|
The Jim Long Interview
By Keith Clark
Q. So how did you introduce these to the market?
Well, we were going through some pretty lean times at that point, but we had made these horns and drivers, and I remember that (noted consultant) Bob Coffeen liked the light weight of the horns in addition to the constant directivity, and he started specifying them into his systems. This got us into the business.
Dave Klepper of Klepper Marshall King helped a lot with the Yankee Stadium renovation project in 1976, where he was doing the sound design. A Bogen dealer was awarded the bid, but they were a commercial sound company and didn’t have the right products for the job. They also couldn’t buy Altec or JBL products. We, on the other hand, were more than willing to sell to just about anyone because we were hungry.
So we sold a “line array” – heard that term recently? – made up of a huge stack of these horns that were mounted in a steel structure in the outfield. There were also some of our CDP horns to cover shadowed regions of the main grandstand. It makes sense that these would have been on delay, a very early digital delay, but then again, that doesn’t seem possible given the timeframe. You forget some of the details as the years go by…
The dealer couldn’t equalize the system, didn’t know enough about tuning, didn’t have a spectrum analyzer, had never seen a third-octave graphic EQ, which I guess were still kind of new then. So I, along with some EV technical folks, came out and worked with Dave Klepper on tuning. I don’t even know for sure that we knew exactly what we were doing, but that system was there for a long, long time.
Q. Over the years, you’ve often made references to Lou Burroughs. What were your favorite aspects of working with Lou?
By the time I got EV, Lou was about 55-60 years old, but even then, he was tirelessly working to push our microphones, particularly in the broadcast market. These were the days when you would go to New York, L.A. and maybe Chicago, visit the networks, show them what you have, and hopefully you’d get their business.
Now Lou would always say “I’m not a salesman.” But he would go to these networks and talk to the operations people and engineers, and he’d ask “what’s your biggest problem, what are you trying to solve?” He’d really study their concerns, take this knowledge back to EV and, with the engineers, create prototypes to solve the problem. Back and forth, and eventually he’d nail the solution. The overall outcome was products like the RE15, RE20, 635 and others. And Sentry monitor speakers – we still sell the Sentry 100A, by the way.
The original Sentry was a much bigger wooden box with a couple of old hi-fi components in it, but it had a fairly flat response curve. Lou found that a lot of these people would judge his mics based on their own speakers, and they would say the mics didn’t sound right. So Lou looked at what they were using, which was usually really crummy speakers, and thus Sentry was born.
Lou’s presentations would always include spell-binding case histories regarding the development and uses of microphones. People would get so excited that they would send him tapes – “listen to what I did with a RE15, and so on…”
I remember Chubby Checker, or someone like that, and his entire band in a studio, making a group recording with a single 635 mic. They sent Lou a tape to prove it, and then Lou turned around and shared this case history, and played the tape, in his next presentation. In fact I’ve still got three or four boxes of these tapes that I rescued from oblivion.
One neat thing about Lou is that he would hold half-hour seminars at AES, covering different topics like “sorting microphones” or “new case histories” or some mixture of all that. He’d start out saying “I want to make you mad, so mad that you’re going to try to prove me wrong. And if you do, tell me and then I’ll learn something. But maybe you’ll learn something too. And maybe we’ll have a better technique and sell some product in the process.”
Previous I Next (3) I Page 4
|
