Sam Inglis Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry podcast. I'm Sam Inglis and in this episode I'm talking to the founder and president of Warm Audio, Bryce Young. Welcome, Bryce. Bryce Young Welcome, or thank-you for welcoming me. Sam Inglis It's an absolute pleasure, how are you doing? Bryce Young Good, doing great. Great to see you again. Sam Inglis Yeah, likewise. Now, in only, I think it's 15 years Warm Audio has become one of the biggest brands in the market and you personally have been the driving force behind that. What's the secret, how have you built up this huge business so fast? Bryce Young Wow yeah, 15 years. It doesn't feel like it's been that long, I think it's flown by. But you're right, 2011 is when the first product was developed, it came out in 2012. I'd say putting really great people around me that are also passionate about audio is what's helped the brand grow. So I've got a really strong team of people that have been involved in pro-audio much of their lives and if you bring in the right people and they love what we're doing, then they're gonna all work really hard to push things forward as well. Sam Inglis And from what I understand, this all starts with your own personal passion. What was your first experience with classic studio hardware and what sort of impression did it make on you? Bryce Young Yeah, I've probably told this story a million times so I'll try to keep it short, but I plugged into my first hardware outboard preamp in a studio in college and I used my low cost inexpensive condensers and I was amazed at how great those condensers sounded through a preamp. And so it was kind of like the light bulb turned on, like oh, preamps, they matter. Like, oh cool, you know? And I started doing research about what are some of the classic famous preamps that, you know, people love and API and Neve style came up and I bought some API and Neve hand-built clones actually on eBay from a guy that was really passionate about that stuff. And I just kind of became obsessed and so took those apart, learned how they were built, tried to build some of my own. I had a little bit of electrical engineering background, a very small amount, like a semester in college. I knew how to use a soldering iron and just kind of from there became obsessed with wanting my own recordings to sound good. I had no intention to start a business and from there, it made sense to make the products available to other people. 02:33 - Sam Inglis And are you still personally involved in the design of everything that Warm makes? Bryce Young Yes, so I would call myself a Product Development Manager. So I don't, I'm not an engineer, so I can't just like from scratch design a schematic, I can look at an old classic vintage schematic and clone that. Obviously that's how I, you know, started in how we still do a lot of what we do but I'm very involved in what we come out with and what gets worked on next and I'd say about 50 to 60% of my time is in product development. 03:09 - Sam Inglis So talking of product development and schematics, there's a perception that vintage sound is down to specific components like transformers or valves. But I mean, in my experience it's not always as simple as that. How do you identify what aspects of a particular circuit are responsible for its sound and is it always the aspects that you expect? Bryce Young That's a good point. I think transformers are talked about a lot because they can have such a dramatic impact on the sound. So if you have a circuit that maybe you like the sound okay, you could put in different transformers and oh wow, that really made a big difference. Same thing with tubes. I think a lot of people, even if they know nothing about circuits, have tried putting different brands of tubes in their products, you know and they hear those sonic differences but you know at first, I think when I got started I thought it was all about the transformers and tubes and then as I played around with different capacitors, different resistor types and distortion circuits particularly, you start to realise everything makes an impact. How much of an impact, you know, that can vary but in distortion circuits, that's one thing that's really fascinating is, a lot of people think resistors don't really matter. Oh resistors, you know, carbon, metal film, they're all gonna do the job but in a distortion circuit like a guitar pedal overdrive, carbon versus metal film sounds completely different, so it depends also how much the components are pushed, you know, in the circuit. Sam Inglis For sure. And with a lot of this older gear also, it can actually vary quite a lot even between examples of the same model. I mean, how do you identify which one you're gonna take as your starting point? Bryce Young That’s an interesting one. I tell a story often about the WA-47 which is you know, based on the U47 and we compared it to three vintage mics that were all vintage Neumann U47’s and all three of those sounded very different. Very different. And so we just had to make a call, which of those three do we think sounds the best, you know. One sounded kind of thin and overly bright and one sounded really meaty in the mid range and one sounded just more balanced and I think we went with the balanced one, tried to get ours to sound just like that. Sam Inglis Well that makes sense but also I was thinking probably quite a lot of people who buy Warm Audio gear maybe haven't used the original equipment on which it's based. Do you think that means they have expectations that aren't actually true of the original? I mean, maybe they think that it's gonna be super saturated and coloured and it really was never like that. Bryce Young I think that's a very fair statement. I think most, I don't wanna say most people, but it probably is most, I'd say most people that are buying pro audio equipment today, if you just look at the numbers, haven't used those originals and so they might have a perception of you know, I don't know, some classic recording that they know used a U47 so I'm gonna plug in this U47, it needs to sound just like that but you know, was that classic U47, was it going through what type of preamp, what type of console, what compressor was being used? I feel like our products get very close though, or close enough that most people say oh wow, this is the sound I was going for and usually people that go in with an open mind are actually unexpectedly surprised. They say, I was kind of expecting this to sound not that great, but good enough, so that's why I bought it and I'm blown away and it sounds better than I expected it to be and I'm super excited now. 07:01 - Sam Inglis Well that's cool. And where do you draw the line then between being faithful to an original design and updating it to fit in a modern studio? I mean for example, probably no one wants to buy a mic now that has a DIN connector on it, or a compressor that operates at weird levels, so I can see why you wouldn't want to use those features now. But then do you also see benefits in adding new features that were never in the original, for example? Bryce Young Yeah, that's a great question. So when we started the company and I didn't have a lot of engineering internally, I only outsourced engineers and it was me, a lot of me just going through old schematics, I was always about let's just replicate this as close as possible to the original, which is awesome, that's what people want, right? But there are those things that come up like it's kind of interesting on a Pultec-style equaliser the, you know, it's static gain, right? I mean you've got boost and cut but like there's no gain control on it and so depending on the impedance of the input that it's going into, the level coming out will go up or down and so if you're running that 600 Ohms output into a 10K Ohms input impedance on your interface, you're actually gonna lose a little bit of level and actually I'm trying to remember if it goes up or down but yeah there's different, depending on the impedance, goes up or down. So you have these guys plugging them in, they say hey, I'm sending Unity outta my DAW, I'm going into this product and it's coming back in negative three, I'm upset, why is it coming…? And it's like well, did you know the original does that too? And they're like, oh really, you know. So we added a little gain trim on that, that adjusts the tube gain + or -3 dB in either direction, just to give people that control. And now when we work on developing a product, if it's a recreation style, which most of ours still are, we do look at it more closely and say hey alright, the vintage original's awesome, everybody wants that, but what do they wish it had on it? So we're, rather than changing the old, we're trying to just add to it. So we released a chorus pedal recently, it's based on a vintage 70s pedal and we realised hey, it would be nice if you have these two controls in two different knobs instead of all in one knob, that turns them both up at the same time and made that adjustment or hey, the impedance on this pedal is kind of not exactly what you'd want for guitar, it’s more set for keyboard. Well, let's add an impedance for a guitar too. So we're definitely trying to dial in and clue into that a bit more now than we used to. 09:43 - Sam Inglis Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense and Warm Audio’s USP I guess, is to make classic designs available to people who can't afford the originals or can't access the originals but that doesn't mean you don't have a professional user base. How much do you take the needs of working professionals on board when you're designing new products? Bryce Young We definitely talk to a lot of working professionals, a lot more than we used to because a lot more working professionals are using the gear now but it's interesting that sometimes what the working professionals want isn't what most people want. I'll give you an example, had several working professionals that use our guitar pedals on stage telling us that the LEDs weren't bright enough, that hey I'm on a stage, I've got spotlights coming, I need brighter LEDs so I know when the pedal's on and off. So then we listen, we release a pedal with brighter LEDs and then you have all these studio guys or at home guys saying, these LEDs are too bright, I don't like them, you know, so it's very interesting. But yeah the professionals, and that's a silly example maybe, but I'd say in general working professionals, we definitely listen to what they have to say and try to implement that wherever we can. Sam Inglis And has it been hard to convince professionals in the studio realm that, you know, Warm Audio gear can hang with the kind of vintage gear that they're used to? Bryce Young It used to be hard. I think people went into using Warm Audio with a preconceived notion that hey, there's no way this could be good because the price is too low and anything that sounds great has to be $4000 and above or whatever they thought, but then when you start seeing just all the people that are using the gear and a lot of it unsolicited, people that we've never even talked to you know, like one day my wife was on Instagram and there's Michael Bublé holding one of our mics while holding his baby and it was like a joke post where he is like singing into our mic and holding his baby at the same time, like and then you know, you see BB Rexha release a music video with our 8000 mic or there's another music video with Snoop Dogg on our 47 and you know, Dolly Parton used our 47 on her rock album, on her vocals on every track. We didn't talk to the engineer in advance, we didn't know about that. So I think what's happening is people are giving it a shot, they're saying OK, this sounds quite good, I'm surprised and it doesn't really make logical sense that a microphone should be 4 or 8 or $10,000. Sam Inglis And are these pros using it in this, your gear in the same way that they would use the original gear, or are they finding different ways to use it? Bryce Young I would say traditional yeah, I wouldn't say any different. I mean, they're looking at it like hey, I need a great mic, this kind of sound for this kind of vocal and replacing you know, what might have been a much more expensive mic that maybe they sold off to bring in some cash so yeah, I'd say the same way. 12:50 - Sam Inglis One development I've seen over the last few years that has surprised me a bit is big name front of house engineers taking analogue outboard hardware on the road with them on big tours. Are you finding that's a growing market for your kit as well? Bryce Young I am seeing it more and more. I'm not seeing it that so, you know, at such astounding levels that it's like wow, everybody's doing it but it is happening more and more I'd say on what you might call the money channels, like hey, lead vocal, we want the lead vocal to sound really good, smooth, warm. So you might see a nice mic pre or like LA-2A style compressor on the vocal, maybe an 1176, but yeah, it is an interesting trend that I think, some of them are saying OK, all these digital effects on my board are cool, they do what I need to do, but it'd be nice if the lead vocal and you know, maybe these couple of instruments had more of an analogue tone to them. Sam Inglis But it's not yet such a big market that you would be designing products especially for that market? Bryce Young You know, we're talking about it because you know, one that's been brought up a lot is, front of house worship has brought up that they just aren't liking the kind of sterile, clean sound that they're getting from their mixing consoles, whether it's an X32 or an Allen & Heath or whatever. Great boards, great products, but they just want more warmth, especially in maybe a front of house church environment where you know, want everything to feel very soothing instead of rock and roll. So I have talked to more people asking for Dante style mic pre’s, so you know, they can put a rack of mic pre’s that are gonna warm things up inside stage and so we've talked about it, that’s something we want to get into and we're considering it, but I just tell them hey, just use the analogue mic pre’s you know, we've already got them and some of them have, so it's an interesting conversation 14:49 - Sam Inglis Yeah, for sure and I wonder actually, if we could do a little bit of a deep dive into the development process that goes into creating a new product. Obviously there's quite a lot of investment upfront in deciding to recreate a specific piece of gear, you need to reverse engineer the design, you need to source the parts, you need to build the tooling, you need to figure out how and if it can be manufactured affordably. How do you decide whether a given item is actually going to repay that investment? Bryce Young That's a good question. I'll be honest, I don't think we always know. I think it really comes down to are we passionate about this idea, do we think it's cool, do we think the market will get excited about it and you know, that is a reason why recreating classics is a little less risky, because hey, we already know that people like this kind of thing, let's make this kind of thing again, or even an exact recreation of it and if it's at this price point they're clearly gonna have interest in it because you know, an old vintage one is much, much more. But we have considered and are working on developing all new unique products, which might be something that you know, one of the questions you might ask me later, usually in interviews people do and yeah, those questions are coming up like hey, it's gonna take a year to develop this, like a engineer's time for a full year, does this make sense and so we're having more of those tough business case conversations. 16:25 - Sam Inglis So which Warm Audio gear has surprised you the most with its popularity? Bryce Young Oh wow, that's a great question. I'd say I knew that our 73 series, so our British-style mic pre’s, would be very popular. I have to say, considering the number of companies that now create British style mic pre’s, there's so many of them, I'm amazed at how many people still buy them, because you'd think how can the world not just be full of these everywhere now? Like it's just the number of British mic pre’s that just keep selling is, it's fantastic. Clearly people love the sound of it the way it makes things sound analogue in a digital world and I knew it sounded great and it would do well, but it just continues on. It's pretty fascinating. Sam Inglis I mean, from a personal point of view, one of the things that's impressed me most about recent Warm Audio launches is that you've recreated some products that are kind of out there like nobody else was doing a copy of the AKG D19. Don't think many other people were doing copies of Ampex Recorder front ends, that kind of thing. I mean, I love that you're doing that but it's, it must feel like a little bit of a risk to be taking when you get the wheels in motion there. Bryce Young The Ampex was definitely one that internally, a lot of people did not believe in that. It was my idea. I gotta bring it up that they didn't believe in me, so that when they watch this video, they can chuckle a little bit. And I just said it's a big piece of history. I mean, if you go back to, Ampex basically took German technology after World War II, they released the first tape machine in a commercial recording studio in 1947, it was Bing Crosby's studio. Then you had Les Paul who got really into the Ampex Recorders and started doing sound on sound recording, plug your name there, they called it sound on sound where you'd use two tape machines and then record a guitar here, play it to the other machine, record another guitar on top and he'd do layering that way. So there's just such cool history there in how recording in the United States got going and actually professionally everywhere was with this brand Ampex, they were like one of the first and just that history was enough for me to say we're gonna do it and it was far more successful than people believed it would be. Sam Inglis Well, that's cool. I'm glad that to hear that people aren't only wanting to buy British style mic pre’s because the world would be a boring place if we all wanted the same things. Bryce Young Absolutely. 19:22 - Sam Inglis Yeah. So what's been the most challenging item to recreate in the Warm Audio catalogue? Bryce Young It was the WA-44, which is a ribbon microphone based on the classic RCA and the reason why that's so complicated and actually I was surprised because if you look at a ribbon microphone, there's hardly anything to it. You've got a magnet, you've got a ribbon and you've got a transformer, three things, how hard can it be right? Make sure that magnet is magnetising or magnetised at the level it should be, make sure you're using a good ribbon quality element, you tension that ribbon correctly and put a good transformer in there, you're done. So I thought it was actually gonna be this really quick development but what's fascinating about magnets and the magnetic field is every shape of every piece of metal or cloth or whatever's inside the baffling material, it all affects the frequency response, it all affects the way the magnet magnetises that ribbon. So even the shape of the magnets, so first we put the magnets in, they were quite similarly shaped to the vintage but not exact, like some of the angles, the way they angled outward and all that and thinking oh well, that's just a small slight angle, how could that matter and it all mattered, it all affected the sound and so it was like revision after revision and it just went on, it was three, three and a half years before it got it right and it was just having to make sure every little detail was perfect. I mean even the, there's some cloth that's in there that's baffling material to prevent from plosives and the cloth we were putting in there looked just like the vintage, but it wasn't the same material. Until we used the same material, it didn't sound the same, so very fascinating process, but glad we got it right and really proud of that product just because there were many times where we were gonna give up and just say, you know, it's not good enough, we’re not gonna release it if it's not good enough and we didn't give up. So I'm glad we didn't. Sam Inglis That's a cool mic for sure and I hear a lot of people say that this is true of in general of like, in some ways the designs that seem superficially the simplest are the hardest to recreate and I think the LA-2A is another one where it's only got a single gain element and not much circuitry, but the response of that element is so non-linear that when you try and emulate it digitally or use another device to substitute for it, it's almost impossible to get it exactly right. Bryce Young You're absolutely right. The T4B and the LA-2A is a great example because you can't just buy those components and put them in and say yay, I built a T4B. The components have such a tolerance difference that when we buy those photo cells that go inside, about 80% of them get thrown away and not only that, when they're first powered on and tested, they change value. So you have to power them on and test them in the dark like three times before you actually know the real value they're gonna be, then you gotta throw away the 80% that don't meet the values that you need and a lot of people don't have the patience for that. So that's why we hire Kenetek in Kentucky to do all of our T4Bs for us because we know he's just obsessive and gonna do them all great and we don't have to worry about it. They're expensive, he charges us a lot but it's consistent quality that's important. Sam Inglis Yeah, I was picturing you having some poor employee who spent their entire days in a dark room testing opto cells. Bryce Young Yeah, that was one of those where it's like, we could maybe save money doing this ourselves but boy, this is gonna be a pain, so let's hire Bill Jones, smart guy, he’ll handle it. 23:11 - Sam Inglis And are there any items that you've kind of prototyped or you've got partway through development and then you have gone look yeah, no, can't do this. Bryce Young Yeah. I think when you start stacking up some of the costs of some things, like there's just no way to do it right at a price point that we think is attractive. Like that's one thing that I think, I don't know, maybe we get credit for it now, but we didn't get credit for it at first. It was sort of like oh, Warm Audio, you make things less expensive. That's like, that's not cool, I want to use the expensive one, it’s more name brand. It's like, well do you realise how hard it is to make something sound this good and make it less expensive? Like anybody can make something sound amazing for $10,000, anybody can do that but, so yeah, we don't really have the desire to release something that people can't even afford, only rich people can afford, so we have a canned some projects. None are coming to mind at the moment, but I think it's because we don't get too far along. We do some initial calculations with like OK, we're gonna need to buy these types of transformers or inductors or tubes, like the bigger priced items and if it just doesn't make sense, we may not do it. One that I've sort of shied away from going down the road on is the Fairchild 670, even though we get that brought up all the time and there are other companies who have now recreated it and done it somewhat affordably, so there is an interest to maybe pull that one back open but if you've ever seen inside of one of those, which I'm sure you have, there's 8 million tubes and 25 transformers and whatever it is and it's just a nightmare. Sam Inglis Yeah I mean, if you're gonna do a 670 properly you need to what, I think two sets of four matched tubes, which will cost you like four figures. Bryce Young Yeah and that's what we do, is we go to these suppliers and say hey, we're gonna buy like big volume, what can you do for us? We want the same quality, the same part that everybody wants, but we need you to give us a better price, we’ll buy like a ton you know and those negotiations usually go pretty well because they do the math and they go, I mean, it worked well with Carnhill Transformers for our British style mic pre’s, they were like OK, you're talking about some serious numbers, we can help you out here. But the tubes in that compressor, JJ is, I think, the only company that still makes them and I was shocked that when we had conversation, it's like $125 tube. When we were like no, we're gonna buy like thousands, can you get these down to, you know, 20, 30 bucks a tube, they were like no way, not gonna happen, you know, in quantity they were still very expensive and so I was like hmm, this'll be a tough one. So hats off to those who've recreated it and made it semi-affordable. 26:00 - Sam Inglis Yeah, for sure. And talking about tubes, I wanted to ask you about maintenance because back in the day, all this high-end kit was sold into environments where there was a full-time tech on hand and parts like spare valves, tubes were readily available. That's not really the case anymore. I mean, does that change how you design and manufacture gear? Bryce Young Yeah. If a tube is no longer manufactured at all we definitely have some skepticism going into it. One example, actually we have two examples of that. Our WA-8000, which is the C-800G style mic that uses a 6AU6. They're no longer made, have not been made in a long time and I don't think they will be. We had to be confident we could secure quite a big number of them to make it worthwhile to make the microphone because how silly would it be to, hey we released this mic and then six months later we discontinue the mic because we're out of tubes. So we have those conversations and then also you don't wanna buy too many tubes, like oh, we should secure how many, oh, if you buy too many and then maybe the mic doesn't sell that well and you just bought all these extra tubes that you're gonna need to get rid of at some point, so it is a little bit tougher. When a tube is still manufactured, it sure makes it a lot easier and what I love about it is a lot of the new old stock tubes are still available. So if somebody buys our product and is like well, I prefer new old stock, I want a tube that sounds 50 years old then great, they can go do that easy right, pull it out, swap it. But it allows us to keep manufacturing if there is a newer tube available. Sam Inglis But then in some products, a substitution is pretty much unavoidable. Like, I mean, nobody's ever gonna make a VF14 again for example, or an AC701 and you think, you feel like you've found acceptable substitutes for those tubes? Bryce Young So interesting you bring that up. So the WA-47 is, because that tube isn't available, the VF14, we had to modify the circuit and so what we did is the VF14 was very low gain tube and you hear a lot of the transformer because of that low gain. So we were like OK, we just cannot recreate the U47 circuit exactly, it’s just not possible, so let's create a tube circuit that has a low gain tube, so it uses the variant of the 12AX7, that's lower gain and then uses a great beautiful AMI TAB Funkenwerk transformer, you're hearing a lot of that colour from the transformer and then of course we're using a K47 style, you know, capsule, M7 capsule. So you're getting a lot of those pieces that give you that tone but you know, that is a product where I'll openly admit it is not an exact replica, it is not an exact clone. I called it the WA-47 because boy, it sure sounds just like a vintage but it’s, circuit wise it's not. That's one of the only ones though where we were really stumped right, whereas like OK, it's impossible, can't do it. Most of the others we can get pretty suitable replacement parts. Sam Inglis What about in the case of older products where the parts are just not documented, like some of those old RCA mixers, for example, the transformers and inductors and so on, it's just there's no information to be had about them at all. Do you kind of reverse engineer those? What do you do? Bryce Young Yeah, so when you brought up RCA, are you referring to like the 44 ribbon? Sam Inglis I'm thinking more about designs like the OP6. I know you don't make an OP6 but there is a bunch of related designs like that where the only real way to find out what they did was to actually destroy them. Bryce Young Yeah so we're lucky, even though the transformer business has lessened over the last several decades because less products use transformers, there's still a few solid transformer manufacturers that have these documented designs and whether they were the original equipment manufacturer of that or whether they tore apart an old one and documented it, a lot of this stuff is documented. Now, it does come up sometimes where none of the common transformer companies have any information on something and in those cases you do have to buy a vintage product and tear it apart and that can be sad to see when it's expensive, right, like oh, this classic thing, let's rip it apart, you know. 30:48 - Sam Inglis So I guess from the outside, recreating classic equipment is kind of a self-limiting business model. So there's a few other companies that started out specialising like that and some of them have also moved sideways and they've started developing software, digital equipment, audio interfaces, that kind of thing. So far Warm Audio has pretty much stuck to the core model of like vintage style analogue gear. Do you think there's still room to grow there or do you have plans to diversify? Bryce Young I think there's a definite need to diversify. There's still room, but we definitely and we have started diversifying guitar pedals, for example. I think guitar pedals were somewhere around 12% of our business last year so you know, we're starting to make waves in that space. We are looking at some other spaces that are adjacent to pro, so they're similar kind of boutique-y vintage analogue devices with transformers and tubes, but not necessarily in pro audio. So we're looking into that. But yeah, developing all new technology is something that we have interest in doing and we have really great engineers. I'll give you an example, hired two of Apogee Electronics previous engineers, one who’s named Lucas van der Mee. He started there in, I think 1998, was there for 25 years before he started working for me. Developed the Duet and the Symphonies and everything, right? So a lot of people look at him as a hire who's been here two years and they're like, when are you making interfaces, when are you gonna do it, you know, you got the guy and sure that's a conversation. But the other part of the conversation is, there's lots of people that make interfaces, there's plenty of them out there, do we really need another one? If we were to go down that road, could we really add anything to the market that's of value? So we do have a product that's hedged, I'll share this, to come out this year sometime, that is an all new product. It is not based on anything vintage, it was developed by Lucas and Tom who work here, that were from Apogee and I think it'll surprise people a little bit. They'll be like, where did this come from, this isn't a recreation, it's not based on vintage architecture, what are you doing and we'll see how they respond. If they like it, if they're like yeah, we just like you Warm and we like what you're doing and wow, this sounds great, then we will probably do more of that. If nobody cares and we probably won’t, you know? Sam Inglis What about vintage digital though? I mean, obviously there are some older digital pieces that are now pretty highly regarded and collectible and hard to repair. Any plans on going down that route? Bryce Young I think I know what you're referring to. Can you gimme an example of something? Sam Inglis Well something like the early Eventide Harmonisers or the early Lexicon Reverbs, the EMT 252, something like that. Bryce Young So what makes a lot of those products difficult is they use chips that are no longer being manufactured, so like we talked about the VF14 tube, you kind of have a similar issue with certain semiconductors that aren't made anymore or aren't really available. There is a little bit of a resurgence on some of those semiconductors coming back, specifically on bucket brigade devices. There are now three companies that I'm aware of that are manufacturing bucket brigade devices. Just five years ago it was maybe one, now we're at three and we've used some of those devices in like our chorus pedal that came out recently. So I definitely have interest in those, I think that's a cool era. I think late 70s, early 80s era was when a lot of that stuff was hot and I think there's, that era is now considered really cool again. So there's a possibility, just gotta find the parts, see if it's viable. Sam Inglis Yeah, for sure. And what about synthesisers? That would be another, I guess, obvious way to branch out. Bryce Young Yeah, I'd love your opinion on synthesisers. That gets brought up a lot and I keep getting mixed opinions. Some people say that's great, you should do that and others say neh, you know. I don't know. I'm curious what you think. Are you a synthesiser guy? Sam Inglis I think everyone's a synthesiser guy a little bit, aren't they? Yeah, I'm a synthesiser guy up to a point but I think it's a pretty, it's a tough market to get into from scratch, a bit like audio interfaces. You've got all these companies who've been making synthesisers for 30, 40 years and to get up to that level in a year or two years, it's a tough ask. Bryce Young Yeah and I'm not a synthesiser guy, I'll just be honest. I don't play them and so I typically go after things that I'm personally passionate about or that I would use or have used myself or that I've always wanted to own. So for us to do synthesisers, if we do, I'll just say this now, if we do, we will have somebody working here that's like a big synth guy, but currently I don't think we have that yet. 36:15 - Sam Inglis Well that seems like a great way to finish because I want to ask you one last question if I may, which is, I mean, you must have had personal experience of more different items of studio gear than almost everybody else. Which ones are your favourites and why? Bryce Young Oh wow, I would say the 44 ribbon mic, believe it or not. I think I just gained so much respect for what was accomplished in the era that they developed those. They developed those in the 30s I think, maybe commercially available in the 40s and also for me, I hadn't really used ribbons much and so getting into that product and then using it a lot and realising why people love ribbons, it's like my excitement for ribbons grew and so it was like a world I didn't really understand and now know and love, so that was really exciting. That's one good example. I'd say this one's maybe too easy of an answer, but the British mic pre thing, there's some really interesting history on the evolution of those consoles and the different transformers that were used over the years and Marinair Radar was the first transformer company used and then it went to St. Ives and then St. Ives was bought by Carnhill and what Carnhill sells today is actually the St. Ives version and a lot of people say the Marinair is better and so we went the extra mile to recreate the Marinair style and they are, even though they're the same electrically as the Carnhill St. Ives, they sound different. They're wound in reverse, they use a larger gap in the core, they have thicker wire gauge, they're just different. And so there's some things like that that I find really fun that even really boutique companies aren't paying attention to, they're like oh yeah, we charge a bunch of money for this British mic pre and we use that Carnhill on the shelf there and we say well, we think the history is really cool, we’re gonna go the extra mile and do this thing others aren't doing and that kind of thing, I just get excited about as well. Sam Inglis And what is the most requested piece that people want you to make? Bryce Young That we haven't yet made? Sam Inglis Yeah, yeah. Bryce Young Yeah, actually it's probably a console. Sam Inglis Okay. Bryce Young And yeah and the hold off on that is, OK, if we made some cool looking vintage boutique-y console, would you just kind of like from your computer go yeah, they did it just like I asked and then not buy it, because it's expensive, you know. Or would you actually buy it and what price point do you think we could actually release a well-built console input and output transformer. So I think there's maybe a little bit of a disillusionment that like Warm Audio could just build me a 16-channel Neve console for 5 grand, you know and it's like yeah, not possible. So I don't know if that request is realistic, let's say. Sam Inglis Yeah and the trouble is once you get into building consoles, everyone wants a different spec, right? Bryce Young Yeah. Yeah, there was a console that I saw actually at NAMM that I thought was different than others that I've seen out there that I thought was really cool and it was called the Hum, which kind of funny because when you think of hum, you don't want your audio to hum. So anyways, I'm giving them a free plug here. They should, you people should go check that out. If you want a vintage style console, see what they got, it’s pretty cool. Sam Inglis Oh yeah. Hum Audio devices, they're Polish and that's super high end stuff, but really, really interesting. Bryce Young Yeah. Yeah, really neat. Sam Inglis Cool. Well, thank you so much, Bryce. This has been absolutely fascinating, what a great talk. Really, really great to catch up and thank-you so much. Bryce Young Yeah, thank-you. Loved seeing you again and spending the time. Sam Inglis Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much. Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcast website page where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.