New Ways
While Miller insists his innovations are fueled by necessity, there’s very little that makes him happier than figuring out a new way to do something.
“If I did things the same way that would be very boring, wouldn’t it? So I’m always looking for new ways to do things; saying how come we can’t do this, or why don’t we do this, or wouldn’t that be cool?”
It’s fair to say Miller is rarely shy about asking those questions or suggesting others pick up a saw, sometimes literally, and find an answer to one of them. As Larry Italia of Yamaha once said, “Stan wasn’t on the cutting edge, he was on the bleeding edge.”
“I remember having a prototype of the Yamaha PM1000-16 at the Universal Amphitheatre,” Miller says, “and talking to Yamaha’s chief engineer at the time, Harry Suzuki. I kept saying ‘Harry, we need more channels. Sixteen is not enough. And he’d say ‘very difficult.’ And I’d say ‘Harry, you cut the end off of one of these, cut the end off another one and then glue them together’.” When Yamaha later rolled out the prototype of the PM1000-32 for a gig Miller was doing in Tokyo at the Budokan “that’s essentially what they had done,” he says.
As for what fuels Miller’s drive to innovate? “Toys,” he says, almost sheepishly and laughs again. “Cranes, tractors, grading machines, cars… You have to understand that I like all kinds of machines.”
Charting A Path
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and raised in the farming community of Holdrege, Miller had plenty of opportunities to indulge that passion early on. “My father actually started locking the garage because I’d take his tools and scatter them all over the place. I was always building something.”
It was a junior high school music teacher who first introduced him to the basics of loudspeaker building and, after hearing the system he’d helped build in his high school gym, he was hooked. He continued to build loudspeaker boxes, took a gig as a radio announcer (primarily because of the equipment it allowed him to work with) and began to work as a DJ – first at his school and then, after graduating in 1958, at the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho.
By age 21, he decided he should continue his education and returned to Nebraska to study teaching at Kearney State Teacher’s College (now the University of Nebraska at Kearney).
“My parents thought I ought to have a career,” he says by way of explanation, “and there wasn’t any place to go to school to learn audio.”
That didn’t stop him from pursuing his passion. While studying teaching, Miller did sound for college theatre, attended seminars hosted by Altec Lansing’s Don Davis, and in 1962 landed an Altec franchise and started up the small consumer audio store that would eventually become Stanal Sound.
When the college hosted concerts, Miller provided the sound, using Altec’s “Voice of the Theatre” loudspeakers and amplifiers he’d built himself. Through those shows, he developed a relationship with Variety Theater International and began touring with acts like Back Porch Minority, Smothers Brothers and Peaches and Herb. In 1964, he got his first taste of international touring with The Young Americans in Australia, Thailand and Japan.