After a while he didn’t really have to be too involved with the bidding process, because if they wanted it done right, they came to him. Nate was probably the first guy to make himself a millionaire in audio. It was his integrity, and that of Western’s gear, that did it.

Who doesn’t belong in this picture? (Or, who’s that goof on the right??)

So in the background was Western Electric, and you went out and tried to find people that fit that mold. When Altec was formed after the dissolution of Western Electric in the late 1930s, a lot of the Western personnel came on board. They bought up the rights to the best Western products for pennies on the dollar and then proceeded to make themselves wealthy men.

Keith: You were one of the pioneers of equalization…

Don: At Altec, I constructed a seminar program in 1968 to show people how to equalize systems. The initial problem was that while even the early equalizers worked very well, the systems in general didn’t. People put in EQ’s and discovered they hadn’t planned enough power, for example, because now they could raise the levels. And what had been adequate before in feedback constraints wasn’t even close to adequate any more. A 10 dB increase in acoustic gain meant a 10 dB increase in power.

This emphasis in training people for equalization is exactly what Pat (Brown) is doing here with Syn-Aud-Con. You’ve got to look at polarity, you’ve got to signal align, you’ve got to clean up all of the impedances, match all the levels, and so on.

The way I found out about the problems, initially, was that we had franchised a bunch of contractors to handle equalization, and they had to spend about $10,000 on specialized equipment – GenRad and Hewlett Packard test gear. But nothing good in the way of progress and improvement seemed to be happening, so Carolyn and I loaded the first HP Real-Time Analyzer (RTA) ever made into the trunk of our car -

Carolyn: - Don had talked HP into building the RTA for him, the first one ever -

Don: - and we went on the road to find out what was going on. We quickly saw that even the best contractors were building inadequate systems – not that they weren’t great compared to most others, but they still weren’t adequate in terms of the extra power that could and should be delivered.

We learned to look at a space and to understand that what it presented acoustically was the challenge. Fit and match the space with an array that could meet the criteria of the space, and then work backwards through the system to fill it out with power and other components needed to do the job right. At that point, system design was being done just the opposite, from the microphone out, rather than speakers back.

Carolyn: And you should mention at that time that HP had also just introduced the desktop computer –

Don: – and that was a huge help.

Carolyn: Yes, Don bought into it quickly.

Don: I was looking at all the “gimmicks” of the time. But in this case, specifically, I was always lousy with a slide rule anyway, and the ability to be able to program everything on this portable computer was great. These early computers were really nothing more than a big programmable calculator, but they were very helpful.

In the earliest computer, we had to go through about 2,000 steps to attain calculations. Reverberation time, noise control, acoustic gain – all of this and more was plugged in for calculation. Of course, we hadn’t discovered how to do intelligibility yet, this was still intuitive only.