Recording - January 2010 - 64

names and phone numbers (this was before email was widespread) of the great financial people on their Board of Directors. They talked about how huge the company was going to grow. After great prodding I got them to promise to call me with their patent number. Now, to me all of this is a bad thing. I can go to most small audio companies at the AES show and talk to the engineers who build the products. I can go onto the show floor and David Royer of Royer Labs/Mojave Audio will talk to me about microphones and Dan Kennedy of Great River Electronics will talk to me about preamps and Hutch Hutchison from Manley Labs will just talk about anything. But this new company wouldn’t let me talk to the engineers just the financial people. After several phone calls, I finally got them to admit that they did not actually have a patent on their circuitry, but it was pending. Now, these people issued several patent requests and abandoned them over the course of seven years. Now, once a product is patented, the information in the patent Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey Hype: An Engineer’s Perspective becomes readily visible to the public, but as long as you keep your patent pending, you don’t have to tell anyone what’s inside it. So it’s in your best interest, especially if you don’t actually have anything innovative, to keep the patent from being issued for as long as possible. I did finally talk to someone there who assured me that they weren’t using all-pass networks, but they had some new secret process. When I attempted to get him to talk about what it was or wasn’t, though, it was very clear that he didn’t actually know anything about filter theory and that he was a marketing guy pretending to be an engineer. I just came back from the fall AES show in New York, where a number of people asked me about a new heavilypromoted product being shown there. This was a product from a startup company so dripping with marketing hype that they had to hire a press agent to keep from being washed away in it themselves. I’m not talking about that product here. I’d probably get sued if I did. But it made me think about another product, one that came out a decade or two ago at an AES show, which appeared in a very similar way. A small startup company came out with a new multiband equalizer, and that seemed like a good thing to me. (I like seeing small startups that seem to be making interesting products.) Their ads in the magazines made the product seem innovative. It employed patented circuitry, and it claimed to have extremely low phase shift. Now the thing about phase shift is that it’s inherent in any analogue equalizer circuit, and a conventional RLC circuit (made with resistors, inductors, and capacitors the L stands for inductors because I is used for current and you’ll have to ask some Germans why that is) is “minimum phase” which means that it has a particular phase shift which can be calculated from the filter slope. There are some ways to make phase shift without changing the frequency response, with a thing called an “all-pass network”—you can combine a filter with an all-pass network that has opposite phase shift if that’s what you want to do. So I went to the manufacturer’s booth at the show and they talked about how wonderful their product was and how it was patented and how it had low phase shift. They handed me a sheet with theRECORDING JANUARY 2010 As long as you can keep your patent pending, you don’t have to tell anyone what’s inside your product The company actually sold a lot of their products, and I still see them in studios now and then. And in retrospect, they do actually have very low phase shift, but they don’t have anything innovative inside them. As I mentioned above, the phase shift of a filter is directly tied to the filter slope. If you make very wide filters (which in the case of a graphic equalizer means each slider affects a very wide range of frequencies), you get very low phase shift. And that’s what these people did. The product actually sounded pretty good. It wasn’t useful for tight surgical eq, but it did wide and sweeping changes in a pleasant way. Mind you, I could have gone to Vince Poulos and bought two Speck parametrics for the price, and the Specks can do the same thing (and a whole lot more). But it actually did what they said it would do! The problem was that the hype obscured everything. The company just faded away. There was no bankruptcy, five years later it was just dissolved. Support for the products disappeared. The patent was issued, and it turned out not to have anything particularly interesting in it. So everyone sits around and wonders was this a front just to get startup money and investment with no actual intention of keeping the company open? Did a designer with a good product idea just fall in with a bad crowd who made things get out of hand? I don’t need to tell you to be skeptical about hype. But if you ever need an example of why you should be—one based on engineering as well as marketing—feel free to quote me. Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) thinks about stuff like this.

Recording - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2010

Recording - January 2010
Fade In.
Contents
Talkback.
2009 AES Convention Report.
Steve Vai.
The Hybrid Guitar Recording Method—A Modern Way of Tracking Serious Tones, Part 2.
Apogee Electronics GiO.
Reviewed & Revisited:Apple Logic Pro 9.
Recording’s Guitar Column.
Reviewed & Revisited: Phonic Helix Board 24 Universal.
Readers’ Tapes.
Zoom G9.2tt.
Once Over—Reviews in Brief.
Line 6 POD X3 Live.
M-Audio Axiom Pro 49.
Advertiser Index.
Fade Out.
Recording - January 2010 - Recording - January 2010
Recording - January 2010 - Cover2
Recording - January 2010 - 1
Recording - January 2010 - Fade In.
Recording - January 2010 - 3
Recording - January 2010 - Contents
Recording - January 2010 - 5
Recording - January 2010 - Talkback.
Recording - January 2010 - 7
Recording - January 2010 - 2009 AES Convention Report.
Recording - January 2010 - 9
Recording - January 2010 - 10
Recording - January 2010 - 11
Recording - January 2010 - 12
Recording - January 2010 - 13
Recording - January 2010 - 14
Recording - January 2010 - 15
Recording - January 2010 - Steve Vai.
Recording - January 2010 - 17
Recording - January 2010 - 18
Recording - January 2010 - 19
Recording - January 2010 - The Hybrid Guitar Recording Method—A Modern Way of Tracking Serious Tones, Part 2.
Recording - January 2010 - 21
Recording - January 2010 - 22
Recording - January 2010 - 23
Recording - January 2010 - 24
Recording - January 2010 - 25
Recording - January 2010 - Apogee Electronics GiO.
Recording - January 2010 - 27
Recording - January 2010 - Reviewed & Revisited:Apple Logic Pro 9.
Recording - January 2010 - 29
Recording - January 2010 - 30
Recording - January 2010 - 31
Recording - January 2010 - Recording’s Guitar Column.
Recording - January 2010 - 33
Recording - January 2010 - Reviewed & Revisited: Phonic Helix Board 24 Universal.
Recording - January 2010 - 35
Recording - January 2010 - Readers’ Tapes.
Recording - January 2010 - 37
Recording - January 2010 - Zoom G9.2tt.
Recording - January 2010 - 39
Recording - January 2010 - 40
Recording - January 2010 - 41
Recording - January 2010 - 42
Recording - January 2010 - 43
Recording - January 2010 - 44
Recording - January 2010 - 45
Recording - January 2010 - Once Over—Reviews in Brief.
Recording - January 2010 - 47
Recording - January 2010 - 48
Recording - January 2010 - 49
Recording - January 2010 - 50
Recording - January 2010 - 51
Recording - January 2010 - Line 6 POD X3 Live.
Recording - January 2010 - 53
Recording - January 2010 - M-Audio Axiom Pro 49.
Recording - January 2010 - 55
Recording - January 2010 - 56
Recording - January 2010 - Advertiser Index.
Recording - January 2010 - 58
Recording - January 2010 - 59
Recording - January 2010 - 60
Recording - January 2010 - 61
Recording - January 2010 - 62
Recording - January 2010 - 63
Recording - January 2010 - Fade Out.
Recording - January 2010 - Cover3
Recording - January 2010 - Cover4
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