Paul White:  Hello, welcome to this Sound On Sound podcast. I'm Paul White, and this time I'm talking to Malcolm Toft, a man whose name is often associated with Trident mixing consoles, but I was more intrigued to find out how it all started for him. The interview was conducted via a Zoom call, so I apologise in advance for the quality of Malcolm's audio. Malcolm Toft: I mean, if you want to go back to the very beginning, you know, like so many sort of post war babies if you like, growing up in the early sixties, I performed a band at school, you know, we all got into rock and roll when we heard the devil's music, you know, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and I just fell in love with the twangs, the thang, you know, the sound of the guitar and just got into playing the guitar, ou know, like so many kids. School friend, he played guitar, he could play Apache better than I could play, so I became the rhythm guitarist and we started a band and I think at probably around 14 and my dad was very supportive and helped us a lot. We used to rehearse in our front room at home and we made a recording at a studio called RG Jones in Morden. And for the first time I actually heard hi-fi. I mean, again, going back to those times, it's always quite interesting to talk to people about this because with modern day, you know, with your iPod and your iPhones and your earbuds you know and we take for granted so much hearing good quality audio every minute of the day. Back in those days, all we heard was, you know, mum and dad's radiogram, which had a little seven by five elliptical speaker in it, there was no bottom end, there was no bass on it, there was a bit of tinny treble and that's how we heard our 78 record, you know, then going on to 45s and of course there was the Dansette record player that everybody had, but it was all, you know, pretty bad quality. So we go into this studio and we make this demo record and suddenly, you know, I hear bass, I hear clear treble, I hear this wonderful sound where you can hear all the instruments and I just completely fell in love, it was, you know, decided my future and I just thought, I want to be part of this and I knew I wasn't going to make it in the band. And I remember asking this old man, Jones, actually his son went on to run the business, they moved to Wimbledon, it became quite a big studio and I remember saying to him, how do I get into a recording studio? And he said, oh you've got to be able to work out decibels in your head, you've got to have a degree in mathematics and, you know, really kind of tried to put me off, but it really didn't put me off. And so we carried on and I used to, my dad had a ferrograph tape recorder and we used to try and record the band in the front room. And when I was 17, I sort of cobbled together my first mixer. I bought some Dolce Italian preamps, valve preamplifiers, built a cabinet and put all these preamps in this cabinet. And you'll appreciate this, I wired them all, I had no knowledge of electronics whatsoever, so I put them in this cabinet, wired up all the outputs together and couldn't understand why when I turned the volume up on one, it affected the volume on the other, because there was no standoff resistors, it was all just joining together, you know. And my girlfriend at the time, she knew a guy who worked at a company called Solartron and he built me a sort of summing box in a tobacco tin, an old Virginia tobacco tin, the sort of one meg ohm resistors, to act as summing resistors that kind of solved the problem. But of course it was all very noisy. I've actually got a press cutting, my dad got me in the local paper at 17 with a picture of me with this mixer saying that, you know, I built this mixer in my front room and I hoped sometime to get a job, or make recording my career or something like that. So that kind of started it all off and luckily I managed to secure a job in a small studio in Putney called Tony Pike Music and this was literally mono tape recorders, we had a six channel mixer, our reverb was a Hammond spring unit hanging down from the ceiling on springs to stop it being affected by vibrations. It was half of his kitchen. There was, I think, treble and bass on every channel, no foldback or anything else like that and it was all in his front room. He was a very intense guy, he was a drummer with a local band, a dance band and he was quite a perfectionist and we were basically making a silk purse out of a sow's ear and we, I think we had one condenser microphone, it wasn't a Neumann or anything else like that. The talkback that we had was a front doorbell buzzer that we pressed to talk to the studio, but we would record, we had an EMI-TR52 tape recorder to leave us rich, mono tape recorder and we would record the backing on one tape recorder, play it back and add the vocals already overdubbed onto another tape recorder and go backwards and forwards like that. So of course you've got a noise builder, but you know, I learned how to engineer. I learned how to balance and he taught me and I learned how to train my ears because we had no soloing. So I would kind of train my ears to pick out the bass, to pick out the guitar in a mix, to sort of solo it in my head. And I also learned a lot about microphone technique as well. He fortunately got a job, it was very friendly with a guy called Harry Stoneham who was the band leader for the Michael Parkinson show and he played that Lowry Hammond organ and we did a lot of elevator music. He got a job with a company called ReadyTune to make background music. But that meant we had a diverse lot of instruments coming into this small studio. We'd have a piccolo, we'd have a flute, we'd have an oboe, we'd have a sax and so I learned how to mic these instruments and I learned how to get the best out of them. So I had a very good training in that sense, you know, I learned from the ground up, you know, mono to mono and all of this, you know, that's how we work. This is 1965, 66, something like that. But it got very intense with him and I almost had a nervous breakdown because of the intensity of the working situation, had to get out of it and I got a job at CBS studios in London, but as a sort of much more backward, regressive from that, because I was just lucky to get into a studio and it was basically dubbing tapes that came in from America on Nab spools and we dubbed them, we'd copy them onto another tape machine and make backup copies. So we had things like Bridge Over Troubled Water coming over and, you know, major songs like this coming over on the original master tapes due to C37, J37, sorry, you know, valve tape machines. So I managed to work my way up into their second studio. They had a small studio, which was mainly voiceovers and a little bit of music, but mostly voiceovers. But I learned a lot about editing. And around 19, it was about early as 1968, one of the guys there said there's this new studio opening in London and they've got an eight track recorder and we said eight track, you can't have eight tracks, it's not possible. Yeah, they've got an eight track recorder and they're called Trident Studios and they're just about to open and this guy had an invite to the opening party and I was still living at home with my mum and dad and you know, coming up to to London, to CBS, they were in Holborn and the guy said I've got a ticket if you want to come, you know and I thought oh okay, there aren't many, those days there were very few independent studios, they were all pie Decker EMI, they were all owned by record labels and this was very unusual for an independent studio not only to be opening but to have an eight track recorder, you know, because we were only just four track, you know, hadn't been around for that long. So I found myself going to this opening party on the Friday night after leaving CBS and I got to St. Anne's Court in Soho where it was and there was a queue all the way down the street, massive amount of people, you know, it was really buzzing. And I ended up in the control room talking to this guy and there was this console there that had eight meters on it. It was like Star Trek Enterprise to me, you know, never seen a console with eight VU meters on it and quadrant faders and you know and all this stuff and I got talking to one of the guys there and he was very sort of upper class. It turned out he was one of the people that invested in it. And I thought, you know, you're not my cup of tea and sort of thing but we got chatting and then I went up to the next floor and Trident at that time, they had a preview theater when they opened the studios. Because they were in the center of the film industry, they had a preview theater where they could show films before they were, you know, early cuts and things like this. And in that room, again a lot of people, was Barry Sheffield, one of the two owners of the studio and we just got talking. This was quite early in the evening, about seven o'clock and I had heard, I should preface all of this, I had heard in the background somebody said, oh and they're looking for an engineer, they can't find the engineer that they want. And I didn't think a lot about it at the time, but it was in the back of my mind. So I got talking to Barry and he said where are you from and I said, oh I'm from CBS studios. He said what do you do? I said I'm an engineer in their second studio. Oh, okay. And then he said, I mean, I'll remember it to my dying day, he said is anybody looking for a job? And I just sort of put my hand up and I sort of went like that. Thought nothing of it, went home quite early on. Apparently the thing went on till about three in the morning, Barry got absolutely hammered, you know. I thought nothing of it. A few days later, I get this phone call at CBS. Ivy, the receptionist says there's a call for you, Malcolm. And it was Barry Sheffield and he said were you serious about that job? And I said yes and I was quite surprised because I didn't think for a moment he'd have remembered me. So I went around there and don't forget the studios hadn't even opened then. This was like March 1968, they were due to open in April. So I went round there and they sat me down with a tape, I can't remember what the tape was and asked me to mix it on this eight track Sound Techniques console. And they gave me a glass of wine and I remember it made me feel very grown up with this glass of wine and I did a mix and lo and behold, I got this letter and I've still got the letter offering me employment as a balance engineer at £1,250 a year. And that was the first time I'd broken the 20 quid a week barrier because at CBS I think I was earning 900 and something a year. And you know, it was a leap into the unknown, I had no idea, you know, whether the studio would be successful, you know, it was complete leap into the unknown. I was really going above my pay grade because to be honest with you I hadn't even worked four track, let alone eight track. And my first job was with Alan Price from The Animals, first job I did, and I soon learned something about 8 track because I tried to bounce a track from adjacent tracks, from track 4 to track 5 and of course, you get complete, it feeds back and you get all sorts of problems with the track gaps, you've got to leave a gap when you bounce on a multi-track. So I soon learned about things like that, but it was a baptism of fire for all of us, you know, it really was. And then bearing in mind this was March, April, okay, in July of that same year, we get The Beatles in to do Hey Jude, because the Beatles had got fed up, they'd done Sgt. Pepper and as you probably know on Sgt. Pepper they used two 4 track machines and they would hit the play button or the record button on both machines to get them in sync because they had no other synchronization methods. So having this 8 track, we'd stolen a march on Abbey Road. Abbey Road made a big mistake, they took nearly a year to approve their 8 track recorder. The engineers were really, the technician, you know, the technical guys were really slow, everything was done very bureaucratically. And we of course had 8 track and The Beatles really wanted to move forward with their recording and they gave us a try and we recorded Hey Jude. And frankly, The Beatles loved it, because we were so different to Abbey Road. Abbey Road was very bureaucratic, you know, even with The Beatles. I mean, they still wore the white coats, they had a canteen that closed at 5:30. If you wanted a microphone, you had to take a chitty down to the stores. If the guy was on his tea break or was reading a book, he'd take half an hour to to get the microphone and of course, by that time you'd lost the moment. Trident was completely different. The ethos of Trident was the client comes first. We had this great guy called Jerry Salisbury, who was a musician and he was like the gopher. He'd make you Marmite toast at three in the morning, you know, he'd get you anything you wanted. We didn't stand on ceremony, you know, everything was for the client, you know, there was no bureaucracy at all. You wanted a certain mic, you wanted to try something, it was all just, everything's available. So it's a completely different atmosphere and The Beatles loved it, quite frankly, The Beatles loved it and they came back and they did Honey Pie, Dear Prudence, you know, but I got to work on that. And within, again a few weeks, I think probably only about three or four weeks of working at Trident, I got assigned to work with a new producer who'd just come in and it was a guy called Tony Visconti and he was working with a band called Tyrannosaurus Rex and he'd done a recording at another studio and wasn't happy with the mix because the engineer put too much compression on it. So Tony came into the studio and I remixed a Tyrannosaurus Rex record, it was called Deborah and it was sort of one of their early recordings and Tony and I just got on, we got on and again something I could always remember, I was setting up some mics, he came in he brought Tyrannosaurus Rex into the studio and I was setting up some mics and he said over the talkback, hey Mal what star sign are you and I said I'm Taurus and he said so am I, we'll work together and Tony and I worked together for three years. And bless his heart, Tony and I have been great friends ever since. And, you know, Tony has actually said, I've got a, I don't know whether you know, I've got a website called allaboutrecording.com. I've done 24 tutorials to try and show people that you don't need to spend a lot of money on equipment, it's not about that, it's about using that equipment in the proper way. And I recorded them at Paul Weller's studio and Tony, bless his heart, I managed to commandeer him at a gig that he was doing and I stuck him in front of us a mic I'd tucked in under my phone and I said, look Tony, I'm doing a series of tutorials. Would you mind just saying something, you know and he said, bless his heart, he said yeah Malcolm Toft taught me everything I know and without Malcolm Toft my career wouldn't have taken off. I couldn't believe that but bless his heart, you know, that's what he did. Because you know, Tony was interested. He said what's EQ, you know, what sort of different frequencies? And he was interested, so he said a lot of engineers wanted to keep it to themselves, they wouldn't tell me and I thought well why not? If he wants to know, and if he wants to dabble, that's fine. So I just told him everything that I knew and then of course Tony went on to have his own studio and everything else. So these were magic times, absolutely magical times, you know, so the whole of 68 and 70 and then of course Trident discovered Queen. Queen came into the studios, you know, Freddie Mercury played at our Christmas parties. I even designed a console for Queen called the Fleximix, a whole other story. But it's just magical times, you know. Roy Thomas Baker took over from me as an engineer. He took over from me when I started designing a console and the console thing came about because I'd been made studio manager at Trident and we were going from 16 track to 24 track. We weren't happy with the Sound Techniques consoles that we'd got. The second one, frankly, wasn't very good. The 16 track console we got wasn't very good. I, as I said, had become studio manager and it was my job to try and source a new console and Barry Sheffield and I went to see the then available manufacturers, which was Cadac, Helios and Neve, they were the main manufacturers really, of any consistency. The Helios we didn't like, it was wraparound, it wouldn't suit our control room. We had a particular problem. Our space for the console was only five foot, it was on a riser. We had a lift housing at the back of the control room, we had to have a remote patch bay as a consequence and we had five feet to get a 24 channel, 24 track console in. So we ruled out the Helios. The Cadec again was too big and the, kind of again, the changing moment was when we went to see Neve. We went down to Cambridge, we were wined and dined by Neve because we were a very successful studio by that time. We met, Rupert wasn't there, but we met with all of their sales staff and their engineering staff and we started saying what we wanted. And we wanted things like EQ on the monitor section. And the reason for that was Roy Thomas Baker quite rightly said of those days we used to get tapes in from America and we'd had tapes in from the UK. We in England were CCAR equalisation and Americans were NAB. So if we got a tape in from America, we had to completely realign a multitrack machine just to play it back. That would take an hour or so just to realign the tape machine. So Roy said, why can't we have treble and bass on the monitor section so we can equalise out the differences between CCAR and NAB, just to get an idea of what it's going to sound like, it'd save a lot of time. But of course, EQ on the monitor section back in the day was anathema. Nobody messed with the monitor section. Had to be flat, you know, had to be without any colouration. The moment you put colouration on it, you were destroying the whole point. But we wanted it. We found, I found particularly talking to all the people at Neve that were there, none of them were recording engineers, they were all electronics engineers. So when we said we wanted to do something, nobody said, well why are you doing that, why don't you do it this way, why don't you do it that way? It was all, can we modify this, can we modify that? And they didn't make a 24 track monitor section, they only made 16 channels. So we were driving back home from Cambridge and we were both fairly quiet in the car, Barry and I and he sort of said, what are we going to do? And I should also interject here that I had been building at home my own mixer, I'd always been interested in the electronic side of it and I'd always thought my career path would be to own my own studio and the only way I was going to own my own studio is building my own mixer, because I couldn't afford to buy one and I was interested in them anyway. So I'd been dabbling at home building a mixer for myself and at Trident we'd employed a maintenance engineer called Barry Porter and Barry was a very good electronics engineer and he was helping me in downtime, sort of giving me certain ideas and helping me generally with what I was doing. And so we were driving back in the car and I was by this time like 26 years of age and obviously not knowing any fear and we talked and as I said, we said well what are we going to do, because the Neve console is going to be just going to be too big, we're not going to get it in there and that's our last chance, what are we going to do? So I said, you know, in a fit of, I don't know, as I say, bravado, I think we could build our own. And Barry said what do you mean? So I said, well, you know, Barry Porter is, you know, a good electronics engineer. I know all the systems and I know what we want, you know, and the engineers here, they know what they want as well. I think between us we could build a console. So Barry and his brother Norman, who was the CEO, we got together, had a lunch and a chat and they said we don't know Barry, but we know you, we trust you. We'll give you a year to build this console. I'll give you a room upstairs and you know, see what you can come up with, basically. So that was the birth of what became the Trident A Range console. Barry and I designed and built it and I wired the first one. We built this prototype console, just thinking of it for our own use, not as a company at all. But as we were building the console, clients heard about it. Roy mentioned us to a new studio that was opening called Chipping Norton Studios in Oxford, two brothers that were building a studio and they said look, could you build a smaller version for me? And I'd been building this console at home as I said and this was the genesis of what became the Trident B range and I used the console that I'd been designing at home, which was an 8 track console, for Chipping Norton Studios. And so suddenly I was faced with this order. So I went back to the owners of Trident and said, look, I've got an order for a console here, you know, maybe we could start a company building consoles. So they said well yeah, if you think you can do it, we'll let you do it. And that was the birth of Trident Audio Developments. That's how Trident Audio started as a console company and then from that the orders just flowed after that because we built the A range, put it into studio. The first, I mean, can't believe it, the very first session we'd been working all night debugging it and goodness knows what and the very first session was an Elton John session, I mean, talk about baptism of fire. Unfortunately, it had to be abandoned because there were too many faults but we got it all working and you know, that was the A range console. But the whole thing was just born out of, you know, us enthusiastic engineers. But it does mean that, you know, the whole Trident legacy is one of engineers, you know, our by word always at the beginning was equipment with consoles designed by engineers for engineers and that's what we were, you know, we were recording engineers first and foremost and that's been my ethos all the way through, I'm a recording engineer who also designs equipment, you know and that's why I think we've got that Trident sound and that's why there is this, you know, difference between us and a lot of other manufacturers. And certainly what I do and what I design is because I'm first and foremost a recording engineer who's gone into designing consoles and that's where I think my strengths lie. So that's a little bit of a potted history and obviously over the years, you know, there's been changes as things do. I've been doing it now for more than 50 years, still excited about doing it, still enjoy doing it. Met a lot of great people along the way and still love it, still got a passion and enthusiasm for it. Paul: So you changed from being a recording engineer to a designer. Malcolm: I stopped being an engineer around 1972, 1973, something like that. The irony of it all is that Trident started a lot of companies. They started a video company, that video company did the iconic Bohemian Rhapsody video and we started a tape duplicating company, but Trident Audio Developments is actually the only company that still maintain that Trident logo, you know, although I don't own that anymore, I'm nothing to do with Trident Audio anymore, but that name still lives on in the manufacturing side. And we were always a sort of black sheep if you like, because they weren't a company that the two brothers, Barry and Norman, founded. It was my idea to make consoles and yet it's the one that's lasted, which is kind of, you know, ironic in a way. Yeah I stopped being an engineer around 72, 73 and got into the manufacturing side from then on really. We developed, as you probably know, I think you were there at the time, we developed the first digitally controlled analogue console, the Trident Diane and the reason that was we were really suffering in the mid eighties because SSL had started to dominate the market, they really took it over, they had a great console, very difficult for us to fight against that. So we saw our sales started to drop off and we had to do something to, you know, basically leapfrog what they were doing, something that would generate interest in us. And one of the engineers that was working for me as a test engineer came up with the idea of this digitally controlled console and he had a ZX Spectrum computer with a little program he loaded and he showed me on the screen an EQ that you could use the nudge buttons to change the frequency in the left, right to change the volume or the other way around I think. And so I was quite intrigued by that, you know, he said look, we can digitally control this by this computer. But the thing that sold me and quite casually he said, oh yeah, he said, I can store that EQ setting by hitting button A, I can store that into memory A and then I got three more memories, I can store different EQs. So I said hang on, I said, you're saying then that halfway through a track I can have a pre stored EQ that I just hit a button and change the EQ when I've dropped a guitar solo into a vocal track, I can change the EQ for the guitar at the same time, just at a hit of a button. Oh yeah, yeah. And you can link it to SMPTE timecode. Wow, that was it. So we started on this great adventure of the Trident Diane, the first digitally controlled console. My mistake was that I, instead of making a small console to start with and proving it, we went for broke with 32 auxiliary sends and 24 auxiliary sends, 32 buses, you know, motorised faders, goodness knows what and it literally broke, it was breaking the company. We were spending so much on development. Although we got a couple of orders, we were running out of cash and basically I had to get money in to keep the project going. And we ended up getting some investors in who frankly I couldn't work with and so I decided that, you know, I had to leave the company and that's what happened. I know I sold off my interest in the company in 1988 because it was just untenable. It was very sad for me, but I couldn't continue under that way of working, you know, way that it was really. So yeah, so I left the company in 1988, had an agreement that I wouldn't compete for three years, which I didn't. I went into providing finance for studios and then in 1991, 92 I started Malcolm Toft Associates with the MTA range of consoles, which became quite popular. And I started that around 1992, I sort of lived through my three years of non-compete with Trident and I was asked again by a guy in America if I was thinking of making a replacement for the Trident Series 80 and that's how the MTA 980 came about, it was a Trident Series 80 for the 90s, so it was the 980 and that was quite a successful console, Radiohead bought one, a lot of studios in America bought them, Paul Weller's Studio ended up with one and yeah, it was a good console, but the market was changing quite a lot over that four or five year period, people starting to get into digital and, you know, again, analogue was suffering. So we found that by the late nineties, again it was, you know, a changing world and I was, you know, looking for sort of other things to do and I ended up talking to the people that owned Joe Meek, making the little compressor pedals and everything else, because the thing I was lacking in some areas was marketing and distribution, because we've got other smaller products and I wasn't able to get a lot of traction with them. So I ended up getting involved with the Joe Meek company who were interested in and originally helping me to market and distribute the products through their distribution chain and then it ended up where they wanted to buy my company, they said oh we'd like to buy the company. So I thought, well okay, that kind of sounds interesting. It might, you know, might be a good solution. They were based down in Devon and I was living in Surrey at the time and to cut a long story short, decided that the only way it's going to work really is if I sort of up sticks, I moved down to Devon, which I think was probably one of the last times I actually saw you wasn't it, cause I think you came down with Hugh, didn't you? Paul: Yeah, you were in Torquay. Malcolm: That's right. I moved down to Torquay cause that's where they were, the Joe Meek people. And I moved down there and not long after I bought what was an ex-hotel. It was literally Fawlty Towers down there. It was near the seafront on Torquay and it was, if you look at the front of Fawlty Towers, it was very much like the place that I bought. And we turned it into a house, but in the basement, there was a big area and I went back to my first love and I built a studio down there with one of my MTA consoles. We started recording local bands and again before I knew that, that had sort of taken off. I met a local DJ while I was down there. He wanted to teach broadcasting and his wife taught dance and they were looking, he was looking for a place to both teach broadcasting and also to have a dance studio for his wife. I wanted to move the studio out of the house because it was starting to take the place over so together we bought the lease on a mill in Newton Abbot, which is when you came down to see us, which we called the Music Mill. So we had the recording studio on the ground floor, we had a broadcast studio down there as well and on the next floor we had a dance studio. So that occupied my time for quite a while. And then through Joe Meek, their main distributor in America was a company called PMI audio. I was sort of getting unhappy really with the way that I was at Joe Meek, things weren't sort of moving forward, we weren't really promoting my products. I was sort of down in Devon, I didn't have too many worries. I was enjoying running the studio, but on the sort of, you know, console front and designing front, things weren't really progressing very far. The guy who ran PMI, a guy called Alan Hyatt said that he wasn't very happy with the way things he was working with Joe Meek and he wanted to strike out on his own and have his own range of products. So he approached me and said look, would you be interested in designing a range of products for me? And that's how I formed an association with PMI Audio and literally within months of my leaving, Joe Meek went into receivership, they went into liquidation and so it was just as well that I sort of, you know, moved along as I did. We bought the Joe Meek name from the liquidators. I designed a range of products for him and then around 2006, 2007 he said why don't we design a mixer, it'd be a good idea to, you know, reintroduce you as what you're always known for, which is mixers. So I designed the Toft Audio Console for PMI Audio, which became a very, very successful product and they sold an awful lot of them, you know. It was my design completely, I designed everything, even the metal work, the graphics, absolutely everything. But the products were made in China which I didn't have any control over unfortunately because all of that side of it was done by PMI. I was really, I was only ever a consultant to the company, I was not an employee, I was a consultant to the company. Had my own company, Mapleton Audio, which I still run, my holding company today. So I designed it all under the Maple or Mapleton Audio banner. But of course they, you know, had all the designs and everything else, but they took control of the manufacturing so I had no control over that and I know there were some quality control issues, but like I say I had no control over the pricing, the manufacturing, or anything else. But you know, it was a very successful mixer, it hit the sweet spot at just the right time. It was a great little 8 track console, you know, great for musicians, great for small studios, it had the right feature set and everything else. So that was a very successful console. But unfortunately things didn't work out terribly well in my relationship with PMI Audio but during the time I was at PMI Audio we managed to get back the Trident name. It ended up in quite a lot of legal issues but nevertheless we got the Trident name back, so we were able to use that. But by about the time that we got the Trident name back, my relationship with the PMI Audio group, I won't go into detail, but there were some issues there that were pretty well insoluble. So I ended up parting company with PMI Audio around 2012, 2013 and started Ocean Audio, making the Ark Console and that's really what I've been doing, that sort of stuff and products under my own name up until this present day, you know, I've been in control of my own destiny ever since then and I'm very excited about what we're doing now and the products that we have. We've got some fairly unique products, distortion unit and the Punisher has been doing very well, you know, it's quite a unique take on distortion. And that again, I was approached by Nick Mitchell, who I'd known for some years through his association with KMR and he'd been trying to get manufacturers to, to make a distortion unit like this and SSL and Audient and a few other companies have said, well we don't really see, you know, where its place is in the market. But It resonated with me because a number of owners of the Toft Console had said we love it when we overdrive the mic pre's, we get that little edge, that little bit of grit when we just overload it, dirtiness to the sound that we like. So I thought yeah, I can understand that. So I took the basic premise of what he sort of said, you know, something that could generate distortion and made the Punisher which actually has three different types of distortion, it's got symmetrical, asymmetrical and transformer distortion. They can be put in series, they can be summed together, you can add an EQ to it, there's a wet and dry control, there's a lot of things going on inside it and so it's quite a unique product, it's very much an analogue distortion generator. In fact we've just, I don't know whether you know, we've launched the Punisher Plus now, which is a rackmount version of it because not everybody's got 500 modules. And also people have said what's it like with an instrument, so we put an instrument input on it as well. So you can now plug your guitar or your bass into it or synthesiser or whatever, because it sounds really good on synths. So we put that on it so you've got an input level control and there's also a calibrated output gain control as well, so you can match it into the rest of your system. I mean, one of the unusual things about the Punisher, as you know, being a guitarist, that whenever you add distortion, you basically overdrive something, so you've got to back the output off, you've always got to, you know, take the master control down because when you've had distortion, you're adding gain effectively, to get it to distort. With the Punisher there's an automatic gain correction, so the gain doesn't change more than one and a half dB, no matter how much distortion you add, the output level stays the same, so you don't have this problem of having to, you know, control the output all the time. So you can add all these three different types of distortion without affecting the gain, which is a real, you know, bonus to a lot of people so you can add all three different types. It was very interesting actually adding the transformer distortion because I've never really done a lot of research into, you know, why transformers sound the way that they do and you know, why they add this so called warmth, et cetera, et cetera. I actually found it very difficult to overload a transformer so I bought the smallest, cheapest transformers I could get. And at high frequency, it's still very difficult to overload. They will still handle well above plus 20 before they would distort. But the bottom end is where it starts to distort and it's all about, it's all below about 130 hertz, which is where you get the warmth. So the transformer distortion is actually very interesting because like I say it is completely different to the others and it just, you can see whether people talk about the warmth because it is all around the bottom end where you get those transients through a transformer. Paul: Well that sounds intriguing. It seems that you've moved away from mixing desks so what other ideas have taken your fancy at the moment? Malcolm: We've just launched a new product actually literally in the last couple of weeks. I'm very prolific, you know, because I, you know, I fortunately have the time to do it and I enjoy doing it, I don't find it a chore. It's a bit like having a train set, you know. I spend my time designing stuff, thinking up ideas. We have the Equate, which is an 8 channel EQ. From the Punisher, the Punisher has high and low shelving EQ combined with swept filters, high and low swept filters and what I found is in conjunction with the high and low shelving, you can really get some interesting results because, you know, with shelving obviously you're boosting everything above a certain plateau, right, and at the bass end, for example, when you're boosting low frequency, you're actually boosting a lot of mud, you know, you can be boosting a lot at 20, 30 hertz, which you might not really want. But by applying a filter, a swept filter, you can shape that so what you actually get, there's a very broad sort of bell type of thing going on when you sort of attenuate the low frequencies and take that bottom end out that you're boosting, you stop it from boosting that. So you get this kind of broad bell type, almost Pultec-ing into it and it was really interesting, I've never, you know, kind of combined swept filters with shelving control before. So from that idea I came up with the Equate and the Equate is eight channels of EQ and a 500 series spacing, 38 mil spacing, so it lines up with 500 series modules. But it's my signature two band EQ, you know, sweep EQ coupled with high and low shelving, but the filters as well. So it's actually a six band EQ, so you get an awful lot of sort of different tonal shaping that you don't get from say, the Series 80 EQ, for example, because you've got the shaping on the high and the low frequencies as well. So that came out about three or four months ago and just very, very recently I've launched Mic Mix. Now Mic Mix is eight channels of mic pre's with balanced input, balanced outputs, but also eight instrument inputs also with their own individual balanced outputs. So you've got effectively 16 inputs independent of each other, each with their own balanced outputs, but they also combine into a little mixer. So you've effectively got a 16 into 2 mixer as well as, at the same time, having 16 independent outputs simultaneously running with it and the mixer's got a monitor output and it's got a balanced, you know, master output. Every channel has a meter on it, four segment meter on it and there's master bar graphs as well. There's phantom power, there's a 50 hertz filter on it and there's a pan control on every input as well. So you've got like, as I say, it's a summing mixer, it's a DI box for 16 balanced inputs, 16 balanced outputs and the instrument inputs go left and right into the mixer. So yeah, I mean, it's like a little Swiss army knife in a 3U unit and again, 500 series spacing. Paul: Retirement isn't holding any kind of attraction at the moment? Malcolm: No, no, no, no, no, I enjoy it too much. Paul: So I heard somewhere that you were also making SSL power supplies? Malcolm: That's right. It came about rather strangely, really. It was sort of just around COVID time I suppose, something like that. A company that I build a couple of small power supplies for in Holland said to me that there's a big problem with the old SSL power supplies because they're very power hungry, they make a lot of noise, they're very unreliable now and all the old linear power supplies and you know, had I ever thought of maybe making a replacement for them. And I looked around at what there was in just one company in America making replacement power supplies for the SSLs using switch mode technology. Now I've been using switch mode technology for quite a few years, sort of probably since about 2009, 2010, I used them on the Ark console, et cetera. So I thought, well, let's have a look at this. So I did some research into SSL's and Neve's and what the power requirements were, came up with the design and one of the unusual things is that they monitor not only, or you can visually see not only the voltage but the current that's being drawn by the console itself, so you know how much power is actually being drawn on each of the power rails, so it gives you a little bit of comfort of knowing that the power rails are balanced, you know, so there's digital display of both voltage and current. And so I designed this power supply and I was a bit, you know, worried, you know, would there be noise, would there be problems, etc, etc. So the first one I tried out was a studio up in Leeds, I think they were. And I remember driving up there with it. It was an SSL console, it was called the Chairworks, I think it was called, or the Furnitureworks, something like that. I should remember, but it's about four years ago now. And I drove up there, it was a Saturday, with a supply and very nervously, took out the SSL connector, plugged my connector in, you know, you know, I hope it works and it was brilliant. It worked really well. And the guy said, well it's quieter than my original SSL. And the great thing about it is that there's absolutely no ambient noise from it because we've got completely silent fans, there's no heat generated by it, you don't need a separate air conditioned room and it draws, I think it's just under 55% less electricity and power. So of course, with all the energy crisis coming in as well, we're in the perfect place. So we've built well over 100 of them now, we've got them at Abbey Road and then SSL, they put in there, we've got them there, we've got them at Stevie Wonder's studio, Paisley Park, loads of, you know, Metropolis, Windmill Lane, you name it, we're in a lot of studios now. Paul: Sounds like you filled a need there then. Malcolm: Absolutely, we filled a need, yeah, yeah, something that I knew very little about at the time but it's turned out that actually the power supplies are a bit of an Achilles heel on the SSL consoles because the connector is quite small, so you've got a lot of current going down that connector and of course the cables used to be, they could be 30 meters long some of the cables, so you get a lot of voltage drop. And of course with the cables getting old, what we find is a lot of people, they buy old SSLs, they refurbish them, recap them, do lots of stuff and use the 40 year old power cable. But of course, you know, the copper's deteriorated, you know, we've actually had cables catch fire. The cable is the, you know, the poor relation so customers have learned to replace their cables now. And of course they can shorten them, they can have the power supply next to the console. It's an interesting product, we enjoy making them. And we make them mostly for SSL's and Neve's but we've now started making them, we've just done one for Trident Series 80, for Frank Zappa's old console, in America, we shipped one out there. Yeah, so we're now doing replacements for, we've done one for actually an ATI Paragon live sound console in Germany, so we can now make variations of them as well. You know, as long as people want to buy what I make, I'm happy, you know, I enjoy doing it. I've got a passion for it, you know, it's one of these things, probably like you, I must get a proper job sometime. Paul: Yeah, exactly like that. So before we finish off, is there anything else that you feel that you would like to build? Any ideas kicking around at the moment? Malcolm: Well there are ideas, of course there are. I can't, I couldn't possibly say Paul, at the moment, so watch this space quite soon because there are some exciting things coming out, some exciting things. There's a lot going on actually at the moment, a lot of interesting sort of slightly diverse things, but also yeah, new products as well as other avenues, so it's a very exciting time at the moment, yeah. Paul: That's brilliant, thanks Malcolm. Malcolm: Thank-you, lovely speaking to you again. Sam Inglis: Thank-you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information, along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.