Interview with Michael Barry, by Phoebe Kuo, October 2006

KUO: What was your first experience with a record player?

BARRY: There was my dads, and old Fisher. He liked audio growing up, he had a neat mono system. He was always playing records. I remember the whole process of putting in records and he took good care of them and had a neat collection. Since we always had music on, it was part of our household. He took such care of buying and having the records around, it was one of those background things for me I was taken with. A magic – this plastic could make music. He liked classical, showtunes... He took pleasure going out and buying them and bringing them back home. It was a mystery, a magic. He was an engineer for general electric. It was just the vinyl, the music, the records!

KUO: What was your first record player?

BARRY: Of course I listened to the radio in High School. My first turntable was in college at Stanford. I purchased my first stereo in an installment plan, cause I couldn’t afford the whole thing. I was working at the Redwood City library. Initially got a pair of Phillips speakers, which were very early-on bi-amped (had their own amplifiers in them – this is now standard in all computer speakers, but at the time was revolutionary), a Yamaha preamp, and B&O turntable. that was a lot of paychecks. The turntable was magic, sophisticated, had a cool design. Bang & Olafson was the first company to recognize the shift of teenagers from buying autos to music. They rethought, from European perspective, what audio would look like. The turntable is what they were famous for (there is one in the MoMA). In the dorm that was a very big deal. Having your own audio system in the 70’s was both a big deal and drew a fair amount of attention. This experience sucked me into both into the design side of audio and into beginning to buy music. My interest in audio design was born.

B&O was probably my first encounter with that severe, Danish aesthetic. I’ve since outgrown the B&O notion that there is a dominant form/design, in which functionality should be carried. I am now more organic and iterative. There are things that may not fit that ideal – that brutalist form – and you can find enormous beauty in things that aren’t pure geometry. They can be emotionally exciting, and still work exquisitely well. And be intuitive. B&O says there’s a kind of mastery in owning and knowing how to work an appliance. (And if you can’t figure it out, that’s your problem.) This approach bothers me. On the other hand, pulling off egalitarian design is beautiful.

KUO: What is it about LPs?

BARRY: One of the initial limitations [challenges] of the B&O turntable was – in high end audio – how to most accurately reproduce live music through these machines – which are basically a collection of amps, tubes, moving cones, needles tied to coils, transducers. It’s a kind of time machine – how do you recreate Toscanini’s seminal performance of Beethoven?!

LP’s are about bringing it right into your living and have it there. You wanted the sound and experience to be just perfect. Perfection – that was where the audio industry was at the time. There was an interesting subculture, audio geeks, talking about things like “imaging” – it wasn’t just left/right stereo accuracy, or a correct reproduction of frequency, but something more. You could hear “depth” – now commonly known as the “sound stage” – you could get a sense of reality. You could tell where each instrument was sitting in the room.

In LP’s you can hear the accuracy and depth you can’t achieve in digital. 70’s saw significant changes in technology, speakers (quad electrostatics, Snell). It was no longer just about how loud you could get, but the accuracy of the sound.

KUO: Can you talk a bit about your product, the tone arm you developed?

BARRY: The tone arm was the first complete, cradle-to-grave product I ever got out on the market. I had to give it to people, have them use it, and say things like, “Oh this is hard to hold!” I had look at all the choices other companies had to make, and had to resolve the problems on my own.

The Process, the Discovery, the result.
We started to analyze how records were made, the actual technology of the groove on the LPs. The tone arm could only by sheer luck line up all the components right. Here is how a record is cut: you put music in something like the reverse of a stylus. A mic transduces it into a cutter, basically a big lathe. The cutting tool cuts the groove. We realized the setup of the cutting tool was really important, because the cut is at an angle. And the only way to really to pick up everything in the groove, was for the diamond needle on your LP player to match the exact angle of the stylus that cut the record to begin with. Everyone else in the industry was minimizing tracking mass or outside vibration. No one was replicating the cutting head angle. Second thing – the low end requires a different approach to pivoting. You have what’s on the sides and what’s on the bottoms of the groove. The system has to be light on high end, while stable and massive on the bottom. A unipivot had to capture opposite attributes. So we came up with a dual pivot tone arm. Most tone arms had nasty pivots, but “Grace” had jewel bearings, which we also used. We had a massive bearing. The horizontal was very high mass and stable, and absorbed system vibration (great for low end). Then it had a parallelogram at the front, which was needed for responsive motion. At the front of the arm, we had a thread and a knob to adjust the parallelogram angle. We started calling up different record labels and getting their cutting head angles. If you look at an inside groove of an LP, the vinyl cutters scratch a series of letters into the record. They actually write which issue, the date, and cutting angle used. We decoded it. We compiled a tracking angle list for all albums. You could adjust your tone arm to your vinyl.

Today there are impressive arms and turntables, see “Transrotor”. It was tough keeping resonance down – when you want to keep the cartridge as still as possible. Struggled with it. Got help from German machinists through Ampex, where I worked. “G-job” was “Government jobs” – aka moonlighting. You get a job with a company, and then do your thing on the side.

Some magazine called us the “best tone arm for under 200 dollars”.

Our company was called Psionic, and the arm was called. . . . uhh… Well, we sold a couple hundred arms, and then sold the company to Acoustat.

KUO: And then, not long after, CDs came out . . .

BARRY: Around 1981 CDs came out. It took just 2 years for CDs to take over vinyl. It was a shock. The shift in music wasn’t towards accuracy, it was towards personalization and portability.

Chrysler tried to put a record player in the trunk of a car. They actually had enough spring for to prevent bouncing completely. But the problem was, you had to change it every half and hour.

I worked on cartridges for Shure. I was giving a design talk, and the VP heard tone arm story, and said, “That’s pretty cool. Do you know much about Shure?” Roughly half the company was cartridges when CD’s came out. The other half was microphones. I later worked on cartridge product positioning (not design) with them. Funny story. They tried to kill their cartridge system in the 90’s, but the cartridges just kept selling. The product that was selling was, within the American market, the preferred DJ cartridge. But at the time they didn’t know who was buying it, they just saw the sales figures. The cartridge was actually designed for jukeboxes – so it had to have robust suspension, and the amplification required a tish-boom sound -- a lot of high and low end, not much in the middle. DJ’s loved it! It was indestructible and great for scratching. The M-91. A little black box, ugly as can be. They haven’t changed it since, haven’t dared to.

It’s fascinating that the technology hasn’t been replaced, yet the market is still there, it’s consistent. It’s not dying! It seems that new technologies don’t replace old ones, as long as the old ones are satisfying certain needs that new ones don’t.

Here’s the critical thing – any consumer technology that allows for production of music, for creativity, will survive. Really, it was the black kids in Oakland who had passion for music who discovered scratching as a way of making music. Vinyl playing for consumption became a tool for production.

KUO: You say the DJ culture essentially saved LP’s. Is there much of an audiophile community left, and could they have saved the LP industry on their own?

BARRY: There is a huge audiophile community in Asia, Japan, Europe, a fair one in Canada, and some in the US. Actually, the community is mostly my age! It’s a community that’s shrinking. The majority of us grew up with vinyl in college and are reliving the college years, buying things we could never have afforded in college years. Really, the industry survived because they found this other need – you can make music with LPs without reading music. I’m not calling DJ’s ignorant. Scratchers are brilliant, phenomenal artists, they are skilled as any violinist in a big orchestra. To watch these guys, they’re magic. That nuance – you can’t scratch with CDs. It just doesn’t work. DJs found a new kind of magic, in the same medium in which audiophiles found magic. The engineers could never have predicted this.

KUO: The rise of DJs, the emergence of CDs – what’s the timeline?

BARRY: My DJ scratcher knowledge is not really there – I wanna say scratching happened really close to the time CDs came out. You were looking at a club scene. It wasn’t disco, it was the original club-house scene starting in the York. Sure, you have disco, where you play the Beegees through. Then you have the house DJs who want to control the mix from one song to another. You can absolutely control the crossover, and even contribute your own voice to it, through the movement of the record, by creating your own sound to it.

The birth of an entire culture: You had street hip hop, you had tagging, you had scratching, you had the dance. These factors are central to the phenomenon.

In retrospect, it’s like Oh my god, I didn’t see it happening. The CD was obvious to me, the shift that this [record players] could make music. I didn’t see. They took it on. It’s utterly unique. These guys are just brilliant.

Shure was very slow to recognize these users. They hired some 19year old to go to Oakland (purchases were local) to figure out who’s using them. He told them it’s a musical instrument, convinced them that they should design cartridges for DJ’s. He totally got into it, and now he’s a DJ. [This was while Michael was with Shure.] For a long time, they didn’t see the cartridge as a legitimate product. It was marketed for antique jukeboxes. All this happened in the late 80’s.

Ortofon, Stanton, these are good European brands.

…. I’ve been out of the area for 4-5 years.

KUO: Would you have done things differently, given this knowledge about the rise of DJ and scratching culture?

BARRY: As a Stanford designer, I was supposed to solve the problem I was given. I would like to think I would have seen the larger market, and that I would have connected with the black kids in Oakland. But at the time this is what I knew and understood, and this is all there was. What more could there be?

“By the way…”
By the way, CDs are almost dead, too. CEC (Japanese) makes the best CD player on the market. It’s belt driven. See, the more error correction in a machine, the more smear in sound. So actually you want very little error correction. How it works -- the laser is sweeping back and forth, constantly. Hence the need for error correction. Machines nowadays give less and less options for control: it comes out of the factory either working or not. But if you go in yourself and hotwire the standards/arc of the sweep, and decrease it, you stabilize the sound  --- you start to get a very different quality of sound. It’s crisper.

The question ask is, How do I take really good care of the sound --  whether digital or vinyl.

KUO: Given that you own and enjoy both a high end Turntable and high end CD player, which do you prefer to listen to?

BARRY: I still love vinyl. Part of it is because you can keep going into it. Even with the CEC CD player, you reach a limit to what you can hear. With LPs, there seems to be almost no limit. It’s got depth. You hear the car going by in the original recording, the breath of the original artist. And any voice, there’s a richness and depth. Leonard Cohen – okay, one can argue that he can barely sing. Yet that voice on vinyl is like . . . you just can’t hear him in any other way. And there’s a joy and thrill to it.

In CDs, you have some limits to the data stream, the sampling rate. Effectively you’re chopping a stream of info into little pieces and reassembling it. There are always the edges of these pieces. The human ear is surprisingly sensitive. Aliasing, that’s what we call it when data coming in from higher frequencies affect the lower ones. The human ear is far more sensitive than an eye. Okay, it’s like a non-digitized picture. There’s a clarity and breadth of life in it. Have you ever walked down a street in downtown Palo Alto and you hear music coming from somewhere and you say, Yeah, that’s live. You don’t know just how you know, but there’s a shimmer in the air. Vinyl is a little closer to capturing that shimmer. So digital has given us access. I have my shuffle and I wouldn’t give it up – it’s great for running! But with LPs it’s a recreation of reality. It’s a time machine.

Copyright 2006 Ambidextrous Magazine, Inc.