The Jim Long Interview
With Keith Clark
Editor, Install Sound

Jim Long

On a recent summer afternoon, I had the pleasure of a long conversation with Jim Long, an audio industry fixture for almost 40 years. Spending his entire career with Electro-Voice, Jim’s long been known for unique ability to explain audio techniques and concepts in simple, logical and just plain understandable ways. This in addition to his great marketing work for EV through the years.

He’s still with the company despite it’s move to Minneapolis for combined operation at Telex, working out of his same Buchanan office and at home, in addition to leading educational seminars regularly at Telex HQ.

Jim was kind enough to allow me to tape our conversation and share it with you here.

Q. How did you get started in this business?

In the early ‘60s, I went to Purdue University to get an Electrical Engineering degree, mostly because that’s what my dad expected me to do. In those days, you did that.

Prior to summer break in 1963, I decided that I wanted a job, and I was kind of a hi-fi geek. Now, I didn’t think all that much of EV hi-fi speakers, but I knew that EV was not too far from home. So I sent them an e-mail… (laughs). Actually, I sent them a Western Union telegram asking for a job. This was a big deal in those days – I had to go to the student union and write it out to be sent.

I got a reply pretty quickly, the gist of which was “report to work on June 1”, or something to that effect. So I did.

Since then, I’ve never really left EV, except to finish up my degree at Purdue and when I went to Northwestern University to get an MBA. This was my dad’s influence again – “marketing’s the thing, it’s a growing field, etc.”

I considered other jobs, and even went to San Francisco to interview with Hewlett Packard, but in the end I took a full-time engineering position with EV. This was in 1966.

Q. So you had a background in engineering. How did you end up in marketing?

Jim, circa 1968.

Some of this is a bit sketchy in my mind, but I recall that about six months after I took the engineering job, I walked into Al Kahn’s office and inquired about getting into marketing. Al remembers this conversation better than I do – he says my words were “keep an eye on me”. But the crux was that I thought I could do more for the company in marketing than in engineering.

So they started sending me literature projects that needed to be written and managed, rep bulletins, dealer letters and the like. Then they asked me to do a “sales presentation” for a microphone I’d developed. This didn’t bother me at all. I had a ball doing it, and from then on, I was in marketing and sales.

Q. At that time, what was EV’s status in pro audio?

EV was one of the dominant microphone companies in virtually all applications, and they were also big in hi-fi gear and to a certain extent, provided commercial sound equipment.

When I first arrived, they were at the end of a major investment in an organ product. It was an interesting device, with a spinning capacity disk. A waveform of recorded pipe organ tracks was applied to the disk to create the sound. It sounded real good and they sold a bunch of them, but there were too many entrenched organ companies and EV couldn’t get a toehold in the market. So that went away, but it was fascinating.

I remember seeing a JBL 375 large-format compression driver acting as a door-stop in engineering. I didn’t even know what it was. The director of engineering at that time, John Gilliam, explained that it was a professional sound driver and that we (EV) should make them someday.

About 1973, John started designing a driver, and horn work was also ongoing, with Don Keele serving as the project engineer on the first constant directivity horn. The idea for constant directivity came from John Gilliam and, in particular, Ray Newman, as I recall. Don was relatively new to the company at that point, and he took the idea and ran with it, did a bunch of measurements, made the product a reality.

So we ended up with these funny-looking white, fiberglass horns - the first CD horns. There was no bass system, no enclosures… and no marketing plan.

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