ProAudio Review - September 2008 - (Page 42)

by Mel Lambert Barry Andrews, John Andrews, Pat Quilter lmost without exception, proaudio companies have interesting origins. Sometimes it starts with a hot breakthrough from a technical genius that cannot help but make it to market, or maybe an enterprising marketer sees a unique opportunity for a more powerful widget and locates talented designers to turn that dream into a practical reality. QSC Audio Products has a more unusual ancestry. When, in 1968, Barry Andrews’ motorcycle broke down in an industrial park in Costa Mesa, CA, southwest of Los Angeles, he struck up a conversation with a guy working in a nearby garage. That man turned out to be Pat Quilter, who told Andrews about his fledgling business: designing and building various types of backline amplifiers. In those heady days of power-chord rock and roll, Quilter’s best chance seemed to lie with local guitar and bass players; Andrews’ experience in building loudspeaker cabinets appeared to be a natural fit. Initially based out of an 800-square-foot shop, the two founded a company to offer such exotic products as The Quilter Sound Thing and The Duck Amp. The rest, as they say, is history. While Barry Andrews took charge of sales and marketing and currently enjoys the title of CoChief Executive Officer, his brother John Andrews - who had recently obtained his business degree from USC - was brought aboard to handle the financial side of the operation, and now serves as co-CEO. During the past 40 years, QSC Audio Products has continued to earn an enviable reputation as a high-tech developer and innovator of products for the live-sound and installed-sound industries and, since the Eighties, within the cinema market. “Through all of the subsequent musical QSC: Behind the Scenes QSC Audio Products — 40 years of high-tech innovation and development of products for live-sound, installation and cinema markets trends,” John Andrews considers, “the one CORPORATE PHILOSOPHY – IT’S THE thing that remained relatively constant was SOUND THAT MATTERS Regarding QSC’s overall philosophy, the power amp. Since the one thing we knew really well was power-amp technology, it “Most people would agree that great sound made sense to us that we should play to our makes the experience better,” John Andrews strengths, and concentrate on what we did offers. “Whether it’s in the cinema, at a conbest. We decided to become the world’s cert or at church, we all know how much largest amplifier company.” In addition to the more pleasurable and memorable an event is popular Series One, Series Three, EX Series that sounds great, as opposed to one that and PowerLight amplifiers, QSC has also doesn’t. Usually, sound is an integral part of developed companion lines of loudspeakers that experience. It is pretty exciting to be in an for its target market segments; the combina- industry where we can be intimately involved in delivering a mind-blowing experience. tion has proved extremely successful. “We want QSC to be the most trusted In 1992 the company relocated to its current Costa Mesa headquarters as the site for provider of high-quality audio systems and services to artists and profesa new 50,000-square-foot mansionals worldwide; being ‘the ufacturing facility capable of most trusted’ is a heavy producing over 500 units per responsibility - it is not easily day; five years later ground earned but you can lose it in a was broken for a new 81,000heart beat. We’ve always had square-foot addition adjacent the orientation to take care of to QSC’s existing building. our customers, even when we During the late-Nineties, recdidn’t necessarily have the ognizing a growing need for skills or resources to do the digital networking, QSC job properly. developed RAVE (Routing “We had a pretty well-pubAudio Via Ethernet), an open licized incident many years system architecture capable of ago when we’d shipped tens carrying up to 64 channels of of thousands of amplifiers audio over standard Ethernet Pat Quilter before we found out that there connections. And in 2001, QSC unveiled the ACE Series loudspeakers, was a defective ribbon cable that would fail sparking an important phase in the compa- over time. We spent millions of dollars recallny’s evolution, culminating with a new ing and fixing amplifiers that hadn’t even 42,000-square-foot product-distribution cen- failed yet. It was a humbling and expensive ter. Manufacturing, warehousing, corporate experience, but our customers saw first hand offices, engineering, technical services and that they could trust us to take care of them sales also are housed within these buildings. even when we screwed up. Our values are 42 | ProAudio Review | September 2008 www.proaudioreview.com http://www.proaudioreview.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ProAudio Review - September 2008

ProAudio Review - September 2008 Contents Publisher’s Page: It's A Hard Drive World Broadcast News and New Products Lawo mc256 Digital Production Console Studio News and New Products Earthworks PM40 Piano Mic System Onkyo Professional PR-SC885 HDMI 1.3a Surround Sound Processor Developments and Trends: Instrument Microphones Benchmark Media DAC1 Pre Focal Twin6 Be Studio Reference Monitors Cascade FAT HEAD II Blumlein Package Studio Projects CS5 Microphone M-Audio Pulsar II Small-Diaphragm Condenser Live News and New Products JBL MRX512M Live Monitor QSC: Behind The Scenes Contracting News and New Products Primacoustic Broadway Professional Acoustic Solutions Buyer's Guide: Contracting Amplifiers/Mixers Buyer's Guide: Contracting Speakers Single Slice: pc muñoz "Chatter & Buzz"

ProAudio Review - September 2008

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