Immediately before Record Plant I was involved with Ami Hadani at TTG. We both had previously worked together for Phil Ramone at A&R Studios in New York on 48th Street, with Don Frey, who was his partner, and Art Ward who was pretty much the owner. [...] Prior to that, I was with MGM in New York with the famous Val Valentin who was Director of Engineering for Verve and MGM for years.
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That all started back in New York with Phil Ramone. We had speakers at A&R that were the standard studio stuff of the era that only went down to about 63 Hertz. Phil kept saying that something wasn't right on the bottom end and he was right. Acoustic instruments require 40 Hertz at the bottom end for monitoring and if you truly want to hear the fundamentals of bass drum, the acoustic bass with a bow, you need your monitoring system to allow all that to happen and to be realized. You can't do it if your speaker stops at 63 Hertz. You don't hear 50, you don't hear 40, you don't hear 45, all that information is gone. When I got to TTG in Los Angeles they had a spate of monitors that were similar to what they had at A&R. Ami (Hadani) said to me, "Are you going to follow through on this monitor thing?" To which I said, "We have to, we really have to. Especially in a room of this size, we've got to. You're going to have low frequencies laying around in the room." I knew all that from my days at JBL. I had worked for JBL for seven years in the 1950s and I knew a little bit about how rooms responded to sound. Ami asked, "All right, how do you want to start it?" I said, "Well, you've got to increase the speaker box volume, you've got to add a second woofer to it, that's where I began, and perhaps we should turn the monitor vertically. How about two woofers, just one active, one passive, or both active in parallel, and we can energize that, and put the tweeter, a driver in range above or the middle between the woofers. Let's experiment." Ami said, "All right, fine, go ahead." So, we did. I didn't really have any sophisticated equipment for testing and listening. Seat of the pants, we put together our first monitor, and, yeah, it got down to 40 Hertz, actually 38 Hertz. Then I said, "All right, let's do this," so we hung them up. And sure enough, it really did work. It was a vast improvement, instantly. It was a small industry in those days. Someone would pick it up the phone and say, "Hey, have you heard this? Have you heard about what's going on over at TTG?" The news in the industry traveled fast in those days. The guys picked up the phones, as maintenance people often do, as the owners do, and as the producers do, and they talked to their friends on the other side of the nation. LA talked to New York all the time, New York talked to Nashville. People were coming from different parts of the country to hear what we had. We had people in there from the south, musicians from Louisiana, from Alabama, and from Nashville, and we had New Yorkers in there too. Of course, everyone in LA was becoming aware that things were changing. Among the people who came through TTG in those days was Jimi Hendrix who, I think, was the one who originally told Gary about the monitors we had built.
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You recall in the late-sixties the industry was eight- track; there was an endless demand for more tracks; the more engineers used track bouncing to compensate for more tracks, the more the noise would go up. There was 12- track one- inch in those days, but the separation track wasn't very good; you would have high-frequency bleed from one track to another. The only answer was to double the tracks (8-to-16) and widen the tape (1-to-2 inches). It was more mechanics than electronics and it was going to take some time. Eight months later, TTG had the first working 16-track two-inch machine in Los Angeles. To take an Ampex 300 transport, which was designed for the weight of a half-inch reel of tape, and take that up to two-inch, required substantial changes in the transport. Those were done one-by-one-by-one during that eight-month learning curve until finally I got it right. All I needed then was some two-inch tape. So, I called Jim Mullins at 3M and explained what I was doing, that I was interested in the acetate more than the mylar because of the stretch problems; especially on a two-inch format, mylar was just too unstable; especially in the rough handling in the studio environment, the acetate made more sense; at least you could splice it if it broke. I sold Mullins on the idea that the industry was crying out for more tracks and that the only way to give that to them was with two-inch tape, which would first give us 16- track and possibly 24-track. [...] It was an interesting time. When we first got the 16-tracks running, the three machines, two recorders and one player, over at TTG in 1968, I remember Wally Heider, who was a friend and who was then doing all the remotes in town, said to me, "Tom, I'm losing my clients. They're going to you guys and you lock them up because of your 16- track. It's not fair." I said, "So, what do you want?" He said, "Give me two recorders and a player right now." A month and a half later, we got Wally those three machines. And it spread from there.
