Ken (continued): I am only sorry that much of the development I saw for Smaart did not happen. It's that software development thing again that's so hard. My vision has always been that the industry needs a control surface, something that is cross-platform and supported industry wide. The virtual control of signal processing, routing, monitoring and integrated intelligent agents is the future. DSP and native signal processing will become/is becoming a commodity black box.

Ken (continued): The key bit, as in the hard bit, is the software. I could go on but how about another question or if you'd like, let me know! Never been shy to express where I think things are going in the industry.

Grampa Lee: Doesn't it seem with software - even more than with hardware - it takes even more end user input to figure out what is lacking?

Ken: Definitely, because the development team in software is rarely people who actually use the stuff in the field and because testing of software is much more complex than testing a hardware device. Software is never done. There is always the next release, the new features you come up with doing the last set.

Ken (continued): One of the problems faced by audio equipment manufacturers is that they're all hardware companies at heart. They treat software as a necessary evil to sell hardware. This has to change for the industry to move to the next level. What should be interesting is to see some new companies come on the horizon who are primarily software companies building products to run on other people's more generic hardware.

Ken (continued): I would not be surprised to see spin-off companies out of some of the bigger signal processing companies, where the software development teams bring to market more advanced software for their previous employers hardware.

Jim G: Was there much thought on your part of not selling EAW or was it something that you felt it was time to do? I mean, did you have to think very hard on it once the dollars were satisfactory?

Ken: Selling EAW was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was my “first born”. One of the main reasons for selling was that to realize where I saw the industry and EAW going, we needed to develop DSP and software and it would be like starting over. So we went looking for a partner that had the resources to go in that direction.

Ken (continued): We considered buying a small electronics company, but we really needed to build this whole new area of expertise both in manufacturing and engineering. We had been approached repeatedly over the previous few years by people trying to buy EAW. Mackie seemed like a great compliment to EAW. Unfortunately, Mackie was suffering from serious growing pains.