Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/7010
digital audio workstation was beginning to take place," describes Muller. "We were experiencing this revolu- tion, from the position of being engineers and studio owners, and were seeing first hand the technical is- sues that were arising. For example, someone would come into Dangerous and cut tracks in the live room, through the Neve and record into our Pro Tools rig. Then, for budgetary reasons, they would wind up hav- ing to mix the record in someone's apartment in Pro Tools. They would say to me, 'I know this stuff sounded great at the studio, but I am not getting that same sound to come through in the context of my mix. Can you build something that can help us out?' So we star ted looking at the system architecture of DAWs and how software mixing worked. We knew most everyone with a DAW had a multichannel inter- face already, so we put together these prototype black boxes to help our clients mix.The Dangerous 2- Bus evolved from that, and the gear company was born at Dangerous Music. It seemed appropriate to give it the studio name." He and Muth looked at what else was going on with DAWs, which were being marketed as recording studios in a box."They are really software editors, soft- ware mixers, DSP and hard disk recorders in a box, not a complete studio," explains Muller. "So, when someone [took] their mixing console and tossed it out because they bought a DAW, Chris and I asked our- selves, 'What functions are they losing and how is that absence going to interfere with the creative and tech- nical process of recording? Where is your volume con- trol, your speaker selector, your input selector, your talkback, your cue path, your dim level and your meter- ing?' All of those things were not really par t of any DAW. As soon as we knew the 2-Bus was something that the audio community wanted, we started thinking about these other areas DAWs didn't cover, and the whole modular console idea was right in front of us." Muller credits their success to understanding the issues from "both sides of the glass" in the studio.That eventually led to the popular ST-SR stereo and sur- round monitor control system. "It took us longer to do the R&D on the ST-SR than anything else because we wanted this seamless upgrade path, especially since we knew that surround sound would become more prominent," he says. "Some people would need surround, but not all the time, and ever ybody still needs stereo, so you can buy just the stereo con- troller and then you can add the expansion module to it and get into surround without having to sell the stereo unit to buy the surround one. It's basically a system that you can expand and add functionality to as needed, with no obsolesce." Today, the amount of products for DAWs has in- creased sizably."We get copied often and these less ex- pensive alternatives come out, but I know that's part of the business," says Muller. "But, we refuse to engage in what I call 'the race to the bottom,' which is when new things get progressively cheaper, but none of them sound as good as the original. We cater to people who care about sound, the reliability of the equipment and consistency.We try to design gear that is going to work for those folks, and we don't want to compete in the race to make a smaller, less expensive, inferior piece of equipment designed to sell a million units, despite the obvious financial appeal. Chris and I joke with each other and say that no matter how hard we try, we just can't seem to design a cheap piece of shit." Muller offers an impor tant observation about the current role of analog in a digital world."The potential quality of analog equipment has never been higher than today. It is a mature technology compared to dig- ital, which is relatively new. Analog component design has been consistently improving, and in some ways we have digital to thank for it. For example, look at some- thing like noise floor. Everyone was initially wowed by digital's low noise floor compared to ana- log. Well, that pushed developers to make higher quality and better performing com- ponents, and designers like us are aware of this market force and keep up with what is coming out. And if you are not afraid to use the more expensive par ts, you can make higher quality analog equipment than ever before. So, analog has never been bet- ter, if you want it to be." M C D S P During the mid-'90s, Colin McDowell, CEO/CTO/founder of Mountain View, CA's McDSP (www.mcdsp.com), understood that plug-in technology was the future of the audio industr y. While at New Mexico State University, he was already working on plug-ins. "Around that time, Digidesign had a plug-in called DINR, which was a noise reduction plug-in," he explains. "Basically, I designed that same product independently while I was in college.That prompted me to seek out Digidesign. I worked for Digidesign, and later Dolby. I got to do a lot of signal processing engineering for both those companies." Working at Digidesign gave McDowell an insight to what the market needed at that time. "During my time at Digidesign, I saw that they weren't really inter- ested in making plug-ins. I could see they were a hard- ware company first and foremost. For example, their plug-in DINR was one of the most successful money- makers of its time, but compared to how much rev- enue the hardware generated, DINR was a very small piece of the pie. So, that gave me the idea that a smaller company might be better suited for making just plug-ins, which is why I started my own company." McDowell star ted by building stuff he wanted to use himself while in the studio. "For example, I might have wanted a whole rack of Neve gear for a project, but didn't have that kind of money to buy it all.Then I [realized] it all could be done in software, and I star ted modeling them. For each product I did, I seemed to have the knack to pull out the subjective stuff that people liked from certain outboard gear. It's not that I saw the age of computers and software sig- nal processing before anyone else, it's just something that I liked to do. And like most engineers, I wanted things to be done a certain way, so I broke off on my own and tried it." McDSP has a large variety of plug-ins for both music production and post, and in today's world, the line between music and post is blurred. "A lot of cus- tomers know us from the music production side, not the post production side," says McDowell, "but many of our plug-ins crossed over from music to post through word of mouth. A good example is the ML4000 mastering limiter and the Multi-band dy- namics processor, which is typically used for master- ing. It's really useful in post production because www.postmagazine.com February 2010 • Post 31 McDSP has a large selection of plug-ins for music production and post. Blue Sky's SAT 8 compact mid-field monitor and Sub 212 active subwoofer.