As a teenager I was heavily into motorcycles and in the finest tradition of the archetypal adolescent fact-grabber I pored over motorbike magazines. I soon noticed a trend that almost every innovation, every new idea in motorcycle design had been tried before at some point. Innovation rarely breaks new ground.

As an adult my fact-grabbing tendencies have been displaced towards pro audio and the same theme has persisted that most products build incrementally on what has been before. But not all of them. Here’s a selection of audio products I think broke new ground:

EMT 140 Plate Reverb

To understand why something as big, sensitive and inconvenient as a plate reverb was as significant as it was when it was first introduced in 1957 you have to consider the alternatives which preceded it. The first reverb on recordings was the natural acoustic of the space in which the recording was made. If you wanted a different reverb you would have to go to a different space and if you wanted a drier sound you had to move closer to the mic. Using multiple mics added some flexibility but only a little.

Next came the reverb chamber. By sending audio to a purpose-built, small, highly reflective room elsewhere in the building to be replayed over a speaker, and capturing the resulting reverberant sound via mics in the chamber, a controllable reverb effect could be deployed.

The best reverb chambers sound excellent. Check out UAD’s Capitol Chambers to hear just how great a good chamber sounds. But this is hardly an accessible technology. That being said, if you haven’t ever tried using a hallway or stairwell as an ad hoc chamber you definitely should. It’s great to try out at least once.

The EMT 140 was a large steel plate, suspended in an enclosing box with a transducer which transmitted vibrations onto the plate and pickups elsewhere on the plate which captured the vibrations complete with all the reflections and associated ringing in produced by the plate.

It’s an electromechanical device much like a spring reverb, the principle is the same but the results are very different. A well tuned plate sounds wonderful and this is why they are still in use today and digital emulations of them are available in every digital reverb you’ll use. The plate is what the doingy spring reverb tank in your guitar amp wants to be when it grows up!

Eventide DDL 1745 Digital Delay

Prior to 1971 the only ways to delay an audio signal were either to move further away from it, a fact exploited by the rather wonderful Cooper Time Cube with its coils of hosepipe in a box, or to record it to analogue tape and replay the recording a little later, the method behind slap delay, the Echoplex and tape flanging. It was only when Eventide introduced the DDL 1745 that it became possible to delay audio in the digital domain. With only 200ms of delay available this was still incredibly useful and the convenience of this development compared to using tape was applied in creating double tracking effects, introducing pre-delay to plate reverbs and time aligning PA systems.

Rapid progress was made in the subsequent years and before the 70s were out we had the first digital reverbs and samplers but it all started here.

Fairchild Compressor

In the 60s various trips were made by staff from British studios to America to find out why American records sounded more exciting than British output at the time. One of the results of these trips was the acquisition of Fairchild compressors. These were hard to get and extremely expensive but the difference was deemed worth it.

So much has been said about the Fairchild but much of that seems to revolve around the historic records it played a part on and on its ‘vintageness’. Neither of those things were what made it attractive at the time it was introduced so what was it about the Fairchild which prompted people, with access to techs who could build a valve compressor in house, to travel such a long way and spend so much money? Ultimately the answer has to be because it was better.

It was characterised by an extreme response when pushed hard and compared to other units available at the time it was unusually fast. The colour for which it became known after being (ab)used by innovative engineers was never the point of the design and because of its fidelity and speed it was used, and advertised, as a broadcast limiter and for use on cutting lathes. Of course technology being what it is it wasn’t the fastest unit for long and as that quality became less important its character became its principal quality.

Context is everything and how we view the Fairchild today definitely isn’t how Rein Narma would have envisaged it when he designed it in the early 50s but the fact that we’re still talking about it 70 years later is testament to how right he got it.

Ampex Tape Machines

Recording to magnetic media had been around since the beginning of the 20th century in the form of the wire recorder. The media developed to a tape format, initially using paper(!). The tape recorder as we would recognise it today, a reel to reel machine running at 30ips, was first introduced in the form of the Magnetophon K1 in 1935 but noise was a persistent problem.

It was in 1940 that German engineer Walter Weber combined AC bias with the BASF’s newly developed tape format, as opposed to the recording wire which preceded it, which brought dramatic improvements to the tape format. Occurring during the war and of strategic importance, this development remained widely unknown until 1945 when Jack Mullin, a US army signalman found and confiscated two machines and a cache of recording tape from a German radio station. Go to 26.30 in the video above to hear Jack himself tell the story of this discovery.

Back in the US Mullin attracted the attention of both Ampex and Bing Crosby, who drawn by the advantages of being able to transmit at prime time on both the east and west coasts, invested in the technology. The rest is, very literally, history.

Waves L1 Ultramaximiser

In the section about the Fairchild I mentioned that, for its time, it was unusually fast, and fast limiters have always been in demand. The 1176 was also distinguished for its speed. But the Waves L1 broke the race by being the fastest possible limiter. Released in 1994 this was a look ahead limiter, meaning that rather than reacting as quickly as possible to a peak once it starts happening, L1 looks ahead and reacts instantaneously.

It sounded innocent enough but in the same way as a Fairchild, bought as transparent broadcast limiter, ended up creating big, sucking cymbals when Ringo hit his kick drum, the L1, which could serve the benign purpose of protecting AD converters from stray peaks, was quickly used to raise the average level of mixes far beyond what had previously been the norm. This progressive raising of level became the infamous loudness war which was such a feature of the music of the beginning of the 21st century. Of course other products contributed to this but L1 gets a mention because it was there at the start and, most dangerously of all, it was just so easy to use. However it’s not fair to blame the tools  for poor decisions. After all, I ruined enough mixes with inappropriate use of Maxim. That was my fault, not Digidesign’s!

Other contenders for this list might have been the Aphex Aural Exciter, Antares Auto-Tune or the Alesis ADAT. What audio product do you think should have made this list?