GC PRO ADVISORY BOARD: Art Kelm

I met Art about ten years ago and knew him by reputation for many years before that. We have worked on several studios together. He has been designing and building private facilities since before most people realized that was even an option. I have learned a great deal from Art and I am thrilled to have as a member of our advisory board.

This room must have good power conditioning and grounding systems. Otherwise, Art wouldn't be smiling. "Say a triple-shielded isolation transformer sells for three times as much as an average one, but you get three times as much noise rejection. Do you want to get rid of all of the noise, or just some of it?" Soft walls and hard floors are one of Art's design philosophies. This Kelm-designed facility in San Diego has multiple control rooms all networked to each other. Pro Tools and video systems can be accessed from any of the four identical control rooms. Each control room can tap into common tracking rooms and iso booths. This studio's UPS and power conditioning system is the size of a Volkswagon. A big Volkswagon. Art on power: "It’s not what people tend to point out as the coolest part of their rig. 'Hey, let’s go back and look at this panel board in the back of the room, you’ll really like this!' It doesn’t make the tour, shall we say."

GC Pro: We’re chatting with Art Kelm, studio designer and grounding guru, among other things. You’ve been in this business for- AK: 35 years. GC Pro: Wow! How did it all start? How did you get sucked into this crazy business? Where are you from originally? AK: Actually, I’m from Chicago, Illinois. And I always hung out with musicians my whole life. I was always the guy from eighth grade on that would fix the amps for the guys that I hung out with. Went to college for design engineering and electronic engineering, got my EE. After college, I worked for Rockwell, doing satellite communication work GC Pro: Still in Chicago at that point? AK: Still in Chicago at that point. One summer, after working there for five years in satellite communication work, I was 23 years old, and decided to go to BYU for a summer course they had on audio. And Bill Putnam was one of the speakers at that course. GC Pro: Cool! AK: While I was there I bumped into Todd Fisher, who said that his mother was having problems with wireless microphones in Vegas, and I was doing wireless telephony. So I said, "How hard can that be?" So they offered me a job doing wireless microphones for Debbie Reynolds in 1974. And that’s when I left Chicago and went on the road with Debbie, and we designed our own wireless microphone system. GC Pro: Before that it wasn’t common at all. AK: At the time, there was only Schwintech, Edcore and Vega. Nobody could get more than four microphones, maybe five microphones to work at one time. That was the most you could possibly have that were functioning. I went to all three manufacturers and told them what I wanted to do with twelve microphones, with a splitter system or a diversity-type system, and only Edcore bought into building a system from scratch. It was all rack mountable. We had remote antennas, the whole nine yards. So that’s what got me to LA. GC Pro: Wow. AK: Then my first gig in LA was at Chateau Recorders as a tech. So all of a sudden I was in LA as a technician for studios. That’s the fastest way to get there! (laughs) GC Pro: Was working in studios something you had always loved? AK: Yes, I always wanted to be an engineer. GC Pro: So that was the passion? AK: I always wanted to be an engineer, and I thought being a technician would get me to be an engineer. But once I got to LA and realized that was not the case. Being an engineer, you’re an engineer; being a tech, you’re a tech. So I tried to cross over for a number of years, but I just always enjoyed fixing things more than doing overdubs. GC Pro: Right. AK: Quite frankly, engineering looked like a lot more fun than it really was. You sat there for hours and hours and hours, going over the same lyric… (laughs) GC Pro: Not your thing? AK: Some guys were cut out to do that; I was not cut out to sit there and beat that same horse to death over and over and over again. I realized I was better off as a tech so I focused on being a really good tech, and tried to work at the best places I could in Los Angeles. GC Pro: You certainly succeeded. AK: Actually, I’d gone to Hawaii and built my first studio in 1977, right after I left Debbie. I went to Hawaii for a year and built a studio, and realized that at 26 years old, I needed to come back to LA and work more. So I came back to LA and got a job at Canyon Recorders, which, at the time, all we did was rent 24-track tape machines and Dolby racks and synchronizers. Cause no one, in 1979, locked up tape machines. I mean, they locked them up, but no one owned machines, and/or synchronizers. They were always a rental item. GC Pro: Right. AK: You’d keep getting called back, you’d go, "I need a second machine!", so you’d have to go out and rent another machine, and rent a synchronizer. GC Pro: Yeah, and the tech came with it. AK: Yeah, cause no one knew how to set everything up. There was also training involved. So I’d go out and set everything up. Joe Tuzin would come along. He would train the engineer how to work the system. I’d be testing and he’d be training. At the time, that’s all we did. Machine rentals and synchronizer rentals. I did that for two years. We were at Record One on a tour, cause it hadn’t opened yet, we went over to look at it, to look at Q-Lock synchronizers that Steve Waldman, the chief engineer, had bought the first Q-Locks in Los Angeles. So we went to look at those as rental items. I looked at Record One and went, "What a nice studio!" So, I pitched Steve, and I got the job as the night tech there, right before they opened in 1979. And I stayed with Steve there from ’79 through ’81, In ’82, I went back and built a studio for Laura Nyro in Connecticut, then came back to LA and got a job at Ocean Way. That lasted about a year or so. Then I went back to Record One and stayed at Record One until ’88, when I went to The Complex. GC Pro: Allen owned both of them at the time? AK: No. Allen Sides owned Ocean Way, but he didn’t own Record One yet. I was there for the sale to Allen. He offered me a job but Greg Ladanyi and George Massenberg had offered me a job at The Complex. I thought The Complex would be a lot more fun. Just cause it was, you know… I got to work with George. I always looked for, "Who are the best guys in LA to work with? Who are the most demanding engineers?" GC Pro: Who you’re going to learn the most from. AK: Yeah. Exactly. That’s fun. Learning is fun, so I went to The Complex until ’91 when George left and Greg left, then I left. That’s when I moved up to Northern California. Then I came back down and worked for Disney or Record Plant for awhile, on a 4-day workweek. I was chief engineer at Record Plant for a year and a half - I’d just commute. Out of all those years, what I found is that all these problems that people have with hums and buzzes and all that stuff, always related back to a) a manufacturer issue or b) power and grounding, or an electrician that did something wrong. That’s where all this comes from. It all comes from the electrician’s end. You trust it and… you know, you shouldn’t. (laughs) GC Pro: Very few electricians I’ve ever met know much about audio. Are there are electricians in LA who work on studios and claim they know all about audio? AK: Of course. And they get close, but they can’t really fix audio problems. I think, if you’re really going to do power and grounding, you really need to be able to fix the audio gear also so you know why the power and grounding interacts that way. GC Pro: It has to be a logical process. AK: Exactly. GC Pro: You have to eliminate things along the way, or you can’t find the root of the problem. AK: Exactly. The biggest thing about that is, when I would ask for isolation transformers to an electrician, they’d go to the local hardware store, and you’d just get a transformer. All transformers are not created equal. You have to look at what’s a really good isolation transformer and what’s a really poor isolation transformer. And that gets into mode rejection and common mode noise rejection. A better transformer simply reject more noise. GC Pro: And they cost way more so people try to cut corners. AK: They cost more. Say an average isolation transformer, a single-shielded isolation transformer sells for $800 to $1200, while a triple-shielded isolation transformer sells for more like $3500. So it’s three times as much, but you get three times as much noise rejection. Do you want to get rid of all of the noise, or just some of it? The other that part many people overlook is power quality in the sense of the dynamic range of audio. Like if when you’re listening to something, as much as speaker wire and cables matter to the audio path, it also matters to the power path. Having the right gauge of wire. Having wire that’s oversized, is always better. Studios that I’ve re-wired power-wise, everyone’s always said that the bottom end tightens up, imaging sounds cleaner and clearer, so there’s definite benefits on all levels for doing a better power distribution system. In the home studio environment, I’ve always found that the problems there are that people plug into three or four outlets in the room. Those three or four outlets all have their own path back to the panel, and that’s why there are always so many problems that cause hums and buzzes in small home rooms. Guys are tearing their hair out, where I’ve got a system I’ve put together where you can have an electrician pull one 240V circuit to your room, we can come out of that, go into a small isolation transformer, and then into a distribution box that’s rack-mounted. Then you can power your whole room off one outlet. GC Pro: With a clean source. AK: And all those problems go away. And all of a sudden, all those light dimmers in the room and all that noise is now gone. GC Pro: It's hard to realize how dramatic that is until you’ve experienced it. AK: Absolutely. GC Pro: After you spent all this time in major studios, what got you into consulting and building high-end private facilities? AK: I’ve enjoyed the acoustics of rooms, the building of rooms. That was more of a hobby than a real income. Being in studios, you always meet musicians who are doing home studios. They don’t want to pay big guys to come out and design a room for them. So I got into it very casually, helping guys make their little rooms sound better. GC Pro: But you’re basing this on being in dozens of world-class studios. AK: Exactly. You’ve got a real reference point. It’s based on being exposed to good sounding rooms. Working at all the rooms that were well built, working with the world-class engineers, hearing their opinions. One guy may love the room, the other guy walks in, he hates the room. As a tech, you’re standing there going, "Well, gee… what do you love about it? What do you hate about it? Why is that?" Just asking questions. So I’ve got a real good basis of room design just out of the feedback from engineers. That’s where I get into my concepts. I like soft walls with hardwood floors. I’ve made those rooms sound the best to me, even in a recording space. I think that hardwood floors and soft walls, it’s a point of reference that’s your best starting point. But again, it’s all from experience. It’s like the way I learned about power is from solving problems, not from getting an engineering degree in electricity. It’s from, "okay, this hums, this buzzes, let’s get rid of this sound," then go back and figure out why it was making the sound. First order of business is, there’s a problem, we have down time, let’s get rid of it. GC Pro: Right. AK: You reverse engineer what you had to do to get rid of the noise. You figure out, is it an electrical issue, or is it a manufacturer issue? Cause as we all know, not all manufacturers design the best gear in terms of noise rejection and… GC Pro: …power supplies? AK: Sure, the power supplies. Even how they do the audio chassis mounting is not always proper. You get into a lot of issues of ripping things off rack rails and making them quiet, or going inside and removing audio chassis ground jumpers to make them really quiet. Out of all that, I’ve learned good power distribution can save you a lot of time on the install side, with ground lifts and green wires. If you do it right, you never need a ground lift and you never have to run extra green wires to stuff. GC Pro: As I said, you have to actually experience it. When I worked for Mesa Boogie, we did a lot of A/B listening of different components inside the amplifier. And then, actually one day listened to a whole bunch of different power cords, just the IEC detachable power cords, from the same wall socket, the same power coming from the same place. Each power cords sounded different and made a tube amp act different. AK: Oh yeah. GC Pro: That’s just a six foot piece of wire. Multiply that into a whole studio environment- AK: A whole distribution system- GC Pro: -and it’s truly dramatic. AK: I recommend having one panel board for every studio in the main control room to try and keep all your lengths, all your distances from the panel to an outlet under fifty feet. It’s the same mentality as speaker-to-power amp mentality. You keep the wire short, keep the wires a heavy gauge, you have better low-end transient response. GC Pro: So your number one service you offer these days is power schemes and grounding schemes. AK: Power and grounding. I think that power in this environment is even more important than power in the old days of analog gear, because digital equipment is so dependent on pure power and clean power. It’s also very prone to failure if you get a lot of power spikes, power disturbances, even noise on the system, and/or noise in the ground plane. My current focus is to bring to the table just the simple knowledge about good power distribution, and what a good power distribution system is. What you need to address when you’re looking at power, what the products out there that are available, which ones really do the work and which ones are more snake oil than they are reality. GC Pro: It’s methodology of grounding and power as well as the components used, correct? AK: Correct. Methodology is the basics, and the basics have never changed. That can even cross over to word clock distribution and blocking and all other taspects of digital recording. It’s the same mentality. You’d really like to have a sensible clock, that clock distributed to all locations in an equal distance so it arrives at the same time. It just makes fundamental sense. GC Pro: With the evolution of recording technology and the accessibility of excellent gear at much lower price points, when did it become feasible to do professional quality recording in a project studio or home studio environment? AK: I think the Eighties were the time when that actually came into play, cause people that had money could afford to buy real consoles and real tape machines. Where the turning point was, oddly enough, was with ADATs. ADATs kind of turned the corner where all of a sudden the recording format… and then after ADATs came DA-88s, and then obviously the hard-drive systems. So I’d say starting in the mid-Eighties through to the mid-Nineties was when it became anybody could do a quality recording darn near any place. I would say another breakthrough was DA-88s, cause I think it sounded better than the ADATs. Even for composers, that’s when composers made their changeover from composing at big studios to composing at home. And I think that goes hand in hand with the keyboard technology. High-quality samplers and things along those lines where you could actually score a TV show out of an extra room in your house. GC Pro: You’ve pretty much got involved right at the beginning of that whole thing. AK: My first home studio was for a guy, Jerry Bodkin, he’s in his seventies now. He’s a scoring composer guy that did a lot of TV in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. I did his first home studio in 1979. I’ve always been a proponent of that. It just makes sense that if an artist wants to write something or get an idea down on tape as it were, they shouldn’t have to go to a studio. They should be able to get the ideas at home and just put the idea down. Obviously as technology’s gotten cheaper, that has gone from just getting ideas down to full production. GC Pro: And through that whole period, you drew on what you had seen and heard at the major studios your maintained. And you sort of incorporated different elements into your own style? AK: That’s correct. I can talk about artists that want to have a home studio, but what does that mean? Does it mean you build a real control room that is mix quality, or do you just take an extra bedroom and make it usable? From my point of view, I let the artist drive that bus. It’s up to them what they want; it’s not up to me to dictate what they have to have. It’s one of my design philosophies that differs from some other peoples’ design philosophies. GC Pro: That’s a great perspective, and that’s gotten you into a very wide range of projects from relatively simple environments to full-on… like the Don Henley private studio. AK: Again, it’s up to the artist. How far does the artist want to take it? My job, as a consultant/technician, is to advise the client, "Okay, this is a smart move, I think. My opinion is that if you make this investment in equipment, you’ll get what you want," and vice-versa. Sometimes guys want to take it a little too far and have higher expectations, so it’s trying to reign in their expectations. And you tell him what’s realistic and what’s not realistic. At the same time, let them take the lead. GC Pro: Excellent. What a fun process to go through, and especially as many times as you’ve done it. AK: Again, most of the artists I’ve done studios for, I’ve met in the studio. They’ve been working in studios I’ve been chief engineer at, and they’ve had questions like, "Gee, I’m thinking of getting this product, what do you think?". GC Pro: You’re working with the Zappa family a lot right now. Is that a long-time relationship you’ve had with them? AK: That’s been three years. I first started that relationship when Dweezil was looking for someone to re-vamp Frank’s control room, cause he thought that it had issues with imaging, and just basically how it sounded. He’d interviewed a number of studio builders, and after all was said and done, I got the job. So I worked with the family; it was basically a family affair, shall we say. Just between myself and Dweezil and Gail and Richard Landers who also helps me on projects. I’d call it a collaborative effort. I did the basic design as far as room acoustics and how it should be, and the basic layout, and then everyone had their input, back and forth. That’s what’s a lot of fun. That was a one year rebuild, just on the control room. Since then, we’ve gone through and rebuilt all the tape machines, and now we’re in the midst of doing transfers of Frank’s classic records to the new Sony HD format for re-release. GC Pro: So much history in that place. AK: We’re doing some more transfers next week of the stereo version of Apostrophe, and the stereo version of Over-Nite Sensation. That’s ongoing, and the way I look at it, it’s going to be ongoing for the next few years, cause it’s a big project, and there’s a lot there to deal with. GC Pro: Plus, Dweezil’s always creating new music. He’s working on a TV soundtrack currently. AK: Exactly. Dweezil has a future. He’s not retired yet, which was the whole point of the rebuild. He wanted to get into an environment that he could basically start putting out records and get into the TV scoring market. And not have to go out and rent studio time, cause he has a studio right there that his dad had, and it seemed to work fine for Frank. Again, as technology changes and as things changed, he needed more space than the old control room lent itself to. It’s a different style of working, also. GC Pro: You’ve been a technical consultant to me at a lot of different levels. If someone wants to hire you today, are you still willing to get involved in all aspect of a studio project even though your focus is power and grounding? AK: By all means, yes. The reality is, I like getting involved in all levels of the project, but my basis is, let’s start with the power and grounding of it, then let’s talk about the room design- GC Pro: Otherwise, you could be chasing your tail for months trying to make it work right. AK: Exactly, which most people do. On some days, it’s good, on some days, it’s bad. I’ve heard and seen all these… "It works fine except after 6:00. After 6:00 I get a hum." But in terms of installations, I still love doing installs. I can’t get away from being the guy that really loves plugging things in and making them work. In terms of the acoustic aspect of it, I’m a little more selective. You have to make sure that before you jump into a project to design a room, cause a room is such a personal issue. GC Pro: It’s subjective. AK: It’s very subjective. I really need to feel as I’m on the same page as the client so that what I’m going to do for them will actually make them happy, and I’m not going down one path and they’re going down another path. The power and grounding aspect is always a challenge, cause you’re dealing with people’s homes… from the service coming into the building to your location and to make it all right and make it cost effective. For whatever reasons, as you and I both know, when it comes to power distribution, it’s not something people like to spend money on, cause it’s hard to see or touch. GC Pro: It’s not sexy. AK: It’s like, "Look at my UPS, isn’t that cool?" It’s not what people tend to point out as the coolest part of their rig. "Hey, let’s go back and look at this panel board in the back of the room, you’ll really like this!" It doesn’t make the tour, shall we say. (laughs) GC Pro: Right. AK: We’ve been speaking recently about the new SSL console. I think it’s an excellent, excellent product, I want to get more involved in the installation of it. GC Pro: Yeah, I think it’s incredibly timely, the AWS 900 was introduced very recently. It’s a hybrid design, a digital control surface with 24 channels of world class analog, and a proper monitor section, in a very affordable package. I think it opens up a whole new possibility of what can be done in a private studio. AK: I’d have to agree. In most current trends of home studios and workstations, you always have to depend on having outboard monitor systems, because most workstations only give you one speaker output. We all know we need two, if not three, speaker selects. The same thing with 2-track, or any kind of stereo playback devices. There maybe only one of two 2-track returns in any home environment. It seems to address all the little outboard boxes that you had to buy now are all in one package… GC Pro: and very integrated, and very high end. AK: With SSL, you have the support team there as well, where a lot of your smaller packages, you don’t have a large company standing behind them. GC Pro: Or the history of building world-class analog gear. There’s certainly a lot of great individual pieces of gear out there. But as an integrated solution, I think it’s truly unique. AK: Along those lines, the market’s changing, and people are not just located in Los Angeles or New York anymore. They located elsewhere around the country. You know as well as I do, there’s people out there in smaller markets that can use this new technology really well. GC Pro: Absolutely. You’re not dependent on the Coasts and the major studios and the support network which goes with that. You can create it anywhere now. AK: This may be off-topic, but what you’re doing with Guitar Center Pro, as a pro division, it really helps lend support to the smaller markets because you have the bigger markets behind you. And you tap on those resources in the bigger market that help the guy in the smaller market, so they can achieve the same quality. GC Pro: That leads into another good question. An artist’s ability to have their own work environment goes hand and hand with the whole evolution of the music industry right now. The large record label model is questionable at this point, and the whole production and distribution of music is evolving. What are your thoughts on that? AK: I think it’s exciting, cause the music industry tends, to my view, go through trends of the labels can control everything, then all of a sudden the independents control everything. This is a natural cycle. And I think we’re in that cycle where leadership by the labels is floundering, so it’s really back to the artist again to put things back on track and make records people want to hear. GC Pro: It’s interesting you say that. When’s the last time you think the independents had any real clout? AK: I would say, probably in the Seventies. Seventies into the Eighties, and then it got snatched away. In the Sixties, it was all corporate. I mean, even if you wanted to look at the Seventies like with A&M Records and Herb Alpert. You look at the guys that ran the labels… in my opinion, A&M was a small label, and it was run by musicians. Most of the successful… Geffen records and stuff. Those are all musician-oriented labels. GC Pro: Warner Brothers as well, right? AK: Yeah, exactly. CBS New York, that was corporate. I think the Sixties, and CBS and ABC, those were corporate record companies. That whole Seventies trend of musicians like Clive Davis and stuff. Guys that made records, they knew about records. I guess they did know about bean counting, but that wasn’t the focus. The focus was making quality music that people wanted to hear. GC Pro: Right. AK: And then the Eighties kinda went sideways and the Nineties too, from my take. Now I think it’s coming back around. It is the fact that now you don’t have to get signed by a label to get your music out there. There’s other means to get distribution. GC Pro: You can make a record, get independent distribution, sell a relatively small amount and make pretty good money. AK: Yeah. And keep most of the money for yourself. GC Pro: Yeah, I think it’s great. AK: So it is an exciting time, cause with technology, people in smaller markets, where most of the talent really comes from, get their ideas out there, and get their music out there. I’m curious as to how the labels are going to adjust to that. GC Pro: I do think it’s exciting. A lot of people paint it as doom and gloom, and everything is horrible. But out of any transition comes all kinds of new creative opportunities. AK: It’s breaking the mold. For my two cents, you have to embrace change cause it’s gonna happen with or without you. At the same, you have to, from a technical standpoint, you need to know which products are actually advancing technology, and which products are not. GC Pro: What, to you, is the most exciting new thing that’s happened technology-wise in the last ten years? What do you think is going to last and be a part of how we work? AK: I would say sample rates. People realizing that having a brick wall at 22K… basically, the 16-bit, 44.1 technology that was the first digital format, people have finally realized, was not all that it was cracked up to be. Now that we have 24/192, things are sounding much more real, and much more authentic. I was always confused by the fact that someone would listen to a 16-bit, 44.1 CD and go, "Doesn’t that sound just like the real thing?" I mean, to me, it never did. It always sounded a little harsher. GC Pro: So that’s what’s made digital realistic to you. AK: My only concern in this day and age is the fact that with MP3 technology and what that’s all about, that people have to understand that MP3 is what it is. It’s a delivery format, or as I call it, "AM radio for the 21st century", it’s not an audiophile format. GC Pro: To me, there’s a huge middle ground that’s really important. The everyday CDs that we buy should sound good, like vinyl used to. The bulk of the CDs – not the specialty label audiophile stuff – also need to sound really good. AK: As technology advances and that becomes more cost effective to do, that will happen. It is exciting to me to see the people have actually come to terms with digital. GC Pro: To me, the ideal scenario is to combine really good analog with really good digital, and you’ve got tremendous power at that point. AK: Exactly. I’m really happy to see SSL and Digidesign coming out with a larger work surface mentality where you actually have a work surface that is tactile and you can look at everything and you know what’s going on. It’s not just a keyboard, a mouse and three screens in front of you. You actually reach over and turn something up or turn something down and not have to click and drag. I’m glad to see that coming back. That people have realized that tactile interface is important. We’re humans. We have fingers. Like the SSL thing. You have a digital work surface and an analog work surface. That makes a lot of sense. GC Pro: So, switching to recording professionals… with this whole transition of our industry and of technology, do you think recording professionals are going to learn new skills and/or diversify into scoring video games, or doing sounds for cell phones, or… what’s your crystal ball guess on the recording pros themselves? AK: Gosh, that’s a good question. It’s a double-edged sword, I would have to say. Let’s take mastering as an example. Mastering engineers used to be these guys that would sit down and make that 2-track transfer it to vinyl accurately. Their job was to get that energy transferred across. Listen to the master, listen to the vinyl, and get as close as possible. In this market, it seems like people tend to believe that they can master their own stuff. I just don’t think that’s the case. It seems like the mastering engineer has been relegated to the guy that just makes sure that from track to track, it sounds as loud as possible. Or doing some EQ to make track to track to track sound consistent. The idea of you put on a disc and play it from front to back, and have it sound like it was recorded consistently has kinda been lost. That seems to be where the mastering engineer has been relegated to, kinda like cleaning up people’s messes. I would like to see the engineers who are bringing stuff for mastering back off a little bit on the Finalizers and all the compression, all the stuff they’re doing before they bring it to the mastering engineer. Many people don’t understand the whole engineering process of making things work together. Making instruments work together. And on through to the final product. So let the mastering engineer or the guy who has those chops do that. GC Pro: Right. AK: At home, I don’t think people want the least amount of dynamics and most amount of level. I think at home when you listen to something, you really want to have the most dynamics. GC Pro: Well, that’s the end result of what you’re describing. You end up with these ultra-compressed, very two-dimensional sounding records. That’s what we listen to in the car and at home now as a result of everything being mixed like a single. AK: And that takes away from the quality to me. Cause it should be all about quality. That’s my whole thing. Use technology to capture what the artist is doing as best as possible, and then transferring that to the public so that the public can hear the best quality the public has to put out. It’s always nice to understand lyrics. It’s nice to have things that are intelligible, like instruments and stuff. GC Pro: Is that too much to ask for? AK: (sarcastically) It’s supposed to be just a wall of sound. The music starts, you look at the meters and the meters go up to zero or plus 2 and they stay there until they come back down at the end of the song. It’s like, "Well, okay." I guess that works, but it really doesn’t excite me too much. It gets more into my opinion of record making with dynamics, as opposed to record making with a compressor on every single piece of gear. GC Pro: Okay, here’s a total diversion. What other interests… you’re obviously deeply impassioned with music and studios and all these other things we’ve been talking about. What are your outside interests? What else do you enjoy? AK: Ha-ha-ha. Oddly enough, not much. GC Pro: That’s the standard answer, actually. AK: This is my hobby! I just happen to make a living at it. GC Pro: Right. AK: The only thing I do for downtime is play golf, at least once a month, which is all I ever get to do. I use that as a walk in the park. I don’t use it as a competitive sport. It’s more, "Let me get out and walk around and just see what nature’s doing." Some people don’t consider golf courses nature, but to me it is. My life is consumed in what I do. You can ask my wife that. She’d back me up 100% on that one. GC Pro: She is also involved in the industry, right? AK: She’s been doing custom wiring for years… any room that I build, she does the pre-wire for. I do hire other sub-contractors, but she’s my main sub as it were. GC Pro: It’s an family affair. AK: It’s an audio family affair, which is all good, you know? GC Pro: That’s a very cool thing. AK: She understands what I do and how I do it. The pros and cons of it all. Being part of it, she appreciates it more. Especially the quality of things you have to do.