In fact, not necessarily absolutely flat – the old vinyl cutting curve was three dB per octave from the bass to the high frequencies. That was like a very gentle slope to the highs; that’s the thing that seems to be the most pleasant to the ears to most humans. So nearly flat but with the bass a bit stronger, sounds perfect to me.

Audience member

I was going to ask something else, but I want to follow that up. Is it likely that systems that are boosting high-mid frequencies, SM-58 style, and cheap stage wedges that are boosting high-mid frequencies, that’s a feedback-generating combination? Because that seems to be the main delay in my soundchecks throughout my career, waiting for the singer to get away from the wedges because this is the signal chain, this is creating feedback.

Tony Andrews

I think you just belt it out, really.

Audience member

I just needed to say that out loud, get it off my chest. But I was going to ask something else. Are you serious that people who spend time in loud environments should always protect their ears, every time?

Tony Andrews

Yeah, they should. But nothing’s straightforward. Distortion creates far more damage than level. In a club, yeah, of course it’s loud. Me and all the other people who engineer have spent years trying to get DJs to keep it out of the red. Most mixers won’t stand being in the red. That’s why it’s red. It’s red is saying, “I can’t take any more, I’m full up, and I’m going to throw all my toys out the fucking pram, because this is stupid.” That’s what’s coming out of the mixer, completely distorted. How can anybody do anything with it at that point? It doesn’t matter how good the soundsystem is, because the soundsystem is only there to faithfully reproduce what you give it. So, a reasonable sound guy is not going to let the system get blown to pieces. He’s going to have a limiter or a compressor on the system, because this is what happens. All sorts of famous and professional people drive their mixers into the red, so we’re not even struggling with whether a Pioneer is as good compared with a Formula Sound, we’re actually struggling with the way people drive things most of the time. Red does not mean “I’m on,” it means “I’m suffering.” All these people subjected to this audio are also suffering and it’s quite staggering, but this is the truth. I’ve tried to say it nicely – this is an interview, more relaxed, and I much prefer this – but I have done things where I’ve written it all out and told people, put slides up, showed bitrate and sample rate, tried to get an awareness of gain structure and what clean sound is and why it’s important anyway. I hope maybe I’ve got across to you that’s it’s staggeringly important because it’s the doorway to another part of our consciousness, or can be. It won’t be if it’s horrible and dirty and messed up, which most of the time it is.

You don’t get it in live concerts and you don’t get it in many clubs. A place like Cielo in New York, where you’ve got an owner who’s completely clued in to this, he’s sound-treated the whole of the room. He’s got us in, he’s got a Formula Sound most of the time, though sometimes people will come along and say they need an 800, but most of the time he’s controlling it and keeping it good. And he knows about the WAV and the MP3 thing. Look at the reputation the club’s got. This is not something really special – it’s just where a bit of intelligence and understanding has been applied. An audio chain is only as good as the weakest part of the story. If you’ve got a sequence of gates and only one is open, that’s the speed that people can walk through it. You only need one bad part in the whole story to bring it all down, like the wrong microphone or a crappy soundcard or a mixer that’s in the red.

I think I’m beginning to get across to you just how delicate this thing is. It is delicate. It’s not just, whack it up and get it out. When you’re dealing with a sensory system that can sort things out from time differences from 15 to 20 millionths of a second, I think that deserves respect. It’s taken billions of years to evolve to this point. Did you know, for instance, that all the oxygen that we breathe was put here by three billion years of cyanobacteria? All the oxygen on earth is the waste product of cyanobacteria. It wasn’t until they learned to process oxygen, which is a much faster metabolism than anything else. In fact, the human brain uses up more energy than anything else in the world. It’s a phenomenally powerful piece of processing equipment. If you’re up a mountain, the first thing you should do is get something on your head because you lose so much heat out the top of your head. That’s probably why we’ve all got hair, because there’s so much energy required just for this thing to exist and work, and we’re only using a fraction of it.

Gerd Janson

And there was one more question in the back.

Tony Andrews

It was nothing to do with audio, but it is.

Gerd Janson

It’s all intertwined.

Audience member

I heard Funktion Ones can’t be brought upstairs. Because it’s so heavy. Is there a way to make it less heavy?

Audience member

Who told you that?

Audience member

This guy in LA installs it in clubs, but he can’t bring it upstairs or something. That’s what his criteria is – the club has to be floor-level. Because he said it’s too heavy or something.

Tony Andrews

Maybe he’s taking something half the size of this.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Marketing has a lot to answer for, there’s no question. It’s a blight on the earth to peoples’ intelligence. To be frank, we’ve been designing equipment to go in trucks since the ’70s; before some of these people saying this were even born, we were already thinking about a truck pack. One of the biggest problems hitting speaker people at the moment is the price of neodymium. It’s gone up by a factor of five. Why is this relevant? It’s relevant to your question because neodymium is a material with some of the highest magnetic coercivity; in other words, how much magnetism can it hold. It’s way out in front of everything else, so you can make quite good horsepower speakers with very lightweight magnets. Suddenly, they’re all in wind generators and hybrid cars and over the years Chinese pricing has driven everybody else out of the business. Suddenly they’ve captured the market. The price of neodymium in one of our 25” speakers is about $375, before we’ve even begun to put metal around it and turn it into a magnet. It was costing $65 – that’s happened in the last couple of years and they’re probably not going to allow export soon. So, there’s people out there beavering away, opening up neodymium mines in other parts of the world. But it’s going to take a while.

Audience Member

Sorry to take up time, but I have to ask this question. I could sit and design the most beautiful system, put gold leads on it, gold wires, but in the real world I have to sell this product. How much does the real world come into this when you’re designing? Because I can design a system, but it’s going to be $80m, and the client’s not going to buy it. How much does that come into your thought when you design? Or do you design and then scale back? I’m talking real-world application, trying to sell something in real-world commerce.

Tony Andrews

Further up the story than the commerce is the natural instinct to get the most out of the minimum amount of materials. So, from an engineering point of view, do not over-complicate it, try to come up with elegant solutions that use the least amount of wood in loudspeakers. That’s why efficiency is important, because if you can get a good conversion of electrical to audio output you don’t need so many speakers. All these considerations come into it. The cosmetics we have are a case of form following function. We’ve never done anything to one of our speakers to go, “Let’s put some bling in to make it more attractive.” Right now, Ann is experimenting with black lacquer and various finishes because a lot of people now want to put our small speakers in their homes and they’d like them to look pretty. Fair enough. But the look of Funktion One is actually engineering, that’s made it look like that.

Audience Member

I wasn’t saying gold leaf for the look, I was saying for the transmission of sound. Or to say I could design the best-sounding speaker, but it may cost too much for the average person. You have to take into account, can the average person purchase this?

Tony Andrews

No, there’s no limits on what we put out there purely on cost. If we have to spend money on a part and we can see a performance result, we definitely will use it, for sure. That’s what makes us happy, to get it as good as we possibly can. It’s my way of contributing to the world, to enjoy music.

Audience Member

Are you publicly traded?

Tony Andrews

No.

Audience Member

OK, that’s why.

Tony Andrews

No, not at all. There’s seven partners and altogether there’s 15 people involved [in the company].

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Yeah, I am. There’s still some more. I keep finding those dirty windows and want to get them cleaner. The thing we started in the mid-’70s, there was a TMS series when we were a dominant force all over the live world. In the ’80s we did Pink Floyd, for instance. It was very, very successful as a live system. That was the first generation. The second was what we called Flashlight – I think that was actually what Pink Floyd used – and now we have something called Resolution. But I can go back to 1975, and there’s a line of development that’s come all the way through. I think there’s something on Slices where they’ve taken out a bit of what I said, but not put the questions in that I got. They put this up on the web where I say I’ve got no respect for the other manufacturers. The reason I say this is because a) It was a question, but b) Christian Heil, V-DOSC, he did this line array thing and, up to a point it has some evenness of dispersion, which people enjoy, but it was a line, so it would fit into stage sets much better than a point-source cluster. So, we went from a three-dimensional approach to sound to a two-dimensional approach. To me, that’s not going forward, which is why I won’t do it. There’s lots of other problems, which I won’t bore you with. But he’s got a lot of success with that and then every other manufacturer in the world suddenly was doing line arrays. They didn’t have their own thing, they’re not thinking, “Where can I take this to?” They’re just thinking, “This is selling, we better make one just the same.” And, of course, it’s an arrangement of the same components, there’s no great componentry development, it’s just an arrangement of multiple speakers. And everyone else has done it, so of course, I haven’t got any respect. I think if you’re really into this then you follow because it’s not a done deal. Who said the development in this area was over? It’s not. When I started it, it was the land of pioneers and the people who were involved in it then were very different from the people involved in it now. It’s a different mentality. It’s not being driven by the artistic element and production values, it’s being driven by politics and the vested interests that get into everything humans get up to. In other words, it’s corrupt.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

How to get lots of high frequency from multiple units without it going to pieces and cone filtering? Because the wavelengths are so short, as soon as you separate two things by a wavelength, they see themselves as separate sources, so, therefore, they start arguing. When things are one, they can’t argue. It’s funny, it’s a bit like people. When they get close in a family, they can have real arguments. When they’re far enough away it’s somebody else’s problem. If they’re really, really close then they can’t because they’ll never get far enough apart. I don’t know, I think about this madness. High frequencies are so delicate that the things that reproduce them also have to be delicate. So the idea of a 1000-watt tweeter is anathema, it’s not going to work. For a voice coil to take 1000 watts it’s got to weigh a lot, and as soon as it weighs a lot, how’s it going to go backwards and forwards at 18,000 times a second? That’s a problem that nobody’s really cracked. A line array puts them all in a line, but they’re still interfering like mad, which is why you don’t get any audio out of a line array above 8k. Most of it is canceled. All what I’d call air, the stuff in a soundsystem above 12k, it’s not there. It’s all gone. It’s alright though, a telephone only goes to about 500 to 5k and you can understand what’s going on. But this is not an audio experience, this is just about hearing what somebody is saying.

Gerd Janson

Can you pass the mic?

Audience member

With audio perception connected to certain listening modes, what would you consider proper listening mode for your soundsystems? And do you think people in a club are aware of it?

Tony Andrews

In a club situation, you could have a four-point system or a two-point. If you criss-cross the stereo, which we’ve always done on a four-point, it’s more interesting spatially than just two. Outside is good because you don’t have a room painting all over your audio. It’s better to be outside if you can, a much purer experience.

Audience member

Let’s say you have a dancefloor full of 500 drunk people: Do you think they notice how much effort has gone into the loudspeakers?

Tony Andrews

You mean, do they notice a difference in loudspeakers? Yes, I do, very much so. Considering that we fight against fashion that we don’t agree with, we wouldn’t be successful unless there were enough people appreciating the differences.

Gerd Janson

I think you meant right in the immediate situation than in there, right? Not about the club owner, who wants a good system.

Tony Andrews

Have I got the question wrong?

Gerd Janson

I think he means the bottom line of it is if someone at the end of the night with his 500 drunken friends notices the difference.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Yeah, I think they will. Depending on the kind of drugs involved, one should be more sensitive to it, frankly. It’s really important when your perception is heightened to have it pure and clean. It’s a vexation. Bad sound is a vexation to the spirit. No doubt.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

Firstly, I’m not so sure that they don’t and even if they don’t consciously care about it, it’s still going to affect them.

Audience member

Some people don’t know any better either, that’s part of it. Sometimes you hear a good system and it’s hard to go back to a bad one, like eating McDonald’s every day. Then you eat real food and you’re like, “How did I eat that before?”

Tony Andrews

True, true, the bar keeps going up. What we’re talking about here, you could say: Is there any point striving for excellence in life?

Audience member

That’s the real question.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

[Laughs] All power to you, man.

Audience member

You mentioned Cielo earlier, and I’m sure there’s a great many clubs around the world that have Funktion One soundsystems. But you probably have your particular favorites.

Tony Andrews

Cielo is definitely one of them. Space in Ibiza is another, I was really pleased with the way it worked out there this year with the new proofing in the roof and the new system. It all came together really good.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

We do the Glade electronic music festival. We try to do some ambisonic surround-sound experiments there, but we’re still waiting for sufficient separate channels to do something really good. We did Glastonbury one year, but that’s another… No, don’t go there. We did do Glastonbury from about 1979 up to about ’93 and I personally had a lot to do with the founding of that festival. I knew all the characters involved, and I could tell you some horrible stories.

Audience member

I want to ask you about how music is being mixed and mastered nowadays and especially concerning overcompressing, squeezing the life out of music.

Tony Andrews

Well done. Brilliant. That’s exactly what’s happening. There seems to be this idea that you’ve got to be half a dB louder than the track that came on the radio before you’re gonna get played. Of course, that’s a one-way ticket to hell. There’s a track I liked, a recent dance track, in my terms, anyway, which is Bob Sinclar “Children Of The Sky.” I like the idea, the groove everything about it. I’ve tried three times to get a decent copy of that. I thought the first was a bootleg, because you can’t release a track that sounds so bad, got another one, same thing, another one, same thing. When I put it into Sound Forge and look at it in waveform it tells me it’s 0.1db off clip. When you look at the waveform, it’s all flattened off at the top. It sounds disgusting, it’s unplayable. As much as I love it, I can’t play it, because they were suffering from this delusion that it has to be louder than something else. If the person listening wants it louder there’s a thing called the volume control on most audio equipment.

Audience member

A bit of consolation apparently in the last year or two, there’s been a bit of a backlash against that. They’re trying to ease it back a little bit, just to keep it true to the original mixing engineer idea.

Tony Andrews

Good. Wasn’t there a day back in March? The idea is gathering momentum.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

You’ve got guys who are skilled in the art and understand it [who are] leaving the business because they can’t stand it. They get no creative satisfaction from their part of the story.

Audience member

They’re getting bullied by the record companies.

Tony Andrews

Forced to cram everything into a dynamic range of 2db. It’s absurd. One thing you can all get out of this is that humans are fully capable of behaving absurdly, and nowhere do they do it more than in audio. The things they say about speakers, audio, the way to do things, most of it is nonsense. Find out for yourselves. Knowledge is power. You don’t want to be beholden to somebody who got it from some marketing guy who’s twisting the story in the first place, or his mate who just said something, because that’s how most of it works, I’m afraid. You’ve got to get your own mind, very important.

Audience member

Since you said the human ear is designed primarily for the human voice, do you have any theory why we all get sold on a nice fat bass?

Tony Andrews

Why we like a nice fat bass? It’s a good question. I think it’s within us, in our genes. In history, big bass would be coming from thunderstorms, which when you’re a kid are certainly scary. Volcanic activity or earthquakes and more recently explosions. Bombs. All these things are something you need to pay attention to. I would suggest that human beings come with an adrenalin reaction to big bass. There’s a lot of octaves in bass, too. If you start at 20, you’ve only got to go to 40 to have a whole octave. Then you go to 80 and that’s another octave. And then 160, that’s another octave again. As you’re getting into mid-bass you’ve already had three octaves to play with, which goes under the heading of bass. It’s more ornate than it feels, than it sounds like. Most material you get, you’re lucky if anything goes down to 40. Quite rare. Most people think 40Hz is 25 or 30Hz. I did, until I really experienced it. So, there’s a whole level below what we typically have as bass called infrabass, which goes down to 7Hz. The vibration of the visceral cavity is around 7Hz and if you can vibrate a person at around 7Hz they will disintegrate internally. People have done it – there was a French guy at the turn of the last century who made a huge whistle that vibrated at 7Hz, and he killed himself when he switched it on. It’s really true; it happened. So, we’ve only had big bass since the ’70s that isn’t an explosion or something dangerous, and I think we still have that reaction. I think we also like our molecules being vibrated. It’s a kind of massaging effect. With earplugs, I’ve been close to 14 double 21s at the Prague O2 Arena and I’ve actually felt the air being sucked in and out of my lungs. The eyeballs were going all over the place, but I’ve never had it where it’s taking the air out of you. I quite enjoyed it, but you shouldn’t do it for too long.

Gerd Janson

Do we have any more questions?

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Tony Andrews

[Laughs] No, we don’t, is the short answer. We’d quite like to. There’s only so many of us and so much time. Remember The KLF, Jimmy Cauty? We did an armored personnel carrier for him once with a big soundsystem on it.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Gerd Janson

People you invite to listen to your new speakers and then you trust their judgment?

Tony Andrews

Yeah, we solicit opinion from everybody when we have demo rooms at the trade fairs.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Gerd Janson

But your hearing is gone from one ear.

Tony Andrews

Be perfect, wouldn’t it? Then you’d have no QC problems there [laughs].

Gerd Janson

So, please give it up for Tony Andrews.

[applause]