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Published in SOS May 2013

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Wes Dooley in his reel-to-reel
years.
The Ribbon Guy
Wes Dooley & Audio Engineering Associates

When RCA abandoned ribbon mics, Wes Dooley of
AEA believed they still had a place in the modern
studio so he set about making his own.
Daniel James
e automatically associate Los Angeles with Hollywood and the
entertainment industry, but it is also a city of engineers. Wedged
between the sprawl of LA and the San Gabriel Mountains, the
college town of Pasadena is home to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and the California nstitute of Technology (known as Caltech). t also
houses the headquarters of Audio Engineering Associates, the
manufacturers who have perhaps done more than any other to bring high-
quality ribbon microphones back into widespread use.
The AEA factory is a modest, single-storey building in a residential
neighbourhood. ts lobby contains an extensive reference collection of
vintage microphones, including the RCA ribbon designs from the 1930s
onward that AEA have helped bring back into vogue. The invention of
talking pictures created strong demand in Hollywood for high-quality
microphones like the RCA 77 series, with their iconic pill-shaped bodies
and central axis mounts.
West Coast Wonders
The vintage Ampex tape machine in AEA's test room is another reminder
that the modern sound-recording industry began just a few miles away in
Hollywood. t was Bing Crosby's desire to pre-record his radio shows that
led to him putting up the capital for the Ampex company to start mass
production of reel-to-reel tape machines in the USA. Recordings no longer
had to be cut directly to acetate disc, making all kinds of studio manipulation
possible. One of the very first Ampex machines was given to Les Paul by
Crosby, enabling Paul to perfect his overdubbing technique. The Les Paul
Trio had already enjoyed a US number one hit backing Crosby on 't's Been
A Long, Long Time' in 1945, and legend has it that it was Crosby who
suggested building the original home studio in Les Paul's Hollywood
garage. Radio engineer and DJ Sam Phillips purchased two Ampex 350
machines for his Memphis studio in 1954, the same year he auditioned
Elvis Presley.
We may think of the Shure 55 as the 'Elvis mic', but look closely at photographs of Presley's Louisiana
Hayride debut in 1954, and you'll see that radio station KWKH had provided a ribbon mic for the lead
singer. The backing band had to make do with gathering around the cheaper Shure dynamic mic. RCA
ribbon mics were built by craftsmen, with a commensurate price tag, although some radio and recording
engineers managed to obtain them as US Government war surplus. The new condenser microphone
designs of Georg Neumann, sold under the Telefunken brand name, had yet to take over the American
recording market.
n the 1950s, being a producer and recording engineer meant building much of your own equipment. Bill
Putnam covered all bases by founding both Universal Records and Universal Audio. Relocating to
Hollywood from Chicago, Putnam started the URE studio equipment company, and acquired the company
that became Teletronix. He also developed two studios, United Recording and Western Recorders, a block
apart on Sunset Boulevard, which became known as the United/Western complex. Recordings made at
United/Western included sessions for Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, who had both invested in Putnam's
studio ventures.
Putnam was assisted at Western by Wally Heider, a former lawyer who was able to break into the top flight
of the recording business because of his passion for making live recordings of big bands. By the time
Putnam hired him as a setup technician, Heider was already well-known to some of the musicians recording
at Western. Band leader Stan Kenton asked for Heider to engineer his
In this articIe:
West Coast Wonders
After-hours Sessions
Ribbon Rebirth
Smooth Operators
Not To Be Sneezed At
The Past & The Future
Keep Tidy
The Space-Tempo Continuum
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985
AEA maintain an extensive
reference collection of vintage
microphones!
Even more of AEA's jaw-
dropping collection of historic
microphones.
AEA's new-old-stock RCA
ribbons are just 1.8 microns
thick, and have to be 'crinkled'
(corrugated) by hand so that
they can move in response to
sound pressure.
recording on Heider's second day at the studio. This unprecedented
promotion started a career which would lead to Heider creating the 'San
Francisco Sound' of the late 1960s, including recording Jefferson Airplane,
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Neil Young.
After-hours Sessions
Before moving to San Francisco, Heider mentored a young student called
Wes Dooley, who was attending Pomona College during the early 1960s,
and was beginning to make recordings of his own. "As Wally Heider taught
me, microphone positioning is more important than anything else you do as
an engineer. f you have great musicians, you can make a great recording if
you put the mics somewhere useful. Heider told Dooley that EQ was only to
be used in emergencies, and to try different microphone positions or
changing the microphone first. "Wally said, you never want to get into
a situation where you're trying to fix it later.
Dooley had joined the staff of the Pomona College radio station in
enrolment week, and began hanging out in Los Angeles nightclubs.
"A friend of mine was doing a folk show, and thought that was ultra-cool, so
for the next three years did a folk show. Only, playing records (even when
was the first one to break Bob Dylan in LA think played 'Baby, Let Me
Follow You Down') wasn't nearly as much fun as going to the ce House,
the Troubadour and the Ash Grove.
He soon began borrowing the station's tape machine to make after-
hours live recordings, with scant consideration for electrical safety
regulations. "The station went dark at midnight, so pulled the Ampex 350
out of the cabinet, and with everything exposed so you could kill yourself, put it on a cocktail table at the
Troubadour.
Some of the bands would oblige Dooley with an impromptu recording session. " talked to the Clancy
Brothers and Tommy Makem and they said 'Oh yeah, we'll stay after 2am and do a radio set for you.' had
one reel of tape, of course, so that tape became some weeks later someone like Lightning Hopkins, or
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. started with the Electro-Voice 664 dynamic mic. Bob Gerbracht,
a friend of mine at Caltech, went to an auction at Hal Roach's Culver City movie studio, where they had
a Telefunken U47 that no-one bid very hard on, as it didn't have a power supply. So, like most people in the
early '60s, we built our own power supply. (Gerbracht went on to complete his physics doctorate, and his
computer programming would later help NASA bring Apollo 13 safely back to Earth.)
"n the process of doing all this, met Wally Heider, who came over to the
ce House, where took care of the sound system. Frank DeMedio, the chief
engineer from United/Western was there with him, as they were good
friends. Wally at that point was still working at United/Western with Bill
Putnam, before he split off and started his own business. We had a couple
of quarter-inch two-track machines, one with home-brew electronics. Frank
DeMedio had built a three-track on a quarter-inch Ampex 351 deck,
expanded out to half-inch. Wow! Stereo, plus Jackie DeShannon's voice in
the centre! You could rebalance the voice later!
After shows, Dooley would give Heider and DeMedio a hand loading
equipment into their rented bob-tail truck. The engineers said, "Could we
hire you to do this? Dooley would have happily helped for free, but he was
being offered a job moving gear and running the cables. So Dooley got to
hang around at the Hollywood studios, watching and learning. "Through
Wally, got introduced to Bill Putnam. got to see 6000 Sunset Boulevard,
where Western was, and Studio A where Sinatra got recorded. Heider told
Dooley to put the old RCA 44 and 77 ribbon mics up for brass and
woodwind, rather than the modern condenser mics training that would
prove very useful, many years later.
With the help of splitter boxes designed by Frank DeMedio, it was no longer necessary for bands on tour
to stay late at venues and record a second set, just for Dooley and his friend Bob Gerbracht. "We built stuff
for some people in Germany, and they traded us a pair of Telefunken U67s without power supplies. So
was incredibly lucky at age 21 had a pair of U67s and a U47. 'd set those up as main mics on stage,
give a split to the PA, and make a little mix on our custom four-by mixer. That made my radio show.
Dooley now regrets that he only owned that one reel of tape in those days. "Now, tell people: save
everything! Media is cheap! Keep good notes so you can find it again. At the time, Dooley didn't know
anything about syndication, either.
Ribbon Rebirth
Not only are AEA's mics
entirely made on site: so too
are some of their tools, like this
device which is used to hand-
crinkle the ribbons.
The heart of an AEA KU4
cardioid ribbon microphone,
with crinkled ribbon held
loosely in the vertical magnet
gap by two small clamps.
The KU4, like the RCA KU3A
on which it is based, is unusual
in not having a figure-8 polar
pattern. ts cardioid
directionality is achieved using
this acoustic labyrinth.
As the 1960s progressed, Dooley dropped out of college but continued
working with the college's radio station. His engineering skills led him to
build some early project studios for musicians in Los Angeles, including
rooms designed around the new Moog synthesizers. John Stephens, who
had worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was building innovative
tape machines, including an eight-track that you could carry a far more
appealing prospect for Dooley than the large, heavy and sometimes
unreliable Ampex multitrack machines. By the early 1970s, Dooley was
travelling in Europe and Africa, sitting in on recording sessions, visiting
microphone manufacturers, and making location recordings. He saw Decca
classical sessions in London, watched the BBC trying to figure out how to
record John Cage at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, and recorded
traditional music for anthropologists working in Zambia. Back in Pasadena,
he founded the AEA company with Bob Gerbracht. Their first product was
a tall microphone stand that was light enough to carry around with you.
n 1976, RCA exited the ribbon microphone business. Dooley had been
shown how to re-ribbon a mic by Dick Knoppow, AEA's chief engineer and
vintage ribbon aficionado. Knoppow knew Jon Sank, an engineer who had
been working at RCA on the classic mic designs from 1960 until the
department closed. (Jon's son, Stephen Sank, continues the family tradition
with the Cloud ribbon microphones, reviewed in Sound On Sound
December 2011.) t became clear that there was a niche business in
servicing the needs of ribbon mic users. Demand from the studios meant
that AEA began to manufacture new parts so they could service the vintage
RCA mics. n the UK, Coles were still making the 4038 studio ribbon and
4104 lip microphone for the BBC, and so AEA began servicing these mics
for North American customers.
When AEA began producing their own ribbon designs in the early 1980s,
Dooley and his engineers were adamant that they would not compromise
on quality. They wanted to mesh art, music and technology, and produce
microphones that served all three. Their design approach relied on critical
listening, comparing live and control-room sound, before any measurements
were made. AEA's first reissue of an RCA microphone, the 44, did not even
come with a spec sheet. t was only when Oscar-winning film sound
engineer Shawn Murphy said that the reissued mic sounded as good as his
original RCA 44 mics that Dooley knew the goal had been achieved. Eddie
Van Halen bought a pair of the AEA 44s for stereo recording, having noticed
that the original RCA mic sounded the closest to what he heard when standing in front of a drummer. Les
Paul told Dooley that the AEA R44 was his favourite mic.
Smooth Operators
One significant benefit that Wes hears in ribbon mics is a lack of annoying
high-end resonances. "We were raised up on Altec 604E monitors, which
are like microscopes. They put things a little more forward than they really
are. f you can make it sound good on those, it's probably going to sound
good on a wide variety of things, but they're not accurate. Same problem
with older Tannoys and JBLs, they have that edgy sound, which is the same
sort of sound you get on condenser mics. You get high-Q resonances on
large-diaphragm mics in the 8-12 kHz range, that 'tizz' which is so
noticeable on a U47 or a AKG 414. f you play it loud with that edginess at
the top end, either from loudspeakers or microphones, that's the reason you
have less hearing sensitivity as the day wears on, and you turn it up.
Eventually your ears can't protect themselves, and you become deaf.
"Ribbons don't have any extra high end; ribbons are low-tuned, as opposed to condensers being high-
tuned like a drum skin, with a sound of their own. With low-tuned systems you put the ribbon in just tight
enough to stay in the magnet gap. A big ribbon like the 44 that we do is very low-tuned. Most ribbons are in
the 15-65 Hz range for tuning, ours are 16.5Hz and run down to about 12Hz. By the time you're up to a few
hundred Hertz, the resonant structure has pretty much gone away. f it's a thin ribbon, it doesn't store energy.
That's why the BBC uses a 0.6 micron ribbon in the Coles 4038. They went to 1.8 micron on the RCA mics,
and Beyer went up to the 4-6 micron range where it's treated more like a piston. t's not quite as thick as in
ribbon tweeters where you're trying to make it as sturdy as possible.
Another great advantage of most ribbon designs especially at low frequencies is their very well-
behaved and consistent figure-8 polar pattern, as compared with multi-pattern capacitor mics. "Ribbons hold
pattern down to 20Hz because they're native figure-8. Condenser mics that try to be figure-8s do two things.
Below about 400Hz they roll off in level, but they also go omni. The native pattern for a stretched-diaphragm
n addition to critical listening,
impulse response tests are
now used to evaluate each
mic's performance.
condenser is omni, that's where they want to go. The original RCA 44 held pattern well, and sounded good
off-axis, so you could wrap people around it. For nominal omnis, the BBC would tell you to only have people
plus or minus 20 degrees [from the axis]. Yes, it's an omni, but it's only a good omni in that area.
Good figure-8 mics have very deep nulls off-axis, and for Dooley, this is a hugely valuable property when
trying to fulfil Wally Heider's principle of achieving as much as possible through mic placement alone.
"That's the key to the interaction between the mics and the room, and with the PA system. How does the
microphone sound on the dark side, where it has less output, and how does that influence your bleed? How
much can you let the musicians hear each other, and how much do you have to block them out and run on
headphones? Our rule of thumb is that the more the musicians can hear each other and play with eye
contact, the less they have to think about technical stuff, like not liking the headphone mix. Everyone having
24 tracks of headphone mix burns through a huge amount of time, and starts putting technology in the way.
Not To Be Sneezed At
Ribbon microphones have a reputation for fragility; according to Wes
Dooley, this is largely undeserved, though he acknowledges that sudden
blasts of air are a hazard. "People say the mics are fragile but a sneeze
can be in the 50 to 100 mile-an-hour range! And many failures are down to
user error. Dooley recalls a conversation with an engineer at
United/Western about a particularly egregious example: "The mic setup
guys at Western had rolled a mic stand, in the wind and rain, with an RCA
77 on it and no plastic around the microphone, between Western and
United, a block away. The engineer at United told them to roll it right back
and explain to the chief engineer at Western what they had done. Another
time, a customer enquiring about a repair on a Coles 4038 explained that
the weight of the mic meant the stand kept falling over. After the third time it
had fallen over, the mic had stopped working. Dooley suggested investing
in a gym weight to place on the base of the stand.
n fact, there's a trade-off between transient response (which is best in
a ribbon with very low mass) and durability, as newer ribbon designs have
shown. Mics such as the Fostex M11RP and M88RP, for instance, featured
an aluminium ribbon on a circular plastic substrate. "You can do things like
the printed circuit ribbons that Fostex did, which were like neodymium-magnet headphone drivers turned
into a microphone. The Crowley & Tripp approach, now bought by Shure, is the same, except that you're
holding the ribbon at the ends instead of all the way round, like a moving-coil diaphragm. t weighs more,
but when something really bad happens, like when someone unplugs a guitar amplifier and the cone jumps
out an inch, you're going to trash pretty much anything other than the Crowley & Tripp/Shure. The thing
love about the Shure is that it's in the same tradition as the SM57 and 58. You can take it anywhere and it's
not going to hurt. For years told people the Shure SM81 was the microphone to use on the junior high
school stage. You need a mic which will take repeated drops from four feet.
On the other hand, Wes Dooley does agree with another widely held belief about ribbon mics: that their
performance is quite dependent on the choice of mic preamp and, in particular, that low-impedance inputs
don't get the best out of them. "There's a really good 1950's paper that an engineer wrote about how at
resonance, a mic's impedance rises dramatically, just like any loudspeaker. A mic with a narrow, high-
Gauss gap like the RCA 77 goes up into the 1400-1800C range from a nominal 250C. f you're going into
a 1000C input impedance, you have dips in the output of more than 6dB at resonance. A typical resonance
for those ribbons would be around 50Hz. As one person said when we loaned them an AEA 18,000+C input
impedance preamp, ' didn't know 77s had any bass!' He'd never heard them with the right electronics
before.
He is, however, at pains to point out that capacitor mics can be sensitive to preamp choice too. "Forty-eight
Volt phantom power was a wonderful thing for the original Neuman KM-series mics that only needed 0.4mA
of current. The P48 power specification requires 10mA to be available per microphone, but many lower-cost
or battery powered units don't have that sort of capacity. Tube mics came with bespoke power supplies, but
now we have a one-size-fits-all approach, which leads to unintended consequences. Some P48 condenser
mics need 10mA of current during start-up but only 4mA while operating. f mics like these are starved for
start-up current, they will still deliver audio, but they don't sound quite right.
"A more common P48 problem, rarely diagnosed, occurs when pin two or three shorts to ground. Almost
7mA of current then magnetises the core of your mic's output transformer, which changes its sound. Once
the shorted microphone cable has been fixed or the phantom power is turned off, the output transformer core
remains magnetised. The transformer will sound different until it is deliberately demagnetised, or used to
record a kick drum or a pipe organ.
The Past & The Future
Although the operating principle behind the ribbon mic hasn't changed, and AEA's own designs retain
a strong RCA influence, the process of improvement and refinement is ongoing. "We designed the R84 to

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be easier to manufacture today, and to have less stray fields. You put two together and they don't go 'clunk'
like the RCA 44s and 88s do. A paper-clip is enough to cause a major problem for a vintage RCA ribbon
mic, due to its huge magnets, whereas the AEA R84 is somewhat more practical. "t doesn't weigh 8lb we
tried to make it light enough that it didn't cause stands to fall over.
And, like the RCA mics before them, AEA's mics are built to last. "Here we've seen everything from 70-
year-old ribbons that ran fine, to Abbey Road where they have 1935 Blumlein ribbons that they use all the
time. These microphones don't have an inherent lifetime limit; they're real sturdy, if you don't sneeze into
them! Since we work regularly with microphones that are that old, we make decisions. nstead of zinc cast
parts, we do bronze and machined brass because we've seen failures at 50, 60 or 70 years zinc is not
a good material to work with! We're making microphones where we're going to be dead and gone, and the
guys that buy them are going to be dead and gone, and if we don't have a nuclear meltdown or the asteroid
hits, the mic are going to be in service and people will be doing music. We hope that electricity continues,
and people are going to be recording!
Keep Tidy
According to Wes Dooley, one of Wally Heider's career tips for sound engineers was to leave recording
rooms clean and tidy, even if they weren't when you arrived. t increases the chances that you'll be invited
back, and the studio owner will be happier to see you. The young Dooley took this on board, noting that
"When your mum says it, it doesn't have quite the same impact as when someone like Wally says it!
The Space-Tempo Continuum
Having listened to the same musicians performing in different rooms, Wes Dooley concurs with the late
orchestral conductor Erich Leinsdorf's view that the size of the room affects the tempo at which music is
played. Since the days of chamber music, the size of the performance room has become progressively
larger, which affects how musicians hear each other, and in turn their behaviour. "The main concert hall
for the Vienna Philharmonic is articulate in the bass, so you can play faster. A lot of rooms have so much
reverberation in the low frequencies that you don't go fast in the bass because it starts sounding
smeared.
Published in SOS May 2013