Keith: What are the roots of Syn-Aud-Con?

Carolyn: By 1972, we could see that things at Altec were not going so well due to some management problems. About that time, Don was asked to establish the European market for them, and he said we’d go over and check things out before agreeing to do it. But at that time, the economy was under some dramatic changes and it just wasn’t feasible -

Don: - well, we had an acquaintance named Mr. Vorwig who had been in charge of truck production during the war (World War II), on the German side, and who also had been the engineer that originally tested the Volkswagen for Hitler. Mr. Vorwig had a party that we attended, and he and some of the guests, including a banker in Frankfort, laid out for us what exactly was going to happen with the economy, the deflation of the U.S. dollar that would occur. I had to tell Altec that I wouldn’t take their offer.

Carolyn: Don and I used to work for a few years and then take time off and go to Europe and travel for months at a time – we didn’t have children so we could do that. Through the ‘50s, the economy was great, but by ’72, we found that prices were already 10 times more than in the ‘50s. And, things had changed with Altec –

Don: - when a company is being torn apart by bad management, the talent leaves first. The ones that hang in there may be great workers, but that’s not where the talent lies and where the future and insight is. There were a lot of strange contracts coming across my desk that I didn’t want to sign, and this is what happens... I’ve often sworn I was going to write a book on mismanagement with all of it I’ve seen over the years. I resigned from Altec in December 1972.

Carolyn: Altec offered Don a year’s salary if he would not go to work for the competition -

Don: – Which I had no intention of doing anyway –

Carolyn providing TEF guidance.

Carolyn: – we took six months to write our book, Sound System Engineering, because we had an income from Altec. Sams Publishing printed it at no cost and allowed us to buy it at $10 a copy. It was loose leaf at that time, and about three years later they decided to publish it as a book. Then a few years later, we revised it.

Don: We had a lot of lovely people help us with this, just like Pat does now with Syn-Aud-Con.

Carolyn: GenRad and HP loaned us thousands of dollars worth of equipment for our seminars.

Carolyn: In 1973, the oil crisis started and things were not good in terms of starting a business, but we decided to anyway.

Don: We set out on the road with a Dodge three-quarter ton truck and a camper shell to house all the gear, towing a trailer behind it to live in. We toured the country and taught audio.

Carolyn: Don could see that the only way we would really be able to make it in doing this tour would be to set up a sponsorship program. He went to Shure - or they came to him, I can’t recall – and they were great in terms of support. That first year, Shure, UREI and Sun Music were our first sponsors.

Don: The point is that there were several of these engineering folks and their companies who were very supportive, who understood what we had and wanted to give.

Carolyn: Another interesting and critical thing at this point in time is that Altec pretty much owned the contracting business. RCA had a service company and could still do some things at that point. And, some other names that aren’t even around anymore were the big entities. At the time, companies like Electro-Voice, Shure, JBL and so forth were really still just independent gadget makers.

What we did that was unique at the time was to put together all of the elements offered by these companies into proper systems. These pioneer sponsors of Syn-Aud-Con could provide the quality components, individually, and then that equipment could be formed into quality systems.

Don: UREI, for example, was one of the first to make the equalizer, and they were a sponsor. Emilar would make the drivers that were needed. So we “filled the chain” with sponsors so that people would know where to go to fill out an entire system. That was a piece of serendipity that worked out well for both us and the sponsors. It wasn’t really a deliberate thought-out thing, but just something that happened.