Extinct Audio Microphones - Stewart Tavener

Stewart Tavener from Extinct Audio and Xaudia chats to Drew Stephenson about the origins of his companies and how he became a ribbon microphone specialist with his own range of products.

Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:27 - A Background in Chemistry
03:26 - Setting Up A Repair Service
04:55 - Specialising In Ribbon Microphones
07:58 - Dispelling Ribbon Microphone Myths
10:48 - The Extinct Audio BM9
11:52 - Launching The Business
14:34 - A General Purpose Microphone
15:57 - Stories Behind The Scenes
17:05 - Future Plans

Stewart Tavener Biog
Stewart Tavener first became interested in audio equipment in his teens, recording with a four track tape recorder and a couple of borrowed microphones, which included an old Reslo PR and a Shure dynamic. It wasn’t long before he broke the Reslo but he held on to it with the aim of repairing it one day. As the internet grew in popularity in the mid 90s, a few groups dedicated to old audio equipment appeared and Stewart received good advice from a number of fellow enthusiasts, including Dave Royer and Mark ‘Marik’ of Samar audio.

On learning the basics, Stewart started to look for other microphones to fix. Up until the 1970s the UK had some excellent audio manufacturers including Reslo, Grampian, Film Industries, STC and Lustraphone, but these companies had not been able to compete with new products from AKG and Shure. With no spare parts available these old ribbon mics were available for little cost and Stewart purchased as many as he could. This hobby eventually became a full time job in 2007, when he set up Xaudia to repair microphones for other owners. Over the next few years, he repaired and upgraded ribbon mics every day and estimates having worked on 400 to 500 microphones each year for ten years.

In 2017, Adam Watson came on board and together they launched their own range of microphones under the Extinct Audio brand. These new microphones would be redesigned from scratch and manufactured locally. Most of the parts are made in the workshop in York, or by an engineering partner in Manchester, while the packaging is created by another UK company. All of the assembly for Extinct Audio microphones is carried out in-house.

https://www.extinctaudio.co.uk/
http://xaudia.com/

Drew Stephenson Biog
Drew Stephenson is a singer-songwriter, home recording enthusiast and occasional SOS contributor. He also looks after digital communications for one of the largest UK building societies, specialising in corporate podcasts, animations and video content.
http://www.drewstephenson.com/

Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts

Creators and Guests

Host

Drew Stephenson

Drew Stephenson is a singer-songwriter, home recording enthusiast and occasional SOS contributor. He also looks after digital communications for one of the largest UK building societies, specialising in corporate podcasts, animations and video content.

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Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound people and music industry podcast channel. Today we're talking to Stewart Tavener. I first met Stewart in his role as a recording engineer and mixer at SleepSafe Studios, but he's probably better known as the man behind the X Audio and Extinct Audio microphone brands. He's also pretty much the go to man for all things ribbon microphone in the UK.

Stewart. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? I think there's a physics PhD in there somewhere, isn't there? And how you first became interested in the technical side of microphones? It's a good question. So it's chemistry rather than physics or physical chemistry, the boundary between the two.

A lot of work on things like magnetic resonance, which sounds like a long way away from microphones, but Because we were making measurements, principles like signal to noise were extremely important. And we tended to run on fairly low academic budgets, which meant if things broke, they had to be fixed.

And I developed some skills in fixing broken amplifiers and similar bits of equipment, sometimes without instructions. I've played in bands since I was 14, and was very interested in recording our own music. I think the whole microphone side of things started when I found an old Resolo ribbon microphone at a car boot sale.

I took it home, plugged it into an old Tascam 4 track, and I thought it sounded wonderful. So, being me and being curious about these things, the second thing I did with it was to take it apart, and I broke the ribbon. Absolutely heartbroken. And it probably sat there in a box and it came to me with, uh, with me to university.

And sometime around about the late 1990s when the internet was just getting going, I found a music discussion group and there was a certain Dave Royer on there who kindly shared some tips about how I might fix this ribbon microphone. So I went away through my academic contacts. I was able to get hold of some very thin aluminum foil.

I think they were used for x ray sources at the time and for scientific experiments. Um, figured out how to corrugate it and made, um, made a working microphone from what was there. I was really pleased. And then, I guess my academic career didn't really go where I thought it was going to go. And, at the same time, the band was doing quite well and we'd started building our own recording studio.

Again, on a limited budget. And I started buying broken bits of equipment with the idea of maybe saving a few quid and fixing them and building a studio that way, which worked quite well. In particular, the microphones kept grabbing me. At that time, you could get broken British ribbon microphones for maybe 30, and I could get them working, which was Much cheaper than doing something like buying an SM57, for example, and I love the character of them.

I love the warmth. I love the way they make you sound instantly like you were on the BBC. And that was really a large part of how I got started with the ribbon microphones in particular. And they do lend themselves to repairs quite nicely. Things are fairly human sized and it's basic physics rather than Esoteric electronics and that makes them work.

So they seem logical to me with my background and when did you start? fixing things for other people so round about 2007 that I just my academic career had kind of ground to a halt and I realized I was either going to stay there for The pension or I could try and do something else and I made that decision to to get out But it wasn't the original plan to fix things for a living The original plan was to run a recording studio, but it's quite hard As I'm sure a lot of our listeners will know to make money from recording music, because a lot of people are doing it and a lot of musicians, they don't have a great budget either.

So on the side, I put up a little website and started offering my services as a general repair guy, which was Exordia. And around about that time, I'd spotted some equipment on eBay, which belonged to an old RCA engineer, including a corrugator. So I bought this corrugator with the intention just to fix my own microphones and maybe make the money back for my initial outlay, which was round about a thousand pounds.

I put up the service on the website and within a month I had enough interest to be able to repay that initial investment. So it grew from there and By 2010 I had a queue of work for the repairs and I still have a queue of work now. It's never got to the point where there weren't broken ribbon microphones here waiting to be repaired.

At the beginning I was more of a general repair guy but I did find that I was good at the ribbon microphones. I understood them and I went more and more into specializing in that direction. So at what point did you realize that You had gone from being fairly handy at fixing things to becoming an expert on ribbon microphones and realizing that you had a potential business.

I think it became apparent that it was the business probably after three years. In terms of expertise, I say to people, the first thousand are the hardest. And once you've done a thousand of anything, hopefully you've become quite competent at it. So I think, I think about the thousand mark. Now, you've previously told me that Ribbon microphones are fundamentally fairly simple devices.

So, what kind of challenges does repairing them throw up? Is it around parts, or is it knowledge, or is it It's, it's details, and it's getting things to be reliably repeatable and consistent. I think that's, that's one of the, um, challenges. So, fundamentally, they're a very simple device. They're, the way a ribbon microphone operates is by having a small thin piece of aluminium, the ribbon, in a magnetic field and the sound waves move the ribbon in the magnetic field which produces an electrical current.

It's very similar to a car alternator for example, which is why we call it the motor, I know that's backwards, but it's very similar, it's the reverse of a motor, and we do refer to the working heart of a ribbon microphone as, as being the motor. So fundamentally they're simple. And that means an awful lot of people have made weird and wonderful versions over the years.

And it's, it's very much been a cottage industry with lots of little businesses. If you look at the history of it, making things for a while and then moving on or, um, running out of funding or not getting the customers and so on. And that's one of the really delightful things about it because you always find the new obscure brands and so on in terms of challenges, I think.

Things like the, judging the thickness of the foil that you need to use, the, if you read the internet, people will say, Oh, you need to use 1. 8 micrometers or 2. 4 micrometers. It's not that simple because the ribbon itself forms a, a filter with the transformer. So the way the ribbon and transformer work together is a little bit more subtle, perhaps than people first realize.

And the ribbon needs to be matched to the transformer or vice versa. So there's that understanding that element is key. And then being able to work to very close tolerances is also key because as your ribbon gets thinner further away from the magnets, the sensitivity drops off quite rapidly. So you want the ribbon to be as wide as possible.

But without touching the magnets and very often we're working to 0. 1 of a millimeter. Uh, I think that's the real challenge. It's the hand to eye skills. Um, and again, this is why I say the first thousand are the hardest because that's when you're developing the look and feel of it. Um, from a technician in terms of understanding the physics of it is that they're really simple, really simple devices.

It's attention to detail as always. That's the critical thing. I think there's an opportunity here to settle a couple of much debated points about ribbon microphones. The first one is, should ribbon microphones always be stored vertically? I have never seen evidence of sag in a well made ribbon microphone.

That's a very careful answer. Yeah, yes, it is a careful answer. I think sometimes if microphones Uh, being shipped from overseas on a boat, possibly from the other side of the world for months and months and months being rocked that can actually cause problems with the ribbons. And I'm not necessarily sure that storage vertical or horizontal would solve that maybe, maybe not.

Um, in terms of on the bench, we've never observed it. We store our microphones piggledy piggledy sideways, upwards, downwards. The ribbon's so light, if it's well made, it shouldn't sack. There may be situations where the corrugations have not been made tight enough or deep enough. Maybe there are some issues there, but we don't see it.

Second question. Phantom power and ribbon microphones, good, bad, ugly, indifferent. It should not matter. With a modern ribbon microphone, it should be transformer balanced. And here's the thing, if it's transformer balanced, and it has balanced phantom power, there is no voltage across the microphone. If you short one leg of the transformer, then that's a different matter.

And then it's not balanced phantom power anymore, it's just power. And power is bad phantom power won't harm a ribbon microphone. So no trs plugs and no trs plugs and patch base Do not run this. This is bad Don't run phantom power through a trs jack patch bay because that can be bad whilst we're on it I think people can worry about the wrong things in terms of what we see we see Microphones that have been stretched through too much level with the ribbon blown or stretched.

We see that commonly. I guess people could mistake that for the ribbon sagging, but it's sagged because it's been overloaded. It's stretched because it's been overloaded. It's not spontaneously dropped its corrugations. We see a lot of dirt inside ribbon microphones, so if you're putting your microphone repeatedly down on your carpet and there's small iron particles, there's stray iron everywhere in dirt and soil.

That will suck it straight up and you'll end up with dirt inside the microphone. Saliva? Aluminium will oxidise. We like to think of aluminium as not rusting, but it will oxidise over time with saliva. And wind blasts, bad handling, those are the things which damage your microphone. I'm far more concerned about those things than I am about balanced phantom power and about ribbon sack.

So, don't overload it, don't put it down on the carpet, don't spit on it, and Keep away from wind blasts. Don't use them outside without a A rack out, or, you know, a wind windshield, considerable windshield. Yeah. So moving on then to extinct audio and the, the BM nine. Why did you choose to use this design or to, to go with this design?

What, what led you in that direction? I've done a lot of modifications of the Bang Olufsen microphones in particular. And the BM 3 was one that I particularly liked working on. So it seemed a logical, um, starting point for those things. And when, when they come in very often, those microphones, they've got weak magnets, so we've replaced the magnets.

Replaced the ribbon, uh, they had 50 ohm transformers, which meant they're quite low output. So we might put a new transformer in there. So that was jumping off the point. We're getting into my grandfather's ex territory there, aren't we? Absolutely. So. Um, we'd already got the skills for those kind of repairs and spare parts for it.

But the BM 9 is not a BM 3. The only part you could take off the BM 9 and put on a BM 3 is the top cap. There is no other common component to it. It's a completely new microphone. No new product launch goes without any hitches. What kind of hurdles have you had to overcome? I think the hardest thing for me has been balancing things because I've continued to run the repair shop, which is, I mean, I love working on the old microphones.

And, um, can I answer it in a roundabout question and tell you a little bit of how, um, I was able to get them up and running? Um, which might actually be the answer to the previous question. So my friend, Adam lost his job and people had asked me for years and years and years, Oh, why don't you make your own microphone?

And I'd never had the. The manpower to, um, to be able to consider doing it with an extra pair of hands. I thought, well, maybe we can create new microphones and create some useful employment. Adam came on board and that was the opportunity to do it. I didn't want to let go of repairing things because that's what I love doing.

So. balancing the repair shop with orders for new microphones I think that's been the hardest thing for me because if we're busy with the new mics i'm getting behind on repairs and If we're not busy with the new mics, then it's the usual cash flow issues and so on I suppose the hardest thing was doing things like getting the uh, getting the money together to do it finding the Engineers in England who could make the parts for us.

That's been a challenge. Um, Did you have to do much in the way of prototyping or were you fairly confident about no we did I mean it was it was seven months with Between starting incorporating the business and getting the first microphones out there Just I think it's pretty quick really but that's quite a long time without any income coming in I suppose we were in a good position anyway, because I had quite a long list of people I could call And say hey, do you want to try?

This because I've been doing repairs for 10 years by the time that Extinct started. So I think really we did very well and things went a lot more smoothly than perhaps we'd even anticipated. To be honest, we did find we, we outgrew our infrastructure quite quickly, which is why we've recently had to move everything to a new premises.

We were, we were definitely getting to the point where we're building limited and then we just gained an extra pair of hands. So we've got, we've got a third person now, Paul, who's, who's come on board to, to help with things. But I don't want to get to the point where I become a man manager, I just want to, I want to use my hands and be at the bench, really, which is the major motivation for me.

I'm going to come back to that in a bit, in terms of future plans, but do you find that the design characteristics of the, the BM9 lend itself to particular roles? Are there particular jobs that you would recommend it for, or that, that kind of design? I've learned that my customers will always surprise me.

And find something new to do with it. I don't really want to say it's for this or it's for that. It's a general purpose, uh, ribbon microphone and the black ops version is designed to be a near field version of that. So it has a bit of base cut in the transformer that that's the thinking behind it, but we had a customer come along and say, um, uh, can I use this on a kick drum and I thought, no.

But then they did, uh, you know, we care in a pop shield and it was a closed skin on the front and it sounded really good. People do weird and wonderful things. We've got somebody taking the Valkyr to record bird sound, which really surprised me and I had no, I would never have recommended the microphone for that, but he's off in the Orkney islands recording nature sounds with it.

He's put the microphone in a tent. He's built a whole tent as a windshield. Which is madness, but if it works, so I'm really reluctant to say this microphone is for X because our customers are so So knowledgeable and they always have their own plans about where a sound will work that, you know, general purpose try it any interesting stories about people who have Abused the microphones and maybe you've had somebody coming back and said this doesn't work anymore, or I tried to do this people have people have relatively um sensible in the way that they use them and we I always put a an idiot proof guarantee on repair anyway, so if they break things within the first few weeks.

It's, it's fine. I think some of the things which astound me are the way people sometimes send things along. We had, I always told the story of a, an RCA 7070X, which well over a thousand pounds worth of rare vintage ribbon microphone, and a customer wanted an urgent repair on it. So he posted it up to me.

In an unregistered package a jiffy bag around the microphone and our postman managed to jam it into the letterbox Now for those who don't know The 77 it's quite a big microphone with a mesh So we had to remove it from the letterbox straighten the grills and so on and go back That was one thing that did astound me so What's next for Exordia and Extinct?

You've got this lovely new room. Does this indicate anything of an expansion? Are we going to see anything different coming out of the building? Or are you at a stable point for the company? So it's been a hell of a year for everybody and I think this year is going to be one of consolidation. So we've, we've managed to pull off a move to a nicer premises, which is going to be our own home for hopefully the next 20 years, if that's been a big investment, I think we just need to take stock.

Put a little bit of money into the back into the bank account and, uh, go again. I think you won't be seeing condenser microphones from us. Uh, despite a rumor earlier in the year, we did see your Instagram, my 47. I built that, I built that for, um, as a clone for our own studio and a few years ago, and I put an extinct badge on it.

So it was just a little bit of fun. It was amazing how much interest we got from it. I'm not interested in building condenser microphones until. I could build my own capsule, and if I could make my own capsule, it would become an interesting exercise for me because I, I, I really think that would be fun and exciting if it's a case of buying again, capsules and electronics and, uh, making something and reselling it.

It's not me. And again, I'm not an electronics expert. People think perhaps I am, but I, it's electromagnetism that I've come in from. I can get by with electronics, but I probably don't have anything new to offer the world. But the, the, um, the capsule side of it could be interesting. So perhaps, um, one day it would be nice, wouldn't it?

But I think for the coming year, we just have to stick to our core business and, um, just consolidate a little bit and then see where the world's at before, before going again. We do have a mid side transformer decoder. On the horizon for stereo, um, microphones. So if you're using a stereo ribbon microphone in mid side mode, it will give you left and right output.

It's, it's a very simple device, passive device. So that will be the next, the next thing. So that's just a box that you would plug in between the microphone and the, the preamp. Well, I think that just about covers the whistle stop tour of your professional life, Stuart. Thank you very much. Found it fascinating.

I'm sure I listen as well too. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. This has been the sound on sound podcast with guru of all things ribbon microphone, Stuart Tavner. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find more details and web links.

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