Kim Ryrie – Influencing the Sound of the World’s Biggest Artists

Kim Ryrie: 0:00

So they took it to Stevie's studio. Steve, he absolutely fell in love with it literally on the day pulled out his checkbook, put his thumbprint on it. No discount 25 grand us.

Lee Gray: 0:15

Welcome to Tales from the top. So many are striving for success. But how do you define it? What's it really like and what happens when you get there? Join me Lee Gray, co founder of Kyron Audio - creators of ultimate home Music Systems, and my co host Jayde Deverson, founder of Deverson Design - creators of unique luxury environments as we celebrate the lives and achievements of those who have dared to dream big and acheived incredible heights. We delve into what drives them now, new challenges that they face and discuss the unexpected tales from the top. Today's guest is Kim Ryrie. While you may not have heard of the name, you have almost certainly heard of his work. Kim co-created the world's first digital sampling synthesizer, which is one of the most influential musical innovations in the past 100 years. The Fairlight CMI revolutionised music creation, and changed the course of popular music forever, shaping the sound of albums by Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Michael Jackson, and many more. If this wasn't enough, Kim went on to develop digital audio technology designed to raise the quality of audio we hear from loudspeakers, allowing for true high definition audio in playback, finding its way into Abbey Road Studios and in the homes of discerning music listeners all over the world. Kim, welcome to the show. How are we? Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: 1:35

Oh, good. Sun's coming out here in Sydney after a cold winter.

Lee Gray: 1:40

Half your luck. All right, good. Well, we'll dive straight in. Tell us what was your earliest memories of being interested in audio?

Kim Ryrie: 1:50

Ah. I well, I I'm told that I used to grab onto the side of the radiogram and wiggle my ass whenever there was a record playing. I guess it started then. Sort of soon after Walter Carlos's Switched on Bach record, which was made with the Moog synthesizer. And I just thought it was absolutely fantastic and, at the time we'd started an electronics magazine, my father had a magazine company and I talked him into starting an electronics magazine 'caus the other magazines were sporting magazines like Rugby League Week, Australian Golf, Australian Cricket, Revs Motorcycle News, that sort of stuff. So I wanted to do an electronics magazine, and at the time, the only electronics magazine was called Electronics Australia and my father had a look at all the ads in it and thought "this is a good idea ok, we'll do an electronics magazine," so we started Electronics Today in 1970 or 1971, something like that. I'd learned to stand up. And, but what really triggered it was when I heard And then we soon started overseas editions called in the UK and in France so became electronics today international or ETI. Yeah, you're showing that cover? Our, our listeners can't see it. But that's the first issue. And that's me on the cover. poking around with a with an oscilloscope. Yeah. So anyway, but But what I've managed, we had a team of a couple of people in the magazine where we design DIY projects every month, we did about two or three projects, like build your own amplifier or something like that. And I talked everyone into building a synthesizer for people to make and they're all thought as completely insane. And but because I was the boss's son, I sort of talked them into it. And so we spent, you can do anything. I think it was but it took about 10 months to publish all the different modules in the synthesizer. It was called the ETI 4600.

Lee Gray: 4:22

And they were a catchy name.

Kim Ryrie: 4:25

Yeah, it was, it was absolutely a catchy name. I can't remember where it came from, I think because it had four oscillators, and six of something else. So there were apparently 1000s built over the years, especially in the UK. So there were companies that would sell kits of parts for that. And so by the

Jayde Deverson : 4:47

end of the who was building them, who was making these things, although there was a DIY project, what what sort of DIY is we talking electronics enthusiast or music and electronics into

Kim Ryrie: 5:00

Yes, yeah, in the main. So we got to the end of that. And I was really frustrated that I no matter what I did, I couldn't make natural sounds from it. I just couldn't work it out to get a violin sound or a piano sound and something. And it was about the time that the microprocessor had come out that the 4600 for Motorola, I sorry, it's something that's wrong if it was the 6800, which was an eight bit microprocessor that ran at one megahertz. blinding speed. And, and so I rang up, school friend of mine, we were used to build stuff at school together, Peter Vogel and said, you know, what are you doing? And he said, not much, what are you doing? Actually, he was doing some video, color, color TV, it just started in Australia, and he was building a sort of colorizer thing. And, and I said, Well, do you want to make the world's greatest synthesizer? And he said, he said, Well, how's that gonna work? And I said, Well, you know, these new microprocessor things that have just come out, we could use them. And I had this fantasy that if we just have enough oscillators, and enough, you know, voltage controlled amplifiers, and yeah. And format, controllers, and things like that, and you could program them with a computer, you could surely make a natural sound. So anyway, somehow, I convinced him because we used to do stuff at school with no money, no resources, and somehow we sort of did it anyway. So my grandmother, who lived on the waterfront of Sydney Harbor, in one of the, you know, her basement in her house was where Lawrence Hargrave used to design kites. And he's a famous sort of Australian, he's on some dollar bills or something somewhere. And this used to be his basement where he designed this stuff. So we opened shop down in the basement, and we, we didn't have any money, as I said, we had, we had about three or $400 between us. So that was what it cost to incorporate Fairlight Instruments Proprietary Limited. And we had rooms full of junk that we've collected over the years. So we call that the capital of the company. And, and we did things like we assembled boards for Jaycar, and stuff like that, you know, like pocket money. And, and, and I was, I remember, there's a photo of that we had no photographs of this, but there was one photo of me sort of tinkering with a music keyboard that I had upside down. And I noticed that had, on every key, it had a little magnet and a coil on every key, because I was trying to design a touch sensitive keyboard that actually pushed back on you, you know, to create the dynamics of a keyboard. And, and funnily enough, that's about the only photo I've found of our life in that in that period. We were there for about a year. But someone had introduced us to a guy called Tony Firth. And he said, if you're if you're working on a music, digital music thing, you should make this Tony Firth guy who's over in North Sydney, and he'd received a grant from the Arts Council of Australia to develop a digital synthesizer for the Canberra School of Music, which was intended as a sort of educational thing where you could create a waveform out of harmonics. So Tony, had had worked at Fairchild in America for for some years, and he'd come back to Australia. And he was Motorola's consultant on microprocessors. So this was very handy, but he'd already developed this dual processor architecture using two Motorola 6800 one megahertz processes, and they both shared a common memory which ran a two megahertz so on one cycle one processor could write or read from the memory and on the other cycle, the other one so this way, we avoided the very time consuming issue of interrupting the processor, which in those days, took a long time before the processor could sort of do anything else. So Tony, come up with this architecture was fantastic. He also designed a little graphics display controller thing and a floppy disk control, although not at first at first this you had to pick this thing up from punched paper tape. And it would take an hour to boot, the computer, there was about a reel that was about a foot in diameter of punch paper that sort of rolled on the floor. And if you trod on the paper in the process of booting that was seriously bad, you'd have to start again. So this was the first this, this was Tony's first processor. And he was running out of time, he got a bit of money from the grant to do this, but he was not finished, he couldn't finish it, he had other work that he was supposed to do. So when we turned up, it was a win win, because it was like, Oh, well, you could take this over and deliver something to the Canberra School of Music, which which, you know, he was committed to, and, and we inherited, you know, working microprocessor platform, in terms of the process, which at which had already been constructed in a way that let you read waveform memory, but very small amounts that was only like four kilobytes of memory. So we had a huge jump from Tony's original design. And it's fair to say the Fairlight would not have happened without Tony's because my idea was completely ridiculous. It turned out to be the Prophet five, ended up using what I was, which came out about five years later, or six years later, which was what what I intended, originally when I talked to Peter, so yeah, so

Lee Gray: 11:36

just going back a bit. I mean, you're talking about the display. And this was revolutionary in its own right, wasn't it? This was the pen activated

Kim Ryrie: 11:44

year, the light pen that weren't like the photo you got, that's a series three, actually, that was a lidar model that didn't use a light pen, it used that little pad with a pen on the left, you find one, if you find another shot of the fair light with a green display, that's it there on the right, that and you can see the light pen sort of hanging up. Hanging up there.

Lee Gray: 12:08

Was that was that designed by him? This was brand

Kim Ryrie: 12:11

new. Oh, no, no, wait, no, we know we designed all that. But yeah, he Yes, he had a version of the light pen. So but but that was not his physical design.

Lee Gray: 12:19

So you designed the light pen.

Kim Ryrie: 12:22

We.. that light pen was,it was a purchased item actually. Right. But but we built the monitor, you couldn't buy monitors. So you know, we got this guy to blow the glass. And I used to go. And I used to go and argue with the guy that the green phosphor of the last batch was different green from the latest batch. You know, forget about colour. This was just green, and the keyboard, you can see the alphanumeric keyboard. We bought the switches that from Honeywell, every switch was individual. It's a Hall Effect magnetic switch. So you made every key on the keyboard. Every key on the keyboard, I had to get the key tops engraved by an engraver. You know, up in North Sydney. Wow. And yeah, now, what you're seeing there, that photo is all those vertical lines, their little faders. And the light pen ones the level of each fader up and down their harmonic levels. So the leftmost fader is the fundamental. And then the next one across is the second harmonic third, and so on, I think we I think we did up to the early model would do up to 32 harmonics. And then I thought, Oh, hang on. And that was all that did was create one cycle with a with a given harmonic content. And this is what the Canberra School of Music was interested in, you know that. And that's what Tony had come up with. And then I thought, well, hang on. This all sounds incredibly boring, because you could, you could wide the harmonics up and down, but it just sounded incredibly electronic, and absolutely unusable musically. So I thought, well, we could create once and by the way, one one cycle was was like 100. And from memory 128 bytes long, and this is a bit in bytes. So one cycle, so you just repeated that that just went into circle. And that's how you got the harmonics. So I thought what why don't we just animate these right? Because we could fit in we had, you know, 4k of RAM, not four Meg, 4k. So we could fit, you know, dozens of waveforms and we could sort of animate them. So we drew so you could draw a curve of how the fundamental moved in time. And then you could draw in how the second harmonic moved in time and the third and that was vaguely interesting, but again, it was too synthetic, very still a still it was made a lot of interesting sounds but not, not, not organic sounds by any any mean and then the And then a 16k bit memory chip was announced that dynamic RAM chip came out. And, you know, I just said to Peter, this is unbelievable 16 k bits on a chip. And we could, if we had eight of them, we could have 16k bytes. And 16k is so much memory, that we could sample a real natural sound into that

Jayde Deverson : 15:31

you must have felt like the kings of digital data. And must have been incredible

Kim Ryrie: 15:35

is incredible. This was overwhelming amount of memory, you know, yeah. So, Peter went off, he didn't muck around Peter, within within about a week, we had a prototype, he had redesigned the entire audio management of the way for memory management system, and a one circuit board. Prior to this, by the way, we had something like 16 different circuit boards, each circuit board was I cannot talk in inches, it's about eight inches square. And there was about 16 of those, and then they plugged into a big motherboard at the back. And each circuit board did a different function eight times. So one would, would be, you know, the target register board. And then another one would be the, the attack, ramp, board and so on. So we thought no, and then b one would be the graphics controller want to be the light bank controller want to be the dual processor want to be the RAM and that sort of thing. So we managed to design the eight functions all under one circuit board. So all we need now we had eight circuit boards that were all the same, which was of course a huge advance in manufacturing terms. So that made it all more viable. And each board had its own 16k of memory. So we've gone from eight kilobytes of memory that we shared between eight channels to 16 kilobytes times eight channel. So that meant we could have a different sounds a step change on each of the on each of the cards. And then, and we actually, to get the pitch of the memory, we were all we did was we just ran the we just ran the sample rate? At different sample rates, depending on what key you were pressing. Okay, so if you, if you, if you wanted a high pitch, it would, it would, the sample rate would be about 200 kilohertz. And if you wanted a low, so an octave below would be 100 kilohertz below that. 50 below that 25 below that 12. So we're now moving with sample rates in the audio band. Okay, so the sample rate was actually 12 kilohertz, for example, or even less, so we had to have a tracking filter, tracking low pass filter that, that, that cleaned away all of those switching frequencies above what's called the Nyquist rate. And so that when you hit a bass note, you only heard the bass frequencies, you didn't hear all the high for the hot the high frequency switching. So I mean, this, this is sort of unheard of in terms of horrifically nasty in today's terms, but we would sell these things for 25,000 US dollars back in 1980.

Jayde Deverson : 18:41

Well, so back in 1980 of VH VB VC Commodore was about two and a half thousand, $3,000. So that right, yeah, that's a family sedan is 10 times have families today, right? And we

Kim Ryrie: 18:55

couldn't make enough of these, right? So we are so we ended up with 100 people working in Rushcutters. Bay, we had a, we had two floors of a big building. There was no such thing as contract manufacturing. So we had to do everything ourselves. We had to get the circuit boards made. We didn't actually we didn't make the circuit boards. There was an Australian manufacturer of double sided circuit boards. In those days, it was pretty terrifying to use them in terms of quality, but we did work eventually. We had our own sort of ultrasonic cleaning system that use these ozone depleting chemicals. It was it was all just absolutely horrendous in retrospect, but it was. Yeah, it was fun at the time.

Lee Gray: 19:46

So just so he can explain how they're the Fairlight worked, you would actually record real sounds and then you were Yeah. sampling them.

Kim Ryrie: 19:53

Yeah, sorry. I missed the rather important part. We Peter designed an A to D analog to digital converter. Yep. And you were just, we just plugged the microphone into that and made a sound. And depending on what sample rate you chose, when you did the sample, this determined how long that sample could be, you could sort of do with a sample rate of, say, 32k, you know, you've got half a second of sample, which doesn't sound like much, but it's amazing what you could do with it when you do tricks like sustain areas of the of the waveform and, and so on and you add attacks and decays and you could do port, a portamento, you know, frequency gliding, and all this sort of stuff. So this is all these are all the features that that we're able to add in software. And by the way, anyone that could write, you know, two lines of code pretty much got employed in our in our software department. Because they weren't, this is pre apple. I mean, Apple was writing in DOS, then I suppose. We were writing this in assembler, there was no dos.

Jayde Deverson : 21:08

Okay, well, that's predates everything I know.

Kim Ryrie: 21:10

Yeah. This was this was dos is, is we had I'm just trying to think of that name. It was a industrial operating system that we managed to buy the source code for, and modified it. It was a real time operating system, I can't remember how many I think it was called Q dos or M dos or something like that. And by having the source code, it meant when we had bugs in it, we were able to fix that ourselves, because at the time, it was impossible to get you well, for instance, when Microsoft had software that doing office work, it was completely and utterly incapable of doing anything in real time that you could rely on in terms of making music or sound at all. So and it was one of the reasons that Fairlight ran into trouble later on, because our r&d department. And by then we had about 25 people in r&d, about 10 of them. Were doing video and about 15 We're doing audio. And because we actually we also introduced some of the first video effects products, but I'll get distracted. Yeah, so

Lee Gray: 22:31

It's hard when you have achielved so much, isn't it Kim?

Kim Ryrie: 22:33

Well, it wasn't me. It wasn't. It wasn't me.

Lee Gray: 22:39

Just to bring it into layman's term. So to put it into context, so we've gone from the Moog, which is analog synth, which is making interesting electronic sounds, to now completely reinventing the wheel where we can record any sound from nature instruments. And we can we can sample that to a length of half a second. Yeah. And so we know we've got something that's gone from, you know, strange 60s Space noises to a synthesizer that we recognize today. And so what what was the first sound that you recorded?

Kim Ryrie: 23:15

Yeah. Well, in, in the while we were developing this thing, someone said, Ah, if you're into synthesizers, you should meet Michael Carlos, who had come to Australia from America with the band, Tully, and the government tried to stop them coming into Australia because they'd had marijuana bust in America. And they, they were the band for Hair back in the day, and anyway, Michael was, was in the, in the band Tully. He later managed to get a permanent residency in Australia. He couldn't stand America. This was back in the, you know, he had the Vietnam day syndrome and all of that, and he was an incredibly bright guy and, and a music composer. And he ended up doing a fair bit of film music work in Australia. And someone said, I You should meet Michael because he's got a Moog synthesizer in Sydney. And so we met Michael and I think at the time he was the musical director of Jesus Christ Superstar. The first Harry Miller. Jesus Christ.

Jayde Deverson : 24:32

Oh, that was John English, I think was it Yeah.

Kim Ryrie: 24:34

John English that one was what's his face? He was the front of the head guy. Yeah.

Jayde Deverson : 24:40

Pontius Pilate.

Kim Ryrie: 24:41

No, no, no. John English was my 8 bit memory is failing me.

Jayde Deverson : 24:51

Mines a one flinch memory.

Kim Ryrie: 24:54

Anyway, so So after that he'd been doing film music and the trouble with doing film music is your critical path to a movie hitting the streets. You know, everything else is done the film's edited, and suddenly, you've got to come up with a soundtrack for it. And if you're a sort of creative person like Michael, who needs to get everything right, it's Judas Iscariot. Sorry. That's right. Yeah. How could I forget? Yeah, sorry.

Jayde Deverson : 25:24

It was bugging me. I had to get it.

Kim Ryrie: 25:27

Yeah. So anyway, so Michael, when I met him was was really stressed out because he was doing a film for the ABC at the time, I think was Storm Boy or something like that. And. And he was fascinated with what we were doing. And anyway, we over the over the months, we were good friends. So we had the prototype of the sampler working and we brought it over to Michael's house and said, Hey, check this out. And he said, What does it do? I said, Well, we sample you can sample any sound into it played on this little keyboard that we've thrown together. And he had a dog, and you could tell the dog to speak and it would bark. And, and that was the first sort of formal sample that Michaels dog bark, dog bark. And it went into the formal into the Fairlight sound library has been used on a lot of albums. Actually, that was the first first sample.

Lee Gray: 26:29

Fantastic. As as, as so many iconic sounds, anything from the 80s. I mean, it's it really is incredible how you changed it, but it's like that was the orchestral hit. Yeah, that was that was just used in everything. So much so that the songs were written about. I'm not going to use this orchestral hit sound because everybody was using it so much.

Kim Ryrie: 26:53

Yeah, that was from the Firebird Suite. We

Lee Gray: 26:58

write the openingcord opening chord of the Firebird Suite Yeah, Stravinsky, Stravinsky.

Jayde Deverson : 27:04

So speaking of performers, you've obviously everyone's used it. But I just want to show you this. And for the viewing audience,

Lee Gray: 27:12

Jayde's got a new toy he can share screen. He's got a news just worked out how to do it, everyone. So that's why

Kim Ryrie: 27:19

you should make the showing you make the same YouTube channel now? Yeah, I

Lee Gray: 27:22

think we're going to.

Jayde Deverson : 27:25

So this young lady that on that I'm showing to Lee and Kim now one of my favorite performers of all time, Kate Bush. So in 1983, she was quoted as to saying that when I first was going to buy the Fairlight, I was really worried because it costs so much money. So 1983 It was about 18,000 pounds, she says, but I haven't regretted it at all, I'm really pleased with it. It's been a great inspiration to me. You must have had a lot of accolades like that. And, and with Kate Bush, I mean, what's tell me tell me about Kate Bush and your association with her and how she managed to find out about this.

Kim Ryrie: 28:10

She would have come across it through through Psycho Systems in London. And when, when Peter Vogel, Peter took the first prototype Fairlight to Los Angeles. And we had a friend there called Bruce Jackson, who at the time, he had grown up, he'd grown up next to my house in Point Piper, I mean, next to the house where we had the basement. And Bruce started a company in Australia called Jands, which was Jacks Bruce Jackson and Story that that's that's how that legendary. Exactly. Wow. So Bruce, Bruce taught me how to sold he was like, four or five years older than me, we virtually grew up there. And so he, after Jands, he left Jands and went to work in America for a company called Claire Brothers who did all the big outdoor sound gigs. And, and they were doing Elvis' sound for example. And, and one day Elvis' sound guy was sick or something, and there was an outdoor concert and then they said to Bruce, can you do can you do this concert for Elvis? And he said, Yeah, of course. So as you do, you do. Well, he was yeah, he's

Jayde Deverson : 29:33

mommy's doing a roast lamb but what

Kim Ryrie: 29:35

he could take anything on and but at the end

Lee Gray: 29:35

In the pool with corn I think? of it, he said, Elvis you know, really you sound like shit. I'm sorry to say. Really we should look at of course, everyone. I would have imagined just no one spoke to Elvis like that right. So he loved it because no one would tell him the truth except Bruce. I and so they worked on Bruce worked on his sound and got him sounding really good. Anyway, long story short, he was full time with with Elvis for many years. And Elvis always bought him an aeroplane for his birthday, you know, that sort of thing. So anyway, when this thing when we had the prototype in 79, I rang up Bruce and said, Listen, we've got this thing and you can play any sound on it. And do you think anyone would be

Kim Ryrie: 30:25

No, no, no. But going back back back to Peter, back to interested in buying it? With these were sort of things we didn't think about, you know, at first. And it was so expensive to make that he said, What do you mean it can play any sound and he said, Well, you just make a sound into it. And then he played on the keyboard, you can't be serious. So it will bring it over. So Peter took it over, and it just managed to fit into his aeroplane with with the two of them Peter and Bruce. This is one that Elvis bought him. This is the one that Elvis bought him and but and and then but Bruce said, Look, you should you should. There's a couple of people I want to show it to. One is Geordie Hormel, who's who owned the Village Recording Studios in Los Angeles, one of the biggest studios there at the time and Stevie Wonder whose recording Secret Life of Plants he might be interested in that so they took it to Stevie's Psycho Systems in London that Kate Bush would have. And in studio. Stevie, absolutely fell in love with it literally on the day pulled out his checkbook, put his thumbprint on it. No discount 25 grand US. And but the guy, there was another guy and I forgotten his name at the moment. Who was in the studio when Stevie was getting the demo. He said, you've got a I've got to tell Peter Gabriel about this. So he rang up Peter Gabriel, like literally on the spot. So you've got to see this thing. This is a this is a thing can play any sound and blahdy blahdy blah. So Peter said, Well, I wonder if you could organize getting it over to London for me to have a play with so some months later Peter took it to London to Peter Gabriel's studio. And and Peter of course also also bought it straight away and and Peter's nephew's a guy called Steven Payne said, look how what about we set up a company here? And we'll be if Fairlight let us we'll be the exclusive UK distributors for this thing. This is this Geordie? No, no, Geordie was no that That's America because Geordie also when I get the same thing from Geordie, Geordie said, if you let me be the exclusive distributor in the States, I'll buy every unit you can buy. And what I didn't mention is that Geordie was the air with his brother of Spam. Which is for Hormel Meats. Geordi Hormel, so that's and and and Hormel Meats is sort of like half of Minnesota. So Geordie's income was like quarter of a million dollars a month or something and and Geordie used to write music for the I Love Lucy show and had about a one acre property at the bottom of Sunset Boulevard in in Pacific Palisades. It was all pretty cute. He was across the road from Will Rogers Park, which I don't know if anyone's been there, but it it never rained in, in in Los Angeles, and there had been a huge downpour and have a Will Rogers Park and come down the hill gone across Sunset Boulevard and into Geordie's swimming pool. And when I visited, when I visited Geordie he had they've obviously cleaned up the property, but there was corn growing in the swimming pool, he decided he decided he'd rather grow corn in the swimming pool because no one's swimming it anymore. This is a guy we're dealing with. So anyway, where was I? So to cut long story short. fact there Stephen painting that photo you've just put up with Kate. To his right. That is Stephen Payne. Right. And yeah, getting the demo. We did a they did a big press conference in London is doing the demo for Peter Gabriel there as well. So yeah, that's Steven. Yeah. They did a put on a big press do and they programmed. Something I can't remember. The bird singing in Barclay square. Something what's the

Jayde Deverson : 35:02

Vera Lynn Nightingale Sang in Barclay Square

Kim Ryrie: 35:06

So they've programmed all of that with nightingales and a whole new test in the machine and in invited all the press to this thing, and there was one and waiters, and the whole thing was very full on. And they got a huge amount of press. They were good at doing that sort of thing. Psycho systems. I had a nice office in Paddington there. Yeah.

Lee Gray: 35:24

I just want to highlight how humble Kim is, you know, we had a pre interview to this one. And I asked him about the Kate Bush track Running Up the Hill, which, you know, most people would know, right now is one of the highest selling albums. And first of all, he said, I can't remember if it was a Fairlight that she used. But then I researched the song a bit further. And this is this is the quote that I found, Jade, and what was it from Kate Bush, regarding the types of sounds you get? How did you get that little part and Running Up the Hill. And she said, that comes in first, at the side of song, after the drums for the vocals. Sorry. And that's, that's the Fairlight. And that was actually what I wrote the song with. And that was, that's what I wrote the song around. So she based that entire song around that instrument. And Kim wasn't even aware of that.

Kim Ryrie: 36:24

Yeah, well, we, we were lucky, we had a lot of really creative people. And we obviously they tended to be the successful ones, because they needed to have the money to pay for this thing. And, and they're all really very easy to get on with just really nice, creative people. So it was a terrific time. And, and they gave us a lot of feedback on you know, it'd be good if we could do this would you know that so we, we did whatever we could, in terms of, you know, adding features. Obviously, to the extent, you know, the technology, let us do it in those days. And then over the years, we had there was the first CMI called CMI computer musical instrument because I didn't want to use the word synthesizer, because to me, they had too much electronic baggage attached to it. So I wanted to and well see also we we had because it was a computer, we were able to do a sequencer. And so we sort of also had the first sequencer where you could just play stuff on the keyboard, and then edit that. And Michael Carlos, who I mentioned to you with the dog came into the office one day, not long after that, actually, and said, Ah, can I borrow your I'm sort of interested in learning how to program can I borrow some documentation that would teach me how to how to program so we gave him all the stuff we could sort of lay our hands on, because we knew he was incredibly bright guy, and it'd be fantastic to have an actual composer writing stuff, you know, Software wise. And literally only like, two months later, he came in and said, Here, try this and so I brought him floppy disk with him. This was before hard disk. Of course, there are only eight inch floppy disks. Put it the floppy.

Lee Gray: 38:19

You important the first one, right?

Kim Ryrie: 38:23

floppyy disk pretty much we would have certainly I don't know about that for sure. But we certainly would have had some of the first floppy disk drives. And actually, there's another story behind that. Because before we even did, before we even finished the music instrument, we were trying to make money to sort of fund the development. So this would have been mid 70s. And Remington Office Machines came to us and said, Look, we understand you're making, you know, sort of the only Australian computer and and we want to sell an Australian business computer. And I said well, we don't know anything about business. So that's when

Jayde Deverson : 39:09

they thought let's get the contracts arranged

Kim Ryrie: 39:11

Exactly. So. Now don't worry about that we'll really quickly write the program for the business. But can you give us the computer so we we did a we made up a system which was a desk, you know, with a monitor on it and but they needed I think it was a megabyte of memory, which was like an impossible amount of memory. And, and the only way you could do it at the time, one eight inch floppy disk could do 128k bytes per side. But they just brought out a new drive. A company called Shugart had brought out a a drive that could do both sides of the disc, which meant you got quarter of a megabyte on one disk, which meant if we had four of them We had a megabyte. And so we we got this Namco to come up with some office furniture for us it had held four of these drives in one side of the desk. And that was all fine and dandy until we discovered that when you wrote on one side of the disk, sometimes it would write through to the other side of the disk causing, causing absolute catastrophic corruption of data. And so, I'm, I, you know, I obviously was freaking out and, and I got onto Shugart and said, Listen, you know, this is completely ridiculous. We're selling to Remington Office Machines. And, and, you know, this needs to work and are the other problem was that it would scratch the oxide off the new, these new heads would literally rip the oxide over time didn't take long, and the oxide would literally start disappearing of the of the disk. Well, then we discovered an IBM floppy disk that this didn't happen on. So that was, that was a good improvement, but it was still occasionally corrupting the other side of the disc. So anyway, then Shugart said, I know we've, we have discovered a modification that fixed the problem. But we've decided to stop manufacturing the disc, because we were one of their only customers at this stage. I said, Well, you can't do that, we're committed, we got to develop, you know, deliver 100 of these computers. And, and, you know, we'd have to take legal action and all this sort of drama. And I said, Well, you know, the the modification is a hand modification we've got to do under the heads. And anyway, long story short, they did restart production just for us. For for these disk drives. And within about six months, a Japanese company brought out a new double sided drive, which was absolutely sensationally fantastic, beautifully built. And even more reliable. So we ended up changing to that. So I just get distracted again, but this is sort of some of the learning curve, you know, of how to make computers reliable, which was, by the time the Fairlight came out, which was probably a year or two after that little episode. It was pretty bulletproof, we've managed to make because see, people weren't used to computer bugs they'd never heard of, because I have worked in computer. So they weren't used to the idea that things just don't work sometimes. And they didn't like it. And whereas now we just deal with it, you know, on a daily basis in those days, or even less. So it's why we had to have our own operating system that we could fix bugs very quickly. You know, we had people like Jean-Michel Jarre doing world tours with his Fairlight. And if the thing died on stage would be Tubular Bells all of a sudden becomes complete catastrophe.

Lee Gray: 43:07

Actually, this is probably a good time to tell you a Kubrick story, if you want to talk about a catastrophe, right?

Kim Ryrie: 43:11

Oh, yeah. So well, you know, I was a I was a Kubrick fanboy big time, I'd seen 2001, about 2001 times and, and one day, I got home and there was a message on my message machine saying, is this Kim Ryrie? Play. This is Stanley Kubrick. Could you give me a call, please. So I'm sort of shaking. And so I call back and it was his direct line. I went straight through to him. And he said are I'm just calling to check to see if you've got another Fairlight about to come out because we wanted to use the Fairlight in a movie we're doing my daughter wants is going to do the soundtrack. And Vivian Kubrick and I said no, we haven't got anything coming out anytime soon. And so long story short, they bought bought a unit. And I think it was it was would have been six months later or something. I was in London, asleep in a hotel somewhere. And the phone rang at two or three in the morning. And I answered it, and there's this hysterical woman on the phone. So I was This is Kim, you know, this is Vivian Kubrick. And I've, I've, you know, I've got a problem. My Fairlight is not working and I've got rush is in the morning and can you help? And I didn't even know where I was. I'm thinking what? You know, this is completely incredible. So I anyway, I worked at what she's been doing after five minutes we sorted out. And and that was that and then and then about two days later she rang back and said, Look, thanks so much for that it was all worked out fine and it was great and everyone loved it and so on. And what are you doing What was the film Kim? Full Metal Jacket. And, and any and he said, Could you look this this weekend is daddy's birthday, do you want to come? And I said I can't come I've got a tradeshow opening in New York, you know, two days, so I never got to meet my all time hero.

Lee Gray: 45:46

That's got to be a regret. Trade show versus meeting Kubrick.

Kim Ryrie: 45:54

Yeah, that was very sad.

Jayde Deverson : 45:58

Today's episode is sponsored by us Kyron Audio and Deverson Design.

Lee Gray: 46:03

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Jayde Deverson : 46:27

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Lee Gray: 46:49

To get in touch with one of our principals directly visit our website kyronaudio.com.au or deversondesign.com.au to book a consultation. And now on with the show. I just want to I just want to highlight this quickly too because Kim will never tell you but you're just so you understand. So the amount of people that used use the Fairlight it was it did a changed the sound of the 80s and music that came after that. So I'm just gonna read a really short list of some of the people that used it. So Michael Jackson, Herbie Hancock, Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder Peter Gabriel, Hans Zimmer Duran Duran, Devo, Yello, Prince, Def Leppard. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Led Zeppelin, The Art of Noise, Queen, Joni Mitchell, Pet Shop Boys, Ice House, ZZ Top, Fleetwood Mac, and, and that is a tiny tip of the iceberg. So there's, there's no one on this planet that would not have heard the sounds that the Fairlight made. And I don't think you can underestimate how it changed the entire landscape of music.

Kim Ryrie: 47:58

We were just incredibly lucky. We were sort of the only show in town in a way in terms of where there was talent, people that wanted to learn to program and stuff like that they'd come to us, because we will.

Lee Gray: 48:11

That's true. But you're humble. Right? They took the bravery. And for some reason, the reason that two guys in grandma shed, hey, let's build the world's best synthesizer. Full tip of the hat.

Kim Ryrie: 48:27

Well, it's incredible. Yeah, it is funny that we were just so arrogant that we would do that

Jayde Deverson : 48:36

was itarrogance or concept that you basically Well, why can't we do it? And just had a go? Look, it's a lot like Lee has done with these speakers. I mean, do is very similar story.

Kim Ryrie: 48:48

I think the the, it's looking back. It's just a whole lot of coincidences and meeting the right people, because it sure wouldn't have happened. If we hadn't lucked into the right people. People like Tony Firth people like Michael Carlos said, I was just about to tell you the story of Michael. So Michael with the dog, and you know, the composer. So we went to a tradeshow in New York. And Michael was with me. And we had it we booked a room in the hotel where there was an audio trade show. And now the audio engineering show it was. So we were introducing this thing for the first time. And this guy came in, and a guy called Roger. Roger Linn. And he he had this little box with him. And he said, Oh, look, this is a prototype. It's a prototype drum machine that I've come up with. And I've just got some people I'd love to demo it. Would it be okay if I plugged it into your mixer just to do a quick demo? So I said, Hey, yeah, sure. So he plugged it in and he's and this is the first drum machine right? And so you can be pressed things and I've gone Wow, look at this. This is amazing. So, anyway, I said, Look, if you'd like you can stay, you can do show every half hour, we'll do it on the half hour. And so he was, he was able to get quite a few people interested in that. But meanwhile, I've got more evil thoughts going on. Which is, why don't we do this, you know, so and of course, Michael was there too. And so we, we talked about doing a, what we call the rhythm sequencer, we call the Page R, I should have mentioned that when you with the Fairlight, every page had a letter, you know, like Page R was a rhythm sequence, and page something else was something else, it was about 10 different pages that different different things. And so, so what you could do was, you could just put not only drums, of course, you could put any instrument in our case, and you could program them, and it would default, the the hit to a certain rhythm quantize that you could set, you know, the resolution of the quantizing of the, of the rhythm. So, this software, it's sort of to the Fairlight became, and this was quite early on, this was really the first year of release, we might have managed to get the first release of page R out, I think it was, and it was like, what VisiCalc was to Apple, you know, VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet. And, and everyone thought Apple, you know, computers were fine and dandy, but it wasn't until the spreadsheet came out that everyone thought I well actually now I've got to have one of these, because now I can do spreadsheet. Well, now it's a practical exactly in that two bit like What page R was to the Fairlight because suddenly became very easy to put down your backing tracks. You could and Michael being a composer, of course, just just just made this sensational bit of software that made composition, you know, just just leapfrog ahead in terms of the sort of things you could try and edit on the fly and so on. Yeah. So, so that was that was that was page R.

Lee Gray: 52:33

It, and then it felt like somehow morphed into video. How did how did that come about?

Kim Ryrie: 52:39

Yeah. So one of the programmers was a guy that we had doing programming on the fellows guy called Kia Silverbrook. And Kia kind of one day and said, Look, I've got an idea for a video product for the collider pen. Would it be okay, if I use the facilities? You know, after hours to work on a prototype? I said, Yeah, of course. So a couple of months later, he he came up and showed me this thing where you took the light pen, or a light pen. And you sort of drew it on any TV set. And it would do kaleidoscopic images. And you could set the color and all this and you can draw butterflies and all that sort of stuff. And he had this idea that you could, that he could make these things for x $100. And as a kid, that's all great, but I'm getting bored. You know, after about a minute and a half, I'm starting to get bored with this idea. Why don't you organize a real time video input? Oh, that's a good idea. Okay, so he went off, you know, two weeks later, we've got video coming in. And you could draw kaleidoscopic images over the top of that. And then we thought our and he was any need organize the way of colorizing the images so you could do different effects. And you could animate, you know, you could freeze frame live effects. And then we thought, well, actually, we really want two live images coming in. So the second video input, long story short, this turned into a thing called the computer video instrument. So we have the computer musical instrument, the CMI, and now we had the CVI. So you could do all sorts of quite fun effects with this thing, not at not at full resolution not at sort of broadcast resolution. But I think the first resolution of the digital images was only like 250 by 250 Something very low res like that. And and we were selling those boxes for for doing music for instance, the ABC TV bought them and they were using them to do some of their video effects even though it was low res it was it was Still an . And we saw that it was quite cheap. Yeah, that's, that's unit day you've got up on the screen. And, and we did a sort of disco version where people could have them in discotechs, and so on. And that was doing quite well. But it wasn't very expensive. We sold them for, I don't know, it was like a couple of 1000 bucks it was it was not ridiculously expensive, like the music machine. And then I received in the mail, not in the mail by the post. This is about a year or two later, this huge box full of patents that had arrived from Ampex in America with a legal letter saying, we think you might be infringing some of our patents

Lee Gray: 55:53

right Cease and desist.

Kim Ryrie: 55:56

It but it that, but don't worry, because we're happy to license, you know, all these patents. And they reckoned we were infringing, you know, about 10 patents or something. And it was going to cost hundreds of 1000s of dollars to do all that. And then I realized that the description of every pattern referred to broadcast quality, and there is a standard for broadcast quality video. So I wrote back and said, Look, I don't think we are actually because we don't have a broadcast quality video product. And that was the last we heard from them. So that was quite

Lee Gray: 56:33

the Fairlight went on to be major video editing platform right?

Kim Ryrie: 56:39

Yeah. But that was through that was not through us. That was what happened ultimately was that Fairlight was bought by a company in Melbourne called Black Magic, and Black Magic their skills in video high definition video, they literally mostly design fabulous cameras and stuff, but they wanted to integrate. We, we didn't really talk about post production because we also buy by bout 80s 87, 88 We we had the first hard disk recorder. We we by now we had hard disks, and we worked out how to how to do hard disk recording and and there wasn't much of that around. In fact, there was virtually none of it around. And I such a pathfinder. Yeah. Well, it's it's just that people came to us because we had the technology and they kept on the sort of suggest well, you can do that. Why can't you do this post production? Right? And especially things like Foley Sound Effects. You know, we started off doing stuff like that. We had a guy in Germany who made porno movies. If

Jayde Deverson : 57:50

needed, some sound effects.

Kim Ryrie: 57:51

He found a use for it. I'm serious. He needed the seer I would love to see in his keyboard. Well, he had a series three. By the time of this series three, you could record about 10 seconds on one key. So that's 16 bit. So anyway, yeah, well, we digress a bit.

Lee Gray: 58:23

Oh, no, we fell off the rails.

Kim Ryrie: 58:29

So yeah, so So Black Magic wanted to integrate the, so I should just go back. So we started Fairlight Fairlight Instruments, we stopped making the keyboard though it just that all sort of went bad. By the end of the there was a recession in in 88. And our only competitor American company called Synclavier who had raised about, I think six or $8 million in capital. And despite the recession, they were able to keep selling their machines because they were funding the license, the leasing of it unsecured to studios and things. And we couldn't do that we had offices in New York, we had office in Los Angeles, and so on. And that was the overheads were horrendous. And so so that ran into serious financial problems. We stopped making the musical instrument because it was it was uncompetitive because we we weren't able to move to a we weren't able quickly enough to move away from our proprietary, very robust computer platform to a PC or a Mac platform. It was just that were all very reliable, unreliable, I should say. And our guys just sort of didn't want to do it and they kept anyway that didn't work. So bottom line, I thought okay, we We'll move into post production because at the moment they're editing soundtracks on sprocketed magnetic film, which was just completely insane

Lee Gray: 1:00:12

you know, we're literally talking cutting room floor and we're

Kim Ryrie: 1:00:15

cutting room floor. I don't know if you've seen a dubber room in a for instasnce if you go to Paramount or Sony Pictures, any with any of those big film things where they're where they're mastering this the soundtracks there's a room of what they call dubbers. And each dubber is like a big rackmount unit with with 35 mil film on sprocket and film but instead of film, film, it's magnetic film. And each dubber recorded about six audio tracks typically on on one film. And so you might have 10 to 15 of these machines in a row, and they're all synchronized together. So if, if one sprocket moved, every machine moved by the same amount using these things, selsun Motors, which was another miraculous intervention of the day, so and, and I thought, well, this is crazy. Why Why don't we, you know, we could do this digitally, you know, using object based editing. And by now Michael Carlos had become a great programmer for us. And, and, and he, you know, he and others. Were working in the new that we call this company Fairlight ESP, which was Fairlight, Electric Sound and Picture. And so it was focused on post production rather than music production. So right, so we're able now we managed to get about eight continuous audio tracks running from a single hard disk, which in those days was quite, quite an achievement. And by then, we had a 16, Channel Fairlight, the last, the model, the series three Fairlight had 16 channels, 16 bit audio, lots of buffer memory. And so each, each track could run just out of RAM. I can't remember how long but something like 10 seconds of audio, independently of what you could get off the hard disk. So the industry was used to 24 track recorders so I thought, Well, why don't we make a post production digital audio workstation that had 24 tracks, even though there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved, namely, that you can only ever play 16 tracks at a time, because we only had 16 channels based on the series three, and you didn't see Yeah, and and, and you could only sustain the equivalent of eight audio tracks continuously, right. But for post production, that wasn't really a problem, because sound effects tended to only be a couple of seconds. The only things that used continuous sound were either ambient ambience and stereo soundtracks. So there might have been maybe four continuous tracks, but the rest were dialogue tracks and sound effects. And so hence why this was so good for Foley. Yeah, and Foley, but But you could literally do a whole whole film soundtrack on on one of these machines. Certainly, you could do video setup, you know, for TV, you could certainly manage it on that, for doing really feature films, you'd need to say three machines 24 tracks each, you know, why did we want to do

Lee Gray: 1:03:50

this the first? Sorry, is this the first digital video editing machine?

Kim Ryrie: 1:03:53

Now this didn't digital audio? Yes. at that scale? That's right. So and that used object oriented editing where you could see the waveform scrolling across the screen, and they would synchronize with the video or the film. So this was pretty revolutionary in the day, and we were selling this for$100,000 each. And we sold them we had most of Hollywood we had Paramount Sony Pictures Tato Glen Glen NHK in Japan had like 20 of them something like stuff like this. So

Lee Gray: 1:04:33

it would have been a great day when they ordered

Kim Ryrie: 1:04:36

No, no , no, this happened over time we and then that. we added consoles to that mixing consoles. And so that was how that all develops. So that was Fairlight's post production stuff. Peter wasn't involved in the in the second stage of the Fairlight. He was a bit burnt out after the first First by 88. So we we all a core r&d guys, he helped me get started with Fairlight ESP. But he just wanted to just take time off and head to the hills. Yeah. So we had the key r&d guys come across we, we kept working on software upgrades for the music instruments that were still in the field, there are a lot of them. So that generated income for us while we worked on the on the post production product. And then ultimately, that is what Black Magic bought that that IP as that ended up that ended up on PC platforms. And then they integrated it with their sensational.

Lee Gray: 1:05:48

What year was that Kim, because I didn't realize Blackmagic had been around that. Yeah,

Kim Ryrie: 1:05:51

they have a good question. I think they took it over at least 10 years ago, something like that.

Lee Gray: 1:06:02

Okay, so this wasn't back in the 80's.

Kim Ryrie: 1:06:04

This is relatively recent stuff, right?

Lee Gray: 1:06:08

And then while all this was going on, you just decided that you're going to reinvent the way louder? Yeah, well, what if come to your latest.

Kim Ryrie: 1:06:15

So what happened was, we had VCs involved in, in, they started getting involved in the, in the other company, and I was trying to get them to move everything down onto the PC platform. And, and they didn't want to do it. They wanted to stay with the thing. And I said, Well, look, this is really you can't do that. It'll, you'll come a cropper because there's going to end up being too much competition from company. Companies like Digidesign and, and so on. Yeah. And they thought, oh, no, there always be a high, high end market. And I just, well, I saw what happened in the music industry. And I just thought the same is gonna happen to post production, which of course it did. And so that's why that's why I decided I wanted to do something else. And, and what had happened. One of our programmers, a guy called Brian Connolly from many years earlier, contacted me, and he'd started a company called Lake DSP. And, and they developed this headphone technology that made you think when you're wearing headphones, that the sound was coming from outside of your head. And he invited me over to to see that and said, Look, what are you doing? I said, Well, I'm, I'm working with Fairlight. But you know, I'm ready to do something new. And he said, Well, can you help us? commercialize this out of head headphone stuff? And I said, Yeah, I can, I could sort of do a week on week off with that work. And he said, Yeah, that'd be fine. So we, we looked at this, and then he was used, though, they develop this stuff called long convolution, finite impulse response, to do this out of head. Sound familiar? So yeah, and I was amazed at what this could do. And, and he showed me a demo that they've done with a little speaker as a little car speaker. And they measured the, the errors that it was doing in the time domain and, and played that back. And, and, and I, and I was amazed that the the improvement was quite, wasn't unbelievable, but it was certainly noticeable. And yes, and this was using a chip that had been developed by the CSIRO I think, was called the A250, or something like this in hardware. And they developed it with an idea that they could use it for car audio, but it turned out to be not long enough taps there was you know, only 250 taps, you can't do that much with that. And it was quite expensive. And, and car audio, people don't want to pay any money for anything. So so that that didn't pan out, but but he took they took the technology they started he started his own company with Lake, and another guy called Dave McGraw. And Dave was a was one of these geniuses that develop the algorithms to do the out of head, headphone technology.

Lee Gray: 1:09:24

And so in layman's terms, what is this algorithm

Kim Ryrie: 1:09:28

So what you do, the way we notice that sound is doing? coming from outside our head is that our ears have a whole lot of filtering going on. You know, the ear lobes create if a sound comes from me from behind. The ear lobe creates a different type of filtering than if the sound had come from in front. The fact that I got two ears also tells me what direction it's come from. So the ear is incredibly sensitive to the most amazingly subtle differences in filtering, and so on its how we, you know, it's back in the day, when you're about to get jumped on by a bear from behind, you sort of needed to know how it worked. So this is, this is what you did was you, you put microphones in your ear in effectively little tiny microphones, they would then measure then they would create a sound at a certain location in front of you to the right in front of you to the left directly in front of you. And then from the rear, left on the rear, right, for example, like surround sound, you know, left center, right, you know, surround live surround, right. So, so for each source, you would end up recording a different filter set as the ears hear it. Okay. This is this is called a an HRT have a head related transfer function. So the so the Save Yeah, so. So you'd have, you'd have one, which would relate to the front left speaker, for example, you'd have another filter related to so you could you could run these filters, using the this convolution process and mimic these these effects. So,

Lee Gray: 1:11:19

right, so I said, all of a sudden, you've got surround sound inside of your headphones.

Kim Ryrie: 1:11:24

Exactly. And so I said, well, well, you've got to know they needed money. That was the other thing that we're running out of money. And they said, Well, how do we get some funding? I said, Well, the first thing you need to do is make a demo. So I wrote a little script with James Bond and Q. And Q was calling James Bond into his laboratory to demonstrate this new technology that the Russians had come up with the nether No, that they come up with with the Russians were after or something. I can't remember what it was. Anyway, there was this guy in Sydney who could do Sean Connery, you would swear it was him speaking.

Lee Gray: 1:12:03

Jade doesn't do a bad Sean Connery. And

Kim Ryrie: 1:12:05

another guy did que right. So we wrote this little script it was about the script was about two minutes long, you know, and, and James had put the headphones on good lord Q. I don't believe that. So anyway, long story short, Brian was out in, in in the city and ran into Paul Keating, whose office happened to be next to Lakes office, and sort of and Brian dropped down to the, to his knees in front of Paul Keating and says, Oh, you know, you know, how are you God? And

Lee Gray: 1:12:39

are those for not from Australia? This was our former Prime Minister

Kim Ryrie: 1:12:42

Prime Minister. They don't make him like that anymore. I can tell you. So anyway. They started chatting. And Paul said, Well, you know, what do you do? Oh, we did this audio technology. And you know, could we give you a demo or something? And? And he said, Yeah, I'd be interested to, he didn't want to come into the, into the office. But we we recorded the demo on a little portable CD player with headphones on it and got his secretary to leave Paul, Paul Keating secretary, leave it on Paul's desk. And he played the thing the next day come into the office next door that I that was

Lee Gray: 1:13:27

So that Dolby Algorithm there. What what unbelievable, you know, let's you know, show me what you're doing. So long story short, Paul introduced them to his his mate who had lots of money from Strathfield Car Radios or whatever it was. And he ended up investing in Lake, Lake ended up going public. They did a deal with Dolby. That's so Lake Headphones is now called Dolby Headphones. And Lake is now Adobe Australia. With 200 employees doing so happened to that algorithm? So there's this is just the Dolby that we see on so many of the devices we have no,

Kim Ryrie: 1:14:08

well, that's well, that's still what's called it's literally called Dolby Headphones. So so if you plug headphones into a product, I have a Sony product that has Dolby Headphones on it, it will do this out of head effect. When you just play normal audio, it will sort of seem to come from out of your head.

Lee Gray: 1:14:28

What did you do? What did you do with that algorithm that

Kim Ryrie: 1:14:30

Well, I couldn't have done nothing to do with me. I was only helping them with their commercialization, but sorry, yeah, then yeah. So what I said to them, I said this is incredible. You could use this to do speaker correction because I was a failed loudspeaker designer, you know, pre Fairlight pre everything. And I could never make speakers sound realistic. I just found it incredibly frustrating making passive crossovers and never working the way I wanted them to. And we had abandoned and, and I got hold of a pair of Voice of the Theatre speakers, you know the horn speakers they used in theaters in the day. And we were blowing up the little horn tweeter in these things virtually every week, we blew up a new diaphragm in the horn. But it's every good rock band does. But no a passive speaker. So there was just a passive crossover network inside these

Lee Gray: 1:15:28

passive speaker is a speaker without an amplifier. Exactly.

Kim Ryrie: 1:15:31

So you just fed up from one amplifier. And, and, and then we just built some amplifiers that this was during the days of Electronics Today magazine, and we just finished building two little build it yourself 100 watt amplifier modules. And I thought I know I could do what the pro audio speakers do and make an active speaker out of my Voice of the Theater speaker. So I put two amps, one driving the horn and one driving the bass driver. And that meant we could I could put steeper filters in front of steeper crossover filters that protected the diaphragm of the horn by a factor of four better, which meant we stopped blowing up the horns. And we also it just sounded way, way cleaner. And I'm thinking Well hang on why? Why aren't all speakers built like this, you know, built actively. Anyway, that was when I was turned on to active back. That was a long time ago. But then I stopped building speakers for, you know, 30 years. And that's what motivated DEQX to start because when I said to Brian, at Lake, you know, you should be using this convolution technology for to correct loudspeakers. He said no, yeah, that it's all too hard. We've, we've tried it, and it does sort of work. But we've we've got to focus on this headphone stuff, why don't you do it? And, and it was when it was sort of good timing for me because I thought I sort of had enough of Fairlight by now and wanted to try something new. And and Brian said, and by the way, you should meet Paul Glendenning. He's the best engineer we've had. But he won't work with us because he doesn't like one of our engineers. And, and so I contacted Paul, and it was a bit like the early days of Fairlight, you know, what are you doing? Or not much? What are you doing? Actually, he was doing microwave technology for, for microwave ovens. And he was a very bright cookie. And I said, Well, you know, you want to start this company, and we're going to make speakers sound better. And, and so that's how we started. That's how we started DEQX. That was in 1997. And, and it was we didn't really know what we were doing, or I didn't, I was just we were just sort of playing around originally to see where this would lead us. And I thought, Oh, this will only take a year or two won't be a problem. And of course, it was just 20 years later. You know, we finally got it nearly right. So I think what will happen? I should have explained, we haven't really explained what DEQX does, I suppose DEQX, by the way, D E Q X stands for Digital equalization and crossover. So that's sort of what we feel is the formula for a truly high definition loudspeaker that is that ultimately can be affordable. At the moment. If you want a really great high definition loudspeaker. It's in the order of $50,000 to a couple of $100,000, you know, using the old technology. And what we can do is we can take a really cheap and nasty speaker you know, the show I just did in Melbourne recently, at an audio show where there wouldn't wouldn't have been a speaker there that was less than, you know, 1000s of dollars. I brought in a pair of Dayton audio $150 a pair of speakers and showed the difference that you can do by measuring the errors that the speaker makes in the time domain. In other words, what we call timing coherence or or it's called group delay of phase response. And that's where every speaker because of the electro mechanics involved in and and also the filters involved. Old in passive speaker design, it causes certain frequency groups to be physically delayed in time before you hear them. And the delay is only fractions of a millisecond, or, at worst several milliseconds in low frequency. But we noticed that we with we hear that sound that hang on that's not right. That's sort of that's not real.

Lee Gray: 1:20:27

Yeah, if I could put it into super layman's terms, it's if you can imagine the sound coming out of the speaker, you get little bits of the bass bits of the mids. And it's it's like a wave coming at you like it's almost a wave shape. And it all comes at a mix different times. And what Kim's device does is chops it into 1000s of pieces, the frequencies, and then it delays everything to the slowest one. So then all of a sudden, every sound is hitting your ears at it. And it's not subtle. The difference is you're all of a sudden you're hearing, you know, you'll have a 3d soundstage in front of you, you know from your two speakers, and you'll be able to say there's the drums over there. There's the violinists, the singers there and stood up, or she sat down, you know, all of a sudden, this information that is there on your standard recordings gets revealed. So yeah,

Kim Ryrie: 1:21:11

it's quite a bit. See what's what's great about audio technology over the last couple of decades is that everything's great. You know, it's all gone digital it's all gone high resolution, everything's fine and dandy from the, from the recording studio through to mastering, distribution of the media unless it gets too compressed. And then we get through to our home system, and then it gets amplified. But when it gets to the loudspeaker, because the loudspeaker is seriously electromechanical compared to everything upstream of it, that's the bit, we're like, literally by two orders of magnitude, the accuracy of the signal coming into the speaker can get annihilated. And we're so used to hearing that, we just sort of know that what we're listening to is coming out of a speaker. And it's and it's not real, except for the very best systems. And so what we do as, as Lee was saying, we literally just delay all the audio by about 10 milliseconds. Sound sound, by the way, travels about 10 feet in about one foot per millisecond. So 10 milliseconds is like 10 feet. So we can we work out we've measured which frequency groups a particular speaker has delayed, and by how much and then we, we delay everything, so that we can then glue it all back together again precisely as it should have been.

Lee Gray: 1:22:42

I mean, I had I had a gentleman here today, we utilise some of Kim's tech in our in our systems, and had a gentleman here leave today. He said, I have to go home and rethink about how I listen to music. And after 73 years of listening. It's it's quite profound, what it can do.

Jayde Deverson : 1:23:00

So that journey has been quite huge. Kim for you, and Lee, also for you as well. Kim, where to now what what is happening now?

Kim Ryrie: 1:23:12

Well, I think the as, as Lee was saying, the we've had to wait for the technology to catch up and latest processing. Unfortunately, what's held us back, you know, over the years has been to do what's called finite impulse response. Filtering, at high resolution requires a huge amount of processing digital signal processing, performance, and digital signal processor chips over the years, just and that's what we've used in the products to date. They do pretty well. But ideally, you want even more processing power. They we use, for example, 100 times more processing power than the normal digital audio would use, for instance to do equalization and stuff like that. So it's seriously more hungry with with processing. But now that you've got ARM processor cores and especially the latest generation ones, which were all designed, of course for mobile devices, things like iPhones and what have you. The power is just so incredible compared to DSP chips that we had to use in the past. Plus the fact that they now talk to the internet. So suddenly all these things that are coming together so you know we can do streaming on the same chip that we can do the processing.

Lee Gray: 1:24:51

Kim, I think we're gonna have to leave it there. It's been absolutely wonderful. And if anything, I come away from this just feeling unbelievably proud of what is created right here in Australia? You're, you're humble to a fault. While you know what you've what you've created, and reinvented in numerous times throughout your life, and it's just oh, why don't we just give it a crack is just, it is quite, it's quite incredible. And most people, most people don't just do that, you know, it's a very small percentage of the population that have that, that courage and then and then to see it through to it's not let's just talk about it over the bar, it's, you know, you actually get your hands dirty, and you're sure you're getting you're standing on the shoulders of giants yourself and sharing these accolades with others, but your achievements are incredible. And you know, from my wife and I, who are massive eighties fans, thank you so much, because, you know, just love those sounds that were created through that era. It's just incredible.

Kim Ryrie: 1:25:54

Well thanks very much, ya know, it's been a pleasure to talk to you all. And I know it's all gonna go well with your company in the new speakers that you've been working on, because they look pretty good. I haven't heard them yet.

Lee Gray: 1:26:09

But you will. Thank Thanks. Thanks, Kim. I really, really appreciate your time. Yes.

Jayde Deverson : 1:26:16

Thanks, Kim. Thanks.

Lee Gray: 1:26:17

To the listenersI hope that you enjoyed that as much as we did. Thanks for listening to the show. And if you'd like to find out more about Kyron Audio or Deverson Design, and how we can create bespoke luxury environments and experiences in your life. You're more than welcome to book a call with one of our principals through our websites kyronaudio.com.au or deversondesign.com.au or follow us on our socials. Links are in the description. And we will be back next week with another episode to discover more Tales from the top