As for the genesis of DSL’s revolutionary loudspeaker technology: “Well, I like things people say you can’t do. I had a friend who said ‘there are speakers that sound good and there are speakers that go loud, but there aren’t any that do both and that sounded like a target to me. So we’ll say, ‘we need a speaker that does this kind of a job’ and then it’s ‘O.K., how do you do that?’”
In the case of the Jericho Horn, the answer was complicated. “The combiner in the Jericho was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Literally, it was four months of saying ‘wow, I wish I hadn’t said I thought I knew how to do this’, but it ended up being very similar to what I’d envisioned.”
In recent applications the box has proven itself a powerful and compact alternative to line array.
“With the interference pattern that a line array produces, if the wind blows, there’s a pronounced comb filtering effect,” he explains. “If you have a speaker like the Jericho that radiates essentially as one single source, the wind has almost no effect. It’s a giant difference in subjective sound quality.”
Expanding Horizons
Although his number one priority is to help keep DSL growing, expanding what’s possible in sound reinforcement has also led Danley to ponder problems well outside the realm of live sound.
“I have ideas that cover a lot of subjects,” he says, among them the possibilities of alternative energy and propulsion technologies utilizing sound. “If you look at the motion and pressure involved with sound, the force that wind applies is actually in the same neighborhood, so I have a couple of ideas about how to capture energy from moving air.”
Clearly, he’s thinking farther outside the box than ever, but pondering problems that would give most people a screaming headache is just another day in paradise for Danley, an extension of what has driven him to invent and innovate his entire life,
“One of the things Roy Whymark said to me was, ‘what’s good about you is that you don’t know what you can’t do.’ What I do is to try the best I can to solve the problem at hand; however that happens, I really don’t give that much thought. You notice something in the mechanical world and you find an electronic analogy to that, or there’s something in the air motion that there’s a mechanical equivalent to.
“But that’s how a lot of good inventions come about – you take a principle from one area and apply it to another it’s never been used in.”
Based in Toronto, Kevin Young is a freelance music and tech writer, professional musician and composer. Find out more about Danley Sound Labs here.