Barry's career covers nearly the
entire spectrum of the audio world.
After getting his
ham radio license at age 11, (K2YDD, Yankee Doodle Dandy)
and building homemade audio tube amps at age 12, (inverted
metal 6L6's in a tub of water...) he was the youngest
DJ in the country on the Armed Forces Radio Network, broadcasting
to the Veterans Hospital radio network stations a daily
jazz show at the age of 12-15. His early interest in music,
guided by his mother, a piano teacher, also led to learning
the trumpet and drums and studying classical music, while
his early interest in electronics and audio was guided
by his father, also a ham radio operator. Of course he
gave up the trumpet when they invented neighbors.
Special project
US Navy electronics classes (at age 12) and high school
stints at both Cass Tech in Detroit and the General Electric
Company-sponsored high school in Schenectady, NY, provided
an early electrical engineering background.
While a teenager
he installed language laboratories in high schools and
colleges, and on weekends worked for the local hi-fi stores,
connecting the higher-end hi-fi home units of the day.
In 1964 he worked
for a year+ at 73,
(a magazine devoted to ham radio), learning publishing,
printing, product photography and graphic arts photography,
and helped build and install cutting edge (at the time)
ham radio electronics projects from satellite communications
to moonbounce antenna systems.
Engineering jobs
with both Moog
and Arp
Synthesizer companies in the late 1960's and early
70's led to a move to Boston where he built a number of
famous recording studios. While at Intermedia Studios
on Newbury Street, using the original Modern
Recording Techniques book written by Bob Runstein,
Barry developed and taught the FIRST audio engineering
classes, under the auspices of the RIA, The Recording
Institute of America. The class outlines and teaching
formula were subsequently adopted and copied (the sincerest
form of flattery...) by just about every "recording
school" in the country. His nearly four hundred students
have gone on to win every audio/sound industry award,
(Gold/Platinum records, Grammy, Cleo, Addy, Tony, Academy
Awards/Oscars...) and he still keeps in touch with many
of them.
He also played a
part in helping to start the Boston
Audio Society in 1972, and for 21 years has been the
webmaster and a contributor.
Moving to Hollywood
in 1977, Barry worked for many of the major recording
studios doing electronic design, service, "maintenance",
setup and audio mixing and remixing, disc mastering, and
while at Crystal Studios, along with Andrew Berliner,
co-designed and built two million dollar recording/mixing
boards, each of which was many years ahead of what any
other companies were even dreaming of doing: circuits
that we now take for granted, such as digital attenuators,
were first implemented in the Crystal board.
See the article HERE
!
For the Hollywood
studios, in 1980 Barry started a custom wiring company,
Zenotronics, which made studio interconnect harnesses,
microphone cable sets and custom wiring harnesses
one of the first in what has become a major industry niche.
The exemplary line of Mogami
wire and cable, now as then, is still offered and suggested.
Venturing back into
the non-audio world of electronics, Barry worked at a
private division of Hughes Aircraft in the early 80's,
setting up a futuristic developmental Faraday shielded
test laboratory and low emf noise prototype shop, while
bringing the Hughes engineers to Crystal Studios on the
weekends to show off the audio end of the universe !
In Miami during
the mid 80's, while working at Harris Audio, Barry built
and set up the sound systems in many of the prizewinning
discos in Miami Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, and New York, including
Biscayne Baby, Club Z, OvO, Façade, and Visage
in New York. Mostly using Meyer
UPA cabinets, the unique feature was the phase coherent
multi-cabinet rigging / splay system that Barry developed
which insured ultra-smooth high frequency coverage on
the dance floor, with no comb filtering. The white
noise test procedures developed during these tests
are the basis for the white noise tracks included on the
Soundoctor
Test CD.
In an era when installers
were still using distributed systems, Barry pioneered
the use of high-contrast on-and-off the dance floor pristine
audio, where the bar and waitstaff were specifically in
quiet areas and therefore could converse accurately
in the acoustic shadow of the dance floor sound, while
patrons who walked out onto the dance floor were literally
bathed in a new level of sound coherency, carefully engineered
to provide the maximum emotional response and benefit
while NOT causing the patrons to become queasy from incorrectly
tuned boomy bass.
After installing
various legitimate theater sound systems, systems in houses
of worship, systems in yachts and pleasure boats, 70 volt
paging speaker systems in airports, many restaurants and
night clubs, and some home multitrack studios and producers'
screening rooms, Barry finally decided to open his own
high-end audio salon, Inner
Ear Audio, in Florida, in 1993. Way ahead of the curve
as usual, a decision was made to move to California to
become the mad-scientist-in-residence at Miller &
Kreisel Sound, where Barry handled all manner of audio
details, setups, recording studio tweaks, dealer training,
the computer network, all the websites, email and phone
tech support and way more, for over 8 years.
Once again an independent
audio pioneer, Barry lives in North Carolina with his
magical wife and MANY cats. Barry was the Senior Tech
Support Engineer for JL
Audio for the HOME products line of subwoofers, their
installation, setup and service, for over 8 years.
Soundoctor is the
culmination of the experience of a lifetime in audio coupled
with the premise that YOU CAN GET THE MOST BANG FOR
THE BUCK in audio. The equipment sold and the services
provided focus on getting you, the end user, an incredible,
emotionally fulfilling auditory experience, especially
where others have failed or fallen short, and with absolute
financial efficiency. Results are all that matter!
|