Sound Image expanded to Nashville in 1989, a move that was particularly fortuitous with an explosion in the popularity of country music. Barbara Mandrell, whose 1989 tour was one of the largest of the time, was integral to the company’s work, even requesting the opening of the Nashville office.
“She was everything to us; a really good business person and a good friend,” Shadoan says. More country acts joined the fold, including Clint Black and Brooks & Dunn, and to this day, the genre contributes to a fair percentage of the company’s touring revenue.
The contracting/integration division was created in 1991, followed a year later by a new regional and corporate division. Then in 1994, Sound Image became the first touring company to deploy a fiber optic networking system with power amplifiers, which became the basis for the landmark QSControl system from QSC. Next came the 1995 move to the current headquarters in Escondido.
Making Transitions
Also around this time, Adams and Ritto began the development of a new waveguide technology for loudspeakers using composite, graphite carbon fiber materials. (Shadoan credits design engineer Mark Engebretson, who worked with Sound Image on the project, for coining the term “waveguide technologies.”) The effort eventually resulted in the establishment of the company’s Audio Composite Engineering (ACE) Department in the mid 1990s.
Ritto’s passion for boating and friendship with multiple America’s Cup winner Dennis Conner directly inspired the work with composites. “If you look at a boat without a deck, it looks like the back of a speaker box, and Ross literally came in one day and said, ‘We’re going to make speakers out of this stuff’,” Shadoan says.
Work with equipment manufacturers, which had begun during the hot-rodding days, continued to bear fruit into the next millennium. In 2000, Sound Image aided in the development of JBL VerTec line arrays, and in 2001, signed a distribution agreement with QSC. Shadoan also stopped mixing around the same time: “I went from a console to a calculator exclusively in 2001. The last show I mixed was Boz Scaggs, who’s like my brother.”
The organization – and Shadoan in particular – took a major hit in 2009 with the passing of Ritto, who’d been previously diagnosed with cancer. “It’s still difficult,” Shadoan says about the loss of his friend, the person whose passion directly inspired his own love of audio and the best business partner he could have asked for. “Ross and I were so compatible. Even though I knew him 30-plus years, in all that time we had maybe five knock-down, drag-out ‘screaming-and-breaking-stuff’ fights.”
While the loss of Ritto was staggering, it also serves to this day to highlight the strength of what he helped build: a team that continues to look to the future and move forward, headed by strong veteran leadership supported by a steady stream of new talent. As noted earlier, a current major focus is expansion to serve new markets, highlighted by the United Audio Companies directive with SSE.
So what’s next? “I don’t know,” Shadoan says, laughing. “If you find out, let me know. If someone had told me I’d be where I am now when I was that 18-year-old with the van who was looking to be Smokey Bear’s sidekick, I never would have believed it.
“I tell my daughter, and all kids, to find something that they love and stay there. Just do it. Some day all of that hard work, passion, loyalty and everything you’ve put into it will reward you – not always financially, but usually – and besides, everything in life ain’t always about money anyway.”