Music and audio innovator Hartley Peavey received the 2010 MIPA Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award at the Musikmesse International Press Awards.
Chosen by the votes of more than 100 magazines worldwide, he accepted the MIPA Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award during the annual Musikmesse and Prolight + Sound convention in Frankfurt. Peavey Electronics Corp. also won the MIPA Best Guitar Amp Combo Award for the Peavey Vypyr 15 modeling guitar amplifier at the event.
As the founder and CEO of Peavey Electronics Corp., Hartley Peavey heads one of the world’s largest and most diversified manufacturers of musical-instrument and professional-audio products, boasting a product line exceeding 2,000 products and distribution into more than 130 countries.
“Peavey Electronics has stayed at the forefront of the music and audio industry by evolving,” said Peavey. “We have pioneered a lot of technologies and earned many patents, and I believe that is because we’ve had the benefit of evolving under the same leadership for 45 years. Unlike a lot of our competitors, who have been bought and sold over and over, we have had the ability to learn from our and others’ mistakes, and move forward. I am honored to accept this award and to be part of this continually evolving thing we call music.”
Two of Peavey’s most enduring innovations include pioneering the use of CNC manufacturing techniques in making guitars—a move that brought consistency and quality and ushered in the modern era of guitar production—and MediaMatrix, which brought large-scale sound systems into the digital age by allowing users to configure and control them from a computer.
Peavey MediaMatrix is the audio-system architecture in more than 7,000 airports, government and convention halls, theme parks, hotels, stadiums and other large venues around the world.
Peavey continues to innovate with technologies such as the Peavey IPR power amplifiers and ReValver guitar-amp modeling software. The IPR Series utilizes an advanced design that dramatically reduces weight while increasing reliability, thermal efficiency and output power, and enables users to conserve energy during transportation, operation, and even cooling.
ReValver software models guitar amplifiers through a proprietary algorithm that analyzes the interactions of the amps’ components at the circuit level, based on the amps’ original schematics. By mapping these amplifier models from the component level, ReValver is able to model every nuance with amazing accuracy, allowing players to design their ultimate guitar amps and speaker systems. With ReValver, players can go “under the hood” and swap tubes, tone stacks, power supplies and more, or build their own virtual amplifiers one component at a time.
“The MIPA Lifetime Achievement Award goes to leaders and innovators who have made major contributions to the development of the MI and Pro Audio industry,” said Gerald Dellmann, CEO of MM-Musik-Media-Verlag. “Hartley Peavey is one of only 10 other figures honored by this award, which include Ikutaro Kakehashi, founder of Roland Corporation; Tsutomu Katoh, founder of Korg; Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, founder of Sennheiser Corporation; and Jim Marshall, founder of Marshall Amplification.”
