How did you first become involved in the industry?
I've always loved listening to music and tinkering with electronics. Unfortunately, I have no musical talent. I played trumpet in school, and was moved to baritone horn as my mistakes were less obvious there. My parents and their friends would give me broken radios and 'hi fi' gear (pre stereo) and I'd take them apart and fix them. When I was about 12, I cobbled together my first stereo system from an old hi fi system by cutting the tonearm off of the turntable and replacing it with one with a stereo cartridge. I ran one channel through the old hi fi and the other channel through the amplifier and speaker from a 16mm movie projector. In high school, I booked and mixed my friends' band and made demo tapes for them. My professional career began in 1972 when I starting working in a small shop as a salesperson.

What / who have been the biggest influences on your career to date?
Merv Summerhays was a family friend. He was a ham radio operator and had an amazing shop in his basement. I spent a lot of time hanging out there and when I was 16 or 17 he helped me build a 16-channel microphone mixer. We even etched our own circuit boards.

What milestones in Rane's history have helped shape the company we see today?
Rane has always been engineering driven rather than marketing driven. We approach product design from a problem solving angle. Our engineers like to study how products are being used, and the strengths and weaknesses of the current solutions, and only after they have gained that understanding do they delve into developing a product. A great example of this approach is our magnetic fader technology. We didn't set out to design a new fader, but it was the only way that we could solve the problem that scratch and performance DJ's had with wearing out faders.
Audio faders were not designed to do what DJ's currently do with them. The very best conductive film contact faders ('studio faders') were designed for maybe 500,000 passes. A DJ can do that in a few weeks. The best faders simply weren't adequate to the needs of this market. We studied different ways to extend fader life. Our first approach was to use conventional faders to control VCA's. This took the audio out of the fader and extended its useful life, but once the contact material wears out the fader is useless. We explored various alternatives and settled on using a magnet and sensors. This approach has the same feel and response as a conventional fader, but has no parts to wear out. You may remember seeing the test fixture on our website; we hooked the fader up to a sewing machine and had an optical counter track the movements. We got tired of fixing the sewing machine and stopped the test after 15 million cycles.
This is the same approach we use on all of our products: Talk to the market, learn the problems and develop better mousetraps.

What products, both past and present, have you been most proud to be involved with?
I'm very excited about our current generation of products. We have great performance and features in our DJ mixers that cover all styles of mixing. I really enjoy the associations we have developed with DJ's around the world. We have two very different approaches to digital audio. We have a series of digital products for Live Sound which are digital with conventional analog controls. This approach combines the best of both worlds, the precision of digital with the ease of use of analog. We also have a series of programmable digital processors that have no controls. All of the programming is done using software and a PC.

How did Rane's involvement with Grandmaster Flash come about and how successful has your association been?
Flash phoned us. He had been using our mixers, he liked the performance and the sound quality, but he felt that the features could be improved. He had a lot of great ideas based on years of travelling and performing around the world. Some of the features that he wanted to incorporate, such as AGC (automatic gain control) were very difficult to implement, but Flash was adamant that the mixer had to have it. One of our top engineers, Rick Jeffs, worked very closely with Flash to pull it off. The resulting mixer, the Empath, has exceeded our sales expectations.

Explain the background to Rane's collaboration with Serato on the recent Scratch LIVE product. How important is this new development to the Rane product range?
Serato has been building plug-ins for Pro Tools for sometime. About 18 months ago, they decided that they wanted to develop a standalone version of their Scratch plug-in. They borrowed some mixers from us for their preliminary showcases and liked the performance and build quality. All of the DJ's that they talked with spoke highly of Rane, so they approached us to partner with them on Scratch LIVE. Serato developed the software; Rane developed the hardware and is responsible for selling and marketing this product. We've felt the need to move our DJ product offerings into the computer world and our collaboration with Serato helped accelerate this move. We are discussing other possible collaborative efforts with Serato and see a solid future working with them.

How do you see mixing / scratch technology developing?
The convergence of computers and DJ has only just begun. Computers and microprocessors have become an integral part of our lives. We will see continued acceptance of digital products and computers provided that manufacturers develop and improve appropriate user interfaces and controls.

Which Rane products and developments should we keep an eye out for in the near and not so near future?
The convergence of computers and DJ has only just begun...

What do you like / dislike most about the audio industry?
I enjoy the camaraderie in the audio industry. I'm not very pleased with the plethora of knock-off products that have surfaced over the past years.

How do you see the future developing for you personally, Rane and the industry at large?
I love what I'm doing. Rane is a great company to work for. I'm proud of the products that we build. Products are becoming more sophisticated and it is up to us as manufacturers to continue to find ways to make the new technologies easier to use and understand.