Sam Inglis  Hello, and welcome to the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry podcast with me, Sam Inglis. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Betty Bennett and Bob Clearmountain. Now, Bob Clearmountain I'm sure will be familiar to you all as one of the leading audio engineers and producers in the world, while Betty Bennett is the founder of Apogee Electronics Inc. Welcome. BB Thank-you, nice to be here. SI Yeah, delighted to have you on the show and delighted to be able to record this podcast in person rather than over Zoom, as they usually are. So what brings you to the UK? BB Well, we're here to see our distributor and to also see a number of studios. We'd like to come in and see what's going on actually firsthand in London. SI So you can check out how they're using your products? BB Yes and those who aren't. SI So in this podcast that really I'd like to focus on the Apogee story, I suppose. So I wonder if we could go right back to the beginning and you could tell us a little bit about how you came to found an audio electronics company. BB Okay, so going way back, nearly 40 years actually, next year is our 40th year anniversary. We started in late 1985 and there was three of us, Bruce Jackson and Christoph Heidelberger. Now, Christoph and I had worked together at Soundcraft in the mid 80s, he was an engineer there, a Swiss German engineer and then he had moved to America and then came by to see Bruce and I. Bruce Jackson was a live sound engineer and also an engineer, electronic type engineer and we all were having dinner one night and talking about CDs and what they sounded like and how disappointing so many of the professionals were because they sounded clinical and sterile and many of the mastering engineers and recording engineers and artists were just unhappy with them, they liked, they were used to the sound of their cassette tapes or their records. So Christoph said, I've been working on something and I have a really good idea what the problem is and so he went on to discuss it with Bruce and it was an anti-aliasing, anti-imaging filter that was in the 3324s at the time. They were using the Sony’s to record in the Mitsubishi 850s and that's how we started, by making a filter that we could actually replace the ones that were in the existing multitracks with a pin for pin compatible one. After like a year and a half of research though, it took a while. But, and what was unusual about it is there were so many mastering engineers that let us actually take apart their Sony 1630s and try out different versions of it until we got it right, because the mastering guys were the most, not upset, but they were discouraged by what was coming off of their, you know, the output of what they were having. Because, you know, they're mastering engineers and so it was, yeah, so it was Bernie Grunman and Doug Sachs and Bob Ludwig. They were all so great by allowing us to void the warranty that's on their machines and actually dig in there and change them out. SI And Bob, what was your first experience with an Apogee product? BC Yeah well, it was actually here in London. There was an AES show at the time, I think, in Olympia, that area over there and I walked in and I saw them on the shelf and I thought, well these are cute, what's this about, you know and I'd heard something about the filters and I knew some people that had replaced the filters in their tape machines with better ones and I knew that it made the machine sound better. I said, well, this is interesting. Now they're making converters. I would think it was an AD1000. BB Yeah. BC And so that was interesting to me and then the DAT thing came along and I was a little, always a little disappointed with analogue because it never sounded the same to me. Whenever I would record something on analogue it would come back and I think, well, okay, it's close but it doesn't sound exactly like what it sounded like when I was recording or mixing and there's got to be something better, something that's more accurate than that, that doesn't, it, I felt that the recording medium was making decisions about what the sound was supposed to be and wait a minute, that's my job you know, I'm the engineer and so I realised that digital was, the multitrack digital was helping that first off and I was, I wanted to mix digitally and so I was mixing to DAT and DAT's were very new at the time and they sounded okay, you know, sounded pretty good, but there was still something not right about it and so I said, well, let me try one of these Apogee things and it was actually your ex-partner that dropped a, no, you came by, that's right, he was showing it to me, but at the time I had a cold and I couldn't tell and he was very disappointed that I couldn't hear the difference and I, you know, I couldn't hear anything at the time and so Betty came over and dropped off an AD1000 for me to try out and I just loved it, you know and not only that but it had this soft limit thing that kept from overs being a big problem. I could actually put more level onto the tape and I thought this was fantastic. So I immediately bought a set and that was that. And not only that, but I met my future wife at the same time. SI That was a good day then. BC Yeah, really good day. BB So Betty, I guess nowadays if you're designing an audio interface, your choice as to the converters itself is actually quite limited because there are only a few, a handful of companies that make suitable converters, but back in the day you were actually designing converter circuits and essentially building your own converters. That must have been quite an ambitious thing to take on. BB Well, it was and we worked with Analogue Devices a lot of that at the time and I know that Bruce spent quite a bit of time with those engineers and they went back and forth about things. So they would send us designs and he would listen to them and comment and so there was a lot of involvement with the component manufacturers at that time to get it right. Because they, designing by the book doesn't always get you the, the result that you want. You know sometimes the way the diagram says that you should do it or the way the book says that you should do it isn't the way that is the best way. You have to modify it because of the way our hearing is. SI Absolutely and I guess of course you also have to take into account people's established working practices. Like Bob was saying people like to hit the converters hot, you need to offer them some protection in case of overloads. BB Correct, yeah. So that's why we came up with soft limit, so that you could hit harder and it would roll it off for you. BC It was interesting, because a lot of, because some of the Apogee engineers would, especially the analogue guys, would try different, they would look at the specs and they would say, okay, well this is the best spec and this should sound the best. But then he'd try all kinds of different components and different arrangements of different combinations of components and really listened to see what sounded better and sometimes the best sounding combination of components weren't the best, necessarily the best and so much of it is subjective. It's an artistic decision, actually, what these guys would come up with. SI In your experience, those early converters, before the Apogees came along, what did you feel was lacking from them sonically? BC Well it was, there were artifacts. Things like jitter and like, the filtering was a big problem in the early ones because they used these brick wall anti-aliasing filters that actually would ring down into the audio spectrum even though they were way up at 22k, it would cause this sort of ringing problem into what you could hear and that would cause the harshness. So that was the problem with the early converters and that's what Apogee solved and it's amazing how, today people don't realise how Apogee was so responsible for digital audio becoming accepted as a medium just because of that and the fact that they understood jitter and what kind of a problem that was, how proper clocking was really important. There were digital console manufacturers like Yamaha and some of these others that would use their clock just to make their systems sound better. BB We actually OEMd that to a number of even high end audiophile companies like Denon and Ankyo and boy I’m going back in history here but we did, we actually eventually OEMd that to DigiDesign as well. Boy, there was a lot of companies. We did a lot of work under the hood for a lot of companies, not just filters, but clocks and then, of course, there was a dither algorithm that we worked really hard on for years. Whenever it went from 20, from 16 bit to 20 bit and then 24 bit. UV22 was a real outstanding engineering feat for us, it took us years to get that algorithm together. SI And of course during the 90s we saw this gradual transition away from tape based recording towards hard disk non-linear recording. How did you adapt what Apogee was offering to address that transition? BB Well, that's interesting because at the time there were Sound Tools and then that became Pro Tools and Digidesign. It was Peter Gotcher and Evan (Brooks) and they were the two founders of Digidesign and they had come to us and said, look, we need a converter, you know. So we were a young company at the time and we said, okay, we can do it. We can only, you know, they wanted a really inexpensive one and then they wanted a high end one and we said, well, we can do the high end one for you cause there's only like six of us at Apogee at the time. So we did the AD8000 and they did the 808 and there was a vast difference in the quality there and, but they could produce them in, you know, huge quantities and we could only, you know, we made everything in America and, you know, they were, AD8000s were a great, great product. They, I don't know if you remember, but they had an ADAT interface, a TDIF interface, SDIF, SPDIF, we could format convert between all those. It was a really great box and I know there's still quite a few people still using them because we're trying to, you know, upgrade people, but they love those and so they won't move on from them. The only problem is, is that it's 20 years old and we're, you know, parts, so if anything goes bad, you know, off, we, it's difficult to replace them. BC We just spoke to some people in a studio yesterday actually, that were wondering if they could, cause they had blown theirs up because some, one of their carpenters or something, the tech had plugged something in wrong and it fried them and they're wondering if there's any way we could get these to work again. BB Well, I'm looking to see if we have any that people did trade in that we can kind of scavenge some parts and get them back together for them. So we're working on it. SI Another thing that began to be a possibility around that sort of time was high sample rate recording and we started to see converters appearing that offered 96kHz and then later 192kHz. Was this something you pushed for or did you not feel it made a huge amount of difference? BB Well look, at the time disk space was an issue, you know, so 48k was good, 44.1, but as time went on, there is a difference in 96k. Now when you're getting up to 192, you know, that's... BC Yeah not so much, I think. BB ... up to somebody with better ears than I have. But 96k, there was something to pushing up to that frequency, so that's, we did that, again, disk space for the user, for the customer was the issue until years later when it became very possible to record, you know, at any length in time, you know, so 96 wasn't an issue. SI So for many years, I would guess one of the sort of bread and butter standard markets for Apogee was replacement converters for Pro Tools systems, but eventually you launched your own audio interface. What was the first Apogee self contained audio interface? BB Well, you know, the AD8000 was a self contained one in a way, but it was generally marketed towards Digidesign. So eventually what happened is we came out with a Duet, I think that was our single largest innovative product of that 10 year period there and that was because of Apple, actually. They had bought emagic, which then became Logic and they needed an interface and so they asked us to make a small interface that was at a certain price point, which we couldn't meet again. So, but we did because we could see the industry was turning that way. The high end studios were, they were still, the top tier, were still doing well. Probably the secondary tier, there was more home studios then and that became really the project based thing. And again, knowing Bob and Bob's association with labels, we came to understand that labels were giving budgets to the artists, so they would give them like $40,000 to go out and buy like an ADAT machine and, you know, the pieces of gear they needed to make the record. So I could see it coming that there was going to be a real change, it wasn't going to be just, you know, high end studios any longer, that people are going to do home recording. So the Duet was interface that we made for Logic and Apple to start with, but it was an amazing product. I mean, it was a two channel interface. It was very beautiful and it had one big knob and then everybody in the world copied us after that. SI And the Duet was a USB interface, is that right? BB It was. Well first of all, it was FireWire. SI Oh, right. BB Right. Back in those days when the computers were firewire, so it was, the first Duet was firewire and then we went on to USB. SI And does there, there must be an engineering challenge associated with the Duet. Making something work well enough, bus powered over the limited amount of power that you get from a USB connection. BB It was a real struggle because you're weighing in everything, you know. You want to put in really great components and components draw a lot of power and so I have to say that we did a good, really good job there because to make something small, affordable and bus powered was a real challenge. It wasn't an easy, oh let's just send it to an ODM and have them make something for us with the spec, you know, because they sounded really good too and people really enjoy them. SI Absolutely. And Bob, did that change the way you worked at all? Were you always still working on large consoles or did you ever get involved in mixing on laptops? BC Well I actually did because there was a Brian Ferry record called Olympia that I mixed here at the time. Hugh Padgett had his own room with an SSL in it and Brian Ferry wanted to work in London instead of coming to LA, so I came over and he only had one Pro Tools rig and it,was at everything was at a different sample rate and so I thought, well, I know I'll just bring a Duet and I'll mix the entire album through a Duet, you know, as the stereo master and it went really well. In fact, what, I think I mixed it to Logic and Manfred, the Logic guy came over and he helped me out. It was so nice of Man, He's one of the actually, engineers at Logic and so that certainly was something. I mean, other than that, my, you know, my normal thing is the high end, is all Apogee's high end gear which I love. I mean, I have like a whole couple of racks full of Symphonies and other things I have two... SI You have a big band? BC Big bands, two big bands that keep, because I have two Pro Tools rigs, a multi track rig and a print rig and so that keeps the two in sync and it goes on from there, yeah. But yeah, the low end. But I still have a Duet, the current Duet on this side of my desk that I use for various things, you know, I use them for Zoom, oh I know what I'm communicating with someone like Bruce Springsteen that I use, all my communication goes through that. I mean, that's not really a high end use, but it's just functionally, it does exactly what I want it to do which is wonderful and it's really easy to set up and just works great for that. SI So your preference for large, working on an SSL is more down to the workflow and the familiarity than it is with any sort of issue of absolute sound quality? BC No, no, it's absolute sound quality. The most important thing, absolutely. SI OK. But you feel you can achieve that same level of sound quality with a Duet or something similar if you have to? BC Yeah, yeah, I was totally happy with it. I mean, I tested it out and it was, you know, they tell me that maybe it's not absolute Symphony quality, but I thought it, for my purpose, I thought it was, you know, for that record it sounded great. SI And Betty, that product must then have really changed Apogee as a company because suddenly you'd gone from making these high-end boxes costing many thousands of dollars for pro studios to making what is essentially a mass market product. BB It changed us yeah, for sure. And they were in the Apple stores and you know, we were in Guitar Center and all the, in Thomann and yeah, it was a product that it was reachable for anybody because there were the Duet, the first Duet the firewire one was $495. So it was expensive for a two channel device because there was lots of really cheapy ones, but it was the first one around that price range at really great quality, it changed, yeah, we sold so many of those, yeah and people still have them. They still hang on to them. There's even people out there with the firewire ones that still have a firewire computer, but we're gradually grasping those out of their hands. SI And since then you've sort of, as it were, filled in the gap and you've brought out quite a number of audio interfaces that are larger than the Duet but not quite as large as a maxed out Pro Tools HD rig. BB Yeah, we filled out our line. We brought out a four channel, which was the Quartet and then we brought out an eight channel, another besides the AD8000, we went to an eight, then there was the PSX100, and then we went to the Ensemble, so that was eight channels and that was a great box and then the ensemble two. So we really had, you know, from a one channel, cause we made it a product called One, which was, it's an interesting one and people still have those too because it was a microphone and a converter and it had a line input and a mic input. Plus it had a built-in microphone that Bob actually did and it was a complete interface and so it went all the way up the line from like a $200 product to a, at the time, probably around $10,000. So yeah, from one channel to 32x32. SI And then at some point Apple suddenly decided they didn't like firewire anymore and the future was going to be Thunderbolt and that must have been quite an interesting series of events for you. BB Well it was. Well, we also did a PCI card, which took us a long time because of the fact latency was a big deal, so we worked really hard on it and ended up with like 1.6 milliseconds round trip analogue to analogue, so that was just incredible and then, you know, then Thunderbolt. Yeah, we worked on that for a long time and then ended up working with Apple on that a little bit too. SI Yeah, cause for as long as I can remember, people have been telling me that systems such as Pro Tools HD are dinosaurs and they're going to die out and we're going to have this glorious native sort of revolution where everything's just host based and they haven't died out and nearly all high-end studios are still using Pro Tools HD. And these days, I think it is, the main reason is latency and sort of predictability and stability. Does that chime with your experience? BB It's true. I mean, they told us years ago that that format was going away and there's still, you know, we see that it is changing now that people are going to M1 computers and it is changing gradually. But then Digidesign changed their, they've gone to a subscription base, so they've kind of changed their format and how they price things and things, so that's kept some people on that system and then some people are just moving on. But the numbers are going down, you know, people are moving on, but not as fast, certainly as one had anticipated. SI Sure and another technology that's making inroads at the moment I guess, is audio over IP, Ethernet audio. Is that something that you've dabbled in? BB Yeah, we have, yeah. So we've got a DANTE interface and we are, you know, considering, you know, the different formats from AES and you know, of course MADI, that was supposed to have died too. And some of these, they just won't ever go away. I mean, we made a MADI card with SSL ages, you know, maybe 15 years ago and we just thought, oh, the format's dying and it's still around, right? So it is interesting to try to keep up and it's expensive to keep up, because every time you make that change, it's a rather large engineering effort. SI A year or two ago you brought out a product that I thought was really interesting, which is called the Symphony Desktop. Now that was, took the Symphony name from your high-end interfaces but as the name implies, it was a much smaller unit that was designed to sit on your desk. And I thought the interesting thing about it was that it incorporated your own line of plug-ins, it had digital signal processing running on the unit itself, so that you could process the signal either in the record path or the monitor path. What led you to implement that? BB Well, there was a number of reasons. One, we thought that it would be good to have something that ran natively and also in the box, so that because there was, you know, a large percentage of the industry that did enjoy, I guess, working in the box and having their plug-ins run on their interface. So at some point we said, okay, we'll move into that area. So we did with a select number of plug-ins, but what we did initially is made sure that they ran natively and at the same time, so you didn't have to open up different screens for it and whatever you did on the desktop automatically happened natively and then you didn't have to travel with it, so you could just travel neat, you could still have your laptop and work on an airplane without lugging around your interface. SI And is that a concept that your users have embraced? BB Yeah they love it, they really do. So we've put now DSP and everything from our little Boom, which is our small little interface that's about $250 and then in the new Duet, the Duet 3 has a channel strip, a DSP channel strip in it and you know, Symphony Desktop and now the new products that we've just launched, Symphony Studio, we've just launched a series of three products, a 2x12 an 8x8 and an 8x16. So they're interfaces but also they tend to, we have the monitor workflow for Atmos as well and they have, you know, all the speaker, like EQs. BC I mean the one specifically designed I think for mixing multi-channel, you know, surround sound and immersive is probably the 2x12, which is the minimum that you need is like 12 outputs, but all the outputs have each one has a 16 channel parametric EQ for room equalisation. They all have delay settings, so depending on where your speakers are set up, you can compensate and then they, there's also base management and they all have all those features, you know, there's a 2x12 an 8x8 and then 8x16 and all inputs have mic preamps so you can plug mics into them and so they're useful for a lot of different uses besides immersive audio but they're kind of also specifically designed for that. SI So even if as a buyer you're not yet in a position to mix in immersive audio you might want to consider a product like this because it future proofs your studio. BB Exactly yeah, that's a big reason because, you know, people are mixing on headphones sometimes immersively, but they eventually want to get speakers and so, they're all set up then, they don't have to think about that later. BC Yeah and there's DSP on the input as well, so you can do some equalisation or compression. SI One trend I'm seeing in audio interfaces that are designed for Atmos and other immersive formats is the integration of sort of helper tools like Sound ID from Sonarworks, for example. Is that a route you've gone down or is it, do you think people prefer to configure this stuff manually? BB No, we'll go down that road too. We just haven't released it yet because we're just busy releasing the software that we planned on this. But yeah, that's something that we're going to incorporate. SI Yeah absolutely, because it's pretty daunting trying to set up 16 bands of EQ per speaker yourself. BB Yeah, yeah, for sure. BC But there's just so much we get, we wanted to get, well, they wanted to release the box and so that's coming, yeah. SI And meanwhile the Symphony Mark II remains your, as it were, flagship product. And does that also have these features on it? BB No, well it has the monitoring, but it doesn't have the speaker... BC ... equalization, yeah, it doesn't do that. SI So the thought is that people who are in a position to have a system like that would probably have a downstream box handling that kind of thing. BB Or they have Genelecs or yeah. SI Yeah, speakers that can internalise all that. BC And the If you're using a Dolby Renderer, that can do most of that as well you know, if you're using it with a renderer. SI And in terms of the take up of Atmos among studios and music creators, what's your experience regarding that? Are you seeing it as being very popular now? BB Very popular. We are, at least. As I was mentioning earlier, we've gone to London and Paris and Berlin and Italy, Korea, Japan, Canada and all over the United States and we've done these Atmos or immersive audio seminars and the interest, it's always packed, you know and we actually have to, there's a list of people that want to get in. I mean, people want to know about this and they want to learn about it. So I do see it coming and not everybody has adopted it yet. But I think that people want to have the ability to adopt it in the future. You know at first it was like, oh, is this going to stick around and then once the labels started saying, look, we prioritise your mix if you send us an Atmos mix or an immersive audio mix, then people really started to get the idea that this is here to stay, it’s not going away. Plus you have all the gaming folks that use it and then they're even using it with podcasts now or with audiobooks. So I think it's not going away, it's the next revolution kind of, in our evolution in our industry. SI And in your experience, is it a battle that Atmos has won over the other immersive formats, or is there still active competition there? BB Well I think they kind of work, you know the Apple immersive system and Atmos are a tiny bit different, but I guess with their renders, how, explain that, Bob. BC Well, they're mainly different for headphone listening, you know. If you're listening through speakers, it's all the same thing, it’s just how they try to turn, you know, 12 channels into... BB ...binaural... BC ...binaural and it's two channels. So the binaural version coming out directly out of the renderer is a bit different than the Apple version and, you know, supposedly, I think the Apple version, the Apple music version is designed more specifically for their headphones. I think, you know, I'm not sure about that, but that's the impression I get. SI Yeah, sure. But you haven't had a lot of demand for instance, for Sony 360 or other immersive formats? BC I haven't, no. No, personally. I mean, we've had some demos of it and... BB It's good, it’s really good. BC It sounds really good, it’s just it's, you know, ends up being a lot of speakers and 12 speakers is a lot for people to think about and now they've I think, I don't know, it's like 16 speakers or something like that. BB Yeah it might be pushing people's budget maybe over the top. BC It's a bit much. I mean, I wish them every bit of luck with it but... SI Yeah, I think, I don't know where I'd put 16 speakers in my room. BC I know. I'm trying to figure out how to do our, you know, a 12 speaker system in our living room that's got a sloped ceiling and so I was just looking at pendant speakers. Apparently Genelec makes some pretty nice ones. SI And then meanwhile, at the other end of the market, another one of your hit products has been the HypeMiC. BB Oh right, that's a favourite actually because well, what happened is we've had the Mic+ for years and that's been a real hit, people carry those around, it’s like an essential tool, especially if they're on tour or they're traveling or actually going anywhere, they can, you know, interface with their iPhone or with their computer, iPad, whatever. But I got this call from a customer producer who was doing some very top artists and he said, you know, here's the thing, I love the Mic+ but I know I could get a better performance out of the artist if they could hear their voice with compression, I just know that they would sing better you know, they would give me everything they've got. So is there any way that you can put a compressor in there? So of course I went to our engineers and I said, so what about an analogue compressor, you know, we wanted it to be analogue as well, we didn't want to do a digital one. And at first it was like, why would anybody want that and then I, you know, Bob's like, I would want that. And so anyways we did it and at first it didn't go over well within Apogee, even the sales guys thought oh, no-one's going to want to buy an analogue compressor and a microphone. But it took off like crazy. I mean, there definitely was a need there and it's really an incredibly popular microphone because as we're using this now, someone's going to add compression later. I mean, we could actually right now be using a HypeMiC with compressor. BC The surprising thing to me was that it's a really good sounding compressor, it isn't just some cheesy thing that, you know, that, oh well, yeah, that's a compressor and it's just like a very low-rent version. I mean, it sounds like an LA-2A or something like that and, you know, it's very high quality. SI Well the other impressive technical demonstration I've seen with the HypeMiC is that you can aggregate them as USB devices. So you can have, is there an upper limit on how many HypeMiC’s you can connect at once? BB Well, at this point we just did four. So we did something to make it much easier, so we're associated with the Soho houses and they were using another system and the receptionist at the Soho house ends up being the audio engineer in many cases, you know, so what happens is, we needed to set up a system for them where they could use the HypeMiC’s and have a multi podcasting situation. So we did some software so that you don't have to go through the setup of like audio MIDI and try and, you know so, and any of that stuff confuses people. So, we also did some custom software called First Take. Why don't you tell them about it? BC Yeah, First Take is just a, it's a Mac app, I don't know if it's... BB It’s not iOS yet, no, it's just Mac. BC Or iOS, not Windows though. Is it Windows? BB No, it's just Mac. BC But it's really just the most simple thing you can imagine. There's four channels, you can plug in up to four HypeMiC’s or there's some other, I think the clip mic, the Apogee clip mic works with, in there as well and it's just got a big red button and you press that and it records all four microphones plus a stereo mix of those mics. And it's also got four headphone outputs of, because the HypeMiC has a headphone and so you, each person can control their own headphone level, you know, coming out of the mic and it's just so dead simple and inexpensive too because the software is free. BB It's free, yeah. SI Well you say simple, but successfully aggregating USB devices from a technical point of view isn't necessarily as simple as all that. BC That's why this has made it, because to do that without software like this it’s really not simple. BB We made it so that the software does it all for you in the background, so you don't have to do anything but plug it in to the little USB hub that we send with it. So there's a USB hub that we chose because you can't just buy any USB hub because they're cheap and cheerful and they don't all work. So we have a special USB hub and you just plug in your microphones to the hub and then hit the record button. So all that audio, MIDI, all that setup, all that aggregation is done in the background. So the customer or the podcaster or whoever don't have to do anything but hit the button. BC Yeah, you can name the files, you can name each microphone and it'll put, each file will have that person's name on it you know, just real basic stuff, just so easy. SI Sounds great, we should use it for our podcast. BB I know, we should try it, right? SI I'm going to change the subject completely now because this is, there's something that I'm interested in right now, which is, obviously we're recording this podcast in London, you're from L.A., you sell products all around the world. Following the U.S. election there's been a lot of talk about the possibilities of a trade war, tariffs being introduced. How do you think that will affect our industry? BB I think that that will affect our industry because first of all, our new president to be is definitely talking the talk about a high tariff from China, right. So we do make some products in China. We make a lot of them in the U.S. but that will affect, you know, nearly every manufacturer because some stuff comes from China because in some instances are the only ones that are making certain semiconductors. So they're placing, you know, there was what a 25% tariff on this stuff. So if they go up to 100% it will automatically increase the price of products. Plus China is a big market for us and is for all audio companies, I think, because you know, there's a lot of people there and there's a lot of people interested in audio and it's been one of the fastest growing markets for us. So I don't doubt that they will also place tariffs on our products, so anything coming in from the U.S. or our U.S. manufacturer will also be tariffed. So I I think then who knows what Europe's gonna do, you know. I mean if we start putting tariffs on European stuff, I don't know, I just think we're going back in time like 40 years, it feels like we're going backwards instead of forwards. SI Yeah for sure and in what is a globally, a relatively small industry, it often feels like we're the collateral damage when the car industry is the real target or something similar to that. BB Exactly and you can't be heard. I mean, I tried once because when we were making all of our products in the U.S., again there was components that we could only buy from China and Trump when he first came in, put a tariff on components. So even though we were manufacturing in the United States, we were being charged 25% and at that time they didn't have a tariff on other products, so finished goods weren't being tariffed. So all my competitors could still bring their products in tariff free, so here I was the one person manufacturing here, well not here in London, but in the U.S. and I had this surcharge, so I tried writing to the Chamber of Commerce and to senators and this and that and I got absolutely nowhere. I mean, we're just not big enough to make an impact. BC They were being penalised, you know for manufacturing the United States basically. I mean, that's not what they called it, but that's what was happening. BB But now it's going to be everybody, so... SI It's hard to see how there won't be a lot of unintended consequences from this. BB There really will be, yeah. SI And while we're talking about future developments, I feel there's an obligatory question that I have to ask you both about artificial intelligence, machine learning. There's a lot of crystal ball gazing going on. How do you think that's going to affect music and how do you think that's going to affect Apogee products? Are you actively looking to incorporate it? BB Well, I've been thinking about it a lot to be honest and just try to, you know, I don't know if anybody can figure it out. Maybe I should ask the AI that, figure this out for me. Actually, I have and the answers aren't right yet, but it is going to affect our industry. I mean, it's affecting the special effects industry, the movie industry, it'll affect people in commercials, advertising and in some ways we all sell products to those folks. So if there's less of them, then there's less sales opportunities but I think eventually what will happen, what I'd like to see happen is, I mean we've all talked about, all I have to do is type in I want a song that sounds like Ed Sheeran and make it, you know, do a duet with, you know, Frank Sinatra and out pops a song that sounds pretty damn good, right? So, and then some people consider that that's still an art because somebody had to creatively think of those things to tie those two things together, Ed Sheeran with Frank Sinatra. But what I'd like to see is two channels, you know, a streaming channel for real humans and then a streaming channel for AI, so at least people will have the understanding of knowing I'm listening to a real person, you know and this is AI. So that's creative in its own way and, but I'd really like to hear somebody that I can see physically at some point. So and I do think that the live industry will blossom to some degree because of the fact that musicians will now need to support themselves by doing gigs and not that they're not now, but I think even more so. I think record, I don't want to say too much, but I do feel like performance will become more and more important because people will want to gather because so much will be done on their computer, they want to know what's really real and so they want to see you in the flesh. So I think that part of the industry will do well. SI I'm sure you're right. And Bob, from your point of view, how do you see AI affecting the world of the mix engineer? BC This is a tough thing to talk about really, but I have heard about people, there's some mixing, AI mixing software available now, apparently. And it really worries me, of course. So I'm in the boat with a lot of other people, you know, with actors and singers and songwriters and Jesus, if you can just use your mixing software and replace then not have a mixer, okay yeah. Except that it's hard to imagine, just like any great art, that any really great art or any really great music can be created artificially by artificial intelligence. I mean yeah, it can sound like somebody else, it can copy some great music or great art and I hope it's the same with mixing, I hope that it can't really duplicate what somebody does like that, you know, or me. You know, I can only hope that that doesn't come to pass. SI So we're not going to be able to buy AI Bob? BC I don't think so, at least I'm not going to contribute to that, you know, because I'm still doing this. I love what I do. I just love mixing records, you know and I don't know and I want to keep doing it until I'm dead, you know. I say someday somebody's going to find me with my head down on the desk, just gone, with a big smile on my face. SI I think if that's the way any Sound On Sound reader would want to go, bring it on, yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Betty and Bob. It's been lovely to talk to you and congratulations also on the 40th birthday of Apogee. BB Oh, thank you. SI When's the exact birthday? BB Well, it's 2025. It's really, it's October but we'll be celebrating in January at the NAMM show because that's going to be a really big show. BC Yeah so everybody come on by, listen and celebrate with us. SI I’ll certainly be there. And can you share, before we go, is there anything you can share about upcoming developments? BB Oh dear, no. BC It's all top secret. BB I wish I could. SI I'm sure there's a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline. BB Well there is, because you know what, we've had a rough patch because we were part of that whole AKM fire thing, you know, so we had five products we had to re-develop and then redesign and then, you know, then of course the part shortage through the, so there's been a bit of hole in our game plan, but now we're back in force and so you'll be seeing some nice new stuff from us next year. BC Yeah. The studio series is pretty tremendous and it's nearly on time which is incredible because it was a big development and there's a lot to it and so that's great. BB We got it in the year that we said we were, so that's really great. BC It's a small company. SI You heard it here first. Well, thank you so much, Betty and Bob. You've been listening to the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry podcast with me, Sam Inglis. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do check out the show notes page and also listen to our other episodes online. It only remains for me to thank my guests today, Betty Bennett and Bob Clearmountain. Thank-you so much. BB Well thank-you. BC Thanks Sam, great to see you too.